Lawyer discovers way to spew utter BS all day long, rarely have to go to court or do actual research, and have plenty of "think-of-the-children" groups pay him lots of money for his opinion and support.
I think Jack Thompson is laughing all the way to the bank.
>I'm sick and tired of the medical "profession". It has a lot in common with the oldest profession.
Hey, what a coincidence! I'm sick and tired of people who lump nurses and doctors into the same broad category with their retarded insurance providers! They have a lot in common with people who lump everyone with a last name of "Yousef" into the same broad category with "terroristic bad-guy evildoers".
But, hey, next time you visit the ER with a life-threatening emergency, be sure to wear your T-shirt with that catchy slogan on it. We all need a good chuckle once in a while.
"With aluminum at $1.25 a pound, all it needs would be a large check from the government and someone to build as many nuclear or solar/wind power plants as it takes, and we could make this competitive with $3/gallon gasoline!"
Really... and while we're replacing 131 billion gallons of gasoline a year with aluminum pellets, will aluminum still be $1.25 a pound?
Write back when you get the funding for all of those nuclear plants for the sole purpose to recycle the pellets...
What an incredibly bad idea. You probably are lying about being a "slash dot reader" (who the fuck would call themselves reading "slash dot" instead of "/." or "slashdot" after reading it for years?), but that's OK, Mr. 7-digit UID. Unfortunately, your friend, Ashley Heyer, was stupid enough to put her real name, her real picture, and her real signature on a fake ID. I don't know about you, but if I was a public prosecutor involved in a "get tough" law-enforcement program to show my fellow voters how I'm serious about protecting kiddies from the evils of underage drinking, I'd start with an easy case where the offender (like Ashley Heyer) is admitting her guilt in using a fake ID to try to buy alcohol.
If she's claiming the fake ID is not hers, then how did her signature, and her photo (which I'm guessing is remarkably similar to the one on her real ID) get on there? Don't tell me, the Magic Fake ID Fairy? I guess it doesn't matter that Ashley Heyer was in possession of the fake ID that somehow wasn't hers, where and from whom did she get it from then? I like how you claimed in another post here, "rachel did serve the underaged girl beer. then the under aged girl served her a DMCA notice." What, so the fake ID miraculously appeared in Ashley Heyer's pocket? Or Ashley Heyer didn't willingly and conscientiously seek to be served an alcoholic beverage using that fake ID at a bar? Regardless of what Rachel did, that seems to be remarkably poor judgement for a page in Iowa's legislature who evidently is aspiring to "go places".
Of course, since Ashley Heyer is a public figure serving the Iowa legislature, it only seems fair that her likeness (if not her signature) is no longer wholly her own. After all, celebrities can't sue the paparazzi for publishing their likenesses, based on that. Why would Ashley Heyer get special treatment in a court of law?
I wish you the best of luck as you, Ashley Heyer, are "going places". Maybe not the places your daddy dearest told you that you were going, but places nonetheless. In fact, be sure to heft a cold one to yourself, Ashley Heyer, to celebrate not only your underage drinking, but your strongarm tactics in abusing the DMCA to try to get embarrassing information about your use of a fake ID at the wrong bar. I would hate for someone to linksome stories to this so Google would put your idiocy at the top of the list. Especially since you seem to have such a promising spot as a page in Iowa's legislative House. Ashley Heyer, consider this a lesson in public relations! Something valuable, I hear, in politics.
>On the other hand, Americans could do worse than adopt the French election system. A genuine, fair two-round election, an 85% voter turn-out, a clear majority for the winner, and the election over at election night --- not bad, isn't it?
Although, by the same poll, 53% of Europeans think astrology is rather scientific, and a whopping 33% said the Sun goes around the Earth. So much for a better education.
>10% unemployment in a country that held out until 5/6/2007 is quite a feat, and should not be discounted.
ROTFL... that's rich. Considering the unofficial unemployment rate among young adults is widely considered around twice the official 10%. And that any American President would be out of a job if US unemployment reached anywhere near 10% officially. Face it, the French economy is tied down with the ropes of its "social net". Look at all the trouble GM and Ford are in with overpaying their noncompetitive UAW labor in salaries and benefits, and spread that across a national workforce.
I am all for retracting copyright back to 20 years. This story has the wrong heading: if it had **AA in it, you could read posts from copyright abolitionists for hours. Check this story out from yesterday, there are plenty of people advocating disregarding and ignoring copyright in order to somehow "hurt" big multinationals, who can't understand 2 simple concepts:
1) You can't be picky about which copyrights you defend: RIAA songs or GPLed source code, and
2) Copyright infringement isn't hurting the RIAA/MPAA from a financial standpoint anyways.
I hate the RIAA/MPAA as much as the next person interested in sane IP, but is it too much to ask, please quit with the inane "Yay! Go pirates! Go copyright infringers! Go!".
There seems to be an easy to spell out way to put the RIAA/MPAA out of business, and that is, REFUSE TO BUY / DOWNLOAD / USE THEIR PRODUCTS. If they get no money, they can't hire lawyers. They can't bribe politicians. In short, they cease to be loudmouthed assholes that matter and just become loudmouthed assholes without a job. The key here is to stop using RIAA/MPAA products.
Unfortunately, I hear too much of, "Yeah! I'm all about hurting the RIAA! They're thugs! Evil incarnate! I'd do anything to see them go down! Right after I download the latest [RIAA-sponsored music]! And perpetuate their popularity and hype... which is exactly what keeps the RIAA/MPAA in business..."
Most of the comments seem to indicate that 90%+ of the entertainment media out there is trash, right? Unoriginal, recycled bullshit? So put your attention and your money where your mouth is. Ditch all of your commercial songs on your iPod. Listen to indie or unsigned music. Because just like Google feeds on pageviews, the RIAA/MPAA companies feed on hype and mindshare. The rampant copyright infringement isn't hurting the RIAA/MPAA one bit from a financial standpoint. (And we all know where the heart of a multinational corp is... the pocketbook.) What it does is reinforce their impression that what they're "guarding" is VALUABLE, and what they need to do in order to increase revenue is to try to get some blackmail, er... enforcement so y'all will go buy it for $1.00 on their sponsored downloading service. (Gee... I wonder where Microsoft got their idea for their "Non-WGA, buy a discounted genuine license today!" model.)
If no one was actually downloading the latest shit-on-a-platter from Justin Timberlake or [name your regurgitated mass-market artist here], do you think the schmucks at the RIAA/MPAA would even care about teh intarWeb?
>I like where you're heading. Perhaps we can tap into those darned gaming machines also. These got to be a heap of excess kinetic energy when you slap those buttons.
>Ditto sex. The three BIG EVILS of the Conservative universe - drinking, gambling and prostitution - could just turn out to be the saviors of the world
In the bedroom:
"Honey, what's that?!?!"
"They call it Sex@Home. We have to do our part to stop global warming..."
>The most stunning example of this is how they gained sympathy all over the world after 9/11 and then somehow managed to squander it all in a few months, simply by showing an astonishingly bullying attitude rather than looking for co-operation regarding the Iraq war....
> And yet somehow they managed to squander almost all of this in just a few months, by showing an amazingly bullying attitude and disdainfully neglecting all the persistent warnings about the chaos and surging terrorism that would unavoidably ensue if they went forth with their Iraq adventure.
Living in the US and being one of the 25% of people interested in news and current events, I can guarantee you that the Iraq War, which began in March of 2003, took quite a bit longer than "a few months".
Your memory, however, is correct, much of the US' "international good-will" evaporated in a few months after 9/11, especially in Muslim and what used to be the "non-aligned" countries. After the US attacked the Taliban in Afghanistan. And to that, I give a giant middle finger to the self-serving hypocrites around the world expressing "sympathy" and withdrawing it after the US took appropriate action in its self-defense.
It's sad so many people lump in the justified war in Afghanistan with the unjustified war in Iraq.
>No offense obviously, but the brain in particular runs more efficiently on ketones than it does on glucose. Many people have been using various low-protein modified fasts (today known primarily as the Atkins diet) for years to control seizures, some types of which depend on the presence of glucose in the brain to occur.
That doesn't tell me the brain is running more efficiently, that tells me people are using those diets for treating overactivity of neurons in their brain by denying plentiful energy for those overactive neurons to use. The brain is not running more efficiently, its running on less fuel at hand. Overactive neurons would stop firing simply by running out of ATP.
>>care to spell out exactly how Ubuntu hurts Free software?
>.... because it relieves the pressure on manufacturers to open up their drivers leaving us with hard-to-support hardware which has to have laborious cleanroom reverse-engineering. Because it confuses people about what Free software is and why linux has been able to evolve to greater security than other OSs. Because it steals market share from other distros that are putting revenue back into hiring hackers that release completely Free software.
>It's pretty damn obvious.
Pretty damn obvious to you, maybe. But to me, if Ubuntu achieves a significant desktop penetration while working well with Nvidia display cards, the pressure will be on ATI to actually support their hardware on Linux... or lose marketshare to their competitors.
It has no more positive or negative effect on "educating" people what Free Software is about than plunking down some Knoppix discs and letting people use it. The onus of explaining the principles of Free Software should not be on the distro, it should be on people like me who introduce others to Free Software. A real conversation beats an impersonal FAQ any day of the week.
I didn't realize Free Software was a zero-sum game. That every Ubuntu convert from Windows was a Gentoo takeaway. Or are you one of those people who believe every act of copyright infringement is a lost sale? Wasn't one of the main points of Free Software that you can study a distro like Ubuntu's improvements, learn from them and use them to improve your own software?
>Granted, you've proved yourself to be a complete idiot, but a great many researchers (and not merely those itching for grants on a personal level) have stated that they could probably cure X,Y or Z disease (cancer is often mentioned) with a certain amount of money and that the only thing holding them back is the necessary funding to move forward as quickly as society would like.
Really. Pray tell, show me how money is going to get you through Phase I, II or III clinical trials any faster than usual. (Of course, corruption would probably work, but I don't anyone rational wants for US R&D to function that way.) Tell me how money buys you personally the insight to see the problem of targeting the average metastatic clump of cancer cells in such a way that a solution presents itself. And you can't. Because the basic science isn't there yet.
>And wow! We spend a whole $28b on medical grants through the NIH per year! WOW! Is that really some significant number to you? We spend 51% of our national budget on the military. Our military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan will have cost us the better part of a trillion dollars over only six years. $28 billion split among all medical grants... verses a couple hundred billion rebuilding some other nation that we engaged in over false pretenses.
Danger, AC, danger! Straw man alert! Oh noes! We're pouring money down a rathole in Iraq! But you've yet to show how throwing more money at cancer research will "cure cancer" one second faster!
>I'm not satisfied with "advances" every few years. We dedicated ourselves to hitting the moon within a decade. And we did it. Surely with enough funding, we can make the same dedication to certain health concerns rather than depending on Bill Gates to do it for us.
Did you read my original post? Any bit of it? There are genuinely underfunded diseases that need research out there. There are a few ultra-rare cancer types that could probably use some more money, but a bigger problem would be finding the researchers, and patients, to work the problem. Cancer in general is not underfunded. If you don't like the pace of research, why don't you get a MD/PhD yourself and become a hero?
Since you seem unfamiliar with the space program, listen closely. Going to the moon was an engineering problem. An expensive and complex engineering problem, to be sure, but all the basic science to do so had already been worked out. Curing cancer, on the other hand, is not.
>All of your points are fine. Whatever. There is nothing one can say that can change the fact that we're spending a thousand percent more on a ridiculous military effort that benefits NOBODY that could serve a greater benefit for countless people for the rest of existence if that money was spent on preserving life.
Blah blah blah, blah blah, blah blah blah. Tired of waving your scarecrow? Would I rather spend the money from the Iraq War on, say, subsidies for the American uninsured? Sure! It'd be a lot more productive than either throwing it away in Iraq, or spending it on already funded cancer research.
>I'm not some fucking bleeding heart. I'm simply a pragmatist.
ROTFL!!!1!11eleventy-one! No, please. Stop. Go back to playing World of Warcraft.
>Spend half a trillion dollars DEFENDING our country rather than attacking another (meanwhile leaving our own country generally undefended) and spend the other half on something more beneficial.
Sounds like you have an axe to grind, and one that has nothing to do with cancer research.
>Yes, but we fund many forms of social welfare (not just corporate welfare). Other than feeding people, what could be a greater social welfare concern than curing a slew of the greatest sicknesses man has ever known?
>Really, our society has advanced to the point where we have the resources to do a lot of great things that will benefit everyone. We just seem to lack the will. And while it's nice to think private industry will do it, they're not going to cure cancer, because a cancer cure won't make them rich. They'll lose money. And even if they simply stumble upon some sort of "prolong your life" drug (you know they don't care to CURE it of course), it won't be for decades.
O RLY?
For the record, the US federal government spends $28 billion on medical grants through the National Institutes of Health. Per year. According to Wikipedia, the NIH through the National Cancer Institute sponsored the research of two-thirds of the available cancer drugs we have. And that's not counting state-funded research, or private grants.
Just like all the celebrities who made it their mission in the 1990s to preach, "let's throw more money at curing AIDS!", more money (or more "will", as you like) will not always equal a better solution, simply because the basic research is not there yet. Contrary to your opinion, there are hundreds of thousands of doctors and doctors-in-training who would love to be known as the one who cured a particular type of cancer. Even the ones that work for Big Pharm. The basic scientific problem is that many cancers are the body's own cells, with a few restrictions on growth removed (see Nowell's Law). How do you target and kill that without killing your patient? And that's the conundrum.
There have been many advances in cancer research, despite what laypeople will tell you. Many cancers caught in Stage I or even Stage II are curable with multimodality therapy (surgery, chemo, radiation). Which is why cancer screening is such a hot topic in medical literature now. Gardasil and other anti-HPV vaccines in the works have the potential to cure all or most cervical, penile, and scrotal cancers (all have an etiology that starts with HPV). Five years from now, I predict we'll be talking about Epstein-Barr Virus-associated cancers in the same way. The majority of juvenile cancers, like Wilm's tumor or ALL, can be cured. Society could cure 90%+ of future lung cancer by throwing away their damn cancer sticks.
But you would never know the amazing progress being made, because tens of thousands of anonymous researchers and doctors working in labs around the world to find the cure for "cancer" (that's like saying, find the "cure for sports injuries" or the "cure for autoimmune diseases") isn't sexy. What they say doesn't fit in a convenient seven-second sound-bite. Haven't people been working on cancer for centuries, where's the damn cure already?!? And wouldn't you rather know about the latest on Paris Hilton, or watch the latest Grey's Anatomy, or go play some more World of Warcraft instead?
And to respond to the gun nuts who come out and say, "Well, gee, if everybody was packing heat, somebody would have shot the guy before he killed 30 people!":
How would death rates on campus be affected in the long-term with tens of thousands of college students with ready access to large amounts of alcohol and firearms?
Because no one gets into a fight over stupid shit in college... especially while inebriated.
Cellulosic ethanol is a proven technology, the only issue now is ramping it up to industrial scale. Iogen and SunOpta (both Canadian biotech companies) have already built pilot plants, and are selecting sites to build industrial scale plants (In Iogen's case, they're contemplating offers from the US, Canada, and European countries to host the plant, which would produce 50 million+ gallons of ethanol a year.)
The great thing about sugarcane and cellulosic ethanol production is they don't require outside power to run, unlike corn ethanol plants. They take a byproduct of the production process and use it for fuel.
News At 11, Industry Insider Hates Nonconformist
on
Spore Dev Down On the Wii
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This pretty much says it all:
"Hecker also took Nintendo to task for not taking games seriously enough. "It's not clear to me that Nintendo gives a s*** about games as an art form," he said. To illustrate his point, he searched for references to games as art on all three console manufacturers web sites. While he found numerous such references on both the official PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 sites, Wii.com had none at all. He then shared quotes from executives at Sony and Microsoft talking about games as a serious artistic medium, and then a quote from a Nintendo executive saying the company only wanted to make "fun" games." God forbid Nintendo would want to make FUN games, instead of exclusively games that take 5 years of development, a hundred different visual artists, and [insert generic Save The World/Universe epic scope] breadth and gameplay.
Chris Hecker & his coworkers look like he's putting out a great game, but he needs to take himself and what he does a little less seriously. As a games consumer I care less about what neato tricks a developer can contort the console CPU into doing and more about how much fun it is. Which is why I'm getting a Wii, as soon as, well, I can find one locally!
"I don't need an OS installed AT ALL and I don't want to pay a Windows tax. And yes, I'd expect a Windowless box to be a whee bit cheaper."
You might be waiting a while, then, considering how much pay-for-preinstall crapola is out there for brand-name Windows desktops. The "Windows tax" is more than offset nowadays by the multitudes of companies willing to shell out cash to Dell to stick their demos, trials, adware or spyware in the box as added... features.
>Hook. line, sinker, rod, reel, basket, boots, and copy of Angling Times.
>John Kerry's exceptionally rich wife pays about 10% of her income in taxes. What's your rate?
I'm sorry, were you arguing against an income tax? It seems to me the problem with John Kerry's wife and her taxes isn't the income tax, it's the numerous loopholes that the rich politicians have put in the income tax for the benefit of themselves and their rich buddies. Isn't it ominous that people like Steve Forbes support replacing the income tax with a flat or sales tax? I wonder who would benefit the most from the change?
John Kerry and his wife should be paying 40%+. At that income level, you shouldn't need any sort of loophole.
I am unsure how many of you do research on this subject, but I recommend that people watch the documentary The Other Side of AIDS. It has amazing interviews and explanations by a Nobel Prize winning scientist for his discovery in AIDS meds, as well as Dr Peter Duesberg, a professor of molecular cell biology from the University of California who shed real light on alot of the bogus statements made about HIV. If you explore these areas, and find out that the HIV has actually never been seen, just the antibodies...supposedly...how on earth are scientists finding a vaccination or any treatment for an unknown/unseen virus? I wish I was kidding.
I wish you were too. Because now you're just an ill-informed crackpot, just like the filmmakers who made "The Other Side of AIDS". How on Earth this got modded "Insightful" is beyond me. For those of you not in the know, "The Other Side Of AIDS" is just the latest bunch of idiots trying to push the agenda that HIV does not cause AIDS. And that HIV positives are better off not taking antiretrovirals. If you really believe that pile of stinking shit, moosejaw, I can suggest a carefully monitored experiment that will win you a Nobel Prize at the very least. You like Nobel Prizes, right? And please, recruit all of your HIV-is-not-the-cause buddies.
Experiment:
Test yourselves for HIV. Make sure you're negative. Now inject yourselves with a large bolus of HIV-infected blood. Do nothing out of the ordinary for 10 ten years, take no antiretroviral drugs, and get back to us with the results. Since HIV doesn't cause AIDS, right, you'll be great, you'll have disproved 99.9999999% of conventional medical wisdom, and earned yourself an easy million from the Prize committee. Congratulations! Now get to it.
To tone it down a little, the easiest way to refute your idiocy is to refer to the many and varied mortality outcomes-based clinical trials of antiretroviral drugs in AIDS patients. I suggest using the search functions on PubMed or even a general journal like NEJM or JAMA. All approved antiretroviral drugs in combination regimes, when taken as prescribed, extend the lifespan of AIDS patients well beyond the life expectancy of an AIDS patient not taking antiretrovirals. Dispute that. If AIDS was not caused by HIV, CD4 counts would not improve, and patients would not live one year longer than AIDS patients who weren't taking antiretrovirals.
Will the human population ever get to a level of education where we don't have to rehash 20 year-old debates over basic crap like "What causes AIDS?" "Why can't I see a pretty picture of AIDS on a microscope?" "What if we're all wrong, I'm a genius, and HIV doesn't cause AIDS?" HIV deniers remind me a lot of the nutty strict Creationists on evolution.
"I think the problem with the American perspective has always been "where's the free lunch" instead of making mutual sacrifices to make the world a better place."
And you completely miss the parent's entire point, which is Kyoto is a stupid treaty, since the worst polluters in the foreseeable future get a free pass on... polluting. There's no "mutual sacrifices" about Kyoto.
Slashdot Mirror
Now more steaks and burgers can be burned on the outside, raw on the inside!
Lawyer discovers way to spew utter BS all day long, rarely have to go to court or do actual research, and have plenty of "think-of-the-children" groups pay him lots of money for his opinion and support.
I think Jack Thompson is laughing all the way to the bank.
>I'm sick and tired of the medical "profession". It has a lot in common with the oldest profession.
Hey, what a coincidence! I'm sick and tired of people who lump nurses and doctors into the same broad category with their retarded insurance providers! They have a lot in common with people who lump everyone with a last name of "Yousef" into the same broad category with "terroristic bad-guy evildoers".
But, hey, next time you visit the ER with a life-threatening emergency, be sure to wear your T-shirt with that catchy slogan on it. We all need a good chuckle once in a while.
"With aluminum at $1.25 a pound, all it needs would be a large check from the government and someone to build as many nuclear or solar/wind power plants as it takes, and we could make this competitive with $3/gallon gasoline!"
Really... and while we're replacing 131 billion gallons of gasoline a year with aluminum pellets, will aluminum still be $1.25 a pound?
Write back when you get the funding for all of those nuclear plants for the sole purpose to recycle the pellets...
What an incredibly bad idea. You probably are lying about being a "slash dot reader" (who the fuck would call themselves reading "slash dot" instead of "/." or "slashdot" after reading it for years?), but that's OK, Mr. 7-digit UID. Unfortunately, your friend, Ashley Heyer, was stupid enough to put her real name, her real picture, and her real signature on a fake ID. I don't know about you, but if I was a public prosecutor involved in a "get tough" law-enforcement program to show my fellow voters how I'm serious about protecting kiddies from the evils of underage drinking, I'd start with an easy case where the offender (like Ashley Heyer) is admitting her guilt in using a fake ID to try to buy alcohol.
If she's claiming the fake ID is not hers, then how did her signature, and her photo (which I'm guessing is remarkably similar to the one on her real ID) get on there? Don't tell me, the Magic Fake ID Fairy? I guess it doesn't matter that Ashley Heyer was in possession of the fake ID that somehow wasn't hers, where and from whom did she get it from then? I like how you claimed in another post here, "rachel did serve the underaged girl beer. then the under aged girl served her a DMCA notice." What, so the fake ID miraculously appeared in Ashley Heyer's pocket? Or Ashley Heyer didn't willingly and conscientiously seek to be served an alcoholic beverage using that fake ID at a bar? Regardless of what Rachel did, that seems to be remarkably poor judgement for a page in Iowa's legislature who evidently is aspiring to "go places".
Of course, since Ashley Heyer is a public figure serving the Iowa legislature, it only seems fair that her likeness (if not her signature) is no longer wholly her own. After all, celebrities can't sue the paparazzi for publishing their likenesses, based on that. Why would Ashley Heyer get special treatment in a court of law?
I wish you the best of luck as you, Ashley Heyer, are "going places". Maybe not the places your daddy dearest told you that you were going, but places nonetheless. In fact, be sure to heft a cold one to yourself, Ashley Heyer, to celebrate not only your underage drinking, but your strongarm tactics in abusing the DMCA to try to get embarrassing information about your use of a fake ID at the wrong bar. I would hate for someone to link some stories to this so Google would put your idiocy at the top of the list. Especially since you seem to have such a promising spot as a page in Iowa's legislative House. Ashley Heyer, consider this a lesson in public relations! Something valuable, I hear, in politics.
>On the other hand, Americans could do worse than adopt the French election system. A genuine, fair two-round election, an 85% voter turn-out, a clear majority for the winner, and the election over at election night --- not bad, isn't it?
I don't know... considering 25% of Americans think that the Sun goes around the Earth, and 40% of Americans believe using the zodiac to predict the future is at least somewhat scientific, it makes me kind of scared to think about that kind of turnout.
Although, by the same poll, 53% of Europeans think astrology is rather scientific, and a whopping 33% said the Sun goes around the Earth. So much for a better education.
>10% unemployment in a country that held out until 5/6/2007 is quite a feat, and should not be discounted.
ROTFL... that's rich. Considering the unofficial unemployment rate among young adults is widely considered around twice the official 10%. And that any American President would be out of a job if US unemployment reached anywhere near 10% officially. Face it, the French economy is tied down with the ropes of its "social net". Look at all the trouble GM and Ford are in with overpaying their noncompetitive UAW labor in salaries and benefits, and spread that across a national workforce.
I would third that. If possible.
I am all for retracting copyright back to 20 years. This story has the wrong heading: if it had **AA in it, you could read posts from copyright abolitionists for hours. Check this story out from yesterday, there are plenty of people advocating disregarding and ignoring copyright in order to somehow "hurt" big multinationals, who can't understand 2 simple concepts:
1) You can't be picky about which copyrights you defend: RIAA songs or GPLed source code, and
2) Copyright infringement isn't hurting the RIAA/MPAA from a financial standpoint anyways.
I hate the RIAA/MPAA as much as the next person interested in sane IP, but is it too much to ask, please quit with the inane "Yay! Go pirates! Go copyright infringers! Go!".
There seems to be an easy to spell out way to put the RIAA/MPAA out of business, and that is, REFUSE TO BUY / DOWNLOAD / USE THEIR PRODUCTS. If they get no money, they can't hire lawyers. They can't bribe politicians. In short, they cease to be loudmouthed assholes that matter and just become loudmouthed assholes without a job. The key here is to stop using RIAA/MPAA products.
Unfortunately, I hear too much of, "Yeah! I'm all about hurting the RIAA! They're thugs! Evil incarnate! I'd do anything to see them go down! Right after I download the latest [RIAA-sponsored music]! And perpetuate their popularity and hype... which is exactly what keeps the RIAA/MPAA in business..."
Most of the comments seem to indicate that 90%+ of the entertainment media out there is trash, right? Unoriginal, recycled bullshit? So put your attention and your money where your mouth is. Ditch all of your commercial songs on your iPod. Listen to indie or unsigned music. Because just like Google feeds on pageviews, the RIAA/MPAA companies feed on hype and mindshare. The rampant copyright infringement isn't hurting the RIAA/MPAA one bit from a financial standpoint. (And we all know where the heart of a multinational corp is... the pocketbook.) What it does is reinforce their impression that what they're "guarding" is VALUABLE, and what they need to do in order to increase revenue is to try to get some blackmail, er... enforcement so y'all will go buy it for $1.00 on their sponsored downloading service. (Gee... I wonder where Microsoft got their idea for their "Non-WGA, buy a discounted genuine license today!" model.)
If no one was actually downloading the latest shit-on-a-platter from Justin Timberlake or [name your regurgitated mass-market artist here], do you think the schmucks at the RIAA/MPAA would even care about teh intarWeb?
Just a thought.
>I like where you're heading. Perhaps we can tap into those darned gaming machines also. These got to be a heap of excess kinetic energy when you slap those buttons.
>Ditto sex. The three BIG EVILS of the Conservative universe - drinking, gambling and prostitution - could just turn out to be the saviors of the world
In the bedroom:
"Honey, what's that?!?!"
"They call it Sex@Home. We have to do our part to stop global warming..."
A quick google seems to confirm there's a ton of .mov -> other format converters out there...
I know, I know, the easy workaround...
>The most stunning example of this is how they gained sympathy all over the world after 9/11 and then somehow managed to squander it all in a few months, simply by showing an astonishingly bullying attitude rather than looking for co-operation regarding the Iraq war. ...
> And yet somehow they managed to squander almost all of this in just a few months, by showing an amazingly bullying attitude and disdainfully neglecting all the persistent warnings about the chaos and surging terrorism that would unavoidably ensue if they went forth with their Iraq adventure.
Living in the US and being one of the 25% of people interested in news and current events, I can guarantee you that the Iraq War, which began in March of 2003, took quite a bit longer than "a few months".
Your memory, however, is correct, much of the US' "international good-will" evaporated in a few months after 9/11, especially in Muslim and what used to be the "non-aligned" countries. After the US attacked the Taliban in Afghanistan. And to that, I give a giant middle finger to the self-serving hypocrites around the world expressing "sympathy" and withdrawing it after the US took appropriate action in its self-defense.
It's sad so many people lump in the justified war in Afghanistan with the unjustified war in Iraq.
>No offense obviously, but the brain in particular runs more efficiently on ketones than it does on glucose. Many people have been using various low-protein modified fasts (today known primarily as the Atkins diet) for years to control seizures, some types of which depend on the presence of glucose in the brain to occur.
That doesn't tell me the brain is running more efficiently, that tells me people are using those diets for treating overactivity of neurons in their brain by denying plentiful energy for those overactive neurons to use. The brain is not running more efficiently, its running on less fuel at hand. Overactive neurons would stop firing simply by running out of ATP.
>>care to spell out exactly how Ubuntu hurts Free software?
>.... because it relieves the pressure on manufacturers to open up their drivers leaving us with hard-to-support hardware which has to have laborious cleanroom reverse-engineering. Because it confuses people about what Free software is and why linux has been able to evolve to greater security than other OSs. Because it steals market share from other distros that are putting revenue back into hiring hackers that release completely Free software.
>It's pretty damn obvious.
Pretty damn obvious to you, maybe. But to me, if Ubuntu achieves a significant desktop penetration while working well with Nvidia display cards, the pressure will be on ATI to actually support their hardware on Linux... or lose marketshare to their competitors.
It has no more positive or negative effect on "educating" people what Free Software is about than plunking down some Knoppix discs and letting people use it. The onus of explaining the principles of Free Software should not be on the distro, it should be on people like me who introduce others to Free Software. A real conversation beats an impersonal FAQ any day of the week.
I didn't realize Free Software was a zero-sum game. That every Ubuntu convert from Windows was a Gentoo takeaway. Or are you one of those people who believe every act of copyright infringement is a lost sale? Wasn't one of the main points of Free Software that you can study a distro like Ubuntu's improvements, learn from them and use them to improve your own software?
OK, Mr. Coward. I'll bite. I've got time to burn.
>Granted, you've proved yourself to be a complete idiot, but a great many researchers (and not merely those itching for grants on a personal level) have stated that they could probably cure X,Y or Z disease (cancer is often mentioned) with a certain amount of money and that the only thing holding them back is the necessary funding to move forward as quickly as society would like.
Really. Pray tell, show me how money is going to get you through Phase I, II or III clinical trials any faster than usual. (Of course, corruption would probably work, but I don't anyone rational wants for US R&D to function that way.) Tell me how money buys you personally the insight to see the problem of targeting the average metastatic clump of cancer cells in such a way that a solution presents itself. And you can't. Because the basic science isn't there yet.
>And wow! We spend a whole $28b on medical grants through the NIH per year! WOW! Is that really some significant number to you? We spend 51% of our national budget on the military. Our military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan will have cost us the better part of a trillion dollars over only six years. $28 billion split among all medical grants... verses a couple hundred billion rebuilding some other nation that we engaged in over false pretenses.
Danger, AC, danger! Straw man alert! Oh noes! We're pouring money down a rathole in Iraq! But you've yet to show how throwing more money at cancer research will "cure cancer" one second faster!
>I'm not satisfied with "advances" every few years. We dedicated ourselves to hitting the moon within a decade. And we did it. Surely with enough funding, we can make the same dedication to certain health concerns rather than depending on Bill Gates to do it for us.
Did you read my original post? Any bit of it? There are genuinely underfunded diseases that need research out there. There are a few ultra-rare cancer types that could probably use some more money, but a bigger problem would be finding the researchers, and patients, to work the problem. Cancer in general is not underfunded. If you don't like the pace of research, why don't you get a MD/PhD yourself and become a hero?
Since you seem unfamiliar with the space program, listen closely. Going to the moon was an engineering problem. An expensive and complex engineering problem, to be sure, but all the basic science to do so had already been worked out. Curing cancer, on the other hand, is not.
>All of your points are fine. Whatever. There is nothing one can say that can change the fact that we're spending a thousand percent more on a ridiculous military effort that benefits NOBODY that could serve a greater benefit for countless people for the rest of existence if that money was spent on preserving life.
Blah blah blah, blah blah, blah blah blah. Tired of waving your scarecrow? Would I rather spend the money from the Iraq War on, say, subsidies for the American uninsured? Sure! It'd be a lot more productive than either throwing it away in Iraq, or spending it on already funded cancer research.
>I'm not some fucking bleeding heart. I'm simply a pragmatist.
ROTFL!!!1!11eleventy-one! No, please. Stop. Go back to playing World of Warcraft.
>Spend half a trillion dollars DEFENDING our country rather than attacking another (meanwhile leaving our own country generally undefended) and spend the other half on something more beneficial.
Sounds like you have an axe to grind, and one that has nothing to do with cancer research.
>Yes, but we fund many forms of social welfare (not just corporate welfare). Other than feeding people, what could be a greater social welfare concern than curing a slew of the greatest sicknesses man has ever known?
>Really, our society has advanced to the point where we have the resources to do a lot of great things that will benefit everyone. We just seem to lack the will. And while it's nice to think private industry will do it, they're not going to cure cancer, because a cancer cure won't make them rich. They'll lose money. And even if they simply stumble upon some sort of "prolong your life" drug (you know they don't care to CURE it of course), it won't be for decades.
O RLY?
For the record, the US federal government spends $28 billion on medical grants through the National Institutes of Health. Per year. According to Wikipedia, the NIH through the National Cancer Institute sponsored the research of two-thirds of the available cancer drugs we have. And that's not counting state-funded research, or private grants.
Just like all the celebrities who made it their mission in the 1990s to preach, "let's throw more money at curing AIDS!", more money (or more "will", as you like) will not always equal a better solution, simply because the basic research is not there yet. Contrary to your opinion, there are hundreds of thousands of doctors and doctors-in-training who would love to be known as the one who cured a particular type of cancer. Even the ones that work for Big Pharm. The basic scientific problem is that many cancers are the body's own cells, with a few restrictions on growth removed (see Nowell's Law). How do you target and kill that without killing your patient? And that's the conundrum.
There have been many advances in cancer research, despite what laypeople will tell you. Many cancers caught in Stage I or even Stage II are curable with multimodality therapy (surgery, chemo, radiation). Which is why cancer screening is such a hot topic in medical literature now. Gardasil and other anti-HPV vaccines in the works have the potential to cure all or most cervical, penile, and scrotal cancers (all have an etiology that starts with HPV). Five years from now, I predict we'll be talking about Epstein-Barr Virus-associated cancers in the same way. The majority of juvenile cancers, like Wilm's tumor or ALL, can be cured. Society could cure 90%+ of future lung cancer by throwing away their damn cancer sticks.
But you would never know the amazing progress being made, because tens of thousands of anonymous researchers and doctors working in labs around the world to find the cure for "cancer" (that's like saying, find the "cure for sports injuries" or the "cure for autoimmune diseases") isn't sexy. What they say doesn't fit in a convenient seven-second sound-bite. Haven't people been working on cancer for centuries, where's the damn cure already?!? And wouldn't you rather know about the latest on Paris Hilton, or watch the latest Grey's Anatomy, or go play some more World of Warcraft instead?
And to respond to the gun nuts who come out and say, "Well, gee, if everybody was packing heat, somebody would have shot the guy before he killed 30 people!":
How would death rates on campus be affected in the long-term with tens of thousands of college students with ready access to large amounts of alcohol and firearms?
Because no one gets into a fight over stupid shit in college... especially while inebriated.
Cellulosic ethanol is a proven technology, the only issue now is ramping it up to industrial scale. Iogen and SunOpta (both Canadian biotech companies) have already built pilot plants, and are selecting sites to build industrial scale plants (In Iogen's case, they're contemplating offers from the US, Canada, and European countries to host the plant, which would produce 50 million+ gallons of ethanol a year.)
The great thing about sugarcane and cellulosic ethanol production is they don't require outside power to run, unlike corn ethanol plants. They take a byproduct of the production process and use it for fuel.
Chris Hecker & his coworkers look like he's putting out a great game, but he needs to take himself and what he does a little less seriously. As a games consumer I care less about what neato tricks a developer can contort the console CPU into doing and more about how much fun it is. Which is why I'm getting a Wii, as soon as, well, I can find one locally!
"I don't need an OS installed AT ALL and I don't want to pay a Windows tax. And yes, I'd expect a Windowless box to be a whee bit cheaper."
You might be waiting a while, then, considering how much pay-for-preinstall crapola is out there for brand-name Windows desktops. The "Windows tax" is more than offset nowadays by the multitudes of companies willing to shell out cash to Dell to stick their demos, trials, adware or spyware in the box as added... features.
>>First, the income tax is progressive.
>Hook. line, sinker, rod, reel, basket, boots, and copy of Angling Times.
>John Kerry's exceptionally rich wife pays about 10% of her income in taxes. What's your rate?
I'm sorry, were you arguing against an income tax? It seems to me the problem with John Kerry's wife and her taxes isn't the income tax, it's the numerous loopholes that the rich politicians have put in the income tax for the benefit of themselves and their rich buddies. Isn't it ominous that people like Steve Forbes support replacing the income tax with a flat or sales tax? I wonder who would benefit the most from the change?
John Kerry and his wife should be paying 40%+. At that income level, you shouldn't need any sort of loophole.
I am unsure how many of you do research on this subject, but I recommend that people watch the documentary The Other Side of AIDS. It has amazing interviews and explanations by a Nobel Prize winning scientist for his discovery in AIDS meds, as well as Dr Peter Duesberg, a professor of molecular cell biology from the University of California who shed real light on alot of the bogus statements made about HIV. If you explore these areas, and find out that the HIV has actually never been seen, just the antibodies...supposedly...how on earth are scientists finding a vaccination or any treatment for an unknown/unseen virus? I wish I was kidding.
I wish you were too. Because now you're just an ill-informed crackpot, just like the filmmakers who made "The Other Side of AIDS". How on Earth this got modded "Insightful" is beyond me. For those of you not in the know, "The Other Side Of AIDS" is just the latest bunch of idiots trying to push the agenda that HIV does not cause AIDS. And that HIV positives are better off not taking antiretrovirals. If you really believe that pile of stinking shit, moosejaw, I can suggest a carefully monitored experiment that will win you a Nobel Prize at the very least. You like Nobel Prizes, right? And please, recruit all of your HIV-is-not-the-cause buddies.
Experiment:
Test yourselves for HIV. Make sure you're negative. Now inject yourselves with a large bolus of HIV-infected blood. Do nothing out of the ordinary for 10 ten years, take no antiretroviral drugs, and get back to us with the results. Since HIV doesn't cause AIDS, right, you'll be great, you'll have disproved 99.9999999% of conventional medical wisdom, and earned yourself an easy million from the Prize committee. Congratulations! Now get to it.
To tone it down a little, the easiest way to refute your idiocy is to refer to the many and varied mortality outcomes-based clinical trials of antiretroviral drugs in AIDS patients. I suggest using the search functions on PubMed or even a general journal like NEJM or JAMA. All approved antiretroviral drugs in combination regimes, when taken as prescribed, extend the lifespan of AIDS patients well beyond the life expectancy of an AIDS patient not taking antiretrovirals. Dispute that. If AIDS was not caused by HIV, CD4 counts would not improve, and patients would not live one year longer than AIDS patients who weren't taking antiretrovirals.
Will the human population ever get to a level of education where we don't have to rehash 20 year-old debates over basic crap like "What causes AIDS?" "Why can't I see a pretty picture of AIDS on a microscope?" "What if we're all wrong, I'm a genius, and HIV doesn't cause AIDS?" HIV deniers remind me a lot of the nutty strict Creationists on evolution.
>Or to send only girls..... and a webcam.
I think you just solved NASA's chronic funding shortages! Brilllliant!
"I think the problem with the American perspective has always been "where's the free lunch" instead of making mutual sacrifices to make the world a better place."
And you completely miss the parent's entire point, which is Kyoto is a stupid treaty, since the worst polluters in the foreseeable future get a free pass on... polluting. There's no "mutual sacrifices" about Kyoto.