Yes, as long as you're not going to engage in activities which copyright law prohibits, you can ignore it.
Simply using a program doesn't require a license.
Distributing that program, or creating a derived work based on it, does.
Copying a program into RAM from your hard drive to run it is "not copying" in exactly the same sense as copying it to your retina in order to read it is "not copying." Copyright law explicitly does not cover simply running a program, despite what MS wants you to believe.
Actually, on the Mac, it does do this for every "installer" (although fortunately a good portion of programs don't need an installer - well, actually almost none do, but some use it anyway.) I always found it quite funny. OSX is BUILT on free software from the ground up, they can hardly claim they weren't aware of it, but the installer program (it reads.pkg files, essentially the same idea as.rpm or.deb) rigidly follows the protocol "display license, only proceed when agree is clicked." So there is the license on screen, saying clearly "You do not have to agree" and yet you do, indeed, have to click the button labeled agree (not exactly the same thing I think, but makers of proprietary software including Apple certainly do want you to think it is) in order to get it installed.
It's a little more than that. Debian maintains a stable branch, and when firefox (or any other app) releases a new version, debian stable sticks with the old one, but backports any security and stability work. This appears to be what the mozilla folks have a problem with - when they release a new version they want everyone to move to it. Debian just doesn't work that way though. They maintain their stable version independently, and do a damn good job of it - security work gets backported, but new features (statistically suspect to introduce new issues that won't be discovered or fixed for awhile) don't. Mozilla says they can't use the name and logo, so they're going to call it iceweasel now. But other than that, it's really a continuation of what they've *always* done with this and every other upstream package. You can call it a fork if you want, but if it's a fork it's a parrallel fork and it's not starting now, it's been going for many years.
Well, see, that's the neat thing about the Tomcat.
It's an air-to-air machine. It's really only good for shooting down planes. Since they haven't been used to shoot down civilian planes, and they weren't built for bombing, they were pretty much 'kind to humanity.' War is certainly something to be avoided, but as long as it's only one combatant killing another, that's on a different plane entirely from the killing of civilians.
And it's the bombers that kill civilians.
Interestingly, the Tomcat appears to be the last pure air-to-air plane made. It's being replaced with "fighter-bombers" - with a real emphasis on the bomber aspect.
Great idea, though probably not the way you intend it to be.
Folks that realise voting is futile may well be more statistically likely to perform jury nullification as well.
This has more information.
"Sexton, who attends the University of California, Berkeley, says that while he can search the site for specific products, he's unable to associate prices with those goods."
"If he did get to the checkout point, he would face an additional barrier: the Web site requires the use of a mouse to complete a transaction, noted plaintiffs' attorney Mazen Basrawi, who works for Berkeley, Calif.-based Disability Rights Advocates and is also blind."
The use of "she" in that role (or alternating he/she, or using "he" for certain classes of subjects and "she" for others where identity and sex of the referent is indefinite, or using neologism like "hir") is, in fact, a much newer (rather than "earlier") phenomenon, rather than "earlier".
Not the use of 'she' in that role, the use of 'she', period.
The word 'she' was *invented* in the twelfth century. The native English third person singular pronouns, masculine and feminine, had by that point merged into 'he' - only natural since the language had shed grammatical gender anyway. (A relic of the original third person singular feminine pronoun survives in the word 'her,' and close relatives can still be seen in related languages, for instance compare the Swedish 'henne.') 'She' is an invented word to reïnject gender distinction in the third person singular pronoun set of a language which had lost gender as a grammatical feature, thus a similar, but not an identical, motivation.
If you'd actually look at the examples you linked, you'll find every one of them agrees with my statement. In each case the mixing of numbers is related to an indefinite number, not an indefinite gender. For instance, in "let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves" the subject here is 'each [of the brethren]' that is to say, it refers to each individual in a group of unknown number. This is not at all the modern 'singular they' it's the 'indefinite they' which has been used in English for ages. Thackeray's "no one prevents you, do they?" is again the same thing - this is not a circumlocution involving a definite, singular subject to avoid exposing gender, it's the old indefinite number showing up again - not one out of the rather large set of those who might interfere is interfering. This is referring simultaneously to a singular 'one' and a much larger plural universe at the same time, in the same word. Even the much more recent Oscar Wilde's "experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes" is the same story once again, 'everyone' is synctactically singular, but semantically plural, and thus the proper use of the indefinite 'they.'
You're right, you only need one example to disprove 'invariably' which makes it a bold statement. I made it fully aware of that. Show me one case of Shakespeare using 'they' in reference to a genuine definitely singular entity and you'll prove me wrong. You can't do it, though, because it didn't happen.
Comments not someone is indeed correct.
The rest of your argument, however, is not. 'Singular they' is indeed a revision, motivated by gender politicists unsatisfied with the availability of 'he' as the natural gender neutral third person singular pronoun in English. (Earlier, 'she' was imported for similar reasons as well.) The early uses sometimes claimed as 'singular they' in fact are invariably actually 'indefinate they' where the *number* is indefinite.
The exclusionary rule is a rather recent invention. Not quite what the founders had in mind, I dare say. But it was necessitated by the demonstrable inability of the system to prosecute police who violate that law.
It would be much better to allow all evidence - but also to give police that commit crimes to obtain evidence the full punishment of the law. After all, if someone does commit a crime, they should be punished, and the fact that their rights were violated by the police afterwards shouldn't really affect that. But what happens is that, in general, the police won't investigate each other, the prosecutors won't prosecute the police, and so they're effectively above the law. And the courts can neither investigate nor prosecute - that's beyond their power. So they did the one thing they could do about the situation - they started throwing evidence out and letting criminals walk free, in the hopes this would at least give the police some incentive to begin to obey the law they're sworn to uphold.
*Roughly* as many, perhaps. Wordcounting is problematic, and it depends on how you gather your data and how you define what should be counted. There are many, many decisions that have to be made, and depending on how you make them you can get greatly varying wordcounts. Wordcounting is also really beside the point.
While it's fashionable to diss Whorf and Sapir over this (and other things) the point they were making was quite accurate. English doesn't have separate roots for 'drifting snow' versus 'clinging snow' or 'snow on ground' versus 'snow floating in water' for instance - and Eskimo languages do.
Tender cuts are NOT tasty cuts. They're much easier to cook, and they're *tender* of course, easy to chew, and traditionally favoured for those reasons.
You want a tasty cut of meat, go get a brisket. Tough as hell, takes about two days to cook it right because you want to marinate it and slow-cook it to overcome the toughness so you can chew the sucker, but it's tasty beyond belief. Tenderloin can't compete at all, for taste, it's just a lot easier to prepare.
The calculation problem is real, but not insoluble. The real trick is that it cannot be solved centrally - you have to have some sort of distributed mechanism to be able to approximate it.
The rest of your post pretty much goes on to sketch another good argument against making downloading illegal. Fines that are higher than the violator can be expected to earn in a lifetime are so high as to be meaningless, and ineffective. And setting a fine so out of proportion with the actual 'value' attributed to the 'crime,' even if it were not effectively so high as to be meaningless, destroys public faith and respect in the legal system anyway. The cost of effective enforcement in this case is far in excess of any benefit to society that could be argued, and the cost of *ineffective* enforcement may be even higher.
And no, humans aren't completely rational, not by any stretch of the imagination. However, they are much more rational than many people give them credit for, and the assumption actually holds fairly well when applied in aggregate to a large group.
It makes perfect sense, and many legal systems historically have used this principle. A functional legal system will attach a penalty for crimes which exceeds their actual cost, proportionate to the chance of getting caught. I.e. if you destroy $100 worth of property, and confess to it immediately, you pay the $100 back, but if you have to be caught, you must pay significantly more than ($100*X/1), where X is the likelihood of apprehension in those circumstances. So if you have a 50% chance of evading punishment entirely, the fine needs to be over $200, otherwise it's rational to attempt to evade detection. If the fine is for example $500, and your chance of evading detection only 50/50, it makes good sense to immediately confess and pay $100 instead. If most people do that, then law enforcement can realistically attempt to catch the rest, but if the fine is the same amount either way, everyone attempts to evade, law enforcement has too many cases to chase, the chances of evading and the number of offenders attempting evasion start increasing in a feedback loop, and the result is uncontrolled breakdown of law, or a police state, which is sort of the same thing, and at any rate equally undesireable.
The whole plea-bargain system in this country, btw, is NOT an example of this. It actually has the opposite effect. If you confess your crime immediately, you won't be able to plea-bargain, since you have nothing to bargain with. But if you evade, not well enough to avoid arrest, but at least well enough to give your lawyer something to work with, that's how you get a plea bargain. This actually increases the incentive to evade, driving ever-increasing law enforcement requirements...
You claim it's been "cultured", "sequenced", and "examined" but I note you don't say "purified." Fact is, until it's purified, you don't know what the heck it is you're "culturing, sequencing, and examining."
HIV has also been shown to cause disease in infected animals when infected with pure HIV.
Reference?
How much more isolation do you want? Despite what Duesberg argues, all of Koch's rules for determining the infectious agent of a disease have been fulfilled.
Duesberg, in fact, doesn't argue that at all. You're just so horribly confused here I don't even know what to say. Actually, Duesberg has probably offered the strongest arguments *against* the position you impute to him here of anyone involved.
The bottom line is: what did 30 million people die of, if not from HIV-caused AIDS?
Opportunistic infections taking advantage of a severely compromised immune system? That's clear. Now the interesting question is, what caused those immune systems to become so compromised. Even though a virus is a politically useful answer, it's certainly not the only logically possible answer. Nor is there any logical reason to deny that there may be different causes for different cases. The immune system is a complex system, and it's hardly inconceivable that it might break down for a number of reasons.
As to Duesbergs lack of results, results require experiments, experiments require money, and the day he opened his mouth and questioned Gallos claims his money has been cut off. And THAT is what we should all be outraged about. Duesberg has submitted countless grant proposals with good research designs that would have settled the issues he raises, one way or the other, with good solid data. Up until he opened his mouth on this issue, he was a top rank grant writer, and he's done a lot of first class science. But now all he can do is write, because experiments take money, and no one is willing to fund experiments that might prove the paradigm that the funding sources have embraced was wrong.
What caused the giant explosion of AIDS in the gay community if something other than the HIV transmission via unprotected sex?
OK, you've got a number of people with severely degraded immune systems. They're all homosexuals, part of a 'scene' that involves unprotected sex with many partners (and you can put that 'many' in capital letters and use the blink tab, it was several people a night, every night) as well as heavy hard drug use. You can't think of a single hypothesis to explain this besides an infectious agent? Please.
The immune system is known to have a tendency to go a bit haywire when overstimulated. Heavy drug use is exactly the sort of thing that would be expected to overstimulate it. It's hardly a stretch to consider that a longterm pattern of unprotected anal intercourse with numerous partners could have the same effect, if you think about it. Combine the two, and that seems like a quite possible explanation. It's too bad the empirical work that would allow us to confirm or deny that hypothesis has been consistently denied funding for twenty years, huh?
What caused the dramatic fall-off of AIDS related deaths in the US after anti-retroviral drugs were introduced and became affordable?
The decline in deaths might well be related to the decline in new cases. The decline in new cases might well have something to do with the decline in heavy hard drug use, and the decline in massively promiscous unprotected anal intercourse? Just a guess. Again, we'd know, but the experiments that would have provided the data just don't get funded.
Conspiracies on this scale don't happen in an open world.
This isn't exactly a conspiracy. It's not like all the people controlling the funding, and the people whose experiments they are funding, got togeth
It's quite possible, as Duesberg has suggested, that HIV is simply a very weak virus that only really has a chance to multiply inside a compromised immune system. That would explain the correlation.
Papadopulos and others point out another possibility - it's uncertain just what is being detected. In the absence of a bona-fide isolation of the virus, it's nothing but guesswork. The proper isolation of the suspected infectious agent is a very basic, fundamental step in dealing medically with any infectious disease - with one exception. AIDS. This shouldn't take more than a couple hundred thousand dollars to do, even assuming that's it for some reason far more difficult to do with HIV than with any other infectious agent known to man. Millions of dollars are thrown around for reasearch on the subject every year, but for some reason no one will spare a couple hundred thousand to actually make sure that the working hypothesis all this money is being spent on is actually correct? Something stinks here.
I don't know if AIDS is caused by HIV or not, but I do know that this is a question that *should* have been settled long ago, and either way, this episode will be one of the textbook examples of the perils of politicising science in a couple decades or so.
Regarding 'equivalent' I did just what you suggest, and got this. Look at 1b. "Having similar or identical effects."
Where we have two words, their is normally such a subtle difference in their meaning. Yes, there's a lot of overlap, but it's not normally exact. Wrong, for instance, is more emphatic than incorrect, and can carry moral judgements, which incorrect does not. Anyhow...
No two acts are ever equivelant in the exact sense you are using. But all acts of murder are essentially equivelant, in the meaning I am using.
As for Roosevelt, amazingly enough, John T. Flynn basically saw through the game even at the time. See The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor, written in 1945. But it was the massive declassification of archives in the 90s that allowed Robert Stinnet, a decorated veteran of the Pacific War himself, to progress beyond the informed guess-work of Flynn and really document what happened. It's really quite shocking, and nefarious above even what Flynn could bring himself to believe. Here is a short article he wrote on it, and I highly recommend his book, which sadly is not available online, but is very worth ordering.
Slashdot Mirror
No, actually I'm clicking a stupid button to continue the install. I'm not agreeing to anything.
Yes, as long as you're not going to engage in activities which copyright law prohibits, you can ignore it. Simply using a program doesn't require a license. Distributing that program, or creating a derived work based on it, does.
Copying a program into RAM from your hard drive to run it is "not copying" in exactly the same sense as copying it to your retina in order to read it is "not copying." Copyright law explicitly does not cover simply running a program, despite what MS wants you to believe.
Actually, on the Mac, it does do this for every "installer" (although fortunately a good portion of programs don't need an installer - well, actually almost none do, but some use it anyway.) I always found it quite funny. OSX is BUILT on free software from the ground up, they can hardly claim they weren't aware of it, but the installer program (it reads .pkg files, essentially the same idea as .rpm or .deb) rigidly follows the protocol "display license, only proceed when agree is clicked." So there is the license on screen, saying clearly "You do not have to agree" and yet you do, indeed, have to click the button labeled agree (not exactly the same thing I think, but makers of proprietary software including Apple certainly do want you to think it is) in order to get it installed.
My Mac runs mutt just fine, thanks.
It's a little more than that. Debian maintains a stable branch, and when firefox (or any other app) releases a new version, debian stable sticks with the old one, but backports any security and stability work. This appears to be what the mozilla folks have a problem with - when they release a new version they want everyone to move to it. Debian just doesn't work that way though. They maintain their stable version independently, and do a damn good job of it - security work gets backported, but new features (statistically suspect to introduce new issues that won't be discovered or fixed for awhile) don't. Mozilla says they can't use the name and logo, so they're going to call it iceweasel now. But other than that, it's really a continuation of what they've *always* done with this and every other upstream package. You can call it a fork if you want, but if it's a fork it's a parrallel fork and it's not starting now, it's been going for many years.
The defendent had a lawyer present for part of the trial. He withdrew when she went broke and couldn't pay him anymore.
Raise your kids like that and watch what happens when they finally move out from under your thumb.
It'll be a total disaster, and yes, it will be your fault.
Well, see, that's the neat thing about the Tomcat.
It's an air-to-air machine. It's really only good for shooting down planes. Since they haven't been used to shoot down civilian planes, and they weren't built for bombing, they were pretty much 'kind to humanity.' War is certainly something to be avoided, but as long as it's only one combatant killing another, that's on a different plane entirely from the killing of civilians.
And it's the bombers that kill civilians.
Interestingly, the Tomcat appears to be the last pure air-to-air plane made. It's being replaced with "fighter-bombers" - with a real emphasis on the bomber aspect.
Great idea, though probably not the way you intend it to be. Folks that realise voting is futile may well be more statistically likely to perform jury nullification as well.
This has more information. "Sexton, who attends the University of California, Berkeley, says that while he can search the site for specific products, he's unable to associate prices with those goods." "If he did get to the checkout point, he would face an additional barrier: the Web site requires the use of a mouse to complete a transaction, noted plaintiffs' attorney Mazen Basrawi, who works for Berkeley, Calif.-based Disability Rights Advocates and is also blind."
Umm, to remove some tacky crap that some moron stuck on it?
Not the use of 'she' in that role, the use of 'she', period.
The word 'she' was *invented* in the twelfth century. The native English third person singular pronouns, masculine and feminine, had by that point merged into 'he' - only natural since the language had shed grammatical gender anyway. (A relic of the original third person singular feminine pronoun survives in the word 'her,' and close relatives can still be seen in related languages, for instance compare the Swedish 'henne.') 'She' is an invented word to reïnject gender distinction in the third person singular pronoun set of a language which had lost gender as a grammatical feature, thus a similar, but not an identical, motivation.
If you'd actually look at the examples you linked, you'll find every one of them agrees with my statement. In each case the mixing of numbers is related to an indefinite number, not an indefinite gender. For instance, in "let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves" the subject here is 'each [of the brethren]' that is to say, it refers to each individual in a group of unknown number. This is not at all the modern 'singular they' it's the 'indefinite they' which has been used in English for ages. Thackeray's "no one prevents you, do they?" is again the same thing - this is not a circumlocution involving a definite, singular subject to avoid exposing gender, it's the old indefinite number showing up again - not one out of the rather large set of those who might interfere is interfering. This is referring simultaneously to a singular 'one' and a much larger plural universe at the same time, in the same word. Even the much more recent Oscar Wilde's "experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes" is the same story once again, 'everyone' is synctactically singular, but semantically plural, and thus the proper use of the indefinite 'they.'
You're right, you only need one example to disprove 'invariably' which makes it a bold statement. I made it fully aware of that. Show me one case of Shakespeare using 'they' in reference to a genuine definitely singular entity and you'll prove me wrong. You can't do it, though, because it didn't happen.
Comments not someone is indeed correct. The rest of your argument, however, is not. 'Singular they' is indeed a revision, motivated by gender politicists unsatisfied with the availability of 'he' as the natural gender neutral third person singular pronoun in English. (Earlier, 'she' was imported for similar reasons as well.) The early uses sometimes claimed as 'singular they' in fact are invariably actually 'indefinate they' where the *number* is indefinite.
The exclusionary rule is a rather recent invention. Not quite what the founders had in mind, I dare say. But it was necessitated by the demonstrable inability of the system to prosecute police who violate that law.
It would be much better to allow all evidence - but also to give police that commit crimes to obtain evidence the full punishment of the law. After all, if someone does commit a crime, they should be punished, and the fact that their rights were violated by the police afterwards shouldn't really affect that. But what happens is that, in general, the police won't investigate each other, the prosecutors won't prosecute the police, and so they're effectively above the law. And the courts can neither investigate nor prosecute - that's beyond their power. So they did the one thing they could do about the situation - they started throwing evidence out and letting criminals walk free, in the hopes this would at least give the police some incentive to begin to obey the law they're sworn to uphold.
Sad, huh?
*Roughly* as many, perhaps. Wordcounting is problematic, and it depends on how you gather your data and how you define what should be counted. There are many, many decisions that have to be made, and depending on how you make them you can get greatly varying wordcounts. Wordcounting is also really beside the point.
While it's fashionable to diss Whorf and Sapir over this (and other things) the point they were making was quite accurate. English doesn't have separate roots for 'drifting snow' versus 'clinging snow' or 'snow on ground' versus 'snow floating in water' for instance - and Eskimo languages do.
So few people understand this today!
Tender cuts are NOT tasty cuts. They're much easier to cook, and they're *tender* of course, easy to chew, and traditionally favoured for those reasons.
You want a tasty cut of meat, go get a brisket. Tough as hell, takes about two days to cook it right because you want to marinate it and slow-cook it to overcome the toughness so you can chew the sucker, but it's tasty beyond belief. Tenderloin can't compete at all, for taste, it's just a lot easier to prepare.
The calculation problem is real, but not insoluble. The real trick is that it cannot be solved centrally - you have to have some sort of distributed mechanism to be able to approximate it.
The rest of your post pretty much goes on to sketch another good argument against making downloading illegal. Fines that are higher than the violator can be expected to earn in a lifetime are so high as to be meaningless, and ineffective. And setting a fine so out of proportion with the actual 'value' attributed to the 'crime,' even if it were not effectively so high as to be meaningless, destroys public faith and respect in the legal system anyway. The cost of effective enforcement in this case is far in excess of any benefit to society that could be argued, and the cost of *ineffective* enforcement may be even higher.
And no, humans aren't completely rational, not by any stretch of the imagination. However, they are much more rational than many people give them credit for, and the assumption actually holds fairly well when applied in aggregate to a large group.
Yes, thanks, you're completely correct, I obviously didn't have enough caffeine in my bloodstream when I wrote that ;)
It makes perfect sense, and many legal systems historically have used this principle. A functional legal system will attach a penalty for crimes which exceeds their actual cost, proportionate to the chance of getting caught. I.e. if you destroy $100 worth of property, and confess to it immediately, you pay the $100 back, but if you have to be caught, you must pay significantly more than ($100*X/1), where X is the likelihood of apprehension in those circumstances. So if you have a 50% chance of evading punishment entirely, the fine needs to be over $200, otherwise it's rational to attempt to evade detection. If the fine is for example $500, and your chance of evading detection only 50/50, it makes good sense to immediately confess and pay $100 instead. If most people do that, then law enforcement can realistically attempt to catch the rest, but if the fine is the same amount either way, everyone attempts to evade, law enforcement has too many cases to chase, the chances of evading and the number of offenders attempting evasion start increasing in a feedback loop, and the result is uncontrolled breakdown of law, or a police state, which is sort of the same thing, and at any rate equally undesireable.
The whole plea-bargain system in this country, btw, is NOT an example of this. It actually has the opposite effect. If you confess your crime immediately, you won't be able to plea-bargain, since you have nothing to bargain with. But if you evade, not well enough to avoid arrest, but at least well enough to give your lawyer something to work with, that's how you get a plea bargain. This actually increases the incentive to evade, driving ever-increasing law enforcement requirements...
You claim it's been "cultured", "sequenced", and "examined" but I note you don't say "purified." Fact is, until it's purified, you don't know what the heck it is you're "culturing, sequencing, and examining."
Reference?
Duesberg, in fact, doesn't argue that at all. You're just so horribly confused here I don't even know what to say. Actually, Duesberg has probably offered the strongest arguments *against* the position you impute to him here of anyone involved.
Opportunistic infections taking advantage of a severely compromised immune system? That's clear. Now the interesting question is, what caused those immune systems to become so compromised. Even though a virus is a politically useful answer, it's certainly not the only logically possible answer. Nor is there any logical reason to deny that there may be different causes for different cases. The immune system is a complex system, and it's hardly inconceivable that it might break down for a number of reasons.
As to Duesbergs lack of results, results require experiments, experiments require money, and the day he opened his mouth and questioned Gallos claims his money has been cut off. And THAT is what we should all be outraged about. Duesberg has submitted countless grant proposals with good research designs that would have settled the issues he raises, one way or the other, with good solid data. Up until he opened his mouth on this issue, he was a top rank grant writer, and he's done a lot of first class science. But now all he can do is write, because experiments take money, and no one is willing to fund experiments that might prove the paradigm that the funding sources have embraced was wrong.
OK, you've got a number of people with severely degraded immune systems. They're all homosexuals, part of a 'scene' that involves unprotected sex with many partners (and you can put that 'many' in capital letters and use the blink tab, it was several people a night, every night) as well as heavy hard drug use. You can't think of a single hypothesis to explain this besides an infectious agent? Please.
The immune system is known to have a tendency to go a bit haywire when overstimulated. Heavy drug use is exactly the sort of thing that would be expected to overstimulate it. It's hardly a stretch to consider that a longterm pattern of unprotected anal intercourse with numerous partners could have the same effect, if you think about it. Combine the two, and that seems like a quite possible explanation. It's too bad the empirical work that would allow us to confirm or deny that hypothesis has been consistently denied funding for twenty years, huh?
The decline in deaths might well be related to the decline in new cases. The decline in new cases might well have something to do with the decline in heavy hard drug use, and the decline in massively promiscous unprotected anal intercourse? Just a guess. Again, we'd know, but the experiments that would have provided the data just don't get funded.
This isn't exactly a conspiracy. It's not like all the people controlling the funding, and the people whose experiments they are funding, got togeth
Oh, here's some Mullis for you too.
Here. And here.
Science 101: Correlation is not causation!
It's quite possible, as Duesberg has suggested, that HIV is simply a very weak virus that only really has a chance to multiply inside a compromised immune system. That would explain the correlation.
Papadopulos and others point out another possibility - it's uncertain just what is being detected. In the absence of a bona-fide isolation of the virus, it's nothing but guesswork. The proper isolation of the suspected infectious agent is a very basic, fundamental step in dealing medically with any infectious disease - with one exception. AIDS. This shouldn't take more than a couple hundred thousand dollars to do, even assuming that's it for some reason far more difficult to do with HIV than with any other infectious agent known to man. Millions of dollars are thrown around for reasearch on the subject every year, but for some reason no one will spare a couple hundred thousand to actually make sure that the working hypothesis all this money is being spent on is actually correct? Something stinks here.
I don't know if AIDS is caused by HIV or not, but I do know that this is a question that *should* have been settled long ago, and either way, this episode will be one of the textbook examples of the perils of politicising science in a couple decades or so.
Regarding 'equivalent' I did just what you suggest, and got this. Look at 1b. "Having similar or identical effects."
Where we have two words, their is normally such a subtle difference in their meaning. Yes, there's a lot of overlap, but it's not normally exact. Wrong, for instance, is more emphatic than incorrect, and can carry moral judgements, which incorrect does not. Anyhow...
No two acts are ever equivelant in the exact sense you are using. But all acts of murder are essentially equivelant, in the meaning I am using.
As for Roosevelt, amazingly enough, John T. Flynn basically saw through the game even at the time. See The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor, written in 1945. But it was the massive declassification of archives in the 90s that allowed Robert Stinnet, a decorated veteran of the Pacific War himself, to progress beyond the informed guess-work of Flynn and really document what happened. It's really quite shocking, and nefarious above even what Flynn could bring himself to believe. Here is a short article he wrote on it, and I highly recommend his book, which sadly is not available online, but is very worth ordering.