That's one of my problems with Linux. Ubuntu has been out for what--less than 4 years, and popular for less than that? Before Ubuntu was the big thing, it was Gentoo. Etc etc, and before that, Redhat. (ignoring, Fedora, Suse, etc and of course the parent distro of Ubuntu--debian--has been around forever as well)...before that, slackware. And so on.Z
While Gentoo might have been the distro with the most buzz before Ubuntu, the audience for Gentoo was never the same as the audience for Ubuntu. Each has had its share of buzz, but for totally different reasons.
So far Ubuntu seems to have decent staying power (and most importantly--*one* man with money behind it). It just seems crazy to me that Red Hat which virtually WAS linux for the first decade of Linux has been relegated to near irrelevance?
Irrelevance? By what standard? Red Hat has a market capitalization of $1.64 billion. You think they got it from their rich uncle?
The reasons you don't hear a lot of buzz about Red Hat on Slashdot are A.) Red Hat is well-established, produces a stable, reliable, quality product -- and that kind of thing doesn't make the news; and B.) most of the people reading Slashdot are not Red Hat customers. You can't fiddle around with Fedora and decide "Red Hat is irrelevant." Talk to me when you actually pay for a Red Hat Enterprise support contract, then tell me you're going to give it up and go back to Gentoo. I believe if you investigate you'll find that Red Hat enjoys a quite healthy popularity -- in the markets it cares about.
The SCO Group is a descendant company of the Santa Cruz Operation, an early Unix vendor.
Not exactly. The SCO Group was formerly Caldera. It bought some Unix assets from the Santa Cruz Operation, but they are not really the same company. After selling off its Unix division, the Santa Cruz Operation went on to become Tarantella, which is now owned by Sun.
It's very easy to suddenly whip out the discrimination card
I believe that was the GP's point.
Seriously -- my mom worked in human resources for many years (not her proudest moment), and bringing up age is not something you want to do in an interview. Another good way to get slapped with a lawsuit is to tell someone who is calling for a reference that the candidate in question was fired from your company for stealing -- even if he was. If you don't understand these things, I would seriously suggest requesting a sit-down briefing with your own HR department and have them fill you in on the labor laws in your state.
Hard to argue with HP for being pissed off about this one. The PC market is cutthroat, so making an investment in higher priced integrated and/or discrete graphics chipsets, only to discover at the last moment that your competition has just been given the green light to undersell you with relaxed requirements has got to hurt.
Is that what HP is claiming? That it was forced to add higher-end components to be able to ship Vista machines, only to be undercut by competitors later?
If that's the case, then why on Earth did the HP 2133 Mini-Note, HP's (rather pricey) entry into the "netbook" market, ship with Vista? It's not like they went all-out to add high-end components to it. To my knowledge, it is the only netbook that does ship with Vista, and Vista is its biggest Achilles heel. You cannot activate Aero Glass on it, so forget about that. You probably don't want to activate most of the gee-whiz Vista desktop features, because the Via processor is really poky. Its Windows Experience index is 1.7, fer chrissakes, and that's because of the processor rating. Why, HP? Why??
Re:Nope, sorry
on
Ender in Exile
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· Score: 2, Insightful
My money and time is best spent elsewhere.
cf. L. Ron Hubbard's science fiction.
I don't know how much of Orson Scott Card's money goes toward directly supporting his political causes, but we know that it is at least possible for money spent on science fiction books to go toward agendas that we might otherwise oppose completely.
Dangerous, indeed. I actually believe that sometimes one has a civic duty to step up and argue this sort of thing.
The reason these kinds of ideas spread is because they go unchallenged. Sometimes people don't know how to address the specific talking points. Sometimes they think the idea sounds crazy and they just want to tell the other person to fuck off. But as long as an idea is left to float in the air, there's always the chance that someone else might listen and have a seed planted in their brain.
The idea that drugs cause AIDS is insidious because it sounds plausible. Whatever you may think of drug use -- right or wrong -- even the most unabashed recreational drug user will tell you that heavy drug use can be pretty rough on your body.
So it starts with a simple idea. "The math doesn't add up; there's no way that the gas chambers in Auschwitz could have been used to kill as many Jews as they say." Sounds interesting. Remind me to look up the figures sometime. But as soon as the door is opened, sooner or later other ideas get let in. "Isn't it true, after all, that in the late 1930s Jewish activist groups were inciting political unrest in Germany?"
If you look at the world political stage, HIV/AIDS is very much a human rights issue. In Africa, corrupt politicians have used arguments very similar to the GP's as tools of oppression. The same arguments can be used to deny basic human rights to entire segments of the U.S. population, as well -- and that would suit some people just fine. It falls to right-thinking, compassionate people to nip it in the bud.
Me: Ah, that must be it. I left at 6. So what's up?
Is that so hard? In my experiences, bosses might expect all kinds of things, but rational people generally have a pretty good grip on what is reasonable to expect and what is not -- unless you give them other ideas.
Having said that, I now carry a personal BlackBerry phone. It hasn't failed yet but it's not exactly bug free. If you think Microsoft products are poor quality, you should experience what RIM calls "release" software. Nothing that pulling the battery and waiting a few minutes for the thing to reinitialize won't fix, though.
I'll second that. I've found BlackBerry Forums to be invaluable, not only for locating the latest firmware versions (whichever carrier may have them) but also for letting everybody know which ones are flaky as hell and to be avoided.
I replaced a rock-sold stable but physically damaged Pearl 8100 with a brand-new Pearl 8120 and I had to pull the battery from the new phone about four times in the first week. It's stable now, but only after two firmware updates.
I can't find any documentation of that. Got a citation to share? You may be talking about older models that relied more on WAP and RIM's private network, rather than the new IP/WiFi enabled ones.
Even if RIM has been against third-party VoIP apps on the handsets, however, T-Mobile offers UMA service on the latest BlackBerry models. If you're within WiFi range, your calls go over the WiFi instead of the cellular network. Normally these calls still get counted against your standard minutes, but if you pay an extra fee per month, WiFi usage is unlimited.
Regardless of who bought it, which would you spend more time protecting? Your personal entertainment device that lets you listen to music etc. or the virtual servant bell which forces you to check your email regularly out of hours and which few people use for personal calls.
In all fairness, modern BlackBerry handsets do audio and video. Mine even has a 3.5mm headphone jack. Many also come equipped with cameras (although people who need to go places that don't allow cameras can get ones without). It's also good for surfing the Web, and although it comes equipped with a pretty decent mapping application, Google Maps is even better. As for personal calls, well, I really just don't enjoy being on the phone that much. But if I was somewhere away from home and I needed to make a phone call, I imagine pulling my BlackBerry out of my pocket, dialing a number, and holding it to my ear would be the simplest way to do it. Why wouldn't I?
What's more, all modern BlackBerry handsets have an Auto On/Off feature. If you're really so concerned, have it switch itself off at 6pm and come back on in the morning.
Words fail me.
The DEFINITION of AIDS REQUIRES the patient to be 'HIV positive' in order for them to be diagnosed with 'AIDS'...
i.e. it's a circular argument, moron...
Well, that's Koch's Postulates for you. If an organism has a disease and you can isolate a pathogen from that organism and then culture that pathogen outside the organism, then introduce that pathogen to another organism and the new organism exhibits the same disease... well, if you can do that, then Koch might say you're onto something. (This HAS been done with HIV/AIDS, by the way.)
By your logic, if the definition of having the flu requires that the patient be infected with a strain of the influenza virus, then it's a circular argument to claim that influenza causes the flu. So long as influenza can be isolated from any organism that doesn't have sniffles, then influenza must not cause flu.
Or to put it even more simply for you retards:
TB death - HIV = TB death
TB death WITH HIV = 'AIDS'
It is you who are making the circular argument. It is entirely possible to die of tuberculosis without having a compromised immune system -- in fact, it happens all the time -- and these deaths would not be classified as AIDS. A tuberculosis patient who does not mount an immune response is an anomaly, and then doctors must investigate why there is no immune response. Tuberculosis is not caused by a virus, and does not attack immune system cells, therefore a low T-cell count is not considered a symptom of tuberculosis. HIV is a virus and HIV has been shown to attack immune cells, therefore when a patient with both tuberculosis and HIV dies of tuberculosis after having failed to mount an immune response, it seems only logical to suspect HIV. But you argue that HIV does not cause AIDS, and in fact HIV is a harmless virus, and therefore someone who dies of TB with a compromised immune system who also has HIV could not have failed to mount an immune response because of HIV. What, then is the reason for the lack of immune response?
All the scientific evidence proves, beyond ANY doubt, that 'AIDS' is not a sexually transmitted disease, that 'AIDS' 'medications' are what kill people in the West
How? How does it prove this? Please explain, because so far it doesn't seem as if you're adequately informed.
The article you cite is extremely easy to rebut. Like Duseberg's original claims, it does not cite any research later than 1997. HIV/AIDS research has come a long, long way since then. Furthermore, the article only focuses on research into AIDS cases in the U.S. Its hypothesis is that AIDS is caused by the use of AZT and other drugs, including recreational drugs. It furthermore claims that almost all AIDS is found in homosexual men and heterosexual drug abusers. The implication is that behaviors, including sex between men and drug use, are the cause of AIDS.
How does this article explain the AIDS epidemic in Africa, where AIDS is far, far more prevalent than in the U.S.? During the height of the African epidemic, Africans did not have access to AZT or similar drugs, nor did they use cocaine and amyl poppers in any great prevalence. Furthermore, in Africa the AIDS epidemic is primarily a disease of heterosexuals, including females.
How does a behavior-based cause of AIDS explain cases of AIDS in children and hemophiliacs?
How does this theory of AIDS explain why HIV+ patients have had longer lifespans since the beginning of the HAART (highly active antiretroviral therapy) era? If, as you claim, the cause of AIDS is in fact the drugs designed to cure it, then why does giving patients a combination of many such drugs make them live longer than they did when they had just one such drug (AZT)?
Of course, none of you will bother reading it, because you might have to THINK, and you would literally rather DIE, wouldn't you?
I have read it. It is you who are not thinking. In f
I haven't really played PC games in 20 years, but back in my day the procedure was to remove copy-protection checks from illicit copies of games before you redistributed them. Are people still doing this? Or is there something about the way that SecuROM works that makes it difficult to remove a game's dependence on the service?
It seems to me that not having to install irremovable malware would be a very strong motivator to install pirated versions of games, rather than the store-bought ones.
Well the GP of this post is not completely off. What they may be referring to is the fact that one prominent researcher's study came to the conclusion that HIV was not highly correlated to AIDS which suggested that HIV was not the causing the AIDS. Immediately he was kicked out of the scientific community as they stated that he should be jailed for life for trying to disprove a current hypothesis (which is the point of being scientific).
Part of your claim is mostly true. A prominent researcher (Peter Duesberg) did assert that HIV was not the cause of AIDS. His claims were not based on correlation between AIDS and HIV, however, because all prominent studies show an extremely high correlation -- people with AIDS invariably have HIV. Duesberg's argument was that correlation did not equal causation.
The second part of your claim is inflammatory and inaccurate. It is possible that some individuals expressed the sentiment that Duesberg should be jailed; this would be their own personal opinions. But Duesberg was not "drummed out of the scientific community" by any means. To this day he remains a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at UC Berkeley.
STD cases are rising every year (NON-CUMULATIVE figures, of course), yet where are all the teenagers dying from 'AIDS'?
The fast answer is that HIV is not a highly contagious disease. In fact, compared to something like measles -- or HPV or active herpes -- it is actually quite difficult to catch HIV. The reason we focus so much attention on it, however, is because unlike herpes or genital warts, you die from it.
That is, until recently. Compared to 1981, we have quite a lot of experience treating AIDS. In fact, the clinical definition of AIDS an HIV-positive patient with fewer than 200 T-cells per cubic millimeter of blood. By definition, if we can stop your T-cells from dying, you don't get AIDS. (But if we stop treating you, you do.)
Other than that, it's 2008. To say that HIV does not cause AIDS at this late stage in the game is akin to denying evolution. The amount of scientific evidence linking HIV to AIDS is simply overwhelming.
I'm not at the tail end of a PhD in biology or anything close, but even I know this much. You do yourself a disservice by approaching scientific topics with blinkers on.
The funny part is that "beastiality" is a misspelling. The correct spelling is "bestiality." And yet... there really are 13 groups under that spelling. I think you may have inadvertently given away more than you intended.;-)
I can see that point of view, but unfortunately condoning it is exactly the approach being pushed in San Francisco. We just defeated a proposition that would not legalize prostitution, but instead would forbid the police department from responding to any calls about prostitution. Got that? The laws against prostitution would not change, but if I called the cops and said there were hookers working in my front yard they would not be permitted to act on that call. We just voted on this proposition on November 4. It failed by only 16 percentage points, largely because of strong advocacy by sex industry interests.
It amounts to the same thing. In fact, if you criminalize being a john, prostitutes will have more reason to avoid the police, because they need to attract johns to make money. Besides, contrary to popular belief, hauling in a load full of hookers is not exactly a prize collar for your average beat cop. Prostitutes are usually more valuable as informers for other crimes, such as drug trafficking or gang activity. Plus, many streetwalkers are all too happy to get hauled in every once in a while -- at least they get a bed and a free meal, and it sure beats getting the crap beaten out of them for not having made enough money.
pop quiz: does making it illegal make prostitution more or less susceptible to criminal influence?
Trick question. If you stop calling the people participating in the act "criminals," then the criminal influence disappears. The behavior does not, however. The question is whether it is healthy for society to condone the behaviors associated with the prostitution industry.
Living in San Francisco, I have seen firsthand what happens when you condone prostitution. Our former district attorney, Terrence Hallinan, basically made it known that prostitution offenses would not get prosecuted in the City of San Francisco a few years back. The result was totally predictable. The corner of 17th and Capp, which previously had been a known location for crack whores, gradually became a full-on outdoor brothel. Pimps drove in vans full of hookers from Richmond and Oakland and had them work the corners. Where once you had filthy, toothless women in sweatpants, now you had women in plastic hot pants and six inch heels, ducking behind cars when the police rolled by. Three blocks over on 20th Street, pimps would beat up prostitutes out in front of the steps of my friend's house, you'd have men cruising around the neighborhood accosting women alone on the street, and hookers would be using drugs in people's doorways.
So when you folks talk about victimless prostitution and legalizing it, please be a little more specific. Cuz just not calling the people criminals anymore ain't going to work.
Downtown in San Francisco, you have countless Asian massage parlors, many of which are staffed by women who have been trafficked from mainland China on promises of good jobs, etc. Once they get here they are basically held hostage, forced to "work off their travel expenses" -- which will never be worked off, because their debts to their kidnappers mysteriously keep growing. Across town, in the sleepy avenues of the Sunset District, there are whole houses full of these women. These women are not choosing to work for their pimps for protection, or because they can't make an honest living as prostitutes any other way. They are victims of international crime rings who have friends and family thousands of miles away, some of which will never see them again.
I'm sorry, but you Slashdotters are talking like typical men. All you want to see is the hot chick who's willing to have sex with you. The truth is that prostitution has destroyed the lives of thousands of women. The happy-go-lucky, sex-positive female who chose the sex industry as a fun, hot way to make a living is the minority. The majority are people who are living on the margins of life, many of whom do not know how to get out and return to normalcy. If you legalize prostitution itself, the people who prey on these women will only marginalize them some other way -- by giving them a drug habit, for example, or through emotional and physical abuse.
Oh, and by the way -- that district attorney I mentioned? Know what he's doing now? He's counsel for the Mitchell Bros. O'Farrell Theatre, which is widely acknowledged as being essentially a legalized brothel. Legalized, in the sense that the cops turn a blind eye to it. You can get pretty much whatever you want at the Mitchell Bros. if you have enough money. And that's the key to it -- these are the types of people who are going to push to bring more vice into communities, because they want the money that it will bring. They don't give a damn about the lives that are being ruined in the streets and behind closed doors, so long as they can get a steady stream of coeds to be strippers-turned-hookers in their clubs.
To me, this is a part of our society to be ashamed of -- not condoned.
Who is going to work for an abusive pimp who takes an arbitrary cut from their wages if there are legal, regulated options?
The "arbitrary cut" that most pimps take out of the earnings of the prostitutes who work for them is 100 percent. That's right, your typical streetwalker makes nothing, zero, zip. The pimp "takes care of the money for her," because she's "no good with money." If you don't believe me, ask a pimp. Read Iceberg Slim. Or, the Hughes Brothers made a documentary called American Pimp, which wasn't very good overall, but was pretty clear on this point.
So, while I understand what you're getting at, I'll ask a counter-question: Who is going to work for an abusive pimp, even if there is no legal, regulated option, when the pimp is going to take all their money? That's not a business. That's just being, uh... victimized, maybe?
You ask who would work for an abusive pimp if there were any other options. Let's get past this idea that prostitutes work as prostitutes completely by choice, and throw the question out there as-is. Who would work for an abusive pimp if there were any other options? Yet it happens all the time. It happens because this is the nature of the abuse.
Women who work in a sex industry that caters 99.9 percent to the basest desires of men stand a very high chance of being abused or victimized -- if not physically, then emotionally, financially, etc. This is going to be true whether society formally condones prostitution or not. The act of seeking sexual gratification without concern for your partner is an asocial act, and as such it should be (at minimum) monitored carefully.
What is wrong with the whole damned thing is this: prostitution is illegal, even though there are no victims for this crime
Let's get over this idea that there are "no victims" in the crime of prostitution. The victims are the prostitutes. Yes, some people do willingly trade sex for money. A great, great many do not. Prostitutes are preyed upon daily by pimps, johns, drug dealers, human traffickers, and sadists. If we decriminalized the business of prostitution, some of this would disappear but some of it would not. Amsterdam, which has legalized prostitution, has recently recognized the influence of international organized crime on its red light district.
Slashdot Mirror
That's one of my problems with Linux. Ubuntu has been out for what--less than 4 years, and popular for less than that? Before Ubuntu was the big thing, it was Gentoo. Etc etc, and before that, Redhat. (ignoring, Fedora, Suse, etc and of course the parent distro of Ubuntu--debian--has been around forever as well)...before that, slackware. And so on.Z
While Gentoo might have been the distro with the most buzz before Ubuntu, the audience for Gentoo was never the same as the audience for Ubuntu. Each has had its share of buzz, but for totally different reasons.
So far Ubuntu seems to have decent staying power (and most importantly--*one* man with money behind it). It just seems crazy to me that Red Hat which virtually WAS linux for the first decade of Linux has been relegated to near irrelevance?
Irrelevance? By what standard? Red Hat has a market capitalization of $1.64 billion. You think they got it from their rich uncle?
The reasons you don't hear a lot of buzz about Red Hat on Slashdot are A.) Red Hat is well-established, produces a stable, reliable, quality product -- and that kind of thing doesn't make the news; and B.) most of the people reading Slashdot are not Red Hat customers. You can't fiddle around with Fedora and decide "Red Hat is irrelevant." Talk to me when you actually pay for a Red Hat Enterprise support contract, then tell me you're going to give it up and go back to Gentoo. I believe if you investigate you'll find that Red Hat enjoys a quite healthy popularity -- in the markets it cares about.
The SCO Group is a descendant company of the Santa Cruz Operation, an early Unix vendor.
Not exactly. The SCO Group was formerly Caldera. It bought some Unix assets from the Santa Cruz Operation, but they are not really the same company. After selling off its Unix division, the Santa Cruz Operation went on to become Tarantella, which is now owned by Sun.
Quite often it is cheaper to pay the person suing you off rather than attempt to fight the case.
But that's true of all civil cases. I think something like 90 percent never see the inside of a courtroom.
It's very easy to suddenly whip out the discrimination card
I believe that was the GP's point.
Seriously -- my mom worked in human resources for many years (not her proudest moment), and bringing up age is not something you want to do in an interview. Another good way to get slapped with a lawsuit is to tell someone who is calling for a reference that the candidate in question was fired from your company for stealing -- even if he was. If you don't understand these things, I would seriously suggest requesting a sit-down briefing with your own HR department and have them fill you in on the labor laws in your state.
Obligatory: Computer stuff. Lots of fun/memory-jogging images in there ... including portraits of Richard Stallman and family!
Assume normal distribution of IQ (as most do), and mean and median are the same. The joke is the truth.
Hard to argue with HP for being pissed off about this one. The PC market is cutthroat, so making an investment in higher priced integrated and/or discrete graphics chipsets, only to discover at the last moment that your competition has just been given the green light to undersell you with relaxed requirements has got to hurt.
Is that what HP is claiming? That it was forced to add higher-end components to be able to ship Vista machines, only to be undercut by competitors later?
If that's the case, then why on Earth did the HP 2133 Mini-Note, HP's (rather pricey) entry into the "netbook" market, ship with Vista? It's not like they went all-out to add high-end components to it. To my knowledge, it is the only netbook that does ship with Vista, and Vista is its biggest Achilles heel. You cannot activate Aero Glass on it, so forget about that. You probably don't want to activate most of the gee-whiz Vista desktop features, because the Via processor is really poky. Its Windows Experience index is 1.7, fer chrissakes, and that's because of the processor rating. Why, HP? Why??
My money and time is best spent elsewhere.
cf. L. Ron Hubbard's science fiction.
I don't know how much of Orson Scott Card's money goes toward directly supporting his political causes, but we know that it is at least possible for money spent on science fiction books to go toward agendas that we might otherwise oppose completely.
Dangerous, indeed. I actually believe that sometimes one has a civic duty to step up and argue this sort of thing.
The reason these kinds of ideas spread is because they go unchallenged. Sometimes people don't know how to address the specific talking points. Sometimes they think the idea sounds crazy and they just want to tell the other person to fuck off. But as long as an idea is left to float in the air, there's always the chance that someone else might listen and have a seed planted in their brain.
The idea that drugs cause AIDS is insidious because it sounds plausible. Whatever you may think of drug use -- right or wrong -- even the most unabashed recreational drug user will tell you that heavy drug use can be pretty rough on your body.
So it starts with a simple idea. "The math doesn't add up; there's no way that the gas chambers in Auschwitz could have been used to kill as many Jews as they say." Sounds interesting. Remind me to look up the figures sometime. But as soon as the door is opened, sooner or later other ideas get let in. "Isn't it true, after all, that in the late 1930s Jewish activist groups were inciting political unrest in Germany?"
If you look at the world political stage, HIV/AIDS is very much a human rights issue. In Africa, corrupt politicians have used arguments very similar to the GP's as tools of oppression. The same arguments can be used to deny basic human rights to entire segments of the U.S. population, as well -- and that would suit some people just fine. It falls to right-thinking, compassionate people to nip it in the bud.
Thank you for your kudos, though!
Really?
Boss: Did you get my email?
Me: Not yet, I just got in.
Boss: I sent it at 9pm last night.
Me: Ah, that must be it. I left at 6. So what's up?
Is that so hard? In my experiences, bosses might expect all kinds of things, but rational people generally have a pretty good grip on what is reasonable to expect and what is not -- unless you give them other ideas.
Having said that, I now carry a personal BlackBerry phone. It hasn't failed yet but it's not exactly bug free. If you think Microsoft products are poor quality, you should experience what RIM calls "release" software. Nothing that pulling the battery and waiting a few minutes for the thing to reinitialize won't fix, though.
I'll second that. I've found BlackBerry Forums to be invaluable, not only for locating the latest firmware versions (whichever carrier may have them) but also for letting everybody know which ones are flaky as hell and to be avoided.
I replaced a rock-sold stable but physically damaged Pearl 8100 with a brand-new Pearl 8120 and I had to pull the battery from the new phone about four times in the first week. It's stable now, but only after two firmware updates.
I'm not sure if this is a software or hardware issue, but OS v4.5 has been released.
My understanding is that version 4.5 is something of a misnomer. It's really just a heavily, heavily patched version of 4.3. FWIW.
Can't do VoIP apps - restricted by RIM.
I can't find any documentation of that. Got a citation to share? You may be talking about older models that relied more on WAP and RIM's private network, rather than the new IP/WiFi enabled ones.
Even if RIM has been against third-party VoIP apps on the handsets, however, T-Mobile offers UMA service on the latest BlackBerry models. If you're within WiFi range, your calls go over the WiFi instead of the cellular network. Normally these calls still get counted against your standard minutes, but if you pay an extra fee per month, WiFi usage is unlimited.
Regardless of who bought it, which would you spend more time protecting? Your personal entertainment device that lets you listen to music etc. or the virtual servant bell which forces you to check your email regularly out of hours and which few people use for personal calls.
In all fairness, modern BlackBerry handsets do audio and video. Mine even has a 3.5mm headphone jack. Many also come equipped with cameras (although people who need to go places that don't allow cameras can get ones without). It's also good for surfing the Web, and although it comes equipped with a pretty decent mapping application, Google Maps is even better. As for personal calls, well, I really just don't enjoy being on the phone that much. But if I was somewhere away from home and I needed to make a phone call, I imagine pulling my BlackBerry out of my pocket, dialing a number, and holding it to my ear would be the simplest way to do it. Why wouldn't I?
What's more, all modern BlackBerry handsets have an Auto On/Off feature. If you're really so concerned, have it switch itself off at 6pm and come back on in the morning.
Words fail me. The DEFINITION of AIDS REQUIRES the patient to be 'HIV positive' in order for them to be diagnosed with 'AIDS'... i.e. it's a circular argument, moron...
Well, that's Koch's Postulates for you. If an organism has a disease and you can isolate a pathogen from that organism and then culture that pathogen outside the organism, then introduce that pathogen to another organism and the new organism exhibits the same disease... well, if you can do that, then Koch might say you're onto something. (This HAS been done with HIV/AIDS, by the way.)
By your logic, if the definition of having the flu requires that the patient be infected with a strain of the influenza virus, then it's a circular argument to claim that influenza causes the flu. So long as influenza can be isolated from any organism that doesn't have sniffles, then influenza must not cause flu.
Or to put it even more simply for you retards: TB death - HIV = TB death TB death WITH HIV = 'AIDS'
It is you who are making the circular argument. It is entirely possible to die of tuberculosis without having a compromised immune system -- in fact, it happens all the time -- and these deaths would not be classified as AIDS. A tuberculosis patient who does not mount an immune response is an anomaly, and then doctors must investigate why there is no immune response. Tuberculosis is not caused by a virus, and does not attack immune system cells, therefore a low T-cell count is not considered a symptom of tuberculosis. HIV is a virus and HIV has been shown to attack immune cells, therefore when a patient with both tuberculosis and HIV dies of tuberculosis after having failed to mount an immune response, it seems only logical to suspect HIV. But you argue that HIV does not cause AIDS, and in fact HIV is a harmless virus, and therefore someone who dies of TB with a compromised immune system who also has HIV could not have failed to mount an immune response because of HIV. What, then is the reason for the lack of immune response?
All the scientific evidence proves, beyond ANY doubt, that 'AIDS' is not a sexually transmitted disease, that 'AIDS' 'medications' are what kill people in the West
How? How does it prove this? Please explain, because so far it doesn't seem as if you're adequately informed.
The article you cite is extremely easy to rebut. Like Duseberg's original claims, it does not cite any research later than 1997. HIV/AIDS research has come a long, long way since then. Furthermore, the article only focuses on research into AIDS cases in the U.S. Its hypothesis is that AIDS is caused by the use of AZT and other drugs, including recreational drugs. It furthermore claims that almost all AIDS is found in homosexual men and heterosexual drug abusers. The implication is that behaviors, including sex between men and drug use, are the cause of AIDS.
How does this article explain the AIDS epidemic in Africa, where AIDS is far, far more prevalent than in the U.S.? During the height of the African epidemic, Africans did not have access to AZT or similar drugs, nor did they use cocaine and amyl poppers in any great prevalence. Furthermore, in Africa the AIDS epidemic is primarily a disease of heterosexuals, including females.
How does a behavior-based cause of AIDS explain cases of AIDS in children and hemophiliacs?
How does this theory of AIDS explain why HIV+ patients have had longer lifespans since the beginning of the HAART (highly active antiretroviral therapy) era? If, as you claim, the cause of AIDS is in fact the drugs designed to cure it, then why does giving patients a combination of many such drugs make them live longer than they did when they had just one such drug (AZT)?
Of course, none of you will bother reading it, because you might have to THINK, and you would literally rather DIE, wouldn't you?
I have read it. It is you who are not thinking. In f
I haven't really played PC games in 20 years, but back in my day the procedure was to remove copy-protection checks from illicit copies of games before you redistributed them. Are people still doing this? Or is there something about the way that SecuROM works that makes it difficult to remove a game's dependence on the service?
It seems to me that not having to install irremovable malware would be a very strong motivator to install pirated versions of games, rather than the store-bought ones.
Well the GP of this post is not completely off. What they may be referring to is the fact that one prominent researcher's study came to the conclusion that HIV was not highly correlated to AIDS which suggested that HIV was not the causing the AIDS. Immediately he was kicked out of the scientific community as they stated that he should be jailed for life for trying to disprove a current hypothesis (which is the point of being scientific).
Part of your claim is mostly true. A prominent researcher (Peter Duesberg) did assert that HIV was not the cause of AIDS. His claims were not based on correlation between AIDS and HIV, however, because all prominent studies show an extremely high correlation -- people with AIDS invariably have HIV. Duesberg's argument was that correlation did not equal causation.
The second part of your claim is inflammatory and inaccurate. It is possible that some individuals expressed the sentiment that Duesberg should be jailed; this would be their own personal opinions. But Duesberg was not "drummed out of the scientific community" by any means. To this day he remains a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at UC Berkeley.
STD cases are rising every year (NON-CUMULATIVE figures, of course), yet where are all the teenagers dying from 'AIDS'?
The fast answer is that HIV is not a highly contagious disease. In fact, compared to something like measles -- or HPV or active herpes -- it is actually quite difficult to catch HIV. The reason we focus so much attention on it, however, is because unlike herpes or genital warts, you die from it.
That is, until recently. Compared to 1981, we have quite a lot of experience treating AIDS. In fact, the clinical definition of AIDS an HIV-positive patient with fewer than 200 T-cells per cubic millimeter of blood. By definition, if we can stop your T-cells from dying, you don't get AIDS. (But if we stop treating you, you do.)
Other than that, it's 2008. To say that HIV does not cause AIDS at this late stage in the game is akin to denying evolution. The amount of scientific evidence linking HIV to AIDS is simply overwhelming.
I'm not at the tail end of a PhD in biology or anything close, but even I know this much. You do yourself a disservice by approaching scientific topics with blinkers on.
The funny part is that "beastiality" is a misspelling. The correct spelling is "bestiality." And yet ... there really are 13 groups under that spelling. I think you may have inadvertently given away more than you intended. ;-)
I can see that point of view, but unfortunately condoning it is exactly the approach being pushed in San Francisco. We just defeated a proposition that would not legalize prostitution, but instead would forbid the police department from responding to any calls about prostitution. Got that? The laws against prostitution would not change, but if I called the cops and said there were hookers working in my front yard they would not be permitted to act on that call. We just voted on this proposition on November 4. It failed by only 16 percentage points, largely because of strong advocacy by sex industry interests.
Legalize prostitution. Criminalize the clients.
It amounts to the same thing. In fact, if you criminalize being a john, prostitutes will have more reason to avoid the police, because they need to attract johns to make money. Besides, contrary to popular belief, hauling in a load full of hookers is not exactly a prize collar for your average beat cop. Prostitutes are usually more valuable as informers for other crimes, such as drug trafficking or gang activity. Plus, many streetwalkers are all too happy to get hauled in every once in a while -- at least they get a bed and a free meal, and it sure beats getting the crap beaten out of them for not having made enough money.
pop quiz: does making it illegal make prostitution more or less susceptible to criminal influence?
Trick question. If you stop calling the people participating in the act "criminals," then the criminal influence disappears. The behavior does not, however. The question is whether it is healthy for society to condone the behaviors associated with the prostitution industry.
Living in San Francisco, I have seen firsthand what happens when you condone prostitution. Our former district attorney, Terrence Hallinan, basically made it known that prostitution offenses would not get prosecuted in the City of San Francisco a few years back. The result was totally predictable. The corner of 17th and Capp, which previously had been a known location for crack whores, gradually became a full-on outdoor brothel. Pimps drove in vans full of hookers from Richmond and Oakland and had them work the corners. Where once you had filthy, toothless women in sweatpants, now you had women in plastic hot pants and six inch heels, ducking behind cars when the police rolled by. Three blocks over on 20th Street, pimps would beat up prostitutes out in front of the steps of my friend's house, you'd have men cruising around the neighborhood accosting women alone on the street, and hookers would be using drugs in people's doorways.
So when you folks talk about victimless prostitution and legalizing it, please be a little more specific. Cuz just not calling the people criminals anymore ain't going to work.
Downtown in San Francisco, you have countless Asian massage parlors, many of which are staffed by women who have been trafficked from mainland China on promises of good jobs, etc. Once they get here they are basically held hostage, forced to "work off their travel expenses" -- which will never be worked off, because their debts to their kidnappers mysteriously keep growing. Across town, in the sleepy avenues of the Sunset District, there are whole houses full of these women. These women are not choosing to work for their pimps for protection, or because they can't make an honest living as prostitutes any other way. They are victims of international crime rings who have friends and family thousands of miles away, some of which will never see them again.
I'm sorry, but you Slashdotters are talking like typical men. All you want to see is the hot chick who's willing to have sex with you. The truth is that prostitution has destroyed the lives of thousands of women. The happy-go-lucky, sex-positive female who chose the sex industry as a fun, hot way to make a living is the minority. The majority are people who are living on the margins of life, many of whom do not know how to get out and return to normalcy. If you legalize prostitution itself, the people who prey on these women will only marginalize them some other way -- by giving them a drug habit, for example, or through emotional and physical abuse.
Oh, and by the way -- that district attorney I mentioned? Know what he's doing now? He's counsel for the Mitchell Bros. O'Farrell Theatre, which is widely acknowledged as being essentially a legalized brothel. Legalized, in the sense that the cops turn a blind eye to it. You can get pretty much whatever you want at the Mitchell Bros. if you have enough money. And that's the key to it -- these are the types of people who are going to push to bring more vice into communities, because they want the money that it will bring. They don't give a damn about the lives that are being ruined in the streets and behind closed doors, so long as they can get a steady stream of coeds to be strippers-turned-hookers in their clubs.
To me, this is a part of our society to be ashamed of -- not condoned.
Who is going to work for an abusive pimp who takes an arbitrary cut from their wages if there are legal, regulated options?
The "arbitrary cut" that most pimps take out of the earnings of the prostitutes who work for them is 100 percent. That's right, your typical streetwalker makes nothing, zero, zip. The pimp "takes care of the money for her," because she's "no good with money." If you don't believe me, ask a pimp. Read Iceberg Slim. Or, the Hughes Brothers made a documentary called American Pimp, which wasn't very good overall, but was pretty clear on this point.
So, while I understand what you're getting at, I'll ask a counter-question: Who is going to work for an abusive pimp, even if there is no legal, regulated option, when the pimp is going to take all their money? That's not a business. That's just being, uh ... victimized, maybe?
You ask who would work for an abusive pimp if there were any other options. Let's get past this idea that prostitutes work as prostitutes completely by choice, and throw the question out there as-is. Who would work for an abusive pimp if there were any other options? Yet it happens all the time. It happens because this is the nature of the abuse.
Women who work in a sex industry that caters 99.9 percent to the basest desires of men stand a very high chance of being abused or victimized -- if not physically, then emotionally, financially, etc. This is going to be true whether society formally condones prostitution or not. The act of seeking sexual gratification without concern for your partner is an asocial act, and as such it should be (at minimum) monitored carefully.
What is wrong with the whole damned thing is this: prostitution is illegal, even though there are no victims for this crime
Let's get over this idea that there are "no victims" in the crime of prostitution. The victims are the prostitutes. Yes, some people do willingly trade sex for money. A great, great many do not. Prostitutes are preyed upon daily by pimps, johns, drug dealers, human traffickers, and sadists. If we decriminalized the business of prostitution, some of this would disappear but some of it would not. Amsterdam, which has legalized prostitution, has recently recognized the influence of international organized crime on its red light district.
Deregulating immorality does NOT work.
Usually the protagonists are somewhat involved in the solution to the problem.
Meh. Not in The War of the Worlds, and that's an acknowledged classic.