I can see you know nothing of finance or eminent domain law,
Eminent domain *requires* that the taker pay fair market value for the property. That is NOT the cost paid for the property, but rather what the owner would be expected to receive if he sold the property. In the case of a drug patent that would be what another company would pay for the patent - and that would be determined by the commercial value of the drug, that is profits minus expenses.
If a state were to try to make up it's own value that was much lower than the fair market value you can bet the company would take the case to the courts and invoke the 14th Amendment to the constitution.
drug companies spend much more money on marketing (which is basically bullshit), which is the main reason why drug prices are exorbitant in the USA.
Ah, the faery world of the social liberal. Here is the straight dope. Drug companies spend a lot of money on marketing because they have to. Not because they just feel like it. No company blows that kind of money on anything unless there is a real need.
In the case of the drug company, unless they spend a lot of money marketing that new drug, forget selling enough to recover the costs to develop new medicines.
Now one thing that people here have seemed to miss is that there is a big slowdown currently going on in the development of new drugs. Most pharms have pretty empty pipelines at the moment. This has really got health professionals worried because the development of new drugs actually tends to drive healthcare costs down - for the simple reason that no pill is as expensive as a hospital stay, treatment by more radical means, and incapacitation (and loss of productivity) of a functioning member of society.
Gee, most West European countries pay unemployment benefits for many years. And they have been doing it for decades. They seem to be doing quite well.
Europeans also have MUCH higher tax rates, higher unemployment, and lower economic growth rates.
That is because Europe counts everyone. America stops counting people after their 6 months of benefits run out.
WRONG. Official US numbers are calculated from household surveys that count everyone. Here is a Bureau of Labor Statistics report if you don't believe me.
A trademark is a very different thing from a patent. Basically all German trademarks were revoked by the US after WWII as a punishment, both the trademark company name Bayer and the trademark Aspirin were revoked.
I think that the Wright brother's patents on airplanes were taken away by the US govt in WWI
You think wrong. During WWI a consortium of aircraft manufacturers was formed for wartime production. The companies participating pooled their patents ending the possibility of infringement lawsuits. After the war was over the consortium was disbanded and the patents reverted back to the original holders.
the concept of eminent domain is not actually part of the constitution
The 5th and 14th amendments recognize de facto that the government has the power to take property for the common good, and requires fair compensation for that property.
Now ot seems to me that the taking of a patent with the idea that it would save the government money is truly a stupid idea - fair compensation would require that the company not be hurt by the taking. The constittion also provides protection against bills of attainder that might also be relevant.
php is usable out of the box, integrates nicely out of the box with oh just about anything you can imagine. with java you have to shore it up with bailing wire and bubblegum before its usable.
I call bullshit. PHP is nowhere near as complete a development platform as Java.
its quite simple, people find themselves far more productive in php than java. doesnt matter how semantically perfect the language is if it takes you 3 times as long to do something in java as it does in php.
Yes, PHP is better for prototyping because you can create something faster. But have you ever worked on a PHP application that has been around for a few years? PHP applications rapidly become maintenance nightmares after a few hands work on them. Java can be that way too, but the language 'semantic perfection' makes maintanable code a bit more natural. In the long run that translates to lower costs over the life of the project.
Well, I think mysql is used more than postgresql mostly because it was first to become widely distributed. In terms of end use there really isn't all that much difference between the two except maybe postgresql has a bit more support for what people consider to be standard relational features.
One thing to consider when you choose either is what the upgrade path might be. Mysql maps reasonably well to Microsoft SQL server, while postgresql maps better to Oracle.
As far as Java vs. PHP goes, I think that the statement that PHP is more widely used is very dicey. PHP is more widely used, but on small projects. Once you get into something that is being used on a large scale Java is far more common. There are a variety of reasons, a lot of which are historical, and some which are due to the structure of the language. For example I can't see a formal SDLC shop mapping too well to the use of PHP. For a big project this would be a very serious problem.
One good thing that I hope will come out of IBM"s PHP support is better tools - solid Eclipse plugins for PHP would be greatly appreciated.
France is a wonderful place to visit if you speak at least a little French. I've been there a couple of times and generally been treated quite well, even by their notoriously prickly waiters. I love the habit they have of never bringing the check until you ask for it. Of course if you don't make an effort to fit in at least a little bit they will react negatively.
I think their attitude is that they are really good friends with us on the whole, and that gives them the right and duty to criticize us.
After 9.11.01 Le Monde led with an editorial 'Nous Sommes Tous Americans'. I think that said a lot about the real ties between France and the US.
Of course like in any country there are chauvanistic idiots, but you have to realize that is a reaction to some unfortunate recent political issues rather than any sort of long term emnity.
And you can do the same with Red Hat's enterprise offerings, since they're distributing a bunch of GPL applications and it's illegal to restrict that. What you pay for on RH is support.
Where can I download a Red Hat Workstation or Server ISO image from???
Fedora is useless to me because there is no backing from the 3rd party application providers. It's treated as a strictly experimental distro and nobody supports it. When RH dropped went to their pricey paid support only model I went to SuSE.
With SuSE I can download or buy a set of CD's and install as many times as I want.
War, totalitarian government, censorship, political repression, the cultural revolution etc. make it pretty hard to establish and maintain the infrastructure or academic freedom needed to support the sort of work needed to win a Nobel Prize. Things have gotten a little better recently, but for essentially the entire history of the Nobel Prize China has been a place where you flee from if you have aspirations of this sort. Also China still has a long way to go with its educational system - a higher percentage of US residents have masters degrees than Chinese citizens who can read. This is very different from India which has a pretty high literacy rate.
The closest China has come to having a citizen win a Nobel Prize was in literature. Gao Xingjian renounced his Chinese citizenship several years before winning the prize, and lives in France as a French citizen. Since he is not politically acceptable to the Chinese government his work is banned in China and the government has never made a statement acknowledging his award.
China claims the Dalai Lama is a Chinese citizen, and thus has a claim on his Nobel Peace prize, but His Holiness refutes that he has Chinese citizenship, and most countries do not recognize China's annexation of Tibet.
There is also a Taiwanese born chemist who won a Nobel Prize while working in the US. China of course claims Tiawanese citizens are really citizens of China. However he was a naturalized US citizen at the time he did his work, so he does not qualify.
There is also a Nobel Laureate in Physics (1957) who is a Chinese born American citizen now living back in China. Apparently he is now politically acceptable since China occasionally runs articles about him in their press. Good thing he was outside China when the Red Guard was rampant. They probably would have re-educated him, if not worse.
People who think China is reformed because they have adopted a limited form of captialism are sadly in error. The way of thinking that led to Tiananmen still has the upper hand in China.
Probably because that would get you bounced from the ISP real quick. ISPs charge a premium for dedicated lines, and generally view an effort to use a basic service line in this manner as abuse.
At the other end, you have a bottom of at least 10% that is either utterly incapable of learning or has tremendous motivation problems.
Or is disconnected from the whole society by language, culture and economics.
One thing to keep in mind is that the US educational system includes much more post secondary education than other countries where admission to university requires top marks in a very competitive exam. Something like 70% of US students study formally past high school. That is not factored into any assesment that tests say 7th graders.
In any assesment of the educational system you have to examine the performance of the end result (adults) and how their educational experience in total prepares them. As I said before, I have great doubts that these tests are really relevant or should be the measure we use to evaluate our educational system.
There is a huge disconnect in the results of these tests versus the performance and productivity of the adult American in the US economy. To me it really calls into question the validity of the measurements these tests are generating. I certainly would NOT overhaul the US educational system with the goal of generating good results on these tests - you may find you are throwing away what is best in the US system in favor of teaching to a test that has no or very limited correlation with economic performance.
If you travel outside the US, and talk to educators in other countries, they all envy the emphasis on independent thought that is part of the US educational system - they are all evaluated on the results their students get on competitve exams that emphasize factual knowledge - which leads to abominations like the cram schools common in Asia, and forces the teachers to teach to those exams.
And if you have ten statistics and only pick the favorable one you will never see or solve your problems.
And conversely if you pick only the unfavorable statistics derived from a standardized test of questionable relevance you will chase problems that don't exist.
Once the American citizen enters the work force it appears he is very well prepared indeed - his productivity is absolutely world class. Isn't that the most important measurement?
Mod parent up. China is still largely a centrally managed economy on the macro level with policies set for political reasons, not based on sound principles. China has been stinting development of infrastructure so badly that there are problems expanding manufacturing due to power shortages. Lack of investment in capital has meant that China is actually losing manufacturing jobs faster than any other country on earth to more modernized nations because automation will always will out against manual labor once wages reach any reasonable level.
With massive foreign loans and suicidally low currency valuations in order to stimulate exports China has backed itself into a trap where it must let currency valuations rise to pay off debt and raise capital for infrastructure investment, yet it cannot afford to let valuations rise because that will destroy it's export driven economy.
Anyone who has really studied the current Chinese economy realizes that they are headed for a period of retrenchment, if not an out-and-out recession/depression in the not too distant future.
US school students are being creamed in science and math competitions worldwide.
THe US is punished in these tests by the diversity of it's population. If you compare the top 10% of US students vs. the rest of the world, the numbers are very different than a comparison of the average students. That top 10% of US students is absolutely competitive with the top 10% from any other country in the world.
Talent knows no geographical boundaries. The key is that it is a diaspora, not an Indian or Chinese institution. For example, despite the vast talent pool in the Chinese population, no Chinese citizen has ever won a Nobel Prize, Those prizes have gone to members of the diaspora working in western institutions.
Until India and China build institutions comparable to the best in the west they will never become true knowledge superpowers.
much of its population still lives in third world conditions, like Detroit.
If you think Detroit is 3rd world, I suggest you visit Bangladesh.
I'm just wondering if gross inequality is a nessessary or sufficient condition for a country to undergo economic growth.
It seems clear that there has to be a reward for hard work and talent for a country to undergo economic growth. However that is only necessary, not sufficient.
Why is it that the public at large is expected to foot the bill for cable television for the luxury of watching programming that includes commercials? Television networks as well as your cable company make tons of money on the advertising that goes into television programs.
Because cable companies DON'T get advertising revenue from the channels they carry. In general cable companies have to pay the content sources for the programming they carry. Some basic channels are free, but most are not.
They arent supposed to help the consumers that take part in them, they are supposed to punish the offending company
If that is the case, it is a perversion of English common law.
A tort results in a remedy, with an award pf damages to the plaintiff. It has been throughout the history of English law intended to right a civil wrong. Only in extreme cases are punative damages awarded.
Unfortunately class action law suits are generally rigged to reward lawyers, not the victims. It is gross.
Slashdot Mirror
MARKETING IS NOT DEVELOPMENT NOR MANUFACTURING
I can see you know nothing of finance or eminent domain law,
Eminent domain *requires* that the taker pay fair market value for the property. That is NOT the cost paid for the property, but rather what the owner would be expected to receive if he sold the property. In the case of a drug patent that would be what another company would pay for the patent - and that would be determined by the commercial value of the drug, that is profits minus expenses.
If a state were to try to make up it's own value that was much lower than the fair market value you can bet the company would take the case to the courts and invoke the 14th Amendment to the constitution.
drug companies spend much more money on marketing (which is basically bullshit), which is the main reason why drug prices are exorbitant in the USA.
Ah, the faery world of the social liberal. Here is the straight dope. Drug companies spend a lot of money on marketing because they have to. Not because they just feel like it. No company blows that kind of money on anything unless there is a real need.
In the case of the drug company, unless they spend a lot of money marketing that new drug, forget selling enough to recover the costs to develop new medicines.
Now one thing that people here have seemed to miss is that there is a big slowdown currently going on in the development of new drugs. Most pharms have pretty empty pipelines at the moment. This has really got health professionals worried because the development of new drugs actually tends to drive healthcare costs down - for the simple reason that no pill is as expensive as a hospital stay, treatment by more radical means, and incapacitation (and loss of productivity) of a functioning member of society.
Gee, most West European countries pay unemployment benefits for many years. And they have been doing it for decades. They seem to be doing quite well.
Europeans also have MUCH higher tax rates, higher unemployment, and lower economic growth rates.
That is because Europe counts everyone. America stops counting people after their 6 months of benefits run out.
WRONG. Official US numbers are calculated from household surveys that count everyone. Here is a Bureau of Labor Statistics report if you don't believe me.
A trademark is a very different thing from a patent. Basically all German trademarks were revoked by the US after WWII as a punishment, both the trademark company name Bayer and the trademark Aspirin were revoked.
I think that the Wright brother's patents on airplanes were taken away by the US govt in WWI
You think wrong. During WWI a consortium of aircraft manufacturers was formed for wartime production. The companies participating pooled their patents ending the possibility of infringement lawsuits. After the war was over the consortium was disbanded and the patents reverted back to the original holders.
the concept of eminent domain is not actually part of the constitution
The 5th and 14th amendments recognize de facto that the government has the power to take property for the common good, and requires fair compensation for that property.
Now ot seems to me that the taking of a patent with the idea that it would save the government money is truly a stupid idea - fair compensation would require that the company not be hurt by the taking. The constittion also provides protection against bills of attainder that might also be relevant.
See FindLaw
php is usable out of the box, integrates nicely out of the box with oh just about anything you can imagine. with java you have to shore it up with bailing wire and bubblegum before its usable.
I call bullshit. PHP is nowhere near as complete a development platform as Java.
its quite simple, people find themselves far more productive in php than java. doesnt matter how semantically perfect the language is if it takes you 3 times as long to do something in java as it does in php.
Yes, PHP is better for prototyping because you can create something faster. But have you ever worked on a PHP application that has been around for a few years? PHP applications rapidly become maintenance nightmares after a few hands work on them. Java can be that way too, but the language 'semantic perfection' makes maintanable code a bit more natural. In the long run that translates to lower costs over the life of the project.
Well, I think mysql is used more than postgresql mostly because it was first to become widely distributed. In terms of end use there really isn't all that much difference between the two except maybe postgresql has a bit more support for what people consider to be standard relational features.
One thing to consider when you choose either is what the upgrade path might be. Mysql maps reasonably well to Microsoft SQL server, while postgresql maps better to Oracle.
As far as Java vs. PHP goes, I think that the statement that PHP is more widely used is very dicey. PHP is more widely used, but on small projects. Once you get into something that is being used on a large scale Java is far more common. There are a variety of reasons, a lot of which are historical, and some which are due to the structure of the language. For example I can't see a formal SDLC shop mapping too well to the use of PHP. For a big project this would be a very serious problem.
One good thing that I hope will come out of IBM"s PHP support is better tools - solid Eclipse plugins for PHP would be greatly appreciated.
manchester nail
So the dolts live in Manchester, eh?
Here we refer to this practice as using the up and down screwdriver.
PHP has very few rules that the programmer can rely on. Googling up academic criticism of PHP's "design" is left as an exercise to the reader.
It is much worse than that. A good language should be about support for effective software architectures.
France is a wonderful place to visit if you speak at least a little French. I've been there a couple of times and generally been treated quite well, even by their notoriously prickly waiters. I love the habit they have of never bringing the check until you ask for it. Of course if you don't make an effort to fit in at least a little bit they will react negatively.
I think their attitude is that they are really good friends with us on the whole, and that gives them the right and duty to criticize us.
After 9.11.01 Le Monde led with an editorial 'Nous Sommes Tous Americans'. I think that said a lot about the real ties between France and the US.
Of course like in any country there are chauvanistic idiots, but you have to realize that is a reaction to some unfortunate recent political issues rather than any sort of long term emnity.
That's disproportionatly French, as French is the 11th most commonly spoken language in the world.
So what are they bitchin' about?
And you can do the same with Red Hat's enterprise offerings, since they're distributing a bunch of GPL applications and it's illegal to restrict that. What you pay for on RH is support.
Where can I download a Red Hat Workstation or Server ISO image from???
Curta Mechanical Calculator
Moon Watch
IBM Model M Keyboard
K&E Decilon Slide Rule
HP-41 Programmable Calculator
Varian A-60 NMR
Electron Microscope
Fedora is useless to me because there is no backing from the 3rd party application providers. It's treated as a strictly experimental distro and nobody supports it. When RH dropped went to their pricey paid support only model I went to SuSE.
With SuSE I can download or buy a set of CD's and install as many times as I want.
why do you think this is?
War, totalitarian government, censorship, political repression, the cultural revolution etc. make it pretty hard to establish and maintain the infrastructure or academic freedom needed to support the sort of work needed to win a Nobel Prize. Things have gotten a little better recently, but for essentially the entire history of the Nobel Prize China has been a place where you flee from if you have aspirations of this sort. Also China still has a long way to go with its educational system - a higher percentage of US residents have masters degrees than Chinese citizens who can read. This is very different from India which has a pretty high literacy rate.
The closest China has come to having a citizen win a Nobel Prize was in literature. Gao Xingjian renounced his Chinese citizenship several years before winning the prize, and lives in France as a French citizen. Since he is not politically acceptable to the Chinese government his work is banned in China and the government has never made a statement acknowledging his award.
China claims the Dalai Lama is a Chinese citizen, and thus has a claim on his Nobel Peace prize, but His Holiness refutes that he has Chinese citizenship, and most countries do not recognize China's annexation of Tibet.
There is also a Taiwanese born chemist who won a Nobel Prize while working in the US. China of course claims Tiawanese citizens are really citizens of China. However he was a naturalized US citizen at the time he did his work, so he does not qualify.
There is also a Nobel Laureate in Physics (1957) who is a Chinese born American citizen now living back in China. Apparently he is now politically acceptable since China occasionally runs articles about him in their press. Good thing he was outside China when the Red Guard was rampant. They probably would have re-educated him, if not worse.
People who think China is reformed because they have adopted a limited form of captialism are sadly in error. The way of thinking that led to Tiananmen still has the upper hand in China.
Probably because that would get you bounced from the ISP real quick. ISPs charge a premium for dedicated lines, and generally view an effort to use a basic service line in this manner as abuse.
At the other end, you have a bottom of at least 10% that is either utterly incapable of learning or has tremendous motivation problems.
Or is disconnected from the whole society by language, culture and economics.
One thing to keep in mind is that the US educational system includes much more post secondary education than other countries where admission to university requires top marks in a very competitive exam. Something like 70% of US students study formally past high school. That is not factored into any assesment that tests say 7th graders.
In any assesment of the educational system you have to examine the performance of the end result (adults) and how their educational experience in total prepares them. As I said before, I have great doubts that these tests are really relevant or should be the measure we use to evaluate our educational system.
There is a huge disconnect in the results of these tests versus the performance and productivity of the adult American in the US economy. To me it really calls into question the validity of the measurements these tests are generating. I certainly would NOT overhaul the US educational system with the goal of generating good results on these tests - you may find you are throwing away what is best in the US system in favor of teaching to a test that has no or very limited correlation with economic performance.
If you travel outside the US, and talk to educators in other countries, they all envy the emphasis on independent thought that is part of the US educational system - they are all evaluated on the results their students get on competitve exams that emphasize factual knowledge - which leads to abominations like the cram schools common in Asia, and forces the teachers to teach to those exams.
Is that what we should be doing? I think NOT.
And if you have ten statistics and only pick the favorable one you will never see or solve your problems.
And conversely if you pick only the unfavorable statistics derived from a standardized test of questionable relevance you will chase problems that don't exist.
Once the American citizen enters the work force it appears he is very well prepared indeed - his productivity is absolutely world class. Isn't that the most important measurement?
Mod parent up. China is still largely a centrally managed economy on the macro level with policies set for political reasons, not based on sound principles. China has been stinting development of infrastructure so badly that there are problems expanding manufacturing due to power shortages. Lack of investment in capital has meant that China is actually losing manufacturing jobs faster than any other country on earth to more modernized nations because automation will always will out against manual labor once wages reach any reasonable level.
With massive foreign loans and suicidally low currency valuations in order to stimulate exports China has backed itself into a trap where it must let currency valuations rise to pay off debt and raise capital for infrastructure investment, yet it cannot afford to let valuations rise because that will destroy it's export driven economy.
Anyone who has really studied the current Chinese economy realizes that they are headed for a period of retrenchment, if not an out-and-out recession/depression in the not too distant future.
US school students are being creamed in science and math competitions worldwide.
THe US is punished in these tests by the diversity of it's population. If you compare the top 10% of US students vs. the rest of the world, the numbers are very different than a comparison of the average students. That top 10% of US students is absolutely competitive with the top 10% from any other country in the world.
Talent knows no geographical boundaries. The key is that it is a diaspora, not an Indian or Chinese institution. For example, despite the vast talent pool in the Chinese population, no Chinese citizen has ever won a Nobel Prize, Those prizes have gone to members of the diaspora working in western institutions.
Until India and China build institutions comparable to the best in the west they will never become true knowledge superpowers.
much of its population still lives in third world conditions, like Detroit.
If you think Detroit is 3rd world, I suggest you visit Bangladesh.
I'm just wondering if gross inequality is a nessessary or sufficient condition for a country to undergo economic growth.
It seems clear that there has to be a reward for hard work and talent for a country to undergo economic growth. However that is only necessary, not sufficient.
Why is it that the public at large is expected to foot the bill for cable television for the luxury of watching programming that includes commercials? Television networks as well as your cable company make tons of money on the advertising that goes into television programs.
Because cable companies DON'T get advertising revenue from the channels they carry. In general cable companies have to pay the content sources for the programming they carry. Some basic channels are free, but most are not.
They arent supposed to help the consumers that take part in them, they are supposed to punish the offending company
If that is the case, it is a perversion of English common law.
A tort results in a remedy, with an award pf damages to the plaintiff. It has been throughout the history of English law intended to right a civil wrong. Only in extreme cases are punative damages awarded.
Unfortunately class action law suits are generally rigged to reward lawyers, not the victims. It is gross.