There's no need to reiterate your question. I know what you asked. If you'd asked, "does the earth orbit the sun?" I would have responded in the same way, discussing the bizarreness of the question, rather than pointlessly delivering a literal answer.

They have to do with the insane ideology that's behind your earth-and-sun question.

Thanks. I'm slowly managing to tease it out of you. I provoked you into giving a link to a right-wing think-tank. As I said, your views are so loopy that you must have picked them up wholesale from some such source.

The linked article is not even about regulation. It's about the too-big-to-fail doctrine.

This is the second jibe against education. I ignored the first, but it's really starting to look like you're one of those freaks one hears about whose parents pulled them out of school in order to teach them that the world was made by Jehovah in six days. I've been reading a lot about them recently. Scarily ignorant people. It would be best to tone down your attacks on education, lest people think you are one of those.

I also previously mentioned talk radio, as I have heard it is another central source of gun-toting, gummint-hating, black-lynching wackiness. I don't actually know where you personally got it; perhaps you masturbate nightly over Ayn Rand and Ann Coulter. It's just that the odds of any given individual deciding that a crisis involving banks lending when they shouldn't was caused by the existence of recently-removed lending restrictions, are slim. It's more likely to be a lie that has been spread as truth from a central repository. In the same way, the story of Noah was a lie/tale that was put in a book and spread as truth.

If you can understand this concept in relation to Noah, you should be able to understand it in relation to what we are discussing (even if you think there is no lie). If you think that the Bible is true, however, then there is no hope at all.

Yes, I know. I disingenuously pretended that you were asking a serious question rather than just snarkily pushing a straw man at me.

It's absolutely astonishing that anyone could ask such questions. Again, I can barely imagine someone actually coming up with such a thing, in the same way that I can barely imagine someone coming up with the story of Noah and believing it. It's the sort of idea people only receive as part of belonging to a cult. I'm suspecting the cult of Ayn Rand here.

Well, no, obviously not. Which is understandable, given that you're just using the tactic of "I'll repeat back my opponent's disparaging remark, changing a couple of words".

The idea that the existence of regulation is the cause of the current crisis is like saying that AIDS is caused by the existence of doctors. It's just so crazy that you must have obtained it from some repository of craziness — the odds of any given individual coming up with it himself are just way too slim.

Yes, because they know. If they act unethically, regulation will be necessary.

Did a gun-carrying radio talkshow host tell you that? It's not an idea anyone could have spontaneously formed.

Essentially, yeah. Except the shutting-up part is optional. And after the listening there should ideally be an action phase.

That would be fine as a rhetorical question, but you actually don't know, do you?

Similarly, I can imagine a kid who sits in the back of the class sending text messages and chewing gum saying, "Why would I go out of my way to try to figure out what this nutjob teacher is saying? If my stoner friends tell me that learning is for losers, and I have no idea why you are trying to make me literate and numerate, then your teaching has completely failed, and you need to rethink it."

It's always good to re-evaluate strategies, but it's not for you to say so. It is yours to listen for once.

Ah, I considered the possibility that the summary might be talking about a different deal from the one I have, but when I saw that the Youtube video also said 2am, I took that as confirmation. Anyway, the controversy over the encouragement of illegal download applies to both deals.

I see that the ad for the 8pm–8am deal mentions 5GB of peak traffic and says that if you go over it, you will be throttled both off and on peak. In my case, I did not respond to an ad. AAPT phoned me up and orally offered me 20GB on peak, with unlimited downloads off peak. We did an audio contract right there on the phone. I never agreed to my offpeak broadband being cut off if I went over my onpeak limit.

8pm to 8am? I wish!

I am currently on AAPT's unlimited-offpeak plan. The article summary is wrong. The offpeak period in fact begins at 2am. You can actually see this in the fine print at the bottom of the linked Youtube video.

In passing, I'll moan about something related. Last month, we went over our onpeak limit of 20GB. Our broadband was cut off, and we had to content ourselves with dial-up speed for the rest of the month. We sighed, and thought, "oh well, at least the broadband will only be cut off from 8am till 2am. We're paying for unlimited traffic from 2am till 8am, so we'll still have that."

I had, of course, forgotten that it was AAPT we were dealing with -- that cesspit of incompetence, greed and malice. The wankers cut us off overnight too.

Since then, I have resolved to be careful during the day, and to download the Internet every frickin' night from 2am till 8am.

Maybe. There are two ways to be compliant: ship the code with the product, or make it available to all. The latters applies to you and me; both the latter and the former apply to Edu4. They therefore have a much better case to make.

It's best to leave these lawsuits to the recipient or the copyright holder, but it is true that everyone in the world has the right that AFPA trampled on. Perhaps a class-action suit would be appropriate.

I've tried OpenSolaris, and also NexentaOS/StormOS, which is Ubuntu running on the OpenSolaris kernel instead of Linux.

I found that there was a lack of good documentation, and incompatibilities with certain hardware (for example, the hardware emulated by VirtualBox). Also, it seems to be hard to get ZFS to play nicely with other filesystems on the same hard disk.

Ubuntu already does everything I need it to. Persisting with OpenSolaris would be a bit masochistic.

Other people may be able to tell you a happier story

He's talking about London-Paris, not Newark-Tampa.

(And you got three people modding you "insightful". Definitely too many Americans with mod points.)

Placebo is not only a type of control. It can also be used to refer to the pleasing effect of knowing you are getting a real treatment.

People who get morphine without knowing it only get about as much relief as people who think they are getting morphine but aren't. (People who think they're getting it, and are indeed getting it, report even greater relief.)

From this, we can see that the placebo effect surrounding morphine is about equal to its actual clinical effect. This is an important finding. It's helpful to be able to quantify the effect in this way.

You keep saying "best" and "most", but no one is disputing "best" and "most". The problem arises when people get so used to two things being much the same "most" of the time and in the "best" cases, that they end up making the mistake of thinking that the things are actually synonymous.

The writer of the article does this when he says "It is not possible to create strong or weak placebos, since the placebo effect is a measure of poorly defined effects and of chance alone." If he changed that to refer to "scientific controls", then he'd be closer to the mark. But he is wrong to say it of placebo.

The finding that placebo pills' effectiveness change with colour (blue is better for tranquillisers; red is seen as a tougher weapon against disease) is not something to sweep under the carpet by saying that it "is not possible to create strong or weak placebos". Instead, this knowledge helps us create better controls (by making sure the pills are the same colour as the real drug, where the researchers might otherwise have assumed it was irrelevant). It also allows us to make more effective drugs on the market, by deliberately creating a strong placebo effect along with the real effects.

N.B.: I am not defending the Wired article, which I find is also sloppy with its terminology. I'm just criticising the sloppiness of the scienceblogs.com one.