Looks to me like it just lets someone that works for a company overseas for over one year to work for that same company in the US and grants them a visa to do so. Granted their family also gets a VISA to come go to school (kids) and get a job (spouse), but what's the problem?
All and all you're right. I wouldn't choose to give someone cancer just because they didn't understand what someone else was going through or was making fun of them. I wouldn't wish someone's family member murdered just because they didn't understand what someone else who experienced a family member dying felt like. In fact I'd generally feel sorry for them and tell them I hope they never have to experience it. I also wouldn't nuke (even in the high atmosphere) another country just for running their mouths - especially when what they're attempting to do is deescalate the situation.
In this case though, if some other country or collection of countries (UN) is trying to determine the US response to an issue having never been in their shoes themselves then I think a reasonable political response from the US would be "That's easy to say when it didn't happen to you! Let me go down the list of all the things you call no big deal. How would you feel about me if I did the same thing to you right now?". And then itemize each and every one. This would be a very reasonable and may even get others to understand that it is, in fact, a big deal though I doubt it. But the truth is, it doesn't matter if someone else gets it or not sometimes... sometimes you just have to do what you think is right.
Some people are so passive they'll let anything happen to them and never respond (until one day they just say f it all and go postal). Other people are overly aggressive and go out picking fights for a good time. But almost everyone lies in between. The US lies in between and they are generally a very meek country in terms of what they could do vs what they actually do. In this case, they would have every right to tell anyone who wants to meddle to go find something else to get involved in, because the US is going to go make sure the offender never does it to anyone else again. That would be the right thing to do, and hard decision or not I'd hope they'd do it.
If it makes you feel any better I'd hate for you to be the one to have to make those decisions too. There's no decision to be made and if a counter attack CAN still be accomplished after such an event it should be. And if the rest of the world had a problem with it enough to start trash-talking the US, then the US should go ahead and fire off a couple of the same sort of attacks at a few nato nations and see if they still feel like it's no big deal. And then ignore them either way.
Likely issues: pacemakers (death), traffic fatalities from failed signals (death), people on medical equipment that requires power (death), hospital outages (likely death especially for anyone unfortunate enough to be in surgery), lost productivety, the anarchy that would quickly break out when people realize they have no power for an extended time. This list goes on and on.
To even assert that it is somehow not a first strike because "technically no one got killed" just boggles.
Add to that, when women did not work in those times, they were not counted as unemployed.
Is it any different now? When women don't work today they're not counted as unemployed when they don't want to be "employed". For example, stay at home mothers are not "unemployed" the way you are using the word. And at that time, that was the majority of women's profession... by choice.
I'm curious if (but fairly certain that) computers are getting sufficiently fast that soon they will feel the same way about chess that they do about tic tac toe (and 'thermonuclear war').
Hmmm... not sure I want to take economics or policy advice from a wikipedia page that asserts that demand is somehow driven by the price. That assertion, that pricing drives demand, makes me automatically think to myself "what else is that page totally wrong about?". Modifying prices may certain cause more quantity to be purchased (called quantity demanded), but the actual demand hasn't changed. The price TELLS you the demand, it doesn't cause an "increase in aggregate demand that results from the price decrease".
Basically the page mfwitten recommends says "Yeah, people will lose their jobs, but stuff will be cheaper, so those people might still be able to afford it even if they get worse jobs and more people that couldn't afford before it became cheaper will now be able to do so. Therefore, Win win win... don't be scared of the machines".
It might be right. I actually tend to agree that it will all be alright in the end and that we should automate damn near everything we can. But the argument presented on that page isn't convincing anyone other than those who think that price drives demand, and that group of people can probably be convinced of just about anything.
Why go into business to make a product that targets like 0.0001% of the market?
That's like asking why the company that made "spinner" rims decided to go into business (or branch out into) with a product that only appealed to a small group of people. Especially when only a small group of them could afford them. The "market" wasn't everyone with a car... it was everyone with a car who wanted to look cool sitting at a stoplight and had money they were willing to allocate toward that purpose. The bonus is that there was very little competition (partially because the market is so small). WAY SMALL MARKET, but still tons of money to be made if the premium / markup is sufficiently high.
You probably consider "the market" to be "all people that use keyboards at all". But that's not true for him just like the market for spinners isn't everyone that has a car. He likely considers the market to be a very specific subset of computer users, and therefore his product actually targets 100% of "the market" as he's defined it. His pricing also demonstrates that he knows his market is tiny. A keyboard can be had for $10, but his is priced at between $70 and $100 per sale. It's not because it's novel, it's because he had to have that price to actually make any money in the small market he's chosen.
depending on how many manufacturers make a particular generic drug
Well, that's exactly what I'm suggesting WONT happen if you follow my idea. That's why I abandoned it. To further clarify, if the medical community says "this is the #1 generic we will prescribe so all you pharmacies need to make sure you carry it too" then all the other competitors that make a generic for that drug will be economically justified to quit on that drug and shift their focus to trying to become the #1 generic for some other drug. I'm sure there's profit to be made at #3 or #4, but it's probably about as big as the difference in being on the first page of a google search and only the 3rd or 4th. You might be a competitor, but you've barely got a seat at the table. If that's what happens, if there's really only the name brand and 1 generic then a LOT of the benefit stands to be lost for the consumer.
I'm not saying that eggs being safely in multiple baskets isn't a big deal. It's important. I'm just not sure how much companies care to be nothing but the fallback in case something terrible happens... are they willing to invest to get into a market that they know they'll never succeed in (because the medical community actively endorses someone else) unless another manufacturer is for some reason forced out? On the aggregate, I doubt it.
I do think it would have to be one or two drugs being recommended TOPS. Probably just 1 beyond the brand name. Why? Pharmacies don't have unlimited shelf space to store more options. They typically have the brandname and whichever generic they choose to carry. That's why I said the medical community probably needs to settle on 1 generic to be preferred and used by all pharmacies... but then we're back to the outliers deciding it's not worth it and getting out of the game.
Hypponen added that what set cyber-weapons apart from traditional weapons was the fact that anyone could get their hands on one of these weapons, unlike a nuclear bomb, missiles or tanks which only armies would have access to.
Regular people can't get ahold of traditional weapons? What? Isn't that a large part of what most of the US (and the peanut gallery around the world) has been arguing about for the last month? That people can get their hands on the terrible traditional weapons?
So why don't "they" (go as far up the chain as need be) just outlaw cyber-weapons around the world. Seems like that would take care of the whole problem... or does that only apply to computers... or neither? And do you think "they" would be scared shitless of the prospect of trying "require" the cyberweapons of the US or Russia to be handed over. And do you think that the US, Russia, UK, Israel, Iran, Pakistan, any of them would be willing to give theirs up when there is even the slightest prospect that anyone else on that list had them? How'd that work out with nukes?
If you ban cyberweapons, only criminals will have cyberweapons.
Once a patient is doing well on one generic manufacturer's version of a particular drug, can't the doctor avoid "additional variables that are introduced as soon as the Pharmacy decides to switch to a different generic" by prescribing "fluoxephetamine by Teva, dispense as written"? It's like people sticking with Equate brand because they know what they're going to get out of Perrigo or whatever other company manufactures Equate drugs for Walmart.
Unfortunately not. There's two problems. The first is that it can take months to find out if a patient is doing well. During that time "establishing a dosage timeframe" the pharmacy could change drugs. Annoying. The second thing is that the pharmacy may not be able to DAW even after the patient knows the best drug at the best dosage because the pharmacy may just quit offering that generic altogether. That's the whole point. In cases where there is more than one generic the pharmacies are going to go with the one that makes them the most money (or whatever other scoring function they choose to use). The patient can then try to find another pharmacy to fill it with exactly the right generic, hopefully one has exactly what they need., but certainly no guarantees.
A trend of D.A.W. orders for a particular generic might be a step toward changing pharmacists' mind about this.
You're right, assuming anyone would NOTICE the trend. I doubt at any given pharmacy they'd notice rather it'd have to be aggregated (all the "Walgreens" would have to report the DAW orders for each particular generic) and analyzed at "the top". Then someone would have to make an actual business decision to continue offering that drug rather than saying "hell, if it doesn't work for a few patients they can just go ahead and go back to the docs to figure out the new mixture... or we'll lose them as a customer... who care's it's a generic, there's barely any people, and we're not making that much anyway". The market might make them notice it, but that same market will tell them it's not worth chasing.
I wonder if a better solution might be for the the medical community as a whole to recommend "standard generics" that pharmacies could carry if they are going to carry any generic for a particular drug at all. If they put forth those recommendations where the pharmacies can actually find them and then educate their patients (yeah, right) to find a new pharmacy (and tell their pharmacy why they're leaving) then maybe that'd do something for it all in the long run. But in the short term, certain patients are stuck with the current situation of having to stick with what works.Plus, guess what would probably happen if the medical community as a whole settle in behind a particular generic? That generic essentially becomes the defacto drug and you lose a lot of the benefit of price wars that make generics GOOD for the consumer. So never mind my idea... but there's got to be some solution.
I have family who have to take meds daily and there is one drug they must take that the generics are simply not CONSISTENT enough. It's not that the generics are "different" it's that you can't count on consistency. Pharmacies can (and do) change the generic vendor for a particular drug whenever they see fit. So if there are 3 manufacturers of a drug then the pharmacy may use one of them for a while, then switch to another, then back, then to a third, and so on. The problem is that each of them will have the own slight variations. Some with a faster delivery, some with a slower, some with a different method that is handled great by one person's body, but not so well by another. All minor when consistency doesn't matter, but in some cases it is vital.
The brand name drug is the same every time. And in cases where it can take months to find just the right dosage and schedule the brand name drug is the only drug without those additional variables that are introduced as soon as the Pharmacy decides to switch to a different generic. That switch can lead to some really crappy situations where people spend months doing great and then all of a sudden have issues because, without the patients knowledge, the pharmacy has changed what drug they are getting. The pharmacies all think it's okay to do so because the drugs are all the same... mostly. But the doctors who often spend months with patients trying to get the body chemistry just right know better. Which is why they often write prescriptions and tell their patients to make sure they always get the brand name.
Most of the time it doesn't matter... a pain pill needed after a root canal or a simple course of antibiotics probably wouldn't matter at all. But when you're talking about ongoing meds (think thyroid or immune suppressives for transplants or other issues) then it can make a huge difference to use something that is CONSISTENT. Not doing so means you're going to get the cheapest option to buy, but the quite possibly the most expensive option when you start talking about new doctors visits and tests to determine what could be going wrong all of a sudden, when nothing went wrong except someone changed a variable by changing providers. Hopefully that sheds a little light on the difference.
There is nothing "alive" about a virus. You don't "kill" it. You either take away what one needs to propogate or "break" it in some way (literally damaging it so that it won't work anymore). That is why you get a "deactivated" flu vaccine as opposed to a "dead" flue vaccine.
I only mention this because it seems that those little virus buggers may end up just floating around inside the body indefinitely while the host is being treated. Remove the treatment or do something that causes the treatment to fail and you're right back to having a real problem on your hands.
Suffering sucks, but since you're an expert on perspective then please tell me who suffers more? The parents at Sandy Hook or the the parents St Jude Research hospital with kids fighting and dying of cancer? Or the parents whose kids join the army and die fighting for their country? Or the parents in other countries who kids are caught in the crossfire of war or die playing with landmines? Or the father / husband who listens to his wife and daughters being raped and burned alive because he didn't have a way to protect them from the thugs who have no regard for the laws limiting guns? Which one's suffering is more important?
No one would really feel comfortable answering that question and I only pose it because you wanted add a little perspective, but that's fooling yourself. You should have instead added a LOT of perspective. It's an issue that has many sides... not just two. And when you take notice that there are many sides it becomes a little harder to look at just one of them and call it fixable. Look, I'm a parent. Suffering and worry is unfortunately PART of life as a parent. Parents should not expect for their children to have perfect lives where no harm comes. At the same time no parent should ever have to bury a child and my heart wept for what those parents endure... not just at Sandy Hook, but all of those examples I gave. I honestly can't imagine it without being in physical pain myself.
However, while you have the right to voice your opinion that "we, as a nation, have proven ourselves incapable of properly storing, ascertaining who be allowed to have..." you should also keep in mind (really really keep it in mind) that a big part of why you have a protected right to voice your opinion (especially in Texas where if what you said got out people might come lookin' for ya) is because of all the suffering of all the moms and dads who lost their children and their own lives fighting for that right... a fight they would have surely lost to vastly more "powerful" force had they not had their own guns.
To know that they were to go through that suffering and to decide that it was worth it means that they were already suffering an even greater existence. They loved their families and they wanted them to be free. These people had to fight a government who wanted nothing more than squash them and who likely believed that these men were traitors and crazy nuts. There were plenty of people who were willing to just go with whatever the crown said (like you) in order to avoid more misery, but your right to say whatever you want to say today was won by a different group - a group that believed that freedom was more important than a little temporary suffering and who knew that ONLY the possibility of an armed revolt would keep the freedom they had fought for from being taken away by their new government.
You can disarm yourself if you wish and PERHAPS save a little suffering in the here and now, but dollars to donuts, in the end you will have created more suffering for far more people by allowing, no demanding, that not only you but everyone else be made a victim rather than remain people with some control over their own destiny.
This is insightful? I figured you were mostly joking (fun to pick on accountants and lawyers), but then I saw it was modded 'insightful' and that just made me sad. So I don't know if I'm responding to you or the mods, but this concept that the accountant (a private party) getting paid for a [valuable] service is somehow worse for society than the government getting the money to do with as they please is just plain... not... bright. The accountant still pays taxes. The accountant spends their earned money and in doing so stimulates the economy through their spending. All of those people who get the accountant's money... they pay taxes too. They all spend the part of the money that they get to keep with relative efficiency and on things that they found useful. And Uncle Sam gets a share off the top of each transaction along the way... over and over again. Not only that but Uncle Sam doesn't have to support (food stamps and unemployment) all of those people that the accountant funded because they are able to make a living selling things to people who have money to spend... which they wouldn't not have had if the government would have gotten it all. The government is the parasite not the guy actually out working for a living.
Every time I hear someone break out into song about how the 2nd amendment was written at a time of muskets being the norm and that they (the founders) would not have meant for it to cover the weaponry of today I get more confused. I've never really been able to put my finger on exactly why I get confused, but it's always just seemed so ridiculous to me that someone would think that the amendments are not designed to keep pace with the world and its advances. Let me just ask this question - maybe it will help me to understand where certain people, those who believe as you do, are coming from.
It seems that the logical extension of your stance on the 2nd amendment would beg the following questions. Since we didn't have the internet back then does that mean that the 1st amendment shouldn't apply to speech on the internet? I mean, come now, no way they saw that coming and frankly they could have never expected radical, potentially dangerous ideas to be able to spread so quickly. For that matter, since we didn't have automobiles does that mean that the 4th amendment shouldn't apply to your new SUV or, if you're lucky enough to have one, your own airplane? I mean, how could they gave intended to cover those things when they didn't even exist?
As a rule we take for granted and get all "up in arms" when the man infringes on one of the other rights protected (not granted - protected) by the constitution. We PAINSTAKINGLY point out how everything new is actually old (there is nothing new under the sun) and that the constitutionally protected rights should extend to this or that situation. But guns get different treatment and the 2nd amendment is treated differently. Why? And does it actually make sense to treat it differently or is it a purely emotional subject?
I don't think you understand what that means (first to invent VS first to file), and I think you're turning it in to something it's not. In reality you could always (and still can) patent something you "haven't invented yet" if by "invented" you define it as "having built". Legally, inventing something is coming up with an idea and putting it all on paper in legalese with pretty drawings and what not. That's "inventing" as far as the USPTO is concerned. And, they're right, but they've kind of bastardized the word (or someone has somewhere along the way). Everything else is just the child's play portion of actually "putting things together" (constructing) following the instruction presented by the inventor in the patent. You don't have to actually build something to invent it or to patent it... with one exception. A perpetual motion machine requires a prototype to be patented.
The change from first to invent to first to file just means that you do not retain rights to your invention by simply inventing it first. If you invent some widget in 2013 and then your neighbor sees what you've done and files a patent for it in 2015 they will get all rights to that IP... because they were the first to file. It used to be that being the first to invent was worth something, but that has now changed.
Finally, I think that Maximum Prophet was suggesting, as an improvement to the current patent system, that one should not be allowed to patent theoretical items, but rather only items that they've actually built.
No, Ghostzilla, follow the thread here. The poster THAT I RESPONDED TO (Kup) was responding to someone else (alen) who said the military protects their gun through safety measures. Kup said nothing about the military controlling firearms, but instead insinuated that those controls / procedures that Alen shared would fail because Kup believes:
"I don't care what the rules are, if they can be broken some will be."
If you can't understand that (what Kup said) being a STRONG argument against gun control then I suppose I can go on to explain, but I'm betting you can figure it out.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, the most striking thing about this conversation (on/.) is what seems to me to be an anti-advancement attitude. Did musket owners feel the same way about self-contained ammunition? Will future people feel that way before phasers or whatever are widely adopted?
I'm not sure gun owners (at least the type worried about EMPs and stuff) are anti-advancement as much as they are "it works now - if you want to make one component better you better make damn sure everything else still works".
I'm pretty sure all "old school enthusiasts" are like that though. My father in law used to be a carpenter. I bought a new cordless drill a few years back and he's like, "why? You not have a cord long enough?". I explained that it was nice to not to need the cord and that sometimes worrying about the cord is actually not something you want to have to do. He didn't care... corded ones worked fine. Then he was doing some work at the house one day and grabbed it and started working... "that's pretty neat I guess," was all he said. But you could tell he was actually coming around. A few days later he was doing some more work with a cordless saw and it died on him in the middle of a cut. Guess what happened? You'd of thought his gun went "click" instead of "bang". He found out he was right about them newfangled cordless tools and decided he would never be convinced to have only cordless drill on hand now. Ask him how he'd work in a power outage without cords is the answer I guess...
If you need a tool and it doesn't work it's frustrating. Muzzle loader shooters probably had a sense of arrogance when they pulled the trigger of their friends new self-contained ammo shooter and it went click instead of bang. I'm sure misfires were far more common in the early days. And musket shooters knew exactly how to load their powder and how to make it work every time. Those newfangled bullets were surely something to fear since they couldn't be trusted.
You're right. I was letting all other relevant things be equal in my discussion. If death by infections was reduced by 50% I'm sure people would take drugs that had a higher incidence of headaches as a side effect in order to keep from dying of the infection - even if they were very anti-pharma.
But you're missing an important bit of understanding as far as I can tell. Sometimes there simply isn't a trade off to be had no matter what people WANT the case to be... or it is so minuscule that it might as well not be there.
In the case of firearms, that's how most (American) firearms owners will see it. You've taken something and made it 3x more likely to fail all because it was having some USER ISSUES some.0001% of the time. To my knowledge we don't do this with ANY other industry as a whole.
Guns today are purely mechanical. To introduce an electrical component, even if it actually IMPROVED reliability under normal circumstances (lets say from 99.99% to 99.999999%), it introduces a new point of failure into the system... and a biggie for gun owners.
Many of the people who own firearms for defense want to be prepared for "whatever" may come. This includes people in the military of course, but also retired military and regular old love my country, love my family citizens. One "whatever" scenerio is that of an EMP. Another is a nuclear attack (which would trigger an EMP). These people who want to be prepared would obviously never be interested in such an "advancement" an an electrical safety built into their firearms. In fact, they would actually be willing to PAY MORE to DOWNGRADE to a purely mechanical firearm because that other one could not be trusted in as many circumstances (especially the most dire ones) even if it was MORE trustworthy under "normal" circumstances.
I think it'd have to be a mechanical mechanism and there are already LOTS of those. People not using them (trigger locks, locking their firearms up, etc) and not following general gun safety rules (don't point it at others EVER, always assume it's loaded, keep your finger off the trigger, etc) are the failures. In general, firearms are IDEAL for the "needs" that they serve at this time. I'm not saying someone won't have an innovation that makes them more safe to own down the road, but I think for it to be acceptable under the circumstances in which we expect our guns to work (ALWAYS), or to atleast have a chance to work, adding electrical / smart components to them that would potentially disable them is going to be a no go.
And there you have it. I don't know your actual feelings on the matter, but whether you realize it or not you just made the point AGAINST gun control. Well done.
I know how my boss would feels if I took code that completed its task 99.99 percent of the time (.01% failure) and modified it so that it now completed it's actual task only 99.97% percent of the time (.03% failure). He'd want to know WHY in the hell I made a change that causes failure to occur 3x more often.
If the device was a pacemaker then that's 3x the deaths due to failure. Why would people buy that product if it was 3x more likely to fail?
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I'm not be argumentative or sarcastic. Why would I be outraged by the L visa?
Did I find the wrong thing? L1 Visa? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-1_visa
Looks to me like it just lets someone that works for a company overseas for over one year to work for that same company in the US and grants them a visa to do so. Granted their family also gets a VISA to come go to school (kids) and get a job (spouse), but what's the problem?
All and all you're right. I wouldn't choose to give someone cancer just because they didn't understand what someone else was going through or was making fun of them. I wouldn't wish someone's family member murdered just because they didn't understand what someone else who experienced a family member dying felt like. In fact I'd generally feel sorry for them and tell them I hope they never have to experience it. I also wouldn't nuke (even in the high atmosphere) another country just for running their mouths - especially when what they're attempting to do is deescalate the situation.
In this case though, if some other country or collection of countries (UN) is trying to determine the US response to an issue having never been in their shoes themselves then I think a reasonable political response from the US would be "That's easy to say when it didn't happen to you! Let me go down the list of all the things you call no big deal. How would you feel about me if I did the same thing to you right now?". And then itemize each and every one. This would be a very reasonable and may even get others to understand that it is, in fact, a big deal though I doubt it. But the truth is, it doesn't matter if someone else gets it or not sometimes... sometimes you just have to do what you think is right.
Some people are so passive they'll let anything happen to them and never respond (until one day they just say f it all and go postal). Other people are overly aggressive and go out picking fights for a good time. But almost everyone lies in between. The US lies in between and they are generally a very meek country in terms of what they could do vs what they actually do. In this case, they would have every right to tell anyone who wants to meddle to go find something else to get involved in, because the US is going to go make sure the offender never does it to anyone else again. That would be the right thing to do, and hard decision or not I'd hope they'd do it.
If it makes you feel any better I'd hate for you to be the one to have to make those decisions too. There's no decision to be made and if a counter attack CAN still be accomplished after such an event it should be. And if the rest of the world had a problem with it enough to start trash-talking the US, then the US should go ahead and fire off a couple of the same sort of attacks at a few nato nations and see if they still feel like it's no big deal. And then ignore them either way.
Likely issues: pacemakers (death), traffic fatalities from failed signals (death), people on medical equipment that requires power (death), hospital outages (likely death especially for anyone unfortunate enough to be in surgery), lost productivety, the anarchy that would quickly break out when people realize they have no power for an extended time. This list goes on and on.
To even assert that it is somehow not a first strike because "technically no one got killed" just boggles.
Yes, but how many of those 2700 both had a colonoscopy and crossed a bridge when sneaking in? Exactly. Of course they didn't get caught!
Add to that, when women did not work in those times, they were not counted as unemployed.
Is it any different now? When women don't work today they're not counted as unemployed when they don't want to be "employed". For example, stay at home mothers are not "unemployed" the way you are using the word. And at that time, that was the majority of women's profession... by choice.
I'm curious if (but fairly certain that) computers are getting sufficiently fast that soon they will feel the same way about chess that they do about tic tac toe (and 'thermonuclear war').
Hmmm... not sure I want to take economics or policy advice from a wikipedia page that asserts that demand is somehow driven by the price. That assertion, that pricing drives demand, makes me automatically think to myself "what else is that page totally wrong about?". Modifying prices may certain cause more quantity to be purchased (called quantity demanded), but the actual demand hasn't changed. The price TELLS you the demand, it doesn't cause an "increase in aggregate demand that results from the price decrease".
Basically the page mfwitten recommends says "Yeah, people will lose their jobs, but stuff will be cheaper, so those people might still be able to afford it even if they get worse jobs and more people that couldn't afford before it became cheaper will now be able to do so. Therefore, Win win win... don't be scared of the machines".
It might be right. I actually tend to agree that it will all be alright in the end and that we should automate damn near everything we can. But the argument presented on that page isn't convincing anyone other than those who think that price drives demand, and that group of people can probably be convinced of just about anything.
So there's still that bit of mystery meat, huh?
Why go into business to make a product that targets like 0.0001% of the market?
That's like asking why the company that made "spinner" rims decided to go into business (or branch out into) with a product that only appealed to a small group of people. Especially when only a small group of them could afford them. The "market" wasn't everyone with a car... it was everyone with a car who wanted to look cool sitting at a stoplight and had money they were willing to allocate toward that purpose. The bonus is that there was very little competition (partially because the market is so small). WAY SMALL MARKET, but still tons of money to be made if the premium / markup is sufficiently high.
You probably consider "the market" to be "all people that use keyboards at all". But that's not true for him just like the market for spinners isn't everyone that has a car. He likely considers the market to be a very specific subset of computer users, and therefore his product actually targets 100% of "the market" as he's defined it. His pricing also demonstrates that he knows his market is tiny. A keyboard can be had for $10, but his is priced at between $70 and $100 per sale. It's not because it's novel, it's because he had to have that price to actually make any money in the small market he's chosen.
depending on how many manufacturers make a particular generic drug
Well, that's exactly what I'm suggesting WONT happen if you follow my idea. That's why I abandoned it. To further clarify, if the medical community says "this is the #1 generic we will prescribe so all you pharmacies need to make sure you carry it too" then all the other competitors that make a generic for that drug will be economically justified to quit on that drug and shift their focus to trying to become the #1 generic for some other drug. I'm sure there's profit to be made at #3 or #4, but it's probably about as big as the difference in being on the first page of a google search and only the 3rd or 4th. You might be a competitor, but you've barely got a seat at the table. If that's what happens, if there's really only the name brand and 1 generic then a LOT of the benefit stands to be lost for the consumer.
I'm not saying that eggs being safely in multiple baskets isn't a big deal. It's important. I'm just not sure how much companies care to be nothing but the fallback in case something terrible happens... are they willing to invest to get into a market that they know they'll never succeed in (because the medical community actively endorses someone else) unless another manufacturer is for some reason forced out? On the aggregate, I doubt it.
I do think it would have to be one or two drugs being recommended TOPS. Probably just 1 beyond the brand name. Why? Pharmacies don't have unlimited shelf space to store more options. They typically have the brandname and whichever generic they choose to carry. That's why I said the medical community probably needs to settle on 1 generic to be preferred and used by all pharmacies... but then we're back to the outliers deciding it's not worth it and getting out of the game.
Hypponen added that what set cyber-weapons apart from traditional weapons was the fact that anyone could get their hands on one of these weapons, unlike a nuclear bomb, missiles or tanks which only armies would have access to.
Regular people can't get ahold of traditional weapons? What? Isn't that a large part of what most of the US (and the peanut gallery around the world) has been arguing about for the last month? That people can get their hands on the terrible traditional weapons?
So why don't "they" (go as far up the chain as need be) just outlaw cyber-weapons around the world. Seems like that would take care of the whole problem... or does that only apply to computers... or neither? And do you think "they" would be scared shitless of the prospect of trying "require" the cyberweapons of the US or Russia to be handed over. And do you think that the US, Russia, UK, Israel, Iran, Pakistan, any of them would be willing to give theirs up when there is even the slightest prospect that anyone else on that list had them? How'd that work out with nukes?
If you ban cyberweapons, only criminals will have cyberweapons.
Once a patient is doing well on one generic manufacturer's version of a particular drug, can't the doctor avoid "additional variables that are introduced as soon as the Pharmacy decides to switch to a different generic" by prescribing "fluoxephetamine by Teva, dispense as written"? It's like people sticking with Equate brand because they know what they're going to get out of Perrigo or whatever other company manufactures Equate drugs for Walmart.
Unfortunately not. There's two problems. The first is that it can take months to find out if a patient is doing well. During that time "establishing a dosage timeframe" the pharmacy could change drugs. Annoying. The second thing is that the pharmacy may not be able to DAW even after the patient knows the best drug at the best dosage because the pharmacy may just quit offering that generic altogether. That's the whole point. In cases where there is more than one generic the pharmacies are going to go with the one that makes them the most money (or whatever other scoring function they choose to use). The patient can then try to find another pharmacy to fill it with exactly the right generic, hopefully one has exactly what they need., but certainly no guarantees.
A trend of D.A.W. orders for a particular generic might be a step toward changing pharmacists' mind about this.
You're right, assuming anyone would NOTICE the trend. I doubt at any given pharmacy they'd notice rather it'd have to be aggregated (all the "Walgreens" would have to report the DAW orders for each particular generic) and analyzed at "the top". Then someone would have to make an actual business decision to continue offering that drug rather than saying "hell, if it doesn't work for a few patients they can just go ahead and go back to the docs to figure out the new mixture... or we'll lose them as a customer... who care's it's a generic, there's barely any people, and we're not making that much anyway". The market might make them notice it, but that same market will tell them it's not worth chasing.
I wonder if a better solution might be for the the medical community as a whole to recommend "standard generics" that pharmacies could carry if they are going to carry any generic for a particular drug at all. If they put forth those recommendations where the pharmacies can actually find them and then educate their patients (yeah, right) to find a new pharmacy (and tell their pharmacy why they're leaving) then maybe that'd do something for it all in the long run. But in the short term, certain patients are stuck with the current situation of having to stick with what works.Plus, guess what would probably happen if the medical community as a whole settle in behind a particular generic? That generic essentially becomes the defacto drug and you lose a lot of the benefit of price wars that make generics GOOD for the consumer. So never mind my idea... but there's got to be some solution.
I have family who have to take meds daily and there is one drug they must take that the generics are simply not CONSISTENT enough. It's not that the generics are "different" it's that you can't count on consistency. Pharmacies can (and do) change the generic vendor for a particular drug whenever they see fit. So if there are 3 manufacturers of a drug then the pharmacy may use one of them for a while, then switch to another, then back, then to a third, and so on. The problem is that each of them will have the own slight variations. Some with a faster delivery, some with a slower, some with a different method that is handled great by one person's body, but not so well by another. All minor when consistency doesn't matter, but in some cases it is vital.
The brand name drug is the same every time. And in cases where it can take months to find just the right dosage and schedule the brand name drug is the only drug without those additional variables that are introduced as soon as the Pharmacy decides to switch to a different generic. That switch can lead to some really crappy situations where people spend months doing great and then all of a sudden have issues because, without the patients knowledge, the pharmacy has changed what drug they are getting. The pharmacies all think it's okay to do so because the drugs are all the same... mostly. But the doctors who often spend months with patients trying to get the body chemistry just right know better. Which is why they often write prescriptions and tell their patients to make sure they always get the brand name.
Most of the time it doesn't matter... a pain pill needed after a root canal or a simple course of antibiotics probably wouldn't matter at all. But when you're talking about ongoing meds (think thyroid or immune suppressives for transplants or other issues) then it can make a huge difference to use something that is CONSISTENT. Not doing so means you're going to get the cheapest option to buy, but the quite possibly the most expensive option when you start talking about new doctors visits and tests to determine what could be going wrong all of a sudden, when nothing went wrong except someone changed a variable by changing providers. Hopefully that sheds a little light on the difference.
There is nothing "alive" about a virus. You don't "kill" it. You either take away what one needs to propogate or "break" it in some way (literally damaging it so that it won't work anymore). That is why you get a "deactivated" flu vaccine as opposed to a "dead" flue vaccine.
I only mention this because it seems that those little virus buggers may end up just floating around inside the body indefinitely while the host is being treated. Remove the treatment or do something that causes the treatment to fail and you're right back to having a real problem on your hands.
Suffering sucks, but since you're an expert on perspective then please tell me who suffers more? The parents at Sandy Hook or the the parents St Jude Research hospital with kids fighting and dying of cancer? Or the parents whose kids join the army and die fighting for their country? Or the parents in other countries who kids are caught in the crossfire of war or die playing with landmines? Or the father / husband who listens to his wife and daughters being raped and burned alive because he didn't have a way to protect them from the thugs who have no regard for the laws limiting guns? Which one's suffering is more important?
No one would really feel comfortable answering that question and I only pose it because you wanted add a little perspective, but that's fooling yourself. You should have instead added a LOT of perspective. It's an issue that has many sides... not just two. And when you take notice that there are many sides it becomes a little harder to look at just one of them and call it fixable. Look, I'm a parent. Suffering and worry is unfortunately PART of life as a parent. Parents should not expect for their children to have perfect lives where no harm comes. At the same time no parent should ever have to bury a child and my heart wept for what those parents endure... not just at Sandy Hook, but all of those examples I gave. I honestly can't imagine it without being in physical pain myself.
However, while you have the right to voice your opinion that "we, as a nation, have proven ourselves incapable of properly storing, ascertaining who be allowed to have..." you should also keep in mind (really really keep it in mind) that a big part of why you have a protected right to voice your opinion (especially in Texas where if what you said got out people might come lookin' for ya) is because of all the suffering of all the moms and dads who lost their children and their own lives fighting for that right... a fight they would have surely lost to vastly more "powerful" force had they not had their own guns.
To know that they were to go through that suffering and to decide that it was worth it means that they were already suffering an even greater existence. They loved their families and they wanted them to be free. These people had to fight a government who wanted nothing more than squash them and who likely believed that these men were traitors and crazy nuts. There were plenty of people who were willing to just go with whatever the crown said (like you) in order to avoid more misery, but your right to say whatever you want to say today was won by a different group - a group that believed that freedom was more important than a little temporary suffering and who knew that ONLY the possibility of an armed revolt would keep the freedom they had fought for from being taken away by their new government.
You can disarm yourself if you wish and PERHAPS save a little suffering in the here and now, but dollars to donuts, in the end you will have created more suffering for far more people by allowing, no demanding, that not only you but everyone else be made a victim rather than remain people with some control over their own destiny.
This is insightful? I figured you were mostly joking (fun to pick on accountants and lawyers), but then I saw it was modded 'insightful' and that just made me sad. So I don't know if I'm responding to you or the mods, but this concept that the accountant (a private party) getting paid for a [valuable] service is somehow worse for society than the government getting the money to do with as they please is just plain... not... bright. The accountant still pays taxes. The accountant spends their earned money and in doing so stimulates the economy through their spending. All of those people who get the accountant's money... they pay taxes too. They all spend the part of the money that they get to keep with relative efficiency and on things that they found useful. And Uncle Sam gets a share off the top of each transaction along the way... over and over again. Not only that but Uncle Sam doesn't have to support (food stamps and unemployment) all of those people that the accountant funded because they are able to make a living selling things to people who have money to spend... which they wouldn't not have had if the government would have gotten it all. The government is the parasite not the guy actually out working for a living.
Every time I hear someone break out into song about how the 2nd amendment was written at a time of muskets being the norm and that they (the founders) would not have meant for it to cover the weaponry of today I get more confused. I've never really been able to put my finger on exactly why I get confused, but it's always just seemed so ridiculous to me that someone would think that the amendments are not designed to keep pace with the world and its advances. Let me just ask this question - maybe it will help me to understand where certain people, those who believe as you do, are coming from.
It seems that the logical extension of your stance on the 2nd amendment would beg the following questions. Since we didn't have the internet back then does that mean that the 1st amendment shouldn't apply to speech on the internet? I mean, come now, no way they saw that coming and frankly they could have never expected radical, potentially dangerous ideas to be able to spread so quickly. For that matter, since we didn't have automobiles does that mean that the 4th amendment shouldn't apply to your new SUV or, if you're lucky enough to have one, your own airplane? I mean, how could they gave intended to cover those things when they didn't even exist?
As a rule we take for granted and get all "up in arms" when the man infringes on one of the other rights protected (not granted - protected) by the constitution. We PAINSTAKINGLY point out how everything new is actually old (there is nothing new under the sun) and that the constitutionally protected rights should extend to this or that situation. But guns get different treatment and the 2nd amendment is treated differently. Why? And does it actually make sense to treat it differently or is it a purely emotional subject?
I don't think you understand what that means (first to invent VS first to file), and I think you're turning it in to something it's not. In reality you could always (and still can) patent something you "haven't invented yet" if by "invented" you define it as "having built". Legally, inventing something is coming up with an idea and putting it all on paper in legalese with pretty drawings and what not. That's "inventing" as far as the USPTO is concerned. And, they're right, but they've kind of bastardized the word (or someone has somewhere along the way). Everything else is just the child's play portion of actually "putting things together" (constructing) following the instruction presented by the inventor in the patent. You don't have to actually build something to invent it or to patent it... with one exception. A perpetual motion machine requires a prototype to be patented.
The change from first to invent to first to file just means that you do not retain rights to your invention by simply inventing it first. If you invent some widget in 2013 and then your neighbor sees what you've done and files a patent for it in 2015 they will get all rights to that IP... because they were the first to file. It used to be that being the first to invent was worth something, but that has now changed.
Finally, I think that Maximum Prophet was suggesting, as an improvement to the current patent system, that one should not be allowed to patent theoretical items, but rather only items that they've actually built.
I would mod this, but I don't know if it is funny or insightful. Probably both. Oh well, you're anon, so you get NEITHER!
"I don't care what the rules are, if they can be broken some will be."
If you can't understand that (what Kup said) being a STRONG argument against gun control then I suppose I can go on to explain, but I'm betting you can figure it out.
Try reading the rest of the discussion (there were several more exchanges - and one of them even covers your message!). But again... this is slashdot.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, the most striking thing about this conversation (on /.) is what seems to me to be an anti-advancement attitude. Did musket owners feel the same way about self-contained ammunition? Will future people feel that way before phasers or whatever are widely adopted?
I'm not sure gun owners (at least the type worried about EMPs and stuff) are anti-advancement as much as they are "it works now - if you want to make one component better you better make damn sure everything else still works".
I'm pretty sure all "old school enthusiasts" are like that though. My father in law used to be a carpenter. I bought a new cordless drill a few years back and he's like, "why? You not have a cord long enough?". I explained that it was nice to not to need the cord and that sometimes worrying about the cord is actually not something you want to have to do. He didn't care... corded ones worked fine. Then he was doing some work at the house one day and grabbed it and started working... "that's pretty neat I guess," was all he said. But you could tell he was actually coming around. A few days later he was doing some more work with a cordless saw and it died on him in the middle of a cut. Guess what happened? You'd of thought his gun went "click" instead of "bang". He found out he was right about them newfangled cordless tools and decided he would never be convinced to have only cordless drill on hand now. Ask him how he'd work in a power outage without cords is the answer I guess...
If you need a tool and it doesn't work it's frustrating. Muzzle loader shooters probably had a sense of arrogance when they pulled the trigger of their friends new self-contained ammo shooter and it went click instead of bang. I'm sure misfires were far more common in the early days. And musket shooters knew exactly how to load their powder and how to make it work every time. Those newfangled bullets were surely something to fear since they couldn't be trusted.
You're right. I was letting all other relevant things be equal in my discussion. If death by infections was reduced by 50% I'm sure people would take drugs that had a higher incidence of headaches as a side effect in order to keep from dying of the infection - even if they were very anti-pharma.
.0001% of the time. To my knowledge we don't do this with ANY other industry as a whole.
But you're missing an important bit of understanding as far as I can tell. Sometimes there simply isn't a trade off to be had no matter what people WANT the case to be... or it is so minuscule that it might as well not be there.
In the case of firearms, that's how most (American) firearms owners will see it. You've taken something and made it 3x more likely to fail all because it was having some USER ISSUES some
Guns today are purely mechanical. To introduce an electrical component, even if it actually IMPROVED reliability under normal circumstances (lets say from 99.99% to 99.999999%), it introduces a new point of failure into the system... and a biggie for gun owners.
Many of the people who own firearms for defense want to be prepared for "whatever" may come. This includes people in the military of course, but also retired military and regular old love my country, love my family citizens. One "whatever" scenerio is that of an EMP. Another is a nuclear attack (which would trigger an EMP). These people who want to be prepared would obviously never be interested in such an "advancement" an an electrical safety built into their firearms. In fact, they would actually be willing to PAY MORE to DOWNGRADE to a purely mechanical firearm because that other one could not be trusted in as many circumstances (especially the most dire ones) even if it was MORE trustworthy under "normal" circumstances.
I think it'd have to be a mechanical mechanism and there are already LOTS of those. People not using them (trigger locks, locking their firearms up, etc) and not following general gun safety rules (don't point it at others EVER, always assume it's loaded, keep your finger off the trigger, etc) are the failures. In general, firearms are IDEAL for the "needs" that they serve at this time. I'm not saying someone won't have an innovation that makes them more safe to own down the road, but I think for it to be acceptable under the circumstances in which we expect our guns to work (ALWAYS), or to atleast have a chance to work, adding electrical / smart components to them that would potentially disable them is going to be a no go.
And there you have it. I don't know your actual feelings on the matter, but whether you realize it or not you just made the point AGAINST gun control. Well done.
I know how my boss would feels if I took code that completed its task 99.99 percent of the time (.01% failure) and modified it so that it now completed it's actual task only 99.97% percent of the time (.03% failure). He'd want to know WHY in the hell I made a change that causes failure to occur 3x more often.
If the device was a pacemaker then that's 3x the deaths due to failure. Why would people buy that product if it was 3x more likely to fail?