Now consider that rerunning a medical test and the origional paper wrong will get a researcher rewarded while writing anything whatsoever questioning human caused global warming gets a researcher labeled a whore of the oil companies and the argument that the science on GW might be at least as flawed as these biomedical papers grows.
I think it's a mistake to imply that biologists are better people or scientists than atmospheric physicists. The main difference is not in scientific integrity, ethics, or bias, but that there is one major split in the atmospheric physics field: whether or not global warming is going on. In biology, there are still divisions where either side starts adopting the "If you disagree with me you're a (insult here)," but they are many smaller ones. You don't have 30 labs entrenched on either side, you have one lab against another.
There are also many aspects of biomedical research where, like climate change, it's not so cut and dry, and results are open to interpretation. And there are definite cases in biomedical research were going against a dogma could hurt your funding.
The outside influence from green nuts and oil companies don't help either, and the fact that the public is more interested in the outcomes than most debates of biomedical research adds up to the impression that you get. Not to say climatologists are saints, just to point out that all scientists are people.
Peer review can both help and hinder - there's the reputation effect of guest authorship where having a well-known, senior, academic's name on the paper helps it through no matter how absurd the findings.
Then there are reviewers who review papers they do not have the expertise to review. And to be frank I've seen some pretty bloody ludicrous comments from supposedly expert reviewers - the sort of stuff 1st year students wouldn't make.
So... you might say peer reviewed is not a perfect system, and if there were a perfect system, we should switch to that.
Lets see here... Divination! That is what we should do! Anyone have an ouija board?
(Kidding. I know you were explaining the problem, not saying we should abandon peer review.)
Yeah, but usually, the last one is just as hard. It's kind of odd when you have a strong hammer stroke, let's call it "Election 2000" followed by a huge gigantic, nuclear powered one, let's call it "9/11," followed by some other still pretty significant ones, such as one I'd like to call "patriot act" and one I'd like to call "gitmo", then some ones that are even smaller but still pretty heavy, like a hammer blow I'd call "Paris Hilton" or "American idol." Somewhere in there was another huge one called "Let's attack Iraq and think up a reason later" And let's not forget the sizeable "Election 2004" strike. Then a bunch of smaller ones. But then a little kid named "some ISP" comes up with a "wierd copyright snafu" wiffle bat and swings, and that breaks the stone of JonnyGTO's mind? Totally possible, just bizzare.
I would be suprised to actually HEAR that. I wouldn't be suprised to see evidence SUGGESTING that.
Noob question: wouldn't they have it in their contract that you can't use more than a set amount of bandwidth if that is an issue? If not, why not? Or are ISPs kind of acting like all-you-can-eat buffets that SAY you can eat all you can, but cut you off at 20 pounds of taquitos... lying bastards at ponderosas...
THAT was what broke your camel's back? Not, you know, politics, entertainment, police videos, scientology, or anything else, it was COPYRIGHT infringement that set you over the line? Seems odd. Copyright issues to me seem one of the less blatant examples of insanity I could think of.
It's important to identify a problem no matter what, but are any of these biases fixable? I would argue that some of them, specifically the bias toward positive results, is not fixable and is inherent to how science works.
To quote one of the articles "...negative results are potentially just as informative as positive results, if not as exciting." But negative results often require much much more verification than positive results, if they can be verified at all, and are limited in how much they can tell you. The antidepressant studies mentioned, a negative result, that the antidepressants did nothing, only tells you that in the patients tested, the doses tested did not give you a noticeable positive result. Publishing a negative result on that would have very limited conclusions. The next year, they could find that doubling the dose was actually effective, making the writeup of the earlier negative result pointless and even more trivial. A waste of time, plus then you've published saying your own product doesn't work.
Negative results get even more pointless in other fields. If someone does a mutagenesis screen for a particular defect in C. elegans, and doesn't find any mutants affecting that, it could be noteworthy, indicating that any genes affecting that process were so vital that when you took one away you didn't get a worm at all, or it could just be luck that genes affecting the process were never mutated, or the researcher didn't do it correctly, or all genes involved were redundant, or some combination. What conclusions could you draw from that? It would be a negative result that would be nigh impossible to tell anything from. Without any positive hits, you could go to the trouble of making sure you did it correctly, but you're not going to make sure every gene got hit at least once, that would be impossible.
In still other cases, a negative result is often retrospectively found to be the fault of the researcher. Who wants to publish something that is basically telling your peers how dumb you are?
There's also that it requires a lot of extra work to make sure it's a negative rather than a null result. Usually when I hit a negative result, my inclination is to see if I did it wrong by repeating the experiment if possible, if it comes up negative again I usually take a different approach, if that also gets a negative result I re-evaluate. I don't ever do all the other supporting experiments that would be needed to convince a reviewer it's a real negative result. If I use an RNAi construct to knock down a gene, and it doesn't do what I'm expecting or anything else interesting, I don't verify the gene is actually knocked down, since that's more effort that would probably be a waste. I'm definitely taking a risk that it's a real result, but it's hard to prove a negative and there's also less motivation to do so.
The limited ability to make positive conclusions about negative results also limits where they could be published. There is a journal for negative results, but a publication there is not something I personally would put on a CV.
So while it is interesting that a bias against negative results may be throwing us off, it's not very usefull knowledge, because I don't see us able to do anything about it.
I was actually thinking of that same paper. Study size is a good qualifier to how much stock to put into the conclusions of a study. But I think it's a mistake to write off a study entirely because of it's sample size. For one thing, there is no magic number by itself.
I think I was pretty clearly not saying "you must accept it." Why would you put words in my mouth like that? What I'm saying is that results trump hypothesis, not the other way around. He's says that TV doesn't have that influence, these results argue they do, the results are more convicing than the word of an AC.
Blind acceptance is bad, skepticism good, but only if it's logical and open-minded. If results run counter to your worldview, you can't reject the results on that basis, you see if there are problems with the methods, results, or conclusions and if there are, THEN you say it's BS.
The AC has done none of this. He looked at the conclusion only (and, it seems, didn't even RTFA), decided it was wrong, and that only another study could prove it. That's not healthy skepticism, that's dogmatism. Historically, that has been even more toxic to science than blind acceptance.
Well, repeatability is of course important, but like you aluded to, it's usually not in a researchers interest to repeat someone else's experiments just to validate it, and there should be some caution when dealing with a single study. And of course you're right when you point out that reporting of science often overstates things.
The assumption though should not be that the results are incorrect. What you're saying is "I don't believe it, so it's going to remain BS until someone else wastes their funding to confirm it." If there are some obvious glaring errors with the methodology, that's a legitimate reason to discount the results. If it's just you doubt the theory because it doesn't seem very plausible to you, it's more likely that you are wrong than the study.
Naturally, this is not proven yet without verification, and should not go into any textbooks without the qualifier "One study concluded...". But your hypothesis that TV can't have that influence is refuted (though not disproven) by the results of the present study, not vice versa.
I know! It's almost as ridiculous as the idea that we're made up of little tiny atoms! Hey, earth to scientists, I'm a person, not a bunch of atoms! Speaking of earth, there are some people who claim the earth is round! How ridiculous is that! I see hills, that doesn't look too round! And what about if you walk too far in one direction? Wouldn't you fall off the earth?!? I tell you, these scientists just need a little bit of common sense and a little less scientific method!
Well, I'd like to see a non-NRA source that suggests the french resistance was at all successfull because private citizens had guns, but that is otherwise a point well taken. As I said to the other response, I don't know much about the french resistance, but I was under the impression that their best work involved sabotage and aiding the enemy, not actually shooting germans. I clearly need to research this before we get invaded...
...yes, now that I post that I realize we had shifted to talking about Iraq. doh! Sorry about that.
In the case of the Iraqis, the resistance to invasion lasted the blink of an eye, which is one thing. I don't fault them for resisting, anyone would. The CIVILIAN insurgency clearly isn't helping anything though besides the mortician.
So I'm not saying france shouldn't have resisted the Nazi invasion, or Israel should have given up, I'm saying armed individuals carrying out insurgent attacks like are going on in Iraq now aren't doing anything worthwhile. They're just pointlessly killing.
What I'm getting down to, albeit poorly, is that a shotgun and being a one-man-army isn't going to win you back your rights after an invasion or military coup. Trying to repel the US army with a shotgun would simply be suicide. Realizing that is not weakness.
Ah. So Tibet and Taiwan should should just peacefully and quietly cede to China instead of resisting? Georgia should have just peacefully ceded to Russia? And I guess Palestine to Israel? When Iraq invaded Kuwait they shouldn't have resisted either? When Germany attacked its neighbors they should have just rolled over?
I clearly wasn't saying "Don't resist invasion by a foreign nation." Don't put words in my mouth.
As far as the french revolution, I think you may have picked up on a good point. I don't know much about what their tactics were, I'm guessing though they did not rely on civilian guns. Not the best comparison, as guns have improved somewhat since then, and I'd guess that the French were less well-armed before being invaded than the US population is now.
"If there is a military coup in this country, or we abandon democracy and go to martial law"
That is really a completely different topic.
We were talking about armed resistance to OUR OWN GOVERNMENT taking our rights away, specifically on how shotguns wouldn't dissuade the national guard if they were ordered to march on us. It seems like you're the one talking about a completely different topic, although it's been a long day, my brain is fried, and I could be off...
If they had invaded your country with an overwhelming force, would you have given up?
It might be glamorous to die for a cause, but it's more effective to live for one. In the face of an overwhelming invader, my responsibility is not to go out in a blaze of ineffective glory, but to do my best to make things better. In the case of Iraq, what any responsible person (reguardless of how they feel about the foreign presence) should be doing is trying to pull their country out of the rubble and turmoil first.
If there is a military coup in this country, or we abandon democracy and go to martial law, an armed citizenry isn't going to be much of a deterrent. What's keeping us safe from that is a strong tradition of democracy, seperation of powers, and in most cases respect for the constitution. Not guns.
Cowering from bullies is not the right thing to do.
Poking terrorists with a stick while knowing they'll probably seek revenge with a bomb on people who had nothing to do with you is also not the right thing to do. Look at the response to those danish cartoons: the paper got death threats, but the terrorist response was against anything Danish. The danish embassy in pakistan was bombed, with those cartoons being the reason. The people who died did not make the cartoon.
There are no good easy bumper-sticker sized answers when it comes to what to do about extremist fundamentalism.
1) They broke laws, probably laws protecting the privacy of their customers. If this is the case, why in the world should they be granted immunity?
2) The did not break any laws. If this is the case, why in the world should they be granted immunity?
Oh, I didn't mean to say anything about SHOULD get immunity, like as in they deserve it. Clearly they don't because this is exactly the type of thing the laws they broke (assuming they exist) should be prohibiting. I'd rather the telecos gave my information to marketers than the government, marketers with personal information are annoying, the government with personal information is dangerous. But I digress, I didn't mean "should."
Ethics aside, it didn't seem likely to me that if the government ordered you to do something you would be breaking a law to do so. I guess that's Bush for you. Hey, live and learn!
"So you think a rag-tag band of locals defending their homes and equipped with only small arms would be no match for the U.S. Army? How's Iraq going?"
Well, as I understand it, insurgents with guns are a problem, but the real problem is insurgents with homemade bombs. Plus they have the religeous fanaticism to stand against an overwhelming force that gives them the totally false hope of defeating us. Any sane group would have given up.
Right, I understand that the administration does what it wants ignoring the consitution, and I want to see them jailed for it. And I understand that telecoms were complicit in that. That's about all I know about the case right now.
It seems a bit different from someone driving the getaway car for a bank heist, if nothing else in scale of the crime. Have any laws been broken by the telecos? Is there a law saying that you must obey the constitution even when ordered not to by the government? There is a law against aiding and abetting someone who robs a bank, but I would imagine there's no law against aiding the president when he urinates on the constitution. Is it that they broke privacy laws without a proper warant?
It seems to me that if I were the owner of a telecom company, and some government agent or the president was telling me to turn over documents, I'd consult my lawyers, sure, but if they came back with "Uh... we really have no clue as to what you should do, there's not much precedent here..." then what? If this was a case of the executive branch saying "We passed this law that says you have to turn over these documents to us or you're going to jail, we don't need a warrant," what is the teleco supposed to do? Claim powers of judicial review, say the president is being unconstitutional, and no?
Only three ways to get infected with HIV and we have had the blood supply fixed for decades. I don't share needles and don't take it in the pooper so the odds of my catching AIDS is close enough to zero for me to not care much about the disease. Should we continue to research it? Yes, but the level of funding vs the levels for diseases we are all much more likely to get is totally out of proportion.
How about we let people who study diseases make choices reguarding funding, rather than politicians? AIDS is a global crisis that needs to be solved quickly, the common cold and less fatal diseases that might affect more of us, especially in the US, are on the agenda, but aren't really as big a problem. Breast cancer is bad, but it isn't going to kill most of the adult population of any continent. AIDS might.
Slashdot Mirror
not like there are any really really good games for wii.
Begs the question "what do you mean by really really good games when there's..." But I'm not going to ask it. So there, foiled your plot! :-P
Now consider that rerunning a medical test and the origional paper wrong will get a researcher rewarded while writing anything whatsoever questioning human caused global warming gets a researcher labeled a whore of the oil companies and the argument that the science on GW might be at least as flawed as these biomedical papers grows.
I think it's a mistake to imply that biologists are better people or scientists than atmospheric physicists. The main difference is not in scientific integrity, ethics, or bias, but that there is one major split in the atmospheric physics field: whether or not global warming is going on. In biology, there are still divisions where either side starts adopting the "If you disagree with me you're a (insult here)," but they are many smaller ones. You don't have 30 labs entrenched on either side, you have one lab against another.
There are also many aspects of biomedical research where, like climate change, it's not so cut and dry, and results are open to interpretation. And there are definite cases in biomedical research were going against a dogma could hurt your funding.
The outside influence from green nuts and oil companies don't help either, and the fact that the public is more interested in the outcomes than most debates of biomedical research adds up to the impression that you get. Not to say climatologists are saints, just to point out that all scientists are people.
Peer review can both help and hinder - there's the reputation effect of guest authorship where having a well-known, senior, academic's name on the paper helps it through no matter how absurd the findings.
Then there are reviewers who review papers they do not have the expertise to review. And to be frank I've seen some pretty bloody ludicrous comments from supposedly expert reviewers - the sort of stuff 1st year students wouldn't make.
So... you might say peer reviewed is not a perfect system, and if there were a perfect system, we should switch to that.
Lets see here... Divination! That is what we should do! Anyone have an ouija board?
(Kidding. I know you were explaining the problem, not saying we should abandon peer review.)
Yeah, but usually, the last one is just as hard. It's kind of odd when you have a strong hammer stroke, let's call it "Election 2000" followed by a huge gigantic, nuclear powered one, let's call it "9/11," followed by some other still pretty significant ones, such as one I'd like to call "patriot act" and one I'd like to call "gitmo", then some ones that are even smaller but still pretty heavy, like a hammer blow I'd call "Paris Hilton" or "American idol." Somewhere in there was another huge one called "Let's attack Iraq and think up a reason later" And let's not forget the sizeable "Election 2004" strike. Then a bunch of smaller ones. But then a little kid named "some ISP" comes up with a "wierd copyright snafu" wiffle bat and swings, and that breaks the stone of JonnyGTO's mind? Totally possible, just bizzare.
I would be suprised to actually HEAR that. I wouldn't be suprised to see evidence SUGGESTING that.
Noob question: wouldn't they have it in their contract that you can't use more than a set amount of bandwidth if that is an issue? If not, why not? Or are ISPs kind of acting like all-you-can-eat buffets that SAY you can eat all you can, but cut you off at 20 pounds of taquitos... lying bastards at ponderosas...
Copyright holders by definition cannot violate their own copyrights.
You say that, but I've violated my own copyrights several times. I can send you a video for $20, assuming you're over the age of 21.
THAT was what broke your camel's back? Not, you know, politics, entertainment, police videos, scientology, or anything else, it was COPYRIGHT infringement that set you over the line? Seems odd. Copyright issues to me seem one of the less blatant examples of insanity I could think of.
It's important to identify a problem no matter what, but are any of these biases fixable? I would argue that some of them, specifically the bias toward positive results, is not fixable and is inherent to how science works.
To quote one of the articles "...negative results are potentially just as informative as positive results, if not as exciting." But negative results often require much much more verification than positive results, if they can be verified at all, and are limited in how much they can tell you. The antidepressant studies mentioned, a negative result, that the antidepressants did nothing, only tells you that in the patients tested, the doses tested did not give you a noticeable positive result. Publishing a negative result on that would have very limited conclusions. The next year, they could find that doubling the dose was actually effective, making the writeup of the earlier negative result pointless and even more trivial. A waste of time, plus then you've published saying your own product doesn't work.
Negative results get even more pointless in other fields. If someone does a mutagenesis screen for a particular defect in C. elegans, and doesn't find any mutants affecting that, it could be noteworthy, indicating that any genes affecting that process were so vital that when you took one away you didn't get a worm at all, or it could just be luck that genes affecting the process were never mutated, or the researcher didn't do it correctly, or all genes involved were redundant, or some combination. What conclusions could you draw from that? It would be a negative result that would be nigh impossible to tell anything from. Without any positive hits, you could go to the trouble of making sure you did it correctly, but you're not going to make sure every gene got hit at least once, that would be impossible.
In still other cases, a negative result is often retrospectively found to be the fault of the researcher. Who wants to publish something that is basically telling your peers how dumb you are?
There's also that it requires a lot of extra work to make sure it's a negative rather than a null result. Usually when I hit a negative result, my inclination is to see if I did it wrong by repeating the experiment if possible, if it comes up negative again I usually take a different approach, if that also gets a negative result I re-evaluate. I don't ever do all the other supporting experiments that would be needed to convince a reviewer it's a real negative result. If I use an RNAi construct to knock down a gene, and it doesn't do what I'm expecting or anything else interesting, I don't verify the gene is actually knocked down, since that's more effort that would probably be a waste. I'm definitely taking a risk that it's a real result, but it's hard to prove a negative and there's also less motivation to do so.
The limited ability to make positive conclusions about negative results also limits where they could be published. There is a journal for negative results, but a publication there is not something I personally would put on a CV.
So while it is interesting that a bias against negative results may be throwing us off, it's not very usefull knowledge, because I don't see us able to do anything about it.
I was actually thinking of that same paper. Study size is a good qualifier to how much stock to put into the conclusions of a study. But I think it's a mistake to write off a study entirely because of it's sample size. For one thing, there is no magic number by itself.
I think I was pretty clearly not saying "you must accept it." Why would you put words in my mouth like that? What I'm saying is that results trump hypothesis, not the other way around. He's says that TV doesn't have that influence, these results argue they do, the results are more convicing than the word of an AC.
Blind acceptance is bad, skepticism good, but only if it's logical and open-minded. If results run counter to your worldview, you can't reject the results on that basis, you see if there are problems with the methods, results, or conclusions and if there are, THEN you say it's BS.
The AC has done none of this. He looked at the conclusion only (and, it seems, didn't even RTFA), decided it was wrong, and that only another study could prove it. That's not healthy skepticism, that's dogmatism. Historically, that has been even more toxic to science than blind acceptance.
Well, repeatability is of course important, but like you aluded to, it's usually not in a researchers interest to repeat someone else's experiments just to validate it, and there should be some caution when dealing with a single study. And of course you're right when you point out that reporting of science often overstates things.
The assumption though should not be that the results are incorrect. What you're saying is "I don't believe it, so it's going to remain BS until someone else wastes their funding to confirm it." If there are some obvious glaring errors with the methodology, that's a legitimate reason to discount the results. If it's just you doubt the theory because it doesn't seem very plausible to you, it's more likely that you are wrong than the study.
Naturally, this is not proven yet without verification, and should not go into any textbooks without the qualifier "One study concluded...". But your hypothesis that TV can't have that influence is refuted (though not disproven) by the results of the present study, not vice versa.
I know! It's almost as ridiculous as the idea that we're made up of little tiny atoms! Hey, earth to scientists, I'm a person, not a bunch of atoms! Speaking of earth, there are some people who claim the earth is round! How ridiculous is that! I see hills, that doesn't look too round! And what about if you walk too far in one direction? Wouldn't you fall off the earth?!? I tell you, these scientists just need a little bit of common sense and a little less scientific method!
Indeed, I've heard that the Danish resistance generally consisted of being rude to the occupying soldiers.
Besides that, if elrous thought I was accusing the danes of being cowardly, he seriously misread my post.
Well, I'd like to see a non-NRA source that suggests the french resistance was at all successfull because private citizens had guns, but that is otherwise a point well taken. As I said to the other response, I don't know much about the french resistance, but I was under the impression that their best work involved sabotage and aiding the enemy, not actually shooting germans. I clearly need to research this before we get invaded...
...yes, now that I post that I realize we had shifted to talking about Iraq. doh! Sorry about that.
In the case of the Iraqis, the resistance to invasion lasted the blink of an eye, which is one thing. I don't fault them for resisting, anyone would. The CIVILIAN insurgency clearly isn't helping anything though besides the mortician.
So I'm not saying france shouldn't have resisted the Nazi invasion, or Israel should have given up, I'm saying armed individuals carrying out insurgent attacks like are going on in Iraq now aren't doing anything worthwhile. They're just pointlessly killing.
What I'm getting down to, albeit poorly, is that a shotgun and being a one-man-army isn't going to win you back your rights after an invasion or military coup. Trying to repel the US army with a shotgun would simply be suicide. Realizing that is not weakness.
Ah. So Tibet and Taiwan should should just peacefully and quietly cede to China instead of resisting? Georgia should have just peacefully ceded to Russia? And I guess Palestine to Israel? When Iraq invaded Kuwait they shouldn't have resisted either? When Germany attacked its neighbors they should have just rolled over?
I clearly wasn't saying "Don't resist invasion by a foreign nation." Don't put words in my mouth.
As far as the french revolution, I think you may have picked up on a good point. I don't know much about what their tactics were, I'm guessing though they did not rely on civilian guns. Not the best comparison, as guns have improved somewhat since then, and I'd guess that the French were less well-armed before being invaded than the US population is now.
"If there is a military coup in this country, or we abandon democracy and go to martial law"
That is really a completely different topic.
We were talking about armed resistance to OUR OWN GOVERNMENT taking our rights away, specifically on how shotguns wouldn't dissuade the national guard if they were ordered to march on us. It seems like you're the one talking about a completely different topic, although it's been a long day, my brain is fried, and I could be off...
If they had invaded your country with an overwhelming force, would you have given up?
It might be glamorous to die for a cause, but it's more effective to live for one. In the face of an overwhelming invader, my responsibility is not to go out in a blaze of ineffective glory, but to do my best to make things better. In the case of Iraq, what any responsible person (reguardless of how they feel about the foreign presence) should be doing is trying to pull their country out of the rubble and turmoil first.
If there is a military coup in this country, or we abandon democracy and go to martial law, an armed citizenry isn't going to be much of a deterrent. What's keeping us safe from that is a strong tradition of democracy, seperation of powers, and in most cases respect for the constitution. Not guns.
Cowering from bullies is not the right thing to do.
Poking terrorists with a stick while knowing they'll probably seek revenge with a bomb on people who had nothing to do with you is also not the right thing to do. Look at the response to those danish cartoons: the paper got death threats, but the terrorist response was against anything Danish. The danish embassy in pakistan was bombed, with those cartoons being the reason. The people who died did not make the cartoon.
There are no good easy bumper-sticker sized answers when it comes to what to do about extremist fundamentalism.
1) They broke laws, probably laws protecting the privacy of their customers. If this is the case, why in the world should they be granted immunity?
2) The did not break any laws. If this is the case, why in the world should they be granted immunity?
Oh, I didn't mean to say anything about SHOULD get immunity, like as in they deserve it. Clearly they don't because this is exactly the type of thing the laws they broke (assuming they exist) should be prohibiting. I'd rather the telecos gave my information to marketers than the government, marketers with personal information are annoying, the government with personal information is dangerous. But I digress, I didn't mean "should."
Ethics aside, it didn't seem likely to me that if the government ordered you to do something you would be breaking a law to do so. I guess that's Bush for you. Hey, live and learn!
"So you think a rag-tag band of locals defending their homes and equipped with only small arms would be no match for the U.S. Army? How's Iraq going?"
Well, as I understand it, insurgents with guns are a problem, but the real problem is insurgents with homemade bombs. Plus they have the religeous fanaticism to stand against an overwhelming force that gives them the totally false hope of defeating us. Any sane group would have given up.
Right, I understand that the administration does what it wants ignoring the consitution, and I want to see them jailed for it. And I understand that telecoms were complicit in that. That's about all I know about the case right now.
It seems a bit different from someone driving the getaway car for a bank heist, if nothing else in scale of the crime. Have any laws been broken by the telecos? Is there a law saying that you must obey the constitution even when ordered not to by the government? There is a law against aiding and abetting someone who robs a bank, but I would imagine there's no law against aiding the president when he urinates on the constitution. Is it that they broke privacy laws without a proper warant?
It seems to me that if I were the owner of a telecom company, and some government agent or the president was telling me to turn over documents, I'd consult my lawyers, sure, but if they came back with "Uh... we really have no clue as to what you should do, there's not much precedent here..." then what? If this was a case of the executive branch saying "We passed this law that says you have to turn over these documents to us or you're going to jail, we don't need a warrant," what is the teleco supposed to do? Claim powers of judicial review, say the president is being unconstitutional, and no?
I didn't. ;)
Only three ways to get infected with HIV and we have had the blood supply fixed for decades. I don't share needles and don't take it in the pooper so the odds of my catching AIDS is close enough to zero for me to not care much about the disease. Should we continue to research it? Yes, but the level of funding vs the levels for diseases we are all much more likely to get is totally out of proportion.
How about we let people who study diseases make choices reguarding funding, rather than politicians? AIDS is a global crisis that needs to be solved quickly, the common cold and less fatal diseases that might affect more of us, especially in the US, are on the agenda, but aren't really as big a problem. Breast cancer is bad, but it isn't going to kill most of the adult population of any continent. AIDS might.
In a society that values freedom of speech, any page blocked is done so wrongfully.
Except goatse and 2 chicks. Those are the two good uses of censorship.
IAANAMB? I am advocating new acronyms meaning bullshit?