There are a number of problems with the study as presented in the abstract. But, I bet you didn't study amusia and how studying them may tease out additional information. That part is new, at least to me. Too bad you chose the "heard it before" line instead of pointing out obvious failures of the abstract.

People with amusia had no preference on the notes, and no "preference for harmonic over inharmonic tones". But they didn't appreciate the "beating" which is more predominant in dissonant notes.

If these are all true, they should have had some sense of the beating in the dissonance, and been able to at least detect with accuracy greater than chance dissonant notes. Or maybe the idea that beating and dissonance are related is incorrect.

And if there was no preference for harmonic tones with amusia, the study cannot exclude beating while including harmonicity as a foundation of musical preference. Being incapable of detecting both doesn't give any clue as to which is more important.

They have fallen back on the old psycho-acoustical models since the study failed to show anything at all. I didn't read they study, but if it shows something else, I'd dismiss the person who wrote the abstract. If anything, I would have concluded that beating is not the foundation of dissonance.

After all, a minor second can sound perfectly lovely as part of a Major 7th chord. I am thinking it has something to do with context, and I see no mention of context here. The entire reason for mentioning Schoenberg is that he wanted to take away the context that we relied on, and make us listen to the notes and the rhythms. A chord is no longer a chord, and it serves no function in a key, because there is no key. No leading tone, no major or minor, no context.

Given a lack of context, some people can enjoy the dissonance of Schoenberg because they expect a lack of context. Given context, the same sounds can be very jarring, even when heard by people who appreciate Schoenberg.

I agree it's horseshit, but at least I explained why.

There are ways to improve voting. This is a short step, to ensure compatibility between voting systems and those systems which report the results.

There are also good ways to implement electronic voting. This does not address those. Only the interchange.

I appreciate that paper should be involved. I also appreciate that open-source, or at least visible-source, methods can allow e-voting without tampering, and without producing a paper trail that someone who can influence your employment status can read.

Rejecting this accomplishes nothing. Accepting it accomplishes a step towards the right thing.

Would you reject a step in the right direction?

Since I can't get you above +5, a personal thank you for reading, understanding, and providing concise information.

Requesting injunctions, granting them, and having them be followed, are separate things on a separate timetable.

The complaints were filed "today", I saw nothing further. coondoggie is a bit premature on the whole "pulling the plug" thing. timothy should have caught that, but this being slashdot, we just trust whatever random-ass submitters post.

I assume they could keep doing business as long as they want to, until ordered otherwise.

They usually sense hesitation and hang up, thinking you are playing them. I have been hung up on many times when I expressed interest. Usually over 20% will work, but it you say you have no idea and let them lead you, they would let you by.

They don't want people who know their interest rate.

My standard answers were:
Well, I have 2 cards, and I think my girlfriend has at least one in my name
Honestly, I have no idea how much money. One card is over $5k, and I'm sure the other is a lot more.
I couldn't even tell you the interest rate. Yeah, twenty something sounds familiar, I think I saw that.

Then they lead me around and I waste as much time as possible.

Apparently they charge $200 or $300 to your card for the "service" of calling your bank and asking for a lower rate, which you can do yourselves almost without fail as long as you have a good payment history. Search google for the phone number, you'll get piles of hits for "who called me?" forums and lots of dirt. It's sad, because there are a lot of saps who admit to being taken. Thankfully, a small part of the victims do post what happened. I should say, a small part of the victims think to search the internet, a smaller part think to post, and a smaller part give details. Extrapolate and you got your victim pool.

Think like an idiot. I get a Canadian station, "ION TV". Sometimes when I'm flipping channels they have "Smart Cookies", who advise people on finance. They play the same episodes of Gadget Girlz, Body Fuel, and Smart Cookies repeatedly. I think there was only one season of each.

Anyway, the interviews with random people at the mall who don't know their balance or rate is very revealing. They buy a sweater for 15% off and put it on a 23% card, paying the minimum.

That's the entire reason your CC statement has changed, if you are American, is the government protecting stupid people like that from themselves. That's where they got the business.

Stephanie, who doesn't know her own cell number, gave people mine instead. I got calls from her dentist, doctor, random people. I know details about her left on my voice mail that I probably shouldn't know about a stranger. I could have claimed to be her husband or boyfriend, just by hinting and following the caller's lead.

Anyway, I have taken a good number of these calls. At least one was in a bar. I got to the part where they want my credit card number. I hesitated. A supervisor told me that my account number is actually the CC number plus the CVV on the back. He can't use the card without that, he claims, and giving just my "member number" is safe.

I couldn't drag him on any further, so I said I just let these calls go on as long as possible so you don't bother someone else. He said he doesn't mind, he gets paid by the hour, and I could be doing something else. My answer, I'm just sitting here eating food that's bad for me and having a beer. No hot chicks to hit on, I'm just waiting till I'm sure I'm good to drive. Then he starts the insults, stereotypes based on my area code.

I enjoyed the call, but I'm glad they are out of business.

Charging many times a product's fair market value, when people are still buying it, seems to re-define fair market value. The cost of production is irrelevant to the cost. What people will pay is the market value.

Yes, it's greedy to maximize your profits by establishing a price point that gets you the most buyers at the most profit.

The rest of your post is, while verbose, I am not arguing against. The problem the MAFIAA is fighting against is one they created themselves, by not understanding when they needed to.

We are past the point of having a revolution. Surveillance cameras, drones, and a few key people holding the keys to the big weapons make sure of that.

The last successful terrorist attack served its purpose. It changed the American way of life. For the worse. And almost all of those changes apply to the people who want change the most. Further attacks in any form will bring the iron fist tighter, in the guise of providing safety.

There is no single target, or small group of targets, that will replace the people in power. If you were to somehow take out all of the lawmakers, you would have replacement lawmakers who follow the same masters. Try taking out the masters, they are very spread apart. It is futile.

There is no fight, there is no target. You have to do this by educating everyone you come into contact with. Calling for a revolution is like pissing in a hurricane.

Because of idiots with a massive budget to spend or get cut. The contract was with Verizon, providing Cisco hardware. Someone wanted top-of-the-line, whether it was appropriate or not.

Five days later, state officials signed the $24 million contract with Verizon Network Integration to buy the Cisco routers.

Verizon delivered an additional 100 routers to the state for free. West Virginia officials never asked for the additional equipment -- valued at more than $2.26 million.

Verizon spokesman Keith Irland said the company simply responded to router specifications detailed in the state's bid posting.

"They specified the equipment they wanted," Irland said. "That's what they requested, that's what we bid on. We had the lowest price, and we won the bid for the equipment and related maintenance."

The Gazette-Mail contacted two Cisco sales agents last week, asking whether the 3945 series routers were appropriate for schools and libraries.

"The 3945 is our router solution for campus and large enterprises, so this is overkill for your network," a Cisco representative responded.

The sales agents recommended a smaller router -- with a list price of $487.

You mean features like storing data and dishing it back out; or nonsense features like CPLM5 certification?

Plus you are comparing corporate Oracle to Corporate SQL. For most people all Free and Open Source would be just peachy. Most people including facebook. I rarely see the really big big big sites doing anything with any of the Oracley Microsofty IBMy stuff. They usually take Open Source and then roll their own. Sort of shows that the route to success starts with open source and ends with modified open source.

I had to quote the whole idiocy. Yes, we are comparing Corporate SQL, the kinds people buy. With the license charges, I don't think groups like Google nor Facebook could afford per-core or per-CPU licenses to do what they do.

This branch of the thread is about how Cisco stays in business when bidding 5x the lowest competitor. Not how they stay in business when an open-source router company gives away hardware for free. How does open source have anything to do with the previous argument?

You could argue the same for why buy Unix and Oracle when there's Microsoft Server and SQL. The answer is because the expensive one actually has some features.

Oracle is expensive, and it is great at what it does. It doesn't have a fancy GUI (SQL developer doesn't come close to what you can do with SSMS), but there are several you can buy, which also suck compared to SSMS. At the same time, Microsoft keeps making things difficult. Look at threads where people can't find Activity Monitor in Sql 2008 R2. They like SSMS as a GUI tool, but the new interface is pretty much shat upon.

This is why people go with expensive. There is a feature they want or need, and one provider either doesn't provide it (a decent management interface like SSMS) or keeps butchering it into useless eye candy (like SSMS). If Cisco has the one thing you really depend on, you will pay them.

The route to success starts with a great idea that nobody thought of and executing it well, and at the right time. How you implement it can be on open or closed platforms. There is another route to success, where you throw out ridiculous quotes just to see if someone will bite. Or like Microsoft, offer to sell an OS you don't even have. Or like Apple, pay attention to the things dumb users care about so they develop a fanatical, thoughtless appreciation. There are many routes to success, as it turns out.

Reading comprehension check.

The entire post says that yogurt can help prevent some problems, but not C. difficile. Read it again and see if you disagree.

AC did not claim it is homeopathic. The exact quote is

You are right, though, it is a homeopathic remedy that "works".

That comes from a misunderstanding of #41786373 poorly constructed quote "Yoghurt efficiency is not homeopathic lie."

In context of parent quote #41785977

"Right now, the evidence provided means the 'yoghurt or kefir are just as good' claim carries as much weight as the claim that homeopathic vaccines are as effective as real vaccines."

I would assume this should have been something like "Yoghurt efficiency is not along the lines of homeopathic lies, but your analogy is terrible."

Unfortunately, "yoghurt or kefir are just as good" is just as provably false as homeopathy. The probiotic test done by "Québec Nationnalle health agency" was not on curing C. difficile. It was a review of a meta-study which examined giving patients an antibiotic along with a pro-biotic. Sorry for Slashdot apparently translating to UTF-8 but not setting the page encoding properly.

Une méta-analyse regroupant 9 études
randomisées à double insu, dans lesquelles les probiotiques étaient administrés à titre préventif et parfois en association avec de la vancomycine ou du métronidazole, a été
publiée (Dâ(TM)Souza, 2002).

This has absolutely nothing to do with curing C. diff. infections. The only result was that yogurt is more likely to prevent C. Diff. when given with vancomycin or metronidazole. This is exactly, though more verbosely, what Acheron was trying to say. It won't cure it, but it might help a little.

Yogurt and Kefir are similar in the same way chimpanzees and people are similar. "Bacterial dairy product".

Similar process, different result because the bacteria are different.

One post mentioned Kefir has 23 different bacteria strains, which I assume is a very specific recipe, but did not give me enough to ensure I found the right citation.

Yogurt is good for normal antibiotic-related diarrhea. I would assume Kefir would help where Yogurt would not, but I am not going to make my own. Feel free to start your own Kefir anti-diarrhea business and monetize the crap out of it.

If neither works, someone may have found the correct secret herbs and spices to combine together to create a hostile environment for C. difficile, which neither one of these can reliably cure.

Try Yogurt, then try Kefir, then if it hasn't fixed you up, you can be assured by a great many patients who have suffered they would pay almost anything for a cure within hours. Sure greed is involved, but it is worth the value to the patient. If this is not patentable, which it likely is not unless one strain is proprietary, the only greed is reading the research and re-creating it. Then who wins?

If one is productive, one can choose to work fewer hours and do the same amount of work, or work more hours and accomplish more. They are not mutually exclusive, and only a lazy person would choose to work fewer hours.

American workers stay longer in the office, at the factory or on the farm than their counterparts in Europe and most other rich nations, and they produce more per person over the year.

Both are true.

And the link between GDP and income is non-existent. No one has to to be paid more because they produce more. It would be nice in a morally controlled world, but that's not where Americans work.

I believe the study is just an example of random number crunching, where the people spending long hours in the office aren't necessarily the most productive, but create more wealth. An efficient factory line can make the 40-hour-and-under crowd very productive, enough to offset productivity loss over 55 hours.

I only read the article, which I suggest you do at the very least, and any assumptions made were due to not reading the actual report.

I actually fail to see what is really that new with this

Reading is one thing, comprehending is another. For the first time, we know what can get rid of this very bad bug in a mammal, without using the previously accepted (and not at all controversial) fecal transplant when other antibiotics fail.

Mouse or not, this gives a target to look for in humans. And assuming all of the ingredients are human-compatible, this should result in a good step towards curing a very painful and debilitating condition.

The principle has been known for a while, but the exact mix that works for this particular bug has not been known. Hopefully you see where the big deal is now. Previous treatments offered certain strains which only succeeded under certain circumstances, most likely when the patient had some of the missing flora.

I won't address the rant, it is a blend of ignorance, well-trodden fact, incomplete understanding, internal inconsistency, and a few others that can't be specified because they are wrapped around other fallacies. If you indeed can read, you should read less mainstream media, and certainly quit reading slashdot comments.

Rather than further mod you to oblivion, I chose to leave both your initial reply, where you admit to willfully remaining ignorant on something you dismiss, and the followup where you actually admit to learn something.

I think I like it better this way.

Especially after being hacked several times already. Standard response among large companies is to make new rules and clamp down everything. That should have happened two breaches ago.