And of course, everyone else on slashdot waits with baited breath to see you and your ilk post grammar complaints. Surely, nobody just gets over the minor typos and actually concentrates on the article, which (unlike so many other articles) is actually really interesting news for nerds.

What astounds me is the arrogance of some people who seem to imply by their behavior that they believe that they themselves never make mistakes. I would assert that losing sight of the forest for the trees (what’s more interesting, quantum telescopes or complaints about grammar?) IS a mistake, which means that you ARE imperfect and therefore might want to stop making yourself look like an ass by unnecessarily complaining about grammar and spelling.

Some people have a really hard time separating “truth” from “fact,” and they also have difficulty with how these relate to science.

A novel may contain truth, in that it is not a factual account of anything, but you might learn a life lesson from it. Indeed, many childrens books (and certainly many other genres) are specifically intended to teach valuable lessons. Religious practitioners often conflate the two. If your scriptures are (as they are taught) “true,” does that mean they are factual? You might learn something from the Bible, but there are many things in it provably non-historical, consistent with the Hebrew penchant for taking other people’s oral traditions and adding a “moral” component. Anything historical in it doesn’t necessarily convey useful truth, and anything non-historical is not necessarily devoid of truth.

Conversely, it’s common to mislead by the use of facts. Propagandists often present accurate factual information, followed by specious reasoning that leads the listener to an incorrect conclusion. It’s all in how you present things, what you emphasize, what you downplay, and what teleological conjectures you want to draw to explain those facts. Politicians are brilliant at making the statistics say whatever they want.

Then there’s science. It is indeed fact-based. And we hope that it is true. But in fact, it is not a truth generating engine. It is a MODEL generating engine. A true model is, of course, better than one that is merely numerically accurate, but there’s only so far you can be sure (or maybe even care) just how true it is. Sometimes, you just need something predictlve. A recent Ars article about zebra stripes mentioned how scientists developed and tested several different explanatory models before they found one or two that were fully consistent with all of the facts. Every single one of those models, even the wrong ones, was scientific, because they were falsifiable (a term that few people really understand). Another example is the prevailing theory of the moon’s origin; we have a model that is consistent with what we can measure today, but there’s so little physican evidence that we only accept the model because we lack any better explanation. It if turned out to be wrong, nobody would be the least bit surpirsed. Even a blind, non-explanatory model, like using a neural net for numerical regression, is of scientific value, because it can be used to do engineering, and it may aid in further analysis that leads to a falsifiable explanatory model. Once a model has gone from postulate to hypothesis to theory, consistent with the evidence, we can say that it is consistent with the FACTS, but as for truth, we can only say that it is PROBABLY MOSTLY TRUE. Each time we discover some more evidence that we haven’t explained or which contradicts the model, we have to adjust it, making it incrementally more probably mostly true.

This brings me to pseudoscientific ideas like intelligent design. Even if it were, hypothetically, true, it isn’t and can’t be science. Why? Because it isn’t falsifiable. Anything you can’t explain, you can dismiss as being the result of some outsider tweak, so it’s impossible to prove it wrong. It’s also not predictive. It makes no interesting testable claims that evolutionary theory doesn’t, so it doesn’t yield any new knowledge. Finally, it’s useless to engineering. Not all scientific theories are necessarily going to be used by engineers, but in the case of intelligent design, it CAN’T be. A potentially useful scientific theory must be based entirely on predictable naturalistic mechanisms. This way, engineers can develop new systems that rely on or leverage those natural phenomena. Intelligent design, on the other hand, requires miracles or alien interference that we’re (by definition) too primitive to understand. And unfortunately, engineers can’t perform magic and don’t have access to alien hyperspace nano-wormhole entangement bioengineering technology.

Considering just how many Windows XP systems the must have, with a sizable fraction of them being the sort you CAN’T upgrade (due to there being no Linux or Win 7 version of some software packages, literally or practically), this was probably the best option.

From Microsoft’s perspective, they want to stop supporting an ancient OS. So it’s reasonable for them to charge for additional support. It’s actually probably the UK government that got the better deal here, since Microsoft would be able to function a bit more efficiently if they could just chuck it.

Someone else mentioned DRM for old software that you can’t virtualize, like those old printer port dongles that were required to run some software. I don’t know UK law, but I’m betting it’s illegal right now to crack or reverse engineer those things, like the DMCA in the US. If I were in parliament, I’d be about ready to propose a bill to make it legal to crack them in just this sort of situation, where you’re not violating the original intent of the license agreement. Just one license to one machine. In some cases, the DRM was moronic anyway, because the software is useless without the much more expensive piece of equipment it was attached to.

It goes both ways, though. At a company I once worked for, we sold some recording software that worked with our graphics cards. It turns out that since it was just an X11 extension, it would work with other graphics cards, so one govermnent entity started making unlicensed copies and using them with competitors’ cards. We were pissed. We were pissed that they were violating the licensing agreement, and we were pissed that we had to add some bullshit license key system to ensure that they complied with our contractual agreements. We didn’t believe in it, and we didn’t want to waste the resources on it. (And we all hated things like Flex LM with a passion. Most unreliable and brittle system on the planet.) But it was easier than trying to sue them or even just argue with them. We used a technological means to make it super inconvenient (not not impossible) to not comply with already-agreed licensing terms, and they kept buying more of our products without so much as a minor disagreement (because they knew they were in the wrong in the first place and were in no position to complain). It also means that when they want to migrate a copy of the software from an old machine that died to a new one, it’s inconvenient for both them and us. But they made their bed.

Don’t be surprised if your MD doesn’t know about it. Some people will lump it in with junk like homeopathy, even though the chemical properties are very straight-forward. MDs don’t know about alternative treatments and/or nutrition because they don’t study this in school. I once had a gastroenterologist tell me that he didn’t believe in food allergies, so I wasn’t too impressed. On the other hand, a DO is more likely to know about these things.

Anyhow, this isn’t stuff I’ve picked up from forums. I’ve spent many years learning about these things by internet searches and speaking with nutritionists. It takes a while to start making sense of it all and takes a lot of study.

I disagree. Think of holding patents as another way of funding an already cash-strapped educational system. A lot of schools are in need of better facilities for teaching students, many bright students are in need of scholarships, and professors are substantially under-paid compared to their industry counterparts. To do research (and get paid during the summer), you have to go out and apply for grant money, and not all of it can come from the NSF or other government agency. Organizations like SRC pool industry funding for research as well. So, if a professor or grad student invents something truly novel and actually worth patenting, why not leverage that as a means to bring more money into the school? This isn’t double-dipping anymore than it is double-dipping to use one grant-funded innovation as supporting work to motivate more grant-funded work. It’s more research funding to make the school run better and the royalties aren’t functionally a whole lot different from any other industry grant. It means that students, instructors, and researchers at that school will have better resources.

What Boston U is doing exactly, I’m not sure. There was a big hubbub at Wisconsin recently too, but Guri Sohi is a MAJOR pioneer in computer architecture, so I’m inclined to lean towards his side there. When someone sues over patents, my first reaction is to assume they’re trolling. But universities aren’t shell corporations or patent trolls that produce no real innovations. Things most universities patent have already been published in peer-reviewed venues, unlike so much other crap that is snuck into the PTO, making them much more likely to be real innovations, often with functional prototypes and open source implementations. if anything, I would say that universities should get the benefit of the doubt WAY more than any other class of patent applicants.

Thumbs up to you. My wife grew up in a family that put too much value on being “tough” and never going to the doctor. If she had gone to the doctor in high school and been properly diagnosed with celiac disease, that might have been caught early enough to avoid further complications. Instead, it got progressively worse and caused her to develop auto-immune thyroiditis (Hashimoto’s disease). If you think mood problems from plain old depression are bad, you’ve not seen anything until you’ve met someone with Hashimoto’s.

(Just to fill in some gaps so you don’t have to look it up, in people with celiac disease, the body produces an IgA antibody for one or more of the peptides that gluten breaks down into. The intestinal villi are composed of proteins that are sufficiently analogous to the gluten peptides that those same IgA antibodies attack the intestines. So, celiac is an auto-immune disease spurred on by a spurious reaction to a food protein. In general, if gluten is eliminated, the antibody isn’t produced anymore, and the body can heal. If the disease progresses, you can develop leaky gut syndrome, where food proteins as well as those IgA antibodies get into the blood. There are proteins in the thyroid that are sufficiently analogous to the gluten peptides that they will attack the thyroid, often causing symtoms of Grave’s disease. Now, through a process that I don’t fully understand, this auto-immune response can take on a life of its own, where the body’s immune system actively produces antibodies that attack your own thyroid gland. Thyroid function is critical to energy management and many other endocrine processes, and interfering with it can be debilitating. It gets worse from there, and it’s very hard to treat. Note that other hypotheses suggest that it might be the other way around: You might start out with a general propensity to auto-immune disorder, which gets out of hand due to trauma of one kind or another.)

SSRIs work reasonably well for a lot of people to help with depression. But that depends on how much serotonin you have in reserve and whether or not the depression is actually caused by low serotonin. One of the major places your body stores serotonin is in the intestinal lining. If you eat a diet that is more conducive to intestinal health, you’ll store serotonin better. Meanwhile, 5-HTP supplements are like eating pure serotonin (there’s actually a two step conversion process from 5-HTP to Tryptophan to Serotonin, IIRC, but 5-HTP passes through the blood-brain barrier much more easily than Tryptophan). And if you are too low in serotonin, an SSRI won’t help, because there just isn’t enough serotonin to reputake inhibit.

Some people are low on norepinepherine too, so an MD might prescribe an SSNRI. Tyrosine (which you can also get in pill form) is a precursor to dopamine, norepinepherine, and epinepherine. Another way to boost dopamine is low-dose (i.e. 4.5mg) naltrexone (LDN), prescribed for a variety of things including chronic fatigue and autoimmune diseases; it’s a dopamine receptor antagonist that causes the brain to produce a net surplus of dopamine. Some people with mood problems also benefit from supplementing GABA, but that never worked for me or my wife, so I don’t know much about it, except that GABA is inhibitory in some parts of the brain and excitatory in others, making it have the opposite of the desired effect for some people.

Another mood enhancer is Theanine. You can get it in pill form, but a great source of that is Kombucha, which is fermented tea. It’s also loaded with antioxidants and probiotics. The probiotics and possibly the moderate amount of vinegar are also helpful for digestion problems.

Getting back to intestinal health, some people have a mild sensitivity to things like dairy (casein, lactose), wheat (gluten), and/or soy. Removing those from your diet may reduce tissue inflamation that interferes with good intestinal function. My kids can’t have dairy in winter. That’s when all these colds and other infections go around. Dairy causes just enough additional inflammation that when they pick up a bug, they much more prone to ear infections that require antibiotics (which tend to also kill off a lot of good bacteria). In small children, eustachian tubes aren’t fully developed and tend to have drainage problems. If we keep them off dairy (they get calcium and protein from other sources), proper drainage prevents ear infections from getting out of hand, and although they probably pick up various infections anyway, the symptoms are so mild that there’s no need to take them to the doctor. IIRC, when I was a kid, my parents observed that if I had too much dairy, I’d get phlemmy and have more trouble with colds and such. The dairy might also directly interfere with immune function. Anyhow, removing that may seem like a mild food irritant can actually have a substantial positive impact on intestinal function due to reduced inflammation and as a result better mucosal lining and better serotonin storage.

Other amino acids people often take to enhance intestinal health (e.g. people diagnose with celiac disease who require a great deal of gut rebuilding) include glycine and glutamine. Google that for more.

Not to get mystical or anything, but everything in the human body is a lot more connected than is suggested by what you learn superficially in high school biology. Why would the human body store serotonin (an important brain neurotransmitter) in the intestinal lining? I don’t know. Because there was no selective pressure not to? Perhaps the mucosal lining that partly serves to protect your tissues from getting digested themselves just happens to be good at suspending other things the body needs to store. Either way, the link is well established (see http://www.jneurosci.org/content/21/16/6348.full.pdf in the Journal of Neuroscience, for instance). Some things may seem obvious, like maintaining proper blood sugar levels (prefer low glycemic foods) and making sure you get enough protein are good for mental function; in fact, the link goes much deeper. Eat well, and you’ll think well.

That’s MY point. Plus, if the .NET JIT is anything like the JVM, only hotspots get compiled, while the rest are interpreted. (If you only run a piece of code once, it may be faster to interpret it than to compile and then run it.)

THIS is the kind of scientific data I want to hear about. In the US, we have lots of pollutants in our air and water and questionable things our food. In the EU, many things are more strictly regulated. If it’s healthier to live there, but ASD rates are higher, then although that doesn’t necessarily rule out contaminants entirely, it points to other things being the dominant cause. (Like genetics, epigenetics, diagnosis rates, etc.)

I skimmed over the links, but I probably just missed it. So apps take 60% less time to start, and they use 15% less memory. What about run-time performance? How much faster are they when executing?

Well, see, there are the normal gay people who just regular people with interesting or boring personalities that live normal lives, except they happen to be gay, like some people happen to have red hair. When someone is a jackass and says something bigoted (like calling you “fagot” or “ginger”), their response is take a moment to say “fuck you” and then go back to being normal people. Those are the sorts of people I’d hang out with (or not, but sexuality doesn’t enter into my decision).

Then there are the gay people who dress like sluts and engage in NSFW acts during gay pride parades that make all gay people look bad to anyone that might be on the fence. I’m all for gay pride parades, but could they try to dress and behave with some class? I can see how marginalized people would understandably want to lash out, but some behaviors don’t necessarily have the effect you want. I don’t care what your sexuality is, I think it’s reasonable to not approve of sex acts (gay or straight, real or implied) being done in public. Shouldn’t people try to make these family-friendly events?

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100719132218AARakwK

The people who hounded Eich may share some similarities with the latter group.

That being said, if I were on the board of directors of Mozilla, I would not have voted to hire him as CEO, if I had known of his political leanings, because bigotry makes me angry and I would be concerned about the indirect effects of his beliefs on the policies of the company.

Sure, but some things are more poisonous than others, no? Or do you like to eat sodium cyanide for fun?

BTW, I looked at that article you linked to. By no means was I suggesting that it would be a good idea to have a kid drink a whole bottle of lugol’s. That would be insane. On the other hand, the occasional drop in their fruit juice is probably a good idea. Unless you’re treating a diagnosed defficiency (which people suffering from thyroid diseases often have), it’s a safe bet to keep the dosage below the average Japanese diet, which is 1 to 3 milligrams per day. My kids get substantially less than that.

See “http://www.mastersofdentistry.net/why-choose-mod/health-prevention/“ for a suggestion about use of iodine in place of flouride for tooth hardening.

I haven’t vetted this web page for accuracy against other sources, but the general themes jive with what I know: http://drsircus.com/medicine/iodine/iodine-dosages

Unless you’ve displaced iodine too much with other halides (which happens), the body doesn’t need much iodine intake, because it gets stored. If you’re low, then you might need high doses for a while. http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/06/29/iodine-deficiency-risk.aspx

I can’t address all of your misinformation. However, it is well known, for instance, that bromine displaces iodine in the thyroid. They’re both halides, and bromine acts therefore as an endocrine disruptor, inhibiting proper thyroid function. It’s also linked with thyroid cancer (indirectly at least, because low iodine is linked with thyroid cancer). SO, if you want to keep your thyroid healthy, don’t consume bromides.

Fluorides have a similar effect, actually. It too is a halide and displaces iodine. What about chlorine, you say? Chlorine (or several chloride compounds anyway; we’re talking about bound forms of all of these chemicals) is another essential element used by the body, so there is no conflict there (although I can’t say what happens if you get them out of balance).

If you don’t care about your thyroid function, that’s fine. But people with Grave’s, Hashimoto’s, auto-immune thyroiditis, and various other such diseases DO care about that and DON’T appreciate these contaminants exascerbating and/or causing their trouble. But maybe you only give a crap about your own health (or maybe not even that?).

You didn’t address the mercury in fish or arsenic in rice. Convenient that you left those out? Oh, and the carcinogenic flame retardant.

As for BPA, allow me to quote wikipedia (which you should have looked at before responding): Bisphenol A is an endocrine disruptor that can mimic estrogen and has been shown to cause negative health effects in animal studies.

High doses: For iodone, a high dose would be MANY times the RDA, but well within safe limits. See "http://www.thyroid.org/iodine-deficiency/“. The RDA depends on your condition (e.g. pregnant) and ranges from 150 to about 300 micrograms. However, regular doses of 12.5 milligrams are completely safe, and some people with thyroid diseases are recommended to take up to 50 milligrams/day for a while to treat a defficiency. The average Japanese diet brings in 1 to 3 milligrams per day from edible seaweed. Extreme doses *much higher than I’m talking about) are at risk primarily of disrupting thyroid function (differently from a deficiency, of course).

As for teeth, instead of getting fluoroapatite (Ca5(PO4)3F), you get iodoapatite (Ca5(PO4)3I). Basic chemistry. Go learn some.

Of course, you’re one of those conspiracy people, but like backwards or something. You think some people just want to make things more expensive or inconvenient. Are the commies trying to disrupt our economy by suggesting we don’t use chemicals with known health effects? There’s also not a conspiracy the other way either. These contaminants are not in our food and water because some people are conspiring to hurt us. Free-market factors have given rise to cost-effective solutions to problems, some of which we have subsequenty determined to be unhealthy. The main problem is that people are cheap and ignorant.

Clarification: You can safely consume iodone in dosages several times the RDA with no negative effect. Instead of “high”, perhaps I should have said “a few times normal.”