Note that the studies do not say multivitamins are worthless, nor does it address any other health areas except those three. That is just the headline sensationalism.

Did you miss the part where the TFA's title said "Stop wasting money on supplements"? The article itself is trying to make the argument that it's a waste for most people to take multivitamins. But the reason given is that it doesn't prevent death, heart attacks, cancer, or dementia.

Guess what? Hiring policemen don't prevent natural death, heart attacks, cancer or dementia either. Neither does wearing a seatbelt. Neither do all those safety regulations on cars and aircraft. Are they going to write an editorial next saying that we should "Stop wasting money on police, seatbelts, safety regulation", and cite studies showing that they don't prevent natural death, heart attacks, cancer, or dementia?

Vitamin deficiency causes all kinds of random problems that are often not quickly diagnosed. Do a cost-benefits analisys. It's a low probability that I'll have a vitamin deficiency, but if I do, vitamins will help a lot. Given how little they cost, it seems like a no-brainer.

What would be better is if the US patent office had to repay the royalties (or perhaps a percentage of them). Then there would actually be incentive for them to be careful about the patents they approved. As it is, they get money for any patent they approve, and no negative consequences for approving patents which are later overturned.

Cuts and scrapes get soap and bandages.

Of course, and that's the right thing to do -- until such time as you discover that your leg has actually been infected, and that you need antibiotics. It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it can be incredibly dangerous. I don't know what the rate of bacterial infection is for falling out of a tree, but let's say it was 1 in 1,000. No antibiotics means that goes from "1 in 1000 children who scrape their knee hospitalized" to "1 in 1000 children who scrape their knee die", which is pretty bad.

And of course, there's the insane requirement enacted in 2006 that the USPS pre-pay healthcare benefits 50 years in advance

According to the Times, the real financial problem facing the Post Office may have been created by Congress in the first place through the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. The law required the service to begin prefunding the healthcare benefits of future retirees 50 years in advance. The requirement costs about $5.6 billion a year, and it caused the Postal Service to lose $5.1 billion the first year after it was enacted.

So for the last 7 years, they've had a $5B handicap -- limiting what they can do wrt expanding into other markets, upgrading services, and so on. I'd say they're doing pretty amazing.

It would be akin (because of the vast separation in time) to our finding forty thousand versions of "Damn, Og just missed small deer. ... No, wait, he return. ... Damn, Og just missed small deer."

Your example contains "damn", which could help you track exposure to religion, attitudes towards swearing, and so on. The existence of "small deer" could help you track the change of population and determine exactly when a species became extinct / sacred / in high demand. Even when not mentioned, a historian might be able to deduce that Og was using a ranged weapon here rather than a close-combat one, to help study ancient technology, correlating it with other evidence to track the rise and fall of different tribes or races. That all sounds like a potential treasure-trove of information to me.

Most of our data are totally uninteresting pieces of garbage. Think of it, a future species recovers an archive of present tweets and facebook comments.

Said by someone who obviously has never done much looking at history. The fact that "uninteresting pieces of garbage", that either everyone knew and assumed or thought didn't need to be said, were *not* written down, makes it a lot harder to understand the context in which the things we *do* have were said. Having a handful of people's full FB / twitter records will be a treasure trove of information for 50th-century historians trying to figure out what life was actually like in the 20th century.

Let us never confuse creating value with capturing value; somehow we have to get them better aligned.

Do we? Because you know, I was under the impression that not everybody measured value and success by the fatness of one's wallet.

This isn't about Linus. I'm sure that Linus is at least as happy, if not far happier, than Ballmer, Elop, or Fiorina. It's about us as society. Money is power, after all -- it's people with money that decide what buildings are built, what movies get made, what devices are produced, and so on. Giving that power to Ballmer and Elop, who are good at "capturing value" while destroying it, is bad for society.

Where are they "badmouthing" Linux? All they said was that Linux is over-kill for running a single application within a VM. Linux and OSv are different tools for different purposes.

Especially since Linux was the first hypervisor they ported to, and has the best support at the moment.

Additionally unfounded. Given that BSD sources can be downloaded, modified, and their changes never see the light of day the loss of information is virtually guaranteed. Not to say it doesn't happen with the GPL, but it's actually a legal risk to allow it to happen.

In practice, the vast majority of the time GPL and BSD are functionally equivalent. The reason is this: if a company takes a GPL project, makes changes, but doesn't do the work to upsteam them, and then just publishes their changes as patches on their own website, there is a very low probability that those patches will ever make it either upstream, or into a competitor's product. Publishing the patches on your website is not considered "contributing to the community"; actually doing the work of upstreaming is. A company that doesn't upstream anything but only publishes patches on their website is considered a "taker" by the community. The major things driving contributions to upstream are the pain of having to rebase local modifications in order to pull new code from upstream, and the benefits of being seen to "give back" to the community. These both would work the same for a BSD project.

However, just like any time you're working with other people, "what happens in the worst case" is important, and has a material impact on how you relate when there are disadgreements. If the situation becomes tense with your wife, you'll act differently if you know that in the event of a divorce she'll get half of your considerable property than if you know she can't touch a dime. Similarly, the fact that I could take those published patches and upstream them myself is important to me. And although companies like BSD when they're the only one contributing to a project, it seems to me that GPL provides a much better "worst case scenario" for you if you're working with a competitor.

If you don't want to be demeaned, don't work in a job where your role includes cleaning up human excrement and vomit from trains.

Or, we as society could stop demeaning people for doing good work and making the world a better place. Do you want to be able to take a subway without the place reeking of shit and puke? Then be thankful for the people cleaning it up; give them respect, good working conditions, and a living wage. Anyone who is creating value for society deserves that much, whether they're designing the next iPhone or washing the piss smell of a public lavatory. And if you don't give them any of that, don't be surprised if they don't deliver very much value to you.

Besides, the demeaning argument could be applied to any kind of time keeping system. So you use your finger to clock on instead of a card. So what?

If the card is exactly the same, then why go through the expense of the fancy new equipment?

If the fingerprint system really is cheaper / more robust / maintainable / whatever, then it may make sense to upgrade. If, as I suspect, it is is more expensive, and they're doing it not to reduce costs and increase efficiency of processing but to have more control over people. Either that's not necessary, in which case it's demeaning, or it is necessary, in which case (it seems to me) they're doing something else really wrong.

well the reason they don't want the scanners is that then they can't as easily sell their job when they move on - or have their cousin cover for them on a sick day.

Possibly, but another very good reason they don't want scanners is that it's demeaning and insulting.

Unless there are significant problems (and not just "significant bending of the rules", but "significant extra expense or reduction in quality"), there is no reason to treat people like criminals.

And if there are significant problems, there's a better solution: Hire people you trust, and then trust the people you hire; and don't judge them by stupid metrics like "has been physically present exactly N hours?", but by metrics like, "Is the area they were responsible for clean?" If it would take an average person working at a reasonable rate 8 hours to clean a certain area, and because of me the area is now clean, then pay me for 8 hours worth of work, whether it took me 8 hours or three hours.

That's a post from August 13, about the ruling going into this trial -- not about the actual trial or the verdict itself, which is what this article was about.

I really miss Groklaw's coverage and analysis of this whole thing.

Where is your god now??

Giving people's choices dignity and meaning by allowing them (and others around them) to experience consequences for those choices.

You are crazy. If you look at deaths per yer per 100K vehicles [wikipedia.org], the rate ranges from 14,050 (Togo) down to 4.6 (Malta). Other samples: UK (5.1), US (15), Russia (55), Bangladesh (6,300).

Wait, 14% of the population dies every year in Togo due to automobile accidents? That's just not possible. There must be a mistake somewhere.