I'm going to assume you're not trolling, and you truly believe your compassion based argument against double-blind trials. I'll start out by saying that I'm sorry that my offer of a differing viewpoint seems to have been taken by you as an attack on your values and beliefs. It is not meant to be an attack, and I'm sorry to have provoked an emotional reaction in you.

I don't know how or why you came to have a strong belief against double-blind trials, but I suggest that it does not hurt to consider an alternate viewpoint, even if you are not convinced by it. This is why I suggested you look at Goldacre's book.

Anyway, it's my view that double-blind trials make the world a better and more humane place. My reasoning is that they provide us with more reliable information about the effectiveness of treatment. They fight against data distortions from the placebo effect by "blinding" the patient. They also fight against confirmation bias, sample population manipulation, cherry-picking, and other distortions by blinding the researcher to which treatment each patient is receiving. It's a two-fold data protection system.

The result is that we have more effective medical treatments through better medical data. Although perhaps a few hundred people receive the placebo treatment, millions more will benefit because we would have a better idea of which treatments are more effective. This gives doctors a more accurate view of the world, which undoubtedly helps when treating patients. This is why I see double-blind trials as having a greater benefit to the world than any negative effect that placebo treatment may have.

The patients receiving placebo knew that they may or may not receive a placebo treatment. They also knew that the actual non-placebo medicine may or may not be effective, and could even be harmful. They freely decided to be a part of the study anyway, and sometimes get paid to do so. Besides, even if they do unknowingly receive placebo, their health tends to improve anyway because they believe the placebo treatment will work.

Okay, your turn. I look forward to your response.

If you wish to understand why we do double blind trials, I suggest you pick up a copy of Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

Mac OS X is arguably much more open than Windows. I base this argument on Mac OS X's open Mach kernel, BSD components, and GNU command line utilities included in the system. Although it also has lots of proprietary code, much like Windows, the difference is that Windows doesn't have as many open components as Mac OS X.

Also, both systems are equivalent with respect to the ability to install programs downloaded from the web, and I hope this never changes. If it does, I will throw a fit and deliver a pie to the face of the relevant executive officers. That restriction would be enough to make me go back to a Linux desktop. YMMV.

It goes without saying that most forms of Linux are way more open than either system.

You know what would suck? If people started hosting web sites from their home that were down half of the time. That would be worse for the internet then if an ISP just said "Please go else where to host a server".

This is a new service. Google has no idea what problems they are going to run in to and are taking it slow. How stupid would they have sounded if they came out and said "Hey guys we are starting a new ISP division. Who wants to sign up their mission critical servers to be hosted by us?". It's fine for the internet if a home goes down but not if a business's servers go down. That is why that phrase is perfectly reasonable. You CAN host servers out of your home but you SHOULD not since Google can't guarantee any reasonable QOS yet.

Here is something in my Optimum Online terms of service

So yes they can. At lest Google did not say I can't they only said I should not. If you want server support you need to get a business class internet connection, Google is not selling that yet.

IANAL but I don't think that the usage of the word 'permitting' would undo the ambiguity of the word 'should' in any court of law. Historically Google does not care much one way or the other what people do with their services as long as they do not cause trouble. Since they clearly have the power to throttle connection speeds I don't think the high usage of having a sever would be causing them any trouble. I'm leaning to they are just recommending you don't do it, not that it is forbidden. However neither of us will have the information to prove who is right until we see the actual contracts.

"should not" is not "can not". They may only be pointing out that since they make little guarantees about up time of your connection hosting anything on it is a bad idea. Has anyone seen any clarification from them on this?

Android and iOS both have permissions and protections in place to prevent apps from accessing personal data such as Contacts and Location. Although there have been incidents of breaches, the protections work most of the time. Android also sandboxes the apps, and although I'm not 100% sure I believe that iOS does so as well.

What is it about the Windows Phone implementation specifically that is so different and presumably better?

non-vocal music

This is key. The human brain only has one language processing section. Music with lyrics will cause it to compute words rather then letting you read or write what ever you are working on. The article points this out but basically ignores how well people can concentrate when listening to music with-out lyrics. Have any studies actually looked at non-lyric music working?

If you magically make the voting machines 100% secure, attackers will target the infrastructure that transmits, stores, and counts the votes.

I believe Chromium also excludes Google's software update functionality.

Slightly off-topic, but am I the only one that thinks the word "cyber" is a silly 90's throwback?

This blog does a great job a ripping Campbell's "The China Study" apart. http://rawfoodsos.com/the-china-study/. The short story is he warped his representation of the numbers to make meat look worse then it is to reach conclusions that not even his academic papers support. I agree that the problem is the western diet, but not because the western diet contains large amounts of meat. I've tried my best to read about this topic with an open mind and I've come to the conclusion that we have two major problems in our western diets that is killing us. 1) Too much sugar. See "Sugar: the bitter truth" and 2) Too much Omega-6 compared to Omega-3. This can be partly tied to meat consumption as corn feed beef is much lower in Omega-3 then grass feed beef is. Cut out the soda and eat good quality meat and you will avoid most of the modern health issues

Okay, so TimSort.rangeCheck() was allegedly copied from java.util.Arrays.

Aside from the obviousness issues, this fact would make it slightly more sensible to use rangeCheck() for a copyright infringement case, except for the fact that java.util.Arrays was provided by Sun under the GPL v2. The GPL was written to encourage copying and modification.

The worst I could say about Google allegedly copying this code is that they re-licensed the GPL rangeCheck() method to Apache 2.0, which you can't really do; the combination of GPL code and non-GPL code would be a GPL end product. Regardless, I still don't see a billion dollar damage claim.

Wow, you're right, that's completely insane. Look at the revision history of TimSort.

How can Oracle claim copyright damages on a file in Java's source code that is Copyrighted in 2009 by Google?
Why hasn't Google tried to nullify the copyright claim on this file on the grounds they they wrote the code and that they themselves own the copyright?
Why would Oracle make an issue of this file if the case for infringement is so weak?

None of this makes any sense to me whatsoever. I feel like I'm missing something; Oracle can't be this outrageous and Google's lawyers can't be this dumb. Can someone clarify?

What's amusing is that the 9 lines in question don't even implement the algorithm; they perform a quick sanity check before the real computation starts. Is this really the best they have? Couldn't they have found more creative lines of code to be infringing on a copyright?

Anyway I've been looking some stuff up. TimSort was originally written into Python by Tim Peters in 2002 (BSD-style license). If I'm not mistaken, that would mean that Sun wrote a trivial check as part their own re-implementation of someone else's work, and are claiming massive copyright damages on it. If Oracle wins that, that's one hell of a precedent.