Not exactly the right analogy.

What the Americans are doing with state and local government and sports franchises comes down to scarcity of supply. There are only a finite number sports franchises within any given professional sports league, and beyond a certain point the talent level is diluted and the overall entertainment value and ticket sales goes down. There are any number of American cities and states that would love to host X sports franchise. A successful pro sports team can bring millions of dollars tax revenue or more to a locale directly, and provide a much bigger indirect boost to the city in business growth and prestige. (See: Oklahoma City after they wooed the NBA SuperSonics / now the Thunder away from Seattle.)

The sports teams realize the benefits they provide just by being there. And they trade those benefits for sports arenas, tax breaks, and other concessions from the locale. If a city gets bitter or bored of supporting the team, they can and will pack up and move elsewhere.

Thank you, Ra's al Ghul!

Data can be made anonymous without losing its usefulness; however, data cannot be made anonymous without losing the ability to check its veracity.

If there is no real person connected to data in aggregate in a scientific study, then there is no way to prevent a scientist from making up data wholesale and padding the results to favor one outcome or another. Conversely, if a skeptical competitor levels charges of this against you, being unable to point to the real people that you derived the results from looks bad.

It's a horrible question. Treating the HIV infection with anti-HIV medications can for the most part prevent or regress the syndrome of AIDS. If it was just a "great diagnostic for immune problems that it does not actually cause", treating and suppressing the HIV infection should be 100% ineffective in helping the patient.

Hi! Your comments are a sterling example of the dangers that having just a little knowledge in a certain field poses. As a doctor who has worked in an HIV clinic, let me give you the best practical proof for your reinventing of the wheel. Take an AIDS patient who is sick with an opportunistic infection. Cure the infection, and start the patient on a good regimen of anti-HIV medications. In most patients who aren't too far gone, their immune systems will rebound, and as long as they're compliant with taking their meds, the odds are they will never reexperience the practical consequences of an AIDS diagnosis.

Testing positive for HIV used to be a death sentence. Now with current anti-HIV meds, HIV can be relegated to a chronic illness less burdensome, and less deadly, than type 2 diabetes mellitus. Do you understand that? Treatment of an HIV infection can prevent the onset of AIDS, a clinical syndrome.

If you want a better proof, have a scientist inject you with HIV virus. Make a journal, and see what happens in 5 years.

Why do I even bother responding to this nonsense.

Please, do show us the stats. I get tired of the false meme that "oh, we would have cured disease X already if the results weren't being suppressed in a big conspiracy"! Medical research is hard work, and frustrating. Not only do you have to cure the disease in the test tube, but then you have to cure the disease in a living patient, and make sure it doesn't do something equally or more horrible to the patient in the process.

On top of that, the public has been oblivious to the fact that real progress in cancer treatment, and yes, even cures, are being made. Many leukemias and lymphomas are now curable through chemotherapy and radiation. This boy in the article is in the small minority that standard treatment did not work. Solid tumor cancers are getting better early detection and treatment. Mortality from many cancers has been dropping over the last 2 decades. What was once usually a consistent death sentence doesn't have to be.

Most of us physicians try to live up to our creed: "First, do no harm." This includes not jumping to try every crazy-ass, untested treatment that some would-be genius cooked up and put in a syringe on the patients under our charge, if there are other treatment options that are still available. And here's a crazy thought: some diseases are better off untreated. I have an 85 year-old with dementia that was recently diagnosed with a lung tumor, likely malignant cancer but slow growing. Am I going to recommend putting her under general anesthesia, the knife, follow-up chemotherapy and possible radiation? Hell no.

If you truly think the standard of care in medicine is the same as 1952, I invite you, when you get sick, to turn down any or all recommendations for an MRI or a CAT scan. No heart catheterizations. No minimally invasive or laparoscopic surgery. No joint replacements. Very few blood pressure, cardiac, or autoimmune treatments. None of the advances for asthma and other lung diseases. If you're infected and allergic to penicillins and sulfa medications, good luck! I certainly wouldn't want the alternatives: veritable bleach in the veins or antibiotics toxic to the kidneys and ears.

tl,dr: You're full of it.

Infinite computing power to apply analytics to hiring practices, and they end up with nepotism. Truly garbage in, garbage out. I bet the friends of the HR VP are all top candidates...

"...To a frustrated game developer who feels the software conglomerates are stifling his creativity..."

Are we talking about the same person here? Notch takes Infiniminer, adds some new features and extensibility to the basic gameplay, which becomes his one and only claim to creative success. And it's the software conglomerates' fault that he doesn't have an original idea out yet?

Lucking into the Angry Birds /FarmVille style sweepstakes does not a gamer genius / tycoon make. He wants to build a Valve? Good luck.

They obviously need more employee lock-ins. Servants! Work harder! You are failing management!

Whoa. You're confusing "It's wrong because ethically it stinks" with "It's wrong because it's against the law".

It IS wrong that multibillion dollar corporations are unfairly paying cellar-level taxation for large profits made from consumers. Just because corporations own governments around the world and have enshrined that unfairness in taxation law to benefit themselves does not suddenly make that right.

Yay! It's got prettier particle effects than BF3! Glad that's $60 that would be well spent. "The blood spatter will be even cooler now!"

Is this a damnation of Internet Explorer, or a damnation of a weak-ass privacy flag labeled "Do Not Track" that corporations can apparently ignore at will?

Newsflash: this is not a indication that Google is doing things the right way. This means Do Not Track needs to be fixed.

Not the original poster, but yet again, the propensity of any given person (you, me, this guy in Brooklyn) to act dumb and do really stupid things should be proportionally inverse to their ability or desire to engage in activities that can hurt themselves and/or others.

Hairyfeet is 100% correct, and what I am most thankful for out of this completely avoidable tragedy is that no innocent bystanders got hurt with this guy.

Yes, we can all die in the next minute, but if a person dies while doing something completely forseeable and avoidable such as driving drunk, juggling running chainsaws, or doing stunts with remote control helicopters right over your own head, there is no guilt on anyone else's part, and there is very little sympathy, except for the people that person left behind that have to deal with the aftermath.

So a teenager whom a jury said was shot in self-defense (or there was no convincing evidence otherwise) is perfectly appropriate? Might as well name the asteroid "Al Sharpton".

How about a black scientist, like George Washington Carver? Or Mae Jemison or Guion Bluford, since this is space and asteroids we're talking about? Maybe a Rosa or a Frederick or a W.E.B. might have done a thing or two for civil rights and African Americans?

Oh, I don't know, dominating the cable news cycle for months on end, hundreds of thousands of people taking selfies wearing hoodies and national black leaders/celebrities calling for a Double Jeopardy trial and/or punishment for George Zimmerman seems to show some kind of social backing.

Why don't we start enshrining every person that gets shot in a bar fight next?

Are you from the United States? If you don't think there isn't a War on Motorists out there (ostensibly for the safety of the children! but also to increase the local government revenue), you haven't been paying any attention at all.