You know, the day I wrote my reply I expected some brian-rot in respone from you, and I had a big essay composed in my head. Now I've just got this: You're charting the path on a short trip to hell. I've read your other posts on this forum and I have taken the measure of your character. You are clearly a bigot filled with irrational hatred. Go ahead and take your trip. Just keep your shit the fuck away from me. Whatever capacity I had to politely tolerate filth such as yourself went up in flames on tuesday.
Re:Coordinated Efforts
on
More WTC News
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· Score: 2
There are a lot of people talking about how this will end up impacting our civil rights. One thing I would like to see change is the apparent ease with which terrorists communicate their message through the world press, in concert with their attacks. I guess I'm appalled and shocked that a reporter would waste any time at all reprinting the words of a known and admitted terrorist. Just like I was disgusted when the Unabomber manifesto was printed, because these messages give a smidgeon of validity to the horrifying activities that are behind them. I think we as a civilization need to hold our journalists to a far higher standard of ethics and make them realize that giving any voice of validity or authority to someone like bin Laden is, in my personal view, aiding and abetting his murderous acts. And if we cannot shame our media into adopting this code of ethics, we must legally force them to. The reporter in your linked interview stood on the same piece of land as bin Laden and spoke to him. He should have been arrested the first time he put the words of this filth in print, and charged as an accomplice to his crimes. I know he's got his big fucking story to tell. But we as a society should make it clear that when the medium is terror, we aren't interested in the story. We do not care about the persons involved because they have ceased to be human beings. They have become animals without reason. I read the bin Laden interview. It's clear that he's fucking irrational and cannot differentiate between what a government does and what its people do. But I don't really care what he thinks. If he is the person responsible for this he should be punished as if his acts had no reason. The most powerful punishment we as a society could inflict on these bastards is to take away their ability to speak to us. Make it impossible for his message to reach any ears. Believe me he cares that we hear him. He went to great lengths to get an interview. He orchestrated his appearance carefully. Without that appearance he would just be some madman in hiding. We should take that piece of terror away. I think it will shrivel and die without the ability to disseminate the "message."
Goes to show that these terrorists had this thing planned down to the smallest detail.
I seriously doubt they expected it to completely collapse. They probably intended to gut it with the fire. But I don't give fucking terrorists much credit for that level of intelligence. They knew they would cause a world of hurt with a lot of fuel and fire. I doubt they thought much beyond that.
See, I think this problem could be solved by adding three people to the personnel normally in the crew complement of an airplane. Two gigantic hulking kevlar-vested security guards with cattle prods or stun guns would be required for every ~100 or so passengers. And a third undercover guard armed with an actual pistol would be added. His identity would be unknown to anyone onboard except for the pilot and the two kevlar-vested thugs.
But that's just my opinion. If the airlines cannot bear the additional cost that security must require, well that's tough titty. They are operating machines that can kill lots of the rest of us. We should demand and require that they have control of those machines at all times, or revoke their license to operate them.
Another thought: X10 is taking the chance that they may or may not benefit from this by having a (very small, to be sure) community notice that they've done it and turn to them later on for business as a way of returning the favor.
Unlike, say, the gas stations around my town who have openly advertised that they intend to raise their gas prices to $5 in response to this. When the opportunity comes around for the community to decide on theirfate, there's a good chance we'll remember the knife they chose to stick in our backs in a time of tragedy. . .
That's a very admirable thing to do -- to facilitate better communication for people by giving up the bandwidth normally used for their ads. I wish more corporations had the cojones to do real things that "give" from their actual bottom line back to the community that supports them. I don't know why your comment was modded as funny . . . I take things like this pretty seriously. It's a hopeful sign that not everybody running a business in the world today is a backstabbing blackguard.
I was just scrolling down and noticed the tiny number of comments (compared to ~2000 on one of the WTC stories above) and was going to make some snappy remark about how lively this discussion was. However, it may get livelier. The economy is going to boing back and forth as a result of the bombings. Let's hope opportunistic bastards who think they're going to profit from this are put in public stocks and have model jetplanes thrown at them.
Very odd indeed. The title of the album, "The Coup." On a related note, my wife is reading a novel written around 1985 whose premise is that a terrorist group blows up Wall Street (the only difference being, the group first calls and tells them to evacuate). She said it's been very surreal to go through today because the events described in the novel mirror pretty closely what's happening now. And she just picked it up last week. It's by someone named Patterson.
A friend of mine (here in Louisville) called a local gas station and was told that the price was $1.65 at the moment, but he had already been given the word that his next increase was taking it to $5.00. I was sitting there when he called.
When the Gulf War started, I was driving down a stretch of road in Denver. This was after the invasion, but before the "desert storm." We knew it was coming. I passed one gas station, and the price was sitting at about $.85 or so, whatever was the norm then. And then the radio broadcast was interrupted and they started reporting on the results of Desert Storm. The very next gas station we passed had already posted a price of $1.30. This was within five minutes.
Yeah. "In other news, the impending turmoil has inspired the greedy, bloodsucking bastards in the oil industry to use this panic and disorder as a fucking feeble excuse to juice up their profits."
Someone is certain to have remained behind to benefit from this. I'm listening to a Tool song as I read this. "Ticks and Leeches" off of Lateralus. "Hope this is what you wanted. Hope this is what you had it mind. 'Cause this is what you're getting."
I rather think the end result of this will be a zero tolerance policy for terrorists. They will not be able to pop their little fucking heads up to talk about their "message" anymore without fear of getting immediately capped.
Sure. They could have used those insidious phones and paper letters!
Get real. The people planning this probably spent some time training together to get it right.
You've "seen some stories." We've all seen some fucking stories on the Internet. I remember, before I ever used the Internet, reading Vernor Vinge's "Fire on the Deep." My favorite quote was "They don't call it the Net of A Million Lies for nothing."
Yes, I think the world will be different after today too. But I don't think the answer (implied in your premise) is preventing people from communicating with each other.
Yeah. I imagine it's because our system is shit because it's too expensive to upgrade. I imagine after this a plane going off course will probably be instantly surrounded by fighter jets.
Charley Pride doesn't have the first idea of what Napster, the Internet, or digital music mean. He's on this crusade because he walked into a music store in his home town, the proprieter of which he knew, and found counterfeit copies of his CD on the shelves. That was legitimately piracy and legitimately took money from his pocket by selling something manufactured by someone else instead of the thing manufactured for him.
In the article I read he explicitly stated that he didn't know nuthin' bout no napster, but if it was anti-piracy it was OK with him. He's an ignorant tool, and deserves what he's going to get, which is a gigantic black eye in the public. Kind of like what another country-western, er, "performer" by name of Garth Brooks got when he whined that people were stealing money from him by selling used copies of his CD's. That thing between my thumb and forefinger? It's not the world's smallest violin, playing your bleeding-heart anthem. It's just a fuckin' booger.
And previously producers of that "content" (that word is as revolting to me as "consumer" and "taxpayer" are, mentioned elsewhere in this thread) only owned the RIGHT TO FIRST SALE and the right to prevent others from selling copies in their stead. They did not have the right to control who listened to it or how many people they shared it with or whether they used it in their car or on a boat or with a goat, or even whether they chose to make a personal copy for whatever use got their nads off.
The basic problem is they are attempting to assert a level of control they are not legally entitled to (or weren't before the DMCA) and in doing so they are eroding the rights of the public. We as the public (theoretically) grant them the right to profit from their creativity in return for contributing it to the public commons. This is not a "content industry." This is the promotion of useful arts and sciences for the benefit of the public.
People (ok, parasites) who have made a living off of it fail to understand that there is no moral obligation granted by us for them to make a decent living, or even a fair moonlighting wage, off of their productions. They are simply allowed the monopoly on creating and selling copies for a limited time in order to encourage more of their works. The Draconian measures now in place aren't encouraging anyone. They are discouraging people from disseminating valuable scientific and cultural information for fear of being sued into oblivion by a group of peple who have formed this bizzare expectation that they are entitled to a "revenue stream" for all eternity based on a work performed in a singular moment of time. A real musician has to go and perform music on a daily basis to get paid. But if you have a "content-protected" CD, you can perform it once and never again have to be bothered with actually doing the job you're paid to do. (For those of you firing up your "you don't know what you're talking about" flamethrowers, I am a musician who has worked in such capacity for a living before. I know exactly what kind of work it is.)
I read an article about Charley Pride and his crusade against "piracy." He had, at the writing of the article, no idea how Napster worked, or even what an MP3 was. His crusade started because he walked into a music store in his home town and saw a bunch of counterfeit CD's of his on the shelves. There's nothing defensible about selling counterfeit works. That actually takes money from the musician. There is a distinct difference between doing that and sharing it with a friend. I guarantee his CD sales will slump because of this gimmick. He will have thousands of people who get the CD, can't play it in whatever place they choose, don't really know what's wrong, and dump it in the pile of shit they don't listen to anymore. His contribution (if it can be called such) to the cultural commons will be stifled because of this and I bet ten to one odds his actual sales will suffer. It's actually pretty delicious, to me, to see how this kind of thing is totally backfiring.
The problem is, the DMCA diminishes our respect for the law, and those who create it. It was so clearly bought for the narrow goals a special interest group, and passed almost in secret. It demonstrates the depth of corruption in our government, and the moral bankruptcy of our culture. That a corporation needs to take away the rights of citizens (who happen to be their customers, but are citizens of a free country first) to be curious about the nature of the product they buy, in order to prevent a corporation's unnatural business model, is a sign that the corporation has lost touch with reality, and expects society to perserve its existence and profits in spite of its obvious flaws. E-books don't work, and won't work. No one wants pay-per-read, pay-per-view, or pay-per-listen. The enraged public reaction to Divx proved that conclusively.
Even where the law is wrong it must be obeyed,
A law this wrong cannot be obeyed. It forbids a broad range of activities under which almost anyone involved in digital information technology could be culpable. It is for all appearances designed to produce a witch hunt-style atmosphere among computer intelligentsia which will paralyze criticism and independent thought. Any one of us could be guilty of circumventing encryption technology by peeking where we ought not. It treats programming as a black art, and criminalizes casual behavior that may or may not have real criminal intent.
...most Slashdotters wouldn't purchase it even if it had absolutely NO restrictions...
...Go ahead, tell me I'm wrong, I could use a good laugh.
OK. You're wrong. You have no idea what most slashdotters do. Chances are you wouldn't be able to identify one of us as a slashdotter if we mugged you in an alley. All the other posts on slashdot could be the work of a single manical AI program that argues with itself all day long, and you could be the only real human being who reads and posts to this site. Or, conversely, "Zico" could be nothing more a knee-jerk reactionary trolling script, and I'm just responding to thin air for the author's amusement. Regardless of what the true case is, I can definitely say that you personally cannot know the purchasing habits of however many thousand active slashdot users.
Just a side note: I was on gluc until a couple of months ago. I know lots of people who are on it. Not sure what it was doing for me, but I was able to reproduce the effects of the drug by changing what I ate and exercising more frequently. My point is that yes some of these drugs are revolutionary, but some of them appear to be little better than snake oil. I had to change doctors to find one who would agree to treat me without the glucophage. BM puts out several variants on gluc, most of which are just changes in the delivery mechanism. They expect to make billions, I'm sure. When their patent expires, they'll probably do their best to discredit their former glorious advance and go to another, incrementally more effective drug. I strongly suspect, because of my experiences, that doctors are not encouraged to find other ways to treat illnesses because of incentives from the drug companies. It's hard to find one who actually looks at what's wrong with me and advises a treatment beyond just giving me a pill. Another example: I had a doctor tell me, with a straight face, that I had a virus and in the same breath prescribe an antibiotic for it. I went home and threw the prescription away and changed doctors. Read up on the antibiotic crisis lately? There's an example of a self-devouring industry that shouldn't exist in the first place. If our so-called medical establishment didn't hand the fucking things out like candy our immune systems wouldn't be so weak . ..
Besides I'd say that more and better drugs have been found by companies (which you hate) then by non-companies.
Your turn. Prove it.
My turn to what? Yes these companies spent so much in hard dollars during these years. Did that money go to research, or did it go to executive bonuses and other bullshit? Is there any way to tell? Large companies waste money in all sorts of creative ways. Every one I've ever been at fudged costs and documentation out the ass. I remain skeptical of both the supposed "investment" that goes into creating these, and the rewards we are recieving thereby. And as I discover more about how the drug industry gets their leads in the first place (good ol' government funding there) I begin to suspect that, as usual, the public is being had. Saying I "hate" these "companies" is a simplistic way of putting it.
Re:Music CDR's already contain a "RIAA tax"
on
RIAA To Target CD-R
·
· Score: 2
so why doesn't she tell her member companies to STFU and simply advertise them?
Well, maybe because they already know you don't need a "music" CDR to make a "music" CD. Maybe because to the CD burner and the reader there is not a whit of difference.
Don't tell me you are that stupid to believe that companies will continue making products that costs millions to develop
Well, since you put it that way, I must be.
Two questions I keep posting, and I have yet to see them answered:
1. How much does it really cost a company to make a drug? I know where I work, estimates of what it "costs" do to something are fictitious at best. The answer would of course dictate whether I thought the public would pay for the research on drugs that were really important.
2. Aside from the occasional life-saving AIDS treatment (note I don't use the word "cure"), what drugs have these companies really produced, lately, using this supposedly irreplacable intellectual property reward system, that have been of long-term use to society, or humanity? Prozac? Rogaine? Viagra?
I am increasingly skeptical of this system as something worth preserving. Drugs got developed before giant pharmacutical companies existed. Cures were found for great diseases. The motivation can be, and should be, something other than cold hard cash.
If patents can't be enforced we will not see much more research&development for deceases.
I hope not. We have enough deceased as it is. If you meant "diseases," though, I think you're overstating your case. There are plenty of people who would fund research for a cure for various "deceases." I don't, however, feel like funding, even as a consumer, most of the treatments. I'm diabetic. I was, until a few months ago, taking one of the latest diabetic drugs on the market at a pretty hefty premium. Actually, my insurance company was paying for it. Anyway, after a lot of experimentation and consultation with my doctor I decided I would try to control my sugar with diet. Well, two months later and I'm doing fine. I'm pretty lucky, but I also think it's revealing that I can do for myself with some self-control what the drug was doing for me. Yeah, the drug companies spend a lot of money, creating medicines that we may or may not need. Maybe the system isn't doing exactly what we need it to do.
Do you have any idea at all what the development costs are for this kind of medicines?
More importantly, do you? I hear a lot of numbers. They often smell like they've been freshly pulled from someone's ass. What does it actually cost to develop a treatment for AIDS?
Patents as a concept is very important for all economies all over the world
I'm becoming increasingly skeptical of this. I would be happy to hand over tax money to fund medical research in the public interest. Again, for a cure. I think we're being sold one treatment after another because it's a long term strategy for the survival of drug companies. That isn't working for the best interests of people like me (and believe me, Diabetes can be just as fatal as AIDS if left unchecked. It's just not as scary). There are a lot of assumptions in your argument that just don't pan out. Medical research got done long before there were medical patents. Presumably there are people who have a slightly wider focus than the checkbook in front of them.
This is some of the most annoying rhetorics I've ever heard on Slashdot... If we let kids watch horror movies, how long until they start watching porn and God(tm) knows what else? If we let marijuana go legal (for health reasons, of course), how long before we legalize cocaine?
Look, if I give you an inch, how long before you'll take a mile? Let's do the math: 1 inch per day x 356 days per year is 365 / 12 = 30 (rounded off) inches per year. Therefore at that rate, it will take you 63360 / 30 = 2112 years (and some) to take a mile from me. The last track on Rush's "2112" is "Something for Nothing," which explicitly states that you can't have your freedom for free, and if you want that mile from me, you'll have to take it an inch at a time.
Sorry, I was just letting my mind wander down a slippery slope. Pardon me.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, the day I wrote my reply I expected some brian-rot in respone from you, and I had a big essay composed in my head. Now I've just got this: You're charting the path on a short trip to hell. I've read your other posts on this forum and I have taken the measure of your character. You are clearly a bigot filled with irrational hatred. Go ahead and take your trip. Just keep your shit the fuck away from me. Whatever capacity I had to politely tolerate filth such as yourself went up in flames on tuesday.
There are a lot of people talking about how this will end up impacting our civil rights. One thing I would like to see change is the apparent ease with which terrorists communicate their message through the world press, in concert with their attacks. I guess I'm appalled and shocked that a reporter would waste any time at all reprinting the words of a known and admitted terrorist. Just like I was disgusted when the Unabomber manifesto was printed, because these messages give a smidgeon of validity to the horrifying activities that are behind them. I think we as a civilization need to hold our journalists to a far higher standard of ethics and make them realize that giving any voice of validity or authority to someone like bin Laden is, in my personal view, aiding and abetting his murderous acts. And if we cannot shame our media into adopting this code of ethics, we must legally force them to. The reporter in your linked interview stood on the same piece of land as bin Laden and spoke to him. He should have been arrested the first time he put the words of this filth in print, and charged as an accomplice to his crimes. I know he's got his big fucking story to tell. But we as a society should make it clear that when the medium is terror, we aren't interested in the story. We do not care about the persons involved because they have ceased to be human beings. They have become animals without reason. I read the bin Laden interview. It's clear that he's fucking irrational and cannot differentiate between what a government does and what its people do. But I don't really care what he thinks. If he is the person responsible for this he should be punished as if his acts had no reason. The most powerful punishment we as a society could inflict on these bastards is to take away their ability to speak to us. Make it impossible for his message to reach any ears. Believe me he cares that we hear him. He went to great lengths to get an interview. He orchestrated his appearance carefully. Without that appearance he would just be some madman in hiding. We should take that piece of terror away. I think it will shrivel and die without the ability to disseminate the "message."
I seriously doubt they expected it to completely collapse. They probably intended to gut it with the fire. But I don't give fucking terrorists much credit for that level of intelligence. They knew they would cause a world of hurt with a lot of fuel and fire. I doubt they thought much beyond that.
But that's just my opinion. If the airlines cannot bear the additional cost that security must require, well that's tough titty. They are operating machines that can kill lots of the rest of us. We should demand and require that they have control of those machines at all times, or revoke their license to operate them.
Unlike, say, the gas stations around my town who have openly advertised that they intend to raise their gas prices to $5 in response to this. When the opportunity comes around for the community to decide on theirfate, there's a good chance we'll remember the knife they chose to stick in our backs in a time of tragedy. . .
That's a very admirable thing to do -- to facilitate better communication for people by giving up the bandwidth normally used for their ads. I wish more corporations had the cojones to do real things that "give" from their actual bottom line back to the community that supports them. I don't know why your comment was modded as funny . . . I take things like this pretty seriously. It's a hopeful sign that not everybody running a business in the world today is a backstabbing blackguard.
I was just scrolling down and noticed the tiny number of comments (compared to ~2000 on one of the WTC stories above) and was going to make some snappy remark about how lively this discussion was. However, it may get livelier. The economy is going to boing back and forth as a result of the bombings. Let's hope opportunistic bastards who think they're going to profit from this are put in public stocks and have model jetplanes thrown at them.
Very odd indeed. The title of the album, "The Coup." On a related note, my wife is reading a novel written around 1985 whose premise is that a terrorist group blows up Wall Street (the only difference being, the group first calls and tells them to evacuate). She said it's been very surreal to go through today because the events described in the novel mirror pretty closely what's happening now. And she just picked it up last week. It's by someone named Patterson.
A friend of mine (here in Louisville) called a local gas station and was told that the price was $1.65 at the moment, but he had already been given the word that his next increase was taking it to $5.00. I was sitting there when he called.
When the Gulf War started, I was driving down a stretch of road in Denver. This was after the invasion, but before the "desert storm." We knew it was coming. I passed one gas station, and the price was sitting at about $.85 or so, whatever was the norm then. And then the radio broadcast was interrupted and they started reporting on the results of Desert Storm. The very next gas station we passed had already posted a price of $1.30. This was within five minutes.
Yeah. "In other news, the impending turmoil has inspired the greedy, bloodsucking bastards in the oil industry to use this panic and disorder as a fucking feeble excuse to juice up their profits."
Shove Nostrodamus up your nostrils. This is real. He lived in a fictional, fantastic world. Don't get the two confused.
I rather think the end result of this will be a zero tolerance policy for terrorists. They will not be able to pop their little fucking heads up to talk about their "message" anymore without fear of getting immediately capped.
Get real. The people planning this probably spent some time training together to get it right.
You've "seen some stories." We've all seen some fucking stories on the Internet. I remember, before I ever used the Internet, reading Vernor Vinge's "Fire on the Deep." My favorite quote was "They don't call it the Net of A Million Lies for nothing."
Yes, I think the world will be different after today too. But I don't think the answer (implied in your premise) is preventing people from communicating with each other.
Yeah. I imagine it's because our system is shit because it's too expensive to upgrade. I imagine after this a plane going off course will probably be instantly surrounded by fighter jets.
The same thing that's wrong with letting it happen again. I'm afraid, however, it's too late for that.
In the article I read he explicitly stated that he didn't know nuthin' bout no napster, but if it was anti-piracy it was OK with him. He's an ignorant tool, and deserves what he's going to get, which is a gigantic black eye in the public. Kind of like what another country-western, er, "performer" by name of Garth Brooks got when he whined that people were stealing money from him by selling used copies of his CD's. That thing between my thumb and forefinger? It's not the world's smallest violin, playing your bleeding-heart anthem. It's just a fuckin' booger.
The basic problem is they are attempting to assert a level of control they are not legally entitled to (or weren't before the DMCA) and in doing so they are eroding the rights of the public. We as the public (theoretically) grant them the right to profit from their creativity in return for contributing it to the public commons. This is not a "content industry." This is the promotion of useful arts and sciences for the benefit of the public.
People (ok, parasites) who have made a living off of it fail to understand that there is no moral obligation granted by us for them to make a decent living, or even a fair moonlighting wage, off of their productions. They are simply allowed the monopoly on creating and selling copies for a limited time in order to encourage more of their works. The Draconian measures now in place aren't encouraging anyone. They are discouraging people from disseminating valuable scientific and cultural information for fear of being sued into oblivion by a group of peple who have formed this bizzare expectation that they are entitled to a "revenue stream" for all eternity based on a work performed in a singular moment of time. A real musician has to go and perform music on a daily basis to get paid. But if you have a "content-protected" CD, you can perform it once and never again have to be bothered with actually doing the job you're paid to do. (For those of you firing up your "you don't know what you're talking about" flamethrowers, I am a musician who has worked in such capacity for a living before. I know exactly what kind of work it is.)
I read an article about Charley Pride and his crusade against "piracy." He had, at the writing of the article, no idea how Napster worked, or even what an MP3 was. His crusade started because he walked into a music store in his home town and saw a bunch of counterfeit CD's of his on the shelves. There's nothing defensible about selling counterfeit works. That actually takes money from the musician. There is a distinct difference between doing that and sharing it with a friend. I guarantee his CD sales will slump because of this gimmick. He will have thousands of people who get the CD, can't play it in whatever place they choose, don't really know what's wrong, and dump it in the pile of shit they don't listen to anymore. His contribution (if it can be called such) to the cultural commons will be stifled because of this and I bet ten to one odds his actual sales will suffer. It's actually pretty delicious, to me, to see how this kind of thing is totally backfiring.
Even where the law is wrong it must be obeyed,
A law this wrong cannot be obeyed. It forbids a broad range of activities under which almost anyone involved in digital information technology could be culpable. It is for all appearances designed to produce a witch hunt-style atmosphere among computer intelligentsia which will paralyze criticism and independent thought. Any one of us could be guilty of circumventing encryption technology by peeking where we ought not. It treats programming as a black art, and criminalizes casual behavior that may or may not have real criminal intent.
...Go ahead, tell me I'm wrong, I could use a good laugh.
OK. You're wrong. You have no idea what most slashdotters do. Chances are you wouldn't be able to identify one of us as a slashdotter if we mugged you in an alley. All the other posts on slashdot could be the work of a single manical AI program that argues with itself all day long, and you could be the only real human being who reads and posts to this site. Or, conversely, "Zico" could be nothing more a knee-jerk reactionary trolling script, and I'm just responding to thin air for the author's amusement. Regardless of what the true case is, I can definitely say that you personally cannot know the purchasing habits of however many thousand active slashdot users.
Just a side note: I was on gluc until a couple of months ago. I know lots of people who are on it. Not sure what it was doing for me, but I was able to reproduce the effects of the drug by changing what I ate and exercising more frequently. My point is that yes some of these drugs are revolutionary, but some of them appear to be little better than snake oil. I had to change doctors to find one who would agree to treat me without the glucophage. BM puts out several variants on gluc, most of which are just changes in the delivery mechanism. They expect to make billions, I'm sure. When their patent expires, they'll probably do their best to discredit their former glorious advance and go to another, incrementally more effective drug. I strongly suspect, because of my experiences, that doctors are not encouraged to find other ways to treat illnesses because of incentives from the drug companies. It's hard to find one who actually looks at what's wrong with me and advises a treatment beyond just giving me a pill. Another example: I had a doctor tell me, with a straight face, that I had a virus and in the same breath prescribe an antibiotic for it. I went home and threw the prescription away and changed doctors. Read up on the antibiotic crisis lately? There's an example of a self-devouring industry that shouldn't exist in the first place. If our so-called medical establishment didn't hand the fucking things out like candy our immune systems wouldn't be so weak . . .
Besides I'd say that more and better drugs have been found by companies (which you hate) then by non-companies.
Your turn. Prove it.
My turn to what? Yes these companies spent so much in hard dollars during these years. Did that money go to research, or did it go to executive bonuses and other bullshit? Is there any way to tell? Large companies waste money in all sorts of creative ways. Every one I've ever been at fudged costs and documentation out the ass. I remain skeptical of both the supposed "investment" that goes into creating these, and the rewards we are recieving thereby. And as I discover more about how the drug industry gets their leads in the first place (good ol' government funding there) I begin to suspect that, as usual, the public is being had. Saying I "hate" these "companies" is a simplistic way of putting it.
Well, maybe because they already know you don't need a "music" CDR to make a "music" CD. Maybe because to the CD burner and the reader there is not a whit of difference.
Well, since you put it that way, I must be.
Two questions I keep posting, and I have yet to see them answered:
1. How much does it really cost a company to make a drug? I know where I work, estimates of what it "costs" do to something are fictitious at best. The answer would of course dictate whether I thought the public would pay for the research on drugs that were really important.
2. Aside from the occasional life-saving AIDS treatment (note I don't use the word "cure"), what drugs have these companies really produced, lately, using this supposedly irreplacable intellectual property reward system, that have been of long-term use to society, or humanity? Prozac? Rogaine? Viagra?
I am increasingly skeptical of this system as something worth preserving. Drugs got developed before giant pharmacutical companies existed. Cures were found for great diseases. The motivation can be, and should be, something other than cold hard cash.
I hope not. We have enough deceased as it is. If you meant "diseases," though, I think you're overstating your case. There are plenty of people who would fund research for a cure for various "deceases." I don't, however, feel like funding, even as a consumer, most of the treatments. I'm diabetic. I was, until a few months ago, taking one of the latest diabetic drugs on the market at a pretty hefty premium. Actually, my insurance company was paying for it. Anyway, after a lot of experimentation and consultation with my doctor I decided I would try to control my sugar with diet. Well, two months later and I'm doing fine. I'm pretty lucky, but I also think it's revealing that I can do for myself with some self-control what the drug was doing for me. Yeah, the drug companies spend a lot of money, creating medicines that we may or may not need. Maybe the system isn't doing exactly what we need it to do.
Do you have any idea at all what the development costs are for this kind of medicines?
More importantly, do you? I hear a lot of numbers. They often smell like they've been freshly pulled from someone's ass. What does it actually cost to develop a treatment for AIDS?
Patents as a concept is very important for all economies all over the world
I'm becoming increasingly skeptical of this. I would be happy to hand over tax money to fund medical research in the public interest. Again, for a cure. I think we're being sold one treatment after another because it's a long term strategy for the survival of drug companies. That isn't working for the best interests of people like me (and believe me, Diabetes can be just as fatal as AIDS if left unchecked. It's just not as scary). There are a lot of assumptions in your argument that just don't pan out. Medical research got done long before there were medical patents. Presumably there are people who have a slightly wider focus than the checkbook in front of them.
Look, if I give you an inch, how long before you'll take a mile? Let's do the math: 1 inch per day x 356 days per year is 365 / 12 = 30 (rounded off) inches per year. Therefore at that rate, it will take you 63360 / 30 = 2112 years (and some) to take a mile from me. The last track on Rush's "2112" is "Something for Nothing," which explicitly states that you can't have your freedom for free, and if you want that mile from me, you'll have to take it an inch at a time.
Sorry, I was just letting my mind wander down a slippery slope. Pardon me.