Defamation laws are becoming increasingly important to protect our democratic process.
Quite the opposite: laws against defamation and insults are a serious threat to our democratic process since they are being used to stifle free speech. These laws are a serious problem in Europe. In the US, they are usually unconstitutional and usually don't stand up to a serious court challenge.
The "Congress shall make no law..." is the reason libel and slander laws in the US are so weak; stronger laws would be unconstitutional and have been struck down when Congress tried enacting them.
So, yes, the First Amendment is "granting you immunity for many kinds of liability" because liabilities only exist as a result of laws, and Congress shall make no laws creating such liabilities for protected free speech.
Much as I like the UDHR, it is far less useful because it is rather vague and can actually be used to stifle free speech. For example, under UDHR, you might legally restrict criticism of a religion, while under the Constitution, you cannot.
Not even that. If it's an important technology, your original patent will likely run out beflongore major applications of the technology are made. So, you paid for your patent and to maintain it, but the later patents cover a much more lucrative period in the use of the invention.
I said you were wrong, meaning that the American slaves would not clearly have been better off.
The negation of "would clearly have been better off" is "would not clearly have been better off", not "would clearly have been worse off".
What I know for a fact is that your reasoning is false. The 1833 act only passed because Britain paid off the slave holders and made other concessions. Britain simply could not have passed the exact Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 if the American colonies had remained part of the British empire because the British government could not have met the provisions of the act.
I have no idea what would have happened without the American revolution, but I do know for a fact that your argument is incorrect: Britain simply could not have passed the same act and freed the slaves in the South; they just wouldn't have had the money to pay for it.
Britain abolished slavery decades before the United States, so clearly there's one group who would have been better off under British rule. : If the colonies had remained part of Britain one of four things would have happened: (1) slavery wouldn't have been abolished in the British Empire at the time, (2) there would have been an exemption (like there was for other territories), (3) the British would have been unable to enforce it in the South, or (4) the South would have declared independence then and there. Nobody would have been better off, if anything, it would have lasted longer.
While no on can claim that America is backward or undeveloped today, the lives of the native Americans, the blacks and the poor all suffered under America's hard line expansionism and slightly regressive social policies during the early nineteenth century.
The native Americans were slaughtered under British rule; by the time the US was founded, maybe 10% of the original population was left. Giving them more rights was a goal of the American revolution. Of course, Americans did still commit crimes against Indians; many of those who did were recent European arrivals who were pushing outward, and the US government could do little to control their behavior. Overall, under British rule, they would likely have fared far worse. Similar comments apply to blacks: the British created the problem and the US was slowly trying to fix it without tearing itself apart--and it nearly did during the Civil War. If you want to see how the British treated natives and other cultures, look to India and Africa, and look to the Opium Wars with China. All Americans, including native Americans, were far better off independent instead of a British colony.
You think that would have happened if US independence hadn't happened first? And then the British saw their empire crumble and power dissipate in war after war, so that in the end, a friendly mostly-independent Canada was better for them than a rebellious colony. None of that might have happened if the US had remained British.
"Animals and their digestive systems are highly adapted to how those nutrients are delivered, as well as to the other "micronutrients" that come along with specific food sources."
You made no allowance for the diets being nutritionally adequate, nor did you make any reference to "Behavioral or other factors". You stated categorically that I was wrong when I said that animals had a requirement for specific nutrients, and not for specific feedstuffs.
In the very next sentence, I mention satiety as a difference ("behavioral and other factors"). You then respond with an experiment that eliminates satiety as an experimental factor.
I stated categorically that you were wrong when you said that the source of nutrients was irrelevant. It is may be irrelevant to you (maximum growth under factory conditions), but it is very relevant to other outcomes and other production methods.
Diets need to be tailored to the activity level, age, and desired outcome... The problem is not production levels, it is demand.
That kind of diet is a conscious intervention in food choice and rarely works long term against obesity. If you place humans in an environment where meat is unlimited and nearly free, they will eat too much of it. It's not an "American character flaw", it's human biology. Other nations have better nutrition and less obesity because foods like meat are more expensive, sold in smaller portions, and discouraged by culture and education.
That's what we need to do in the US as well. And in the US we can do that by cutting subsidies, increasing taxes, changing education, limiting sales to children (school), regulating packaging, and requiring health warnings.
If you cannot provide me with a PRIMARY reference for that 60% number, or explain to me how 120,200 kg of active antibiotics is only 60% of 89,900 kg of active compound, then don't bother responding
You claim you had 8 years of graduate studies in the sciences; you ought to be able to read those two sentences and figure out why the numbers don't add up. The information is all there in the primary source.
I was wrong on one thing: you're not a liar, you really just don't get it. Unfortunately, the same happens when you read and respond to people's posts, so "debating" with you really is not possible.
No, a $1500 fee would not be reasonable; that would translate into a 1:20 risk of having any given house burn down each year. Actual risk is more like 1:2000, and you need a 2x penalty to discourage opting out. So, we're at a $300k on-the-spot fee, which is probably more than the house was worth.
Second, while your comment is technically true it misses the point. Disaccharides are not absorbed intact.... Even if your assertion that nutritionally adequate but concentrated food can leave an animal hungry is true, it is largely irrelevant... You don't know what you are talking about.
Well, apparently I do know what I am talking about, since you just said that both my points are true. The fact that you consider them "irrelevant" is just a result of your inability to follow an argument.
He saw identical growth performance in animals fed the purified diet and a conventional corn soy diet, indicating that he had met the animals minimum requirement for all nutrients.
So? My point was that, although two food items may be nutritionally equivalent, they are not equivalent as foods once behavior and other factors enter the equation. For humans, less nutritious foods are often healthier foods. For animals, how and what they eat and how they are raised affects texture and flavor.
I always find it interesting to be told that the information I spend 8 years in graduate school acquiring from some of the greatest scientists in my field are wrong.
It's not a lack information that's your problem, it's your inability to put that information in context. Food and farming involve everything from psychology and cooking to ecology and geology, but you try to reduce it to maximizing nutrient production. Maximizing nutrient production is not the problem in the US; we have an obesity epidemic and produce far in excess of what we need. What the US needs to do is to produce foods that encourage people to eat healthy despite their (as you put it) "character flaws".
(And maximizing nutrient production isn't really even the issue in countries with famine, but that's a different story.)
Instead of all that verbiage, just re-read that sentence:
"Overall, the total amount of antimicrobials given to food-producing animals in 2001 was less than half that given in 1994, and the time period during which these animals were exposed to antimicrobials was significantly reduced. Usage has increased somewhat since 2001, but in 2008 was still only 60% of 1994 levels."
Now read this sentence:
"Trends in the estimated total consumption (kg active compound) of prescribed antimicrobials for production animals, Denmark"
Come on, you can figure it out. It's not that hard.
"We" prefer both software and protocols to be open. But "we" need to talk to and work with people who use proprietary software and protocols. So, "we" do the best we can: OpenOffice can read/write MS Office files, and Android can run Skype.
Also as an aside, HFCS is 60% fructose and 40% sucrose where as normal granulated sugar is 50% of each.
False. HFCS is a mixture of monosaccharides, while granulated sugar is a disaccharide. They are chemically different and behave differently in the digestive system.
In moderation there is nothing wrong with HFCS
For identical amounts of calories, HFCS appears to be significantly worse than granulated sugar according to recent studies; go check the literature.
Either way, no animal has a requirement for corn, or grass, or hay, or whatever. What they have is a requirement for specific nutrients. The source of those nutrients is largely irrelevant.
False as well. Animals and their digestive systems are highly adapted to how those nutrients are delivered, as well as to the other "micronutrients" that come along with specific food sources. For example, if you deliver the same amount of nutrients in highly concentrated form (to an animal or human), they won't feel satiated as much as when you deliver them in more natural, less accessible forms.
I'd prefer that agriculture be taught along side math, science, english and music in schools.
Yes, and preferably not the kind of obsolete nonsense that you spew forth. To you, agriculture and nutrition comes down to a few basic nutritional components that should be produced with industrial efficiency. That kind of view was prevalent in the 1960's, but we have learned meanwhile that it does not work: it is bad for people and it is bad for the environment.
You claimed antibiotics use had gone up since the introduction of antibiotics bans, when in fact they had gone down. Since all reports (original and summary) are crystal clear about this fact, you are a liar.
You have provided no other references supporting continued use of antibiotics in animal feeds. Instead, you just create a lot of irrelevant verbiage. You have nothing useful to contribute.
Use of antibiotics has actually gone up in Denmark.... Finally, your opinions are not sufficient to refute the evidence I've seen with my own eyes, been shown by other researchers in the field, or have read in the official reports
Since you're obviously too lazy to actually read the actual reports and scientific papers, here is the pertinent extract from the US Congressional summary:
Denmark, the world’s largest exporter of pork, has taken some of the most aggressive steps in the world in limiting antibiotic use in food-producing animals and in collecting data to evaluate the effects of those steps. From the beginning of 1995 to the end of 1999, the Danish government and Danish animal producers effectively ended the use of antimicrobials for routine prophylaxis (disease-prevention) and growth promotion and took additional steps to discourage unnecessary antimicrobial uses. 15 This resulted in a significant reduction in total quantity of antimicrobials used in food-producing animals, although the reduction was not uniform across all classes of antimicrobials. 16 Overall, the total amount of antimicrobials given to food-producing animals in 2001 was less than half that given in 1994, and the time period during which these animals were exposed to antimicrobials was significantly reduced. 17 Usage has increased somewhat since 2001, but in 2008 was still only 60% of 1994 levels. 18
In summary, [the WHO report] found that Denmark’s termination of growth promoter use:
* Did not affect the levels of the major human pathogens in chickens or pigs
* Reduced the rates of antibiotic resistance in one class of bacteria known as enterococci, noting that this thereby reduced the pool of antibiotic resistance genes that might otherwise be transferred to food-borne pathogens (enterococci ordinarily are not themselves food-borne pathogens).
* Was associated with both increases and decreases in rates of antimicrobial resistance in different food-borne pathogens (noting that the growth-promoting antimicrobials generally are not effective against these organisms, and so terminating their use would not be expected to have a direct effect on rates of resistance in these organisms).
* Did not result in adverse economic effects on chicken producers and had only an approximately 1% adverse economic impact on pig producers, primarily because of decreased weight gain and increased mortality in recently-weaned pigs.
If you actually read some of the other papers on the subject, you'll find that overall, antibiotics may actually increase costs slightly, rather than decrease them. Also, Denmark is the largest pig exporter in the world, so their decision was for a product that is much more economically vital to their economy than meat is to ours. Furthermore, experiments in other countries have yielded pretty much the same results, which is why the EU has adopted this policy overall.
So, stop making things up and start getting the facts. There is no rational basis justifying the use of antibiotics for growth promotion in animals.
Stop making things up and look at the data: eliminating antibiotics from animal feed has no noticeable effect on production, but it greatly decreases the presence of resistant strains in the community. This has been true in every country it has been tried in.
Your arguments for the benefits of a meat-based diet and against the harm of large scale meat production are just as fictitious; the evidence against your view is crystal clear. It's an outrage that we subsidize meat production in the US; we should eliminate the subsidies and seriously consider a tax.
Obviously you are the one that does not understand how agriculture works
Obviously, you are ignorant of some very basic facts about American eating habits and economics: Americans eat too much meat and too little high quality vegetables, meat prices are too low, and decreasing meat prices further will cause even more meat to be consumed. We need fewer meat producers, more producers of more variety of high quality vegetables, and meat prices need to go up.
My point, which you'd have to be an idiot to have actually missed, was that these superbugs are not a threat to everyone all of the time
But they are a serious threat to everyone all the time, because you can get injured or need surgery at any time in your life, no matter how healthy you are. The fact that they are no more virulent than non-resistant strains does not change that.
However, it is a smaller contributor being scapegoated while the single largest contributor is largely given a free pass.
Outlawing antibiotics use in animal feeds just brings veterinary medicine in line with human medicine: use antibiotics only to cure disease. That's not "scapegoating", it's common sense.
Furthermore, nobody knows what the largest contributor to antibiotic resistance is. Since industrial meat production is bad for so many other reasons, reducing it is a good idea anyway. Furthermore, we know it can be done without ill effect because other countries are doing it.
Human abuse of antibiotics in Humans is far more culpable, but because it is politically dangerous to try and reform human prescribing practices no one will touch it.
Antibiotics are available under prescription, and doctors are supposed to prescribe them only when necessary, based on their judgment. Doctors and medical organizations are making a big effort to reduce antibiotics abuse.
How specifically do you want to change the law to reduce their abuse further?
If organic farming had been practiced from the beginning, maybe; of course that would have come at the cost of the enormous yields we now enjoy, nay, need, to sustain the population.
The EU eliminated antibiotics from animal feeds and they aren't starving. The US produces and consumes way too much meat anyway; you could drastically reduce meat production in the US with the only major effect being a healthier population.
The same is pretty much true for other kinds of agricultural products as well: the US could produce more than enough food using organic methods. Food is only 12% of the average US household budget, and much of that is due to expensive and unhealthy prepared foods. Switching to organic foods would make fruits, vegetables, and meats somewhat more expensive, but that's offset by a switch away from prepared and convenience foods. And since organic agriculture is more labor-intensive than industrial farming and food preparation, it would create jobs.
The rest I'm unsure about. The "scheduling from a mobile device", "offline syncing", and "context sensitive menu" things may have been innovative, but that's been around for 10+ years so at this point it shouldn't count. The flash monitoring sounds kind of obvious, but the implementation may not be (I don't know much in the area).
No. All those functions have been around on laptops and tablets for a long time, as well as the Apple Newton and Palm devices. Many companies have developed and sold this kind of software. Android's productivity apps could entirely be based on open, established synchronization protocols, since that functionality has been standardized long ago.
Furthermore, many of these patents are of the form "doing X on a phone", where X itself is public domain and well understood; it's doubtful that such patents should hold up at all.
However, Google needs to step up to the plate and defend their partners. For a licensing fee, they should probably provide indemnification.
Slashdot Mirror
What is surprising is that they were running some sort of database process that maxxed out at 2 billion records,
Not really; they're probably using some Microsoft consumer product... plus declared something to be a signed int.
Defamation laws are becoming increasingly important to protect our democratic process.
Quite the opposite: laws against defamation and insults are a serious threat to our democratic process since they are being used to stifle free speech. These laws are a serious problem in Europe. In the US, they are usually unconstitutional and usually don't stand up to a serious court challenge.
The "Congress shall make no law..." is the reason libel and slander laws in the US are so weak; stronger laws would be unconstitutional and have been struck down when Congress tried enacting them.
So, yes, the First Amendment is "granting you immunity for many kinds of liability" because liabilities only exist as a result of laws, and Congress shall make no laws creating such liabilities for protected free speech.
Much as I like the UDHR, it is far less useful because it is rather vague and can actually be used to stifle free speech. For example, under UDHR, you might legally restrict criticism of a religion, while under the Constitution, you cannot.
Not even that. If it's an important technology, your original patent will likely run out beflongore major applications of the technology are made. So, you paid for your patent and to maintain it, but the later patents cover a much more lucrative period in the use of the invention.
I said you were wrong, meaning that the American slaves would not clearly have been better off.
The negation of "would clearly have been better off" is "would not clearly have been better off", not "would clearly have been worse off".
What I know for a fact is that your reasoning is false. The 1833 act only passed because Britain paid off the slave holders and made other concessions. Britain simply could not have passed the exact Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 if the American colonies had remained part of the British empire because the British government could not have met the provisions of the act.
I have no idea what would have happened without the American revolution, but I do know for a fact that your argument is incorrect: Britain simply could not have passed the same act and freed the slaves in the South; they just wouldn't have had the money to pay for it.
Britain abolished slavery decades before the United States, so clearly there's one group who would have been better off under British rule.
:
If the colonies had remained part of Britain one of four things would have happened: (1) slavery wouldn't have been abolished in the British Empire at the time, (2) there would have been an exemption (like there was for other territories), (3) the British would have been unable to enforce it in the South, or (4) the South would have declared independence then and there. Nobody would have been better off, if anything, it would have lasted longer.
While no on can claim that America is backward or undeveloped today, the lives of the native Americans, the blacks and the poor all suffered under America's hard line expansionism and slightly regressive social policies during the early nineteenth century.
The native Americans were slaughtered under British rule; by the time the US was founded, maybe 10% of the original population was left. Giving them more rights was a goal of the American revolution. Of course, Americans did still commit crimes against Indians; many of those who did were recent European arrivals who were pushing outward, and the US government could do little to control their behavior. Overall, under British rule, they would likely have fared far worse. Similar comments apply to blacks: the British created the problem and the US was slowly trying to fix it without tearing itself apart--and it nearly did during the Civil War. If you want to see how the British treated natives and other cultures, look to India and Africa, and look to the Opium Wars with China. All Americans, including native Americans, were far better off independent instead of a British colony.
You think that would have happened if US independence hadn't happened first? And then the British saw their empire crumble and power dissipate in war after war, so that in the end, a friendly mostly-independent Canada was better for them than a rebellious colony. None of that might have happened if the US had remained British.
Could someone please put a Burqa on that Gaddafi guy? The face is scaring the children!
"Animals and their digestive systems are highly adapted to how those nutrients are delivered, as well as to the other "micronutrients" that come along with specific food sources."
You made no allowance for the diets being nutritionally adequate, nor did you make any reference to "Behavioral or other factors". You stated categorically that I was wrong when I said that animals had a requirement for specific nutrients, and not for specific feedstuffs.
In the very next sentence, I mention satiety as a difference ("behavioral and other factors"). You then respond with an experiment that eliminates satiety as an experimental factor.
I stated categorically that you were wrong when you said that the source of nutrients was irrelevant. It is may be irrelevant to you (maximum growth under factory conditions), but it is very relevant to other outcomes and other production methods.
Diets need to be tailored to the activity level, age, and desired outcome ... The problem is not production levels, it is demand.
That kind of diet is a conscious intervention in food choice and rarely works long term against obesity. If you place humans in an environment where meat is unlimited and nearly free, they will eat too much of it. It's not an "American character flaw", it's human biology. Other nations have better nutrition and less obesity because foods like meat are more expensive, sold in smaller portions, and discouraged by culture and education.
That's what we need to do in the US as well. And in the US we can do that by cutting subsidies, increasing taxes, changing education, limiting sales to children (school), regulating packaging, and requiring health warnings.
If you cannot provide me with a PRIMARY reference for that 60% number, or explain to me how 120,200 kg of active antibiotics is only 60% of 89,900 kg of active compound, then don't bother responding
You claim you had 8 years of graduate studies in the sciences; you ought to be able to read those two sentences and figure out why the numbers don't add up. The information is all there in the primary source.
I was wrong on one thing: you're not a liar, you really just don't get it. Unfortunately, the same happens when you read and respond to people's posts, so "debating" with you really is not possible.
No, a $1500 fee would not be reasonable; that would translate into a 1:20 risk of having any given house burn down each year. Actual risk is more like 1:2000, and you need a 2x penalty to discourage opting out. So, we're at a $300k on-the-spot fee, which is probably more than the house was worth.
Oh, come on, everybody gives a volume discount. Can't we say... $500m instead of $1b?
Second, while your comment is technically true it misses the point. Disaccharides are not absorbed intact. ... Even if your assertion that nutritionally adequate but concentrated food can leave an animal hungry is true, it is largely irrelevant ... You don't know what you are talking about.
Well, apparently I do know what I am talking about, since you just said that both my points are true. The fact that you consider them "irrelevant" is just a result of your inability to follow an argument.
He saw identical growth performance in animals fed the purified diet and a conventional corn soy diet, indicating that he had met the animals minimum requirement for all nutrients.
So? My point was that, although two food items may be nutritionally equivalent, they are not equivalent as foods once behavior and other factors enter the equation. For humans, less nutritious foods are often healthier foods. For animals, how and what they eat and how they are raised affects texture and flavor.
I always find it interesting to be told that the information I spend 8 years in graduate school acquiring from some of the greatest scientists in my field are wrong.
It's not a lack information that's your problem, it's your inability to put that information in context. Food and farming involve everything from psychology and cooking to ecology and geology, but you try to reduce it to maximizing nutrient production. Maximizing nutrient production is not the problem in the US; we have an obesity epidemic and produce far in excess of what we need. What the US needs to do is to produce foods that encourage people to eat healthy despite their (as you put it) "character flaws".
(And maximizing nutrient production isn't really even the issue in countries with famine, but that's a different story.)
Instead of all that verbiage, just re-read that sentence:
"Overall, the total amount of antimicrobials given to food-producing animals in 2001 was less than half that given in 1994, and the time period during which these animals were exposed to antimicrobials was significantly reduced. Usage has increased somewhat since 2001, but in 2008 was still only 60% of 1994 levels."
Now read this sentence:
"Trends in the estimated total consumption (kg active compound) of prescribed antimicrobials for production animals, Denmark"
Come on, you can figure it out. It's not that hard.
"We" prefer both software and protocols to be open. But "we" need to talk to and work with people who use proprietary software and protocols. So, "we" do the best we can: OpenOffice can read/write MS Office files, and Android can run Skype.
Also as an aside, HFCS is 60% fructose and 40% sucrose where as normal granulated sugar is 50% of each.
False. HFCS is a mixture of monosaccharides, while granulated sugar is a disaccharide. They are chemically different and behave differently in the digestive system.
In moderation there is nothing wrong with HFCS
For identical amounts of calories, HFCS appears to be significantly worse than granulated sugar according to recent studies; go check the literature.
Either way, no animal has a requirement for corn, or grass, or hay, or whatever. What they have is a requirement for specific nutrients. The source of those nutrients is largely irrelevant.
False as well. Animals and their digestive systems are highly adapted to how those nutrients are delivered, as well as to the other "micronutrients" that come along with specific food sources. For example, if you deliver the same amount of nutrients in highly concentrated form (to an animal or human), they won't feel satiated as much as when you deliver them in more natural, less accessible forms.
I'd prefer that agriculture be taught along side math, science, english and music in schools.
Yes, and preferably not the kind of obsolete nonsense that you spew forth. To you, agriculture and nutrition comes down to a few basic nutritional components that should be produced with industrial efficiency. That kind of view was prevalent in the 1960's, but we have learned meanwhile that it does not work: it is bad for people and it is bad for the environment.
You claimed antibiotics use had gone up since the introduction of antibiotics bans, when in fact they had gone down. Since all reports (original and summary) are crystal clear about this fact, you are a liar.
You have provided no other references supporting continued use of antibiotics in animal feeds. Instead, you just create a lot of irrelevant verbiage. You have nothing useful to contribute.
Use of antibiotics has actually gone up in Denmark. ... Finally, your opinions are not sufficient to refute the evidence I've seen with my own eyes, been shown by other researchers in the field, or have read in the official reports
Since you're obviously too lazy to actually read the actual reports and scientific papers, here is the pertinent extract from the US Congressional summary:
http://energycommerce.house.gov/documents/20100712/Briefing.Memo.Health.2010.7.14.pdf
If you actually read some of the other papers on the subject, you'll find that overall, antibiotics may actually increase costs slightly, rather than decrease them. Also, Denmark is the largest pig exporter in the world, so their decision was for a product that is much more economically vital to their economy than meat is to ours. Furthermore, experiments in other countries have yielded pretty much the same results, which is why the EU has adopted this policy overall.
So, stop making things up and start getting the facts. There is no rational basis justifying the use of antibiotics for growth promotion in animals.
Stop making things up and look at the data: eliminating antibiotics from animal feed has no noticeable effect on production, but it greatly decreases the presence of resistant strains in the community. This has been true in every country it has been tried in.
Your arguments for the benefits of a meat-based diet and against the harm of large scale meat production are just as fictitious; the evidence against your view is crystal clear. It's an outrage that we subsidize meat production in the US; we should eliminate the subsidies and seriously consider a tax.
You must be pretty out of touch with German culture and news if you can't even spell "Spiegel" correctly.
Obviously you are the one that does not understand how agriculture works
Obviously, you are ignorant of some very basic facts about American eating habits and economics: Americans eat too much meat and too little high quality vegetables, meat prices are too low, and decreasing meat prices further will cause even more meat to be consumed. We need fewer meat producers, more producers of more variety of high quality vegetables, and meat prices need to go up.
My point, which you'd have to be an idiot to have actually missed, was that these superbugs are not a threat to everyone all of the time
But they are a serious threat to everyone all the time, because you can get injured or need surgery at any time in your life, no matter how healthy you are. The fact that they are no more virulent than non-resistant strains does not change that.
However, it is a smaller contributor being scapegoated while the single largest contributor is largely given a free pass.
Outlawing antibiotics use in animal feeds just brings veterinary medicine in line with human medicine: use antibiotics only to cure disease. That's not "scapegoating", it's common sense.
Furthermore, nobody knows what the largest contributor to antibiotic resistance is. Since industrial meat production is bad for so many other reasons, reducing it is a good idea anyway. Furthermore, we know it can be done without ill effect because other countries are doing it.
Human abuse of antibiotics in Humans is far more culpable, but because it is politically dangerous to try and reform human prescribing practices no one will touch it.
Antibiotics are available under prescription, and doctors are supposed to prescribe them only when necessary, based on their judgment. Doctors and medical organizations are making a big effort to reduce antibiotics abuse.
How specifically do you want to change the law to reduce their abuse further?
If organic farming had been practiced from the beginning, maybe; of course that would have come at the cost of the enormous yields we now enjoy, nay, need, to sustain the population.
The EU eliminated antibiotics from animal feeds and they aren't starving. The US produces and consumes way too much meat anyway; you could drastically reduce meat production in the US with the only major effect being a healthier population.
The same is pretty much true for other kinds of agricultural products as well: the US could produce more than enough food using organic methods. Food is only 12% of the average US household budget, and much of that is due to expensive and unhealthy prepared foods. Switching to organic foods would make fruits, vegetables, and meats somewhat more expensive, but that's offset by a switch away from prepared and convenience foods. And since organic agriculture is more labor-intensive than industrial farming and food preparation, it would create jobs.
The rest I'm unsure about. The "scheduling from a mobile device", "offline syncing", and "context sensitive menu" things may have been innovative, but that's been around for 10+ years so at this point it shouldn't count. The flash monitoring sounds kind of obvious, but the implementation may not be (I don't know much in the area).
No. All those functions have been around on laptops and tablets for a long time, as well as the Apple Newton and Palm devices. Many companies have developed and sold this kind of software. Android's productivity apps could entirely be based on open, established synchronization protocols, since that functionality has been standardized long ago.
Furthermore, many of these patents are of the form "doing X on a phone", where X itself is public domain and well understood; it's doubtful that such patents should hold up at all.
However, Google needs to step up to the plate and defend their partners. For a licensing fee, they should probably provide indemnification.