> You've forgotten about the biggest software patentee of them all. IBM's software patent practice just dwarfs those of Microsoft and Sun combined.
No idea whether IBM patents software as well - presumably they do - but they do also patent lots and lots of real stuff. You know, chips & electronics.
and £10 puts it into the impulse buy category for quite a few people...heck, if I saw that in a shop on holiday I'd probably buy some and mail then to myself.
> But it never changed one thing: I do not obey the speed limits. No matter what you do to me, I drive at the speed, at which I feel comfortable given the road conditions and the traffic. Which means I am normally speeding, but speeding never caused any trouble - it is not paying attention to the road that causes trouble.
I wholeheartedly agree, but watch out - once they take your license away for speeding the only place you'll be driving is on a track.
actually, a lotus elise weighs 860kg empty. Mind you, that's "with no options", so by the time you've added the few creature comforts you can get into an Elise, it's probably up to 900.
> Are you saying that the people of Africa lack the insight to see the wisdom of such a course, and the self-control to adopt it?
Yes, most of them do, just like most of the people in the rest of the world. People want to have sex. That's just a fact; whether one deals with that constructively or by denial is of course a matter of choice.
If all your unit tests in Python deliver is some approximation of type safety - i.e. what the C++ compiler checks - then you're not writing them right.
If you're writing them right, then you end up with tests for the functionality. You still need those in C++, or Java, or Eiffel.
> Apparantly these volunteers think there is a sum of money worth their lives. Either they are right, or they are stupid. Which is it? They think a certain amount of money, plus benefit to society, is worth the risk they expose themselves to. Just like test subjecs in other countries do; the weighting depends on your circumstances. The chances of dying in a medical safety trial are slim.
>The old guy on the corner on my way home is useless. nobody is useless. Not utilized, perhaps, but that's different. 1. He's someone's son. No matter how screwed up their life, children should outlive their parents 2. he's probably someone's sibling. 3. he's someone's friend Finding someone who doesn't fit those three categories will be difficult. Human life has an intrinsic value
> Uh- I think you've got me confused with someone else- yes what is happening is wrong, but what is happening is a direct consequence of depending on international trade, money, and ridiculous hierarchial structures to begin with.
Monsieur Marixst Hacker 42: 1. 42 is a good choice of # 2. Hacker is nice 3. Marxist is less nice; Karl was a decent historian; a bad futurist; and a swine in his personal life. So wre lots of people, but there's no need to sanctify him. 4, I _think_ I know where you're at - I was there a couple of years ago - but let's break it down: 4.1. you claim money is bad: money is good because, face it, swapping pigs for pizza gets tedious 4.2. International trade is bad: If I can get X on ebay from London for $Y, and get it from HK for 0.80*Y, why should I subsidise the inefficient producer in London? There are some good arguments - e.g. why should I eat lamd from New Zealand when there's perfectly good Lamb in Wales? - but Locality is a second or third order environmental effect.
> Politically useful suggests that it's actually useful to have politics to begin with- something that I'm not sure of at all. I see no need to have more than 5 acres per family and local trade barriers to prevent destruction of the local labor force. Well, that makes a lot sense, so goodby/. Nice knowing you, you pustule of late-capitalist society. Obviously a society based on 5 acres per family is perfect, but it might have a smidgen of trouble creating chips and the internet. Oh, and antibiotics, surgery, universities. But heck, we are all natural farmers, just like we were in the good old bronze age when most of our kids died before reaching 4. Let's get back to nature!
Oh! What happens when you have more than two kids? Do you divide the farm up into 2.5 acres, or do you go out and conquer more land? Or do you take up a trade with more productivity/acre? Nah, that wouldn't be socialist enough.
> local trade barriers to prevent destruction of the local labor force. Trade barriers are always the solution to any problem. Ask European sugar farmers.
> Also a worthless exercise. Why bother controling land that you can't directly use yourself? Because you get income on it. Why bother pretending to be stupid when you know the answer?
>No they are not. Unless they have no choice but taking the cash and risk dying of some drug poisoning, or risk a life-long handicap, rather than risk dying of hunger or other diseases due to environmental pollution (Bophal or the arsenic-polluted wheels, thanks to the big corporations selling their so-called medication and pesticides) without a controlling insta
Arsenic polluted W E L L S, NOT W H E E L S ! I keep on telling people that spelling is important, and they don't listen... How would arsenic in a wheel kill people, apart from running them over? As for wells, the deep underground water in certain parts of Bangladesh naturally contains high levels of arsenic; apparently this is quite unusual and didn't show up in the potability tests when charities started digging deep wells to provide people with safe drinking water.
This is a tragedy, but you really can't blame evil corporations for it. People tried to do a good thing, and there were unanticipated consequences. It's dreadful, but sometimes these things happen - you could also do a cost benefit analysis and see whether more people would have died from otherwise unsafe water without the wells.
> We are not some happy brotherhood of equal men. No, we're neither equal nor happy (in general), but we have equal rights.
> The egalitarian fiction is nothing more than that, a fiction. No, it's an ideal to strive for. I don't think I've ever seen it put better anywhere than here - http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/inde x.htm - "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".
Of course you can argue about the Creator bit; that's fine. We're not equal - but we have the same rights. Whether you're lucky or unlucky in your choice of parents.
> When it comes to India, they certainly have the surplus population to spare.
The world has population to spare. Given your admirable public spirited attitude, you have been volunteered for elimination.
> We are not some happy brotherhood of equal men. The egalitarian fiction is nothing more than that, a fiction. You just flunked the compassion test. Would you like to collect your official "I'm subhuman, shoot me!" badge or should I post it?
> Why is that? The world is filled with people who are human only in terms of their biology, but hardly live in any way we typically associate with humanity. Blindly judging by your attitude and where you're posting: You are the exception, not what you would call 3rd world people. You forget how much the west has progressed in the last 150 years - your great-great-grandfather would feel more at home in a subsistence village than in your suburban home. Get some perspective - you are where you are because you are lucky; not because of your merit. People twice as smart as you starve to death every day. *
> Most of them would die anyway if it wasn't for the generosity and ingenuity of European peoples. Certainly, the level of suffering that exists in India didn't exist before the introduction of European technologies and civilizing elements. So on the one hand the white race (sorry, European Peoples, that sounds much less racist) generously feeds India, on the other you're saying that our technology and "civilizing elements" cause all the suffering? I agree that "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds", but within two adjacent sentences it _is_ considered good form to agree with oneself;)
On top of that, one would have to be spectacularly ignorant to believe that India was not civilized before Britain took it over. I'm sure it was just a slip of the keyboard in your case.
* Yes, I'm pretty sure I can back that up with statistics, but given that it's tedious and elementary I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader,
> This is another example of countries in Europe and North America benefitting from someone else's suffering.
Let's get a grip here: It's not like drug trials on humans are there to calibrate the LD-50 dose; most of the people involved in a trial shouldn't expect anything worse than minor side effects. Then again, people apparently die from Aspirin, so there is some risk - but the risk is small enough for plenty of people in developed nations to take it as well. The difference is, they generally don't get paid.
Also, certainly in the later stages of drug development, you get drugs that may help your condidition, so you could benefit from the new wonder drug. But either way, by the time drugs get tested on people, whether in India or Indiana, they are fairly safe.
Actually, that's plain stupid, although I like how you divide the world into "America" and "overseas". Can you name one good reason why the US should not accept studies from - say - France or Japan? No? Didn't think so.
> The _REAL_ reason for American companies to be testing drugs on India is not to save money - its to reduce (eliminate?) their legal liability.
And why would corporations care about their legal liability? BECAUSE IT COSTS THEM M O N E Y ! ! ! Good grief.
BTW, the US has quite stringent rules prohibiting bribing government officials in other countries. Of course they only apply if you get caught, and if you're not the government, but that's another topic altogether.
> "Third World lives are worth much less than the European lives. That is what colonialism was all about,
>hits the nail on the head. unfortunatly.
Actually, it doesn't. Colinialism in general was about economics, raw materials, trade. Life was cheap everywhere in those days. But of course it's much easier to blame colonialism 50 years ago than corruption and bad policy now.
> I think this is not exactly the case. More to the tune of "...a lot of the medical advancements we enjoyed in the 50s and 60s..."
You're being far too generous. " a few minor medical advancements of the 50s" perhaps - the major progress was undoubtedly antibiotics, invented in England and brought into full-scale production by the Americans.
Bad ethics does not imply good science, nor, thankfully, vice versa.
> The US/FDA COULD refuse to accept or deny the right to sale to any drug that is tested without adhering to the same restrictions/rules that they would have to in the US. Test subjects would still be cheaper, but at least there would be incentive for treating these people decently.
An incentive for treatingpeople decently would be nice, but seeing how the US is outsourcing its torture, surely outsourcing its drug testing is rather benign, don't you think? At least with randomized trials you have a 50% chance of getting a drug that may help your condidtion, whereas once you - or someone with a similar sounding name - is suspected as a terrorist you seem to have a 100% chance of getting fucked.
Damn right it is. Like global warming, it's all down to those greedy capitalists exploiting the environment. Nothing to do with me driving my kid to school in my nice new SUV, is it?
> These bastards have NO ethics... how would they feel if they themselves were on the breadline with no job protection and the only work available being dirty, shit jobs exported from countries that should know better
And how would they feel if there were no jobs at all?
> The United Kingon approaches counter-terrorism as part of a criminal investigation and has to deal with due process of law.
They only manage to keep it within the law is by constantly passing new laws creating new offences and giving the government new powers. Of course, they conflict with the Human Rights Act, but they seem to have enough of a majority to keep giving themselves breathing space. It's a good thing Tony took up politics, because he clearly wouldn't have been much good as a lawyer;)
> The United States approaches counter-terrorism as military action..... which is - generally speaking - wrong, and also as likely to be successful as military tactics against a guerilla army.
> The UK has much more experience dealing with domestic terrorism -- did they originally overreact as well Google for internment northern ireland.
They're still overreacting now; most of those new "anti-terror" laws are unnecessary, pointless, and quite possibly counterproductive.
Slashdot Mirror
> You've forgotten about the biggest software patentee of them all. IBM's software patent practice just dwarfs those of Microsoft and Sun combined.
No idea whether IBM patents software as well - presumably they do - but they do also patent lots and lots of real stuff. You know, chips & electronics.
and £10 puts it into the impulse buy category for quite a few people...heck, if I saw that in a shop on holiday I'd probably buy some and mail then to myself.
> But it never changed one thing: I do not obey the speed limits. No matter what you do to me, I drive at the speed, at which I feel comfortable given the road conditions and the traffic. Which means I am normally speeding, but speeding never caused any trouble - it is not paying attention to the road that causes trouble.
I wholeheartedly agree, but watch out - once they take your license away for speeding the only place you'll be driving is on a track.
So it's fine for me to drive an Army tank over your puny SUV then?
actually, a lotus elise weighs 860kg empty. Mind you, that's "with no options", so by the time you've added the few creature comforts you can get into an Elise, it's probably up to 900.
i d=1
http://www.grouplotus.com/car/car_tech_specs.php?
> Are you saying that the people of Africa lack the insight to see the wisdom of such a course, and the self-control to adopt it?
Yes, most of them do, just like most of the people in the rest of the world. People want to have sex. That's just a fact; whether one deals with that constructively or by denial is of course a matter of choice.
Surely as a member of the military you will do whatever you're bloody well told to do; isn't that the whole point?
If you happily nibble on raw garlic, then you probably don't get sick because no one comes close enough to infect you.
If all your unit tests in Python deliver is some approximation of type safety - i.e. what the C++ compiler checks - then you're not writing them right.
If you're writing them right, then you end up with tests for the functionality. You still need those in C++, or Java, or Eiffel.
> Apparantly these volunteers think there is a sum of money worth their lives. Either they are right, or they are stupid. Which is it?
They think a certain amount of money, plus benefit to society, is worth the risk they expose themselves to. Just like test subjecs in other countries do; the weighting depends on your circumstances. The chances of dying in a medical safety trial are slim.
>The old guy on the corner on my way home is useless.
nobody is useless. Not utilized, perhaps, but that's different.
1. He's someone's son. No matter how screwed up their life, children should outlive their parents
2. he's probably someone's sibling.
3. he's someone's friend
Finding someone who doesn't fit those three categories will be difficult. Human life has an intrinsic value
> Uh- I think you've got me confused with someone else- yes what is happening is wrong, but what is happening is a direct consequence of depending on international trade, money, and ridiculous hierarchial structures to begin with.
Monsieur Marixst Hacker 42:
1. 42 is a good choice of #
2. Hacker is nice
3. Marxist is less nice; Karl was a decent historian; a bad futurist; and a swine in his personal life. So wre lots of people, but there's no need to sanctify him.
4, I _think_ I know where you're at - I was there a couple of years ago - but let's break it down:
4.1. you claim money is bad: money is good because, face it, swapping pigs for pizza gets tedious
4.2. International trade is bad: If I can get X on ebay from London for $Y, and get it from HK for 0.80*Y, why should I subsidise the inefficient producer in London? There are some good arguments - e.g. why should I eat lamd from New Zealand when there's perfectly good Lamb in Wales? - but Locality is a second or third order environmental effect.
> Politically useful suggests that it's actually useful to have politics to begin with- something that I'm not sure of at all. I see no need to have more than 5 acres per family and local trade barriers to prevent destruction of the local labor force. /. Nice knowing you, you pustule of late-capitalist society. Obviously a society based on 5 acres per family is perfect, but it might have a smidgen of trouble creating chips and the internet. Oh, and antibiotics, surgery, universities. But heck, we are all natural farmers, just like we were in the good old bronze age when most of our kids died before reaching 4. Let's get back to nature!
Well, that makes a lot sense, so goodby
Oh! What happens when you have more than two kids? Do you divide the farm up into 2.5 acres, or do you go out and conquer more land? Or do you take up a trade with more productivity/acre? Nah, that wouldn't be socialist enough.
> local trade barriers to prevent destruction of the local labor force.
Trade barriers are always the solution to any problem. Ask European sugar farmers.
> Also a worthless exercise. Why bother controling land that you can't directly use yourself?
Because you get income on it. Why bother pretending to be stupid when you know the answer?
>No they are not. Unless they have no choice but taking the cash and risk dying of some drug poisoning, or risk a life-long handicap, rather than risk dying of hunger or other diseases due to environmental pollution (Bophal or the arsenic-polluted wheels, thanks to the big corporations selling their so-called medication and pesticides) without a controlling insta
... How would arsenic in a wheel kill people, apart from running them over? As for wells, the deep underground water in certain parts of Bangladesh naturally contains high levels of arsenic; apparently this is quite unusual and didn't show up in the potability tests when charities started digging deep wells to provide people with safe drinking water.
Arsenic polluted W E L L S, NOT W H E E L S ! I keep on telling people that spelling is important, and they don't listen
This is a tragedy, but you really can't blame evil corporations for it. People tried to do a good thing, and there were unanticipated consequences. It's dreadful, but sometimes these things happen - you could also do a cost benefit analysis and see whether more people would have died from otherwise unsafe water without the wells.
Bhopal is a different story.
> We are not some happy brotherhood of equal men.
e x.htm -
;)
No, we're neither equal nor happy (in general), but we have equal rights.
> The egalitarian fiction is nothing more than that, a fiction.
No, it's an ideal to strive for. I don't think I've ever seen it put better anywhere than here - http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/ind
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".
Of course you can argue about the Creator bit; that's fine. We're not equal - but we have the same rights. Whether you're lucky or unlucky in your choice of parents.
> When it comes to India, they certainly have the surplus population to spare.
The world has population to spare. Given your admirable public spirited attitude, you have been volunteered for elimination.
> We are not some happy brotherhood of equal men. The egalitarian fiction is nothing more than that, a fiction.
You just flunked the compassion test. Would you like to collect your official "I'm subhuman, shoot me!" badge or should I post it?
> Why is that? The world is filled with people who are human only in terms of their biology, but hardly live in any way we typically associate with humanity.
Blindly judging by your attitude and where you're posting: You are the exception, not what you would call 3rd world people. You forget how much the west has progressed in the last 150 years - your great-great-grandfather would feel more at home in a subsistence village than in your suburban home. Get some perspective - you are where you are because you are lucky; not because of your merit. People twice as smart as you starve to death every day. *
> Most of them would die anyway if it wasn't for the generosity and ingenuity of European peoples. Certainly, the level of suffering that exists in India didn't exist before the introduction of European technologies and civilizing elements.
So on the one hand the white race (sorry, European Peoples, that sounds much less racist) generously feeds India, on the other you're saying that our technology and "civilizing elements" cause all the suffering? I agree that "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds", but within two adjacent sentences it _is_ considered good form to agree with oneself
On top of that, one would have to be spectacularly ignorant to believe that India was not civilized before Britain took it over. I'm sure it was just a slip of the keyboard in your case.
* Yes, I'm pretty sure I can back that up with statistics, but given that it's tedious and elementary I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader,
> This is another example of countries in Europe and North America benefitting from someone else's suffering.
Let's get a grip here: It's not like drug trials on humans are there to calibrate the LD-50 dose; most of the people involved in a trial shouldn't expect anything worse than minor side effects. Then again, people apparently die from Aspirin, so there is some risk - but the risk is small enough for plenty of people in developed nations to take it as well. The difference is, they generally don't get paid.
Also, certainly in the later stages of drug development, you get drugs that may help your condidition, so you could benefit from the new wonder drug. But either way, by the time drugs get tested on people, whether in India or Indiana, they are fairly safe.
Actually, that's plain stupid, although I like how you divide the world into "America" and "overseas". Can you name one good reason why the US should not accept studies from - say - France or Japan? No? Didn't think so.
> The _REAL_ reason for American companies to be testing drugs on India is not to save money - its to reduce (eliminate?) their legal liability.
And why would corporations care about their legal liability? BECAUSE IT COSTS THEM M O N E Y ! ! ! Good grief.
BTW, the US has quite stringent rules prohibiting bribing government officials in other countries. Of course they only apply if you get caught, and if you're not the government, but that's another topic altogether.
> "Third World lives are worth much less than the European lives. That is what colonialism was all about,
>hits the nail on the head. unfortunatly.
Actually, it doesn't. Colinialism in general was about economics, raw materials, trade. Life was cheap everywhere in those days. But of course it's much easier to blame colonialism 50 years ago than corruption and bad policy now.
> I think this is not exactly the case. More to the tune of "...a lot of the medical advancements we enjoyed in the 50s and 60s..."
You're being far too generous. " a few minor medical advancements of the 50s" perhaps - the major progress was undoubtedly antibiotics, invented in England and brought into full-scale production by the Americans.
Bad ethics does not imply good science, nor, thankfully, vice versa.
> The US/FDA COULD refuse to accept or deny the right to sale to any drug that is tested without adhering to the same restrictions/rules that they would have to in the US. Test subjects would still be cheaper, but at least there would be incentive for treating these people decently.
An incentive for treatingpeople decently would be nice, but seeing how the US is outsourcing its torture, surely outsourcing its drug testing is rather benign, don't you think? At least with randomized trials you have a 50% chance of getting a drug that may help your condidtion, whereas once you - or someone with a similar sounding name - is suspected as a terrorist you seem to have a 100% chance of getting fucked.
> Yeah it's all the corporations fault.
Damn right it is. Like global warming, it's all down to those greedy capitalists exploiting the environment. Nothing to do with me driving my kid to school in my nice new SUV, is it?
> These bastards have NO ethics... how would they feel if they themselves were on the breadline with no job protection and the only work available being dirty, shit jobs exported from countries that should know better
And how would they feel if there were no jobs at all?
Didn't think about that, did you?
You won't have to remember "Welcome to Guantanomo!"
>There's a correlation between quantity of engineers and quality of product?
Yes. It's negative.
> The United Kingon approaches counter-terrorism as part of a criminal investigation and has to deal with due process of law.
;)
They only manage to keep it within the law is by constantly passing new laws creating new offences and giving the government new powers. Of course, they conflict with the Human Rights Act, but they seem to have enough of a majority to keep giving themselves breathing space. It's a good thing Tony took up politics, because he clearly wouldn't have been much good as a lawyer
> The United States approaches counter-terrorism as military action.....
which is - generally speaking - wrong, and also as likely to be successful as military tactics against a guerilla army.
> The UK has much more experience dealing with domestic terrorism -- did they originally overreact as well
Google for internment northern ireland.
They're still overreacting now; most of those new "anti-terror" laws are unnecessary, pointless, and quite possibly counterproductive.