If a pharmacy sells prescription meds without a prescription, they should have their license revoked and it doesn't matter where they are. If a non-pharmacy sells meds... then the laboratory that sells it to them should have its license revoked !
The online pharmacies aren't licensed by the US (from the article "Google knowingly accepted ads from online pharmacies, based in Canada and elsewhere..."), so the US can't revoke their licenses. The laboratory that sells to these legitimate pharmacies, licensed in their own countries, isn't doing anything illegal. This leaves Google as the only part of this chain that the US can punish.
Science is like Linux: It's complicated, but if you want to put in the time and energy to learn it, you can understand it and make changes.
Religion is like Apple: It's simple, but you will never understand or change the decisions the leaders make for you.
...the poll by the Crowne Plaza hotel chain showed...
So, the "researchers" at Crowne Plaza Hotels asked a bunch of people (presumably their customers) to self-report when they're most creative. Then they came up with an average number that's supposed to be everyone's most creative time. Sounds pretty scientific.
As a fellow biker, I feel your pain. But, the fact that everyone who almost hit you was on a cell phone doesn't prove anything (cell phones are way too common now). I bet every single one of them also had a windshield, but that doesn't mean the windshield was the cause.
I used to ride a lot before cell phones became ubiquitous, and all it takes for car-bike accidents is the stupidity and arrogance of drivers who refuse to share the road.
Finally, I wonder if anyone's done a study on the dangers of talking on cells while riding bikes. I have to admit, I've done it a couple of times on my bike, while at the same time sleeping, high on drugs, reading a paper, and shaving my legs (better aerodynamics). It wasn't too bad:)
[A]cting pursuant to the Constitution and [the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002] is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
He's saying the attack on Iraq is a continuation of the previous war in Afghanistan, which, as the letter states, includes those that attacked us on 9/11.
Listen, we can highlight, bold, and italicize, and parse the carefully crafted words of lawyers and commissions all day. But the fact is, the administration linked Saddam to Al-Qaeda so strongly that a strong majority of people thought he was behind 9/11. Many in the press, who should have known better, just went along and didn't scream headlines like "Look, you freakin' idiots, Saddam wasn't involved in 9/11." Now, the press is waking up, and trying to correct itself, but, as usual, is just fucking it up again. They think they can make up for 3 years of pro-Bush bias with a few years of anti-Bush bias.
I completely agree with you that the 9/11 commission's words are being blown out of proportion. Misreporting, even if it supports my views, benefits no one. That's why Michael Moore bugs the crap out of me. BUT, the press isn't misrepresenting the truth. Bush and his gang implied strong links between saddam and 9/11, and the 9/11 commission found none. So, I guess you're right, bush never claimed a connection, but he sure did hint at it an awful lot.
I wish we had an active press that just reported the facts, analyzed it using the best available information, and let the people decide. Instead we had numbnuts (numbovaries?) like Judith Miller of the NY times who swallowed Chalabi's lies whole last year and regurgitated them all over the front pages.
George Bush never claimed there was a link between 9/11 and Iraq.
I hate to reply to sigs, but He DID. Both directly, and by implication
in a letter to Congress on March 19, 2003, Bush said the Iraq war was permitted under legislation authorizing force against those who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
Anyway, that's not important. What's important is that he and everyone in his adminsitration wasted no chance to mention Sadam's name in close proximity to Bin Laden's. This repeated subtle linking of Sadam to Bin Laden is why about 50% of our people still think that Saddam had something to do with 911.
Anyone have any ideas for Mission Impossible to stay ahead of the game?
They could start by making movies that don't suck ass. That'd be my first suggestion.
As for staying ahead of the self-destruct tapes/CDs/DVDs thing, with everything going biotech (Spiderman's radioactive spider was turned into a genetically engineered one), how about this: A suppository that, upon insertion, uploads data to your brain via the enteric nervous system. When it's done, it deletes its own data, stimulates your colon, and you poop it out.
All we need is a catchy message like "this message will exit in 3 seconds." The commercial tie-ins to diarrhea medicine are very exciting.
I feel the same way. It's painful to see what we're becoming. The 'intellectual elite' who every day bring new scientific and technological advances to our great nation are now a common scapegoat for politicians. Maybe I have a skewed view of public opinion because I live in the south (where a good portion of the population is waiting for the rapture), but it seems that the country values blind faith and greed (somehow linked together in the protestant work ethic of people like Ken Lay) more than science.
It's amazing that we still have creationism vs. evolution debates in the 21st century or that a functionally illiterate president (MBA=pointy haired boss) prays to decide the merits of stem cell research. But while Bush's public anti-intellectualism may just be a public pose he strikes to appeal to Joe Sixpack, the fact that this has such wide appeal is worrisome.
I'm almost done with a joint MD/PhD program and I'm seriously considering not hanging around the US. I'm not saying I'm the future of the country or that my leaving will make even the slightest change in anything, but a lot of people in the sciences are starting to get very disillusioned by the direction of our country. If enough of them leave or decide to go back to their home countries, we're in trouble.
Luckily, the US, despite our recent woes, still spends more on R&D than any other country. People like me can bitch and moan all we want about the rubes in government or our immoral foreign policy, but at the end of the day, if you want to practice science, the US is still where it's at. Anyway, maybe the reason we have all this money to throw around (some of which dribbles onto the sciences) is because our military is so good at killing people all over world to protect our economic dominance.
Giant Food Inc. was caught providing its customers' prescription purchasing info to marketers
A customer's alcohol buying habits was brought up by Von's (part of Safeway) when he sued after slipping on spilled yogurt in their store (it didn't make it to court)
You couldget rejected
for health care coverage if you have a heart condition and your insurance company finds out that you've been filling your cart with potato chips and desserts.
Any number of other problems from the sharing of your purchasing information between business partners.
Wired article on Robert Rivera, "a Los Angeles man who slipped and fell on a carton of spilled yogurt at a Von's grocery store."
"During mediation, Givens (privacy activist) said that it emerged that Von's had obtained Rivera's supermarket card data that reportedly showed alcohol purchases. Though the evidence was never introduced in court, he lost the case."
"Von's said at the time that the company would never use customer supermarket buyers club information in litigation."
from the article: Say that when your shoes wear out, you want a similar pair. It's incredibly difficult today for the retailer to tell a customer which new model corresponds to the old one. But we could fix that with RFID. That's a great sales tool.
I was on the fence about RFID, but learning that it can replace a sheet of paper with old model numbers in column one and new model numbers in column two sold me.
Some may say that this task could be online and automated using a database-backed web-site. They're obviously ignoring the fact that this method requires no infrastructure overhead, and, what's worse, generates no profit for Scott McGregor's bosses at Philips.
Or mathematics is another example. Large amounts of it were invented by Arabs, but their religion...
That silly Arab religion. It's almost as silly as the Hindi religion or that Caucasian religion. (there are Arab Christians, Jews, Bahaiis, etc.)
...doesn't permit advanced forms of banking...
All it forbits is interest, which, if I recall, is forbidden in the Caucasian and Hebrew religions. Some Muslims have simply been more anal about keeping their religion in spite of practical concerns.
It's not politically correct to say so, but the West really is a superior culture when it comes to making practical use of theoretical discoveries.
Obviously I'm not denigrating the West's accomplishments, because the leaps in science and technology have been huge (I'm not sure why we lump the US with "the west" other than it being a code word for "white people") But this is a pretty recent phenomenon (relative to the entire time humanity has been around). Look at the great civilizations of Asia that lasted for centuries and contributed much to where we are today (shoulders of giants kinds of things) and you may get a different perspective.
Anyone can take a chunk of time and make their own race sound superior. Indeed, travel to any remnant country of a great civilization and all you hear is how they were responsible for this or that.
Power (economic, military, or scientific) shifts from region to region through time. Greece, Rome, western Europe have all been huge cultural and scientific centers at one time or another. Now it's the US' turn. The exponential nature of the growth of science means that each new bearer of scientific superiority will claim a larger share of the total knowledge.
When our star of knowledge fades, another group or region will take the cumulative human knowledge and run with it. Racists in those countries will then pretend that they're the center of all knowledge.
Here's my analysis, which is about as scientific as those found in "The Bell Curve" Civilization, science etc. started in Mesopotamia, moved west to the Greeks, then west to the Romans, then west to Western Europe, then West to the US. The way I see it, it's going to move to Japan, then China, then back to the middle east. Of course, I'm ignoring the Incas, Mayas, etc., but that doesn't fit my pet theory, so in the spirit of the pseudoscience exhibited in the aforementioned book, I'll just ignore them.
Or it was; in the last century the West has spent less of its resources on developing technology and more on supporting those who aren't able to support themselves. Simple natural selection now means that our populations are becoming geared towards those who consume handouts but produce no new discoveries.
The west has been superior in the past century
As a society does better, it's only natural that they'll spend their resources on their own citizens. If you look at the US 100 years ago we weren't spending any money on social programs. As we've done better, we've decided to spend some of that money on our poor (the "meek" in the bible), but we've spent even more money on basic and applied sciences. The kind of big government that gave us social security, and will hopefully one day give us socialized medicine, is the same kind of government that funds projects like the Human Genome project, the space program, the NIH, NSF, even defense spending are responsible for many of our greatest accomplishments.
Sounds cruel, but medical technology is largely to blame for overpopulation, boosting the birth rate, raising the average life expectancy...
First day of med school we got a lecture that essentially boiled down to "you're not hot shit, so get over yourselves" The main point: the majority of the increase in the average life expectancy (fewer dead kids, longer-living adults) is due to improvements in hygiene and sanitation (brought about by the germ theory of disease and the industrial revolution). Sexy toys like MRIs and wonder drugs are making important, but incremental, improvements.
Regarding the misappropriation of technology: while I hate the "won't someone think of the children types," too (mostly because they're often just framing their own biases in terms of children) when someone is dying you can't just say, "well I'd save you, but that'd throw mother nature's plan out of whack.":)
As for overpopulation, most of the developed nations are either at low positive or negative population growth. In developing countries it has to do with religious superstitions or lack of education about birth control.
As far as information goes, creativity isn't a team sport.Ever hear of a fiction novel written by 12 people? Didn't think so. It may be true that developing ideas may require resources and manpower, but inspiration strikes individuals.
You're right. Inspiration, like lightning, is probably not going to strike several people at exactly the same time, but it can strike different people working on different parts of the same project at different times. The best bands to be in are one where different people come up with the melody, chord structure, harmony, the solo, bass lines, etc.
Save yourselves some time. The basic point of the whole article is: rain is good, but too much rain causes problems.
PHBs may contact him at www.technobility.com to have him spout his truisms at the next company event that requires a keynote speaker (he's a keynote speaker, according to his short bio in the article, so don't contact him for any other kind of speaking engagement)
Good point, but I think fear and intellectual laziness are behind RIAA's actions. The member companies are afraid of how new technology will affect them and they're too lazy to come up with a new business model.
Music is supposed to be a form of communication. The most expressive music simulates the cadences of emotional speech (bluesy wails, wah wahs, even a fast frantic solo). With western classical music we saw the organization of these concepts into rules for intervals and chord sequences, but somewhere along the line it all got too bloated for a lay understanding. It became so that you needed to know all these things to truly appreciate what the composer was trying to express.
This isn't bad by itself, of course. Poetry with a 300 word vocabulary is pretty crappy (think nursey rhymes or bad rap). The development of this new vocabulary for music helps make it more expressive, but at the same time less accessible.
People can still respond to the purely emotional parts of a piece like Beethoven's 9th, the majority sit there twidling their tumbs waiting for the "Ode to Joy" part to start. Why spend years listening to classical music and reading music theory when you can just pop in the latest nursery rhyme (e.g. Brittany) and get instant gratification?
I guess, the PDAs just treat the symptom and gives yuppies something to say at cocktail parties to make themselves look sophisticated, but the solution is better (maybe mandatory) music education in school.
The technology we have now in a laptop is leaps and bounds beyond what Pink Floyd had at the time they made Dark Side of the Moon. The Beatles had basically 4 tracks that they kept bouncing around. For me the technology isn't the bottleneck, it's the talent:)
...and are switching to devices that don't require hand contact like pagers.
They must be talking about those new anal pagers that give you the message by anal-braille. The anus has a pretty high concentration of sensory endings, so it makes perfect sense to use it instead of less sensitive parts like the hip or back. Plus it's close to where the pager is usually located anyway.
You may think that clean-up would be an issue, but you can buy these cute little disposable latex covers for the insertable part.
Re:This goes back to the early days of Apple
on
Beatles Bite Apple
·
· Score: 1
Actually neither of these is true:
So none of what you wrote after the colon is true?:) Just kidding. Thanks for the corrections
Slashdot Mirror
If a pharmacy sells prescription meds without a prescription, they should have their license revoked and it doesn't matter where they are. If a non-pharmacy sells meds... then the laboratory that sells it to them should have its license revoked !
The online pharmacies aren't licensed by the US (from the article "Google knowingly accepted ads from online pharmacies, based in Canada and elsewhere..."), so the US can't revoke their licenses. The laboratory that sells to these legitimate pharmacies, licensed in their own countries, isn't doing anything illegal. This leaves Google as the only part of this chain that the US can punish.
Science is like Linux: It's complicated, but if you want to put in the time and energy to learn it, you can understand it and make changes. Religion is like Apple: It's simple, but you will never understand or change the decisions the leaders make for you.
So, the "researchers" at Crowne Plaza Hotels asked a bunch of people (presumably their customers) to self-report when they're most creative. Then they came up with an average number that's supposed to be everyone's most creative time. Sounds pretty scientific.
who's = abbreviation for 'who is'
whose = possessive of whose
As a fellow biker, I feel your pain. But, the fact that everyone who almost hit you was on a cell phone doesn't prove anything (cell phones are way too common now). I bet every single one of them also had a windshield, but that doesn't mean the windshield was the cause. I used to ride a lot before cell phones became ubiquitous, and all it takes for car-bike accidents is the stupidity and arrogance of drivers who refuse to share the road. Finally, I wonder if anyone's done a study on the dangers of talking on cells while riding bikes. I have to admit, I've done it a couple of times on my bike, while at the same time sleeping, high on drugs, reading a paper, and shaving my legs (better aerodynamics). It wasn't too bad :)
Just give them half a benadryl for the long road trips. Better yet, don't have children.
To make most words plural, simply add an s. For example, user becomes users . I'm guessing licensee becomes licensees.
English isn't really that difficult, people.
He's saying the attack on Iraq is a continuation of the previous war in Afghanistan, which, as the letter states, includes those that attacked us on 9/11.
Listen, we can highlight, bold, and italicize, and parse the carefully crafted words of lawyers and commissions all day. But the fact is, the administration linked Saddam to Al-Qaeda so strongly that a strong majority of people thought he was behind 9/11. Many in the press, who should have known better, just went along and didn't scream headlines like "Look, you freakin' idiots, Saddam wasn't involved in 9/11." Now, the press is waking up, and trying to correct itself, but, as usual, is just fucking it up again. They think they can make up for 3 years of pro-Bush bias with a few years of anti-Bush bias.
I completely agree with you that the 9/11 commission's words are being blown out of proportion. Misreporting, even if it supports my views, benefits no one. That's why Michael Moore bugs the crap out of me. BUT, the press isn't misrepresenting the truth. Bush and his gang implied strong links between saddam and 9/11, and the 9/11 commission found none. So, I guess you're right, bush never claimed a connection, but he sure did hint at it an awful lot.
I wish we had an active press that just reported the facts, analyzed it using the best available information, and let the people decide. Instead we had numbnuts (numbovaries?) like Judith Miller of the NY times who swallowed Chalabi's lies whole last year and regurgitated them all over the front pages.
Anyway, sorry for replying to a sig :)
I hate to reply to sigs, but He DID. Both directly, and by implication
in a letter to Congress on March 19, 2003, Bush said the Iraq war was permitted under legislation authorizing force against those who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
Anyway, that's not important. What's important is that he and everyone in his adminsitration wasted no chance to mention Sadam's name in close proximity to Bin Laden's. This repeated subtle linking of Sadam to Bin Laden is why about 50% of our people still think that Saddam had something to do with 911.
They could start by making movies that don't suck ass. That'd be my first suggestion.
As for staying ahead of the self-destruct tapes/CDs/DVDs thing, with everything going biotech (Spiderman's radioactive spider was turned into a genetically engineered one), how about this: A suppository that, upon insertion, uploads data to your brain via the enteric nervous system. When it's done, it deletes its own data, stimulates your colon, and you poop it out.
All we need is a catchy message like "this message will exit in 3 seconds." The commercial tie-ins to diarrhea medicine are very exciting.
...if you're excited and happy about something?
It's amazing that we still have creationism vs. evolution debates in the 21st century or that a functionally illiterate president (MBA=pointy haired boss) prays to decide the merits of stem cell research. But while Bush's public anti-intellectualism may just be a public pose he strikes to appeal to Joe Sixpack, the fact that this has such wide appeal is worrisome.
I'm almost done with a joint MD/PhD program and I'm seriously considering not hanging around the US. I'm not saying I'm the future of the country or that my leaving will make even the slightest change in anything, but a lot of people in the sciences are starting to get very disillusioned by the direction of our country. If enough of them leave or decide to go back to their home countries, we're in trouble.
Luckily, the US, despite our recent woes, still spends more on R&D than any other country. People like me can bitch and moan all we want about the rubes in government or our immoral foreign policy, but at the end of the day, if you want to practice science, the US is still where it's at. Anyway, maybe the reason we have all this money to throw around (some of which dribbles onto the sciences) is because our military is so good at killing people all over world to protect our economic dominance.
"During mediation, Givens (privacy activist) said that it emerged that Von's had obtained Rivera's supermarket card data that reportedly showed alcohol purchases. Though the evidence was never introduced in court, he lost the case."
"Von's said at the time that the company would never use customer supermarket buyers club information in litigation."
Say that when your shoes wear out, you want a similar pair. It's incredibly difficult today for the retailer to tell a customer which new model corresponds to the old one. But we could fix that with RFID. That's a great sales tool.
I was on the fence about RFID, but learning that it can replace a sheet of paper with old model numbers in column one and new model numbers in column two sold me.
Some may say that this task could be online and automated using a database-backed web-site. They're obviously ignoring the fact that this method requires no infrastructure overhead, and, what's worse, generates no profit for Scott McGregor's bosses at Philips.
That silly Arab religion. It's almost as silly as the Hindi religion or that Caucasian religion. (there are Arab Christians, Jews, Bahaiis, etc.)
All it forbits is interest, which, if I recall, is forbidden in the Caucasian and Hebrew religions. Some Muslims have simply been more anal about keeping their religion in spite of practical concerns.
It's not politically correct to say so, but the West really is a superior culture when it comes to making practical use of theoretical discoveries.
Obviously I'm not denigrating the West's accomplishments, because the leaps in science and technology have been huge (I'm not sure why we lump the US with "the west" other than it being a code word for "white people") But this is a pretty recent phenomenon (relative to the entire time humanity has been around). Look at the great civilizations of Asia that lasted for centuries and contributed much to where we are today (shoulders of giants kinds of things) and you may get a different perspective.
Anyone can take a chunk of time and make their own race sound superior. Indeed, travel to any remnant country of a great civilization and all you hear is how they were responsible for this or that.
Power (economic, military, or scientific) shifts from region to region through time. Greece, Rome, western Europe have all been huge cultural and scientific centers at one time or another. Now it's the US' turn. The exponential nature of the growth of science means that each new bearer of scientific superiority will claim a larger share of the total knowledge.
When our star of knowledge fades, another group or region will take the cumulative human knowledge and run with it. Racists in those countries will then pretend that they're the center of all knowledge.
Here's my analysis, which is about as scientific as those found in "The Bell Curve" Civilization, science etc. started in Mesopotamia, moved west to the Greeks, then west to the Romans, then west to Western Europe, then West to the US. The way I see it, it's going to move to Japan, then China, then back to the middle east. Of course, I'm ignoring the Incas, Mayas, etc., but that doesn't fit my pet theory, so in the spirit of the pseudoscience exhibited in the aforementioned book, I'll just ignore them.
Or it was; in the last century the West has spent less of its resources on developing technology and more on supporting those who aren't able to support themselves. Simple natural selection now means that our populations are becoming geared towards those who consume handouts but produce no new discoveries. The west has been superior in the past century
As a society does better, it's only natural that they'll spend their resources on their own citizens. If you look at the US 100 years ago we weren't spending any money on social programs. As we've done better, we've decided to spend some of that money on our poor (the "meek" in the bible), but we've spent even more money on basic and applied sciences. The kind of big government that gave us social security, and will hopefully one day give us socialized medicine, is the same kind of government that funds projects like the Human Genome project, the space program, the NIH, NSF, even defense spending are responsible for many of our greatest accomplishments.
They're still around. People just call them Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz now.
First day of med school we got a lecture that essentially boiled down to "you're not hot shit, so get over yourselves" The main point: the majority of the increase in the average life expectancy (fewer dead kids, longer-living adults) is due to improvements in hygiene and sanitation (brought about by the germ theory of disease and the industrial revolution). Sexy toys like MRIs and wonder drugs are making important, but incremental, improvements.
Regarding the misappropriation of technology: while I hate the "won't someone think of the children types," too (mostly because they're often just framing their own biases in terms of children) when someone is dying you can't just say, "well I'd save you, but that'd throw mother nature's plan out of whack." :)
As for overpopulation, most of the developed nations are either at low positive or negative population growth. In developing countries it has to do with religious superstitions or lack of education about birth control.
You're right. Inspiration, like lightning, is probably not going to strike several people at exactly the same time, but it can strike different people working on different parts of the same project at different times. The best bands to be in are one where different people come up with the melody, chord structure, harmony, the solo, bass lines, etc.
PHBs may contact him at www.technobility.com to have him spout his truisms at the next company event that requires a keynote speaker (he's a keynote speaker, according to his short bio in the article, so don't contact him for any other kind of speaking engagement)
Good point, but I think fear and intellectual laziness are behind RIAA's actions. The member companies are afraid of how new technology will affect them and they're too lazy to come up with a new business model.
This isn't bad by itself, of course. Poetry with a 300 word vocabulary is pretty crappy (think nursey rhymes or bad rap). The development of this new vocabulary for music helps make it more expressive, but at the same time less accessible.
People can still respond to the purely emotional parts of a piece like Beethoven's 9th, the majority sit there twidling their tumbs waiting for the "Ode to Joy" part to start. Why spend years listening to classical music and reading music theory when you can just pop in the latest nursery rhyme (e.g. Brittany) and get instant gratification?
I guess, the PDAs just treat the symptom and gives yuppies something to say at cocktail parties to make themselves look sophisticated, but the solution is better (maybe mandatory) music education in school.
Shameless plug of my band (all recorded on PCs)
They must be talking about those new anal pagers that give you the message by anal-braille. The anus has a pretty high concentration of sensory endings, so it makes perfect sense to use it instead of less sensitive parts like the hip or back. Plus it's close to where the pager is usually located anyway.
You may think that clean-up would be an issue, but you can buy these cute little disposable latex covers for the insertable part.
So none of what you wrote after the colon is true? :) Just kidding. Thanks for the corrections