Does HIV actually cause AIDS? The human immune system is a chemical and virus killing machine. I can't imagine a worse fate for a virus than to go up against 520 million years of vertebrate evolution. And yet the HIV virus does this and more - it actually disables and removes the immune system with surgical precision.
Wow. And it evolved within the last twenty years. And it only infects gays and black people. And it doesn't kill. And it's easily cleaned up with bleach. And it removes stains from carpets, takes the kids to school, and does your taxes by February.
Why cure HIV? It seems to do just about everything.
>This mystical force is passed from one individual to another through body >fluids... why don't we just call the mystical force HIV?
Because this "mystical force" isn't passed from one person to another. AIDS isn't infectious. At all. Neither is diabetes, cancer, arthritis, obesity, heart disease, cirrhosis, or Alzheimer's.
That's the gaping flaw in your idea. You haven't shown any evidence that AIDS is transmissible. Even the government admits you can only get it from gay ass fucking. A gay assfucking virus? You actually believe this?
His ignorance isn't staggering, it's confusing. Yes, HIV is harmless. Those of us who read medical papers can agree on that much. But if HIV is harmless, why do we have to stop having sex? The OP refuses to follow his own thought to the logical conclusion: that you cannot get AIDS from sex and nobody on Earth ever has.
* Pounding the body with massive doses of intoxicants, most notably nitrite poppers (anyone up for gay anal sex?)
* Highly toxic anti-viral medication, such as AZT, which is sure to cause death if ingested.
* Malnutrition, or the shutting down of the body's systems though sheer neglect, mostly seen in Africa.
In other words, when you consider that statistically, all early AIDS patients were gay, most of them used "batteries of recreational drugs" before sex, all were told they were going to die, all were given toxic AZT, all died, and that poor Africans have nothing to do with this, then you can neatly explain the AIDS "epidemic" in you armchair without even hitting reload.
Problem is, AZT and other retrovirals cost $25,000 per year, and if you explain away the AIDS epidemic, then you destroy everyone's profit and research incentives. Meanwhile, the gay community is complicit in this deception, because no gay man wants to admit that he is a drug addict or gave the disease to himself.
Remember Richard Nixon's "War on Cancer?" This was a viral research program that concluded in the late 1970's with nothing to show for its efforts. Except that a few years later, along came HIV and a massive new round of research funding. Convenient?
As the OP says, debunking HIV/AIDS takes a lot of reading. But that's also kind of the point: the evidence against HIV is so massive that even paraphrasing it would leave you breathless.
>most digitizing systems are flaky. They sort of work. >If you don't mind spending thousands of dollars, you can get clean audio
What about a $300 sound card like M-Audio with breakout box and 1/4" plugs? Or is this the "quite expensive but still consumer-grade piece of equipment that...simply stopped delivering?"
Actually, M-Audio and similar cards with 1/4" plugs would seem to fall under the category of pro gear. I understand everything you are saying about crippled consumer hardware but maybe the problem is that you've realized you need pro gear but you still haven't bought any.
Personally I use a 4-head stereo vcr for master recordings and I digitize later on by playing the tape. That's because you're right, pro digital gear is expensive - I've never dared shop for it. Maybe you should build a Shuttle box (minimal footprint desktop) with an M-audio card and use the laptop as a display only. These Shuttle boxes are pretty damn small and as always, you can build a dream PC usually under $1000.
Keep in mind what you are asking for:
* Digital sampling * Digital copy * High performance * Reliable * Affordable * Portable * Easy to use
You're asking for everything. Certainly, even if you had the money, a consumer-grade solution would only do half of these things. I'm not surprised you settled on a laptop. Portability and ease of use seem to be high on your list, and those things are perhaps the most difficult to obtain in a recording environment that usually includes microphones, stands, mixers, pre-amplifiers, tape decks, monitors, and cords for optimum control and sound quality.
The problem with your view of the world is not copyright, it is the fact that artists have signed over their copyright to the companies they work for. In other words, if artists HAD copyright then you wouldn't be pissed off!
Well if certain artists don't want to go on tour, then they need to sell something of value in the marketplace, like a high-quality recording that can't be duplicated with consumer hardware. The real tragedy of the music industry is not ripping off mp3s, or DRM laws, or paying $17 for a Beatles CD. The tragedy is paying $17 for a CD from a washed-up act like Ratt or Devo.
In other words, all of this started going downhill when people were convinced that a $0.02 coaster was "a new audio format." CD's and MP3's don't sound good because they don't cost anything to manufacture.On the other hand, if bands sold products, and those products differed in price based on supply (quality) and demand (popularity), then there would not be an argument.
It's stunningly simple. But like I said, people have been paying essentially nothing for recordings (on the manufacturing side) since the invention of the CD, so creating a marketplace for music products is something that few of us have ever imagined.
Would you be willing to pay a small fee each month if you could get all the music you want and have no legal liability?
I do and it's not small. My cable provider charges me $50/mo. I get all the music I want and I have no legal liability. This fee probably exceeds what I was spending on CD's prior to the internet, and it exceeds all my other monthly bills including electricity, gas, phone, and tv.
Yep. And you should realize that like most troll moderations, it's wrong. A troll post is an attempt to deceive people through eagerness or clever fact-altering. The Oprah book club scandal A Million Little Pieces is a perfect example of a troll. Your post was a repeat of a lame joke enjoyed by trolls, which itself is not a troll, but simply "-1 Redundant" or even "+1 Funny." After all, Funny is completely subjective and you can riff Simpsons all day long and get +1 Funny's every step of the way.
The Troll moderation itself is a bit of a joke, because if moderators could properly discern a troll, then the trolls wouldn't have owned Slashdot for four straight years. For most of Slashdot's history since T(HG)SB (April 2002), 70% of posts were trolls and 20% of stories themselves were trolls (rough estimate). You can tell the heyday of trolling is over because comments on stories are back down to ~200 like they were in 1999-2000.
Then teenagers would start pawning their iShuttles to their coke dealers, and magazines would write glowing pieces about the new culture of iShuttle downloads, when in reality they are all piled up in one kid's drawer and everyone else is looking for razors and straws.
3. Great ability to attract outstanding people to work with him.
Unlike retail, office or construction work, engineers typically enjoy being over-stressed. This isn't Jobs strength, it's a flaw of everyone else around him. You don't get a lot of points for being the chest-beating alpha male (Jobs) at the asylum (Apple).
4. If he respects you, he will interact with you and modify his ideas
That's because none of his ideas are realistic.
5. The damn guy knows how to make money!
Steve Jobs reminds me a lot of Philip Greenspun of ArsDigita fame. You could say many of these things about Philip too...vision, authority, culture, etc. But what do Phil Greenspun, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates all have in common?
* All 3 tried to program a computer. * All 3 failed. * Then they met legions of nerds to do the work for them.
>pressing the correct one is often a simple matter of intuition -- >it's probably the biggest button, the one that's directly under your thumb in its natural position.
Since the GameCube buttons are all different sizes, only ONE of the buttons is the "biggest button," meaning that all the others are basically vestigal (useless).
>They failed to mention how absolutely crappy the N64 controller is. I've never met ANYONE who found it comfortable.
The N64 controller started making the buttons different shapes and sizes, for example the small yellow camera buttons that would have been full-sized on anyone else's system. Thereby making the controller perfect for Mario64 and useless for SF/MK/KI (did N64 even release any fighting games?) The next step was the GameCube controller, which made so little sense that I put it down after 20 minutes and never returned.
I see Nintendo's logic that different button shapes would be easier to remember, but it's actually not.
>The article confuses "analog" and "digital", >claiming that the Atari 2600 joystick was not "analog" "because it only had 8 directions".
So was the atari joystick analog or not? I doubt it. I know it was right-handed though.
> The NES cross pad was hardly looked at as an improvement at the time.
For some reason it's on the left side.
As far as I can tell from browsing arcade images, most arcades prior to 1985 had two sets of buttons on each side of the joystick. Look at the the Atari 2600 joystick, the red button is on the upper LEFT. Intellivision and Coleco controllers both had pads up top, allowing ambidextrous use, and Coleco had fire buttons on *both* sides.
I was only 10 when NES came out, but I remember being shocked at the TV commercials. The only parallel I can think of for playing with the left hand is driving a car.
My favorite controller:
* Coleco Action Controller - Big joystick with *4* color-coded fire buttons, 12-button keypad, a comfy hand grip AND scroll wheel! Playing baseball with a throw button for each base was....a revelation.
>Marijuana does lessen intelligence and damage neurology I believe... >but for an autistic person, that also has the effect of making us human.
Mmmm...take a step further and realize that your definition of "intelligence" is circular, based on being autistic. My friend in college told me the same thing, "Oh, now that I've smoked pot, I don't score as well on exams." Well if you still care about your exam scores, then you haven't smoked nearly enough.
Mmmm...$15 for 400 pieces of paper, those are razor thin margins to be sure. Last I checked a ream of paper was $2.99 and laser toner is about a penny a page. And that's if I do it. Maybe they should just put the books online for free and let us bear the costs of printing? It would certainly be cheaper.
The licences are needed by any DJ who wants to store digital copies of sound recordings to use when playing in public. This includes legally-purchased downloads, which are normally licensed only for personal use, as well as copies of tracks from records or CDs.
According to this, copying anything to your computer invokes the license requirement. I find this pretty bizarre; I have an extensive vinyl collection and nowhere on any of the labels does it say what I can or can't do with my music.
He said the £200 charge was "reasonable", adding: "You don't actually have to DJ using a laptop. You can use vinyl, you can use CD, so we're saying that if it's not worth your while spending £200 then don't do it."
Exactly. Now if you use vinyl tracks recorded to a laptop, that invokes the license requirement. CD's are already a digital sampling of analog music, so wouldn't the "digitization fee" be included with purchase? How do you need a license to digitize something that's already digital?
Well if you think banning Wikipedia is bad, you should know that China has a history of civil rights abuses, including domestic spying, rigged elections, suspension of habeas corpus, torture, military invasion, and a media monopoly that prevents dissenters from appearing on television.
As usual, this pro business article contains selective logic: namely, that the music business needs to grow, every quarter, in perpetuity, in order for it to exist. Apparently being down 0.44% for the quarter is considered a disaster of technology-negating proportions.
I guess now we know what the definition of "is" is.
Claim: An episode of the popular kid's TV show Pokemon caused over 600 young children in Japan to have epileptic attacks.
Origin: After 618 Japanese children reportedly experienced seizures from viewing that December 1997 episode of Pocket Monsters and were rushed to hospital, the TV show was shut down for several months
Status: False.
Go figure. I guess the people at Snopes don't read their own copy.
This post is incorrectly modded...it was the first post, so how the hell can it be a troll? I'm struggling to figure out how the moderator feels he was deceived.
Slashdot Mirror
If we can't replace human beings with machines, then what's the point of being alive?
>E.g. HIV causes AIDS?
Does HIV actually cause AIDS? The human immune system is a chemical and virus killing machine. I can't imagine a worse fate for a virus than to go up against 520 million years of vertebrate evolution. And yet the HIV virus does this and more - it actually disables and removes the immune system with surgical precision.
Wow. And it evolved within the last twenty years. And it only infects gays and black people. And it doesn't kill. And it's easily cleaned up with bleach. And it removes stains from carpets, takes the kids to school, and does your taxes by February.
Why cure HIV? It seems to do just about everything.
You can't honestly believe that African diseases were classified as "AIDS" ten years ago.
>This mystical force is passed from one individual to another through body
>fluids... why don't we just call the mystical force HIV?
Because this "mystical force" isn't passed from one person to another. AIDS isn't infectious. At all. Neither is diabetes, cancer, arthritis, obesity, heart disease, cirrhosis, or Alzheimer's.
That's the gaping flaw in your idea. You haven't shown any evidence that AIDS is transmissible. Even the government admits you can only get it from gay ass fucking. A gay assfucking virus? You actually believe this?
His ignorance isn't staggering, it's confusing. Yes, HIV is harmless. Those of us who read medical papers can agree on that much. But if HIV is harmless, why do we have to stop having sex? The OP refuses to follow his own thought to the logical conclusion: that you cannot get AIDS from sex and nobody on Earth ever has.
Thank God I'm not the only one. My own wake-up call happened when I stumbled on Peter Duesberg's paper The Chemical Bases of the Various AIDS Epidemics: Recreational Drugs, Anti-viral Chemotherapy and Malnutrition. (pdf). In other words, destruction of the body's immune system is reasonably caused by:
* Pounding the body with massive doses of intoxicants, most notably nitrite poppers (anyone up for gay anal sex?)
* Highly toxic anti-viral medication, such as AZT, which is sure to cause death if ingested.
* Malnutrition, or the shutting down of the body's systems though sheer neglect, mostly seen in Africa.
In other words, when you consider that statistically, all early AIDS patients were gay, most of them used "batteries of recreational drugs" before sex, all were told they were going to die, all were given toxic AZT, all died, and that poor Africans have nothing to do with this, then you can neatly explain the AIDS "epidemic" in you armchair without even hitting reload.
Problem is, AZT and other retrovirals cost $25,000 per year, and if you explain away the AIDS epidemic, then you destroy everyone's profit and research incentives. Meanwhile, the gay community is complicit in this deception, because no gay man wants to admit that he is a drug addict or gave the disease to himself.
Remember Richard Nixon's "War on Cancer?" This was a viral research program that concluded in the late 1970's with nothing to show for its efforts. Except that a few years later, along came HIV and a massive new round of research funding. Convenient?
As the OP says, debunking HIV/AIDS takes a lot of reading. But that's also kind of the point: the evidence against HIV is so massive that even paraphrasing it would leave you breathless.
>most digitizing systems are flaky. They sort of work.
>If you don't mind spending thousands of dollars, you can get clean audio
What about a $300 sound card like M-Audio with breakout box and 1/4" plugs? Or is this the "quite expensive but still consumer-grade piece of equipment that...simply stopped delivering?"
Actually, M-Audio and similar cards with 1/4" plugs would seem to fall under the category of pro gear. I understand everything you are saying about crippled consumer hardware but maybe the problem is that you've realized you need pro gear but you still haven't bought any.
Personally I use a 4-head stereo vcr for master recordings and I digitize later on by playing the tape. That's because you're right, pro digital gear is expensive - I've never dared shop for it. Maybe you should build a Shuttle box (minimal footprint desktop) with an M-audio card and use the laptop as a display only. These Shuttle boxes are pretty damn small and as always, you can build a dream PC usually under $1000.
Keep in mind what you are asking for:
* Digital sampling
* Digital copy
* High performance
* Reliable
* Affordable
* Portable
* Easy to use
You're asking for everything. Certainly, even if you had the money, a consumer-grade solution would only do half of these things. I'm not surprised you settled on a laptop. Portability and ease of use seem to be high on your list, and those things are perhaps the most difficult to obtain in a recording environment that usually includes microphones, stands, mixers, pre-amplifiers, tape decks, monitors, and cords for optimum control and sound quality.
The problem with your view of the world is not copyright, it is the fact that artists have signed over their copyright to the companies they work for. In other words, if artists HAD copyright then you wouldn't be pissed off!
Well if certain artists don't want to go on tour, then they need to sell something of value in the marketplace, like a high-quality recording that can't be duplicated with consumer hardware. The real tragedy of the music industry is not ripping off mp3s, or DRM laws, or paying $17 for a Beatles CD. The tragedy is paying $17 for a CD from a washed-up act like Ratt or Devo.
In other words, all of this started going downhill when people were convinced that a $0.02 coaster was "a new audio format." CD's and MP3's don't sound good because they don't cost anything to manufacture. On the other hand, if bands sold products, and those products differed in price based on supply (quality) and demand (popularity), then there would not be an argument.
It's stunningly simple. But like I said, people have been paying essentially nothing for recordings (on the manufacturing side) since the invention of the CD, so creating a marketplace for music products is something that few of us have ever imagined.
Would you be willing to pay a small fee each month if you could get all the music you want and have no legal liability?
I do and it's not small. My cable provider charges me $50/mo. I get all the music I want and I have no legal liability. This fee probably exceeds what I was spending on CD's prior to the internet, and it exceeds all my other monthly bills including electricity, gas, phone, and tv.
Yep. And you should realize that like most troll moderations, it's wrong. A troll post is an attempt to deceive people through eagerness or clever fact-altering. The Oprah book club scandal A Million Little Pieces is a perfect example of a troll. Your post was a repeat of a lame joke enjoyed by trolls, which itself is not a troll, but simply "-1 Redundant" or even "+1 Funny." After all, Funny is completely subjective and you can riff Simpsons all day long and get +1 Funny's every step of the way.
The Troll moderation itself is a bit of a joke, because if moderators could properly discern a troll, then the trolls wouldn't have owned Slashdot for four straight years. For most of Slashdot's history since T(HG)SB (April 2002), 70% of posts were trolls and 20% of stories themselves were trolls (rough estimate). You can tell the heyday of trolling is over because comments on stories are back down to ~200 like they were in 1999-2000.
Then teenagers would start pawning their iShuttles to their coke dealers, and magazines would write glowing pieces about the new culture of iShuttle downloads, when in reality they are all piled up in one kid's drawer and everyone else is looking for razors and straws.
1. Incredibly creative and has great vision.
Failed engineer.
2. Absolute perfectionist.
Autistic.
3. Great ability to attract outstanding people to work with him.
Unlike retail, office or construction work, engineers typically enjoy being over-stressed. This isn't Jobs strength, it's a flaw of everyone else around him. You don't get a lot of points for being the chest-beating alpha male (Jobs) at the asylum (Apple).
4. If he respects you, he will interact with you and modify his ideas
That's because none of his ideas are realistic.
5. The damn guy knows how to make money!
Steve Jobs reminds me a lot of Philip Greenspun of ArsDigita fame. You could say many of these things about Philip too...vision, authority, culture, etc. But what do Phil Greenspun, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates all have in common?
* All 3 tried to program a computer.
* All 3 failed.
* Then they met legions of nerds to do the work for them.
>pressing the correct one is often a simple matter of intuition --
>it's probably the biggest button, the one that's directly under your thumb in its natural position.
Since the GameCube buttons are all different sizes, only ONE of the buttons is the "biggest button," meaning that all the others are basically vestigal (useless).
>They failed to mention how absolutely crappy the N64 controller is. I've never met ANYONE who found it comfortable.
The N64 controller started making the buttons different shapes and sizes, for example the small yellow camera buttons that would have been full-sized on anyone else's system. Thereby making the controller perfect for Mario64 and useless for SF/MK/KI (did N64 even release any fighting games?) The next step was the GameCube controller, which made so little sense that I put it down after 20 minutes and never returned.
I see Nintendo's logic that different button shapes would be easier to remember, but it's actually not.
>The article confuses "analog" and "digital",
>claiming that the Atari 2600 joystick was not "analog" "because it only had 8 directions".
So was the atari joystick analog or not? I doubt it. I know it was right-handed though.
> The NES cross pad was hardly looked at as an improvement at the time.
For some reason it's on the left side.
As far as I can tell from browsing arcade images, most arcades prior to 1985 had two sets of buttons on each side of the joystick. Look at the the Atari 2600 joystick, the red button is on the upper LEFT. Intellivision and Coleco controllers both had pads up top, allowing ambidextrous use, and Coleco had fire buttons on *both* sides.
I was only 10 when NES came out, but I remember being shocked at the TV commercials. The only parallel I can think of for playing with the left hand is driving a car.
My favorite controller:
* Coleco Action Controller - Big joystick with *4* color-coded fire buttons, 12-button keypad, a comfy hand grip AND scroll wheel! Playing baseball with a throw button for each base was....a revelation.
>the chunky palm grips have been copied by pretty much all other pads since.
Yep. The Playstation controller was the same as the SNES controller except for the palm grips, which have become standard issue since then.
>Marijuana does lessen intelligence and damage neurology I believe...
>but for an autistic person, that also has the effect of making us human.
Mmmm...take a step further and realize that your definition of "intelligence" is circular, based on being autistic. My friend in college told me the same thing, "Oh, now that I've smoked pot, I don't score as well on exams." Well if you still care about your exam scores, then you haven't smoked nearly enough.
Mmmm...$15 for 400 pieces of paper, those are razor thin margins to be sure. Last I checked a ream of paper was $2.99 and laser toner is about a penny a page. And that's if I do it. Maybe they should just put the books online for free and let us bear the costs of printing? It would certainly be cheaper.
According to this, copying anything to your computer invokes the license requirement. I find this pretty bizarre; I have an extensive vinyl collection and nowhere on any of the labels does it say what I can or can't do with my music.
Exactly. Now if you use vinyl tracks recorded to a laptop, that invokes the license requirement. CD's are already a digital sampling of analog music, so wouldn't the "digitization fee" be included with purchase? How do you need a license to digitize something that's already digital?
Well if you think banning Wikipedia is bad, you should know that China has a history of civil rights abuses, including domestic spying, rigged elections, suspension of habeas corpus, torture, military invasion, and a media monopoly that prevents dissenters from appearing on television.
Thank God we live in America!
The End of Sex.
As usual, this pro business article contains selective logic: namely, that the music business needs to grow, every quarter, in perpetuity, in order for it to exist. Apparently being down 0.44% for the quarter is considered a disaster of technology-negating proportions.
I guess now we know what the definition of "is" is.
This is my favorite one from snopes:
Claim: An episode of the popular kid's TV show Pokemon caused over 600 young children in Japan to have epileptic attacks.
Origin: After 618 Japanese children reportedly experienced seizures from viewing that December 1997 episode of Pocket Monsters and were rushed to hospital, the TV show was shut down for several months
Status: False.
Go figure. I guess the people at Snopes don't read their own copy.
This post is incorrectly modded...it was the first post, so how the hell can it be a troll? I'm struggling to figure out how the moderator feels he was deceived.