Placebos have undoubtedly successfully treated more people than any medical procedure. [We can say this because treatments are rarely twice as effective as placebo. As such, placebo can be considered to be responsible for typically 50-100% of a treatment's effectiveness.]

There are many health issues where treatments don't outperform placebo by 10% eg mental health.

Now if you or your public health service is on a budget, a cheap placebo might well be the best option.

A couple more points:

- Many treatments are impossible to test against placebo eg osteopathy and the like. Homeopathy is perfect to test against placebo -- it is scientifically indistinguishable from water. Therefore we know with far more certainty than anything else that homeopathy doesn't outperform placebo. We could still be wrong but we can be surer of that than any other complementary treatment.

- Double blind is a necessity for testing against placebo. Single blind cannot give a positive result -- but a negative one means your treatment is pretty bad. But double blind methodologies are often flawed and should always be tested by asking the patient what they think they took. If > 55% guess correctly, you have a problem.

Placebo can have physiological effects.

"Physical changes are real. For example, studies on asthma patients show less constriction of the bronchial tubes in patients for whom a placebo drug works."

https://www.psychologytoday.co...

--Aunt Tillie could probably roll her own kernel if you gave her a webpage with good instructions that would compile it for her and then prompt where to save the download ;-)

--Of course there's no guarantee of no-malware-included at that point, but ease-of-use matters quite a bit for some people.

You must have missed the giant Viacom lawsuit that was won by Google largely because of the absolutely insanely massive ContentID effort that was put in place after the acquisition.

If you have never checked out ContentID at a technical level, do - it's quite astonishing. It's very hard to argue that YouTube is a platform for massive copyright violation these days given that ContentID was thought by many to be impossible, yet there it is.

Java is ugly. It is not complex by any reasonable definition, unless you're comparing it to BASIC or something. Part of the reason Java is ugly is that it's so simple, in fact - it eschews syntax sugar and various conveniences that'd make the code shorter and prettier.

I tend to feel that Java is on the wrong side of programming language trends here: there's a lot to be said for simplicity, but some languages are showing that you can add a lot of convenient and helpful features to Java-like languages without exploding the language's complexity budget. C# for instance is widely agreed to be more pleasant to use than Java (at least, widely agreed by most devs with experience in both that I've met).

On the JVM unfortunately we've been kind of limited until now in the "simple, beautiful yet performant" space. There are languages like Scala that are static enough to be reasonably fast, but there seems to be a growing consensus that Scala is very complicated. I've seen it be called the C++ of the JVM. There are lots of dynamic languages like Ruby, Python, Groovy, Clojure etc that gain simplicity and terseness by abandoning static typing entirely but sacrifice maintainability and performance. There's Frege, a Haskell dialect that I have no experience of, but lazyness-by-default seems a controversial choice at best.

Lately there's also Ceylon and Kotlin, which seem to be exploring a new space in PL design that can be summed up as Scala but made a lot simpler. The syntaxes are terse and compact, the typing is static, the IDE support is developed alongside the language, and they compile to both the JVM and Javascript. Kotlin is my personal favourite. The feature set eliminates much of the tedious boilerplate in Java without adding much potential for code maintenance disasters or excessive complexity. It also increases safety, like by making nullability a part of the type system.

--I'm with you on that, mang :-)

--Just FYI from a rider, there is some conflicting information out there:

https://rideapart.com/articles...

> Every helmet maker ever will tell you not to apply Rain-X or something similar to your visor. However, weâ(TM)ve been doing it for years with no ill effects. It causes water to quickly bead up and run off, aiding vision. Itâ(TM)s said to reduce the effective life of your shield, but weâ(TM)re replacing our clear visors once a year anyway due to scratches and whatnot. So itâ(TM)s definitely worth considering if youâ(TM)re regularly riding in wet road conditions.

http://www.triumphrat.net/spri...

> First, what is Rain-X and why is it a problem for visors? Itâ(TM)s a mixture of ethanol, acetone and isopropyl alcohol with a bit of silicone thrown it. Those three solventsâ"quite aggressiveâ"super clean the surface and leave behind a molecular layer of silicone that causes water to bead and shed. The product was originally intended for glass windshields and the company that currently owns the trademarkâ"ITW Brandsâ"says it is not recommend for plastic. The problem material is the acetone, which can soften and craze acrylics and polycarbonates.
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>> The best reason not to use Rain-X is that there are better cleaner/rain-repellant products, specifically paste-type cleaners that are basically emulsifiers with a little isopropyl alcohol thrown in as a solvent and silicone or wax to act as surfactants, causing water to bead and blow off. I tested a half dozen of these and the two best were LP Acrylic Polish and Sealant and 210 Plastic Scratch Remover. Others, such as Plexus, perform similarly.

--I wish I had mod points. That's pretty creative :-)

--I trust you're behind a firewall/router, but have you ever had any logged intrusion attempts on the drive?

I agree.

In my opinion, Opera 12 was the prettiest browser. I still use it on my laptop.

I'm going to forward this Slashdot post to Vivaldi so that they can see how unpopular their skin is. Unfortunately, their website is done out in the same skin.

I guess Tetzchner wasn't the aesthetic one in Opera Software.

I still think Vivaldi will soon be the best browser available for power users.

Well, they would need to know they exist, first. . . If such a law ever passed, it would be trivial to make detecting such cameras near impossible. . .

Correct. However, Orwell did not anticipate that the general public would be the ones to have the majority of networked cameras that they could use to keep tabs on the government. I have cameras installed at my home, but I am not just going to share with anyone unconditionally. A string of events would have to occur first before I would even consider sharing specific footage with the local police. I believe anyone else (including in the UK) shelling out their own money would be inclined to do the same (else risk their own footage being used against themselves).

So, in short, yes, everything will be recorded just like Orwell's predicted. However, the economic tendency is for everyone to have a piece of the footage pie and be able to choose when and with whom they share it with.