Just as the PhD Comics comic referred to in another posting says.

Neither is the International Business Times, whence this article refers.

The web site for Nature magazine, however, is a science web site, and there's a much better story there on the same topic.

Yes, I'd be inclined to pay attention to only the claims in the Nature news article on the same topic.

A better source is the article in Nature .

No, it's not just you, and, yes, that sentence is completely devoid if any scientific sense. Better sentences can be found in the news article from Nature .

Well, there's "magnet therapy" as in "wear a magnet on your body", and there's "magnet therapy" as in "coat extremely small magnetic particles with a protein that binds to bacteria, viruses, and bacterial toxins, run your blood through a machine where the particles bind to the bacteria/viruses/toxins and get magnetically removed from the blood, and pump the blood back in".

It's quite possible for the first form of "magnet therapy" to be bullshit and the second form of "magnet therapy" to work.

Makes me not want to read the International Business Times, but to, instead, read the news article from Nature , as suggested in another post.

It provides a convenient phone number to provide to people who require one but to whom you don't want to talk, e.g. charitable organizations that will pester you to increase your donation. Turn the ringer off, give it an answering machine or similar service, and let people leave messages which you pick up later.

(It may also work better for speakerphone calls than a mobile phone.)

Yup. And honored by a "mainly Canadian economics blog", no less.

And I've had to put up with those damned geographers claiming they've seen triangles with three right angles when it's been mathematically proven that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees! "Empirical evidence" indeed!

And, of course, an axiom is just a starting point; if the axioms are inconsistent with each other, or with reality, the conclusions drawn from the axioms could be bogus, no matter how air-tight the reasoning.

Because some other type of phone would require you to understand the technicalities of a backup? Sounds like the kind of phone most non-technical consumers wouldn't use.

Or because, with some other type of phone, the technicalities of a backup would be simple enough for non-technical consumers to use?

The article pointed to the very very very very very incomplete release notes for stuff after 3.5.

You wanted to link to the 3.5 release notes.

It's only "safe" if you 1) trust that the machine to which you're connecting restricts the ability to bind to ports under 1024 (not guaranteed), and that the only people running processes on the machine in question are either trustworthy or are restricted from running programs that bind to those ports (not guaranteed), and that the system services you care about have ports under 1024 (not guaranteed).

And what guarantees that a "system service" (whatever that might mean) has a port under 1024? Perhaps a better scheme for determining whether to trust a service is called for here - one that would probably obviate the need for "privileged ports".

One would hope that services that trust untrustworthy guarantees would be in the minority; in the best of all possible worlds, they would be completely non-existent.

Good. Ideally, nobody would trust them, and claims such as "It prevents regular user programs from masquerading as system services, which usually sit below port 1024." would be treated as the uninteresting claims that they are.

"CISC functionality" is the ability to execute a given CISC instruction set with acceptable performance. Transistors can be used in several different ways to achieve that, and you can choose to use fewer transistors in one place on a chip in favor of more transistors in another place, and if that choice means you still get better overall performance executing the same instruction set, that choice is a good one.

Again, as long as the full instruction set can be executed (even if some of it is executed by trap code), you don't have a subset. You may happen to execute some functions slower, and other functions faster, but if the net result is faster execution of the code actually run on the machine, you have a better implementation.

Smart people add registers iff they're sufficiently useful that it's worth either increasing the die size or taking transistors away from other functions.

For existing architectures, the reason they don't do it is that it would require changes to the instruction format, which, for most instruction set architectures, would be a royal pain. For x86, they (AMD, to be specific) could and did add Yet Another Prefix to double the number of registers as the instruction set already had a tradition of adding prefixes. For ARM, they were already introducing a 64-bit variant of the instruction set, and didn't have to maintain binary compatibility. For, for example, System/3x0, you'd have to add prefixes to an instruction set lacking prefixes, or somehow use opcode bits to refer to additional registers. If somebody were to design a brand new CISC architecture (in an era where we're not designing many new instruction set architectures at all), they could design one with 32 GPRs.