In the screenplay, the focus is on a robot politician which another poster mentioned- Susan Calvin is the main character, but not the title character. I think it starts with his "death", but it's been a while since I've read it. Ellison worked together pieces from a bunch of these stories to form a coherent narrative.
I agree. I like Smith, but the ideal actor for this role would be "impassive" (I think that's the word) without being wooden. Smith is too light and breezy. I would have expected someone like Denzel, perhaps; I imagine Tim Robbins could pull it off as well. Maybe Ethan Hawke. They'd also have to look very "ordinary"- good looking, but could have come off an assembly line.
The other problem is that Smith is too babyfaced. I thought the main character faked aging to masquerade as a human, so the actor would need to do an Orson Welles-in-Citizen-Kane transformation. Not too many people could pull that off- and you'd probably have to have a relatively young actor do it too. I just don't think Smith would be credible as an older man.
This is sort of like getting Joe Pesci to play the role of Julius Caesar.
Exactly! The real exciting stuff is the unmanned expeditions, which have (except for the stupid equipment failures) been producing bad-ass results and much better science than the ISS. NASA runs the risk of becoming a publically-funded boondoggle- they should stick to useful science.
One of the only sane minds on this has been Robert Park of the American Physics Society. He's consistently argued very loudly against the ISS, but has also praised missions like the Pathfinder and calls the search for non-human life (e.g. polar Mars, Europa) one of the most important scientific endeavors of our time.
Frankly, I think a Europa probe would be infinitely more useful than the ISS. And I think human expeditions to Mars are pointless right now.
Also, IRIX (like every commercial Unix, I guess) is hand-tailored to a very specific set of hardware. There are many advantages over Linux in this respect. You can partition off groups of processors for certain tasks, etc. They've also got extremely high-quality compilers.
The coolest thing I've seen so far is the ability to suspend a job and save an image of the running process to disk, then come back to it later- perhaps after several months and several reboots. God, I would kill to be able to do that on Linux.
Except Sun's hardware is demonstrably inferior to most of the other stuff in its class. Sun has a few things going for it that make it the market leader, and they do make nice boxes, but they're not exactly supercomputers.
SGI has made much better computers for a long time; the Origin series blows away any Sun in terms of scalability and price/performance. SGI got into the game too late to have dotcoms lusting over its boxes, and no one will ever brag about their huge Oracle database running on an SGI. Plus, SGI always appears to be headed for the toilet. Still, their OS runs on my old Indigo and on boxes up to 1024 processors. Sun just hit 172 procs, I think. And they don't have anything like NumaFlex.
IBM's Power 4 is much the same deal, except that IBM has a better future and huge existing customer base. Alpha, for sure, and probably PA-RISC as well are superior to the UltraSparc architecture. My impression is that Sun ate up the midrange/lowend market with relatively inexpensive workstations and this enabled it to move into big iron (but I could be wrong- I haven't been doing this for very long). They didn't start making really large machines until they and SGI strip-mined Cray; SGI got the better technology out of that deal.
I used to own an ancient SparcStation LX running 2.5.1, and I loved it- it was far superior to the PCs and Macs I'd used, and it wasn't fast but it didn't feel sluggish either. I liked Solaris just fine, but it didn't have nifty features that would have made it polished as well as powerful and stable. NeXTStep and Irix were more advanced workstation OSes at the time my box was made, but didn't catch on.
We bought an Origin 300 as a file server; we'd have been happy with Sun as well- they're not bad machines, and we were looking for anything better than a crappy dual-P3 Dell box. Unfortunately, a Sun of comparable power to the Origin would have cost more than 50% more and would actually have been less powerful. Um, no.
Best motherfucking book ever, and one of the least recognized. Imagine a more literate "Star Trek" with elements of "Alien" and "Forbidden Planet" thrown in (but it predates all of them by quite some time). Though it was born out of pulp sci-fi, it transcends the vast body of what was being written then; I'd rank it up alongside "Nightfall". Vernor Vinge is the only other author I've read who makes me feel anything like I do reading Space Beagle.
Other than that, all of Philip K Dick's short stories. His novels are even better, but most of them aren't sci-fi the way Asimov or Heinlein are; I think he just wrapped them in futuristic settings. Of all of these, I'd say "Eye in the Sky" and "Ubik" are my favorites.
email q2tgiquo23@yahoo.com if you really care that much. (yes, it's real- I hit a bunch of keys at random in the hope that random-address spammers would miss me. didn't work.)
The idea of drugging a society into obedience probably sounds pretty reasonable to a population spooked by an isolated terrorist attack that killed almost three-quarters as many Americans as died of heart disease and cancer every day, 365 days a year.
Right, and we know how pro-drug the current administration is.
To make your analogy work, you'd have to imagine heart disease explosively wiping out a quarter of the stadium during the Superbowl all at once. (okay, perhaps that isn't so far out...)
Pardon me stating the obvious, but the way technology and the Bush administration are rolling along utterly without any reigns
Except that the supreme court, even packed with Republican appointees, has been steadily expanding your freedoms for most of the past 50 years, and many of the rights we take for granted and bitch about today were unheard of for much of our nation's history (ahem, abortion). Sure, Bush would love to change the makeup of the court, but people seem to spend more time bitching than doing anything about it.
Don't forget, too, that the (failed) Clipper Chip scheme was Clinton's fault. We also have much stronger- and 100% legal- cryptography now, that the NSA won't be able to break, and there's no practical way this can be supressed. Carnivore is essentially a joke, because my sense is that we could easily defeat it with ubiquitous strong encryption but the apps just aren't there yet.
The only thing that I'm really worried about is this program Poindexter is heading. But I'm not worried about Bush, per se, but some of the people who'll be in charge. (I didn't vote for Bush and don't like him very much, but I'm annoyed that liberals speak about him in the same tones that conservatives used to speak about Clinton.)
Re:Yeah.. I'll go see it...
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Actually, I thought Hard Boiled had a lot more plot than some of the incoherent rubbish Hollywood churns out, and stands up very well compared to some of the incoherent rubbish to come out of China/HK as well. Both Chow and Tony Leung are actually good actors.
The problem with most action movies is that they fall apart as soon as the shooting stops. Woo partly avoids this by rarely letting this happen, but the movie always feels more crisply plotted and engaging without feeling totally plotless. Over-the-top doesn't necessarily equate to nonsensical- very few directors (or actors) understand this.
No, and I have never had any sort of connection with any of them. I'm a programmer affiliated with the med school of a very large private university, doing computational biology (I was a molecular bio major). I do not work on anything remotely AIDS-related, nor does the group I'm in receive any AIDS-related funding, but quite a few other scientists here do.
(Actually, my university does make some money off AIDS therapies developed here too, but this pisses off a lot us anyway. It doesn't indicate ulterior motives, because like most universities they try to commercialize anything they can, and AIDS research is only a small part of that.)
even though you don't provide any evidence that Duesberg believes such a thing, so you could be making it up
It says so on that page you quoted, fairly close to the top- Duesberg tried to claim the award. This is one of the things that bugs me; the HIV-is-bogus lobby can't even agree on this. And you didn't read the page before posting it, either. Shame.
As for the genome, protein structures, etc., you could always do a Google search, but that would require an open mind. HIV-RT is (indirectly) of interest in my line of work, so I do actually know a little bit about it (and the people down the hall know quite a bit more). A few of the many, many structures are this, this, or this, and you can find many more by simply going here and doing a search for "HIV" or "reverse transcriptase". The genomes of HIV1 and HIV2 can be found, like almost every other genome, at the NCBI here and here.
Yes, the nasty side-effects are obvious, but trying to cloud them with language such as "brute force attack on reverse transcription" only makes your argument more suspicious, particularly in light of the questions that you've failed to answer. What, exactly, are the side effects of AZT?
I don't see how that's clouding the language; you're making a big deal about the side effects but you don't appear to know much about pharmaceuticals or molecular biology. AZT is a nucleoside analogue chain terminator, meaning it replaces thymidine in nascent DNA chains but prevents further addition to the chain. I believe the problem is that it fucks with normal transcription too, and it was originally intended as an anticancer drug. I don't know anything about the actual external side effects, only the molecular ones, but I seem to recall it involves some sort of anemia. (Okay, other pages say it basically just makes you feel horribly ill.)
I'll agree AZT is a nasty drug. But you didn't answer my question: what about other therapies that do appear to be successful? Some of these can't be taken in combination with AZT, so you have to leave that out of your argument.
How do you explain it under your belief system, you know, the one that dictates that HIV==AIDS?
"Belief system"? Um, well, the evidence doesn't necessarily dictate anything- medical science isn't advanced enough. I would argue that "AIDS is (usually) cause by HIV", which is a good bit different, and I don't have an answer for what happened to those children. There are plenty of weird examples like that involving AIDS, but they don't mean existing hypotheses about the role of HIV are wrong, only that disease resistance and molecular biology are very complicated. And we knew that already. You can't use anecdotal evidence as proof of a broad generalization; it's just not statistically valid.
As a counter-example, how do you explain the 2.2 million Africans who died from AIDS last year, where they can't afford AZT and certainly aren't doing many poppers? And, for that matter, I'm not clear on how you can cite the children as an example when you believe they were misdiagnosed in the first place. Did they have HIV and not get AIDS- either because of weird biology (my argument) or HIV's harmlessness (Duesberg's argument)- or did they not have HIV in the first place? If the latter, does this mean everyone who's tested positive for HIV does not have any such virus in them?
So, the first problem here is that all you're able to do is nitpick. The second problem is that your hypotheses, to be correct, require that there be a vast conspiracy on the part of the news media, the medical establishment, and the pharmaceutical companies to fabricate AIDS so that GlaxoSmithKline can boost its revenues. It's one thing to claim that Gallo acted inappropriately, but to extend this to accuse a vast number of AIDS researchers of falsifying data is sort of absurd. You clearly haven't even bothered to do the most cursory sort of investigation, and you seem to have virtually no knowledge of biology beyond what you've read on the Virus Myth web page. And I'm a bit peeved that you keep accusing everyone of working for pharmaceutical companies- heck, the assholes didn't even read my resume when I sent it to them last spring.
Here's a challenge: read this from beginning to end and see if you understand it.
So there's the rub... what's the difference between advancing an operating system, and using it to undercut other people's businesses?
Good question, and I don't know the answer. However, I'd argue that Microsoft has the right to copy anyone it wants, barring outright IP infringement (and, sometimes, even there- it's not like the opensource community doesn't copy everything to come out of the Windows world too). Should Microsoft have been prevented from implementing TCP/IP? Should they have bought Trumpet outright instead? My feeling is that in these cases, let the best product win. What I object to is forcing the competition out by a) clauses in OEM agreements (or even covert threats) that shut out the competition, and b) technical measures that prevent interoperability. Microsoft is known to have done both of these, which is why browser-tying itself is such a poor excuse for an antitrust lawsuit.
As far as browsers go, it's my understanding that Microsoft would have had to pay Netscape to package the browser with Windows- and they'd have been stupid not to include a browser. I realize their motives were sleazy in the extreme, but given the importance of the Web and the fundamental position of the browser, I can understand that they'd be worried about tying themselves to NSCP for a vital part of the OS.
To take the opposite side, how is Sun not trying to undercut Microsoft's office software business by giving away OpenOffice to the world?
I also thing that the DoJ could have put up a much better case if they had concentrated on the contractual issues where there were real problems and not getting side tracked into the Web browser issue.
Bingo! I never had any problem with Microsoft packaging IE along with Windows. Everyone else was doing this- Jamie Zawinksi's home page mentions something about finishing Netscape 1.0 in time for SGI to ship it with Irix 5.3. On the other hand, forcing Compaq and Apple to ship only IE on their systems is far beyond mere sleaziness, as is forcing OEMs into agreements that preclude pre-installing other OSes. Too bad the DOJ couldn't make a decent case, or find any execs with the balls to stand up to Microsoft.
The whole browser-tying issue made for some hilarious embarassments for Microsoft, but it just didn't deserve much more than a slap on the wrist. It actually bothered me, because the government appeared to be getting into the business of regulating technological advancements rather than regulating contract law etc., which enabled Microsoft to spew bullshit about "freedom to innovate" that wouldn't have lasted for a second if the main issue had been bullying PC makers. It's only a short step from preventing browser tying to requiring integrated DRM tech or mandating crypto backdoors.
Right, I'm sure the AG is just itchin' to win the votes of the Bearded Geek demographic. He's now guaranteed to have the entire MIT LCS staff out campaigning for him, and that'll really impress the elderly and Hispanics. RMS is such a political mastermind, too, and with Bradley Kuhn at his side there's no limit to how far they can influence public policy. I expect we'll see John Kerry or Ted Kennedy introduce a law requiring Windows to be GPL'd within the next few months.
I agree that P2P technologies don't have to meet the same fate. This doesn't contradict my point at all though- Napster's success was based on illegal file sharing. That's what made them so popular, which in turn brought in the VCs. Not the "promise of the Internet" or any such garbage. When legal file sharing is more popular than illegal file sharing on the major P2P networks, you may resume whining about the sad fate of Napster.
I have no sympathy for Napster. The product was innovative, the business plan was crap. It was just another friggin' dotcom that got too arrogant and fucked up, and I'm amazed that Slashdot readers have so much sympathy for it. Think about it, people: their entire existence as a corporation was built on trading other companies' IP freely over the Internet. They were going to make money off music piracy. They weren't a p2p network, so they didn't even have the excuse of not controlling their users. There may have been legitimate uses of Napster, but those weren't going to ever keep the VCs happy. Sorry, they deserved to burn, and get replaced by something better and less oriented towards IP violations.
This is not the same as the RIAA going after colleges or the Rio makers, or the MPAA and DeCSS, or all the TV networks and SonicBlue. This is like going after the people burning VCDs of Harry Potter over in East Asia.
SGI wasn't ever a "desktop" company anyway, contrary to what the parent poster said. They were always a workstation company, and Indys and O2s were intended for power users (though I've heard of them being used as office machines). They filled the same niche as the Sparcstations- the Indy and the Sparcstation 4 were introduced at about the same time.
I haven't had much trouble with the O2, but I've never been very impressed either. SGI's customer base was people who needed something twice as powerful as the best PC and were willing to pay through the nose for it. The Indigo2 cost as much as a luxury car but was worth every pennny. Now with PCs (and Linux) not sucking quite so much, and with NVidia et al. churning out cheap, fast graphics chipsets, SGI has to focus on a higher-end (and lower-volume) market. They still make great "superworkstations" and visualization systems, but they'll never be able to make another Indy.
The Cray-style systems are the one area where SGI is still going strong. We just bought an Origin 300, and even though the processors are slower for most tasks the overall architecture is far superior to anything in the PC world, and will probably remain so for years.
What continues to impress me about their machines is how well they age; I still use an Indigo2 and I'd never call it "fast" but it runs "smoother" than any other computer/OS I've ever used. And that's with a recent Irix revision- not bad for a 9-year-old computer.
Even Duesberg contends that HIV exists. The genome has been sequenced, the structures of the protease and reverse transcriptase have beeen solved. You people are more interested in dogma than science- just as bad as the creationists.
As for AZT, everyone with more than a basic knowledge of biology and chemistry understands how dangerous it is- a brute force attack on reverse transcription (and, unfortunately, normal DNA replication). It's a particularly poor example, because the nasty side effects are obvious; why don't you try arguing against the therapeutic power of, say, Crixivan or d4t instead?
If they felt so strongly about slavery, they should have had the guts to say so and frame it as a war for human rights. It's highly debatable whether Lincoln even genuinely cared about the plight of southern blacks...
Well, yeah. But it was obvious that no new slave states would be added (thus choking off the economy of slavery and ultimately dooming the system), which is (if I remember correctly) why the South seceded as soon as Lincoln was elected. I would argue here that the end justifies the means, that regardless what the motivations and/or legal bases for secession and war were, the Union absolutely should have beat the shit out of the South because slavery would have been ended. Lincoln's reasoning is disturbing, but I have absolutely no quarrel with the ultimate result.
Any system that allows something as evil as a racist holocaust because of "manifest destiny" is hopelessly flawed and should be eliminated as quickly as possible.
Except none of that was built into our constitution. Our past may be shameful, but it's not like our government explicitly permitted raping and slaughtering the natives in our Constitution. You seem to be defending- or at least apologizing for- the CSA based on legal reasoning, but it was founded based on a largely untenable principle. FYI, importation of slaves was already illegal long before the Civil War (I believe 1809), but hundreds of thousands were brought in illegally anyway.
I actually liked the iPaq even with PocketPC 2002- all sorts of things I consider crippling annoyances on Windows (over-dependence on icons and GUI) work very well there, and the familiarity of the interface is a plus. It seemed to run very smoothly, too- must have been a huge leap from CE. The screen was gorgeous on the model I tried, and the machine actually felt reasonably fast. I've never been much impressed with PalmOS handhelds (except for the awesome clamshell Clie models, and they have problems too). But I'd normally rather have my pubic hairs plucked out than use Windows for any length of time, and I loved the iPaq the first time I used it.
However, these things can get out of control in a hurry. My coworkers bought the entire PCMCIA cradle, and at that point it won't fit into any pocket outside of a large winter jacket. Then we threw in my wireless card, and we ended up having this ridiculously obese little gadget with an antenna sticking out that wrung every last bit of life out of the batteries in a few minutes. This was only partially compensated for by the coolness factor of controlling our NT PDC through Windows Terminal Services on the iPaq.
I'd once thought that high-end handhelds needed Microdrives before they became truly useful, but Flash memory is so cheap that a much more fragile hard drive would be superfluous. Still, I'd like to have one of these (or rather the Zaurus, since I'm a Unix programmer) with integrated 802.11, which would enable me to throw in all sorts of other gadgets and/or a shitload of memory and still have full connectivity.
The Confederate States of America had a constitutional government with popular democratic support, and was in a situation basically analogous to Taiwan today.
Except, as far as I know, it's illegal to own people in Taiwan and kill them if they don't work hard enough.
The Civil War was a turning point for the United States of America, turning them from a republic into an empire, with Lincoln as its first emperor.
Is "empire" supposed to be a perjorative term here? It's awfully perverse to mock our current form of government when the one we had before was partly run by racist scumbags who enslaved a large portion of the population. Reminds me of the sociopathic leftists who long for the good old days of Soviet Russia ("10 million kulaks and counting!").
Most of your other points make sense, but I'd argue any system that allows something as evil as slavery to continue because of "states' rights" is hopelessly flawed and should be eliminated as quickly as possible.
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In the screenplay, the focus is on a robot politician which another poster mentioned- Susan Calvin is the main character, but not the title character. I think it starts with his "death", but it's been a while since I've read it. Ellison worked together pieces from a bunch of these stories to form a coherent narrative.
I agree. I like Smith, but the ideal actor for this role would be "impassive" (I think that's the word) without being wooden. Smith is too light and breezy. I would have expected someone like Denzel, perhaps; I imagine Tim Robbins could pull it off as well. Maybe Ethan Hawke. They'd also have to look very "ordinary"- good looking, but could have come off an assembly line.
The other problem is that Smith is too babyfaced. I thought the main character faked aging to masquerade as a human, so the actor would need to do an Orson Welles-in-Citizen-Kane transformation. Not too many people could pull that off- and you'd probably have to have a relatively young actor do it too. I just don't think Smith would be credible as an older man.
This is sort of like getting Joe Pesci to play the role of Julius Caesar.
Exactly! The real exciting stuff is the unmanned expeditions, which have (except for the stupid equipment failures) been producing bad-ass results and much better science than the ISS. NASA runs the risk of becoming a publically-funded boondoggle- they should stick to useful science.
One of the only sane minds on this has been Robert Park of the American Physics Society. He's consistently argued very loudly against the ISS, but has also praised missions like the Pathfinder and calls the search for non-human life (e.g. polar Mars, Europa) one of the most important scientific endeavors of our time.
Frankly, I think a Europa probe would be infinitely more useful than the ISS. And I think human expeditions to Mars are pointless right now.
Also, IRIX (like every commercial Unix, I guess) is hand-tailored to a very specific set of hardware. There are many advantages over Linux in this respect. You can partition off groups of processors for certain tasks, etc. They've also got extremely high-quality compilers.
The coolest thing I've seen so far is the ability to suspend a job and save an image of the running process to disk, then come back to it later- perhaps after several months and several reboots. God, I would kill to be able to do that on Linux.
Except Sun's hardware is demonstrably inferior to most of the other stuff in its class. Sun has a few things going for it that make it the market leader, and they do make nice boxes, but they're not exactly supercomputers.
SGI has made much better computers for a long time; the Origin series blows away any Sun in terms of scalability and price/performance. SGI got into the game too late to have dotcoms lusting over its boxes, and no one will ever brag about their huge Oracle database running on an SGI. Plus, SGI always appears to be headed for the toilet. Still, their OS runs on my old Indigo and on boxes up to 1024 processors. Sun just hit 172 procs, I think. And they don't have anything like NumaFlex.
IBM's Power 4 is much the same deal, except that IBM has a better future and huge existing customer base. Alpha, for sure, and probably PA-RISC as well are superior to the UltraSparc architecture. My impression is that Sun ate up the midrange/lowend market with relatively inexpensive workstations and this enabled it to move into big iron (but I could be wrong- I haven't been doing this for very long). They didn't start making really large machines until they and SGI strip-mined Cray; SGI got the better technology out of that deal.
I used to own an ancient SparcStation LX running 2.5.1, and I loved it- it was far superior to the PCs and Macs I'd used, and it wasn't fast but it didn't feel sluggish either. I liked Solaris just fine, but it didn't have nifty features that would have made it polished as well as powerful and stable. NeXTStep and Irix were more advanced workstation OSes at the time my box was made, but didn't catch on.
We bought an Origin 300 as a file server; we'd have been happy with Sun as well- they're not bad machines, and we were looking for anything better than a crappy dual-P3 Dell box. Unfortunately, a Sun of comparable power to the Origin would have cost more than 50% more and would actually have been less powerful. Um, no.
Best motherfucking book ever, and one of the least recognized. Imagine a more literate "Star Trek" with elements of "Alien" and "Forbidden Planet" thrown in (but it predates all of them by quite some time). Though it was born out of pulp sci-fi, it transcends the vast body of what was being written then; I'd rank it up alongside "Nightfall". Vernor Vinge is the only other author I've read who makes me feel anything like I do reading Space Beagle.
Other than that, all of Philip K Dick's short stories. His novels are even better, but most of them aren't sci-fi the way Asimov or Heinlein are; I think he just wrapped them in futuristic settings. Of all of these, I'd say "Eye in the Sky" and "Ubik" are my favorites.
*sigh*
email q2tgiquo23@yahoo.com if you really care that much. (yes, it's real- I hit a bunch of keys at random in the hope that random-address spammers would miss me. didn't work.)
The idea of drugging a society into obedience probably sounds pretty reasonable to a population spooked by an isolated terrorist attack that killed almost three-quarters as many Americans as died of heart disease and cancer every day, 365 days a year.
Right, and we know how pro-drug the current administration is.
To make your analogy work, you'd have to imagine heart disease explosively wiping out a quarter of the stadium during the Superbowl all at once. (okay, perhaps that isn't so far out...)
Pardon me stating the obvious, but the way technology and the Bush administration are rolling along utterly without any reigns
Except that the supreme court, even packed with Republican appointees, has been steadily expanding your freedoms for most of the past 50 years, and many of the rights we take for granted and bitch about today were unheard of for much of our nation's history (ahem, abortion). Sure, Bush would love to change the makeup of the court, but people seem to spend more time bitching than doing anything about it.
Don't forget, too, that the (failed) Clipper Chip scheme was Clinton's fault. We also have much stronger- and 100% legal- cryptography now, that the NSA won't be able to break, and there's no practical way this can be supressed. Carnivore is essentially a joke, because my sense is that we could easily defeat it with ubiquitous strong encryption but the apps just aren't there yet.
The only thing that I'm really worried about is this program Poindexter is heading. But I'm not worried about Bush, per se, but some of the people who'll be in charge. (I didn't vote for Bush and don't like him very much, but I'm annoyed that liberals speak about him in the same tones that conservatives used to speak about Clinton.)
Actually, I thought Hard Boiled had a lot more plot than some of the incoherent rubbish Hollywood churns out, and stands up very well compared to some of the incoherent rubbish to come out of China/HK as well. Both Chow and Tony Leung are actually good actors.
The problem with most action movies is that they fall apart as soon as the shooting stops. Woo partly avoids this by rarely letting this happen, but the movie always feels more crisply plotted and engaging without feeling totally plotless. Over-the-top doesn't necessarily equate to nonsensical- very few directors (or actors) understand this.
Damn, I gotta buy that DVD.
There's already a movie similar in concept to that: Antitrust. I watch it once a week, sort of like attending mass.
This is a weird comparison to make. . . what, were you molested by a priest or something?
Casting Ryan Philipe as a genius computer programmer is probably the most offensive thing Hollywood has done to the geek population so far.
Do you work for a big pharm company?
No, and I have never had any sort of connection with any of them. I'm a programmer affiliated with the med school of a very large private university, doing computational biology (I was a molecular bio major). I do not work on anything remotely AIDS-related, nor does the group I'm in receive any AIDS-related funding, but quite a few other scientists here do.
(Actually, my university does make some money off AIDS therapies developed here too, but this pisses off a lot us anyway. It doesn't indicate ulterior motives, because like most universities they try to commercialize anything they can, and AIDS research is only a small part of that.)
even though you don't provide any evidence that Duesberg believes such a thing, so you could be making it up
It says so on that page you quoted, fairly close to the top- Duesberg tried to claim the award. This is one of the things that bugs me; the HIV-is-bogus lobby can't even agree on this. And you didn't read the page before posting it, either. Shame.
As for the genome, protein structures, etc., you could always do a Google search, but that would require an open mind. HIV-RT is (indirectly) of interest in my line of work, so I do actually know a little bit about it (and the people down the hall know quite a bit more). A few of the many, many structures are this, this,
or this, and you can find many more by simply going here and doing a search for "HIV" or "reverse transcriptase". The genomes of HIV1 and HIV2 can be found, like almost every other genome, at the NCBI here and here.
Yes, the nasty side-effects are obvious, but trying to cloud them with language such as "brute force attack on reverse transcription" only makes your argument more suspicious, particularly in light of the questions that you've failed to answer. What, exactly, are the side effects of AZT?
I don't see how that's clouding the language; you're making a big deal about the side effects but you don't appear to know much about pharmaceuticals or molecular biology. AZT is a nucleoside analogue chain terminator, meaning it replaces thymidine in nascent DNA chains but prevents further addition to the chain. I believe the problem is that it fucks with normal transcription too, and it was originally intended as an anticancer drug. I don't know anything about the actual external side effects, only the molecular ones, but I seem to recall it involves some sort of anemia. (Okay, other pages say it basically just makes you feel horribly ill.)
I'll agree AZT is a nasty drug. But you didn't answer my question: what about other therapies that do appear to be successful? Some of these can't be taken in combination with AZT, so you have to leave that out of your argument.
How do you explain it under your belief system, you know, the one that dictates that HIV==AIDS?
"Belief system"? Um, well, the evidence doesn't necessarily dictate anything- medical science isn't advanced enough. I would argue that "AIDS is (usually) cause by HIV", which is a good bit different, and I don't have an answer for what happened to those children. There are plenty of weird examples like that involving AIDS, but they don't mean existing hypotheses about the role of HIV are wrong, only that disease resistance and molecular biology are very complicated. And we knew that already. You can't use anecdotal evidence as proof of a broad generalization; it's just not statistically valid.
As a counter-example, how do you explain the 2.2 million Africans who died from AIDS last year, where they can't afford AZT and certainly aren't doing many poppers? And, for that matter, I'm not clear on how you can cite the children as an example when you believe they were misdiagnosed in the first place. Did they have HIV and not get AIDS- either because of weird biology (my argument) or HIV's harmlessness (Duesberg's argument)- or did they not have HIV in the first place? If the latter, does this mean everyone who's tested positive for HIV does not have any such virus in them?
So, the first problem here is that all you're able to do is nitpick. The second problem is that your hypotheses, to be correct, require that there be a vast conspiracy on the part of the news media, the medical establishment, and the pharmaceutical companies to fabricate AIDS so that GlaxoSmithKline can boost its revenues. It's one thing to claim that Gallo acted inappropriately, but to extend this to accuse a vast number of AIDS researchers of falsifying data is sort of absurd. You clearly haven't even bothered to do the most cursory sort of investigation, and you seem to have virtually no knowledge of biology beyond what you've read on the Virus Myth web page. And I'm a bit peeved that you keep accusing everyone of working for pharmaceutical companies- heck, the assholes didn't even read my resume when I sent it to them last spring.
Here's a challenge: read this from beginning to end and see if you understand it.
So there's the rub... what's the difference between advancing an operating system, and using it to undercut other people's businesses?
Good question, and I don't know the answer. However, I'd argue that Microsoft has the right to copy anyone it wants, barring outright IP infringement (and, sometimes, even there- it's not like the opensource community doesn't copy everything to come out of the Windows world too). Should Microsoft have been prevented from implementing TCP/IP? Should they have bought Trumpet outright instead? My feeling is that in these cases, let the best product win. What I object to is forcing the competition out by a) clauses in OEM agreements (or even covert threats) that shut out the competition, and b) technical measures that prevent interoperability. Microsoft is known to have done both of these, which is why browser-tying itself is such a poor excuse for an antitrust lawsuit.
As far as browsers go, it's my understanding that Microsoft would have had to pay Netscape to package the browser with Windows- and they'd have been stupid not to include a browser. I realize their motives were sleazy in the extreme, but given the importance of the Web and the fundamental position of the browser, I can understand that they'd be worried about tying themselves to NSCP for a vital part of the OS.
To take the opposite side, how is Sun not trying to undercut Microsoft's office software business by giving away OpenOffice to the world?
I also thing that the DoJ could have put up a much better case if they had concentrated on the contractual issues where there were real problems and not getting side tracked into the Web browser issue.
Bingo! I never had any problem with Microsoft packaging IE along with Windows. Everyone else was doing this- Jamie Zawinksi's home page mentions something about finishing Netscape 1.0 in time for SGI to ship it with Irix 5.3. On the other hand, forcing Compaq and Apple to ship only IE on their systems is far beyond mere sleaziness, as is forcing OEMs into agreements that preclude pre-installing other OSes. Too bad the DOJ couldn't make a decent case, or find any execs with the balls to stand up to Microsoft.
The whole browser-tying issue made for some hilarious embarassments for Microsoft, but it just didn't deserve much more than a slap on the wrist. It actually bothered me, because the government appeared to be getting into the business of regulating technological advancements rather than regulating contract law etc., which enabled Microsoft to spew bullshit about "freedom to innovate" that wouldn't have lasted for a second if the main issue had been bullying PC makers. It's only a short step from preventing browser tying to requiring integrated DRM tech or mandating crypto backdoors.
Right, I'm sure the AG is just itchin' to win the votes of the Bearded Geek demographic. He's now guaranteed to have the entire MIT LCS staff out campaigning for him, and that'll really impress the elderly and Hispanics. RMS is such a political mastermind, too, and with Bradley Kuhn at his side there's no limit to how far they can influence public policy. I expect we'll see John Kerry or Ted Kennedy introduce a law requiring Windows to be GPL'd within the next few months.
I agree that P2P technologies don't have to meet the same fate. This doesn't contradict my point at all though- Napster's success was based on illegal file sharing. That's what made them so popular, which in turn brought in the VCs. Not the "promise of the Internet" or any such garbage. When legal file sharing is more popular than illegal file sharing on the major P2P networks, you may resume whining about the sad fate of Napster.
I have no sympathy for Napster. The product was innovative, the business plan was crap. It was just another friggin' dotcom that got too arrogant and fucked up, and I'm amazed that Slashdot readers have so much sympathy for it. Think about it, people: their entire existence as a corporation was built on trading other companies' IP freely over the Internet. They were going to make money off music piracy. They weren't a p2p network, so they didn't even have the excuse of not controlling their users. There may have been legitimate uses of Napster, but those weren't going to ever keep the VCs happy. Sorry, they deserved to burn, and get replaced by something better and less oriented towards IP violations.
This is not the same as the RIAA going after colleges or the Rio makers, or the MPAA and DeCSS, or all the TV networks and SonicBlue. This is like going after the people burning VCDs of Harry Potter over in East Asia.
SGI wasn't ever a "desktop" company anyway, contrary to what the parent poster said. They were always a workstation company, and Indys and O2s were intended for power users (though I've heard of them being used as office machines). They filled the same niche as the Sparcstations- the Indy and the Sparcstation 4 were introduced at about the same time.
I haven't had much trouble with the O2, but I've never been very impressed either. SGI's customer base was people who needed something twice as powerful as the best PC and were willing to pay through the nose for it. The Indigo2 cost as much as a luxury car but was worth every pennny. Now with PCs (and Linux) not sucking quite so much, and with NVidia et al. churning out cheap, fast graphics chipsets, SGI has to focus on a higher-end (and lower-volume) market. They still make great "superworkstations" and visualization systems, but they'll never be able to make another Indy.
The Cray-style systems are the one area where SGI is still going strong. We just bought an Origin 300, and even though the processors are slower for most tasks the overall architecture is far superior to anything in the PC world, and will probably remain so for years.
What continues to impress me about their machines is how well they age; I still use an Indigo2 and I'd never call it "fast" but it runs "smoother" than any other computer/OS I've ever used. And that's with a recent Irix revision- not bad for a 9-year-old computer.
AIDS research is the single most well-funded disease research in human history.
I find this dubious, and the NIH spends vastly more on cancer research: see their official funding page.
HIV has not been isolated.
Even Duesberg contends that HIV exists. The genome has been sequenced, the structures of the protease and reverse transcriptase have beeen solved. You people are more interested in dogma than science- just as bad as the creationists.
As for AZT, everyone with more than a basic knowledge of biology and chemistry understands how dangerous it is- a brute force attack on reverse transcription (and, unfortunately, normal DNA replication). It's a particularly poor example, because the nasty side effects are obvious; why don't you try arguing against the therapeutic power of, say, Crixivan or d4t instead?
Go tell that to the East Africans. Better yet, go spend a week barebacking in San Francisco and tell us how you feel in a few years.
If they felt so strongly about slavery, they should have had the guts to say so and frame it as a war for human rights. It's highly debatable whether Lincoln even genuinely cared about the plight of southern blacks...
Well, yeah. But it was obvious that no new slave states would be added (thus choking off the economy of slavery and ultimately dooming the system), which is (if I remember correctly) why the South seceded as soon as Lincoln was elected. I would argue here that the end justifies the means, that regardless what the motivations and/or legal bases for secession and war were, the Union absolutely should have beat the shit out of the South because slavery would have been ended. Lincoln's reasoning is disturbing, but I have absolutely no quarrel with the ultimate result.
Any system that allows something as evil as a racist holocaust because of "manifest destiny" is hopelessly flawed and should be eliminated as quickly as possible.
Except none of that was built into our constitution. Our past may be shameful, but it's not like our government explicitly permitted raping and slaughtering the natives in our Constitution. You seem to be defending- or at least apologizing for- the CSA based on legal reasoning, but it was founded based on a largely untenable principle. FYI, importation of slaves was already illegal long before the Civil War (I believe 1809), but hundreds of thousands were brought in illegally anyway.
I actually liked the iPaq even with PocketPC 2002- all sorts of things I consider crippling annoyances on Windows (over-dependence on icons and GUI) work very well there, and the familiarity of the interface is a plus. It seemed to run very smoothly, too- must have been a huge leap from CE. The screen was gorgeous on the model I tried, and the machine actually felt reasonably fast. I've never been much impressed with PalmOS handhelds (except for the awesome clamshell Clie models, and they have problems too). But I'd normally rather have my pubic hairs plucked out than use Windows for any length of time, and I loved the iPaq the first time I used it.
However, these things can get out of control in a hurry. My coworkers bought the entire PCMCIA cradle, and at that point it won't fit into any pocket outside of a large winter jacket. Then we threw in my wireless card, and we ended up having this ridiculously obese little gadget with an antenna sticking out that wrung every last bit of life out of the batteries in a few minutes. This was only partially compensated for by the coolness factor of controlling our NT PDC through Windows Terminal Services on the iPaq.
I'd once thought that high-end handhelds needed Microdrives before they became truly useful, but Flash memory is so cheap that a much more fragile hard drive would be superfluous. Still, I'd like to have one of these (or rather the Zaurus, since I'm a Unix programmer) with integrated 802.11, which would enable me to throw in all sorts of other gadgets and/or a shitload of memory and still have full connectivity.
The Confederate States of America had a constitutional government with popular democratic support, and was in a situation basically analogous to Taiwan today.
Except, as far as I know, it's illegal to own people in Taiwan and kill them if they don't work hard enough.
The Civil War was a turning point for the United States of America, turning them from a republic into an empire, with Lincoln as its first emperor.
Is "empire" supposed to be a perjorative term here? It's awfully perverse to mock our current form of government when the one we had before was partly run by racist scumbags who enslaved a large portion of the population. Reminds me of the sociopathic leftists who long for the good old days of Soviet Russia ("10 million kulaks and counting!").
Most of your other points make sense, but I'd argue any system that allows something as evil as slavery to continue because of "states' rights" is hopelessly flawed and should be eliminated as quickly as possible.
Sorry for replying as an Anonymous Coward
You should be apologizing for posting as "Ann Coulter" instead. Eeeeeeew.