Don't be silly, the legal regime in America has become a major issue for corporations. Mostly, it figures in the decision about where in the USA to locate, but it's absolutely an issue in overseas expansions. Take the new US banking disclosure regulations that demand that they change their operations even outside the US if they're to operate at all in the US. In response, many foreign banks are just closing down their US operations: the cost of implementing the changes isn't worth the revenue they get from American customers.
One of the biggest problems in US law is its sheer capriciousness. You can be sued for things that other companies did (it's called strict liability). There's any number of overlapping and sometimes contradictory regulations whose enforcement is totally up to the whims of the regulators in place at the time (and if a new party takes power, they can retroactively go after you for something that the previous regulators had allowed). The laws are constantly changing, so you can't plan your business.
With contingency fees, your customers can sue you for free, as you endure millions in legal bills. Punitive damages can go as high as a jury cares to pump it. Plaintiffs can go "jurisdiction shopping" to sue you in the area with the most favorable laws and to cherry pick the most plaintiff-friendly judge. Meanwhile, your executives spend weeks and months producing documents and affidavits, or cooling their heels in the courtroom instead of doing their jobs. It's often easier to settle, and how many times can you afford that?
They don't need Peter Jackson now-- they have a big hit franchise! Just scoop up Michael Bay and it'll do just fine. Or that guy who did Time Bandits. Whatever, the point is the kids won't know the difference. In this business, movies is movies, and when you got a great property and cash flying around, the artsy types can only mess it up.
Without guys like us making connections and cutting deals, there'd have been only one Highlander movie. And that would have been a real tragedy.
Have you ever actually read anything about Iraq? I mean, like anything at all? If not a book, then maybe a magazine article? Or a pamphlet? I'm having trouble believing that anyone can be so completely ignorant about a country that's been so important for so long to our foreign policy; I suppose you're just taking advantage of readers' ignorance.
If you actually believe your comment above, please please please get a book on Iraq. I'm not trying to condescend here; I just don't have the time to outline what's been happening there for the past five years in a format which you might understand. Enough to say that your comment reveals you know little about Libertarians (neither Bush, Cheney, nor Rumsfeld would identify themselves as Libertarians any more than I would), nothing about reconstruction policy, nothing about the fighting there or who we're fighting or where they're from or why we're fighting them, nothing about the confluence of sectarian strife and other foreign powers involved, etc etc.
There are intelligent and devastating critiques to be made of the Bush administration's handling of Iraq. There are strong anti-war arguments to be made in the face of what we know now about our intelligence findings. It's just that your crap has no bearing on reality there. It's like saying "Bush is pro-life and that's why Iraq was out of control last year". It's scary how someone can be so colossally ignorant about something so important.
I guess I should start by reminding you that conservatives and libertarians are not the same thing. They're mostly allied these days because the liberals (progressives, whatever they're calling themselves these days) have won most of the political battles of the 20th century and both philosophies want to prune back their excesses.
Libertarianism isn't no government, it's government that does what it is supposed to do -- preserve civil liberties -- and nothing more. Libertarians in the US want drastically reduced government because when government tries to do lots of other stuff (as it does in the United States), it not only screws that stuff up, but it compromises its ability to do its core job of preserving liberty.
As you point out, one major component of a government is rule of law. Honest and effective police and courts are both libertarian principles. The reason libertarians want less government in the US is because of the staggering number of things that the government is involved in that have nothing to do with preserving liberty. At best, it's a distraction. At worst, you end up stomping on liberty in the name of trying to be Santa Claus or Dr. Phil.
One of Bush's flaws is precisely that he is not a libertarian. His "Compassionate Conservatism" pisses libertarians off because where it differs from what Newt Gingrich and Ronald Reagan call conservatism, it does so by jettisoning the libertarian ideals they held, while keeping the strong national defense and religious stuff that conservatives believe in but libertarians dislike. Newt used things like block grants to move many decisions to the state level where they could be personalized to local conditions. Reagan said "government is the problem" and deregulated. Bush said, "Government is the solution" and raised spending drastically. Not just on defense. The No Child Left Behind Act basically began federalizing education. The Prescription Drug plan expanded the government's role in paying for pharmaceuticals. These proposals aren't libertarian at all, and neither is Bush. Conservatives gave Bush a pass because they felt the war on terror issues were more important. Libertarians didn't give Bush a pass on that stuff at all, and remain critical of him to this day.
Incidentally, your summary of what happened in Fallujah indicates that like many people you have little or no understanding of what happened over there beyond what Jon Stewart told you. Or who the neo-conservatives are and what they believe (they aren't libertarians by any stretch of the imagination, either). Things certainly went wrong for a while, but you're totally missing the point about the lessons of Iraq, which are orthogonal to the "libertarians vs liberals" point you're trying to make.
I worked in a US Senate office, and I think that it varies by office. Our Member received a daily report of call volumes, aggregated by issue and position. Every call from a constituent was logged, and every one of them received a letter from us responding. If he disagreed, he explained why. The letters (often form letters, since inevitably people call all saying basically the same thing and meriting basically the same reply) were drafted by a staffer (usually the one who researched the issue) but every single letter was read and approved by the Senator himself-- and some days there were thousands. I know because more than once I'd see a big stack of letters come in from him, and he'd ruthlessly line-edit them all. It was an unbelievable amount of work.
What you're talking about is a balance you hear about in political science classes. Do we elect representatives who simply reflect their constituents, or do they exercise their judgement and act in the interests of their constituents. Going all the way in either direction leads to tyranny.
I suppose each Senator has their own particular place on the spectrum. Ours used his best judgment, but the congressman who doesn't listen alertly to what his constituents are calling/writing in about had better be in a safe seat or he'll never be re-elected. There are plenty of members of congress like that: they get elected, stop paying attention to the folks back home, and are voted out after a single term. On the other hand, if you blow with the winds, people will rightly fault you for being a fickle mush-head. Either way, I'd say that your friends either work for a Senator in a safe seat or are doomed to be one-termers.
Universities have been working to suppress free expression and control behavior for at least two decades. The free speech zones, speech codes, and other attempts to indoctrinate or control students have been around at least since the late 80's. It's a function of bureaucracy to gradually make everything that isn't banned mandatory. The justifications change (it used to be in the name of "tolerance" and "diversity"), but the control is the same.
Remember all the signs that went up in movie theaters? "In light of the events of 9/11, patrons may not bring food and drink into the theater." Same group, different department.
If you're only just noticing this, you haven't been paying attention.
I am unqualified to evaluate what you say and so I will not quibble with any of it. However, can I come outright and say that I honestly do not care about scientific value at this point? I want to see a moonbase. I want proof it can be done on a small planetary scale. I want to see new settlements of humans off this planet, even if only to our nearest satellite. I want to see the whole thing shown to be do'able, not for study's sake, but because it should be being done. I want to see a practical application and a first step to living elsewhere. I think a base on the moon provides that in a way that asteroid exploration just doesn't.
Then I'd suggest you invest in a company that intends to buy a moonbase. From a "get humanity off the planet" point of view, the exercise is one of getting enough resources: energy, matter of various useful flavors, people and infrastructure up a nasty gravity well. Having done that, there is little point to dumping all that valuable stuff back into another gravity well that has to be repeatedly conquered.
The asteroids are a full planet's worth of natural resources, all broken up into nice bite-sized pieces for our convenience. They exist in a free-fall environment, which comes in handy since putting a centrifuge in a lunar environment is impractical. Already in solar orbit, it's much easier to ship stuff to earth orbit to expand a space station. Due to the long transit times, an asteroid mission would necessarily rely on recycling rather than consumables so it would be more likely to lead to a permanent presence.
The moon will someday come in handy as an airless, low gravity way point for travellers inbound or outbound from earth. But until we have somewhere to go, asteroids are the better bet.
The appropriate group would more likely be the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)-- and sure enough, looking at their site, they already have picked it up. But the ACLU might get interested, too. If you go through the site, you'll see other similar cases. Most are political, but a few are exactly the same: student criticizes university, university bullies student into submission with non-judicial processes.
The next link down on the site is a good example. An student took some courses at a community college, and ended up with a shitty professor. When he dropped the class, he emailed his classmates and asked if any wanted to take the course with him at another school. So the college charged him with "hazing, disorderly conduct, breach of the peace, and failure to comply with directions of a college official". The first he heard of it was when he was notified that he'd been found guilty. When he tried to appeal, he found out that appeals are reviewed by the same staffer who makes the rulings in the first place. Later, when FIRE came to his defense and it became a national story, the college dropped the charges, then quietly reinstated them based on brand new accusations of disruptions in class-- charges much harder for him to defend himself against because then it's a he-said, she-said situation.
Colleges do this kind of stuff all the time. Even their so-called "judicial" processes are designed to look good on paper but completely betray the principles they teach in class.
Many years ago, I served with the student judicial committee in the university I was at at the time. They regularly practiced all kinds of shenanigans; their favorite trick was to have an administrator come in after we'd gone into deliberations to present new evidence that only we would know about and that the accused wasn't even aware of. I never said a word about it at the time because it just didn't occur to me how unfair the system was. Since then, I've become deeply ashamed at my lack of judgment. The student chairman, who played along with the administration's tactics as well, went on to become a researcher specializing in civil liberties.
This is a very interesting system you're describing. You're right that confidence in the integrity of the system is paramount. If even 10% or 5% of the electorate gave up on democracy and decided to take up arms, the country would collapse. Every technological advance makes that critical threshold number go down as our infrastructure becomes from complex and fragile and as individuals become more empowered.
I think what most people miss, though, is the real goal of voting. Yeah, you're trying to pick the "best" people for the job, whatever that means. But you're also trying to exert influence on the voter. Every time someone exerts a force, there's a counterforce, and I've long felt that this reverse effect was the most important.
People get so caught up in the mathematics of voting that they lose sight of the fact that the result of the process is supposed to be a coherent national policy. In the article, Poundstone tries to claim that Senators and Presidents weren't directly elected because the Framers realized Poundstone's problem and couldn't resolve it. If you actually read the history, though, it turns out that they were worried about the policy outcome of too much popular participation. They were worried that left to themselves, the people would be fickle and prone to passions of the moment. Long, staggered terms for senators, indirect elections, and a very hard-to-change Constitution mean that big changes in national policy require sustained, broad-based, long-term effort. Not to mention convincing an entire branch of government that isn't elected at all.
I'd say that the sole purpose of democracy isn't to select the government that people want. That's important, but even more important is that it exists to take a naturally balkanized, radical electorate and integrate them into a cooperating, moderate whole. It's to gel the mix of narrow, contradictory, ever-shifting popular impulses into a stable and consistent policy. And its to invest people in the process sufficiently that they are comfortable with its outcome, especially since no policy can completely satisfy more than a tiny minority of the public.
This can't be accomplished mathematically. It has to be argued out in a necessarily messy process. All the slicing and dicing in the world won't produce a policy that satisfies a majority, because such a policy doesn't exist. Candidates, factions, coalitions and parties are just proxies for these policies.
Wow, nice analysis. I'd add that with environmentalists already attacking wind power, that "this is the best option" arguments simply won't hold water. Most environmentalists will simply try to attack nuclear power without suggesting any alternative. For all their high-minded rhetoric, in practice they're a strong force for the status quo.
My school doesn't permit wikipedia as a source, and for very good reason. [[WP:RS]] -- Not a Reliable Source even by its own standards
I've been caught up in the anti-wikipedia controversy lately. I'm still a very happy and frequent contributor/user and so I'm all the more concerned when I hear about overt manipulations that occur at the very top by a core group who (except for Jimbo himself) hide behind their usernames and are completely anonymous. That adds to the grain of salt I have from the subtle sources of bias that can creep in.
So, no, I don't consider Wikipedia to be sourceable, certainly not at the university level, perhaps not even at the high school level. Instead, you should use wikipedia as a starting point in your research, maybe going to the references in the articles you find. But as the recent controversy shows, you can't just stop there. You need to really hunt around for opposing viewpoints that might be intentionally suppressed.
At the graduate level, using wikipedia does more harm than good-- it biases your thinking without providing you with depth. At that level, you should already have the overview of the topic anyway. Instead you really should use traditional research techniques and bypass Wikipedia altogether.
The problem comes when Wikipedia's stated policies are at odds with their real behavior.
I honestly don't know anything about naked short selling or the lawsuit or the people involved. But I read the Register article, and looked over the userid's on Wikipedia, and there really seems to be something to what the Register is saying about what the Wikipedia people are doing. The editor seemingly involved has his/her talkpage semiprotected, and the last edit was by that same editor who was recently removed as a sysop, Durova, which removed a question about the Register article. Wikipedia seems to be stonewalling on the whole thing. It seems like they really are pursuing some kind of agenda.
What scares me is that I don't know what Jimbo Wales or Wikipedia or any of the editors involved stand to gain from this financial debate. Except for Wales himself, they're all anonymous editors and any conflict of interest is totally undisclosed. It's genuinely weird that they're taking these drastic steps to control the four articles involved, and noone seems to know why. I'd probably have dismissed Byrne's allegations as being conspiracy theories if it weren't for the mystery about its wikipedia coverage.
With the ruling taking that many years, that many millions of dollars, and that much invested time, only a major multinational like IBM or Novell could survive long enough for "justice" to be served. The reality is that ordinary people like those kids and grandmothers the RIAA is suing can't afford to defend themselves so they either settle immediately or, after going bankrupt with a legal war of attrition, settle later.
Obviously the good guys won here, but could you imagine if it had been startups or midsized companies that SCO targeted?
This happens all the time. Vicious, predatory legal tactics are indicative of a system that is completely failing. I'm pretty happy with how our country is doing in general and how our system works compared to others, but the judicial system is a major exception. Much as we joke about the systems in third world countries where you can buy the verdict you want, when you strip away our elaborate rituals, our judiciary is little different.
I'm glad your mom is ok now, and I wish her the best for the future.
However, 8-10 years to develop a drug AFTER the pre-clinical work that identifies a compound you think might do some good. Hearing about these breakthroughs is cruel because the media talks about what's happening in vitro or in animal testing. The odds of any one compound making it all the way to approval are very low. Maybe it has unacceptable side effects (and yes I read that they say the compound is non-toxic. We'll see), maybe the drug performs differently in a living creature than it does in a test tube. Maybe the results aren't transferable to a human if it DOES work. These are all hurdles that have to be overcome, and like I said the junkyards and bankruptcy courts are littered with drugs that looked great in the test tube and for one reason or another didn't work out.
In 8-10 years we'll find out. No sooner. The media is totally irresponsible for reporting on test tube results this early.
And when data is cached in a DLL or cache directory? There are lots of ways to scoop data out of a laptop that isn't necessarily encrypted, but isn't in an obvious place either. I'm virtually certain that such a law could be used to prosecute virtually anyone whose laptop is stolen.
Not that gov't personnel should be allowed to bring data in the clear home with them, but we have to recognize that such a law could be grounds for gross abuse.
Actually my understanding is that the parent is correct in saying that Big Pharma is weak in the research department on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Ideas are difficult to put on an assembly line, and as with IT, you find small startups and universities having the most good ideas. Big Pharma needs R&D and expertise in-house, but they're very alert to what the startups are doing.
I haven't studied the development/approvals process in detail but there really aren't major economies of scale to be had that I've seen. Trials are insanely expensive, there's just no way around it. You can outsource big swaths of it to make what economies you can of it, but remember the key elements here aren't dollars or personnel, it's time and risk.
On the finance side, what I've mainly seen is startups getting funded by venture capital firms. You'll see different firms jumping into Phase I trials and pre-trial than you will funding a firm with drugs in phase IIb or III trials. As you point out, there's a risk (and time!) to reward ratio that makes it worth the high risk and long payback horizon, and that of course decreases as a drug moves further towards approval.
Startups stay pretty lean; they outsource whatever they can and avoid unnecessary expenses. So most big and mid-size pharmas, instead of licensing individual drugs, will just go ahead and buy the whole company if they're small enough. Big payoffs and easier for the acquirer to manage.
Finally, on your point about the compounds themselves. Small molecule pharmaceutical research is actually in decline. As our knowledge of the genome advances, we've become much more sophisticated about mapping the chain of events in a disease. Large molecule "biologics" are becoming increasingly precise in their actions. That improved effectiveness and reduces side effects; it also reduces the value of old-style brute force research methods. The next big thing in pharma are drugs tied to particular genetic traits of patients. This GREATLY improves safety and efficacy, but means more drugs with limited markets. That's bad for big pharma-- after a government takeover of the industry I'd call this their greatest threat. This could be the Age of the Startup if the capitalist system continues and biologics continue taking over.
Why is the speed of progress so different in semiconductor research and drug development?
The fundamental tenet that drives us all in the semiconductor industry is a deeply felt conviction that what matters is time to market, or time to money. But you never hear an executive from a pharmaceutical company say, "Before the end of the year I'm going to have xyz drug," the way Steve Jobs said the iPhone would be out on schedule. The heart of every high-tech executive has been, get the product into customers' hands and ramp up production. That drive is just not present in pharma; the drive to get sufficient understanding and go for it is missing.
This is such total bullshit that I'm stunned. It takes 8-10 years, by law, to get a new drug approved. And $800 million dollars. Most drugs don't even make it through clinical trials. Then if yours passes you get about 5 years to recoup your entire investment before a drug goes out of patent. Every month you save trying to get a drug out faster is another month of profits. Pharmas spend billions on technologies and processes to save even one month, let alone a year or two. They have government liasons whose only job is to nag the FDA to rule on paperwork so they can hurry a drug along. They're OBSESSED with time to market.
Grove may know computers, but he knows nothing about biotechnology.
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Don't be silly, the legal regime in America has become a major issue for corporations. Mostly, it figures in the decision about where in the USA to locate, but it's absolutely an issue in overseas expansions. Take the new US banking disclosure regulations that demand that they change their operations even outside the US if they're to operate at all in the US. In response, many foreign banks are just closing down their US operations: the cost of implementing the changes isn't worth the revenue they get from American customers.
One of the biggest problems in US law is its sheer capriciousness. You can be sued for things that other companies did (it's called strict liability). There's any number of overlapping and sometimes contradictory regulations whose enforcement is totally up to the whims of the regulators in place at the time (and if a new party takes power, they can retroactively go after you for something that the previous regulators had allowed). The laws are constantly changing, so you can't plan your business.
With contingency fees, your customers can sue you for free, as you endure millions in legal bills. Punitive damages can go as high as a jury cares to pump it. Plaintiffs can go "jurisdiction shopping" to sue you in the area with the most favorable laws and to cherry pick the most plaintiff-friendly judge. Meanwhile, your executives spend weeks and months producing documents and affidavits, or cooling their heels in the courtroom instead of doing their jobs. It's often easier to settle, and how many times can you afford that?
I know, I meant that he actually visualized how that would be.
And I thought I was twisted for suggesting Michael Bay. You sir, are an evil, demented lunatic.
I like that.
They don't need Peter Jackson now-- they have a big hit franchise! Just scoop up Michael Bay and it'll do just fine. Or that guy who did Time Bandits. Whatever, the point is the kids won't know the difference. In this business, movies is movies, and when you got a great property and cash flying around, the artsy types can only mess it up.
Without guys like us making connections and cutting deals, there'd have been only one Highlander movie. And that would have been a real tragedy.
Have you ever actually read anything about Iraq? I mean, like anything at all? If not a book, then maybe a magazine article? Or a pamphlet? I'm having trouble believing that anyone can be so completely ignorant about a country that's been so important for so long to our foreign policy; I suppose you're just taking advantage of readers' ignorance.
If you actually believe your comment above, please please please get a book on Iraq. I'm not trying to condescend here; I just don't have the time to outline what's been happening there for the past five years in a format which you might understand. Enough to say that your comment reveals you know little about Libertarians (neither Bush, Cheney, nor Rumsfeld would identify themselves as Libertarians any more than I would), nothing about reconstruction policy, nothing about the fighting there or who we're fighting or where they're from or why we're fighting them, nothing about the confluence of sectarian strife and other foreign powers involved, etc etc.
There are intelligent and devastating critiques to be made of the Bush administration's handling of Iraq. There are strong anti-war arguments to be made in the face of what we know now about our intelligence findings. It's just that your crap has no bearing on reality there. It's like saying "Bush is pro-life and that's why Iraq was out of control last year". It's scary how someone can be so colossally ignorant about something so important.
I guess I should start by reminding you that conservatives and libertarians are not the same thing. They're mostly allied these days because the liberals (progressives, whatever they're calling themselves these days) have won most of the political battles of the 20th century and both philosophies want to prune back their excesses.
Libertarianism isn't no government, it's government that does what it is supposed to do -- preserve civil liberties -- and nothing more. Libertarians in the US want drastically reduced government because when government tries to do lots of other stuff (as it does in the United States), it not only screws that stuff up, but it compromises its ability to do its core job of preserving liberty.
As you point out, one major component of a government is rule of law. Honest and effective police and courts are both libertarian principles. The reason libertarians want less government in the US is because of the staggering number of things that the government is involved in that have nothing to do with preserving liberty. At best, it's a distraction. At worst, you end up stomping on liberty in the name of trying to be Santa Claus or Dr. Phil.
One of Bush's flaws is precisely that he is not a libertarian. His "Compassionate Conservatism" pisses libertarians off because where it differs from what Newt Gingrich and Ronald Reagan call conservatism, it does so by jettisoning the libertarian ideals they held, while keeping the strong national defense and religious stuff that conservatives believe in but libertarians dislike. Newt used things like block grants to move many decisions to the state level where they could be personalized to local conditions. Reagan said "government is the problem" and deregulated. Bush said, "Government is the solution" and raised spending drastically. Not just on defense. The No Child Left Behind Act basically began federalizing education. The Prescription Drug plan expanded the government's role in paying for pharmaceuticals. These proposals aren't libertarian at all, and neither is Bush. Conservatives gave Bush a pass because they felt the war on terror issues were more important. Libertarians didn't give Bush a pass on that stuff at all, and remain critical of him to this day.
Incidentally, your summary of what happened in Fallujah indicates that like many people you have little or no understanding of what happened over there beyond what Jon Stewart told you. Or who the neo-conservatives are and what they believe (they aren't libertarians by any stretch of the imagination, either). Things certainly went wrong for a while, but you're totally missing the point about the lessons of Iraq, which are orthogonal to the "libertarians vs liberals" point you're trying to make.
I worked in a US Senate office, and I think that it varies by office. Our Member received a daily report of call volumes, aggregated by issue and position. Every call from a constituent was logged, and every one of them received a letter from us responding. If he disagreed, he explained why. The letters (often form letters, since inevitably people call all saying basically the same thing and meriting basically the same reply) were drafted by a staffer (usually the one who researched the issue) but every single letter was read and approved by the Senator himself-- and some days there were thousands. I know because more than once I'd see a big stack of letters come in from him, and he'd ruthlessly line-edit them all. It was an unbelievable amount of work.
What you're talking about is a balance you hear about in political science classes. Do we elect representatives who simply reflect their constituents, or do they exercise their judgement and act in the interests of their constituents. Going all the way in either direction leads to tyranny.
I suppose each Senator has their own particular place on the spectrum. Ours used his best judgment, but the congressman who doesn't listen alertly to what his constituents are calling/writing in about had better be in a safe seat or he'll never be re-elected. There are plenty of members of congress like that: they get elected, stop paying attention to the folks back home, and are voted out after a single term. On the other hand, if you blow with the winds, people will rightly fault you for being a fickle mush-head. Either way, I'd say that your friends either work for a Senator in a safe seat or are doomed to be one-termers.
And, yes, we got alot of crazies calling in, too.
Universities have been working to suppress free expression and control behavior for at least two decades. The free speech zones, speech codes, and other attempts to indoctrinate or control students have been around at least since the late 80's. It's a function of bureaucracy to gradually make everything that isn't banned mandatory. The justifications change (it used to be in the name of "tolerance" and "diversity"), but the control is the same.
Remember all the signs that went up in movie theaters? "In light of the events of 9/11, patrons may not bring food and drink into the theater." Same group, different department.
If you're only just noticing this, you haven't been paying attention.
Then I'd suggest you invest in a company that intends to buy a moonbase. From a "get humanity off the planet" point of view, the exercise is one of getting enough resources: energy, matter of various useful flavors, people and infrastructure up a nasty gravity well. Having done that, there is little point to dumping all that valuable stuff back into another gravity well that has to be repeatedly conquered.
The asteroids are a full planet's worth of natural resources, all broken up into nice bite-sized pieces for our convenience. They exist in a free-fall environment, which comes in handy since putting a centrifuge in a lunar environment is impractical. Already in solar orbit, it's much easier to ship stuff to earth orbit to expand a space station. Due to the long transit times, an asteroid mission would necessarily rely on recycling rather than consumables so it would be more likely to lead to a permanent presence.
The moon will someday come in handy as an airless, low gravity way point for travellers inbound or outbound from earth. But until we have somewhere to go, asteroids are the better bet.
The appropriate group would more likely be the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)-- and sure enough, looking at their site, they already have picked it up. But the ACLU might get interested, too. If you go through the site, you'll see other similar cases. Most are political, but a few are exactly the same: student criticizes university, university bullies student into submission with non-judicial processes.
The next link down on the site is a good example. An student took some courses at a community college, and ended up with a shitty professor. When he dropped the class, he emailed his classmates and asked if any wanted to take the course with him at another school. So the college charged him with "hazing, disorderly conduct, breach of the peace, and failure to comply with directions of a college official". The first he heard of it was when he was notified that he'd been found guilty. When he tried to appeal, he found out that appeals are reviewed by the same staffer who makes the rulings in the first place. Later, when FIRE came to his defense and it became a national story, the college dropped the charges, then quietly reinstated them based on brand new accusations of disruptions in class-- charges much harder for him to defend himself against because then it's a he-said, she-said situation.
Colleges do this kind of stuff all the time. Even their so-called "judicial" processes are designed to look good on paper but completely betray the principles they teach in class.
Many years ago, I served with the student judicial committee in the university I was at at the time. They regularly practiced all kinds of shenanigans; their favorite trick was to have an administrator come in after we'd gone into deliberations to present new evidence that only we would know about and that the accused wasn't even aware of. I never said a word about it at the time because it just didn't occur to me how unfair the system was. Since then, I've become deeply ashamed at my lack of judgment. The student chairman, who played along with the administration's tactics as well, went on to become a researcher specializing in civil liberties.
Sleep well....
This is a very interesting system you're describing. You're right that confidence in the integrity of the system is paramount. If even 10% or 5% of the electorate gave up on democracy and decided to take up arms, the country would collapse. Every technological advance makes that critical threshold number go down as our infrastructure becomes from complex and fragile and as individuals become more empowered.
I think what most people miss, though, is the real goal of voting. Yeah, you're trying to pick the "best" people for the job, whatever that means. But you're also trying to exert influence on the voter. Every time someone exerts a force, there's a counterforce, and I've long felt that this reverse effect was the most important.
People get so caught up in the mathematics of voting that they lose sight of the fact that the result of the process is supposed to be a coherent national policy. In the article, Poundstone tries to claim that Senators and Presidents weren't directly elected because the Framers realized Poundstone's problem and couldn't resolve it. If you actually read the history, though, it turns out that they were worried about the policy outcome of too much popular participation. They were worried that left to themselves, the people would be fickle and prone to passions of the moment. Long, staggered terms for senators, indirect elections, and a very hard-to-change Constitution mean that big changes in national policy require sustained, broad-based, long-term effort. Not to mention convincing an entire branch of government that isn't elected at all.
I'd say that the sole purpose of democracy isn't to select the government that people want. That's important, but even more important is that it exists to take a naturally balkanized, radical electorate and integrate them into a cooperating, moderate whole. It's to gel the mix of narrow, contradictory, ever-shifting popular impulses into a stable and consistent policy. And its to invest people in the process sufficiently that they are comfortable with its outcome, especially since no policy can completely satisfy more than a tiny minority of the public.
This can't be accomplished mathematically. It has to be argued out in a necessarily messy process. All the slicing and dicing in the world won't produce a policy that satisfies a majority, because such a policy doesn't exist. Candidates, factions, coalitions and parties are just proxies for these policies.
Wow, nice analysis. I'd add that with environmentalists already attacking wind power, that "this is the best option" arguments simply won't hold water. Most environmentalists will simply try to attack nuclear power without suggesting any alternative. For all their high-minded rhetoric, in practice they're a strong force for the status quo.
OK so I just saw this last night for the first time and it was funny. Not the funniest I've ever seen but you won't be sorry you saw it, I assure you.
What you MUST do is go to the Brawndo site and view the commercial.
That was my question, thanks.
My school doesn't permit wikipedia as a source, and for very good reason. [[WP:RS]] -- Not a Reliable Source even by its own standards
I've been caught up in the anti-wikipedia controversy lately. I'm still a very happy and frequent contributor/user and so I'm all the more concerned when I hear about overt manipulations that occur at the very top by a core group who (except for Jimbo himself) hide behind their usernames and are completely anonymous. That adds to the grain of salt I have from the subtle sources of bias that can creep in.
So, no, I don't consider Wikipedia to be sourceable, certainly not at the university level, perhaps not even at the high school level. Instead, you should use wikipedia as a starting point in your research, maybe going to the references in the articles you find. But as the recent controversy shows, you can't just stop there. You need to really hunt around for opposing viewpoints that might be intentionally suppressed.
At the graduate level, using wikipedia does more harm than good-- it biases your thinking without providing you with depth. At that level, you should already have the overview of the topic anyway. Instead you really should use traditional research techniques and bypass Wikipedia altogether.
The problem comes when Wikipedia's stated policies are at odds with their real behavior.
I honestly don't know anything about naked short selling or the lawsuit or the people involved. But I read the Register article, and looked over the userid's on Wikipedia, and there really seems to be something to what the Register is saying about what the Wikipedia people are doing. The editor seemingly involved has his/her talkpage semiprotected, and the last edit was by that same editor who was recently removed as a sysop, Durova, which removed a question about the Register article. Wikipedia seems to be stonewalling on the whole thing. It seems like they really are pursuing some kind of agenda.
What scares me is that I don't know what Jimbo Wales or Wikipedia or any of the editors involved stand to gain from this financial debate. Except for Wales himself, they're all anonymous editors and any conflict of interest is totally undisclosed. It's genuinely weird that they're taking these drastic steps to control the four articles involved, and noone seems to know why. I'd probably have dismissed Byrne's allegations as being conspiracy theories if it weren't for the mystery about its wikipedia coverage.
According to this, it hardly matters, as Congress feels the need to ban at least manned Mars missions altogether. It seems stupid and pointless to me.
Does the mother create the egg? Or does it self-generate?
This is actually a semiserious question
With the ruling taking that many years, that many millions of dollars, and that much invested time, only a major multinational like IBM or Novell could survive long enough for "justice" to be served. The reality is that ordinary people like those kids and grandmothers the RIAA is suing can't afford to defend themselves so they either settle immediately or, after going bankrupt with a legal war of attrition, settle later.
Obviously the good guys won here, but could you imagine if it had been startups or midsized companies that SCO targeted?
This happens all the time. Vicious, predatory legal tactics are indicative of a system that is completely failing. I'm pretty happy with how our country is doing in general and how our system works compared to others, but the judicial system is a major exception. Much as we joke about the systems in third world countries where you can buy the verdict you want, when you strip away our elaborate rituals, our judiciary is little different.
Beyond the technical need for levels, they can create suspense if they're timed right. The old arcade games used to do that.
I'm glad your mom is ok now, and I wish her the best for the future.
However, 8-10 years to develop a drug AFTER the pre-clinical work that identifies a compound you think might do some good. Hearing about these breakthroughs is cruel because the media talks about what's happening in vitro or in animal testing. The odds of any one compound making it all the way to approval are very low. Maybe it has unacceptable side effects (and yes I read that they say the compound is non-toxic. We'll see), maybe the drug performs differently in a living creature than it does in a test tube. Maybe the results aren't transferable to a human if it DOES work. These are all hurdles that have to be overcome, and like I said the junkyards and bankruptcy courts are littered with drugs that looked great in the test tube and for one reason or another didn't work out.
In 8-10 years we'll find out. No sooner. The media is totally irresponsible for reporting on test tube results this early.
And when data is cached in a DLL or cache directory? There are lots of ways to scoop data out of a laptop that isn't necessarily encrypted, but isn't in an obvious place either. I'm virtually certain that such a law could be used to prosecute virtually anyone whose laptop is stolen.
Not that gov't personnel should be allowed to bring data in the clear home with them, but we have to recognize that such a law could be grounds for gross abuse.
Actually my understanding is that the parent is correct in saying that Big Pharma is weak in the research department on a dollar-for-dollar basis. Ideas are difficult to put on an assembly line, and as with IT, you find small startups and universities having the most good ideas. Big Pharma needs R&D and expertise in-house, but they're very alert to what the startups are doing.
I haven't studied the development/approvals process in detail but there really aren't major economies of scale to be had that I've seen. Trials are insanely expensive, there's just no way around it. You can outsource big swaths of it to make what economies you can of it, but remember the key elements here aren't dollars or personnel, it's time and risk.
On the finance side, what I've mainly seen is startups getting funded by venture capital firms. You'll see different firms jumping into Phase I trials and pre-trial than you will funding a firm with drugs in phase IIb or III trials. As you point out, there's a risk (and time!) to reward ratio that makes it worth the high risk and long payback horizon, and that of course decreases as a drug moves further towards approval.
Startups stay pretty lean; they outsource whatever they can and avoid unnecessary expenses. So most big and mid-size pharmas, instead of licensing individual drugs, will just go ahead and buy the whole company if they're small enough. Big payoffs and easier for the acquirer to manage.
Finally, on your point about the compounds themselves. Small molecule pharmaceutical research is actually in decline. As our knowledge of the genome advances, we've become much more sophisticated about mapping the chain of events in a disease. Large molecule "biologics" are becoming increasingly precise in their actions. That improved effectiveness and reduces side effects; it also reduces the value of old-style brute force research methods. The next big thing in pharma are drugs tied to particular genetic traits of patients. This GREATLY improves safety and efficacy, but means more drugs with limited markets. That's bad for big pharma-- after a government takeover of the industry I'd call this their greatest threat. This could be the Age of the Startup if the capitalist system continues and biologics continue taking over.
Been done by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle...
In the Mote in God's Eye, the moties have a technology like this.
This is such total bullshit that I'm stunned. It takes 8-10 years, by law, to get a new drug approved. And $800 million dollars. Most drugs don't even make it through clinical trials. Then if yours passes you get about 5 years to recoup your entire investment before a drug goes out of patent. Every month you save trying to get a drug out faster is another month of profits. Pharmas spend billions on technologies and processes to save even one month, let alone a year or two. They have government liasons whose only job is to nag the FDA to rule on paperwork so they can hurry a drug along. They're OBSESSED with time to market.
Grove may know computers, but he knows nothing about biotechnology.