but why can't Tesla open their own Tesla dealerships? Have the incumbents rigged that too?

Apparently the definition of "dealership" requires that two or more models be sold. Since Tesla only has the one model, they can't open a "dealership".

The people who are the best in technical fields tend to have well developed social intelligence as well as being technically brilliant. These aren't either-or abilities. The lack of social or emotional skills is a cognitive deficit.

As one who moved to Silicon Valley (which looks to me like one big Aspergers ward B-J ) and socializes with many of the founders of the compter industry, I can tell you that there are a lot of unquestionably "technically brilliant" and wildly successful people who would be textbook examples of Aspergers' "sufferers".

My own opinion is somewhat between yours and that of the previous poster: I suspect Aspergers' people primarily do well with computers because it's a field where the "missing social skills" are not an impediment to success.

The various levels of social-skill blindness, and the resulting stronger focus on the functionality that IS present, may also help more with the programming somewhat (if only by reducing distriction from anthropomorphizing the machines), or it may simply be irrelevant. I suspect it helps some - more than lack of communication with the Pointy Haired Bosses hurts - but that any such effect pales before the "something interesting I can do" effect.

Yes, social skills can help in teamwork, organizing and finding financing for companies, and in finding problems that technology can solve and earn a profit doing so. (Example: Social media.) On the other hand, building technological prosthetics to help replace the missing functionality can also help lead to success. (Example again: Social media.)

Actually, there are certainly outcome studies for statins. Just picking a random one:
http://www.trialresultscenter....

What makes you say there is no evidence? The results on that trial suggest a 33% reduction in death due to cardiovascular causes, and 23% for all causes. That's just the first one I stumbled upon on Google - I'm by no means an expert. If you have any links to trials that suggest otherwise I'd be interested (preferably non-meta - meta analyses are subject to the kinds of hypothesis-mining problems you go on about later in your post).

That is a common statement that I actually disagree with. I know somebody who struggles with drug side-effects and constantly ends up taking what on paper should be sub-optimal therapies because they're still better than nothing and the mainline therapies cannot be tolerated. I don't think that it is ever to give doctors more options. I do think that any drug should be safe and effective compared to placebo, but I don't agree with the general practice of not approving drugs that are inferior to those already on the market. That said, I can see why companies would not pursue these drugs for commercial reasons.

Most of the rest of your post I completely agree with. The lack of reproducability in clinical studies is a big problem. The hypothesis-mining problem is supposed to be prevented by pre-registering trials, but that hasn't gone perfectly. Also, with the sheer number of failed drug candidates out there it stands to reason that sooner or later a few will make it through with problems that are not apparent, even if the companies are completely on the up-and-up.

The problem is that if you raise the bar you drive up the costs so high that we won't have new drugs at all, and that isn't necessarily a better state to be in.

[reference to graph with post-vaccination bumps in Measles incidences and a recommendation for a second, booster, dose at the start of the third bump.]

Maybe this is just the half-time of the shots, and it's time to refresh? I.e. "2014, third dose recommended"

I suspect the second-dose recommendation was driven by the detection of substantial numbers of Measles cases among those vaccinated a few years previously, indicating that the immunity from one dose wore down after a few years.

I also suspect that we'll get a third-dose recommendation iff a similar number of cases is detected among those who had two dosesk (of non-defectivek vaccine, properly spaced).

The proper signal comes, not from the overall infection rate, but from the infection rate among those already vaccinated.

From an LA Times story:

Earlier this week, fears emerged that thousands of people might have been exposed to measles when a sick UC Berkeley student traveled on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system.

And from the story it referenced:

In yet another sign of the perils and irresponsibility of the anti-vaccination movement, thousands of riders of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system are being warned that they may have been exposed to measles -- a disease that was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000 but has since returned.The latest threat comes from an unnamed and unvaccinated UC Berkeley student who apparently contracted the disease while traveling in the Philippines during an outbreak there. Public health officials in Contra Costa County say people who rode BART during the morning or evening rush hours from Feb. 4 through Feb. 7 may have been exposed by the carrier, who is unidentified.

That could be hundreds of thousands of people.

(The estimate was later expanded to millions. Also, this "patient zero" infected four of his family members in addition to any he infected on the BART or elsewhere.)

There's more than fuel efficiency to consider when comparing mass transit vs. private automobile transportation.

If you like everything being expensive and high crime then I guess San Francisco is the place for you. Don't forget about the awful weather and huge homeless population. Actually it sounds like a liberal paradise.

Slashdot moderators have absolutely no intellectual honesty.

Shashdot moderators have no CONSISTENCY. They are randomly selected and only get to moderate a small number of posts each.

Further, they each get to chose which postings they moderate. People with different idea systems and hot buttons will chose different postings.

To expect "intellectual honesty" in the moderators to be visible as some visible, rational, consistency among moderation of diverse items is to expect that the readership of Slashdot to be suffering from such extreme group-think that they all moderate identically (excetpt for their choices of what to moderate).

Why don't we decide on a handful of strong PRNGs, and make every major OS use them exclusively,

Maybe because if somebody then breaks one or more of THOSE they have a zero-day exploit for EVERYTHING.

While we're at it. why don't we standardize on an operating system, and version, and stop all this diversity? After all, if a committee comes up with a pick how can any individual or team invent anything better?

Genetic engineering is getting to the point that we can soon modify our children so they all have the same immune system - the best one we can find in the wild or tweak up. Why don't we do that too? After all, you'd NEVER see a disease mutate so it's fatal to everyone with that flavor of immune system, would you? B-/ (You know, like the corn blight that was fatal to the cytoplasmic male-sterile corn that was virtually all that was grown in the US in the early '70s, and nearly wiped out the crop for a year or two?)

Of course the REAL reason is because it's a FREE MARKET. Companies who's management thinks they have a better design for a random number generator get to deploy their own choice, and the customers get to decide whether they want to trust their data and critical processes to that OS or switch to some alternative (either immediately or after they pick up the pieces from the LAST set of exploits...)

* This Sony device is SO stupid that if you try charging it with a standard wall-wart microUSB (maybe it was mini) supply, it will think it is connected to an active USB host, repeatedly attempt to negotiate the power, refuse to use the power it is being given, and eventually stop negotiating because the battery is dead. Absolutely brain damaged piece of kit.

They won't be deleted. There will simply be a recording malfunction. At least, that is what all the records will show. No supervisor is going to sign off on deleting incriminating evidence. Plenty will sign off on a statement that no video could be recovered from the device.

Agreed. There is already precedence - if a corporation destroys documents sought during an investigation the court will treat those documents as if they were incriminating. Video should be no different - absence of video on its face should be sufficient to exclude any testimony by the officer or evidence collected by them.

Most of the billions that get spent on drugs that turn out to be useless is spent by the companies researching them, and the drugs are cancelled before getting to market. I never really got the whole sue-them-because-I-wouldn't-have-bought-it-if-I-had-known thing. Suppose you take a painkiller and it turns out that it might cause heart attacks. You want your money back. However, you still got the benefit of the painkiller. It seems a bit like wanting to return a car for a full refund after having driven it for 3 years because there was a recall on some particular component. After all, who would have bought a car knowing it had a defective water pump, even if the manufacturer offered to replace it for free? It makes more sense to just compensate the people who had heart attacks.

The real problem is that there is no way to answer with certainty the question, "is this drug safe and effective?" You can answer it with increasingly greater confidence the more money you spend studying it, but the answer is always up for debate. Aspirin would never be allowed on the market if it were discovered today, and neither would most over-the-counter medications of its age (MAYBE ibuprofen would be on the market, but I'm not sure it would be sold without a prescription).

The problem with setting the bar really high is that it does two things. First, any drug that turns out to be safe will take a long time to get to market, and lots of people will suffer untreated in the meantime. If a drug saves lives, then many of those people will die - increased scrutiny on drugs can actually kill people in that sense. Second, raising the bar raises costs, and that means that fewer drugs are cost-effective to develop (whether your motive is profit or not). That means that diseases that don't impact many people don't get treatments.

Medical research simply isn't easy. Studies are really expensive to run, and people are hard to study because you can't lock them in cages like rats and poke at them. There are tons of contradictory studies, and lots of reasons to think that a lot of published data is simply wrong. None of this is some great conspiracy - it is just the nature of studying people.

There is no "1 year term" in what he posted. He posted "per year".
A 1 year term would not describe something something over an "indefinate" amount of time, it would describe it over a definite amount of time - 1 year.

A "per year" term is indefinite - and irrelevant since the amount of land required doesn't increase or decrease over time (provided you have enough to rotate your crops, fallow, etc. as appropriate, and a single acre is plenty of space to manage that for a single person). The only way "per year" even means anything is if you're referring to the yield as in "how long can I live off of this". Farming up X years worth of food for stockpiling in a bomb shelter or some shit, for example. But you wouldn't do that for subsistence farming (eat as needed and sell/trade any excess) or any long-term farming (if X > 1 you better be selling your excess or you're just wasting it as it spoils).

"Per year" would only make sense if it were a one-time harvest of a specific crop or if you planned to not farm the land afterward / were preparing for a bad harvest in the future. In either case the "per year" term is redundant as you can simply reduce the acreage requirement by the same factor.

If you could get 3 years worth of stockpiled grain for a person out of an acre of land in a single harvest of an annual crop, you would just say the requirement per person was 1/3 acre per person, not 1 acre per person per 3 years, every year.

If you need to feed 1 person for a few months, then you would be talking about specific seasons and crops - you wouldn't mention "per year" at all.

"I'm appreciated here!"

Thanks for an example that produces this result. I tried non-obvious things like "franklin delano roosevelt" and "golfball handstand" and got no ads. I did notice that the former query gave me a half page (right side) summary of FDR, and the latter had no summary (but left the entire right half of the page blank just in case there might have been one. What a waste.) I think it would be much better to put the "sponsored results" back on the right side since it will be empty otherwise, and it removes the ads from the inline search results.

Yahoo groups with "neo" now puts the ads inline with the messages with just a very light color box -- easy to miss. So many times I've been in a group and wondering why the moderator has allowed a discussion of auto parts in a group that has nothing to do with cars.

Isn't it Google that gets unhappy when people game their system to get prominent search rankings, and yet they're now taking money from people to return prominent, sometimes irrelevant search rankings? Is hypocrite spelled with a 'y' or an 'i'?