With the patent system as it is, where genetic codes and proteins can be patented, and where protection for drug profits is long and deep, there are situations like this that come up that allow unscrupulous companies to hike drug costs ridiculously like these clowns at Mylan.
Yes, many drug research efforts don't pan out. But Epinephrine has been out for a long time. Is anyone seriously going to try to tell me that $50 in 2007 became $304 in 2017? Even given the bogusly low inflation rates that are officially reported, that's insane.
This is profiteering. If the company didn't need to profiteer in 2007, why do they in 2017? No good reason methinks.
How about the definition of sole source is 'no equivalent product available at present'?
And how about you cap the rates at which drug costs can increase unless the providers can show material evidence that their costs have escalated so much?
I don't have $608 to shell out (US) for something I have to replace every 1-2 years. I'm carrying an old epi-pen that's probably not as efficacious now, but it's likely still better than no pen. I just can't afford the money to get a new one (let alone two, since protocol says you hit yourself with the first and about 30 minutes later the second if you haven't reached emergency medical care).
This should be a true generic. There should be equipment whose patents have an earlier mandatory expiry because they exist in the space called 'in the interest of public health'. I'm not suggesting these guys shouldn't have got their money back, but seems to me they are well beyond that point now.
On the other hand, this is exactly why the government or NGOs should be investing in some sorts of medical research in the public interest and making the product patents entirely open and available.
Epinephrine isn't patented. Its the injector. This seems like the kind of thing a Gates Foundation or even the Government could underwrite the development of (and may have already for Atropine and the like in prior days, if we call those syrettes an early version). Make the injector patent available and then it truly is generic because epinephrine is not patented.
The reality is that big Pharma has great lobbyists, political connections, and lawyers and the whole US patent system around biomedical issues defies any sort of common sense or rational thinking.
I hear rumours of alternatives, but I'm not sure they are available beyond the US borders. The Epipen fiasco and the price rise has hit many of us living in other countries too, but I'm not sure any alternatives exist where I live. I am going to look into that now though.
Patents should help protect innovation, but not form monopolies artificially (well, that may be other legislation that does that but that also needs looked at), should not have extensive duration, and should have clauses surrounding medical equipment that if the equipment price rises too quickly or if the provider becomes sole source, that the patent becomes licenseable by other companies for a very modest fee. At some point, the public interest has merit at least as great as profits for corporations.
I wish I had a pile of mod points. Anyone who can get Moloch, Captain Yossarian, and the reasonable use of the word golem into a post is all right in my books.
Where I worked for, our rule was: We deliver on time. We deliver major features for the iteration. Others are negotiable and can be dropped or shifted to the next. This kind of strategy allowed us to develop projects of 18-20 iterations of 3 weeks each and be major feature complete and stable at the end while having delivered working code every 3 weeks to the client so they could start seeing progress and testing and writing manuals and so forth.
On time delivery of an iteration (and repeatedly doing so) gives a customer confidence in your ability. Do this a few times then if you hit a big snag, you've got some cred in the client bank and can negotiate for a feature shift or a partial implementation in an iteration.
When you don't deliver software frequently and regularly, you can get to the end of the project and the customer can shelve the excellently functioning product for some trivial reason (I have seen it happen - insane, but customers make choices like that). Deliver early and often and the customer's issues get identified early (good communication also required) and handled.
You have a story that looks like 20 story points but your average velocity for the team is 13. We need to either have a slightly longer sprint (say a third week which should yield about an additional 7 points based on your 13 over 2 weeks or we need to add some manpower to increase our velocity. If those aren't feasible, then we should create two substories that each describe a portion of the work and then work on one in one iteration and one in the next.
You can't be religious about every assertion made in theoretical models of how to apply something. We built (ported) a huge system from one OS to another (N-tier, multiple host types, complex interactions within a software stack on a host and across between hosts) and of course there were some big stories at the start. So we broke them down.
We also knew that in the early sprints, until enough things were together, we couldn't do much functional testing (too many bits needed for anything to work). So we set the testing expectation moderately in the early sprints with more weight on that as enough of the structure came together to allow functional testing.
Seriously, it sounds like you guys are too rigid and too unimaginative by an order of magnitude.
Not accurate. Management usually has broken out content by major features and knows roughly how many sprints will be needed. It is quite possible to use Agile and have a view to the future, it just isn't set in stone and inflexible.
It sound like most Agile detractors (or detractors of any tool or technology) have had issues with them being put in place in a very inflexible way.
Flexibility (just enough process to be useful, not enough to be cumbersome) is generally the best approach. It's not always a clear point and it sometimes needs to be dynamic. What is known though is that if you try to treat any technology or methodology like a religion (zealotry and can't get enough), bad outcomes ensue.
Because you are enamoured of process (obviously or these guys wouldn't be employed) and have picked expensive tools, you get down on the method as if it is responsible for those choices....
We used Rally (Rallye?) and it worked very well for us and I don't think it was extortionate in costs.
I've seen a lot of waterfall projects die under the weight of tools and management ideas (too terrible to be methodologies). Same with other ideas like XP Programming (always doing pair work is insane for experienced teams but having that as an option is not).
You can always mis-apply a technology or conceptual approach poorly enough to kill a project.
If you don't understand the requirements well enough to create broad users stories for features (to be refined and broken down further into smaller subordinate user stories in the iterations where those featurs are worked on), you certainly don't know enough to estimate them and you'll never be able to tell a client or funding source how much the work is going to cost (even broadly).
User stories can be as big a mire as you choose. When we used Agile on a $1M+ contract, we delivered in something like 18 sprints (the last ones were bug killing sprints) and the major items sought were delivered. Lots of 'nice to do' were too, but not all. We only ever spent about one afternoon doing sprint planning (for a team of about 6 at our end and another few overseas) for any sprint (there was preplanning for major features by sprint but we'd have to develop the subordinate user stories at the start of each sprint and put our estimates in).
The project was very successful.
The way a manager of mine once put it: You need process, but just enough. Too much and you die under the weight of it, too little and you get lost in the bushes with no idea when you'll finish or if you'll finish. That applies to any methodology: Waterfall, Objectory, Rational, Agile, etc.
You don't watch many of the shows where people go into screwed up housing and repair things often done by professional contractors (a lot done by non-pros too, but that's an aside here). Even professionals get in over their head.
For instance, Ottawa was having a train tunnel put through downtown with a limestone geology. The company did test drills all along. Then they agreed to a fixed top end cost (the City forced that as they knew this could go badly). Along the way, sinkholes, collapses, and the predictably bad geology making things tough on the contractor.
Most of these big projects either are so overpriced to begin with to cope with the massive uncertainties or they end up being so late and overbudget it isn't funny.
The thing about the software world is in many cases, if you told the customer actually how much the thing the customer wants done and done right would cost, they'd give up at the start.
Once they are $600K into a project, another $50K here or there (adding up possibly to another $200 or more) is absorbed with ill grace but follows the doctrine of sunk costs and not wanting to lose that investment so sending more money down the hole....
One of the reasons clients come to software companies is because they DO NOT understand software. Thus, they want things that they would ask for in other business areas or engineering areas where concrete schedules and tasks (such as building buildings) are not particularly new.
Educating your customer is difficult but having done so, you reap some significant rewards. Also having an uneducated customer can sometimes be worse for your team than no customer at all (I've been on the sorts of projects that broke project teams and lead to significant talent outflow).
Accountability can kind of be built into Agile development by the way in which features for sprints are assigned and then results and velocity are tracked at the granular level. Of course, this depends on the how the Agile is attempted. I've seen it done in ways that didn't couple the product closely to the business requirements leading to wasted effort and inefficiency too.
Well, I agree with days, and maybe weeks, but likely never months. Generally in my experience, if you can't estimate a thing in days or a few weeks, you haven't broken it down enough and don't understand it well enough. Plus shaving time to make tight bids or to satisfy management is a lot harder when you are working in terms of weeks because a week can be a lot to lose.
The problem most times with estimates for truly new types of work (like some I was involved in during the mid nineties on mobile computing for our federal police) was that there are a lot of technical unknowns and some may actually be insoluble or very lengthy to address. That can blow those very low granularity estimates all to heck. I think that project was months late and finished $200K or more over budget on an $800K or $1.2M project (I forget now exactly).
On the other hand, I've been on projects where we did a $46K technical investigation/requirements development assistance first on a $250K project after and totally de-risked the thing from a technical perspective as well as being sure we knew what features we wanted and what tech was best. So we built the $250K project on-budget and within about 1 week of the planned schedule (just to take out some final glitches).
I've also worked on Agile projects where they estimated by sprint and the only larger scale planning was feature planning per sprint. Of course, that was for a product company, not a contracting company - they have very different project planning requirements in my experience due to how they get their funding (customers won by bid versus from corporate leadership investing in a new product).
The problem with Agile and the world of big companies is that most accounting departments and management techniques and de-risking analysis wants definitive progress indicators and deadlines for market and costs for funds allocation in accounting ahead of when Agile can provide these things. Many managers and accountants still love the fiction inherent in waterfall project planning. Our Agile work did deliver excellent product in what I think of as minimum time (my opinion) but it gave many of the waterfall lovers apoplexy and dealing with higher level management and accounting apoplexy isn't always a simple thing for project technical managers/leaders.
Sales people and execs agree, software developers simply try to invent tomorrow's answer today for a deadline yesterday. Often they end up inventing a duck billed platypus with the intention that it function in the vacuum of space (to wit, not a very successful design or outcome).
I should know. I've built that damn platypus against good sense but under orders.
I know a guy who owns an armoured car. it is unarmed, but he takes it out at times and drives around.
So you can own an armoured vehicle.
One of the issues of tanks and other modern armoured vehicles is that they are *integrated systems* and the manufacturer may be able to sell you a tank, but not if it contains defense department secret technologies like range finders, sighting systems, computer driven stabilization systems, EW and comms gear, etc.
So, although perhaps you could buy such a vehicle as a raw vehicle, you couldn't buy the entire integrated array of technologies.
I think to satisfy realistic control of those technologies, you should pay (as a consumer wanting to buy one) the cost of the vehicle and the cost of extraction of those technologies from the integrated system (if even possible).
So then you could still buy an M1, but it might cost you 1.3 or 1.5x the cost of a fully-integrated standard M1.
The issue with the police being outgunned isn't on the overall scale (eventually enough ERT members will show up). It's a short (and lethal) time where patrol officers with pistols, limited armour, and unarmoured patrol cars are engaged by high velocity portable weapons systems. That's when they are outgunned and the LA bank situation was an example of that that had nothing to do with a Cartel. So would be some active shooter/terrorism examples and police are expected to be first responders here too.
There are permissions viewers, but you may also find permission managers. I have one installed but my phone is charging.
Not sure if the app has been borked by updates since the last time I went and used it to revoke some permissions after installation. It may have been. Google has tampered a bunch with security settings.
I usually go adjust the permissions after installation but before first execution.
Ultimately, people should light a fire under Google to force app publishers to only request perms they really need and to allow users to disable any perms they don't like (and encourage app devs to not make that break their app - modular enable-able/disable-able app functionality please!). Of course, that may be hard. If they still can't do a f***ing table of contents in Google Docs with page numbers, there isn't much hope they can get this right or will pay attention to massive outcry. In some ways, Google is a metric pantload of nerds doing nerd things and ignoring anyone that might actually use their apps. Microsoft, for all its flaws, was often more customer responsive than Google has been. Just sayin'.
There are tools that will let you edit app permissions after installation to remove some of them. Or at least I have installed and used those in past and hoped they worked. In some cases, apps check at startup and bork themselves like petulant children if they don't get what they want (even if they didn't need it) but others seem to run fine without the extraneous permissions (like ones that would allow linking to social media that I don't use so the function never gets invoked).
Ultimately, I should never have to enable an app feature that I will never use and should never have to grant permissions except as needed for the features I actually use. PC apps got this long ago (for the most part). Mobile apps have taken terrible directions in this respect.
Was it simply to raise government revenues by any means they could and someone said 'this vaccine that is unproven and not (at the time in 2010) required or in demand is worth $200K if we sell an exclusive license"? Even that could be defensible as the government has some responsibility to help provide non-taxation revenues where it can.
Or was the notion to make it available for potential production for a modest fee? That may have factored into the thinking. For this point, an exclusive license may have been a poor choice.
Every government I have seen behaves in ways I do not approve of. I refuse to call any of them evil as most politicians are morally flexible - it is part of why they can engage in compromise and diplomacy when they choose. This government is not my favourite, but I simply dislike and disagree with their policies. Those I can take clear issue with without needing to step off into abusive ad hominem territory.
There are many that would blame Mr. Harper's government for heavy snowstorms (global warming), downturns in the global economy (greed and elitism, Bilderbergism, etc), the tensions in Eastern Europe (grandstanding, not cozying up to an ex-Soviet KGB strongman with familiar tendencies, etc), global warming (albeit the majority of that comes to provide energy we all collectively use), and everything else. That is ultimately a bad sort of process because it obscures legitimate critiques of the policies his Government supports and instead focuses on personal attacks.
Mr. Harper appears to be a power-hungry politician who plays hard ball and prefers adversarial relations with the other parties, rather than a more collegial one. That doesn't make him different than many others past and future and is irrelevant (red herring) where it does not directly relate to any particular policy (as policies should stand or fall on their own merits).
As a Canadian, I am curious why that original deal was inked and what dictated the cost structure. I'm going to guess $205,000 may not have even paid back development costs so it may have been a price intended to recoup a small portion of expenses or simply to make the product more openly available.
It's a travest that it is now going to be manufactured for $50M or so it seems without the benefit of understanding the technical complexity of manufacturing it. The facility would have to be secure physically and in terms of any risks of outside exposure/escape. I'm curious how many units $50M is going to buy and how much the will in turn sell for.
If that cost is more reasonable than it seems likely to be, based on the actual cost of facilities and so on to manufacture this and total volume of production, then perhaps this $50M is just alarming because it seems large.
I do think Canada should not be selling exclusive license to any such development as it may be needed and we don't want anyone hoarding and overpricing it. We should have sold a non-exclusive license.
You can lose even with a case with merit. The law is not oriented so as to preclude you from engaging in a suit entirely out of the fear you might, from a technicality, be found to have your suit not substantiated.
Yes, the law may not award costs and punitive damages for prosecutorial aggressiveness, but it serves other ends. Perhaps that issue is meant to be dealt with by other means?
In the US, don't you elect prosecutors, judges, and sherrifs, and DAs, and so on? These people, one presumes, are doing as the electorate wish.... or they shouldn't be getting elected.
You also elect the politicians that pass these laws under which these people get charge in the first place. Don't vote in the major party candidates if this is the result.
Only your exercise of the franchise and extensive public outcry can change this sort of conduct.
You state something false - you certainly can recognize when you are going up against big money and thumbing your nose against it. You can certainly plan, if not for the specific tactic they will take, for the general fact that you are endangering their bottom line and that affects many people's pocketbooks and they aren't going to take that assault on their livelihood (even an unrealized one or one which simply has great potential) lying down.
Saying you can't plan for this is saying that you can't recognize the power of massive corporations to change laws, use extra legal means or harrassment, and to lobby or that you can't recognize that nation states are driven by their wealthy and their corporations in the modern world and law bends to accommodate wealth (because it is the tool of the wealthy in some large measure as we need a savant class to interact with it).
Facts obvious at the outset: MP3.com / MegaUpload / others all threaten big media bottom lines Big media has a lot of money and has a track record of ruthlessness and a willingness to be bloody-minded The US and other western countries are to some degree politically influenced by corporations (the US most of all I suspect) The US will exert its reach beyond its borders in various ways and allies will often comply to stay in their good books The world is increasingly global and being outside the nation of an empire whose monied corporations you are threatening is no defense Any and all tactics are on the line when large amounts of money are involved
We can all reasonably forsee these things gong forward and could even 25 years ago. So there's no way except willful self-delusion that Kim couldn't have seen this coming. To assume a constancy of law, an inability of the major players to exert influence to change law, an inability of a major empire to reach beyond its borders, and to presume his small budget could match their large budget in terms of power and capability..... these are all willful acts of self-delusion. Ego plays a big role here. The urge to thumb ones nose at a bully is great for most of us.... the odds of our nose getting realigned while doing so are pretty high too.
This is the problem with the world today: Institutions (Corporations/Nation-States) now have a life well beyond that of their employees or their economic or geographic sector because of the money involved in them. The larger they are, the more pronounced this is. Individuals and smaller groups of individuals can never match this.
This is why the current surveillance state trends, government non-transparency, militarization of police, and government-for-corporate-interests (or government-for-rich-people as a more classic description) are so troubling. Individuals and smaller entities can't muster the power to oppose this and these trends are enshrining tools and laws that make it hard to ever build towards opposing these institutions and power centers.
In the long run, a nation strongly sunk under this sort of influence and control by an elite and with all sorts of ways of stopping the masses from developing more moderate countermeasures and opposition can only end one way: Anarchy and complete tear down and rebuilding. Revolution. Social unrest on a nationwide scale. Extensive bloodletting. Likely even if you can manage the revolution, the rebuilding may fail and you end up in a failed state scenario.
I hate to say it, but in the next couple of hundred years, I expect to see either the veneer of freedom and democracy finally disavowed in Western nations or else massive social upheaval and these states being reduced to the dustbin of history (maybe with nothing but chaos and misery replacing them like Africa often sees).
We don't care enough and aren't strong enough to put up the hard fight now. The fortification of power is ever increasing. In the long run, that just increases the butcher's bill.
Yes, I'm feeling pretty grim about the possibilities and probabilities. I have read a lot of histories and most empires don't go gracefully into the good night.
It is a bit unfair the upstarts get away with leasing rather than their own build out, but since the Big 3 got their build-outs on the back of the Canadian Taxpayer, I don't really feel so bad.
If we decoupled content provision from bit pipe/access provision, we'd be in better shape. Access provision would be a lower margin thing, but cities and even non-profits could invest (thinking of folks like Ottawa FreeNet) if the government would back them up. Rogers, Bell and Telus could stick to content provision (or break up with one part doing content, another access/bit piping).
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With the patent system as it is, where genetic codes and proteins can be patented, and where protection for drug profits is long and deep, there are situations like this that come up that allow unscrupulous companies to hike drug costs ridiculously like these clowns at Mylan.
Yes, many drug research efforts don't pan out. But Epinephrine has been out for a long time. Is anyone seriously going to try to tell me that $50 in 2007 became $304 in 2017? Even given the bogusly low inflation rates that are officially reported, that's insane.
This is profiteering. If the company didn't need to profiteer in 2007, why do they in 2017? No good reason methinks.
How about the definition of sole source is 'no equivalent product available at present'?
And how about you cap the rates at which drug costs can increase unless the providers can show material evidence that their costs have escalated so much?
I don't have $608 to shell out (US) for something I have to replace every 1-2 years. I'm carrying an old epi-pen that's probably not as efficacious now, but it's likely still better than no pen. I just can't afford the money to get a new one (let alone two, since protocol says you hit yourself with the first and about 30 minutes later the second if you haven't reached emergency medical care).
This should be a true generic. There should be equipment whose patents have an earlier mandatory expiry because they exist in the space called 'in the interest of public health'. I'm not suggesting these guys shouldn't have got their money back, but seems to me they are well beyond that point now.
On the other hand, this is exactly why the government or NGOs should be investing in some sorts of medical research in the public interest and making the product patents entirely open and available.
Epinephrine isn't patented. Its the injector. This seems like the kind of thing a Gates Foundation or even the Government could underwrite the development of (and may have already for Atropine and the like in prior days, if we call those syrettes an early version). Make the injector patent available and then it truly is generic because epinephrine is not patented.
The reality is that big Pharma has great lobbyists, political connections, and lawyers and the whole US patent system around biomedical issues defies any sort of common sense or rational thinking.
I hear rumours of alternatives, but I'm not sure they are available beyond the US borders. The Epipen fiasco and the price rise has hit many of us living in other countries too, but I'm not sure any alternatives exist where I live. I am going to look into that now though.
Patents should help protect innovation, but not form monopolies artificially (well, that may be other legislation that does that but that also needs looked at), should not have extensive duration, and should have clauses surrounding medical equipment that if the equipment price rises too quickly or if the provider becomes sole source, that the patent becomes licenseable by other companies for a very modest fee. At some point, the public interest has merit at least as great as profits for corporations.
I wish I had a pile of mod points. Anyone who can get Moloch, Captain Yossarian, and the reasonable use of the word golem into a post is all right in my books.
And your comment was spot on too.
Horsepuckey.
Engineer is derived from use of ingenuity. That's not germaine only to something with pistons. Nice try.
Where I worked for, our rule was: We deliver on time. We deliver major features for the iteration. Others are negotiable and can be dropped or shifted to the next. This kind of strategy allowed us to develop projects of 18-20 iterations of 3 weeks each and be major feature complete and stable at the end while having delivered working code every 3 weeks to the client so they could start seeing progress and testing and writing manuals and so forth.
On time delivery of an iteration (and repeatedly doing so) gives a customer confidence in your ability. Do this a few times then if you hit a big snag, you've got some cred in the client bank and can negotiate for a feature shift or a partial implementation in an iteration.
When you don't deliver software frequently and regularly, you can get to the end of the project and the customer can shelve the excellently functioning product for some trivial reason (I have seen it happen - insane, but customers make choices like that). Deliver early and often and the customer's issues get identified early (good communication also required) and handled.
Misuse of a tool to justify not moving forward is insanity. It's also a choice.
Our approach to that same problem would be:
You have a story that looks like 20 story points but your average velocity for the team is 13. We need to either have a slightly longer sprint (say a third week which should yield about an additional 7 points based on your 13 over 2 weeks or we need to add some manpower to increase our velocity. If those aren't feasible, then we should create two substories that each describe a portion of the work and then work on one in one iteration and one in the next.
You can't be religious about every assertion made in theoretical models of how to apply something. We built (ported) a huge system from one OS to another (N-tier, multiple host types, complex interactions within a software stack on a host and across between hosts) and of course there were some big stories at the start. So we broke them down.
We also knew that in the early sprints, until enough things were together, we couldn't do much functional testing (too many bits needed for anything to work). So we set the testing expectation moderately in the early sprints with more weight on that as enough of the structure came together to allow functional testing.
Seriously, it sounds like you guys are too rigid and too unimaginative by an order of magnitude.
Not accurate. Management usually has broken out content by major features and knows roughly how many sprints will be needed. It is quite possible to use Agile and have a view to the future, it just isn't set in stone and inflexible.
It sound like most Agile detractors (or detractors of any tool or technology) have had issues with them being put in place in a very inflexible way.
Flexibility (just enough process to be useful, not enough to be cumbersome) is generally the best approach. It's not always a clear point and it sometimes needs to be dynamic. What is known though is that if you try to treat any technology or methodology like a religion (zealotry and can't get enough), bad outcomes ensue.
Because you are enamoured of process (obviously or these guys wouldn't be employed) and have picked expensive tools, you get down on the method as if it is responsible for those choices....
We used Rally (Rallye?) and it worked very well for us and I don't think it was extortionate in costs.
I've seen a lot of waterfall projects die under the weight of tools and management ideas (too terrible to be methodologies). Same with other ideas like XP Programming (always doing pair work is insane for experienced teams but having that as an option is not).
You can always mis-apply a technology or conceptual approach poorly enough to kill a project.
The way you are pursuing Agile may be suicidal, but that is not necessarily Agile's fault.
If you don't understand the requirements well enough to create broad users stories for features (to be refined and broken down further into smaller subordinate user stories in the iterations where those featurs are worked on), you certainly don't know enough to estimate them and you'll never be able to tell a client or funding source how much the work is going to cost (even broadly).
User stories can be as big a mire as you choose. When we used Agile on a $1M+ contract, we delivered in something like 18 sprints (the last ones were bug killing sprints) and the major items sought were delivered. Lots of 'nice to do' were too, but not all. We only ever spent about one afternoon doing sprint planning (for a team of about 6 at our end and another few overseas) for any sprint (there was preplanning for major features by sprint but we'd have to develop the subordinate user stories at the start of each sprint and put our estimates in).
The project was very successful.
The way a manager of mine once put it: You need process, but just enough. Too much and you die under the weight of it, too little and you get lost in the bushes with no idea when you'll finish or if you'll finish. That applies to any methodology: Waterfall, Objectory, Rational, Agile, etc.
You don't watch many of the shows where people go into screwed up housing and repair things often done by professional contractors (a lot done by non-pros too, but that's an aside here). Even professionals get in over their head.
Mostly not.
For instance, Ottawa was having a train tunnel put through downtown with a limestone geology. The company did test drills all along. Then they agreed to a fixed top end cost (the City forced that as they knew this could go badly). Along the way, sinkholes, collapses, and the predictably bad geology making things tough on the contractor.
Most of these big projects either are so overpriced to begin with to cope with the massive uncertainties or they end up being so late and overbudget it isn't funny.
The thing about the software world is in many cases, if you told the customer actually how much the thing the customer wants done and done right would cost, they'd give up at the start.
Once they are $600K into a project, another $50K here or there (adding up possibly to another $200 or more) is absorbed with ill grace but follows the doctrine of sunk costs and not wanting to lose that investment so sending more money down the hole....
This is a great way to do things. It's just hard to get some clients to understand that.
One of the reasons clients come to software companies is because they DO NOT understand software. Thus, they want things that they would ask for in other business areas or engineering areas where concrete schedules and tasks (such as building buildings) are not particularly new.
Educating your customer is difficult but having done so, you reap some significant rewards. Also having an uneducated customer can sometimes be worse for your team than no customer at all (I've been on the sorts of projects that broke project teams and lead to significant talent outflow).
Accountability can kind of be built into Agile development by the way in which features for sprints are assigned and then results and velocity are tracked at the granular level. Of course, this depends on the how the Agile is attempted. I've seen it done in ways that didn't couple the product closely to the business requirements leading to wasted effort and inefficiency too.
Well, I agree with days, and maybe weeks, but likely never months. Generally in my experience, if you can't estimate a thing in days or a few weeks, you haven't broken it down enough and don't understand it well enough. Plus shaving time to make tight bids or to satisfy management is a lot harder when you are working in terms of weeks because a week can be a lot to lose.
The problem most times with estimates for truly new types of work (like some I was involved in during the mid nineties on mobile computing for our federal police) was that there are a lot of technical unknowns and some may actually be insoluble or very lengthy to address. That can blow those very low granularity estimates all to heck. I think that project was months late and finished $200K or more over budget on an $800K or $1.2M project (I forget now exactly).
On the other hand, I've been on projects where we did a $46K technical investigation/requirements development assistance first on a $250K project after and totally de-risked the thing from a technical perspective as well as being sure we knew what features we wanted and what tech was best. So we built the $250K project on-budget and within about 1 week of the planned schedule (just to take out some final glitches).
I've also worked on Agile projects where they estimated by sprint and the only larger scale planning was feature planning per sprint. Of course, that was for a product company, not a contracting company - they have very different project planning requirements in my experience due to how they get their funding (customers won by bid versus from corporate leadership investing in a new product).
The problem with Agile and the world of big companies is that most accounting departments and management techniques and de-risking analysis wants definitive progress indicators and deadlines for market and costs for funds allocation in accounting ahead of when Agile can provide these things. Many managers and accountants still love the fiction inherent in waterfall project planning. Our Agile work did deliver excellent product in what I think of as minimum time (my opinion) but it gave many of the waterfall lovers apoplexy and dealing with higher level management and accounting apoplexy isn't always a simple thing for project technical managers/leaders.
Sales people and execs agree, software developers simply try to invent tomorrow's answer today for a deadline yesterday. Often they end up inventing a duck billed platypus with the intention that it function in the vacuum of space (to wit, not a very successful design or outcome).
I should know. I've built that damn platypus against good sense but under orders.
I know a guy who owns an armoured car. it is unarmed, but he takes it out at times and drives around.
So you can own an armoured vehicle.
One of the issues of tanks and other modern armoured vehicles is that they are *integrated systems* and the manufacturer may be able to sell you a tank, but not if it contains defense department secret technologies like range finders, sighting systems, computer driven stabilization systems, EW and comms gear, etc.
So, although perhaps you could buy such a vehicle as a raw vehicle, you couldn't buy the entire integrated array of technologies.
I think to satisfy realistic control of those technologies, you should pay (as a consumer wanting to buy one) the cost of the vehicle and the cost of extraction of those technologies from the integrated system (if even possible).
So then you could still buy an M1, but it might cost you 1.3 or 1.5x the cost of a fully-integrated standard M1.
The issue with the police being outgunned isn't on the overall scale (eventually enough ERT members will show up). It's a short (and lethal) time where patrol officers with pistols, limited armour, and unarmoured patrol cars are engaged by high velocity portable weapons systems. That's when they are outgunned and the LA bank situation was an example of that that had nothing to do with a Cartel. So would be some active shooter/terrorism examples and police are expected to be first responders here too.
There are permissions viewers, but you may also find permission managers. I have one installed but my phone is charging.
Not sure if the app has been borked by updates since the last time I went and used it to revoke some permissions after installation. It may have been. Google has tampered a bunch with security settings.
I usually go adjust the permissions after installation but before first execution.
Ultimately, people should light a fire under Google to force app publishers to only request perms they really need and to allow users to disable any perms they don't like (and encourage app devs to not make that break their app - modular enable-able/disable-able app functionality please!). Of course, that may be hard. If they still can't do a f***ing table of contents in Google Docs with page numbers, there isn't much hope they can get this right or will pay attention to massive outcry. In some ways, Google is a metric pantload of nerds doing nerd things and ignoring anyone that might actually use their apps. Microsoft, for all its flaws, was often more customer responsive than Google has been. Just sayin'.
There are tools that will let you edit app permissions after installation to remove some of them. Or at least I have installed and used those in past and hoped they worked. In some cases, apps check at startup and bork themselves like petulant children if they don't get what they want (even if they didn't need it) but others seem to run fine without the extraneous permissions (like ones that would allow linking to social media that I don't use so the function never gets invoked).
Ultimately, I should never have to enable an app feature that I will never use and should never have to grant permissions except as needed for the features I actually use. PC apps got this long ago (for the most part). Mobile apps have taken terrible directions in this respect.
What was the logic of that sale?
Was it simply to raise government revenues by any means they could and someone said 'this vaccine that is unproven and not (at the time in 2010) required or in demand is worth $200K if we sell an exclusive license"? Even that could be defensible as the government has some responsibility to help provide non-taxation revenues where it can.
Or was the notion to make it available for potential production for a modest fee? That may have factored into the thinking. For this point, an exclusive license may have been a poor choice.
Every government I have seen behaves in ways I do not approve of. I refuse to call any of them evil as most politicians are morally flexible - it is part of why they can engage in compromise and diplomacy when they choose. This government is not my favourite, but I simply dislike and disagree with their policies. Those I can take clear issue with without needing to step off into abusive ad hominem territory.
There are many that would blame Mr. Harper's government for heavy snowstorms (global warming), downturns in the global economy (greed and elitism, Bilderbergism, etc), the tensions in Eastern Europe (grandstanding, not cozying up to an ex-Soviet KGB strongman with familiar tendencies, etc), global warming (albeit the majority of that comes to provide energy we all collectively use), and everything else. That is ultimately a bad sort of process because it obscures legitimate critiques of the policies his Government supports and instead focuses on personal attacks.
Mr. Harper appears to be a power-hungry politician who plays hard ball and prefers adversarial relations with the other parties, rather than a more collegial one. That doesn't make him different than many others past and future and is irrelevant (red herring) where it does not directly relate to any particular policy (as policies should stand or fall on their own merits).
As a Canadian, I am curious why that original deal was inked and what dictated the cost structure. I'm going to guess $205,000 may not have even paid back development costs so it may have been a price intended to recoup a small portion of expenses or simply to make the product more openly available.
It's a travest that it is now going to be manufactured for $50M or so it seems without the benefit of understanding the technical complexity of manufacturing it. The facility would have to be secure physically and in terms of any risks of outside exposure/escape. I'm curious how many units $50M is going to buy and how much the will in turn sell for.
If that cost is more reasonable than it seems likely to be, based on the actual cost of facilities and so on to manufacture this and total volume of production, then perhaps this $50M is just alarming because it seems large.
I do think Canada should not be selling exclusive license to any such development as it may be needed and we don't want anyone hoarding and overpricing it. We should have sold a non-exclusive license.
You can lose even with a case with merit. The law is not oriented so as to preclude you from engaging in a suit entirely out of the fear you might, from a technicality, be found to have your suit not substantiated.
Yes, the law may not award costs and punitive damages for prosecutorial aggressiveness, but it serves other ends. Perhaps that issue is meant to be dealt with by other means?
In the US, don't you elect prosecutors, judges, and sherrifs, and DAs, and so on? These people, one presumes, are doing as the electorate wish.... or they shouldn't be getting elected.
You also elect the politicians that pass these laws under which these people get charge in the first place. Don't vote in the major party candidates if this is the result.
Only your exercise of the franchise and extensive public outcry can change this sort of conduct.
You state something false - you certainly can recognize when you are going up against big money and thumbing your nose against it. You can certainly plan, if not for the specific tactic they will take, for the general fact that you are endangering their bottom line and that affects many people's pocketbooks and they aren't going to take that assault on their livelihood (even an unrealized one or one which simply has great potential) lying down.
Saying you can't plan for this is saying that you can't recognize the power of massive corporations to change laws, use extra legal means or harrassment, and to lobby or that you can't recognize that nation states are driven by their wealthy and their corporations in the modern world and law bends to accommodate wealth (because it is the tool of the wealthy in some large measure as we need a savant class to interact with it).
Facts obvious at the outset:
MP3.com / MegaUpload / others all threaten big media bottom lines
Big media has a lot of money and has a track record of ruthlessness and a willingness to be bloody-minded
The US and other western countries are to some degree politically influenced by corporations (the US most of all I suspect)
The US will exert its reach beyond its borders in various ways and allies will often comply to stay in their good books
The world is increasingly global and being outside the nation of an empire whose monied corporations you are threatening is no defense
Any and all tactics are on the line when large amounts of money are involved
We can all reasonably forsee these things gong forward and could even 25 years ago. So there's no way except willful self-delusion that Kim couldn't have seen this coming. To assume a constancy of law, an inability of the major players to exert influence to change law, an inability of a major empire to reach beyond its borders, and to presume his small budget could match their large budget in terms of power and capability ..... these are all willful acts of self-delusion. Ego plays a big role here. The urge to thumb ones nose at a bully is great for most of us.... the odds of our nose getting realigned while doing so are pretty high too.
This is the problem with the world today: Institutions (Corporations/Nation-States) now have a life well beyond that of their employees or their economic or geographic sector because of the money involved in them. The larger they are, the more pronounced this is. Individuals and smaller groups of individuals can never match this.
This is why the current surveillance state trends, government non-transparency, militarization of police, and government-for-corporate-interests (or government-for-rich-people as a more classic description) are so troubling. Individuals and smaller entities can't muster the power to oppose this and these trends are enshrining tools and laws that make it hard to ever build towards opposing these institutions and power centers.
In the long run, a nation strongly sunk under this sort of influence and control by an elite and with all sorts of ways of stopping the masses from developing more moderate countermeasures and opposition can only end one way: Anarchy and complete tear down and rebuilding. Revolution. Social unrest on a nationwide scale. Extensive bloodletting. Likely even if you can manage the revolution, the rebuilding may fail and you end up in a failed state scenario.
I hate to say it, but in the next couple of hundred years, I expect to see either the veneer of freedom and democracy finally disavowed in Western nations or else massive social upheaval and these states being reduced to the dustbin of history (maybe with nothing but chaos and misery replacing them like Africa often sees).
We don't care enough and aren't strong enough to put up the hard fight now. The fortification of power is ever increasing. In the long run, that just increases the butcher's bill.
Yes, I'm feeling pretty grim about the possibilities and probabilities. I have read a lot of histories and most empires don't go gracefully into the good night.
It is a bit unfair the upstarts get away with leasing rather than their own build out, but since the Big 3 got their build-outs on the back of the Canadian Taxpayer, I don't really feel so bad.
If we decoupled content provision from bit pipe/access provision, we'd be in better shape. Access provision would be a lower margin thing, but cities and even non-profits could invest (thinking of folks like Ottawa FreeNet) if the government would back them up. Rogers, Bell and Telus could stick to content provision (or break up with one part doing content, another access/bit piping).