Really? Any number?

This seems like a pretty silly straw man to me. If the foot massage outfit is claiming to cure disease by rubbing your feet, then yes they should be shut down. If the foot massage outfit is just claiming to make your feet feel nice, then everyone's happy.

Yes thanks, we all know that. Doctors know that too. I believe that it would be covered in medical school. The average incidence of X is important too. If one out of ten people have X, then your 90% hit-rate test means that you have a 50/50 chance of having the deadly X. I think.

What rubbish. There would be plenty of money in it, training dogs isn't cheap you know. Might be more difficult to train the rats though.

They don't. The role of a healthy mind in the maintenance of a healthy body is fairly well understood by the medical community - which isn't to say that anyone really knows how it works, but doctors understand that happier people get better faster.

No-one, anywhere, is saying that the placebo effect is bad. What they are saying is that homeopathic remedies are no more effective than sugar pills. Which is perfectly true. It is, therefore, dishonest to sell homeopathic remedies and claim that they cure people.

You seem to be arguing against a position that does not exist.

It will be alot faster in java though....

And it will be compiled, and (somewhat) typesafe (ok... but more so than python at least).

Which of course wasn't your point. But if your point is that your boss is an idiot and doesn't listen to technical direction from the knowledgeable people that he employs, then you simply need to get a different job.

The problem seems to be MKVs to me - I have endless playback problems with them over the WiFi, whereas mp4 containers of comparable quality and size run without issue.

Christ. Who writes this rubbish?

I read some of the book using Amazon's 'look inside' feature. It's deeply un-engaging, and highly unlikely to hold a child's attention for very long at all. Compare the writing in it to something that's actually good, and you'll hopefully understand what I mean.

I KNOW - this is the most irritating thing ever. It's almost as if microsoft did this to deliberately make the command line harder to use.

I'm not sure that I completely agree - I listen to music on the way into work, and I've never even once found myself in a position when lack of audio clues put me in any danger.

As long as you use regular earbuds, and not the in-ear-silicon things that block out noise, then you'll be fine.

I do agree about audiobooks though, albeit for a different reason. You'll never be able to concentrate on them properly because you'll regularly have to concentrate too much on avoiding the idiot drivers. You'll just end up missing whole pages.

[Also rode to work for 15 years...]

Don't worry. They will.

Yes you do - the tail lights of the car in front of you are a pretty integral part of driving (I would hope).

If there's one thing we can agree on about icon design, it's that no-one agrees about it....

A couple of years ago when I flew through the US everyone had an e-reader. The last time I flew, which was late last year, everyone had paper books. I notice that the bookstores in US airports still seem to be going strong - Amazon is still selling books hand over fist.

Sure, e-readers are great for storing millions of books (that you can't lend to your friends... dang it), but they just suck.

I don't believe that's true. Quite a few people down a bottle of spirits and pass out and never wake up. It's probably next to impossible to kill yourself with beer purely through the acute toxicity of alcohol, but the same is not true of (say) vodka.

It's normally kids without sufficient experience to understand that although it's physically possible to drink an entire bottle of vodka in a few minutes, it's quite likely to end your life. The LD50 of ethanol translates to a little under half a litre of vodka (or gin, or whatever). That's not very much.

But that doesn't matter.