There are still people who think that piracy might end up with them on the receiving end of a lawsuit. Really rich people don't care, and poor people won't be much bothered. But someone who makes $100k/year has a lot to lose and yet not enough resources to avoid being hurt badly by an adverse judgement.
Cable is putting out Dexter, Boardwalk Empire, and Game of Thrones, all of which feature interesting plots, very good acting, and engaging writing. (Dexter was pretty weak last season, but I've been pretty happy with this one.)
Unless you donate every penny you make above the poverty line to someone who would otherwise die, you're just as guilty as they are. I think my duties to other human beings are limited - I don't think that the fact that people starve, or die of cholera, or have repressive governments, means that we shouldn't have movies, music, or Disney World.
You have this odd focus on murder, as though the gradations of killing another person and making more money are equivalent. The drug companies do offer life-extending compounds, but unless you already lead a rich-country lifestyle they're astonishingly unlikely to do much for you.
But they don't. Most people are generally law-abiding and actually want to follow the rules of traffic. I've lived most of my life in a place where greens are delayed by as much as two full seconds after a reasonable-length yellow, and running red lights - really running them, not just coming in right at the end of a yellow - is very rare.
(there used to be much stronger restrictions also on how Big Pharma could seek to debase the judgment of doctors directly - through perks that are just dressed-up kick-backs for prescribing costly drugs)
I'd love to hear about this. PhRMA has very strict rules - about all they can do these days is give a doctor dinner (and not his/her spouse, unless said spouse is also an MD or RN).
You're scientifically right about Prilosec/Nexium (and, by extension, Celexa/Lexapro; you also might go for Effexor/Pristiq if you branched out into metabolites, though that's a little more dangerous as Allegra is merely a metabolite of Seldane yet lacks any of the latter's potential for cardiotoxicity). Nexium's success, however, has little to do with crowding drugs out of doctors' minds and a great deal to do with patients' pocketbooks. American health insurance companies don't pay for OTC meds; patients have to buy them themselves. If the co-pays are fairly low for a brand-name drug, it will cost the patient less out of pocket to get the prescription rather than the OTC, even though the OTC is less expensive overall. It's the same reason that so many antihypertensive drugs come in combination pills - one pill, one co-pay.
See, without the new and expensive drugs, there won't be any more cheap generics to come along. You can - right now - take every medication that was best-on-the-market in 1990 as a generic.
What bad publicity? The big boys do the offshore work, the Alaska work - we're talking about land-based here, which are mostly in areas that have had oil and gas exploration for a long time and look at it as a source of revenue and jobs.
Not really. Everybody acts like sales and marketing are unimportant details. They are not. Products do not sell themselves, and no amount of disliking sales and marketing people is going to change that. Companies that ditch their highly-paid sales staff (some of whom will outearn the CEO/founder, especially in small companies) quickly find this out.
Universities don't discover drugs. They discover mechanisms. Drug companies make drugs that work on those mechanisms. I suppose, if the Aussie taxpayers really did finance all of Gardasil, they ought to be intelligent enough to extract some pretty damned good fees for the US patent rights. If they can charge much more, but don't pay more, then what kind of chumps are running AU? Sure as hell not the CSIRO guys who went after Buffalo.
In the early 1900s, nobody had NMR, IR, or mass spectrometry to determine structures and reproduce them. And we really had very few drugs - if you study the development of clinically useful drugs, modern mechanisms of action mostly didn't appear until the amphetamines of the 1920s, and penicillin and the antihistamines in the 1930s.
A very similar situation obtains in the oil and gas drilling industry - small companies do the development work, identify the field, drill a few test wells, and ultimately sell the field to a large company like ExxonMobil, Texaco, etc. The small companies do their job and take their profit, then move on to the next one - they're more nimble, and the big boys would rather pump oil and refine it for fuels and chemicals than go out and find it.
This bears only the most tenuous connection to the truth. Yes, the cholesterol synthesis pathway came out of a lot of university research. HMG-CoA reductase is a critical enzyme. There are a lot of compounds that will inhibit enzymes in vitro; the vast majority are utterly unsuited to use as anything but research compounds because they aren't safe, can't be made into an orally bioavailable form, have bad kinetics, or any of a thousand other things that can sink a potential drug.
Drugs come from... drug companies, not from universities, because drug companies have the billions of dollars to put a compound through clinical trials and the expertise to make the drugs usable.
I guess I wasn't clear enough with the second half of my statement. I didn't watch the video, but unless that was a Nexus phone it wasn't a developer phone; it was a phone that he used for development. His original contract of sale / use with AT&T for the phone may very well have included terms that allowed them to run CIQ whenever he used the device, not just while using their service.
Just because you no longer have an early termination fee doesn't mean that you're no longer under contract; you're still operating under the same terms as before except that you can cancel service at any time. Glance at click-through licenses some time; they say things like "use of this device constitutes..." rather than "use of this service constitutes..."
As for space shifting, nobody will sue you for OCR'ing your paperback books or typing them in by hand. Just because it's legal for you to do it yourself doesn't mean they have an obligation to make it easy, or to do the conversion for you for free.
Slashdot Mirror
That's fine if you don't mind watching TV a year or more behind.
I'm talking about one that's actually out, not in the works. I did think of one - warfarin was developed as a rat poison.
There are still people who think that piracy might end up with them on the receiving end of a lawsuit. Really rich people don't care, and poor people won't be much bothered. But someone who makes $100k/year has a lot to lose and yet not enough resources to avoid being hurt badly by an adverse judgement.
Cable is putting out Dexter, Boardwalk Empire, and Game of Thrones, all of which feature interesting plots, very good acting, and engaging writing. (Dexter was pretty weak last season, but I've been pretty happy with this one.)
Unless you donate every penny you make above the poverty line to someone who would otherwise die, you're just as guilty as they are. I think my duties to other human beings are limited - I don't think that the fact that people starve, or die of cholera, or have repressive governments, means that we shouldn't have movies, music, or Disney World.
You have this odd focus on murder, as though the gradations of killing another person and making more money are equivalent. The drug companies do offer life-extending compounds, but unless you already lead a rich-country lifestyle they're astonishingly unlikely to do much for you.
But they don't. Most people are generally law-abiding and actually want to follow the rules of traffic. I've lived most of my life in a place where greens are delayed by as much as two full seconds after a reasonable-length yellow, and running red lights - really running them, not just coming in right at the end of a yellow - is very rare.
Sorry, I don't follow you. I don't think making money is evil. He thinks that making money is OK but if you make too much it's evil.
Except that you think that making profits is acceptable, just that maximizing them is evil. What's the dividing line?
(there used to be much stronger restrictions also on how Big Pharma could seek to debase the judgment of doctors directly - through perks that are just dressed-up kick-backs for prescribing costly drugs)
I'd love to hear about this. PhRMA has very strict rules - about all they can do these days is give a doctor dinner (and not his/her spouse, unless said spouse is also an MD or RN).
You're scientifically right about Prilosec/Nexium (and, by extension, Celexa/Lexapro; you also might go for Effexor/Pristiq if you branched out into metabolites, though that's a little more dangerous as Allegra is merely a metabolite of Seldane yet lacks any of the latter's potential for cardiotoxicity). Nexium's success, however, has little to do with crowding drugs out of doctors' minds and a great deal to do with patients' pocketbooks. American health insurance companies don't pay for OTC meds; patients have to buy them themselves. If the co-pays are fairly low for a brand-name drug, it will cost the patient less out of pocket to get the prescription rather than the OTC, even though the OTC is less expensive overall. It's the same reason that so many antihypertensive drugs come in combination pills - one pill, one co-pay.
profits have to be made. Yet maximising profits, by high prices on monopoly drugs, resulting in preventable deaths, is evil
The difference between good and evil is what you decide is "enough" profit for them?
Which drugs have you seen universities develop and hand - ready for clinical trials - to a drug company? I'm genuinely curious.
See, without the new and expensive drugs, there won't be any more cheap generics to come along. You can - right now - take every medication that was best-on-the-market in 1990 as a generic.
What bad publicity? The big boys do the offshore work, the Alaska work - we're talking about land-based here, which are mostly in areas that have had oil and gas exploration for a long time and look at it as a source of revenue and jobs.
Not really. Everybody acts like sales and marketing are unimportant details. They are not. Products do not sell themselves, and no amount of disliking sales and marketing people is going to change that. Companies that ditch their highly-paid sales staff (some of whom will outearn the CEO/founder, especially in small companies) quickly find this out.
Spare me the rhetoric. There is no shame in trying to earn money. Do you donate every penny you make above the poverty line to those who are below it?
$10M is a drop in the bucket for a clinical trial.
Universities don't discover drugs. They discover mechanisms. Drug companies make drugs that work on those mechanisms. I suppose, if the Aussie taxpayers really did finance all of Gardasil, they ought to be intelligent enough to extract some pretty damned good fees for the US patent rights. If they can charge much more, but don't pay more, then what kind of chumps are running AU? Sure as hell not the CSIRO guys who went after Buffalo.
In the early 1900s, nobody had NMR, IR, or mass spectrometry to determine structures and reproduce them. And we really had very few drugs - if you study the development of clinically useful drugs, modern mechanisms of action mostly didn't appear until the amphetamines of the 1920s, and penicillin and the antihistamines in the 1930s.
So what? The fact that marketing a drug is really expensive doesn't mean that developing it is cheap.
A very similar situation obtains in the oil and gas drilling industry - small companies do the development work, identify the field, drill a few test wells, and ultimately sell the field to a large company like ExxonMobil, Texaco, etc. The small companies do their job and take their profit, then move on to the next one - they're more nimble, and the big boys would rather pump oil and refine it for fuels and chemicals than go out and find it.
This bears only the most tenuous connection to the truth. Yes, the cholesterol synthesis pathway came out of a lot of university research. HMG-CoA reductase is a critical enzyme. There are a lot of compounds that will inhibit enzymes in vitro; the vast majority are utterly unsuited to use as anything but research compounds because they aren't safe, can't be made into an orally bioavailable form, have bad kinetics, or any of a thousand other things that can sink a potential drug.
Drugs come from... drug companies, not from universities, because drug companies have the billions of dollars to put a compound through clinical trials and the expertise to make the drugs usable.
I guess I wasn't clear enough with the second half of my statement. I didn't watch the video, but unless that was a Nexus phone it wasn't a developer phone; it was a phone that he used for development. His original contract of sale / use with AT&T for the phone may very well have included terms that allowed them to run CIQ whenever he used the device, not just while using their service.
Just because you no longer have an early termination fee doesn't mean that you're no longer under contract; you're still operating under the same terms as before except that you can cancel service at any time. Glance at click-through licenses some time; they say things like "use of this device constitutes..." rather than "use of this service constitutes..."
As for space shifting, nobody will sue you for OCR'ing your paperback books or typing them in by hand. Just because it's legal for you to do it yourself doesn't mean they have an obligation to make it easy, or to do the conversion for you for free.
when purely tap-typing, I seem to be slightly more accurate with the iOS keyboard
That's your answer right there. Most people don't spend most of their time typing in numbers and special characters, nor even capitalizing much.