The high printing and distributing costs are a major reason why academia is (oh so slowly) moving towards publishing on-line instead of in traditional paper journals.
Almost no individual scientists or laboratories in my field (biochemistry/molecular biology) actually gets the paper copies of any journal except for Science and Nature, unless it's specifically a journal they're an editor for. Everyone else either reads the papers online, or prints out a PDF (or reads them on their iPad or similar device - since I started doing this I haven't touched a paper copy). Institutional libraries still get paper copies, but I'm not sure how much use those actually get. If the printing costs really are a large part of the subscription fee, we're all getting screwed.
Very interesting (assuming it's reproducible and not an artifact), but will it scale any better than the accelerator method? Palladium is not exactly cheap.
Every time I read claims like this, I'm reminded of the central planners in communist regimes, who sincerely believed - with an almost religious fervor - that putting Marx's theories into practice would lead to explosive economic growth and a rapid increase in prosperity.
Hell, transmutation has been done for decades - it's one of the things the DOE is really good at (since I believe it was invented at what is now Berkeley Lab). You just need an accelerator suitable for heavy ions (really just a beefy, room-sized cyclotron), which are smashed into something else heavy at high energies. Most of the known transuranic elements were created this way. The problem is that it's horrifically inefficient - it's mostly just a scientific tool, used to study elements/isotopes that don't exist in nature and aren't stable for any useful length of time anyway.
You can't expect to come tromping into US companies with your tax handgun drawn and leave with 44% of their profits and have them survive international competition.
Which is why, when the government decides some essential industry is too important to leave to the Chinese, they traditionally offer huge tax breaks to the domestic producers. Problem solved. It's been done many times before, and surely will be in the future; this is no different. (I'm ignoring the obvious avenues for corruption, which are indeed serious, and if I were going to design my ideal fantasy system it would probably have no corporate income tax at all, but it's simply obtuse to pretend that the default corporate income tax rate is an absolute barrier.)
Are you sure their first impulse was to EAT it? I mean...it's Japan.
Japan is widely reviled for using its permitted "research whaling" activities as a cover for what essentially amounts to hunting for food. They kill whales (mostly minke, I think, which are at least fairly common) in the hundreds or thousands every year, I believe in the Antarctic, supposedly for research purposes, but since there is no prohibition on using the leftovers after the "research" is done, the meat ends up being sold in Japan. The problem is that most Japanese don't even know what whale meat tastes like, and from what I've read it's not very appealing, so it's not like there's any wide demand for the product - in fact the government has tried to promote its consumption to gain support for their policies. Obviously certain interests have great interest in the government, but it's never been clear to me whether this was a "protect our livelihoods" thing, or traditionalists and reactionaries trying to preserve a custom in the face of Western imperialism. (There's a lot of this in the US and Canada too, but it's the Indian tribes, not the central governments. Norway is one of the few other governments that pushes the practice, and you can buy whale meat there too.)
The Japanese are also notorious for their dolphin killing - there was a documentary called The Cove from a few years ago that captured the whole mess on film.
The 20th-century totalitarian states arguably all existed in part due to huge inequality during this period.
I think it's much more complicated than that: Russia was arguably even worse before the Gilded Age, because the majority of the population were serfs. The country wasn't particularly industrialized by 1917 either, so most of the Gilded Age excess passed it by. (The excesses of existing aristocracy, of course, continued right up until the Bolsheviks took over, and the peasants were still in miserable condition.) Germany was the complete opposite: the country was one of the best-developed in Europe, and Bismarck had introduced what were then incredibly novel and progressive welfare programs when it unified (of course, the primary goal was to discourage communist revolution). Even after WWI, despite hyperinflation and depression, Germany had an enormous middle class and was in much better condition - or at least had much more potential - than the vast majority of the world and even Europe. That Hitler was able to take over had very little to do with lower-class discontent; in fact, the parties which actually advocated (or claimed to) for the working class, the Social Democrats and Communists, were the primary opponents of the Nazis. If they had cooperated (instead of the Communists denouncing the Social Democrats as "social fascists"), or if the German conservatives didn't foolishly ally themselves with Hitler, the result could have been much different.
If anything, I would argue that the countries which experienced some of the most spectacular benefits and disparities of the Gilded Age - the US and UK - managed to stay relatively stable.
Oh you mean that the rich are getting richer so that makes you feel worse off in comparison even though you really are better off as well
Except that by the metric of household income the lower income tiers aren't particularly better off. The wealthy saw a significant increase in their incomes (inflation-adjusted) over the last several decades; the working poor saw almost none. See here, and especially this plot.
There're exceptions, as the two Space Shuttle accidents
The 1996 crash in Xichang, China was almost certainly far more deadly - the rocket almost immediately crashed into a nearby heavily populated area. It's not actually clear how many people died, since the government of course has a monopoly on information.
Yes I'm sure that it's irrelevant what 1.5 Billion directly involved people think...
You can probably dig up dozens of examples in the present day alone where large numbers of citizens of one country think they should be able to order around the citizens of another country because of some asinine historical claim. The Chinese have lots of strange ideas like this; so do the Russians. And tens of millions of Americans thought (and probably still do) that Iraq was involved in 9/11. But wishing something, however passionately, does not automatically make it true. Until at least 1980, mainland China's economic policies had nothing to do with the rapid growth and wealth of Taiwan in the late 20th century (well, except to the extent that Maoist incompetence meant one fewer competitor), and for the time being, the Taiwanese continue to make their own destiny (except for whatever effects PRC threats have) . No amount of fictitious posturing on either side changes the fact that Taiwan has been de facto independent for more than 60 years.
I believe Folding@Home is a seperate standalone project, so it's all or nothing. In addition, there are a LOT of protein folding projects. I'd really like to see them work together - or explain why they are different.
Not only are there a lot of projects like this, most of them - whatever their intrinsic scientific merit - have very little direct application to fighting disease. Sure, the people directing the projects like to claim that they're medically relevant, but this is largely because the NIH is the major source of funding. It's also really difficult to explain the motivations for such projects to a general audience without resorting to gross oversimplifications. (This isn't a criticism of protein folding specifically, it's all biomedical basic research that has these problems.) My guess is that it will take decades for most of the insights gleaned from these studies to filter down to a clinical setting.
The project that is arguably more relevant to disease is Rosetta@Home, but that's because of the protein design aspect, not the structure prediction. (In fact, Rosetta doesn't even do "protein folding" in the sense that Folding@Home does - it is a predictive tool, not a simulation engine like Folding@Home.)
it's those who scream the loudest about global warming that want us to wait twenty years until we can switch to renewable power sources.
Straw man. Ask most actual scientists who know anything about the topic, and we'll tell you we should be building nuclear power plants as fast as possible. (And yes, I would happily live near one, although since I live practically on top of a fault line it would be a pretty stupid place to build it.)
As for your characterization of Taiwan you should talk to some Chinese about that.
It's irrelevant what mainland Chinese think about Taiwan: like it or not, they've been under entirely different governments for the last six decades, and have followed much different courses of political and economic development.
Or maybe we should be happy that investment in scientific research is going up, and put petty patriotism behind us.
Except that one of the main reasons why we invest in scientific research is that it helps advance our economy. Obviously everyone benefits to some degree, but typically the country responsible for a new innovation benefits the most. As a citizen of the USA, I want our country to make new discoveries and technologies first, not because of petty patriotism, but because I will (probably) personally benefit from the expansion of our economy, far more than I would from the expansion of the Chinese economy. I'd rather not have to move to Shenzhen to find suitable employment.
In addition to that, the attitude of the Chinese government towards, well, pretty much everyone except Syria, Iran, and North Korea, does not inspire much confidence in their future benevolence. In fact, their foreign policy often seems to be adopting the very worst characteristics of the US in recent years: pointless aggression, tone-deafness, and an almost deliberate tendency to offend the rest of the world for no apparent reason. I'm fully aware that the US has done lots of shitty things around the world (I expect to be reminded of this anyway, as inevitably happens on Slashdot threads), but as a US citizen I at least have some control over what my government does. I have zero control over the actions of the Chinese government - neither does anyone else, their own citizens included. So it's a little difficult for me to trust in their good faith, or to be entirely optimistic about their continued growth. It's great that the lives of Chinese citizens are steadily improving, but I'm not very optimistic about the idea of China as the dominant superpower - again, not because I think the US is so great, but I live here and have to deal with it.
The reference to "free trade" means that China faces minimal barriers to trade with the US - i.e. exports can flow freely into the country, and there's no punishment for companies offshoring their manufacturing (or R&D, for that matter). Reciprocity isn't necessarily part of the deal.
If the talent is better and equal or cheaper in cost then this game is over
I guess the next question is "does this game actually matter?" Germany's population is about the same fraction of the US population as the US is of China, and presumably their R&D budget is much smaller than ours. But you never hear the Germans wailing about how the US has surpassed Germany in R&D spending; indeed, Germany's economy is one of the strongest in the world (especially Europe), with a large manufacturing sector and excellent technology, despite relatively high labor costs. Which doesn't mean that Germany is perfect or doesn't have problems - just that being overtaken in R&D spending doesn't automatically turn you into a third-world country.
China's labor is 1/10 the cost of the USA so in comparison, China is spending 5x times as much on R&D as the US or $2 billion if we compare actual wages.
That's only true if you assume that the entire R&D budget goes towards pay wages. In some cases this may be true, but there are an awful lot of technologies required for certain fields that don't magically get cheaper in China. Biotech equipment and consumables are good examples: a lot of these simply aren't produced anywhere besides the US, Japan, and Europe, and they're incredibly expensive. My favorite example is BGI, AKA the Beijing Genomics Institute, which has probably the largest sequencing capacity of any single site worldwide - using technology created entirely in the US and UK. Those sequencers were a huge initial investment, and excluding staff costs, these machines aren't cheap to run either. This isn't the only example: the Chinese supercomputer which was briefly at the top of the Top500 list was made using NVIDIA chips.
Of course the Chinese could eventually learn to make their own technology - if past precedent holds, they'll simply copy the western designs, which is what they're now doing for supercomputers. But they're not necessarily doing that either: in BGI's case, they're trying to simply buy one of the US companies that makes sequencing equipment, and making processors based on the Alpha chip.
Combine Ray's genius with the semantic toy shop that Google has assembled, and the informational framework for an autonomous intellect will become. The real question is how you make something like that self aware.
Who says we have to make it self-aware to reach the Singularity? A sentient program is only one possible route; others include artificially and massively expanding human intelligence via brain-computer interfaces or bioengineering, uploading our consciousness into the computer (I find this less compelling), or possibly group consciousness (also via brain-computer interfaces). I would also argue that some other technologies besides artificial intelligence could also be considered a Singularity, because they would effectively redefine what it means to be human and accelerate progress at an enormous pace. Self-replicating, "artificially intelligent" in the CS sense, but not truly sentient manufacturing nanotechnology is one example, or effective, ubiquitous longevity treatment. Imagine what we (both as individuals and societies) could accomplish if we solved the supply problem and everyone remained youthful into their 200s. But maybe these are simply another step on the path to a true Singularity.
This hardly seems like it's worth NASA's effort. You already know that the loons won't be convinced by it.
Stupid question: how many of these loons actually exist? Maybe I'm an out-of-touch elitist or don't visit the right websites, but the only discussion of the apocalypse that I recall seeing is in news articles about the phenomenon and/or debunking it. Which leads me to believe that it's at least 90% a media-created phenomenon, with only a mere handful of nutjobs actually believing this stuff. (A more intriguing possibility is that the entire thing really is bullshit, just someone's social engineering experiment, or perhaps a viral marketing campaign.)
Quite literally the owners of these private enterprises are telling the government to get out of their way and not mess with their businesses.
True, but let's at least use honest labeling: they're telling one branch of the federal government, specifically the executive branch. With a government as large and bureaucratic as ours it's inevitable that individual vested interests occasionally come to the fore, but it's unfair to slander the entire thing as if it's one monolithic entity (among other problems, many of the dissenting congressmen aren't even in the same party as the one running the executive branch and hence NASA). NASA is not at fault here.
The real exciting stuff in America is happening with private companies, who are essentially telling the U.S. government to get lost and not get in their way.
This seems like a misreading to me - SpaceX is perfectly happy to do business with the US government, and it's not like they're ignoring federal regulations to do their work. A more accurate statement would be that the US government has told private companies "go ahead, we'll stay out of the way."
There are already therapies that cost that much just to keep the patient alive for another year. I think they could get away with a substantially higher price for a one-time course of treatment that would actually cure cancer - probably with discounts for those who couldn't afford it.
Of course, the value of the free advertising and public goodwill for being the company that cured cancer would count for an awful lot too. (Probably also a Nobel prize in it for someone - the creators of Gleevec won the Lasker award, and that drug needs to be taken continually.)
My hope is that the companies who stand to profit from this test very thoroughly on a large batch of patients for many years.
They're called "Phase III clinical trials" in the US, and they are absolutely mandatory for obtaining FDA approval to market the product, and effectively mandatory if you want insurance companies to reimburse, without which the market would be prohibitively small. But even the best-run large-scale clinical trial, where every adverse effect is cataloged and reported, won't always catch every potential complication, especially those that may take years to manifest.
Slashdot Mirror
the letter was published in the bulletin of the ams (i think), with a rebuttal from Knuth telling him, politely, to go fuck himself.
This sounds fascinating (especially since I occasionally encounter similar problems) - do you have a URL for this? Google wasn't very helpful.
The high printing and distributing costs are a major reason why academia is (oh so slowly) moving towards publishing on-line instead of in traditional paper journals.
Almost no individual scientists or laboratories in my field (biochemistry/molecular biology) actually gets the paper copies of any journal except for Science and Nature, unless it's specifically a journal they're an editor for. Everyone else either reads the papers online, or prints out a PDF (or reads them on their iPad or similar device - since I started doing this I haven't touched a paper copy). Institutional libraries still get paper copies, but I'm not sure how much use those actually get. If the printing costs really are a large part of the subscription fee, we're all getting screwed.
Very interesting (assuming it's reproducible and not an artifact), but will it scale any better than the accelerator method? Palladium is not exactly cheap.
If we passed the Fair Tax...
Every time I read claims like this, I'm reminded of the central planners in communist regimes, who sincerely believed - with an almost religious fervor - that putting Marx's theories into practice would lead to explosive economic growth and a rapid increase in prosperity.
Hell, transmutation has been done for decades - it's one of the things the DOE is really good at (since I believe it was invented at what is now Berkeley Lab). You just need an accelerator suitable for heavy ions (really just a beefy, room-sized cyclotron), which are smashed into something else heavy at high energies. Most of the known transuranic elements were created this way. The problem is that it's horrifically inefficient - it's mostly just a scientific tool, used to study elements/isotopes that don't exist in nature and aren't stable for any useful length of time anyway.
You can't expect to come tromping into US companies with your tax handgun drawn and leave with 44% of their profits and have them survive international competition.
Which is why, when the government decides some essential industry is too important to leave to the Chinese, they traditionally offer huge tax breaks to the domestic producers. Problem solved. It's been done many times before, and surely will be in the future; this is no different. (I'm ignoring the obvious avenues for corruption, which are indeed serious, and if I were going to design my ideal fantasy system it would probably have no corporate income tax at all, but it's simply obtuse to pretend that the default corporate income tax rate is an absolute barrier.)
Ewww. Point taken, my apologies. I'm going to go hide under the bed and whimper now.
Are you sure their first impulse was to EAT it? I mean...it's Japan.
Japan is widely reviled for using its permitted "research whaling" activities as a cover for what essentially amounts to hunting for food. They kill whales (mostly minke, I think, which are at least fairly common) in the hundreds or thousands every year, I believe in the Antarctic, supposedly for research purposes, but since there is no prohibition on using the leftovers after the "research" is done, the meat ends up being sold in Japan. The problem is that most Japanese don't even know what whale meat tastes like, and from what I've read it's not very appealing, so it's not like there's any wide demand for the product - in fact the government has tried to promote its consumption to gain support for their policies. Obviously certain interests have great interest in the government, but it's never been clear to me whether this was a "protect our livelihoods" thing, or traditionalists and reactionaries trying to preserve a custom in the face of Western imperialism. (There's a lot of this in the US and Canada too, but it's the Indian tribes, not the central governments. Norway is one of the few other governments that pushes the practice, and you can buy whale meat there too.)
The Japanese are also notorious for their dolphin killing - there was a documentary called The Cove from a few years ago that captured the whole mess on film.
The 20th-century totalitarian states arguably all existed in part due to huge inequality during this period.
I think it's much more complicated than that: Russia was arguably even worse before the Gilded Age, because the majority of the population were serfs. The country wasn't particularly industrialized by 1917 either, so most of the Gilded Age excess passed it by. (The excesses of existing aristocracy, of course, continued right up until the Bolsheviks took over, and the peasants were still in miserable condition.) Germany was the complete opposite: the country was one of the best-developed in Europe, and Bismarck had introduced what were then incredibly novel and progressive welfare programs when it unified (of course, the primary goal was to discourage communist revolution). Even after WWI, despite hyperinflation and depression, Germany had an enormous middle class and was in much better condition - or at least had much more potential - than the vast majority of the world and even Europe. That Hitler was able to take over had very little to do with lower-class discontent; in fact, the parties which actually advocated (or claimed to) for the working class, the Social Democrats and Communists, were the primary opponents of the Nazis. If they had cooperated (instead of the Communists denouncing the Social Democrats as "social fascists"), or if the German conservatives didn't foolishly ally themselves with Hitler, the result could have been much different.
If anything, I would argue that the countries which experienced some of the most spectacular benefits and disparities of the Gilded Age - the US and UK - managed to stay relatively stable.
Oh you mean that the rich are getting richer so that makes you feel worse off in comparison even though you really are better off as well
Except that by the metric of household income the lower income tiers aren't particularly better off. The wealthy saw a significant increase in their incomes (inflation-adjusted) over the last several decades; the working poor saw almost none. See here, and especially this plot.
There're exceptions, as the two Space Shuttle accidents
The 1996 crash in Xichang, China was almost certainly far more deadly - the rocket almost immediately crashed into a nearby heavily populated area. It's not actually clear how many people died, since the government of course has a monopoly on information.
Yes I'm sure that it's irrelevant what 1.5 Billion directly involved people think...
You can probably dig up dozens of examples in the present day alone where large numbers of citizens of one country think they should be able to order around the citizens of another country because of some asinine historical claim. The Chinese have lots of strange ideas like this; so do the Russians. And tens of millions of Americans thought (and probably still do) that Iraq was involved in 9/11. But wishing something, however passionately, does not automatically make it true. Until at least 1980, mainland China's economic policies had nothing to do with the rapid growth and wealth of Taiwan in the late 20th century (well, except to the extent that Maoist incompetence meant one fewer competitor), and for the time being, the Taiwanese continue to make their own destiny (except for whatever effects PRC threats have) . No amount of fictitious posturing on either side changes the fact that Taiwan has been de facto independent for more than 60 years.
I believe Folding@Home is a seperate standalone project, so it's all or nothing. In addition, there are a LOT of protein folding projects. I'd really like to see them work together - or explain why they are different.
Not only are there a lot of projects like this, most of them - whatever their intrinsic scientific merit - have very little direct application to fighting disease. Sure, the people directing the projects like to claim that they're medically relevant, but this is largely because the NIH is the major source of funding. It's also really difficult to explain the motivations for such projects to a general audience without resorting to gross oversimplifications. (This isn't a criticism of protein folding specifically, it's all biomedical basic research that has these problems.) My guess is that it will take decades for most of the insights gleaned from these studies to filter down to a clinical setting.
The project that is arguably more relevant to disease is Rosetta@Home, but that's because of the protein design aspect, not the structure prediction. (In fact, Rosetta doesn't even do "protein folding" in the sense that Folding@Home does - it is a predictive tool, not a simulation engine like Folding@Home.)
it's those who scream the loudest about global warming that want us to wait twenty years until we can switch to renewable power sources.
Straw man. Ask most actual scientists who know anything about the topic, and we'll tell you we should be building nuclear power plants as fast as possible. (And yes, I would happily live near one, although since I live practically on top of a fault line it would be a pretty stupid place to build it.)
As for your characterization of Taiwan you should talk to some Chinese about that.
It's irrelevant what mainland Chinese think about Taiwan: like it or not, they've been under entirely different governments for the last six decades, and have followed much different courses of political and economic development.
Or maybe we should be happy that investment in scientific research is going up, and put petty patriotism behind us.
Except that one of the main reasons why we invest in scientific research is that it helps advance our economy. Obviously everyone benefits to some degree, but typically the country responsible for a new innovation benefits the most. As a citizen of the USA, I want our country to make new discoveries and technologies first, not because of petty patriotism, but because I will (probably) personally benefit from the expansion of our economy, far more than I would from the expansion of the Chinese economy. I'd rather not have to move to Shenzhen to find suitable employment.
In addition to that, the attitude of the Chinese government towards, well, pretty much everyone except Syria, Iran, and North Korea, does not inspire much confidence in their future benevolence. In fact, their foreign policy often seems to be adopting the very worst characteristics of the US in recent years: pointless aggression, tone-deafness, and an almost deliberate tendency to offend the rest of the world for no apparent reason. I'm fully aware that the US has done lots of shitty things around the world (I expect to be reminded of this anyway, as inevitably happens on Slashdot threads), but as a US citizen I at least have some control over what my government does. I have zero control over the actions of the Chinese government - neither does anyone else, their own citizens included. So it's a little difficult for me to trust in their good faith, or to be entirely optimistic about their continued growth. It's great that the lives of Chinese citizens are steadily improving, but I'm not very optimistic about the idea of China as the dominant superpower - again, not because I think the US is so great, but I live here and have to deal with it.
The reference to "free trade" means that China faces minimal barriers to trade with the US - i.e. exports can flow freely into the country, and there's no punishment for companies offshoring their manufacturing (or R&D, for that matter). Reciprocity isn't necessarily part of the deal.
If the talent is better and equal or cheaper in cost then this game is over
I guess the next question is "does this game actually matter?" Germany's population is about the same fraction of the US population as the US is of China, and presumably their R&D budget is much smaller than ours. But you never hear the Germans wailing about how the US has surpassed Germany in R&D spending; indeed, Germany's economy is one of the strongest in the world (especially Europe), with a large manufacturing sector and excellent technology, despite relatively high labor costs. Which doesn't mean that Germany is perfect or doesn't have problems - just that being overtaken in R&D spending doesn't automatically turn you into a third-world country.
China's labor is 1/10 the cost of the USA so in comparison, China is spending 5x times as much on R&D as the US or $2 billion if we compare actual wages.
That's only true if you assume that the entire R&D budget goes towards pay wages. In some cases this may be true, but there are an awful lot of technologies required for certain fields that don't magically get cheaper in China. Biotech equipment and consumables are good examples: a lot of these simply aren't produced anywhere besides the US, Japan, and Europe, and they're incredibly expensive. My favorite example is BGI, AKA the Beijing Genomics Institute, which has probably the largest sequencing capacity of any single site worldwide - using technology created entirely in the US and UK. Those sequencers were a huge initial investment, and excluding staff costs, these machines aren't cheap to run either. This isn't the only example: the Chinese supercomputer which was briefly at the top of the Top500 list was made using NVIDIA chips.
Of course the Chinese could eventually learn to make their own technology - if past precedent holds, they'll simply copy the western designs, which is what they're now doing for supercomputers. But they're not necessarily doing that either: in BGI's case, they're trying to simply buy one of the US companies that makes sequencing equipment, and making processors based on the Alpha chip.
Combine Ray's genius with the semantic toy shop that Google has assembled, and the informational framework for an autonomous intellect will become. The real question is how you make something like that self aware.
Who says we have to make it self-aware to reach the Singularity? A sentient program is only one possible route; others include artificially and massively expanding human intelligence via brain-computer interfaces or bioengineering, uploading our consciousness into the computer (I find this less compelling), or possibly group consciousness (also via brain-computer interfaces). I would also argue that some other technologies besides artificial intelligence could also be considered a Singularity, because they would effectively redefine what it means to be human and accelerate progress at an enormous pace. Self-replicating, "artificially intelligent" in the CS sense, but not truly sentient manufacturing nanotechnology is one example, or effective, ubiquitous longevity treatment. Imagine what we (both as individuals and societies) could accomplish if we solved the supply problem and everyone remained youthful into their 200s. But maybe these are simply another step on the path to a true Singularity.
(Yes, I read too much science fiction.)
This hardly seems like it's worth NASA's effort. You already know that the loons won't be convinced by it.
Stupid question: how many of these loons actually exist? Maybe I'm an out-of-touch elitist or don't visit the right websites, but the only discussion of the apocalypse that I recall seeing is in news articles about the phenomenon and/or debunking it. Which leads me to believe that it's at least 90% a media-created phenomenon, with only a mere handful of nutjobs actually believing this stuff. (A more intriguing possibility is that the entire thing really is bullshit, just someone's social engineering experiment, or perhaps a viral marketing campaign.)
Quite literally the owners of these private enterprises are telling the government to get out of their way and not mess with their businesses.
True, but let's at least use honest labeling: they're telling one branch of the federal government, specifically the executive branch. With a government as large and bureaucratic as ours it's inevitable that individual vested interests occasionally come to the fore, but it's unfair to slander the entire thing as if it's one monolithic entity (among other problems, many of the dissenting congressmen aren't even in the same party as the one running the executive branch and hence NASA). NASA is not at fault here.
The real exciting stuff in America is happening with private companies, who are essentially telling the U.S. government to get lost and not get in their way.
This seems like a misreading to me - SpaceX is perfectly happy to do business with the US government, and it's not like they're ignoring federal regulations to do their work. A more accurate statement would be that the US government has told private companies "go ahead, we'll stay out of the way."
They can charge $100,000 for it as pure profit
There are already therapies that cost that much just to keep the patient alive for another year. I think they could get away with a substantially higher price for a one-time course of treatment that would actually cure cancer - probably with discounts for those who couldn't afford it.
Of course, the value of the free advertising and public goodwill for being the company that cured cancer would count for an awful lot too. (Probably also a Nobel prize in it for someone - the creators of Gleevec won the Lasker award, and that drug needs to be taken continually.)
My hope is that the companies who stand to profit from this test very thoroughly on a large batch of patients for many years.
They're called "Phase III clinical trials" in the US, and they are absolutely mandatory for obtaining FDA approval to market the product, and effectively mandatory if you want insurance companies to reimburse, without which the market would be prohibitively small. But even the best-run large-scale clinical trial, where every adverse effect is cataloged and reported, won't always catch every potential complication, especially those that may take years to manifest.