....it doesn't do anyone any good to be spreading FUD! If you actually spent some time researching this topic, you will find that what you said isn't entirely true. Take the Dell Latitude 6430u that comes with Windows 8. You can disable secure boot in BIOS. I refer you to page 44 of its owners manual....

Well, I don't have a 6430u, but I just looked at page 44 of the owner's manual. It's written in gobbledygook language with double negatives and obscurity about what exactly is being enabled/disabled.

What's more, one of the controls 'described' on the page has a big warning that it's for one-time use only and "Activate and Disable options will permanently activate or disable the feature and no further changes will be allowed".

Maybe I could navigate that path to freedom if I had plenty of information from elsewhere, but that 'owner's-manual' page looks like it's exploiting complexity and obscurity to hinder the use of freedom.

It's unfair to call 'FUD' when information about available features has been obscured to the point of incomprehensibility.

-wb-

> Google has been systematically destroying all of their services with "improvements".

Besides the changes in gmail, youtube & play already mentioned, there's also Google books. Google now seems to be regretting its earlier public-benefit position on books, and taking many previously-available scanned books off line. After reading the google-books availability/copyright statements, you would end up thinking that a whole lot of 19th-c. works less than 140 years old are still in copyright ..... It's hard to know how they can keep a straight face when announcing these legal pretexts.

-wb-

One of the big points about viruses that remain in the body long-term, is that they somehow manage to find shelter in which to evade the immune system -- at least for most of the time, and at least from those parts of the immune system that might otherwise eradicate them. (See for example 'virus latency' at http://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/abstract/S1931-3128(10)00217-9?script=true/).

Many of the mechanisms of that sheltering are still unknown, or incompletely known. That means, in turn, that it's at least not going to be a surefire winner to have an extra protein -- against which you want a really strong protective immune response -- tagging along with the sheltering virus.

Plus, it would seem that the main article is reporting a theoretical study (from the 'supporting information' for the PNAS paper referred to in the main story -- which is all that I could so far access -- here http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2012/11/14/1209683109.DCSupplemental/pnas.201209683SI.pdf -- other than the abstract).

The status of the matter appears to be that this is an 'if only . . . ' -- so far.

-wb-

You think it's not possible to make a c***-heap out of stored data in a new system?

-wb-

Comments can become indispensable when the reason for putting something in (and the criterion for its correctness) is external to the code itself. I used sometimes to think "it must be obvious where that came from", but now with failing memory I often find it's not as obvious as I thought it should be. :(

-wb-

... but the code your wrote; more maintainable now, or then?

Interesting point. I'm returning just now to re-use/update/port some stuff I wrote a while back, some of it 5+ years ago, and even some bits from 24 years ago. Sometimes I find the rationale was clear enough, other times I have to kick myself before I can figure it out again, and there is one awkward little knot that still works but I completely forgot how and why, and so far I didn't manage to untie it.

What this does remind me, though, is that my memory is not getting any better. So for fresh code now, I insert more and longer spell-it-out comments than I used to give, and generally try to forget about compressing executable things, because speed, with modern compilers and processors, is just not a problem for what I'm doing. I do know that in future, without the commentaries, it would take me even longer to get (again) the reasons why this stuff was going in just there.

-wb-

To be more specific: with so many toothed wheels it's not just a problem in recreating logical process flow. What are the allowable tolerances for the thing not to jam? What are the necessary tolerances for the thing to move at all, lubricated or not? Is there even a window of tolerance where the thing can complete its moves without jamming?

-wb-

The Wikipedians have at last altered the policy that discriminated against truth: "Verifiability, and not truth, is one of the fundamental requirements for inclusion in Wikipedia;" (here is a link to the revision history of the 'Verifiability' policy http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia3AVerifiability&action=historysubmit&diff=511066476&oldid=483539130.)

-- but as Philip Roth found, it still looks as if any old gossip or fable can still find its way in, and it can then be hard to get removed.

There still seems to be something like an erosion process: A once-good-quality Wikipedia article gets doctored by editors who have preconceptions rather than information. The noisy ones just keep on putting their stuff in, and sometimes they delete good material with reliable citations in support. This is probably against Wikipedia policy, but policy is theory, and practice can be something else. The cleanup can be much more difficult to do than the contamination.

But WP can still be a good source of links to really reliable information.

-wb-

Well I wish it was a slap, but:

(a) they point to the fact that two courts found the case merited a conviction, and indicate that this vindicates their original decision to prosecute:

"Following our decision to charge Mr Chambers, both the magistrates' court and the crown court, in upholding his conviction, agreed that his message had the potential to cause real concern to members of the public, such as those travelling through the airport during the relevant time," it said in a statement http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-19009344/,

and
(b) whoever decided to bring the case probably still has that box ticked, that quota reached, or whatever else it takes to give a CPS bureaucrat a feeling of job satisfaction -- I'm afraid.

-wb-

"I think it was Newton who said if you knew the position and velocity of every particle in the universe, you could predict the future down to the effect the flutter of a sparrow's wing would have on the weather."

Doesn't sound much like the kind of thing Newton wrote, have you got a citation for it?

-wb-

excellent good sense, what more can one say?

-wb-

I travel from country to country all the time and have never been detained for longer than about 45 minutes, and that was just queuing. I stopped going to the US when they started treating travelers like convicts some years back. As far as I can tell instead of getting better the situation just keeps getting worse.

That ("treating travelers like convicts") is exactly what I thought I was seeing when I last entered the US, just over a year after 9/11. I, too, decided not to visit the country any more unless its officials seemed to be returning to standards of civilized behaviour. I think those US officials and agencies are betraying their fellow-citizens, many of whom are very civilized and are perhaps unaware of what is being done in their name.

-wb-

C is awesome incarnate: lean, readable and full of low level goodness.

C can be readable .... if the programmer has kept to a reasonable kind of discipline and order in the coding, that is. (FTFY)

Obfuscating C can be as hard to read as old 'spaghetti Fortran', I think.

-wb-

Umm, y'know, if you RTFA you find that the original article was posted to the arxiv on 1 April :)

-wb-

but 14% had been vaccinated

No, what the article actually said was, that among the _completely unvaccinated_, the _reason_ for lack of vaccination in 86% of cases was parental refusal. That doesn't say that 14% were vaccinated: it says that in 14% of unvaccinated cases the lack of vaccination was _not_
assigned to parental refusal as the cause.

I'm afraid this is how numerical data gets mashed into garble.

After considering the other numerical data the authors of the report concluded that "declining the vaccine carries a whopping risk for pertussis" (p.2).

-wb-