This picture from the article, is of an ancient Torah scroll "snuck out of", or as the police call it "stolen", from Iraq. Maybe the Interpol Iraqi Art Taskforce should be notified.
Great point dude. Would mod up you if I could. But since this creation stuff basically requires making stuff up on the spot and attaching scientific jargon to it: couldn't god just have created the isotopes in such ratios when he made everything else? Put a little K40 here, a bit more Ar40 there. Dude, this stuff was ALL created: don't you think he'd create these isotopes and set us up to create the field of "geology"?
These people call recessive genetic traits "mistakes" that have accumulated. Less mistakes back then meant marrying your cousin was okay.
Glad somebody found a quote, sort of. I disagree with his politics on most issues, but I'm going to vote for him just because he seems to have integrity. He has a track record of doing what he says he will, which to me means that you don't have to watch your back. The majority of politicians we have now talk a lot but vote for whoever "contributes" most to their campaign funds. If you're going to screw me, at least have the decency to do it to my face.
Gee wheez my lucky day, Here's my bank routing number, just deposit it all there: 32824422. In case that doesn't work see the attached file with the social security numbers for my whole family.
Seems like a very similar argument could be made against laws that prohibit decrypting signals that pass through one's property No, you really can't make a similar argument. As an individual in the US, the government owns the spectrum and has decided to lease it and make laws saying you can't screw with their signal with your own broadcasts. The First Nations are Sovereign. Whether or not anybody likes it, they are their own countries and own their own spectrum. They could very well decide to put up their own towers and broadcast right over the Canadian cell transmissions. They can do whatever the hell they want. Instead of provoking a fight by jamming, they are suing. Just because people don't think the Canadian government should recognize their sovereignty is a different matter. If Canada wants to charge them fees for First Nation's transmissions, they can work on that too. And yes, they own the airspace too. No, airlines don't have to pay fees but they do need permission to fly over another country's airspace.
After LA the incident in May where protesters and cameramen kept running into police batons and shooting themselves with stolen police guns, the LAPD wants the city council to ban masks and goggles from public demonstrations. A law somewhere in Europe against masks was recently applied to burkas (no source, but google can backup any claim).
As other people have pointed out your are COMPLETELY wrong about your recividism statistics, which are meaningless themselves unless broken down by type of crime committed. "Sex offender" is a meaningless title because the crimes that fall within its umbrella are extremely varied. Peeing in an alley (indecent exposure) and rape (of any age) are both "sex offenses". So is "producing child pornography" by the child him/herself for his/her own use read this/. post
And you altogether miss the point: Sex offender registries are made to make people feel safe. But how about the great majority of sex offenders who just have not been caught yet? The pool of potential offenders is large enough that rates of sexual crimes don't go down when you lock up the ones you catch.
As a parent, I don't give a shit about the registries. I make sure my kids don't come into contact with any adults they don't know, expect of course in group situations like school or sports where they are not alone. When it comes to my wife, she takes general precautions to keep herself safe. What the hell am I supposed to do with a map showing all the sex offenders living around me? Knock on their doors and ask them to be nice? Tell the guy my daughter can't go to his house?
Actually, this is not quite as innocuous as you seem to imply. If a myspace profile is suddenly gone and people know MySpace is removing known sex offenders, it is entirely possible they will assume she is a sex offender, Great argument for not using myspace altogether. If your "friends" only exist on myspace and decide you are a child molester (and not any other variety of sex offender) based on a profile disappearing, BFD. Find friends who would try a phone call first before burning your house down.
About your friend's coworker: does he expect people to read the WHOLE article before assuming he is guilty? People actually come to/. to read news and don't even go beyond the summary. And these are people who are interested in the news.
Damn right.
Here's what mozilla says about nglayout.initialpaint.delay
Lower values will make a page initially display more quickly, but will make the page take longer to finish rendering. Higher values will have the opposite effect.
Nice how they have to tell you exactly where to find the prefs.js
How about a disclaimer: "If you can't find the file without installing an extension, leave it alone"
Spying on kids, passing reactionary laws, and all the rest are a cop out because parenting is hard. Its a lot easier to install spyware and look at a list of sites, or to track your kid via GPS than it is to actually develop a trusting relationship where your kid respects you as a parent and actually views you as someone with some knowledge, not just as a voyeur who can punish.
Based on your post, you sound like you grew up in a pretty sheltered environment. I used to get on BBSes (sp?) too, and plenty of them had actual porn.gifs, just as raunchy as any of today's porn niches. Of course looking at porn in and of itself is no indicator of anything and has never been proven to be problematic for teenagers. Parents just don't like johnny looking at it.
Yes, one child molested is too many. Creating a paranoid generation who believes constant surveillance produces security is not a good thing either. Your parents taught you not to talk to strangers; teach your kids the same and tell them it applies to the internet as well. You mention kids getting exposed to "millions" of people online. Where exactly does this happen? As a parent its your job to keep your kid from sending a picture of himself to random people in a chat room and to keep the millions of people out of your house. We don't change our clothes standing in front of open windows, so why do we do it online?
If laws were so good at preventing crime, why do we have more people in prison than any other country in the world? We have plenty of laws, yet they still seem to get broken. Does fear of getting caught prevent you from killing somebody, molesting, robbing a bank? Probably not. Its not the fear of getting caught that discourages behavior, its knowing whats right, what you consider moral or ethical. Does fear of getting caught prevent P2P? Plenty of laws and scare tactics there. I would consider myself a failure as a parent if my kids (older teens) did not do things because they were afraid of getting caught. Sure they do stuff I don't like but I have to deal with that and trust them to not go over the edge. Making bad decisions is called "growing up", your job is to instill values that don't lead to too many bad decisions or just one really bad one.
For parents to keep the same level of attention on what their kids are doing, they have to use tools like "spyware" Insane idea number one: Put computer in room where whole family congregates #2:Parents should actually be in the room, watching TV, paying bills, or using their own computers #3a:Its not like things are really all that different than they used to be: there aren't more perverts looking to molest kids, just more paranoia/hype (see previous/. submission re lower recidivism rates for sex offenders than other criminals) #3b: The internet doesn't expose kids to more danger: Long ago, books like the Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, Anarchists Cookbook (useless), porn mags, or the back section of Popular Mechanics provided plenty of ways for kids to do "bad" things. #4: The fear of getting caught (i.e deterence) works SO well that we have tons of people in jail, people still use drugs, prostitutes still walk around, etc. #5: Sexual predators on the internet: Don't believe everything Dateline says
And finallly: FTFA:
While age verification works pretty well for adults, it is much harder to do with children. Are you kidding?? Does anybody actually believe this?
Maybe if these people stopped spending all their time looking for ways to save the children, then they would have some free time to talk to Johnny about his IE cache.
I can put ANY piece of "trash" out on the curb on trash day and its gone before the trash truck comes. Here's a list of things in the last couple of months: 2 broken chairs, a half burnt curtain, deadbolts without keys, an obviously broken TV(cracked screen), a plastic broom handle, etc. Just straight trash and its picked up by guys in pickups. I'm sure they can fix some of the stuff like the chair, or maybe salvage parts from the TV or something, but apparently people have uses for all sorts of things. IF this guy had put out what we in big cities call "an advertisement", the books would be gone pretty damn quickly. He lives in Kansas City and can't find even ONE person who wants that shit? TFA mentioned antique children's books and some stuff beyond Clancy and Harry Potter, like a book from the early 1900s. He's a huge egocentric prick for burning books; hopefully he had enough brains to keep the rare stuff out of the fire.
RM
but this can never happen unless the gov't fully deregulates the market itself and we all know this will never happen.> Yes, it did create some new "regulations", such as local carriers have to open their infrastructure, but the end result was the huge scam we have today.
new investors enter it and drive the price down to where it was before; New investors with billions and billions to spend on new cables and such? Or new investors who will use local carrier lines just like they did after 1996?
This is basically the "Net Neutrality" debate reworded. The difference is that now it seems as though those to don't want to pay more will be missing out on stuff like video. For a while now, ISPs have been advertising POTENTIAL rates that were achievable as long as not everybody used bandwidth consuming applications. In terms of overall usage, most internet users just check email, look at relatively small pages, and occasionally download music or software. The problem now is that everybody wants what their ISPs promised them when they signed up. Even though there is no minimum speed promised, as more people find bandwidth intensive uses for their connections, as some point nobody will get anywhere near the top, advertised speeds. This is not about deregulating the market, its about the telecoms not delivering on what they promised. Read This The infrastructure was supposed to already be here because WE paid for it. Why do I have to pay again?
MM
from 1990 until as recently as 2006. Here's a link
This has to do with benzene formation in the actual can of soda from ascorbic acid and benz. acid reacting due to heat/light. They decided the amount was too small to cause harm. The importance of the finding is that it seems to imply that benzoic acid/benzene are BOTH safe in small amounts. Or if you want, that only benzene in small amounts is safe. This argument altogether skips a little known property of molecules such as benzene known as "nonpolarity". The nonpolar benzene in soft drinks may enter gastrointestinal cells, but won't get very far since it is not soluble in water/blood. The benzoic acid is very much like certain pharmaceutical drugs in that it can be delivered as a "prodrug" (a pre-drug before the cell converts it to the actual drug).
Basically my point is that this issue can be skirted by industry who claim the benzene/benz acid health effect was already dealt with, when it has not.
Actually, what you are talking about is DISTRIBUTION of child porn which is a different crime than manufacture of it. Not to mention, there's probably a conspiracy charge in there too. The majority opinion actually states that the purpose of the law is to protect children from exploitation, either from adults or minors:
"The stateâ(TM)s purpose in this statute is to protect minors from exploitation by anyone who induces them to appear in a sexual performance and shows that performance to other people.... The Stateâ(TM)s interest in protecting children from exploitation in this statute is the same regardless of whether the person inducing the child to appear in a sexual performance and then promoting that performance is an adult or a minor."
The point is not that the pictures become legal child porn. In the possession of any adult, they would still be illegal. What if you took pictures of yourself as a teenager as a "savings account" for a rainy day as in your example? Especially interesting is the "induces" part: nobody induced them, they took the pictures themselves. They "exploited" themselves. If in the future somebody sells the pictures, they are still not guilt of "inducing" the minors to produce the images. The intent of the judges was not to avoid any future trouble with so-called "legal porn", it was that they were guilty because they were immature and as a result the photos might be distributed.
Wonder what would have happened if the files for encrypted with PGP and shown to each other in person such that they only had access to their pictures via the key.
"Further, if these pictures are ultimately released, future damage may be done to these minors' careers or personal lives. These children are not mature enough to make rational decisions concerning all the possible negative implications of producing these videos.In addition, the two defendants placed the photos on a computer and then, using the Internet, transferred them to another computer. Not only can the two computers be hacked, but by transferring the photos using the Net, the photos may have been and perhaps still are accessible to the provider and/or other individuals."
In the name of protecting them from future damage to careers and personal lives, they will now be labeled as Sex Offenders for the rest of their lives? This is an appleals court and this is the best they can come up with? The concept of justice is fleeting since logic does not seem to matter anymore. Bet the prosecutor and the judges are real proud for catching these dangerous predators. What is not clear is how they were caught. Also interesting is the "transferring...using the net" part. He just assumes email is accessible to everyone, with no mention of possible security they employed. And yes the computers can be hacked, so is any adult with porn guilty of making it available to minors since a computer can be hacked? The potential for a computer to be "hacked" makes lots of people and companies guilty of lots of crimes.
In a sense, the pharma industry is already nationalized. The NIH funds the basic science research which paves the way for their "development" of drugs. The massive amounts of knowledge produced by grunts (PhD students) ends up in the public domain or is licensed at bargain basement prices. Similarly, the NIH funds plenty of research that ends in failure. Either way, pharma only carries the ball the last couple of yards for the touchdown and the glory (i.e. profits). Nevermind the fact that our tax dollars carried most of the burden. For a great example look at the case of Louis Ignarro who received the Nobel prize in medicine for his work on nitric oxide. He received millions in grants and got academic bragging rights. Pfizer used the signaling pathways he discoverd to make billions from Viagra. Sure, they found the molecule that stimulates NO, but that's the easy part compared to finding the actual enzyme involved, not to mention discovering the myriad pathways through which the enzyme exerts it effects. Of course pharma claims it spends billions on R&D. Most of that cost is from the clinical trials. These costs would be greatly reduced if competing companies were not producing very similar drugs. With government based production there would not be such redundancy, since you only need one drug that works. The money saved could be used to find drugs that exert a similar action through different pathways, which would help with the issue of side effects. Also, the recent trend is to produce "lifestyle" drugs. These drugs are not saving lives but they are highly profitable. With a socialized system, actual disease would be the target not profit. Finally, when it comes to public health, very necessary drugs like antibiotics are not sought after because of the low potential profits. This is where the free market completely fails us. Market forces have not in the last 20 years pushed for development of drugs that the average person actually needs. The situation is so screwed up that if a company pursues this avenue of low investment return, the FDA is obliged to grant the drug Orphan status which grants one company a monopoly. When a "free market" needs monopolies so people don't die, its time for a little change.
In Russia Avian Virus Sells YOU
Sorry, I beg for forgiveness. I'm new here and had to be indoctrinated.
Seriously though, how is Indonesia selling a flu strain this any different from patents on drugs found in Amazonian plants or patents on strains of rice? At first pharma just took the plants and patented the chemicals they found, so eventually the locals got enough clout to sell what was already being taken without reimbursment. Why is it an issue for Indonesia to profit form a potential public health disaster when big pharma does so everyday? If public health concerns or medical science superceded the need for profit, then Gardisil would be give away since it benefits the public health to do so.
This case does reveal an important question: Does the fact that she went public, nullify her expectation of privacy under HIPPA? For example, if an actress talks about her breast implants on television interviews, can the doctor then talk about her case? With regards to this case it seems that any public discussion on his part regarding her case could be a violation of HIPPA. If it is not a violation, can a porn star's doctor discuss her negative HIV results since she must in fact have negative results to work in the industry? Lots of questions here. Need a medical law specialist.
In terms of the free speech, does his public defense of himself with regards to her case override her privacy expectations? Finally, a simple question: what does " limited purpose public figure" mean? If my gardener does a crappy job and I post pictures of my dead lawn with his company name, is that defamatory? Sorry for asking too many questions, but this case has many implications.
...how does the government plan to address the issue of unsecure wifi? Though I can't seem to find the links for the slashdot articles, it was mentioned a few days ago that federal courts have ruled that just because the RIAA can link an IP to a specific person's account, it doesn't mean that they were the ones downloading music. This is an obvious fact to most of us. With regard to this current bill, it appears to me that the first person who gets caught doing something can just point to the RIAA cases. As a defense, criminals could just have unsecure open networks and even encourage (via wifi range extenders) random connections. This way there will be a trail of high bandwidth use attributable to mutiple connections. So if they get caught they just point to the router logs and all the connections they receive.
Do these people who write laws affecting IT actually hire IT professionals? I'm serious. I thought that the Congressional Research Service was supposed to point out obvious problems with laws.
Slashdot Mirror
This picture from the article, is of an ancient Torah scroll "snuck out of", or as the police call it "stolen", from Iraq. Maybe the Interpol Iraqi Art Taskforce should be notified.
Great point dude. Would mod up you if I could. But since this creation stuff basically requires making stuff up on the spot and attaching scientific jargon to it: couldn't god just have created the isotopes in such ratios when he made everything else? Put a little K40 here, a bit more Ar40 there. Dude, this stuff was ALL created: don't you think he'd create these isotopes and set us up to create the field of "geology"? These people call recessive genetic traits "mistakes" that have accumulated. Less mistakes back then meant marrying your cousin was okay.
Glad somebody found a quote, sort of. I disagree with his politics on most issues, but I'm going to vote for him just because he seems to have integrity. He has a track record of doing what he says he will, which to me means that you don't have to watch your back. The majority of politicians we have now talk a lot but vote for whoever "contributes" most to their campaign funds. If you're going to screw me, at least have the decency to do it to my face.
Gee wheez my lucky day,
:)
Here's my bank routing number, just deposit it all there: 32824422. In case that doesn't work see the attached file with the social security numbers for my whole family.
Thanks a bunch
That's nothing. My little kid knows that without even having to google it. How about this? Dinosaurs were on Noah's Ark 4300 years ago.
After LA the incident in May where protesters and cameramen kept running into police batons and shooting themselves with stolen police guns, the LAPD wants the city council to ban masks and goggles from public demonstrations. A law somewhere in Europe against masks was recently applied to burkas (no source, but google can backup any claim).
Why is this informative when its wrong?
As other people have pointed out your are COMPLETELY wrong about your recividism statistics, which are meaningless themselves unless broken down by type of crime committed. "Sex offender" is a meaningless title because the crimes that fall within its umbrella are extremely varied. Peeing in an alley (indecent exposure) and rape (of any age) are both "sex offenses". So is "producing child pornography" by the child him/herself for his/her own use read this /. post
And you altogether miss the point: Sex offender registries are made to make people feel safe. But how about the great majority of sex offenders who just have not been caught yet? The pool of potential offenders is large enough that rates of sexual crimes don't go down when you lock up the ones you catch.
As a parent, I don't give a shit about the registries. I make sure my kids don't come into contact with any adults they don't know, expect of course in group situations like school or sports where they are not alone. When it comes to my wife, she takes general precautions to keep herself safe. What the hell am I supposed to do with a map showing all the sex offenders living around me? Knock on their doors and ask them to be nice? Tell the guy my daughter can't go to his house?
Nice how they have to tell you exactly where to find the prefs.js How about a disclaimer: "If you can't find the file without installing an extension, leave it alone"
Fair enough. I was thinking 286 graphics. On the other hand there was that all text Star Trek "Role Playing" Game with Deanna Troi.
Spying on kids, passing reactionary laws, and all the rest are a cop out because parenting is hard. Its a lot easier to install spyware and look at a list of sites, or to track your kid via GPS than it is to actually develop a trusting relationship where your kid respects you as a parent and actually views you as someone with some knowledge, not just as a voyeur who can punish.
.gifs, just as raunchy as any of today's porn niches. Of course looking at porn in and of itself is no indicator of anything and has never been proven to be problematic for teenagers. Parents just don't like johnny looking at it.
Based on your post, you sound like you grew up in a pretty sheltered environment. I used to get on BBSes (sp?) too, and plenty of them had actual porn
Yes, one child molested is too many. Creating a paranoid generation who believes constant surveillance produces security is not a good thing either. Your parents taught you not to talk to strangers; teach your kids the same and tell them it applies to the internet as well. You mention kids getting exposed to "millions" of people online. Where exactly does this happen? As a parent its your job to keep your kid from sending a picture of himself to random people in a chat room and to keep the millions of people out of your house. We don't change our clothes standing in front of open windows, so why do we do it online?
If laws were so good at preventing crime, why do we have more people in prison than any other country in the world? We have plenty of laws, yet they still seem to get broken. Does fear of getting caught prevent you from killing somebody, molesting, robbing a bank? Probably not. Its not the fear of getting caught that discourages behavior, its knowing whats right, what you consider moral or ethical. Does fear of getting caught prevent P2P? Plenty of laws and scare tactics there. I would consider myself a failure as a parent if my kids (older teens) did not do things because they were afraid of getting caught. Sure they do stuff I don't like but I have to deal with that and trust them to not go over the edge. Making bad decisions is called "growing up", your job is to instill values that don't lead to too many bad decisions or just one really bad one.
#2:Parents should actually be in the room, watching TV, paying bills, or using their own computers
#3a:Its not like things are really all that different than they used to be: there aren't more perverts looking to molest kids, just more paranoia/hype (see previous
#3b: The internet doesn't expose kids to more danger: Long ago, books like the Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, Anarchists Cookbook (useless), porn mags, or the back section of Popular Mechanics provided plenty of ways for kids to do "bad" things.
#4: The fear of getting caught (i.e deterence) works SO well that we have tons of people in jail, people still use drugs, prostitutes still walk around, etc.
#5: Sexual predators on the internet: Don't believe everything Dateline says
And finallly:
FTFA: While age verification works pretty well for adults, it is much harder to do with children. Are you kidding?? Does anybody actually believe this?
Maybe if these people stopped spending all their time looking for ways to save the children, then they would have some free time to talk to Johnny about his IE cache.
I can put ANY piece of "trash" out on the curb on trash day and its gone before the trash truck comes. Here's a list of things in the last couple of months: 2 broken chairs, a half burnt curtain, deadbolts without keys, an obviously broken TV(cracked screen), a plastic broom handle, etc. Just straight trash and its picked up by guys in pickups. I'm sure they can fix some of the stuff like the chair, or maybe salvage parts from the TV or something, but apparently people have uses for all sorts of things. IF this guy had put out what we in big cities call "an advertisement", the books would be gone pretty damn quickly. He lives in Kansas City and can't find even ONE person who wants that shit? TFA mentioned antique children's books and some stuff beyond Clancy and Harry Potter, like a book from the early 1900s. He's a huge egocentric prick for burning books; hopefully he had enough brains to keep the rare stuff out of the fire. RM
from 1990 until as recently as 2006. Here's a link This has to do with benzene formation in the actual can of soda from ascorbic acid and benz. acid reacting due to heat/light. They decided the amount was too small to cause harm. The importance of the finding is that it seems to imply that benzoic acid/benzene are BOTH safe in small amounts. Or if you want, that only benzene in small amounts is safe. This argument altogether skips a little known property of molecules such as benzene known as "nonpolarity". The nonpolar benzene in soft drinks may enter gastrointestinal cells, but won't get very far since it is not soluble in water/blood. The benzoic acid is very much like certain pharmaceutical drugs in that it can be delivered as a "prodrug" (a pre-drug before the cell converts it to the actual drug). Basically my point is that this issue can be skirted by industry who claim the benzene/benz acid health effect was already dealt with, when it has not.
Actually, what you are talking about is DISTRIBUTION of child porn which is a different crime than manufacture of it. Not to mention, there's probably a conspiracy charge in there too. The majority opinion actually states that the purpose of the law is to protect children from exploitation, either from adults or minors:
"The stateâ(TM)s purpose in this statute is to protect minors from exploitation by anyone who induces them to appear in a sexual performance and shows that performance to other people.... The Stateâ(TM)s interest in protecting children from exploitation in this statute is the same regardless of whether the person inducing the child to appear in a sexual performance and then promoting that performance is an adult or a minor."
The point is not that the pictures become legal child porn. In the possession of any adult, they would still be illegal. What if you took pictures of yourself as a teenager as a "savings account" for a rainy day as in your example?
Especially interesting is the "induces" part: nobody induced them, they took the pictures themselves. They "exploited" themselves. If in the future somebody sells the pictures, they are still not guilt of "inducing" the minors to produce the images. The intent of the judges was not to avoid any future trouble with so-called "legal porn", it was that they were guilty because they were immature and as a result the photos might be distributed.
Wonder what would have happened if the files for encrypted with PGP and shown to each other in person such that they only had access to their pictures via the key.
I am at a loss of words. From TFA:
...using the net" part. He just assumes email is accessible to everyone, with no mention of possible security they employed. And yes the computers can be hacked, so is any adult with porn guilty of making it available to minors since a computer can be hacked? The potential for a computer to be "hacked" makes lots of people and companies guilty of lots of crimes.
"Further, if these pictures are ultimately released, future damage may be done to these minors' careers or personal lives. These children are not mature enough to make rational decisions concerning all the possible negative implications of producing these videos.In addition, the two defendants placed the photos on a computer and then, using the Internet, transferred them to another computer. Not only can the two computers be hacked, but by transferring the photos using the Net, the photos may have been and perhaps still are accessible to the provider and/or other individuals."
In the name of protecting them from future damage to careers and personal lives, they will now be labeled as Sex Offenders for the rest of their lives? This is an appleals court and this is the best they can come up with? The concept of justice is fleeting since logic does not seem to matter anymore. Bet the prosecutor and the judges are real proud for catching these dangerous predators. What is not clear is how they were caught.
Also interesting is the "transferring
In a sense, the pharma industry is already nationalized. The NIH funds the basic science research which paves the way for their "development" of drugs. The massive amounts of knowledge produced by grunts (PhD students) ends up in the public domain or is licensed at bargain basement prices. Similarly, the NIH funds plenty of research that ends in failure. Either way, pharma only carries the ball the last couple of yards for the touchdown and the glory (i.e. profits). Nevermind the fact that our tax dollars carried most of the burden. For a great example look at the case of Louis Ignarro who received the Nobel prize in medicine for his work on nitric oxide. He received millions in grants and got academic bragging rights. Pfizer used the signaling pathways he discoverd to make billions from Viagra. Sure, they found the molecule that stimulates NO, but that's the easy part compared to finding the actual enzyme involved, not to mention discovering the myriad pathways through which the enzyme exerts it effects.
Of course pharma claims it spends billions on R&D. Most of that cost is from the clinical trials. These costs would be greatly reduced if competing companies were not producing very similar drugs. With government based production there would not be such redundancy, since you only need one drug that works. The money saved could be used to find drugs that exert a similar action through different pathways, which would help with the issue of side effects. Also, the recent trend is to produce "lifestyle" drugs. These drugs are not saving lives but they are highly profitable. With a socialized system, actual disease would be the target not profit. Finally, when it comes to public health, very necessary drugs like antibiotics are not sought after because of the low potential profits. This is where the free market completely fails us. Market forces have not in the last 20 years pushed for development of drugs that the average person actually needs. The situation is so screwed up that if a company pursues this avenue of low investment return, the FDA is obliged to grant the drug Orphan status which grants one company a monopoly. When a "free market" needs monopolies so people don't die, its time for a little change.
In Russia Avian Virus Sells YOU Sorry, I beg for forgiveness. I'm new here and had to be indoctrinated. Seriously though, how is Indonesia selling a flu strain this any different from patents on drugs found in Amazonian plants or patents on strains of rice? At first pharma just took the plants and patented the chemicals they found, so eventually the locals got enough clout to sell what was already being taken without reimbursment. Why is it an issue for Indonesia to profit form a potential public health disaster when big pharma does so everyday? If public health concerns or medical science superceded the need for profit, then Gardisil would be give away since it benefits the public health to do so.
This case does reveal an important question: Does the fact that she went public, nullify her expectation of privacy under HIPPA? For example, if an actress talks about her breast implants on television interviews, can the doctor then talk about her case? With regards to this case it seems that any public discussion on his part regarding her case could be a violation of HIPPA. If it is not a violation, can a porn star's doctor discuss her negative HIV results since she must in fact have negative results to work in the industry? Lots of questions here. Need a medical law specialist.
In terms of the free speech, does his public defense of himself with regards to her case override her privacy expectations?
Finally, a simple question: what does " limited purpose public figure" mean? If my gardener does a crappy job and I post pictures of my dead lawn with his company name, is that defamatory?
Sorry for asking too many questions, but this case has many implications.
...how does the government plan to address the issue of unsecure wifi? Though I can't seem to find the links for the slashdot articles, it was mentioned a few days ago that federal courts have ruled that just because the RIAA can link an IP to a specific person's account, it doesn't mean that they were the ones downloading music. This is an obvious fact to most of us. With regard to this current bill, it appears to me that the first person who gets caught doing something can just point to the RIAA cases. As a defense, criminals could just have unsecure open networks and even encourage (via wifi range extenders) random connections. This way there will be a trail of high bandwidth use attributable to mutiple connections. So if they get caught they just point to the router logs and all the connections they receive. Do these people who write laws affecting IT actually hire IT professionals? I'm serious. I thought that the Congressional Research Service was supposed to point out obvious problems with laws.