I do, actually, and I think it's tragic. We'd be a lot better off if that number was larger. I wish I could get into the head of every high school kid out there and get them to understand that math and science are important. It's how the physical world works, as best as we understand it.
GP is making a version of the Keynesian argument, which disputed classical econ less than 100 years ago. Economics as a science is an infant compared to sciences like physics. There's a great deal we don't properly understand yet. I'm afraid you're woefully misguided if you think Adam Smith "had this figured out".
Except for the very safe drugs for commonplace ailments that are sold OTC public is not qualified to make judgments about the drugs they should take. Honest. They aren't. Doctors are paid to have that expertise.
This is utter nonsense. Anyone with a decent understanding of scientific method and the ability to read research papers is fully qualified to make judgements about the drugs they should take. It boggles my mind that people will go in to their mechanic and question whether a proposed treatment is the right one but will give over care of the only body they ever get to someone else.
I do have conversations with doctors over treatments. I ask why they recommend a particular treatment, what alternatives exist, etc, and I research them. Interestingly, sometimes doctors don't know why one treatment is better, it's just what they like to do. Rarely, some have given me answers that amount to folk medicine. "My mom always..." The ones who really impress me say things like "Yes, drug X is getting a lot of press, but clinical trials show it's not more effective than the one I recommend, which also has fewer side effects/costs less/whatever". Those are the doctors I want.
You are actually a great case in point. I trust if/when you go to a doctor who prescribes Nexium for you, you will demand generic Prilosec because you know it's a better choice for you.
I really think Groupon is destroying value at an epic rate. They get retailers to offer their goods at ridiculous discounts. The retailers only get to keep part of the ridiculously discounted price, so they lose money on the deal in the hopes of attracting customers. The customers they attract may be the fickle kind who chase the deal of the day and will come back only if you offer it again, or people like me, who will use a groupon for a cheap deal on a place I patronize anyway. I'd love to see some hard data on this if anybody has it. Eventually people are going to realize they don't want to sell a dollar's worth of goods for a quarter anymore, Groupon's revenue stream will shrivel, and that $10 billion valuation will be but a distant memory. Not taking the $6 billion was a huge error.
Actually, GP is actually correct and you are theoretically correct...eventually. Well, no, not even that. Stock prices are theoretically the discounted value of all future income flows you expect from owning it. If you expect to hold them forever, that's just dividends out until discounting makes it irrelevant, or liquidation if the company doesn't last that long. Revenue ignores expenses, and is the wrong measure entirely. Otherwise it's mostly just the discounted value of whatever you can sell it for in the future.
In the real world, where you may not hold the stock long enough for any of that to matter, you're estimating what others will be willing to pay for the stock in the nearish future. Riding a bubble can make perfect sense. You know a stock doesn't deserve the valuation it has, but greater fools than you are driving the price up anyway. They are also relying on the actions of greater fools (and you are one of their greater fools), and so you're all riding a wave of expectations of a higher stock price entirely divorced from real value. Lots of people see this. The problem is that timing the market proves impossible and you never know if you're the fool or the one capitalizing on the fool's error.
are not copyrightable. He's saying that the function, aka the generic software method, of drawing a box is not copyrightable. Nobody copied the CODE, which would be a copyright violation. They reimplemented the idea. This is just the equivalent of saying that you can still write books about kid wizards even though JK Rowling already did it. You can have spells that petrify people (that's would be a function, right?), but if you go as far as lifting entire passages (copying the actual code that comprises the function), THEN you're talking about a copyright violation.
I do. Just making the obvious point that Netflix doesn't make one sedentary or fat. Not exercising makes one sedentary (by definition) and persistently eating more calories than you burn makes you fat.
Wait, wait. I watch Netflix a lot and I think it's a great deal. I also run 20+ miles a week, have a resting heart rate in the 50s, and am in the best shape of my life. Would I have to pay your ridiculous tax, too?
The Republicans have signed a pledge [atr.org] that they will never vote to raise taxes on anybody for any reason whatsoever. If they violate that pledge, the head of the organization who created it can and will ensure they lose their seat by cutting off their campaign funding. So they really can't agree to raise taxes.
Yes they can! This is the thing that annoys me most about politicians. If I'm ever elected to office, and losing my job is the cost of doing the RIGHT thing for the country, I'm going to lose my job. That minimal level of ethics should be EXPECTED and REQUIRED of all politicians.
(Although, I think the last mile should actually be municipality/township owned, with it connecting to a central exchange in which any ISP can provide service out to the internet.)
Really? You want the government to own and manage the wire through which all of your internet communications go through? I'd much prefer a private company with a large enough pair to say "warrant or court order, please." every time they're asked for data.
True enough. I was imprecise in what I said. Absolutely, the goal and hope in the lab I was in was that we'd get to clinical trials, which of course means testing it on real, live humans with actual tumors. Some of our work did lead to clinical trials, and I'm sure still does, I just don't work there anymore. You don't get to clinical trials, though, before testing something on animals to see if there's credible reason to believe it's going to work better than current therapies.
Yeah, we knew that already.
on
Of Mice and Cancer
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I worked with mice and rats in oncology research. That this stuff isn't directly translatable to humans is something everyone knows. For someone to comment on that would be like someone saying "Whoa! This room is just FULL of air!" Uh, yeah. And?
They use mice and rats because testing things on people is unethical and testing things on animals a lot more like us (primates, pigs, etc) is either unethical or expensive.
In my experience it wasn't the case that the biological effects were wildly different. A substance that produced a particular effect in rats often would in humans (or other animals) too, but often at a different dose. The problem with mice/rats was their tolerance. You might find a drug that was effective in rats, but its toxic dose in humans is less than or too close to its therapeutic dose.
He said he wants something that is easy to implement, and only reason he is going with open source is because then he doesn't have to ask for purchase approval. Which IMO is a really stupid reason and will hurt in the long run - it's insane to take worse software just because you don't want to ask your boss if it's okay to buy this one.
Uh, no. Depending on where in the economy you live, you can find an open source product that does what you need and get the actual work done LONG before purchasing can actually get the software on your desk.
Dozens of pharma companies are working on a cure for cancer right now, and have been for decades.
Actually, that bit is why whatever they come up with to cure cancer is NOT obvious and IS worthy of patent protection. As an example of something that wouldn't be worthy of patent protection, imagine SARS-II emerges next year. No one has ever tried to cure or prevent transmission of this new disease. You take the revolutionary step of wearing a surgical mask, quarantining infected people, using negative pressure ventilation rooms, etc and patent the whole process. It's novel, obviously, because you're solving a brand new problem. It's also obvious because you're simply applying a class solution to a new instance.
Yes, yes he did! He did not develop it *first*. I don't even like the word "recreated" unless Carmack knew of their work. If he didn't, they both developed it, by which I mean went through the intellectual exercise of coming up with the idea and implementing it in code.
I'm not opposed to ALL software patents, but vehemently opposed to patents on things that aren't true innovations. Carmack's complaint that he shouldn't be able to sit down, solve a problem in an obvious way, and be told his code is infringing because someone else did the same obvious thing earlier is entirely valid.
The problem I see is that the underlying technology changes, which makes solutions possible or practical that no one would have done before simply because they didn't work. If Intel/AMD/nvidia/whatever comes out with a billion core chip tomorrow and I solve some problem today in a trivial way that only works on billion core chips, who innovated? It wasn't me, I was just the one who used today's new hammer to whack yesterday's old nail.
I've attended classes off and on over the last 20 years. It's not at all uncommon for faculty to tell students they may not record the lectures. It IS odd, but it is not an assumption.
I don't mind giving up control of where I'm going if public transportation reliably gets me there. You're dead on about convenience, though I'd say that goes to grandparent's practicality argument. It takes me 30 minutes to get to work every morning. According to Google, public transport would take me 1:51. So, I'm supposed to trade in my hour of driving for nearly 4 hours every day in a bus? Yeah...not happening.
I wouldn't mind using public transport, but it has to not be massively less efficient for me to do so.
Traditional surveillance is less subject to abuse because it's harder to do. If you want to follow someone around, it costs you at least 4-5 FTEs to do it, so you're not as likely to do it. The fact that sticking a $500 tracker on someone's car is so easy to do is one reason we should restrict the ability to do it. It is more abusable.
Contrary to popular opinion, it's also possible to open your eyes and figure out if someone is following you, at least some of the times. For example, I used to make late night drives on lonely, arrow-straight highways. There is either NOBODY around for miles, or they're all driving in the dark, or stopped.
One more, all this seems to hinge on "reasonable expectation of privacy." Why can't enough of us just get together and demand that as reasonable people, we DO expect that we're not being followed around on a whim, and that if we are genuinely suspected of doing something wrong, that LE should get a warrant for something as invasive as this. After all, "expectation" is simply what a bunch of reasonable people expect. Well, I expect to be left alone. I expect due process. I expect checks and balances.
I, as a scruffy looking 20 or 21 year old totalled my car one snowy night. State troopers responded to the accident (no injuries, but a couple of messed up cars). One of them gave me a lift to civilization in the passenger seat. So yeah, it does happen.
Right. And to put a finer point in it, let's say you own a single share of a publicly traded company. If that company gets sued into the stone age and the owners are liable, that includes you even though you had nothing to do with whatever they got sued for. Making the corp a separate entity makes corps largely possible. Without that, investors would be hard to find (I am NOT giving you $money if that means my risk is up to and including my full net worth) and getting people to start companies at all would be harder because the downside risk of any transaction would so vastly exceed the upside potential.
I have a problem with trivial patents and the examples of trivial patents have often been software patents. When someone actually creates a useful invention in software and it's non trivial, I think they should reap the rewards of it. That encourages people to go work on hard problems that otherwise might be ignored as unprofitable. Unfortunately what often happens is that someone goes out and solves a problem in a fairly straightforward way, a way that most of us would have solved the problem had it been what we're working on, and only because they were the first to file a patent for it, they get to restrict everyone else's right to do something obvious for the better part of 2 decades.
Yeah, this strikes me as a rather dumb thing to do. It probably works well as long as you're dealing with ethical agents who are interested in finding truth and just as happy to clear an innocent citizen, but that doesn't describe all of them. There's also this notion of circumstantial evidence that has an unfortunately high value in court (as in not zero like it should). If this guys travels happened to mirror some terrorist, odds are he wouldn't be out in the fresh air writing about this experience.
write a fingerprint matching algorithm to line up the fibers
If I had $50,000 for every problem I've had to solve that had a step like "write an algorithm to do foo" where that step turned out to be the hard part...
My expectation is that you could sit down and write such an algorithm in a not very big number of hours. You'd then find that it didn't work. I mean sure, you generate fingerprints and some match, but you get 15 matches where you want one and the correct match isn't in the 15. Then begins the part where you learn phenomenal amounts about why this is actually hard.
Slashdot Mirror
I do, actually, and I think it's tragic. We'd be a lot better off if that number was larger. I wish I could get into the head of every high school kid out there and get them to understand that math and science are important. It's how the physical world works, as best as we understand it.
GP is making a version of the Keynesian argument, which disputed classical econ less than 100 years ago. Economics as a science is an infant compared to sciences like physics. There's a great deal we don't properly understand yet. I'm afraid you're woefully misguided if you think Adam Smith "had this figured out".
This is utter nonsense. Anyone with a decent understanding of scientific method and the ability to read research papers is fully qualified to make judgements about the drugs they should take. It boggles my mind that people will go in to their mechanic and question whether a proposed treatment is the right one but will give over care of the only body they ever get to someone else.
I do have conversations with doctors over treatments. I ask why they recommend a particular treatment, what alternatives exist, etc, and I research them. Interestingly, sometimes doctors don't know why one treatment is better, it's just what they like to do. Rarely, some have given me answers that amount to folk medicine. "My mom always..." The ones who really impress me say things like "Yes, drug X is getting a lot of press, but clinical trials show it's not more effective than the one I recommend, which also has fewer side effects/costs less/whatever". Those are the doctors I want.
You are actually a great case in point. I trust if/when you go to a doctor who prescribes Nexium for you, you will demand generic Prilosec because you know it's a better choice for you.
I really think Groupon is destroying value at an epic rate. They get retailers to offer their goods at ridiculous discounts. The retailers only get to keep part of the ridiculously discounted price, so they lose money on the deal in the hopes of attracting customers. The customers they attract may be the fickle kind who chase the deal of the day and will come back only if you offer it again, or people like me, who will use a groupon for a cheap deal on a place I patronize anyway. I'd love to see some hard data on this if anybody has it. Eventually people are going to realize they don't want to sell a dollar's worth of goods for a quarter anymore, Groupon's revenue stream will shrivel, and that $10 billion valuation will be but a distant memory. Not taking the $6 billion was a huge error.
Or they'll change their model.
Actually, GP is actually correct and you are theoretically correct...eventually. Well, no, not even that. Stock prices are theoretically the discounted value of all future income flows you expect from owning it. If you expect to hold them forever, that's just dividends out until discounting makes it irrelevant, or liquidation if the company doesn't last that long. Revenue ignores expenses, and is the wrong measure entirely. Otherwise it's mostly just the discounted value of whatever you can sell it for in the future.
In the real world, where you may not hold the stock long enough for any of that to matter, you're estimating what others will be willing to pay for the stock in the nearish future. Riding a bubble can make perfect sense. You know a stock doesn't deserve the valuation it has, but greater fools than you are driving the price up anyway. They are also relying on the actions of greater fools (and you are one of their greater fools), and so you're all riding a wave of expectations of a higher stock price entirely divorced from real value. Lots of people see this. The problem is that timing the market proves impossible and you never know if you're the fool or the one capitalizing on the fool's error.
He's not saying that functions like
are not copyrightable. He's saying that the function, aka the generic software method, of drawing a box is not copyrightable. Nobody copied the CODE, which would be a copyright violation. They reimplemented the idea. This is just the equivalent of saying that you can still write books about kid wizards even though JK Rowling already did it. You can have spells that petrify people (that's would be a function, right?), but if you go as far as lifting entire passages (copying the actual code that comprises the function), THEN you're talking about a copyright violation.
I do. Just making the obvious point that Netflix doesn't make one sedentary or fat. Not exercising makes one sedentary (by definition) and persistently eating more calories than you burn makes you fat.
Wait, wait. I watch Netflix a lot and I think it's a great deal. I also run 20+ miles a week, have a resting heart rate in the 50s, and am in the best shape of my life. Would I have to pay your ridiculous tax, too?
Yes they can! This is the thing that annoys me most about politicians. If I'm ever elected to office, and losing my job is the cost of doing the RIGHT thing for the country, I'm going to lose my job. That minimal level of ethics should be EXPECTED and REQUIRED of all politicians.
Really? You want the government to own and manage the wire through which all of your internet communications go through? I'd much prefer a private company with a large enough pair to say "warrant or court order, please." every time they're asked for data.
True enough. I was imprecise in what I said. Absolutely, the goal and hope in the lab I was in was that we'd get to clinical trials, which of course means testing it on real, live humans with actual tumors. Some of our work did lead to clinical trials, and I'm sure still does, I just don't work there anymore. You don't get to clinical trials, though, before testing something on animals to see if there's credible reason to believe it's going to work better than current therapies.
I worked with mice and rats in oncology research. That this stuff isn't directly translatable to humans is something everyone knows. For someone to comment on that would be like someone saying "Whoa! This room is just FULL of air!" Uh, yeah. And?
They use mice and rats because testing things on people is unethical and testing things on animals a lot more like us (primates, pigs, etc) is either unethical or expensive.
In my experience it wasn't the case that the biological effects were wildly different. A substance that produced a particular effect in rats often would in humans (or other animals) too, but often at a different dose. The problem with mice/rats was their tolerance. You might find a drug that was effective in rats, but its toxic dose in humans is less than or too close to its therapeutic dose.
Uh, no. Depending on where in the economy you live, you can find an open source product that does what you need and get the actual work done LONG before purchasing can actually get the software on your desk.
Actually, that bit is why whatever they come up with to cure cancer is NOT obvious and IS worthy of patent protection. As an example of something that wouldn't be worthy of patent protection, imagine SARS-II emerges next year. No one has ever tried to cure or prevent transmission of this new disease. You take the revolutionary step of wearing a surgical mask, quarantining infected people, using negative pressure ventilation rooms, etc and patent the whole process. It's novel, obviously, because you're solving a brand new problem. It's also obvious because you're simply applying a class solution to a new instance.
Yes, yes he did! He did not develop it *first*. I don't even like the word "recreated" unless Carmack knew of their work. If he didn't, they both developed it, by which I mean went through the intellectual exercise of coming up with the idea and implementing it in code.
I'm not opposed to ALL software patents, but vehemently opposed to patents on things that aren't true innovations. Carmack's complaint that he shouldn't be able to sit down, solve a problem in an obvious way, and be told his code is infringing because someone else did the same obvious thing earlier is entirely valid.
The problem I see is that the underlying technology changes, which makes solutions possible or practical that no one would have done before simply because they didn't work. If Intel/AMD/nvidia/whatever comes out with a billion core chip tomorrow and I solve some problem today in a trivial way that only works on billion core chips, who innovated? It wasn't me, I was just the one who used today's new hammer to whack yesterday's old nail.
I've attended classes off and on over the last 20 years. It's not at all uncommon for faculty to tell students they may not record the lectures. It IS odd, but it is not an assumption.
I don't mind giving up control of where I'm going if public transportation reliably gets me there. You're dead on about convenience, though I'd say that goes to grandparent's practicality argument. It takes me 30 minutes to get to work every morning. According to Google, public transport would take me 1:51. So, I'm supposed to trade in my hour of driving for nearly 4 hours every day in a bus? Yeah...not happening.
I wouldn't mind using public transport, but it has to not be massively less efficient for me to do so.
Traditional surveillance is less subject to abuse because it's harder to do. If you want to follow someone around, it costs you at least 4-5 FTEs to do it, so you're not as likely to do it. The fact that sticking a $500 tracker on someone's car is so easy to do is one reason we should restrict the ability to do it. It is more abusable.
Contrary to popular opinion, it's also possible to open your eyes and figure out if someone is following you, at least some of the times. For example, I used to make late night drives on lonely, arrow-straight highways. There is either NOBODY around for miles, or they're all driving in the dark, or stopped.
One more, all this seems to hinge on "reasonable expectation of privacy." Why can't enough of us just get together and demand that as reasonable people, we DO expect that we're not being followed around on a whim, and that if we are genuinely suspected of doing something wrong, that LE should get a warrant for something as invasive as this. After all, "expectation" is simply what a bunch of reasonable people expect. Well, I expect to be left alone. I expect due process. I expect checks and balances.
I, as a scruffy looking 20 or 21 year old totalled my car one snowy night. State troopers responded to the accident (no injuries, but a couple of messed up cars). One of them gave me a lift to civilization in the passenger seat. So yeah, it does happen.
Right. And to put a finer point in it, let's say you own a single share of a publicly traded company. If that company gets sued into the stone age and the owners are liable, that includes you even though you had nothing to do with whatever they got sued for. Making the corp a separate entity makes corps largely possible. Without that, investors would be hard to find (I am NOT giving you $money if that means my risk is up to and including my full net worth) and getting people to start companies at all would be harder because the downside risk of any transaction would so vastly exceed the upside potential.
I have a problem with trivial patents and the examples of trivial patents have often been software patents. When someone actually creates a useful invention in software and it's non trivial, I think they should reap the rewards of it. That encourages people to go work on hard problems that otherwise might be ignored as unprofitable. Unfortunately what often happens is that someone goes out and solves a problem in a fairly straightforward way, a way that most of us would have solved the problem had it been what we're working on, and only because they were the first to file a patent for it, they get to restrict everyone else's right to do something obvious for the better part of 2 decades.
You're kidding, right? You think a billionaire needs (needed...) benefits?
Yeah, this strikes me as a rather dumb thing to do. It probably works well as long as you're dealing with ethical agents who are interested in finding truth and just as happy to clear an innocent citizen, but that doesn't describe all of them. There's also this notion of circumstantial evidence that has an unfortunately high value in court (as in not zero like it should). If this guys travels happened to mirror some terrorist, odds are he wouldn't be out in the fresh air writing about this experience.
They do. They shoot back.
If I had $50,000 for every problem I've had to solve that had a step like "write an algorithm to do foo" where that step turned out to be the hard part...
My expectation is that you could sit down and write such an algorithm in a not very big number of hours. You'd then find that it didn't work. I mean sure, you generate fingerprints and some match, but you get 15 matches where you want one and the correct match isn't in the 15. Then begins the part where you learn phenomenal amounts about why this is actually hard.