The Rice Thresher, Vol. 89, No. 16, Ed. 1 Friday, January 18, 2002 Page: 2 of 20
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THE RICE THRESHER OPINION FRIDAY, JANUARY 18.2002
the Rice Thresher
Leslie Liu, Robert Reichle
Editors in Chief
Dramatically increasing
Owlnet quotas
When the members of the current senior class were freshmen,
Owlnet disk space quotas of 4 MB were a constant annoyance. If you
left too many e-mails on the server, put too many pictures up on your
Web page or had to load presentations onto your account, the
system would quickly inform you of the impending lockdo wn of your
account.
In August 1999, the quotas increased by 20 MB, and such hassles
became much rarer, although they still occasionally haunted power
users.
Now our Owlnet quotas have suddenly increased fivefold (See
Story, Page 1). Who would have ever imagined three years ago that
each Rice student would have 100 MB of server space at his disposal?
It's almost too much space; at the rate the computer industry has
been growing, it'll be at least a few more years before the average
student even approaches reaching the new limit. We applaud the
forward thinking that led Information Technology to supply Rice
with ample server space for the foreseeable future.
However, we hope IT will exercise similarly good planning if (or,
more likely, when) they start collecting the proposed $200 IT fee.
Two hundred dollars is not pocket change; judging by opinions
gathered at college government meetings, most students are op-
posed to the fee. If the institution of the new fee is inevitable, at least
we can hope the money will go toward improvements that affect
student life as much as these quota increases have.
Participating in
student government
It's coming, and sooner than you think. Yes, the General Election
is less than a month away — time to polish your hand-pumping and
baby-kissing skills if you want to get elected.
What's that? You have no intention of running for any of the
offices up for grabs?
Our point exactly.
All too often we hear students grumble about how nothing ever
gets accomplished through all the bureaucracy of the various blan-
ket-tax organizations. But those same students rarely take the
initiative to run for office and affect change from within the system.
We challenge everyone who has ever complained about how
student government and the blanket-tax organizations work to run
for office. With a month between now and the elections, there's
plenty of time to practice your inauguration speech. And with all this
advance notice, there's no excuse not to think about running.
If your beef is with the lack of school spirit, you should vie for the
esteemed honor of being our very own Sammy the Owl, leading
cheers and jeers against opposing teams.
So start thinking about your options now — petitions for the
General Elections are due Feb. 1.
Reporting the good,
the bad and the ugly
Another semester begins, and the usual grind of work and play
resumes. Before you get too caught up in your busy lives, take a few
minutes to let the Thresher know how things are going. Has con-
struction got you down? Was registration a disaster? Are your
professors doing a good job? Is the Thresher doing a bad job? We
want to know what problems you have with student life at Rice.
We also want to know what good things are happening. Is the
newly renovated Rayzor Hall the snazziest building you've ever
seen? Are language classes benefitting from the renovated Lan-
guage Resource Center? If you have something positive to say about
life at Rice, the Thresher wants to be a forum for you to do so. And,
if you have a news tip you believe might be worth a news story, let
us know at thresher@rice.edu.
The basic purpose of the Thresher is to be a forum for campus
news and opinion, giving unbiased and fair treatment to all sides of
any issue. It's impossible for us to pursue this end without feedback
from our readers. If we do something wrong, we may not catch it
unless you tell us. If you feel our opinions are problematic, we could
miss the other side of the argument unless you show it to us. We'd
all like Rice to be perfect. We'd like the Thresher to be perfect, too.
So as long as we're not, we hope to hear from you.
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Support the dominant paradigm
Allocation of AIDS funding defies reality
AIDS is the boogeyman in
everyone's closet. Naively, as chil-
dren, we believe there is a monster
in our midst, yet upon closer inspec-
tion we realize the threat
isn't there; it isn't real.
Americans are particu-
larly ignorant about the
AIDS threat, often citing
dire trends on a domestic
and global scale. With
this, we rationalize exist-
ing funding disparities,
earmarking mammoth
proportions of National
Institutes for Health fund-
ing toward AIDS re-
search.
It is long past time for
us to cast out this boogeyman and
reveal AIDS advocacy for what it
truly is: a gigantic advertisement for
a product that doesn't exist. To this
end, the specter of the growing do
mestic AIDS epidemic mu<t be
soundly refuted, a relatively simple
task considering all germane statis-
tics stand in opposition.
Owen
Courreges
United States for AIDS patients in
1987 was 59 per 100, yet little more
than a decade later in 1998 this num-
ber had plummeted to a mere 4 per
100 patients. The rate of
new AIDS infections like-
wise dropped substan-
tially, from over 20,000 per
quarter in 1993 to scarcely
10,000 in 1998.
Since its first diagno-
sis injanuary 1981, AIDS
has killed approximately
450,000 Americans, while
cancer, a far more preva-
lent disease, kills a whop-
ping 560,000 every year.
Heart disease, even more
widespread,is the cause
of almost twice that, averaging one
million deaths per year. No rising
trend has been seen in raw num-
bers of AIDS deaths, and hence
cvr-ent trends alone are no justifi-
cation for the current funding im-
balance. If one were to determine
NIH funding based on national
trends, AIDS would certainly not
The annual rate of death in the receive priority.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Ugly and'pretty'
ecosystems both vital
To the editor:
We are forever indebted to
Owen Courreges for the revela-
tion that a region's ecological im-
portance rests upon its appeal as a
vacation spot for "the upper crust
of American society" ("Drill the
'mostquito-infested wasteland',"
Dec. 7). How much simpler our en-
vironmental policies will become
when we can abandon respect for the
world's varied ecosystems in favor of
anthropocentric opinions about
which ones we think are "pretty!"
Sheryl Wallin, Thomas Piatt
Sid seniors
Kemp's letter based
on half-truths'
To the editor:
It saddens me that Megan Kemp
and the Rice Young Democrats have
chosen to bring Washington, D.C.-
style partisan politics to Rice. Parti-
san attacks based on half-truths and
distortions have no place at Rice.
Kemp's Dec. 7 letter to the editor
("College Republicans shirk elec-
tion duties") states that the Rice
College Republicans promised to
run the December runoff election.
We did not. Kemp was randomly
contacted before I was by the Harris
County Clerk's office, and she alone
pledged to be the elections judge
for both the November election and
the December runoff.
Though I initially offered to ful-
fill her December commitment for
her, the county clerk asserted that
Kemp ought to fulfill her own obli-
gation. I thus rescinded my offer.
Kemp's responsibilities as elec-
tions judge included recruiting
enough volunteers to keep the polls
open. Alas, she thought that it was
my job to find volunteers for her.
Moreover, she failed to provide any
specific information, such as when
election clerks were needed. It's not
a surprise that campus Republicans
See RESPONSIBILITIES, Page 4
Neither is the mere fact that AIDS
is a transmittable disease a reason-
able validation. Influenza receives a
pittance when compared with AIDS,
yet it causes roughly 20,000 deaths
per year, despite widely available
vaccinations. AIDS causes slightly
fewer deaths, killing less than 17,000
people per year, according to the
Centers for Disease Control.
Moreover, it does not follow that
simply because AIDS is communi-
cable it poses greater threat than a
non-transmittable disease, such as
cancer, which kills 33 people for ev-
ery one AIDS fatality. To wit, unless
a highly improbable scenario plays
out and domestic AIDS deaths rise
exponentially, AIDS will never be as
worthy of federal funding as cancer
research.
Claiming that the U.S. bears re-
sponsibility for funding AIDS re-
search because of the mounting toll
worldwide is similarly unhelpful. The
leading infectious cause of death
worldwide is not AIDS, but acute
respiratory infections. Globally,
Sec- STATISTICS. Page 1
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Liu, Leslie & Reichle, Robert. The Rice Thresher, Vol. 89, No. 16, Ed. 1 Friday, January 18, 2002, newspaper, January 18, 2002; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth442983/m1/2/: accessed June 13, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.