O-kay Look under bullets 1 - 4(which support the conclusion the pure HIV culture has caused AIDS in laboratory workers(i.e. humans) which is actually a stronger case than animals.
Duesberg, in fact, doesn't argue that at all. You're just so horribly confused here I don't even know what to say. Actually, Duesberg has probably offered the strongest arguments *against* the position you impute to him here of anyone involved.
OK, you've got a number of people with severely degraded immune systems. They're a homosexuals, part of a 'scene' that involves unprotected sex with many partners (and you can put that 'many' in capital letters and use the blink tab, it was several people a night, every night) as well as heavy hard drug use. You can't think of a single hypothesis to explain this besides an infectious agent? Please.
I can think of lots of hypotheses but the fact remains that a simple hypothesis(the infective agent is HIV) is the most simple, most accurate, most backed-up hypothesis there is.
If your only answer is "drug use" you have a very weak argument. There are very very many cases of people who are not drug-users and who do not engage in promiscuous sex developing AIDS from exposure to HIV through unprotected sex or transfusions. Read the book "Borrowed Time" for instance. There are also very very many cases of heavy drug-users who do not end up with AIDS and are also, incidentally, HIV negative. Asserting that all gay people who develop AIDS are also hard drug users verges on statistically unfounded prejudice , the kind that the Reagan administration used to deny any obligation to help them.
Nor is there any logical reason to deny that there may be different causes for different cases.
Then the cases not caused by HIV but by other immune deficiency syndrome are not AIDS. I suggest you read this. Look under the justification for the fulfillment of Koch Rule 1. Scientists discovered that a small number of people having a clinical diagnosis of AIDS-like disease actually had a different disorder. Also look at the surveillance statistics.
The immune system is a complex system, and it's hardly inconceivable that it might break down for a number of reasons.
It does break down for a nubmer of reasons. Those are separate illnesses. The most coherent, simple, and productive explanation is that the constellation and development of AIDS-related illnesses and this kind of immune deficiency are caused by HIV, not any other cause. The simplest answer is usually the right one, as a guiding principle. IN this case, we have a simple answer and the data supports this answer. The fact it is complex points to the idea that one source capable of affecting it in its entirety is responsible - otherwise we have to assume that many different forces are responsible, an idea that on its face and statistically is untenable and violates Occam's razor.
As to Duesbergs lack of results, results require experiments, experiments require money, and the day he opened his mouth and questioned Gallos claims his money has been cut off. And THAT is what we should all be outraged about. Duesberg has submitted countless grant proposals with good research designs that would have settled the issues he raises, one way or the other, with good solid data. Up until he opened his mouth on this issue, he was a top rank grant writer, and he's done a lot of first class science. But now all he can do is write, because experiments take money, and no one is willing to fund experiments that might prove the paradigm
True. But you can consider the fact that record contracts are exceedingly rare, making a career as an artist is extremely hard, and so the actual "worth" of the contract is much higher than the value of the promised outcome or the amount of money the contract offers. It can launch a lifelong career, after all. Thus, record companies basically coerce bands into signing the first agreement that comes their way, even if it is unfair(which it probably is), basically saying: this is your only chance, take it now, nothing better is going to come along. It is the band's decision to sign the agreement, but that doesn't mean the agreement is fair.
Now that internet distribution is picked up completely by Apple, and professional recording equipment and production is so common as to be available at relatively low cost to artists who record at home, it is simply absurd that record companies have somehow reduced the share of money given to their artists and are delivering the savings on distribution apparently to themselves all on the basis of inflated prices for "record studio time" and artifically high-valued distribution channels. As far as I can tell, the means by which record companies exploit their artists are corrupt. The artists are the people who are responsible for all of their revenue, after all, and should be proportionately compensated.
Hollywood at least recognizes that star power primarily drives the consumption of a film. It often pays stars $20 million just to be in a movie, on top of a share of the box office ticket sales. That is, a huge portion of a film's budget is devoted to paying the stars. While labels don't bring in as much money as Hollywood studios, major record companies don't seem to pay the same debt of gratitude to their talent. Executives and label owners whose only real talent is to broker unfair deals end up walking home with the lion's share of the cash.
It's kind of like how the oil companies could afford to reduce the price of oil artificially, but they know that we are dependent on their oil(purposefully) so that we give them tons and tons of money at unfair prices to get our fix and as a result they become immensely, excessively, profitable. Sounds like a collusion in an oligopoly to me.
I think that a paradigm shift is happening with music because of the labels' obviously backwards dealings and the democratization that the internet and digital recording bring. The oil problem, on the other hand, is going to be around for a long time.
HIV has been cultured in vitro. Its genome and DNA have been sequenced and examined. Its infectious process has been observed - hence the availability of therapies to treat HIV disease, which incidentally also produce increased T-cell counts. HIV has also been shown to cause disease in infected animals when infected with pure HIV.
How much more isolation do you want? Despite what Duesberg argues, all of Koch's rules for determining the infectious agent of a disease have been fulfilled. People who say that HIV has not been sufficiently proven to be the cause of AIDS, such as the Perth group, have set up ridiculous standards that are not even fulfilled by other, widely accepted causative agents. The bottom line is: what did 30 million people die of, if not from HIV-caused AIDS? What caused the dramatic fall-off of AIDS related deaths in the US after anti-retroviral drugs were introduced and became affordable? What caused the giant explosion of AIDS in the gay community if something other than the HIV transmission via unprotected sex? How about among hemophiliacs and intravenous drug users? Why, when screening processes were put in place to detect the presence of HIV antibodies in blood donations, did the cases of infection via blood-transfusion go to approximately zero? Good science produces results. Duesberg hasn't produced any results.
Conspiracies on this scale don't happen in an open world. There will always be fringe voices on some radical position against a widely held theory - some of them are being polemicists just for the sake being polemicists, some of them are impervious to reason. The only conspiracies going on here belong to corrupt governments of poor countries who refuse their citizens the vital medical treatment with the justification of exactly the reasons you are giving, while their people die because they don't receive medicines that have been proven to be effective in scientifically rigorous studies and in the field.
Isn't that your position regarding HIV/AIDS? That a bunch of TV stories told you so, so it must be right?
That's not his logic. His logic is that reasonable tests of the HIV/AIDS theory have shown it to be most probably true, and there is a high correlation between seropositivity for HIV and the development of and eventual death due to AIDS related illnesses. If your argument is that we shouldn't trust *any* fact that we are handed, you are correct: no fact is 100% true. But that makes life unviable, and there are reasonable, recognized criteria for distinguishing between truthful claims and deceptive ones. One of those criteria is the amount of scientific evidence furnished to prove a claim. There is a ton of such evidence for the HIV/AIDS correlation, just like there is a ton of evidence for evolution and global warming.
Your only other response is that smart people aren't to be trusted.
Please take a look at his logic again. You are deliberately changing the sense of his statement. All he said was that smart people shouldn't be trusted just because they have a history of being smart. That is, intelligence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being correct about intellectual or scientific questions.
Funny, all the people I listed say they've been looking for that link in the science journals and have never seen it.
The link is implied by the amount of data supporting it and widely recognized. There is no scientific paper that is *simply* about the link between HIV and AIDS, but the statistical supporting the accepted link is overwhelming. My other post details why it is these scientists' burden of proof to challenge what is seen as a reasonable conclusion about the relationship between HIV and AIDS.
Even if the number of people with AIDS is not 100% correlated with the number of people who are seropositive for HIV, and 100% mutually exclusive with people who are HIV negative, the millions of people who have died of AIDS since it emerged and whose HIV tests are positive is proof enough for me and most scientists. Especially during the eighties when an HIV positive test result gave you a 6 month to 3 year life expectancy which much more often than not elapsed and resulted in the death of a patient. There is DEFINITELY a relationship between HIV seropositivity and the development of AIDS, while it is not known if HIV is the *only* agent involved in AIDS. The correlation is in the high 0.9s which is a reasonable criterion to establish some kind of causal relationship. Not to mention that viral load tests(which use methods to detect the volume of HIV DNA in the blood) are good at predicting illness, and drugs that target specific aspects of the HIV reproductive cycle(transcriptase inhibitors and protease inhibitors) are effective in preventing full-blown AIDS to people whose previous seropositivity would have resulted in death is good enough proof for me. The burden of proof is on the scientists you bring up to produce a different agent which shows as high a correlation with the development of the immune-related opportunistic diseases with which AIDS is associated. Until they can do this, they are not helping the battle against the AIDS pandemic by raising the specter of doubt over something that is reasonably established.
Also, the lack of 100% overlap between HIV positive people and people with AIDS related disease may be explainable by other, possibly more simple, probably more plausible theories. For instance, there may be some mechanism which in those people without AIDS, left untreated, are able to stop the reproduction of the HIV virus using the human cellular reproduction system. Science's time would be better spent by studying those who are exposed to HIV or are seropositive for HIV but don't develop the disease sans treatment than by discounting the role of HIV in AIDS altogether. Moreover, to account for the seronegativity in people who do go on develop immune deficiencies associated with AIDS: lots of diseases can be infective and still not cause the immune system to produce antibodies, and fairly pronounced diseases can go undetected if the immune system is suppressed to begin with, so that it fails to produce detectable antibody levels.
But how does that produce any more colors than a traditional screen? I thought the entire point was to escape the limitations imposed by the RGB standard - with non-integer red green and blue values between 0 and 255 the number of possible colors increases to infinity, assuming any decimal value is fair game, as far as I can tell. Is this correct? Someone please explain. I don't understand your fancy modern displays or your color definition spectrum, I'm just a caveman!
In addition: Just because Microsoft won on features doesn't mean they also didn't steal the foundation of their browser or that they didn't do so unfairly - the thing that required the most vision was still the basic browser GUI and HTML rendering, and these are things they definitely stole. They didn't even develop the Explorer foundation themselves - they bought Spyglass Mosaic which also utilized Andreessen's NCSA Mosaic code. So yeah - everything eventually comes back to Andreessen.
Are you ready to admit the possibility that Andreessen's bad business sense and eventual laziness maybe worked in combation with Microsoft's anti-competitive streak to force Netscape to the sidelines?
Calm. Down. I've seen this four or five times in the past day or two - people not comprehending what I say, or just selectively reading my points to construct the weakest possible straw man.
I never said that Netscape was a perfect browser, or that Marc Andreessen didn't screw up his advantage. I just said he was a visionary. Which he was.
In fact I just conceded that he wasn't a good businessman.
Um, I don't know what aspects of the browser you're not supposed to "copy". Did you level that accusation at Opera too?
I don't know - by not copying it?
First of all Opera came after Mosaic(1992) and Internet explorer(1995) in 1996, and by that time the standard interface was entrenched in the popular consciousness. What you are saying here again proves my point. The fact that every browser since Mosaic has used basically the same interface layout invented by Andreessen pretty much proves that no one else has been able to envision something better. Just because browser layout seems so obvious to you now doesn't mean it was obvious back then - it just means you're so used to the interface that you've taken it for granted, which is actually a testament to its novelty. Back then it was quite an impressive feat to bring an intuitive user interface and graphical browsing to such a novel idea. The fact that Andreessen caught onto the necessity of bringing the Internet to regular citizens makes him exactly what an inventor is - something who finds a solution for an apparent need or desire.
Your memory must be failing. Both Andreessen and Jim Clark essentially claimed they had pretty much "invented" the "internet" time and time again back way when Netscape was the darling of the stock market and they had zero competitors.
I think you are inventing things out of thin air.
"Pretty much essentially claimed that they had pretty much 'invented' the 'internet" is different from *actually* claiming what he did do: that you brought the world wide web from obscurity into prosperity. Andreessen definitely gives credit to others when he talks about who brought the internet to fruition, but obviously he's not going shy away from claiming his integral role in the story.
I was young at the time but I don't ever recall Andreessen claiming that he was the sole or main inventor of the internet. All I ever remember he said, rightfully, was that he played an integral part in defining the world wide web as it is today and bringing it to the masses.. In fact he's on record for crediting Al Gore for a lot of the Internet development. For instance,
Al Gore may not have invented the Internet, but Marc Andreessen, who invented the world's first commercial Web browser, gives the former vice president credit for paving the way. "He had people buying into the concept of the information superhighway before anybody had an idea about what it would be," says Andreessen, who profited from the traffic by creating one of the most successful on-ramps, Netscape Communications.
Everytime someone claims that someone else mistakenly claimed that they are responsible for the internet it turns out a) to be false and b) to be serving a political agenda.
And then they proceeded to run the company into the ground when the going got tough, proving that neither of them even qualified as decent businessmen
How exactly is forming a billion dollar company and selling it to AOL at a huge profit 'running it into the ground' and proviing that you are not 'even qualified as decent businessmen?'' That's success by any standard. Netscape didn't do as well as it could have, but you seem very willing to discount everything it's helped to give you to serve some weird polemic impulse in your head.
That's not what I said at all. If you read it again, I said that to most customers the vendor lock-in isn't perceived as a negative as it is with Microsoft products, which literally tricked most people into using internet explorer to browse the web. And while buying music from iTMS that only plays on the iPod is a lock-in, it is also viewed as helping to make a better, more tightly integrated product. I don't really agree with that sentiment but most users feel that the benefit is enough that they can overlook the fact that they can't use other players with the iTMS songs. As I said I'm not necessarily "defending the practice." It may be necessarily anti-competitive. But it's not maliciously so as it is with Microsoft - it is truly a benefit to both the customer and the business. It is in the end an honest victory for Apple - better product = more sales.
The vendor-lock-in is only one way. By buying an iPod you are encouraged to purchase music from iTMS with limited DRM. You are by no means forced to do so - the player plays MP3s and other formats, after all. By buying a different player you are forced to use a different music store - of which there are countless many. No one forces you to use iTunes or to buy music from iTMS.
So yeah, Apple is trying to make better products, and succeeds at doing so. Honestly.
Yes. This is what happens when visionaries go up against beheamoth monopolies. Tech visionaries tend not to be cynical, realistic, or even all that competitive when they first try to sell their ideas. They're not therefore prepared to deal with people who play dirty and are only out to win, as Microsoft does. They naively believe that the quality and freshness of their ideas is the only thing required to take their product to the top and leave it there.
Unfortunately this often results in people taking advantage of them when they aren't equipped to look out for their own interests. Just look at Jobs(who yes, I believe, is a visionary.) They learn, though. This article is about how Andreessen has managed to acquire better business sense and become a bettetr manager and businessman because of it. It takes a while to learn things like that if you've never been to business school. But I think that theese people eventually have certain advantages - they're more open-minded, not locked in to text-book business school examples and stategies. They have a better intuition about things. They also have the advantage of learning to merge the creative side of their business with the competitive side - something that one-degree MBA students are never guaranteed to learn, as they are pressed into shape by a cookie cutter and sent out into the world to apply their studies without a clue how to generalize them and use them to stimulate creativity.
Maybe you are not aware than Marc Andreessen worked at NCSA and invented Mosaic, upon whose layout every modern web browser is based. So basically nearly every aspect of the web interface you were looking when you posted this troll was invented by him.
Considering Mosaic was the first web browser to run on Windows, it is very much accurate to credit Marc Andreessen with setting the World Wide Web into motion and bringing it to the people. Meanwhile Microsoft missed the boat and only entered the browser market when it became very obvious that this Netscape thing was becoming very profitable and they wanted a piece. They then copied every aspect of the browser, packaged it into their operating system, thereby locking people in unknowingly, and to this day they continue to willfully 'invent new features'(read: break agreed upon standards) in order to keep other browsers out of their cheaply earned monopoly.
So. 'Visionary' turns out to be an apt label for him. Apt, I say!
So you're saying the whole iPod/iTunes/iTMS/DRM system is not vendor lock-in? Not to mention the fact that OSX is runnable (officially) only on Apple hardware?
iTunes is vendor lock-in. Most people who buy music from iTMS don't see it that way, however. I'm not defending the practice, but everything you're pointing to is the exact means by which Apple confers the image of "it just works, it's completely integrated from top to bottom without any holes" upon itself. Presumably most of theeir customers view this fact as a benefit and not a cost - ease of using something you want to use vs. being locked into something you don't want to use.
How about the fact that Apple is notorious for breaking backwards compatibility when it suits them?
Which instance of backwards compatibility breaking are you talking about? They've taken great pains to make every transition to new hardware or software with the most backwards compatibility possible. The Classic OS 9 virtual machine in OS X for instance. The 68000 emulation in the PowerPC transition. Rosetta when moving to Intel. It's not like Microsoft who code themselves into circles trying to maintain backwards compatibility at the base of the Win32 API at the expense of performance and stability.
And as far as threatening and bullying their fanbase, have you forgotten the ThinkSecret litigation already?
Apple has had some skeletons in their closet.They are playing hard ball now, which is apparently what it takes in our culture. I don't like the Think Secret litigation, either, though.
Apple produces some fine hardware and software, but don't let that gull you into thinking that they're any fluffier or friendlier than the competition--because they're not. That's right. My top post pretty much expresses exactly this sentiment.
Anyway, out of Apple and Microsoft, Microsoft is definitely the bigger bully hands down. Their expressed attitude(or at least Balmer's) regarding competition is that it's not healthy and they must crush it. This means being not very good at many things rather than being good at one or two things.
Apple, on the other hand, is doing what it can to preserve its own piece of the pie - it is definitely not out to crush competition and therefore their own customers, but is actually sincerely trying to improve their development of good products whose sales benefit both their customers and themselves.
Uhm - how is observing how Apple markets its products with a tone of reserved, slightly suspicious admiration "fanboy tripe?" Did you even read the post?
Geez. People can't praise Apple on Slashdot for a second anymore without being branded an Apple 'fanboi' . It's as if you don't like something *just* because it has a devoted following.
I take it you don't really understand what I was saying or didn't read the post, or even the blockquote you used. They *pretend* to care. That was the whole point.
Google does it in a different way. Bubbly icons. A search box. A results page in milliseconds that suggests to you possible typo errors - "Did you mean...." Read: a lifeless computer program that has human surface Yes, of course the bottom line is the main concern. That's why I was tlaking about it as a "deception" - and a "marketing coup."
Some of you slashdot readers are quite literal-minded and need to learn to seperate the thing being perceived from the perception.
I think he was more referring to the image of being a giant corporation.
But you're right, Apple has perpretrated a pretty impressive deception. In fact, it is the ultimate marketing coup : a multi-billion dollar company masquerading as a marginalized, under-appreciated underdog. It works quite well - how else to get the too-cool-for-school, indie, emo, anti-conformist crowd to buy their mass-media-oriented, incredibly trendy device? I'm starting to think all those years of stagnant sales, bad management, and being tethered to a virtually ignored platform are paying off. That's what fostered this image. It's a text-book case study on how to form a brand.
Moreover, this is a winning attitude that we see everywhere. After all, it's how people get elected, too. Make people think you are a little guy, fighting against a greater, unflagging, oppressive evil - even if you are the Man - and not only do they let their guard down, they're on your side almost immediately(witness: the bombastic "Star Wars" take-off the Republicans did at one of their conventions, framing the Democrats as the dark Imperial forces and themselves as the Rebel Alliance. Or the multi-millionaire cable executive Ned Lamont in the recent Democratic primary. )
They won't be able to keep up this facade forever. For almost a year now, everywhere I turn I see an iPod. Even though I myself own one, it's starting to make me resentful. Do people have to be entertained every minute of the day? How much of our life are we willing to spend on distractions?
Apple has to be weary of becoming disconnected - of pitching products *at* people rather than *to* people. Microsoft does the former, especially with Xbox and Zune. They are obviously grasping at markets they have no business being near. I think Apple is less evil, though - or maybe not, judging by the recent accounting scandal. Anyway, Apple doesn't want to go that route. Of course Jobs and his marketing department have mastered the art of the opposite - making people think that Apple furthers their individualism and self-expression, their person-hood. Apple's ads talk to you as people instead of as commodities. They've even gone so far as to anthropomorphize computers, as if to emphasize(or invent) the humanity sequestered in all this sterile circuitry. You're getting a friend, not just a tool. It's aesthetic genius - all geared towards delivering another channel for the mainstream recording industry to reach you with their over-produced crap. So I doubt Apple's music-player monopoly will go away unless some court or legislation tears down their partial vertical integration with ITMS.
Have they sold out? Is this something we want to preserve even if it is deceptive? Maybe. I have no problem with big corporations as long as they don't start unduly influencing our public policies. I do however like it when gigantic corporations see the importance of talking to their customers as if they were human beings and not wallets - or at least pretending to. Google does this. Apple does this. It's great - but we mustn't let our guard down. If it's not too late.
It wasn't when Microsoft did it. Apple lost its opportunity. They tried to license the OS again in the mid 90's and it almost killed them. Steve Jobs came in, bought back all the licenses, and established a reign of Apple-only Macs. In order for him to reneg on that decision there will have to be a very compelling reason, such as the not losing all the hardware sales, tight control of licensing restrictions so that clone-makers are guaranteed to make computers that work seamlessly with OS X, and rigorous driver support so that their OS's reputation doesn't get slammed by poor performance and poor hardware compatibility.
Those are big difficulties, so Apple is not going to forfeit their control over the platform that easily. It may happen when they are heading up into double-digit desktop market share, but I doubt it, strongly. For every gain in OS market share, remember, Apple makes billions of dollars in hardware sales. There has to be a promise that their hardware sales will immediately be replaced by licensing sales - not that they would drop their hardware development if they licensed, just that it would be hard to compete with companies like Dell offering computers at several lower price points than Apple. Apple might start having to cheapen its own hardware quality in order to keep up in sales volume, and that might be bad news for the platform.
Slashdot Mirror
O-kay Look under bullets 1 - 4(which support the conclusion the pure HIV culture has caused AIDS in laboratory workers(i.e. humans) which is actually a stronger case than animals.
Actually, he does argue that Koch's criteria have not been fulfilled, which is what I said he had argued against.
I can think of lots of hypotheses but the fact remains that a simple hypothesis(the infective agent is HIV) is the most simple, most accurate, most backed-up hypothesis there is.
If your only answer is "drug use" you have a very weak argument. There are very very many cases of people who are not drug-users and who do not engage in promiscuous sex developing AIDS from exposure to HIV through unprotected sex or transfusions. Read the book "Borrowed Time" for instance. There are also very very many cases of heavy drug-users who do not end up with AIDS and are also, incidentally, HIV negative. Asserting that all gay people who develop AIDS are also hard drug users verges on statistically unfounded prejudice , the kind that the Reagan administration used to deny any obligation to help them.
Then the cases not caused by HIV but by other immune deficiency syndrome are not AIDS. I suggest you read this. Look under the justification for the fulfillment of Koch Rule 1. Scientists discovered that a small number of people having a clinical diagnosis of AIDS-like disease actually had a different disorder. Also look at the surveillance statistics.
It does break down for a nubmer of reasons. Those are separate illnesses. The most coherent, simple, and productive explanation is that the constellation and development of AIDS-related illnesses and this kind of immune deficiency are caused by HIV, not any other cause. The simplest answer is usually the right one, as a guiding principle. IN this case, we have a simple answer and the data supports this answer. The fact it is complex points to the idea that one source capable of affecting it in its entirety is responsible - otherwise we have to assume that many different forces are responsible, an idea that on its face and statistically is untenable and violates Occam's razor.
True. But you can consider the fact that record contracts are exceedingly rare, making a career as an artist is extremely hard, and so the actual "worth" of the contract is much higher than the value of the promised outcome or the amount of money the contract offers. It can launch a lifelong career, after all. Thus, record companies basically coerce bands into signing the first agreement that comes their way, even if it is unfair(which it probably is), basically saying: this is your only chance, take it now, nothing better is going to come along. It is the band's decision to sign the agreement, but that doesn't mean the agreement is fair.
Now that internet distribution is picked up completely by Apple, and professional recording equipment and production is so common as to be available at relatively low cost to artists who record at home, it is simply absurd that record companies have somehow reduced the share of money given to their artists and are delivering the savings on distribution apparently to themselves all on the basis of inflated prices for "record studio time" and artifically high-valued distribution channels. As far as I can tell, the means by which record companies exploit their artists are corrupt. The artists are the people who are responsible for all of their revenue, after all, and should be proportionately compensated.
Hollywood at least recognizes that star power primarily drives the consumption of a film. It often pays stars $20 million just to be in a movie, on top of a share of the box office ticket sales. That is, a huge portion of a film's budget is devoted to paying the stars. While labels don't bring in as much money as Hollywood studios, major record companies don't seem to pay the same debt of gratitude to their talent. Executives and label owners whose only real talent is to broker unfair deals end up walking home with the lion's share of the cash.
It's kind of like how the oil companies could afford to reduce the price of oil artificially, but they know that we are dependent on their oil(purposefully) so that we give them tons and tons of money at unfair prices to get our fix and as a result they become immensely, excessively, profitable. Sounds like a collusion in an oligopoly to me.
I think that a paradigm shift is happening with music because of the labels' obviously backwards dealings and the democratization that the internet and digital recording bring. The oil problem, on the other hand, is going to be around for a long time.
HIV has been cultured in vitro. Its genome and DNA have been sequenced and examined. Its infectious process has been observed - hence the availability of therapies to treat HIV disease, which incidentally also produce increased T-cell counts. HIV has also been shown to cause disease in infected animals when infected with pure HIV.
How much more isolation do you want? Despite what Duesberg argues, all of Koch's rules for determining the infectious agent of a disease have been fulfilled. People who say that HIV has not been sufficiently proven to be the cause of AIDS, such as the Perth group, have set up ridiculous standards that are not even fulfilled by other, widely accepted causative agents. The bottom line is: what did 30 million people die of, if not from HIV-caused AIDS? What caused the dramatic fall-off of AIDS related deaths in the US after anti-retroviral drugs were introduced and became affordable? What caused the giant explosion of AIDS in the gay community if something other than the HIV transmission via unprotected sex? How about among hemophiliacs and intravenous drug users? Why, when screening processes were put in place to detect the presence of HIV antibodies in blood donations, did the cases of infection via blood-transfusion go to approximately zero? Good science produces results. Duesberg hasn't produced any results.
Conspiracies on this scale don't happen in an open world. There will always be fringe voices on some radical position against a widely held theory - some of them are being polemicists just for the sake being polemicists, some of them are impervious to reason. The only conspiracies going on here belong to corrupt governments of poor countries who refuse their citizens the vital medical treatment with the justification of exactly the reasons you are giving, while their people die because they don't receive medicines that have been proven to be effective in scientifically rigorous studies and in the field.
Isn't that your position regarding HIV/AIDS? That a bunch of TV stories told you so, so it must be right?
That's not his logic. His logic is that reasonable tests of the HIV/AIDS theory have shown it to be most probably true, and there is a high correlation between seropositivity for HIV and the development of and eventual death due to AIDS related illnesses. If your argument is that we shouldn't trust *any* fact that we are handed, you are correct: no fact is 100% true. But that makes life unviable, and there are reasonable, recognized criteria for distinguishing between truthful claims and deceptive ones. One of those criteria is the amount of scientific evidence furnished to prove a claim. There is a ton of such evidence for the HIV/AIDS correlation, just like there is a ton of evidence for evolution and global warming.
Your only other response is that smart people aren't to be trusted.
Please take a look at his logic again. You are deliberately changing the sense of his statement. All he said was that smart people shouldn't be trusted just because they have a history of being smart. That is, intelligence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being correct about intellectual or scientific questions.
Funny, all the people I listed say they've been looking for that link in the science journals and have never seen it.
The link is implied by the amount of data supporting it and widely recognized. There is no scientific paper that is *simply* about the link between HIV and AIDS, but the statistical supporting the accepted link is overwhelming. My other post details why it is these scientists' burden of proof to challenge what is seen as a reasonable conclusion about the relationship between HIV and AIDS.
Even if the number of people with AIDS is not 100% correlated with the number of people who are seropositive for HIV, and 100% mutually exclusive with people who are HIV negative, the millions of people who have died of AIDS since it emerged and whose HIV tests are positive is proof enough for me and most scientists. Especially during the eighties when an HIV positive test result gave you a 6 month to 3 year life expectancy which much more often than not elapsed and resulted in the death of a patient. There is DEFINITELY a relationship between HIV seropositivity and the development of AIDS, while it is not known if HIV is the *only* agent involved in AIDS. The correlation is in the high 0.9s which is a reasonable criterion to establish some kind of causal relationship. Not to mention that viral load tests(which use methods to detect the volume of HIV DNA in the blood) are good at predicting illness, and drugs that target specific aspects of the HIV reproductive cycle(transcriptase inhibitors and protease inhibitors) are effective in preventing full-blown AIDS to people whose previous seropositivity would have resulted in death is good enough proof for me. The burden of proof is on the scientists you bring up to produce a different agent which shows as high a correlation with the development of the immune-related opportunistic diseases with which AIDS is associated. Until they can do this, they are not helping the battle against the AIDS pandemic by raising the specter of doubt over something that is reasonably established.
Also, the lack of 100% overlap between HIV positive people and people with AIDS related disease may be explainable by other, possibly more simple, probably more plausible theories. For instance, there may be some mechanism which in those people without AIDS, left untreated, are able to stop the reproduction of the HIV virus using the human cellular reproduction system. Science's time would be better spent by studying those who are exposed to HIV or are seropositive for HIV but don't develop the disease sans treatment than by discounting the role of HIV in AIDS altogether. Moreover, to account for the seronegativity in people who do go on develop immune deficiencies associated with AIDS: lots of diseases can be infective and still not cause the immune system to produce antibodies, and fairly pronounced diseases can go undetected if the immune system is suppressed to begin with, so that it fails to produce detectable antibody levels.
But how does that produce any more colors than a traditional screen? I thought the entire point was to escape the limitations imposed by the RGB standard - with non-integer red green and blue values between 0 and 255 the number of possible colors increases to infinity, assuming any decimal value is fair game, as far as I can tell. Is this correct? Someone please explain. I don't understand your fancy modern displays or your color definition spectrum, I'm just a caveman!
In addition: Just because Microsoft won on features doesn't mean they also didn't steal the foundation of their browser or that they didn't do so unfairly - the thing that required the most vision was still the basic browser GUI and HTML rendering, and these are things they definitely stole. They didn't even develop the Explorer foundation themselves - they bought Spyglass Mosaic which also utilized Andreessen's NCSA Mosaic code. So yeah - everything eventually comes back to Andreessen.
Are you ready to admit the possibility that Andreessen's bad business sense and eventual laziness maybe worked in combation with Microsoft's anti-competitive streak to force Netscape to the sidelines?
Calm. Down. I've seen this four or five times in the past day or two - people not comprehending what I say, or just selectively reading my points to construct the weakest possible straw man.
I never said that Netscape was a perfect browser, or that Marc Andreessen didn't screw up his advantage. I just said he was a visionary. Which he was.
In fact I just conceded that he wasn't a good businessman.
Read my reply to your other rant.
Um, I don't know what aspects of the browser you're not supposed to "copy". Did you level that accusation at Opera too?
I don't know - by not copying it?
First of all Opera came after Mosaic(1992) and Internet explorer(1995) in 1996, and by that time the standard interface was entrenched in the popular consciousness. What you are saying here again proves my point. The fact that every browser since Mosaic has used basically the same interface layout invented by Andreessen pretty much proves that no one else has been able to envision something better. Just because browser layout seems so obvious to you now doesn't mean it was obvious back then - it just means you're so used to the interface that you've taken it for granted, which is actually a testament to its novelty. Back then it was quite an impressive feat to bring an intuitive user interface and graphical browsing to such a novel idea. The fact that Andreessen caught onto the necessity of bringing the Internet to regular citizens makes him exactly what an inventor is - something who finds a solution for an apparent need or desire.
Your memory must be failing. Both Andreessen and Jim Clark essentially claimed they had pretty much "invented" the "internet" time and time again back way when Netscape was the darling of the stock market and they had zero competitors.
I think you are inventing things out of thin air.
"Pretty much essentially claimed that they had pretty much 'invented' the 'internet" is different from *actually* claiming what he did do: that you brought the world wide web from obscurity into prosperity. Andreessen definitely gives credit to others when he talks about who brought the internet to fruition, but obviously he's not going shy away from claiming his integral role in the story.
I was young at the time but I don't ever recall Andreessen claiming that he was the sole or main inventor of the internet. All I ever remember he said, rightfully, was that he played an integral part in defining the world wide web as it is today and bringing it to the masses.. In fact he's on record for crediting Al Gore for a lot of the Internet development. For instance,
Everytime someone claims that someone else mistakenly claimed that they are responsible for the internet it turns out a) to be false and b) to be serving a political agenda.
And then they proceeded to run the company into the ground when the going got tough, proving that neither of them even qualified as decent businessmen
How exactly is forming a billion dollar company and selling it to AOL at a huge profit 'running it into the ground' and proviing that you are not 'even qualified as decent businessmen?'' That's success by any standard. Netscape didn't do as well as it could have, but you seem very willing to discount everything it's helped to give you to serve some weird polemic impulse in your head.
That's not what I said at all. If you read it again, I said that to most customers the vendor lock-in isn't perceived as a negative as it is with Microsoft products, which literally tricked most people into using internet explorer to browse the web. And while buying music from iTMS that only plays on the iPod is a lock-in, it is also viewed as helping to make a better, more tightly integrated product. I don't really agree with that sentiment but most users feel that the benefit is enough that they can overlook the fact that they can't use other players with the iTMS songs. As I said I'm not necessarily "defending the practice." It may be necessarily anti-competitive. But it's not maliciously so as it is with Microsoft - it is truly a benefit to both the customer and the business. It is in the end an honest victory for Apple - better product = more sales.
The vendor-lock-in is only one way. By buying an iPod you are encouraged to purchase music from iTMS with limited DRM. You are by no means forced to do so - the player plays MP3s and other formats, after all. By buying a different player you are forced to use a different music store - of which there are countless many. No one forces you to use iTunes or to buy music from iTMS.
So yeah, Apple is trying to make better products, and succeeds at doing so. Honestly.
No kool-aid here, move along.
Yes. This is what happens when visionaries go up against beheamoth monopolies. Tech visionaries tend not to be cynical, realistic, or even all that competitive when they first try to sell their ideas. They're not therefore prepared to deal with people who play dirty and are only out to win, as Microsoft does. They naively believe that the quality and freshness of their ideas is the only thing required to take their product to the top and leave it there.
Unfortunately this often results in people taking advantage of them when they aren't equipped to look out for their own interests. Just look at Jobs(who yes, I believe, is a visionary.) They learn, though. This article is about how Andreessen has managed to acquire better business sense and become a bettetr manager and businessman because of it. It takes a while to learn things like that if you've never been to business school. But I think that theese people eventually have certain advantages - they're more open-minded, not locked in to text-book business school examples and stategies. They have a better intuition about things. They also have the advantage of learning to merge the creative side of their business with the competitive side - something that one-degree MBA students are never guaranteed to learn, as they are pressed into shape by a cookie cutter and sent out into the world to apply their studies without a clue how to generalize them and use them to stimulate creativity.
Maybe you are not aware than Marc Andreessen worked at NCSA and invented Mosaic, upon whose layout every modern web browser is based. So basically nearly every aspect of the web interface you were looking when you posted this troll was invented by him.
Considering Mosaic was the first web browser to run on Windows, it is very much accurate to credit Marc Andreessen with setting the World Wide Web into motion and bringing it to the people. Meanwhile Microsoft missed the boat and only entered the browser market when it became very obvious that this Netscape thing was becoming very profitable and they wanted a piece. They then copied every aspect of the browser, packaged it into their operating system, thereby locking people in unknowingly, and to this day they continue to willfully 'invent new features'(read: break agreed upon standards) in order to keep other browsers out of their cheaply earned monopoly.
So. 'Visionary' turns out to be an apt label for him. Apt, I say!
So you're saying the whole iPod/iTunes/iTMS/DRM system is not vendor lock-in? Not to mention the fact that OSX is runnable (officially) only on Apple hardware?
iTunes is vendor lock-in. Most people who buy music from iTMS don't see it that way, however. I'm not defending the practice, but everything you're pointing to is the exact means by which Apple confers the image of "it just works, it's completely integrated from top to bottom without any holes" upon itself. Presumably most of theeir customers view this fact as a benefit and not a cost - ease of using something you want to use vs. being locked into something you don't want to use.
How about the fact that Apple is notorious for breaking backwards compatibility when it suits them?
Which instance of backwards compatibility breaking are you talking about? They've taken great pains to make every transition to new hardware or software with the most backwards compatibility possible. The Classic OS 9 virtual machine in OS X for instance. The 68000 emulation in the PowerPC transition. Rosetta when moving to Intel. It's not like Microsoft who code themselves into circles trying to maintain backwards compatibility at the base of the Win32 API at the expense of performance and stability.
And as far as threatening and bullying their fanbase, have you forgotten the ThinkSecret litigation already?
Apple has had some skeletons in their closet.They are playing hard ball now, which is apparently what it takes in our culture. I don't like the Think Secret litigation, either, though.
Apple produces some fine hardware and software, but don't let that gull you into thinking that they're any fluffier or friendlier than the competition--because they're not.
That's right. My top post pretty much expresses exactly this sentiment.
Anyway, out of Apple and Microsoft, Microsoft is definitely the bigger bully hands down. Their expressed attitude(or at least Balmer's) regarding competition is that it's not healthy and they must crush it. This means being not very good at many things rather than being good at one or two things.
Apple, on the other hand, is doing what it can to preserve its own piece of the pie - it is definitely not out to crush competition and therefore their own customers, but is actually sincerely trying to improve their development of good products whose sales benefit both their customers and themselves.
Uhm - how is observing how Apple markets its products with a tone of reserved, slightly suspicious admiration "fanboy tripe?" Did you even read the post?
Geez. People can't praise Apple on Slashdot for a second anymore without being branded an Apple 'fanboi' . It's as if you don't like something *just* because it has a devoted following.
I take it you don't really understand what I was saying or didn't read the post, or even the blockquote you used. They *pretend* to care. That was the whole point.
Google does it in a different way. Bubbly icons. A search box. A results page in milliseconds that suggests to you possible typo errors - "Did you mean...." Read: a lifeless computer program that has human surface Yes, of course the bottom line is the main concern. That's why I was tlaking about it as a "deception" - and a "marketing coup."
Some of you slashdot readers are quite literal-minded and need to learn to seperate the thing being perceived from the perception.
I think he was more referring to the image of being a giant corporation.
But you're right, Apple has perpretrated a pretty impressive deception. In fact, it is the ultimate marketing coup : a multi-billion dollar company masquerading as a marginalized, under-appreciated underdog. It works quite well - how else to get the too-cool-for-school, indie, emo, anti-conformist crowd to buy their mass-media-oriented, incredibly trendy device? I'm starting to think all those years of stagnant sales, bad management, and being tethered to a virtually ignored platform are paying off. That's what fostered this image. It's a text-book case study on how to form a brand.
Moreover, this is a winning attitude that we see everywhere. After all, it's how people get elected, too. Make people think you are a little guy, fighting against a greater, unflagging, oppressive evil - even if you are the Man - and not only do they let their guard down, they're on your side almost immediately(witness: the bombastic "Star Wars" take-off the Republicans did at one of their conventions, framing the Democrats as the dark Imperial forces and themselves as the Rebel Alliance. Or the multi-millionaire cable executive Ned Lamont in the recent Democratic primary. )
They won't be able to keep up this facade forever. For almost a year now, everywhere I turn I see an iPod. Even though I myself own one, it's starting to make me resentful. Do people have to be entertained every minute of the day? How much of our life are we willing to spend on distractions?
Apple has to be weary of becoming disconnected - of pitching products *at* people rather than *to* people. Microsoft does the former, especially with Xbox and Zune. They are obviously grasping at markets they have no business being near. I think Apple is less evil, though - or maybe not, judging by the recent accounting scandal. Anyway, Apple doesn't want to go that route. Of course Jobs and his marketing department have mastered the art of the opposite - making people think that Apple furthers their individualism and self-expression, their person-hood. Apple's ads talk to you as people instead of as commodities. They've even gone so far as to anthropomorphize computers, as if to emphasize(or invent) the humanity sequestered in all this sterile circuitry. You're getting a friend, not just a tool. It's aesthetic genius - all geared towards delivering another channel for the mainstream recording industry to reach you with their over-produced crap. So I doubt Apple's music-player monopoly will go away unless some court or legislation tears down their partial vertical integration with ITMS.
Have they sold out? Is this something we want to preserve even if it is deceptive? Maybe. I have no problem with big corporations as long as they don't start unduly influencing our public policies. I do however like it when gigantic corporations see the importance of talking to their customers as if they were human beings and not wallets - or at least pretending to. Google does this. Apple does this. It's great - but we mustn't let our guard down. If it's not too late.
Yes I am kidding.
About 9 million people have the name Kim in Korea.
Is it just me or could the Korean peninsula use a massive U.S. airdrop of new baby-names?
Or nevermind. We really wouldn't want to incite an onslaught of Kim Jong Il's new Taepodong missiles.
In my defense I did say "almost simultaneously." I had to, of course, to make the joke work. And that's all we really care about here.
What's a dozen years between friends? Or - with the case of Liebniz and Newton - sworn enemies?
That's unfair. His basement totally has flourescent lighting.
It wasn't when Microsoft did it. Apple lost its opportunity. They tried to license the OS again in the mid 90's and it almost killed them. Steve Jobs came in, bought back all the licenses, and established a reign of Apple-only Macs. In order for him to reneg on that decision there will have to be a very compelling reason, such as the not losing all the hardware sales, tight control of licensing restrictions so that clone-makers are guaranteed to make computers that work seamlessly with OS X, and rigorous driver support so that their OS's reputation doesn't get slammed by poor performance and poor hardware compatibility.
Those are big difficulties, so Apple is not going to forfeit their control over the platform that easily. It may happen when they are heading up into double-digit desktop market share, but I doubt it, strongly. For every gain in OS market share, remember, Apple makes billions of dollars in hardware sales. There has to be a promise that their hardware sales will immediately be replaced by licensing sales - not that they would drop their hardware development if they licensed, just that it would be hard to compete with companies like Dell offering computers at several lower price points than Apple. Apple might start having to cheapen its own hardware quality in order to keep up in sales volume, and that might be bad news for the platform.
(I was wondering why the link wasn't working.)
Pornotube is in your pants?
In the late 17th Century, Newton and Liebniz came up with Calculus almost simultaneously.
Now, in the 21st century, we have 'dcapel' and 'mincognito' with identical, +1 Insightful Slashdot posts simultaneously.
I call that progress.
It's now time for you two to sue the pants off of each other for copyright infringement.
Ready, set, call your lawyers...now!
*corrections: by "through computers" I mean "without solving the problem yourself, just by inputting the problem into the computer"
and the Matrix still needs us to survive for our electrochemical enegy, so I guess we're still useful for something.