If the value of confidentiality is higher than damages a single party suffers (which I would argue is almost always the case in these types of discrimination cases), then your proposed third path is the null set.
It would be kind of silly for the school to offer that you need to pay $100K to the school if you don't want to keep it confidential, and you get $80k if you keep it confidential, because the expected probability of the school getting $100K from the plaintiff is essentially zero.
The end result is the same: you get nothing from us if you don't want to keep it confidential (essentially no deal and you pay $100K to lawyers), and $80k if you keep it confidential.
Make it illegal to keep secret the details of settlement agreements.
The problem is that there is value in the secrecy and people that are wronged, often just want a pound of flesh, not justice. Basically, it's "blackmail" for victims inside a legal framework. If it were illegal (as normal blackmail is), it wouldn't exist. The legal frame work is the incentive for the corporations to give in (w/o it, there's no incentive).
Given the cost of legal representation to extract a pound of flesh, eliminating this form of legalized reverse blackmail is probably just a recipe for big corporations to out lawyer people. If society instead wanted justice, it wouldn't be an issue.
Not sure that outlawing settlements w/ confidentiality agreements is a good alternative, but it certainly could be an alternative, but with both sides agree? My guess is that not only probably not, the lawyers would lobby against it (since they get paid from settlement money).
With some diseases, just putting the bacteria back can be better than any anti-bacterial treatment in the first place (esp if the bacteria is resistant like C.difficile). Of course, you have to admit that FMT as a standard therapy is kinda gross...
Yes, but there's also a poorly understood bottleneck in the transmission of the mother's mitochondrial "chromosomes" to her children...
I'm not a expert on this by any means, but a simplistic answer is that it suggests that only a few of mitochondria out of the 1000's that are in the egg are the ones replicating (rather than all of them uniformly). Perhaps it is related to the inhibition process described in this analysis. As I recall, the eggs come as part of the later differentiation cycle in the inner cell mass and those are the only ones that get passed to children.
Of course that's just a guess. As I understand it, one question is if the "chromosomes" go through some sort of actual selection process before/during/after mtDNA replication prior to binary fission and what that mechanism might be, or if there is a selection process done after fission by some other unknown method.
Also a great step forward to removing genetic diseases from the gene pool.
For some definition of genetic disease... Definitions are very important in this area...
Historically, anything people didn't agree with was categorized as a disease. For example, being gay was once considered a potential genetic mental disorder/disease. Not to be too flip about it, it once had a strong potential to handicap you in life relative to your peers which could potentially shorten your lifespan. I imagine not everyone has migrated away from this view.
Also, evolutionary, there have been times when certain diseases apparently have been beneficial in certain environments. The classic example from secondary school is the sickle-cell anemia / malaria dichotomy. Given the controversy over monoculture, it's important to understand this in the context of disease resistance.
Humanity has a pretty poor track record on this whole definition thing which is why treading lightly is a prudent thing to do.
Of course mitochondrial disease elimination isn't a binary thing because of heteroplasmy in mutations and inheritance. This apparently isn't as rare as various forms of chimerism or mosaicism which are of course the DNA analogs...
AFAIK, a ooplasmic transfer technique has already been href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1312708.stm">done (creating a mix of mitochondria or heteroplasmy). Other techniques allow using an entire donor egg which could eliminate nearly all of the population of the mother's mitochondria in the child. Since reality often doesn't conform to strict rules, I think there have been documented cases of paternal mitochondria from the sperm making into people (usually the egg kills paternal mitochondria off after fertilization, but life apparently sometimes finds a way around this).
Given the possibility of egg-fusion, it isn't totally clear that a mistake could be made in IVF resulting in a mosaic/chimera baby with two independent lines of DNA (they already have been IVF babies that have a mix of father-mother, and mother dna in a mosaic/chimera). Such a baby would have 3 parents.
Where I need to pay money to remove said videos from the Internet.
Generally, no amount of money can remove a video from the internet.
Even if you get the courts on your side (e.g, Cindy Lee Garcia), the giant internet companies will not be on your side and will oppose any removal fighting tooth and nail. Apparently, someone taking your likeness in a video and dubbing over your words can cause you to be targets of death threats and cause you to fear for you safety and nobody will care and apparently very little you can do about it.
Welcome to the future. It has always been here and will always be different that you expect.
Life ain't fair, that wasn't part of the bargain. The best we can hope for is that it's fair enough for most of us.
Of course sometimes the act of making sure you (and your team) are safe before trying to give first-aid to someone might get you hauled away in handcuffs.
In no way can Google be reasonably found to be at fault here.
Nonsequitor.
Example, Microsoft can be found at fault if it "gives-away" internet explorer free with every copy of windows. People than couldn't afford a computer with windows, but if it were to be deemed necessary, could use a computer w/o windows (say Linux) with another internet browser (say Firefox), or perhaps have the government or charitable organizations subsidize them (effectively giving that tax money to Microsoft), right.
Oh right, there's no option other than Microsoft because they killed the rest of the market by pricing below cost...
Just because it's free doesn't mean it doesn't cost somebody something...
Obama could buy everyone in America free donuts and this site would find a way to complain about it.
Obama could buy everyone in America free donuts and this site would find a way to complain about it.
Free donuts may cause weight problems and increase health care costs. Also how will dunkn donuts compete with free donuts being handed out by the government, think of the job loss. Perhaps we need price supports for the oat farmers to compensate for lost revenue. Who gets to decided what type of donut? Do beignets count? Are there going to be no-bid contracts awarded for the making of donuts? Unionize the workers, or make companies involved with donuts implement new federal contract minimum wage of $10.10/hr. Need a have USDA work on a standard grading scheme for donuts (analogous to catsup). Must appropriate money to revise the recently revised USDA "competitive food standards" disallowing most donuts provided to school children (even if free). Are GM ingredients being used? What type of fat? Corn-oil? Lard? Are they Kosher? Are they Halal? How do we respect all religions? Are "noodlie" appendage donuts allowed? What about gluten free? Are we discriminating against these people? Can't use red sprinkles, they are made from bug parts (think of the vegetarians and vegans). How about the sugar, is it real sucrose, or HFCS, or *gasp* one of the artificial sweeteners that cause cancer! Government contract should specify the used oil be recycled for alternative fuel vehicles. 1000 page bill needs to be passed w/o reading followed by 12M words of regulations need to be generated by the executive branch... How to reconcile this policy with Michelle's Let's Move initiative? Maybe the 1% should pay for their own damn donuts...
Yeah, these are a few reasons why the government shouldn't get involved with give-aways (donuts or otherwise). Sometimes the government should just do less...
Of course the USPTO is aware of this as mentioned in their 2012 press release...
Here's an excerpt from the WH press release...
Today, the USPTO is announcing that it is exploring a series of measures to make it easier for the public to provide information about relevant prior art in patent applications, including by refining its third-party submission program, exploring other ways for the public to submit prior art to the agency, and updating its guidance and training to empower examiners to more effectively use crowd-sourced prior art.
The mere collection of this information, although important, is not what is being addressed here. The USPTO has a complex procedure in place to insert 3rd party information into a patent file for consideration by the examiner. Basically you can only submit other patents or papers (no explanations, analysis, comments, instructions, protest or wild-ass-diatribes allowed). There is also a time window, specific forms and a submission fee and a requirement that the submission be directed at a specific pending patent and limited to 10 items.
Of course the examiner is somewhat free to consider third party resources (like AskPatents), but they are often leery of doing so as third-party participation in the examining process is strictly regulated by statute. AFAIK, this is because examiners aren't supposed to consider pre-publication protests or other opposition in determining the validity of a patent application, only technical information, not opinions of others (like competitor companies or people with axes to grind).
Hopefully, this initiative will streamline the process of getting them relevant technical information w/o the inevitable chaff that tends to go along with crowdsourcing sites. Just because a document gets uploaded to a crowdsourcing site doesn't mean it's a legitimate document. Some people have an agenda, ya know...
So there's the company that already forked android and made it not free FireOS (amazon's fork of android).
Oh wait, then there's this open handset alliance that forbids its members using android forks, except when it conflicts with the mother ship's desires...
Is that an acceptable use of something "free"? (trick question)
the price will ALWAYS be what someone is willing to pay.
Of course in abstract that might seem true, but that's not how it works. There is price elasticity, market segmentation, and opportunity cost of redeploying your investment elsewhere....
In a group of people, there are individuals willing to pay a range of prices for range of items, it behooves you to set the price to minimize the opportunity cost of your choices.
The big lever in a non-command economy is the market segmentation approach: identify alternate profitable price points and offer them variants to maximize your profit. Why charge the same price to everyone? You can offer a crappy discount version to increase your volume at a lower margin and/or a luxury version to snag those who are willing to pay more.
Of course if your ideology doesn't admit an idea in the form of from each according to the ability to pay and to each what they need/want, well, I really don't know what your ideology is...
Yeah, it was a puff piece written in first-person form, but this whole egg-free stuff actually gained momentum back in the 2001 and came to a tipping point back during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic scare...
Two of the first widely deployed cell-based, mono-valent flu vaccines (2009-H1N1-only) were Celtura (made by Novartis) and Celvapan (made by Baxter). The shortage of egg-based virus production during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic scare and the controversy over the use of adjuvant MF59 (e.g., in Pandemrix, an egg-based flu-vaccine developed as a supplemental flu shot that year) used to amp the immune response in order to *stretch/cut* the available virus production tended to obscure the difference between egg and cell-based vaccines to most of the public...
FWIW... Novartis makes a few variants (Celtura, Optaflu, Flucelvax) grown in cells derived from the MDCK** line of cells. Baxter makes another variant (Celvapan, Preflucel) grown in cells derived from the VERO*** line of cells. Protein Sciences' FluBlok is quite different, though. An insect line (expresSF+) of cells is infected with a baculovirus which was GM-ed to encode the desired HA protein (e.g., a specific H1 flu-variant). No flu virus present.
**MDCK: cell line extracted by S. H. Madin, N. B. Darby from Canine (adult female cocker spaniel) Kidney tissue in September 1958. ***VERO: cell line extracted by Yasumura and Kawakita from a VErda (green) monkey RinO (kidney) tissue in March 1962. expresSF+: private cell line isolated in 1983 by C. Cherry and G. Smith from some unknown mixture of cells originated from a fall armyworm (a type of caterpillar) started in 1970.
Desalinization is being done on a industrial scale in Israel and is cost competitive with shipping/pumping water from out of state.
Of course if you are in Israel, when you talk about shipping in water from neighboring states, the marginal cost of the enterprise is not always top of the considerations list...
Although the current Klamath water rights dispute between Oregonians and Californians and Native Americans is pretty bitter, it isn't that bad in comparison and they all have a common enemy (the US bureau of reclamation)...
At least in Arizona new golf courses are basically illegal.
FTFY. There are plenty of existing golf courses in Arizona. Also, golf courses built before 1985 have their water allocation grandfathered in... Also the drought-conditions annual water allotment per acre for Arizona golf-courses is 4.6 acre-ft where in California, some locales restrict it to merely 2.3 acre-ft... (of course Arizona only has about ~300 courses and California has over a thousand)...
However, what is really killing the new golf course industry is not its water allotment, its that young folks don't seem to want to play golf (and the older ones *ahem* stop playing). In 2000, there were ~30M US player who played 520M rounds, in 2013, there were ~24M players who played about 460M rounds...
It seems many people in Arizona want to buy a retirement house next to a golf course (as such houses appear to be in high demand and sell for a high premium), but apparently they don't actually play much golf, they just like the nice professionally manicured lawns to look at out their windows...
If climate change is now a weapon of mass destruction and the US and the West are the predominate causes of it, does that mean they are guilty of war crimes (related to the WMDs)?
Since the US actually met its 2012 Kyoto target (coincidentally, of course, since the US didn't actually ratify the treaty), and many other "western" countries did not, perhaps we turns states evidence** and get a reduced sentence?
**Of course, the economic crash, accounted for about 1/2 of it, but as the economy rebounded, US switched coal to natural gas (more efficient) for the other 1/2. Europe switch nuclear to coal (more dirty) because they don't have big natural gas reserves to fall back on (and politicians don't apparently count in Kyoto accounting)...
I think the EU used virtually used this same excuse for Galileo...
Without a GNSS for ourselves, over time everything migrates to cheap GPS which is under control of the US which mean delegating our right to vote for the overseers to US citizens... I don't care how expensive it is, we need to just do it (and throw our aerospace companies a bone)...
I guess if the EU want to spend the money on their own internet, that's fine (as long as they make it compatible with the rest of the internet). Compatibility was an interesting issue with GNSS for a long time (the Galileo folks eventually conceded that this should be important and signed an agreement)...
The notion isn't that creative work for material reward, it's that creative people are given material rewards for their creations so that they *don't* have to be burdened with meaningless labour. Of course some are less creative than others, so their creations receive fewer rewards and they need to keep their day job.
Perhaps the real objection is that there appears to be an abstract way to relatively value creative works to society that is independent of the self-reward to the creator (not the existence of a *material* embodiment of the reward per-se)?
FWIW, there was actually an episode about this (TNG: When the Bough-Breaks) where they meet up with a society that is totally post-scarcity full-automation society where everyone forgot how things worked because they were too busy playing with their toys. When a fertility crisis comes on them, they initially resort to kidnapping children instead of giving up their toys. Of course, they relent and see the error of their ways and vow to turn off their toys and re-learn their technology.
I think everyone is reading too much into this notion of how Star Trek is supposed to somehow represent a post-scarcity utopia...
I really don't understand these comments about the star trek universe of no-money/post-scarcity...
In every one of the series they had stuff like "credits", and several groups in the federation yet outside of star-fleet seemed to be characterized with a significant economic (or underground economy) component.
For example:
Rich dilithium miners on TOS Mudd's women. The price of Tribbles on TOS Trouble w/ Tribbles. The market on Farpoint on TNG Pilot The motivation for the Krieger wave generator on TNG Perspective Pretty much all of DS9
The closest analogy I can find is the military. People in most military organizations live in somewhat funny-money land (on-base housing, meals, px, etc) there's really no accumulating wealth in such a society, because many of the laws of economics don't fully apply (influence peddling and possessing certain skills are infinitely more valuable than any abstract credits and these commodities are durable wealth, not exchangeable wealth).
My interpretation is that Starfleet is like the military in a fascist society. In a fascist society with a dominating military, members *inside* the military might feel that money doesn't really matter if all their basic needs + minor luxuries are met. However *outside* the military all bets are off, and in star trek, there appear to be many elements of fascism (ultranationalism, primacy of the government over the individual, cultural and racial purity of worlds based on exceptionalism) in the worlds that make up the federation... As example, the Vulcans, Betazoids, Giedons all are portrayed in that vein...
I personally fail to see the utopian connotation of the way this "no-money" philosophy as it is portrayed in Star Trek (even though I'm generally a fan of the ST-universe). It seems to be out of character and something that is far from utopian to me.
Re:You have violated copyright by posting this.
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Star Trek Economics
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And 5 quatloos, oh damn I dated myself.
I bet 10 quatloos on people being too young to get that joke.
Five thousand quatloos that the newcomers will have to be destroyed;^)
Not just these games, there was a similar flak about the LZR racer swimsuit during the Beijing Olympics... Of course that technology was successful so some teams desperate wanted to break their contracts with their suits suppliers/sponsor to wear this suit in competition...;^)
When we see persons of worth, we should think of equaling them; when we see persons of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves. --Confucius
The superior man honours talent and virtue and bears with all. He praises the good and pities the incompetent. --Confucius
The superior man is affable but not adulatory; the ordinary man is adulatory but not affable. --Confucius
FWIW, I doubt Mencius or Confucius would advocate calling out losers, most of the philosophy they espoused relies on improving yourself, and not bringing yourself down to the level of those that you are trying to distance yourself...
Slashdot Mirror
If the value of confidentiality is higher than damages a single party suffers (which I would argue is almost always the case in these types of discrimination cases), then your proposed third path is the null set.
It would be kind of silly for the school to offer that you need to pay $100K to the school if you don't want to keep it confidential, and you get $80k if you keep it confidential, because the expected probability of the school getting $100K from the plaintiff is essentially zero.
The end result is the same: you get nothing from us if you don't want to keep it confidential (essentially no deal and you pay $100K to lawyers), and $80k if you keep it confidential.
Make it illegal to keep secret the details of settlement agreements.
The problem is that there is value in the secrecy and people that are wronged, often just want a pound of flesh, not justice. Basically, it's "blackmail" for victims inside a legal framework. If it were illegal (as normal blackmail is), it wouldn't exist. The legal frame work is the incentive for the corporations to give in (w/o it, there's no incentive).
Given the cost of legal representation to extract a pound of flesh, eliminating this form of legalized reverse blackmail is probably just a recipe for big corporations to out lawyer people. If society instead wanted justice, it wouldn't be an issue.
Not sure that outlawing settlements w/ confidentiality agreements is a good alternative, but it certainly could be an alternative, but with both sides agree? My guess is that not only probably not, the lawyers would lobby against it (since they get paid from settlement money).
Sadly, that's the way the world really works.
With some diseases, just putting the bacteria back can be better than any anti-bacterial treatment in the first place (esp if the bacteria is resistant like C.difficile). Of course, you have to admit that FMT as a standard therapy is kinda gross...
Yes, but there's also a poorly understood bottleneck in the transmission of the mother's mitochondrial "chromosomes" to her children...
I'm not a expert on this by any means, but a simplistic answer is that it suggests that only a few of mitochondria out of the 1000's that are in the egg are the ones replicating (rather than all of them uniformly). Perhaps it is related to the inhibition process described in this analysis. As I recall, the eggs come as part of the later differentiation cycle in the inner cell mass and those are the only ones that get passed to children.
Of course that's just a guess. As I understand it, one question is if the "chromosomes" go through some sort of actual selection process before/during/after mtDNA replication prior to binary fission and what that mechanism might be, or if there is a selection process done after fission by some other unknown method.
Also a great step forward to removing genetic diseases from the gene pool.
For some definition of genetic disease... Definitions are very important in this area...
Historically, anything people didn't agree with was categorized as a disease. For example, being gay was once considered a potential genetic mental disorder/disease. Not to be too flip about it, it once had a strong potential to handicap you in life relative to your peers which could potentially shorten your lifespan. I imagine not everyone has migrated away from this view.
Also, evolutionary, there have been times when certain diseases apparently have been beneficial in certain environments. The classic example from secondary school is the sickle-cell anemia / malaria dichotomy. Given the controversy over monoculture, it's important to understand this in the context of disease resistance.
Humanity has a pretty poor track record on this whole definition thing which is why treading lightly is a prudent thing to do.
Of course mitochondrial disease elimination isn't a binary thing because of heteroplasmy in mutations and inheritance. This apparently isn't as rare as various forms of chimerism or mosaicism which are of course the DNA analogs...
AFAIK, a ooplasmic transfer technique has already been href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1312708.stm">done (creating a mix of mitochondria or heteroplasmy). Other techniques allow using an entire donor egg which could eliminate nearly all of the population of the mother's mitochondria in the child. Since reality often doesn't conform to strict rules, I think there have been documented cases of paternal mitochondria from the sperm making into people (usually the egg kills paternal mitochondria off after fertilization, but life apparently sometimes finds a way around this).
Given the possibility of egg-fusion, it isn't totally clear that a mistake could be made in IVF resulting in a mosaic/chimera baby with two independent lines of DNA (they already have been IVF babies that have a mix of father-mother, and mother dna in a mosaic/chimera). Such a baby would have 3 parents.
No, because the UK isn't Kansas.
No, but they have their own mess going on there in the CSA (child support agency)... Apparently earning its own level of bureaucratic hell...
Where I need to pay money to remove said videos from the Internet.
Generally, no amount of money can remove a video from the internet.
Even if you get the courts on your side (e.g, Cindy Lee Garcia), the giant internet companies will not be on your side and will oppose any removal fighting tooth and nail. Apparently, someone taking your likeness in a video and dubbing over your words can cause you to be targets of death threats and cause you to fear for you safety and nobody will care and apparently very little you can do about it.
Welcome to the future. It has always been here and will always be different that you expect.
Life ain't fair, that wasn't part of the bargain. The best we can hope for is that it's fair enough for most of us.
Of course sometimes the act of making sure you (and your team) are safe before trying to give first-aid to someone might get you hauled away in handcuffs.
In no way can Google be reasonably found to be at fault here.
Nonsequitor.
Example, Microsoft can be found at fault if it "gives-away" internet explorer free with every copy of windows. People than couldn't afford a computer with windows, but if it were to be deemed necessary, could use a computer w/o windows (say Linux) with another internet browser (say Firefox), or perhaps have the government or charitable organizations subsidize them (effectively giving that tax money to Microsoft), right.
Oh right, there's no option other than Microsoft because they killed the rest of the market by pricing below cost...
Just because it's free doesn't mean it doesn't cost somebody something...
He does good things, and the you bitch?
Obama could buy everyone in America free donuts and this site would find a way to complain about it.
Obama could buy everyone in America free donuts and this site would find a way to complain about it.
Free donuts may cause weight problems and increase health care costs.
Also how will dunkn donuts compete with free donuts being handed out by the government, think of the job loss.
Perhaps we need price supports for the oat farmers to compensate for lost revenue.
Who gets to decided what type of donut? Do beignets count?
Are there going to be no-bid contracts awarded for the making of donuts?
Unionize the workers, or make companies involved with donuts implement new federal contract minimum wage of $10.10/hr.
Need a have USDA work on a standard grading scheme for donuts (analogous to catsup).
Must appropriate money to revise the recently revised USDA "competitive food standards" disallowing most donuts provided to school children (even if free).
Are GM ingredients being used?
What type of fat? Corn-oil? Lard?
Are they Kosher? Are they Halal? How do we respect all religions? Are "noodlie" appendage donuts allowed?
What about gluten free? Are we discriminating against these people?
Can't use red sprinkles, they are made from bug parts (think of the vegetarians and vegans).
How about the sugar, is it real sucrose, or HFCS, or *gasp* one of the artificial sweeteners that cause cancer!
Government contract should specify the used oil be recycled for alternative fuel vehicles.
1000 page bill needs to be passed w/o reading followed by 12M words of regulations need to be generated by the executive branch...
How to reconcile this policy with Michelle's Let's Move initiative?
Maybe the 1% should pay for their own damn donuts...
Yeah, these are a few reasons why the government shouldn't get involved with give-aways (donuts or otherwise).
Sometimes the government should just do less...
Of course the USPTO is aware of this as mentioned in their 2012 press release...
Here's an excerpt from the WH press release...
Today, the USPTO is announcing that it is exploring a series of measures to make it easier for the public to provide information about relevant prior art in patent applications, including by refining its third-party submission program, exploring other ways for the public to submit prior art to the agency, and updating its guidance and training to empower examiners to more effectively use crowd-sourced prior art.
The mere collection of this information, although important, is not what is being addressed here. The USPTO has a complex procedure in place to insert 3rd party information into a patent file for consideration by the examiner. Basically you can only submit other patents or papers (no explanations, analysis, comments, instructions, protest or wild-ass-diatribes allowed). There is also a time window, specific forms and a submission fee and a requirement that the submission be directed at a specific pending patent and limited to 10 items.
Of course the examiner is somewhat free to consider third party resources (like AskPatents), but they are often leery of doing so as third-party participation in the examining process is strictly regulated by statute. AFAIK, this is because examiners aren't supposed to consider pre-publication protests or other opposition in determining the validity of a patent application, only technical information, not opinions of others (like competitor companies or people with axes to grind).
Hopefully, this initiative will streamline the process of getting them relevant technical information w/o the inevitable chaff that tends to go along with crowdsourcing sites. Just because a document gets uploaded to a crowdsourcing site doesn't mean it's a legitimate document. Some people have an agenda, ya know...
So there's the company that already forked android and made it not free FireOS (amazon's fork of android).
Oh wait, then there's this open handset alliance that forbids its members using android forks, except when it conflicts with the mother ship's desires...
Is that an acceptable use of something "free"? (trick question)
I don't think you understand what a "joke" is.
Jokes don't necessarily have to be funny... Jokes can be simply things that are not to be taken seriously...
E.g., This job is a joke. That test was a joke. My car is a joke. Beta is a joke.
Perhaps: s/beta/google glass/
Funny? Nah...
the price will ALWAYS be what someone is willing to pay.
Of course in abstract that might seem true, but that's not how it works. There is price elasticity, market segmentation, and opportunity cost of redeploying your investment elsewhere....
In a group of people, there are individuals willing to pay a range of prices for range of items, it behooves you to set the price to minimize the opportunity cost of your choices.
The big lever in a non-command economy is the market segmentation approach: identify alternate profitable price points and offer them variants to maximize your profit. Why charge the same price to everyone? You can offer a crappy discount version to increase your volume at a lower margin and/or a luxury version to snag those who are willing to pay more.
Of course if your ideology doesn't admit an idea in the form of from each according to the ability to pay and to each what they need/want, well, I really don't know what your ideology is...
Yeah, it was a puff piece written in first-person form, but this whole egg-free stuff actually gained momentum back in the 2001 and came to a tipping point back during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic scare...
Two of the first widely deployed cell-based, mono-valent flu vaccines (2009-H1N1-only) were Celtura (made by Novartis) and Celvapan (made by Baxter). The shortage of egg-based virus production during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic scare and the controversy over the use of adjuvant MF59 (e.g., in Pandemrix, an egg-based flu-vaccine developed as a supplemental flu shot that year) used to amp the immune response in order to *stretch/cut* the available virus production tended to obscure the difference between egg and cell-based vaccines to most of the public...
FWIW...
Novartis makes a few variants (Celtura, Optaflu, Flucelvax) grown in cells derived from the MDCK** line of cells.
Baxter makes another variant (Celvapan, Preflucel) grown in cells derived from the VERO*** line of cells.
Protein Sciences' FluBlok is quite different, though. An insect line (expresSF+) of cells is infected with a baculovirus which was GM-ed to encode the desired HA protein (e.g., a specific H1 flu-variant). No flu virus present.
**MDCK: cell line extracted by S. H. Madin, N. B. Darby from Canine (adult female cocker spaniel) Kidney tissue in September 1958.
***VERO: cell line extracted by Yasumura and Kawakita from a VErda (green) monkey RinO (kidney) tissue in March 1962.
expresSF+: private cell line isolated in 1983 by C. Cherry and G. Smith from some unknown mixture of cells originated from a fall armyworm (a type of caterpillar) started in 1970.
Desalinization is being done on a industrial scale in Israel and is cost competitive with shipping/pumping water from out of state.
Of course if you are in Israel, when you talk about shipping in water from neighboring states, the marginal cost of the enterprise is not always top of the considerations list...
Although the current Klamath water rights dispute between Oregonians and Californians and Native Americans is pretty bitter, it isn't that bad in comparison and they all have a common enemy (the US bureau of reclamation)...
At least in Arizona new golf courses are basically illegal.
FTFY. There are plenty of existing golf courses in Arizona. Also, golf courses built before 1985 have their water allocation grandfathered in...
Also the drought-conditions annual water allotment per acre for Arizona golf-courses is 4.6 acre-ft where in California, some locales restrict it to merely 2.3 acre-ft... (of course Arizona only has about ~300 courses and California has over a thousand)...
However, what is really killing the new golf course industry is not its water allotment, its that young folks don't seem to want to play golf (and the older ones *ahem* stop playing). In 2000, there were ~30M US player who played 520M rounds, in 2013, there were ~24M players who played about 460M rounds...
It seems many people in Arizona want to buy a retirement house next to a golf course (as such houses appear to be in high demand and sell for a high premium), but apparently they don't actually play much golf, they just like the nice professionally manicured lawns to look at out their windows...
If climate change is now a weapon of mass destruction and the US and the West are the predominate causes of it, does that mean they are guilty of war crimes (related to the WMDs)?
Since the US actually met its 2012 Kyoto target (coincidentally, of course, since the US didn't actually ratify the treaty), and many other "western" countries did not, perhaps we turns states evidence** and get a reduced sentence?
**Of course, the economic crash, accounted for about 1/2 of it, but as the economy rebounded, US switched coal to natural gas (more efficient) for the other 1/2. Europe switch nuclear to coal (more dirty) because they don't have big natural gas reserves to fall back on (and politicians don't apparently count in Kyoto accounting)...
I think the EU used virtually used this same excuse for Galileo...
Without a GNSS for ourselves, over time everything migrates to cheap GPS which is under control of the US which mean delegating our right to vote for the overseers to US citizens... I don't care how expensive it is, we need to just do it (and throw our aerospace companies a bone)...
I guess if the EU want to spend the money on their own internet, that's fine (as long as they make it compatible with the rest of the internet). Compatibility was an interesting issue with GNSS for a long time (the Galileo folks eventually conceded that this should be important and signed an agreement)...
The notion isn't that creative work for material reward, it's that creative people are given material rewards for their creations so that they *don't* have to be burdened with meaningless labour. Of course some are less creative than others, so their creations receive fewer rewards and they need to keep their day job.
Perhaps the real objection is that there appears to be an abstract way to relatively value creative works to society that is independent of the self-reward to the creator (not the existence of a *material* embodiment of the reward per-se)?
FWIW, there was actually an episode about this (TNG: When the Bough-Breaks) where they meet up with a society that is totally post-scarcity full-automation society where everyone forgot how things worked because they were too busy playing with their toys. When a fertility crisis comes on them, they initially resort to kidnapping children instead of giving up their toys. Of course, they relent and see the error of their ways and vow to turn off their toys and re-learn their technology.
I think everyone is reading too much into this notion of how Star Trek is supposed to somehow represent a post-scarcity utopia...
I really don't understand these comments about the star trek universe of no-money/post-scarcity...
In every one of the series they had stuff like "credits", and several groups in the federation yet outside of star-fleet seemed to be characterized with a significant economic (or underground economy) component.
For example:
Rich dilithium miners on TOS Mudd's women.
The price of Tribbles on TOS Trouble w/ Tribbles.
The market on Farpoint on TNG Pilot
The motivation for the Krieger wave generator on TNG Perspective
Pretty much all of DS9
The closest analogy I can find is the military. People in most military organizations live in somewhat funny-money land (on-base housing, meals, px, etc) there's really no accumulating wealth in such a society, because many of the laws of economics don't fully apply (influence peddling and possessing certain skills are infinitely more valuable than any abstract credits and these commodities are durable wealth, not exchangeable wealth).
My interpretation is that Starfleet is like the military in a fascist society. In a fascist society with a dominating military, members *inside* the military might feel that money doesn't really matter if all their basic needs + minor luxuries are met. However *outside* the military all bets are off, and in star trek, there appear to be many elements of fascism (ultranationalism, primacy of the government over the individual, cultural and racial purity of worlds based on exceptionalism) in the worlds that make up the federation... As example, the Vulcans, Betazoids, Giedons all are portrayed in that vein...
I personally fail to see the utopian connotation of the way this "no-money" philosophy as it is portrayed in Star Trek (even though I'm generally a fan of the ST-universe). It seems to be out of character and something that is far from utopian to me.
And 5 quatloos, oh damn I dated myself.
I bet 10 quatloos on people being too young to get that joke.
Five thousand quatloos that the newcomers will have to be destroyed ;^)
Not just these games, there was a similar flak about the LZR racer swimsuit during the Beijing Olympics... Of course that technology was successful so some teams desperate wanted to break their contracts with their suits suppliers/sponsor to wear this suit in competition... ;^)
When we see persons of worth, we should think of equaling them; when we see persons of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves. --Confucius
The superior man honours talent and virtue and bears with all. He praises the good and pities the incompetent. --Confucius
The superior man is affable but not adulatory; the ordinary man is adulatory but not affable. --Confucius
FWIW, I doubt Mencius or Confucius would advocate calling out losers, most of the philosophy they espoused relies on improving yourself, and not bringing yourself down to the level of those that you are trying to distance yourself...