"Sugar" may refer to a product of beets rather than cane actually. It's hard to see how that could make any difference if you are dealing with refined sugar, but when cooking with less processed or raw forms, the cane is clearly superior, and 'boiled cane syrup' sounds to me like it's still syrup, not sugar. So it seems possible the Whole Foods brand may taste better, for those that really take the time to savor their oatmeal properly.
The 'healthier' claim is harder to swallow though.
"All versions of English spoken in areas of white native-speaking descent have a very high phonemic similarity."
This is not only not true (scots dialect is as 'white' as you could get and it's quite possibly the furthest outlier in the language) even if were true it would be pointless. Are you really implying that only *white* English speakers contribute to our literature? Please. You cannot be serious.
"It would not be difficult at all to make a single phonemic spelling that would adequately represent all dialects."
If it's so easy go do it.
You'll find that it's not nearly as easy as you think and what you wind up with is not going to be much different from what we use right now.
That's because the natural way to coherently link the tangled mass of local phonologies together into a single written standard is to walk back the historical developments, providing written phonemes that represent the ancient root from which the diverse modern pronunciations stem.
You talk about dropped 'r's? That's barely even scratching the surface. There are dozens of different 'r's which are used by different dialects, in different environments, and when 'dropped' they are usually actually converted into another phoneme, or trigger a conversion of a neighboring phoneme...
"That's a completely spurious comparison. Latin was spoken by the conquerors, and the locals failed to learn it correctly."
Sorry your scenario is the spurious one. Latin, as in Classical Latin, was spoken as a native language by no one, ever. It was always a literary language.
Spoken 'vulgate' latin was not a literary language and it was spoken all the way from Romania to Brittania at one time. The differences that develop have nothing to do with errors or failure to learn correctly just normal language change processes that affect all vernaculars. The vulgar remained mutually intelligible at first under the shared influence of the literary Latin but as that fell out of use and was replaced with new literary languages derived from local vulgar usage, the gluing influence of the shared literary form was lost, and the divergence accelerated.
"Auto translators do not translate text displayed in a graphic."
Text displayed in a graphic are only permissible as an alternative the browser may choose to display. The actual text representation must ALWAYS be included using the MANDATORY 'alt' tag. It is never permissible to make assumptions about the capabilities of the user agent, which may or may not have any effective way of displaying graphics. Widespread tolerance for scofflaws on this issue is the single largest source of suck on the internet today.
Historical spellings are the only reason English is still a single language that is mutually intelligible (at least in written form) all around the world. It's the key to its success, not a weakness. If we follow your track well we can just look to Latin historically to see what happens. The local street languages will be adapted into faux-literary languages with phonetic spellings, mutually unintelligible. This reduces the global marketplace of ideas that takes place in English today into a number of isolated, smaller exchanges which do not really have access to each other, making us all poorer, and then after some time each of those languages will once again be using historical spellings to hold together the dialects that have been developed anyway.
Just like French today.
So no thank you, let's not try to kill the tongue of Shakespeare. Learn to use it better instead.
"Country" is actually a bit ambiguous. I believe the most precise way to say it is that England, Scotland, and Wales are three nations incorporated in a single multi-national State, 'the United Kingdom.' (Ireland on the other hand is one nation split between two States.)
"The RSA has already explicitly said the contract doesn't say what they are accused of it saying."
Link? Because what I remember reading from them was more of a very carefully calculated non-answer. Did not deny the elements of the crime, but very vaguely denied any intent. An evasive, lawyerly answer, not a straightforward denial at all.
"You may be right about bananas, but our protection has a large component of "disease-free" driving it. "
That's one of the scare-tactics used to drum up political support for it.
In reality while I cant discount this entirely I am very skeptical that the diligence of your customs service would delay the onset of a new Panama Disease by more than a year or two at most. When and if that happens, there might be a small benefit. Every day until it happens your people are paying truly staggering amounts of money to keep a handful of banana planters who would otherwise have liquidated and reinvested in something profitable years ago right where they are.
The irony of someone mentioning they were aussie and criticizing the us for protectionist farm policy was too thick to ignore.
"Major importers are all "it's fine, we check it all and fumigate blah, blah, blah" but it only takes one shipment of diseased fruit and we're stuffed. "
Exactly my point. It wouldnt even take a commercial shipment. A ship full of iPods could bring it just the same. Unless you are ready to wall yourself off to all importers and tourists the idea that you can physically prevent the entry of a disease like that is dangerous illusion.
I know how diligent aussie customs are. They confiscated my almonds of all things!
Yet they and I both missed a bag of banana chips. Go figure.
How many tourists pass through Oz each year? And forget that, let's assume we have complete control there and nothing will ever get through. Let's talk about commercial shipping, dockyards, sailors, fishermen.... yeah.
If another Panama Disease hits Australia will have to deal with it right along with the rest of the world. You might gain a season or two but it wont last long.
"Sure there are cheaper products to be had from overseas (although I don't agree that they're just as good, given given the lead time of getting them to my supermarket - fresh fruit and vegetables start to deteriorate the moment they're picked, and bananas from Peru just aren't going to stack up against bananas from Nth Qld)"
If you want super-super fresh you always want to go farmers market anyway, of course. But the standard grocery store bananas in SE Qld were not dramatically better than what I am used to, they just come with astronomical price tags. It's my understanding in either case they are mass produced, picked green, transported in a controlled environment, then ripened in a controlled environment before sale, so it's hard to see how there could be too much difference.
Fresh tree-ripened fruit are a different matter of course but that is a market that does not require protectionist laws to protect it. It would fetch similar or even better prices here if it were available for purchase.
"Oh please, spare me the pointless semantic games. 'belief' and 'religious belief' are not the same thing. All minds function on belief, scientific or not."
It's no game, and a scientific mind nonetheless is by definition one disciplined and trained to disallow it. It's not that hard if you understand the need and apply yourself. The closest you should come to "beliefs" about scientific questions would be the assumption that sensory data does reflect some sort of existential reality rather than being some sort of elaborate hallucination. Even that is open to question, and in fact questioning it regularly is a good exercise. This has nothing to do with the Matrix btw this was probably an old technique when the skeptics of ancient Greece started teaching it.
There are no beliefs. There are only working hypotheses, confidence estimates; empirical evidence and logic.
"Admittedly many scientists do say "We should shun Duesberg", but that's a natural human reaction to someone who seems to have been instrumental in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children."
The same rhetorical dodge just keeps getting used over and over again.
We are not and have never been talking about Duesberg later in Africa. We are talking about Duesberg right after the media all lit up with the big official announcement that "HIV=AIDS." He wasnt blacklisted and shunned and treated like a subhuman for what happened in SA years later, he was destroyed right then and his life followed a very different trajectory from that point on as a result of that.
"If you believe that latter, you shouldn't have brought up the former. There are quite a few Nobel prize winners that went on to promote demonstratively wrong ideas"
You premise does not support your conclusion, your unstated (and incorrect) missing postulate being that I somehow implied that having a Nobel prize made one infallible. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. Need I mention Obamas "Peace Prize?"
But outside of the Peace prize, a Nobel is at least a fairly good indicator of greater than normal skill in the field in which it was won. And again, in this case, it was won for work on the same test he commented on. That doesnt make him infallible but it certainly rebuts the accusation that he was outside of expertise, commenting on something he knew nothing about. There just is no question that he was at the time this happened one of the worlds leading authorities on that test, he was comfortably inside his competence.
It's amazing that anyone could be so dense as to need this spelled out for them in such detail. I don't say that to try to be offensive but out of genuine amazement. He invented the test. He said to paraphrase that yes it could indeed do exactly what Duesberg thought it was doing. Whether or not they were both largely wrong is at this point many many years later entirely besides the point. The question is was their skepticism at the time reasonable and if you have any understanding of what science means I dont see how you can think it wasnt. Science is the product of skepticism, it requires it, it becomes disfunctional when it doesnt get enough, and it cannot be done by men who are afraid to be wrong.
The company you are ordering from will screw you on obvious errors every chance they get. On the rare occasions when they do not, it's called "breach of fiduciary responsibility" and is actionable. So yes, I do not see anything wrong with the little people treating them the same way in return. And I have no idea what SD or FW are, though they sound like they might be interesting.
"Protectionism doesn't work and we Aussies would appreciate it if the US stopped protecting is farmers."
How about AU do the same? Bananas in particular are outrageous. Y'all pay many times the market rate and the Bananas while fine are in no way superior to the far less expensive products our good friends in Peru keep trying to send you...
Actually like most words 'socialist' can be applied ambiguously. In the US it typically means what you say, but in other cases it may not. And libertarian socialists do exist. They have some funny notions and extended dialogue might well resolve them out of existence, but they certainly exist, and they are not authoritarians.
"If GEMA themselves uploaded the content with the intent that YouTube would redistribute it, then clearly they can't turn round and argue that YouTube was acting without consent when that redistribution happens."
Sure they can. Who is going to stop them? Not this court.
Even if they had the will, it's trivial to cover ones tracks in such a situation. They can do it and just pretend it was someone else and unless they are terminally stupid at some point you will never know, let alone be able to prove, they did it.
"What is needed is a new licensing model for published data that says "anyone is free to use these data to replicate the results of the current study, however it CANNOT be used as a basis for new analyses without written consent of the primary investigator of this paper or until [XX] years after publication." "
I could not disagree more.
What is needed here is to deal with the real problem - the issues that force working scientists into a position where doing good science (publishing your data) can harm your career.
Slapping a band-aid on a symptom without addressing the fundamental malfunction here is guaranteed to make things worse, not better.
"But for an unskilled carpenter, I see two possibilities: - the carpenter may limit his designs to what the CNC machine can make (no curved wood objects for one example) - the fundamentals of carpentry might be ignored (like the properties of natural wood, growth, shrinkage)"
Very much like what you see when people trained as CAD operators try to do the job of an engineer. I remember a truly lovely staircase. Guy sure could draw nicely but he had no idea what 'tensile strength' means and if it had been built instead of caught it would have resulted in dozens of deaths.
"You have to admit that he's got a point: some pirates are pirates because pirating is cheaper than paying. I don't see why that fact is "off limits" in the discussion."
It shouldnt be, but we should also keep in mind that there are different categories of costs involved other than cash payments.
For instance, new games. Now fortunately they tend to suck and I dont want to play them too badly, but pretty much any mainstream title is going to come with the cost of installing spyware/drm crap as a mandatory part of the package. That is a cost far in excess of the actual cash you pay for the game, and THAT drives a significant amount of game piracy.
The classic reaction is to buy the game, put the box on the shelf unopened, and download a pirated copy with the junk removed. I have known so many avid gamers to do this that I would venture to call it common.
In that case the company is still getting their money, but the thing is, it's very easy for someone that has already accepted the fact that the pirate copy is superior to lose his job or get hit with unexpected bills or whatnot and just quit buying them at all, which should be their real concern here. Ultimately, it's a problem they create themselves, by foisting an intentionally defective product on their customers, and if they cannot figure that out and stop it, they really do not deserve to remain profitable.
Yes, technically PCR is a technique to amplify the signal to allow detection via a test that would otherwise not be sensitive enough. If Mullins believes that it can also amplify noise to create a false signal, that opinion would certainly be well within his professional competence, as well as a statement against his own interest, no?
"Now, I know it's usually an invalid assumption to criticize a person's science based on their personal life"
If you know that then why did you bother wasting an entire paragraph doing just that? I dont care what these people do in their free time, what I care about is the integrity of science.
"Dr. Duesburg did some interesting work on cancer. Apparently along with disputing that HIV causes AIDS, he also disputes the results of his own work"
You say that like it's a bad thing, when in reality it is a mark of a real scientist to remain skeptical even of ones own work.
Really, it's almost like you WANT me to believe you are arguing in bad faith.
"So you believe which of those two contrary hypothoses?" [sic]
Neither, of course.
A scientific mind does not function on 'belief.'
If you want me to guess? I'd say both of the groups I mentioned, as well as the orthodox establishment, will probably turn out to have been substantially wrong to one degree or another. But that is no more than an educated guess based on the history of science.
Whether or not there is ultimately any truth to the criticisms and countercriticisms is really secondary to me. What interests me the most is the way that supposedly scientific institutions devolve into exactly the same sort of relationships and behavior that we expect from religious institutions - the way that what should be a scientific theory comes to be viewed more like a religious creed, and scientific skepticism comes to be seen as heresy. It's not a matter of the orthodoxy is right or the heresy is right - they may both be wrong, at least partly. But what the heck does orthodoxy and heresy have to do with science?
I am honestly not sure if you think you are putting one past me or if you think this makes sense.
There is no cure for the common cold because the "common cold" is actually a symptom with over 200 different possible causes, and it's a mild nuisance not worth the trouble. If one of them started killing people tomorrow I expect a vaccine at least, if not a full cure, would appear very quickly.
"Mullis has also done no actual research into HIV/AIDS. He is also a molecular biologist and infectious diseases is outside his area of expertise."
This is hilarious and typical of the character assassination.
True, he's a molecular biologist. His expertise? He INVENTED the modern PCR test! Go look that up. It's actually a pretty big deal, there's a little something called the Nobel prize he got for that specifically.
Now he may not be a board certified specialist in infectious diseases but he is certainly qualified to comment on how the test he invented works, and that is exactly the context in which he chipped in to support Duesberg!
As I said earlier, dishonest debating tactics make me suspicious. If he were one of your 5,000 Durban signers, no one would question whether he was qualified.
"This is ancient history. The modern anti-HIV cocktails are largely drugs that were invented long after Duesberg's research career fizzled out"
Over the past decade or so I understand there has been a shift away from the ones he was writing about to less toxic drugs, and also a lot more emphasis on general immune and health support. Both of which he actually advocated early.
"No, but being wrong and continuing to say the same thing over and over again for decades is a pretty good way to piss people off."
Your chronology is wrong though, along with your cause and effect. He was only mildly skeptical and his career was trashed. Later, unable to get the funding for experimental work, he became a rather persistent and I am sure annoying critic, not before.
"For people who can afford to pay for the treatment, AIDS basically is cured - we can't totally eliminate HIV from the system, but patients can survive almost indefinitely with a reasonable quality of life."
In other words we havent found it yet.
We could keep people alive "almost indefinitely" back in the 80s.
"We don't have a cure for the flu either"
Huh?
Ok if you want to split that hair, fine.
We were told we would have a cure and/or a vaccine. Where's that vaccine?
Huge amounts of money have spent searching for it, quite a bit of time has passed, it doesnt seem to be any closer than it was back then, and we still hear the same thing about how HIV is so unique, it does things no other virus can, we still dont really understand it. Maybe it really is the special snowflake. Or maybe there is something fundamentally wrong about the assumptions we are working from.
All these years later, and assuming for the sake of argument that HIV does indeed cause AIDS and that Duesberg and the other skeptics were all dead wrong on that - treating them like scientists who are supposed to remain skeptical, rather than priests who are supposed to remain orthodox, would not have hurt and might well have helped.
I dont think there is anyone in the field today who would argue that we have just wasted too much time on understanding the workings of the immune system itself, or the role of environmental factors on its functioning. Plus the demands of human ego would have made it nearly unavoidable for them to concoct ways to test their hypothesis versus HIV=AIDS directly, experimentally.
It's one thing to cling to your theory when you are attacked for it, belittled for it, and made to suffer for it - like the wind blowing on the traveller you just make him clutch his coat tighter. But when your own test is built and run and it says no, it's obviously time to move on.
If you think that is an accurate description of what Duesberg believes you havent even begun to understand his argument. Let me guess, you havent actually read HIM, just someone elses character assassination.
What Duesberg actually thinks is going on is that AIDS - the "symptoms" of the disease, primarily rapid immune collapse, but also possibly sarcomas and so on - is being caused by several different causes in different cases. In cases of chronic long term intravenous drug users who develop AIDS, it would make a certain amount of sense to think their recreation and the collapse of their immune system might be related. Many early cases were, not just gay, but specifically gay men who were getting LOTS of sex, and engaging in the most risky forms of sex, and using amyl nitrate(?) on a daily basis on top of that. In that population group, a peculiar sarcoma is characteristic, but it's not seen in other groups with AIDS. Acquired sensitivity to environmental chemicals has been known for decades to cause severe immune problems, and could account for some of the cases as well. Finally, in some population groups, particularly in Africa, he argues that many AIDS deaths are really poverty deaths. In i.e. Ethiopia the mortality rate didnt skyrocket, but instead of people dying of i.e. dysentary they were now dying of AIDS, because it was redefined to include dysentary and other things that people were already dying of as diagnostic for AIDS.
Since HIV is only a symptom of the real problem, which varies, treating HIV is in his view worse than pointless. Worse because the "cocktails" used - many of which he trialed and rejected in his pioneering cancer research - are toxic and cause great damage in and of themselves. He believes that if you give them to a patient who has nothing worse than a flu, that patient will then develop AIDS, i.e. experience catastrophic immune collapse, with no virus needed. He suggests a range of treatments for different sorts of cases and continuing research focused on the immune system, rather than on the HIV virus, which he believes will turn out to have been a very costly red herring.
That, in a nutshell, is what he argues, without pejorative and at least without deliberately trying to make him sound like the retarded kid from the trailer park. It's from memory of a book that he wrote and I read some years back - not some idiots on the internet arguing about it, but actually reading what he wrote at least, but my apologies to him if I got anything wrong.
His hypothesis may well be wrong, but simply being wrong would not justify the negative reaction he has received. The man is of an age where I doubt he is actively working now, but back when this happened if you were making a short list of the people you really needed on your team if you were trying to find a cure for AIDS, he was a guy that would have been pretty close to the top of it. He voiced reservations and his career was pretty much killed right there. A lot of prestige and not just individuals but big institutions, government, media, research funding institutes, had just announced that HIV=AIDS and now that we knew what was causing it the cure was assured.
It's interesting that you characterize it by describing obviously ignorant beliefs and let us say low-rent characters, with no mention of any actual AIDS skeptics. Drs Duesberg Rasnick and Farmer dont exist in your world, right? And certainly Dr Mullis (the inventor of the PCR test used in AIDS clinics worldwide) never existed, right?
No, clearly those people do not exist, I must have dreamed them, because only drop outs who live in trailer parks ever doubt the official story, even for a moment.
Without any opinion at all on which side is right about the disease, the rhetorical tactics used by those who take position as defenders of orthodoxy does seem to tend towards the dishonest, and your post was a good example of this. It seems to me that if you were truly as confident of the conclusion as you wish to appear, you would not feel the need to stoop to this.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, that's a great idea, except for how incredibly long it would take to charge your car!
"Sugar" may refer to a product of beets rather than cane actually. It's hard to see how that could make any difference if you are dealing with refined sugar, but when cooking with less processed or raw forms, the cane is clearly superior, and 'boiled cane syrup' sounds to me like it's still syrup, not sugar. So it seems possible the Whole Foods brand may taste better, for those that really take the time to savor their oatmeal properly.
The 'healthier' claim is harder to swallow though.
"All versions of English spoken in areas of white native-speaking descent have a very high phonemic similarity."
This is not only not true (scots dialect is as 'white' as you could get and it's quite possibly the furthest outlier in the language) even if were true it would be pointless. Are you really implying that only *white* English speakers contribute to our literature? Please. You cannot be serious.
"It would not be difficult at all to make a single phonemic spelling that would adequately represent all dialects."
If it's so easy go do it.
You'll find that it's not nearly as easy as you think and what you wind up with is not going to be much different from what we use right now.
That's because the natural way to coherently link the tangled mass of local phonologies together into a single written standard is to walk back the historical developments, providing written phonemes that represent the ancient root from which the diverse modern pronunciations stem.
You talk about dropped 'r's? That's barely even scratching the surface. There are dozens of different 'r's which are used by different dialects, in different environments, and when 'dropped' they are usually actually converted into another phoneme, or trigger a conversion of a neighboring phoneme...
"That's a completely spurious comparison. Latin was spoken by the conquerors, and the locals failed to learn it correctly."
Sorry your scenario is the spurious one. Latin, as in Classical Latin, was spoken as a native language by no one, ever. It was always a literary language.
Spoken 'vulgate' latin was not a literary language and it was spoken all the way from Romania to Brittania at one time. The differences that develop have nothing to do with errors or failure to learn correctly just normal language change processes that affect all vernaculars. The vulgar remained mutually intelligible at first under the shared influence of the literary Latin but as that fell out of use and was replaced with new literary languages derived from local vulgar usage, the gluing influence of the shared literary form was lost, and the divergence accelerated.
"Auto translators do not translate text displayed in a graphic."
Text displayed in a graphic are only permissible as an alternative the browser may choose to display. The actual text representation must ALWAYS be included using the MANDATORY 'alt' tag. It is never permissible to make assumptions about the capabilities of the user agent, which may or may not have any effective way of displaying graphics. Widespread tolerance for scofflaws on this issue is the single largest source of suck on the internet today.
Absolutely not.
Historical spellings are the only reason English is still a single language that is mutually intelligible (at least in written form) all around the world. It's the key to its success, not a weakness. If we follow your track well we can just look to Latin historically to see what happens. The local street languages will be adapted into faux-literary languages with phonetic spellings, mutually unintelligible. This reduces the global marketplace of ideas that takes place in English today into a number of isolated, smaller exchanges which do not really have access to each other, making us all poorer, and then after some time each of those languages will once again be using historical spellings to hold together the dialects that have been developed anyway.
Just like French today.
So no thank you, let's not try to kill the tongue of Shakespeare. Learn to use it better instead.
"Country" is actually a bit ambiguous. I believe the most precise way to say it is that England, Scotland, and Wales are three nations incorporated in a single multi-national State, 'the United Kingdom.' (Ireland on the other hand is one nation split between two States.)
"The RSA has already explicitly said the contract doesn't say what they are accused of it saying."
Link? Because what I remember reading from them was more of a very carefully calculated non-answer. Did not deny the elements of the crime, but very vaguely denied any intent. An evasive, lawyerly answer, not a straightforward denial at all.
"You may be right about bananas, but our protection has a large component of "disease-free" driving it. "
That's one of the scare-tactics used to drum up political support for it.
In reality while I cant discount this entirely I am very skeptical that the diligence of your customs service would delay the onset of a new Panama Disease by more than a year or two at most. When and if that happens, there might be a small benefit. Every day until it happens your people are paying truly staggering amounts of money to keep a handful of banana planters who would otherwise have liquidated and reinvested in something profitable years ago right where they are.
The irony of someone mentioning they were aussie and criticizing the us for protectionist farm policy was too thick to ignore.
"Major importers are all "it's fine, we check it all and fumigate blah, blah, blah" but it only takes one shipment of diseased fruit and we're stuffed. "
Exactly my point. It wouldnt even take a commercial shipment. A ship full of iPods could bring it just the same. Unless you are ready to wall yourself off to all importers and tourists the idea that you can physically prevent the entry of a disease like that is dangerous illusion.
I know how diligent aussie customs are. They confiscated my almonds of all things!
Yet they and I both missed a bag of banana chips. Go figure.
How many tourists pass through Oz each year? And forget that, let's assume we have complete control there and nothing will ever get through. Let's talk about commercial shipping, dockyards, sailors, fishermen.... yeah.
If another Panama Disease hits Australia will have to deal with it right along with the rest of the world. You might gain a season or two but it wont last long.
"Sure there are cheaper products to be had from overseas (although I don't agree that they're just as good, given given the lead time of getting them to my supermarket - fresh fruit and vegetables start to deteriorate the moment they're picked, and bananas from Peru just aren't going to stack up against bananas from Nth Qld)"
If you want super-super fresh you always want to go farmers market anyway, of course. But the standard grocery store bananas in SE Qld were not dramatically better than what I am used to, they just come with astronomical price tags. It's my understanding in either case they are mass produced, picked green, transported in a controlled environment, then ripened in a controlled environment before sale, so it's hard to see how there could be too much difference.
Fresh tree-ripened fruit are a different matter of course but that is a market that does not require protectionist laws to protect it. It would fetch similar or even better prices here if it were available for purchase.
"Oh please, spare me the pointless semantic games. 'belief' and 'religious belief' are not the same thing. All minds function on belief, scientific or not."
It's no game, and a scientific mind nonetheless is by definition one disciplined and trained to disallow it. It's not that hard if you understand the need and apply yourself. The closest you should come to "beliefs" about scientific questions would be the assumption that sensory data does reflect some sort of existential reality rather than being some sort of elaborate hallucination. Even that is open to question, and in fact questioning it regularly is a good exercise. This has nothing to do with the Matrix btw this was probably an old technique when the skeptics of ancient Greece started teaching it.
There are no beliefs. There are only working hypotheses, confidence estimates; empirical evidence and logic.
"Admittedly many scientists do say "We should shun Duesberg", but that's a natural human reaction to someone who seems to have been instrumental in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them children."
The same rhetorical dodge just keeps getting used over and over again.
We are not and have never been talking about Duesberg later in Africa. We are talking about Duesberg right after the media all lit up with the big official announcement that "HIV=AIDS." He wasnt blacklisted and shunned and treated like a subhuman for what happened in SA years later, he was destroyed right then and his life followed a very different trajectory from that point on as a result of that.
"If you believe that latter, you shouldn't have brought up the former. There are quite a few Nobel prize winners that went on to promote demonstratively wrong ideas"
You premise does not support your conclusion, your unstated (and incorrect) missing postulate being that I somehow implied that having a Nobel prize made one infallible. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. Need I mention Obamas "Peace Prize?"
But outside of the Peace prize, a Nobel is at least a fairly good indicator of greater than normal skill in the field in which it was won. And again, in this case, it was won for work on the same test he commented on. That doesnt make him infallible but it certainly rebuts the accusation that he was outside of expertise, commenting on something he knew nothing about. There just is no question that he was at the time this happened one of the worlds leading authorities on that test, he was comfortably inside his competence.
It's amazing that anyone could be so dense as to need this spelled out for them in such detail. I don't say that to try to be offensive but out of genuine amazement. He invented the test. He said to paraphrase that yes it could indeed do exactly what Duesberg thought it was doing. Whether or not they were both largely wrong is at this point many many years later entirely besides the point. The question is was their skepticism at the time reasonable and if you have any understanding of what science means I dont see how you can think it wasnt. Science is the product of skepticism, it requires it, it becomes disfunctional when it doesnt get enough, and it cannot be done by men who are afraid to be wrong.
The company you are ordering from will screw you on obvious errors every chance they get. On the rare occasions when they do not, it's called "breach of fiduciary responsibility" and is actionable. So yes, I do not see anything wrong with the little people treating them the same way in return. And I have no idea what SD or FW are, though they sound like they might be interesting.
"Protectionism doesn't work and we Aussies would appreciate it if the US stopped protecting is farmers."
How about AU do the same? Bananas in particular are outrageous. Y'all pay many times the market rate and the Bananas while fine are in no way superior to the far less expensive products our good friends in Peru keep trying to send you...
Actually like most words 'socialist' can be applied ambiguously. In the US it typically means what you say, but in other cases it may not. And libertarian socialists do exist. They have some funny notions and extended dialogue might well resolve them out of existence, but they certainly exist, and they are not authoritarians.
"If GEMA themselves uploaded the content with the intent that YouTube would redistribute it, then clearly they can't turn round and argue that YouTube was acting without consent when that redistribution happens."
Sure they can. Who is going to stop them? Not this court.
Even if they had the will, it's trivial to cover ones tracks in such a situation. They can do it and just pretend it was someone else and unless they are terminally stupid at some point you will never know, let alone be able to prove, they did it.
"What is needed is a new licensing model for published data that says "anyone is free to use these data to replicate the results of the current study, however it CANNOT be used as a basis for new analyses without written consent of the primary investigator of this paper or until [XX] years after publication." "
I could not disagree more.
What is needed here is to deal with the real problem - the issues that force working scientists into a position where doing good science (publishing your data) can harm your career.
Slapping a band-aid on a symptom without addressing the fundamental malfunction here is guaranteed to make things worse, not better.
"But for an unskilled carpenter, I see two possibilities:
- the carpenter may limit his designs to what the CNC machine can make (no curved wood objects for one example)
- the fundamentals of carpentry might be ignored (like the properties of natural wood, growth, shrinkage)"
Very much like what you see when people trained as CAD operators try to do the job of an engineer. I remember a truly lovely staircase. Guy sure could draw nicely but he had no idea what 'tensile strength' means and if it had been built instead of caught it would have resulted in dozens of deaths.
"You have to admit that he's got a point: some pirates are pirates because pirating is cheaper than paying. I don't see why that fact is "off limits" in the discussion."
It shouldnt be, but we should also keep in mind that there are different categories of costs involved other than cash payments.
For instance, new games. Now fortunately they tend to suck and I dont want to play them too badly, but pretty much any mainstream title is going to come with the cost of installing spyware/drm crap as a mandatory part of the package. That is a cost far in excess of the actual cash you pay for the game, and THAT drives a significant amount of game piracy.
The classic reaction is to buy the game, put the box on the shelf unopened, and download a pirated copy with the junk removed. I have known so many avid gamers to do this that I would venture to call it common.
In that case the company is still getting their money, but the thing is, it's very easy for someone that has already accepted the fact that the pirate copy is superior to lose his job or get hit with unexpected bills or whatnot and just quit buying them at all, which should be their real concern here. Ultimately, it's a problem they create themselves, by foisting an intentionally defective product on their customers, and if they cannot figure that out and stop it, they really do not deserve to remain profitable.
Yes, technically PCR is a technique to amplify the signal to allow detection via a test that would otherwise not be sensitive enough. If Mullins believes that it can also amplify noise to create a false signal, that opinion would certainly be well within his professional competence, as well as a statement against his own interest, no?
"Now, I know it's usually an invalid assumption to criticize a person's science based on their personal life"
If you know that then why did you bother wasting an entire paragraph doing just that? I dont care what these people do in their free time, what I care about is the integrity of science.
"Dr. Duesburg did some interesting work on cancer. Apparently along with disputing that HIV causes AIDS, he also disputes the results of his own work"
You say that like it's a bad thing, when in reality it is a mark of a real scientist to remain skeptical even of ones own work.
Really, it's almost like you WANT me to believe you are arguing in bad faith.
"So you believe which of those two contrary hypothoses?" [sic]
Neither, of course.
A scientific mind does not function on 'belief.'
If you want me to guess? I'd say both of the groups I mentioned, as well as the orthodox establishment, will probably turn out to have been substantially wrong to one degree or another. But that is no more than an educated guess based on the history of science.
Whether or not there is ultimately any truth to the criticisms and countercriticisms is really secondary to me. What interests me the most is the way that supposedly scientific institutions devolve into exactly the same sort of relationships and behavior that we expect from religious institutions - the way that what should be a scientific theory comes to be viewed more like a religious creed, and scientific skepticism comes to be seen as heresy. It's not a matter of the orthodoxy is right or the heresy is right - they may both be wrong, at least partly. But what the heck does orthodoxy and heresy have to do with science?
Nothing.
"Remember, the common cold is yet to be cured."
I am honestly not sure if you think you are putting one past me or if you think this makes sense.
There is no cure for the common cold because the "common cold" is actually a symptom with over 200 different possible causes, and it's a mild nuisance not worth the trouble. If one of them started killing people tomorrow I expect a vaccine at least, if not a full cure, would appear very quickly.
"Mullis has also done no actual research into HIV/AIDS. He is also a molecular biologist and infectious diseases is outside his area of expertise."
This is hilarious and typical of the character assassination.
True, he's a molecular biologist. His expertise? He INVENTED the modern PCR test! Go look that up. It's actually a pretty big deal, there's a little something called the Nobel prize he got for that specifically.
Now he may not be a board certified specialist in infectious diseases but he is certainly qualified to comment on how the test he invented works, and that is exactly the context in which he chipped in to support Duesberg!
As I said earlier, dishonest debating tactics make me suspicious. If he were one of your 5,000 Durban signers, no one would question whether he was qualified.
"This is ancient history. The modern anti-HIV cocktails are largely drugs that were invented long after Duesberg's research career fizzled out"
Over the past decade or so I understand there has been a shift away from the ones he was writing about to less toxic drugs, and also a lot more emphasis on general immune and health support. Both of which he actually advocated early.
"No, but being wrong and continuing to say the same thing over and over again for decades is a pretty good way to piss people off."
Your chronology is wrong though, along with your cause and effect. He was only mildly skeptical and his career was trashed. Later, unable to get the funding for experimental work, he became a rather persistent and I am sure annoying critic, not before.
"For people who can afford to pay for the treatment, AIDS basically is cured - we can't totally eliminate HIV from the system, but patients can survive almost indefinitely with a reasonable quality of life."
In other words we havent found it yet.
We could keep people alive "almost indefinitely" back in the 80s.
"We don't have a cure for the flu either"
Huh?
Ok if you want to split that hair, fine.
We were told we would have a cure and/or a vaccine. Where's that vaccine?
Huge amounts of money have spent searching for it, quite a bit of time has passed, it doesnt seem to be any closer than it was back then, and we still hear the same thing about how HIV is so unique, it does things no other virus can, we still dont really understand it. Maybe it really is the special snowflake. Or maybe there is something fundamentally wrong about the assumptions we are working from.
All these years later, and assuming for the sake of argument that HIV does indeed cause AIDS and that Duesberg and the other skeptics were all dead wrong on that - treating them like scientists who are supposed to remain skeptical, rather than priests who are supposed to remain orthodox, would not have hurt and might well have helped.
I dont think there is anyone in the field today who would argue that we have just wasted too much time on understanding the workings of the immune system itself, or the role of environmental factors on its functioning. Plus the demands of human ego would have made it nearly unavoidable for them to concoct ways to test their hypothesis versus HIV=AIDS directly, experimentally.
It's one thing to cling to your theory when you are attacked for it, belittled for it, and made to suffer for it - like the wind blowing on the traveller you just make him clutch his coat tighter. But when your own test is built and run and it says no, it's obviously time to move on.
If you think that is an accurate description of what Duesberg believes you havent even begun to understand his argument. Let me guess, you havent actually read HIM, just someone elses character assassination.
What Duesberg actually thinks is going on is that AIDS - the "symptoms" of the disease, primarily rapid immune collapse, but also possibly sarcomas and so on - is being caused by several different causes in different cases. In cases of chronic long term intravenous drug users who develop AIDS, it would make a certain amount of sense to think their recreation and the collapse of their immune system might be related. Many early cases were, not just gay, but specifically gay men who were getting LOTS of sex, and engaging in the most risky forms of sex, and using amyl nitrate(?) on a daily basis on top of that. In that population group, a peculiar sarcoma is characteristic, but it's not seen in other groups with AIDS. Acquired sensitivity to environmental chemicals has been known for decades to cause severe immune problems, and could account for some of the cases as well. Finally, in some population groups, particularly in Africa, he argues that many AIDS deaths are really poverty deaths. In i.e. Ethiopia the mortality rate didnt skyrocket, but instead of people dying of i.e. dysentary they were now dying of AIDS, because it was redefined to include dysentary and other things that people were already dying of as diagnostic for AIDS.
Since HIV is only a symptom of the real problem, which varies, treating HIV is in his view worse than pointless. Worse because the "cocktails" used - many of which he trialed and rejected in his pioneering cancer research - are toxic and cause great damage in and of themselves. He believes that if you give them to a patient who has nothing worse than a flu, that patient will then develop AIDS, i.e. experience catastrophic immune collapse, with no virus needed. He suggests a range of treatments for different sorts of cases and continuing research focused on the immune system, rather than on the HIV virus, which he believes will turn out to have been a very costly red herring.
That, in a nutshell, is what he argues, without pejorative and at least without deliberately trying to make him sound like the retarded kid from the trailer park. It's from memory of a book that he wrote and I read some years back - not some idiots on the internet arguing about it, but actually reading what he wrote at least, but my apologies to him if I got anything wrong.
His hypothesis may well be wrong, but simply being wrong would not justify the negative reaction he has received. The man is of an age where I doubt he is actively working now, but back when this happened if you were making a short list of the people you really needed on your team if you were trying to find a cure for AIDS, he was a guy that would have been pretty close to the top of it. He voiced reservations and his career was pretty much killed right there. A lot of prestige and not just individuals but big institutions, government, media, research funding institutes, had just announced that HIV=AIDS and now that we knew what was causing it the cure was assured.
Oh, btw, where is that cure?
"If he doesn't enforce his copyright fairly he loses period. You can't pick and choose."
Wrong.
You're thinking of Trademark. Copyright does not work the same way.
How do your words taste now? A little bitter? Need some salt?
It's interesting that you characterize it by describing obviously ignorant beliefs and let us say low-rent characters, with no mention of any actual AIDS skeptics. Drs Duesberg Rasnick and Farmer dont exist in your world, right? And certainly Dr Mullis (the inventor of the PCR test used in AIDS clinics worldwide) never existed, right?
No, clearly those people do not exist, I must have dreamed them, because only drop outs who live in trailer parks ever doubt the official story, even for a moment.
Without any opinion at all on which side is right about the disease, the rhetorical tactics used by those who take position as defenders of orthodoxy does seem to tend towards the dishonest, and your post was a good example of this. It seems to me that if you were truly as confident of the conclusion as you wish to appear, you would not feel the need to stoop to this.