8pm to 8am? I wish!

I am currently on AAPT's unlimited-offpeak plan. The article summary is wrong. The offpeak period in fact begins at 2am. You can actually see this in the fine print at the bottom of the linked Youtube video.

In passing, I'll moan about something related. Last month, we went over our onpeak limit of 20GB. Our broadband was cut off, and we had to content ourselves with dial-up speed for the rest of the month. We sighed, and thought, "oh well, at least the broadband will only be cut off from 8am till 2am. We're paying for unlimited traffic from 2am till 8am, so we'll still have that."

I had, of course, forgotten that it was AAPT we were dealing with -- that cesspit of incompetence, greed and malice. The wankers cut us off overnight too.

Since then, I have resolved to be careful during the day, and to download the Internet every frickin' night from 2am till 8am.

Maybe. There are two ways to be compliant: ship the code with the product, or make it available to all. The latters applies to you and me; both the latter and the former apply to Edu4. They therefore have a much better case to make.

It's best to leave these lawsuits to the recipient or the copyright holder, but it is true that everyone in the world has the right that AFPA trampled on. Perhaps a class-action suit would be appropriate.

I've tried OpenSolaris, and also NexentaOS/StormOS, which is Ubuntu running on the OpenSolaris kernel instead of Linux.

I found that there was a lack of good documentation, and incompatibilities with certain hardware (for example, the hardware emulated by VirtualBox). Also, it seems to be hard to get ZFS to play nicely with other filesystems on the same hard disk.

Ubuntu already does everything I need it to. Persisting with OpenSolaris would be a bit masochistic.

Other people may be able to tell you a happier story

He's talking about London-Paris, not Newark-Tampa.

(And you got three people modding you "insightful". Definitely too many Americans with mod points.)

Placebo is not only a type of control. It can also be used to refer to the pleasing effect of knowing you are getting a real treatment.

People who get morphine without knowing it only get about as much relief as people who think they are getting morphine but aren't. (People who think they're getting it, and are indeed getting it, report even greater relief.)

From this, we can see that the placebo effect surrounding morphine is about equal to its actual clinical effect. This is an important finding. It's helpful to be able to quantify the effect in this way.

You keep saying "best" and "most", but no one is disputing "best" and "most". The problem arises when people get so used to two things being much the same "most" of the time and in the "best" cases, that they end up making the mistake of thinking that the things are actually synonymous.

The writer of the article does this when he says "It is not possible to create strong or weak placebos, since the placebo effect is a measure of poorly defined effects and of chance alone." If he changed that to refer to "scientific controls", then he'd be closer to the mark. But he is wrong to say it of placebo.

The finding that placebo pills' effectiveness change with colour (blue is better for tranquillisers; red is seen as a tougher weapon against disease) is not something to sweep under the carpet by saying that it "is not possible to create strong or weak placebos". Instead, this knowledge helps us create better controls (by making sure the pills are the same colour as the real drug, where the researchers might otherwise have assumed it was irrelevant). It also allows us to make more effective drugs on the market, by deliberately creating a strong placebo effect along with the real effects.

N.B.: I am not defending the Wired article, which I find is also sloppy with its terminology. I'm just criticising the sloppiness of the scienceblogs.com one.

Your post partly just repeats what I said was the purpose of placebo, and partly expresses an overly narrow view of the matter.

The scienceblogs.com article equated placebo with control, and I am extricating them. You are wrong to say the only meaningful drug test is drug versus placebo.

Interesting data have also been gleaned from situations where people receive treatment but don't know it. Their outcomes can then be compared with people who receive treatment and know it, people who don't receive treatment but think they are, and people who know they're not getting treatment. There is no need to do these experiments at different times or in different places.

No, the guy who wrote that article is wrong. He is using "placebo" where he should be saying "control". A control is what you use to measure the difference between normality and the thing you are testing. In medicine, this may or may not involve a placebo (which means a "pleaser"). For example, I can give 1000 people my new drug, and put another 1000 people in a control group, with no drug. However, I may worry that some of the improvement in my patients is due to the psychological effect of popping a pill; I therefore may give the control group a fake pill to take, called a placebo. If I have enough funding, I may even have three groups: one with the real drug, one control group with the placebo, and one true control group with absolutely nothing. This will often produce three levels of improvement.

A control cannot be described as strong or weak, but a placebo given as part of a control certainly can be. Although it is something designed to have no real effect, the fact is that every aspect of the treatment situation (the colour of the pills, frequency of treatment, the crispness of the white coats...) alters the strength of the pleasing effect, which can have major consequences for health and well-being.

Unless you are in the army of a country currently being invaded, your SMSs are not that important. In fact, it would probably be better if you didn't answer them, or even walked off the job.

Look, I use Linux, and Microsoft is evil, etc.

I've also met some Poles who were... old-fashioned, let's say.

But let's not use this to make a cheap attack. The original photo was perhaps appropriate for politically-correct America, where it is normal to have ads in which 100% of the people in them belong to a minority. In Poland, that is pushing it too much. They modified the ad so that only 67% of the people were a minority (an Oriental guy, a white guy and a white girl). It's not as if they knocked it down to 33% or 0%. Do you realise that Poland has a population that is 96.7% ethnic Polish? Once you count other groups, that means that ~99% of the people are white. And you're whining that they only have 33% ethnic minorities in an advert, plus 33% female (in a male-dominated industry).

It's not a matter of being "scared". Do you not have even a layman's understanding of marketing, of localisation?

What, pray tell, is the first result if one googles for " cut his mic! "?

Some parts are; some parts aren't. And I'm not saying that everywhere has to end up very well connected. Some places obviously don't merit a New-York-style subway, but they could perhaps have a bus come through once a week instead of never, or once a day instead of once a week. It all depends.

More needs to be done before you can just say you are at the saturation point for the existing density. The fewer cars are used everywhere, the easier it will be to push for better transport, and thus the vicious circle becomes virtuous.

There, I fixed it for you.