Of course it's shit easy to mass produce a particular chemical compound once you've read the patent on how to make it. Genius. Let me ask you, if it's so easy, why didn't Brazil hire an Indian company to discover and develop a new AIDS drug?
Of course Canada (and all of Europe) use their government-controlled single payer position to force the drug prices down in their countries. That's the primary reason why drugs are so expensive in the US, we're subsidizing the drugs for the rest of the world. Once the US starts demanding the same prices as Europe & Canada, the stock prices will drop considerably as investors realize there's no money to be made in drugs anymore. Once the stock price drops, the companies will have to cut marketing, R&D, etc etc. Then we're gonna have some new little virus climb out of the forrest like HIV did half a century ago, and everybodies gonna scream bloody murder because there won't be a drug industry to pull them out.
Sorry to disappoint, but there's a lot of people inside drug companies that give a lot of shit about people. I personally know I could be making a hell of a lot more money in the financial industry than I do in pharma. Why have lobbiests & etc to deal w/ governmental issues? Tell ya what, when the HMO's, AARP, & etc quit pushing the government to expropriate drugs & give them away for free, the companies would be more than happy to drop the government affairs and get back to doing science. But in the current climate, if you don't lobby, your interests will get buried. And then, once the investors realize that there are no more paying customers, you'll have no drug industry. Hope there's good leaches around in a few years when you decide to get sick.
Where get the $1e9 dollars per drug? Lots of places. Here's a couple:
Essentially, when you want the drug companies to give away a drug, you want to expropriate their property. As an investor, ask yourself whether you're willing to put your money into an industry that's subject to expropriation, and think about whether you want a drug industry around or not the next time a pesky little virus emerges from the forrest.
And Amen to giving more encouragement to the drug industry to further ignore the needs of the developing world. All the majors have pretty much halted work on antibiotics, anti-parasitics, and any other program that's not primarily focused at the health issues of fat white males. I'm not saying that poor people shouldn't have access to drugs, but when it costs $1,000,000,000 to develop a new drug, the investors will require their companies to focus on the needs of paying customers.
Wow, I hope if you ever get charged with anything, you've got a better lawyer than yourself. If you know or should have known that an action is illegal, you're personally responsible to not take that action. If you put it in writing and save a copy, you remove all possibility of using the defense that you didn't know your actions were illegal. Yes, your employer is going to bear the brunt of any civil case, mainly because they've got more money than you do. But if the BSA finds your little note about "I know this is illegal, so I'm gonna install this software under duress", you're going down in a blaze of glory. Have fun with that, now.
Let me get this right-- you're criticizing the schools for acting in bad faith, failing to protect their networks from you? When you've agreed to their terms, in order to use their computers, and then you break your agreement by attacking their systems? WTF?
Yes, the schools should make an effort to protect their systems from attackers, for their own benefit (reducing IT headaches in the long run, preventing release of confidential info, etc etc). But if you violate their terms, you deserve to be punished according to the agreement. If you repeatedly attack their systems, they should lock you out of their systems. It's not their responsibility to force you to behave. If you don't wanna behave, that's your choice. But don't whine about it when you suffer the consequences.
Because you pretty much can't buy a new computer w/o vista, and people are still buying computers? Even if you order a custom system, you pretty much have to beat them w/ a herring to get them to install XP on it. I do not know a single person who has "upgraded" a system to Vista.
The electoral college should be amended out of existence yesterday. The fact that the two parties love the winner-take-all system should make that obvious. If you live in California or Texas, your vote for president is totally irrelevant.
If your blockbuster won't let twelve year olds rent "Death-Death-Death-And-Blood 7" it is due to store (or corporate) policy, not due to regulation.
And that is why the movie industry finds itself without legal regulations in this area. When congresscritters started making noise in this area years ago, the voluntary ratings system was proactively put into place. Remember a couple of years ago all kind of noise about kids walking into R movies? And how, not long after, all the theaters tightened up? The fact that retailers haven't been enforcing the ESRB voluntarily is the reason why they find themselves in legislative crosshairs, and the movie industry doesn't.
I don't believe the government really wants to get involved, but if they keep hearing, "my ten year old son just went out and bought ultra mayhem IV with extra boobz, do something about it" from their constituents, they're gonna eventually step in.
Except for those of us that know WTF we're doing, and can't get the CSR to do jack about it. About six months ago was having intermittent drops by Cox's cable service in San Diego. Call them up, work through the 10 minute computerized script (did you reboot your computer? Hit one. Did you reset your modem, hit one......). Wait ten more minutes to talk to a human who tries to get me to do the same thing. Nothing fixes it, so "your cable modem must have an faulty component. Get a new one".
Allrighty then, got a new cable modem. Still occasional drops. Get a service guy out, twice. Nothing wrong with the cable service at the box, must be a problem in the house. B.S.
Finally, third visit, the guy actually climbs the pole and finds out there's a crack in their top-of-the-pole junction that's letting water into the system & shorting out the signal, when it dries out the signal comes back. Total loss of my time: about ten hours on the phone over several months, & many, probably > 40 hours of lost service, most of the time spent w/ Cox claiming it was my problem, when I was saying from the beginning it was dropped signal on their end. So no, it's not 90% percent lying, and 10% confused, stupid, or wrong. And the CSR reps that think that way are, in my opinion, a big part of the problem.
Finally, I think most of us accept that a video game (or other virtual reality experience) is valid training for real-life events.
So you're gonna be allright with your oncological surgeon having learned via "Trauma Center: Under the knife", right?
Anyone who has watched kids get fired up by watching Power Rangers and run around kicking shit knows that media has an effect on children.
As you so cleverly pointed out, the plural of anecdote is not data. Kindly point us to a statistical study showing a causative relationship between watching violent TV or playing violent videogames results in real-life violence (actions resulting in serious bodily injury, not kids wrestling). TIA.
No, we are investigating perjury and obstruction of Justice. Amazingly enough, those are the same exact charges for which the Republican senate tried to impeach Clinton.
IANAL, but doesn't the Patent Research Exemption specifically mean that research does *not* require a license. Even companies can work on research and clinical trials and they don't need a licence as long as they don't begin commercial manufacture of the product within the patent term?
There is no such thing as non-profit research at a university today, at least not in the life sciences. The reasons that non-profits are licensing these things is because THEY want to patent their inventions, and sell them to industry. If they don't have a license for the original research they did, they won't be able to sell it in turn. When the federal government started to encourage universities to patent the results of research off of NIH and NSF grants, and charge licensing fees, the whole idea of non-profit basic research died a sad death. Uni's are just for-profit research entities today, teaching is nearly irrelevant (most faculty consider it a burden & waste of their time), the junior faculty don't get paid much, & the post-docs and grad students are essentially slave labor, but the Profs that bring in big grants & patents are paid as much if not more than an industry.
Just my opinion, I would agree that the movie Serenity doesn't deserve the response in this poll, but my guess is that what most people were voting for was Firefly+Serenity.
Serenity was o.k., didn't suck but didn't think it was that great, useful in that it tied up many of the loose ends left by the sudden death of the series. Firefly proper, on the other hand, was pretty much the greatest sci-fi series to be put on T.V. Each episode was very enjoyable in and of itself, while it was clear that the series was going somewhere very interesting in an overall plot arc. Of course, then Fox completely screwed it up, aired it out of order, and then killed it when people got confused. I've never seen a squandering of a creative asset like that, ever. The series DVDs are some of the very, very few DVDs I'll watch more than once or twice.
In the midwest, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Circuit City, EBGames/Gamestop ALL have plenty of the white DS Lites in stock. Target had a few black ones, and I haven't seen any of the pink ones.
Now, thats a variety of stores from KC MO, KC KS, St. Louis MO, Columbia MO, Springfield IL, Peoria IL, Urbana/Champaign IL, and Little Rock AR that I've personally been in in the last two weeks, at various times of day, and various days of the week.
Dude, you gotta find a better hobby than browsing the electronics section of discount stores over a four state area. I mean, dude. Wow.
But it was still incredibly boring (not all of it, of course). It read like a history book.
I don't think it was supposed to read like a history book, as much as an experiment in trying to make a made-up mythology read like the Torah/Bible/Qu'ran. In that respect it succeeds enormously. The writing styles change dramatically between the separate books, to the point where Akalabeth reads like it was written by a totally different author than the Silmarillion proper. Looking at it more in the context of an author playing with the media than as a book written to entertain an audience, I really enjoy it.
Trust me, the results from things like Fondling@Home are pretty much worthless to all drug companies. Especially Pharmacia & Upjohn, since they no longer exist. If you don't like the fact that drugs are created by private, for-profit corporations, maybe you should talk to the US government about where they choose to spend their money. Developing a new drug costs ~1 billion. The US is spending $5bil a month in Iraq. That's ~60 new drugs a year. The FDA only approved ~30 NCE's last year. That's right, for the low low price of one war in Iraq, you could literally double the output of the entire pharmaceutical R&D industry, and it would all be owned by the US taxpayers.
See the Guardian for the numbers in a poll done in the UK. Among 16 to 24 year old muslims living in the UK, 37% said they would prefer to live under Sharia law, as opposed to 60% who wanted to live under UK law. I would suggest 60/40 does not constitute a vast majority. "Nearly a third of 16 to 24-year-olds believed that those converting to another religion should be executed". WTF???? The numbers do go down quite a bit for the older people polled, but double digit percentages still would prefer Sharia law even at 55 years old.
Really? I heard it was because pollination was being outsourced to the flies. Apparently they're willing to do it for 10% of the bee's salaries. Of course, the flies have no idea how to pollinate a crop, but nobody will notice until the VP is long gone, with the big bonus for reducing costs this year.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it's shit easy to mass produce a particular chemical compound once you've read the patent on how to make it. Genius. Let me ask you, if it's so easy, why didn't Brazil hire an Indian company to discover and develop a new AIDS drug?
Of course Canada (and all of Europe) use their government-controlled single payer position to force the drug prices down in their countries. That's the primary reason why drugs are so expensive in the US, we're subsidizing the drugs for the rest of the world. Once the US starts demanding the same prices as Europe & Canada, the stock prices will drop considerably as investors realize there's no money to be made in drugs anymore. Once the stock price drops, the companies will have to cut marketing, R&D, etc etc. Then we're gonna have some new little virus climb out of the forrest like HIV did half a century ago, and everybodies gonna scream bloody murder because there won't be a drug industry to pull them out.
Sorry to disappoint, but there's a lot of people inside drug companies that give a lot of shit about people. I personally know I could be making a hell of a lot more money in the financial industry than I do in pharma. Why have lobbiests & etc to deal w/ governmental issues? Tell ya what, when the HMO's, AARP, & etc quit pushing the government to expropriate drugs & give them away for free, the companies would be more than happy to drop the government affairs and get back to doing science. But in the current climate, if you don't lobby, your interests will get buried. And then, once the investors realize that there are no more paying customers, you'll have no drug industry. Hope there's good leaches around in a few years when you decide to get sick.
Where get the $1e9 dollars per drug? Lots of places. Here's a couple:
The Tufts CSDD studies is a good source, their estimate was $900 mil four years ago.
Medical News Today estimates $1.2 billion for a new biological
Essentially, when you want the drug companies to give away a drug, you want to expropriate their property. As an investor, ask yourself whether you're willing to put your money into an industry that's subject to expropriation, and think about whether you want a drug industry around or not the next time a pesky little virus emerges from the forrest.
And Amen to giving more encouragement to the drug industry to further ignore the needs of the developing world. All the majors have pretty much halted work on antibiotics, anti-parasitics, and any other program that's not primarily focused at the health issues of fat white males. I'm not saying that poor people shouldn't have access to drugs, but when it costs $1,000,000,000 to develop a new drug, the investors will require their companies to focus on the needs of paying customers.
Wow, I hope if you ever get charged with anything, you've got a better lawyer than yourself. If you know or should have known that an action is illegal, you're personally responsible to not take that action. If you put it in writing and save a copy, you remove all possibility of using the defense that you didn't know your actions were illegal. Yes, your employer is going to bear the brunt of any civil case, mainly because they've got more money than you do. But if the BSA finds your little note about "I know this is illegal, so I'm gonna install this software under duress", you're going down in a blaze of glory. Have fun with that, now.
Let me get this right-- you're criticizing the schools for acting in bad faith, failing to protect their networks from you? When you've agreed to their terms, in order to use their computers, and then you break your agreement by attacking their systems? WTF?
Yes, the schools should make an effort to protect their systems from attackers, for their own benefit (reducing IT headaches in the long run, preventing release of confidential info, etc etc). But if you violate their terms, you deserve to be punished according to the agreement. If you repeatedly attack their systems, they should lock you out of their systems. It's not their responsibility to force you to behave. If you don't wanna behave, that's your choice. But don't whine about it when you suffer the consequences.
Because you pretty much can't buy a new computer w/o vista, and people are still buying computers? Even if you order a custom system, you pretty much have to beat them w/ a herring to get them to install XP on it. I do not know a single person who has "upgraded" a system to Vista.
The electoral college should be amended out of existence yesterday. The fact that the two parties love the winner-take-all system should make that obvious. If you live in California or Texas, your vote for president is totally irrelevant.
Jack Bauer can torture krypton into kryptonite. Hell, Jack Bauer could torture xenon into kryptonite by beating the electrons out of it.
George, is that you?
And that is why the movie industry finds itself without legal regulations in this area. When congresscritters started making noise in this area years ago, the voluntary ratings system was proactively put into place. Remember a couple of years ago all kind of noise about kids walking into R movies? And how, not long after, all the theaters tightened up? The fact that retailers haven't been enforcing the ESRB voluntarily is the reason why they find themselves in legislative crosshairs, and the movie industry doesn't.
I don't believe the government really wants to get involved, but if they keep hearing, "my ten year old son just went out and bought ultra mayhem IV with extra boobz, do something about it" from their constituents, they're gonna eventually step in.
Many websites are entertaining to me, but there's not a single one whose disappearance would constitute a major problem for me.
Except for those of us that know WTF we're doing, and can't get the CSR to do jack about it. About six months ago was having intermittent drops by Cox's cable service in San Diego. Call them up, work through the 10 minute computerized script (did you reboot your computer? Hit one. Did you reset your modem, hit one......). Wait ten more minutes to talk to a human who tries to get me to do the same thing. Nothing fixes it, so "your cable modem must have an faulty component. Get a new one".
Allrighty then, got a new cable modem. Still occasional drops. Get a service guy out, twice. Nothing wrong with the cable service at the box, must be a problem in the house. B.S.
Finally, third visit, the guy actually climbs the pole and finds out there's a crack in their top-of-the-pole junction that's letting water into the system & shorting out the signal, when it dries out the signal comes back. Total loss of my time: about ten hours on the phone over several months, & many, probably > 40 hours of lost service, most of the time spent w/ Cox claiming it was my problem, when I was saying from the beginning it was dropped signal on their end. So no, it's not 90% percent lying, and 10% confused, stupid, or wrong. And the CSR reps that think that way are, in my opinion, a big part of the problem.
I hate quoting myself from an earlier comment, but...
Hahahahahahahahaha. That's funny.
Hahahahahahahahaha
That's funny.
So you're gonna be allright with your oncological surgeon having learned via "Trauma Center: Under the knife", right?
As you so cleverly pointed out, the plural of anecdote is not data. Kindly point us to a statistical study showing a causative relationship between watching violent TV or playing violent videogames results in real-life violence (actions resulting in serious bodily injury, not kids wrestling). TIA.
No, we are investigating perjury and obstruction of Justice. Amazingly enough, those are the same exact charges for which the Republican senate tried to impeach Clinton.
A cantenna & your neighbor's open access point?
There is no such thing as non-profit research at a university today, at least not in the life sciences. The reasons that non-profits are licensing these things is because THEY want to patent their inventions, and sell them to industry. If they don't have a license for the original research they did, they won't be able to sell it in turn. When the federal government started to encourage universities to patent the results of research off of NIH and NSF grants, and charge licensing fees, the whole idea of non-profit basic research died a sad death. Uni's are just for-profit research entities today, teaching is nearly irrelevant (most faculty consider it a burden & waste of their time), the junior faculty don't get paid much, & the post-docs and grad students are essentially slave labor, but the Profs that bring in big grants & patents are paid as much if not more than an industry.
Just my opinion, I would agree that the movie Serenity doesn't deserve the response in this poll, but my guess is that what most people were voting for was Firefly+Serenity.
Serenity was o.k., didn't suck but didn't think it was that great, useful in that it tied up many of the loose ends left by the sudden death of the series. Firefly proper, on the other hand, was pretty much the greatest sci-fi series to be put on T.V. Each episode was very enjoyable in and of itself, while it was clear that the series was going somewhere very interesting in an overall plot arc. Of course, then Fox completely screwed it up, aired it out of order, and then killed it when people got confused. I've never seen a squandering of a creative asset like that, ever. The series DVDs are some of the very, very few DVDs I'll watch more than once or twice.
First you have to make it up your Mom's basement stairs.
Dude, you gotta find a better hobby than browsing the electronics section of discount stores over a four state area. I mean, dude. Wow.
I don't think it was supposed to read like a history book, as much as an experiment in trying to make a made-up mythology read like the Torah/Bible/Qu'ran. In that respect it succeeds enormously. The writing styles change dramatically between the separate books, to the point where Akalabeth reads like it was written by a totally different author than the Silmarillion proper. Looking at it more in the context of an author playing with the media than as a book written to entertain an audience, I really enjoy it.
Trust me, the results from things like Fondling@Home are pretty much worthless to all drug companies. Especially Pharmacia & Upjohn, since they no longer exist. If you don't like the fact that drugs are created by private, for-profit corporations, maybe you should talk to the US government about where they choose to spend their money. Developing a new drug costs ~1 billion. The US is spending $5bil a month in Iraq. That's ~60 new drugs a year. The FDA only approved ~30 NCE's last year. That's right, for the low low price of one war in Iraq, you could literally double the output of the entire pharmaceutical R&D industry, and it would all be owned by the US taxpayers.
See the Guardian for the numbers in a poll done in the UK. Among 16 to 24 year old muslims living in the UK, 37% said they would prefer to live under Sharia law, as opposed to 60% who wanted to live under UK law. I would suggest 60/40 does not constitute a vast majority. "Nearly a third of 16 to 24-year-olds believed that those converting to another religion should be executed". WTF???? The numbers do go down quite a bit for the older people polled, but double digit percentages still would prefer Sharia law even at 55 years old.
Really? I heard it was because pollination was being outsourced to the flies. Apparently they're willing to do it for 10% of the bee's salaries. Of course, the flies have no idea how to pollinate a crop, but nobody will notice until the VP is long gone, with the big bonus for reducing costs this year.