Yep, that's right. Do *you* have health insurance not tied to your place of work? Do you have 100% assurance that the company from which you bought the insurance will still be there 70 years hence? Have you negotiated rates that will be predictable, no matter what health conditions you develop? Do you have money full set aside to pay the premiums for your full life span? If the answer to any of those questions is no, you have not planned for sudden health crisis.
Unfortunately, in the US, it is pretty much impossible to satisfy all of those requirements.
The "crisis" that is potentially 40 years away is that SS will be taking more money out than has been put in/set aside. That's not great, but is not the end of the world (it's not doom), and has happened multiple times in the past.
The 40 year date is a very conservative one -- it's probably more, and could be infinite
*Very* small adjustments could move that time horizon to the infinite future even under conservative economic assumptions
The larger fact is that basic problem is a too large federal deficit, not a systemic social security problem, and the proposed "reform" makes the underlying problem worse, not better.
The solutions were very elegant, but very difficult to debug and very difficult to reason about.
Just to clear up, this is because of the lazy evaluator. Because code is executed until it needs to be, you never know what's happening when.
Except that Scheme is not lazy. The problem for the OP is probably in groking first order functions and closures. If you don't have your head wrapped around those two concepts, it's going to be difficult to see how even fairly simple programs work.
For instance, in OO languages, a common advanced technique is to create an object factory. In pretty basic Scheme, you can create a function that creates an object factory function. It just requires a new way of thinking about programming.
they want software to be intuitive, with levels of fault, and 'programming' to be done nearly entirely at the design level. When building a house, generally design decisions are the biggest concern. With programming, it's more often the actual construction.
In software, design *is* construction. There is no theory and standard practice of software construction, the way that there is for engineering, architecture, and construction (and many decisions are made construction-time rather than design-time in those disciplines anyway). Without a workable theory and model, you can't design much anyway.
We are at a stage of software development similar to where construction was thousands of years ago, except that we are trying to build complex skyscrapers and suspension bridges, rather than pyramids, which might be in our abilities.
GPL is like a prion, anything it touches is meant to turn into itself. The whole objective of GPL is deliberately and explicitly to prevent commercial exploitation. If you think differently then you have never met RMS in person and listened to him for more than 30 minutes.
This is total and utter BS. The whole purpose of GPL is to keep code open, not to prevent commerical exploitation, and the GPL=virus, prion, whatever nonsense is just that: nonsense. You only have to open your code if you create a derivative work of the GPLed code, by incorporating it into your application, and you only *get* to incorporate that work if you accept the GPL (unless it the code is dual licensed). There is no magic copyright fairy dust in the GPL that magically opens closed code.
I've not met the man in person, and I'm not an FSF true believer, but perhaps you weren't hearing when you listened to him? Someone who made his living selling GPLed code for many years isn't against selling code. He's against closing code.
Try a medical informatics program. Google for "medical informatics program", and you'll get a ton of hits. Combines the medical degree and IT, and hard to outsource
With business software, there are the same issues. Every enterprise sw company I've been in has been right on the edge between profit and loss. Sure, there are some companies that find the golden goose, and get that wonderful ability to mint money by reproducing software at close to zero marginal costs, but it ain't true for most of the market.
Why do you think Sistani is a nutjob? For, uh, not being part of an undemocratical group of cronies? For wanting some sort of direct elections? For wanting to make sure that Shia (who have been pretty nastily repressed but are the majority) have some sort of proprotional representation? For not seeking direct political power? For standing up to the powers that be (pre and post Saddam)? For being a respected religious leader?
Yes to the Greek part, but no to the "birth" part, as Genesis means "coming into being" generally, and only "birth" in one specific sense. "teknon" is more specific to "birth".
No. See Good to Great and Built to Last. The thesis of both books is that great companies build a strong team of leaders around a strong culture. Dictators can deliver results for a time, but the company dies when the dictator leaves. Both books are based on empirical evidence (actual performance over time) not B-school BS speculation.
The XP advocates are not as far out or as hard line as one would think reading this review, or the book to which it refers (disclaimer: I've not read the book, but have read much of the source text which appeared on the authors web site). There are debates on the extremeprogramming Yahoo group constantly about how far to push emergent design versus design up front (one of the major advocates of XP, Martin Fowler, takes a dissenting view on this matter), about pair programming and how to manage people who don't pair well, etc. There is also a fair bit of self-directed humor by the major advocates for XP. XP needs thoughtful critique, and books (such as Pete McBreen's) that do this are well received.
The web-posted material on which this book is based is not a thoughful critique. It is parody, yes, but not a critique. One of the central points made is that XP requires, e.g., strong unit testing and refactoring to work. Yep. If you don't do that, XP doesn't work well. Yep. These are points no XP advocate denys. The material ends up making the claim that if you don't do XP you can't do XP. This is quasi-interesting, if utterly obvious, but not the basis for a book-length attack on XP.
Skip this book and buy McBreen's if you want to read a critique. Join the Yahoo group and state your critique thoughfully, and read how some of the major thinkers in XP respond. Then make up your mind.
th, ch, etc. are digraphs, not diphthongs. They are different things. A digraph is a two-letter encoding of one phoneme, a dipthong is, typically, a combination of vowel sounds run together as a single sound, of which there are many in English. For instance, in "their", "th" is a digraph for the theta sound, "ei" represents a diphthong.
They're not completely separate. I remember seeing Java objects being instanciated in JavaScript embedded in pages destined for Netscape.
Right, and by that logic Python is related to Java 'cause you can instantiate Java objects in Jython. And C is nearly the same as lotsa languages, 'cause lotsa languages have C extensions which allow you to instantiate C objects in the language. Javascript and Java have only the notion of being roughly C-looking languages which came out at roughly the same time, and were both championed by Netscape.
You are including Medco's sales in your $40Bn figure. The correct figure for the Merck unit is aproximately $20Bn, of which the $2.4Bn R&D figure represents 12% of sales. Further, you need to take out the Medco proportion of G&A, advertising and marketing, and account for the "materials and production" line (which accounts for the cost of producing drugs) noted in the filing. Unfortunately, although the filing breaks out the revenue from Medco, it does not break out the costs, but the situation is clearly not as absurd as you suggest.
Let's look at this the other way: if there was no ability to patent drugs, would Merck be able to afford the $2.4Bn in R&D costs? (The true cost of R&D is probably higher than this, as there are certainly some in-licensing costs to account for here, in which Merck purchases compounds from other companies).
Yes, Merck spends a good deal on marketing, and makes a very healthy profit. The profit comes from the blockbuster model most of the large companies follow: there is some volatility in R&D spend, but much higher volatility in the market. A strong drug can generate orders of magnitude more dollars than the R&D spend. With such a model, pharma companies tend to blitz market, attempting to make as much as they can. The spend on marketing because they make even more in profits. All of that, however, presupposes that they have good drugs to sell.
It is rare that any one company has a "single source" of something that people need. Much profit these days in is antihyperlipidemia drugs, of which there are many. Likewise, there are two major Cox-II inhibitor drugs on the market, with more coming. Of the top classes of drugs, only Pfizer has a semi-monopoly with Viagra.
Part of the problem here is our irrational health care system. I'd agree with you (I'd imagine) that with a more rational healthcare system, the average cost per drug would be less, marketing costs would be less, and there would still be enough funding for R&D.
Right, I think you missed the point of the movie. The supposed genetic superiority was more ideology than science. The genetically "superior" got the best jobs, the inferior got the menial jobs, and it was all justified by pseudoscience *exactly* the same way that northern european whites justified their ruling position in America in the late 1800s.
The requirements were fully understood and detailed ahead of time
The biggest technical risks were understood ahead of time
The problem is that you can't fully understand the requirements and the technical risks ahead of time, since they can only be fully known by building the software. In the time that it takes to fully understand the requirements and the technical risk, you could have released version 1 of the software, which would be incomplete, and would miss the mark but would be:
A better attempt at understanding requirements and technical risk than armchair analysis
An actual deliverable that, if you are lucky, might just be valuable to the customer
How many times have you spent 10% of your time on the hard stuff, and 90% of your time on the easy or silly details? Why is the program 90% done for 1/2 the project duration? Why do the requirements and the specs always change? Why does the customer always hate the first version of the program?
That's why the open source rule of "release early, release often" is the proper way of doing things in commercial software as well. The emphasis on planning and control makes the difficulty of software development worse that it could be, because it focuses effort on nearly meaningless exercises (business and technical analysis) that don't uncover real risks nearly so efficiently as building working software.
"Some Christians are morally bankrupt" does not imply "All Christians are morally bankrupt". It is just that sort of misguided reasoning that leads Islamic terrorists to justify killing innocent Americans and Americans to justify killing innocent Arabs, Pakistanis...
As a number of people have commented, war is a bad metaphor for what we need to do here. This is not, however, simply a police action, as some people have suggested.
I suggest that the best analogy for what we need to do is treat this like the Italian struggle against the Mafia. The crucial step is a cultural change, from the situation where the CD party treated the Mafia as a necessary evil that was just part of the political landscape, to where all of Italian society turned against the Mafia, and magistrates and judges were willing to risk their lives to rid Italy of Mafia control. The Mafia still exists, no doubt, but it no longer has the same insidious grip on the political system.
Here, the crucial step is getting the Arab and Muslim countries to stop treating their radical Islamists as necessary evils who, since they can mobilize the poor, and can kill dissenters, must be tolerated and accepted. Many countries, such as Iran and Syria, have used these groups to fight proxy wars for political control over the Middle East. The best thing that can come out of this tragedy is an alignment of Arab and Muslim contries against their radical elements, and a change in the culture there to stop accepting bloody attacks against civilians as acceptable political tactics.
That's why bombing Kabul, for example, is likely to be counter-productive. As much as we want the Taliban to be out of Afganistan and replaced by some more acceptible government, the likelihood that we will succeed is low, and the likelihood that we will simply piss off the very countries we need to align against these guys is high.
I suspect that what Rumsfeld et al. are talking about by "new kind of war" is making their point on asymetric warfare: the notion that we have gotten so good at fighting conventional wars that no one will send armies and navies against us, but will instead fight with more "terrorist-like" actions. My guess is that internal in the Pentagon this is being used as an "I told you so/wake up call".
Bluetooth technology has a range of up to 30 feet and you can even surf the internet with the 270c using your home pc's internet connection. How many phones do you know of harness that ability?
Why would you surf the internet with a phone when your laptop is 30 feet away?
As seen by their recent financials press release (and one expects that the SEC filings will have even more juicy details), RedHat is rapidly turning from a software vendor to a services providor, where RH Linux is almost a loss leader.
Given that IBM has traditionally been quite successful at this sort of game (using hardware and software sales as leads for larger services and support contracts), where does IBM stand vis a vis RedHat? IBM takes the high ground, RH takes the low? Direct competitors? Potential acquisition target?
OK, looking at the Babelfish translation helped with business-speak. Second paragraph is:
It will be done in the "Marché Libre" [see the explaination in the letter below], near the end of July. According to this document, this IPO has the goal of permitting the persuit of fantastic growth in market share without having their hands tied by by investors who, as everyone knows, have become less generous with the new economy and are waiting (too) impatiently for a return on investment.
Here it is: Mandrake is going IPO. Sources close to the company have given us a document that has already been distributed to the employees and shareholders (?) (or, at least, certain of them [reference to the recently departed former executive staff???]).
It will be done in the "Marché Libre" [see the explaination in the letter below], near the end of July. According to this document, this IPO has the goal of permitting [something -- seems garbled, or I just don't understand investment-French, or both] without having their hands tied by by investors who, as everyone knows, have become less generous with the new economy and are waiting (too) impatiently for a return on investment.
You will find in the complete text of the article the document, just as we received it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, that's right. Do *you* have health insurance not tied to your place of work? Do you have 100% assurance that the company from which you bought the insurance will still be there 70 years hence? Have you negotiated rates that will be predictable, no matter what health conditions you develop? Do you have money full set aside to pay the premiums for your full life span? If the answer to any of those questions is no, you have not planned for sudden health crisis.
Unfortunately, in the US, it is pretty much impossible to satisfy all of those requirements.
The larger fact is that basic problem is a too large federal deficit, not a systemic social security problem, and the proposed "reform" makes the underlying problem worse, not better.
Except that Scheme is not lazy. The problem for the OP is probably in groking first order functions and closures. If you don't have your head wrapped around those two concepts, it's going to be difficult to see how even fairly simple programs work.
For instance, in OO languages, a common advanced technique is to create an object factory. In pretty basic Scheme, you can create a function that creates an object factory function. It just requires a new way of thinking about programming.
In software, design *is* construction. There is no theory and standard practice of software construction, the way that there is for engineering, architecture, and construction (and many decisions are made construction-time rather than design-time in those disciplines anyway). Without a workable theory and model, you can't design much anyway.
We are at a stage of software development similar to where construction was thousands of years ago, except that we are trying to build complex skyscrapers and suspension bridges, rather than pyramids, which might be in our abilities.
This is total and utter BS. The whole purpose of GPL is to keep code open, not to prevent commerical exploitation, and the GPL=virus, prion, whatever nonsense is just that: nonsense. You only have to open your code if you create a derivative work of the GPLed code, by incorporating it into your application, and you only *get* to incorporate that work if you accept the GPL (unless it the code is dual licensed). There is no magic copyright fairy dust in the GPL that magically opens closed code.
I've not met the man in person, and I'm not an FSF true believer, but perhaps you weren't hearing when you listened to him? Someone who made his living selling GPLed code for many years isn't against selling code. He's against closing code.
Try a medical informatics program. Google for "medical informatics program", and you'll get a ton of hits. Combines the medical degree and IT, and hard to outsource
With business software, there are the same issues. Every enterprise sw company I've been in has been right on the edge between profit and loss. Sure, there are some companies that find the golden goose, and get that wonderful ability to mint money by reproducing software at close to zero marginal costs, but it ain't true for most of the market.
Why do you think Sistani is a nutjob? For, uh, not being part of an undemocratical group of cronies? For wanting some sort of direct elections? For wanting to make sure that Shia (who have been pretty nastily repressed but are the majority) have some sort of proprotional representation? For not seeking direct political power? For standing up to the powers that be (pre and post Saddam)? For being a respected religious leader?
Yes to the Greek part, but no to the "birth" part, as Genesis means "coming into being" generally, and only "birth" in one specific sense. "teknon" is more specific to "birth".
No. See Good to Great and Built to Last. The thesis of both books is that great companies build a strong team of leaders around a strong culture. Dictators can deliver results for a time, but the company dies when the dictator leaves. Both books are based on empirical evidence (actual performance over time) not B-school BS speculation.
He also said he wanted a foreign policy that wasn't arrogant, and that he was against secret evidence. Oh well.
The web-posted material on which this book is based is not a thoughful critique. It is parody, yes, but not a critique. One of the central points made is that XP requires, e.g., strong unit testing and refactoring to work. Yep. If you don't do that, XP doesn't work well. Yep. These are points no XP advocate denys. The material ends up making the claim that if you don't do XP you can't do XP. This is quasi-interesting, if utterly obvious, but not the basis for a book-length attack on XP.
Skip this book and buy McBreen's if you want to read a critique. Join the Yahoo group and state your critique thoughfully, and read how some of the major thinkers in XP respond. Then make up your mind.
See definitions of diphthong and digraph
Right, and by that logic Python is related to Java 'cause you can instantiate Java objects in Jython. And C is nearly the same as lotsa languages, 'cause lotsa languages have C extensions which allow you to instantiate C objects in the language. Javascript and Java have only the notion of being roughly C-looking languages which came out at roughly the same time, and were both championed by Netscape.
This
and
this
I like the first one better.
Let's look at this the other way: if there was no ability to patent drugs, would Merck be able to afford the $2.4Bn in R&D costs? (The true cost of R&D is probably higher than this, as there are certainly some in-licensing costs to account for here, in which Merck purchases compounds from other companies).
Yes, Merck spends a good deal on marketing, and makes a very healthy profit. The profit comes from the blockbuster model most of the large companies follow: there is some volatility in R&D spend, but much higher volatility in the market. A strong drug can generate orders of magnitude more dollars than the R&D spend. With such a model, pharma companies tend to blitz market, attempting to make as much as they can. The spend on marketing because they make even more in profits. All of that, however, presupposes that they have good drugs to sell.
It is rare that any one company has a "single source" of something that people need. Much profit these days in is antihyperlipidemia drugs, of which there are many. Likewise, there are two major Cox-II inhibitor drugs on the market, with more coming. Of the top classes of drugs, only Pfizer has a semi-monopoly with Viagra.
Part of the problem here is our irrational health care system. I'd agree with you (I'd imagine) that with a more rational healthcare system, the average cost per drug would be less, marketing costs would be less, and there would still be enough funding for R&D.
WWWWolf, who should get back to the Usenet any week now
Please do! The trolls have been misssing you -- the LARTs just haven't been the same.
Arien
Right, I think you missed the point of the movie. The supposed genetic superiority was more ideology than science. The genetically "superior" got the best jobs, the inferior got the menial jobs, and it was all justified by pseudoscience *exactly* the same way that northern european whites justified their ruling position in America in the late 1800s.
- The requirements were fully understood and detailed ahead of time
- The biggest technical risks were understood ahead of time
The problem is that you can't fully understand the requirements and the technical risks ahead of time, since they can only be fully known by building the software. In the time that it takes to fully understand the requirements and the technical risk, you could have released version 1 of the software, which would be incomplete, and would miss the mark but would be:- A better attempt at understanding requirements and technical risk than armchair analysis
- An actual deliverable that, if you are lucky, might just be valuable to the customer
How many times have you spent 10% of your time on the hard stuff, and 90% of your time on the easy or silly details? Why is the program 90% done for 1/2 the project duration? Why do the requirements and the specs always change? Why does the customer always hate the first version of the program?That's why the open source rule of "release early, release often" is the proper way of doing things in commercial software as well. The emphasis on planning and control makes the difficulty of software development worse that it could be, because it focuses effort on nearly meaningless exercises (business and technical analysis) that don't uncover real risks nearly so efficiently as building working software.
See the agile software development movement for more.
"Some Christians are morally bankrupt" does not imply "All Christians are morally bankrupt". It is just that sort of misguided reasoning that leads Islamic terrorists to justify killing innocent Americans and Americans to justify killing innocent Arabs, Pakistanis...
(See this commentary in the New Yorker and this one in Salon for calls to treat this as a police action.)
I suggest that the best analogy for what we need to do is treat this like the Italian struggle against the Mafia. The crucial step is a cultural change, from the situation where the CD party treated the Mafia as a necessary evil that was just part of the political landscape, to where all of Italian society turned against the Mafia, and magistrates and judges were willing to risk their lives to rid Italy of Mafia control. The Mafia still exists, no doubt, but it no longer has the same insidious grip on the political system.
Here, the crucial step is getting the Arab and Muslim countries to stop treating their radical Islamists as necessary evils who, since they can mobilize the poor, and can kill dissenters, must be tolerated and accepted. Many countries, such as Iran and Syria, have used these groups to fight proxy wars for political control over the Middle East. The best thing that can come out of this tragedy is an alignment of Arab and Muslim contries against their radical elements, and a change in the culture there to stop accepting bloody attacks against civilians as acceptable political tactics.
That's why bombing Kabul, for example, is likely to be counter-productive. As much as we want the Taliban to be out of Afganistan and replaced by some more acceptible government, the likelihood that we will succeed is low, and the likelihood that we will simply piss off the very countries we need to align against these guys is high.
I suspect that what Rumsfeld et al. are talking about by "new kind of war" is making their point on asymetric warfare: the notion that we have gotten so good at fighting conventional wars that no one will send armies and navies against us, but will instead fight with more "terrorist-like" actions. My guess is that internal in the Pentagon this is being used as an "I told you so/wake up call".
Why would you surf the internet with a phone when your laptop is 30 feet away?
Given that IBM has traditionally been quite successful at this sort of game (using hardware and software sales as leads for larger services and support contracts), where does IBM stand vis a vis RedHat? IBM takes the high ground, RH takes the low? Direct competitors? Potential acquisition target?
It will be done in the "Marché Libre" [see the explaination in the letter below], near the end of July. According to this document, this IPO has the goal of permitting the persuit of fantastic growth in market share without having their hands tied by by investors who, as everyone knows, have become less generous with the new economy and are waiting (too) impatiently for a return on investment.
It will be done in the "Marché Libre" [see the explaination in the letter below], near the end of July. According to this document, this IPO has the goal of permitting [something -- seems garbled, or I just don't understand investment-French, or both] without having their hands tied by by investors who, as everyone knows, have become less generous with the new economy and are waiting (too) impatiently for a return on investment.
You will find in the complete text of the article the document, just as we received it.