What, you think the pills cure mental illness? They only alleviate the symptoms, sometimes more, sometimes not at all. For some people, the side effects are worse than the original illness. Add to that that doctors are bad at adapting the dosage to the individual patient (for example, it's possible to test how much medication the patient retains in their blood, but this is usually not done).
As long as someone's illness doesn't cause them to commit serious crimes or do physical harm, you have no right to tell them what medication to take.
It should also be noted that this only accounts for random errors, not errors in the experimental method, errors in how the data is interpreted, errors from external noise, etc.
Um... radio telescopes receive radio waves, they don't emit them. If they emitted any significant amount of elctromagnetic noise, they'd disturd adjacent telescopes.
People also need to understand that "psychosomatic" doesn't mean it's all in your head. It means psychological circumstances cause somatic (bodily) symptoms. For example, stress can cause unconscious tension in your muscles, which creates muscle pain and decreased blood flow, which are both bodily symptoms.
Cell phones can catch viruses wirelessly. If you don't know the specifics of how different machines communicate with each other, and have heard of cellphone viruses, it's entirely reasonable to believe fax machines can infect your computer. It happens to be wrong, since fax machines are normally not equipped with wireless transmitters and use incompatible OSes and/or processors, but you need to have specific knowledge about technology to rule it out.
Using the "null hypothesis" that way, we must also conclude that scientists who believe in the Higgs particle are crackpots, since numerous studies and billions of dollars have been spent on proving its existence, without success. After all, the null hypothesis for a particle's existence is that it doesn't exist.
Skeptics are often fond of pointing out that the absence of evidence is not evidence for the absence; the null hypothesis is the exact opposite of this.
The cathode ray tube in old-style (non-flat) TV screens generates both a moderate electromagnetic field, and a local electrostatic field. Which is not very strange, since it works by firing electrons onto a phosphorescent glass surface and direct them using electromagnets.
As a (moderate) atheist, what baffles me the most is not what Christians believe, but how little many Christians know about the history and the holy book of their own religion.
Things which appear to have "just spontaneously happened" often turn out to have underlying organisation which might be invisible to most of the people who turn up to the rallies. Nothing is ever a simple, smooth, flat collective, even (especially) in a highly idealised cultlike environment.
The opposite may also be true: things which appear to be planned sometimes turn out to have arisen spontaneously. One such thing is language; naive observers tend to assume that someone has decided the meaning of words and which rules of grammer we use, but they have almost always arisen spontaneously, and tend to evolve according to their own rules no matter how language experts try to dictate "proper" use.
I agree that groups such as Anonymous have an informal structure, though; some people are more influential than others, some are more competent on some tasks and thus tend to be relied upon for those tasks, and so on. I'm just not sure the group can be stopped by removing the currently most influential people, since it just means someone else will be the most dominant in the group. The structure of Anonymous seems to be far more plastic and flexible than that of ordinary educational institutions or political factions. It's fairly similar to Al Qaida. Al Qaida is a movement, not a group in the strict sense. It's just a bunch of people who happen to share some goals and network a lot with each other. Only smaller groups within Al Qaida have a formal hierarchy.
A more viable strategy for the FBI might be to simply infiltrate the chat boards where Anonymous meets and then let them be. As soon as a dangerous operation is planned, they're prepared for it, and who can guess who the spy is, since they're all anonymous?
Everyone calls Anonymous a bunch of childish pranksters, but creating an organization that requires the FBI to jump through hoops just to open a priority investigation hints at deeper intelligence.
It hints at collective intelligence, i.e, that a group of people can do things its individuals are incapable of. This is why free markets are usually more efficient at distributing goods and fine-tuning production than a group of experts armed with supercomputers.
No, but nobody ever claimed that. They're just claiming Anonymous is without leaders and an internal hierarchy. Of course they have temporary agendas: their agenda is whatever site they're targeting at the moment.
I don't see how you can lump in Wikileaks with Lulzsec and Anonymous. The latter two are trying to disrupt the operations of governments and corporations they don't like, which is both destructive and illegal. Wikileaks are only doing what newspapers have been doing for centuries - exposing secrets which are embarrassing to the people in power. There's nothing illegal about what Wikileaks does, and they do it to inform the public, not out of spite or revenge. Parts of the US government have desperately tried to find something to pin on the Wikileaks editors, but not even they have succeeded. Unless you count the ridiculous rape accusations against Assange, which officially have nothing to do with Wikileaks.
As for this anti-US screed... go ahead, tell me which government doesn't behave exactly like this (or worse) towards internal dissidents which it considers a threat. I don't care which government you name or what YOUR country is. I guarantee that no-knock armed raids without accountability occur when YOUR government (for any and all values of "your") feels threatened enough.
But some governments need to be pushed further than others before they start doing armed raids without accountability. You can't say that, for example, the UK is just like North Korea just because it could become as oppressive if pushed far enough.
The extent to which you believe otherwise is the extent to which you don't understand government and the urge to power. This hypocrisy and naivete is one reason why the term "Eurotrash" exists, and why Americans often think Euros are lazy, weak fools. This "despise" thing you seem to enjoy works both ways. Hatred begets hatred, thus neatly closing the loop.
Free speech and individual rights are not just luxuries we enjoy for our pleasure. They are necessary for a country to function well. For example, a government quickly becomes corrupted and inefficient if people are not allowed to examine and criticise it. The people in power prefer to sweep problems under the rug and perpetuate them before letting themselves or their friends be embarrassed. The leaders may also believe they're doing the right thing as they drive their country over the cliff's edge, because they never hear any opposing viewpoints. For example, several of Adolf Hitler's officers realised during the latter parts of WW2 that the war was lost and it was better for Germany to surrender. In a democratic country, Hitler could have been deposed, but since Hitler was the supreme and undisputable leader, his officers had to try to assassinate him, which failed.
The point of this? Well, a "strong" country isn't necessarily one that is decisive and picks up arms as soon as it encounters a conflict. Taking up arms without good reason may also be a sign of weakness - that the government is trying to distract its people from internal problems, and getting away with it. Historically, wars almost always occur when a country has large internal problems.
I'm not saying European countries are better in this respect, just that war and violence is usually a bad idea.
It doesn't have to be available to the player. The game can have an API with all the functions the player can access. The in-game code can be interpreted.
Hm? This was the board member who was opposed to censorship, and tried to make the board's work more transparent. Of course the more censorship-friendly board members don't like him posting about it on his blog.
I agree; it's better to err on the side of freedom and allow some abuse of free speech, than to err on the side of censorship and open up possibilities for politicians and bureaucrats to censor anyone who threatens their power.
That being said, people are judged by what they say, and if someone says something implying a possibility of committing a crime, their speech, in whatever form it may come, can be used as proof against them.
This is not without its problems either, since anyone can be made to look suspicious if you dig through enough of his or her statements. As Cardinal Richelieu said, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." There's a reason lawyers always advice their clients not to talk to the police, no matter how innocent they are.
Most people have also broken the law in some way or other, often without being aware of it. Having access to all private information gives a lot of power to politicians and civil servants to scare or blackmail their enemies - you know that if you criticise the wrong person, they'll find something to pin on you, maybe even something you're guilty of without being aware of it. Especially since the law is a matter of interpretation.
And even if you're eventually found to be not guilty, you may be arrested, tied up in court for a long time, lose your job, etc.
I'm not saying the patent office did anything wrong. They have to follow the law as it's written. I think the bar is set too low to begin with, and it's the responsibility of the politicians (and ultimately, everyone) to change.
Uh, no, it's considerably worse to have broad patents. If your patent is valid outside of the market you have gone into, then it's worth much much more than in its current limited state. Thay means way more effort by the Apples of the world to patent generic things and demand licensing.
I agree. My point is that it's bad to allow patents on trivial ideas too, so either way, you get a flawed system.
I have to ask: If the mag-safe connector has been around so long, and the idea is so good everybody wants it, why did it take twenty years to finally turn up?
I don't see anyone rushing to copy the idea. The patent is so specific any competitor who wants to use the idea can make some minor modifications if they want to use it in their own electronic product. The patent is only useful for preventing competitors to make accessories compatible with Apple's products, since the accessory would need a connector that looks just like Apple's.
The reason it took so long to came up with this specific design, is probably that there are so many possible connector designs, it takes too much time and money to patent all of them. Perhaps Apple should be granted a business method patent for "A method to prevent competing accessory products to a main product by patenting the interface between the main product and accessory product", but I think there's a lot of prior art. Inkjet printer manufacturers have been doing this for years to prevent compatible third-party ink refills from being sold.
True, calculus wasn't obvious in any conventional sort of the word. But the fact that it was discovered independently by two different people at roughly the same time, suggests that it was an idea "whose time had come", and that someone else would have discovered it even if Newton and Leibniz never existed.
Well, I think the point is that the improvements were obvious given common technical knowledge. Any engineer who sat down with the task of adapting a magnetic breakaway connector to that specific device, would easily come up with a solution by just applying common knowledge. The only reason nobody came up with and patented it before, is that there are so many different variations and each device requires a slightly different adaptation.
In this case, the patent is so ridiculously specific, it doesn't stop anyone from making similar breakaway connectors to their own electronic devices; the patent's only use is to stop third-party manufacturers from making compatible accessories.
I take that as an argument that the concept of patents is flawed. If you allow people to patent minor modifications, you get a lot of trivial patents; if you don't, you get ridiculously broad patents.
Slashdot Mirror
What, you think the pills cure mental illness? They only alleviate the symptoms, sometimes more, sometimes not at all. For some people, the side effects are worse than the original illness. Add to that that doctors are bad at adapting the dosage to the individual patient (for example, it's possible to test how much medication the patient retains in their blood, but this is usually not done).
As long as someone's illness doesn't cause them to commit serious crimes or do physical harm, you have no right to tell them what medication to take.
It should also be noted that this only accounts for random errors, not errors in the experimental method, errors in how the data is interpreted, errors from external noise, etc.
No, it means what it says. Absence of evidence is not evidence for the absence.
Obviously an astronomer with mod points doesn't have a sense of humor. Hard to believe there's a humorless astronomer out there, but there you go.
I see what you did there.
Um... radio telescopes receive radio waves, they don't emit them. If they emitted any significant amount of elctromagnetic noise, they'd disturd adjacent telescopes.
People also need to understand that "psychosomatic" doesn't mean it's all in your head. It means psychological circumstances cause somatic (bodily) symptoms. For example, stress can cause unconscious tension in your muscles, which creates muscle pain and decreased blood flow, which are both bodily symptoms.
Cell phones can catch viruses wirelessly. If you don't know the specifics of how different machines communicate with each other, and have heard of cellphone viruses, it's entirely reasonable to believe fax machines can infect your computer. It happens to be wrong, since fax machines are normally not equipped with wireless transmitters and use incompatible OSes and/or processors, but you need to have specific knowledge about technology to rule it out.
Using the "null hypothesis" that way, we must also conclude that scientists who believe in the Higgs particle are crackpots, since numerous studies and billions of dollars have been spent on proving its existence, without success. After all, the null hypothesis for a particle's existence is that it doesn't exist.
Skeptics are often fond of pointing out that the absence of evidence is not evidence for the absence; the null hypothesis is the exact opposite of this.
The cathode ray tube in old-style (non-flat) TV screens generates both a moderate electromagnetic field, and a local electrostatic field. Which is not very strange, since it works by firing electrons onto a phosphorescent glass surface and direct them using electromagnets.
Sigh, what do they teach kids in school today...
The Reader's Digest Pot Belly?
+1
As a (moderate) atheist, what baffles me the most is not what Christians believe, but how little many Christians know about the history and the holy book of their own religion.
Things which appear to have "just spontaneously happened" often turn out to have underlying organisation which might be invisible to most of the people who turn up to the rallies. Nothing is ever a simple, smooth, flat collective, even (especially) in a highly idealised cultlike environment.
The opposite may also be true: things which appear to be planned sometimes turn out to have arisen spontaneously. One such thing is language; naive observers tend to assume that someone has decided the meaning of words and which rules of grammer we use, but they have almost always arisen spontaneously, and tend to evolve according to their own rules no matter how language experts try to dictate "proper" use.
I agree that groups such as Anonymous have an informal structure, though; some people are more influential than others, some are more competent on some tasks and thus tend to be relied upon for those tasks, and so on. I'm just not sure the group can be stopped by removing the currently most influential people, since it just means someone else will be the most dominant in the group. The structure of Anonymous seems to be far more plastic and flexible than that of ordinary educational institutions or political factions. It's fairly similar to Al Qaida. Al Qaida is a movement, not a group in the strict sense. It's just a bunch of people who happen to share some goals and network a lot with each other. Only smaller groups within Al Qaida have a formal hierarchy.
A more viable strategy for the FBI might be to simply infiltrate the chat boards where Anonymous meets and then let them be. As soon as a dangerous operation is planned, they're prepared for it, and who can guess who the spy is, since they're all anonymous?
Everyone calls Anonymous a bunch of childish pranksters, but creating an organization that requires the FBI to jump through hoops just to open a priority investigation hints at deeper intelligence.
It hints at collective intelligence, i.e, that a group of people can do things its individuals are incapable of. This is why free markets are usually more efficient at distributing goods and fine-tuning production than a group of experts armed with supercomputers.
No, but nobody ever claimed that. They're just claiming Anonymous is without leaders and an internal hierarchy. Of course they have temporary agendas: their agenda is whatever site they're targeting at the moment.
I don't see how you can lump in Wikileaks with Lulzsec and Anonymous. The latter two are trying to disrupt the operations of governments and corporations they don't like, which is both destructive and illegal. Wikileaks are only doing what newspapers have been doing for centuries - exposing secrets which are embarrassing to the people in power. There's nothing illegal about what Wikileaks does, and they do it to inform the public, not out of spite or revenge. Parts of the US government have desperately tried to find something to pin on the Wikileaks editors, but not even they have succeeded. Unless you count the ridiculous rape accusations against Assange, which officially have nothing to do with Wikileaks.
As for this anti-US screed... go ahead, tell me which government doesn't behave exactly like this (or worse) towards internal dissidents which it considers a threat. I don't care which government you name or what YOUR country is. I guarantee that no-knock armed raids without accountability occur when YOUR government (for any and all values of "your") feels threatened enough.
But some governments need to be pushed further than others before they start doing armed raids without accountability. You can't say that, for example, the UK is just like North Korea just because it could become as oppressive if pushed far enough.
The extent to which you believe otherwise is the extent to which you don't understand government and the urge to power. This hypocrisy and naivete is one reason why the term "Eurotrash" exists, and why Americans often think Euros are lazy, weak fools. This "despise" thing you seem to enjoy works both ways. Hatred begets hatred, thus neatly closing the loop.
Free speech and individual rights are not just luxuries we enjoy for our pleasure. They are necessary for a country to function well. For example, a government quickly becomes corrupted and inefficient if people are not allowed to examine and criticise it. The people in power prefer to sweep problems under the rug and perpetuate them before letting themselves or their friends be embarrassed. The leaders may also believe they're doing the right thing as they drive their country over the cliff's edge, because they never hear any opposing viewpoints. For example, several of Adolf Hitler's officers realised during the latter parts of WW2 that the war was lost and it was better for Germany to surrender. In a democratic country, Hitler could have been deposed, but since Hitler was the supreme and undisputable leader, his officers had to try to assassinate him, which failed.
The point of this? Well, a "strong" country isn't necessarily one that is decisive and picks up arms as soon as it encounters a conflict. Taking up arms without good reason may also be a sign of weakness - that the government is trying to distract its people from internal problems, and getting away with it. Historically, wars almost always occur when a country has large internal problems.
I'm not saying European countries are better in this respect, just that war and violence is usually a bad idea.
It doesn't have to be available to the player. The game can have an API with all the functions the player can access. The in-game code can be interpreted.
No, I'm suggesting a higher bar for having a patent granted.
Hm? This was the board member who was opposed to censorship, and tried to make the board's work more transparent. Of course the more censorship-friendly board members don't like him posting about it on his blog.
I agree; it's better to err on the side of freedom and allow some abuse of free speech, than to err on the side of censorship and open up possibilities for politicians and bureaucrats to censor anyone who threatens their power.
That being said, people are judged by what they say, and if someone says something implying a possibility of committing a crime, their speech, in whatever form it may come, can be used as proof against them.
This is not without its problems either, since anyone can be made to look suspicious if you dig through enough of his or her statements. As Cardinal Richelieu said, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." There's a reason lawyers always advice their clients not to talk to the police, no matter how innocent they are.
Most people have also broken the law in some way or other, often without being aware of it. Having access to all private information gives a lot of power to politicians and civil servants to scare or blackmail their enemies - you know that if you criticise the wrong person, they'll find something to pin on you, maybe even something you're guilty of without being aware of it. Especially since the law is a matter of interpretation.
And even if you're eventually found to be not guilty, you may be arrested, tied up in court for a long time, lose your job, etc.
I'm not saying the patent office did anything wrong. They have to follow the law as it's written. I think the bar is set too low to begin with, and it's the responsibility of the politicians (and ultimately, everyone) to change.
Uh, no, it's considerably worse to have broad patents. If your patent is valid outside of the market you have gone into, then it's worth much much more than in its current limited state. Thay means way more effort by the Apples of the world to patent generic things and demand licensing.
I agree. My point is that it's bad to allow patents on trivial ideas too, so either way, you get a flawed system.
I have to ask: If the mag-safe connector has been around so long, and the idea is so good everybody wants it, why did it take twenty years to finally turn up?
I don't see anyone rushing to copy the idea. The patent is so specific any competitor who wants to use the idea can make some minor modifications if they want to use it in their own electronic product. The patent is only useful for preventing competitors to make accessories compatible with Apple's products, since the accessory would need a connector that looks just like Apple's.
The reason it took so long to came up with this specific design, is probably that there are so many possible connector designs, it takes too much time and money to patent all of them. Perhaps Apple should be granted a business method patent for "A method to prevent competing accessory products to a main product by patenting the interface between the main product and accessory product", but I think there's a lot of prior art. Inkjet printer manufacturers have been doing this for years to prevent compatible third-party ink refills from being sold.
True, calculus wasn't obvious in any conventional sort of the word. But the fact that it was discovered independently by two different people at roughly the same time, suggests that it was an idea "whose time had come", and that someone else would have discovered it even if Newton and Leibniz never existed.
Well, I think the point is that the improvements were obvious given common technical knowledge. Any engineer who sat down with the task of adapting a magnetic breakaway connector to that specific device, would easily come up with a solution by just applying common knowledge. The only reason nobody came up with and patented it before, is that there are so many different variations and each device requires a slightly different adaptation.
In this case, the patent is so ridiculously specific, it doesn't stop anyone from making similar breakaway connectors to their own electronic devices; the patent's only use is to stop third-party manufacturers from making compatible accessories.
I take that as an argument that the concept of patents is flawed. If you allow people to patent minor modifications, you get a lot of trivial patents; if you don't, you get ridiculously broad patents.