You could have answered that with a simple act of RTFA. In short: no. They had no access to their subjects' mental health records.
I put up my screed on the weakness of the study (after seeing it covered by the Grauniad) at http://tmblr.co/ZaUL7yHBNSh0 before I saw it here, and the short version of my unassailable opinion is that it is a deeply flawed study whose data is just good enough to make a strong case for further study, undermined by the authors drawing unsupportable conclusions and pointlessly denigrating prior work and practical experience.
And yes, hypnotics are often taken by people for whom insomnia is a secondary condition grounded in deeper problems. That doesn't mean the hypnotics are not very useful in enabling them to address the deeper problems. Speaking from personal experience, a dozen doses of Ambien taken over the space of about 2 months during the breakup of my first marriage were critical to saving my job, my ability to eventually pull out of a deep depression, and possibly as many as 4 lives. When life is slicing deep enough that you cannot sleep for days on end, the lack of sleep itself gnaws on the stripped bones of sanity.
The main recommended use of hypnotics is for short periods in cases where insomnia itself is causing additional problems and more comprehensive treatments for underlying primary causes are too slow and/or are impeded by the effects of insomnia. Real primary insomnia that can be managed with hypnotics is pretty rare. A valid conclusion from the study is that people in that one HMO in rural PA who are being prescribed hypnotics are not getting adequate overall care, and that the inadequacy correlates with the amount of hypnotics that they are being prescribed. The authors claim (and I tend to believe them) that there is a growing consensus that CBT is a better treatment for chronic insomnia, but CBT is not something a doctor can write a scrip for and have the patient sleeping soundly that night for a few bucks. It can also uncover and address underlying issues like depression, OCD, and other cases where insomnia is really just a symptom of a more complex primary mental disorder. Of course, if you are a researcher specializing in retrospective studies of this sort who has been given access to a very large data set of patient records by an HMO, you don't have a strong incentive to write a conclusion that this HMO is controlling costs by encouraging doctors to prescribe cheap drugs instead of referring patients to expensive months-long rounds of a talk therapy, even when the best type seems to be the relatively efficient CBT.
Calling this "independent" is hogwash. It's a scam MS has been pulling for well over a decade, paying for "independent" competitive studies whose design and publication they control, and then trumpeting the results of the ones that say things they like.
In this case, the methodology was designed in a way that only exposed the test addresses to a narrow subclass of spam and which helped rationalize the fact that the study is completely blind to false positives. It cannot be accidental that the most widespread criticism of Hotmail and Microsoft's other hosted mail services by outsiders who work with mail servers and spam control is not that they deliver or emit spam, but that they have massive chronic false positive problems, not just with mis-filing into "Spam" or rejecting in SMTP for no good reason, but with mail being accepted for delivery and vanishing without a trace, in large volumes. It's a mess and I am 100% certain that MS knows about internally, at least at senior mail geek levels. It is a spectacular display of chutzpah for MS to be applauding themselves for a study in which they would have been beaten by a email system with no Internet connectivity.
And as someone who has been dealing with spam filtering and prevention since before anyone at MS knew that "spam" wasn't just a Hormel product, I should add that a methodologically sound study of the filtering systems of the big freemailers is probably not possible in the real world. Different people get significantly different types of spam and non-spam based on the history of their addresses and how they use them, and you really can't say anything meaningful about an 'average' mail stream because no real address has one. The big freemail providers have a very hard job because of the scale and diversity of their user base and pathological business models, but that can't justify promotion of a study which ultimately is worthless.
Note that this is not a reply to any particular prior comment...
From TFA:
The scientists are careful to point out that lower-altitude glaciers in the Asian mountain ranges – sometimes dubbed the "third pole" – are definitely melting. Satellite images and reports confirm this. But over the study period from 2003-10 enough ice was added to the peaks to compensate
That is exactly what one would expect for some degree of overall warming. The highest parts of the Himalayas are still high and cold enough to freeze out every bit of moisture in the air that brings them snow, but that air (mostly monsoon flow from the south) is generally moister because it and the ocean it has passed are significantly warmer than in the past. The result is low glaciers melting back from the warm air and rain instead of snow and higher protoglacial snowpack growing faster than the existing glacier paths can move out.
This is very basic weather science: more snow in routinely cold places does not mean they are getting colder, it means they are getting more injections of warm humid air. Of course that's only true as long as the cold predominates, because eventually it all turns to rain. I've watched this happen in Michigan, where we've gone from record snowfall years (but not record cold) to unusually warm and soaked-through winters.
Here's an idea - recipient's SMTP server refuses e-mails unless they get 0.01 cents with it.
Don't bother trying to patent that idea. It has been proposed and even tried many times.
One problem with it is simply that there is no reliable mechanism in place to identify the responsible sender of every piece of email. Internet email is not a single system, but rather a loosely confederated mob of independently operated systems that mostly use a common set of protocols. Most email these days is spam, sent mostly by hijacked machines, of which most is rejected easily by most receiving systems. The bulk of spam that makes it to user inboxes is either being sent in ways that are intentionally deceptive and often using stolen resources or is arguably not really spam because it is pursuant to some formally (if ignorantly) accepted agreement to be sent mail. Neither of those is easily addressed by making rules for people to follow. The first set are not going to follow any new rules and the latter are working within the letter of the existing rules.
I'm sure 'itwbennett' would rather everyone go to his employer's website to read that article, but it is clearly not written (or edited) by anyone who has any basic clues about spam-fighting. Just reading the subtitle makes me cringe for the unfortunate "journalists" lassoed into writing it, as it was clearly done by spam neophytes in a desperate scramble for click-scrounging content. The article is vaguely about a paper presented almost a year ago at LISA '11. There are links to an abstract and the original paper at the LISA '11 site: http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa11/tech/
The general space of sniffing out spam by looking at TCP characteristics has been mined for years usefully with Symantec and MailChannels both offering proprietary tools that use such techniques and some open DNSBL's using TCP sniffing to identify sources, but it would be incorrect to believe that any one methodology will ever be a magical silver bullet against spam.
Since I'm not from the U.S. I might have misunderstood something here, but does the U.S. senate really have the authority to change in employment contracts for the worse?
No, and the cited bill does not directly do that. What it does is redefine the scope of exemption from the wage and hour rules of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Typically, FLSA applies to people paid on an hourly basis with or without a formal employment contract, and requires employers to pay 1.5 times the regular hourly wage for all hours worked over 40 in a week. Some salaried workers are also covered by FLSA, and some hourly wage workers are not. The rules about what jobs are "FLSA exempt" are very complex and detailed, with a general theme that highly compensated jobs that require managerial, supervisory, creative, or self-directed work are generally exempt from FLSA rules. A very large fraction (maybe a majority) of IT jobs are and always have been FLSA exempt and hence employers can (and often do) require workers in those jobs to work more than 40 hours without following the FLSA rules. Exempt salaried workers can be required to work overtime with no extra pay at all. When hiring for an exempt position or reclassifying a job as exempt, employers must inform the employee of its exempt status.
Employers usually classify every job they legally can as exempt from FLSA. This bill is a change in the rules of what sorts of jobs can be classified as exempt. Because most workers in the US are "at will" with no formal employment contract, reclassifying a job is usually a unilateral act by an employer. So this act (if passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President) would not *force* a change in any contracts, but it would end a requirement for overtime pay for some types of employee. The last change in those rules was considered by many to have created some problem circumstances of forcing classification of jobs as non-exempt even though they logically fit the rationale for exemption. I am not familiar with all of the details of that, so I'm not sure if that argument has merit. The only non-exempt IT jobs I can think of are low-level jobs like helpdesk, 1st level desktop support, and data center ops techs.
If the DHS and other federal agencies were helping to coordinate, that's a pretty big stain on Obama-the-organizer's record as an organizer.
That's a big if. Every story about federal involvement ends up referencing a story by a glorified blogger in Minneapolis publishing under the umbrella of a far-right Christianist billionaire, who claims that he got his information from one anonymous source at the Dept. of Justice.
Also, even if there ends up being a non-ridiculous corroboration of the story, people need to get some perspective on how government, and especially policing, actually works under normal circumstances. DoJ is supposed to be largely autonomous from political control, and even if you were to assume that Obama would like to have replicated the Bush model of trying to pack DoJ with loyalists, the objective fact is that GOP Senators have blocked appointments there to an unprecedented extent and as a result there is a serious leadership gap there which is largely surrounded by people hired under a regime that sought "Loyal Bushies" to fill all roles. The lead agencies for this sort of thing would be the FBI and DHS, both of which are still mostly run by people hired by Bush. The GOP project of obstructionism via political appointment blockage has resulted in a government that runs mostly on autopilot, and autopilot for police agencies tends towards paranoia and excessive force. Even if this is an entirely true story that is just suffering from crappy journalism, it isn't clear that this is the sort of thing that would even make it up to political appointee level even if there weren't so many of those seats sitting empty.
Every echo of this story leads back to the same original source:
Rick Ellis, a Minneapolis-based journalist for Examiner.com, reports that these cities also had the help of the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Calling Ellis a journalist is really talking about his past, as Examiner.com is not a journalistic operation. It is a glorified bloghost that hands out locality and topical concessions to whoever wants them. If you'd like to be the Fargo correspondent on the topic of alien abductions, head on over and sign up... Ellis' claimed source for federal involvement is a single anonymous DoJ employee. No serious journalistic operation would publish a story on such a thin thread, particularly given the on-the-record denials of federal involvement. Veterans of Usenet will recognize his claim as akin to the classic "the lurkers support me in email" assertion.
Beyond that weakness, it is helpful to understand the background of Examiner.com. It is a property of Clarity Media, which also owns dead-tree newspapers using the Examiner name in SF, DC, and Baltimore and The Weekly Standard. A sibling company owns The Oklahoman. A watcher of media would note the common thread here: strident right-wing publications unconcerned with issues of fact or journalistic integrity. The whole bunch is owned by Philip Anschutz, who is something of a native-born Rupert Murdoch, except that he avoids media coverage himself and is more of a partisan theocrat than a pure devotee of money. Anschutz has bankrolled a menagerie of anti-gay, anti-porn, and anti-science entities such as Colorado for Family Values, Discovery Institute, Media Research Council, Institute for American Values, and so on. He also is the main backer of the Narnia films and has helped prop them up via his Regal Entertainment Group theater chain. In short, Anschutz is someone with a history of spending large amounts of money on evangelism, propaganda, and disinformation in support of a far-right Christian Dominionist agenda. Examiner.com is less purely bullshit than some other parts of Anschutz's media operations, but the rightward tilt is pretty clear behind the amateurism.
Even if Ellis isn't shilling for Anschutz and has a real source at DoJ, it is also important to recognize the failed status of the DoJ. Under Ashcroft and Gonzales, there was a project of political hiring for staff positions that mutated in 2008 into 'burrowing' of Bush appointees into civil service slots. Since 2009, GOP Senators have used their 'hold' privileges to prevent many appointments in DoJ (and elsewhere) so there are a lot of empty chairs at DoJ and some Bush holdovers to go along with the "Loyal Bushie" staff and the burrowing. In short: there is an ethically problematic population of anti-Obama partisans at DoJ, one of whom could be Ellis' anonymous source.
There is an interest on the Right in feeding the basic distrust of Obama in the Occupy movement. That distrust is not entirely baseless, but the legitimate issues (e.g. the courting of financial sector contributors, heavily compromised policies, etc.) aren't overwhelming. Convincing the Occupiers and their sympathizers that there is an active role being played by the Obama Administration in trying to collapse their movement serves the purposes of the GOP and of those to its right such as Anschutz. It should be expected by anyone watching politics that there will be a barrage of efforts to convince the Left that the Democrats who are actually electable to office are as unsalvageably corrupt and enslaved to Big Money as any Republicans. Some of that will be spinning of facts, some will be disinformation. This story smells strongly of disinformation.
It is here because tekgoblin wanted traffic and because/. has no actual editors. The original story which tekgoblin ripped off (with a link, so I guess it is OK...) was posted at The Smoking Gun 4 days ago.
(Not Actually) News for Nerds: If you want to read sordid trivial examples of what substance abuse can lead to, TSG is the place to find it. Not tekgoblin.
Stuff That Matters: 20 years into its free-market life, the Internet is so stuffed full of worthless junk and stupid money that incoherent aggregation sites like tekgoblin can survive on the revenue from robotic ad sales paying for traffic they get by posting summarized TSG stories to/. If 2000-2001 was the bursting of the "Internet Bubble," I guess that what we have now is more of a sclerotic "Internet Pustule."
Due to a design flaw, the Android root CA trust database cannot be changed without reflashing the phone in currently available versions of Android. Given the way the military handles their PKI, this makes existing Android devices infeasible. Android 4 is supposed to address this.
I have never been a significant user of Windows personally and I try to avoid handling it professionally, but in 20 years of system administration I've seen essentially just two reasons that Windows survives: games and inertia.
The game situation is special because it is impervious to erosive migration. I don't play games personally, but I don't need to in order to understand that Windows is a better game platform than any other general purpose OS. Games are the one software segment where users are constantly moving to new products and where it really matters to users whether a platform has the most titles. For a gamer, switching to any other platform means access to fewer games without paying the hassle and/or performance penalties of virtualization, emulation,or dual booting. Widespread use of those approaches just further cement the dominance of Windows. Most gamers probably shouldn't switch off of Windows.
In the workplace and for non-gamers, the reason people stick with Windows is inertia. Even if the end result is better than sticking with Windows, the effort and disruption of change is often enough to make switching simply not worthwhile.
The reasons this misfeature has become less common in MUA's over time are that it is fundamentally fraudulent and that it doesn't really work. Spammers who use their own working return path addresses are far more likely to have working unsubscribe mechanisms than they are to have working mechanisms for handling asynchronous bounce messages. That's because in many places (including the USA) unsub mechanisms are legally mandated, but bounce handling is not required and is an inherently hard problem. As a result, there are legally compliant spamming operations like Constant Contact that have fully functional unsub systems and that deal with standard 5xx responses to the RCPT command in SMTP properly, but which basically ignore asynchronous bounce messages and error responses at other points in SMTP.
Any news on HIV / AIDS? Strange that that isn't the first virus threw into the petri dish with this stuff, to be honest.
Not strange at all. HIV is a slow and fragile retrovirus, which makes it very difficult to work with in a cell culture environment. Note that all of the viruses cited cause fast-moving broad epidemics because they can infect through air and dry surface contact, while the spread of HIV has been controlled largely by behavior because it is relatively hard to pass between living humans, much less between cell cultures in petri dishes. If HIV was as fast-acting and robust as influenza A viruses or even polio, we wouldn't think of it as a particularly scary STD, we'd think of it as the disease that largely depopulated the planet in the 1980's.
It is a bit telling that Oracle hasn't kept current on MacOS. Apple has never made heavy-duty servers suitable for Oracle, and has been falling behind in that space since Oracle 10 was the new hotness. The XServe wasn't a bad little box, but it was a *little* box that was really designed for Apple's existing customer population, not for heavy database users. Whatever else Oracle may be, they are not stupid. They know that they have no real reason to care about MacOS as a platform for any of their products.
You speak of rules and permissibility, but you fail to cite where those rules are.
I've looked at the FCC regs and can't find what you claim exists. Cite please?
So this is supposed to cast doubt on his credentials as a climate scientist... how, exactly?
It is proof that he is either irrational or dishonest. Add to that the fact that he is involved with the Cornwall Alliance, a religious organization whose war on climate science is explicitly faith-based and is grounded in making dogmatic counter-factual proclamations. The only conclusion I can come to from those facts is that e cannot be considered a scientist, whatever his formal credentials are. UMich and UWisc should be embarrassed by his degrees, and UAH should be embarrassed by his tenure.
If Sony's issues were due to their own negligence in securing their network, why should the insurance company have to pay? If I'm driving drunk my insurance company isn't going to cover my car when I get into an accident, so why the hell should an insurance company cover this?
That's a lousy analogy because drunk driving is a criminal behavior. In many places it is illegal for an insurance company to write a policy that covers personal liability for criminal acts, but they frequently can cover extremely stupid acts of negligence or even (rarely) corporate liability for the crimes of individuals.
But that doesn't seem to be relevant in this case, since Zurich seems to be suing over finer points of coverage terms rather than over whether Sony was negligent in their sloppy security. Zurich is expert in the finer points of defining degrees and scopes of negligence and writing them into umbrella corporate liability insurance policies, so that seems an unlikely area for them to be litigating. The article says nothing about negligence, but it does imply that Zurich is looking to get a grey area settled over where security breach harm sits in the legal taxonomy of torts. They are claiming that their policy doesn't cover any of the claimed harm in the suits against Sony, and that if it does then Sony's other insurers are also on the hook.
If Sony was a person this wouldn't even be a question...
Right, because a person cannot run a global conglomerate business doing billions of dollars of commerce daily with hundreds of millions of customers. If Sony was a person the underlying event could not have occurred.
More to the point you were trying to make and stipulating your dubious theory that this is about negligence... A business entity has more complicated liabilities and needs more complex insurance than an individual because it is made up of many people with non-homogeneous knowledge and motivations and distinct functions and responsibilities as part of the business. A corporation can sometimes be held liable for damage from intentional actions by low-level employees that were unforeseen, unpreventable, and in violation of corporate policy. That doesn't even have an analogy in an individual person. However, if a person is negligent in a way that contributes to harm to others, it can be a complicated process involving both fact and law to determine whether a particular insurance policy will cover that harm. For example, suppose that I had a swimming pool in my back yard that I let neighborhood kids use without any real supervision. One day the local bully comes by, pulls out the pump power line, tosses it in the pool, and starts pushing kids in. They all get scared out of their skulls and get minor shocks, maybe a lot of bruises, maybe even a few broken bones. I would get sued. If my homeowner's insurance had a specific rider covering harm to guests in my swimming pool, my insurance company would probably make some judgment as to whether to defend those suits or settle them, no matter how careless I was, and go after the bully on the other end. If my homeowner's policy didn't explicitly acknowledge the pool or explicitly excluded pool-related liability, I could have a problem much like the one Sony now has with Zurich.
The slimeballs who cracked Sony should be hoping for a Zurich win against Sony and subsequent wins in similar escape suits by the other insurers. Insurers have terrifying legal teams and a lot of law tilting the playing field in their favor. In many cases, the direct perpetrators of a harmful act can be pursued by an insurer to cover whatever the insurer paid on claims plus legal fees, while lacking the protections that a criminal defendant gets when being prosecuted by the government. Sony could go after them as well, but they probably would be as good at it.
The trick here is going to be proving that Sony was negligent with their security.
No, it isn't. That is not what the suit is about at all. No reasonably intelligent adult reading the article would believe that it is.
Zurich's suit is actually about what constitutes "property damage" and other issues specific to the Zurich policy covering Sony, as well as the other insurance policies that Sony may have in place. Zurich is also suing Sony's other insurers as a second line of defense, so that even if the court decides that the policy written by Zurich includes coverage for the specific sorts of damages claimed by customers for a criminal security breach at the particular Sony unit in question. The article doesn't include filings, but it says nothing at all about Zurich claiming negligence. Zurich actually markets their coverage as handling the gaps between other sorts of more specific corporate liability insurance, and their policy may well have a much more forgiving standard for negligence than they want to fight over. For example, it might be that they explicitly insure the corporate entity against individual negligence below a particular level of the corporate bureaucracy, in which case they'd have to show that particular higher-ups at Sony knew that security was inadequate.
Based on the article, this looks more like Zurich is saying that online security breaches simply are not covered by their policy at all. They may be covering incidents like a Bravia power supply shorting out and burning down a house, but not covering the emotional trauma of having to abandon whatever value might exist in a Sony online account.
Making commercial law more uniform was a core aspect of the 3 radical overhauls of US national legal identity: the Revolution, the Constitution, and the Civil War.
You do realize that the driving push for the settlement of america was a radical overhaul in commercial law as related to personal legal identity?
You know that the main reason for the introduction of the printing press was a radical overhaul of commercial law?
You know that the war in iraq (both of them) were fundamentally based on commercial law?
gawd... oversimplifying much?
Not really.
The Revolution was primarily a response to the maze of taxes and trade rules that the British imposed on the American Colonies and their other overseas territories.
What we call "The" Constitution was a second try, after the Articles of Confederation proved that letting the States regulate their own commerce meant 13 little protectionist hells. The process leading to the writing of The Constitution started with a couple of small meetings trying to work out commercial conflicts between the states.
The Civil War was over slavery. Anyone who says otherwise is an imbecile or a liar. Slavery was an issue in 1860 because the Constitution had frozen the US in place for 2 decades in the middle of the most radical economic change in human history so that a transitional state became a static norm that evolved into a defensible position for the South. In 1787 slavery was dying out almost everywhere but had its strongest remnant in the race-based varieties of the New World. The US Constitution effectively stopped the process in the US South for 20 years, giving its beneficiaries time to bolster it socially and philosophically. Eventually the strain of sustaining a slave economy alongside (and arguably inside) a non-slave economy was untenable and the US had to unify its economy on one labor model. The most significant change in law between 1860 and 1870 was not the abolition of slavery by the legally questionable Emancipation Proclamation or even the legally sound 13th Amendment that banned slavery, it was the 14th amendment which nailed down federal supremacy, citizenship, due process rights, and equal protection rights.
If software patents cannot be worked around within the United States
That's awfully hyperbolic. It might even be called utter bullshit.
Apple has hundreds of millions of customers. They just got dinged for about 1 hour of their net earnings (or about 15 minutes of their gross revenue) to cover their liability in this case. It sucks that they have to bother, but they are arguably the juiciest target for such cases these days and it's costing them a tiny piece of their huge gushing flood of cash. Venue selection only really works for patent trolls suing very large companies like Apple, so if *YOU* want to be safe from patent trolls, *YOU* probably can be without even thinking about it. If you want to be Facebook or Apple, you might occasionally have to pay off the trolls in amounts that do not really amount to anything significant.
Like it or not, Indiana and Michigan and Alaska and Texas are not different countries
I am aware that Indiana and Michigan and Alaska and Texas are not different countries. But as I understand it, if I do no willful business in Texas, the district courts of Texas lack personal jurisdiction, and I can have the suit moved to a different venue whose juries don't always find in favor of a patent holder.
Well, let's start by staying factual: EDTX juries do not always find in favor of patent holders. They just lean that way more than most other places, and the docket is less clogged there (or at least it used to be... ) than in many other places.
But your comparison to a case against you in a state district court is radically different than the case at hand, and is tangential to your original suggestion about the scope of patent decisions. Patent cases have their own particularly well-defined (and relatively loose) venue rules based on personal jurisdiction, but they also are one of the types of cases where the district courts work under the "Federal Circuit" rather than subordinate to the various regional (numbered) appeals circuits. The underlying principle is that patents are part of the federal duty to regulate all of the interstate and international commerce of the US in a coherent fashion, and applying fact-based patent infringement rulings in the piecemeal way that issues of law sometimes get applied would encourage would-be infringers to try to game the system. Patent holders do sometimes fail to get their venue of choice (e.g. Pragmatus v. Facebook et al.) when it is clear that they are pure trolls and can't make an argument for infringements happening in the hands of a large fraction of all US residents. Getting a venue change doesn't protect a defendant from the outcome of a patent case applying to them in the whole of the US.
My idea was not to do business in any jurisdiction whose "juries tend to automatically side with plaintiffs in patent suits." How does a federal district court in one part of the country have jurisdiction over someone who intentionally does no business in that part of the country?
So, your question answers itself. Like it or not, Indiana and Michigan and Alaska and Texas are not different countries, they are parts of one country.
Making commercial law more uniform was a core aspect of the 3 radical overhauls of US national legal identity: the Revolution, the Constitution, and the Civil War. The period leading up to the Civil War with its dysfunctional legal treatment of slaves can be seen as a demonstration of the intrinsic problems with letting different jurisdictions define the scope of property differently, and that is essentially what a district-by-district application of patent law would look like, only with a more complex patchwork and less brutal stakes.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm 47 and have never owned a non-mobile wallet. Not sure what the point would be.
You could have answered that with a simple act of RTFA. In short: no. They had no access to their subjects' mental health records.
I put up my screed on the weakness of the study (after seeing it covered by the Grauniad) at http://tmblr.co/ZaUL7yHBNSh0 before I saw it here, and the short version of my unassailable opinion is that it is a deeply flawed study whose data is just good enough to make a strong case for further study, undermined by the authors drawing unsupportable conclusions and pointlessly denigrating prior work and practical experience.
And yes, hypnotics are often taken by people for whom insomnia is a secondary condition grounded in deeper problems. That doesn't mean the hypnotics are not very useful in enabling them to address the deeper problems. Speaking from personal experience, a dozen doses of Ambien taken over the space of about 2 months during the breakup of my first marriage were critical to saving my job, my ability to eventually pull out of a deep depression, and possibly as many as 4 lives. When life is slicing deep enough that you cannot sleep for days on end, the lack of sleep itself gnaws on the stripped bones of sanity.
The main recommended use of hypnotics is for short periods in cases where insomnia itself is causing additional problems and more comprehensive treatments for underlying primary causes are too slow and/or are impeded by the effects of insomnia. Real primary insomnia that can be managed with hypnotics is pretty rare. A valid conclusion from the study is that people in that one HMO in rural PA who are being prescribed hypnotics are not getting adequate overall care, and that the inadequacy correlates with the amount of hypnotics that they are being prescribed. The authors claim (and I tend to believe them) that there is a growing consensus that CBT is a better treatment for chronic insomnia, but CBT is not something a doctor can write a scrip for and have the patient sleeping soundly that night for a few bucks. It can also uncover and address underlying issues like depression, OCD, and other cases where insomnia is really just a symptom of a more complex primary mental disorder. Of course, if you are a researcher specializing in retrospective studies of this sort who has been given access to a very large data set of patient records by an HMO, you don't have a strong incentive to write a conclusion that this HMO is controlling costs by encouraging doctors to prescribe cheap drugs instead of referring patients to expensive months-long rounds of a talk therapy, even when the best type seems to be the relatively efficient CBT.
Calling this "independent" is hogwash. It's a scam MS has been pulling for well over a decade, paying for "independent" competitive studies whose design and publication they control, and then trumpeting the results of the ones that say things they like.
In this case, the methodology was designed in a way that only exposed the test addresses to a narrow subclass of spam and which helped rationalize the fact that the study is completely blind to false positives. It cannot be accidental that the most widespread criticism of Hotmail and Microsoft's other hosted mail services by outsiders who work with mail servers and spam control is not that they deliver or emit spam, but that they have massive chronic false positive problems, not just with mis-filing into "Spam" or rejecting in SMTP for no good reason, but with mail being accepted for delivery and vanishing without a trace, in large volumes. It's a mess and I am 100% certain that MS knows about internally, at least at senior mail geek levels. It is a spectacular display of chutzpah for MS to be applauding themselves for a study in which they would have been beaten by a email system with no Internet connectivity.
And as someone who has been dealing with spam filtering and prevention since before anyone at MS knew that "spam" wasn't just a Hormel product, I should add that a methodologically sound study of the filtering systems of the big freemailers is probably not possible in the real world. Different people get significantly different types of spam and non-spam based on the history of their addresses and how they use them, and you really can't say anything meaningful about an 'average' mail stream because no real address has one. The big freemail providers have a very hard job because of the scale and diversity of their user base and pathological business models, but that can't justify promotion of a study which ultimately is worthless.
Note that this is not a reply to any particular prior comment...
From TFA:
That is exactly what one would expect for some degree of overall warming. The highest parts of the Himalayas are still high and cold enough to freeze out every bit of moisture in the air that brings them snow, but that air (mostly monsoon flow from the south) is generally moister because it and the ocean it has passed are significantly warmer than in the past. The result is low glaciers melting back from the warm air and rain instead of snow and higher protoglacial snowpack growing faster than the existing glacier paths can move out.
This is very basic weather science: more snow in routinely cold places does not mean they are getting colder, it means they are getting more injections of warm humid air. Of course that's only true as long as the cold predominates, because eventually it all turns to rain. I've watched this happen in Michigan, where we've gone from record snowfall years (but not record cold) to unusually warm and soaked-through winters.
Here's an idea - recipient's SMTP server refuses e-mails unless they get 0.01 cents with it.
Don't bother trying to patent that idea. It has been proposed and even tried many times.
One problem with it is simply that there is no reliable mechanism in place to identify the responsible sender of every piece of email. Internet email is not a single system, but rather a loosely confederated mob of independently operated systems that mostly use a common set of protocols. Most email these days is spam, sent mostly by hijacked machines, of which most is rejected easily by most receiving systems. The bulk of spam that makes it to user inboxes is either being sent in ways that are intentionally deceptive and often using stolen resources or is arguably not really spam because it is pursuant to some formally (if ignorantly) accepted agreement to be sent mail. Neither of those is easily addressed by making rules for people to follow. The first set are not going to follow any new rules and the latter are working within the letter of the existing rules.
I'm sure 'itwbennett' would rather everyone go to his employer's website to read that article, but it is clearly not written (or edited) by anyone who has any basic clues about spam-fighting. Just reading the subtitle makes me cringe for the unfortunate "journalists" lassoed into writing it, as it was clearly done by spam neophytes in a desperate scramble for click-scrounging content. The article is vaguely about a paper presented almost a year ago at LISA '11. There are links to an abstract and the original paper at the LISA '11 site: http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa11/tech/
The general space of sniffing out spam by looking at TCP characteristics has been mined for years usefully with Symantec and MailChannels both offering proprietary tools that use such techniques and some open DNSBL's using TCP sniffing to identify sources, but it would be incorrect to believe that any one methodology will ever be a magical silver bullet against spam.
Since I'm not from the U.S. I might have misunderstood something here, but does the U.S. senate really have the authority to change in employment contracts for the worse?
No, and the cited bill does not directly do that. What it does is redefine the scope of exemption from the wage and hour rules of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Typically, FLSA applies to people paid on an hourly basis with or without a formal employment contract, and requires employers to pay 1.5 times the regular hourly wage for all hours worked over 40 in a week. Some salaried workers are also covered by FLSA, and some hourly wage workers are not. The rules about what jobs are "FLSA exempt" are very complex and detailed, with a general theme that highly compensated jobs that require managerial, supervisory, creative, or self-directed work are generally exempt from FLSA rules. A very large fraction (maybe a majority) of IT jobs are and always have been FLSA exempt and hence employers can (and often do) require workers in those jobs to work more than 40 hours without following the FLSA rules. Exempt salaried workers can be required to work overtime with no extra pay at all. When hiring for an exempt position or reclassifying a job as exempt, employers must inform the employee of its exempt status.
Employers usually classify every job they legally can as exempt from FLSA. This bill is a change in the rules of what sorts of jobs can be classified as exempt. Because most workers in the US are "at will" with no formal employment contract, reclassifying a job is usually a unilateral act by an employer. So this act (if passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President) would not *force* a change in any contracts, but it would end a requirement for overtime pay for some types of employee. The last change in those rules was considered by many to have created some problem circumstances of forcing classification of jobs as non-exempt even though they logically fit the rationale for exemption. I am not familiar with all of the details of that, so I'm not sure if that argument has merit. The only non-exempt IT jobs I can think of are low-level jobs like helpdesk, 1st level desktop support, and data center ops techs.
If the DHS and other federal agencies were helping to coordinate, that's a pretty big stain on Obama-the-organizer's record as an organizer.
That's a big if. Every story about federal involvement ends up referencing a story by a glorified blogger in Minneapolis publishing under the umbrella of a far-right Christianist billionaire, who claims that he got his information from one anonymous source at the Dept. of Justice.
Also, even if there ends up being a non-ridiculous corroboration of the story, people need to get some perspective on how government, and especially policing, actually works under normal circumstances. DoJ is supposed to be largely autonomous from political control, and even if you were to assume that Obama would like to have replicated the Bush model of trying to pack DoJ with loyalists, the objective fact is that GOP Senators have blocked appointments there to an unprecedented extent and as a result there is a serious leadership gap there which is largely surrounded by people hired under a regime that sought "Loyal Bushies" to fill all roles. The lead agencies for this sort of thing would be the FBI and DHS, both of which are still mostly run by people hired by Bush. The GOP project of obstructionism via political appointment blockage has resulted in a government that runs mostly on autopilot, and autopilot for police agencies tends towards paranoia and excessive force. Even if this is an entirely true story that is just suffering from crappy journalism, it isn't clear that this is the sort of thing that would even make it up to political appointee level even if there weren't so many of those seats sitting empty.
Every echo of this story leads back to the same original source:
Rick Ellis, a Minneapolis-based journalist for Examiner.com, reports that these cities also had the help of the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Calling Ellis a journalist is really talking about his past, as Examiner.com is not a journalistic operation. It is a glorified bloghost that hands out locality and topical concessions to whoever wants them. If you'd like to be the Fargo correspondent on the topic of alien abductions, head on over and sign up... Ellis' claimed source for federal involvement is a single anonymous DoJ employee. No serious journalistic operation would publish a story on such a thin thread, particularly given the on-the-record denials of federal involvement. Veterans of Usenet will recognize his claim as akin to the classic "the lurkers support me in email" assertion.
Beyond that weakness, it is helpful to understand the background of Examiner.com. It is a property of Clarity Media, which also owns dead-tree newspapers using the Examiner name in SF, DC, and Baltimore and The Weekly Standard. A sibling company owns The Oklahoman. A watcher of media would note the common thread here: strident right-wing publications unconcerned with issues of fact or journalistic integrity. The whole bunch is owned by Philip Anschutz, who is something of a native-born Rupert Murdoch, except that he avoids media coverage himself and is more of a partisan theocrat than a pure devotee of money. Anschutz has bankrolled a menagerie of anti-gay, anti-porn, and anti-science entities such as Colorado for Family Values, Discovery Institute, Media Research Council, Institute for American Values, and so on. He also is the main backer of the Narnia films and has helped prop them up via his Regal Entertainment Group theater chain. In short, Anschutz is someone with a history of spending large amounts of money on evangelism, propaganda, and disinformation in support of a far-right Christian Dominionist agenda. Examiner.com is less purely bullshit than some other parts of Anschutz's media operations, but the rightward tilt is pretty clear behind the amateurism.
Even if Ellis isn't shilling for Anschutz and has a real source at DoJ, it is also important to recognize the failed status of the DoJ. Under Ashcroft and Gonzales, there was a project of political hiring for staff positions that mutated in 2008 into 'burrowing' of Bush appointees into civil service slots. Since 2009, GOP Senators have used their 'hold' privileges to prevent many appointments in DoJ (and elsewhere) so there are a lot of empty chairs at DoJ and some Bush holdovers to go along with the "Loyal Bushie" staff and the burrowing. In short: there is an ethically problematic population of anti-Obama partisans at DoJ, one of whom could be Ellis' anonymous source.
There is an interest on the Right in feeding the basic distrust of Obama in the Occupy movement. That distrust is not entirely baseless, but the legitimate issues (e.g. the courting of financial sector contributors, heavily compromised policies, etc.) aren't overwhelming. Convincing the Occupiers and their sympathizers that there is an active role being played by the Obama Administration in trying to collapse their movement serves the purposes of the GOP and of those to its right such as Anschutz. It should be expected by anyone watching politics that there will be a barrage of efforts to convince the Left that the Democrats who are actually electable to office are as unsalvageably corrupt and enslaved to Big Money as any Republicans. Some of that will be spinning of facts, some will be disinformation. This story smells strongly of disinformation.
WTF has happened to /.
http://meta.slashdot.org/story/11/08/25/1245200/rob-cmdrtaco-malda-resigns-from-slashdot
It is here because tekgoblin wanted traffic and because /. has no actual editors. The original story which tekgoblin ripped off (with a link, so I guess it is OK...) was posted at The Smoking Gun 4 days ago.
(Not Actually) News for Nerds: If you want to read sordid trivial examples of what substance abuse can lead to, TSG is the place to find it. Not tekgoblin.
Stuff That Matters: 20 years into its free-market life, the Internet is so stuffed full of worthless junk and stupid money that incoherent aggregation sites like tekgoblin can survive on the revenue from robotic ad sales paying for traffic they get by posting summarized TSG stories to /. If 2000-2001 was the bursting of the "Internet Bubble," I guess that what we have now is more of a sclerotic "Internet Pustule."
Due to a design flaw, the Android root CA trust database cannot be changed without reflashing the phone in currently available versions of Android. Given the way the military handles their PKI, this makes existing Android devices infeasible. Android 4 is supposed to address this.
I have never been a significant user of Windows personally and I try to avoid handling it professionally, but in 20 years of system administration I've seen essentially just two reasons that Windows survives: games and inertia. The game situation is special because it is impervious to erosive migration. I don't play games personally, but I don't need to in order to understand that Windows is a better game platform than any other general purpose OS. Games are the one software segment where users are constantly moving to new products and where it really matters to users whether a platform has the most titles. For a gamer, switching to any other platform means access to fewer games without paying the hassle and/or performance penalties of virtualization, emulation,or dual booting. Widespread use of those approaches just further cement the dominance of Windows. Most gamers probably shouldn't switch off of Windows. In the workplace and for non-gamers, the reason people stick with Windows is inertia. Even if the end result is better than sticking with Windows, the effort and disruption of change is often enough to make switching simply not worthwhile.
The reasons this misfeature has become less common in MUA's over time are that it is fundamentally fraudulent and that it doesn't really work. Spammers who use their own working return path addresses are far more likely to have working unsubscribe mechanisms than they are to have working mechanisms for handling asynchronous bounce messages. That's because in many places (including the USA) unsub mechanisms are legally mandated, but bounce handling is not required and is an inherently hard problem. As a result, there are legally compliant spamming operations like Constant Contact that have fully functional unsub systems and that deal with standard 5xx responses to the RCPT command in SMTP properly, but which basically ignore asynchronous bounce messages and error responses at other points in SMTP.
Any news on HIV / AIDS? Strange that that isn't the first virus threw into the petri dish with this stuff, to be honest.
Not strange at all. HIV is a slow and fragile retrovirus, which makes it very difficult to work with in a cell culture environment. Note that all of the viruses cited cause fast-moving broad epidemics because they can infect through air and dry surface contact, while the spread of HIV has been controlled largely by behavior because it is relatively hard to pass between living humans, much less between cell cultures in petri dishes. If HIV was as fast-acting and robust as influenza A viruses or even polio, we wouldn't think of it as a particularly scary STD, we'd think of it as the disease that largely depopulated the planet in the 1980's.
The article speculates that the change is because MySQL is now Oracle property
Can't Oracle fix this problem by offering Oracle on mac hardware?
1. What "problem" would that be?
2. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/macos/whatsnew/index.html
It is a bit telling that Oracle hasn't kept current on MacOS. Apple has never made heavy-duty servers suitable for Oracle, and has been falling behind in that space since Oracle 10 was the new hotness. The XServe wasn't a bad little box, but it was a *little* box that was really designed for Apple's existing customer population, not for heavy database users. Whatever else Oracle may be, they are not stupid. They know that they have no real reason to care about MacOS as a platform for any of their products.
Integration and maintenance effort.
You speak of rules and permissibility, but you fail to cite where those rules are. I've looked at the FCC regs and can't find what you claim exists. Cite please?
So this is supposed to cast doubt on his credentials as a climate scientist... how, exactly?
It is proof that he is either irrational or dishonest. Add to that the fact that he is involved with the Cornwall Alliance, a religious organization whose war on climate science is explicitly faith-based and is grounded in making dogmatic counter-factual proclamations. The only conclusion I can come to from those facts is that e cannot be considered a scientist, whatever his formal credentials are. UMich and UWisc should be embarrassed by his degrees, and UAH should be embarrassed by his tenure.
If Sony's issues were due to their own negligence in securing their network, why should the insurance company have to pay? If I'm driving drunk my insurance company isn't going to cover my car when I get into an accident, so why the hell should an insurance company cover this?
That's a lousy analogy because drunk driving is a criminal behavior. In many places it is illegal for an insurance company to write a policy that covers personal liability for criminal acts, but they frequently can cover extremely stupid acts of negligence or even (rarely) corporate liability for the crimes of individuals.
But that doesn't seem to be relevant in this case, since Zurich seems to be suing over finer points of coverage terms rather than over whether Sony was negligent in their sloppy security. Zurich is expert in the finer points of defining degrees and scopes of negligence and writing them into umbrella corporate liability insurance policies, so that seems an unlikely area for them to be litigating. The article says nothing about negligence, but it does imply that Zurich is looking to get a grey area settled over where security breach harm sits in the legal taxonomy of torts. They are claiming that their policy doesn't cover any of the claimed harm in the suits against Sony, and that if it does then Sony's other insurers are also on the hook.
If Sony was a person this wouldn't even be a question...
Right, because a person cannot run a global conglomerate business doing billions of dollars of commerce daily with hundreds of millions of customers. If Sony was a person the underlying event could not have occurred.
More to the point you were trying to make and stipulating your dubious theory that this is about negligence... A business entity has more complicated liabilities and needs more complex insurance than an individual because it is made up of many people with non-homogeneous knowledge and motivations and distinct functions and responsibilities as part of the business. A corporation can sometimes be held liable for damage from intentional actions by low-level employees that were unforeseen, unpreventable, and in violation of corporate policy. That doesn't even have an analogy in an individual person. However, if a person is negligent in a way that contributes to harm to others, it can be a complicated process involving both fact and law to determine whether a particular insurance policy will cover that harm. For example, suppose that I had a swimming pool in my back yard that I let neighborhood kids use without any real supervision. One day the local bully comes by, pulls out the pump power line, tosses it in the pool, and starts pushing kids in. They all get scared out of their skulls and get minor shocks, maybe a lot of bruises, maybe even a few broken bones. I would get sued. If my homeowner's insurance had a specific rider covering harm to guests in my swimming pool, my insurance company would probably make some judgment as to whether to defend those suits or settle them, no matter how careless I was, and go after the bully on the other end. If my homeowner's policy didn't explicitly acknowledge the pool or explicitly excluded pool-related liability, I could have a problem much like the one Sony now has with Zurich.
The slimeballs who cracked Sony should be hoping for a Zurich win against Sony and subsequent wins in similar escape suits by the other insurers. Insurers have terrifying legal teams and a lot of law tilting the playing field in their favor. In many cases, the direct perpetrators of a harmful act can be pursued by an insurer to cover whatever the insurer paid on claims plus legal fees, while lacking the protections that a criminal defendant gets when being prosecuted by the government. Sony could go after them as well, but they probably would be as good at it.
The trick here is going to be proving that Sony was negligent with their security.
No, it isn't. That is not what the suit is about at all. No reasonably intelligent adult reading the article would believe that it is.
Zurich's suit is actually about what constitutes "property damage" and other issues specific to the Zurich policy covering Sony, as well as the other insurance policies that Sony may have in place. Zurich is also suing Sony's other insurers as a second line of defense, so that even if the court decides that the policy written by Zurich includes coverage for the specific sorts of damages claimed by customers for a criminal security breach at the particular Sony unit in question. The article doesn't include filings, but it says nothing at all about Zurich claiming negligence. Zurich actually markets their coverage as handling the gaps between other sorts of more specific corporate liability insurance, and their policy may well have a much more forgiving standard for negligence than they want to fight over. For example, it might be that they explicitly insure the corporate entity against individual negligence below a particular level of the corporate bureaucracy, in which case they'd have to show that particular higher-ups at Sony knew that security was inadequate.
Based on the article, this looks more like Zurich is saying that online security breaches simply are not covered by their policy at all. They may be covering incidents like a Bravia power supply shorting out and burning down a house, but not covering the emotional trauma of having to abandon whatever value might exist in a Sony online account.
Making commercial law more uniform was a core aspect of the 3 radical overhauls of US national legal identity: the Revolution, the Constitution, and the Civil War.
You do realize that the driving push for the settlement of america was a radical overhaul in commercial law as related to personal legal identity? You know that the main reason for the introduction of the printing press was a radical overhaul of commercial law? You know that the war in iraq (both of them) were fundamentally based on commercial law? gawd ... oversimplifying much?
Not really.
If software patents cannot be worked around within the United States
That's awfully hyperbolic. It might even be called utter bullshit.
Apple has hundreds of millions of customers. They just got dinged for about 1 hour of their net earnings (or about 15 minutes of their gross revenue) to cover their liability in this case. It sucks that they have to bother, but they are arguably the juiciest target for such cases these days and it's costing them a tiny piece of their huge gushing flood of cash. Venue selection only really works for patent trolls suing very large companies like Apple, so if *YOU* want to be safe from patent trolls, *YOU* probably can be without even thinking about it. If you want to be Facebook or Apple, you might occasionally have to pay off the trolls in amounts that do not really amount to anything significant.
Like it or not, Indiana and Michigan and Alaska and Texas are not different countries
I am aware that Indiana and Michigan and Alaska and Texas are not different countries. But as I understand it, if I do no willful business in Texas, the district courts of Texas lack personal jurisdiction, and I can have the suit moved to a different venue whose juries don't always find in favor of a patent holder.
Well, let's start by staying factual: EDTX juries do not always find in favor of patent holders. They just lean that way more than most other places, and the docket is less clogged there (or at least it used to be... ) than in many other places.
But your comparison to a case against you in a state district court is radically different than the case at hand, and is tangential to your original suggestion about the scope of patent decisions. Patent cases have their own particularly well-defined (and relatively loose) venue rules based on personal jurisdiction, but they also are one of the types of cases where the district courts work under the "Federal Circuit" rather than subordinate to the various regional (numbered) appeals circuits. The underlying principle is that patents are part of the federal duty to regulate all of the interstate and international commerce of the US in a coherent fashion, and applying fact-based patent infringement rulings in the piecemeal way that issues of law sometimes get applied would encourage would-be infringers to try to game the system. Patent holders do sometimes fail to get their venue of choice (e.g. Pragmatus v. Facebook et al.) when it is clear that they are pure trolls and can't make an argument for infringements happening in the hands of a large fraction of all US residents. Getting a venue change doesn't protect a defendant from the outcome of a patent case applying to them in the whole of the US.
My idea was not to do business in any jurisdiction whose "juries tend to automatically side with plaintiffs in patent suits." How does a federal district court in one part of the country have jurisdiction over someone who intentionally does no business in that part of the country?
So, your question answers itself. Like it or not, Indiana and Michigan and Alaska and Texas are not different countries, they are parts of one country.
Making commercial law more uniform was a core aspect of the 3 radical overhauls of US national legal identity: the Revolution, the Constitution, and the Civil War. The period leading up to the Civil War with its dysfunctional legal treatment of slaves can be seen as a demonstration of the intrinsic problems with letting different jurisdictions define the scope of property differently, and that is essentially what a district-by-district application of patent law would look like, only with a more complex patchwork and less brutal stakes.