I can't speak to apple's enterprise support, but I have experienced issues with MS servers and their support came through with custom fixes on the spot. We had an issue with Exchange some years ago and they escalated our issue through the night, grabbing data dumps as we went. By the morning they had identified an issue with their OS software and a patch was released to us the next day. I was pretty impressed with that level of support.

Those kind of issues are quite rare - but in a large enterprise you see rare stuff all the time. In my experience, the more vertical the app, the better the response when you have an issue - probably because they only have so many potential customers and they can't afford to piss them off. Accounting system vendors and CRM vendors get right on it. We had less luck when we encountered issues with MS office. Same vendor, different economic incentives.

Call it what you like, but plants respond to other organisms in their environment and communicate among themselves. They form complicated and interconnected communities. Trees in the forest actually communicate information about danger not only via the release of volatile compounds like acetylene gas, but also via a nervous-system-like network of mycorrhizae, a cooperative arrangement that not only connects multiple organisms, but one that spans multiple kingdoms.

Bacterial and archaea communicate with other microbes via complex chemical signals, even cooperating in forming complex biofilm communities that go to war with other communities. They also communicate with higher organisms, including their human hosts. Current research is beginning to show that organisms in our microbiome can actually influence our behavior and health - to the degree that they can actually command us to gain or lose weight. Research in mice has shown that a protozoan can control the behavior of its host mouse making it more likely to be eaten by a cat, the other host in the parasitic organism's life cycle.

Organisms across all kingdoms respond to stimuli in their environment and communicate with other organisms in extremely complex ways that we are only beginning to understand. Claiming that humans have no special status above animals because animals can feel pain and then claiming that humans and animals have a special status above other organisms because their anatomy is more foreign and their manifestation of response to negative stimuli doesn't involve a central nervous system is a bit hypocritical because the line-drawing is equally arbitrary. Humans are animals. We don't gather energy directly from sunlight. We don't fix carbon. We obtain our energy and building materials from other organisms, just like all other animals. Any moral component to this is a completely human construct. Perhaps that is what separates us from the other animals. Our navel-gazing.

Let's try explaining it by absurd example.

I don't know that Scowler complaining to his friends about the drug dealers that hang out behind the 7-11 should be illegal per se, but it still amounts to facilitating illicit drug use. I'm not saying he should go to jail, just that providing information about the location of drug dealers should hurt Scowler's pocketbook, in such a way that he'll proactively try to prevent it.

Substitute any other behavior you'd like for drugs in this silly vignette and you'll see why your financial solution is no improvement. I'm not saying that homosexuality should be illegal per se, just that engaging in that behavior should affect your bottom line...

Free speech is free speech. Anything that chips away at our right to freely express our ideas is an abomination. "Facilitating rights violations" is an absurd, made-up weasel word to get around protections for free speech. Substituting financial penalties for criminal violations doesn't change the calculus at all. And no, the fact that there are government officials at the highest levels who agree with you doesn't make you right, it just makes it more terrifying.

None of that means that there isn't a real problem that the entertainment industry has to face with piracy. It just means that I'm not willing to trade any of my freedom for their security. And you shouldn't be willing to make that trade either.

If any of these chimps are named Eric.... Well, let's just hope they have their chimp license in order before they get to court.... Judges can be sticklers on paperwork. I doubt the old "cross out the word 'dog' and write in 'chimp' above" trick is going to fly.

And as an old-school champion of free speech you should fight for the chimps' right to free speech, even if they can't speak - being chimpanzees and all. Which is nobody's fault, not even the animal researchers.

On a more serious note of agreement, I wonder if the judge can have them committed for observation for filing something so patently ridiculous that it suggests either a devious bit of performance art or a pathology at work.

I really couldn't disagree more. It is one thing to claim that "information wants to be free" and disavow copyrights altogether, but simply pointing to a location and saying "this is what exists at website.com" should always be protected speech under all circumstances. I really can't think of any justification for preventing someone from pointing out a true fact about where something is located. Not even if it were something much worse than a bootleg copy of a concert video or a copy of a Hollywood DVD - like something really both illegal and immoral, such as kiddie porn.

That is all that google does. "Hey, you can find a web page that contains the words "banana hammock" at this address". I don't care what words you substitute for "banana Hammock" and what content you actually find at the web address, simply pointing to it should in all cases be a protected expression of the right to free speech. I don't care if you earn 8 trillion dollars for saying it, or it costs you three bucks and a half-eaten snickers bar to say it, the financial arrangements around your speech are perfectly irrelevant to your right to speak.

The problem isn't that the idea of including groups for sexes is questionable - it is the subdividing of small groups into even smaller groups based on numerous criteria. This is commonly done in small pilot studies that turn up marginal results which are later shown to be erroneous. Normally this is a non-issue. It is part of the scientific process - look for phenomena and then follow up with further study.

But when the study becomes the basis for stories in the media - watch out. We see this over and over. A small study of (insert food, chemical product, alternative treatment here) that checks a bunch of different variables shows a significant change in one or two. The media runs with the story and people begin to act as if the study is "scientific truth". When the follow up studies show that the whole thing was nonsense, it is too late. The idea has already entered the public consciousness as fact.

Here is a nice article about the effect of these sorts of preliminary results on the practice of medicine. It has some nice links to other sources on things like publication bias and researcher degrees of freedom that lead to the publication of false positives.

I can't support your conspiracy theory, but you do point out a major flaw in the current peer-review publication model. Interesting stuff makes it in to the journals. New stuff makes it in. Interesting and new stuff makes it into Nature, even if the paper itself is rather weak.

Boring stuff doesn't make Nature. Boring things like replication of other results. If you can get a contradictory result you are in. But confirming? Nah, not gonna get published unless there is something really significant going on. A huge percentage of publications in medicine are not replicated. We really do need a change in the system such that, as you put it, all the data points are preserved. Plus it would have been great to pick up a few publications as a graduate student by replicating studies. (Although I'm not sure "didn't work, culture got contaminated" counts as a result worth preserving. It is surprising how often critical steps get left out of the materials and methods section. Heck, I might have paid for a publication that was entirely composed of attempts at replicating an experiment using only the information in the materials and methods. Yeah rookie, of course you have to solublize in DMSO first! Everybody knows that...)

To the extent that the PR machine went ballistic in this case, it is because their livelihood was being attacked by another PR machine based on what is in all probability an erroneous result. Failing to answer this propaganda would not be a good idea for them, any more than having our public health officials sitting around mutely waiting for further study while the celebrities told us that vaccines made their kids autistic was a good idea. Dow Corning didn't counter the BS claims about their breast implants very effectively and they went out of the business while paying out millions in claims. It didn't really help them when they were vindicated by further studies years later.

Bad papers make it through peer review all the time. One of the best things about journal club is ripping apart a paper that has weak experimental design or unsupported conclusions. Editors miss this sort of thing quite frequently, particularly if the result is exceptional for some reason - things like cold fusion and arsenic life are extreme examples of this, but things like acupuncture and acai berries are also common examples.

Things that are hard for reviewers to ferret out include built in biases such as too many degrees of researcher freedom and very small effects with barely statistically significant numbers. In this case they found a very small effect against a very large background of similar results. This sort of effect almost always disappears when the study is replicated. This is commonly seen in studies of homeopathy and other CAM treatments. One small study shows a small effect for some condition - which disappears in better designed follow-up studies. It is very common to find multiple degrees of freedom in these studies as well - examine a group of 100 people who take ginko for a couple of months and check 100 different biological markers. You should find 5 markers that show a statistically significant change due to random chance.

In this case they split by gender - which sounds somewhat defensible - except that it means that they had an opportunity to double their fishing expedition - and they found a result in female mice. They also tested for a large number of different markers and checked a variety of organs, only seeing effects in some of the parameters. The paper makes it sound very impressive in the introduction - as if eating roundup resistant corn would increase your cancer risk by 300% to 600%. Further reading made these numbers a little less impressive. And reading the comments by researchers who are familiar with this strain of mouse leads one to believe that the results are exactly as expected, even if they had not been given any GMO feed, due to the animal's innate susceptibility to exactly these effects from simply being fed too much. The researchers in this paper allowed the mice to eat their fill.

None of this means their results are wrong. Just that the data is way to shaky to support the conclusions and level of discussion this paper garnered.

It should be pretty easy to do the correct study without spending money on mice and technicians, just on testing. Millions of animals are fed exclusively on GMO corn feed. Millions more are never fed GMO corn. It should be pretty straightforward to get access to a few thousand examples of the same breed of pig or chicken from each group and check them for any number of health effects. Of course, these animals are not nearly as prone to spontaneous tumors, so the incidence of cancers will be much, much lower. And I suppose we have our anecdotal results right there as well - surely a negative health effect would be noticed across millions of animals over the last decade. Farmers tend to take things like feed that makes their animals sick quite seriously.

This is not entirely nonsense, but it is way too simplistic. Microbes are capable of bizarre behaviors like horizontal gene transfer to gain multiple resistance quickly. Resistance genes in the wild predate the use of antibiotics by humans - by millions of years - so any use of antibiotics will eventually create resistant strains. This makes perfect sense, as antibiotics are largely fungal anti-bacterial chemical warfare agents. They've been fighting it out for a billion years or so all over the planet. More responsible use of antibiotics is certainly warranted, but levels of resistance will certainly always be increasing, no matter what the antibacterial agents are.

Phage therapy has tremendous potential, but it is likely going to require some major changes in the western regulatory scheme, particularly in the United States. To be maximally effective, phage therapy will have to be rapidly developed and deployed to deal with the natural evolution of resistance in bacteria. These cocktails of anti-bacterial viruses can potentially be custom built for each outbreak or even each patient, but not under the current multi-year clinical trial based approval mechanism for antibiotics and other drugs used by the FDA.

There are many new developments in medicine that will be pressing for change in the regulatory scheme. C. Diff. is currently being treated (successfully) by fecal transplants. They are working to standardize the bacterial mix for these transplants into a "drug" that can be standardized and regulated. Without some improvements in the approval mechanisms these developments will be significantly slowed.

I wonder what the overall contribution of vehicle vs. pedestrian is to the total death and injury by vehicle numbers.

Hmm.... " Pedestrians are 1.5 times more likely than passenger vehicle occupants to be killed in a car crash on each trip.2" It seems that pedestrian deaths might be worth worrying about.

I'm not sure what that sentence means though - they report ~4,000 deaths and 70,000 injuries to pedestrians per year, while there are tens of thousands killed and millions injured in motor vehicle accidents every year.

Yes, the best people are self-motivated. And if you are paying them $X and they can make 7*$X somewhere else, you won't hold them long. And if you want someone making $X at your competitor to join your company, you'd do well to offer him more than $X to leave.

In a long-lived slashdot tradition, it doesn't appear that anyone on this discussion thread read the fine article. It argues that freedom is the root of fear in America. More specifically it is the freedom myth - that we are a nation founded in freedom - that is the root of all fear and paranoia in America. He compares 3 countries with what he defines as cultures of fear based in freedom myth as the root of their anti-democratic evils: the US, Israel and Apartheid South Africa.

In his view we are slaves to a culture created in the back of covered wagons, with women and children cowering in fear from the isolation and danger crossing the frontier alone.

I suppose it is left to the reader to divine what the solution would be if the problem is that we venerate freedom too much.

Yup. Unless they come up with some sort of industry-wide accident payout system or some federal level legislation to protect manufacturers, it is going to be tough sledding for automated driving. They do seem to be working toward some sort of national legal framework for this - I hope they get it right. Since the day I saw that first DARPA challenge race, I've been waiting for my self-driving car. Each new revelation of an even better version just twists the knife. Google's blind guy driving video left me sure that it was only a matter of time until I could get one. This year's news makes it clear that they are ready to go - they just need the government and the rest of us to catch up.

Having no other information than the articles provided, I kinda had the same hunch. Just because they showed there were some possible bugs in the code doesn't mean that this particular accident was caused by the computer.

I'll be interested to see what the flood of cases to follow looks like. I'm guessing they will also be dominated by elderly drivers.

All that being said, I have a very close friend who lost his teenage daughter to an unexplained single car accident that looked very much like an uncontrolled acceleration. She was driving a new Toyota Corolla at the time. It makes me wonder if she didn't find one of these software bugs...