Re:Welcome to capitalism
on
HIV Vaccine
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· Score: 1
The trend will be to encourage the use of older, cheaper and less effective drugs rather than newer, better formulations.
Many "new" drugs dance in the grey area between the patent office and the FDA. You want the "new" drug to be different enough from the old drug to you can get a defensible patent. However, you also want the new drug to be substantially similar to the old drug to allow you to skip much of the FDA red tape.
Then, when the older drug comes into the public and the generic manufacturers sink their teeth in, you release all that less than flattering medical data to scare people away from the older drug (which is not as profitable due to competition from generics) to the newer (still proprietary) drug.
The comparative effacy of the new v. old drug has usually never been established. If they meet the substantial similarity requirements of the FDA, the [i]actual[/i] effacy of the new drugs may have never been established (I.E. comparative v. placebo or accepted nominal treatment).
This "newer, better" v "older, [...] less effective" thought process is marketing. "Newer, better" v. "older, cheaper" is closer to the truth.. from the pharmacorp's perspective.
What are the costs relative to making the fuel from new materials plus disposing of the old ones?
This is a good question, and basically the main factor that drives whether we re-process fuel or not. Another concern is how much U-235 remains when the reactor is incapable of safe criticality due to self-poisoning. They've been at it for the better part of a century... a large majority of the fuel is burnt before refueling becomes necessary.
The whole concern about the amount of hazardous, heavy metal, radioactive waste generated, the man-hours required, the man-REM required, and the fact that you still end up with a bunch of high level waste at the end makes fuel reprocessing a loser as far as safety and environmental impact are concern.
Then there's all the [i]other[/i] plant material that becomes contaminated and/or activated. That doesn't even have the financial edge of being made out of scarce raw materials.
Don't you need steel and anti-contamination clothing and tools to run a "regular" fission reactor? Do you have a study that demonstrates that these factors would add up to a greater waste problem than the existing one?
Yes. You need a reactor core, pipes, support, and all that other groovy stuff that's made out of steel alloys. And Yes, normal reactor operations and maintenance will consume anti-Cs, tools, and equipment. But we're not comparing Rx operation to reprocessing operations. We're comparing the waste generated from stuffing all the waste from normal reactor operations into a steel-lined concrete cask against all the waste generated from reprocessing all the waste generated from Rx operations... and then stuffing all that combained waste into a steel-lined concrete cask.
As another concern, there's always the posibility that improved techniques will come along for re-processing... at which point you can re-open the casks and reprocess fuel and other materials then.. and maybe come out a winner on total waste generated, environmental risk involved, and man-REM required.
And this is all anecdotal based on my experiences with the DOE and Navy
How about we refine the waste, make it further useful, and save on the amount of waste we create?
The cost of reprocessing irradiated plant materials is considerably higher than simply making them from new materials. Add to that, the fact that everyone that works with former plant materials will require special radiation training... and a bigger paycheck (both to account for their training/knowledge and their radiation exposure).
Also the preprocessing plant would generate huge volumes of waste on its own. Steels are relatively dense and stable wastes. Reprocessing would generate a lot of liquid waste. Also, with many of the reactor wastes, the main danger is radioactivity... the reprocessing wastes would present heavy metal and a variety of interesting chemical wastes. Have you ever tried to dispose of radioactive, heavy metal, hazardous chemical, liquid waste?
On top of all that relatively high level waste is the medium and low level stuff... tools, anti-contamination clothing, analytical equipment, etc. Reprocessing most emphatically does not reduce the amount of waste.
They didn't create laws around wiretapping because it was technologically difficult at one time to do it. It has never been terribly difficult to spy on someone, from a technological point of view. The laws were put in place to make it difficult to spy on someone, from a legal point of view.
That was the point, to make spying on people difficult. That technology has made it even easier to illegally spy on people in 2004 compared to the ease with which you could illegally spy on people in 1960... isn't a very convincing argument to make the spying legal, or remove oversight.
It would not be difficult to ammend existing wirerap laws to include new technology, or develope caselaw to extend the application of existing law.
I'd ask him what sort of ideas he'd have to improving employee morale/productivity.
If all he can come up with is "Casual Friday" or other similarly benighted schemes, give 'im the boot.
How about you put the detectors on one side (the inside) and the display cells on the other side (the outside). Then you go partying around town in your cool invisible pants.
There's no bag/pocket under there. That's the zipper. The new uniforms are unisex, so they have the big ass zipper for the ladyfolk's defference in plumbing.
I've never used any sort of always-on antivirus program, and I've never had a virus scan come back with a positive. The only programs in the "computer security" genre that I keep around are ZoneAlarm, AdAware, and SpybotSD.
My philosophy is this: If I cannot associate some request for permission to access the internet or to set/modify a cookie with something I have just done, permission is denied.
It would be nice if more people took an interest in what their computers are actually doing and kept their software up to date... but I have doubts that many users would know where to look to find out if their software is up-to-date.
The simple fact is that we've ALWAYS relied on non-regulars when it comes time to fight a real war. In EVERY major war the US has fought, the bulk of its forces have been made up of reservists, guardsman, draftees, militia, whatever, and not regular military.
This is probably because a large bit of the "regular military" is recent enlistees. "Reservist" says, to me, someone that's completed several years of on-the-job training, and isn't enough of a discipline to have gotten kicked out.
That, or it's just the DoD's way of saying "Wait, you thought we were through? Nope, bend over and grab your ankles, because we're back for more."
Did these braniacs ever consider that maybe the reason for the wide margins IS THAT MORE PEOPLE VOTED THAN REGISTERED.
If the margin of victory is larger than your margin of error, recounts are unnecessary. If you take the statistically improbable stance that all of mistakes favored the winner, and, after correcting for the error, the winner is still the winner, the error is insignificant.
Which is an interesting point that was never really dealt with in 2000 in Florida. The margin of victory in Florida was never greater that the historical margin for error... it was never actually determined who had more votes.
I haven't been under the impression that RFIDs are conventionally programmable ojects. Thus, they'll behave the same way they're initially manufactured to behave until they break.
So, even though you can program the scanner to disregard "retired" RFIDs, they're still going to perk up and shout when scanned.
The question being asked, as I understand it, is what is the RFID density necessary to defeat the effectiveness of a scanner? That there are so many RFIDs making noise simultaneously that there is no descernable signal.
Re:Anyone with two feet and perhaps access to a ca
on
The Trouble with RFID
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· Score: 1
So the F in RFID stands for "Flair."
Speaking of which, it would probably be more effective to embed the collected RFIDs into buttons. Then you can just trade buttons (and put them on a vest, if it so suits your sense of style, or lack thereof) and be a slightly different group of 246 different people.
Also, how many RFIDs would you have to have to make scanning ineffective due to the individual tags stepping on each other's signal?
We, that is, human beings and our industry, have vastly increased the amount of unbreathable crap being pumped into our air.
"Vastly increased"? I think you have, perhaps, slightly, overestimated the contribution human industry makes to the carbon cycle as a whole.
I'll agree that humans today are producing hundreds or thousands of times more greenhouse gases that they produced in the past. I disagree that this change is signicant.
Volcanic eruptions can pump more unbreathable crap into the air in a single day than human industry can produce in a year. Curiously, this doesn't seem to have any long term effect on gas ratios... the cycles shifts equilibrium slightly and absorbs all of it.
I personally doubt humans play a significant role in global warming and believe it is, in fact, a natural cyclic process which will end (or, rather, begin again) in the next Ice Age.
The important thing about global warming isn't an average increase in average temperatures and the melting of the ice caps. Rather, it's the increased availability of energy in the atmosphere causing so-called Super Storms, widespread disruption of historical weather patterns, and eventually a collapse of the large scale convection that been keeping the climate so temperate for the past several thousand years.
As for your colder winters... as energy is pumped into the jet stream it takes a higher amplitude curve, carrying colder polar air further towards the equator than it normally does. So, yeah, colder winters are not unexpected
Anyway, until some money gets thrown at studies doing something besides trying to link human activities to global warming, we're never going to know to what extent these changes are just part of the normal ice age cycle... and totally beyond our control, or even ability to effect.
The only reactor design I can think of that uses liquid sodium and low enrichment fuel is a Fast Breeder. One of the products of a fast breeder is Plutonium.
Funny you should mention that.
There are several robotics projects out there that use PDAs for processing and control functions. Just get a wireless enabled PDA.
A friend and I have ripped apart a couple RC cars for this sort of thing. Instead of hooking the remote up to a parallel port, though, we hooked it up to a Basic Stamp. Been talking about hooking it up to a serial/parallel port just so we don't have to program in PBASIC anymore.
Also talking about duct taping the hacked remote to the RC car and then adding various sensor inputs to the basic stamp. Oh, and the rotating knives... but that's another matter. Just your basic programmable autonomous robot for considerably less than many of the kits out there.
In cloning they'll take the genetic material (full set, diploid) from a somatic cell and inject it into an egg (having removed the egg's own genetic material [half set, haploid]). They then do some interestingstuff to convince the egg it's been fertilized so it will start dividing.
In this case they're just removing the haploid DNA from a donor egg and replacing it with the haploid DNA from another egg. Then it's pretty much standard IVF techniques
I'm not sure why this is outlawed. On the one hand it could be the reason many (large mammal) clones die prematurely is because of the nuclear transfer process and all the speculation about telomere erosion and the like are red herring. No one much likes the scenario of some parents having to clean up Junior with a sponge mop due to macroscale apoptosis when he reaches puberty.
I haven't heard much about these kind of trials being conducted in other animals, though. It would be useful, as it would allow you to control for a number of things (aforementioned telomere erosion, for example). I'd assume either the results weren't that interesting (I.E. no significant effect on development or mortality) or the laws banning it were worded broadly enough to ban non-human animal testing as well.
Anyone know whether anyone is doing this in animals besides humans?
What projects you process data packets for seems to be user selected. So, user choice is the authentication process.
I suppose there will be the SETI@home team people choosing which projects are initially offered, so that would be be the authentication initally to make sure you weren't getting shady non-academic data.
But, with that said, I don't see why we'd necessarily need to limit ourselves to academic data. I think it would be cool to use a distributed computing application for a massive render farm to help out grassroots digital animation groups. While it's all cool and stuff to process radio signals, I think being able to go see a movie and go "I helped make this" would be more gratifying.
You have it slightly wrong. Client A sends an alert to Client B when something is input into Client A and continues to send the alert periodically so long as input occurs during the period. Client B displays an indication of activity on A when it recieves the alert and checks if it has recieved the alert periodically. If Client B has recieved no alert in the previous preiod, it clears the indication.
Thus, Client B doesn't get stuck with a "$user is typing a message..." because $user got booted offline before Client A sent the no input alert. Client A goes offline, Client B stops recieving the input alert from Client A, Client B stops the indication.
The "innovation" is that Client B stops indicating input when it stops being told to indicate input... rather than having it stop indicating input when it is told to stop indicating input, as ajakk describes.
Because you just know that a well organized technologically sophisticated terrorist cell would target the average user's access to pr0n. Hit us where it hurts, right? Infidel western devils just gotta have that pr0n.
Perhaps it hasn't occurred to you, but computers run: air traffic control, banking, train switching, power production and distribution, water treatment purification and distribution, and pretty much all communication technology at this point.
Having your computer not turn on might be an "aw bummer" moment, but when you realize it's because your power isn't on... unfortunately when you try to report the outage you realize your phone can't get tone. Cellphone doesn't get service either. "Ah, well." you grumble, and get in your car to go get something to eat. Traffic is a bitch, though, all the lights are either out (due to lack of power) or behaving erratically. You stop at the ATM to get some cash for some food, but it doesn't seem to be working. You figure you could just use debit or credit card, but when you finally find a restaurant that's open they explain that they can't seem to process the cards that day. You sigh and content yourself to what you can afford with the few dollars on you: a small bowl of soup and a big glass of water. The glass of water was a bad idea, though, since a valve mix-up at the threatment plant (after they lost computer control and coordination) has contaminated half the water in the city. Your last thought a few days later as the dehydration from the sickness finally steals your conciousness for the last time? It's not about missed e-mail.
What is your criteria for "work" regarding the Farnsworth Fusor?
It's fairly easy to get one capable of producing a constant fusion reaction. There are commercial production designs used as on-demand neutron sources.
If you mean "work" in the sense of producing more power than it uses, it was shown back in the 80s that electrostatically driven fusion could never even reach breakeven.
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Many "new" drugs dance in the grey area between the patent office and the FDA. You want the "new" drug to be different enough from the old drug to you can get a defensible patent. However, you also want the new drug to be substantially similar to the old drug to allow you to skip much of the FDA red tape.
Then, when the older drug comes into the public and the generic manufacturers sink their teeth in, you release all that less than flattering medical data to scare people away from the older drug (which is not as profitable due to competition from generics) to the newer (still proprietary) drug.
The comparative effacy of the new v. old drug has usually never been established. If they meet the substantial similarity requirements of the FDA, the [i]actual[/i] effacy of the new drugs may have never been established (I.E. comparative v. placebo or accepted nominal treatment).
This "newer, better" v "older, [...] less effective" thought process is marketing. "Newer, better" v. "older, cheaper" is closer to the truth.. from the pharmacorp's perspective.
The whole concern about the amount of hazardous, heavy metal, radioactive waste generated, the man-hours required, the man-REM required, and the fact that you still end up with a bunch of high level waste at the end makes fuel reprocessing a loser as far as safety and environmental impact are concern.
Then there's all the [i]other[/i] plant material that becomes contaminated and/or activated. That doesn't even have the financial edge of being made out of scarce raw materials.
Yes. You need a reactor core, pipes, support, and all that other groovy stuff that's made out of steel alloys. And Yes, normal reactor operations and maintenance will consume anti-Cs, tools, and equipment. But we're not comparing Rx operation to reprocessing operations. We're comparing the waste generated from stuffing all the waste from normal reactor operations into a steel-lined concrete cask against all the waste generated from reprocessing all the waste generated from Rx operations... and then stuffing all that combained waste into a steel-lined concrete cask.As another concern, there's always the posibility that improved techniques will come along for re-processing... at which point you can re-open the casks and reprocess fuel and other materials then.. and maybe come out a winner on total waste generated, environmental risk involved, and man-REM required.
And this is all anecdotal based on my experiences with the DOE and Navy
The cost of reprocessing irradiated plant materials is considerably higher than simply making them from new materials. Add to that, the fact that everyone that works with former plant materials will require special radiation training... and a bigger paycheck (both to account for their training/knowledge and their radiation exposure).
Also the preprocessing plant would generate huge volumes of waste on its own. Steels are relatively dense and stable wastes. Reprocessing would generate a lot of liquid waste. Also, with many of the reactor wastes, the main danger is radioactivity... the reprocessing wastes would present heavy metal and a variety of interesting chemical wastes. Have you ever tried to dispose of radioactive, heavy metal, hazardous chemical, liquid waste?
On top of all that relatively high level waste is the medium and low level stuff... tools, anti-contamination clothing, analytical equipment, etc. Reprocessing most emphatically does not reduce the amount of waste.
Isomeric transition is a nuclear process.
That must be some good crack you're smoking.
They didn't create laws around wiretapping because it was technologically difficult at one time to do it. It has never been terribly difficult to spy on someone, from a technological point of view. The laws were put in place to make it difficult to spy on someone, from a legal point of view.
That was the point, to make spying on people difficult. That technology has made it even easier to illegally spy on people in 2004 compared to the ease with which you could illegally spy on people in 1960... isn't a very convincing argument to make the spying legal, or remove oversight.
It would not be difficult to ammend existing wirerap laws to include new technology, or develope caselaw to extend the application of existing law.
I'd ask him what sort of ideas he'd have to improving employee morale/productivity. If all he can come up with is "Casual Friday" or other similarly benighted schemes, give 'im the boot.
How about you put the detectors on one side (the inside) and the display cells on the other side (the outside). Then you go partying around town in your cool invisible pants.
There's no bag/pocket under there. That's the zipper. The new uniforms are unisex, so they have the big ass zipper for the ladyfolk's defference in plumbing.
I've never used any sort of always-on antivirus program, and I've never had a virus scan come back with a positive. The only programs in the "computer security" genre that I keep around are ZoneAlarm, AdAware, and SpybotSD.
My philosophy is this: If I cannot associate some request for permission to access the internet or to set/modify a cookie with something I have just done, permission is denied.
It would be nice if more people took an interest in what their computers are actually doing and kept their software up to date... but I have doubts that many users would know where to look to find out if their software is up-to-date.
Wow. That looks like crap.
I end up with a column of search results on the left, a column of ads on the right, and a big empty column of white space in the middle.
Looks like somebody coded for 800x600.
This is probably because a large bit of the "regular military" is recent enlistees. "Reservist" says, to me, someone that's completed several years of on-the-job training, and isn't enough of a discipline to have gotten kicked out.
That, or it's just the DoD's way of saying "Wait, you thought we were through? Nope, bend over and grab your ankles, because we're back for more."
If the margin of victory is larger than your margin of error, recounts are unnecessary. If you take the statistically improbable stance that all of mistakes favored the winner, and, after correcting for the error, the winner is still the winner, the error is insignificant.
Which is an interesting point that was never really dealt with in 2000 in Florida. The margin of victory in Florida was never greater that the historical margin for error... it was never actually determined who had more votes.
I haven't been under the impression that RFIDs are conventionally programmable ojects. Thus, they'll behave the same way they're initially manufactured to behave until they break.
So, even though you can program the scanner to disregard "retired" RFIDs, they're still going to perk up and shout when scanned.
The question being asked, as I understand it, is what is the RFID density necessary to defeat the effectiveness of a scanner? That there are so many RFIDs making noise simultaneously that there is no descernable signal.
So the F in RFID stands for "Flair."
Speaking of which, it would probably be more effective to embed the collected RFIDs into buttons. Then you can just trade buttons (and put them on a vest, if it so suits your sense of style, or lack thereof) and be a slightly different group of 246 different people.
Also, how many RFIDs would you have to have to make scanning ineffective due to the individual tags stepping on each other's signal?
We, that is, human beings and our industry, have vastly increased the amount of unbreathable crap being pumped into our air.
"Vastly increased"? I think you have, perhaps, slightly, overestimated the contribution human industry makes to the carbon cycle as a whole.
I'll agree that humans today are producing hundreds or thousands of times more greenhouse gases that they produced in the past. I disagree that this change is signicant.
Volcanic eruptions can pump more unbreathable crap into the air in a single day than human industry can produce in a year. Curiously, this doesn't seem to have any long term effect on gas ratios... the cycles shifts equilibrium slightly and absorbs all of it.
I personally doubt humans play a significant role in global warming and believe it is, in fact, a natural cyclic process which will end (or, rather, begin again) in the next Ice Age.
The important thing about global warming isn't an average increase in average temperatures and the melting of the ice caps. Rather, it's the increased availability of energy in the atmosphere causing so-called Super Storms, widespread disruption of historical weather patterns, and eventually a collapse of the large scale convection that been keeping the climate so temperate for the past several thousand years.
As for your colder winters... as energy is pumped into the jet stream it takes a higher amplitude curve, carrying colder polar air further towards the equator than it normally does. So, yeah, colder winters are not unexpected
Anyway, until some money gets thrown at studies doing something besides trying to link human activities to global warming, we're never going to know to what extent these changes are just part of the normal ice age cycle... and totally beyond our control, or even ability to effect.
The only reactor design I can think of that uses liquid sodium and low enrichment fuel is a Fast Breeder. One of the products of a fast breeder is Plutonium.
Why does Toshiba want plutonium?
Funny you should mention that.
There are several robotics projects out there that use PDAs for processing and control functions. Just get a wireless enabled PDA.
A friend and I have ripped apart a couple RC cars for this sort of thing. Instead of hooking the remote up to a parallel port, though, we hooked it up to a Basic Stamp. Been talking about hooking it up to a serial/parallel port just so we don't have to program in PBASIC anymore.
Also talking about duct taping the hacked remote to the RC car and then adding various sensor inputs to the basic stamp. Oh, and the rotating knives... but that's another matter. Just your basic programmable autonomous robot for considerably less than many of the kits out there.
I've often wondered how these types of systems can be made handicapped accessible
In cloning they'll take the genetic material (full set, diploid) from a somatic cell and inject it into an egg (having removed the egg's own genetic material [half set, haploid]). They then do some interestingstuff to convince the egg it's been fertilized so it will start dividing.
In this case they're just removing the haploid DNA from a donor egg and replacing it with the haploid DNA from another egg. Then it's pretty much standard IVF techniques
I'm not sure why this is outlawed. On the one hand it could be the reason many (large mammal) clones die prematurely is because of the nuclear transfer process and all the speculation about telomere erosion and the like are red herring. No one much likes the scenario of some parents having to clean up Junior with a sponge mop due to macroscale apoptosis when he reaches puberty.
I haven't heard much about these kind of trials being conducted in other animals, though. It would be useful, as it would allow you to control for a number of things (aforementioned telomere erosion, for example). I'd assume either the results weren't that interesting (I.E. no significant effect on development or mortality) or the laws banning it were worded broadly enough to ban non-human animal testing as well.
Anyone know whether anyone is doing this in animals besides humans?
What projects you process data packets for seems to be user selected. So, user choice is the authentication process.
I suppose there will be the SETI@home team people choosing which projects are initially offered, so that would be be the authentication initally to make sure you weren't getting shady non-academic data.
But, with that said, I don't see why we'd necessarily need to limit ourselves to academic data. I think it would be cool to use a distributed computing application for a massive render farm to help out grassroots digital animation groups. While it's all cool and stuff to process radio signals, I think being able to go see a movie and go "I helped make this" would be more gratifying.
Bravo for actually reading the article, ajakk.
You have it slightly wrong. Client A sends an alert to Client B when something is input into Client A and continues to send the alert periodically so long as input occurs during the period. Client B displays an indication of activity on A when it recieves the alert and checks if it has recieved the alert periodically. If Client B has recieved no alert in the previous preiod, it clears the indication.
Thus, Client B doesn't get stuck with a "$user is typing a message..." because $user got booted offline before Client A sent the no input alert. Client A goes offline, Client B stops recieving the input alert from Client A, Client B stops the indication.
The "innovation" is that Client B stops indicating input when it stops being told to indicate input... rather than having it stop indicating input when it is told to stop indicating input, as ajakk describes.
Because you just know that a well organized technologically sophisticated terrorist cell would target the average user's access to pr0n. Hit us where it hurts, right? Infidel western devils just gotta have that pr0n.
Perhaps it hasn't occurred to you, but computers run: air traffic control, banking, train switching, power production and distribution, water treatment purification and distribution, and pretty much all communication technology at this point.
Having your computer not turn on might be an "aw bummer" moment, but when you realize it's because your power isn't on... unfortunately when you try to report the outage you realize your phone can't get tone. Cellphone doesn't get service either. "Ah, well." you grumble, and get in your car to go get something to eat. Traffic is a bitch, though, all the lights are either out (due to lack of power) or behaving erratically. You stop at the ATM to get some cash for some food, but it doesn't seem to be working. You figure you could just use debit or credit card, but when you finally find a restaurant that's open they explain that they can't seem to process the cards that day. You sigh and content yourself to what you can afford with the few dollars on you: a small bowl of soup and a big glass of water. The glass of water was a bad idea, though, since a valve mix-up at the threatment plant (after they lost computer control and coordination) has contaminated half the water in the city. Your last thought a few days later as the dehydration from the sickness finally steals your conciousness for the last time? It's not about missed e-mail.
From the ways it's phrased, it sounds like you're just sending them a link to some central library with an authorization key.
Which, of course, would mean they're testing an online delivery system. Maybe they're finally starting to TRY to catch on and catch up.
What is your criteria for "work" regarding the Farnsworth Fusor? It's fairly easy to get one capable of producing a constant fusion reaction. There are commercial production designs used as on-demand neutron sources. If you mean "work" in the sense of producing more power than it uses, it was shown back in the 80s that electrostatically driven fusion could never even reach breakeven.