People are probably hardwired to be delusional. A majority of Americans also believe in Aliens. A sizable minority (IIRC) believe in ESP. Does this mean that every cranky belief carries a selective advantage?
To say that this is a selective advantage is disingenuous - there's a selective advantage in being able to think and reason at all, pretty clearly. We don't reason perfectly, but that does not mean that flawed reasoning has an evolutionary advantage - we aren't blade-proof, either, but no-one suggests there's an evolutionary advantage that comes from dying when stabbed. Do we see a lot of evidence for non-religious populations that died out? No, we don't - neanderthals appear to have ceremonially treated their dead.
There is no such thing as "legitimate marketing". All commercial e-mail is Spam - hardly anyone actually *wants* it, and even people who do want some of the information provided in a marketing e-mail are invariably fed needless heaps of marketing spiel as well.
Yes, there are ethical guidelines that have been established, and there are people that follow them. However, if you look carefully, these so-called ethical guidelines are mainly geared to protect the PR industry (or in this case, the direct marketing industry) from the public, by preventing their members from arousing ire. This is like saying, "I'm not a murderer - I strictly adhere to the ethical standards and guidlines of the American Association of Professional Dismemberers and Disembowlers, and never splatter gore on your lawn."
I'll restrict myself to marketing which follows the general professional guidelines in the US, which basically has two effects: a) Deception. No, not "lying" (which is unethical,) but misdirection and FUD.
b) Market distortion. In order for us to realize all of the benefits which capitalism is theoretically supposed to provide, we need informed consumers making rational choices in an open commodity field with low cost of entry. The requirement to build brand-name recognition through advertizing (which is distinct from building a reputation for quality simply by selling a good product) drives up the cost of entry, discourages informed decision making, and otherwise stifles competition.
People who actually violate the law cause all kinds of additional damage to the economy, but that's chump change compared to the damage that legitimate businesses do.
I'd guess that it's around the border of statistical significance.
The standard deviation in the life expectancy of the general population is about 10 years (meaning - 2/3 people die between 67 and 87), although IIRC it's got a lot of skew.
Anyway, the smaller of the two samples is 135 people, so the error in the estimate of that mean is roughly 10 / sqrt(134) ~= 10/12, so two sigma is about 20 months, and the life expectancy difference is 24 months, so it's significant to 5%.
Well, okay, you can't be "more" or "less" significant (something is either significant, to any particular threshold, or it isn't), but is this the only hypothesis he tested on this data? How many data sets of similar size did he comb through? And why only physics and chemistry?
OTOH, if extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, it stands to reason that ordinary claims should be able to phone it in on paltry evidence like that, so I'm willing to believe that the winners lived longer.
The parent is thinking along the correct lines but is missing something very fundamental. "Intellectual property" IS NOT PROPERTY. The fourth amendment does not apply! Since a patent is merely a privelege granted by the government, the government can simply give a more restricted privelege.
That said, there's no need to take away their patents, by eminent domain or otherwise - you can force Compulsory Licensing on them. There's ample precedent for this. The present system of compulsory licensing is simply inadequate to bring, for example, AIDS cocktails into the affordable range for poor Africans, so it needs to be strengthened.
Obviously, strengthening compulsory licensing of patents would cut into the profits of the pharmaceutical companies (duh), so they're going to fight it tooth and nail; but it's the simplest most conservative solution to the underlying problem.
I, myself, think that a better solution would be to stop offering patents on drugs at all (as it is basically an immoral practice, as TFA points out) and to provide, not "prizes", but "grants" that move beyond basic biology research (presently funded by grants) and into drug discovery. Elementary math indicates that the cost savings would be huge.
The government bureaucracy might grow somewhat, although doing a good job of awarding patents (which they don't do) probably wouldn't be that much less bureaucracy than doing a good job of administering drug discovery grants - but the equally distasteful private bureaucracies that currently parasitize themselves off of government graft would atrophy - which any real libertarian (as opposed to someone who claims a libertarian ideology in order to justify their slavish support for the uber-rich) would have to support.
Very nice, although I think the list of citations is a little short. Dean Baker has been saying much the same thing for some time - but he doesn't have a nobel prize. Still I think he makes a more interesting case for much the same thing and Stiglitz ought to have cited him (among others, but I prefer Baker's writings based on clarity and style.)
I write a new edition of this essay every time the topic comes up (and it has no citations at all, which should not be interpreted as a statement that these are entirely my ideas):
Let us say, just for the sake of argument, that a method of extracting or purifying a gene, or a gene product (a protein) consists of an invention, worthy of patent, in and of itself. This is distinct from patenting the gene itself - if I can do that, I am patenting an end, and not a means to achieving that end. If I come along and purify the same gene product, by some other technique, I'm violating their patent. Crucially, I will violate their patent even I use none of their actual inventions at all! I am violating their patent because I am seeking the same end.
At first glance, this might seem similar to product patents as applied to synthetic molecules. However, in those cases the molecule itself is a unique invention. If I develop a particular technique for tending an orchard, I cannot patent trees! Patenting genes that cause diseases is a separate intellectual fallacy that deserves coverage in it's own right.
This is like patenting the act of killing germs. If a disease is caused by an abnormal (mutant) protein, than the only true cure is to fix that protein - replace it with functional protein, or remove those cells generating the harmful protein, according to the particular condition. The same argument applies to gene-products (proteins) that cause elevated risk for cancer, heart disease and the like. A patent on the gene is basically a patent on all possible cures for that condition/predilection. A gene that causes a predilection for breast cancer should be viewed as a condition in and of itself (which needs to be at least treated,) and not as some part of a particular treatment for breast cancer.
Finally, I should say our genomes, not just collectively, but individually, are the property of the human race. In a biological sense, they are the human race.
Bees are generally black and yellow, and have poisonous stingers. Individual bees, however black or yellow they may be, and poisonous their stingers may be, are all 100% bees - they all possess an equal allotment of beeness. Likewise, the quality of humanity is 100% endowed to each of us.
However, it does not arise from any of us individually. We are all human only because the entire human species exists. The genome of any individual person is not sufficient to specify the human race; the genetic diversity of your fellow human beings is part and parcel of your fundamental human identity.
The same is true, in fact, of the genetic diversity of all known living things, which are our cousins.
Many people have a visceral objection to the idea of a gene being owned. Certain of my colleagues are fond of implying that the objections of laymen arise from some degree of scientific ignorance, or a lack of appreciation for the effort that goes into doing molecular biology. I am a molecular biologist myself, fully cognizant of the hard work that is done. I understand all of that quite well, but I come to the same visceral conclusion: you cannot own that which makes us human.
Firstly, you overstate the cultural problem. It is true that American students are somewhat less likely to pursue careers in science and engineering than our east asian counterparts - but that's driven by economics. Lawyers and MBAs have better employment prospects (all else being equal) than scientists and engineers. The same is not true in east asia, where it is much more difficult to make a go of it as, for example, an attorney. First thing we do, we kill all the lawyers.
Secondly, more money would help. The percentage of incoming NIH grant requests that are funded (and the same is true of other federal agencies) has been dropping steadily for years. A natural result of this is that the US will fail to suck east asia and europe dry of potential scientists, which is what happened during the late 90s when NIH funding was meeting demand for research grants. Second thing we do, we give all the lawyer's money to the HHMI.
By comparative standards, US education is a Deweyist fantasty. We do a much better job at teaching free thinking and critical thinking skills than China or Singapore (I don't actually know about India.) Furthermore, gifted students, the high quantile, perform *better* out of US schools, on average, than out of any country in the world. Now, our educational system serves black, poor and minority students, including especially gifted black students, *very* poorly. Many of the smartest poor people (mostly black, but a few white) I know were (in spite of standardized test scores in my quantile) denied access to higher track secondary education on the basis of poor grades in junior high or elementary, which are in turn an unambiguous result of rascism (and secondarily classism.) If we could root out rascism in the lower levels of our educational system, this would 1) help to ameliorate the climate of anti-intellectualism, which is in large part a response of the systematic exclusion of a large body of the population from the benefits of education and 2) greatly increase our pool of available scientists.
However, for the US to lose it's domination in science is basically inevitable. It is also a good thing, and a healthy and natural result of improvements in human civilization worldwide. The US is not expected to lose its dominant position because the quality of US science will decline - it will lose its dominant position because the quality of east asian science will increase. There are 2.5 billion people in east and south asia - that's *eight times* the population of the US. Given a level playing field, they'd be expected to produce eight times as much science. Even if the US has a four-fold advantage - like, say, a third of the gifted scientists emigrate here to the US instead of staying in their home countries - the US will still "fall behind".
Well, that's good! I'm an American, but I have no desire to have my boot on the neck of the people of the world. The US should not be in a position to monopolize scientific progress for itself, or to use international intellectual property arrangements to guarantee capital streams from the rest of the world into the coffers of rich US-based multinationals.
In sum - yes, the US, mainly the government, should "throw more money" at science, and yes, the quality of our educational system needs improvement (chiefly, it needs more money.) But none of that will change the writing on the wall - the US will not dominate the world perpetually.
Firstly, the claim that the gas price is determined by "market forces" is completely preposterous - if you don't think the oil companies engage in price fixing I laugh at you and call you a naif. Oil is bought and sold on a market - but gasoline isn't. Now, that doesn't mean they're manipulating the prices for political reasons; mostly they aren't, they're just manipulating them to make more money.
Secondly, I'm not blaming the Illuminati for the fact that gas prices are falling nationwide. I'm blaming them for the drop in prices in *swing districts* like Columbus.
They've fallen everywhere - they've *plummeted* in my aunt's would-be district. Here are the figures from the graph:
Now - unless they are supernatural in nature, it is difficult to explain how "market forces" enable the delivery of gas $0.80/gallon cheaper than in Idaho. Perhaps the booming Idaho economy? Please.
One of them is mentioned by the editor who posted the story - the rising price of gasoline figures into the price of that shampoo (not to mention the price Average Consumer pays to drive to and from Cost Co).
The other is that this article measures variation within different outlets in the same market, as opposed to in the same market over time (which is what people care about.) Since Gasoline is not regulated - but the prices *are* controlled by a ologopolistic cartel - you see more variation over time and less variation within a market than you would for other products. It's not generally possible to "shop around" for electricity, but I think electricity - which is regulated, and of similar overall economic importance - is a much better comparison commodity than gasoline.
Finally, I find this is cute - this is a chart showing gas prices in the congressional district wherein my aunt is running for Congress against a Republican in the national leadership. If anyone knows enough about the oil industry to explain to me in detail how they are mucking about with prices in this way, please contact me (despam address above, it works.)
(to see the interesting results, set Area 1 to Columbus, OH, Area 2 to Albany, NY and Area 3 to Boise, ID).
It's pretty clear that the oil companies are plotting to help their good friend Deborah Pryce (and the Republicans generally) in Ohio, but I don't quite follow how they arrange that.
Our (excl.) *constitutional guarantee* does not, at present, include right of access to media, or to be free-from-censorship when using services owned by others, since it extends only to our government.
However, our (incl.) *natural rights* (a function of the human condition and/or an "endowment by the creator"), which are distinct from our constitutional guarantees, are grounded in philosophy and not in law - when someone talks about the "right to free speech", they are refering to something that the first amendment of our constitution *recognizes*, not to something it *grants*. The assertion of a right to free speech includes the right to participate fully and equally in the political process - and the right to be heard by anyone who wishes to listen.
It is clear that the current system curtails this fundamental right in significant ways - although, to be fair, even so, the internet still allows people to realize this fundamental right in ways almost unimaginable 40 years ago.
I'll allow that he has a point, and that software patents are not as bad one might immediately think.
HOWEVER, patents in biology are that bad, and they are worse. He talks some about rapidly changing technologies of the future - those are likely to be biotechnologies, and patents in those areas are already a disaster, with all of the negative consequences for innovation that he doesn't seem to think apply in software (and don't apply as much as I might ordinarily fear.)
Personally, I am opposed to patents generally, and I am opposed to software patents. I can't answer the question - could you be intellectually consistent, and oppose software patents but support some other class of patent. I agree that you can't draw a distinction between "software patents" and "all other patents" (incl business model patents and so forth,) and that only patenting material things might be somewhat artificial.
Nonetheless, I think you could support a more restricted patent regime (it happens I don't) which wouldn't include any software patents at all.
The best thing I can say about the article is that it has an excellent quote for a sig: "it's better, even from a purely selfish point of view, to be constrained by principles than by stupidity."
There is none whatsoever.
If I say "I recommend these sites: " and then I remove one from my list, am I obliged to *explain* myself?
I am not, no more than anyone is obliged to listen to me.
In general, I think corporations *should* be answerable for the broader consequences of their business motivated decisions (even though, as a matter of law, they generally are not). However, in this case, that is absolute hogwash.
They should be free to make whatever recommendations they want. If they are good recommendations, people will tend to listen to them.
I am not concerned with the intrinsic rights of Google to do page rank however they want. I am concerned with the intrinsic rights of individuals to get whatever page rank google decides to give them - if they decide that what they want is google's page rank. They are not answerable to anyone about what information they choose to provide, or why - in the same way that the New York Times is not.
Your problem is that you are accepting the recording industry's propaganda, i.e. "We oppose piracy because people will listen to pirated copies instead of buying CDs."
The *real* objection of the recording industry, and this goes double for clear-channel, is that P2P sidesteps their promotion monopolies and makes the music market harder to manage and control. Fragmentation of the market costs them their niche at the top of the foodchain.
The best example of this attitude was, a while back, movie industry executives noticed that some heavily promoted presumed-blockbuster (I forget which movie it was, The Island maybe) was getting far less than the guaranteed level of attendance given the advertising budget. Careful marketing research traced this phenomenon back to bad word of mouth, which was spreading faster than it had in the past, chiefly by cellphone.
The response of the movie industry was NOT "gee, we'd better stop making movies that even brain damaged 11 year-olds regard as intellectually insulting", but instead "is there any way we can make it illegal to badmouth our movies by text message? Libel law, maybe?" Fortunately, they concluded that was a non-starter.
That long tangent aside, look at clearchannel. Clearchannel's business model depends COMPLETELY on the willingness of the general public to agree-to-like whatever 30 songs they decide they want to play/promote in a single month. They also need to make sure that people keep listening to the radio and not to ipods. Alternate routes of distribution are just as much a threat to clearchannel as they are to the recording industry.
People find similar results when studying brain activity of people playing chess - when considering a good move vs. considering a bad move. Does this mean that people ignore reason when playing chess?
We don't understand the brain, we don't understand how people reason and we don't understand how people make decisions. Anyone who claims otherwise is an idiot, a fraud or both. It is an interesting finding that certain particular areas of the brain "light up" when this particular sample of people are shown a particular sort of information in a particular way - but you can conclude nothing from this.
For myself, the part of my brain that handles emotional responses to complete bullshit is lit up like a XMas tree. Am I, as I type, ignoring reason?
This is an improvement on a known technique. The abstract is as over-reaching as the press release (the linked article).
I'm not a crystallographer, but I work in a lab group that has many crystalographers in it.
It's been known for some time that you can use a variety of materials - including things with porous surfaces, which is what is used here - to assist the process of crystallization. Crystalization is difficult and, frankly, rather unscientific - you take the protein you want to crystallize, and you try different techniques and tricks (of which porous nucleants are an example) until you can get it to work.
So, okay, it would be a "holy grail" if you could find one technique that would let you crystallize most things without going through all that trouble.
However, based on only seven examples (Subscribers only, I'm afraid.), you absolutely cannot conclude that this is a universal nucleant - based on the similarity among the seven examples, I'd be very surprised if it were; even if it were a universal nucleant, nucleation does not always guarantee usable crystals.
Those caveats aside, it does look like a useful advance.
That individual actors have had a tremendous impact on every aspect of modern technological development is obvious to anyone with even a cursory familiarity with the relevant history.
Beyond that, cultural and, I dare say, moral aspects of the technology *have* played a significant role in the adoption of open source methodologies and software, particularly at the academic level. Adoption at the academic level has been, if not a driving force, a necesarry condition for widespread adoption in the corporate sector. The talking heads the author discusses may have provided some needed business-speak triggers to make corporate types more comfortable, but that's hardly important or interesting. Richard Stallman was merely a figurehead for impersonal economic forces, but Bruce Perens has changed history? Please.
So the author's description of history is inaccurate - it is, in fact, anti free software propoganda, and unsurprisingly rooted in the same neo-hagelian ideas as most intrinsically anti-democratic tracts.
However, the course of action he proposes - which is not a challenge of assumptions, as he characterizes it, but a change in policy - is worth independent consideration.
The author thinks that corporate america should move forward with an open source development model and ignore the input and wishes of the broader community of developers - the author of the piece insists they don't exist.
Any corporation that wishes to do this is, of course, free to do so. The question for free software/open source/whatever developers is this - do you want your interests represented, or not? Individual actors have tremendous influence over the course of events from this point onward - and it is pointless to speculate on the outcome of events when individual decisions play such a decisive role.
A software developer trying to accomplish option 1 on his own will face a daunting task, whereas a developer who releases source code, assuming the project is viable, will have a ready supply of suggestions for improving the software and adding features. - This is generally true. But how, exactly, does it follow from the elementary economic forces that the author thinks drive open source? It doesn't - it derives from the existence of the broader community, about which the author urges corporate developers to "stop worrying".
The discussion of legal pitfalls and the economic advantages of scale and so forth are mostly accurate (as other posters have addressed), it is the conclusions that he draws from them with which I disagree.
Everyone on slashdot likes to hate on Orrin Hatch because of his draconian record on copyright enforcement.
However, as a biologist, I'd say that the worst legislation he has pushed, by *far*, was the legislation that exempted natural remedies from the effectiveness and SAFETY requirements applied to modern medicine. People DIED.
Unfortunately, his challenger hasn't a snowball's chance in hell. This is a Democrat, running in *Utah*. The beloved leader carried that state by something like 70-30.
So, the Democrats are perfectly happy to run some geeky little guy who'll embarass himself by letting people edit (deface) his campaign webpage.
No, what I'm really looking forward to is hurricane Omega; so wake me up if we have a year with an additional, what, 18 storms?
Of course, to live up to a name like that it'd better contain energy somewhat greater than Jupiter's red spot - which will be tough, given that spot is something like twice the surface area of the Earth.
There are several ways to integrate the exogenous DNA into the plants - I work with bacteria, the specific techniques you use there (which I know something about) are completely different.
Does doing this make the DNA in question more likely to hop out again?
No one really knows, I'm afraid. In most cases, it still seems like it would be highly unlikely, but our understanding is really very limited.
The only real way to answer that question is to plant the genetically modified organisms and then check. In this respect, you may have an answer to your question right here.
When I frist read what Dr. Johnson said, that was my first thought also.
dada21 is not quoting The Article. dada21 is quoting a person quoted within the article (Dr. Jonhson), and should attribute accordingly to avoid confusion. Furthermore, the person dada21 is quoting is clearly not saying what dada21 seems to think he is saying; if you read on, the *same interviewee*, Dr. Jonhson, says: "There is every reason to suppose that the GM trait could be in the plant's pollen and thus be carried to other charlock in the neighbourhood, spreading the GM genes in that way. This is after all how the cross-fertilisation between the rape and charlock must have occurred in the first place."
So it is very clear that Dr. Jonhson does not mean what the parent seems to think he means.
However, just because Dr. Jonhson says it does not make it true. On examination of the actual facts which are presented (very limited in scope), I believe that it was, in fact, a lateral gene transfer that conferred resistance on the weeds.
I'm a biologist - and I work on a related question specifically (but in bacteria).
There are two possible explanations here, and from what is said in the article, neither can be ruled out. 1) Spontaneous mutation. It is possible that crops growing in this field spontaneously developed resistance (as the parent suggests), due to a mutation in their own genes. This is what the parent seems to think has happened. The likelihood of this occurring depends entirely on the pesticide used.
2) Lateral gene transfer. It is also possible that some genetic material from a GM plant somehow ended up in a relatively distant relative. This sort of thing is somewhere between extremely rare and astonishingly rare (one in a million or one a quadrillion?), we don't know. This is what the article implies happened.
Now, it ought to be fairly easy to tell which occurred. You can use common techniques to detect if the presticide resistant weeds are carrying the pesticide resistance gene from the engineered organisms (you just fish it out via PCR) - if they lack the gene from the engineered organisms, it must have been a spontaneous mutation. Does anyone have a link to the report "on the department's website"? Tentatively, I would have to accept Dr. Johnson's judgement (assuming he knew the result of this fairly simple test).
As to the rest of what the parent says: do not feed the Troll.
I don't doubt that the number of jobs offshored is relatively small - in fact, I would have expected it to be less than 5%, which is quite a lot of jobs.
The point - at least initially - is not to shut down operations and move them overseas (which is often not really cost effective.) The point is that you can threaten people with outsourcing/offshoring/whatever in order to lower their wages.
Large corporations - Caterpillar is a very famous case, type "caterpillar strike breaking" into google if you want detail on that - are very well served in having excess capacity overseas for this purpose. Technical workers do not generally form unions, let alone go on strike, but they still engage in negotiation for higher wages, and the *threat* of offshoring can be a powerful instrument in those negotiations, even if it is usually a bluff.
This is especially important in that the thrust of the article remains true - demand for these skills is actually higher than it was at the peak of the.com boom, but salaries have been successfully contained.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough.
r is.pdf
Same data is available in the original ARIS report that they cite:
http://www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/research_studies/a
People are probably hardwired to be delusional. A majority of Americans also believe in Aliens. A sizable minority (IIRC) believe in ESP. Does this mean that every cranky belief carries a selective advantage?
To say that this is a selective advantage is disingenuous - there's a selective advantage in being able to think and reason at all, pretty clearly. We don't reason perfectly, but that does not mean that flawed reasoning has an evolutionary advantage - we aren't blade-proof, either, but no-one suggests there's an evolutionary advantage that comes from dying when stabbed. Do we see a lot of evidence for non-religious populations that died out? No, we don't - neanderthals appear to have ceremonially treated their dead.
This whole thing is a pseudoscience crock.
Actually, for every 2 people that becomes an atheist, there's about 1 that finds religion.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_prac2.htm
And you can poke around on the site for more data, I can't find the specific number for religious change but it's on there somewhere.
Point is, most of the people attending those megachurches are not former atheists. They're former "main-line" protestants.
There is no such thing as "legitimate marketing". All commercial e-mail is Spam - hardly anyone actually *wants* it, and even people who do want some of the information provided in a marketing e-mail are invariably fed needless heaps of marketing spiel as well.
Yes, there are ethical guidelines that have been established, and there are people that follow them. However, if you look carefully, these so-called ethical guidelines are mainly geared to protect the PR industry (or in this case, the direct marketing industry) from the public, by preventing their members from arousing ire. This is like saying, "I'm not a murderer - I strictly adhere to the ethical standards and guidlines of the American Association of Professional Dismemberers and Disembowlers, and never splatter gore on your lawn."
I'll restrict myself to marketing which follows the general professional guidelines in the US, which basically has two effects:
a) Deception. No, not "lying" (which is unethical,) but misdirection and FUD.
b) Market distortion. In order for us to realize all of the benefits which capitalism is theoretically supposed to provide, we need informed consumers making rational choices in an open commodity field with low cost of entry. The requirement to build brand-name recognition through advertizing (which is distinct from building a reputation for quality simply by selling a good product) drives up the cost of entry, discourages informed decision making, and otherwise stifles competition.
People who actually violate the law cause all kinds of additional damage to the economy, but that's chump change compared to the damage that legitimate businesses do.
I'd guess that it's around the border of statistical significance.
The standard deviation in the life expectancy of the general population is about 10 years (meaning - 2/3 people die between 67 and 87), although IIRC it's got a lot of skew.
Anyway, the smaller of the two samples is 135 people, so the error in the estimate of that mean is roughly 10 / sqrt(134) ~= 10/12, so two sigma is about 20 months, and the life expectancy difference is 24 months, so it's significant to 5%.
Well, okay, you can't be "more" or "less" significant (something is either significant, to any particular threshold, or it isn't), but is this the only hypothesis he tested on this data? How many data sets of similar size did he comb through? And why only physics and chemistry?
OTOH, if extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, it stands to reason that ordinary claims should be able to phone it in on paltry evidence like that, so I'm willing to believe that the winners lived longer.
Gah.
*Fifth* amendment. A little too much of the vino with Christmas dinner.
The parent is thinking along the correct lines but is missing something very fundamental. "Intellectual property" IS NOT PROPERTY. The fourth amendment does not apply! Since a patent is merely a privelege granted by the government, the government can simply give a more restricted privelege.
That said, there's no need to take away their patents, by eminent domain or otherwise - you can force Compulsory Licensing on them. There's ample precedent for this. The present system of compulsory licensing is simply inadequate to bring, for example, AIDS cocktails into the affordable range for poor Africans, so it needs to be strengthened.
Obviously, strengthening compulsory licensing of patents would cut into the profits of the pharmaceutical companies (duh), so they're going to fight it tooth and nail; but it's the simplest most conservative solution to the underlying problem.
I, myself, think that a better solution would be to stop offering patents on drugs at all (as it is basically an immoral practice, as TFA points out) and to provide, not "prizes", but "grants" that move beyond basic biology research (presently funded by grants) and into drug discovery. Elementary math indicates that the cost savings would be huge.
The government bureaucracy might grow somewhat, although doing a good job of awarding patents (which they don't do) probably wouldn't be that much less bureaucracy than doing a good job of administering drug discovery grants - but the equally distasteful private bureaucracies that currently parasitize themselves off of government graft would atrophy - which any real libertarian (as opposed to someone who claims a libertarian ideology in order to justify their slavish support for the uber-rich) would have to support.
Very nice, although I think the list of citations is a little short. Dean Baker has been saying much the same thing for some time - but he doesn't have a nobel prize. Still I think he makes a more interesting case for much the same thing and Stiglitz ought to have cited him (among others, but I prefer Baker's writings based on clarity and style.)
I write a new edition of this essay every time the topic comes up (and it has no citations at all, which should not be interpreted as a statement that these are entirely my ideas):
Let us say, just for the sake of argument, that a method of extracting or purifying a gene, or a gene product (a protein) consists of an invention, worthy of patent, in and of itself. This is distinct from patenting the gene itself - if I can do that, I am patenting an end, and not a means to achieving that end. If I come along and purify the same gene product, by some other technique, I'm violating their patent. Crucially, I will violate their patent even I use none of their actual inventions at all! I am violating their patent because I am seeking the same end.
At first glance, this might seem similar to product patents as applied to synthetic molecules. However, in those cases the molecule itself is a unique invention. If I develop a particular technique for tending an orchard, I cannot patent trees! Patenting genes that cause diseases is a separate intellectual fallacy that deserves coverage in it's own right.
This is like patenting the act of killing germs. If a disease is caused by an abnormal (mutant) protein, than the only true cure is to fix that protein - replace it with functional protein, or remove those cells generating the harmful protein, according to the particular condition. The same argument applies to gene-products (proteins) that cause elevated risk for cancer, heart disease and the like. A patent on the gene is basically a patent on all possible cures for that condition/predilection. A gene that causes a predilection for breast cancer should be viewed as a condition in and of itself (which needs to be at least treated,) and not as some part of a particular treatment for breast cancer.
Finally, I should say our genomes, not just collectively, but individually, are the property of the human race. In a biological sense, they are the human race.
Bees are generally black and yellow, and have poisonous stingers. Individual bees, however black or yellow they may be, and poisonous their stingers may be, are all 100% bees - they all possess an equal allotment of beeness. Likewise, the quality of humanity is 100% endowed to each of us.
However, it does not arise from any of us individually. We are all human only because the entire human species exists. The genome of any individual person is not sufficient to specify the human race; the genetic diversity of your fellow human beings is part and parcel of your fundamental human identity.
The same is true, in fact, of the genetic diversity of all known living things, which are our cousins.
Many people have a visceral objection to the idea of a gene being owned. Certain of my colleagues are fond of implying that the objections of laymen arise from some degree of scientific ignorance, or a lack of appreciation for the effort that goes into doing molecular biology. I am a molecular biologist myself, fully cognizant of the hard work that is done. I understand all of that quite well, but I come to the same visceral conclusion: you cannot own that which makes us human.
Firstly, you overstate the cultural problem. It is true that American students are somewhat less likely to pursue careers in science and engineering than our east asian counterparts - but that's driven by economics. Lawyers and MBAs have better employment prospects (all else being equal) than scientists and engineers. The same is not true in east asia, where it is much more difficult to make a go of it as, for example, an attorney. First thing we do, we kill all the lawyers.
Secondly, more money would help. The percentage of incoming NIH grant requests that are funded (and the same is true of other federal agencies) has been dropping steadily for years. A natural result of this is that the US will fail to suck east asia and europe dry of potential scientists, which is what happened during the late 90s when NIH funding was meeting demand for research grants. Second thing we do, we give all the lawyer's money to the HHMI.
By comparative standards, US education is a Deweyist fantasty. We do a much better job at teaching free thinking and critical thinking skills than China or Singapore (I don't actually know about India.) Furthermore, gifted students, the high quantile, perform *better* out of US schools, on average, than out of any country in the world. Now, our educational system serves black, poor and minority students, including especially gifted black students, *very* poorly. Many of the smartest poor people (mostly black, but a few white) I know were (in spite of standardized test scores in my quantile) denied access to higher track secondary education on the basis of poor grades in junior high or elementary, which are in turn an unambiguous result of rascism (and secondarily classism.) If we could root out rascism in the lower levels of our educational system, this would 1) help to ameliorate the climate of anti-intellectualism, which is in large part a response of the systematic exclusion of a large body of the population from the benefits of education and 2) greatly increase our pool of available scientists.
However, for the US to lose it's domination in science is basically inevitable. It is also a good thing, and a healthy and natural result of improvements in human civilization worldwide. The US is not expected to lose its dominant position because the quality of US science will decline - it will lose its dominant position because the quality of east asian science will increase. There are 2.5 billion people in east and south asia - that's *eight times* the population of the US. Given a level playing field, they'd be expected to produce eight times as much science. Even if the US has a four-fold advantage - like, say, a third of the gifted scientists emigrate here to the US instead of staying in their home countries - the US will still "fall behind".
Well, that's good! I'm an American, but I have no desire to have my boot on the neck of the people of the world. The US should not be in a position to monopolize scientific progress for itself, or to use international intellectual property arrangements to guarantee capital streams from the rest of the world into the coffers of rich US-based multinationals.
In sum - yes, the US, mainly the government, should "throw more money" at science, and yes, the quality of our educational system needs improvement (chiefly, it needs more money.) But none of that will change the writing on the wall - the US will not dominate the world perpetually.
Did you even look at the graph?
Firstly, the claim that the gas price is determined by "market forces" is completely preposterous - if you don't think the oil companies engage in price fixing I laugh at you and call you a naif. Oil is bought and sold on a market - but gasoline isn't. Now, that doesn't mean they're manipulating the prices for political reasons; mostly they aren't, they're just manipulating them to make more money.
Secondly, I'm not blaming the Illuminati for the fact that gas prices are falling nationwide. I'm blaming them for the drop in prices in *swing districts* like Columbus.
They've fallen everywhere - they've *plummeted* in my aunt's would-be district. Here are the figures from the graph:
City,Price @ 7/10/2006,Price @ 9/17/2006
Columbus OH,$2.90,$2.08
Boise ID,$2.86,$2.86
Albany NY,$2.93,$2.75
US Average,$2.95,$2.47
Now - unless they are supernatural in nature, it is difficult to explain how "market forces" enable the delivery of gas $0.80/gallon cheaper than in Idaho. Perhaps the booming Idaho economy? Please.
One of them is mentioned by the editor who posted the story - the rising price of gasoline figures into the price of that shampoo (not to mention the price Average Consumer pays to drive to and from Cost Co).
The other is that this article measures variation within different outlets in the same market, as opposed to in the same market over time (which is what people care about.) Since Gasoline is not regulated - but the prices *are* controlled by a ologopolistic cartel - you see more variation over time and less variation within a market than you would for other products. It's not generally possible to "shop around" for electricity, but I think electricity - which is regulated, and of similar overall economic importance - is a much better comparison commodity than gasoline.
Finally, I find this is cute - this is a chart showing gas prices in the congressional district wherein my aunt is running for Congress against a Republican in the national leadership. If anyone knows enough about the oil industry to explain to me in detail how they are mucking about with prices in this way, please contact me (despam address above, it works.)
Columbus Gas Prices.
(to see the interesting results, set Area 1 to Columbus, OH, Area 2 to Albany, NY and Area 3 to Boise, ID).
It's pretty clear that the oil companies are plotting to help their good friend Deborah Pryce (and the Republicans generally) in Ohio, but I don't quite follow how they arrange that.
Our (excl.) *constitutional guarantee* does not, at present, include right of access to media, or to be free-from-censorship when using services owned by others, since it extends only to our government.
However, our (incl.) *natural rights* (a function of the human condition and/or an "endowment by the creator"), which are distinct from our constitutional guarantees, are grounded in philosophy and not in law - when someone talks about the "right to free speech", they are refering to something that the first amendment of our constitution *recognizes*, not to something it *grants*. The assertion of a right to free speech includes the right to participate fully and equally in the political process - and the right to be heard by anyone who wishes to listen.
It is clear that the current system curtails this fundamental right in significant ways - although, to be fair, even so, the internet still allows people to realize this fundamental right in ways almost unimaginable 40 years ago.
I'll allow that he has a point, and that software patents are not as bad one might immediately think.
HOWEVER, patents in biology are that bad, and they are worse. He talks some about rapidly changing technologies of the future - those are likely to be biotechnologies, and patents in those areas are already a disaster, with all of the negative consequences for innovation that he doesn't seem to think apply in software (and don't apply as much as I might ordinarily fear.)
Personally, I am opposed to patents generally, and I am opposed to software patents. I can't answer the question - could you be intellectually consistent, and oppose software patents but support some other class of patent. I agree that you can't draw a distinction between "software patents" and "all other patents" (incl business model patents and so forth,) and that only patenting material things might be somewhat artificial.
Nonetheless, I think you could support a more restricted patent regime (it happens I don't) which wouldn't include any software patents at all.
The best thing I can say about the article is that it has an excellent quote for a sig:
"it's better, even from a purely selfish point of view, to be constrained by principles than by stupidity."
There is none whatsoever.
If I say "I recommend these sites: " and then I remove one from my list, am I obliged to *explain* myself?
I am not, no more than anyone is obliged to listen to me.
In general, I think corporations *should* be answerable for the broader consequences of their business motivated decisions (even though, as a matter of law, they generally are not). However, in this case, that is absolute hogwash.
They should be free to make whatever recommendations they want. If they are good recommendations, people will tend to listen to them.
I am not concerned with the intrinsic rights of Google to do page rank however they want. I am concerned with the intrinsic rights of individuals to get whatever page rank google decides to give them - if they decide that what they want is google's page rank. They are not answerable to anyone about what information they choose to provide, or why - in the same way that the New York Times is not.
Ah, that's it.
Thanks!
I respectfully disagree.
Your problem is that you are accepting the recording industry's propaganda, i.e. "We oppose piracy because people will listen to pirated copies instead of buying CDs."
The *real* objection of the recording industry, and this goes double for clear-channel, is that P2P sidesteps their promotion monopolies and makes the music market harder to manage and control. Fragmentation of the market costs them their niche at the top of the foodchain.
The best example of this attitude was, a while back, movie industry executives noticed that some heavily promoted presumed-blockbuster (I forget which movie it was, The Island maybe) was getting far less than the guaranteed level of attendance given the advertising budget. Careful marketing research traced this phenomenon back to bad word of mouth, which was spreading faster than it had in the past, chiefly by cellphone.
The response of the movie industry was NOT "gee, we'd better stop making movies that even brain damaged 11 year-olds regard as intellectually insulting", but instead "is there any way we can make it illegal to badmouth our movies by text message? Libel law, maybe?" Fortunately, they concluded that was a non-starter.
That long tangent aside, look at clearchannel. Clearchannel's business model depends COMPLETELY on the willingness of the general public to agree-to-like whatever 30 songs they decide they want to play/promote in a single month. They also need to make sure that people keep listening to the radio and not to ipods. Alternate routes of distribution are just as much a threat to clearchannel as they are to the recording industry.
People find similar results when studying brain activity of people playing chess - when considering a good move vs. considering a bad move. Does this mean that people ignore reason when playing chess?
We don't understand the brain, we don't understand how people reason and we don't understand how people make decisions. Anyone who claims otherwise is an idiot, a fraud or both. It is an interesting finding that certain particular areas of the brain "light up" when this particular sample of people are shown a particular sort of information in a particular way - but you can conclude nothing from this.
For myself, the part of my brain that handles emotional responses to complete bullshit is lit up like a XMas tree. Am I, as I type, ignoring reason?
It does if you are sufficiently sick. (link pulled off of google but it makes the point.)
That said, even if you do have peptides in your urine, they don't crystallize when it hits the snow.
This is an improvement on a known technique. The abstract is as over-reaching as the press release (the linked article).
I'm not a crystallographer, but I work in a lab group that has many crystalographers in it.
It's been known for some time that you can use a variety of materials - including things with porous surfaces, which is what is used here - to assist the process of crystallization. Crystalization is difficult and, frankly, rather unscientific - you take the protein you want to crystallize, and you try different techniques and tricks (of which porous nucleants are an example) until you can get it to work.
So, okay, it would be a "holy grail" if you could find one technique that would let you crystallize most things without going through all that trouble.
However, based on only seven examples (Subscribers only, I'm afraid.), you absolutely cannot conclude that this is a universal nucleant - based on the similarity among the seven examples, I'd be very surprised if it were; even if it were a universal nucleant, nucleation does not always guarantee usable crystals.
Those caveats aside, it does look like a useful advance.
Spare me the "iron laws of history" bullshit.
That individual actors have had a tremendous impact on every aspect of modern technological development is obvious to anyone with even a cursory familiarity with the relevant history.
Beyond that, cultural and, I dare say, moral aspects of the technology *have* played a significant role in the adoption of open source methodologies and software, particularly at the academic level. Adoption at the academic level has been, if not a driving force, a necesarry condition for widespread adoption in the corporate sector. The talking heads the author discusses may have provided some needed business-speak triggers to make corporate types more comfortable, but that's hardly important or interesting. Richard Stallman was merely a figurehead for impersonal economic forces, but Bruce Perens has changed history? Please.
So the author's description of history is inaccurate - it is, in fact, anti free software propoganda, and unsurprisingly rooted in the same neo-hagelian ideas as most intrinsically anti-democratic tracts.
However, the course of action he proposes - which is not a challenge of assumptions, as he characterizes it, but a change in policy - is worth independent consideration.
The author thinks that corporate america should move forward with an open source development model and ignore the input and wishes of the broader community of developers - the author of the piece insists they don't exist.
Any corporation that wishes to do this is, of course, free to do so. The question for free software/open source/whatever developers is this - do you want your interests represented, or not? Individual actors have tremendous influence over the course of events from this point onward - and it is pointless to speculate on the outcome of events when individual decisions play such a decisive role.
A software developer trying to accomplish option 1 on his own will face a daunting task, whereas a developer who releases source code, assuming the project is viable, will have a ready supply of suggestions for improving the software and adding features. - This is generally true. But how, exactly, does it follow from the elementary economic forces that the author thinks drive open source? It doesn't - it derives from the existence of the broader community, about which the author urges corporate developers to "stop worrying".
The discussion of legal pitfalls and the economic advantages of scale and so forth are mostly accurate (as other posters have addressed), it is the conclusions that he draws from them with which I disagree.
Everyone on slashdot likes to hate on Orrin Hatch because of his draconian record on copyright enforcement.
However, as a biologist, I'd say that the worst legislation he has pushed, by *far*, was the legislation that exempted natural remedies from the effectiveness and SAFETY requirements applied to modern medicine. People DIED.
Unfortunately, his challenger hasn't a snowball's chance in hell. This is a Democrat, running in *Utah*. The beloved leader carried that state by something like 70-30.
So, the Democrats are perfectly happy to run some geeky little guy who'll embarass himself by letting people edit (deface) his campaign webpage.
No, what I'm really looking forward to is hurricane Omega; so wake me up if we have a year with an additional, what, 18 storms?
Of course, to live up to a name like that it'd better contain energy somewhat greater than Jupiter's red spot - which will be tough, given that spot is something like twice the surface area of the Earth.
There are several ways to integrate the exogenous DNA into the plants - I work with bacteria, the specific techniques you use there (which I know something about) are completely different.
Does doing this make the DNA in question more likely to hop out again?
No one really knows, I'm afraid. In most cases, it still seems like it would be highly unlikely, but our understanding is really very limited.
The only real way to answer that question is to plant the genetically modified organisms and then check. In this respect, you may have an answer to your question right here.
When I frist read what Dr. Johnson said, that was my first thought also.
dada21 is not quoting The Article. dada21 is quoting a person quoted within the article (Dr. Jonhson), and should attribute accordingly to avoid confusion. Furthermore, the person dada21 is quoting is clearly not saying what dada21 seems to think he is saying; if you read on, the *same interviewee*, Dr. Jonhson, says:
"There is every reason to suppose that the GM trait could be in the plant's pollen and thus be carried to other charlock in the neighbourhood, spreading the GM genes in that way. This is after all how the cross-fertilisation between the rape and charlock must have occurred in the first place."
So it is very clear that Dr. Jonhson does not mean what the parent seems to think he means.
However, just because Dr. Jonhson says it does not make it true. On examination of the actual facts which are presented (very limited in scope), I believe that it was, in fact, a lateral gene transfer that conferred resistance on the weeds.
I'm a biologist - and I work on a related question specifically (but in bacteria).
There are two possible explanations here, and from what is said in the article, neither can be ruled out.
1) Spontaneous mutation. It is possible that crops growing in this field spontaneously developed resistance (as the parent suggests), due to a mutation in their own genes. This is what the parent seems to think has happened. The likelihood of this occurring depends entirely on the pesticide used.
2) Lateral gene transfer. It is also possible that some genetic material from a GM plant somehow ended up in a relatively distant relative. This sort of thing is somewhere between extremely rare and astonishingly rare (one in a million or one a quadrillion?), we don't know. This is what the article implies happened.
Now, it ought to be fairly easy to tell which occurred. You can use common techniques to detect if the presticide resistant weeds are carrying the pesticide resistance gene from the engineered organisms (you just fish it out via PCR) - if they lack the gene from the engineered organisms, it must have been a spontaneous mutation. Does anyone have a link to the report "on the department's website"? Tentatively, I would have to accept Dr. Johnson's judgement (assuming he knew the result of this fairly simple test).
As to the rest of what the parent says: do not feed the Troll.
I don't doubt that the number of jobs offshored is relatively small - in fact, I would have expected it to be less than 5%, which is quite a lot of jobs.
.com boom, but salaries have been successfully contained.
The point - at least initially - is not to shut down operations and move them overseas (which is often not really cost effective.) The point is that you can threaten people with outsourcing/offshoring/whatever in order to lower their wages.
Large corporations - Caterpillar is a very famous case, type "caterpillar strike breaking" into google if you want detail on that - are very well served in having excess capacity overseas for this purpose. Technical workers do not generally form unions, let alone go on strike, but they still engage in negotiation for higher wages, and the *threat* of offshoring can be a powerful instrument in those negotiations, even if it is usually a bluff.
This is especially important in that the thrust of the article remains true - demand for these skills is actually higher than it was at the peak of the