I routinely take a few weeks to reply to mails if I cannot reply quickly and they require some work to be done. Naturally, some of those I wanted to respond to get lost in the infinitely extending inbox.

Despite my poor replying record, I still spend an average of >10 hours per week dealing with email. And I am not a maintainer of any (public) open source project; I simply participate.

I favour the Linus Torvalds method of inbox flow-control: if it's important, send the maintainer the same mail again after a week or so. Try again a week later. If your email covers multiple issues, try spliting up as the maintainer my have time to deal with one of them. If you're not getting an answer, there are lots of practical reasons which are easy to imagine... Especially if it's a project where the maintainer might get a lot of email, or where the maintainer might have very little time to work on it.

If you do resend an email, mark it clearly so the maintainer knows they can delete the earlier one without reading it; there's a fair chance it's been sitting in their inbox for a long time, making them feel guilty, and when they read your mail they are probably dealing with a batch of mail on related subjects.

Ideally, well run projects have a mailing list and other interested participants where things can be refined without the maintainer being a bottleneck. Small projects don't get that far though.

That's interesting and good to know your anecdote; thank you.

I have some ideas on why it may never have worked.

Offering someone money to incorporate your changes is akin to offering short-term paid work. This is because they will have to do some work - and because when they accept the money, they are duty bound to do what you've asked.

Most people do not work as freelancers, and cannot take new short-term jobs easily. They also do not know how to respond to money offers as a freelancer would.

Remember, most non-commercial open source is written by people in their spare time, so they aren't expecting to be offered money and aren't used to it.

Just like other unsolicited job offers, they're quite likely to be working for someone else full-time, or busy with other things. They may have to say no even if they like your offer, or they might simply not be interested.

They may think you require more of their time then you do, and they may not be sure if it would cause problems with their employer to accept money for work from someone else at the same time.

As with all unsolicited offers of work, if you want to be successful that's more likely if you offer enough money to offset the inconveniences and problems of taking you up on it, including imaginary problems.

For some who already does not have time to maintain a project they care about, that means offering more than the commercial rate for the amount of work you think is involved.

I'm curious, what sort of amounts have you offered? I have offered money too, but it has always been "feel-good" amounts to express gratitude afterwards, and did not require anything to be done; it was never enough to pay seriously for work.

Feeling like you don't have the illness doesn't get rid of an illness.

1. It does if the illness is that you are in pain, and the pain goes away.
2. It does if the illness is that you are depressed, and you become happier.
3. It does if the illness is you are always tired, and you have more energy.

I won't say any of the treatments we're talking about consistently cure these things. But it is false to say these changes never occur in response, or to say that they occur to the same extent without treatment.

So? all this has been studies over and over again, never with any effectivness.

Repeating false statements over and over again does not make them true. E.g. random counterexample Acupuncture for low back pain is cost-effective and works, according to medical researchers.

Digging deeper on that one reveals that sham acupuncture works just as well for low back pain. Still, either is better than none.

More interesting (imho) is a German study of 'laser acupuncture' (which frankly I am skeptical of), because that can be double-blinded far more effectively: The German researchers concluded, "that laser acupuncture can supply a valuable advantage for children with headache, with active laser therapies being clearly more effective than placebo laser treatment."

By all means, dispute that conclusion, but by looking at the research or doing your own, not ignoring it and repeating the same unchecked statements.

Specifically, it is false that (1) there are no controlled, double-blinded studies, and it is false that (2) such studies never show a significant effect.

Please be careful with your contradictions. There are controlled clinical studies - which you refer to yourself two sentences later.

There is evidence of a beneficial effect from some treatments - which you also refer to. Pain reduction is a clinically beneficial effect. So is 'feeling better'.

If it doesn't matter where you put the needles, but you still need the needles for the effect, then the practitioners are mistaken about what is important, but you still need the needles.

(Note that acupuncture studies don't all conclude that needle location doesn't matter, though some do; each study typically tests one specific set of treatment locations, and acupuncture is notoriously hard to perform controlled studies on because the purportedly most effective treatments are excluded by the requirements of controlled studies).

As you say, some of them elicit a powerful placebo response. "Powerful" or "doesn't work" - choose one.

If you require a treatment to be understood fully by its practitioner and are not interested in powerful placebo effects for yourself, that's fine for you, but it's an error to say they do no good for anyone.

(You will also rule out a lot of conventional healthcare by that).

Personally I'll take the placebo if it fixes my problem and be glad of it. If the problem is pain, or insomnia, or indigestion, all of which are realistic targets for that sort of treatment, that's good done.

Pragmatism wins over principle when the end-goal of medicine is to alleviate suffering.

There is a mistake often propagated that if something is apparently placebo-equivalent, then you could have the same benefit by simply thinking yourself better without doing anything.

I think many people's reaction against treatments with a weak evidence base is their scam-filter. If the practitioner's explanation isn't scientifically convincing or they are clearly not right about something, they must be a scam and people should be protected from scams - and people do fall for scams, often.

But the fact is, lots of people use them and lots of those people experience a benefit which goes deeper than "the patient feels happier because they think they had a treatment".

It's arguable; you might win.

As devil's advocate I'd argue that "all the information about the document" depends on what you consider to be the document - basically whether you can use the XML file usefully by itself - and "XML file" is definitely something you have, inside a ZIP archive.

There's enough uncertainty that I doubt you could use this fact alone to get a summary judgement to skip the expensive fight if a fight was started.

0. Your assumption about my background is incorrect.

1. "Current genetic and epigenetic theories of cancer-specific drug resistance do not adequately explain" simply means the current theories are wrong and/or incomplete. Nobody claims otherwise; gene expression is very complex.

2. Natural selection does not only mean mutation mechanisms, though it includes them. It also does not mean genetic mechanisms alone. You may wish to read the Wikipedia article.

3. But I agree that evolution is more than just mutation mechanisms, and it's quite likely that acquisition of drug resistance in any cells, not just cancers, involves more than mutation mechanisms.

4. Even if there is heavenly magic involved in addition to molecular error correction, neither implies evolution is goal oriented. What if Her Divine Will is to keep life exciting for all of us by finding it's own new directions all the time? That would be magic with no goal. Error correction is just an unsurprising mechanism detail; you cannot deduce anything deep from that.

I work with video and graphics (programming), and I can say for sure this demo running on Firefox 3.5.2 on my Core Duo 2GHz uses about 1.2 cores and gets less than 25fps at ~1680x1050.

That's with the dots small. (Fancy starfield). When they zoom in together for a moment, it slows down noticably.

It's good for a web browser, but as software rendering goes it's beaten by x86 systems 10-15 years older.

That particular page doesn't do anything that can't be done with a slow CPU, though.

Probably it's because Firefox uses Cairo, and Cairo's software renderer is said to be quite slow.

On the other hand, the XML file inside an ODF file is itself a document stored in a single XML file.

Since the patent cites prior art things which also have that ability, it's clear that the patent is not as simple as "ability to ignore things that are not understood".

Your head hurts because you're imagining a different patent than the actual one.

Those types of change aren't all that radical, even though they're not commonly implemented in compilers at the moment, as far as I know.

You're not describing major algorithm changes, just reorganising data to suit different batching requirements, reorganising loops and so on.
Reorganising loops is decades old already.

Epigenetics is interesting and clearly important, but it does not undermine natural selection; it supports it.

Natural selection is the propagation of beneficial traits - that includes traits arising from epigenetic causes.

You may have forgotten that Darwin's theory was written before anyone knew about DNA or genetics.

In the theory of natural selection, it would be peculiar if epigenetic phenomena didn't exist.

It would also be peculiar if there was no error correcting mechanism: Error correcting genes are a good survival trait.

Finally, nothing which you have mentioned proves anything about evolution having a goal. Certainly, genetic error correction proves no such thing.

A microchip's physics is far less complicated than biological organic chemistry.

Let's put it this way: you can realistically simulate a microchip. Simulating a cell is still too hard.

You can reverse engineer a microchip by taking it apart chemically and analysing the layers. Try doing that with a cell.

You can make a new chip from raw materials. Cell: that's a long way off.

When you can't tell it's the same person because they are using ghost writers, it looks like science but it isn't.

That's the problem.

If it's lots of different people with the related vested interests, the problem is subtler but still significant. Then it's biased science.

You can't retest all the evidence yourself, and you can't afford to pay other people to do it, so you can't tell what's science and what merely looks like science.

I wish there was more study and awareness of the economic idiocy and need for regulation to resolve it, too.

In the UK, the NHS (national health service) cannot afford to treat everyone with certain life-saving drugs because those drugs are too expensive, so they don't, or do so only for a few people.

The drug companies lobby the NHS to include those drugs, and the NHS refuses because the money is better spent on cheaper treatments for more people. Some newspapers and some people side with the drug companies.

Those drug companies justify high prices due to the cost of research, trials and so on, and the patents enable them to maintain the prices.

To be fair, the cost of research etc. is high, and investing in the next drug is needed.

The stupid, awful paradox though, is that if the NHS enforced a lower price, by having the power to override company patents and threaten to make them generically (but only if the company does not agree to sell them at that price itself), then the companies involved could be guaranteed a higher profit for helping more people, while reducing the cost of treatment and care to the NHS.

[All prices in UK pounds - Slashdot does not handle the £ sign properly.]

It's quite simple: Let X be the cost of R&D to the company. Let HP be the high price per person, say 20,000, that the company chooses currently. Let's say 10,000 people choose to use the drug privately. (Revenue = 200 million). Let's say the company believes that strategy makes it's R&D sustainable for future developments. Let's say the marginal cost of production is HP/200 = 100 - after all they say it's dominated by the cost of R&D. (Production cost = 1 million, leaving 199 million for R&D and profits).

Clearly if the NHS agrees to take 1,000,000 person's worth of the drug while enforcing a far lower price of LP = HP/100 = 299 (very affordable per person), then the company will make exactly the same profit, and that's not counting the benefit of scaling up production.

If the NFS takes 1,000,000 person's worth while enforcing a price of 498 (still very affordable compared with 20,000), the company will make guaranteed at least twice the profit, at the same time as helping 100 times as many people.

(* - It's "at least twice" because it's between two and infinity times the profit, depending on the cost of R&D which is somewhere between zero and 199 million, established earlier).

Now will someone explain to me why helping 100 times as many people, while making more profit and/or doing more research, doing more business, with guaranteed long-term business, getting a better reputation and becoming more well known, and yes the individual reps, executives and shareholders can all reap rewards... Why is this something the drug companies negotiate against??!

Simple greed cannot explain it, because everyone in the company stands to benefit personally in the scenario where drugs are cheaper and given to more people, if done properly.

I believe the scenario we're currently seeing is not a result of "evil" corporations and/or individuals in them, nor a result of rational collective greed, but instead is a result of systemic idiocy...