>(I'm not normally quite this dismissive, but this post is so divorced from reality that it's unbelievable. If it hadn't been modded 'Insightful', I would have just tagged it Troll and left things at that....)
You sir, have drank the anti-globalization Kool-Aid. If you hadn't been so quick to denounce somebody that makes you uncomfortable with your views, you might try doing some actual research.
>>"A few years back, after much public outcry, one of these "sweatshops" was closed. Most of the girls ended up in prostitution."
>Liar. Post proof or shut up.
Sure. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, NYT reporters, in 2000, actually took the time to move to Asia and live amongst its poor and destitute. They came in with the same preconceptions of "sweatshops" that you seem to have that came out journalism in the '80s and '90s. And then they actually talked to the workers.
>>"Really, I think Nike is helping these people. Nike offers jobs. People voluntarily take these jobs because they see a good deal -- the pay is "good" and the work is "not bad", by 3rd world standards at least."
>Nike is helpful in the same sense that Abu Ghraib prison was a 'reforming influence'. What you think is useless to anybody (yourself included) unless you occasionally try to align it with what is true. May I suggest that you read No Logo by Naomi Klein for a start?
Excerpt from the article:
It sounded pretty dreadful, and it was. We and other journalists wrote about the problems of child labor and oppressive conditions in both China and South Korea. But, looking back, our worries were excessive. Those sweatshops tended to generate the wealth to solve the problems they created. If Americans had reacted to the horror stories in the 1980's by curbing imports of those sweatshop products, then neither southern China nor South Korea would have registered as much progress as they have today.
The truth is, those grim factories in Dongguan and the rest of southern China contributed to a remarkable explosion of wealth. In the years since our first conversations there, we've returned many times to Dongguan and the surrounding towns and seen the transformation. Wages have risen from about $50 a month to $250 a month or more today. Factory conditions have improved as businesses have scrambled to attract and keep the best laborers. A private housing market has emerged, and video arcades and computer schools have opened to cater to workers with rising incomes. A hint of a middle class has appeared -- as has China's closest thing to a Western-style independent newspaper, Southern Weekend.
Partly because of these tens of thousands of sweatshops, China's economy has become one of the hottest in the world. Indeed, if China's 30 provinces were counted as individual countries, then the 20 fastest-growing countries in the world between 1978 and 1995 would all have been Chinese. When Britain launched the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century, it took 58 years for per capita output to double. In China, per capita output has been doubling every 10 years.
In fact, the most vibrant parts of Asia are nearly all in what might be called the Sweatshop Belt, from China and South Korea to Malaysia, Indonesia and even Bangladesh and India. Today these sweatshop countries control about one-quarter of the global economy. As the industrial revolution spreads through China and India, there are good reasons to think that Asia will continue to pick up speed. Some World Bank forecasts show Asia's share of global gross domestic product rising to 55 to 60 percent by about 2025 -- roughly the West's share at its peak half a century ago. The sweatshops have helped lay the groundwork for a historic economic realignment that is putting Asia back on its feet. Countries are rebounding from the economic crisis of 1997-98 and the sweatshops -- seen by Westerners as evidence of moribund economies -- actually reflect an industrial revolution that is
"So as you feel your skin cancer forming and watch the ice caps come washing over us, just remember it isn't because of mankind, President Bush says so."
And global warming is linked to an incidence of skin cancer... how?
I think you're referring to the ozone hole.
That was the LAST Impending Global Catastrophe. Keep up with the times.
The next time I get a speeding ticket, I'm going to tell the officer, "C'mon, Porco, I wasn't endangering anybody. I was just going 15 over on a highway in light traffic. Besides, I'M A COLLEGE STUDENT, AND I CAN'T AFFORD A $300 TICKET."
Do you know what he's going to tell me? Exactly right.
All I ever heard, 3 or 4 years ago, was, "WAAAHH!! The RIAA is attacking ISPs and file-sharing programs! They should attack the REAL violators instead!", and "WAAAAHH!! If ONLY the RIAA got with the times and introduced a legal way to digitally download songs for a reasonable price!"
If this MIT student actually had any common sense (I know, nerds with none, what a stereotype) she could have purchased all 272 songs for $272 on iTunes. I have no tears for her.
...Is a government project to plant a billion trees. Seriously.
The scientific consensus is that global warming is occurring, and that humans have increased the concentration of CO2 in the air by ~100 parts per million. So instead of coming up with ticky tacky ways to decrease fossil fuel consumption by 0.0001% in this country, why don't we address the root problem? That there's too much carbon dioxide in the air?
I say planting a billion trees would be a whole lot easier, politically and economically, then any other solution presented. Cost: ~$10 billion on the high side.
"One can only wonder what evolutionary pressures caused well endowed Asian males do die out."
One can also only wonder at the evolutionary pressures producing large numbers of white boys obsessed with comparing their penis sizes to males of every other culture.
"This is simply false. Natural selection has not been able to explain hardly anything. It is simply invoked. Read some biological papers. Whenever something new is found, it is simply listed as "having evolved" without any discussion about how the evolution could even have taken place."
As a trained microbiologist and a student doctor, you obviously haven't read many papers. What do you think antibiotic resistance is? Why is it if you stop antibiotic therapy and your illness returns, you can't start taking the same antibiotic again? Is it an "intelligent designer" waving his hand and declaring some bacteria should survive and kill you because of your sins? Or natural selection at its most blunt? By taking the antibiotic you yourself have created the selection conditions necessary for the propogation of the bacteria. By the way, most bacterial mutations related to antibiotic resistance aren't related to "latent genes" or "highly regulated mutagenesis". They're variant amino acid sequences for antibiotic targets that produce slightly different proteins. Or transmembrane pumps that serve another purpose until an antibiotic wanders in. Or community plasmids or viral sequences that don't have any advantage normally, but the bacterial community keeps around because those that don't are periodically wiped out.
Natural selection explains almost nothing. All natural selection means is that dead things don't reproduce, and sick things don't reproduce well. This is a conservative, not a creative process. And random mutation has too big of a search space to do anything productive. Perhaps you should take a 21st century view of evolution rather than the 1950's version of it you are looking at now.
Perhaps you should wonder why human populations in equatorial areas that receive a lot of sunlight tend to have darker skin pigmentation and populations with endemic malaria have a high incidence of sickle cell disease. For doesn't it make sense that the only peoples who could survive conditions perfect for a high incidence of lethal skin carcinomas are those with an built-in resistance to mutation by UV radiation?
And what about sickle cell disease? If "sick things don't reproduce well", why is still around? What kind of fucked-up "intelligent designer" keeps around a genetic disease that is inevitably and messily lethal in its untreated, homozygous state? But if you think about it as a random genetic mutation in the structure of a blood protein that, in its heterozygous state, confers great resistance to a lethal disease, uncaring natural selection sounds like a pretty good explanation for it still existing.
How about cystic fibrosis? If "sick things don't reproduce well", cystic fibrosis should have been history long before modern medicine got around to diagnosing it. And again, what "intelligent designer" would ever design cystic fibrosis? Until you realize that in pre-modern medicine caucasian populations (in which 1 out of 25 people are cystic fibrosis heterozygotes), infectious diseases were 9 out of the top 10 biggest killers. And some of the nastiest killers in those 9 were cholera, typhoid fever, and tuberculosis. And that the microorganisms behind cholera and typhoid fever require a working cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator protein (CFTR), the exact protein that is defective in cystic fibrosis. And that the increased, thickened mucus production in cystic fibrosis heterozygotes appears to be protective against Mycobacterial infections.
"Please tell me what the evidence is that (a) everything shares a common ancestor, and that (b) random mutation + natural selection is sufficient for creating the diversity that exists today from that common ancestor. If you want to be really adventurous, you can also show how (c) life could have proceeded from non-life."
Try looking up "ribosomal RNA sequencing" sometime, since you say you're big on scientific papers. Or hell, try picking up an introductory microbiology book published in the last 10 years. How could life arise from non-life? The Wiki entry on "origin of life" has a good summary of the theories on how that could happen. As well as the experimental proof behind them.
""Arab" oil only just makes it into the top 5 of US oil imports. Most of our oil comes from the Americas, North and South, and Nigeria. Saudi oil takes the number 5 spot. "Arab" oil is much more important to Europe and Asia than it is to the USA."
But that consequently makes Middle-Eastern oil just as important to the US, because it never really is about how "much" oil is sold to US buyers, but at what price.
If, say, al-Qaeda ever gets organized enough to shut down Saudi oil production in a coordinated strike, where will Europe and Asia get their oil? That's right! From the same places the US currently gets its oil, driving up the prices of energy and driving a stake into the heavily transportation-dependent US economy.
You see, we can always "get by" with less oil, but is the economic cost acceptable? For instance, what powers most of the data centers, server farms and other underlying infrastructure for the internet? Hint: it's not hamsters on wheels. If energy prices skyrocket, do you think the corporations will simply suck it up or do you think they'll pass the costs onto the consumer?
Look, all these guys have at one time or another been respectable, but the truth is, HIV is a well-characterized virus with dumptrucks full of money poured into research into how and why it works.
The fact that I can pick out one name, Harvey Bialy, google him and find out he's currently on South Africa's payroll (who deny pregnant mothers with AIDS AZT or other basic anti-HIV drugs, btw) says volumes.
HIV's genome has been sequenced and studied, and scientists know in general how it works. Instead of copying and pasting one of my microbiology textbooks, I'd suggest looking up the "HIV" Wikipedia entry - it's got a good summary of the parts listed. You might try the "AIDS reappraisal" entry, where all the bullshit claims are addressed.
Have you taken a look at what all those "respected scientists" are actually saying? It sounds a lot like the utter crap being spewed by the "respectable scientists" employed by the Creationism... er, I mean the Intelligent Design idiots. "There's problems... there's questions..." Not a single decent counter-hypothesis as to the origin of AIDS or why the volumes of peer-reviewed AIDS research is WRONG.
If they were truly so adamant that HIV did not cause AIDS, there would be a simple way to prove it once and for all: they should all get together and perform a witnessed scientific study whereby they all inject a reasonably large dose of HIV virus into their bloodstreams and monitor the results. Dr. Barry Marshall, in fact, won a Nobel Prize for proving that H. pylori causes GI ulcers by doing just that.
Now to answer your original claims, that some people with HIV do not get AIDS and some people with AIDS do not have HIV, both of them have answers (the Wikipedia page, in fact, covers the 1st one). Some people have genetic mutations to coreceptors that HIV needs to infect CD4+ T-cells (CCR5 and CXCR4 being the 2 most common). Those mutations render the virus unable to infect the cells without further mutation of the virus. This is, in fact, a huge avenue of biomedical research - my medical school is participating in toxicology trials for a proposed drug using this.
The other claim, that some patients with AIDS do not have HIV is a very rare autoimmune condition. Through molecular mimicry or another similar means, a patient's CD4+ immune cells are targeted for destruction by the patient's own immune system, which leads to the loss of those cells and the development of AIDS. Nobody knows why yet (this is VERY rare), but it probably is caused by cross-reaction with similar antigens from a foreign source (bacteria, virus, fungal, etc.). The body has a bad propensity to attack itself - look up rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Goodpasture's, Hashimoto's, or late-stage Lyme Disease among others.
"That bashing's been going on since soon after the product hit the market. I think the patent expiring is why you're hearing more about it because there isn't anyone to "stifle" the truth anymore. The headaches are actually caused by brain lesions. But, those aren't the worst part, the blindness is what really gets you. (For the tin hatters out there)"
How is this unscientific scaremongering crap rated insightful by a supposedly intelligent site like/.? For a rebuttal, here is a letter published in the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet on 7/3/99 regarding this topic:
Sir - Patients at our diabetes clinic have raised concerns about information on the internet about a link between the artificial sweetener aspartame and various diseases. Our research revealed over 6000 web sites that mention aspartame, with many hundreds alleging aspartame to be the cause of multiple sclerosis, lupus erythematosis, Gulf War Syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, brain tumours, and diabetes mellitus, among many others. Virtually all of the information offered is anecdotal, from anonymous sources and is scientifically implausible.
Aspartame, a dipeptide composed of phenylalanine and aspartic acid linked by a methyl ester bond, is not absorbed, and is completely hydrolysed in the intestine to yield the two constituent amino acids and free methanol. Opponents of aspartame suggest that the phenylalanine and methanol so released are dangerous. In particular, they assert that methanol can be converted to formaldehyde and then to formic acid, and thus cause metabolic acidosis and neurotoxicity.
Although a 330 ml can of aspartame-sweetened soft drink will yield about 20 mg methanol, an equivalent volume of fruit juice produces 40 mg methanol, and an alcoholic beverage about 60-100 mg. The yield of phenylalanine is about 100 mg for a can of diet soft drink, compared with 300 mg for an egg, 500 mg for a glass of milk, and 900 mg for a large hamburger (1). Thus, the amount of phenylalanine or methanol ingested from consumption of aspartame is trivial, compared with other dietary sources. Clinical studies have shown no evidence of toxic effects and no increase in plasma concentrations of methanol, formic acid, or phenylalanine with daily consumption of 50 mg/kg aspartame (equivalent to 17 cans of diet soft drink daily for a 70 kg adult) (1, 2).
The anti aspartame campaign purports to offer an explanation for illnesses that are prominent in the public eye. By targeting a manufactured chemical agent, and combining this with pseudo-science and selective reporting, the campaign makes complex issues deceptively simple. Sensational web site names (eg, aspartamekills.com) grab the browser's attention and this misinformation is also widely disseminated via chat groups and chain e-mail.
People consult the internet about medical issues for various reasons and many users regard online sources as being authoritative and valid. The medical profession has a role in teaching our patients to be discriminating consumers of the information offered there.
Anthony Zehetner, Mark McLean
Department of Endocrinology, Westmead Hospital,
Sydney NSW 2145, Australia
3 July 1999
References
1. Aspartame. In: Gelman C R, Rumack B H, Hess A J, eds. DRUGDEX® System. Englewood, Colorado: MICROMEDEX, 1998. Edition expires 1999.
2. Anon. ADA position statement: use of noncaloric sweeteners. Diabetes Care 1991.
...but that's the way it works when you enter a medically-related profession.
I'm in medical school, and once you commit yourself to being a physician, you are expected to conduct yourself professionally in and out of school, just as you would on or off duty as a doctor, regardless of place or time.
Doctors historically and even today are one of the most respected, and trusted, professions in the US. Dentists and nurses certainly want high standards for their professions, as well. Most medical and dental schools have explicit clauses in their student codes regarding unprofessional behavior or actions at ANY time; mine certainly does, and I'd expect Marquette to have it as well.
Calling a teaching professor a "cockmaster" would not be tolerated if he did it face to face with the professor, and it's not any different because he did it online in his blog. If he can't be trusted to keep comments about an academic superior and his fellow peers professional, how can he be trusted to keep comments about future patients confidential and professional as well? Is this the dentist 10 years from now who'll be poking fun of his "stupid immigrant patients that need to learn to pick up a toothbrush and a book on English" at a supermarket with his buddies? Is this the public image of the dental profession that the dental profession wants? And is this the image that Marquette wants to project as its students and alumni?
My school goes out of its way to encourage feedback from its students; we have a student-run quality control feedback team for the curriculum; we have online and traditional commenting forums, end-of-section material, direction, and teaching evaluations, etc. But they also stress and stress again to keep it 100% professional, to make criticism constructive, impersonal, and respectful. We are being evaluated in every interaction as future doctors, whether accidental or in a deliberate setting... and just as the majority of communication is not verbal even when words are being spoken, doing your book learning is just a small part of learning to be a medical professional.
There are no civil rights being broken here... just a student needing to figure out whether mouthing off about his peers and professional superiors is more important than learning what it takes to join his chosen profession.
"For anyone to think that Google doesn't have the desire to be the next Microsoft, you have to see how much money Google is burning to come up with the best and newest data aggregating applets. Microsoft can't keep up, and they're quickly losing the race to releasing new -- and NEEDED -- applications. Word, Excel, IE -- they're all old news. Google Earth, Google Maps, Google SMS, Google Blogsearch, they're all applications that can be enhanced even further if Google had a standard platform to write their uber-versions for. Opera can be that standard platform that extends Google from merely a website to becoming its own operating system."
I'm sure most users (especially big corporations) will hate to be faced with a hard choice between running a lower functionality Google Earth and Blogsearch or ditching the obsolescent, passe Word and Excel for Google's own proprietary Opera-based platform! Decisions, decisions.... I'm sure Bill Gates is sweating bullets about that scenario...
Conspiracy theorists, pay attention!
on
The Year in Ideas
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I found this tidbit interesting:
Under "Making Global Warming Work For You", there was "Millions of acres of ice may soon become suitable for nautical traffic and oil exploration. An estimated quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas resources are in the Arctic."
And people wonder why the energy industry/US government is doing all it can to drag their heels on climate control...
"When two people believe in god so much to beat someone up because they said something anti-christian says, to me, that the leaders of the religious community have failed miserably to actually relay the teachings of their religion."
Wow. I'm against intelligent design (and strict creationism), too, but your post is going a little too far, don't you think?
2 nuts who allegedly beat this guy up and claim to be a part of a religion doesn't necessarily mean they are (their actions certainly prove otherwise), and I don't understand where this ridiculous claim comes from that the "religious leaders" (The Pope? Every pastor and minister in the state of Kansas?) are responsible for their actions, unless you're actually claiming that the religious leaders are calling for this sort of action.
Do all the "environmental leaders" in the US have to be called to task for the fringe wackos that destroy labs that conduct animal research or burn down housing developments? Do the "anti-globalization leaders" have to be held accountable for the few idiots that come to protests to have a little GTA fun and mayhem?
It's not like Louisiana has a sterling reputation for honesty and integrity in political dealings. I bet BellSouth was offering the building for "free" in the first place for some sort of inside deal in service or reconstruction.
Then the city government starts talking about taking away the local broadband market, and you betcha that building suddenly has "issues needing to be worked through". Wink wink.
"The difference between those cases is that one is an empowering technology for people, while the other is an empowering technology for the government. Government has to be held to a much higher standard due to their sheer size and power over any one man."
OK, so since automobiles are technology that can be abused in bad ways (police can ram their vehicles into innocents or cause traffic accidents), should we take away police cars?
Firearms are technology that have obvious bad uses which outnumber the good uses in the hands of police. Should we then disarm all police?
You'd figure people on Slashdot, of all places, would be intelligent enough to recognize that technology is morality-neutral. The trick is not to ban police from using CCTV and pattern recognition technology, like the OP was implying, but to set up and enforce workable watchdog/observer mechanisms to prevent abuse.
"If the UN is in control, it could at least limit these types of unilateral actions. Not saying it'd be perfect or even better, but I'd think it might be a bit more fair."
You're right. If the UN was in charge, Venezuela, the US, and Germany would come to an agreement where Islamic extremist, neo-Nazi and Pat Robertson's site were all shut down.
Actually, I take that back. Pat Robertson is useful to Venezuela because he gives an "outside" enemy to Chavez to rally his people around to his cause, no matter how much he runs it into the ground. So no, Venezuela wouldn't lobby to take down Pat Robertson's site, but they'd probably lobby for some trade concessions, pretending to be hurt and offended by Pat Robertson.
"However, they don't look directly at animal models - so the leap of faith is that the lung infection is bad when the spores do not elicit a neutrophil response. How the spores avoid eliciting a host response in lung is the bigger question, which is not addressed by the paper."
That's because that question has already been answered...
Spores that are inhaled are phagocytized by alveolar macrophages. The spores survive or escape the phagosome, germinate, and use the macrophage as a biological Trojan Horse to spread to the lymph nodes, where the infection becomes systemic (and very lethal).
Disney would be stupid not to buy
on
Pixar For Sale?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Regardless of the success of Chicken Little, buying Pixar would be buying exactly what Disney needs - a company full of talented, creative overachievers who care as much about their art and storytelling as profits and dollar signs (which they have no problem making plenty of).
The best idea would be to buy Pixar and leave it the hell alone - a Hong Kong for Disney's People's Republic.
They all point to the fact that the pharmaceuticals are spending more on research in recent history than the NIH, but it doesn't specify which diseases or disabilities they're spending that money on.
Compare the number of new allergy, erectile dysfunction, and anti-inflammatory drugs that have come out from those companies in that time period (i.e. treating chronic symptoms) to, say, the number of new antibiotics/HIV treatments. You tell me where the private money is going - potential cash cows that will bring more profits to shareholders, or real cures?
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, the tag was broken and I didn't catch it in preview.
This is the article.
You sir, have drank the anti-globalization Kool-Aid. If you hadn't been so quick to denounce somebody that makes you uncomfortable with your views, you might try doing some actual research.
>>"A few years back, after much public outcry, one of these "sweatshops" was closed. Most of the girls ended up in prostitution."
>Liar. Post proof or shut up.
Sure. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, NYT reporters, in 2000, actually took the time to move to Asia and live amongst its poor and destitute. They came in with the same preconceptions of "sweatshops" that you seem to have that came out journalism in the '80s and '90s. And then they actually talked to the workers.
>>"Really, I think Nike is helping these people. Nike offers jobs. People voluntarily take these jobs because they see a good deal -- the pay is "good" and the work is "not bad", by 3rd world standards at least."
>Nike is helpful in the same sense that Abu Ghraib prison was a 'reforming influence'. What you think is useless to anybody (yourself included) unless you occasionally try to align it with what is true. May I suggest that you read No Logo by Naomi Klein for a start?
Excerpt from the article:
"So as you feel your skin cancer forming and watch the ice caps come washing over us, just remember it isn't because of mankind, President Bush says so."
And global warming is linked to an incidence of skin cancer... how?
I think you're referring to the ozone hole.
That was the LAST Impending Global Catastrophe. Keep up with the times.
The next time I get a speeding ticket, I'm going to tell the officer, "C'mon, Porco, I wasn't endangering anybody. I was just going 15 over on a highway in light traffic. Besides, I'M A COLLEGE STUDENT, AND I CAN'T AFFORD A $300 TICKET."
Do you know what he's going to tell me? Exactly right.
All I ever heard, 3 or 4 years ago, was, "WAAAHH!! The RIAA is attacking ISPs and file-sharing programs! They should attack the REAL violators instead!", and "WAAAAHH!! If ONLY the RIAA got with the times and introduced a legal way to digitally download songs for a reasonable price!"
If this MIT student actually had any common sense (I know, nerds with none, what a stereotype) she could have purchased all 272 songs for $272 on iTunes. I have no tears for her.
...Is a government project to plant a billion trees. Seriously.
The scientific consensus is that global warming is occurring, and that humans have increased the concentration of CO2 in the air by ~100 parts per million. So instead of coming up with ticky tacky ways to decrease fossil fuel consumption by 0.0001% in this country, why don't we address the root problem? That there's too much carbon dioxide in the air?
I say planting a billion trees would be a whole lot easier, politically and economically, then any other solution presented. Cost: ~$10 billion on the high side.
One can also only wonder at the evolutionary pressures producing large numbers of white boys obsessed with comparing their penis sizes to males of every other culture.
Yes it is, but I have to say I clicked back to watching paint dry after a few minutes.
"Maybe these guys will open source their design."
As opposed to what? Weld the hood in and equip each car with a self-destructing anti-tamper device?
As a trained microbiologist and a student doctor, you obviously haven't read many papers. What do you think antibiotic resistance is? Why is it if you stop antibiotic therapy and your illness returns, you can't start taking the same antibiotic again? Is it an "intelligent designer" waving his hand and declaring some bacteria should survive and kill you because of your sins? Or natural selection at its most blunt? By taking the antibiotic you yourself have created the selection conditions necessary for the propogation of the bacteria. By the way, most bacterial mutations related to antibiotic resistance aren't related to "latent genes" or "highly regulated mutagenesis". They're variant amino acid sequences for antibiotic targets that produce slightly different proteins. Or transmembrane pumps that serve another purpose until an antibiotic wanders in. Or community plasmids or viral sequences that don't have any advantage normally, but the bacterial community keeps around because those that don't are periodically wiped out.
Natural selection explains almost nothing. All natural selection means is that dead things don't reproduce, and sick things don't reproduce well. This is a conservative, not a creative process. And random mutation has too big of a search space to do anything productive. Perhaps you should take a 21st century view of evolution rather than the 1950's version of it you are looking at now.
Perhaps you should wonder why human populations in equatorial areas that receive a lot of sunlight tend to have darker skin pigmentation and populations with endemic malaria have a high incidence of sickle cell disease. For doesn't it make sense that the only peoples who could survive conditions perfect for a high incidence of lethal skin carcinomas are those with an built-in resistance to mutation by UV radiation?
And what about sickle cell disease? If "sick things don't reproduce well", why is still around? What kind of fucked-up "intelligent designer" keeps around a genetic disease that is inevitably and messily lethal in its untreated, homozygous state? But if you think about it as a random genetic mutation in the structure of a blood protein that, in its heterozygous state, confers great resistance to a lethal disease, uncaring natural selection sounds like a pretty good explanation for it still existing.
How about cystic fibrosis? If "sick things don't reproduce well", cystic fibrosis should have been history long before modern medicine got around to diagnosing it. And again, what "intelligent designer" would ever design cystic fibrosis? Until you realize that in pre-modern medicine caucasian populations (in which 1 out of 25 people are cystic fibrosis heterozygotes), infectious diseases were 9 out of the top 10 biggest killers. And some of the nastiest killers in those 9 were cholera, typhoid fever, and tuberculosis. And that the microorganisms behind cholera and typhoid fever require a working cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator protein (CFTR), the exact protein that is defective in cystic fibrosis. And that the increased, thickened mucus production in cystic fibrosis heterozygotes appears to be protective against Mycobacterial infections.
"Please tell me what the evidence is that (a) everything shares a common ancestor, and that (b) random mutation + natural selection is sufficient for creating the diversity that exists today from that common ancestor. If you want to be really adventurous, you can also show how (c) life could have proceeded from non-life."
Try looking up "ribosomal RNA sequencing" sometime, since you say you're big on scientific papers. Or hell, try picking up an introductory microbiology book published in the last 10 years. How could life arise from non-life? The Wiki entry on "origin of life" has a good summary of the theories on how that could happen. As well as the experimental proof behind them.
What are they thinking?!? This is as petty as a crime gets! Don't they have anything better to do?
DOJ busts spammers for conspiring to find people's email addresses and send email to them
ROCK ON!!! Hang the motherfuckers! Burn them at the stake! It's too bad we can't bust them all!
Corporation infringes on copyright, redistributes modified GPL'ed work without source
Assholes! Somebody take them to court! Sue them for every cent they're worth!
""Arab" oil only just makes it into the top 5 of US oil imports. Most of our oil comes from the Americas, North and South, and Nigeria. Saudi oil takes the number 5 spot. "Arab" oil is much more important to Europe and Asia than it is to the USA."
But that consequently makes Middle-Eastern oil just as important to the US, because it never really is about how "much" oil is sold to US buyers, but at what price.
If, say, al-Qaeda ever gets organized enough to shut down Saudi oil production in a coordinated strike, where will Europe and Asia get their oil? That's right! From the same places the US currently gets its oil, driving up the prices of energy and driving a stake into the heavily transportation-dependent US economy.
You see, we can always "get by" with less oil, but is the economic cost acceptable? For instance, what powers most of the data centers, server farms and other underlying infrastructure for the internet? Hint: it's not hamsters on wheels. If energy prices skyrocket, do you think the corporations will simply suck it up or do you think they'll pass the costs onto the consumer?
Look, all these guys have at one time or another been respectable, but the truth is, HIV is a well-characterized virus with dumptrucks full of money poured into research into how and why it works.
The fact that I can pick out one name, Harvey Bialy, google him and find out he's currently on South Africa's payroll (who deny pregnant mothers with AIDS AZT or other basic anti-HIV drugs, btw) says volumes.
HIV's genome has been sequenced and studied, and scientists know in general how it works. Instead of copying and pasting one of my microbiology textbooks, I'd suggest looking up the "HIV" Wikipedia entry - it's got a good summary of the parts listed. You might try the "AIDS reappraisal" entry, where all the bullshit claims are addressed.
Have you taken a look at what all those "respected scientists" are actually saying? It sounds a lot like the utter crap being spewed by the "respectable scientists" employed by the Creationism... er, I mean the Intelligent Design idiots. "There's problems... there's questions..." Not a single decent counter-hypothesis as to the origin of AIDS or why the volumes of peer-reviewed AIDS research is WRONG.
If they were truly so adamant that HIV did not cause AIDS, there would be a simple way to prove it once and for all: they should all get together and perform a witnessed scientific study whereby they all inject a reasonably large dose of HIV virus into their bloodstreams and monitor the results. Dr. Barry Marshall, in fact, won a Nobel Prize for proving that H. pylori causes GI ulcers by doing just that.
Now to answer your original claims, that some people with HIV do not get AIDS and some people with AIDS do not have HIV, both of them have answers (the Wikipedia page, in fact, covers the 1st one). Some people have genetic mutations to coreceptors that HIV needs to infect CD4+ T-cells (CCR5 and CXCR4 being the 2 most common). Those mutations render the virus unable to infect the cells without further mutation of the virus. This is, in fact, a huge avenue of biomedical research - my medical school is participating in toxicology trials for a proposed drug using this.
The other claim, that some patients with AIDS do not have HIV is a very rare autoimmune condition. Through molecular mimicry or another similar means, a patient's CD4+ immune cells are targeted for destruction by the patient's own immune system, which leads to the loss of those cells and the development of AIDS. Nobody knows why yet (this is VERY rare), but it probably is caused by cross-reaction with similar antigens from a foreign source (bacteria, virus, fungal, etc.). The body has a bad propensity to attack itself - look up rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Goodpasture's, Hashimoto's, or late-stage Lyme Disease among others.
How is this unscientific scaremongering crap rated insightful by a supposedly intelligent site like /.? For a rebuttal, here is a letter published in the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet on 7/3/99 regarding this topic:
...but that's the way it works when you enter a medically-related profession.
I'm in medical school, and once you commit yourself to being a physician, you are expected to conduct yourself professionally in and out of school, just as you would on or off duty as a doctor, regardless of place or time.
Doctors historically and even today are one of the most respected, and trusted, professions in the US. Dentists and nurses certainly want high standards for their professions, as well. Most medical and dental schools have explicit clauses in their student codes regarding unprofessional behavior or actions at ANY time; mine certainly does, and I'd expect Marquette to have it as well.
Calling a teaching professor a "cockmaster" would not be tolerated if he did it face to face with the professor, and it's not any different because he did it online in his blog. If he can't be trusted to keep comments about an academic superior and his fellow peers professional, how can he be trusted to keep comments about future patients confidential and professional as well? Is this the dentist 10 years from now who'll be poking fun of his "stupid immigrant patients that need to learn to pick up a toothbrush and a book on English" at a supermarket with his buddies? Is this the public image of the dental profession that the dental profession wants? And is this the image that Marquette wants to project as its students and alumni?
My school goes out of its way to encourage feedback from its students; we have a student-run quality control feedback team for the curriculum; we have online and traditional commenting forums, end-of-section material, direction, and teaching evaluations, etc. But they also stress and stress again to keep it 100% professional, to make criticism constructive, impersonal, and respectful. We are being evaluated in every interaction as future doctors, whether accidental or in a deliberate setting... and just as the majority of communication is not verbal even when words are being spoken, doing your book learning is just a small part of learning to be a medical professional.
There are no civil rights being broken here... just a student needing to figure out whether mouthing off about his peers and professional superiors is more important than learning what it takes to join his chosen profession.
...there's a sucker born every minute.
Or in this case, at least 10,000 in 4 months.
"For anyone to think that Google doesn't have the desire to be the next Microsoft, you have to see how much money Google is burning to come up with the best and newest data aggregating applets. Microsoft can't keep up, and they're quickly losing the race to releasing new -- and NEEDED -- applications. Word, Excel, IE -- they're all old news. Google Earth, Google Maps, Google SMS, Google Blogsearch, they're all applications that can be enhanced even further if Google had a standard platform to write their uber-versions for. Opera can be that standard platform that extends Google from merely a website to becoming its own operating system."
I'm sure most users (especially big corporations) will hate to be faced with a hard choice between running a lower functionality Google Earth and Blogsearch or ditching the obsolescent, passe Word and Excel for Google's own proprietary Opera-based platform! Decisions, decisions.... I'm sure Bill Gates is sweating bullets about that scenario...
I found this tidbit interesting:
Under "Making Global Warming Work For You", there was "Millions of acres of ice may soon become suitable for nautical traffic and oil exploration. An estimated quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas resources are in the Arctic."
And people wonder why the energy industry/US government is doing all it can to drag their heels on climate control...
"When two people believe in god so much to beat someone up because they said something anti-christian says, to me, that the leaders of the religious community have failed miserably to actually relay the teachings of their religion."
Wow. I'm against intelligent design (and strict creationism), too, but your post is going a little too far, don't you think?
2 nuts who allegedly beat this guy up and claim to be a part of a religion doesn't necessarily mean they are (their actions certainly prove otherwise), and I don't understand where this ridiculous claim comes from that the "religious leaders" (The Pope? Every pastor and minister in the state of Kansas?) are responsible for their actions, unless you're actually claiming that the religious leaders are calling for this sort of action.
Do all the "environmental leaders" in the US have to be called to task for the fringe wackos that destroy labs that conduct animal research or burn down housing developments? Do the "anti-globalization leaders" have to be held accountable for the few idiots that come to protests to have a little GTA fun and mayhem?
It's not like Louisiana has a sterling reputation for honesty and integrity in political dealings. I bet BellSouth was offering the building for "free" in the first place for some sort of inside deal in service or reconstruction.
Then the city government starts talking about taking away the local broadband market, and you betcha that building suddenly has "issues needing to be worked through". Wink wink.
"The difference between those cases is that one is an empowering technology for people, while the other is an empowering technology for the government. Government has to be held to a much higher standard due to their sheer size and power over any one man."
OK, so since automobiles are technology that can be abused in bad ways (police can ram their vehicles into innocents or cause traffic accidents), should we take away police cars?
Firearms are technology that have obvious bad uses which outnumber the good uses in the hands of police. Should we then disarm all police?
You'd figure people on Slashdot, of all places, would be intelligent enough to recognize that technology is morality-neutral. The trick is not to ban police from using CCTV and pattern recognition technology, like the OP was implying, but to set up and enforce workable watchdog/observer mechanisms to prevent abuse.
"So because it has one good use does that mean we should ignore all the possible misuses?"
I don't know. Have you deleted your Peer-to-Peer filesharing programs yet?
"If the UN is in control, it could at least limit these types of unilateral actions. Not saying it'd be perfect or even better, but I'd think it might be a bit more fair."
You're right. If the UN was in charge, Venezuela, the US, and Germany would come to an agreement where Islamic extremist, neo-Nazi and Pat Robertson's site were all shut down.
Actually, I take that back. Pat Robertson is useful to Venezuela because he gives an "outside" enemy to Chavez to rally his people around to his cause, no matter how much he runs it into the ground. So no, Venezuela wouldn't lobby to take down Pat Robertson's site, but they'd probably lobby for some trade concessions, pretending to be hurt and offended by Pat Robertson.
"However, they don't look directly at animal models - so the leap of faith is that the lung infection is bad when the spores do not elicit a neutrophil response. How the spores avoid eliciting a host response in lung is the bigger question, which is not addressed by the paper."
That's because that question has already been answered...
Spores that are inhaled are phagocytized by alveolar macrophages. The spores survive or escape the phagosome, germinate, and use the macrophage as a biological Trojan Horse to spread to the lymph nodes, where the infection becomes systemic (and very lethal).
Regardless of the success of Chicken Little, buying Pixar would be buying exactly what Disney needs - a company full of talented, creative overachievers who care as much about their art and storytelling as profits and dollar signs (which they have no problem making plenty of).
The best idea would be to buy Pixar and leave it the hell alone - a Hong Kong for Disney's People's Republic.
They all point to the fact that the pharmaceuticals are spending more on research in recent history than the NIH, but it doesn't specify which diseases or disabilities they're spending that money on.
Compare the number of new allergy, erectile dysfunction, and anti-inflammatory drugs that have come out from those companies in that time period (i.e. treating chronic symptoms) to, say, the number of new antibiotics/HIV treatments. You tell me where the private money is going - potential cash cows that will bring more profits to shareholders, or real cures?