shittyadmin

That's factually incorrect. No one in the EU can sue a California company for failing to comply with EU laws so long as the company does not have a physical presence in the EU. They'd have to block their site or something as an EU court has no jurisdiction over a California company and would be unable to take action against them.

An explicit law would need to be made in your jurisdiction forcing you to comply with their laws. I'm not aware of any such thing.

I accept payments from the EU and do not comply with GDPR. They can't sue me in my country's court for violating their laws. It really is that simple.

They'd have no repercussions except to block my site - and I'm guessing they didn't intend GDPR to turn into an internet filter.

You don't reside there, you're not liable to abide by their laws. I run a small US company, I don't have to comply with GDPR for example. Same applies here.

I don't see why any company would implement this, perhaps appeasing regulators at the federal level.

There've been a few cases where the ransomware was not decryptable - sites like BleepingComputer frequently discuss which ransomware have been cracked by researchers, which are currently actively run and will provide keys and which are undecryptable and you shouldn't pay in any circumstances. Basically it just makes things more complicated, but people are still willing to pay if they can in their specific case and the one they're infected with is reported as regularly providing good keys.

I feel this is actually a decent service for a few reasons:

- Many average users don't want to understand cryptocurrencies, how to safely and securely buy and use it is a challenge in and of itself.

- They're on the hook and the client pays nothing if the ransomer fails to provide a working key.

- They'll also manage the ransom decryption software - if there's problems with it there are 3rd party tools that can often do a better job of decryption than the original decryption tool, again, this is something that's going to be complicated for average users to deal with.

- For some ransomware there are decryption processes available without the need to pay the ransom, figuring out which of these applies can be challenging

- Certain institutions may be unable or unwilling to work with the attacker directly - introducing a middle man to broker can help solve this.

Overall the piece seems somewhat hyperbolic.

> That sounds like a contradiction --- if you can already execute code, I'd say you're quite privileged.

If you're in a VM, you have no privileges over the host CPU, you can't switch to another VM or to the host itself. That's what's meant by unprivileged here.

I only focused on the JAMA study as I'd seen it before, sorry about that I see it may have looked pretty slanted now, I wanted to have a better look at the positive metaanalysis, however the link on wikipedia was broken, look at where it points on wikipedia, you'll see "Cite error: The named reference Gotink was invoked but never defined (see the help page)."

I'm not disagreeing with you about that depression and anxiety thing, but it seems a bit of a stretch to suggest it to a generally mentally healthy person.

Did you read your own link? One line from it mentions the study that actually brought me to this conclusion:

"A meta-analysis on meditation research published in JAMA in 2014,[167] (that included a combined total of 3515 participants), found insufficient evidence of any effect of meditation programs on positive mood, attention, substance use, eating habits, sleep, and weight."

While there may be other with differing results it's... pretty sketchy in any case. I would hardly say scientific enough to belong in such a class.

I had a look at this when I considered meditation once but found it'd most likely just be a waste of my time. I'd rather not flush my time down the toilet.

Who hasn't had a bad experience with spirituality?

This is the same kind of thing that's used to promote anti-vax campaigns and scam people out of thousands of dollars for fake medical treatments.

I mean the whole idea of "mindfulness" and "meditation" are the sort of pseudoscientific bullshit that just plain don't belong in a scientific class.

Sure, they may have some benefits, but they're essentially just placebo effect. There has to be more interesting science on the topic than that...