I make it a point to disseminate misinformation about me. That's one of the main things I learned watching DS9 (especially with regard to Elim Garak).
And who, exactly, do you think cares enough about you in some nefarious way for this practice to be useful? Odds are you're not a retired spy on the run from old enemies, or anything else that would make you worth keeping tabs on.
TFA actually talks very little about sharing your data with others (FB etc.) It's about collecting data on yourself, and using that data for your own purposes. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if the people who do this also tend to be people who blog compulsively about their personal lives, but you could certainly do one without the other.
Well, I can't provide a link, but I can tell you that a good friend of mine who until recently worked for IBM got caught up in it. And it's even worse than GPP indicated -- they offered him his old job back as a contractor at about two-thirds the pay, with no benefits etc. I don't know if there are any news stories on it because it's not really the kind of thing IBM is going to be eager to publicize, but it's happening. And while the IRS may be cracking down on some of the chicanery involved in hiring contractors, there's nothing in the link you posted to indicate that they're doing anything about the core problem: treating highly skilled, dedicated, specialized technical workers as interchangeable parts.
Not that I think the IRS should do anything about it, you understand -- it's really not their job -- but it's the kind of thing a good union certainly could. Unfortunately, the/. consensus on unions is pretty representative of thinking in the tech world generally, and shows in gory detail how effective decades of anti-union propaganda have been in convincing otherwise intelligent people.
Is that not his point? He wants to know more about how the drugs were developed and why they work they way they do.
No, I don't think he does. His contempt for the single most important item to be reported in any clinical trial says he doesn't really give a damn, but just wants to indulge in an ill-informed rant.
Again fucking statistics used as proof. No knowledge of how chemicals interact within the body, how and why the reactions that cause cancer occur, no fucking nothing. Just the damn statistics.
Again someone who has no idea how drug development and clinical trials work shooting his mouth off.
Seriously. The story submitter was anonymous (probably a good thing!) but I'm really shocked that any Slashdot editor could let that line go through without comment. And spare me the "you must be new here" line -- I know perfectly well that/. editing standards can get pretty sloppy, but this is particularly egregious. Calling Gopher "pre-internet" is the kind of crap I'd expect on a mainstream news site, not from "News for Nerds."
I am Liz Cheney duaghter of recenly deposed USA vice President Dick Cheney and I am seking your assitsance with confidential transaction. As you may know my father during his time in office amassed a firtune of $135,000,000 (one hundered thirty five million USA dollars) and I now need your assistantse to move it out of country. As a bionus for your help on this Transaction I can offer you "magic blue pills" guaranteed made in USA to enlarge your penis to massive unheard of USA propportions and also 1000s of young marriagebale USA women seeking to meet you for life in new country. Please contact me at +001 212 867-5309 or conact USA embassy in your Country.
Watch Iron Man again. Then watch Dark Knight again. Tell me Iron Man is in the same class.
You're right, they're not in the same class: Iron Man is a fun superhero movie with an interesting and likable actor playing the main character, while Dark Knight is a poorly edited mishmash of incoherent action sequences and dollar-store philosophy with a plastic mannequin in the title role.
I understand that this may be a minority opinion.;)
I'll type this on my computer that goes through the internet, then i'll leave work, drive in my car, to my apartment, eat some nice food, ect ect. Why? because of the market. Not because of some stupid belief that we can regulate success and a better life.
Oh, this is fun! Let's take this piece by piece:
my computer
... based on technologies developed for government contracts...
that goes through the internet
... that used be called ARPAnet...
then i'll leave work
... at a company that relies on the courts to enforce its contracts...
drive in my car
... in a car that probably won't kill you because of DOT safety regulations, on roads built with public funds...
to my apartment
... that would be an unsafe rat-trap if not for housing regulations, and where you have a reasonable assurance that you'll be able to continue living because the government won't let your landlord throw you out on the street any time he feels like it...
eat some nice food
... that's been certified by the FDA...
ect ect.
... well, okay, clearly there are some failings in your education, but that's probably your fault, not the fault of the underpaid and overworked public school teachers who tried to drum some knowledge into your thick skull. The rest of it, you enjoy courtesy of your local, state, and federal government whether you are capable of understanding this or not.
It's an increase in cost that has to be paid. whether that's not hiring an additional worker, firing a current one, increasing prices to customers or whatever. it certainly does cost jobs.
That's what you think it does. But do you have any hard evidence to this effect? GPP provided actual data; you're providing a model. If there's a conflict between model and data, then it's probably not the data that's wrong.
... writes a guy who's probably the descendant of Europeans or Africans living in a country created by clearing a very large area of land of any existing buildings and populations.
Take out the "Europeans or Africans" part and that applies to pretty much every person on Earth. There is, as far as we can tell, just about no part of the planet which is currently inhabited by its original human population.
But while history holds many examples of bloody invasions and migrations (and pre-history probably holds many more) there has never been wholesale extermination on the level that OP described. If you're thinking about the westward push across North America... yes, that was grotesque, and I'm not certainly not defending it. But it was a slow process, in most cases a matter of local policy that only later coalesced into a whole, not a planned campaign from beginning to end.
I was of course not serious, I'd think the fact that I was quoting a game from 1993 and talked about blowing up pinecones would be obvious!
There's a somebody-or-other's law that says that extremists are impossible to satirize, because no matter how extreme a caricature of their positions you come up with, they'll always come up with something at least as extreme and be deadly serious about it. Sorry that I didn't realize you were kidding, but you have to understand that there are large numbers of people who would agree with everything you wrote, and not as a joke.
As for the issue of a charismatic dictator convincing the whole planet that he's a benevolent savior, I'm not too worried about it. Hitler rose to power in a very specific place and time; a decade earlier or a decade later, even in Germany as it was, and he couldn't have done what he did. The same applies to Napoleon and France, and Caesar and Rome. Alexander and Genghis Khan might well have become what they became in any age, but they still had to convince primarily their own people. The world's enormous diversity of cultures, political systems, and economic conditions makes it very unlikely that anyone will pull off that trick on a global scale.
First time I've seen something like this, where Obama is more hawkish on a military matter than Bush ? Man that seems wierd...
It shouldn't really be a surprise, generally speaking; Democratic Presidents since Truman have responded to the Republican "soft on defense" dog whistle by acting like kids on a playground who can't back down from a dare.
In this case, though, I'm not sure the "more hawkish" label really sticks. This is about replacing one weapons system with another, not about using either weapon in any particular war. We have such a horror of using nuclear weapons that we're always looking for ways not to use them, and I don't see anything more or less hawkish in destroying an area with a rain of tungsten rods vs. destroying the same area with a nuke. The hawk vs. dove aspect applies more to whether or not we launch a strike at all.
Assuming you're not kidding, there are two major problems with this approach. The first is a matter of morality: "bomb your enemies from orbit until their land is clear of any buildings, population, dogs, pine cones, or ants" may be a lot of fun in a game, but in real life it's mass murder on a scale that not even the most bloody-minded conquerors in history have ever attempted, and that is really not a contest any sane nation wants to win.
Okay, let's assume that the morality of it doesn't bother you (and it probably doesn't, although I suspect if you were ever confronted close-up with the results of such an action, your opinion would change.) The second problem is practical. Could we do what you propose to Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Iran? Maybe we could... but we are not the only country in the world with the capacity to do such a thing, and be assured, the rest of the world will take notice. We get too close to the borders of Russia or China with such a campaign (BTW, take a look at a map and notice just how far west China's borders go) and we are pretty much guaranteeing an all-out nuclear exchange of the sort everyone was more than halfway expecting all through the Cold War. You may be too young to remember what living under the nuclear hammer was like, and just how high the level of mutual paranoia was. Me, I was stationed in Europe when the Wall came down; trust me, we don't want to go back there.
And Russia and China aren't the only major powers we'd have to worry about if we started down that road. Japan, the UK, Germany, India, France... they're all pretty friendly to us these days. That would change in a heartbeat if the US turned into a latter-day version of Genghis Khan's Mongolia. And all of them either have nuclear stockpiles or the ability to produce them quickly, along with delivery systems. The US, or any other country that tried this approach, would quickly find itself isolated in a hostile world full of countries just itching to scorch its cities to the ground, and willing to take the risk of receiving the same treatment in return.
The US is unquestionably stronger militarily than any other country, but we aren't stronger than everybody, and this is a good thing. There will never be another Alexander, another Caesar, another Genghis Khan, another Napoleon, another Hitler, and this is also a good thing. The rest of the world will not allow it, and for the first time in human history, the concept of "the rest of the world" makes a difference in the thinking of those who would follow in the bloody footsteps of emperors. Not because the human race is any wiser or more moral than it used to be, but because there is no other choice.
The continued existence of these positions contribute to maintaining the membership and revenue of the union to which all of these crucial civil servants belong. It is imperative that these unions continue to enjoy increasing and unassailable power forever, and you are well advised to cease your questioning of this policy.
In private industry, there are organizations that allow people to draw enormous salaries -- much larger than any state employee will ever make -- without doing any actual work at all, for years at a time. These organizations generally go by names like "board of directors" and "executive suite," and interestingly, they spend much of their time trying (successfully, as comments like yours show) to convince people that unions are the root of all evil. Why do you suppose that could be?
So why spend millions of dollars to benefit a very small percentage of the population.
Almost everything the government does benefits a very small percentage of the population, at any one time. But you add all those small percentages up, and you get nearly everybody.
Or what about the "victim finder" app for child molesters? Just take the data on family occupancies and compare to local crime statistics and police coverage and voila! Thanks Victim Finder!
This may be the most absurd "think of the chiiildren" argument I've ever heard... and that's saying something.
First of all, the vast majority of molestation victims are attacked by family members, who don't exactly need demographic information to find their targets. Second, even in the very rare case of stranger-abduction attacks, do you really think they're going after children at home? Take a walk outside -- there's a good chance there's an elementary school within a few blocks of where you live.
As for your hypothetical "Negro avoider" bigot... well, let him do what he wants. There are already lots of people who won't drive through "that part of town" where "those people live." As long as they're not burning crosses on people's lawns, who gives a damn?
The question is, if you were starting a business that provides a software solution, would you want to be able to protect your solution from the competition?
How about you ask Microsoft, Oracle, or Adobe that question? Since they all managed to become very successful software companies well before software patents became common, they probably have an answer.
You seem to be assuming that cancer treatment has made great strides since 1970. Actually it hasn't.
It has, whether you want to admit it or not. Are you going to dismiss the ACS as a shill for the health care industry? Here (PDF file) is a pretty comprehensive overview; I direct your attention particularly to the "Trends in 5-year relative survival rates" table on page 18.
And yes, of course cancer treatment centers oversell their treatments. But your claim that:
Actually most cancers have pretty much the same prognosis today they did in 1970.
is absolutely false. You do a nice bait-and-switch there, noting correctly that:
The list of cancers that was incurable in 1970 and is curable today is extremely short.
and then pretending that it supports your earlier claim. But in fact the two claims are completely different. We may not be able to cure most cancers, but we can greatly extend both the quantity and quality of life available to patients who are diagnosed with cancer relative to what we could do 40 years ago. While it is quite true that treatment for almost any kind of cancer is a miserable experience, if you think the level of misery is anywhere near what it was in 1970, then you simply haven't been paying attention.
I'm not going to argue against the idea that more basic research is needed -- hell, I work in basic biomedical research, so it would be absurd for me to make that argument. But I came here from patient care, and I can tell you that we need more research at all levels, "from bench to bedside" as the cliche goes. You can't tell a patient who's been diagnosed with a painful and probably fatal disease, "Well, we might have something that can help you fifteen years from now, but you're SOL since you'll be dead for twelve of those years."
Also, I detected a whiff of anti-government, anti-"Big Science" in your original post. Where exactly do you think the money for basic biological research comes from? Hint: it ain't Merck and Pfizer.
The thing is, even if you had aliens who see in different parts of the EM spectrum, there would still be physical reasons for using certain frequencies (RF specifically) for long-range communication. Radio waves just behave differently from, say, IR or visible light or X-rays, all of which behave differently from each other. Granted, we might not recognize a signal from very slow-living (or very fast-living) beings as being a signal, and they might not recognize ours either, but the transmission frequencies are likely to about the same.
If you're diagnosed with cancer, feel free to restrict yourself to the level of treatment that was available in 1970. Be sure to let us know how it works out for you. But you'd better do it quickly, because odds are you won't have very long.
Agricultural research != farming. GPP was talking about the former, and you jumped in with a rant about the latter... or rather, used the latter as an excuse for an ideological threadjack. Nice move. It's too bad in a way that the Soviet Union isn't around any more, because people like you were highly employable there.
Slashdot Mirror
I make it a point to disseminate misinformation about me. That's one of the main things I learned watching DS9 (especially with regard to Elim Garak).
And who, exactly, do you think cares enough about you in some nefarious way for this practice to be useful? Odds are you're not a retired spy on the run from old enemies, or anything else that would make you worth keeping tabs on.
TFA actually talks very little about sharing your data with others (FB etc.) It's about collecting data on yourself, and using that data for your own purposes. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if the people who do this also tend to be people who blog compulsively about their personal lives, but you could certainly do one without the other.
Well, I can't provide a link, but I can tell you that a good friend of mine who until recently worked for IBM got caught up in it. And it's even worse than GPP indicated -- they offered him his old job back as a contractor at about two-thirds the pay, with no benefits etc. I don't know if there are any news stories on it because it's not really the kind of thing IBM is going to be eager to publicize, but it's happening. And while the IRS may be cracking down on some of the chicanery involved in hiring contractors, there's nothing in the link you posted to indicate that they're doing anything about the core problem: treating highly skilled, dedicated, specialized technical workers as interchangeable parts.
Not that I think the IRS should do anything about it, you understand -- it's really not their job -- but it's the kind of thing a good union certainly could. Unfortunately, the /. consensus on unions is pretty representative of thinking in the tech world generally, and shows in gory detail how effective decades of anti-union propaganda have been in convincing otherwise intelligent people.
Is that not his point? He wants to know more about how the drugs were developed and why they work they way they do.
No, I don't think he does. His contempt for the single most important item to be reported in any clinical trial says he doesn't really give a damn, but just wants to indulge in an ill-informed rant.
Again fucking statistics used as proof. No knowledge of how chemicals interact within the body, how and why the reactions that cause cancer occur, no fucking nothing. Just the damn statistics.
Again someone who has no idea how drug development and clinical trials work shooting his mouth off.
Really? You are shocked that a slashdot editor doesn't check and correct the stories he posts? You must be new here.
I don't normally get into this kind of dick-waving contest, but ... you might want to check our UIDs.
My point is that even by Slashdot standards, this is unusually bad.
Seriously. The story submitter was anonymous (probably a good thing!) but I'm really shocked that any Slashdot editor could let that line go through without comment. And spare me the "you must be new here" line -- I know perfectly well that /. editing standards can get pretty sloppy, but this is particularly egregious. Calling Gopher "pre-internet" is the kind of crap I'd expect on a mainstream news site, not from "News for Nerds."
I am Liz Cheney duaghter of recenly deposed USA vice President Dick Cheney and I am seking your assitsance with confidential transaction. As you may know my father during his time in office amassed a firtune of $135,000,000 (one hundered thirty five million USA dollars) and I now need your assistantse to move it out of country. As a bionus for your help on this Transaction I can offer you "magic blue pills" guaranteed made in USA to enlarge your penis to massive unheard of USA propportions and also 1000s of young marriagebale USA women seeking to meet you for life in new country. Please contact me at +001 212 867-5309 or conact USA embassy in your Country.
What the hell is "wallah"?
Presumably, Iron-wallah would be a steampunk Indian version of Iron Man during the British Raj.
Watch Iron Man again. Then watch Dark Knight again. Tell me Iron Man is in the same class.
You're right, they're not in the same class: Iron Man is a fun superhero movie with an interesting and likable actor playing the main character, while Dark Knight is a poorly edited mishmash of incoherent action sequences and dollar-store philosophy with a plastic mannequin in the title role.
I understand that this may be a minority opinion. ;)
I'll type this on my computer that goes through the internet, then i'll leave work, drive in my car, to my apartment, eat some nice food, ect ect. Why? because of the market. Not because of some stupid belief that we can regulate success and a better life.
Oh, this is fun! Let's take this piece by piece:
my computer
... based on technologies developed for government contracts ...
that goes through the internet
... that used be called ARPAnet ...
then i'll leave work
... at a company that relies on the courts to enforce its contracts ...
drive in my car
... in a car that probably won't kill you because of DOT safety regulations, on roads built with public funds ...
to my apartment
... that would be an unsafe rat-trap if not for housing regulations, and where you have a reasonable assurance that you'll be able to continue living because the government won't let your landlord throw you out on the street any time he feels like it ...
eat some nice food
... that's been certified by the FDA ...
ect ect.
... well, okay, clearly there are some failings in your education, but that's probably your fault, not the fault of the underpaid and overworked public school teachers who tried to drum some knowledge into your thick skull. The rest of it, you enjoy courtesy of your local, state, and federal government whether you are capable of understanding this or not.
Minimum wage does not cost jobs.
umm yes it does.
It's an increase in cost that has to be paid. whether that's not hiring an additional worker, firing a current one, increasing prices to customers or whatever. it certainly does cost jobs.
That's what you think it does. But do you have any hard evidence to this effect? GPP provided actual data; you're providing a model. If there's a conflict between model and data, then it's probably not the data that's wrong.
... writes a guy who's probably the descendant of Europeans or Africans living in a country created by clearing a very large area of land of any existing buildings and populations.
Take out the "Europeans or Africans" part and that applies to pretty much every person on Earth. There is, as far as we can tell, just about no part of the planet which is currently inhabited by its original human population.
But while history holds many examples of bloody invasions and migrations (and pre-history probably holds many more) there has never been wholesale extermination on the level that OP described. If you're thinking about the westward push across North America ... yes, that was grotesque, and I'm not certainly not defending it. But it was a slow process, in most cases a matter of local policy that only later coalesced into a whole, not a planned campaign from beginning to end.
I was of course not serious, I'd think the fact that I was quoting a game from 1993 and talked about blowing up pinecones would be obvious!
There's a somebody-or-other's law that says that extremists are impossible to satirize, because no matter how extreme a caricature of their positions you come up with, they'll always come up with something at least as extreme and be deadly serious about it. Sorry that I didn't realize you were kidding, but you have to understand that there are large numbers of people who would agree with everything you wrote, and not as a joke.
As for the issue of a charismatic dictator convincing the whole planet that he's a benevolent savior, I'm not too worried about it. Hitler rose to power in a very specific place and time; a decade earlier or a decade later, even in Germany as it was, and he couldn't have done what he did. The same applies to Napoleon and France, and Caesar and Rome. Alexander and Genghis Khan might well have become what they became in any age, but they still had to convince primarily their own people. The world's enormous diversity of cultures, political systems, and economic conditions makes it very unlikely that anyone will pull off that trick on a global scale.
First time I've seen something like this, where Obama is more hawkish on a military matter than Bush ? Man that seems wierd...
It shouldn't really be a surprise, generally speaking; Democratic Presidents since Truman have responded to the Republican "soft on defense" dog whistle by acting like kids on a playground who can't back down from a dare.
In this case, though, I'm not sure the "more hawkish" label really sticks. This is about replacing one weapons system with another, not about using either weapon in any particular war. We have such a horror of using nuclear weapons that we're always looking for ways not to use them, and I don't see anything more or less hawkish in destroying an area with a rain of tungsten rods vs. destroying the same area with a nuke. The hawk vs. dove aspect applies more to whether or not we launch a strike at all.
Where's the problem?
Assuming you're not kidding, there are two major problems with this approach. The first is a matter of morality: "bomb your enemies from orbit until their land is clear of any buildings, population, dogs, pine cones, or ants" may be a lot of fun in a game, but in real life it's mass murder on a scale that not even the most bloody-minded conquerors in history have ever attempted, and that is really not a contest any sane nation wants to win.
Okay, let's assume that the morality of it doesn't bother you (and it probably doesn't, although I suspect if you were ever confronted close-up with the results of such an action, your opinion would change.) The second problem is practical. Could we do what you propose to Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Iran? Maybe we could ... but we are not the only country in the world with the capacity to do such a thing, and be assured, the rest of the world will take notice. We get too close to the borders of Russia or China with such a campaign (BTW, take a look at a map and notice just how far west China's borders go) and we are pretty much guaranteeing an all-out nuclear exchange of the sort everyone was more than halfway expecting all through the Cold War. You may be too young to remember what living under the nuclear hammer was like, and just how high the level of mutual paranoia was. Me, I was stationed in Europe when the Wall came down; trust me, we don't want to go back there.
And Russia and China aren't the only major powers we'd have to worry about if we started down that road. Japan, the UK, Germany, India, France ... they're all pretty friendly to us these days. That would change in a heartbeat if the US turned into a latter-day version of Genghis Khan's Mongolia. And all of them either have nuclear stockpiles or the ability to produce them quickly, along with delivery systems. The US, or any other country that tried this approach, would quickly find itself isolated in a hostile world full of countries just itching to scorch its cities to the ground, and willing to take the risk of receiving the same treatment in return.
The US is unquestionably stronger militarily than any other country, but we aren't stronger than everybody, and this is a good thing. There will never be another Alexander, another Caesar, another Genghis Khan, another Napoleon, another Hitler, and this is also a good thing. The rest of the world will not allow it, and for the first time in human history, the concept of "the rest of the world" makes a difference in the thinking of those who would follow in the bloody footsteps of emperors. Not because the human race is any wiser or more moral than it used to be, but because there is no other choice.
Technically this should apply to NATO as well, but fuck it, that's the English language for you.
The BBC and other British news organizations do in fact refer to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as Nato, not NATO.
The continued existence of these positions contribute to maintaining the membership and revenue of the union to which all of these crucial civil servants belong. It is imperative that these unions continue to enjoy increasing and unassailable power forever, and you are well advised to cease your questioning of this policy.
In private industry, there are organizations that allow people to draw enormous salaries -- much larger than any state employee will ever make -- without doing any actual work at all, for years at a time. These organizations generally go by names like "board of directors" and "executive suite," and interestingly, they spend much of their time trying (successfully, as comments like yours show) to convince people that unions are the root of all evil. Why do you suppose that could be?
So why spend millions of dollars to benefit a very small percentage of the population.
Almost everything the government does benefits a very small percentage of the population, at any one time. But you add all those small percentages up, and you get nearly everybody.
Or what about the "victim finder" app for child molesters? Just take the data on family occupancies and compare to local crime statistics and police coverage and voila! Thanks Victim Finder!
This may be the most absurd "think of the chiiildren" argument I've ever heard ... and that's saying something.
First of all, the vast majority of molestation victims are attacked by family members, who don't exactly need demographic information to find their targets. Second, even in the very rare case of stranger-abduction attacks, do you really think they're going after children at home? Take a walk outside -- there's a good chance there's an elementary school within a few blocks of where you live.
As for your hypothetical "Negro avoider" bigot ... well, let him do what he wants. There are already lots of people who won't drive through "that part of town" where "those people live." As long as they're not burning crosses on people's lawns, who gives a damn?
The question is, if you were starting a business that provides a software solution, would you want to be able to protect your solution from the competition?
How about you ask Microsoft, Oracle, or Adobe that question? Since they all managed to become very successful software companies well before software patents became common, they probably have an answer.
You seem to be assuming that cancer treatment has made great strides since 1970. Actually it hasn't.
It has, whether you want to admit it or not. Are you going to dismiss the ACS as a shill for the health care industry? Here (PDF file) is a pretty comprehensive overview; I direct your attention particularly to the "Trends in 5-year relative survival rates" table on page 18.
And yes, of course cancer treatment centers oversell their treatments. But your claim that:
Actually most cancers have pretty much the same prognosis today they did in 1970.
is absolutely false. You do a nice bait-and-switch there, noting correctly that:
The list of cancers that was incurable in 1970 and is curable today is extremely short.
and then pretending that it supports your earlier claim. But in fact the two claims are completely different. We may not be able to cure most cancers, but we can greatly extend both the quantity and quality of life available to patients who are diagnosed with cancer relative to what we could do 40 years ago. While it is quite true that treatment for almost any kind of cancer is a miserable experience, if you think the level of misery is anywhere near what it was in 1970, then you simply haven't been paying attention.
I'm not going to argue against the idea that more basic research is needed -- hell, I work in basic biomedical research, so it would be absurd for me to make that argument. But I came here from patient care, and I can tell you that we need more research at all levels, "from bench to bedside" as the cliche goes. You can't tell a patient who's been diagnosed with a painful and probably fatal disease, "Well, we might have something that can help you fifteen years from now, but you're SOL since you'll be dead for twelve of those years."
Also, I detected a whiff of anti-government, anti-"Big Science" in your original post. Where exactly do you think the money for basic biological research comes from? Hint: it ain't Merck and Pfizer.
The thing is, even if you had aliens who see in different parts of the EM spectrum, there would still be physical reasons for using certain frequencies (RF specifically) for long-range communication. Radio waves just behave differently from, say, IR or visible light or X-rays, all of which behave differently from each other. Granted, we might not recognize a signal from very slow-living (or very fast-living) beings as being a signal, and they might not recognize ours either, but the transmission frequencies are likely to about the same.
If you're diagnosed with cancer, feel free to restrict yourself to the level of treatment that was available in 1970. Be sure to let us know how it works out for you. But you'd better do it quickly, because odds are you won't have very long.
Agricultural research != farming. GPP was talking about the former, and you jumped in with a rant about the latter ... or rather, used the latter as an excuse for an ideological threadjack. Nice move. It's too bad in a way that the Soviet Union isn't around any more, because people like you were highly employable there.