Yeah, I thought the "article" made no sense at first. The thing is, it's actually just an abstract of a much longer academic paper, and while the abstract may seem poorly written, the full text makes much more sense. The full paper is freely downloadable at that same link, and explains things much more clearly.
If this is legal, and it seems everyone is saying that it is, then why stop at criminal investigations? Think about it, this kind of data is a treasure trove of valuable commercial information. With this data they can determine who writes to who and how often, where a given person shops by mail order and sometimes exactly what they're buying, which utilities are billing us, what offers we respond to, it's likely even one's political leanings could be deduced given a deep enough study of the data. The postal service could solve all their financial woes if they just decided to market this stuff, it's a gold mine! And who could possibly object? It's just metadata, after all, stuff that's right there in plain sight, perfectly legal to examine. All kinds of possibilities open up, as we blindly skip on down that old proverbial slippery slope...
And that's the problem with allowing this type of data collection. The outside of each individual piece of mail might seem harmless enough, but put it all together in a searchable database, one that's cross-linked to other, similar databases, and voila! All kinds of information that was previously assumed to be private suddenly becomes easily available. We really do need legislation on when and how these types of databases can be used, and by whom. The law enforcement aspect is just the beginning, people need to realize just how much private information is hidden in, and easily retrievable from, these big aggregations of "public" data. The ability to run highly refined computer searches on a dataset changes all the presumptions about what is and what isn't private. If we don't put some limits on this type of data collection soon, privacy as we have traditionally known it will be a thing of the past. Perhaps it already is.
So can anyone actually tell me what the actual IP problem is here? That is, who precisely is making claims that are preventing needed research, and what is the nature of those claims? The BBC article linked in the summary is notably weak on these details, so it's hard to judge the true seriousness of the problem, if problem there be.
I'm really glad this has come about, not because the DSM itself is a useless book but because the attitudes towards it lead to some gross errors of judgement.
The DSM can be useful: if one clinician wants to communicate to another at a fairly high level the symptoms a patient is experiencing, then a DSM-defined disorder can be a reasonably efficient way of doing this. Also, the DSM does group together some symptoms which tend to occur as clusters under labels which can provide cues for looking for related symptoms which might otherwise be missed.
However...
People make the mistake of thinking that because something is listed in the DSM it is somehow a 'real disease'. The Epstein–Barr virus is a real disease: it is caused by a specific virus. Type I Diabetes is a real disease: it is caused by the loss of insulin-producing cells in the pancreas (although there is the more distal cause of the cell loss). Depression is not a real disease, in this sense - at least, not at the moment. It is a cluster of symptoms which when the occur together are referred to as Depression. Nothing more. (That isn't to say a 'disease' will not actually be identified at some point, but I suspect that will be for a specific subtype of depression, not depression as it is currently classified).
On the radio yesterday, I heard an 'aspie' - who under DSM 5 will no longer be an 'aspie' since Aspergers will no longer exist in its current form - talking about how it was great when he was diagnosed because they finally knew what was wrong with him. The problem is this: they didn't and still don't know what's wrong - just that his symptoms fit a commonly observed pattern, and that there are particular interventions to try to address the associated deficits. Having a listing in the DSM doesn't make things any more or less 'real', but some/many people imagine that it does. Just because there isn't a diagnostic criteria for a very shy child (although I imagine one could be found if looking hard enough), that doesn't mean that there aren't programmes to help the child be more comfortable with social interaction.
This becomes most manifestly a problem when conducting genetic, neurobiological, or even treatment research into the causes for 'a disorder'. Because these disorders are symptom clusters, and often have substantial variation in presentation, they are at times artificially grouped for research. This can hinder research into specific subgroups who show more common characteristics. Similarly, if there is a presentation which includes two DSM disorders (e.g. depression and anxiety, which is a very common comorbidity) then these people will tend to be systematically excluded from research because they are defined as 'having comorbidity'. Are both 'disorders' caused by the same underlying cause? Who knows, but being separate DSM disorders means that this group tends to be very underrepresented in research.
On top of this, there is the involvement of vested interests in the development of disorders, there is the interpretation of things as 'wrong' because they are a DSM disorder, etc.
In summary, the DSM can be useful for clinicians to communicate a summary to each other, when accompanied by further detail. It can provide gross groupings for treatment research, but lacks finesse of distinction which could help tailored treatments to individual characteristics rather than the broader presentation. People suddenly seem to think something is 'real' because it appears in the DSM, and so push to have ever more 'disorders' included. This all makes DSM as much of a hindrance as a help to good research and mental health practices.
I agree with most of what you say, but you make it sound like the purpose of the DSM is to allow clearer communications between doctors, and that isn't really the case in practice. That may originally have been one of the goals, but the plain fact is that nowadays the DSM exists primarily to facilitate billing and insurance claims. The big
OK, I did RTFA, and several linked articles, posts, and blogs as well. And I still don’t get it. I mean, yeah, I get that this is about dick moves by a completely hostile-to-the-customer small business run by idiots, sure, what else is new? But... This is a bus company, right? Typically you wait at a bus stop, and when the bus comes you pay the driver, take a seat, and eventually exit the bus when you reach your stop. Terms and Conditions??? Seriously?? Where and when do these so-called terms and conditions come into play? You’re telling me they hand you a legal document with all the penalties spelled out before they take your money? Because if they don’t do that or something similar, I don’t see how any of this is legal. They can’t just arbitrarily hand out “fines” for breaches of whatever random rules they themselves make up... Can they? I mean, even the old break-open-the-plastic-and-you’ve-accepted-the-EULA situation was never really tested in court, and here there isn’t even a seal to break, you're just getting on a damned bus! When do you even have a chance to read these so-called terms, let alone agree to abide by them? This is crazy! If we’ve really gotten to the point where getting on a bus obligates the customer to pay completely arbitrary financial penalties for various random acts determined wholly by the bus company, well, I’d have to say it’s all over for this country. The lawyers have definitely won.
It is standard practice. Charge as much as you can possibly get away with and plea bargain down from there.
In that case, why wasn't the "standard practice" applied to the boy?
Um, could it be because the boy isn't a minority, perhaps? Yes, I'm playing the race card, but... It's abundantly clear that in America black people are often charged with more serious offenses than whites for the same act, are convicted at trial more often than whites, and receive much harsher sentences than whites convicted of the same crime. No, I don't have links on hand but the statistics do back me up, since I'm lazy I leave verification as an exercise for the/. reader. The point is, given the long-standing and well documented evidence of discriminatory prosecution of black people in this country, it's not at all unreasonable in this case to focus on the race of the accused. If the shoe fits...
After using W8 for a few months (due to hardware support for a slide scanner) I don't see much basis for all the hate. Yeah, the UI is retarded and flashy and gets in the way of getting things done, but I've learned to adapt.
It's simple, really. People hate Windows 8 because, exactly as you state, "the UI is retarded and flashy and gets in the way of getting things done" and that right there is reason enough to hate it. I mean, come on, the bare minimum that people want and expect is a system that isn't retarded and that lets them get on with the work at hand, and Microsoft failed to deliver even that. The failure of Windows 8 is no surprise, and the source of the hate should be obvious. No one should be forced to "adapt" to a substandard and patently broken operating system update, especially not when the old version worked and continues to work just fine. To think otherwise is to succumb to the exact same madness that seems to have afflicted the Windows 8 design team.
Genuine question: how does someone researching gene therapies then commercialize their research without patents; what is the process? I agree with the ethics of not having patents on the human genome, but then what is the process a genetic researcher would then use to turn their research into a product and bring it to market; what's the incentive for a genetic researcher to research new therapies? It seems to me this is expensive and complicated, so there should be some incentive or payoff for the time and money invested. Just curious.
Why does the default have to be commercialization? This is basic research! Have we completely abandoned the idea of knowledge for knowledge's sake? It seems to me there is something wrong with an assumption that all research must be commercialized. I assure you this was not the way science was done for most of our country's history, this is a new thing. My father was a clinical pathologist who could have made a lot of money in the private sector. He deliberately took a job at a much lower pay level working for the VA. He did this because they offered him a big lab and a large research budget. He never gave a thought to commercializing the results of his studies, he was mainly concerned with helping people and advancing science, and I would like to think that he wasn't all that unique in this. How times have changed... I doubt the VA even sponsors much basic research anymore, and the places that do are mainly in it for the money. Being a scientist should not always be about the money.
It's a benefit to the affiliate stations, however Fox wants your to watch your LA affiliate when in LA, not the NY affiliate. Especially for their "talent" shows.
Except the service in question only allows local viewers access to their local affiliates, in fact as of now it is only available in one market, NYC. It is part of their pitch for legal status that they do not allow viewers to see anything other than exactly what those viewers would see with an antenna on their roof. Their customer base is primarily folks who either lack an antenna or whose reception is poor. Again, how is FOX being harmed by this??
>"Feeling the high won't destroy your life. Feeling a constant need for getting high (addiction) will destroy your life."
Actually, for mind/reality-altering drugs (which excludes caffeine, nicotine, sugar, etc) the actual high *can* contribute to destroying lives. While high, judgement and functionality are so severely impaired that there is a huge risk of injury to one self and to others. And all the while, the person is completely unproductive- can't work, can't learn, can't do much of anything useful to society or for themselves.
So yes, the need for getting high does contribute to "destroying your life", and can be the longest part of the destruction, the actual high contributes too.
Sorry, this is total bullshit. For example, let's look at opiate drugs like heroin, which all act similarly upon the brain. It has been shown that as long as the opiate addict has a steady high-quality supply of the drug, very little in the way of harm occurs either physically or mentally. There are many famous historic examples of high-functioning opium addicts, the poet Coleridge is perhaps the best known example. More importantly, and more recently, experiments in Switzerland and elsewhere have demonstrated that when you allow heroin addicts access to cheap and legal heroin, they tend to obtain and hold down jobs, and in general simply get on with their lives. Heroin addiction is no bar to achievement. Any basic pharmacology textbook will show that aside from being highly addictive heroin has virtually no long-term physical side-effects, which is in stark contrast to a legal drug like alcohol. It turns out that virtually all the negative effects we tend to associate with heroin, all the physical and mental deterioration that comes to mind when one hears the word heroin, that's all caused indirectly or directly by the legal prohibitions imposed upon the user and upon society. If you use unclean injection equipment in filthy surroundings, are constantly in and out of prison, go through withdrawal every few days because you lack the money or access to the drug, and the drug itself is polluted with manufacturing impurities plus whatever unknown and dangerous cutting agents were added, well of course, you're bound to see some deterioration. None of that is caused by the drug itself, however. Do some historical research, before heroin and the other opiate drugs were made illegal there were indeed cases of addiction to be found, but no more than we see today, and perhaps a lot less. What there wasn't, strangely enough, was much of the kind of societal harm that drug prohibition is supposed to prevent. Look for examples of criminals supporting their habit through crime, drug-fueled violence, you won't find any of that. In those days most heroin addicts were bored housewives, unassuming little old ladies who purchased their "tonic" cheaply at the nearest drug store. No crime, no deterioration, minimal harm to society. Then prohibition came along... And all the havoc and death and destroyed lives and emotional pain that you see today, it all flowed directly from that. Opiates by themselves simply aren't all that destructive. Until you make them illegal.
The bigger WOW here is that this is even a story. The key phrase in the summary is: "HAS THE OPTION" as in it's an optional feature. You know. One that you can turn off or on. This is the same thing Netflix recently added, where it will post what you're watching if you turn the option on. Here's a novel idea, if you're watching porn on your blackberry, turn off sharing or never enable it to begin with.
This is bitter news, Banks is my favorite living author. You have to admire the way he's handled it, though, with typical grace and a solid infusion of black humor.
And here is a guestbook where you can leave a personal though quite public message for Iain, this page was apparently set up just for well wishers after the news of the cancer broke: http://friends.banksophilia.com/guestbook/
The news looks bad indeed. One can only hope for some kind of last-minute spontaneous remission. Barring that miracle, he will be sorely missed.
Of course, since you read the article, you already know that that hypothetical scenario is irrelevant to the current case. In this instance, the technician who constructed the trap had been called out to service one of his previous installations; the owner of the vehicle complained that the trap wouldn't open. The technician drilled into the compartment and eventually managed to get it open. He discovered that the reason the trap wouldn't open was that it was stuffed over-full with cash: more than $800,000.
Not only did the technician repair the cash-stuffed trap, he later constructed three additional ones for the same client. Granted, the entire trap business in the U.S. operates under a sort of determined wilful blindness, but once you start drilling into million-dollar bricks of cash you really push the boundaries of plausible deniability.
Perhaps, but the fact remains that there is no law against making traps, and no law compelling someone engaged in a legal profession to report suspicions about clients. They prosecuted him as a kingpin, a leader of a major drug operation. This despite the fact that he had no certain awareness of any drug connection at all, let alone knowledge of the day to day details of the trafficking. He saw a bunch of money, that's all, so what? Money is not illegal, not yet, and if for whatever reason I had that much cash lying around, for damn sure I would want a hidden compartment to hold it. There is nothing illegal there. Look, these prosecutors have equated having a vague suspicion that things might not all be above board, with being one of the masterminds of the entire operation! If that doesn't bother you, well, it damn well should.
My school had a few real meth heads when I was in high school. The harm that regular meth did was demonstrable in a way that made DARE completely unnecessary. A lot of students actually avoided meth because they saw the harm it did (damaged intelligence, rotting teeth, misc health issues, etc.)
Just calling the kid(s) on stage at a pep rally for 5 minutes and saying "kids, this is what regular meth use does. This is why we don't want you to use meth. Now Johnny, Susy, etc. please be seated." would stop 95% of kids from ever doing meth. It's not like a STD or something like that it's so in-your-face and repeatable that only morons (even by teen standards) would think it doesn't apply to them.
So tell me, if amphetamines are so unfailingly damaging, why do we not see any of that damage in the millions of young people who take prescribed Adderall, which contains pure amphetamine salts as its active and only ingredient? For the most part we don't see that kind of damage in Adderall users, even those who take the drug every day, and yet it's the same drug. So your argument for prohibition instead becomes a perfect illustration of why prohibition itself is the problem, not the solution. When you make a substance illegal you lose all control of how it is made, distributed, and ingested. The end result is almost always exactly the kind of misery you observed in those meth heads, who presumably as high school students wouldn't have easy access to the drug under a legal harm-reduction substance abuse policy. I'm not saying that there wouldn't be any such casualties at all under such a regime, of course there would, but it's very likely there would be far less of the type of extreme damage we see regularly under current prohibition, and when such damage did occur despite every precaution, it would be far easier to treat because we could hospitalize people instead of warehousing them in jails. Prohibition never works, not even for a substance like meth. Think it through without the subtle biases instilled by years by drug-war propaganda. Regardless what substance you're talking about, prohibition is always worse than legal-but-discouraged. Always.
So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
Taken literally as written, this would seem to imply that God is both male and female. I was not aware that the hermaphroditism of God was a Christian belief, but then, what do I know. I guess if you can exist as a personified father-figure God, His redeemer Son, and a nebulous Holy Spirit all at the same time, then the hermaphroditic part is probably pretty easy.
Seriously, though, even once you resolve all the translation issues, and gently pry apart the braided strands from different traditions, the Bible is still rife with contradiction, and the story of Genesis in particular often seems logically incoherent. You have to wonder if that incoherence isn't part of the Bible's appeal, the rampant vagueness functioning like a kind of Rorschach test upon which the devout can project whatever interpretation feels right to them. The amazing thing is that millions of people actually defer to the Bible as the final arbiter on all kinds of important moral issues, despite all the vagueness and contradiction. To which I say, yeah, good luck with that.
The isolated genes do not exist in nature, and never have. "Products of nature" is not read so broadly as to include any combination of hydrogen, carbon, or other elements, regardless of what isolation or manipulation you perform on them, or no machine would ever be patentable either, by definition.
Using this logic, wouldn't trans-uranic elements also be patentable, since they are all unstable and thus not found in nature? To my knowledge, nobody has ever suggested these elements could possibly be patented, but I don't see why not, given the similarity of the circumstances.
Personally, of course, I believe it's a travesty to suggest that any of this stuff is patentable. To state that these genetic sequences are "not found in nature" is insane, it's a bunch of lawyers bending the English language to the breaking point. Lawyers are good at that kind of thing, apparently.
Well, I see something potentially wrong with your interpretation of it. You assume that Satan is the "losing side", and I don't see how you came to that conclusion. Does it have to do with that fact that, from the Christian perspective, bad people will be tortured for eternity when they die? If so, then while I am not a Satanist, I'm fairly certain they probably do not believe that (unless we're talking masochist Satanists).
It comes from the fact that practically everything we know about Satan comes from Judeo-Christian holy books. Hell, I'll even through in the Quran, just to be inclusive. The fact remains that Satan most definitely comes out of the Old Testament tradition, wherein it is made pretty damn clear that he is subordinate to God in power. Show me some genuine Jewish/Christian/Muslim holy text that says the Devil has much of a chance of coming out on top in The Final Battle. If such a text exists, it certainly hasn't gotten much traction in Churches, Mosques, or Synagogues. Let's face it, one of the basic memes of this whole tradition is "in the end, Good always triumphs over Evil." So it stands to reason, if you're gonna take this stuff both literally and seriously, Good is the obvious choice between the two.
While I have absolutely no doubt about the rampant hypocrisy many Christians display, I've never quite understood how that or anything else could lead one to worship Satan. I mean, think about it. You're going to buy in to the whole Judeo-Christian belief system, accept that the mythology of the Bible is real, that Yahweh and the Devil actually exist as genuine supernatural beings, which is to say gods, you accept all that, and then what do you do? Why, you sign up with the losing side! What else, it's the natural thing to do.
Am I the only one who sees something wrong with this picture?
Honestly, what is the problem with the sentence as written? Look at it:
The dispute started when the spam-fighting group, called Spamhaus, added the Dutch company Cyberbunker to its blacklist, which is used by e-mail providers to weed out spam.
It's totally clear that the phrase "which is used by e-mail providers to weed out spam" is referring to "blacklist" which immediately precedes it, there's really no other way to parse the sentence that makes sense. The only true ambiguity I see in the sentence is the "its," which could conceivably be meant to refer to Cyberbunker rather than Spamhaus. Just to be clear, I am not any kind of an expert on grammar, but I do read a lot and it seems to me if we're going to be that picky about these kind of things there are innumerable examples of much worse sentence construction to be found - and that's just looking at Slashdot summaries.
The regulation is clearly going to happen at MtGox or any other place that exchanges bitcoins for USD. Once you are sending $10,000 USD to someone, the money laundering provisions apply. This should work for as long as businesses don't accept bitcoins directly, which is still mostly the case. There are a small number of businesses that will deal directly in bitcoins, but not enough that you could spend $10,000 on them reasonably yet.
Ah, but among those few businesses is Silk Road, where I'm sure there are lots of people more than happy to deal in large amounts, probably the larger the better. So then, how about this:
1) Acquire bitcoins in excess of US reporting requirements
2) Use them to buy drugs on Silk Road
3) Sell the drugs for US dollars
4) Profit!
Granted, if you make your living selling drugs to begin with, this procedure really isn't going to help you much.
I have always maintained that in order for an ebook to validly claim to offer more features and more convenience than a regular book, it would have to be backward-compatible with printed books as they currently exist. This means that an ebook should have at least 20 (more might be better) paper-thin pages that can be easily leafed through, in between a front and a back cover. In short, it must have a form and function exactly like a real book, something you can pick up and handle exactly like you always have. The difference would be the utilization of a true overwrite-able high-res e-ink, so that you could download or store on-board whatever reading material you like, one book standing in for any and all books. With such a book you could do everything you can currently do with a book, and then some. Downloading different reading material is just the start, you could add functionality like an onboard dictionary for unfamiliar words, instant pop-up footnotes, fully animated pictures, web-connected hyperlinks, all kinds of possibilities open up with such a device. It would in every sense be a traditional book, and it would also have all the capabilities of the devices we currently call ebooks, but it would also be capable of so much more. Until such a book is created, ebooks will remain a crippled technology, lacking even basic functionality taken for granted since the days of Gutenberg. I can only hope that I live to see such a book, and I might, since the technology for it is almost there right now. But the ideal backward-compatible perfect ebook would contain no DRM! It couldn’t, because to do so would break the backward-compatibility, as there is no such DRM found on current printed books. This is my biggest fear: the tech will be there, but the industry will reject it and try to bury it, the way they have initially rejected every single attempt at an improved digital media experience to date. These people just refuse to learn.
And that's why Google bought Youtube. Without Google's pockets, video uploading or user-generated content sites in general would be in deep, deep trouble, and as common and popular as limewire, emule, TPB, etc.
Google needed another platform to sell advertisements, and it protected user-generated content sites in the process. Sometimes, things DO work out.
Perhaps, but given all the concerns about privacy that surround the company, I don't think you can hold up Google buying Youtube as a shining example of a perfect outcome. You can repeat their "do no harm" mantra all day long, in the end it's still another huge mega-corporation acting unilaterally without input from the internet-using public. How long are we going to just sit back and watch these companies in effect make important policy decisions that should rightfully happen only after long public debate, with the results written into law rather than being imposed by regulatory or corporate fiat. Now THAT would be things working out, but it never seems to happen that way. Google may be less evil than some, or even most, but... Do we really have to settle for "less evil"?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I thought the "article" made no sense at first. The thing is, it's actually just an abstract of a much longer academic paper, and while the abstract may seem poorly written, the full text makes much more sense. The full paper is freely downloadable at that same link, and explains things much more clearly.
If this is legal, and it seems everyone is saying that it is, then why stop at criminal investigations? Think about it, this kind of data is a treasure trove of valuable commercial information. With this data they can determine who writes to who and how often, where a given person shops by mail order and sometimes exactly what they're buying, which utilities are billing us, what offers we respond to, it's likely even one's political leanings could be deduced given a deep enough study of the data. The postal service could solve all their financial woes if they just decided to market this stuff, it's a gold mine! And who could possibly object? It's just metadata, after all, stuff that's right there in plain sight, perfectly legal to examine. All kinds of possibilities open up, as we blindly skip on down that old proverbial slippery slope...
And that's the problem with allowing this type of data collection. The outside of each individual piece of mail might seem harmless enough, but put it all together in a searchable database, one that's cross-linked to other, similar databases, and voila! All kinds of information that was previously assumed to be private suddenly becomes easily available. We really do need legislation on when and how these types of databases can be used, and by whom. The law enforcement aspect is just the beginning, people need to realize just how much private information is hidden in, and easily retrievable from, these big aggregations of "public" data. The ability to run highly refined computer searches on a dataset changes all the presumptions about what is and what isn't private. If we don't put some limits on this type of data collection soon, privacy as we have traditionally known it will be a thing of the past. Perhaps it already is.
So can anyone actually tell me what the actual IP problem is here? That is, who precisely is making claims that are preventing needed research, and what is the nature of those claims? The BBC article linked in the summary is notably weak on these details, so it's hard to judge the true seriousness of the problem, if problem there be.
I'm really glad this has come about, not because the DSM itself is a useless book but because the attitudes towards it lead to some gross errors of judgement.
The DSM can be useful: if one clinician wants to communicate to another at a fairly high level the symptoms a patient is experiencing, then a DSM-defined disorder can be a reasonably efficient way of doing this. Also, the DSM does group together some symptoms which tend to occur as clusters under labels which can provide cues for looking for related symptoms which might otherwise be missed.
However... People make the mistake of thinking that because something is listed in the DSM it is somehow a 'real disease'. The Epstein–Barr virus is a real disease: it is caused by a specific virus. Type I Diabetes is a real disease: it is caused by the loss of insulin-producing cells in the pancreas (although there is the more distal cause of the cell loss). Depression is not a real disease, in this sense - at least, not at the moment. It is a cluster of symptoms which when the occur together are referred to as Depression. Nothing more. (That isn't to say a 'disease' will not actually be identified at some point, but I suspect that will be for a specific subtype of depression, not depression as it is currently classified).
On the radio yesterday, I heard an 'aspie' - who under DSM 5 will no longer be an 'aspie' since Aspergers will no longer exist in its current form - talking about how it was great when he was diagnosed because they finally knew what was wrong with him. The problem is this: they didn't and still don't know what's wrong - just that his symptoms fit a commonly observed pattern, and that there are particular interventions to try to address the associated deficits. Having a listing in the DSM doesn't make things any more or less 'real', but some/many people imagine that it does. Just because there isn't a diagnostic criteria for a very shy child (although I imagine one could be found if looking hard enough), that doesn't mean that there aren't programmes to help the child be more comfortable with social interaction. This becomes most manifestly a problem when conducting genetic, neurobiological, or even treatment research into the causes for 'a disorder'. Because these disorders are symptom clusters, and often have substantial variation in presentation, they are at times artificially grouped for research. This can hinder research into specific subgroups who show more common characteristics. Similarly, if there is a presentation which includes two DSM disorders (e.g. depression and anxiety, which is a very common comorbidity) then these people will tend to be systematically excluded from research because they are defined as 'having comorbidity'. Are both 'disorders' caused by the same underlying cause? Who knows, but being separate DSM disorders means that this group tends to be very underrepresented in research.
On top of this, there is the involvement of vested interests in the development of disorders, there is the interpretation of things as 'wrong' because they are a DSM disorder, etc.
In summary, the DSM can be useful for clinicians to communicate a summary to each other, when accompanied by further detail. It can provide gross groupings for treatment research, but lacks finesse of distinction which could help tailored treatments to individual characteristics rather than the broader presentation. People suddenly seem to think something is 'real' because it appears in the DSM, and so push to have ever more 'disorders' included. This all makes DSM as much of a hindrance as a help to good research and mental health practices.
I agree with most of what you say, but you make it sound like the purpose of the DSM is to allow clearer communications between doctors, and that isn't really the case in practice. That may originally have been one of the goals, but the plain fact is that nowadays the DSM exists primarily to facilitate billing and insurance claims. The big
OK, I did RTFA, and several linked articles, posts, and blogs as well. And I still don’t get it. I mean, yeah, I get that this is about dick moves by a completely hostile-to-the-customer small business run by idiots, sure, what else is new? But... This is a bus company, right? Typically you wait at a bus stop, and when the bus comes you pay the driver, take a seat, and eventually exit the bus when you reach your stop. Terms and Conditions??? Seriously?? Where and when do these so-called terms and conditions come into play? You’re telling me they hand you a legal document with all the penalties spelled out before they take your money? Because if they don’t do that or something similar, I don’t see how any of this is legal. They can’t just arbitrarily hand out “fines” for breaches of whatever random rules they themselves make up... Can they? I mean, even the old break-open-the-plastic-and-you’ve-accepted-the-EULA situation was never really tested in court, and here there isn’t even a seal to break, you're just getting on a damned bus! When do you even have a chance to read these so-called terms, let alone agree to abide by them? This is crazy! If we’ve really gotten to the point where getting on a bus obligates the customer to pay completely arbitrary financial penalties for various random acts determined wholly by the bus company, well, I’d have to say it’s all over for this country. The lawyers have definitely won.
It is standard practice. Charge as much as you can possibly get away with and plea bargain down from there.
In that case, why wasn't the "standard practice" applied to the boy?
Um, could it be because the boy isn't a minority, perhaps? Yes, I'm playing the race card, but... It's abundantly clear that in America black people are often charged with more serious offenses than whites for the same act, are convicted at trial more often than whites, and receive much harsher sentences than whites convicted of the same crime. No, I don't have links on hand but the statistics do back me up, since I'm lazy I leave verification as an exercise for the /. reader. The point is, given the long-standing and well documented evidence of discriminatory prosecution of black people in this country, it's not at all unreasonable in this case to focus on the race of the accused. If the shoe fits...
After using W8 for a few months (due to hardware support for a slide scanner) I don't see much basis for all the hate. Yeah, the UI is retarded and flashy and gets in the way of getting things done, but I've learned to adapt.
It's simple, really. People hate Windows 8 because, exactly as you state, "the UI is retarded and flashy and gets in the way of getting things done" and that right there is reason enough to hate it. I mean, come on, the bare minimum that people want and expect is a system that isn't retarded and that lets them get on with the work at hand, and Microsoft failed to deliver even that. The failure of Windows 8 is no surprise, and the source of the hate should be obvious. No one should be forced to "adapt" to a substandard and patently broken operating system update, especially not when the old version worked and continues to work just fine. To think otherwise is to succumb to the exact same madness that seems to have afflicted the Windows 8 design team.
Genuine question: how does someone researching gene therapies then commercialize their research without patents; what is the process? I agree with the ethics of not having patents on the human genome, but then what is the process a genetic researcher would then use to turn their research into a product and bring it to market; what's the incentive for a genetic researcher to research new therapies? It seems to me this is expensive and complicated, so there should be some incentive or payoff for the time and money invested. Just curious.
Why does the default have to be commercialization? This is basic research! Have we completely abandoned the idea of knowledge for knowledge's sake? It seems to me there is something wrong with an assumption that all research must be commercialized. I assure you this was not the way science was done for most of our country's history, this is a new thing. My father was a clinical pathologist who could have made a lot of money in the private sector. He deliberately took a job at a much lower pay level working for the VA. He did this because they offered him a big lab and a large research budget. He never gave a thought to commercializing the results of his studies, he was mainly concerned with helping people and advancing science, and I would like to think that he wasn't all that unique in this. How times have changed... I doubt the VA even sponsors much basic research anymore, and the places that do are mainly in it for the money. Being a scientist should not always be about the money.
It's a benefit to the affiliate stations, however Fox wants your to watch your LA affiliate when in LA, not the NY affiliate. Especially for their "talent" shows.
Except the service in question only allows local viewers access to their local affiliates, in fact as of now it is only available in one market, NYC. It is part of their pitch for legal status that they do not allow viewers to see anything other than exactly what those viewers would see with an antenna on their roof. Their customer base is primarily folks who either lack an antenna or whose reception is poor. Again, how is FOX being harmed by this??
Radiation damage isn't cumulative.
What? Not cumulative? Of course it is! See for example this link, which you don't even have to read, just look at the headline:
http://hsionline.com/2012/05/29/undoing-the-damage/
>"Feeling the high won't destroy your life. Feeling a constant need for getting high (addiction) will destroy your life."
Actually, for mind/reality-altering drugs (which excludes caffeine, nicotine, sugar, etc) the actual high *can* contribute to destroying lives. While high, judgement and functionality are so severely impaired that there is a huge risk of injury to one self and to others. And all the while, the person is completely unproductive- can't work, can't learn, can't do much of anything useful to society or for themselves.
So yes, the need for getting high does contribute to "destroying your life", and can be the longest part of the destruction, the actual high contributes too.
Sorry, this is total bullshit. For example, let's look at opiate drugs like heroin, which all act similarly upon the brain. It has been shown that as long as the opiate addict has a steady high-quality supply of the drug, very little in the way of harm occurs either physically or mentally. There are many famous historic examples of high-functioning opium addicts, the poet Coleridge is perhaps the best known example. More importantly, and more recently, experiments in Switzerland and elsewhere have demonstrated that when you allow heroin addicts access to cheap and legal heroin, they tend to obtain and hold down jobs, and in general simply get on with their lives. Heroin addiction is no bar to achievement. Any basic pharmacology textbook will show that aside from being highly addictive heroin has virtually no long-term physical side-effects, which is in stark contrast to a legal drug like alcohol. It turns out that virtually all the negative effects we tend to associate with heroin, all the physical and mental deterioration that comes to mind when one hears the word heroin, that's all caused indirectly or directly by the legal prohibitions imposed upon the user and upon society. If you use unclean injection equipment in filthy surroundings, are constantly in and out of prison, go through withdrawal every few days because you lack the money or access to the drug, and the drug itself is polluted with manufacturing impurities plus whatever unknown and dangerous cutting agents were added, well of course, you're bound to see some deterioration. None of that is caused by the drug itself, however. Do some historical research, before heroin and the other opiate drugs were made illegal there were indeed cases of addiction to be found, but no more than we see today, and perhaps a lot less. What there wasn't, strangely enough, was much of the kind of societal harm that drug prohibition is supposed to prevent. Look for examples of criminals supporting their habit through crime, drug-fueled violence, you won't find any of that. In those days most heroin addicts were bored housewives, unassuming little old ladies who purchased their "tonic" cheaply at the nearest drug store. No crime, no deterioration, minimal harm to society. Then prohibition came along... And all the havoc and death and destroyed lives and emotional pain that you see today, it all flowed directly from that. Opiates by themselves simply aren't all that destructive. Until you make them illegal.
The bigger WOW here is that this is even a story. The key phrase in the summary is: "HAS THE OPTION" as in it's an optional feature. You know. One that you can turn off or on. This is the same thing Netflix recently added, where it will post what you're watching if you turn the option on. Here's a novel idea, if you're watching porn on your blackberry, turn off sharing or never enable it to begin with.
Wait... Netflix has porn???
This is bitter news, Banks is my favorite living author. You have to admire the way he's handled it, though, with typical grace and a solid infusion of black humor.
Here is the link for his special statement about the cancer diagnosis: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/03/iain-banks-cancer-statement-full
And here is a guestbook where you can leave a personal though quite public message for Iain, this page was apparently set up just for well wishers after the news of the cancer broke: http://friends.banksophilia.com/guestbook/
The news looks bad indeed. One can only hope for some kind of last-minute spontaneous remission. Barring that miracle, he will be sorely missed.
Of course, since you read the article, you already know that that hypothetical scenario is irrelevant to the current case. In this instance, the technician who constructed the trap had been called out to service one of his previous installations; the owner of the vehicle complained that the trap wouldn't open. The technician drilled into the compartment and eventually managed to get it open. He discovered that the reason the trap wouldn't open was that it was stuffed over-full with cash: more than $800,000.
Not only did the technician repair the cash-stuffed trap, he later constructed three additional ones for the same client. Granted, the entire trap business in the U.S. operates under a sort of determined wilful blindness, but once you start drilling into million-dollar bricks of cash you really push the boundaries of plausible deniability.
Perhaps, but the fact remains that there is no law against making traps, and no law compelling someone engaged in a legal profession to report suspicions about clients. They prosecuted him as a kingpin, a leader of a major drug operation. This despite the fact that he had no certain awareness of any drug connection at all, let alone knowledge of the day to day details of the trafficking. He saw a bunch of money, that's all, so what? Money is not illegal, not yet, and if for whatever reason I had that much cash lying around, for damn sure I would want a hidden compartment to hold it. There is nothing illegal there. Look, these prosecutors have equated having a vague suspicion that things might not all be above board, with being one of the masterminds of the entire operation! If that doesn't bother you, well, it damn well should.
My school had a few real meth heads when I was in high school. The harm that regular meth did was demonstrable in a way that made DARE completely unnecessary. A lot of students actually avoided meth because they saw the harm it did (damaged intelligence, rotting teeth, misc health issues, etc.)
Just calling the kid(s) on stage at a pep rally for 5 minutes and saying "kids, this is what regular meth use does. This is why we don't want you to use meth. Now Johnny, Susy, etc. please be seated." would stop 95% of kids from ever doing meth. It's not like a STD or something like that it's so in-your-face and repeatable that only morons (even by teen standards) would think it doesn't apply to them.
So tell me, if amphetamines are so unfailingly damaging, why do we not see any of that damage in the millions of young people who take prescribed Adderall, which contains pure amphetamine salts as its active and only ingredient? For the most part we don't see that kind of damage in Adderall users, even those who take the drug every day, and yet it's the same drug. So your argument for prohibition instead becomes a perfect illustration of why prohibition itself is the problem, not the solution. When you make a substance illegal you lose all control of how it is made, distributed, and ingested. The end result is almost always exactly the kind of misery you observed in those meth heads, who presumably as high school students wouldn't have easy access to the drug under a legal harm-reduction substance abuse policy. I'm not saying that there wouldn't be any such casualties at all under such a regime, of course there would, but it's very likely there would be far less of the type of extreme damage we see regularly under current prohibition, and when such damage did occur despite every precaution, it would be far easier to treat because we could hospitalize people instead of warehousing them in jails. Prohibition never works, not even for a substance like meth. Think it through without the subtle biases instilled by years by drug-war propaganda. Regardless what substance you're talking about, prohibition is always worse than legal-but-discouraged. Always.
For reference, Genesis 1:27:
So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
Taken literally as written, this would seem to imply that God is both male and female. I was not aware that the hermaphroditism of God was a Christian belief, but then, what do I know. I guess if you can exist as a personified father-figure God, His redeemer Son, and a nebulous Holy Spirit all at the same time, then the hermaphroditic part is probably pretty easy.
Seriously, though, even once you resolve all the translation issues, and gently pry apart the braided strands from different traditions, the Bible is still rife with contradiction, and the story of Genesis in particular often seems logically incoherent. You have to wonder if that incoherence isn't part of the Bible's appeal, the rampant vagueness functioning like a kind of Rorschach test upon which the devout can project whatever interpretation feels right to them. The amazing thing is that millions of people actually defer to the Bible as the final arbiter on all kinds of important moral issues, despite all the vagueness and contradiction. To which I say, yeah, good luck with that.
The isolated genes do not exist in nature, and never have. "Products of nature" is not read so broadly as to include any combination of hydrogen, carbon, or other elements, regardless of what isolation or manipulation you perform on them, or no machine would ever be patentable either, by definition.
Using this logic, wouldn't trans-uranic elements also be patentable, since they are all unstable and thus not found in nature? To my knowledge, nobody has ever suggested these elements could possibly be patented, but I don't see why not, given the similarity of the circumstances.
Personally, of course, I believe it's a travesty to suggest that any of this stuff is patentable. To state that these genetic sequences are "not found in nature" is insane, it's a bunch of lawyers bending the English language to the breaking point. Lawyers are good at that kind of thing, apparently.
Well, I see something potentially wrong with your interpretation of it. You assume that Satan is the "losing side", and I don't see how you came to that conclusion. Does it have to do with that fact that, from the Christian perspective, bad people will be tortured for eternity when they die? If so, then while I am not a Satanist, I'm fairly certain they probably do not believe that (unless we're talking masochist Satanists).
It comes from the fact that practically everything we know about Satan comes from Judeo-Christian holy books. Hell, I'll even through in the Quran, just to be inclusive. The fact remains that Satan most definitely comes out of the Old Testament tradition, wherein it is made pretty damn clear that he is subordinate to God in power. Show me some genuine Jewish/Christian/Muslim holy text that says the Devil has much of a chance of coming out on top in The Final Battle. If such a text exists, it certainly hasn't gotten much traction in Churches, Mosques, or Synagogues. Let's face it, one of the basic memes of this whole tradition is "in the end, Good always triumphs over Evil." So it stands to reason, if you're gonna take this stuff both literally and seriously, Good is the obvious choice between the two.
Hey, I'm just sayin', OK?
While I have absolutely no doubt about the rampant hypocrisy many Christians display, I've never quite understood how that or anything else could lead one to worship Satan. I mean, think about it. You're going to buy in to the whole Judeo-Christian belief system, accept that the mythology of the Bible is real, that Yahweh and the Devil actually exist as genuine supernatural beings, which is to say gods, you accept all that, and then what do you do? Why, you sign up with the losing side! What else, it's the natural thing to do.
Am I the only one who sees something wrong with this picture?
Honestly, what is the problem with the sentence as written? Look at it:
The dispute started when the spam-fighting group, called Spamhaus, added the Dutch company Cyberbunker to its blacklist, which is used by e-mail providers to weed out spam.
It's totally clear that the phrase "which is used by e-mail providers to weed out spam" is referring to "blacklist" which immediately precedes it, there's really no other way to parse the sentence that makes sense. The only true ambiguity I see in the sentence is the "its," which could conceivably be meant to refer to Cyberbunker rather than Spamhaus. Just to be clear, I am not any kind of an expert on grammar, but I do read a lot and it seems to me if we're going to be that picky about these kind of things there are innumerable examples of much worse sentence construction to be found - and that's just looking at Slashdot summaries.
posting to undo moderation mistake, sorry for the unintended downmod, however temporary
just can't happen fast enough for some people.
Happened way too slowly for some people.
FTFY
The regulation is clearly going to happen at MtGox or any other place that exchanges bitcoins for USD. Once you are sending $10,000 USD to someone, the money laundering provisions apply. This should work for as long as businesses don't accept bitcoins directly, which is still mostly the case. There are a small number of businesses that will deal directly in bitcoins, but not enough that you could spend $10,000 on them reasonably yet.
Ah, but among those few businesses is Silk Road, where I'm sure there are lots of people more than happy to deal in large amounts, probably the larger the better. So then, how about this:
1) Acquire bitcoins in excess of US reporting requirements
2) Use them to buy drugs on Silk Road
3) Sell the drugs for US dollars
4) Profit!
Granted, if you make your living selling drugs to begin with, this procedure really isn't going to help you much.
I have always maintained that in order for an ebook to validly claim to offer more features and more convenience than a regular book, it would have to be backward-compatible with printed books as they currently exist. This means that an ebook should have at least 20 (more might be better) paper-thin pages that can be easily leafed through, in between a front and a back cover. In short, it must have a form and function exactly like a real book, something you can pick up and handle exactly like you always have. The difference would be the utilization of a true overwrite-able high-res e-ink, so that you could download or store on-board whatever reading material you like, one book standing in for any and all books. With such a book you could do everything you can currently do with a book, and then some. Downloading different reading material is just the start, you could add functionality like an onboard dictionary for unfamiliar words, instant pop-up footnotes, fully animated pictures, web-connected hyperlinks, all kinds of possibilities open up with such a device. It would in every sense be a traditional book, and it would also have all the capabilities of the devices we currently call ebooks, but it would also be capable of so much more. Until such a book is created, ebooks will remain a crippled technology, lacking even basic functionality taken for granted since the days of Gutenberg. I can only hope that I live to see such a book, and I might, since the technology for it is almost there right now. But the ideal backward-compatible perfect ebook would contain no DRM! It couldn’t, because to do so would break the backward-compatibility, as there is no such DRM found on current printed books. This is my biggest fear: the tech will be there, but the industry will reject it and try to bury it, the way they have initially rejected every single attempt at an improved digital media experience to date. These people just refuse to learn.
And that's why Google bought Youtube. Without Google's pockets, video uploading or user-generated content sites in general would be in deep, deep trouble, and as common and popular as limewire, emule, TPB, etc.
Google needed another platform to sell advertisements, and it protected user-generated content sites in the process. Sometimes, things DO work out.
Perhaps, but given all the concerns about privacy that surround the company, I don't think you can hold up Google buying Youtube as a shining example of a perfect outcome. You can repeat their "do no harm" mantra all day long, in the end it's still another huge mega-corporation acting unilaterally without input from the internet-using public. How long are we going to just sit back and watch these companies in effect make important policy decisions that should rightfully happen only after long public debate, with the results written into law rather than being imposed by regulatory or corporate fiat. Now THAT would be things working out, but it never seems to happen that way. Google may be less evil than some, or even most, but... Do we really have to settle for "less evil"?