I keep hearing this from people who seem to think they live in some cyberpunk novel. Please explain how this is so. In doing that; please explain why the North Korean government actually does it. Remember that one counter-example is sufficient to disprove a theory.
Censorship does not have to mean that nobody has that information; it may just mean that most people have great difficulty getting to the information. If that is combined with a system where people feel they have to report every time the come across the information because they fear it is a trick of the secret police, the censorship can be completely effective even if it is not total.
The long term aim of the DRM people is pretty clear. You will have a set of controlled devices; only these devices will have access to up to date information. Only they will have access to a controlled network where up to date information is distributed. The analogue hole will be irrelevant because you won't be able to distribute your recording of information to other people. If you don't understand how that becomes a superb framework for censorship then you don't understand the techology yourself.
I don't think this is really the question. Since both.NET and i686 assembly are turing machine equivalent and so can emulate each other; if you can build a secure sandbox in your.NET then I can build my ActiveX emulator inside your sandbox and also be secure.
However, the practical fact is that.NET and Java are easier to control because the outside interfaces are simpler and better defined and because they will run close to full speed in a sensible interpreter.
I hope you aren't proposing to introduce user prompts for HTML parsing and JS execution?
god no.
But they are secure....[they]..are run in a sandbox (and see above for the discussion on that).
and I'll refer the honourable gentleman to the response I gave in the grandparent (let's come back to this discussion in a couple of years....)
this is no longer a matter of clicking "Yes, just get it over with!" [..] it will actually fail [..]
I agree that this is better than ActiveX, however my claim has never been otherwise. My claim is that it will be worse than without.NET. I'll now go into the bit I wanted to avoid and speculate what might cause.NET to be a security problem which is microsoft's fault.
increased, lower quality attack surface: systems with.NET will still have Java installed. Not only will we have two VMs and thus (approximately) twice the attack surface, also less time will be spent on each VM making there more holes per line of code. Microsoft should have worked with Sun, keeping with the original Sun JVM instead of trying to trick them for commercial gain. This means that we will get both traditional problems with the VMs themselves as well as badly defined and complex interactions where programmers will think that the VM should protect their sandboxed application but it won't.
stronger O/S integration the JVM was designed to be quite OS independent. I'm not sure I liked that, but it meant more ability to rely on the consistency of the functions..Net will be more tightly integrated to the OS and will show inconsistency which will lead to security problems (e.g. you show one thing on a testing PC and a different thing on the PC of the person you want to trick). Again, this is precisely about MS being able to leverage it's Windows monopoly.
No; I dismissed his argument (he deserves our charity because he's an author or else nobody will produce books) and supported his conclusion (the google settlement is crap and badly thought out). Maybe you should learn to read before posting?
The market clearly believes that the prospects of inflation or the risk of default over the next 30 years are very low, relative to almost anything else you can put your money into. Just sayin'.
Ah yes; because the market is clearly the best judge of the value of mortgages^W currencies.
A lot of Europeans are criticizing Obama for saying, "We're canceling the missile defense system,"
[sic].
No, most of us are saying "thank fuck". However, your supposed allies, the Poles, who bent over to let you install the system are saying "what the fuck". They've pissed off their big neighbour Russia for you and now it turns out that none of what was promised is going forward. Having said that, it probably won't matter. They're out there dying for you in Afghanistan and you won't even let them into your country on a visa waiver. Most nations would have left you in your own shit, but for some reason they remain loyal. I'd like to think they would learn that being the US's rent boy doesn't get you paid, but given their repeated experience from Yalta onwards, I don't think they are very good at learning this particular lesson.
N.B. anon grandparent was me by accident. I must have clicked the post anon box 'cos I was logged in both before and after.
and Flash doesn't ask for permission, which is part of its appeal.
You'll note that I specifically excluded flash from the category of well behaved software in my original post. I don't think that "flash did it so we can too" is a good justification for MS.
and it's also bytecode, not native code like ActiveX, so the sandbox actually works).
let's come back to this discussion in a couple of years when the malware writers have had a chance to come to grips with this. In the meantime I'll just note that Java sandboxing is not nearly 100%.
User has to confirm if he wants them to run.
And this is the worst bit of all. "confirm" means a dialog comes up equivalent to "do you want the thing you just asked for to work? yes/no". The user fails to read it and, of course, says yes. The correct thing to do is to kick up an error message and just fail.
Of course; just failing is not "user friendly" in the sense that it stops something happening, however if you have a policy that 99% of the features the user need; the ones which are secure; are just already there and work without question and the other 1% just fail, the overall system is much more friendly than Microsofts 50% work / 50% ask and for 10% of those that ask you should know to say no.
The kick up a dialog that you know the user will click yes to system is only useful for companies that know they are doing something insecure but want to have 100% CYA ability to blame the user. That is evil.
Actually DEC's lawyers did manage. They got "millions of dollars" in an out-of-court settlement from Microsoft. The reason that "Dave Cutler, Microsoft, DEC and just about everyone that has been within a mile of a VMS system would strongly disagree with" me is that the terms of the settlement probably tell them pretty forcefully that they must do so.
Hell; if Microsoft just gives me 10% of what they gave DEC, I'll happily deny that there's any similarity between VMS and NT too.
security features don't matter if you don't use them
The difference between Linux and Windows is not in terms of security features that you do or don't use. The key difference is that Microsoft deliberately channels "not-quite-what-you-wanted-ware" to your system and those channels are used by others for putting malware on your system. The entire point of ActiveX is to put software on your computer you didn't ask for. The reason why autorun wasn't disabled when you thought it was is because MS wants to be able to automatically install software. The.Net/Silverlight system has the same idea behind is and will turn out to be a similar disaster. At the very least it will be used to inflict DRM you don't want.
No amount of astroturfing will change the fact that when you get a Linux system, you get to choose exactly what is there and exactly what isn't. Since you only choose the bits you want you don't tend to choose the bits (except flash) that are designed to automatically install malware. I'll agree that this isn't a fundamental difference between the security Linux Kernel and Windows kernel's security mechanisms. VMS, which Windows copied was certainly more secure than UNIX. However, that's a purely academic discussion. The actual Linux system you install is less likely to deliver software you don't want than the Windows system.
measuring the value of n programmers on a team would require reading and understanding all of their code.
It's beliefs like this that differentiate the PHBs from the sane.
There are many, more or less accurate ways of doing this. If you want to see the amount of code and the level of quality (essentially what you were suggesting), record it all and review random samples. Alternatively, give targets to achieve and see how many the programmer can do and what level of bugs are caused by the programmer's commits. I'm not even trying to say that these are the best ways to do it, just that even the measure
You need to make the job of the people around you easier. That includes your manager.
There's definitely something to say for this. Thinking of your manager as your primary customer is often wise. However, if your manager is so incompetent that he lets you spend a large amount of time sucking up to him and doesn't say "get back to work" then he has a problem and, given that he's still directly managing coders (rather than a manager of managers somewhere high up who's ass licking skills are clearly his key asset), he's probably someone to get away from fast. Even if he's right about how wonderful you are, he won't be able to tell which other coders in the group are good but straight talking or terrible but good at showing off. His chance of success is low.
this is perfectly right; There was a perfectly easy and right way to do this. Send a message to the user telling them to delete the application (with a click okay to do so) and then giving a message just before the application started up (with the same).
The reason that the feature doesn't work like that by default is exactly what you say. This is normal for mobile devices, however. Mostly the operator subsidises the device. Since this means that they are paying, they get to decide and at best they don't care much about your rights. At worst they see your rights as an enemy which has been interfering with their business.
I think this is most interesting to see with Nokia devices. The default when you pay yourself is a very open configurable device. When you get it from an operator they will turn off all sorts of features (e.g. some phones have been unable to be "tethered" where that's almost always in Nokia's basic feature set. Others have wonderful operator menus which spoil an otherwise nice interface).
In the Microsoft case, it's just that instead of giving you the rights when you pay for the device themselves, they choose to keep that power themselves.
The people who benefit from that are their competitors who obeyed the law.
Not to mention new potential competitors that will come in without these costs.
However, the grandparent is living in a fantasy world where prices are determined by costs. If the teleco companies could increase their prices by $25, they would do it anyway. They would just use a different name for it if they didn't have this excuse. Prices are determined by what the customers are willing to pay.
What then is my motivation to produce for distribution future works?
Ego? Contribution to humanity? Bragging rights? The sales of books caused by Googles advertisement of them? It's not as if human creativity suddenly popped into existence when copyright laws started.
On the other hand, this settlement seems pretty deeply wrong. It's pretty clear that the authors understood one form of the copyright law when they wrote their books. A change should involve serious debate and democratic processes. On the other hand, nobody but a big corporation could have pushed something like this. Try just declaring that your little volunteer organisation has the right to share books online; I think you'll find yourself declared "pirates" PDQ.
And whilst we're making sensible linkages (when you think about it, actual existing people really equivalent to arbitrary legally constructed restrictions on free speech) like that I think that standardised egg sizes is the solution to the problem.
.. he never seen a warrant request by the police not granted / the only ones judges declined to sign where the ones he convinced the judge that the he did not believe the police had sufficient reason for a warrant
Something there does not parse. He saw some declined because he persuaded the judge, then he must have seen some not granted?????
I don't think this argument was made. The argument made was about freedom of speech. This is very interesting and profound. Speech is protected but different kinds of speech are protected differently. The stereotypical "shouting fire" to cause a panic isn't at all. At the other end, most systems, especially the USA legal system protect political speech very much. Practical proprietary programming where you don't communicate except inside your courporation and to your compiler is probably difficult to protect. Where does FOSS fit in?
If I understand correctly this means that it's a big advantage for FOSS projects to play up their social involvement (the F) and not so much to push their belief in the practical aspects of FOSS. They can then claim free speech advantages which may protect them against both export control and other such things as patent claims.
I usually ask them "are you willing to give up modern life". You know, cars, fresh food year round, no fridge, modern medicine....[blah blah blah]
This is not an "either or" proposition. You can give up some things. Cycle rather than using a car. Don't watch TV. Walk occasionally. Eat food which is locally grown and in season. You'll actually find that your life is better for it. Just because over consumption of "modern life" is bad doesn't mean that you can't do anything at all.
for all A where someone professional call's A an IQ test then it is true that A is not culturally biased;
however; it is certainly true that
there exist X which professional IQ testers have called an IQ test where X is culturally biased (just the first link in google)
just so we could move forward, could you please give some example of a "real IQ test" which uses logic, math, and spatial recognition without any cultural biases? Most of the cases I have seen have shown problems that probably have the same solutions in different cultures, but are much easier to solve for people who have some specific experience or lack some other experience (e.g. a pattern of numbers may match some standard sequence in a culture and so the "next in the sequence" may be completely different in one culture from another. For bonus points, please tell us how to identify good "real IQ tests"; for example an association of testers you would recommend.
For that matter, why does anyone think it's normal for humans to eat cow secretions?
Ah; now that's a more interesting one. Once upon a time it wasn't normal however, (almost certainly, unless you are a freak or are Chinese) you and your genetically dominant have been taking advantage of a recent gene mutation to make that normal.
That was indeed silly; for a pharmacological company "the purpose of testing" is to get a product they can sell for money. The only place where the organisation as a whole has a different motivation is in a university.
However, the various medicine administration bodies (e.g. the FDA in the USA) insist on the testing to achieve exactly what you said. Correct test design gives the best chance of that. You test the drug on the people it is supposed to help.
Some drugs (e.g. warfarin) may actually be harmful to healthy people even though they are good for sick people. If you tested warfarin in random doses on large numbers of random people you would end up killing quite a few of them. At the same time, if you test it on it's target population, you will find it's effective. That's why you have to test it exactly as you plan to use it.
All of the things you describe are problems with the trial design. If you want to test a drug for safety, then a trial with healthy people might be a good idea, but you don't expect to find treatment.
If you want to test for treatment, then you have to test on people who have the disease you are trying to treat. If you aren't able to diagnose the disease well enough to select people who need treatment, then the market isn't ready for your drug and you have to do more research. That's a perfectly reasonable testing failure. If you aren't willing to pay for testing then you don't deserve the extensive patent rights pharmacological companies get. Companies like that should lose their patent rights.
Labeling something "patent-pending" does nothing other than make you feel good. It has no legal effect at all.
That's not true. If you release it and don't tell someone it's patent pending, they can copy it and won't have to pay royalties till the patent comes out. If you put patent-pending on it, you can go to them for retrospective royalties once your patent comes out.
N.B. Exact details a bit fuzzy. I'm not sure if they count as "willful" before the patent issues or not. They certainly will be counted as "willfully" using the patent afterwards.
The parent is not a troll. He's just misguided. Mod him up as +1 funny or +1 interesting.
The thing about many of those "inventors who sold their idea for a dollar" is that they probably died one meal later than they would have otherwise. Some people in the same situation probably got the money which allowed them to do their next invention. Just because another person, who has money, can make a profit from your idea does not always mean that you can. Look at the number of inventors and companies that completely fail (I believe statistics say 80% of start ups fail).
If you sell whilst you still don't need the money you may get more than when you go bankrupt and the court forces you to sell.
If you want to avoid being forced to sell, get another source of income and come back to the patent later.
Do not stick to an idea for ever and ever just because you have invested lots into it.
It's very simple. If your incomings are greater than your outgoings then you need to reduce your outgoings or increase your income. Doing it later will not make the situation better.
If you do not already have a known source of finance which is going to come and give you money then you should be working. Now is the "crisis". It is time for survival mode. Get a job now. Any job. Once you have one, try to get a better job. Once you have money or a source of money then start talking about start ups. The fact that you have been working for a "failed start up" is a good thing. It means that you have a way to fill in the gap in your CV. If you start sitting around waiting for something to happen, going bankrupt and collecting food stamps that will no longer be true. Get a job now whilst you still count as a working person.
The rise of the "effectiveness" of placebo's might simply indicate a rise in purely psychosomatic, and/or mis-diagnosed "illnesses"...
The great thing about this, in a properly controlled double blind test is that it doesn't matter. The real pill gets the same psychological boost as the placebo. Both pills have the same base line. Now the difference between the two pills is due to the differences in the active ingredients.
This all sounds like total bullshit by pharmacological companies to escape from some cheating they were doing back in the 1990s or something.
. I'd think they could easily cut their prices by 25-50% and still be making a tidy profit.
Probably not whilst delivering the quality and safety that they do. If you look at some of the Meg@#$%# lego clones, have a feel at how they fit together; See how the bricks start breaking up and how Lego seems to last and last, you know what I mean. In the end the Lego is cheaper because it lasts and it still gets used. When I get told that my kid "needs" a rescue helicopter or something instead of buying it, we just build it together.
When I buy random cheap Chinese toys I really feel I could be poisoning my child. I don't think the manufacturer wants to poison my kids any more than I want to do that to his, but I'm sure he has little way to control the quality of the quality of the plastic coming in and no come back if he does find someone has done something bad. Look at the chinese milk scandal. The key thing there is not that the milk companies were cheating and failing to test. Someone was deliberately working around their testing. With that kind of garbage; better buy Lego.
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I keep hearing this from people who seem to think they live in some cyberpunk novel. Please explain how this is so. In doing that; please explain why the North Korean government actually does it. Remember that one counter-example is sufficient to disprove a theory.
Censorship does not have to mean that nobody has that information; it may just mean that most people have great difficulty getting to the information. If that is combined with a system where people feel they have to report every time the come across the information because they fear it is a trick of the secret police, the censorship can be completely effective even if it is not total.
The long term aim of the DRM people is pretty clear. You will have a set of controlled devices; only these devices will have access to up to date information. Only they will have access to a controlled network where up to date information is distributed. The analogue hole will be irrelevant because you won't be able to distribute your recording of information to other people. If you don't understand how that becomes a superb framework for censorship then you don't understand the techology yourself.
unlike ActiveX, it is at least provably possible
I don't think this is really the question. Since both .NET and i686 assembly are turing machine equivalent and so can emulate each other; if you can build a secure sandbox in your .NET then I can build my ActiveX emulator inside your sandbox and also be secure.
However, the practical fact is that .NET and Java are easier to control because the outside interfaces are simpler and better defined and because they will run close to full speed in a sensible interpreter.
I hope you aren't proposing to introduce user prompts for HTML parsing and JS execution?
god no.
But they are secure....[they]..are run in a sandbox (and see above for the discussion on that).
and I'll refer the honourable gentleman to the response I gave in the grandparent (let's come back to this discussion in a couple of years....)
this is no longer a matter of clicking "Yes, just get it over with!" [..] it will actually fail [..]
I agree that this is better than ActiveX, however my claim has never been otherwise. My claim is that it will be worse than without .NET. I'll now go into the bit I wanted to avoid and speculate what might cause .NET to be a security problem which is microsoft's fault.
increased, lower quality attack surface: systems with .NET will still have Java installed. Not only will we have two VMs and thus (approximately) twice the attack surface, also less time will be spent on each VM making there more holes per line of code. Microsoft should have worked with Sun, keeping with the original Sun JVM instead of trying to trick them for commercial gain. This means that we will get both traditional problems with the VMs themselves as well as badly defined and complex interactions where programmers will think that the VM should protect their sandboxed application but it won't.
stronger O/S integration the JVM was designed to be quite OS independent. I'm not sure I liked that, but it meant more ability to rely on the consistency of the functions. .Net will be more tightly integrated to the OS and will show inconsistency which will lead to security problems (e.g. you show one thing on a testing PC and a different thing on the PC of the person you want to trick). Again, this is precisely about MS being able to leverage it's Windows monopoly.
No; I dismissed his argument (he deserves our charity because he's an author or else nobody will produce books) and supported his conclusion (the google settlement is crap and badly thought out). Maybe you should learn to read before posting?
The market clearly believes that the prospects of inflation or the risk of default over the next 30 years are very low, relative to almost anything else you can put your money into. Just sayin'.
Ah yes; because the market is clearly the best judge of the value of mortgages^W currencies.
A lot of Europeans are criticizing Obama for saying, "We're canceling the missile defense system,"
[sic].
No, most of us are saying "thank fuck". However, your supposed allies, the Poles, who bent over to let you install the system are saying "what the fuck". They've pissed off their big neighbour Russia for you and now it turns out that none of what was promised is going forward. Having said that, it probably won't matter. They're out there dying for you in Afghanistan and you won't even let them into your country on a visa waiver. Most nations would have left you in your own shit, but for some reason they remain loyal. I'd like to think they would learn that being the US's rent boy doesn't get you paid, but given their repeated experience from Yalta onwards, I don't think they are very good at learning this particular lesson.
N.B. anon grandparent was me by accident. I must have clicked the post anon box 'cos I was logged in both before and after.
and Flash doesn't ask for permission, which is part of its appeal.
You'll note that I specifically excluded flash from the category of well behaved software in my original post. I don't think that "flash did it so we can too" is a good justification for MS.
and it's also bytecode, not native code like ActiveX, so the sandbox actually works).
let's come back to this discussion in a couple of years when the malware writers have had a chance to come to grips with this. In the meantime I'll just note that Java sandboxing is not nearly 100%.
User has to confirm if he wants them to run.
And this is the worst bit of all. "confirm" means a dialog comes up equivalent to "do you want the thing you just asked for to work? yes/no". The user fails to read it and, of course, says yes. The correct thing to do is to kick up an error message and just fail.
Of course; just failing is not "user friendly" in the sense that it stops something happening, however if you have a policy that 99% of the features the user need; the ones which are secure; are just already there and work without question and the other 1% just fail, the overall system is much more friendly than Microsofts 50% work / 50% ask and for 10% of those that ask you should know to say no.
The kick up a dialog that you know the user will click yes to system is only useful for companies that know they are doing something insecure but want to have 100% CYA ability to blame the user. That is evil.
Actually DEC's lawyers did manage. They got "millions of dollars" in an out-of-court settlement from Microsoft. The reason that "Dave Cutler, Microsoft, DEC and just about everyone that has been within a mile of a VMS system would strongly disagree with" me is that the terms of the settlement probably tell them pretty forcefully that they must do so.
Hell; if Microsoft just gives me 10% of what they gave DEC, I'll happily deny that there's any similarity between VMS and NT too.
security features don't matter if you don't use them
The difference between Linux and Windows is not in terms of security features that you do or don't use. The key difference is that Microsoft deliberately channels "not-quite-what-you-wanted-ware" to your system and those channels are used by others for putting malware on your system. The entire point of ActiveX is to put software on your computer you didn't ask for. The reason why autorun wasn't disabled when you thought it was is because MS wants to be able to automatically install software. The .Net/Silverlight system has the same idea behind is and will turn out to be a similar disaster. At the very least it will be used to inflict DRM you don't want.
No amount of astroturfing will change the fact that when you get a Linux system, you get to choose exactly what is there and exactly what isn't. Since you only choose the bits you want you don't tend to choose the bits (except flash) that are designed to automatically install malware. I'll agree that this isn't a fundamental difference between the security Linux Kernel and Windows kernel's security mechanisms. VMS, which Windows copied was certainly more secure than UNIX. However, that's a purely academic discussion. The actual Linux system you install is less likely to deliver software you don't want than the Windows system.
measuring the value of n programmers on a team would require reading and understanding all of their code.
It's beliefs like this that differentiate the PHBs from the sane.
There are many, more or less accurate ways of doing this. If you want to see the amount of code and the level of quality (essentially what you were suggesting), record it all and review random samples. Alternatively, give targets to achieve and see how many the programmer can do and what level of bugs are caused by the programmer's commits. I'm not even trying to say that these are the best ways to do it, just that even the measure
You need to make the job of the people around you easier. That includes your manager.
There's definitely something to say for this. Thinking of your manager as your primary customer is often wise. However, if your manager is so incompetent that he lets you spend a large amount of time sucking up to him and doesn't say "get back to work" then he has a problem and, given that he's still directly managing coders (rather than a manager of managers somewhere high up who's ass licking skills are clearly his key asset), he's probably someone to get away from fast. Even if he's right about how wonderful you are, he won't be able to tell which other coders in the group are good but straight talking or terrible but good at showing off. His chance of success is low.
They refuse to respect it.
this is perfectly right; There was a perfectly easy and right way to do this. Send a message to the user telling them to delete the application (with a click okay to do so) and then giving a message just before the application started up (with the same).
The reason that the feature doesn't work like that by default is exactly what you say. This is normal for mobile devices, however. Mostly the operator subsidises the device. Since this means that they are paying, they get to decide and at best they don't care much about your rights. At worst they see your rights as an enemy which has been interfering with their business.
I think this is most interesting to see with Nokia devices. The default when you pay yourself is a very open configurable device. When you get it from an operator they will turn off all sorts of features (e.g. some phones have been unable to be "tethered" where that's almost always in Nokia's basic feature set. Others have wonderful operator menus which spoil an otherwise nice interface).
In the Microsoft case, it's just that instead of giving you the rights when you pay for the device themselves, they choose to keep that power themselves.
The people who benefit from that are their competitors who obeyed the law.
Not to mention new potential competitors that will come in without these costs.
However, the grandparent is living in a fantasy world where prices are determined by costs. If the teleco companies could increase their prices by $25, they would do it anyway. They would just use a different name for it if they didn't have this excuse. Prices are determined by what the customers are willing to pay.
What then is my motivation to produce for distribution future works?
Ego? Contribution to humanity? Bragging rights? The sales of books caused by Googles advertisement of them? It's not as if human creativity suddenly popped into existence when copyright laws started.
On the other hand, this settlement seems pretty deeply wrong. It's pretty clear that the authors understood one form of the copyright law when they wrote their books. A change should involve serious debate and democratic processes. On the other hand, nobody but a big corporation could have pushed something like this. Try just declaring that your little volunteer organisation has the right to share books online; I think you'll find yourself declared "pirates" PDQ.
And whilst we're making sensible linkages (when you think about it, actual existing people really equivalent to arbitrary legally constructed restrictions on free speech) like that I think that standardised egg sizes is the solution to the problem.
Just think of the pineapples.
.. he never seen a warrant request by the police not granted / the only ones judges declined to sign where the ones he convinced the judge that the he did not believe the police had sufficient reason for a warrant
Something there does not parse. He saw some declined because he persuaded the judge, then he must have seen some not granted?????
I think the deal with this is that, being open,
I don't think this argument was made. The argument made was about freedom of speech. This is very interesting and profound. Speech is protected but different kinds of speech are protected differently. The stereotypical "shouting fire" to cause a panic isn't at all. At the other end, most systems, especially the USA legal system protect political speech very much. Practical proprietary programming where you don't communicate except inside your courporation and to your compiler is probably difficult to protect. Where does FOSS fit in?
If I understand correctly this means that it's a big advantage for FOSS projects to play up their social involvement (the F) and not so much to push their belief in the practical aspects of FOSS. They can then claim free speech advantages which may protect them against both export control and other such things as patent claims.
I usually ask them "are you willing to give up modern life". You know, cars, fresh food year round, no fridge, modern medicine....[blah blah blah]
This is not an "either or" proposition. You can give up some things. Cycle rather than using a car. Don't watch TV. Walk occasionally. Eat food which is locally grown and in season. You'll actually find that your life is better for it. Just because over consumption of "modern life" is bad doesn't mean that you can't do anything at all.
Sorry, but you seem to state that
however; it is certainly true that
just so we could move forward, could you please give some example of a "real IQ test" which uses logic, math, and spatial recognition without any cultural biases? Most of the cases I have seen have shown problems that probably have the same solutions in different cultures, but are much easier to solve for people who have some specific experience or lack some other experience (e.g. a pattern of numbers may match some standard sequence in a culture and so the "next in the sequence" may be completely different in one culture from another. For bonus points, please tell us how to identify good "real IQ tests"; for example an association of testers you would recommend.
For that matter, why does anyone think it's normal for humans to eat cow secretions?
Ah; now that's a more interesting one. Once upon a time it wasn't normal however, (almost certainly, unless you are a freak or are Chinese) you and your genetically dominant have been taking advantage of a recent gene mutation to make that normal.
That was indeed silly; for a pharmacological company "the purpose of testing" is to get a product they can sell for money. The only place where the organisation as a whole has a different motivation is in a university.
However, the various medicine administration bodies (e.g. the FDA in the USA) insist on the testing to achieve exactly what you said. Correct test design gives the best chance of that. You test the drug on the people it is supposed to help.
Some drugs (e.g. warfarin) may actually be harmful to healthy people even though they are good for sick people. If you tested warfarin in random doses on large numbers of random people you would end up killing quite a few of them. At the same time, if you test it on it's target population, you will find it's effective. That's why you have to test it exactly as you plan to use it.
All of the things you describe are problems with the trial design. If you want to test a drug for safety, then a trial with healthy people might be a good idea, but you don't expect to find treatment.
If you want to test for treatment, then you have to test on people who have the disease you are trying to treat. If you aren't able to diagnose the disease well enough to select people who need treatment, then the market isn't ready for your drug and you have to do more research. That's a perfectly reasonable testing failure. If you aren't willing to pay for testing then you don't deserve the extensive patent rights pharmacological companies get. Companies like that should lose their patent rights.
Labeling something "patent-pending" does nothing other than make you feel good. It has no legal effect at all.
That's not true. If you release it and don't tell someone it's patent pending, they can copy it and won't have to pay royalties till the patent comes out. If you put patent-pending on it, you can go to them for retrospective royalties once your patent comes out.
N.B. Exact details a bit fuzzy. I'm not sure if they count as "willful" before the patent issues or not. They certainly will be counted as "willfully" using the patent afterwards.
The parent is not a troll. He's just misguided. Mod him up as +1 funny or +1 interesting.
The thing about many of those "inventors who sold their idea for a dollar" is that they probably died one meal later than they would have otherwise. Some people in the same situation probably got the money which allowed them to do their next invention. Just because another person, who has money, can make a profit from your idea does not always mean that you can. Look at the number of inventors and companies that completely fail (I believe statistics say 80% of start ups fail).
If you sell whilst you still don't need the money you may get more than when you go bankrupt and the court forces you to sell.
If you want to avoid being forced to sell, get another source of income and come back to the patent later.
Do not stick to an idea for ever and ever just because you have invested lots into it.
It's very simple. If your incomings are greater than your outgoings then you need to reduce your outgoings or increase your income. Doing it later will not make the situation better.
If you do not already have a known source of finance which is going to come and give you money then you should be working. Now is the "crisis". It is time for survival mode. Get a job now. Any job. Once you have one, try to get a better job. Once you have money or a source of money then start talking about start ups. The fact that you have been working for a "failed start up" is a good thing. It means that you have a way to fill in the gap in your CV. If you start sitting around waiting for something to happen, going bankrupt and collecting food stamps that will no longer be true. Get a job now whilst you still count as a working person.
The rise of the "effectiveness" of placebo's might simply indicate a rise in purely psychosomatic, and/or mis-diagnosed "illnesses"...
The great thing about this, in a properly controlled double blind test is that it doesn't matter. The real pill gets the same psychological boost as the placebo. Both pills have the same base line. Now the difference between the two pills is due to the differences in the active ingredients.
This all sounds like total bullshit by pharmacological companies to escape from some cheating they were doing back in the 1990s or something.
. I'd think they could easily cut their prices by 25-50% and still be making a tidy profit.
Probably not whilst delivering the quality and safety that they do. If you look at some of the Meg@#$%# lego clones, have a feel at how they fit together; See how the bricks start breaking up and how Lego seems to last and last, you know what I mean. In the end the Lego is cheaper because it lasts and it still gets used. When I get told that my kid "needs" a rescue helicopter or something instead of buying it, we just build it together.
When I buy random cheap Chinese toys I really feel I could be poisoning my child. I don't think the manufacturer wants to poison my kids any more than I want to do that to his, but I'm sure he has little way to control the quality of the quality of the plastic coming in and no come back if he does find someone has done something bad. Look at the chinese milk scandal. The key thing there is not that the milk companies were cheating and failing to test. Someone was deliberately working around their testing. With that kind of garbage; better buy Lego.
In this case; you get what you pay for.