Actually sham acupuncture is used by some conventional Western-style doctors.... They can train in it over a single weekend, and some of them do remove the woo-factor.

Those who dispense with the Chinese theories say the needles block pain carrying nerves or stimulate release of hormones... but they don't really know any better than the Chinese what's going on. It's just a more acceptable explanation.

It's blindingly obvious you didn't read the links to controlled clinical studies showing efficacy in my other reply on this thread, here.

what it means for a treatment to "work"

No, I am not confused. I simply disagree with you. In the extreme, a mere placebo can save a life. I name that working; you do not. There is no point arguing further.

Another commenter put it very well: Real honesty would involve telling patients not only which treatments are more effective than placebo, but how effective they are absolutely.

But that's a side point, because there are controlled, clinical studies showing acupuncture to be more effective than placebo for some things. Feel free to disagree, or to argue that the studies are of poor quality, or not what they say they are, but don't make yourself look ignorant by denying that they exist at all.

actually effect the course of a disease or are better at relieving symptoms. In other words, using the scientific method to separate the real from the imaginary

I'm quite familiar with the scientific method, thank you. I will readily agree with any proposition that the methodology used to study this area is often of low quality and difficult to take seriously.

An interesting result from placebo investigations is that some placebo effect is found, in some scenarios, even when you don't lie to the patient.

In other words, while knowing it's a placebo reduces the effect, it doesn't always completely eliminate it, leaving room for ethical application and optimisation of what's left.

Not getting a reply can be as simple as the author didn't have time to reply. They may be too busy with life to respond to every email.

When a project is not active, the author probably only works on it once every few months for just a few hours on a rainy weekend, if they've looked at it at all in the last year.

Also, something like 'chntpw', I wouldn't be surprised if that gets far too many mails from annoying users, and also the author may have worried about legal liability if they sell it, as it can be construed as a hacking tool. It's not a great reason for no reply, but it's a possible reason for never quite getting around to it.

If you're serious about a proposal, write again, several times over the course of weeks.

It's difficult because you don't want to be paying silly money, but I would imagine you're more likely to get a result by offering a concrete amount which is large enough to make the author think it's worth their effort when you ask them to do something for you. It's hard to judge what that is though.

Remember that most of the 'open source bounty' sites had bounties so small that they weren't worth the time reading the proposals, let alone doing them... they were mostly token amounts. I would guess there's a bit of perception among FOSS hobby coders who don't sell their software commercially that what someone's offering is a token amount, so if it's an unpalatable request, don't bother.

If I were the author of that program, and I'd kept it closed source, I'd have stopped to think about your offer, but then I'd probably have decided I was spending too much time worrying about a tiny amount and/or legal uncertainties. If I were feeling like your mail was the 100th that day, it'd probably get forgotten or deleted.

On the other hand, if you stated up front that you'd be willing to pay $1000 for me to open source the app, I'd take it seriously, as that's enough for me to take a day off work and make time just for you.

I'm guessing it's a bit different for freelancers who are used to juggling their time around for people, so can take on smaller units of work and respond that bit more quickly and professionally. But I guess most hobby coders don't have that ability. Full time job + family + friends = not much time or flexibility. Make it worth the hassle.

[LIsp] is the only language I know of where you can use its macro facility (reader macros, to be specific) to fully implement another language with arbitrary complex syntax. In other words, a program written in any textual language can be a Common Lisp program if you insert a corresponding CL reader macro definition at the beginning of the code.

Perl can do it too.

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.