You have to strike a balance between ensuring that drug development is profitable, but not excessively so - not an easy thing to do.
Why does it have to be profitable? Why not publicly fund such vital research?
If you objection is that you're opposed to a government role in development of goods, then you can't favor patents and remain logically consistent. We are subsidizing research by private companies by creating artificial monopolies, letting big phrama rake in wads of cash from us by pointing guns at anyone who copies drugs they've patented; why not just subsidize researchers directly by handing out wads of cash? Pay the money in direct taxes to the government rather than by indirect taxes to patent holders.
If you think that only the profit motive can lead to scientific discovery, please explain how we've come to know about quarks and exoplanets. Or to take a more relevant example, Salk never patented his polio vaccine; as he said, "Could you patent the sun?"
Exactly why should we worry about a calendar developed by a civilization that worshiped corn?
Same reason we might want to know about a calendar developed by a civilization that worshiped thunder, I suppose: learning about other cultures and civilizations expands our range of possibilities of what it is to be human.
I posit that one of the most prized products of Capitalism and the free market is to reduce the cost for the end consumer and raise the quality of the products and services.
Do not confuse capitalism with the free market.
The "most prized product" -- the goal -- of capitalism is greater wealth for the aristocrats who control the capital.
The free market doesn't have a goal; the whole idea is that it's a decentralized system of actors each pursuing their own goals. Under certain circumstances -- when buyers and sellers meet with equal power, full knowledge, and no externalization of costs -- it can produce reduced costs and better goods and services for the consumer.
The successfully transferred memory or being or self into the new machine or clone is simply starting a new life... which happens to have the same memories as the poor sap who just died, and considers itself to _be_ that same guy. Of course that latter part is an error of awareness, of perspective, very tempting to think of as continuity but it is an error to be sure.
The thing is, it's the same "error of awareness" that we all make every day. I consider myself to be the same guy as yesterday, as a year or a decade ago, but that's no more than a thought construction.
The "self" is an illusion, a character in the story that your brain tells. Could some other brain tell a story with that same character someday? Maybe, but I suspect it would read like bad fan fiction.
If I can verify my vote, I can prove to myself after the fact how I voted, and therefore I can prove it to somebody else. That somebody else might try to coherce me into voting a specific way.
"CastrTroy! Get in here! You're going to fill out this absentee ballot just the way I tell you, and sign it. I'll mail it for you. If you don't, it's curtains for your grandmother!"
Or:
"CastrTroy! Get in here! You're going to carry this spy camera pen into the voting booth so I can make sure you vote the way I want you to. If you don't, it's curtains for your grandmother!"
So the whole "verifiable ballots allow coercion!" argument doesn't hold water: you can be coerced today. The defense against coercing votes isn't technical, it's that you're going to be locked in a cage for a very long time if you do it. (And rightly so.)
But besides that, it's just factually wrong. It is possible to have a ballot that you can verify but that can't be used to show others how you voted, because it relies on a secret that you know but can't prove. See, for example, Chaum's Punchscan.
voting explicitly implies discarding the identity of the voter
Well, no, actually it doesn't; in the early days of the U.S., voting was public. The secret ballot may have advantages, but it's not the case that voting must be secret to be, well, voting.
If you discard the link, you have *no way on earth* to actually prove something hasn't been rigged somewhere.
Several cryptographic schemes have been proposed that would allow a voter to verify that their vote has been properly registered, and yet let their vote remain secret. A good starting place is the wik's article on auditable voting systems.
A lot of software is just a variant on a theme though
...which is why I qualified my statement to "significant" programs.
Yes, code monkeys who spend their entire careers doing integration work and minor variations can get by with just the detail-oriented side of thinks, but a hacker is a creative type.
Programmers just happen to be more detail oriented than most everyone else. One character in a program with hundreds of thousands is the difference between having something that compiles and something that doesn't. It takes a certain type of personality to accept this as part of the job description.
True. But the good programmer must also be creative, on the order of a poet or novelist. Unlike building a bridge or treating a case of strep throat, where only the details vary between one and the next, every significant program is a completely new expression -- if it were not a new problem, you'd simply re-use existing software.
It takes an unusual combination of personality traits to combine the "every semicolon it it's place" attitude, with "let's create something that has never before existed".
And if this article helped me remember that Toyota offers a commuter car, then the PR campaign worked.
I already new that Toyota makes cars of all sorts -- is there anyone in an industrialized nation that does not know that? I did not know that they found it acceptable to engage in psychopathic behavior.
I've owned a Toyota before and was happy with it. I was considering a Matrix when my Impreza gives up the ghost -- but that is no longer an option, at least not unless Toyota apologizes and makes amends for such outrageous behavior.
But when at a convention I don't yell at random the name under which I submit code.
Irrelevant.
If I communicate on personal matters I do it through outside channels.
Unless you take great pains, you communicate your gender (and your race/ethnicity) to anyone who views you..
Why would somebody make such a group otherwise?
For mutual support when bigotry is encoutered, for simple human interest when it isn't.
To me, it's as weird as if somebody made a group of Debian users with large noses. It can't possibly have any relevance for anything Debian related, yet for some reason somebody thought the shape of one's nose has some relevance in the Debian community.
In a world where some people thought that the shape of one's nose had some relevance to the quality of one's creative output, the shape of one's nose would affect a person's experience. (Even within the Debian community.) People who have a similar life experience tend to group together. There is absolutely nothing weird about that.
The most vocal feminists have sometimes lost touch with reality. It is for these special people who hurt their cause that I reserve the term "feminazi".
The Nazis killed millions of people in cold blood.
Feminists have worked for equality for women. A handful -- a vocal minority -- have made rude bigoted comments about men.
To suggest any that there is ANY COMPARISON AT ALL between feminists and Nazis, is jackassery of the highest order.
People should always be able to take a joke. That includes everyone women, men, jews, arabas, mexican, blacks, fat people etc.
Sure, fsck 'em if they can't take a joke.
But also, fsck 'em if they try to hide their ignorance, fear, and bigotry as jokes.
"Gee, lukas84, when I said that by rights you and all members of your (ethnic group/church/LUG/whatever) should be ritually disemboweled while forced to watch their whole families being raped, I was just joking. Lighten up!"
There shouldn't be a "Debian Women", "Debian LGBT", "Debian Minusvalids" or "Debian Furries" project not because it's somehow wrong for such people to participate (I belong to one of the listed categories), but because such things should be completely irrelevant and everybody should be only judged by the value of the code, art, etc they contribute.
Except that that's not the way the world works. People are in fact judged by gender, orientation, race, etcetera, in our society; and those who are (mis)judged by those criteria naturally will band together for support.
It may not be as bad inside our little enclave of coders (or, actually, it might: I've certainly seen asinine sexist behavior), but when you live in a muddy environment you're going to track mud through the house occasionally. We live in a nation where a political writer can get away with suggesting that women's suffrage might be a mistake, so let's not even pretend that sexism isn't an issue in our broader culture.
After a couple of decades, it might be possible for "Debian Women" to work themselves out of a job. This recently happened in the martial arts system I belong to, when it was decided that there were enough women in both total enrollment and in the senior ranks that it was no longer necessary to have a special "women's seminar" every year. But the reason that things reached the point that sexism was so reduced in significance was because there was this extra support system in place.
So, which part of the chemtrail conspiracy theory would turn out to be a big surprise if it were true?
Pretty much the same big surprise if any big conspiracy theory were true: the part where the government got all those scientists and engineers, and all ordinary working stiffs in their support staff, to be in on the cover-up.
But someone cutting your lawn counts as a independent contractor, and so you don't have a legal responsibility for that (or for FICA, etcetera). My point was that if you're doing the lawn cutting, and you hire someone to work for you, you are responsible for all that stuff, which is why some states require a business license for pretty much anything.
Surely a study like this is not funded by the organic food industry?
Do you think that junk food, including candy, can't be produced organically? Come into my kitchen...
"Organic" refers to how it's grown and produced, not how nutritious is is (other than that it is more likely to lack "negatively nutritious" contamination by pesticides, herbicides, GMOs, etcetera).
Anyway, there's nothing new about associating crime with poor nutrition (the article is a bit pop science sensationalistic but is a good summary, see here and here and here for some of the studies):
Stephen Schoenthaler, a criminal-justice professor at California State University in Stanislaus, has been researching the relationship between food and behaviour for more than 20 years He has proven that reducing the sugar and fat intake in our daily diets leads to higher IQs and better grades in school. When Schoenthaler supervised a change in meals served at 803 schools in low-income neighbourhoods in New York City, the number of students passing final exams rose from 11 percent below the national average to five percent above. He is best known for his work in youth detention centers. One of his studies showed that the number of violations of house rules fell by 37 percent when vending machines were removed and canned food in the cafeteria was replaced by fresh alternatives. He summarizes his findings this way: "Having a bad diet right now is a better predictor of future violence than past violent behaviour."
Recent research showed similar conclusions. Bernard Gesch, physiologist at the University of Oxford, decided to test the anecdotal clues in the most thorough study so far in this field. In a prison for men between the ages of 18 and 21 in England's Buckinghamshire, 231 volunteers were divided into two groups: One was given nutrition supplements along with their meals that contained our approximate daily needs for vitamins, minerals and fatty acids; the other group got placebos. Neither the prisoners, nor the guards, nor the researchers at the prison knew who took fake supplements and who got the real thing.
The researchers then tallied the number of times the participants violated prison rules, and compared it to the same data that had been collected in the months leading up to the nutrition study. The prisoners given supplements for four consecutive months committed an average of 26 percent fewer violations compared to the preceding period. Those given placebos showed no marked change in behaviour. For serious breaches of conduct, particularly the use of violence, the number of violations decreased 37 percent for the men given nutrition supplements, while the placebo group showed no change.
Want to start a lawn care business? Some states require a license as do some counties and cities.
Which is annoying (trust me, I run two small businesses that require me to have licenses or registrations with Maryland, I know the pain) but not generally fatal.
The only reason to have a regulation requiring me to have a license or be certified is to prevent me from doing lawn care.
Or to collect sales taxes. Or to make sure you're not exploiting employees, or hiring undocumented workers. Or to make sure you're not poisoning the environment with misuse of pesticides or fertilizer. Or to make sure you're aware of local noise ordinances so you don't wake me up at 7am with a gorram gas-powered weed whacker. Or to see to it that you post a bond as insurance that you won't collect a whole season's payment up front and then skip town, or that Mrs. Jones will be reimbursed if you mow down her expensive rosebush.
Is it overkill to make a kid mowing his neighbor's yard get a state license? Probably, I sure didn't have one when I was 15. Is it overkill to make a large landscaping company get a state license of some sort? Probably not. Is it some great conspiracy if the kid gets caught up in the regulations meant for the large landscaping company, some deliberate attempt to keep the kid from mowing lawns? No, it's most likely simple oversight or bad planning, and in most cases I expect the kid and his or her customers will ignore the law without consequence.
And let me direct you to Thomas Jefferson's quote on standing armies.
While I'm not inclined to take the opinions of a slave rapist as gospel, I do think that centralized power -- including both standing armies and capitalism -- is a problem.
Of course now that we have big government we have the corporate aristocracy as well.
You seem to be insinuating that somehow "big government" gave birth to the corporate aristocracy. No. Most of what laissez-faire types call "big government" is just an attempt to put some control on the aristocracy.
(Generally a feeble attempt, given the relative size of big business to the government agencies that supposedly reguate them. ExxonMobil's profits, for example, are about four times the entire budget for the EPA -- so if the EPA devoted itself entirely to policing this one oil company, ExxonMobil could outspend it three to one and still remain profitable.)
I'd love a smaller government -- one with less ability and authority to issue corporate charters, land deeds, patents and copyrights, and basically do all the things that empower the capitalist class, concentrating control of property into the hands of a few. But I don't want a government made smaller by taking away its ability to leash the monsters it's creating with it's other hand.
Government is a vector quantity, having not only size but direction. More important than it's size is whether it points toward a system of aristocrats and serfs, or towards justice and equality.
However whereas businesses don't have firearms to enforce what they want government does.
Of course they do. In a capitalist system, the government's primary job is to "protect property rights" -- i.e., to put its firearms at the beck and call of the business class.
If businesses didn't have government guns for enforcement, there would be few rent payments made.
The mechanisms for most CAM modalities (such as say, homeopathy) are usually highly implausible and often would require a complete reworking of the Standard Model.
Homeopathy would require something weird, but one can construct plausible theories about some effects of herbs, acupuncture and acupressure, chiropractic, massage, and osteopathy, as well as health cultivation practices such as yoga and qi gong, without stepping outside (or with only minor tweaks to) the "Standard Model". Even various "energy healing" modalities can be understood psychosomaticly. (And I guess homeopathy could be too, at that.)
Then throw in the fact that rarely is there even good scientific evidence that shows CAM modalities do anything at all and where are you left?
Rarely is there good scientific evidence that shows conventional modalities do anything. Very little medicine is evidence-based.
Moreover, there is a perfectly good reason why there is not nor will there be double-blind placebo controlled trials for vaccines.
Bullshit, as demonstrated by this controlled study of an HIV vaccine candidate: "The study had two (blinded) groups, one control group (receiving placebo injections) and one experimental group (receiving four 'prime' doses of ALVAC HIV and two boost doses of AIDSVAX gp120 B/E), with over 8,000 volunteers in each group, lasting from 2003 until now."
You are basically accusing most physicians of being corporate shills.
Many doctors are corporate shills, yes. Many others have simply declined to engage their critical thinking skills, and believed whatever bullshit Big Pharma spoon-fed them as they were plied with gifts. (I dread the day my physician -- honest, hardworking, intelligent, compentent, and kind -- retires,
The fact that things like herbal supplements are more or less highly unregulated.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does it have to be profitable? Why not publicly fund such vital research?
If you objection is that you're opposed to a government role in development of goods, then you can't favor patents and remain logically consistent. We are subsidizing research by private companies by creating artificial monopolies, letting big phrama rake in wads of cash from us by pointing guns at anyone who copies drugs they've patented; why not just subsidize researchers directly by handing out wads of cash? Pay the money in direct taxes to the government rather than by indirect taxes to patent holders.
If you think that only the profit motive can lead to scientific discovery, please explain how we've come to know about quarks and exoplanets. Or to take a more relevant example, Salk never patented his polio vaccine; as he said, "Could you patent the sun?"
Same reason we might want to know about a calendar developed by a civilization that worshiped thunder, I suppose: learning about other cultures and civilizations expands our range of possibilities of what it is to be human.
It is absurd to suggest that any public company should be permitted to evade the law.
So? One criminal at a time.
Do not confuse capitalism with the free market.
The "most prized product" -- the goal -- of capitalism is greater wealth for the aristocrats who control the capital.
The free market doesn't have a goal; the whole idea is that it's a decentralized system of actors each pursuing their own goals. Under certain circumstances -- when buyers and sellers meet with equal power, full knowledge, and no externalization of costs -- it can produce reduced costs and better goods and services for the consumer.
The thing is, it's the same "error of awareness" that we all make every day. I consider myself to be the same guy as yesterday, as a year or a decade ago, but that's no more than a thought construction.
The "self" is an illusion, a character in the story that your brain tells. Could some other brain tell a story with that same character someday? Maybe, but I suspect it would read like bad fan fiction.
"CastrTroy! Get in here! You're going to fill out this absentee ballot just the way I tell you, and sign it. I'll mail it for you. If you don't, it's curtains for your grandmother!"
Or:
"CastrTroy! Get in here! You're going to carry this spy camera pen into the voting booth so I can make sure you vote the way I want you to. If you don't, it's curtains for your grandmother!"
So the whole "verifiable ballots allow coercion!" argument doesn't hold water: you can be coerced today. The defense against coercing votes isn't technical, it's that you're going to be locked in a cage for a very long time if you do it. (And rightly so.)
But besides that, it's just factually wrong. It is possible to have a ballot that you can verify but that can't be used to show others how you voted, because it relies on a secret that you know but can't prove. See, for example, Chaum's Punchscan.
Well, no, actually it doesn't; in the early days of the U.S., voting was public. The secret ballot may have advantages, but it's not the case that voting must be secret to be, well, voting.
Several cryptographic schemes have been proposed that would allow a voter to verify that their vote has been properly registered, and yet let their vote remain secret. A good starting place is the wik's article on auditable voting systems.
...which is why I qualified my statement to "significant" programs.
Yes, code monkeys who spend their entire careers doing integration work and minor variations can get by with just the detail-oriented side of thinks, but a hacker is a creative type.
True. But the good programmer must also be creative, on the order of a poet or novelist. Unlike building a bridge or treating a case of strep throat, where only the details vary between one and the next, every significant program is a completely new expression -- if it were not a new problem, you'd simply re-use existing software.
It takes an unusual combination of personality traits to combine the "every semicolon it it's place" attitude, with "let's create something that has never before existed".
I already new that Toyota makes cars of all sorts -- is there anyone in an industrialized nation that does not know that? I did not know that they found it acceptable to engage in psychopathic behavior.
I've owned a Toyota before and was happy with it. I was considering a Matrix when my Impreza gives up the ghost -- but that is no longer an option, at least not unless Toyota apologizes and makes amends for such outrageous behavior.
Yes, it does. (Warning: TvTropes.org is a huge timesuck.)
Not by IE, at least IE 7. And they are only issued to individuals, not to organizations or companies. And they are only valid for 30 days. Useless.
Irrelevant.
Unless you take great pains, you communicate your gender (and your race/ethnicity) to anyone who views you..
For mutual support when bigotry is encoutered, for simple human interest when it isn't.
In a world where some people thought that the shape of one's nose had some relevance to the quality of one's creative output, the shape of one's nose would affect a person's experience. (Even within the Debian community.) People who have a similar life experience tend to group together. There is absolutely nothing weird about that.
I believe that many, if not most, OSS projects do have conferences and other get-togthers, at least for the project leaders.
Google hits for: Linux conference = 36,700,000
Google hits for: Apache conference = 5,970,000
Google hits for: PHP conference = 65,100,000
And of course many people are drawn into the F/OSS world by exposure via classes or LUGs or other meatspace interactions.
Why would you think that belonging to such a group was intended as a statement about the quality of one's code?
The Nazis killed millions of people in cold blood.
Feminists have worked for equality for women. A handful -- a vocal minority -- have made rude bigoted comments about men.
To suggest any that there is ANY COMPARISON AT ALL between feminists and Nazis, is jackassery of the highest order.
Sure, fsck 'em if they can't take a joke.
But also, fsck 'em if they try to hide their ignorance, fear, and bigotry as jokes.
"Gee, lukas84, when I said that by rights you and all members of your (ethnic group/church/LUG/whatever) should be ritually disemboweled while forced to watch their whole families being raped, I was just joking. Lighten up!"
Except that that's not the way the world works. People are in fact judged by gender, orientation, race, etcetera, in our society; and those who are (mis)judged by those criteria naturally will band together for support.
It may not be as bad inside our little enclave of coders (or, actually, it might: I've certainly seen asinine sexist behavior), but when you live in a muddy environment you're going to track mud through the house occasionally. We live in a nation where a political writer can get away with suggesting that women's suffrage might be a mistake, so let's not even pretend that sexism isn't an issue in our broader culture.
After a couple of decades, it might be possible for "Debian Women" to work themselves out of a job. This recently happened in the martial arts system I belong to, when it was decided that there were enough women in both total enrollment and in the senior ranks that it was no longer necessary to have a special "women's seminar" every year. But the reason that things reached the point that sexism was so reduced in significance was because there was this extra support system in place.
You can do that just as soon as CACert's free certificates are recognized by the major browsers by default.
Pretty much the same big surprise if any big conspiracy theory were true: the part where the government got all those scientists and engineers, and all ordinary working stiffs in their support staff, to be in on the cover-up.
Not every state requires the licensure you're complaining about, either.
If you think you might run for office or be appointed to a government position someday, that might be a good idea...
But someone cutting your lawn counts as a independent contractor, and so you don't have a legal responsibility for that (or for FICA, etcetera). My point was that if you're doing the lawn cutting, and you hire someone to work for you, you are responsible for all that stuff, which is why some states require a business license for pretty much anything.
Do you think that junk food, including candy, can't be produced organically? Come into my kitchen...
"Organic" refers to how it's grown and produced, not how nutritious is is (other than that it is more likely to lack "negatively nutritious" contamination by pesticides, herbicides, GMOs, etcetera).
Anyway, there's nothing new about associating crime with poor nutrition (the article is a bit pop science sensationalistic but is a good summary, see here and here and here for some of the studies):
Which is annoying (trust me, I run two small businesses that require me to have licenses or registrations with Maryland, I know the pain) but not generally fatal.
Or to collect sales taxes. Or to make sure you're not exploiting employees, or hiring undocumented workers. Or to make sure you're not poisoning the environment with misuse of pesticides or fertilizer. Or to make sure you're aware of local noise ordinances so you don't wake me up at 7am with a gorram gas-powered weed whacker. Or to see to it that you post a bond as insurance that you won't collect a whole season's payment up front and then skip town, or that Mrs. Jones will be reimbursed if you mow down her expensive rosebush.
Is it overkill to make a kid mowing his neighbor's yard get a state license? Probably, I sure didn't have one when I was 15. Is it overkill to make a large landscaping company get a state license of some sort? Probably not. Is it some great conspiracy if the kid gets caught up in the regulations meant for the large landscaping company, some deliberate attempt to keep the kid from mowing lawns? No, it's most likely simple oversight or bad planning, and in most cases I expect the kid and his or her customers will ignore the law without consequence.
While I'm not inclined to take the opinions of a slave rapist as gospel, I do think that centralized power -- including both standing armies and capitalism -- is a problem.
You seem to be insinuating that somehow "big government" gave birth to the corporate aristocracy. No. Most of what laissez-faire types call "big government" is just an attempt to put some control on the aristocracy.
(Generally a feeble attempt, given the relative size of big business to the government agencies that supposedly reguate them. ExxonMobil's profits, for example, are about four times the entire budget for the EPA -- so if the EPA devoted itself entirely to policing this one oil company, ExxonMobil could outspend it three to one and still remain profitable.)
I'd love a smaller government -- one with less ability and authority to issue corporate charters, land deeds, patents and copyrights, and basically do all the things that empower the capitalist class, concentrating control of property into the hands of a few. But I don't want a government made smaller by taking away its ability to leash the monsters it's creating with it's other hand.
Government is a vector quantity, having not only size but direction. More important than it's size is whether it points toward a system of aristocrats and serfs, or towards justice and equality.
Of course they do. In a capitalist system, the government's primary job is to "protect property rights" -- i.e., to put its firearms at the beck and call of the business class.
If businesses didn't have government guns for enforcement, there would be few rent payments made.
Let me also direct you to the use of the historical use of the army and National Guard as strike busters.
Homeopathy would require something weird, but one can construct plausible theories about some effects of herbs, acupuncture and acupressure, chiropractic, massage, and osteopathy, as well as health cultivation practices such as yoga and qi gong, without stepping outside (or with only minor tweaks to) the "Standard Model". Even various "energy healing" modalities can be understood psychosomaticly. (And I guess homeopathy could be too, at that.)
Rarely is there good scientific evidence that shows conventional modalities do anything. Very little medicine is evidence-based.
Bullshit, as demonstrated by this controlled study of an HIV vaccine candidate: "The study had two (blinded) groups, one control group (receiving placebo injections) and one experimental group (receiving four 'prime' doses of ALVAC HIV and two boost doses of AIDSVAX gp120 B/E), with over 8,000 volunteers in each group, lasting from 2003 until now."
Have you been in a fscking doctor's office lately? Notice all the freebies with the names of drugs on them that pharmaceutical sales reps give out to doctors? Are you aware of the way that big pharma spends over $20 billion a year to essentially bribe doctors to use their products? Did you not hear about that recent fraud case against Pfizer?
Many doctors are corporate shills, yes. Many others have simply declined to engage their critical thinking skills, and believed whatever bullshit Big Pharma spoon-fed them as they were plied with gifts. (I dread the day my physician -- honest, hardworking, intelligent, compentent, and kind -- retires,
In point of fact, the FDA has basically the same regulatory power over supplements it has over food. It has the power to make supplement manufactures provide a complete list of ingredients, and to remove supplements from the marketplace if a danger is found. This is certainly a preferable state of affairs to the days of federal paramilitary law enforcement raids on people selling herbs and vitamins, don't you think?