The first study doesn't deal directly with pain, and should never have been published, IMO, it is appallingly bad science. Some (probably not all) of the flaws:

• - It mixes a range of quite different chronic conditions including headaches, allergies, dermatitis, rhinitis (all of which can be caused by stress or psychosomatic effects as well as physiology);
• - it doesn't present a list of all the conditions studied, only "the most frequent diagnoses";
• - the authors "replace" missing data if a patient dropped out (page 3);
• - the authors make arbitrary assumptions about the models without any explanations for their reasoning (page 3 again);
• - and, most damningly, the patients were allowed to use conventional medications during the study (page 6). In other words no useful conclusions about the efficacy of homeopathy can be drawn from it.

as I said, I'm surprised it was published, but given that BioMed Central recently retracted 43 papers for fake peer review, perhaps I shouldn't be.

The second paper is not about homeopathy but about acupuncture, which is (a) naturopathy and (b) an actual physical process involving sticking needles into specific parts of the body (AFAIK nerve clusters).

And in C not just the result, but the behaviour is undefined. If you divide by zero the compiler, runtime libraries and the CPU can do whatever they like. They could ignore you, crash, format your hard drive or kill your pet.

For speed reasons, this is a good thing. If it looks like you might run into undefined behaviour, the compiler can assume that the inputs to the program won't trigger that behaviour. This allows all kinds of optimisations to be performed, from dead code elimination, to hoisting invariant code out of loops.

At least other high level languages define precisely what a divide by zero should do. That way you run into platform or compiler specific heisenbugs far less frequently.

In the logjam paper, they speculate that the NSA has the funds to run the first part of a number field sieve on a small number of 1024bit primes. So long as we keep using software implementations with these well known primes hard coded in their source code, HTTPS SSH & VPN connections may be vulnerable.

Not putting all of our eggs in one basket reduces this risk considerably. In response to this threat, we should periodically publish and use a new set of primes that are appropriate for DH exchanges. Though I would be happier if it were possible to generate a new prime on the first boot of a server.

Or we could swap to using a different method for producing session keys.

Good. But it doesn't go far enough. How about some kind of deprecation warning if DH is using any well known prime number?

FTFY. Look, I like the idea of a single cable and port standard. But there should also be a single protocol. At least you'll have USB3 to fall back on, but I imagine many sales drones and users getting confused on the finer points of compatibility issues.

Humans only have = two hands, and they take up a fair amount of vertical space too. Stack the picking arms 10-20 high, build a conveyor belt that can bring shelves to them and they start to look much more interesting. Sure each robot may take a minute to pick one item. But this is an embarrassingly parallel problem.

Sure you need a directory service. But it needs to be tamper proof. OP is suggesting that all service names should be public keys. So all DHT records that would be published / fetched can be signed. And the connection to the service can also be signed.

That way noone can guess the current key for a known service. Then the only chance of a sybil attack is to convince someone that your key is the service they are looking for. Something that should only be possible by intercepting the first request.

If the economic modelling you use does not have a recession as one of it's possible states. It is not a model of the economy.

If your model of how individual agents interact is not consistent with the rules of double entry book-keeping, you do not have a model of the economy.

If your model of a firms profits don't line up with empirical evidence... you get the idea.

When you impose that model on an actual economy, and it fails to follow your expectations. It isn't the real world that is at fault.

Paraphrasing Hyman Minsky; The natural instability of capitalism is upwards. When firms take small risks and they pay off, they learn to take bigger and bigger risks. Bankers have an incentive to fund larger and larger risks. Asset prices climb. It becomes profitable to speculate on assets without having the income to cover your interest payments. Until the debt level peaks and the whole process works in reverse. A boom becomes a slump. There's a period of pain, when bankers and firms reduce their willingness to take risks. The economy recovers, firms take small risks and they pay off....

But everyone starts the next cycle, still carrying some of their debts from the previous cycle. If there's high inflation, who cares. You can easily pay off your debts with your increased income. But when the mountain of debt in the system gets too large, inflation is impossible.

Once inflation turns to de-flation, the cycle is broken. What starts as a period of tranquility. A "Great Moderation" if you will. Suddenly turns into a crisis. Debtors go bankrupt, money is destroyed. Distressed sellers discover the market is much smaller than they thought it was. Even low risk projects fail as the economy suddenly shrinks.

But if the government sector taxes more in the good times, and runs a deficit during a slump. They can dampen the cycle. They can lessen the pain of the inevitable crash. But do you really think that the people will allow high taxation during a long period with very little trouble?

Do you really think the government caused this? A government run by economists who haven't learnt the right lessons from history. Economists who misunderstand and ignore the role of money and credit. Economists who codified their model of a perfect economy into law. A model which has nothing to do with how the real economy actually works.

If you want to understand the situation, you have to study the role of credit and money in the economy. Both of which, mainstream economics will mistakenly tell you are irrelevant. If you've got an hour, I'd recommend watching one of Steve Keen's recent lectures on YouTube.

When banks lend, they create money and spending power with every loan. When you repay a loan, or go bankrupt, that money you didn't spend doesn't flow around the economy. It didn't become someone else's income.

The people of Greece, have less money that's travelling slower around their economy. They're in a depression. It's not like they're all hoarding it under a mattress. The Maastricht treaty places limits on both the annual government deficit and the total government debt. So at this time, when their people are out of work, the government can't pay them welfare. Making a bad problem so much worse.

The Maastricht treaty is a failed economics experiment. Perpetrated by fools, who turned their economic ideology into law. Giving nations like Greece no way to soften the impact of a financial crisis. Turning an inevitable recession, into a much greater depression.

FTFY. This isn't about the country, it's about the government. When money is leaving the country because the private sector is repaying (or defaulting on) debts, the government is powerless to stimulate the economy. When their tax receipts are reduced during a downturn, they can't increase welfare payments to reduce the misery of the population.