Do you have to be -convinced- that this is not placebo? Say, I prepare 50 doses of some kind of drug. (Not morphine, or nothing addictive, I don't want to become addict). I replace a random one with placebo, in such a way that I won't find out which one until after I finish the experiment. (say, mark the vial with UV ink). Then each day I take the drug, mark the empty vial with the date and write down perceived result. By the end of the experiment I know I have taken the placebo once, but every day I have strong reasons to believe (chance 49 in 50) it's the true drug I take that day. Then just see which vial contained the placebo and match against the notes from that day?
HOW convinced do I have to be? 1 in 100? 1 in 1000?
First off, you might use arbitrary chemical substance with a strong temporary effect on the organism. Not necessarily medicament that would help (or not) with their disease (if any). Take healthy people and give them something that doesn't change their health but has noticable effect. Then state things in a "political" way, that is i.e. "you will be given chemical substances of various effect...". You don't need to actively deceive them. Just (truthfully) state that certain areas of the experiment are secret (and will be revealed after the experiment ends), and eventually slip pieces of information that will drive them to not necessarily right conclusions. And finally, for some kind of reward substantial enough, they should be satisfied. Keep it harmless and nobody can complain it's immoral.
Do a drunk's senses get so suppressed that even this flavor is indiscernable from water?
Not after 100ml of vodka. After 250, yes.
(said by a Pole, applying Polish alcohol durability standards, so may be inadequate for the case. Same as lethal blood alcohol level - Poles are known to survive over 10 promiles.)
That nice trick just reduces the case, he makes 1 thing that don't make sense out of 2. Since you can't explain how placebo works (and thus all implications of its use), any research based on comparison to placebo is worthless.
We know that A+B=10, so let's take the most common B of 1 and calculate A. Oh, it's 9! (Well, value of A seems to drop if B=2, and probably there are other numerous cases where value of A differs but they are still a mystery to the science.) But now I found a great formula of A+C=15. Great, we already know that A=9 so certainly C is 6. See? We proved that C=6. A great scientific success... But in some, not quite understandable cases, other experiments seem to show that C varies from 6. Why? Now that's another great mystery....
...unless that's how the placebo effect works. We are all assuming that the placebo effect is strictly psychological. What if it happens at lower level? If you can actually trick blood cells into "thinking" they receive the medication while they really receive placebo? Since both effects are unexplained, it's only a hypothesis how they work. Any hypothesis can be false.
The story is now so thick with poor experimental practice, unprofessional behavior, and overt fraud that few legitimate researchers will touch the subject for fear of being associated with all the hucksters and frauds who haunt it.
[tinfoil hat mode]And that's exactly what the oil lobby wanted to achieve...[/tinfoil hat mode]
Honestly, I'm glad I learned English, comparing to translations.
Sometimes the translations are okay or nearly okay. Sometimes they are terrible. And worst if you get used to "native" version and then when translation appears, keyboard shortcuts are remapped to match new words. I LOATHE when suddenly aumix stops responding to Q for Quit and I must read help to see that now it's K as "Koniec" (and not W for Wyjdz, Z for Zakoncz, O for Opusc which are synonyms). I feel thoroughly lost in "translated GIMP". Suddenly finding an option becomes tricky. "SOTA Chrome" becomes "Krysztal" while "Cristal" is being renamed to something yet different, and only by remembering the position in menu I'm able to guess where it is. Sure it's about "getting used to", but then some things are simply translated incorrectly and guessing their meaning in your native language is just impossible...
I'm not exactly going to suddenly go "Shit, I was looking for chocolate but I can only find a web site about a designer, I better buy some clothes and forget about that chocolate!"
But now, after seeing this story I'm absolutely convinced I'll buy chocolate of some other brand. No giving my money to surname thieves.
Why would you care for shorter -compile- times?
on
GCC 4.0 Preview
·
· Score: 1
I'd much rather see a compiler that is half as fast but generates twice as fast code. I really can wait another 4 hours to have the desktop manager compiled and then have it running fast, smoothly, making the experience pleasant, than to have crap compiled now.
Google: Stop! Who would PageRank must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he see. Launcelot: Ask me the questions, Google. I am not afraid. Google: What... is your name? Launcelot: My name is 'Sir Launcelot of Camelot'. Google: What... is your quest? Launcelot: To Rank High. Google: What... is your favourite colour? Launcelot: Blue. Google: Right. Off you go. Launcelot: Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. Robin: That's easy! Google: Stop! Who approacheth the PageRank must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he see. Robin: Ask me the questions, Google. I'm not afraid. Google: What... is your name? Robin: 'Sir Robin of Camelot'. Google: What... is your quest? Robin: To Rank High. Google: What... is the capital of Assyria? [pause] Robin: I don't know that! Auuuuuuuugh! Google: Stop! What... is your name? Galahad: 'Sir Galahad of Camelot'. Google: What... is your quest? Galahad: To Rank High. Google: What... is your favourite colour? Galahad: Blue. No, yel-- auuuuuuuugh! Google: Hee hee heh. Stop! What... is your name? eWeek: It is 'eWeek', Paper of Criticism. Google: What... is your quest? eWeek: To Rank High. Google: What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow? eWeek: What do you mean? An African or European swallow? Google: Huh? I-- I don't know that! Auuuuuuuugh!
Patents as such aren't wrong. It's the current implementation of both. The idea behind patents is: 1) Work hard or some novel idea 2) Get it to work. 3) Patent it and start selling it without anybody in the way. 4) Profit!!! - for funding more research on more novel ideas.
How it actually works is: 1) Find some obvious thing nobody thought to patent because it's so blatantly obvious 2) Patent it. Getting it to work is optional. 3) Wait till a bunch of people use it, then sue them. 4) Profit!!! - for funding more lawyers.
Copyright is similarly screwed up, though in most cases significantly higher degree of creativity is needed. Copyrighting silence, copyrighting a single black dot isn't as notorious as patenting triple click. Although in the Trademark field things are VERY screwed up. (site Mobil-X shut down because it's too similar to "Asterix" ????)
What about a hundred other similar online auction systems? All the e-bay competition? Don't you think now E-bay can sue the state for serious anti-competitive practices that will prevent people from using their services and make them move to the competition instead? I guess the estimate loss would be of several billions or more.
Hey, Ohio'ans, prepare for a tax hike, the state will have to pay the damages...
cp/share/mp3/shakira-forever.mp3 ~ ftp MyHomeHost.for.us put shakira-forever.mp3 bye
Who performs the piracy? Did it happen at the moment the guy saved the data on his own drive? Or the moment when he sold me the shell account? Or the moment I performed "cp"? Or the moment I sent the data from the remote host to my own?
The bet is at the moment of "cp" when I create a copy "I own", and technically it's me pirating the song. Same as picking my roommate's CD and ripping it to my harddrive. Still, RIAA can't forbid my roommate to have CDs and letting me live with him, and the only "fishy" thing is my mp3 copy. So RIAA could try to sue russian users who downloaded the songs, but not the service. Although it seems Russian lav doesn't consider performing the "cp" a crime. Duplicating data for personal use, even in remote location isn't a crime. It's not some admin that makes the copy. It's me, running some php procedure or something like that.
Yeah. 5 mins of waiting on hook, then 15 mins of trying to converse with american representative. All for overseas international call rates. And add that to the bill, in eastern europe. I don't think my customer would be happy to be billed extra 50% because of registration process. Much more likely I'll bring a keygen/crack from astalavista.box.sk and reinstall windows with a fake key, even if I got original OEM copy.
$300.000? How do you think, how much would getting such a group to be efficient cost? Any of the $10mln+ companies could sweep such a group under the rug. Sorry, but $300.000 is a puny amount when it comes to business and even punier when it comes to politics. Just to think, the Firefox ad in the NYT was a Big Thing for us. For "nonprofit organization rates". How many businesses place their ads in NYT on daily basis, for commercial rates? How many consider that normal, daily business practice, one of hundreds of ads they place in media worldwide? How are we placed compared to them?
A politician's elected office is more important than the money he receives, because it is the office that allows him to get this money.
Unless he plans to retire. "Okay. End of playing a nice daddy that gives candies to kids. Time to harvest the profits and make use of them." Say, Bush can't be elected a president again. What does he have to lose?
Plus the politician will invest half of the bribe into silencing the press, getting the next campaign, will donate 10% of it to some charity and get the press to shout about it, so he loses the 40 voters and gains 100 others. If the US society wasn't so clueless (choosing someone because of the looks, of the way he speaks or how his commercial clips look like) this strategy will work. Your informed vote choosing someone worthy won't outweight 10 votes of morons cheated into thinking some bastard will make their live easier.
Do you REALLY believe things would be much different if Kerry was at power? Sorry, the elections don't have to be rigged. The elections are plain meaningless. The corruption happens at the moment of nominating the candidates, where people have really little influence, you are given a small set, usually two candidates that differ only on the surface. Which one you choose is mostly meaningless. Real democracy and American Democracy is like "how would you like to have sex?" and "do you want to be screwed in the ass or in the mouth".
Already happened. Face it: We lost it already. No amount of calling will supersede a well placed "donation". No amount of cries will change the fact that the people at power will take really good care that ALL the presidential candidates sit deep in their pockets, and no matter who gets elected, power remains in the same hands. Democracy is dead, elections are just a meaningless circus for entertainment of the public, the real power is at hands of those with real money.
My suggestions: Hannibal Lecter for the national food and agriculture comission. Osama Bin Laden for air transport dept. Saddam Hussein for human rights jury. Michael Jackson for child abuse prevention network CEO. And of course Bill Gates for president of ISO.
Touchpads, joysticks, that little red clitoris that sticks off the middle of keyboard and all kinds of weird pointing devices suck a big time, not only when it comes to gestures. A decent mini mouse that works fine with a laptop costs a few bucks. And the gesture you described is most apparently result of the oversensitive pad tecognizing your drag as a tap=click. Either reconfigure gestures to RMB, or kill "tapping" altogether as it may seem useful at times, but really isn't worth all the nerves and trouble caused by all the false positives.
I feel handicapped without it. Some features: Turn the wheel while holding it pressed - Horizontal scroll. Hold wheel, click RMB/LMB - tab forward/backward. Highlight an URL, drag up - opens in new tab. "scratch" the page (right-left-right) - close tab/window. Press left, holding right - history back. Press right, holding left - history forward. Up-left-up - one directory up:)
There's a difference between 2^64 and 2^160. Everything is theoretically crackable given enough time. But anything that would need more computational power that couldn't be achieved with computational power of computers of total mass greater than Earth, within the universe lifetime is considered totally uncrackable, and everything that takes a month of work of a decent cluster is considered cracked. That's directly corresponding to the above difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have to be -convinced- that this is not placebo?
Say, I prepare 50 doses of some kind of drug. (Not morphine, or nothing addictive, I don't want to become addict). I replace a random one with placebo, in such a way that I won't find out which one until after I finish the experiment. (say, mark the vial with UV ink). Then each day I take the drug, mark the empty vial with the date and write down perceived result. By the end of the experiment I know I have taken the placebo once, but every day I have strong reasons to believe (chance 49 in 50) it's the true drug I take that day.
Then just see which vial contained the placebo and match against the notes from that day?
HOW convinced do I have to be? 1 in 100? 1 in 1000?
First off, you might use arbitrary chemical substance with a strong temporary effect on the organism. Not necessarily medicament that would help (or not) with their disease (if any). Take healthy people and give them something that doesn't change their health but has noticable effect. Then state things in a "political" way, that is i.e. "you will be given chemical substances of various effect...". You don't need to actively deceive them. Just (truthfully) state that certain areas of the experiment are secret (and will be revealed after the experiment ends), and eventually slip pieces of information that will drive them to not necessarily right conclusions. And finally, for some kind of reward substantial enough, they should be satisfied. Keep it harmless and nobody can complain it's immoral.
Do a drunk's senses get so suppressed that even this flavor is indiscernable from water?
Not after 100ml of vodka.
After 250, yes.
(said by a Pole, applying Polish alcohol durability standards, so may be inadequate for the case. Same as lethal blood alcohol level - Poles are known to survive over 10 promiles.)
That nice trick just reduces the case, he makes 1 thing that don't make sense out of 2. Since you can't explain how placebo works (and thus all implications of its use), any research based on comparison to placebo is worthless.
We know that A+B=10, so let's take the most common B of 1 and calculate A. Oh, it's 9! (Well, value of A seems to drop if B=2, and probably there are other numerous cases where value of A differs but they are still a mystery to the science.)
But now I found a great formula of A+C=15. Great, we already know that A=9 so certainly C is 6. See? We proved that C=6. A great scientific success... But in some, not quite understandable cases, other experiments seem to show that C varies from 6. Why? Now that's another great mystery....
...unless that's how the placebo effect works.
We are all assuming that the placebo effect is strictly psychological. What if it happens at lower level? If you can actually trick blood cells into "thinking" they receive the medication while they really receive placebo? Since both effects are unexplained, it's only a hypothesis how they work. Any hypothesis can be false.
The story is now so thick with poor experimental practice, unprofessional behavior, and overt fraud that few legitimate researchers will touch the subject for fear of being associated with all the hucksters and frauds who haunt it.
[tinfoil hat mode]And that's exactly what the oil lobby wanted to achieve...[/tinfoil hat mode]
Honestly, I'm glad I learned English, comparing to translations.
Sometimes the translations are okay or nearly okay. Sometimes they are terrible. And worst if you get used to "native" version and then when translation appears, keyboard shortcuts are remapped to match new words. I LOATHE when suddenly aumix stops responding to Q for Quit and I must read help to see that now it's K as "Koniec" (and not W for Wyjdz, Z for Zakoncz, O for Opusc which are synonyms).
I feel thoroughly lost in "translated GIMP". Suddenly finding an option becomes tricky. "SOTA Chrome" becomes "Krysztal" while "Cristal" is being renamed to something yet different, and only by remembering the position in menu I'm able to guess where it is. Sure it's about "getting used to", but then some things are simply translated incorrectly and guessing their meaning in your native language is just impossible...
Learn English. It pays.
I'm not exactly going to suddenly go "Shit, I was looking for chocolate but I can only find a web site about a designer, I better buy some clothes and forget about that chocolate!"
But now, after seeing this story I'm absolutely convinced I'll buy chocolate of some other brand. No giving my money to surname thieves.
I'd much rather see a compiler that is half as fast but generates twice as fast code. I really can wait another 4 hours to have the desktop manager compiled and then have it running fast, smoothly, making the experience pleasant, than to have crap compiled now.
Google: Stop! Who would PageRank must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he see.
Launcelot: Ask me the questions, Google. I am not afraid.
Google: What... is your name?
Launcelot: My name is 'Sir Launcelot of Camelot'.
Google: What... is your quest?
Launcelot: To Rank High.
Google: What... is your favourite colour?
Launcelot: Blue.
Google: Right. Off you go.
Launcelot: Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.
Robin: That's easy!
Google: Stop! Who approacheth the PageRank must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he see.
Robin: Ask me the questions, Google. I'm not afraid.
Google: What... is your name?
Robin: 'Sir Robin of Camelot'.
Google: What... is your quest?
Robin: To Rank High.
Google: What... is the capital of Assyria?
[pause]
Robin: I don't know that! Auuuuuuuugh!
Google: Stop! What... is your name?
Galahad: 'Sir Galahad of Camelot'.
Google: What... is your quest?
Galahad: To Rank High.
Google: What... is your favourite colour?
Galahad: Blue. No, yel-- auuuuuuuugh!
Google: Hee hee heh. Stop! What... is your name?
eWeek: It is 'eWeek', Paper of Criticism.
Google: What... is your quest?
eWeek: To Rank High.
Google: What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
eWeek: What do you mean? An African or European swallow?
Google: Huh? I-- I don't know that! Auuuuuuuugh!
Patents as such aren't wrong. It's the current implementation of both.
The idea behind patents is:
1) Work hard or some novel idea
2) Get it to work.
3) Patent it and start selling it without anybody in the way.
4) Profit!!! - for funding more research on more novel ideas.
How it actually works is:
1) Find some obvious thing nobody thought to patent because it's so blatantly obvious
2) Patent it. Getting it to work is optional.
3) Wait till a bunch of people use it, then sue them.
4) Profit!!! - for funding more lawyers.
Copyright is similarly screwed up, though in most cases significantly higher degree of creativity is needed. Copyrighting silence, copyrighting a single black dot isn't as notorious as patenting triple click. Although in the Trademark field things are VERY screwed up. (site Mobil-X shut down because it's too similar to "Asterix" ????)
If you're afraid of torrent spoofs, just leave md5sum of each file on the server of IEEE, then everyone can verify if what they got is true or not.
What about a hundred other similar online auction systems? All the e-bay competition?
Don't you think now E-bay can sue the state for serious anti-competitive practices that will prevent people from using their services and make them move to the competition instead?
I guess the estimate loss would be of several billions or more.
Hey, Ohio'ans, prepare for a tax hike, the state will have to pay the damages...
Not quite...
/share/mp3/shakira-forever.mp3 ~
telnet warez.host.ru
cp
ftp MyHomeHost.for.us
put shakira-forever.mp3
bye
Who performs the piracy? Did it happen at the moment the guy saved the data on his own drive? Or the moment when he sold me the shell account? Or the moment I performed "cp"? Or the moment I sent the data from the remote host to my own?
The bet is at the moment of "cp" when I create a copy "I own", and technically it's me pirating the song. Same as picking my roommate's CD and ripping it to my harddrive. Still, RIAA can't forbid my roommate to have CDs and letting me live with him, and the only "fishy" thing is my mp3 copy. So RIAA could try to sue russian users who downloaded the songs, but not the service.
Although it seems Russian lav doesn't consider performing the "cp" a crime. Duplicating data for personal use, even in remote location isn't a crime. It's not some admin that makes the copy. It's me, running some php procedure or something like that.
Naive... This would never get through publisher agencies. Just like "all movies" or "all songs"...
Yeah. 5 mins of waiting on hook, then 15 mins of trying to converse with american representative. All for overseas international call rates. And add that to the bill, in eastern europe. I don't think my customer would be happy to be billed extra 50% because of registration process.
Much more likely I'll bring a keygen/crack from astalavista.box.sk and reinstall windows with a fake key, even if I got original OEM copy.
$300.000? How do you think, how much would getting such a group to be efficient cost? Any of the $10mln+ companies could sweep such a group under the rug.
Sorry, but $300.000 is a puny amount when it comes to business and even punier when it comes to politics.
Just to think, the Firefox ad in the NYT was a Big Thing for us. For "nonprofit organization rates". How many businesses place their ads in NYT on daily basis, for commercial rates? How many consider that normal, daily business practice, one of hundreds of ads they place in media worldwide? How are we placed compared to them?
A politician's elected office is more important than the money he receives, because it is the office that allows him to get this money.
Unless he plans to retire. "Okay. End of playing a nice daddy that gives candies to kids. Time to harvest the profits and make use of them."
Say, Bush can't be elected a president again. What does he have to lose?
Plus the politician will invest half of the bribe into silencing the press, getting the next campaign, will donate 10% of it to some charity and get the press to shout about it, so he loses the 40 voters and gains 100 others.
If the US society wasn't so clueless (choosing someone because of the looks, of the way he speaks or how his commercial clips look like) this strategy will work. Your informed vote choosing someone worthy won't outweight 10 votes of morons cheated into thinking some bastard will make their live easier.
Do you REALLY believe things would be much different if Kerry was at power?
Sorry, the elections don't have to be rigged. The elections are plain meaningless. The corruption happens at the moment of nominating the candidates, where people have really little influence, you are given a small set, usually two candidates that differ only on the surface. Which one you choose is mostly meaningless. Real democracy and American Democracy is like "how would you like to have sex?" and "do you want to be screwed in the ass or in the mouth".
Already happened. Face it: We lost it already. No amount of calling will supersede a well placed "donation". No amount of cries will change the fact that the people at power will take really good care that ALL the presidential candidates sit deep in their pockets, and no matter who gets elected, power remains in the same hands. Democracy is dead, elections are just a meaningless circus for entertainment of the public, the real power is at hands of those with real money.
Yeah, uh...
My suggestions:
Hannibal Lecter for the national food and agriculture comission.
Osama Bin Laden for air transport dept.
Saddam Hussein for human rights jury.
Michael Jackson for child abuse prevention network CEO.
And of course Bill Gates for president of ISO.
#define IsNot(x,y) ((void*)(&(x))!=(void*)(&(y)))
got patented?
Touchpads, joysticks, that little red clitoris that sticks off the middle of keyboard and all kinds of weird pointing devices suck a big time, not only when it comes to gestures. A decent mini mouse that works fine with a laptop costs a few bucks. And the gesture you described is most apparently result of the oversensitive pad tecognizing your drag as a tap=click. Either reconfigure gestures to RMB, or kill "tapping" altogether as it may seem useful at times, but really isn't worth all the nerves and trouble caused by all the false positives.
Add MozGest.
:)
I feel handicapped without it.
Some features:
Turn the wheel while holding it pressed - Horizontal scroll.
Hold wheel, click RMB/LMB - tab forward/backward.
Highlight an URL, drag up - opens in new tab.
"scratch" the page (right-left-right) - close tab/window.
Press left, holding right - history back.
Press right, holding left - history forward.
Up-left-up - one directory up
There's a difference between 2^64 and 2^160.
Everything is theoretically crackable given enough time. But anything that would need more computational power that couldn't be achieved with computational power of computers of total mass greater than Earth, within the universe lifetime is considered totally uncrackable, and everything that takes a month of work of a decent cluster is considered cracked. That's directly corresponding to the above difference.