RIAA loses again. Possible future implacations.

So, if you've been reading my journal for any appreciable length of time,
you probably have an idea of how I feel about copyright and the War on
Consumers that the RIAA has been waging for the last four or five years.
The main thrust of the RIAA's offensive has been attacking people attached
to IP addresses that were found to have made copyrighted works available for
download, with the general argument being that "making available" is the
same as copyright infringment. Being uneducated in copyright law I generally
accepted that this is so, but apparently it's not. TechDirt has an Article
up referencing a Judge throwing out an RIAA complaint on the basis that it's
"making available" claim was insufficient, and pointing to the fact that the
law is quite clear that wiout actual distribution there is no infringment.
Similar judgments have apparently been made before and it hasn't halted the
RIAA machine (they just hinge on sympathetic judges, I guess), but the more
rulings are made the less likely it is to keep working.

Did you take your meds today?

There are a Couple
of Articles
this morning about a study which calls into question the effectiveness of
anti-depressent drugs. Now, right off the bat, I'm not a big fan of
medications in general. "Better living through chemistry," sure, but I'd
rather stand on my own, y'know? Big-time things, like severe diseases as
stuff, I think qualify for medication, but all-in-all our society is way,
way over-medicated, if you ask me. Depression is a rather sticky situation,
though.

It's obvious that the human person is affected by body chemistry. What's in
our bodies can change how we feel, how we act, and how we think. (As an
aside, this is a big part of why I'm not a fan of medication, 'cause that's
a lot of heavy-weight responsibility to be giving to a pill.) If you have
too much or too little of a given chemical, it can throw your whole being
off. So, on the one hand, chemistry can work to moderate or fix such
situations. (As another aside, I don't think it's an easy balance to meet,
and I'm skeptical that you can even come up with a generic "plan" to treat
any of these cases in general.)

At the same time, the mind can affect the body, too, the most obvious being
the very applicable Placebo effect. Which is at the heart of the current
study: that any percieved benefit of anti-depressents may just be
attributable to the patients' belief that they're getting help, and not
really associated with the chemicals you're actually imbibing. In which
case it makes me very uncomfortable with these drugs because of the
aforementioned effects that drugs can have on a person.

Now, I'm not saying we should all toss out all our drugs and what not --
though I might WANT to say that, I know it's not practical and in all
likelihood would do more harm than good. And I've known people who do
demonstrate a noticable improvement (for lack of a better term) when they're
on their meds. But I also had a friend who told me once that, when she was
on anti-depressants, it occurred to her that the only reason she was happy
was because of the drugs, and that made her REALLY depressed.

So, I guess what I'm saying is that, regardless of the end validity of this
study, I don't trust drugs, I don't think you should trust drugs, and if
nothing else people should be very careful about what they're taking and how
it's affecting them personally, not just what "trials" say it's supposed to
do.