Of course they don't. The conservatives are like a kid with a christmas list they've been writing for 9 years, with an ever expanding list of things they wanted done, that they couldn't do as an opposition party or as a minority. Now that they're in charge it's time to reward all the party faithful for the last 9 + years (more than that for those in the precursor parties) with all of the things they've been pushing for. It doesn't matter if the idea is 10 years out of date, completely invalid, useless, a waste of money or anything else. They're finally in charge, and all of the things they wanted to do, more prisons, ditch the gun registry, ditch kyoto, massively expand the navy, drill drill drill (or however you want to describe the oilsands), etc etc etc.
Split the vote on the left, and highlight the fact that the liberals can't seem to find a leader who isn't terrible?
On the upside the greens as a party died nationally. Elizabeth May (their leader) may have gotten a seat, but it was clear that when pressed the left in this country is split between the NDP and the Liberals, not the NDP, Liberals and Greens. Which is good, given our system.
Not really. It's not a commonwealth story, and it has no broader implications for the Westminster system. The tactic in question is probably illegal in the UK as well already, (as part of voter suppression rules). So unless it looks like it's going to cause the Harper government to fall (which it almost certainly can't, because eventually they will just ignore the issue and move on and there's bugger all the rest of us can do) there's not much to say. Unless something significantly changes, it's unlikely to affect the UK in anyway, and other than for a lot of noise here, it's unlikely to change much here either.
Now it *could* get interesting, if a bunch of conservative MP's rebel from the party and support an inquiry or if the RCMP (the federal police) find anything particularly damning of senior officials in office, at which point it might matter to the UK. But it probably wont'.
A big chunk of canadians will go into the next election unsure of whether the new left is orange or red (NDP, the current opposition, or Liberals). Both parties are leaderless, the NDP were basically the party of Jack Layton and his personal charisma nationally, and the Liberals were incapable of finding a competent leader who isn't a rat (Bob Ray, who ratted from the provincial NDP).
That might mean a split of the left again. And given how harper has been behaving it might be a 3 way split in quebec, because they don't want to put up with most of this stuff anymore than the rest of us, but they may vote for a quebec party.
not entirely the case. Parliament is a different creature than other systems. You need a majority of Parliament to govern, or at least a majority to not oppose you any time there's an important issue, it's not just guaranteed seating for 4 years. If there is evidence that your own party was acting illegally it may be in your own personal interest as an MP to bring down your own party in government so that you can continue to collect a government paycheque, and stand out as having strong moral character in rebuilding the party (e.g. 120 or so labour MP's voted to oppose the Iraq war, despite the Prime Minister being from the Labour party, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/2802819.stm).
In a fixed election date system the whole government can basically implode onto itself for 3 years and get nothing done, at which point the oppositions frothing vitriolic rage may make them sloppy or reckless and let you win again anyway, and you can blame them for being obstructionists. In a system where an election can always be called 6 weeks from now you only guarantee yourself the ability to run the country for 6 weeks, and in doing so you may not be able to pass any legislation, so you don't get much out of it.
Not necessarily. Especially if you have graduate students who are not going on to academia (masters students) they may skip the publish a paper part because they don't care. Even though it's good work that warrants being published.
Also, it's a pretty standard academic contract (including tenured) to work out to 1 paper per year, maybe more if you have time, or lots of students. If you have 4, a couple of PhD and a couple of masters, plus yourself, less than one paper a year means you're not getting on with the business of writing papers.
I'm not specifically familiar with the University of Sydney, smaller schools (even just small departments) have to accept that publishing at a rate of 1/year is not possible. You don't have enough students, and you can't get enough grants to publish that much. They have something like 50K students, so it's a decent sized place, I'm not sure even what their turnover rate is for staff.
4 Papers in 3 years around here (ontario canada) would be about what we would require someone to do to get tenure. Once they have tenure it would be a bit less, and less again once they hit about 50. And yes, if you don't manage to get those papers/year you will not be offered tenure and your position filled by someone else. Other academic work (writing a book for example) counts against that. A typical contract here is something like 40/40/20. 40% teaching (4 courses per year, usually as 2 per term, with none in the summer), 40% research, and 20% administrative (committees and the like). If you can't, in 800 hours of work (including supervising grad students who are probably doing more than that) come up with 5-8 pages of work that can get published in a journal you might not be doing your job very well, and that includes begging for money to pay people who can publish.
Basically the only thing you can do is host your program as a cloud service, with dongles. That doesn't mean you should host users files (depends on what exactly the software does and for whom) necessarily, but core parts of your software should be online only.
Sell or give a away a free 'thin' client, that should always let users open files, convert them to another format, that sort of thing. But any actual functionality should require authenticating with your service.
If you're in the 10k/copy space you can set up the licence keys such that you directly track who has them, and where they're from, and if someone tries to access the software from out of a valid range you can simply block them.
There are a couple of ways you could do it, one is to have the client send data to your server to execute, the other is to dynamically pull down modules of the program as needed, and then clean them up once they finish executing. Keeping the data on your servers is the most secure from your perspective, but the least desirable from your customers perspective. Downloading program modules in real time shouldn't be too hard, but someone really determined could probably grab all of the modules and then disable the web check or redirect it, that's a fairly significant pain in the arse though, especially if you're a legitimate business then you're very clearly working hard to pirate the software, and that could land you in trouble, and anyone illegitimate well, they weren't customers anyway.
They wouldn't be allowed. They very nearly lost the farm trying to spin off globalfoundaries because they have a licence from intel for the x86 instruction set. They don't even make their own CPUs any more, GlobalFoundaries does.
Besides, what evidence is there that the 'open' community of CPU developers would design better CPU's than they already make? There aren't exactly a lot of people out there making CPU's on the side for the fun of it, (whereas there are with software). Designing a modern CPU is a really serious engineering challenge, and anyone with the knowledge and experience to make a CPU probably works for AMD or a competitor already.
Deliberate mild inflation is preferable to deflation, or to pegging a currency to an item which can have wild swings in value based on what other countries do to fuck with its value.
And yes, when I said mild inflation the usually targets of 1-3% counts. The US economic growth just in general is 2-3% if you're not doing horribly, add to that 1-3% inflation and in not too many years debt becomes less of an issue.
Inflation is actually good for a lot of people, so long as it is mild. Anyone with a mortgage at a fixed rate (and for a fixed value) benefits from inflation. Before I was born, when inflation spiked up into the 13, 14% range a lot of people my parents age got exceptionally lucky and bought houses etc. at 6% interest fixed rate. With 13% inflation the relative value of their debt was dropping by 7% a year. Now, banking on that to happen in general is dangerous, and 14% inflation just in general can be nasty.
Not everyones wages decrease with inflation, not even necessarily minimum wage. That's why the minimum wage is revisited regularly. Where I lived it was just recently bumped up to around 10 dollars an hour for adults (Ontario Canada), which puts it back in step with inflation for the last however many years. Anywhere I've ever worked that wasn't on minimum wage you always negotiated your salary increases to be more than inflation or at least equal to it.
The rich aren't hurt by inflation if they own stuff. Especially property. Because they can always just increase the rent. The poor *can* be hurt by inflation, but aren't necessarily.
Precious metals make very bad stores of wealth. That's why we don't do it any more. Pegging your currency to a metal that might be mined somewhere else, or that might suddenly have an increase or decrease in demand screws you.
A flat tax would outright screw the poor, and should be avoided. That's what we did in canada essentially by adding a 7% sales tax to all goods and services (the so called GST). Which helped pad government coffers, and simply served to reduce the standard of living of the poor and increase their debt loads. We suddenly started to look a lot more like the US, and a lot less like a civilized country, and then the price of oil shot up and the whole economy changed.
Depends what you define as a social network I suppose, and in general the question applies to any online service. Do you want to count skype as a social network?
And I suppose the same applies to any online service you need to sign up for as part of your employment. You use your employee information as the basis for it, and you make sure your employer clearly understands they are the ones liable since this is part of your work duties and anything that happens to you, your account, or anything done on the account is their responsibility, excluding the regular limits of what is expressly your responsibility.
Re:They woke the sleeping giant that was Intel...
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Apple running x86 made all the difference. It's like a gas engine on a battery powered car. When you absolutely need something to work in windows you have windows but for everything else you have something else. The 'compatibility' anxiety was gone.
I don't see many students using the unix/bsd stuff on their macs. I'm sure they know it's there. But it's pretty and it's not windows and they bought into that. And then when it comes down to trying to accomplish useful things we give them a windows image with what we want on it anyway.
Bill Gates pushed for tablet technology, and they invested in it. Someone else pushed for netbook technology first and MS invested in it, it wasn't a fear of linux, it was a market they could figured they could make money on, and because customers wanted it. That's how everything works. The thing is, they kept making tablet versions even though it was a pitifully small segment of the market, because they figured it might take off. Oh, and you take notes into a program called "One Note" in office on a tablet. I can't remember if it was around in early versions of tablets, but it definitely was by 2005.
But I stand by my assertion MS doesn't care about linux on the desktop. Servers, mobile phones, sure. But on the desktop the only competition MS has is Mac, and even that's hard to call competition. Lots of places got the brilliant idea to change to Linux desktops, realized users have no f'n clue how to accomplish anything, and changed back (see german foreign office for example). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems gives, for 2011, the linux desktop as no more than 2.9%, and that is a single data point, the rest being under 1.57. Microsoft's biggest competitor for the last decade has been their own previous version, with their own mindshare on that version, not Linux. Arguably mac, as apple has, since 2006 when they transitioned to Intel been on the upswing (and it was pretty obvious I think even then that they were ripe for an upswing), and MS took notice of that. But the 1-2% of the market taken up by linux is for people who really care about linux, and they aren't lost windows customers.
Re:They woke the sleeping giant that was Intel...
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I'm in a CS programme outside of the US. And students bring their own laptops, and it's about 50% Apple macbooks now. Most of them actually using OSX.
They made windows XP (and windows 7) for netbooks because it was a form factor to make an OS for. Why did they make a tablet version of XP when they sold almost none of them? Because it was there, and because people wanted windows on a netbook. The moment there was windows on a netbook how many more linux ones sold? Right. Because 1% of the market want Linux home user anything. Netbooks when they started out where (like all new tech) a geeky thing, so geeks were happy with linux netbooks. But the market in general isn't.
Re:They woke the sleeping giant that was Intel...
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You mean Mac and Firefox were credible threats. Linux is in no way a meaningful threat to Windows in the home market (one could argue mac isn't either but it's about 10x the size of Linux).
When you walk into a classroom and half the students have macs, and the other half windows you realize it's exactly what you say: mindshare. Apple has a critical mass of people who will want Apple in the office (assuming these people can ever get jobs). Ballmers microsoft has been poor to innovate, and has done a very bad job PR wise of convincing people of the (correct) fact that Windows 7, and even XP are infinitely better than the BSOD messes that pre windows XP machines were. In a business that iterates as rapidly as IT does you would think consumers wouldn't have these bizarre notions about windows needing a format and reinstall regularly like it did 15 years ago, but they still think like that. MS is slowly starting to realize they should be thinking about the entire experience, and not just the 'windows' part as well. Apple has always done that (not alway for the better, but they try). If you want to improve your computing experience buy a solid state drive. Intel figured that out, AMD didn't. Microsoft understands it, but doesn't do anything about it.
If you want to buy 5000 computers every year how many companies can you buy from?
If you want to buy one computer a year you can build your own for all it matters. If you want 1 computer every 5 years you probably don't have the desire or skills to build your own, nor is saving that small amount of money worth it for a lot of people.
When apply either of those two constraints Dell IBM and HP were the big dogs for a long time, and they were basically in bed with intel. People who don't have the skills to build their own want to buy from someone with a name brand who will stay in business long enough to honour a warranty, and people who want to buy 5000 computers this year are only going to buy from a big outfit, for basically the same reasons, and because there aren't a lot of places that can supply you will 1000 computers by the end of the week. If you're a really big outfit you're looking at buying something like 20-100k computers a year, and when you start talking numbers like that even your acer, asus and toshiba guys will have trouble keeping up.
AMD has the same problem in two different sectors. They had one really good product, and then someone released a better one. In the GPU business AMD will have the best parts for a couple of month then nvidia will come along and take the crown, and neither of them are competing in the high volume business desktop market that intel has (and has gone so far as to put it into the CPU package). For the CPU business Intel has been toying with them for at least 6 years. How do you know that? Because you can overclock an i7 (or a core 2 series) by 30% on air easily. Everytime AMD gets close to matching the performance/watt, performance/dollar or whatever, intel just ups the clocks a bit and boom, they're back in first place. They're basically a full process (die size) ahead of AMD, and they always have been, which gives them a huge advantage. In the GPU business AMD is doing as well as they can, if you look at the steam numbers they're up around 40% of the market. The problem is that the gaming market, which is where the money is on a per unit basis, isn't all that big. nVidia has a revenue of about 3.7 Billion USD, AMD 6.4, and Intel 54. The money is in volume, and AMD can't get volume because their price per unit, per performance, per watt are all just not up to match Intel, yes, Intel was anti-competitive for a while, but they only need to do that for about 4 years to get themselves back out into the lead by a wide margin.
The US federal debt is only 15 trillion dollars. 6 trillion would make a big difference. Of course these are government bonds, so the US government would be obliged to pay them back, er.. something, there's no one to pay if the government has them, but that's beside the point.
With 6 trillion dollars or even half of that, you could get rid of basically all foreign debt the US has. Then your debt would be borrowed entirely from yourselves (which is mostly is now, but not completely). The reason Japan hasn't imploded, despite having 200+% of GDP in debt (compared to the US ~100%), and they've been like that for a decade, is they owe that money to themselves.
Government debt is odd. Especially because it's in a currency you control. Mild inflation, with economic growth and a close to balanced budget deficit makes even big debts like the US has go away very quickly. That won't work for japan because their population is shrinking, and aging, but it will for the US because the population is at least flat, if not growing. But 6 trillion dollars could do a lot of interesting things for the US. Including just cover the deficit for the next 8 or 9 years. (900 billion this year, and progressively less after that, theoretically).
Huh? This story seems to have hit the press the moment it was discovered, and they all sort of ignored the absurdity of it. It's the guy with a printer argument, only expensive printer and organized mafia, but it was absurd. 10 seconds of internet searches reveals US gpd in 1934 as under 100 billion dollars, so a 1 billion dollar bond is just nonsense. That they printed 6000 of them, which is maybe a few thousand dollars in forgery is hardly that significant.
It doesn't seem like anyone important who saw them took them as actually legitimate. They found them and reported them as a result of some bad cheques (that were to the tune of 200k), and that was the end of it.
Well that's just it isn't it? By 2016 the US will definitely have a new government, and they may cancel whatever plan are in place, even if they're behind. SpaceX and Lockheed etc. are all trying to fill requirements set out by NASA. If they want a rocket for mars missions, or new moon landings, looking at something on part with a Satun V doesn't seem unreasonable. But, of course, 4 years, and 4 budgets from now someone else with another plan will come along. And SpaceX and Lockheed may have to completely toss their existing programmes for whatever the new requirements and targets of the day are.
You're stuck on 'what we need for what we're doing today'. That's a very bad way to run government, and a very bad way to run anything actually. What size rocket should we have in 2025? What missions will you want to do in 2025? Basically since the end the Apollo programme NASA's vision has been 'the next project after this one will do something', and then they never do it, because when they get there, they don't have what they need and by the time they start building it someone else comes into power and changes projects. Assuming he gets re-elected the Obama vision for the space programme will almost be ready to start as he's definitely leaving office, and assuming he doesn't the SLS will have been a glorified research paper.
The choices are basically the status quo with a string of marginal improvements or a long term vision and plan, and starting to work towards it. Unfortunately the US process is sufficiently dysfunctional that if Obama does it the Republicans will undo it at the earliest opportunity, which is either 2013 or 2017.
I'm not sure you quite grasp the cost value here. It's worth whatever the government is willing to pay for it. If they want to go to Mars and are wiling to spend 100 billion dollars on it, then they're getting value for their money at 10 billion dollars for a rocket, even if it's only ever used once. They are free to decide what they think the science priorities are, and small missions that are basically rehashing the same experiments they've been doing for the last 30 years doesn't seem to be inspiring much enthusiasm.
If you want to send something of a reasonable size even back to the moon you need something bigger than the size of a falcon heavy. Whether or not that is a good use of someone else's tax dollars isn't for me to decide, but if that's what your politicians want to do, the falcon heavy isn't going to cut it. The falcon heavy couldn't even get the Orion capsule (by itself) to lunar trajectory.
The argument that 'it can only be used for these rare expensive missions' is why NASA is doing it, and not say... anyone else.
ADHD is tricky. First off, the symptoms mirror that of sleep deprivation. Have the person get 2 hours extra sleep a night and see if it makes a difference sort of thing. So there's cultural pressure, which is that patients don't like being told 'stop watching letterman or the daily show, or whatever your kid is watching at 9pm and go to sleep'. But it really is an inability to focus on tasks the way normal people can (or at least, the way people used to be able to).
Secondly, and this is one of those unknowns in psychology, is if we simply missed the diagnoses before, or if we're doing something to induce it. I'm a game developer in academia atm and I was talking to a psychologist studying this stuff in december. Certain video games can cause *short term* adhd symptoms in adults, basically if you play a driving game for 3 hours you may behave like you're adhd for another hour or so. It's matter of how games cause your brain to change how it deals with stimuli. Now the question is: could we be inducing this in children somehow as a permanent condition? Not a lot of under 6 year old play games all that much, and in many cases the 'games' they play are just digital versions of physical games, so the video game theory is more of a odd conjecture than actual theory, because it's an open question and I'm a game developer I hear the video game theory, I'm sure there are a lot of other theories (TV, diet, it might even be some new teaching method in schools, or god knows what).
Um... they tried the sci fi solutions of wonderful fantasy land and 30 million people starved to death under mao.
It's not charity. We do that to africa and we simply exacerbate the problem. If you just give people aid you drive prices down and make it hard for them to compete (I mean general aid, not specific disaster relief). It's giving them a fair chance. And it's not some divine paper, in fact I was quite clear on what they're getting in exchange. Clean water, electricity, food, housing that isn't dirt and logs, and eventually, stuff.
There really is no other way. We can't just give them money, and while we can give them some of the 'stuff' (power generators for example), they need to be able to pay for their use, have staff to be paid to run them, we can't possible match the scale required.
I'm not sure what dream you're talking about. As a kid (and even now as an adult) I want stuff. A house, a car, computer, food, clothes. I want to be able to retire eventually. I'm only going to get those things by exchanging my labour for them, and we use money as a unit of exchange between the two. It's not that complicated a concept, and it provides the granularity '3 chickens and rack of ribs for my vaccinations' lacks. I'm going to guess that people in china may want slightly different stuff, or they set the bar lower than 'a car' and maybe on clean drinking water. But that's how the world works.
I said, and it is depressing, there are generations (or at least major portions of generations) of people in china who basically lack the skills to do anything else. In 1980 1 in 5 people in china couldn't read or write. Consider that in north america something like 70% of people have a post secondary education of somesort, and in china you have 20% of people who didn't manage to get to grade 2 or equivalent. They *need* to be able to educate their children (and they are, and have done that), but they have millions of people who are a long way from being able to do anything in a 'knowledge economy'. They are also about 30 years away from having a workforce that is effectively 100% literate (which is the literacy rate for under 24's now), and as that shifts they will be able to do more and more. But right now, for some people, manual labour is as good as it gets.
As a person of indian decent I have a soft spot for india, who are about 15 years behind china.
Chinas military budget is about 200 billion USD. The US military budget is about 800 billion. And china is spreading that around 4x as many people. Admittedly, it buys a lot more in china, but as even Clausewitz realized, money in absolute terms buys you a better military. Besides, china needs to defend itself from Russia, the US, India, internal muslim extremists, and just generally have a military, so they can eventually do things like help deal with Somali pirates.
What happened when we outsourced all our manufacturing jobs to the USA from Britain, or to Germany from Britain, or to Japan from the USA, or to the other china from the USA? China will lose it's cost competitive edge eventually. Probably in 15 or 20 years, maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less, and india will be following along. But as they get there they will create new markets to sell stuff to, and canadian and american manufacturers will have to start thinking the way people in china do "what does someone in that country need that I can make here?". And labour will do what it has always done, and converge and specialize. For all the complaining about china making iPhones, they assemble iPhones, lots of parts are made other places, and if they use intel or AMD parts for similar products then major important portions are made in the US or Europe.
Again, I reiterate though, chinas currency manipulation causes problems, and chinas general refusal to let US companies do business there is causing problems. Neither of those is acceptable, and, I would argue probably warrant sanctions of some sort. But that is a very different problem than whether or not they should be making things at all.
When I say 2 dollars a day, I mean *total* wages. You're talking about someone earning up around 10 dollars a day being able to spend 2 of it on food (6-7RMB/dollar).
And even few years ago china was great strides into it's progress, which is a far cry from where they were in say, 1990.
Can you get clean water on 3-6 dollars a day? Do you face seasonal shortages of basic necessities, like rice? When your total income is 2 dollars a day (or less) it's very hard to get little things, like meat, or vegetables beyonds one or two.
Food in the US is also subsidized, the wrong things are subsidized, but it is subsidized. That makes a big difference.
I'm under no illusion about the 3rd world nature of the US. But food stamps and welfare still put americans in a much better position than chinese peasants. Even at poverty in the US, you still get to go to school, have vaccinations and so on.
So wait, you'd rather people in china go back to being subsistence farmers with a 44 year life expectancy (that was by the way, 1960), with no education, so you can feel good about giving extra money to your neighbour who's going to go out and spend more on lunch than someone in china would have made in a week? That's the argument against what is happening in china today.
China is in transition. There is a huge swath of people, basically 3 or 4 lost generations of people, and another 1 or 2 in the pipeline who are the transition from destitute subsistence farmers who literally never had anything, to a society of people who have little things like antibiotics, and electricity. Unfortunately, they're lost. They're not savable by any laws rules, treaties or procedures. Nothing. And there are hundreds of millions of them, which makes them worth next to nothing. A million workers at foxconn go on strike? No problem, shut down the facility and move somewhere else, and hire a million others, or let foxconn go out of business and someone else will emerge. Because they have generations of people who have nothing else they can do but repetitive manual labour. Chinas literacy rate in 1950 was 20% (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/12/news/12iht-rchina.t.html?pagewanted=all) Today it's still only about 88%.
Believe it or not, all these exploited workers in china are living the great dream. That their children and childrens children won't have to go through this. But they are condemned to lives of either being peasant farmers who could never read, write or get any actual health care, or being underpaid overworked factory workers. The only thing we can do for them is give them jobs, and we can only give them money based on the fact that they're basically doing the work of robots.
Remember, there are still 2.7 billion people living on less than 2 dollars a day, and 1.1 billion on less than a dollar (worldwide). http://library.thinkquest.org/05aug/00282/over_world.htm . That's slightly out of date, but it conveys the point. Foxconn's wages are about 300 dollars a month, or about 10 dollars a day (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/business/global/08wages.html). Comparatively, people working at foxconn at 10 dollars a day, are doing *extremely* well compared to the lives they would have had 40 years earlier.
In the west we don't really think about the cost of basic things. Workers at foxconn have access to a diverse diet, which, by the way, is actually pretty tough to get on 2 dollars a day. They have generally clean water, again, not something they would have had as starving peasants. Oh, and they aren't starving. They, and their children will be able to read and write. They have electricity, which again, is a pretty radical concept.
The only way billions of *people* in the world are going to get out of illiterate starving and dying to preventable diseases, is if we give them jobs, preferably for honest work. That might be making your shoes, and that might be snapping together an iPod. But you can't just go and pay someone in china 10 dollars and hour for a job someone else will do for 2, it's has devastating cascading effect through society, and frankly, for 10 dollars an hour, it would be cheaper to pay a robot than a foxconn worker. They're better to get the 2 dollars an hour or 1.25 or whatever it is, than to get nothing. Because without money they can't build anything to improve their society with, which is why they (along with a lot of other places) are so far behind, and that china has realized this is why they're growing at a break neck rate and fixing it.
As a grad student, I make about 20k a year (I'm sort of half game developer half grad student, but one is part of the other). I am, by canadian measures barely above the poverty line once you take out my tuition. That's still more money in 1 year that about half the people in the world will make in their lifetimes.
Yes, china has unfair currency practices which (significantly) undervalue their currency, and
I guess I forgot that other countries than canada throw around professional somewhat more liberally. A politician is usually not regarded as a professional, while a professional engineer, doctor, or lawyer, or priest would be (it used to be that you had to have a professional certify your passport for example). They are required to pay dues to a professional organization, and to be a member they must have been accredited to get there. A professor or some of the upper levels of public school administration also might be considered professionals.
If parents have concerns about allergic reactions and the doctor doesn't, then no, they shouldn't be able to opt out. That's sort of the point. Parents are stupid and irrational, or just plain wrong, and the doctor is by definition supposed to be objective.
What do drug companies have to do with it? Of course they're in it to make money, Governments demand better prices and fund research to save money (and lives) but making 300 million doses of anything, which is like 4 million doses per year (or more) costs money and you can't expect people to do that work for free. Doctors should not be allowed to get kickbacks from prescribing it so what does it matter?
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Of course they don't. The conservatives are like a kid with a christmas list they've been writing for 9 years, with an ever expanding list of things they wanted done, that they couldn't do as an opposition party or as a minority. Now that they're in charge it's time to reward all the party faithful for the last 9 + years (more than that for those in the precursor parties) with all of the things they've been pushing for. It doesn't matter if the idea is 10 years out of date, completely invalid, useless, a waste of money or anything else. They're finally in charge, and all of the things they wanted to do, more prisons, ditch the gun registry, ditch kyoto, massively expand the navy, drill drill drill (or however you want to describe the oilsands), etc etc etc.
Split the vote on the left, and highlight the fact that the liberals can't seem to find a leader who isn't terrible?
On the upside the greens as a party died nationally. Elizabeth May (their leader) may have gotten a seat, but it was clear that when pressed the left in this country is split between the NDP and the Liberals, not the NDP, Liberals and Greens. Which is good, given our system.
Not really. It's not a commonwealth story, and it has no broader implications for the Westminster system. The tactic in question is probably illegal in the UK as well already, (as part of voter suppression rules). So unless it looks like it's going to cause the Harper government to fall (which it almost certainly can't, because eventually they will just ignore the issue and move on and there's bugger all the rest of us can do) there's not much to say. Unless something significantly changes, it's unlikely to affect the UK in anyway, and other than for a lot of noise here, it's unlikely to change much here either.
Now it *could* get interesting, if a bunch of conservative MP's rebel from the party and support an inquiry or if the RCMP (the federal police) find anything particularly damning of senior officials in office, at which point it might matter to the UK. But it probably wont'.
A big chunk of canadians will go into the next election unsure of whether the new left is orange or red (NDP, the current opposition, or Liberals). Both parties are leaderless, the NDP were basically the party of Jack Layton and his personal charisma nationally, and the Liberals were incapable of finding a competent leader who isn't a rat (Bob Ray, who ratted from the provincial NDP).
That might mean a split of the left again. And given how harper has been behaving it might be a 3 way split in quebec, because they don't want to put up with most of this stuff anymore than the rest of us, but they may vote for a quebec party.
not entirely the case. Parliament is a different creature than other systems. You need a majority of Parliament to govern, or at least a majority to not oppose you any time there's an important issue, it's not just guaranteed seating for 4 years. If there is evidence that your own party was acting illegally it may be in your own personal interest as an MP to bring down your own party in government so that you can continue to collect a government paycheque, and stand out as having strong moral character in rebuilding the party (e.g. 120 or so labour MP's voted to oppose the Iraq war, despite the Prime Minister being from the Labour party, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/2802819.stm).
In a fixed election date system the whole government can basically implode onto itself for 3 years and get nothing done, at which point the oppositions frothing vitriolic rage may make them sloppy or reckless and let you win again anyway, and you can blame them for being obstructionists. In a system where an election can always be called 6 weeks from now you only guarantee yourself the ability to run the country for 6 weeks, and in doing so you may not be able to pass any legislation, so you don't get much out of it.
Not necessarily. Especially if you have graduate students who are not going on to academia (masters students) they may skip the publish a paper part because they don't care. Even though it's good work that warrants being published.
Also, it's a pretty standard academic contract (including tenured) to work out to 1 paper per year, maybe more if you have time, or lots of students. If you have 4, a couple of PhD and a couple of masters, plus yourself, less than one paper a year means you're not getting on with the business of writing papers.
I'm not specifically familiar with the University of Sydney, smaller schools (even just small departments) have to accept that publishing at a rate of 1/year is not possible. You don't have enough students, and you can't get enough grants to publish that much. They have something like 50K students, so it's a decent sized place, I'm not sure even what their turnover rate is for staff.
4 Papers in 3 years around here (ontario canada) would be about what we would require someone to do to get tenure. Once they have tenure it would be a bit less, and less again once they hit about 50. And yes, if you don't manage to get those papers/year you will not be offered tenure and your position filled by someone else. Other academic work (writing a book for example) counts against that. A typical contract here is something like 40/40/20. 40% teaching (4 courses per year, usually as 2 per term, with none in the summer), 40% research, and 20% administrative (committees and the like). If you can't, in 800 hours of work (including supervising grad students who are probably doing more than that) come up with 5-8 pages of work that can get published in a journal you might not be doing your job very well, and that includes begging for money to pay people who can publish.
Basically the only thing you can do is host your program as a cloud service, with dongles. That doesn't mean you should host users files (depends on what exactly the software does and for whom) necessarily, but core parts of your software should be online only.
Sell or give a away a free 'thin' client, that should always let users open files, convert them to another format, that sort of thing. But any actual functionality should require authenticating with your service.
If you're in the 10k/copy space you can set up the licence keys such that you directly track who has them, and where they're from, and if someone tries to access the software from out of a valid range you can simply block them.
There are a couple of ways you could do it, one is to have the client send data to your server to execute, the other is to dynamically pull down modules of the program as needed, and then clean them up once they finish executing. Keeping the data on your servers is the most secure from your perspective, but the least desirable from your customers perspective. Downloading program modules in real time shouldn't be too hard, but someone really determined could probably grab all of the modules and then disable the web check or redirect it, that's a fairly significant pain in the arse though, especially if you're a legitimate business then you're very clearly working hard to pirate the software, and that could land you in trouble, and anyone illegitimate well, they weren't customers anyway.
They wouldn't be allowed. They very nearly lost the farm trying to spin off globalfoundaries because they have a licence from intel for the x86 instruction set. They don't even make their own CPUs any more, GlobalFoundaries does.
Besides, what evidence is there that the 'open' community of CPU developers would design better CPU's than they already make? There aren't exactly a lot of people out there making CPU's on the side for the fun of it, (whereas there are with software). Designing a modern CPU is a really serious engineering challenge, and anyone with the knowledge and experience to make a CPU probably works for AMD or a competitor already.
Deliberate mild inflation is preferable to deflation, or to pegging a currency to an item which can have wild swings in value based on what other countries do to fuck with its value.
And yes, when I said mild inflation the usually targets of 1-3% counts. The US economic growth just in general is 2-3% if you're not doing horribly, add to that 1-3% inflation and in not too many years debt becomes less of an issue.
Inflation is actually good for a lot of people, so long as it is mild. Anyone with a mortgage at a fixed rate (and for a fixed value) benefits from inflation. Before I was born, when inflation spiked up into the 13, 14% range a lot of people my parents age got exceptionally lucky and bought houses etc. at 6% interest fixed rate. With 13% inflation the relative value of their debt was dropping by 7% a year. Now, banking on that to happen in general is dangerous, and 14% inflation just in general can be nasty.
Not everyones wages decrease with inflation, not even necessarily minimum wage. That's why the minimum wage is revisited regularly. Where I lived it was just recently bumped up to around 10 dollars an hour for adults (Ontario Canada), which puts it back in step with inflation for the last however many years. Anywhere I've ever worked that wasn't on minimum wage you always negotiated your salary increases to be more than inflation or at least equal to it.
The rich aren't hurt by inflation if they own stuff. Especially property. Because they can always just increase the rent. The poor *can* be hurt by inflation, but aren't necessarily.
Precious metals make very bad stores of wealth. That's why we don't do it any more. Pegging your currency to a metal that might be mined somewhere else, or that might suddenly have an increase or decrease in demand screws you.
A flat tax would outright screw the poor, and should be avoided. That's what we did in canada essentially by adding a 7% sales tax to all goods and services (the so called GST). Which helped pad government coffers, and simply served to reduce the standard of living of the poor and increase their debt loads. We suddenly started to look a lot more like the US, and a lot less like a civilized country, and then the price of oil shot up and the whole economy changed.
Depends what you define as a social network I suppose, and in general the question applies to any online service. Do you want to count skype as a social network?
And I suppose the same applies to any online service you need to sign up for as part of your employment. You use your employee information as the basis for it, and you make sure your employer clearly understands they are the ones liable since this is part of your work duties and anything that happens to you, your account, or anything done on the account is their responsibility, excluding the regular limits of what is expressly your responsibility.
Apple running x86 made all the difference. It's like a gas engine on a battery powered car. When you absolutely need something to work in windows you have windows but for everything else you have something else. The 'compatibility' anxiety was gone.
I don't see many students using the unix/bsd stuff on their macs. I'm sure they know it's there. But it's pretty and it's not windows and they bought into that. And then when it comes down to trying to accomplish useful things we give them a windows image with what we want on it anyway.
Bill Gates pushed for tablet technology, and they invested in it. Someone else pushed for netbook technology first and MS invested in it, it wasn't a fear of linux, it was a market they could figured they could make money on, and because customers wanted it. That's how everything works. The thing is, they kept making tablet versions even though it was a pitifully small segment of the market, because they figured it might take off. Oh, and you take notes into a program called "One Note" in office on a tablet. I can't remember if it was around in early versions of tablets, but it definitely was by 2005.
But I stand by my assertion MS doesn't care about linux on the desktop. Servers, mobile phones, sure. But on the desktop the only competition MS has is Mac, and even that's hard to call competition. Lots of places got the brilliant idea to change to Linux desktops, realized users have no f'n clue how to accomplish anything, and changed back (see german foreign office for example). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems gives, for 2011, the linux desktop as no more than 2.9%, and that is a single data point, the rest being under 1.57. Microsoft's biggest competitor for the last decade has been their own previous version, with their own mindshare on that version, not Linux. Arguably mac, as apple has, since 2006 when they transitioned to Intel been on the upswing (and it was pretty obvious I think even then that they were ripe for an upswing), and MS took notice of that. But the 1-2% of the market taken up by linux is for people who really care about linux, and they aren't lost windows customers.
I'm in a CS programme outside of the US. And students bring their own laptops, and it's about 50% Apple macbooks now. Most of them actually using OSX.
They made windows XP (and windows 7) for netbooks because it was a form factor to make an OS for. Why did they make a tablet version of XP when they sold almost none of them? Because it was there, and because people wanted windows on a netbook. The moment there was windows on a netbook how many more linux ones sold? Right. Because 1% of the market want Linux home user anything. Netbooks when they started out where (like all new tech) a geeky thing, so geeks were happy with linux netbooks. But the market in general isn't.
You mean Mac and Firefox were credible threats. Linux is in no way a meaningful threat to Windows in the home market (one could argue mac isn't either but it's about 10x the size of Linux).
When you walk into a classroom and half the students have macs, and the other half windows you realize it's exactly what you say: mindshare. Apple has a critical mass of people who will want Apple in the office (assuming these people can ever get jobs). Ballmers microsoft has been poor to innovate, and has done a very bad job PR wise of convincing people of the (correct) fact that Windows 7, and even XP are infinitely better than the BSOD messes that pre windows XP machines were. In a business that iterates as rapidly as IT does you would think consumers wouldn't have these bizarre notions about windows needing a format and reinstall regularly like it did 15 years ago, but they still think like that. MS is slowly starting to realize they should be thinking about the entire experience, and not just the 'windows' part as well. Apple has always done that (not alway for the better, but they try). If you want to improve your computing experience buy a solid state drive. Intel figured that out, AMD didn't. Microsoft understands it, but doesn't do anything about it.
And definitely not when they're making that better performance per dollar by not making any money.
If you want to buy 5000 computers every year how many companies can you buy from?
If you want to buy one computer a year you can build your own for all it matters. If you want 1 computer every 5 years you probably don't have the desire or skills to build your own, nor is saving that small amount of money worth it for a lot of people.
When apply either of those two constraints Dell IBM and HP were the big dogs for a long time, and they were basically in bed with intel. People who don't have the skills to build their own want to buy from someone with a name brand who will stay in business long enough to honour a warranty, and people who want to buy 5000 computers this year are only going to buy from a big outfit, for basically the same reasons, and because there aren't a lot of places that can supply you will 1000 computers by the end of the week. If you're a really big outfit you're looking at buying something like 20-100k computers a year, and when you start talking numbers like that even your acer, asus and toshiba guys will have trouble keeping up.
AMD has the same problem in two different sectors. They had one really good product, and then someone released a better one. In the GPU business AMD will have the best parts for a couple of month then nvidia will come along and take the crown, and neither of them are competing in the high volume business desktop market that intel has (and has gone so far as to put it into the CPU package). For the CPU business Intel has been toying with them for at least 6 years. How do you know that? Because you can overclock an i7 (or a core 2 series) by 30% on air easily. Everytime AMD gets close to matching the performance/watt, performance/dollar or whatever, intel just ups the clocks a bit and boom, they're back in first place. They're basically a full process (die size) ahead of AMD, and they always have been, which gives them a huge advantage. In the GPU business AMD is doing as well as they can, if you look at the steam numbers they're up around 40% of the market. The problem is that the gaming market, which is where the money is on a per unit basis, isn't all that big. nVidia has a revenue of about 3.7 Billion USD, AMD 6.4, and Intel 54. The money is in volume, and AMD can't get volume because their price per unit, per performance, per watt are all just not up to match Intel, yes, Intel was anti-competitive for a while, but they only need to do that for about 4 years to get themselves back out into the lead by a wide margin.
The US federal debt is only 15 trillion dollars. 6 trillion would make a big difference. Of course these are government bonds, so the US government would be obliged to pay them back, er.. something, there's no one to pay if the government has them, but that's beside the point.
With 6 trillion dollars or even half of that, you could get rid of basically all foreign debt the US has. Then your debt would be borrowed entirely from yourselves (which is mostly is now, but not completely). The reason Japan hasn't imploded, despite having 200+% of GDP in debt (compared to the US ~100%), and they've been like that for a decade, is they owe that money to themselves.
Government debt is odd. Especially because it's in a currency you control. Mild inflation, with economic growth and a close to balanced budget deficit makes even big debts like the US has go away very quickly. That won't work for japan because their population is shrinking, and aging, but it will for the US because the population is at least flat, if not growing. But 6 trillion dollars could do a lot of interesting things for the US. Including just cover the deficit for the next 8 or 9 years. (900 billion this year, and progressively less after that, theoretically).
Huh? This story seems to have hit the press the moment it was discovered, and they all sort of ignored the absurdity of it. It's the guy with a printer argument, only expensive printer and organized mafia, but it was absurd. 10 seconds of internet searches reveals US gpd in 1934 as under 100 billion dollars, so a 1 billion dollar bond is just nonsense. That they printed 6000 of them, which is maybe a few thousand dollars in forgery is hardly that significant.
It doesn't seem like anyone important who saw them took them as actually legitimate. They found them and reported them as a result of some bad cheques (that were to the tune of 200k), and that was the end of it.
Well that's just it isn't it? By 2016 the US will definitely have a new government, and they may cancel whatever plan are in place, even if they're behind. SpaceX and Lockheed etc. are all trying to fill requirements set out by NASA. If they want a rocket for mars missions, or new moon landings, looking at something on part with a Satun V doesn't seem unreasonable. But, of course, 4 years, and 4 budgets from now someone else with another plan will come along. And SpaceX and Lockheed may have to completely toss their existing programmes for whatever the new requirements and targets of the day are.
You're stuck on 'what we need for what we're doing today'. That's a very bad way to run government, and a very bad way to run anything actually. What size rocket should we have in 2025? What missions will you want to do in 2025? Basically since the end the Apollo programme NASA's vision has been 'the next project after this one will do something', and then they never do it, because when they get there, they don't have what they need and by the time they start building it someone else comes into power and changes projects. Assuming he gets re-elected the Obama vision for the space programme will almost be ready to start as he's definitely leaving office, and assuming he doesn't the SLS will have been a glorified research paper.
The choices are basically the status quo with a string of marginal improvements or a long term vision and plan, and starting to work towards it. Unfortunately the US process is sufficiently dysfunctional that if Obama does it the Republicans will undo it at the earliest opportunity, which is either 2013 or 2017.
I'm not sure you quite grasp the cost value here. It's worth whatever the government is willing to pay for it. If they want to go to Mars and are wiling to spend 100 billion dollars on it, then they're getting value for their money at 10 billion dollars for a rocket, even if it's only ever used once. They are free to decide what they think the science priorities are, and small missions that are basically rehashing the same experiments they've been doing for the last 30 years doesn't seem to be inspiring much enthusiasm.
If you want to send something of a reasonable size even back to the moon you need something bigger than the size of a falcon heavy. Whether or not that is a good use of someone else's tax dollars isn't for me to decide, but if that's what your politicians want to do, the falcon heavy isn't going to cut it. The falcon heavy couldn't even get the Orion capsule (by itself) to lunar trajectory.
The argument that 'it can only be used for these rare expensive missions' is why NASA is doing it, and not say... anyone else.
ADHD is tricky. First off, the symptoms mirror that of sleep deprivation. Have the person get 2 hours extra sleep a night and see if it makes a difference sort of thing. So there's cultural pressure, which is that patients don't like being told 'stop watching letterman or the daily show, or whatever your kid is watching at 9pm and go to sleep'. But it really is an inability to focus on tasks the way normal people can (or at least, the way people used to be able to).
Secondly, and this is one of those unknowns in psychology, is if we simply missed the diagnoses before, or if we're doing something to induce it. I'm a game developer in academia atm and I was talking to a psychologist studying this stuff in december. Certain video games can cause *short term* adhd symptoms in adults, basically if you play a driving game for 3 hours you may behave like you're adhd for another hour or so. It's matter of how games cause your brain to change how it deals with stimuli. Now the question is: could we be inducing this in children somehow as a permanent condition? Not a lot of under 6 year old play games all that much, and in many cases the 'games' they play are just digital versions of physical games, so the video game theory is more of a odd conjecture than actual theory, because it's an open question and I'm a game developer I hear the video game theory, I'm sure there are a lot of other theories (TV, diet, it might even be some new teaching method in schools, or god knows what).
Um... they tried the sci fi solutions of wonderful fantasy land and 30 million people starved to death under mao.
It's not charity. We do that to africa and we simply exacerbate the problem. If you just give people aid you drive prices down and make it hard for them to compete (I mean general aid, not specific disaster relief). It's giving them a fair chance. And it's not some divine paper, in fact I was quite clear on what they're getting in exchange. Clean water, electricity, food, housing that isn't dirt and logs, and eventually, stuff.
There really is no other way. We can't just give them money, and while we can give them some of the 'stuff' (power generators for example), they need to be able to pay for their use, have staff to be paid to run them, we can't possible match the scale required.
I'm not sure what dream you're talking about. As a kid (and even now as an adult) I want stuff. A house, a car, computer, food, clothes. I want to be able to retire eventually. I'm only going to get those things by exchanging my labour for them, and we use money as a unit of exchange between the two. It's not that complicated a concept, and it provides the granularity '3 chickens and rack of ribs for my vaccinations' lacks. I'm going to guess that people in china may want slightly different stuff, or they set the bar lower than 'a car' and maybe on clean drinking water. But that's how the world works.
I said, and it is depressing, there are generations (or at least major portions of generations) of people in china who basically lack the skills to do anything else. In 1980 1 in 5 people in china couldn't read or write. Consider that in north america something like 70% of people have a post secondary education of somesort, and in china you have 20% of people who didn't manage to get to grade 2 or equivalent. They *need* to be able to educate their children (and they are, and have done that), but they have millions of people who are a long way from being able to do anything in a 'knowledge economy'. They are also about 30 years away from having a workforce that is effectively 100% literate (which is the literacy rate for under 24's now), and as that shifts they will be able to do more and more. But right now, for some people, manual labour is as good as it gets.
As a person of indian decent I have a soft spot for india, who are about 15 years behind china.
Chinas military budget is about 200 billion USD. The US military budget is about 800 billion. And china is spreading that around 4x as many people. Admittedly, it buys a lot more in china, but as even Clausewitz realized, money in absolute terms buys you a better military. Besides, china needs to defend itself from Russia, the US, India, internal muslim extremists, and just generally have a military, so they can eventually do things like help deal with Somali pirates.
What happened when we outsourced all our manufacturing jobs to the USA from Britain, or to Germany from Britain, or to Japan from the USA, or to the other china from the USA? China will lose it's cost competitive edge eventually. Probably in 15 or 20 years, maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less, and india will be following along. But as they get there they will create new markets to sell stuff to, and canadian and american manufacturers will have to start thinking the way people in china do "what does someone in that country need that I can make here?". And labour will do what it has always done, and converge and specialize. For all the complaining about china making iPhones, they assemble iPhones, lots of parts are made other places, and if they use intel or AMD parts for similar products then major important portions are made in the US or Europe.
Again, I reiterate though, chinas currency manipulation causes problems, and chinas general refusal to let US companies do business there is causing problems. Neither of those is acceptable, and, I would argue probably warrant sanctions of some sort. But that is a very different problem than whether or not they should be making things at all.
When I say 2 dollars a day, I mean *total* wages. You're talking about someone earning up around 10 dollars a day being able to spend 2 of it on food (6-7RMB/dollar).
And even few years ago china was great strides into it's progress, which is a far cry from where they were in say, 1990.
Can you get clean water on 3-6 dollars a day? Do you face seasonal shortages of basic necessities, like rice? When your total income is 2 dollars a day (or less) it's very hard to get little things, like meat, or vegetables beyonds one or two.
Food in the US is also subsidized, the wrong things are subsidized, but it is subsidized. That makes a big difference.
I'm under no illusion about the 3rd world nature of the US. But food stamps and welfare still put americans in a much better position than chinese peasants. Even at poverty in the US, you still get to go to school, have vaccinations and so on.
So wait, you'd rather people in china go back to being subsistence farmers with a 44 year life expectancy (that was by the way, 1960), with no education, so you can feel good about giving extra money to your neighbour who's going to go out and spend more on lunch than someone in china would have made in a week? That's the argument against what is happening in china today.
China is in transition. There is a huge swath of people, basically 3 or 4 lost generations of people, and another 1 or 2 in the pipeline who are the transition from destitute subsistence farmers who literally never had anything, to a society of people who have little things like antibiotics, and electricity. Unfortunately, they're lost. They're not savable by any laws rules, treaties or procedures. Nothing. And there are hundreds of millions of them, which makes them worth next to nothing. A million workers at foxconn go on strike? No problem, shut down the facility and move somewhere else, and hire a million others, or let foxconn go out of business and someone else will emerge. Because they have generations of people who have nothing else they can do but repetitive manual labour. Chinas literacy rate in 1950 was 20% (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/12/news/12iht-rchina.t.html?pagewanted=all) Today it's still only about 88%.
Believe it or not, all these exploited workers in china are living the great dream. That their children and childrens children won't have to go through this. But they are condemned to lives of either being peasant farmers who could never read, write or get any actual health care, or being underpaid overworked factory workers. The only thing we can do for them is give them jobs, and we can only give them money based on the fact that they're basically doing the work of robots.
Remember, there are still 2.7 billion people living on less than 2 dollars a day, and 1.1 billion on less than a dollar (worldwide). http://library.thinkquest.org/05aug/00282/over_world.htm . That's slightly out of date, but it conveys the point. Foxconn's wages are about 300 dollars a month, or about 10 dollars a day (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/business/global/08wages.html). Comparatively, people working at foxconn at 10 dollars a day, are doing *extremely* well compared to the lives they would have had 40 years earlier.
In the west we don't really think about the cost of basic things. Workers at foxconn have access to a diverse diet, which, by the way, is actually pretty tough to get on 2 dollars a day. They have generally clean water, again, not something they would have had as starving peasants. Oh, and they aren't starving. They, and their children will be able to read and write. They have electricity, which again, is a pretty radical concept.
The only way billions of *people* in the world are going to get out of illiterate starving and dying to preventable diseases, is if we give them jobs, preferably for honest work. That might be making your shoes, and that might be snapping together an iPod. But you can't just go and pay someone in china 10 dollars and hour for a job someone else will do for 2, it's has devastating cascading effect through society, and frankly, for 10 dollars an hour, it would be cheaper to pay a robot than a foxconn worker. They're better to get the 2 dollars an hour or 1.25 or whatever it is, than to get nothing. Because without money they can't build anything to improve their society with, which is why they (along with a lot of other places) are so far behind, and that china has realized this is why they're growing at a break neck rate and fixing it.
As a grad student, I make about 20k a year (I'm sort of half game developer half grad student, but one is part of the other). I am, by canadian measures barely above the poverty line once you take out my tuition. That's still more money in 1 year that about half the people in the world will make in their lifetimes.
Yes, china has unfair currency practices which (significantly) undervalue their currency, and
I guess I forgot that other countries than canada throw around professional somewhat more liberally. A politician is usually not regarded as a professional, while a professional engineer, doctor, or lawyer, or priest would be (it used to be that you had to have a professional certify your passport for example). They are required to pay dues to a professional organization, and to be a member they must have been accredited to get there. A professor or some of the upper levels of public school administration also might be considered professionals.
If parents have concerns about allergic reactions and the doctor doesn't, then no, they shouldn't be able to opt out. That's sort of the point. Parents are stupid and irrational, or just plain wrong, and the doctor is by definition supposed to be objective.
What do drug companies have to do with it? Of course they're in it to make money, Governments demand better prices and fund research to save money (and lives) but making 300 million doses of anything, which is like 4 million doses per year (or more) costs money and you can't expect people to do that work for free. Doctors should not be allowed to get kickbacks from prescribing it so what does it matter?