Nicole M. tells me that he actually said, precisely, "So if we block 'em after we're elected, it won't be censorship, it'll be because we need to protect those poor, hapless households, mate".
Well, what can I say. I flew to Australia to attend the speech, and I quickly had to get intoxicated to blend in.
A study just released by the Labor Party shows that 99.9% of the other parties's web site are considered violent, pornographic or both. "So if we block them after we are elected, it won't be censorship, it will be because we need to protect those poor, hapless households", says Mr Weazley, head of the Internet Content Tagging Office at the Labor Party HQ.
You might be right in this particular instance. As I said, Merck is a business, not a bunch of angels. However, I still cannot shake the idea that this "suppressed evidence" was flimsy at best. It might have been a judgement call more that a criminal conspiracy. The trials are going to be a snow job on both sides, of course, because that's the way it goes in court. The truth is safely tucked away and is irrelevant at this point.
Regardless, the bottom line is that all these scientists and researchers are going to have to find another job if Merck is slammed. And unfortunately, it's not like the world is crawling with drug research labs right now.
When you see the huge difference in the medicine history that
a single scientist
can produce in a good lab, I shudder at the though of a few hundreds of them having to go teach undergrads how to dissect frogs.
It's kind of trendy to denigrate drug companies, and trigger-happy lawyers are constantly on the prowl for any lawsuit opportunity. And the public doesn't care. Unfortunately, this will lead to a complete lack of new treatments within a few years.
Developing new antibiotics is very costly and can be dangerous. Recently, courts have punished drugs manufacturers with incredibly high damage awards. Take for instance the COX-2 inhibitors Vioxx. Granted, there were two (2) victims, but there is no proof that the drug actually killed them. It was simply an added risk.
A lot of antibiotics have the potential to expose their manufacturers to that kind of 8-figure lawsuits. Some of them can create kidney or liver damage and are used as "last chance" drugs. Hospitals and doctors cover their arses by requesting waivers to be signed when this kind of dangerous treatment has to be attempted, but the waivers don't include drug manufacturers, which then become the logical target.
I am the first one to think that drug companies are business, not humanitarian angels, but this is getting ridiculous. There are currently almost
10,000 (10^4) lawsuits against Merck alone. If only 10% of these lead to the multimillion damage payola that's becoming the norm, the company will default and its research labs will be closed down. One less avenue for new drugs, at a time where new diseases are propagating fast and old one are reappearing. Good going.
On top of that, antibiotics are extremely expensive to develop, because of the test protocols involved. There were 10 new molecules brought to the market last year. Ten. The development cost for each was several billions.
So you have a product that has ruinous R&D and makes ambulance chasers drool so much they trip over their own tongue. Is it worth it?
The answer is clear: drug companies now prefer to devote their resources to creating new lawsuit-free products such as dinosaur-shaped kid vitamins. The margins are high, the risks are low, and the lawyers are kept at bay.
So next time you hear someone diss drug companies, remind them that thanks to this kind of attitude, the next generation will have to fight deadly infections with grapefruit flavored, T-rex shaped multivitamins. That ought to cure them all right.
Disclaimer: I don't work for a drug company. But I am not getting younger, and I'd like my generation not to have to back to chewing tree bark when we're sick.
In that case, the code you make available for free needs to be explicitely covered by a public domain license. The GPL won't cut it if you don't want your target code to be GPLed.
But this doesn't cover the case where you change jobs. I very much doubt that any private company paying you to work on proprietary code would let you put in on the Web when you're leaving.
I have code I wrote 15 years ago in an "archive" dir in my home directory, subdivided by projects.
Whenever I change my main machine, that dir is of course copied to the new one, and included in the backups. Organiwing the libraries by functionality and language would be a nice thing, but I never seem to find the time.
Beware, though: Most employers specify that code written by employees belongs to the company.
If you write code as a corporate employee and then leave your employer, you should really think twice before carrying that code with you. If your new boss thinks you are copying code written in a previous job, he would have to throw the book at you.
I am disappointed. I suspected BoA to be slightly evil, but I didn't suspect they were clueless.
I can deal with evil. Evil corporations can be kept at bay just by giving them your money or by judicious application of force. But how do you deal with righteous "we-did-nothing-wrong" cluelessness?
A variant of that approach is to create multiple addresses forwarded to your "real" (secret) mailbox, which you don't give the address of. You personalize the addresses given to banks and other such institutions, with the domain name for instance. If an email claiming to be sent by Chase doesn't have "chase.xxx" in its From field (where xxx is a special string a phisher wouldn' know), then it's phishing. The free spamgourmet.com offer one implementation. There are others.
Of course, this assumes that the institution doesn't sell its email list or doesn't leave laptop with their unencrypted customer database laying around to be Trojaned or plain stolen. Considering the number of companies that don't have a freakin' clue about security and privacy, that might be a tall order.
Vista pushed up our noses through gaming?
on
The Great HDCP Fiasco
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
From TFA: Microsoft will eventually end support for Windows XP; already, their Games Division is planning Vista-exclusive titles such as Halo 2. It will only be a matter of time before other software developers follow suit, forcing anyone who's remotely interested in gaming to upgrade to Windows Vista.
Is this really true? Game manufacturers cannot realistically expect much market penetration of Vista before 2007 at the earliest, and they'll probably want to satisfy the XP crowd for another couple of years and make sure their games work with the older OS too. After all, a guy with a $2000 blazing gaming PC will probably hesitate to buy a $250 Vista license just to play an MS game. Might as well buy a used XBox360 at that price.
Overall, unless MS makes some co-marketing deals with game publishers and pays them to make Vista-only games, I don't see game publishers abandoning XP that easily.
Well, considering what a mess southern California is, I see why your father, as any concerned citizen, would think that an earthquake would actually improve LA. I fully agree.
Unfortunately, the Japanese aren't so enlightened and think their citizens can entertain some silly notions of "civil safety" and "preparation". Laughable, I say. Avoid the subway or the high speed if you know a quake is coming? Why, such preposterous ideas. That would deprive the news network of all the juicy victim shots.
Yup, either that, or they set up an earthquake bomb and then flee to their orbital mothership using their invisible ships, which leave a telltale trail of plasma residue.
Almost as easy to believe as the theory that crushing rocks generates electricity.
The warning method described in TFA is nice, but it would be much better to have some early warning (hours to days) that an earthquake is imminent. The december issue of IEEE Spectrum contains
an article describing what technology could be used.
Most of it is surprisingly simple -- the problem being that the physics of earthquake is not well understood yet. For instance, people often observed eerie lighs in the sky in the hours before a quake. Turns out that rock squeezed along a rift can free up eletrons, which means that huge currents flow accross the soil when the pressure is maximum -- right before a quake. It also seems to generate VLF noise (around 0.01 Hz). A simple pair of metal plates separated by an airgap can detect the chance of air conductivity, along with a VLF receptor, can thus form a good earthquake forecast station.
Of course, nobody really knows why these eletrical phenomenon occurs before a quake. But they still can be observed.
Indeed, I learned something. This ammonia/water cycle was used in the 60s by some fridges that used petroleum as the heat source (my grandpa used to have one).
One of my former workplaces does that. They have a contract with the power company saying they can be dropped off the grid on very short notice if there is a power shortage. In exchange, the electric rate they get is substantially discounted.
When the power-down notice quicks in, they start diesel-powered generators, which is a good choice considering the price of natural gas.
Check to see if you'd get a big enough discount to justify the purchase of this kind of equipment.
An excellent summary of the issue -- and thanks for correcting me about hydrocarbons. I just have to remember to drink the right kind:-)
BTW, I looked up the history of ethanol as a gasoline additive. During WWII, the Germans had apparently developed a kind of synthetic gasoline that was based on coal with a sizeable fraction of ethanol.
Anecdote: from 1942 to 1944, the peasants in German-occupied Russia were eager to barter this gasoline against homebrewed vodka. After a while, the German noticed that the vodka they got from the farmers had an awful gasoline taste. Turns out that the farmers were getting the ethanol distilled from the gasoline to boost the alcohol content of some cheap low-grade moonshine, and sell the mix as 80-proof vodka. I don't even know how it's possible to distill ethanol from ethanol-enriched gasoline, but obviously, Russians won't let a mere chemistry detail stand between them and their booze supply.
Some one correct me if I'm wrong
Gladly. This article shows that the wiretapping to US citizens by preseidential decree was started by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Other sources will show you that Roosevelt set up a department that had every international phone call and telegraph message intercepted and analyzed even before WWII.
Naturally, subsequent administations never cut back on these practices. Once an agency has an authority and a budget, it's very hard to remove either...
Right. It remains to be seen if the total end-to-end energy balance is positive. Ethanol combustion is not very energetic compared to hydrocarbones, and so you need much more of it to store the same energy as, say, the same volume of gasoline.
Considering that most agricultural ethanol production processes require energy (to harvest and transport raw biomass, to grind it, to heat and break cellulose, to mix, etc), it's easy to see why you should be very careful with your energy balance, otherwise you might pick a process that won't even break even. The industrial process used to produce wood alcohol (methanol), for example, often consumes way more energy than the final product represents. But in that case, the main concern is total cost, not a positive energy balance.
I still don't know whether it's great or sad that you cannot amortize a PC chipset design cost over "just" a few millions parts a year. It's sad because I still remember a happy time when a specialized top-of-the-line ASIC was worth designing for 10,000 parts a year. That was back when a designer ended up intimately knowing every gate of his design. Now you need a freakin' army to crank up a top-of-the-line chip (with 100,000 times more transistors, granted). Manufacturing capabilities have progressed faster than design skills. The flip side is that it's also great because it means that, well, we now can make billion-gates chips, and by Golly the consumers demand them yesterday.
I know, but what was the proportion of laptops? Remember, the point was why IBM refused to foot the bill for the engineering effort required to create the laptop-specific chipset needed by Apple's future laptop models.
Assume Apple shipped 50% laptops, the volume would be 2 millions a year. Say 5 millions over the next 2 years (expected life of such a chipset design). Not bad, but we are talking about an engineering effort costing $50 to $200 millions. The resulting chipsets would have been $10-$40 more expensive than Intel's in order to pay for this effort, and that's before production costs kick in. You're starting to see why it wasn't a good deal even for Apple.
Now, after its move to Intel, Apple benefits from a standard PC laptop chipset that will be sold in huge volumes (and for which development costs were footed by Intel, not Apple customers only),
and IBM can focus on the consumer electronics market where the volumes are in the tens of millions a year.
The G5 was a decent chip, IBM just didn't have a mobile chip to sell Apple and was too distracted by Xbox 2 and PS3 to care.
Very true. Volume-wise, the game console market beats Apple's meager volume hands down. No wonder then that IBM chose to devote its Microelectronics division's resources to making the PowerPC derivatives for the Nintendo Revolution, XBox 360 and PS/3. Not to mention embedded versions you find in consumer items and under the hood of cars. The Cell processor alone will find its way in many consumer electronics appliances, not just the PS3.
So the choice was between making a laptop chipset for Apple (volume: hundreds of thousands a year) and making a high-volume chipset for several consumer markets (volume: millions a year). Guess where IBM prefered to invest. Can't blame them for telling Apple to go fly a kite.
Mission critical systems normally procure their products directly from the manufacturer, or from a known reseller of the manufacturer - in either case, something that is known and trusted. In addition, for a new supplier, they will generally perform rigerous testing on the product.
You are correct. Qualifying a supplier is painstaking and expensive for a good reason.
Note that back in the 80s, many large computer and electronics companies had an internal component qualifying department from which all parts had to be ordered. The qualification and purchasing depts each took their markup. And unfortunately, they didn't have much incentive to keep costs down, since they were the only game in town for their captive markets (the company). These little empires were destroyed when manufacturing was outsourced. Outsourcers saved money by having lightweight qualification processes... and so fake components started to find their way into reputable brands' products. Often, subassembly suppliers are themselves victims of counterfeits.
Remember the bad capacitors
issue? Although not strictly the same problem (bad caps are due to incorrectly formulated electrolyte thanks to klutzy industrial spies getting spotted and stealing a purposefully faulty formula), it had very much the same effect as fake parts, and reputable suppliers (MSI, ABit) got hit.
Fake Vuitton bags don't endanger anybody's live, they are just a rip-off. Of course, since the whole "elite brand" phenomenon is largely a matter of advertizing overpriced goods, you could just dismiss the problem as a parasitic rip-off riding the coat of a legal rip-off.
However, fakes aren't stopping at clothes and fashion.
The problem is that if you don't fight counterfeit very efficiently, you soon see them appear in places where reliability and traceability are paramount. What about bad components crashing a mission-critical system? Fake brake pads in your car that overheat and fail? Or even worse, fake antibiotics and aviation parts? All these are happening today and are a major concern.
One way to fight counterfeits is to ship items with an RFID tag that is queried at each step of the shipping and traced back to the originating factory. Of course, pirates will soon start counterfeiting tags too, so the system has to be designed to prevent fake and duplicate numbers.
I personally must be naive because I cannot conceive making fake drugs or couterfeit airplane parts -- could you endanger thousands of lives to make a quick buck? Obviously, such scruples belong to a gentler era, such as the Hun invasions.
ROTFL! Brillant post! Absolutely hilarious! Man, you should be a lawyer.
I hope this school is sued and that the morons who started it are sent back to the grocery shelving job they so richly deserve.
Hey, what can I say. Read the rest of the posts, you'll see that I am not the only one to be that pessimistic. Maybe you're more competent than the average MCSE "sysadmin" guy who doesn't know how to fix a problem except by reimaging a PC.
Slashdot Mirror
Nicole M. tells me that he actually said, precisely, "So if we block 'em after we're elected, it won't be censorship, it'll be because we need to protect those poor, hapless households, mate". Well, what can I say. I flew to Australia to attend the speech, and I quickly had to get intoxicated to blend in.
A study just released by the Labor Party shows that 99.9% of the other parties's web site are considered violent, pornographic or both. "So if we block them after we are elected, it won't be censorship, it will be because we need to protect those poor, hapless households", says Mr Weazley, head of the Internet Content Tagging Office at the Labor Party HQ.
Regardless, the bottom line is that all these scientists and researchers are going to have to find another job if Merck is slammed. And unfortunately, it's not like the world is crawling with drug research labs right now.
When you see the huge difference in the medicine history that a single scientist can produce in a good lab, I shudder at the though of a few hundreds of them having to go teach undergrads how to dissect frogs.
Developing new antibiotics is very costly and can be dangerous. Recently, courts have punished drugs manufacturers with incredibly high damage awards. Take for instance the COX-2 inhibitors Vioxx. Granted, there were two (2) victims, but there is no proof that the drug actually killed them. It was simply an added risk.
A lot of antibiotics have the potential to expose their manufacturers to that kind of 8-figure lawsuits. Some of them can create kidney or liver damage and are used as "last chance" drugs. Hospitals and doctors cover their arses by requesting waivers to be signed when this kind of dangerous treatment has to be attempted, but the waivers don't include drug manufacturers, which then become the logical target.
I am the first one to think that drug companies are business, not humanitarian angels, but this is getting ridiculous. There are currently almost 10,000 (10^4) lawsuits against Merck alone. If only 10% of these lead to the multimillion damage payola that's becoming the norm, the company will default and its research labs will be closed down. One less avenue for new drugs, at a time where new diseases are propagating fast and old one are reappearing. Good going.
On top of that, antibiotics are extremely expensive to develop, because of the test protocols involved. There were 10 new molecules brought to the market last year. Ten. The development cost for each was several billions.
So you have a product that has ruinous R&D and makes ambulance chasers drool so much they trip over their own tongue. Is it worth it?
The answer is clear: drug companies now prefer to devote their resources to creating new lawsuit-free products such as dinosaur-shaped kid vitamins. The margins are high, the risks are low, and the lawyers are kept at bay.
So next time you hear someone diss drug companies, remind them that thanks to this kind of attitude, the next generation will have to fight deadly infections with grapefruit flavored, T-rex shaped multivitamins. That ought to cure them all right.
Disclaimer: I don't work for a drug company. But I am not getting younger, and I'd like my generation not to have to back to chewing tree bark when we're sick.
But this doesn't cover the case where you change jobs. I very much doubt that any private company paying you to work on proprietary code would let you put in on the Web when you're leaving.
Whenever I change my main machine, that dir is of course copied to the new one, and included in the backups. Organiwing the libraries by functionality and language would be a nice thing, but I never seem to find the time.
Beware, though: Most employers specify that code written by employees belongs to the company. If you write code as a corporate employee and then leave your employer, you should really think twice before carrying that code with you. If your new boss thinks you are copying code written in a previous job, he would have to throw the book at you.
I can deal with evil. Evil corporations can be kept at bay just by giving them your money or by judicious application of force. But how do you deal with righteous "we-did-nothing-wrong" cluelessness?
Of course, this assumes that the institution doesn't sell its email list or doesn't leave laptop with their unencrypted customer database laying around to be Trojaned or plain stolen. Considering the number of companies that don't have a freakin' clue about security and privacy, that might be a tall order.
Is this really true? Game manufacturers cannot realistically expect much market penetration of Vista before 2007 at the earliest, and they'll probably want to satisfy the XP crowd for another couple of years and make sure their games work with the older OS too. After all, a guy with a $2000 blazing gaming PC will probably hesitate to buy a $250 Vista license just to play an MS game. Might as well buy a used XBox360 at that price.
Overall, unless MS makes some co-marketing deals with game publishers and pays them to make Vista-only games, I don't see game publishers abandoning XP that easily.
Unfortunately, the Japanese aren't so enlightened and think their citizens can entertain some silly notions of "civil safety" and "preparation". Laughable, I say. Avoid the subway or the high speed if you know a quake is coming? Why, such preposterous ideas. That would deprive the news network of all the juicy victim shots.
Almost as easy to believe as the theory that crushing rocks generates electricity.
Most of it is surprisingly simple -- the problem being that the physics of earthquake is not well understood yet. For instance, people often observed eerie lighs in the sky in the hours before a quake. Turns out that rock squeezed along a rift can free up eletrons, which means that huge currents flow accross the soil when the pressure is maximum -- right before a quake. It also seems to generate VLF noise (around 0.01 Hz). A simple pair of metal plates separated by an airgap can detect the chance of air conductivity, along with a VLF receptor, can thus form a good earthquake forecast station.
Of course, nobody really knows why these eletrical phenomenon occurs before a quake. But they still can be observed.
I had no idea this cycle was still in use.
When the power-down notice quicks in, they start diesel-powered generators, which is a good choice considering the price of natural gas.
Check to see if you'd get a big enough discount to justify the purchase of this kind of equipment.
Who moderated the parent down? This is humor, not offtopic, silly!
BTW, I looked up the history of ethanol as a gasoline additive. During WWII, the Germans had apparently developed a kind of synthetic gasoline that was based on coal with a sizeable fraction of ethanol.
Anecdote: from 1942 to 1944, the peasants in German-occupied Russia were eager to barter this gasoline against homebrewed vodka. After a while, the German noticed that the vodka they got from the farmers had an awful gasoline taste. Turns out that the farmers were getting the ethanol distilled from the gasoline to boost the alcohol content of some cheap low-grade moonshine, and sell the mix as 80-proof vodka. I don't even know how it's possible to distill ethanol from ethanol-enriched gasoline, but obviously, Russians won't let a mere chemistry detail stand between them and their booze supply.
Naturally, subsequent administations never cut back on these practices. Once an agency has an authority and a budget, it's very hard to remove either...
Considering that most agricultural ethanol production processes require energy (to harvest and transport raw biomass, to grind it, to heat and break cellulose, to mix, etc), it's easy to see why you should be very careful with your energy balance, otherwise you might pick a process that won't even break even. The industrial process used to produce wood alcohol (methanol), for example, often consumes way more energy than the final product represents. But in that case, the main concern is total cost, not a positive energy balance.
I still don't know whether it's great or sad that you cannot amortize a PC chipset design cost over "just" a few millions parts a year. It's sad because I still remember a happy time when a specialized top-of-the-line ASIC was worth designing for 10,000 parts a year. That was back when a designer ended up intimately knowing every gate of his design. Now you need a freakin' army to crank up a top-of-the-line chip (with 100,000 times more transistors, granted). Manufacturing capabilities have progressed faster than design skills. The flip side is that it's also great because it means that, well, we now can make billion-gates chips, and by Golly the consumers demand them yesterday.
Assume Apple shipped 50% laptops, the volume would be 2 millions a year. Say 5 millions over the next 2 years (expected life of such a chipset design). Not bad, but we are talking about an engineering effort costing $50 to $200 millions. The resulting chipsets would have been $10-$40 more expensive than Intel's in order to pay for this effort, and that's before production costs kick in. You're starting to see why it wasn't a good deal even for Apple.
Now, after its move to Intel, Apple benefits from a standard PC laptop chipset that will be sold in huge volumes (and for which development costs were footed by Intel, not Apple customers only), and IBM can focus on the consumer electronics market where the volumes are in the tens of millions a year.
Volume, thy law is cruel.
Very true. Volume-wise, the game console market beats Apple's meager volume hands down. No wonder then that IBM chose to devote its Microelectronics division's resources to making the PowerPC derivatives for the Nintendo Revolution, XBox 360 and PS/3. Not to mention embedded versions you find in consumer items and under the hood of cars. The Cell processor alone will find its way in many consumer electronics appliances, not just the PS3.
So the choice was between making a laptop chipset for Apple (volume: hundreds of thousands a year) and making a high-volume chipset for several consumer markets (volume: millions a year). Guess where IBM prefered to invest. Can't blame them for telling Apple to go fly a kite.
You are correct. Qualifying a supplier is painstaking and expensive for a good reason.
Note that back in the 80s, many large computer and electronics companies had an internal component qualifying department from which all parts had to be ordered. The qualification and purchasing depts each took their markup. And unfortunately, they didn't have much incentive to keep costs down, since they were the only game in town for their captive markets (the company). These little empires were destroyed when manufacturing was outsourced. Outsourcers saved money by having lightweight qualification processes... and so fake components started to find their way into reputable brands' products. Often, subassembly suppliers are themselves victims of counterfeits.
Remember the bad capacitors issue? Although not strictly the same problem (bad caps are due to incorrectly formulated electrolyte thanks to klutzy industrial spies getting spotted and stealing a purposefully faulty formula), it had very much the same effect as fake parts, and reputable suppliers (MSI, ABit) got hit.
However, fakes aren't stopping at clothes and fashion. The problem is that if you don't fight counterfeit very efficiently, you soon see them appear in places where reliability and traceability are paramount. What about bad components crashing a mission-critical system? Fake brake pads in your car that overheat and fail? Or even worse, fake antibiotics and aviation parts? All these are happening today and are a major concern.
One way to fight counterfeits is to ship items with an RFID tag that is queried at each step of the shipping and traced back to the originating factory. Of course, pirates will soon start counterfeiting tags too, so the system has to be designed to prevent fake and duplicate numbers.
I personally must be naive because I cannot conceive making fake drugs or couterfeit airplane parts -- could you endanger thousands of lives to make a quick buck? Obviously, such scruples belong to a gentler era, such as the Hun invasions.
ROTFL! Brillant post! Absolutely hilarious! Man, you should be a lawyer. I hope this school is sued and that the morons who started it are sent back to the grocery shelving job they so richly deserve.
Hey, what can I say. Read the rest of the posts, you'll see that I am not the only one to be that pessimistic. Maybe you're more competent than the average MCSE "sysadmin" guy who doesn't know how to fix a problem except by reimaging a PC.