Are you sure that's not the intent for /.?

I'd expect most people neither to associate it with the Greek stems in question nor with Eugen Fischer; I'd expect them to have no clue where the word came from.

If you're referring to Pollock, hee came across in the movie as being manic-depressive, not schizophrenic.

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.

Yes! You're both presenting a perfectly defensible argument against marketing and reinforcing my original point! Because geeks tend to abhor marketing, we dismiss its significance, and are perennially gobsmacked as to why an intrinsically emotional, manipulatable species is so susceptible to emotional manipulation.

So long as humanity is what it is, reason will only ever get you so far. You either need to blow the doors off with a staggeringly amazing thing, or come to terms with the fact that every single entity who might care about your thing has feelings, and bending those feelings in your favor can work wonders.

It's not all bad, though; emotional manipulation works under much the same constraints. Unless you're a Level 80 Snake Oil Salesman with a hat full of luck, you're going to have a very hard time making your thing last if it doesn't live up to the hype--and your reputation will suffer for it.

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.)

It's pretty straightforward, to my mind. With the exception of all but the most staggering technological advancements, widespread adoption of new technology typically requires:

1. a sound implementation,
2. a robust support infrastructure, and
3. an effective marketing campaign.

Geeks, for a variety of reasons, tend to respect the first, grok the second, and abhor the third. I personally believe it's what drives our perpetual cycle of incredulity on this subject--because we so detest the last part of this equation, we refuse to see its importance in getting all those squishy, distracted, emotional bags of water to adopt cool new stuff.

NFC has never had the effective marketing campaign in the US, and only kinda had the support infrastructure. The iPhone has incredible inertia on the marketing front, and Apple have clearly done the legwork on building a good starting lineup of financial institutions and retailers for Apple Pay. It remains to be seen whether this'll be sufficient to make NFC catch on, but it's easily the closest we've come to covering all three of the bases above.

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

Law always trumps private contracts. Private contracts are enforced by law and dependent upon it. If I signed a contract that would make me a slave you couldn't enforce it (not with the legal system at least).