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Scientists Say a Dirty Child Is a Healthy Child 331

Researchers from the School of Medicine at the University of California have shown that the more germs a child is exposed to, the better their immune system in later life. Their study found that keeping a child's skin too clean impaired the skin's ability to heal itself. From the article: "'These germs are actually good for us,' said Professor Richard Gallo, who led the research. Common bacterial species, known as staphylococci, which can cause inflammation when under the skin, are 'good bacteria' when on the surface, where they can reduce inflammation."

Comment Don't force your kid to share ... (Score 4, Interesting) 245

Child behavior is often successfully explained (but not always) by how much loving attention a child gets from its role models, and by how much freedom the child gets in pursuing its desires (e.g., if she wants to play with Barbie, then you hurt her confidence by forbidding it, and ultimately lead her to vanity, the very opposite you wanted to achieve by forbidding Barbie). A child is often a delinquent due to insufficient loving attention, or severe repression (and well-meaning parents do a lot of repression, e.g., forcing a child to share when it clearly doesn't want to, or participating in religion). The delinquent behavior of the child is a symbolic cry for loving attention / freedom, which is completely ironic, because we all view it as the child being bad and incurable, but not crying for life. The typical societal response is to punish them in a way to make it even worse: reduce what little loving attention they had even further by locking them up, and telling them that they are bad, which they inherently won't believe. The end result is anger towards society for depriving the child of the freedom and attention that he wanted, which manifests as retaliation against society --- further crime.

Locking kids up because they want more attention and freedom doesn't seem to be the solution, particularly since they come out with a higher probability of worse crimes against society.

Comment Re:because they make new editions to thwart re-use (Score 1) 398

How can you find a used book if a new edition came out? The nice thing about this service is that you can rent a new edition for $69 as opposed to buying it retail for $123, despite that there is *no* option to buy used. Of course, you could buy that new edition and resell it for lots, but then you have the burden of reselling it ... the renting makes it easier.

I kept most of my books. I thought I'd use them, but rarely have, and they just got in my way once I started moving around the world ... should have sold them when I had the chance.

Comment Lots of ISPs already have IPv6, including Verizon (Score 1) 281

Lots of American ISPs are already providing IPv6 because they want to have the government as a customer. Many of you probably could enable IPv6 but don't because your router is incapable of handling IPv6. There are very few home routers that I could find that support IPv6. One that does is Apple's Airport Extreme. I bought that, connected it, and instantly got IPv6 addresses handed out to my home network. Although they are 6to4 addresses, I can connect to other IPv6 hosts, including friends at other ISPs, and ipv6.google.com. When I'm remote, I can connect directly to any of my home computers (when using IPv6) --- no more port forwarding via NAT. One reason that 6to4 appeals to the ISPs is that it puts a time limit on your IPv6 prefix lease which is tied to the lease on the IPv4 address. Thus when the IPv4 address changes, your IPv6 subnet's prefix changes, which makes it hard to run a server, and you must rely on dyndns. Dyndns with IPv6 is very easy, because your end host knows its IPv6 prefix (and doesn't have to ping a remote host to figure out its IP address as is necessary for a IPv4 host behind NAT), and because everything on your subnet knows instantly when the IPv6 prefix changes, and so you can update the dyndns with a very small race condition.

Comment Net neutrality is wrong (Score 1) 873

It is funny to see everyone saying that she was bought out by business interests. I'm not a business interest, and I've been telling Congress that net neutrality is bad. Perhaps there is another side to the story? And I'm not trolling.

And then there's the irony: people on /. so often worry about individual rights, and talk pro freedom, yet in this case they throw the property rights of ISPs out the window (and please don't reply that the common good trumps property rights --- if you do, I'll convince Congress that it is in the public interest to enslave your body and make it available to do my bidding).

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