You talk about cancer as if it were the flu, some common viral infection that most people get every now and then and is a minor annoying blip in one's everyday routine. It's a radically different disease by virtue of the fact that it's your own cells gone rogue. I'm not saying it's beyond the realm of science-based medicine, I'm saying it's not a trivial problem to solve, yet the fact that modern medicine hasn't solved it somehow anoints alternative medicine--which has never empirically shown any effectiveness beyond what you'd see from placebo--as the savior?

The whole point of this article is that it's fine to try something "different", provided you follow a couple baseline rules: first, you go the peer-review route. You do a double-blind clinical trial, you perform the analysis and see that your method works significantly better than placebo and has improvements over the current state-of-the-art, and then you market it publicly. If (and this is a big "if") Burzynski is going this route, he's doing this step entirely backwards, which is ethically suspect at best. Second, you let the data speak for itself, not the lawyers. You sue people who slander you, not your work. If your work is being called into question, you debate it scientifically, just like in the peer-review process.

It's the fact that Burzynski is failing hard on these two points that's getting him into trouble, not the supposed shortcomings of the modern medical industry.

Where you go sure can help, though.

Has this kind of crackdown on those who would reverse-engineer Skype's protocols always been around? Or has it only been elevated to prominence with the acquisition of Skype by Microsoft?

tl;dr can we hate on Microsoft?

We must go deeper!

No good deed goes unpunished.

Being punished for doing the right thing tends to bias people towards hiding this sort of information, which would imply that your vulnerability isn't made public until someone slightly less kind happens upon it. Which is apparently the way these folks would prefer it be made public.

I do it for the mod points :)

Good luck with abstinence being "used widely".

You sound like a politician: all broad platitudes, no concrete examples. You throw around flowery terms like "sweetness and honey", "expectation", and rhetoric about your girlfriend throwing you out, but I have yet to see a single example of how what Google is doing is evil.

Just about every commenter here who thinks Google is being evil is playing the Slippery Slope Fallacy card for absolutely everything it's worth. Yeah, I don't understand why Google is being so hard on the real names policy either, and yeah there's potential for abuse by tying your real name to all your Google accounts (though you're telling you didn't put your real name on your email? seriously?), but they've been King of Search and Advertising for quite some time now and, to my knowledge, haven't used their data for nefarious purposes just yet.

And given your lack of empirical evidence for why Google is being evil, I have to pose the same question regarding your take on Microsoft, Paypal, and Facebook: do you have data for why they're "out to get you", or just more anecdotal BS?

I'm really not trolling you; I just want to see if you have legitimate reasons for your very, very strong feelings or if it's all one big kneejerk, since the data, as it were, would tend to imply the latter.

Putting aside for the moment whether or not I agree with global warming itself, you seem to harbor a patently false understanding of what exactly these "global warming alarmists" are after, because it's anything *but* maintaining the status quo. Changing entrenched lifestyles, adopting new and largely inefficient technologies, and taking the big oil companies and the entire infrastructures that support them out of the game is most assuredly *not* maintaining the status quo. Unless you were using status quo as a synonym to human survival, which is debatable even aside from global warming.

It's not hard to see why the public at large is opposed to nuclear power: see the above headline. What is evidently much harder to see is why that opposition is extremely unreasonable, particularly in relation to power by fossil fuels.

True enough, you got me there :P

I would agree with you to a certain extent that the benefits of being wrong aren't praised enough. I don't think one's career could be ruined by publishing research that ends up being falsifiable, if only because there's a surprising number of papers out there whose work isn't even reproducible (but the work is often negligible anyway, just something published for the sake of being published...and dismissed by the scientific community at large just as quickly), much less falsifiable. The "career ruining" thing comes into play when researchers are consistently publishing papers that aren't reproducible, have no concrete evidence to support their claims, and generally mock the entire scientific process. Beyond that, good scientists just take an ego beating when a paper turns out to be wrong :)

That's the whole idea of the scientific process, though, in that being wrong drives change. The fact that we've "so often been wrong" I think proves the process works: someone publishes a paper, others peer review it and find it ok but with a few nagging yellow flags, other independent labs perform the same experiment and publish different results, consensus breaks down and alternate, more feasible theories are produced instead. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Also, as a student in research who only just had his first-ever paper accepted and published, I'd have to say your blanket statement about the "most powerful clique" ensuring their papers get published and "no one else"s is patently false. There are always going to be bad apples in research, just like any other field, but that doesn't make the whole process broken.

I have to ask: do you have any evidence to support your theory? I'm not questioning your position, simply inquiring on what basis you make your claims. As a fledgling scientist in the ivory tower of academia, I have an insider's perspective on the peer review process, but I admit it's very easy to lose sight of the bigger picture and for that reason welcome any feedback on the process itself.

No, that is exactly what I meant before when I said that the rumor mill changed its tune at least a month ago that this iPad wouldn't have the retina display; that rumor was weeded out very early on.