Having two charging connectors isn't necessarily a bad thing, as sticking with an old connector might end up costing more over time by saddling you with an ancient interface.
Still, any change should be carefully considered and researched, especially if you, as a company, have standardized on a port. Something along the lines of 'pre-2000 connector', '2000 on connecter'. Next redesign: 2010.
Hmmm... Maybe it integrates that technology used for help desk lines to determine how irate a caller is?
You started cursing, it looked you up, found that you have the 'full' service plan covering even 'accidental' damage and decided to charge to prevent you from 'accidentally' driving over it?
You have yet to show an actual instance of this happening in the pharmaceutical industries.
Never argued that it's happened. Merely what would happen if we cut the profit out of the industry.
they send more money on marketing than on research
Tells me that marketing has a more immediate effect on income than research. This is news?
The fact that they move elsewhere is irrelevant in so far as you are interested in having a supply of medicines available for the US citizens.
I was thinking about them switching from medical investments such as drug companies to non-medical fields like energy companies, cable/TV companies, etc...
And the idea that somehow pharmaceutical companies would simply give up and this create a void is absurd.
No, variously they'd shrink and perform less research. Hint: Research tends to get cut before marketing.
BTW, the medical mutual fund I took a quick look at not long ago isn't performing out of line of other mutual funds. The energy one looks like a much better buy at the moment.
I pointed out in the first post a desire to see more extensive workups before the prescribing of drugs. I gave an example getting a bacterial sample and testing it to determine the most effective antibiotic. This doesn't mean that there aren't more possibilities, of course.
Beyond just lowering blood pressure on the basis of various factors based on huge populations, a more personal workup is called for.
The USA has a number of issues, I'll agree. For one thing, we could probably increase our life expectancy by a measurable amount simply by ending the war on (some) drugs. We'd certainly reduce our prison populations.
Why should the US subsidize the cost of new drugs for the rest of the world?
Because it's the only real way to get them for ourselves?
I don't think the US is getting more value from new drugs over the last five years than we are paying fore existing drugs.
My grandfather is, at least. He's on some new, much more effective drugs for treating altheimer's. I want to keep my grandfather, thank you very much.
Similiar situation for cancer, various heart diseases, even diabetes. New antibiotics come out fairly frequently. That new vaccine for HPV to prevent cervical cancer. It's just that we aren't making staggering discoveries like we used to. It's not so long ago that the FDC tightened up chemotherapy drug requirements - it used to simply be required that the drug not be fatal(immediately) and shrunk tumors. Now they have to prove that, on average, they shrink tumors more for their toxicity.
IMO: The increase drug cost simply promotes advertising drugs which has little net value.
From talking with my grandparents, a fair bit of the advertising is in the form of sample drugs - which allows them to be issued a supply sufficient to let the mailorder company get their prescription to them for substantially cheaper than local pharmacies(assuming they even carry the drugs).
Other than that, yes, I've heard that doctors get it even worse than we do on the advertising front. Some buy into it, resulting in people on drugs that aren't effective enough to justify their additional cost. Still, you could counter that in some cases people would be stuck on less effective older(if cheaper) drugs if the doctor hasn't heard about the new drug.
Of course, I'm also of the opinion we're getting to the point that we should have some sort of somantic/genetic workup before prescribing many of the new(and old) drugs to determine which one will be the most effective for the cost*. There's just too many variables anymore for your average doctor to keep track of.
For example - bacterial infections - I'd LOVE to see an affordable and fast test that could take a small sample and spit out a listing of the most effective antibacterials against it(so you can balance allergies, availability, and cost). Probably be worth it even if it cost as much as the common treatment. Test + treatment would be cheaper than treatment1 + treatment2 + treatment3 + hospital stay due to complications because the first two treatments didn't work.
*Wouldn't be a linear scale, especially for the nastier stuff. In some cases 10X the cost for 2X the performance is a good tradeoff. Heck, sometimes 10X the cost for 110% the performance is worth it - and sometimes it isn't.
Ah, now I have a better idea of what you were asking for. Before I was simply responding to the part you quoted. As did the other responder. Given that we BOTH had the same impression, maybe you needed to reword a bit?
It also yields a link stating that 75-80% of the cost and 60% of the time is in the human testing phase.
One of the links that didn't pop up numbers on the goolge page says $802 Million(in 2000 dollars) for R&D, and 1.1 Billion in pre-approval capital costs. I'm not 100% sure, but given the wording, it looks like it includes R&D costs for failed prospects as well (Total medical R&D/number of approved drugs = average cost per approved drug).
For a drug that cost a 'mere' $1 Billion and costs $10 to produce&distribute, like I said, you're going to have to sell 12 MILLION of them in order to start making a profit with a 10X markup.
The situation is much like military planes like the F22. Development cost actually swamps the individual manufacturing cost. Each plane might only cost $10 Million to make, but if you spent a Billion developing it, then only build a hundred of them, each plane ends up 'costing' $20 Million if you include development costs. And the F22 cost more than a billion to develop, though we're ordering more than a hundred of them.
The second part is investment return. Assume that I'm a capital investor. I'm looking to invest X amount of money, delaying my gratifaction in order to make MORE money. I look around in markets - Savings bonds are earning 3% for EE, 4.28% for I(30 year). I look in other bonds, slightly more risk in exchange for a slightly higher profit. I look at stocks, various values, returns, etc... Generally more return at more risk, again.
The patented drug manufacturing market could be considered 'undervalued'. IE there's an excess of profit for the cost, as compared to something like car manufactures. So I invest in that, because there's a good return. This translates into more investment, more dollars devoted to making drugs - and that means new drugs are needed(as old ones lose patent protection and drop in price/returns).
If the USA suddenly flipped to a price-negotiation/dictation* system, the profit wouldn't be there, the area would no longer be under-valued, investors would jump ship, moving elsewhere. Money would dry up, leaving less for research into creating new drugs. Ergo, fewer new drugs.
*Sell at the price we state or you don't sell in our country at all.
If investors don't have a cash cow available(US medical market), they'll move somewhere else in some proportion, decreasing the funds and numbers of developers in the market creating new drugs. Therefore, fewer drugs.
Step one for figuring this stuff out for me is along the lines of 'Assume almost all investors are greedy sociopaths looking for the largest profit'.
4. 90+% of AIDS patients(in the USA) are already capable of affording the medicines on their own, through healthcare or privtate means. The rest can be picked up cheaper by simply buying the drugs through medicare or other indiginent health service.
Though I DO think that medicare should be empowered to be able to negotiate drug prices much like Canada does.
Here's how it works(from his point of view) Drug company A develops drug X.
Drug X cost $1 Billion to develop and gain FDA* approval. It also, in massive quantities, costs $10/dose to manufacture and distribute for the typical treatment course.
Now, if we sell X for $100/treatment, we'll have to sell ~12 million courses in order to start making money.
However Canada, having socialized medicine, acts a lot like Walmart. It knows that it costs $10/dose to make, so they offer $12/course.
As a business, I have to look at providing a million courses at a profit of $2 a course, or not making any money from canada. Yet I'm NOT going to make back my research costs off of what Canada is willing to pay.
So I charge $100/course in the USA to make back my profit, meaning that any drug company looking to make drugs isn't going to count much on the potential profit of selling drugs in socialized places like Canada & Europe. They'll look at the USA.
So the USA ends up paying for the research and profit in order to get drugs developed commercially, in the form of higher drug costs.
If the USA did NOT do this, say by going the same way as Canada and Europe, we'd see substantially lower drug development because the profit is gone.
*While other countries generally have their own equivalent, the FDA seems to be the gold standard, IE once it has FDA approval, gaining approval in other countries is trivial.
The FDA should also be less stringent in the drugs it approves: once you figure out toxicity and dosing, the therapeutics should be routinely available.
I'll agree about speeding up the process in some respects, but we're deathly afraid of more Vioxx type disasters. And Vioxx is only the latest of drugs withdrawn - remember thalidomide and birth defects?
We need to find a balance, maybe not where we are, but there has to be a balance.
On the topic of this, costs are also raised when the company has to basically protect itself financially from when a drug reacts poorly with someone, they die, and the company is sued.
This is a huge part of it. There are a number of drugs that are used by both humans and animals, such as anti-biotics. It's literally happened that my mom and the dog have been on the same drug - the pills are identical, the generic name the same, etc... It was a common anti-biotic.
The cost(before insurance) for Mom: $70 For the dog: $7.
The difference: People don't generally sue if their dog(or other animal) gets a side effect from a drug. Even if they do the damages are generally limited to the value of the animal(a few thousand, at most). But people will do so at the relative drop of a hat for themselves or their children, starting at tens of thousands of dollars, generally in the hundreds of thousands, and sometimes even in the millions.
As for Bill and his practices, I'm reminded of a call in a recent thread to boycott Amazon for their patent nonsense, meanwhile I'm personally boycotting Barnes&Nobles for some VERY uncompetitive local business practices*. I feel like I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place.
I have to agree. The biggest reason for increasing costs of medical care in the USA and elsewhere is the fact that we can do so much more - but it all costs money. Sure, we can treat cancer 10X better than we used to - but it costs 10X more to do so.
*When building a new store in the local mall, they got the mall to agree to having no other bookstores in the mall, which involved not-renewing/revoking the lease to the only competitor in the area. Yes, it's a small area. So there's no other dedicated new-book store(still a used one around) within a hours drive.
The original poster also forgets that the new drug still costs money to make, besides having to pay back the millions. There's not many new drugs today that cost less than $10 for a course to make today.
Still, I had a nasty thought: Drug company makes and sells the treatment to the patient that can afford the $100. Then turns around and donates the treatment to a non-profit that uses it to treat the guy who theoretically could only pay $10.
Then the company turns around and sticks a $100 tax deduction into their return for charitable donations, which actually saves them more money than what they would have gained by somehow selling the treatment to patient A for $100 and only extracting $10 from B.
While the drug companies would be willing to pay quite a bit for it, so wouldn't the healthcare plan companies in order to get it released and saving them money.
I'm also willing to bet that even the US government would look at prosecuting any drug company that locked up a cure for a fatal disease to make more money.
I, for one, would willingly let the company make money hand over fist by selling the treatment very expensively, but throw the book at the company and it's executives if they locked the cure up - I'd actually sit there and start hitting them with murder charges for every AIDS patient who died of complications from then on out. Making the lawsuits against tobacco companies look positively nice in comparison.
Then again, I'd also support the establishment of a 'reasonable cost medicine' research fund - the purpose of which is to discover and gain FDA approval for new usages of non-patentable chemicals and drugs. I'm not sure whether I'd go with a grant or bounty type system. Probably go hybrid for a while. X$ for grants to 'finish up' promising drugs, Y$ for bounties for finding and gaining approval for a new use of a drug.
My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I think the limit up here is 8. It'd take some dedicated screw-ups to mess up that many ballots.
In addition, it shouldn't take too much effort to have the machine spit out ballots with anomalies for hand counting.
The other concern is balancing handicapped access and anonymity. Still, touch screens aren't exactly friendly to the visually impaired by default either.
Well, you could look at it the opposite way: Currently, and especially in the past, the only way to get the pressures and heat necessary for a useful amount of fusion was to set of a nuke - thus you were(and still are) stuck using a fission reaction to get the necessary boost to get the fusion reaction to go.
but H-bomb fusion isn't at all practical for a power source at this time
Agreed. That's why we're looking at different processes for fusion power.
Still, by looking at the history and the way fusion goes - I figure it's a technology that will scale UP well, but not down. The latest proposal I saw had absolutely no provision for harvesting power - yet is as large as a conventional nuclear power plant.
I figure it's something like surface area vs volume - double the length/width/height of the reactor, it's got four times the surface area, four times the containment power demands, yet produces eight times the power.
That gives you some gargantuan sizes needed for useful fusion power - and you thought fission plants were expensive and slow to build.;)
Still two radios for simultaneous 11n in 2.4 GHz and 5 Ghz.
CURRENT enterprise level APs have dual radios in them. They're capable of running 802.11a & g networks simultaneously at full speed.
Hmmm... Research shows that while 802.11n pretty much specifies multiple antennas, it doesn't state multiple radios. From my earlier readings this wasn't made clear.
Instead, we have channel bonding, which means that you're transmitting across a broader spectrum, and multiple transmit chains (MIMO) means that your transmits are less efficient, even at the same power level as non-11n.
Thus requiring more power to beat the noise floor.
More likely, they just found a better material for arresting cables or something.
But that can just be hooked up to existing carriers. I think that it's probably along the lines of the electric catapult - the hook/cable might not be magnetized, but the rail the cable's hooked to could be set up as a induction brake. A steadier stop would reduce wear and tear.
Step 1: Find two sockets that are on different circuits. Step 2: Verify that the circuits are on seperate phases Step 3: Rig a cable going from hot 1 to hot 2* Step 4: Fry circuits using etherkiller type cable@240V
Alternatively, use a dryer socket or something.
*Make sure both circuits aren't GFI, otherwise they'll pop pretty much instantly.
You could probably achieve this by switching to higher efficiency components.
But wouldn't corporate APs, already restricted to PoE, already be using low power devices? I don't think that they wouldn't keep power usage down if they could for the PoE if it was a trivial process.
Still, I agree that power demands will probably come down with time.
I bet most of the energy is in the form of heat from the individual DC converters plugged in to long extension cords laid along the drop ceiling to the nearest electric column.
And you'd be incorrect. Most corporate infrastructures that heavily/professionally deploy wireless is going to due it via PoE - putting in a PoE switch or injector is much cheaper than wiring dozens or hundreds of new power jacks up in ceilings and such. With PoE all you need to do is run a ethernet cable over to the AP to provide both network access and power.
And PoE is only capable of transmitting so much power. 12.95 watts at the device. The new N devices are being reported at 18 watts. We have a little problem here...
While the processing requirements of N is requiring more wattage at the processor, I figure that the dual-radio feature of N is also significant - corporate ones you normally have both a 2.4GHz and a 5GHz radio. With N you're possibly doubling the number of radios to four. This increases power demand. If nothing else, you're also subletting the frequency spectrum even more, thus need to, on average, transmit at a higher power level overall to beat the noise floor.
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Having two charging connectors isn't necessarily a bad thing, as sticking with an old connector might end up costing more over time by saddling you with an ancient interface.
Still, any change should be carefully considered and researched, especially if you, as a company, have standardized on a port. Something along the lines of 'pre-2000 connector', '2000 on connecter'. Next redesign: 2010.
Hmmm... Maybe it integrates that technology used for help desk lines to determine how irate a caller is?
You started cursing, it looked you up, found that you have the 'full' service plan covering even 'accidental' damage and decided to charge to prevent you from 'accidentally' driving over it?
That's why you choose your non-profit carefully to have income/wealth restrictions such that the rich customer can't just go to the charity.
That and you don't let the non-profit have an unlimited number of doses.
You have yet to show an actual instance of this happening in the pharmaceutical industries.
Never argued that it's happened. Merely what would happen if we cut the profit out of the industry.
they send more money on marketing than on research
Tells me that marketing has a more immediate effect on income than research. This is news?
The fact that they move elsewhere is irrelevant in so far as you are interested in having a supply of medicines available for the US citizens.
I was thinking about them switching from medical investments such as drug companies to non-medical fields like energy companies, cable/TV companies, etc...
And the idea that somehow pharmaceutical companies would simply give up and this create a void is absurd.
No, variously they'd shrink and perform less research. Hint: Research tends to get cut before marketing.
BTW, the medical mutual fund I took a quick look at not long ago isn't performing out of line of other mutual funds. The energy one looks like a much better buy at the moment.
I pointed out in the first post a desire to see more extensive workups before the prescribing of drugs. I gave an example getting a bacterial sample and testing it to determine the most effective antibiotic. This doesn't mean that there aren't more possibilities, of course.
Beyond just lowering blood pressure on the basis of various factors based on huge populations, a more personal workup is called for.
The USA has a number of issues, I'll agree. For one thing, we could probably increase our life expectancy by a measurable amount simply by ending the war on (some) drugs. We'd certainly reduce our prison populations.
Why should the US subsidize the cost of new drugs for the rest of the world?
Because it's the only real way to get them for ourselves?
I don't think the US is getting more value from new drugs over the last five years than we are paying fore existing drugs.
My grandfather is, at least. He's on some new, much more effective drugs for treating altheimer's. I want to keep my grandfather, thank you very much.
Similiar situation for cancer, various heart diseases, even diabetes. New antibiotics come out fairly frequently. That new vaccine for HPV to prevent cervical cancer. It's just that we aren't making staggering discoveries like we used to. It's not so long ago that the FDC tightened up chemotherapy drug requirements - it used to simply be required that the drug not be fatal(immediately) and shrunk tumors. Now they have to prove that, on average, they shrink tumors more for their toxicity.
IMO: The increase drug cost simply promotes advertising drugs which has little net value.
From talking with my grandparents, a fair bit of the advertising is in the form of sample drugs - which allows them to be issued a supply sufficient to let the mailorder company get their prescription to them for substantially cheaper than local pharmacies(assuming they even carry the drugs).
Other than that, yes, I've heard that doctors get it even worse than we do on the advertising front. Some buy into it, resulting in people on drugs that aren't effective enough to justify their additional cost. Still, you could counter that in some cases people would be stuck on less effective older(if cheaper) drugs if the doctor hasn't heard about the new drug.
Of course, I'm also of the opinion we're getting to the point that we should have some sort of somantic/genetic workup before prescribing many of the new(and old) drugs to determine which one will be the most effective for the cost*. There's just too many variables anymore for your average doctor to keep track of.
For example - bacterial infections - I'd LOVE to see an affordable and fast test that could take a small sample and spit out a listing of the most effective antibacterials against it(so you can balance allergies, availability, and cost). Probably be worth it even if it cost as much as the common treatment. Test + treatment would be cheaper than treatment1 + treatment2 + treatment3 + hospital stay due to complications because the first two treatments didn't work.
*Wouldn't be a linear scale, especially for the nastier stuff. In some cases 10X the cost for 2X the performance is a good tradeoff. Heck, sometimes 10X the cost for 110% the performance is worth it - and sometimes it isn't.
Ah, now I have a better idea of what you were asking for. Before I was simply responding to the part you quoted. As did the other responder. Given that we BOTH had the same impression, maybe you needed to reword a bit?
First page of google on 'drug development cost' pops up $2B, $1.7B, and $1.7B.
It also yields a link stating that 75-80% of the cost and 60% of the time is in the human testing phase.
One of the links that didn't pop up numbers on the goolge page says $802 Million(in 2000 dollars) for R&D, and 1.1 Billion in pre-approval capital costs. I'm not 100% sure, but given the wording, it looks like it includes R&D costs for failed prospects as well (Total medical R&D/number of approved drugs = average cost per approved drug).
For a drug that cost a 'mere' $1 Billion and costs $10 to produce&distribute, like I said, you're going to have to sell 12 MILLION of them in order to start making a profit with a 10X markup.
The situation is much like military planes like the F22. Development cost actually swamps the individual manufacturing cost. Each plane might only cost $10 Million to make, but if you spent a Billion developing it, then only build a hundred of them, each plane ends up 'costing' $20 Million if you include development costs. And the F22 cost more than a billion to develop, though we're ordering more than a hundred of them.
The second part is investment return. Assume that I'm a capital investor. I'm looking to invest X amount of money, delaying my gratifaction in order to make MORE money. I look around in markets - Savings bonds are earning 3% for EE, 4.28% for I(30 year). I look in other bonds, slightly more risk in exchange for a slightly higher profit. I look at stocks, various values, returns, etc... Generally more return at more risk, again.
The patented drug manufacturing market could be considered 'undervalued'. IE there's an excess of profit for the cost, as compared to something like car manufactures. So I invest in that, because there's a good return. This translates into more investment, more dollars devoted to making drugs - and that means new drugs are needed(as old ones lose patent protection and drop in price/returns).
If the USA suddenly flipped to a price-negotiation/dictation* system, the profit wouldn't be there, the area would no longer be under-valued, investors would jump ship, moving elsewhere. Money would dry up, leaving less for research into creating new drugs. Ergo, fewer new drugs.
*Sell at the price we state or you don't sell in our country at all.
Uhh... Basic profit motive?
If investors don't have a cash cow available(US medical market), they'll move somewhere else in some proportion, decreasing the funds and numbers of developers in the market creating new drugs. Therefore, fewer drugs.
Step one for figuring this stuff out for me is along the lines of 'Assume almost all investors are greedy sociopaths looking for the largest profit'.
I think that you also missed a point
4. 90+% of AIDS patients(in the USA) are already capable of affording the medicines on their own, through healthcare or privtate means. The rest can be picked up cheaper by simply buying the drugs through medicare or other indiginent health service.
Though I DO think that medicare should be empowered to be able to negotiate drug prices much like Canada does.
Here's how it works(from his point of view)
Drug company A develops drug X.
Drug X cost $1 Billion to develop and gain FDA* approval. It also, in massive quantities, costs $10/dose to manufacture and distribute for the typical treatment course.
Now, if we sell X for $100/treatment, we'll have to sell ~12 million courses in order to start making money.
However Canada, having socialized medicine, acts a lot like Walmart. It knows that it costs $10/dose to make, so they offer $12/course.
As a business, I have to look at providing a million courses at a profit of $2 a course, or not making any money from canada. Yet I'm NOT going to make back my research costs off of what Canada is willing to pay.
So I charge $100/course in the USA to make back my profit, meaning that any drug company looking to make drugs isn't going to count much on the potential profit of selling drugs in socialized places like Canada & Europe. They'll look at the USA.
So the USA ends up paying for the research and profit in order to get drugs developed commercially, in the form of higher drug costs.
If the USA did NOT do this, say by going the same way as Canada and Europe, we'd see substantially lower drug development because the profit is gone.
*While other countries generally have their own equivalent, the FDA seems to be the gold standard, IE once it has FDA approval, gaining approval in other countries is trivial.
The FDA should also be less stringent in the drugs it approves: once you figure out toxicity and dosing, the therapeutics should be routinely available.
I'll agree about speeding up the process in some respects, but we're deathly afraid of more Vioxx type disasters. And Vioxx is only the latest of drugs withdrawn - remember thalidomide and birth defects?
We need to find a balance, maybe not where we are, but there has to be a balance.
On the topic of this, costs are also raised when the company has to basically protect itself financially from when a drug reacts poorly with someone, they die, and the company is sued.
This is a huge part of it. There are a number of drugs that are used by both humans and animals, such as anti-biotics. It's literally happened that my mom and the dog have been on the same drug - the pills are identical, the generic name the same, etc... It was a common anti-biotic.
The cost(before insurance) for Mom: $70
For the dog: $7.
The difference: People don't generally sue if their dog(or other animal) gets a side effect from a drug. Even if they do the damages are generally limited to the value of the animal(a few thousand, at most). But people will do so at the relative drop of a hat for themselves or their children, starting at tens of thousands of dollars, generally in the hundreds of thousands, and sometimes even in the millions.
As for Bill and his practices, I'm reminded of a call in a recent thread to boycott Amazon for their patent nonsense, meanwhile I'm personally boycotting Barnes&Nobles for some VERY uncompetitive local business practices*. I feel like I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place.
I have to agree. The biggest reason for increasing costs of medical care in the USA and elsewhere is the fact that we can do so much more - but it all costs money. Sure, we can treat cancer 10X better than we used to - but it costs 10X more to do so.
*When building a new store in the local mall, they got the mall to agree to having no other bookstores in the mall, which involved not-renewing/revoking the lease to the only competitor in the area. Yes, it's a small area. So there's no other dedicated new-book store(still a used one around) within a hours drive.
The original poster also forgets that the new drug still costs money to make, besides having to pay back the millions. There's not many new drugs today that cost less than $10 for a course to make today.
Still, I had a nasty thought: Drug company makes and sells the treatment to the patient that can afford the $100. Then turns around and donates the treatment to a non-profit that uses it to treat the guy who theoretically could only pay $10.
Then the company turns around and sticks a $100 tax deduction into their return for charitable donations, which actually saves them more money than what they would have gained by somehow selling the treatment to patient A for $100 and only extracting $10 from B.
While the drug companies would be willing to pay quite a bit for it, so wouldn't the healthcare plan companies in order to get it released and saving them money.
I'm also willing to bet that even the US government would look at prosecuting any drug company that locked up a cure for a fatal disease to make more money.
I, for one, would willingly let the company make money hand over fist by selling the treatment very expensively, but throw the book at the company and it's executives if they locked the cure up - I'd actually sit there and start hitting them with murder charges for every AIDS patient who died of complications from then on out. Making the lawsuits against tobacco companies look positively nice in comparison.
Then again, I'd also support the establishment of a 'reasonable cost medicine' research fund - the purpose of which is to discover and gain FDA approval for new usages of non-patentable chemicals and drugs. I'm not sure whether I'd go with a grant or bounty type system. Probably go hybrid for a while. X$ for grants to 'finish up' promising drugs, Y$ for bounties for finding and gaining approval for a new use of a drug.
Except that they didn't actually patent the fat gene, they patented the process of detecting said gene.
"Gene patenting" is a broad term referring to the patenting of either a process that involves isolation of DNA (where DNA refers to either DNA or associated materials such as RNA) as well as to a chemical substance related to DNA.
They can't just go around and sue every fat person for violating their patent.
They can't patent a gene until there's an element of artificiality to it - for example, Monsanto's patenting of 'roundup ready' genemod crops.
Actually, I'd much rather have artificial DNA strands covered by patent than copyright, seeing as how we have the whole life+70 for copyright.
At least I can look forward to patents expiring in my lifetime.
My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I think the limit up here is 8. It'd take some dedicated screw-ups to mess up that many ballots.
In addition, it shouldn't take too much effort to have the machine spit out ballots with anomalies for hand counting.
The other concern is balancing handicapped access and anonymity. Still, touch screens aren't exactly friendly to the visually impaired by default either.
Well, you could look at it the opposite way: Currently, and especially in the past, the only way to get the pressures and heat necessary for a useful amount of fusion was to set of a nuke - thus you were(and still are) stuck using a fission reaction to get the necessary boost to get the fusion reaction to go.
;)
but H-bomb fusion isn't at all practical for a power source at this time
Agreed. That's why we're looking at different processes for fusion power.
Still, by looking at the history and the way fusion goes - I figure it's a technology that will scale UP well, but not down. The latest proposal I saw had absolutely no provision for harvesting power - yet is as large as a conventional nuclear power plant.
I figure it's something like surface area vs volume - double the length/width/height of the reactor, it's got four times the surface area, four times the containment power demands, yet produces eight times the power.
That gives you some gargantuan sizes needed for useful fusion power - and you thought fission plants were expensive and slow to build.
Still two radios for simultaneous 11n in 2.4 GHz and 5 Ghz.
CURRENT enterprise level APs have dual radios in them. They're capable of running 802.11a & g networks simultaneously at full speed.
Hmmm... Research shows that while 802.11n pretty much specifies multiple antennas, it doesn't state multiple radios. From my earlier readings this wasn't made clear.
Instead, we have channel bonding, which means that you're transmitting across a broader spectrum, and multiple transmit chains (MIMO) means that your transmits are less efficient, even at the same power level as non-11n.
Thus requiring more power to beat the noise floor.
More likely, they just found a better material for arresting cables or something.
But that can just be hooked up to existing carriers. I think that it's probably along the lines of the electric catapult - the hook/cable might not be magnetized, but the rail the cable's hooked to could be set up as a induction brake. A steadier stop would reduce wear and tear.
Having operated a makeshift incinerator a few times, I have to point out that fire can be insufficient in and of itself.
I've actually held bits of ash with legible writing still on it. I was burning old checks for my parents.
I wouldn't count it destroyed until the ashes are stirred well.
Step 1: Find two sockets that are on different circuits.
Step 2: Verify that the circuits are on seperate phases
Step 3: Rig a cable going from hot 1 to hot 2*
Step 4: Fry circuits using etherkiller type cable@240V
Alternatively, use a dryer socket or something.
*Make sure both circuits aren't GFI, otherwise they'll pop pretty much instantly.
I figure the requirements for a 21 pass overwrite scheme is still a requirement for sanitizing government drives for a reason.
Is it overkill? Certainly. But apparently 3 passes isn't considered enough.
Now, a simple overwrite is considered sufficient for flash, so we do have some standards.
You could probably achieve this by switching to higher efficiency components.
But wouldn't corporate APs, already restricted to PoE, already be using low power devices? I don't think that they wouldn't keep power usage down if they could for the PoE if it was a trivial process.
Still, I agree that power demands will probably come down with time.
I bet most of the energy is in the form of heat from the individual DC converters plugged in to long extension cords laid along the drop ceiling to the nearest electric column.
And you'd be incorrect. Most corporate infrastructures that heavily/professionally deploy wireless is going to due it via PoE - putting in a PoE switch or injector is much cheaper than wiring dozens or hundreds of new power jacks up in ceilings and such. With PoE all you need to do is run a ethernet cable over to the AP to provide both network access and power.
And PoE is only capable of transmitting so much power. 12.95 watts at the device. The new N devices are being reported at 18 watts. We have a little problem here...
While the processing requirements of N is requiring more wattage at the processor, I figure that the dual-radio feature of N is also significant - corporate ones you normally have both a 2.4GHz and a 5GHz radio. With N you're possibly doubling the number of radios to four. This increases power demand. If nothing else, you're also subletting the frequency spectrum even more, thus need to, on average, transmit at a higher power level overall to beat the noise floor.