I agree with most of what you say, but you make it sound like the purpose of the DSM is to allow clearer communications between doctors, and that isn't really the case in practice. That may originally have been one of the goals, but the plain fact is that nowadays the DSM exists primarily to facilitate billing and insurance claims. The big health insurance firms realized long ago that traditional psychiatric therapy (e.g. psychoanalysis) is both extremely costly and open-ended in duration. Requiring a diagnosis from the DSM allows them to cap reimbursement at some set amount and in the process facilitates moving treatment options away from open-ended talk therapy in favor of prescribing medication. Bottom line: when it comes to mental health in the USA, the DSM primarily serves health insurers, not doctors. It is essentially an artifact of our ridiculously inefficient healthcare system.

OK, I did RTFA, and several linked articles, posts, and blogs as well. And I still don’t get it. I mean, yeah, I get that this is about dick moves by a completely hostile-to-the-customer small business run by idiots, sure, what else is new? But... This is a bus company, right? Typically you wait at a bus stop, and when the bus comes you pay the driver, take a seat, and eventually exit the bus when you reach your stop. Terms and Conditions??? Seriously?? Where and when do these so-called terms and conditions come into play? You’re telling me they hand you a legal document with all the penalties spelled out before they take your money? Because if they don’t do that or something similar, I don’t see how any of this is legal. They can’t just arbitrarily hand out “fines” for breaches of whatever random rules they themselves make up... Can they? I mean, even the old break-open-the-plastic-and-you’ve-accepted-the-EULA situation was never really tested in court, and here there isn’t even a seal to break, you're just getting on a damned bus! When do you even have a chance to read these so-called terms, let alone agree to abide by them? This is crazy! If we’ve really gotten to the point where getting on a bus obligates the customer to pay completely arbitrary financial penalties for various random acts determined wholly by the bus company, well, I’d have to say it’s all over for this country. The lawyers have definitely won.

Um, could it be because the boy isn't a minority, perhaps? Yes, I'm playing the race card, but... It's abundantly clear that in America black people are often charged with more serious offenses than whites for the same act, are convicted at trial more often than whites, and receive much harsher sentences than whites convicted of the same crime. No, I don't have links on hand but the statistics do back me up, since I'm lazy I leave verification as an exercise for the /. reader. The point is, given the long-standing and well documented evidence of discriminatory prosecution of black people in this country, it's not at all unreasonable in this case to focus on the race of the accused. If the shoe fits...

It's simple, really. People hate Windows 8 because, exactly as you state, "the UI is retarded and flashy and gets in the way of getting things done" and that right there is reason enough to hate it. I mean, come on, the bare minimum that people want and expect is a system that isn't retarded and that lets them get on with the work at hand, and Microsoft failed to deliver even that. The failure of Windows 8 is no surprise, and the source of the hate should be obvious. No one should be forced to "adapt" to a substandard and patently broken operating system update, especially not when the old version worked and continues to work just fine. To think otherwise is to succumb to the exact same madness that seems to have afflicted the Windows 8 design team.

Why does the default have to be commercialization? This is basic research! Have we completely abandoned the idea of knowledge for knowledge's sake? It seems to me there is something wrong with an assumption that all research must be commercialized. I assure you this was not the way science was done for most of our country's history, this is a new thing. My father was a clinical pathologist who could have made a lot of money in the private sector. He deliberately took a job at a much lower pay level working for the VA. He did this because they offered him a big lab and a large research budget. He never gave a thought to commercializing the results of his studies, he was mainly concerned with helping people and advancing science, and I would like to think that he wasn't all that unique in this. How times have changed... I doubt the VA even sponsors much basic research anymore, and the places that do are mainly in it for the money. Being a scientist should not always be about the money.

Except the service in question only allows local viewers access to their local affiliates, in fact as of now it is only available in one market, NYC. It is part of their pitch for legal status that they do not allow viewers to see anything other than exactly what those viewers would see with an antenna on their roof. Their customer base is primarily folks who either lack an antenna or whose reception is poor. Again, how is FOX being harmed by this??

What? Not cumulative? Of course it is! See for example this link, which you don't even have to read, just look at the headline:

http://hsionline.com/2012/05/29/undoing-the-damage/

Sorry, this is total bullshit. For example, let's look at opiate drugs like heroin, which all act similarly upon the brain. It has been shown that as long as the opiate addict has a steady high-quality supply of the drug, very little in the way of harm occurs either physically or mentally. There are many famous historic examples of high-functioning opium addicts, the poet Coleridge is perhaps the best known example. More importantly, and more recently, experiments in Switzerland and elsewhere have demonstrated that when you allow heroin addicts access to cheap and legal heroin, they tend to obtain and hold down jobs, and in general simply get on with their lives. Heroin addiction is no bar to achievement. Any basic pharmacology textbook will show that aside from being highly addictive heroin has virtually no long-term physical side-effects, which is in stark contrast to a legal drug like alcohol. It turns out that virtually all the negative effects we tend to associate with heroin, all the physical and mental deterioration that comes to mind when one hears the word heroin, that's all caused indirectly or directly by the legal prohibitions imposed upon the user and upon society. If you use unclean injection equipment in filthy surroundings, are constantly in and out of prison, go through withdrawal every few days because you lack the money or access to the drug, and the drug itself is polluted with manufacturing impurities plus whatever unknown and dangerous cutting agents were added, well of course, you're bound to see some deterioration. None of that is caused by the drug itself, however. Do some historical research, before heroin and the other opiate drugs were made illegal there were indeed cases of addiction to be found, but no more than we see today, and perhaps a lot less. What there wasn't, strangely enough, was much of the kind of societal harm that drug prohibition is supposed to prevent. Look for examples of criminals supporting their habit through crime, drug-fueled violence, you won't find any of that. In those days most heroin addicts were bored housewives, unassuming little old ladies who purchased their "tonic" cheaply at the nearest drug store. No crime, no deterioration, minimal harm to society. Then prohibition came along... And all the havoc and death and destroyed lives and emotional pain that you see today, it all flowed directly from that. Opiates by themselves simply aren't all that destructive. Until you make them illegal.

Wait... Netflix has porn???

This is bitter news, Banks is my favorite living author. You have to admire the way he's handled it, though, with typical grace and a solid infusion of black humor.

Here is the link for his special statement about the cancer diagnosis: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/03/iain-banks-cancer-statement-full

And here is a guestbook where you can leave a personal though quite public message for Iain, this page was apparently set up just for well wishers after the news of the cancer broke: http://friends.banksophilia.com/guestbook/

The news looks bad indeed. One can only hope for some kind of last-minute spontaneous remission. Barring that miracle, he will be sorely missed.

Perhaps, but the fact remains that there is no law against making traps, and no law compelling someone engaged in a legal profession to report suspicions about clients. They prosecuted him as a kingpin, a leader of a major drug operation. This despite the fact that he had no certain awareness of any drug connection at all, let alone knowledge of the day to day details of the trafficking. He saw a bunch of money, that's all, so what? Money is not illegal, not yet, and if for whatever reason I had that much cash lying around, for damn sure I would want a hidden compartment to hold it. There is nothing illegal there. Look, these prosecutors have equated having a vague suspicion that things might not all be above board, with being one of the masterminds of the entire operation! If that doesn't bother you, well, it damn well should.

So tell me, if amphetamines are so unfailingly damaging, why do we not see any of that damage in the millions of young people who take prescribed Adderall, which contains pure amphetamine salts as its active and only ingredient? For the most part we don't see that kind of damage in Adderall users, even those who take the drug every day, and yet it's the same drug. So your argument for prohibition instead becomes a perfect illustration of why prohibition itself is the problem, not the solution. When you make a substance illegal you lose all control of how it is made, distributed, and ingested. The end result is almost always exactly the kind of misery you observed in those meth heads, who presumably as high school students wouldn't have easy access to the drug under a legal harm-reduction substance abuse policy. I'm not saying that there wouldn't be any such casualties at all under such a regime, of course there would, but it's very likely there would be far less of the type of extreme damage we see regularly under current prohibition, and when such damage did occur despite every precaution, it would be far easier to treat because we could hospitalize people instead of warehousing them in jails. Prohibition never works, not even for a substance like meth. Think it through without the subtle biases instilled by years by drug-war propaganda. Regardless what substance you're talking about, prohibition is always worse than legal-but-discouraged. Always.

Taken literally as written, this would seem to imply that God is both male and female. I was not aware that the hermaphroditism of God was a Christian belief, but then, what do I know. I guess if you can exist as a personified father-figure God, His redeemer Son, and a nebulous Holy Spirit all at the same time, then the hermaphroditic part is probably pretty easy.

Seriously, though, even once you resolve all the translation issues, and gently pry apart the braided strands from different traditions, the Bible is still rife with contradiction, and the story of Genesis in particular often seems logically incoherent. You have to wonder if that incoherence isn't part of the Bible's appeal, the rampant vagueness functioning like a kind of Rorschach test upon which the devout can project whatever interpretation feels right to them. The amazing thing is that millions of people actually defer to the Bible as the final arbiter on all kinds of important moral issues, despite all the vagueness and contradiction. To which I say, yeah, good luck with that.

Using this logic, wouldn't trans-uranic elements also be patentable, since they are all unstable and thus not found in nature? To my knowledge, nobody has ever suggested these elements could possibly be patented, but I don't see why not, given the similarity of the circumstances.

Personally, of course, I believe it's a travesty to suggest that any of this stuff is patentable. To state that these genetic sequences are "not found in nature" is insane, it's a bunch of lawyers bending the English language to the breaking point. Lawyers are good at that kind of thing, apparently.

It comes from the fact that practically everything we know about Satan comes from Judeo-Christian holy books. Hell, I'll even through in the Quran, just to be inclusive. The fact remains that Satan most definitely comes out of the Old Testament tradition, wherein it is made pretty damn clear that he is subordinate to God in power. Show me some genuine Jewish/Christian/Muslim holy text that says the Devil has much of a chance of coming out on top in The Final Battle. If such a text exists, it certainly hasn't gotten much traction in Churches, Mosques, or Synagogues. Let's face it, one of the basic memes of this whole tradition is "in the end, Good always triumphs over Evil." So it stands to reason, if you're gonna take this stuff both literally and seriously, Good is the obvious choice between the two.

Hey, I'm just sayin', OK?