People have been dying for hundreds of thousands of years. It's not like this is plague or something where a huge portion of the population will die off in a few years time; AIDS takes a relatively long time to kill people, and it's pretty damned hard to spread. HIV infection rates in some countries are near 40% of the population. Between 33 and 46 million people are now infected worldwide. Between 3.2 and 6.4 million new infections occurred in 2005 alone. Most people who are infected do not know they are infected and thus spread the infection further.
I think the situation is a bit worse than you've been led to believe.
Essentially, when you want the drug companies to give away a drug, you want to expropriate their property. As an investor, ask yourself whether you're willing to put your money into an industry that's subject to expropriation, and think about whether you want a drug industry around or not the next time a pesky little virus emerges from the forrest.
If countries breaking patents, will the drug companies stop using publicly-funded research to develop their new drugs which they then sell at exorbitant rates?
As I see it, the pharma industry is expropriating our tax dollars and then whining about the damage being done to the free market when the public actually wants something in return.
I see that you've been reading the leaflets that the pharmaceuticals have been spreading for years. The truth is that most of the actual research is conducted in labs that receive HUGE amounts of public funding. The the drug companies greatest contribution comes in the development of manufacturing processes. Take AZT for example. Developed by the National Institutes of Health in the 1960s as a cancer drug, but failed to amount to anything.
Flash-forward to the early 1980s and the frightening early years of the AIDS crisis where there was absolutely nothing in the way of effective treatments for the first six years of the epidemic. It was pure hospice care until the National Cancer Institute took another look at AZT and found that it was the first drug that HIV seemed to respond to. The patent was assigned to Burroughs-Wellcome who paid for drug trials and promptly began selling it two years later. Selling it at a price that made it the most expensive drugs ever marketed ($8,000+ a year per patient) - despite the fact it was developed with public money and was the only treatment available for a rapidly-spreading disease with a 100% mortality rate.
What about the cost of bailing out MAGTrak every couple years because no one uses trains?
When your national rail company's trains are largely at the mercy of the scheduling whims of private freight companies there is a strong disincentive to use them.
Add to that the pitiful funding for everything from food to maintenance and what do you expect? Amtrak barely gets enough money to keep the lights on.
It would take 10 to 15 years to build, but being an Alaskan, it sounds good to me!"
What if that means you have to give up almost half your $1,000 yearly oil royalty check for ten to fifteen years ? Because that's about what it would cost, assuming Alaska pays half and Russia pays half.
Alaskans don't pay for anything, they have the rest of the country pick up the tab while they hold onto their Permanent Fund cash and elect people who decry excessive Federal government spending. Hypocrites of the first order.
Bemoaning the fact iTunes requires Quicktime to be installed ignores the fact iTunes is nothing but an XML front-end for Quicktime. It's a database and shopping app that offloads all of its media handling to the existing suite of software designed to handle such things.
If they had created another software package to replicate the services provided by Quicktime just for iTunes people would be lining up to say how it exemplified a lack of faith in the established suite.
I don't think it's new features as much as quality. Apple has been going months between Leopard seeds and the quality of the seeds has been dismal. Judging by the number of issues I saw in the last seed, I'm not at all surprised that they are slipping the release. I'll agree that it is a combonation of both.
Personally, I'm just sick of Tiger and want an update already. I'm just glad that the shareware community has done a lot to help counteract Apple's inability to keep up the pace. OmniWeb being the most notable example of this. Bugs aside, it's far ahead of Safari in almost every possible way. Hell, even the graphical tabs become an enjoyable thing after a few days.
They've gone, what, 5 releases without fixing (much) in Finder; what makes you think they'll fix it this time around? Desperate hope, and nothing more.
Their attitude for the past six years has been along the lines of "We've got an amazing new way to share your iPhone's SMS messages with iWeb, who cares about the Finder?"
This was pretty obvious from as early as Mid-March. We knew there would be "secret features" coming, and none of them have thus far appeared in any of the betas.
Apple isn't retarded, and it is highly unlikely that they would have dumped them in the laps of developers a matter of weeks prior to the final release. That being said, I will go into nerd rage spasms if they don't fix Finder this time around and spend their efforts doing some stupid.Mac integration or comparable bullshit feature that ignores the rotting elephant in the room.
I'm quite a fan of Indian cuisine, but in light of the limitations of their air filtering system, don't you think it's a bit cruel to allow an astronaut to bring curry aboard the ISS?
Challenger had to get off the ground as soon as possible. Columbia's loss was in part due to "we don't have time to check that" attitudes from those who could have looked for damage while the orbiter was still in orbit (i.e. photography from other spacecraft) and the assumption that there was no real problem. Challenger, yeah. Columbia? Not so much. Even if they did take the time to get satellite pics of the damage, there was nothing to be done. There was no feasible plan for rescuing the crew. Not enough fuel to fly to the ISS, not enough supplies for them to wait for Atlantis to be prepped for launch, and no means of resupplying them. NASA put all their eggs in one basket, and then broke the basket. Once that foam hit and they reached orbit, they were screwed. The shuttle is simply overly complex and delicate. The problem is more that they went out of their way to not find out if Columbia was OK. Engineers were worried and put in a routine request with the DoD to have one of their birds take a few shots of the orbiter, but NASA managers found out and had it canceled. They were adamant that everything was fine and there couldn't possibly be a need to take a closer look at what happened, despite the fact it wasn't any skin off their back to evaluate the situation further. It wasn't like they were really putting the DoD out in any way, they would have gladly taken some pictures and then resumed whatever it was they were doing with the satellite.
It was a case of "My theory is 100% infallible and don't you dare counter it even if it can be done effortlessly and for free"
In many sprawling communities, walking past the driveway/subdivision is asking to die.
That's not hyperbole, but a basic consequence of planning that is downright hostile to anyone who isn't behind the wheel of a car. I don't believe cars should be eliminated, but car-dependance is a truly awful thing that I'm glad that I've been able to break free of...but I don't know for how long. The attitude of the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority isn't friendly to mass transit. In the words of their last General Manager "the automobile won" and light rail is obsolete. Buses are the future, apparently. In the last few decades, automobile registrations in Boston have tripled as rail lines have been shut down or cut back dramatically in favor of surprise bustitution that suddenly becomes permanent.
It's depressing enough to see a new cookie-cutter car-dependant community rise up where a forest used to be, but it's even worse when a city with an excellent transit system that encourages people to ride the train then walk decides that it wants to be just like PinePointeAutumnPreserveRegistryReserveGrove Habitation Area #49485776893-B and compel people to pick up the bad habits of the suburbs.
Maybe nobody remembers, but back when Steve Jobs first announced the Intel switch, he also announced a 5-year agreement with Microsoft where MS committed to continuing to release Office for the Mac. Surely Apple's lawyers weren't stupid enough to let MS kneecap the product (which is exactly what it's done) and get away with it, right?
Do you remember the MacWorld when Apple and Microsoft announced a new level of partnership, and that the Mactopia site would become the center for all of Microsoft's promised new offerings on the platform? Do you remember what really happened?
Nothing. Microsoft actually began to reduce their support for the Mac. Same thing with the next big announcement of a Microsoft commitment to the Mac at the time of the Intel switch.
- Not-Invented-Here Syndrome: Reinvent and implement what already exists because it's not 100% the way you want it to be. Why collaborate when you can just create another duplicate project that will never make it past beta or even close to feature complete?
- Users, What Users?: Coding for yourself is nice, but if you want users to flock to your app, you might want to actually consider what they want. Don't bitch and moan at them when they offer suggestions, even if said suggestions don't fit your own personal vision, or even if they are downright stupid. That doesn't mean you have to implement them, but it means you have to be weigh them equally with your own ideas. Try to be inclusive and open to your userbase. "Go code it yourself" is a great way to keep OSS in the geek ghettos of the computing world.
- But It Looks Pretty: That's a snazzy looking interface you just whipped up, is it consistent? No? Does it follow standard UI principles? No? I'm sure people won't become frustrated and dismissive of your hard work. You can say that UI standards impinge on your freedom as a developer, but they make a user's life much easier, and makes people much more likely to actually use your software.
- Ask, Don't Beg: Asking companies and organizations to open code is nice and helpful, but be careful how you go about it. It can easily come across as "The OSS community could never dream of putting something like that together. Gimme!" Don't act like you *expect* the code, and that they are evil incarnate for withholding it. Don't make it seem as if the OSS community is incompetent and needs privately-developed projects turned over wholesale to get anything accomplished. Sure it helps a whole lot, but don't make it seem as though OSS is just mooching off the investment of others.
- Vendettas: If two projects can fight over something, no matter how petty, they will. Try coding, it's more productive and makes you appear like a mature, competent project that might help win over those hesitant to support OSS. Or you could just continue the pissing matches and flamefests over icons and licensing minutiae that could probably be settled if egos were set aside for a few moments. Public wars of words, endless forking....nothing gets accomplished but the stroking of egos. Well, except the whole "OSS developers come across as immature, childish amateurs" thing.
then it would be perfect for a cron job. Why do you need to pay someone to click the friggin button?
If it ran Linux, you could automate this with a cron job, but you would also have to deal with the fact that flushing is permanently on the "To Do" list, and if you complain that it is not functioning you are told to go "code it yourself". The toilet would also come with a hefty support contract at a cost approximately 500% of the purchase price.
On the bright side though, the new flashy lights and color scheme are sure to make this the year the Linux toilet is ready for the home bathroom.
Increasingly, it seems as if corporations are coming to the conclusion that not only should they have the potential to earn money from something, but that they have the right to. This is irrespective of practical considerations such as "Does the claim make a bit of sense?"
Microsoft's claim here is another in a flurry of claims that sits alongside the net neutrality debate, the royalties Universal collects on each Zune sold, in addition to the royalties they collect on the music purchased to play on the device and the push by various private weather services to make it illegal for the U.S. government to release taxpayer-funded weather data for free.
Sorry, but if your business model isn't working, if you aren't bringing in as much revenue as you would like to, don't run around holding your hat out demanding more cash just because you want it. Shut up, fix your business model, create a compelling product or service and compete.
There really seems to be no question of "Do these people want to be converted?"
It's pretty audacious to assume that everyone you know really wants to learn a new OS, deal with a whole new slew of applications and the 'nix intricacies that they will inevitably have to work with to keep the installation functioning. A personal desktop OS isn't like a corporate desktop OS. You can't say "Here, it's installed, now don't touch anything." People will want to customize things, change settings and I'm pretty sure that somewhere along the line something will break. I'd much rather have someone who normally wouldn't even know what Linux is switch to something like Mac OS X.
Unfortunately, this will not affect the real problem, which is people continually rebuilding on extremely flood-prone land at taxpayer and insurance customer expense.
There is a difference between: "I'm building my house here, and there is a remote chance of a flood. Would you agree to help me out and spread out the risk?" and "Between me, my father and my grandfather we've rebuilt this house 4 times due to flooding. It's terrible. Give us more money to do it again."
I'm often accused of being a liberal, but the latter group deserve nothing from the government, and insurance companies should not be compelled to grant them policies. There has to be a "Sorry, but that just doesn't make any sense" threshold when it comes to these sorts of things. National Flood Insurance and private initiatives are a good safety net that I fully support, but they shouldn't be a replacement for common sense and responsibility.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was always under the impression that the NT kernel and its later variants was actually put together quite well with the input of the ex-VMS team, and that everything Microsoft dumped on top of it was the primary weak point in the OS.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the situation is a bit worse than you've been led to believe.
Eeek....I meant to say "stop breaking patents"
As I see it, the pharma industry is expropriating our tax dollars and then whining about the damage being done to the free market when the public actually wants something in return.
Flash-forward to the early 1980s and the frightening early years of the AIDS crisis where there was absolutely nothing in the way of effective treatments for the first six years of the epidemic. It was pure hospice care until the National Cancer Institute took another look at AZT and found that it was the first drug that HIV seemed to respond to. The patent was assigned to Burroughs-Wellcome who paid for drug trials and promptly began selling it two years later. Selling it at a price that made it the most expensive drugs ever marketed ($8,000+ a year per patient) - despite the fact it was developed with public money and was the only treatment available for a rapidly-spreading disease with a 100% mortality rate.
Add to that the pitiful funding for everything from food to maintenance and what do you expect? Amtrak barely gets enough money to keep the lights on.
It would take 10 to 15 years to build, but being an Alaskan, it sounds good to me!"
What if that means you have to give up almost half your $1,000 yearly oil royalty check for ten to fifteen years ? Because that's about what it would cost, assuming Alaska pays half and Russia pays half.
Alaskans don't pay for anything, they have the rest of the country pick up the tab while they hold onto their Permanent Fund cash and elect people who decry excessive Federal government spending. Hypocrites of the first order.Bemoaning the fact iTunes requires Quicktime to be installed ignores the fact iTunes is nothing but an XML front-end for Quicktime. It's a database and shopping app that offloads all of its media handling to the existing suite of software designed to handle such things.
If they had created another software package to replicate the services provided by Quicktime just for iTunes people would be lining up to say how it exemplified a lack of faith in the established suite.
Personally, I'm just sick of Tiger and want an update already. I'm just glad that the shareware community has done a lot to help counteract Apple's inability to keep up the pace. OmniWeb being the most notable example of this. Bugs aside, it's far ahead of Safari in almost every possible way. Hell, even the graphical tabs become an enjoyable thing after a few days.
Their attitude for the past six years has been along the lines of "We've got an amazing new way to share your iPhone's SMS messages with iWeb, who cares about the Finder?"
This was pretty obvious from as early as Mid-March. We knew there would be "secret features" coming, and none of them have thus far appeared in any of the betas.
.Mac integration or comparable bullshit feature that ignores the rotting elephant in the room.
Apple isn't retarded, and it is highly unlikely that they would have dumped them in the laps of developers a matter of weeks prior to the final release. That being said, I will go into nerd rage spasms if they don't fix Finder this time around and spend their efforts doing some stupid
I'm quite a fan of Indian cuisine, but in light of the limitations of their air filtering system, don't you think it's a bit cruel to allow an astronaut to bring curry aboard the ISS?
Self-diagnosed Aspergers sufferers will suddenly find themselves without any excuse for their behavior.
It was a case of "My theory is 100% infallible and don't you dare counter it even if it can be done effortlessly and for free"
In many sprawling communities, walking past the driveway/subdivision is asking to die.
That's not hyperbole, but a basic consequence of planning that is downright hostile to anyone who isn't behind the wheel of a car. I don't believe cars should be eliminated, but car-dependance is a truly awful thing that I'm glad that I've been able to break free of...but I don't know for how long. The attitude of the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority isn't friendly to mass transit. In the words of their last General Manager "the automobile won" and light rail is obsolete. Buses are the future, apparently. In the last few decades, automobile registrations in Boston have tripled as rail lines have been shut down or cut back dramatically in favor of surprise bustitution that suddenly becomes permanent.
It's depressing enough to see a new cookie-cutter car-dependant community rise up where a forest used to be, but it's even worse when a city with an excellent transit system that encourages people to ride the train then walk decides that it wants to be just like PinePointeAutumnPreserveRegistryReserveGrove Habitation Area #49485776893-B and compel people to pick up the bad habits of the suburbs.
Does it include an option to disable scaling the environment? Pretty please?
"The Santa Cruz Operation" always sounded more like the name for a wise-guy scam than something you would name your company.
Nothing. Microsoft actually began to reduce their support for the Mac. Same thing with the next big announcement of a Microsoft commitment to the Mac at the time of the Intel switch.
- Not-Invented-Here Syndrome: Reinvent and implement what already exists because it's not 100% the way you want it to be. Why collaborate when you can just create another duplicate project that will never make it past beta or even close to feature complete?
- Users, What Users?: Coding for yourself is nice, but if you want users to flock to your app, you might want to actually consider what they want. Don't bitch and moan at them when they offer suggestions, even if said suggestions don't fit your own personal vision, or even if they are downright stupid. That doesn't mean you have to implement them, but it means you have to be weigh them equally with your own ideas. Try to be inclusive and open to your userbase. "Go code it yourself" is a great way to keep OSS in the geek ghettos of the computing world.
- But It Looks Pretty: That's a snazzy looking interface you just whipped up, is it consistent? No? Does it follow standard UI principles? No? I'm sure people won't become frustrated and dismissive of your hard work. You can say that UI standards impinge on your freedom as a developer, but they make a user's life much easier, and makes people much more likely to actually use your software.
- Ask, Don't Beg: Asking companies and organizations to open code is nice and helpful, but be careful how you go about it. It can easily come across as "The OSS community could never dream of putting something like that together. Gimme!" Don't act like you *expect* the code, and that they are evil incarnate for withholding it. Don't make it seem as if the OSS community is incompetent and needs privately-developed projects turned over wholesale to get anything accomplished. Sure it helps a whole lot, but don't make it seem as though OSS is just mooching off the investment of others.
- Vendettas: If two projects can fight over something, no matter how petty, they will. Try coding, it's more productive and makes you appear like a mature, competent project that might help win over those hesitant to support OSS. Or you could just continue the pissing matches and flamefests over icons and licensing minutiae that could probably be settled if egos were set aside for a few moments. Public wars of words, endless forking....nothing gets accomplished but the stroking of egos. Well, except the whole "OSS developers come across as immature, childish amateurs" thing.
On the bright side though, the new flashy lights and color scheme are sure to make this the year the Linux toilet is ready for the home bathroom.
Increasingly, it seems as if corporations are coming to the conclusion that not only should they have the potential to earn money from something, but that they have the right to. This is irrespective of practical considerations such as "Does the claim make a bit of sense?"
Microsoft's claim here is another in a flurry of claims that sits alongside the net neutrality debate, the royalties Universal collects on each Zune sold, in addition to the royalties they collect on the music purchased to play on the device and the push by various private weather services to make it illegal for the U.S. government to release taxpayer-funded weather data for free.
Sorry, but if your business model isn't working, if you aren't bringing in as much revenue as you would like to, don't run around holding your hat out demanding more cash just because you want it. Shut up, fix your business model, create a compelling product or service and compete.
Don't forget about head lice, either.
There really seems to be no question of "Do these people want to be converted?"
It's pretty audacious to assume that everyone you know really wants to learn a new OS, deal with a whole new slew of applications and the 'nix intricacies that they will inevitably have to work with to keep the installation functioning. A personal desktop OS isn't like a corporate desktop OS. You can't say "Here, it's installed, now don't touch anything." People will want to customize things, change settings and I'm pretty sure that somewhere along the line something will break. I'd much rather have someone who normally wouldn't even know what Linux is switch to something like Mac OS X.
Unfortunately, this will not affect the real problem, which is people continually rebuilding on extremely flood-prone land at taxpayer and insurance customer expense.
There is a difference between: "I'm building my house here, and there is a remote chance of a flood. Would you agree to help me out and spread out the risk?" and "Between me, my father and my grandfather we've rebuilt this house 4 times due to flooding. It's terrible. Give us more money to do it again."
I'm often accused of being a liberal, but the latter group deserve nothing from the government, and insurance companies should not be compelled to grant them policies. There has to be a "Sorry, but that just doesn't make any sense" threshold when it comes to these sorts of things. National Flood Insurance and private initiatives are a good safety net that I fully support, but they shouldn't be a replacement for common sense and responsibility.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was always under the impression that the NT kernel and its later variants was actually put together quite well with the input of the ex-VMS team, and that everything Microsoft dumped on top of it was the primary weak point in the OS.