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Comment Re:Bill Hadley is going to be disappointed (Score 1) 233

And yet there are still some reporters who do investigations.

Yes. Some. Dare I say a vast minority. Given how we're constantly hearing about some blunder in the industry about popular media outlets running with a false story because they don't check their sources it's a real problem. It's beyond the general stupid masses. Even some of the smarter people will typically have some media outlets who they think are "trustworthy" and then take stories on face value. It doesn't take much for a slip-up to screw someone's life.

Heck the general public has gone bat shit crazy only last week on revelations that Snowden has compromised national security because the Russians and the Chinese now have American secrets. Or so pretty much every major news outlet has repeated based on some anonymous source that talked to a single paper.

Comment Re: Horray for Taylor Swift. (Score 1) 368

What silliness. The three months applies to individual users, not individual artists.

If Apple want to offer a free start-up then IT SHOULD BE APPLE'S COST. That is really the end of it. Have you ever heard of a shop having a sale and then deciding that they will simply not pass on the money to vendors as a result?

This is an incredibly dick move by Apple especially since they are sitting on stupid amounts of cash. In no way are the terms Apple negotiated conscionable.

Comment Re: Yes it matters (Score 2) 668

You could not have chosen a better phrasing than "I have witnessed". Your faith in homeopathy has the same probative value as those people bearing witness to sweet Jesus. And neither prayer nor homeopathy (nor your moral indignation) are going to reverse stage 4 cancer.

People like you are the reason that homeopathy is dangerous. Because you (apparently) genuinely believe that homeopathy is an appropriate treatment for cancer. And some of you will counsel patients to come off their chemo regimes and swap to homeopathy, and you will kill people with your recommendations. Thankfully, sometimes you'll at least confine yourself to making these boneheaded recommendations to patients who are in the terminal stages anyway, when the focus ought to switch to palliative relief and aggressive intervention just wrecks the quality of life in a patient's final days, and may hasten the end. But too often, it'll be for patients where there is substantive chance of the chemo being effective. And that puts the blood of dead patients on your hands.

Comment Re:Yes it matters (Score 2) 668

One of the *few* areas in which Western medicine excels? Do you actually believe that there are many other areas in which non-"Western" medicine excels? If so, perhaps you'd like to share just 10 or 20 examples. I'm very excited to hear of your groundbreaking research! After all, if you could show this, you'd be a Galileo for our times.

Comment What I took from the parent (Score 1) 668

was two things:

1. He drunk the bottle, not her, to show her it was nonsense.

2. (More importantly) She thought she was buying real medicine. Not sure what country the parent's in, but in America $250 isn't out of the ordinary for a drug not covered by your insurance, so the high price wouldn't necessarily be a tip off. Assuming I'm not just putting words in the parent's mouth than that's the scary part for me: that Homeopathy is indistinguishable from clinically tested medicine to an intelligent woman.

Comment Re:Bill Hadley is going to be disappointed (Score 1) 233

If I were accused, anonymously, of pedophilia, I would not try to use the courts to find my accuser. Instead I would ignore the accusation unless it was repeated by an identifiable person, such as a reporter asking if it were true. I would answer the reporter by saying it was not, and offering to cooperate with the reporter's investigation into whether or not I was a podophile if he felt the accusation was credible enough to be worth the effort.

Reporter investigation? What's that?

No seriously for the most part investigations are a thing of the past. We live in a world where everyone is a live reporter themselves. An accusation gets made and moments later it hits twitter, Facebook etc, and millions of people know you as a paedophile. Then you come out through a reputable news agency and millions of people will think "Of course he says that, he's trying to hid the fact he's a paedophile!". When things go REALLY south you may even find reputable news agencies pick up what's making the round on twitter as fact, and then your Wikipedia page will have that listed as well complete with references to the media.

Anonymous Cowards can do a lot of damage in the modern media because the masses in general are stupid. Heck last week someone took a selfie of themselves against some poster, and some white knight though he was taking a snap of a child sitting further away, took his photo and it was shared several 10s of thousands of times on Facebook until someone AT HIS WORK mentioned it.

Comment Re:Remember Oscar Wilde (Score 1) 233

So of course an anonymous comment is no reason to believe someone is a pedophile, unless corroborated by further evidence.

Indeed. The Slashdot crowd knows this as I believe we are in general on the upper scale of intelligence and know what "logic" means.
However in this world an anonymous comment with no evidence can be quite damaging if someone decides to run with it and repeat it. Your reputation can be destroyed in an hour because people don't sit down and research what the news outlets may say.

Comment Re: Why does the world need to be so complex (Score 1) 233

That is a reflection of your common sense more than anything, something the world at large lacks. While the candidate's name may not have been tainted for your eyes there are waaaay too many people who will take an anonymous and baseless claim as gospel. I agree with you that this shouldn't affect him. But I agree with him that since it does the perpetrator should be identified, and the court is the way to do that.

Comment Isn't this just on demand processing? (Score 1) 107

The last time Microsoft had a major Xbox Live outage due to high demand they just spun up a bunch of VMs and everything was fine 4 hours later. You keep them idling so that when you need 'em they're ready on a moments notice. Also if you're not Microsoft or Oracle this means you're not paying the licensing costs associated with the software being in production non stop.

Comment Re:yes ... (Score 3, Interesting) 281

Jury is out.

It looks like to get a Windows certification OEMs *must* ship with UEFI 2.3.1 and with Secure Boot enabled by default. It also looks like they've removed the requirement that Secure Boot must be selectable on x86 architectures (which is a backtrack and potentially a problem for Linux). Also it appears that this requirement will only be enforced after 1 year from the Windows 10 release. This is based on replies on the Microsoft Forums.

Currently the technical preview has no problem running under Legacy BIOS (actually people are having more problems installing it on UEFI BIOSes based on forum complaints.

That said some of the media sites are reporting that UEFI is not optional, but I can't find anything on the Microsoft site to say that.

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