Nice point re: the implausibility of homebrew gene therapy (for the time being). Your assertions regarding openness and disclosure were echoed in many thousands of responses FDA received to a recent call for commentary on proposed disclosure rules for gene therapy research (the e-mail address was FDADOCKETS@OC.FDA.GOV, but I'm pretty sure the comment period has expired. May still be worth a try, though, if you're interested and want your voice to be heard).
As many of you may know, the drug/biologics industry has fought bitterly to protect ANY and ALL information relating to gene therapy trials as trade secrets. In fact, they protected such trade secrets about a certain adenovirus vector so well that none of the right people knew it had killed monkeys and seriously injured several humans before it killed Jesse Gelsinger last year (with a little help from a U. Penn research egotist). The upshot is that when these greedy moron subhuman bastards seek to protect prior evidence of toxicity as "trade secrets," people die for lack of the suppressed knowledge. It's shameful. We'll have to hope FDA and HHS have the balls to get these gene cowboys in line before they kill again.
If I understand correctly, he's referring to Sonny Bono's last enduring monument (unless you count that bit of spleen he left on the tree, which has begun to rot by now), the copyright extension act. This extends (as the name suggests) copyright protections from some absurd number of years following the creation of the work, to some absurd number of years following the death of the work's creator. Not sure what the logic was, or why anyone in congress besides bonzo would've thought this was a good idea. Could be that the RIAA got Ricky Martin to give a live performance or something. But I ask you - why do I need to be guaranteed monopoly distribution power over use of my creative works AFTER I'M DEAD??? Would be really interesting to see how the profits generated for descendents of rich bastards by this bone-headed act measure up to the estate taxes that will no longer be collected...
Nothing that fun. They rent half their space out to the boys from Quantico, in exchange for a primo deal on real estate, security services, and inside information on which missionaries' planes will be shot down next, so they can break the news.
Re:Best to hold off until the bugs are worked out.
on
Send out the Clones?
·
· Score: 1
It's very easy, really. When you get your clone, just make sure that the switch is set to "good" and not "evil."
Interesting micro-discussion we've begun. Truth be told, the health insurance lobby is plenty pissed at the Shubbery right now for allowing HIPAA to go into effect (albeit with possible/probable changes to make it less onerous to the moneygrubbers). Bush is not interesting in hearing about problems within FDA. We'll have to wait until Mama Barb or Daddy George comes to rely on something like Propulsid or Lotronex or Rezulin and gets hurt or killed before the new King George will take notice. Interestingly, one of the first things the Shrub admin tried to do, when it was cleaning out the previous admin's political appointees, was to oust the head of FDA, who was not a political appointee. They quickly, and quietly, took that back. Now, the current head is no friend to people who take medicines, as it was under her watch that the three above-referenced drugs, and countless others that haven't yet been proven deadly, were approved, often over the strenuous objections of FDA's own internal reviewers. And it doesn't help that the drugcos hide critical information even from the pharmco-profit-friendly FDA. And lets not forget that this is the FDA that told Lilly its OK to market Prozac as Serafem, in order not to stigmatize the women who take it for a disorder that doesn't officially exist (Pre Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder, PMDD). Wonder how many of these unstigmatized chicks will off themselves due to the suicidality risk of the prozac they're really taking? Wonder if the newly invented indication will extend Lilly's patent on its new emotional cure-all? My take on the drugcos and the govt. regulatory structure is that we need to kill 'em all, and screw sorting 'em out, as they were morally defective, base excuses for humans all along.
As one of many individuals who decide on a daily basis what research involving human subjects is permissible at my institution, I take exception to your comment. Of course, we base "permissible" on silly notions like degree of risk, likelihood of benefit, etc., so maybe we're more legit.
What this really looks like to me is a nifty parallel to the pharmco research sponsor who constructs a well-thought-out study, contracts my institution to do it, and then declines my insititution the right to publish any findings that make pharmco's new drug look like less than a blockbuster.
This kind of intrusion by four-letter entities such as PRMA, RIAA, MPAA, etc. have significantly eroded academic freedom, and the problem will only get worse as institutions of higher learning continue to whore themselves out to the highest bidder, in order to get that new football stadium built, or, better yet, to cover higher salaries for their faculty, to make up for the shameful corporate bondage they've been placed in.
Sad (x3) but true. When a physician/researcher contracts with a pharmaceutical sponsor, that sponsor typically includes a clause stating that all information derived from the research is the property of the sponsor, and that the researcher must seek sponsor's permission to publish, or even discuss, the research findings. Researchers have been sued for publishing findings derived from pharmco-sponsored research that were unflattering, or contradictory to the sponsor's always-cheery findings.
Importantly, very recently a British scientist by the name of David Healy, who had been invited to work at the University of Toronto, had the invitation rescinded because he gave a presentation critical of Prozac and its tendency to arouse suicidality in patients who were not previously suicidal. Dr. Healy stated in his presentation that Prozac may have been responsible for 1 suicide for each day it's been on the market. Eli Lilly, the manufacturer, didn't appreciate the comments, and also happens to be the single largest donor to/supporter of the University of Toronto's medical teaching center. UT officials deny that Lilly had a role in the shooing-away of Dr. Healy, as do Lilly's lawyers. Interestingly, Lilly did the same thing to Healy last year, when he sought to publish a similar article in a Hastings Center publication.
Point is, academic freedom has been sold out to PhRMA and the legal drug cartels for years. Still, I'm disappointed to see the RIAA (and other 4-letter words) getting in on the action of stealing our public knowledge/awareness/safety in the name of profits and IP. Shameful.
So it can go from US to Australia in 23 hours, but can it:
drop bombs to kill friendly troops (without consequence)?
sink the occassional fishing vessel (without consequence)?
piss off Chinese fighter pilots (with the consequence of a slight delay in travel plans)?
guide foreign military powers in their endeavors to shoot down those obnoxious missionary planes (no admission = no consequence)?
Maybe our galoots in green should spend more time working with their human capital than with these nifty machines. Or maybe these robo-planes will be just as good at mistaken-maiming once they've gotten Uncle Sam's healthy dose of "kill 'em all and let the tradewinds sort 'em out" training.
Smack that nail on the head, why dontcha? HIV research, like cancer research, relies EXTREMELY heavily on public-dollar support, mainly through NIH. As the drugcos form their unholy alliances with academic researchers (who obtain the federal grants), the likelihood increases daily that the next multimillion dollar blockbuster drug will come directly from publically-financed research ventures, which are overtaken by drugcos after some early promise is shown. We've all heard of corporate welfare. This is corporate identity theft. Nice to know my tax dollars will fatten Eli Lilly and friends' profits. And nice to have known ya', academia.
Treatment and prevention are related, but distinct, animals. Fault South Africa's president all you like for stifling the available education/prevention programs in that nation, but do not for one minute equate that man's failed thinking/policies for the problems inherent in TREATING the disease. The cost of an anti-HIV regimen is unsustainable for 99.99% of the South African population. Occassional "50% off" deals from profit-extracting western drug firms do not help.
We can all (well, those of us who find the profitmongering drugcos to be despicable, anyway) be happy that the evil 39 (and their own personal RIAA, called PhRMA) have dropped their silly nonsense suit against the struggling South African nation. Now, at least, treatment may commence, even if the education/prevention program must undergo considerable rebuilding. This is simply a case of South Africa needing to strap on its own oxygen mask, as it were, through treatment, before assisting small children in donning theirs (prevention).
I got the impression from the Katz piece that financial difficulties stood in the way of private schooling, so that was not a viable option (note, too, that so-called "vouchers" would not make it any more feasible for most families in this situation, as they typically provide less than 1/4 of the annual cost of private schooling).
My first cynical response to this story was that we oughta take Peter Singer's advice on late-late-late-past-term abortion and rid our schools of these abominable malformed feti known as "bullies," thus eliminating the problem. But then, not too many people agree with, or even sympathize with, Dr. Singer's views, so that may not be the right tack.
Maybe the only way to counter a bully's physical violence is to wear a suit covered with outward-facing spikes. Take that as honest advice, or as a metaphor, and it might just work.
The porn studios are MPAA members. Very few people offer full-length porn on the gnutella network (200+MB files). But there is a proliferation of cut, paste, and spit-shine porn clips out there. Do Jackie V. and his "IP replaced my id" cohorts plan to cuff me for DLing these fine specimens? If they'll leave their hands off of my hands on, I've got no problem with them de-broadbanding some schmuck who tries to DL "Battlefield Earth," or "Dude, Why am I Famous?"
I think you mean to say that the feminine perspective on things can tend to balance out the masculine, which tends to pervade on/. I would agree with you on this point - such balance is good. Of course, to the untrained masculinist, the feminine perspective may come across as shrill and irritating. Witness the lengthy discussion last week surrounding one woman's diatribe as to why all men love porn, and all porn is rape (the logical indignities abound).
Also bear in mind that most (all?) of the Flying Wallendas, when they were performing, were men. Now THEY had balance.
Finger? Poor blind bastard could lose an arm in there. This technology MUST be combined with one of those in-the-works aroma-over-tcp/ip devices, in order to prevent this sort of awful hypothetical tragedy.
You should enjoy the anticipation while you've got it. My DSL hook, thru Verizon (aka "very soon") averages somewhere around the abyssimal 128k cited by the poster. Reason? Verizon has 3 levels of "consumer" service, based on the old GTE formula. "Bronze" service runs $60/mo., and gets you the aforementioned suck-suck-suckety performance. Moving up to "Silver" costs you around $100/mo (and none of these price figures includes the ISP fee, typically $15). Not sure what performance is like on Silver - too much of a cheap bastard. For those consumers out there who light cigars with $100 bills wrapped around rods of purest plutonium, there is "Gold" service, which I'm told exceeds the speed of light. If I remember correctly, this service is upwards of $200/month. So the scheme looks pretty obvious to me - give the bandwidth to those who willingly pay $200/mo. to get their e-mail real fast, and fsck the poor suckers who thought they were getting some kind of bandwidth nirvana with DSL (like me). It's quicker than 56k, but not sufficiently quicker to make it worth my while or my money.
Interesting you should bring up the dead-wood PC Mag. I made the mistake of subscribing a few years ago, when it was mostly actually about PCs. Now I pick up the magazine, and at least three postcards fall out. Given that they typically fall out on my bathroom floor, it's a real bitch to have to pick them up. After removing the postcards, though, the first thing I do with every new PC Mag is rip out all of the ads that don't have content on the backside. Then I head for the brand-spanking-new "business" section and rip that out, because it's not damned "Businesses that use PCs Magazine." By the time I'm done, I'm left with a Dvorak rant and some handy notebook-carrying tips from Big Jim Seymour, and a "user-to-user" section that has devolved into the "how do I open this spreadsheet" advice column for the business-people-who-try-to-use-computers crowd that the mag is apparently targeting. It aggravates the spleen, you know? Guess I'll have to keep getting the facts from/.
But planes don't circle over Gotham constantly. That would, of course, be a national security threat. And don't even think of trying this scheme in DC, where they break out the heat-seeking missles for shadows that cross Casa del Shrubbery. All you flight path are belong to the man.
You, my friend, are on to something. If the average workweek in 'murca was reduced by 5-10 hours, and if the balls-to-the-grindstone corporate slaves would refuse to carry their laptops wherever they go, as if they were small, shiny members of the family, then maybe there could be such a thing as "quality time," as opposed to this shadowy myth of QT we have now, with our "e-mail free weekends" and the long-weekend vacation, which has somehow managed to supplant REAL time away from the biz. Do kids in Italy and France need CIPAs and COPAs and COPPAs (oh my!) for protection? Probably not - because Mom and Dad, or Mom, or Dad, aren't leaving home at 6a to be stuck in traffic for 2 hours only to slave the day away for 9 or 10 more hours, then deal with the return-home traffic, and arrive home in time to heat up some leftovers, kiss the now-sleeping kids, and rest up for the next day. OK, so I know I went a bit OT, but my opinion is that too much time is demanded of workers in this land of the unpaid lunch hour, and those unrealistic, unsustainable demands interrupt the balance of families. This is, I think, at least partially to blame for the kiddie-centric problems of our, ahem, "Great Society."
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As many of you may know, the drug/biologics industry has fought bitterly to protect ANY and ALL information relating to gene therapy trials as trade secrets. In fact, they protected such trade secrets about a certain adenovirus vector so well that none of the right people knew it had killed monkeys and seriously injured several humans before it killed Jesse Gelsinger last year (with a little help from a U. Penn research egotist). The upshot is that when these greedy moron subhuman bastards seek to protect prior evidence of toxicity as "trade secrets," people die for lack of the suppressed knowledge. It's shameful. We'll have to hope FDA and HHS have the balls to get these gene cowboys in line before they kill again.
How fast could it run powered by the decaying heart of a shortsighted vice-president?
If I understand correctly, he's referring to Sonny Bono's last enduring monument (unless you count that bit of spleen he left on the tree, which has begun to rot by now), the copyright extension act. This extends (as the name suggests) copyright protections from some absurd number of years following the creation of the work, to some absurd number of years following the death of the work's creator. Not sure what the logic was, or why anyone in congress besides bonzo would've thought this was a good idea. Could be that the RIAA got Ricky Martin to give a live performance or something. But I ask you - why do I need to be guaranteed monopoly distribution power over use of my creative works AFTER I'M DEAD??? Would be really interesting to see how the profits generated for descendents of rich bastards by this bone-headed act measure up to the estate taxes that will no longer be collected...
Nothing that fun. They rent half their space out to the boys from Quantico, in exchange for a primo deal on real estate, security services, and inside information on which missionaries' planes will be shot down next, so they can break the news.
It's very easy, really. When you get your clone, just make sure that the switch is set to "good" and not "evil."
Interesting micro-discussion we've begun. Truth be told, the health insurance lobby is plenty pissed at the Shubbery right now for allowing HIPAA to go into effect (albeit with possible/probable changes to make it less onerous to the moneygrubbers). Bush is not interesting in hearing about problems within FDA. We'll have to wait until Mama Barb or Daddy George comes to rely on something like Propulsid or Lotronex or Rezulin and gets hurt or killed before the new King George will take notice. Interestingly, one of the first things the Shrub admin tried to do, when it was cleaning out the previous admin's political appointees, was to oust the head of FDA, who was not a political appointee. They quickly, and quietly, took that back. Now, the current head is no friend to people who take medicines, as it was under her watch that the three above-referenced drugs, and countless others that haven't yet been proven deadly, were approved, often over the strenuous objections of FDA's own internal reviewers. And it doesn't help that the drugcos hide critical information even from the pharmco-profit-friendly FDA. And lets not forget that this is the FDA that told Lilly its OK to market Prozac as Serafem, in order not to stigmatize the women who take it for a disorder that doesn't officially exist (Pre Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder, PMDD). Wonder how many of these unstigmatized chicks will off themselves due to the suicidality risk of the prozac they're really taking? Wonder if the newly invented indication will extend Lilly's patent on its new emotional cure-all? My take on the drugcos and the govt. regulatory structure is that we need to kill 'em all, and screw sorting 'em out, as they were morally defective, base excuses for humans all along.
What this really looks like to me is a nifty parallel to the pharmco research sponsor who constructs a well-thought-out study, contracts my institution to do it, and then declines my insititution the right to publish any findings that make pharmco's new drug look like less than a blockbuster.
This kind of intrusion by four-letter entities such as PRMA, RIAA, MPAA, etc. have significantly eroded academic freedom, and the problem will only get worse as institutions of higher learning continue to whore themselves out to the highest bidder, in order to get that new football stadium built, or, better yet, to cover higher salaries for their faculty, to make up for the shameful corporate bondage they've been placed in.
Importantly, very recently a British scientist by the name of David Healy, who had been invited to work at the University of Toronto, had the invitation rescinded because he gave a presentation critical of Prozac and its tendency to arouse suicidality in patients who were not previously suicidal. Dr. Healy stated in his presentation that Prozac may have been responsible for 1 suicide for each day it's been on the market. Eli Lilly, the manufacturer, didn't appreciate the comments, and also happens to be the single largest donor to/supporter of the University of Toronto's medical teaching center. UT officials deny that Lilly had a role in the shooing-away of Dr. Healy, as do Lilly's lawyers. Interestingly, Lilly did the same thing to Healy last year, when he sought to publish a similar article in a Hastings Center publication.
Point is, academic freedom has been sold out to PhRMA and the legal drug cartels for years. Still, I'm disappointed to see the RIAA (and other 4-letter words) getting in on the action of stealing our public knowledge/awareness/safety in the name of profits and IP. Shameful.
drop bombs to kill friendly troops (without consequence)?
sink the occassional fishing vessel (without consequence)?
piss off Chinese fighter pilots (with the consequence of a slight delay in travel plans)?
guide foreign military powers in their endeavors to shoot down those obnoxious missionary planes (no admission = no consequence)?
Maybe our galoots in green should spend more time working with their human capital than with these nifty machines. Or maybe these robo-planes will be just as good at mistaken-maiming once they've gotten Uncle Sam's healthy dose of "kill 'em all and let the tradewinds sort 'em out" training.
Smack that nail on the head, why dontcha? HIV research, like cancer research, relies EXTREMELY heavily on public-dollar support, mainly through NIH. As the drugcos form their unholy alliances with academic researchers (who obtain the federal grants), the likelihood increases daily that the next multimillion dollar blockbuster drug will come directly from publically-financed research ventures, which are overtaken by drugcos after some early promise is shown. We've all heard of corporate welfare. This is corporate identity theft. Nice to know my tax dollars will fatten Eli Lilly and friends' profits. And nice to have known ya', academia.
We can all (well, those of us who find the profitmongering drugcos to be despicable, anyway) be happy that the evil 39 (and their own personal RIAA, called PhRMA) have dropped their silly nonsense suit against the struggling South African nation. Now, at least, treatment may commence, even if the education/prevention program must undergo considerable rebuilding. This is simply a case of South Africa needing to strap on its own oxygen mask, as it were, through treatment, before assisting small children in donning theirs (prevention).
My first cynical response to this story was that we oughta take Peter Singer's advice on late-late-late-past-term abortion and rid our schools of these abominable malformed feti known as "bullies," thus eliminating the problem. But then, not too many people agree with, or even sympathize with, Dr. Singer's views, so that may not be the right tack.
Maybe the only way to counter a bully's physical violence is to wear a suit covered with outward-facing spikes. Take that as honest advice, or as a metaphor, and it might just work.
The porn studios are MPAA members. Very few people offer full-length porn on the gnutella network (200+MB files). But there is a proliferation of cut, paste, and spit-shine porn clips out there. Do Jackie V. and his "IP replaced my id" cohorts plan to cuff me for DLing these fine specimens? If they'll leave their hands off of my hands on, I've got no problem with them de-broadbanding some schmuck who tries to DL "Battlefield Earth," or "Dude, Why am I Famous?"
Why "@forbes.net?" Doesn't Dvorak still work for Ziff Davis? Or did Big Jim Seymour squeeze him out of his slot there?
I think you mean to say that the feminine perspective on things can tend to balance out the masculine, which tends to pervade on /. I would agree with you on this point - such balance is good. Of course, to the untrained masculinist, the feminine perspective may come across as shrill and irritating. Witness the lengthy discussion last week surrounding one woman's diatribe as to why all men love porn, and all porn is rape (the logical indignities abound).
Also bear in mind that most (all?) of the Flying Wallendas, when they were performing, were men. Now THEY had balance.
Most parents would be delighted if their children only sniffed crack. For some reason, the stuff only turns evil when lit on fire.
Finger? Poor blind bastard could lose an arm in there. This technology MUST be combined with one of those in-the-works aroma-over-tcp/ip devices, in order to prevent this sort of awful hypothetical tragedy.
"This tag not to be removed under penalty of law, except by the end consumer of the mattress..."
Visions of an Asian Nelson Muntz... "Stop hitting yourself, SMACK! Stop hitting yourself, SMACK!"
I thought that was the way to outrun gators?!?
You should enjoy the anticipation while you've got it. My DSL hook, thru Verizon (aka "very soon") averages somewhere around the abyssimal 128k cited by the poster. Reason? Verizon has 3 levels of "consumer" service, based on the old GTE formula. "Bronze" service runs $60/mo., and gets you the aforementioned suck-suck-suckety performance. Moving up to "Silver" costs you around $100/mo (and none of these price figures includes the ISP fee, typically $15). Not sure what performance is like on Silver - too much of a cheap bastard. For those consumers out there who light cigars with $100 bills wrapped around rods of purest plutonium, there is "Gold" service, which I'm told exceeds the speed of light. If I remember correctly, this service is upwards of $200/month. So the scheme looks pretty obvious to me - give the bandwidth to those who willingly pay $200/mo. to get their e-mail real fast, and fsck the poor suckers who thought they were getting some kind of bandwidth nirvana with DSL (like me). It's quicker than 56k, but not sufficiently quicker to make it worth my while or my money.
Interesting you should bring up the dead-wood PC Mag. I made the mistake of subscribing a few years ago, when it was mostly actually about PCs. Now I pick up the magazine, and at least three postcards fall out. Given that they typically fall out on my bathroom floor, it's a real bitch to have to pick them up. After removing the postcards, though, the first thing I do with every new PC Mag is rip out all of the ads that don't have content on the backside. Then I head for the brand-spanking-new "business" section and rip that out, because it's not damned "Businesses that use PCs Magazine." By the time I'm done, I'm left with a Dvorak rant and some handy notebook-carrying tips from Big Jim Seymour, and a "user-to-user" section that has devolved into the "how do I open this spreadsheet" advice column for the business-people-who-try-to-use-computers crowd that the mag is apparently targeting. It aggravates the spleen, you know? Guess I'll have to keep getting the facts from /.
Salon sans ads free of charge - webwasher.
But planes don't circle over Gotham constantly. That would, of course, be a national security threat. And don't even think of trying this scheme in DC, where they break out the heat-seeking missles for shadows that cross Casa del Shrubbery. All you flight path are belong to the man.
You, my friend, are on to something. If the average workweek in 'murca was reduced by 5-10 hours, and if the balls-to-the-grindstone corporate slaves would refuse to carry their laptops wherever they go, as if they were small, shiny members of the family, then maybe there could be such a thing as "quality time," as opposed to this shadowy myth of QT we have now, with our "e-mail free weekends" and the long-weekend vacation, which has somehow managed to supplant REAL time away from the biz. Do kids in Italy and France need CIPAs and COPAs and COPPAs (oh my!) for protection? Probably not - because Mom and Dad, or Mom, or Dad, aren't leaving home at 6a to be stuck in traffic for 2 hours only to slave the day away for 9 or 10 more hours, then deal with the return-home traffic, and arrive home in time to heat up some leftovers, kiss the now-sleeping kids, and rest up for the next day. OK, so I know I went a bit OT, but my opinion is that too much time is demanded of workers in this land of the unpaid lunch hour, and those unrealistic, unsustainable demands interrupt the balance of families. This is, I think, at least partially to blame for the kiddie-centric problems of our, ahem, "Great Society."