I work in the broadcast industry. To achieve useful workflows, everything must be network-enabled. Thus every embedded device is on the network, and a potential security risk.
A big problem we have now is with embedded BSD and Linuxes. Many of the distributions are abandoned and/or no longer supported, thus upgrades (especially security upgrades) are difficult.
To be fair, the manufacturers of the devices weren't even thinking that there could ever be a security problem with a Linux-based system, but surprise, they are rare, but can happen!
The technical term is "price discrimination," and it used to be the way everything was priced before about 200 years ago - negotiation, trying to see how much the customer is willing to pay. Fixed prices for everyone regardless of their need or ability to pay is generally a modern concept, brought about only through mass production and mass marketing. Note that through things like Amazon and Ebay, it is going away again.
Price discrimination is beneficial. If a drug company can make more profits in Canada by selling more drugs at a lower price, it means more money for them, which can go into R&D (and yes marketing, overhead, etc.). I can assure you that if drug companies made less profits in Canada because they couldn't price discriminate, they'd make back the profit margin in some other way (such as reducing R&D).
Moreover, price discrimination means that more people in Canada can afford the drugs.
The difference between the US and Canada is that if you have a problem with your insurance provider, it is ILLEGAL for you to pay market rates for your own care in Canada, while you can do that in the US.
Someone I love came down with a rare disease. We had to spend a lot of money to get her to the right kind of specialist. People we know in Canada with this disease don't have this option, they have to come to the US and pay for special care here.
Medical care in the US is improving all the time. A few years ago, there was no treatment for this rare disease, today there is. It is no big surprise that we are spending more for medical care. The American life span rises every year because of it.
Actually generic drugs are CHEAPER in the US than in Canada, because the American generics market is the world's most competitive.
Re:Welcome to capitalism
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 2, Informative
As noted in the European Commission's recent Communication on an industrial policy for the pharmaceutical industry, the EUs share of "new chemical entities" (NCEs) developed worldwide has fallen from one half 20 years ago to only around one third today. Moreover, a McKinsey study has shown that Europe lags behind in major innovations. Of the NCEs developed in 1975-1989 categorized as "breakthroughs," as opposed to those representing merely "therapeutic progress," two-thirds originated in the laboratories of U.S. companies.
Why is the energy of the European industry more focused on the low risk/low reward end of R&D rather than achieving the therapeutic cutting edge?
The main obstacle is the lack of a free market. EU pricing policies in virtually every case involve some form of market distortion. Across Europe, health care tends to be public sector-dominated, creating a series of monopolies on the demand side. The state is either the insurer itself, or it controls the insurance. As health care demand rises, cost containment becomes the priority. Although drug costs are a relatively small percentage of overall health care budgets, drug companies are an easier political target than the state's own employees.
Where price control is used for cost containment, the tendency is to drive out innovation. This happened in Canada and Australia, which have both seen a steep decline in the introduction of new products.
The same will probably happen to countries which engage in "reference" pricing. The trend will be to encourage the use of older, cheaper and less effective drugs rather than newer, better formulations.
Re:Welcome to capitalism
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Can you just shut up about "me too" drugs!
I know plenty of people whose quality of life (an capability of staying alive) depends on the fact that, for instance, there are several different kinds of dopamine antagonists (prochlorperazine, metoclopramide, domperidone) used in gastroparesis, since they all have different effectiveness and different side effects in different people. I know people who might not be alive today if, for instance, a decision was made not to produce domperidone, but they just stuck with metoclopramide.
I myself have very different side effects when taking Prilosec versus Prevacid. I prefer Prilosec, others prefer Prevacid.
On advertising, if the drug companies didn't advertise, I might not even know there is an option between Prilosec and Prevacid.
Plus I hope they sell a lot through advertising because these companies make the drugs that keep people I love alive, and often that is with drugs that are not incredibly profitable, but depend on drugs like Viagra to keep the cash flowing in to continue to produce new drugs.
There are TONS of IT jobs in Washington, DC. If you are willing and capable of getting a security clearance, you can get a job. Getting your first clearance job will be a bit of a challenge, but once you get it, you are set.
Why is the Bush Doctrine "a serious departure from previous American foreign policy"? What do you call the Spanish-American War, Korean War, Vietnam War, Panama invasion, Haitian invasion, Somialia invasion, the Gulf War, Monroe Doctrine, not to mention a half-dozen "secret wars" in El Salvador, etc.
These were all wars of pre-emption. Some had "coalitions," some did not. One may disagree with some or all of them, but the Iraq invasion and the Bush Doctrine is "business as usual," although perhaps it has never been so explicitly spelled out recently.
The War on Drugs has always been stupid. There is one presidential candidate on the ballot who opposes it. I'll leave it to the readers to figure out who.
There are people on this planet who would kill to have the opportunity to get a loan to have them trained in a profession. It is an investment in your future, one that should have a positive return even after the cost of the education and interest are taken into account.
Or the off-shoring could be reducing the price of goods, letting Americans keep more of their income, allowing them to spend more on other things, which could also raise the number of US jobs.
Or off-shoring could be increasing the wealth of countries we trade with, allowing their citizens to purchase things from the US, which would be giving back US jobs.
Or the off-shoring could be changing the description of US jobs by reducing the lowest skilled parts and replacing them with higher skilled or managerial parts.
There is absolutely no difference between replacing part or all of someone's job with a computer/automation or a person in India. Except at least the person in India could be lifted out of poverty...
A lot of economists argue that the minimum wage leads to unemployment. Yet we keep on raising the minimum wage every now and then, and it doesn't seem to have a significant effect on unemployment.
The reason is simple: only 2% of US employees earn the minimum wage. Most of that 2% is retail fast food workers. It is so low that the vast, vast majority of jobs have market-based prices higher than the minimum wage. It may have a deleterious effect on teenage unemployment, but not unemployment in general.
The "smart" politician will say to the public "Oh horrors, there must be a minimum wage hike so people aren't in poverty". What he means is "The market prices for 98% of jobs in this country went up, so raise the minimum wage just enough to make it look like I care, but won't actually lead to significantly higher unemployment."
Take this reasoning and apply it to China and India, both of which also have a minimum wage, though much, much smaller than that of the US). Their min wage t probably only affects a small part of their population as well (as many of the people in those country don't work for wages anyway but are subsistence farmers, and the ones who do tend to make more than them minimum wage).
Heh, there is a fine line between pricing and regulation...I bet you those shipbuilders didn't always get two schekles for a boat of 60 gur...
"For you, brother, I make you a special deal..."
Now I am sure there some recorded fixed prices from various niche vendors in the classical world, but nothing like a Sears Catalog or what you find in your grocery store.
I have all 351 pages of the proposed VC-1 standard right here in front of me. It isn't black-box at all.
What might not be clear is that video codec standards are generally described by their bitsream format and decoding process. MPEG-2 is this way as well. The magic that goes into the encoding bit is left to the encoding geniuses, and is why encoding gets better each year even if you use the same "codec".
The article does appear to indicate that Microsoft has not provided a reference VC-1 encoder. It is typical practice to at least publish an open source reference encoder for the codec, even if it isn't a particularly good one.
I should also mention that you would have to work pretty hard to create a "patent unencumbered" video codec today. Most of the ways you can think of to compress video have been patented by someone or another. Infact, it is only recently that it has been determined who held all the patents on VC-1 compression technqiues.
I bet if Ogg Theora was given the same scrutiny, that VC-1 has had, patent holders would come out of the woodwork and demand a piece of the action. The same thing occured with H.264, and the situation there was so complex that two separate licensing agencies have aggregated all the patent holders.
All these comparisons are BS, because half of the quality of video compression comes from the implementation. We've seen MPEG-2 video of equivalent quality at bitrates half of the same quality 6 years ago. People figure out sneakier ways to pre-processs video, post-process video, and determine which motion vectors to use, etc.
One would expect that, given time, there will be improvements in both VC-1 and H.264 of a similar nature. So it really depends how long a codec has been being implemented.
Both VC-1 and H.264 today, out of the box, produce equivalent -live- encode quality as the best MPEG-2 -live- encoders. Multipass non-live encoding is easy.
Canada will never be able to stop the re-export of prescription drugs. It isn't like either the US or Canada can stop the import of illegal drugs, for example.
Drug companies will raise rates, or cut off Canada. Canada may need to get some of their own pharma companies...
It's called "price discrimination." People outside the US can't afford to pay as much for drugs. Since the marginal cost for the next pill is so small, compared to the massive up-front R&D, if you sell more pills you always make money, even if you have to sell them for less to some people.
This helps everyone by increasing the profitability of drugs (for the people in the US who pay more, the R&D keeps happening), and for the people outside the US who pay less, who otherwise could not buy the drugs.
More than 150 years ago, ALL TRANSACTIONS were done with price discrimination. It was called "haggling." Fixed-prices were something that came along only with mass industrial consumerism, when it became more expensive to haggle and price discriminate than to publish a catalog with a fixed price.
Slashdot Mirror
I work in the broadcast industry. To achieve useful workflows, everything must be network-enabled. Thus every embedded device is on the network, and a potential security risk.
A big problem we have now is with embedded BSD and Linuxes. Many of the distributions are abandoned and/or no longer supported, thus upgrades (especially security upgrades) are difficult.
To be fair, the manufacturers of the devices weren't even thinking that there could ever be a security problem with a Linux-based system, but surprise, they are rare, but can happen!
The technical term is "price discrimination," and it used to be the way everything was priced before about 200 years ago - negotiation, trying to see how much the customer is willing to pay. Fixed prices for everyone regardless of their need or ability to pay is generally a modern concept, brought about only through mass production and mass marketing. Note that through things like Amazon and Ebay, it is going away again.
Price discrimination is beneficial. If a drug company can make more profits in Canada by selling more drugs at a lower price, it means more money for them, which can go into R&D (and yes marketing, overhead, etc.). I can assure you that if drug companies made less profits in Canada because they couldn't price discriminate, they'd make back the profit margin in some other way (such as reducing R&D).
Moreover, price discrimination means that more people in Canada can afford the drugs.
The difference between the US and Canada is that if you have a problem with your insurance provider, it is ILLEGAL for you to pay market rates for your own care in Canada, while you can do that in the US.
Someone I love came down with a rare disease. We had to spend a lot of money to get her to the right kind of specialist. People we know in Canada with this disease don't have this option, they have to come to the US and pay for special care here.
Medical care in the US is improving all the time. A few years ago, there was no treatment for this rare disease, today there is. It is no big surprise that we are spending more for medical care. The American life span rises every year because of it.
Actually generic drugs are CHEAPER in the US than in Canada, because the American generics market is the world's most competitive.
As noted in the European Commission's recent Communication on an industrial policy for the pharmaceutical industry, the EUs share of "new chemical entities" (NCEs) developed worldwide has fallen from one half 20 years ago to only around one third today. Moreover, a McKinsey study has shown that Europe lags behind in major innovations. Of the NCEs developed in 1975-1989 categorized as "breakthroughs," as opposed to those representing merely "therapeutic progress," two-thirds originated in the laboratories of U.S. companies.
Why is the energy of the European industry more focused on the low risk/low reward end of R&D rather than achieving the therapeutic cutting edge?
The main obstacle is the lack of a free market. EU pricing policies in virtually every case involve some form of market distortion. Across Europe, health care tends to be public sector-dominated, creating a series of monopolies on the demand side. The state is either the insurer itself, or it controls the insurance. As health care demand rises, cost containment becomes the priority. Although drug costs are a relatively small percentage of overall health care budgets, drug companies are an easier political target than the state's own employees.
Where price control is used for cost containment, the tendency is to drive out innovation. This happened in Canada and Australia, which have both seen a steep decline in the introduction of new products.
The same will probably happen to countries which engage in "reference" pricing. The trend will be to encourage the use of older, cheaper and less effective drugs rather than newer, better formulations.
Can you just shut up about "me too" drugs!
I know plenty of people whose quality of life (an capability of staying alive) depends on the fact that, for instance, there are several different kinds of dopamine antagonists (prochlorperazine, metoclopramide, domperidone) used in gastroparesis, since they all have different effectiveness and different side effects in different people. I know people who might not be alive today if, for instance, a decision was made not to produce domperidone, but they just stuck with metoclopramide.
I myself have very different side effects when taking Prilosec versus Prevacid. I prefer Prilosec, others prefer Prevacid.
On advertising, if the drug companies didn't advertise, I might not even know there is an option between Prilosec and Prevacid.
Plus I hope they sell a lot through advertising because these companies make the drugs that keep people I love alive, and often that is with drugs that are not incredibly profitable, but depend on drugs like Viagra to keep the cash flowing in to continue to produce new drugs.
Did you know there once were people called "desktop publishers" who took your typewritten manuscripts and put them onto a computer word processor?
UMCP also has a very solid Electrical Engineering program.
There are TONS of IT jobs in Washington, DC. If you are willing and capable of getting a security clearance, you can get a job. Getting your first clearance job will be a bit of a challenge, but once you get it, you are set.
What I really like are blogs that give real information - not the kind of populist watered-down news you get on TV or the newspaper.
For example, check out these blogs by actual economists...
Marginal Revolution
Cafe Hayek
EconLog
Ben Muse
Yes but there is plenty of Thorium, which could be bred into fertile material in a number of ways, including accelerator catalyzed fission.
Why is the Bush Doctrine "a serious departure from previous American foreign policy"? What do you call the Spanish-American War, Korean War, Vietnam War, Panama invasion, Haitian invasion, Somialia invasion, the Gulf War, Monroe Doctrine, not to mention a half-dozen "secret wars" in El Salvador, etc.
These were all wars of pre-emption. Some had "coalitions," some did not. One may disagree with some or all of them, but the Iraq invasion and the Bush Doctrine is "business as usual," although perhaps it has never been so explicitly spelled out recently.
The War on Drugs has always been stupid. There is one presidential candidate on the ballot who opposes it. I'll leave it to the readers to figure out who.
There are people on this planet who would kill to have the opportunity to get a loan to have them trained in a profession. It is an investment in your future, one that should have a positive return even after the cost of the education and interest are taken into account.
Unless you study something like art history...
Canada imports $200 billion from the US every year. So I am all for Canadians having jobs...
Or the off-shoring could be reducing the price of goods, letting Americans keep more of their income, allowing them to spend more on other things, which could also raise the number of US jobs.
Or off-shoring could be increasing the wealth of countries we trade with, allowing their citizens to purchase things from the US, which would be giving back US jobs.
Or the off-shoring could be changing the description of US jobs by reducing the lowest skilled parts and replacing them with higher skilled or managerial parts.
There is absolutely no difference between replacing part or all of someone's job with a computer/automation or a person in India. Except at least the person in India could be lifted out of poverty...
A lot of economists argue that the minimum wage leads to unemployment. Yet we keep on raising the minimum wage every now and then, and it doesn't seem to have a significant effect on unemployment.
The reason is simple: only 2% of US employees earn the minimum wage. Most of that 2% is retail fast food workers. It is so low that the vast, vast majority of jobs have market-based prices higher than the minimum wage. It may have a deleterious effect on teenage unemployment, but not unemployment in general.
The "smart" politician will say to the public "Oh horrors, there must be a minimum wage hike so people aren't in poverty". What he means is "The market prices for 98% of jobs in this country went up, so raise the minimum wage just enough to make it look like I care, but won't actually lead to significantly higher unemployment."
Take this reasoning and apply it to China and India, both of which also have a minimum wage, though much, much smaller than that of the US). Their min wage t probably only affects a small part of their population as well (as many of the people in those country don't work for wages anyway but are subsistence farmers, and the ones who do tend to make more than them minimum wage).
Heh, there is a fine line between pricing and regulation...I bet you those shipbuilders didn't always get two schekles for a boat of 60 gur...
"For you, brother, I make you a special deal..."
Now I am sure there some recorded fixed prices from various niche vendors in the classical world, but nothing like a Sears Catalog or what you find in your grocery store.
I have all 351 pages of the proposed VC-1 standard right here in front of me. It isn't black-box at all.
What might not be clear is that video codec standards are generally described by their bitsream format and decoding process. MPEG-2 is this way as well. The magic that goes into the encoding bit is left to the encoding geniuses, and is why encoding gets better each year even if you use the same "codec".
The article does appear to indicate that Microsoft has not provided a reference VC-1 encoder. It is typical practice to at least publish an open source reference encoder for the codec, even if it isn't a particularly good one.
I should also mention that you would have to work pretty hard to create a "patent unencumbered" video codec today. Most of the ways you can think of to compress video have been patented by someone or another. Infact, it is only recently that it has been determined who held all the patents on VC-1 compression technqiues.
I bet if Ogg Theora was given the same scrutiny, that VC-1 has had, patent holders would come out of the woodwork and demand a piece of the action. The same thing occured with H.264, and the situation there was so complex that two separate licensing agencies have aggregated all the patent holders.
All these comparisons are BS, because half of the quality of video compression comes from the implementation. We've seen MPEG-2 video of equivalent quality at bitrates half of the same quality 6 years ago. People figure out sneakier ways to pre-processs video, post-process video, and determine which motion vectors to use, etc.
One would expect that, given time, there will be improvements in both VC-1 and H.264 of a similar nature. So it really depends how long a codec has been being implemented.
Both VC-1 and H.264 today, out of the box, produce equivalent -live- encode quality as the best MPEG-2 -live- encoders. Multipass non-live encoding is easy.
You should have looked into cheaper foreign med schools ;)
http://www.stmatthews.edu/
A lot of Cubans work in the fields for months every year. No need for a gym!
Not to mention a lower rate of vehicular death - no cars going over 40 MPH...
And less murder - no money to buy drugs, no gangbangers.
You only "spend money" on tax cuts when you are running a deficit, because that deficit is a future tax. Plus interest.
Canada will never be able to stop the re-export of prescription drugs. It isn't like either the US or Canada can stop the import of illegal drugs, for example.
Drug companies will raise rates, or cut off Canada. Canada may need to get some of their own pharma companies...
It's called "price discrimination." People outside the US can't afford to pay as much for drugs. Since the marginal cost for the next pill is so small, compared to the massive up-front R&D, if you sell more pills you always make money, even if you have to sell them for less to some people.
This helps everyone by increasing the profitability of drugs (for the people in the US who pay more, the R&D keeps happening), and for the people outside the US who pay less, who otherwise could not buy the drugs.
More than 150 years ago, ALL TRANSACTIONS were done with price discrimination. It was called "haggling." Fixed-prices were something that came along only with mass industrial consumerism, when it became more expensive to haggle and price discriminate than to publish a catalog with a fixed price.