“This is ultimately a very bad thing,” said Dr. Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale University and longtime critic of alternative therapies.  “It’s putting emphasis and the imprimatur of a university on things that have been discarded as medical fraud for 50 years.”

I read that book. It didn’t end well for “scientists.”

To take advantage of this new offering, you just need to head to one of the participating Kohl’s stores. There are even dedicated parking spots for the service near the entrance, oddly enough. “We are thrilled to launch this unprecedented and innovative concept, allowing customers to bring in their unpackaged Amazon returns to Kohl’s and we will pack them, ship them, and return them to Amazon for free,” said Kohl’s Richard Schepp.

Sounds cool, right? Problem was, the joystick and the control panel Lockheed Martin developed to steer it cost around $38,000. Plus, the joystick was heavy and clunk, and it takes hours to train a sailor to use it. When the military contractor tested the Xbox controller as a replacement, sailors were able to figure out controls on their own within a few minutes. Considering each controller will only set the Navy back $30, scrapping the pricey specialized joystick and panel was a no-brainer.

EFF appealed the decision, the first-ever appeal in W3C history, which concluded last week with a deeply divided membership. 58.4% of the group voted to go on with publication, and the W3C did so today, an unprecedented move in a body that has always operated on consensus and compromise. In their public statements about the standard, the W3C executive repeatedly said that they didn’t think the DRM advocates would be willing to compromise, and in the absence of such willingness, the exec have given them everything they demanded

The government probably sensed things wouldn’t go completely its way after the DC Appeals Court asked other interested parties to submit briefs on the issue. Multiple tech companies have challenged government search warrants and gag orders in last few years, resulting in a handful of small wins on the civil liberties front. Faced with this shift in judicial behavior, the government ditched this case just before public arguments were set to begin.

ISPs love to trot out the First Amendment complaint wherever and whenever possible, similarly insisting that net neutrality protections somehow curtail their free speech rights (arguments that traditionally don’t see much traction in the courts). But Comcast is also busy telling local Vermont news outlets that it’s spending money on lawyers instead of more cable because it’s just really worried about how much Vermont residents pay for broadband and TV service

On average, 47% of newly-created data records have at least one critical (e.g., work-impacting) error. A full quarter of the scores in our sample are below 30% and half are below 57%. In today’s business world, work and data are inextricably tied to one another. No manager can claim that his area is functioning properly in the face of data quality issues. It is hard to see how businesses can survive, never mind thrive, under such conditions.

Awful, as far as I’m concerned. Awful on several levels. For one, this is not how the patent system (for all its flaws) is supposed to work. “The validity of your patents is subject to review, unless you pay off some Indian tribe” does not seem like a good way to run an intellectual property system.

That our company was now in the business of doing process development on MDMA, a category 1 controlled substance (for which we did not have the permits) and this was being done covertly by our CEO with his own hands came as rude shock to everyone in the chemistry lab. If somebody else tried to pull this stunt, we would be talking to the company management that very minute and have him arrested. But in this case, the whole two-man top management team of our little company was involved in it. The CEO was the co-founder and the main investor in the company and clearly the normal rules did not apply to him. The research director was the second co-founder, a former student-buddy of our CEO and he was always extremely protective of him and loyal to the hilt. It was the research director who convinced our CEO to start the company to begin with, right from the grad school. (They had two other classmates founding the company with them but when the relations soured the CEO paid the other two co-founders off.)