He should sue anyway. I certainly would, were I in his position. There's absolutely no excuse for allowing adherents of an arbitrary ideology to wear a mask, while forbidding everyone else from doing the same thing.
We had a similar kerfuffle here a while back, when exceptions to the no-weapons-in-schools rules were made so that Sikh students could bring their "ceremonial daggers" to school. If I had still been a student at the time, I would have bought the biggest damn knife I could find, strapped it to the middle of my chest, and then sued the pants off anyone who tried to prevent me from entering the school. Not because I particularly want to carry a weapon around, but just on principle. Laws and rules are supposed to be impartial - you can't go exempting certain groups just because their imaginary friend has been telling them weird things.
I did consider using a heaver-duty unix OS, but I'm a windows engineer (the home setup is a 2003 domain) and spend more than enough time already fixing those, so I'm not mad keen on learning a new OS just for one purpose.
Trust me - I'm no unix expert either. If you can install and run Ubuntu Linux, you can do the same with OpenSolaris.
The only problems I had with making the switch was hardware incompatibility - one of my SATA controller cards wasn't supported, and my on-board NIC would crap out every half hour or so for about a minute. To correct those issues, I bought a new controller card ($40) and compiled a different version of the network drivers. Everything else was easy. Give it a try - you can at least download the live-cd. That way you can get a feel for it and see if it'll support your hardware, without having to install anything.
But there are still problems. ZFS's pathological case results in rebuild times of 2-3 WEEKS for a 1TB drive in a RAID-Z (similar to RAID-5).
Huh? How big is your array? 2,500 Petabytes?
I've got 2 RAIDZ zpools on one server, one is 5x500GB, the other is 6x1TB. When I ran some tests with the arrays half-filled, the 500GB drives rebuild in around 2 hours, the 1TB in around 5. That gives me a rebuild time of around 10 hours for a FULL terabyte array. That's quite a bit shorter than your 2-3 weeks.
I've managed to get this going, using the excellent FreeNAS - although proceed with caution, as only the beta build supports it, and I've already had serious (all data lost) crashes twice.
That's horrible!!! Even when I was running ZFS under FUSE on Ubuntu, it didn't take out any of my data. I did that for well over a year, and felt pretty nervous about it, but never had an issue. You need to ditch FreeNAS ASAP and get your server on OpenSolaris.
That said I definitely couldn't afford an SSD that would be able to replace the raid-5 in my pc (4x500GB usable space of 1.34TB), the largest SSD listed on ebuyer.com are 250GB @ £360 each, I would need 8 to match my raid 5 setup which is £2880 which is probably enough to build 2 reasonable machines both with a 1.34TB raid-5 using normal HDDs.
In today's prices, it'd be enough to build 2 machines with MCH higher capacity (5TB+). Remember that a 1 TB drive today costs less than what you probably spent per 500 gig drive.
They've got 12 terabytes of data. A generous estimate tells me it would take about 100 hours for the initial backup. If they only generate 1 terabyte of new data per day, they'd be looking at something like a 10 hour back-up time every night. I suppose it's usable in a school environment, but it would still suck.
They did mention they wanted to set it up on a gigabit network, or possibly fiber, which makes me think they'd be transferring a hell of a lot of data to it. With such slow disk speeds, they definitely wouldn't need fiber.
The best (cheap) solution would be to look for a motherboard that supports 8 sata devices, and then throw in a couple of cheap 4 port PCI-E sata cards. That gives 'em the ability to toss in up to 16 drives, which would provide plenty of capacity even in a RAID6 or RAIDZ2 configuration. And the write speed would be massively improved.
The disk access speed on those must be truly pathetic. Putting 15 drives on a single PCI bus is rather like trying to suck a bowling ball through a garden hose.
That's a pretty big if. So far, nobody has pulled it off.
I suppose that if you managed it, you could say that your treatment was effective... just like if you managed to convince the emperor that he isn't really naked, you could call yourself a successful fashion consultant.
Yeah, it's still quackery. Or, to be fair, that's my initial assessment, although I know very little about it. As far as I can tell, the entire "field" seems to be dedicated to pumping people full of vitamins and "dietary supplements", and hoping something good happens. There's no scientific basis for it - in fact, we know that large doses of vitamin supplements just get flushed out of the body anyway.
Of course, if you've got any actual information/evidence, I'm always willing to change my mind. If, on the other hand, you intend simply to make unsupported claims while citing anecdotal experiences and linking to websites of questionable merit.... don't bother.
The "victim", in this case, is the BCA. They are the ones bringing a complaint against Simon Singh. Ergo, the courts should be on Singh's side (aka "innocent until proven guilty), since he is the one being accused. Accusations that happen out of court are irrelevant - courts deal only with the case being presented, where the burden of proof is always on the plaintiff.
The fascinating thing that we're only just beginning to learn is that there is a measurable *physiological* placebo response.
If you'd read the recent Wired article... you would not be so hasty to discount the real, measurable response to placebo.
The article may be recent, but these claims are nothing new. We have decades worth of anecdotes about people responding physically to a placebo treatment. What we don't have is any hard data.
I don't dismiss these claims out of hand, which is why I said that placebo has "little to no effect" on physiology. If I wanted to dismiss it entirely, I would have stated that it has no effect whatsoever. However, even though I acknowledge that the placebo effect can have a small physiological effect, and even though I tacitly accept the idea that it may even have some major effects, I can tell you for a fact that it will never cure any major illness which has a serious physical cause. The placebo effect will never cure cancer, mend broken bones, get rid of your herpes, or help you avoid unwanted pregnancy. It just doesn't work that way.
This is because usually, they actually can't fix much. But their god complex prevents them from ever admitting it.
So I take it you're against healthcare reform? After all, if medicine doesn't work, who cares whether people can afford it!
You do realize, don't you, that there are about 23 million people with diabetes living in the US alone? That's 23 million people being kept alive by these "doctors", suffering from ONE disease, in ONE country. How fucking retarded do you have to be in order to accuse the entire medical profession of being a bunch of arrogant assholes who can't really do anything?
Actually, naturopathic medicine is not only legitimate, it is superior to and will eventually replace allopathic medicine (mainstream, drug-and-surgery medicine), assuming the Singularity does not occur first.
Actually, hemlock tea mixed with battery acid is far superior to both, and will eventually replace them, assuming that pink unicorns don't start farting pixie dust first.
Actually, his experience is the one legitimate example of chiropractic medicine. If they're massaging muscles and realigning joints in order to relieve pain, there's nothing wrong with that. There are plenty of legitimate chiropractors who stick to more-or-less scientific treatments and do their patients a great deal of good. It's the quacks who go around claiming to cure cancer by cracking your back that are the problem. Or the freaks who crack the joints of 4-year-old children, like the douchebag that was featured on Penn and Teller's Bullshit.
Yup. But if the sugar pill can save your life and the medical treatment gives up on you, would you take it?
It can't. Placebo generally works for subjective symptoms - it has little to no effect on serious medical conditions or any effects which can be studied objectively. Have your wife take some placebo birth control, and see how well that works for you.
That wouldn't work because the courts are already against him on the definition of the word "bogus". He argued that by "bogus" he simply meant that the treatment is ineffective. The courts interpret it as meaning that the BCA is deliberately defrauding people. The first thing Singh did was try and get a higher court to accept his definition; unfortunately, last i heard, his petition had failed.
Of course, it shouldn't really matter which definition you go by - the BCA certainly does encourage ineffective treatments for various ailments, and both their approach to the therapy and to the case has been dishonest at best and intentionally deceitful at worst. In any sane legal system he should be able to accuse them of being a bunch of snake-oil-selling half-wits, without having to worry about lawsuits. The UK system is in serious need of an overhaul. The only bright light here is that Singh may get a chance to appeal his case in front of a EU court and, depending on the outcome, may well create a basis for reforming the Brit libel laws.
Starfish aren't fish, either, and you park on driveways and drive on parkways. It's called language. Get used to it...
Well, no... starfish may not be fish, but RV's certainly are recreational vehicles. That's a pretty horrible analogy.
Also driveways and parkways are both properly named, it's just your base assumption which is wrong. A driveway is a private path on which you drive in order to reach the house, and a parkway is a road which passes through a "landscaped thoroughfare" or a park. Both words make perfect sense if you understand their origin.
We just know that it exists... Which to me, is news.
It shouldn't be. Or, at least the general concept shouldn't be. The original IRC bots were written to run on *nix, because they were meant to be used for channel control/moderation, and so needed to run on an always-on server. Which usually meant a shell account on a linux or BSD machine. Small channels only employed one bot, but larger ones used several working in tandem. So, really, the earliest bot-nets were all *nix based - they just weren't malicious.
botnet: an automated and self propagating network of compromised machines.
That's a ridiculous definition. The vast majority of botnets aren't self-propagating. A program that is self-propagating would be a worm. If it happened to maintain communication with other compromised machines, then it would also become a botnet. But self-propagation has never been a requirement in the definition of "botnet".
Of course, the easiest way to make yourself a botnet is to upload an infected file to the Kazaa network, or some similar file-sharing network. Once it's on there I suppose it becomes "self-propagating", in a way. But that's a different matter entirely.
That's interesting. However, a copyright can only be defended by it's owner, right? I could make millions selling pirated Microsoft software, and as long as they don't complain, I'm not doing anything wrong. Copyright laws are civil, not criminal.
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He should sue anyway. I certainly would, were I in his position. There's absolutely no excuse for allowing adherents of an arbitrary ideology to wear a mask, while forbidding everyone else from doing the same thing.
We had a similar kerfuffle here a while back, when exceptions to the no-weapons-in-schools rules were made so that Sikh students could bring their "ceremonial daggers" to school. If I had still been a student at the time, I would have bought the biggest damn knife I could find, strapped it to the middle of my chest, and then sued the pants off anyone who tried to prevent me from entering the school. Not because I particularly want to carry a weapon around, but just on principle. Laws and rules are supposed to be impartial - you can't go exempting certain groups just because their imaginary friend has been telling them weird things.
Trust me - I'm no unix expert either. If you can install and run Ubuntu Linux, you can do the same with OpenSolaris.
The only problems I had with making the switch was hardware incompatibility - one of my SATA controller cards wasn't supported, and my on-board NIC would crap out every half hour or so for about a minute. To correct those issues, I bought a new controller card ($40) and compiled a different version of the network drivers. Everything else was easy. Give it a try - you can at least download the live-cd. That way you can get a feel for it and see if it'll support your hardware, without having to install anything.
But there are still problems. ZFS's pathological case results in rebuild times of 2-3 WEEKS for a 1TB drive in a RAID-Z (similar to RAID-5).
Huh? How big is your array? 2,500 Petabytes?
I've got 2 RAIDZ zpools on one server, one is 5x500GB, the other is 6x1TB. When I ran some tests with the arrays half-filled, the 500GB drives rebuild in around 2 hours, the 1TB in around 5. That gives me a rebuild time of around 10 hours for a FULL terabyte array. That's quite a bit shorter than your 2-3 weeks.
That's horrible!!! Even when I was running ZFS under FUSE on Ubuntu, it didn't take out any of my data. I did that for well over a year, and felt pretty nervous about it, but never had an issue. You need to ditch FreeNAS ASAP and get your server on OpenSolaris.
In today's prices, it'd be enough to build 2 machines with MCH higher capacity (5TB+). Remember that a 1 TB drive today costs less than what you probably spent per 500 gig drive.
They've got 12 terabytes of data. A generous estimate tells me it would take about 100 hours for the initial backup. If they only generate 1 terabyte of new data per day, they'd be looking at something like a 10 hour back-up time every night. I suppose it's usable in a school environment, but it would still suck.
They did mention they wanted to set it up on a gigabit network, or possibly fiber, which makes me think they'd be transferring a hell of a lot of data to it. With such slow disk speeds, they definitely wouldn't need fiber.
The best (cheap) solution would be to look for a motherboard that supports 8 sata devices, and then throw in a couple of cheap 4 port PCI-E sata cards. That gives 'em the ability to toss in up to 16 drives, which would provide plenty of capacity even in a RAID6 or RAIDZ2 configuration. And the write speed would be massively improved.
A single backup using rsync isn't going to cut it. Imagine backing up corrupted data, overwriting other stuff.
That's what snapshots are for.
The disk access speed on those must be truly pathetic. Putting 15 drives on a single PCI bus is rather like trying to suck a bowling ball through a garden hose.
That's a pretty big if. So far, nobody has pulled it off.
I suppose that if you managed it, you could say that your treatment was effective ... just like if you managed to convince the emperor that he isn't really naked, you could call yourself a successful fashion consultant.
Why should defamation be free of the fear of retribution ?
It's not defamation - it's accurate reporting.
If Singh had a case he should have sued them
For what, exactly?
Yeah, it's still quackery. Or, to be fair, that's my initial assessment, although I know very little about it. As far as I can tell, the entire "field" seems to be dedicated to pumping people full of vitamins and "dietary supplements", and hoping something good happens. There's no scientific basis for it - in fact, we know that large doses of vitamin supplements just get flushed out of the body anyway.
Of course, if you've got any actual information/evidence, I'm always willing to change my mind. If, on the other hand, you intend simply to make unsupported claims while citing anecdotal experiences and linking to websites of questionable merit .... don't bother.
What? That made no sense at all.
The "victim", in this case, is the BCA. They are the ones bringing a complaint against Simon Singh. Ergo, the courts should be on Singh's side (aka "innocent until proven guilty), since he is the one being accused. Accusations that happen out of court are irrelevant - courts deal only with the case being presented, where the burden of proof is always on the plaintiff.
The article may be recent, but these claims are nothing new. We have decades worth of anecdotes about people responding physically to a placebo treatment. What we don't have is any hard data.
I don't dismiss these claims out of hand, which is why I said that placebo has "little to no effect" on physiology. If I wanted to dismiss it entirely, I would have stated that it has no effect whatsoever. However, even though I acknowledge that the placebo effect can have a small physiological effect, and even though I tacitly accept the idea that it may even have some major effects, I can tell you for a fact that it will never cure any major illness which has a serious physical cause. The placebo effect will never cure cancer, mend broken bones, get rid of your herpes, or help you avoid unwanted pregnancy. It just doesn't work that way.
This is because usually, they actually can't fix much. But their god complex prevents them from ever admitting it.
So I take it you're against healthcare reform? After all, if medicine doesn't work, who cares whether people can afford it!
You do realize, don't you, that there are about 23 million people with diabetes living in the US alone? That's 23 million people being kept alive by these "doctors", suffering from ONE disease, in ONE country. How fucking retarded do you have to be in order to accuse the entire medical profession of being a bunch of arrogant assholes who can't really do anything?
Actually, hemlock tea mixed with battery acid is far superior to both, and will eventually replace them, assuming that pink unicorns don't start farting pixie dust first.
Actually, his experience is the one legitimate example of chiropractic medicine. If they're massaging muscles and realigning joints in order to relieve pain, there's nothing wrong with that. There are plenty of legitimate chiropractors who stick to more-or-less scientific treatments and do their patients a great deal of good. It's the quacks who go around claiming to cure cancer by cracking your back that are the problem. Or the freaks who crack the joints of 4-year-old children, like the douchebag that was featured on Penn and Teller's Bullshit.
You're a dick, but that was funny as hell :) I'd mod you up if I hadn't already commented earlier.
It can't. Placebo generally works for subjective symptoms - it has little to no effect on serious medical conditions or any effects which can be studied objectively. Have your wife take some placebo birth control, and see how well that works for you.
That wouldn't work because the courts are already against him on the definition of the word "bogus". He argued that by "bogus" he simply meant that the treatment is ineffective. The courts interpret it as meaning that the BCA is deliberately defrauding people. The first thing Singh did was try and get a higher court to accept his definition; unfortunately, last i heard, his petition had failed.
Of course, it shouldn't really matter which definition you go by - the BCA certainly does encourage ineffective treatments for various ailments, and both their approach to the therapy and to the case has been dishonest at best and intentionally deceitful at worst. In any sane legal system he should be able to accuse them of being a bunch of snake-oil-selling half-wits, without having to worry about lawsuits. The UK system is in serious need of an overhaul. The only bright light here is that Singh may get a chance to appeal his case in front of a EU court and, depending on the outcome, may well create a basis for reforming the Brit libel laws.
Well, no ... starfish may not be fish, but RV's certainly are recreational vehicles. That's a pretty horrible analogy.
Also driveways and parkways are both properly named, it's just your base assumption which is wrong. A driveway is a private path on which you drive in order to reach the house, and a parkway is a road which passes through a "landscaped thoroughfare" or a park. Both words make perfect sense if you understand their origin.
It shouldn't be. Or, at least the general concept shouldn't be. The original IRC bots were written to run on *nix, because they were meant to be used for channel control/moderation, and so needed to run on an always-on server. Which usually meant a shell account on a linux or BSD machine. Small channels only employed one bot, but larger ones used several working in tandem. So, really, the earliest bot-nets were all *nix based - they just weren't malicious.
That's a ridiculous definition. The vast majority of botnets aren't self-propagating. A program that is self-propagating would be a worm. If it happened to maintain communication with other compromised machines, then it would also become a botnet. But self-propagation has never been a requirement in the definition of "botnet".
Of course, the easiest way to make yourself a botnet is to upload an infected file to the Kazaa network, or some similar file-sharing network. Once it's on there I suppose it becomes "self-propagating", in a way. But that's a different matter entirely.
That's interesting. However, a copyright can only be defended by it's owner, right? I could make millions selling pirated Microsoft software, and as long as they don't complain, I'm not doing anything wrong. Copyright laws are civil, not criminal.
Apparently you're not aware of the context of this discussion. Please start reading from here.
What?? Do you seriously think that anyone who is smart enough to write a good virus/trojan would be stupid enough to take out a copyright on it?