But he who controls the terms of discussion, often controls the discussion. RMS is using his alternative acronym expansions to de-construct the euphemisms the big media cartels are planting in everyone's minds.
Just like how the government wants to call anyone who's a dissident 'unpatriotic', etc. Think about it.
You're being elitist. Problems with your position:
1) The Internet protocols are designed to be end-to-end. No technical reason anyone shouldn't have their own mailserver if they want.
2) Anyone running their own mailserver *does* pay. Electricity bill for the server, monthly bill for their connection, time invested in managing the server...
3) Central authorities just worked *great* for domains didn't they? Oh wait, they didn't. Verisign and ICANN are a bunch of corrupt crooks. Try again. If we ever give a central authority a monopoly on the handing out of 'authorized' mail servers, trust me when I say it'll be nearly impossible to claw that power back from the fat greedy people who will have grown to love their power more than life itself.
4) Learning experience; running your own server keeps your skills sharp as an IT person. Who gave you the divine right to be the only one around allowed to administer a machine?
If someone ever does get SMTP authority centralized, we'll all just route around it as damage anyways, and build a new protocol. That's how the net works.
... and this is why religion is nonsensical. One is required to be offended on behalf of The Prophet because... someone else says so? Because the religion says so?
These self-perpetuating memes have got to go. "Because they said so" is no justification for believing anything.
Meanwhile, sensible Muslims around the world are shrugging, having done the rational thing and said to themselves "I know the religion says this should be offensive, but it's just a bunch of frigging cartoons, and while they're in bad taste, they're not worth burning down buildings and killing people over."
Of course, an even more rational thing would be to reject a religion that one only believes because it was drilled into your brain as a child -- if you'd been born somewhere else you'd probably be a Christian, Jewish, or Hindu. Total accident of birth.
I agree with you; that was my point, really. I think that MS still wants *their* version of CSS interpretation to be the defacto, so they intentionally broke people's hacks and left the CSS model broken. They still are latching onto some hope that they can extend/extinguish the real CSS interpretation by making people start coding specifically for IE7 again.
... Joe Lunatic with his suitcase dirty bomb will blow himself and 100 people up, contaminating the entire city while Homeland Security jerks off with its new 3D scanner at the Superbowl.. thus proving that all this heightened 'security' is a joke.
Seriously, what's the real likelihood that any terrorist will now try to ram a commercial airliner into a skyscraper? Pretty well zero. It's been done, and is just too obvious in hindsight. Terrorists would just be stupid to actually focus on the Superbowl, when it's obviously got such tight security. Makes for a great distraction, though, while they focus on some other highly-populated target. Sigh.
... I don't understand why even some of the most basic CSS functionality is beyond thier ability to grasp.
It's not a matter of them 'grasping', it's a matter of them embracing (and extending, and extinguishing.. you know, the usual). If they actually implemented CSS properly, web designers might be able to make their pages work on any browser, and then what would be the incentive to use IE?
They'd have fixed CSS support by now if they actually wanted IE to be compliant. They don't, cause they know most webmasters will design for IE rather than get tons of complaints about their sites not working when they try to make it look good in all browsers at once.
Best win32 GUI dev environment. Tons of components to make obscure corners of the Win32 API easy to use (systray apps, bubble-help, transparent or non-square windows,...); most come with source too, if you want to customize them.
Delphi bindings for nearly every common API/toolkit you'll ever want (openGL, SDL, fmod,...)
Great debugger, support for embedded asm if you really really need it.
Remember that the designer of C# was also the head dev for Object Pascal for years... a lot of C#'s nicer language features (like properties) are direct descendents of Delphi.
That's not accurate, is it? Aren't they predicting that a 20T field will produce a gravity-like field, based on the proposed new force carried by the proposed gravitophoton particles, which are messenger particles for this new force?
Not that I understand it or anything, but it seems, to my non-physicist mind, that they're talking about a new fundamental force -- so saying it won't work because regular gravity might crush the mechanism, blow it up, whatever -- isn't valid.
If everyone last century had just said "Quarks? Leptons? What bunk!" and thus never bothered to at least run some experiments, we'd never have known one way or the other. Aristotle never tested things either, as I recall -- that's why he was so wrong about so many things. Thought experiments only go so far.
Someone just has to build the damn thing and see what happens. If something surprising occurs, the theory should be investigated further. If nothing happens, maybe there are no "gravitophotons" -- but it should still be investigated further...
I don't claim to understand the math, but they appear to be elaborating on yet another paper that I haven't looked up yet, describing the device in question. It appears to be a detailed analysis of the actual forces generated by the device, with real honest-to-gosh numbers and all that...
Would someone who actually might understand this stuff, please comment on this paper? Everyone else posting (myself included) have no clue and I'd like to hear some *informed* opinions:-)
It's not solely dependent on the number of dominant parties -- in Canada, we have 3 "traditional" (Conservatives, Liberal, NDP) parties and one separatist party (Bloc Qubecois) that, ridiculously, is allowed to be federal due to Quebec having such a large population -- with no candidates *anywhere* else.
So here we are, with *four* parties, an election coming up.. and the Green Party, which ran in *every* riding in the country, was not even allowed to be on the national televised debates. Even though they qualified for official party status with 4% (or as high as 6%, depending on the source) in the last election. They almost certainly have more of a right to be a *federal* party than the Bloc. So much for democracy.
The ability for new parties to challenge the established old boys' networks is dependent on multiple factors; The media, choosing to give parties exposure for their platforms (or not); and laws regarding the ability of smaller parties to get funding.
The media in Canada isn't much better than that in the US. I haven't heard *one* journalist with the guts to ask hard questions of a federal candidate in an interview, like asking them to sign an affadavit for all those promises they spout during the campaign. But then again, if you piss off the politicians, they won't agree to any interviews...
This may sound mean-spirited but I think in this case, and any like it, I couldn't blame the security community if it just threw up its hands and said:
"Oh, what a horrible situation -- we could issue our own fix that we've written to help you out, MS -- it's ready to go, we know it works -- but due to the DMCA, Trusted Computing, numerous restrictive MS EULAs and the general legal climate you and other large proprietary software vendors have created, we are genuinely afraid to release our change, as it has required us to disassemble, reverse-engineer and generally do things that you would sue us for. Sorry. Good luck to your *own* patch team."
Why, from a moral standpoint, should anyone help MS do their QA? They certainly have proven themselves willing to sue anyone for any number of reasons relating to reverse-engineering their code -- after all, their philosophy is that no one outside of their teams should know about the OS internals in this way.
They can't have it both ways -- either welcome the users' rights to improve the system they paid for, or don't.
(Yes, I realize that this patch was made to benefit the public in general, and to defend everyone's systems, not directly to benefit MS. But MS does get a free lunch out of this, in some respects.)
... though it could be argued that they are damaging your car, causing wear-and-tear on it by driving it each night without compensating you for parts & labour etc. It's not a valid analogy, as copying an MP3 causes no such wear-and-tear.. and I can listen to the song even while it's being copied, while I can't drive my car while it's being joy-ridden at night.
Why do people insist on using cars as analogies for data? It *never* works.
OK, I'm not under 25. But I hang with some who are and look younger than my age:-).
We were at a house party this week, where a DJ had set up with her own vinyl collection and tables. People were dancing up a storm to instrumental loops and mixes, generic stuff the DJ had collected purely for its groove value. The vinyl was just raw material for her own, on-the-fly compositions in a sense.
This has been prevalent for years, of course, but I think it's indicative of a trend; people aren't fixating on specific bands as much, they're analyzing the sounds they like and making their own stuff. I think that's great. With basement studios and DJ gear being so cheap nowadays the idea of the megaBand is fading.
And this is precisely why Canadian courts, in the past, have ruled that downloading MP3s and burning copies of friends' albums for yourself was perfectly legal. We have to pay a levy on every blank CD-R, so since the record industry has already gotten its money from us 'criminals', we have no legal or moral reason to worry about burning songs.
I know the big media companies have, through free-trade 'harmonization' (hate that word) been lobbying intensively for Canada to fix this, and make downloading/burning illegal. Guess they'll remove the blank media levies then, right? Uh-huh.
Treat the public like criminals, they'll act like criminals.
I wish they'd get on that. It would really cut down on spam annoyance if people had an easy way to integrate hashcash generation/verification for messages.
This is proof, at its finest, of Microsoft's intellectual dishonesty. As others have said, while MS was externally telling everyone that their servers were superior to any UN*X solution, their own teams struggled with the design limitations of their own OS. How can anyone trust them when things like this are so well known? It boggles the mind. Hotmail was the same story.
... to change the TOS at any time, unilaterally (from Section 2):
"Even after membership is terminated, this Agreement will remain in effect, including sections 4, 5, 7 and 9-14. MySpace.com's Terms of Use and/or subscription fees that were provided to you at registration may change from time to time. By using the Service and by becoming a Member, you acknowledge that MySpace.com reserves the right to charge for the Service and has the right to terminate a Member's Membership should Member breach this Agreement or fail to pay for the Service, as required by this Agreement."
So who says they won't "pull the trigger" and try to claim rights (even retroactively)?
Hmm... so what's to say they won't suddenly change Section 5 to say "exclusive, in perpetuity rights to all material, even after you leave My Space"? If your novel/mp3/scientific breakthrough is online when they make the change to the TOS, it'll already be too late.
I'm not saying they'd necessarily do this, but it's possible. Better to keep your stuff off of Fox's servers.:-p
Somehow, I don't think you accurately remember just how amazingly *IN YOUR FACE, BUY OUR SHIT AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN* the merchandizing was when the '89 Batman came out. I remember being thoroughly tired, queasy and just plain sick of all the Batman, batman, batman stuff associated with that movie.
It was so bad, it indirectly fuelled the comic crash as well, as I recall. The Batman-the-movie graphic novel was so ridiculously overpriced and overprinted, a shadow of things to come for the comic business in years to follow. Batman pins, cards, happymeals, blah blah blah.. it was actually more highly saturating than the more recent comic book movies...
I don't think he was being conceited at all -- it's quite accurate.
This is just *not* a problem for the majority of IT workers. I'm a developer -- I have seen customers face-to-face on only infrequent occasions. If need be, I dress up for these occasions. For the other 99% of my time, it's nobody's damn business, save for the people who work with me, how I dress as long as I get my work done. At our office, T-shirts are the norm. It has absolutely *no* bearing on the quality of our work, and thus this whole thing is irrelevant. Ties and dress shirts will be disregarded by us as the meaningless things that they are.
I've seen many people suggest that simply concatenating the MD5 and SHA1 hashes would increase security, but that simply (roughly) doubles the effort required, as each hash can be broken in a separate pass; but the above requires that a collision must be found for *both* the SHA1 and MD5 algorithms for a given text and (dopplegänger + MD5 hash), simultaneously.
*Nesting* the two hash algorithms would make things much harder.
Umm.. that was kind of my point, you know... I, for instance, am a music composer and software designer. So yes, I do create my -own- culture, as I believe everyone should strive to do.
So you really don't think that $43, times the number of Windows licenses sold to people who didn't really want them (probably many billions of dollars, in total) would not make the world look quite different today, were it available to the general economy as opposed to being concentrated in Mr. Gates' grubby hands?
For one, lots of entrepeneurs with good ideas would be doing valuable things in our society, instead of staining the road with their rotting carcasses (I am speaking now metaphorically of the many interesting companies and ideas that Microsoft has killed in the marketplace).
The ends don't justify the means, period. Gates got his money through dirty tactics. I am glad that lives will be saved through this donation, but it doesn't change what the man did to get that money. We can never know what good all that money (the billions, not just this donation) could have done for the world if Gates hadn't gotten it all.
You're right to be confused. The music and movie industry, as far as I can tell, actually believe they have the god-given right to be the *only* producers of 'culture' -- our songs, our legends and myths, they want to own it all. In their ideal world, you wouldn't even dream of creating anything yourself. That's why it's up to individuals to keep creating culture and letting it out as copyleft, public domain, GPL, whatever.. just anything other than the frameworks they have constructed to lock our culture up.
Would anyone be able to write a business case to get venture money to start a new bio-tech firm looking at AIDS treatment?
This is why I believe drug research and development should be made illegal to perform by the private sector. That's right, illegal. Drug research should be nationalized worldwide, paid for by taxpayers and performed in government-controlled labs, with independent auditors constantly evaluating the departments' progress in creating new drugs to protect the citizenry.
Why?
1) Private corporations have no conscience. 2) 'Treatments' for diseases create customers for a lifetime, while
true cures erode the customer base they were created to serve
(get the cure, you're no longer a customer!) 3) Because of 1), private Big Pharma has no motive to create cures,
only partially-effective treatments that must be taken over and
over again.
Think I'm crazy? How many of the big diseases that have afflicted mankind have been cured (not treated, *cured*) in the last century? Start counting after WWII and antibiotics.
I know, diseases are hard to cure. But can we really know how many potential cures have been overlooked because the research didn't point immediately to a big-bucks-easy-to-manufacture 'treatment' instead? Answer: we can't, because private Big Pharma doesn't let anyone else into those big boardroom meetings.
As for motivation: scientists are internally motivated to help mankind. Money isn't, and never has been, the right motivator for good science.
Slashdot Mirror
But he who controls the terms of discussion, often controls the discussion. RMS is using his alternative acronym expansions to de-construct the euphemisms the big media cartels are planting in everyone's minds.
Just like how the government wants to call anyone who's a dissident 'unpatriotic', etc. Think about it.
You're being elitist. Problems with your position:
1) The Internet protocols are designed to be end-to-end. No technical reason anyone shouldn't have their own mailserver if they want.
2) Anyone running their own mailserver *does* pay. Electricity bill for the server, monthly bill for their connection, time invested in managing the server...
3) Central authorities just worked *great* for domains didn't they? Oh wait, they didn't. Verisign and ICANN are a bunch of corrupt crooks. Try again. If we ever give a central authority a monopoly on the handing out of 'authorized' mail servers, trust me when I say it'll be nearly impossible to claw that power back from the fat greedy people who will have grown to love their power more than life itself.
4) Learning experience; running your own server keeps your skills sharp as an IT person. Who gave you the divine right to be the only one around allowed to administer a machine?
If someone ever does get SMTP authority centralized, we'll all just route around it as damage anyways, and build a new protocol. That's how the net works.
... and this is why religion is nonsensical. One is required to be offended on behalf of The Prophet because... someone else says so? Because the religion says so?
These self-perpetuating memes have got to go. "Because they said so" is no justification for believing anything.
Meanwhile, sensible Muslims around the world are shrugging, having done the rational thing and said to themselves "I know the religion says this should be offensive, but it's just a bunch of frigging cartoons, and while they're in bad taste, they're not worth burning down buildings and killing people over."
Of course, an even more rational thing would be to reject a religion that one only believes because it was drilled into your brain as a child -- if you'd been born somewhere else you'd probably be a Christian, Jewish, or Hindu. Total accident of birth.
I agree with you; that was my point, really. I think that MS still wants *their* version of CSS interpretation to be the defacto, so they intentionally broke people's hacks and left the CSS model broken. They still are latching onto some hope that they can extend/extinguish the real CSS interpretation by making people start coding specifically for IE7 again.
... Joe Lunatic with his suitcase dirty bomb will blow himself and 100 people up, contaminating the entire city while Homeland Security jerks off with its new 3D scanner at the Superbowl.. thus proving that all this heightened 'security' is a joke.
Seriously, what's the real likelihood that any terrorist will now try to ram a commercial airliner into a skyscraper? Pretty well zero. It's been done, and is just too obvious in hindsight. Terrorists would just be stupid to actually focus on the Superbowl, when it's obviously got such tight security. Makes for a great distraction, though, while they focus on some other highly-populated target. Sigh.
... I don't understand why even some of the most basic CSS functionality is beyond thier ability to grasp.
It's not a matter of them 'grasping', it's a matter of them embracing (and extending, and extinguishing.. you know, the usual). If they actually implemented CSS properly, web designers might be able to make their pages work on any browser, and then what would be the incentive to use IE?
They'd have fixed CSS support by now if they actually wanted IE to be compliant. They don't, cause they know most webmasters will design for IE rather than get tons of complaints about their sites not working when they try to make it look good in all browsers at once.
Parent's points seconded.
...); most come with source too, if you want to customize them.
...)
Best win32 GUI dev environment. Tons of components to make obscure corners of the Win32 API easy to use (systray apps, bubble-help, transparent or non-square windows,
Delphi bindings for nearly every common API/toolkit you'll ever want (openGL, SDL, fmod,
Great debugger, support for embedded asm if you really really need it.
Remember that the designer of C# was also the head dev for Object Pascal for years... a lot of C#'s nicer language features (like properties) are direct descendents of Delphi.
That's not accurate, is it? Aren't they predicting that a 20T field will produce a gravity-like field, based on the proposed new force carried by the proposed gravitophoton particles, which are messenger particles for this new force?
Not that I understand it or anything, but it seems, to my non-physicist mind, that they're talking about a new fundamental force -- so saying it won't work because regular gravity might crush the mechanism, blow it up, whatever -- isn't valid.
If everyone last century had just said "Quarks? Leptons? What bunk!" and thus never bothered to at least run some experiments, we'd never have known one way or the other. Aristotle never tested things either, as I recall -- that's why he was so wrong about so many things. Thought experiments only go so far.
Someone just has to build the damn thing and see what happens. If something surprising occurs, the theory should be investigated further. If nothing happens, maybe there are no "gravitophotons" -- but it should still be investigated further...
Since so many people are claiming it's all bunk *without actually reading the frigging paper*, here's a link:
f ahrt/hqtforspacepropphysicsaip2005.pdf
:-)
http://www.uibk.ac.at/c/cb/cb26/heim/theorie_raum
I don't claim to understand the math, but they appear to be elaborating on yet another paper that I haven't looked up yet, describing the device in question. It appears to be a detailed analysis of the actual forces generated by the device, with real honest-to-gosh numbers and all that...
Would someone who actually might understand this stuff, please comment on this paper? Everyone else posting (myself included) have no clue and I'd like to hear some *informed* opinions
It's not solely dependent on the number of dominant parties -- in Canada, we have 3 "traditional" (Conservatives, Liberal, NDP) parties and one separatist party (Bloc Qubecois) that, ridiculously, is allowed to be federal due to Quebec having such a large population -- with no candidates *anywhere* else.
So here we are, with *four* parties, an election coming up.. and the Green Party, which ran in *every* riding in the country, was not even allowed to be on the national televised debates. Even though they qualified for official party status with 4% (or as high as 6%, depending on the source) in the last election. They almost certainly have more of a right to be a *federal* party than the Bloc. So much for democracy.
The ability for new parties to challenge the established old boys' networks is dependent on multiple factors; The media, choosing to give parties exposure for their platforms (or not); and laws regarding the ability of smaller parties to get funding.
The media in Canada isn't much better than that in the US. I haven't heard *one* journalist with the guts to ask hard questions of a federal candidate in an interview, like asking them to sign an affadavit for all those promises they spout during the campaign. But then again, if you piss off the politicians, they won't agree to any interviews...
Sigh. Rant mode off
This may sound mean-spirited but I think in this case, and any like it, I couldn't blame the security community if it just threw up its hands and said:
"Oh, what a horrible situation -- we could issue our own fix that we've written to help you out, MS -- it's ready to go, we know it works -- but due to the DMCA, Trusted Computing, numerous restrictive MS EULAs and the general legal climate you and other large proprietary software vendors have created, we are genuinely afraid to release our change, as it has required us to disassemble, reverse-engineer and generally do things that you would sue us for. Sorry. Good luck to your *own* patch team."
Why, from a moral standpoint, should anyone help MS do their QA? They certainly have proven themselves willing to sue anyone for any number of reasons relating to reverse-engineering their code -- after all, their philosophy is that no one outside of their teams should know about the OS internals in this way.
They can't have it both ways -- either welcome the users' rights to improve the system they paid for, or don't.
(Yes, I realize that this patch was made to benefit the public in general, and to defend everyone's systems, not directly to benefit MS. But MS does get a free lunch out of this, in some respects.)
... though it could be argued that they are damaging your car, causing wear-and-tear on it by driving it each night without compensating you for parts & labour etc. It's not a valid analogy, as copying an MP3 causes no such wear-and-tear.. and I can listen to the song even while it's being copied, while I can't drive my car while it's being joy-ridden at night.
Why do people insist on using cars as analogies for data? It *never* works.
OK, I'm not under 25. But I hang with some who are and look younger than my age :-).
We were at a house party this week, where a DJ had set up with her own vinyl collection and tables. People were dancing up a storm to instrumental loops and mixes, generic stuff the DJ had collected purely for its groove value. The vinyl was just raw material for her own, on-the-fly compositions in a sense.
This has been prevalent for years, of course, but I think it's indicative of a trend; people aren't fixating on specific bands as much, they're analyzing the sounds they like and making their own stuff. I think that's great. With basement studios and DJ gear being so cheap nowadays the idea of the megaBand is fading.
And this is precisely why Canadian courts, in the past, have ruled that downloading MP3s and burning copies of friends' albums for yourself was perfectly legal. We have to pay a levy on every blank CD-R, so since the record industry has already gotten its money from us 'criminals', we have no legal or moral reason to worry about burning songs.
I know the big media companies have, through free-trade 'harmonization' (hate that word) been lobbying intensively for Canada to fix this, and make downloading/burning illegal. Guess they'll remove the blank media levies then, right? Uh-huh.
Treat the public like criminals, they'll act like criminals.
I wish they'd get on that. It would really cut down on spam annoyance if people had an easy way to integrate hashcash generation/verification for messages.
(Or is there a plugin I haven't found yet?)
This is proof, at its finest, of Microsoft's intellectual dishonesty. As others have said, while MS was externally telling everyone that their servers were superior to any UN*X solution, their own teams struggled with the design limitations of their own OS. How can anyone trust them when things like this are so well known? It boggles the mind. Hotmail was the same story.
... to change the TOS at any time, unilaterally (from Section 2):
:-p
"Even after membership is terminated, this Agreement will remain in effect, including sections 4, 5, 7 and 9-14. MySpace.com's Terms of Use and/or subscription fees that were provided to you at registration may change from time to time. By using the Service and by becoming a Member, you acknowledge that MySpace.com reserves the right to charge for the Service and has the right to terminate a Member's Membership should Member breach this Agreement or fail to pay for the Service, as required by this Agreement."
So who says they won't "pull the trigger" and try to claim rights (even retroactively)?
Hmm... so what's to say they won't suddenly change Section 5 to say "exclusive, in perpetuity rights to all material, even after you leave My Space"? If your novel/mp3/scientific breakthrough is online when they make the change to the TOS, it'll already be too late.
I'm not saying they'd necessarily do this, but it's possible. Better to keep your stuff off of Fox's servers.
Somehow, I don't think you accurately remember just how amazingly *IN YOUR FACE, BUY OUR SHIT AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN* the merchandizing was when the '89 Batman came out. I remember being thoroughly tired, queasy and just plain sick of all the Batman, batman, batman stuff associated with that movie.
It was so bad, it indirectly fuelled the comic crash as well, as I recall. The Batman-the-movie graphic novel was so ridiculously overpriced and overprinted, a shadow of things to come for the comic business in years to follow. Batman pins, cards, happymeals, blah blah blah.. it was actually more highly saturating than the more recent comic book movies...
I don't think he was being conceited at all -- it's quite accurate.
Yes. End of thread.
This is just *not* a problem for the majority of IT workers. I'm a developer -- I have seen customers face-to-face on only infrequent occasions. If need be, I dress up for these occasions. For the other 99% of my time, it's nobody's damn business, save for the people who work with me, how I dress as long as I get my work done. At our office, T-shirts are the norm. It has absolutely *no* bearing on the quality of our work, and thus this whole thing is irrelevant. Ties and dress shirts will be disregarded by us as the meaningless things that they are.
I believe a stronger method would be:
Sig = SHA1(data | MD5(data) )
I've seen many people suggest that simply concatenating the MD5 and SHA1 hashes would increase security, but that simply (roughly) doubles the effort required, as each hash can be broken in a separate pass; but the above requires that a collision must be found for *both* the SHA1 and MD5 algorithms for a given text and (dopplegänger + MD5 hash), simultaneously.
*Nesting* the two hash algorithms would make things much harder.
Umm.. that was kind of my point, you know... I, for instance, am a music composer and software designer. So yes, I do create my -own- culture, as I believe everyone should strive to do.
:-p
But thanks for the amusing flame.
So you really don't think that $43, times the number of Windows licenses sold to people who didn't really want them (probably many billions of dollars, in total) would not make the world look quite different today, were it available to the general economy as opposed to being concentrated in Mr. Gates' grubby hands?
For one, lots of entrepeneurs with good ideas would be doing valuable things in our society, instead of staining the road with their rotting carcasses (I am speaking now metaphorically of the many interesting companies and ideas that Microsoft has killed in the marketplace).
The ends don't justify the means, period. Gates got his money through dirty tactics. I am glad that lives will be saved through this donation, but it doesn't change what the man did to get that money. We can never know what good all that money (the billions, not just this donation) could have done for the world if Gates hadn't gotten it all.
You're right to be confused. The music and movie industry, as far as I can tell, actually believe they have the god-given right to be the *only* producers of 'culture' -- our songs, our legends and myths, they want to own it all. In their ideal world, you wouldn't even dream of creating anything yourself. That's why it's up to individuals to keep creating culture and letting it out as copyleft, public domain, GPL, whatever.. just anything other than the frameworks they have constructed to lock our culture up.
Would anyone be able to write a business case to get venture money to start a new bio-tech firm looking at AIDS treatment?
This is why I believe drug research and development should be made illegal to perform by the private sector. That's right, illegal. Drug research should be nationalized worldwide, paid for by taxpayers and performed in government-controlled labs, with independent auditors constantly evaluating the departments' progress in creating new drugs to protect the citizenry.
Why?
1) Private corporations have no conscience.
2) 'Treatments' for diseases create customers for a lifetime, while
true cures erode the customer base they were created to serve
(get the cure, you're no longer a customer!)
3) Because of 1), private Big Pharma has no motive to create cures,
only partially-effective treatments that must be taken over and
over again.
Think I'm crazy? How many of the big diseases that have afflicted mankind have been cured (not treated, *cured*) in the last century? Start counting after WWII and antibiotics.
I know, diseases are hard to cure. But can we really know how many potential cures have been overlooked because the research didn't point immediately to a big-bucks-easy-to-manufacture 'treatment' instead? Answer: we can't, because private Big Pharma doesn't let anyone else into those big boardroom meetings.
As for motivation: scientists are internally motivated to help mankind. Money isn't, and never has been, the right motivator for good science.