The clock started out with 30s vs 120s, and it continuously counted down for the active side. I don't know at what point more time would have been given, but it was obviously speed chess. Carlson used half of his time to even win in 9 moves.
Gates played in a 'think only of one move' mode, he has no strategy and doesn't even try to look at the board from POV of his opponent, so this was childs game.
Well, nobody really can strategize in the first few moves - that's why all the serious players memorize books full of opening positions. Any intuition they do have usually just is the result of having studied. There are some strategies that can be employed like steering towards more open/closed play and such, but again it all goes back to the book. Everything is empirical.
Disclaimer - I'm not all that seriously into chess, so I'm certainly open to enlightenment by somebody who is.
Those chess grandmasters study the same books and tables extensively.
Yes but they don't memorize them. Human chess players use pattern recognition and the ability to think stategically. Chess programs don't.
Serious chess player memorize quite a few openers. That's probably why Carlsen used so little clock time - he was still in his opening library and booking up time for the middle game (which is really the only place that serious players spend time). Or, if they did wander out of the library it was only because Gates made a questionable move, and the reason they're questionable is that the book of stats show that they usually lead to losses.
Except that you don't just need to prove that a new drug is safe and effective. You need to prove that it is more effective than existing drugs. Under current regulations, aspirin would not be approved for use.
Well, you need to prove that it is at least comparable in relative safety/efficacy to existing drugs. Certainly agree that Aspirin would never make it today. I do think we're overly risk-averse. Painkillers are important, but when you look at in terms of hard numbers nobody ever died of pain, but lots of people have died of painkillers. There needs to be more to the analysis than just number of ICD codes treated/created.
Also, there really should be incentive to create drugs that are reasonably safe/effective even if they aren't the best. People don't have to buy them if they don't want to, but if somebody has an allergy to the best drug out there it is useful to have alternatives. When I hear people decrying "me-too" drugs I think of a friend of mine who seems to have no end to drug sensitivities and the fact that they often have to three 3-4 drugs before they can settle on something that works. If it were up to some people there would be one choice and it would have to be good enough for everybody...
I hope that they were keeping the staff who didn't know about sealed-source radiotherapy away from the patients...
Think back to the kids who graduated in your class in whatever major you had. Remember that half of them were below-average. The same is true in every profession...
otherwise you don't get approval to market the drug.
Whoops, how does that fit into your market-based narrative? It might take a small handful of people to find and develop a new antibiotic, but it takes a army to test it so that it gets approved by the FDA and similar organizations.
That's exactly the case for almost any drug. Small companies discover them all the time, and the big companies tend to license them and test them.
The alternative is the drug market of the 1930s, or the modern day health supplement market. We'll make sure there are lots of products on the shelf at a great diversity of prices, everybody will be convinced that they make them feel better, and yet public health statistics will show that nobody actually does feel better. Oh, and we'll have the occasional thalidomide or whatever. At least with fenfluramine/phentermine or rofecoxib we had clinical trials which greatly facilitated the detection of the problems - those drugs might have been on the market for decades without them. Indeed, the heart attack risks of rofecoxib are barely detectable in the trial data and were considered controversial when they were first suggested, so they might never have been detected if it were simply marketed.
I personally think we're overly risk-averse about approving new drugs, but you certainly can't completely eliminate the need for clinical trials. If you did NOBODY would do them, because they're 99% of the expense when you factor in the fact that the trials show that almost all drug candidates aren't safe/effective. If you keep the trials you could certainly lower the bar a bit for new drugs, but I doubt it would be effective for an antibiotic. The whole point of a new antibiotic would be to only use it in patients that are resistant to all known antibiotics, so there aren't many of them.
The erectile dysfunction drugs were all initially being developed for other purposes. It was an accident when the first one, during testing for its original purpose, was discovered to help erectile dysfunction. The others were all the similar drugs under study for the original purpose that the first one was being developed for when the news broke.
The #1 cost in developing a new drug is proving that it is safe and effective. You can't do that without knowing what the drug is for. If you develop a drug for one thing, and it turns out it is useful for something else, you still need to do the clinical trials to show that it is safe and effective for that other treatment. That means spending a LOT MORE money. If they had discovered that the drug happens to alleviate some muscle problem that effects 12 people per year chances are they wouldn't have tested it further.
Also, it is hardly true that ALL erectile dysfunction drugs were developed for other purposes. That is certainly true of Viagra, but follow-on drugs were targeted.
So, the fact that drug companies have developed new antibiotics, but haven't made much money is in your mind evidence that market based solutions have failed? And it is evidence that drug companies don't develop them? Maybe the problem is not market based solutions but is rather the government interference in the market?
Well, evidence that drug companies don't develop them is the fact that, well, they don't develop them (Trends in antimicrobial drug development: implications for the future. Spellberg B, Powers JH, Brass EP, Miller LG, Edwards JE Jr Clin Infect Dis. 2004 May 1; 38(9):1279-86.). We're just arguing over why.
You're suggesting that drug companies would develop them but just haven't stumbled upon any. I'm suggesting that they're not stumbling upon them because they're not looking, because if they did look for them they wouldn't make any money off of them anyway.
As far as government interference in the market goes, the pharmaceutical market is one of the most regulated markets in existence in any nation (though the level of regulation is certainly higher in the first world). If you eliminated the need to prove that a new antibiotic was safe and effective I suspect that it would certainly increase the supply of antibiotics. The problem is that historically when companies were allowed to do this it tended to result in major public health catastrophes. Suppose some company offers an over the counter antibiotic. It turns out it really does work, costs only 50 cents a pill, and of course saves people a trip to the doctor's office. It sells like crazy. Then 15 years later it turns out it causes heart valve problems in 30% of those taking it (which takes a long time to detect since there are no formal clinical trials either pre- or post-market). So, the 10-man pharma company that made the drug goes bankrupt (it doesn't actually take that many people to discover a drug - the manpower is mostly required to test it, and you can outsource manufacture), and the original owners of the company pocketed their profits eons ago. So, medicare or whatever is left footing the bill. Basically thalidomide all over again...
Also, antibiotics are a class of drugs that really do need more interference than we even have today. If somebody came up with a new antibiotic the most sane policy would be to FORBID it from being used in anybody who didn't have an infection that was susceptible to an existing antibiotic. That would greatly reduce the rate at which resistance to the new antibiotic developed. It would also ensure that nobody made any money off of the new antibiotic.
I think the better solution is to just offer a bounty for new antibiotics (backed by full clinical data). If a company develops a new antibiotic the NIH or whatever can buy the rights for $500M and then they can distribute it to hospitals dealing with serious outbreaks. Resistance could be controlled in part by requir
As to "why drug companies don't make new antibiotics", well that would be an interesting theory, if it were true that they do not actually do so. The main reason that it appears that drug companies don't make new antibiotics is because all of the "easy" ones have already been developed.
There have been a couple of new antibiotics over the last 20 years, but if you look at them almost none of them make much money. An "easy" drug costs about as much to develop as a hard one - most of the costs are in the clinical trials and you need to bribe (er, compensate) the doctors to sign up subjects, otherwise you don't get approval to market the drug.
It isn't like erectile dysfunction drugs are super-easy to develop - it is just far more lucrative to do so.
What I'm saying here is hardly controversial in any case - just about any article/documentary/etc covering the rise of drug-resistant bacteria strains mentions these factors.
As far as the "war on coal" goes - I'm all for taxing coal production to account for the externalities. However, I think the general rise of market-based energy production has led to a power grid that is far less robust than it has been in the past. It used to be that utilities could gouge the public as long as they kept the lights on. Now the system operates a lot more like the stock market - where usually things work fine but every once in a while you have a 2008.
That is one of the problems with market-based solutions. The CEOs get bonuses based on this quarter's profits, and they don't have to pay them back when the company tanks next quarter. This leads to a lot of short-sighted risk-taking. If you're the company running on a more expensive fuel for diversification then you get clobbered in the market while your competitors burn gas. Sure, you'll do better if gas prices spike, but chances are that you'll be bankrupt before that happens, or even if gas prices spike your competitors will just beg for a bailout since, gee, who could have seen that coming?
This is why drug companies don't make new antibiotics. 99% of sick people don't need new antibiotics, so there is no incentive to make them. Of course, the 1% who do need them really need them, and one day if some superbug comes along and wipes out 20% of the population we'll look really stupid for not spending a few hundred million on a new antibiotic, but nobody is going to lynch the current congressmen who aren't appropriating money for one...
Just because they have the option to burn gas doesn't necessarily compel them to do so...
Sorry - one other thing. This isn't a bad thing at all. If some utility has the right pipelines so that they can burn either gas or jet fuel, and the former is in super-high demand and the latter isn't, then it is actually good for the public that they burn the jet fuel and alleviate the shortage of jet fuel. That keeps prices on gas lower for homeowners, who can't just use their trusty oil pipeline to operate their jet fuel home heating unit.
Why didn't the generators use the derivatives market to hedge against spikes in gas prices so they'd be able to keep buying as demand/price rose?
Well, they might very well have had hedges to allow them to buy at normal prices, but then they're left with a choice - take that super-expensive gas that they can buy and burn it, or turn around and sell it to somebody else at market price and burn something else. If they can get more selling the gas than it would take to fuel their generators with jet fuel, then they're going to sell the gas and buy jet fuel.
Just because they have the option to burn gas doesn't necessarily compel them to do so...
Nobody, and I mean NOBODY designs environments to run on either Windows or Linux. If there's a significant Windows presence at all, Linux is hunted out like a disease and eradicated from every nook and cranny.
Uh, my fortune-500 employer begs to differ. We're nearly 100% windows on the desktop, and servers are probably at least 50% windows. However, Linux makes up a significant pool of the servers - certainly anything that is J2EE/apache/etc is on pure Linux - and that is a lot of stuff. Oracle might not be on Linux yet - I'm sure that is purely a matter of however the license fees/etc all work - it is a fairly large deployment. Software that runs on Linux is always seen as a plus - it saves money and hassle all-around.
However, I'm not convinced the Surface Pro will take off at my workplace. Relatively few applications actually get deployed to workstations these days - there is a strong preference to either make it web-based or at least stick it behind Citrix. Most of the stuff that is on the workstations are Office-like applications with no real integrations/etc so that leaves a lot of flexibility around OS. As with the GP, it seems like the iPads are popular mostly with folks who do nothing but send out emails, tweak powerpoints/spreadsheets, and attend meetings. That is a lot of people, but usually not the bottom tier of folks who actually do stuff. Nobody runs their lab on an iPad, unless they're almost completely non-automated or their software is web-based and doesn't require much input.
It could be that life "began" on Earth a few times. Perhaps our form of DNA/RNA wasn't even the first, but was the most successful.
The problem with this argument is that it only works if all the other forms of life were completely exterminated. We've found a lot of strange stuff in exotic places, but it all uses the same genetic code/etc as everything else. It seems unlikely to me that life began on earth more than once, unless you use a really weak version of began (like a piece of RNA formed but never did anything - I'd argue it was never alive to start). If life gets going well enough to start replicating and spreading, then I don't really see anything as likely to stop it short of a global cataclysm (and even that isn't a guarantee).
It seems more likely to me that the spread of life happens much faster than the origin of life. So, once life gets started it tends to overrun the planet before it starts anywhere else, scavenging up all the raw materials of life leaving no niche for a competitor starting out from scratch.
But, I can't say I'm really well-read in this specific area, so perhaps somebody has a clever counter-argument already...
Well, controlling space vs air traffic are fairly different problems. Obviously both involve conflict resolution, but space traffic has some factors that make it both easier and harder.
Space traffic tends to maintain an unchanged ballistic trajectory for a very long period of time (days, weeks, months, years). Air traffic tends not to stay in the air for more than a few hours at a time. Air traffic is easy to maneuver - changing course costs very little compared to maintaining course, but space traffic costs nothing when you maintain cost and uses precious fuel when you change course.
So, with space traffic the idea is to plan an orbit that will be forever free of debris, lay claim to it, and put your ship in it, and then make sure you never put something else up which will conflict.
Another factor with air traffic is that the aircraft are piloted and can use collision-avoidance technology. Since maneuver is cheap, and collisions can be spotted a fair distance out, aircraft which are in conflict can steer to avoid a collision. Spacecraft on the other hand are moving at very high speed and changing course significantly on a short time scale is very expensive (both to make the correction and then to get back to the original orbit), so spotting a collision a few miles out is not sufficient - you need to spot an incoming spacecraft MUCH further away, and just figuring out if a spacecraft that far away will even collide is a problem (with aircraft the protective bubble around each one is small enough that you can just afford to dodge anything that enters it - but if you give each spacecraft a much larger bubble then you have to allow for non-conflicting spacecraft to enter it or you can't put up that many ships).
Oh, and with aircraft you can always mandate that all new aircraft will follow rules X/Y/Z and get immediate compliance. With spacecraft a piece of debris might be up there for centuries, so unless you go clean it up any improvements you make to prevent conflicts with junk will take a long time to be effective.
Bottom line - I'd say that aircraft control and spacecraft control are only very loosely connected.
Doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Stock android doesn't have an su on it and there was no convention for having root apps, so the community created one. Well, now we just need to change the SELinux context. There are also frameworks out there for providing other non-stock APIs to root applications on near-stock firmwares. It will be nice if somebody comes up with an easy way to silently disable DevicePolicyManager for selected device managers...
Depends on whether his ingredients are all "generally recognized as safe." If so, then the FDA isn't going to care, as long as the manufacturing conditions are sanitary/etc.
I mean, do you really want the FDA regulating recipe books?
I haven't played an RPG with actual people in eons, but have played computer games, including the Neverwinter games which are probably as good as it gets for a 3.5-based computer game.
The advantage of a ruleset like 3.5 is that it allows for incredible character variety. The downside is that it is basically impossible to balance that variety across all elements of the game universe. Plus, people tend to focus on combat, so if you min/max your characters right and pick every possible complimentary feat/attribute/skill then you can end up with characters that dish out many times the damage per round of a typical player, while being almost invulnerable to attack (perhaps with some glaring weakness that they need another character to buff them for). However, that same character might not be able to do anything useful outside of combat, while some other character might speak 14 languages, or be skilled at exploring, or can create magic items, or whatever.
So, there are pros and cons to a more balanced approach that ends up being simpler, or a more complex approach that allows you to do all kinds of crazy things but at the risk that players can game the system. From what I understand many 3.5 DMs just tell their players they aren't allowed to abuse the rules - if the character min/maxes and picks 37 feats, 4 classes with a -2 ECL, they just tell them to redo their character.
There are lots of spells that are basically useless in a pure-combat or computer-oriented DND universe. Virtually every edition of DND had some kind of clairvoyance/clairaudience spells and when they get applied to a system where everything revolves around combat they just end up giving you some lame modifier. However, in a role-play scenario being able to hear a hushed conversation on the other side of the tavern is obviously useful.
Simple solution - tariffs. They shouldn't be punitive - they should just recognize the cost of externalities. So, if it costs $1T/yr to build air filtration units that can clean the air to acceptable levels, then impose that much in tariffs against everything that comes in. They can pollute all they want and it won't hurt planet at all since the US will be removing all that pollution. More likely they'll fix their laws to get rid of the tariffs before companies move their business to a country that does.
While we're at it go ahead and add up the cost of blowing up Iraqi civilians and trying to clean up the carnage and add it as a tax on oil. Suddenly we'll see a lot fewer people cheering as the bombs fall, and a lot more diversification in our energy supply.
You don't need to punish people that do stupid things - you just need to make them pay the price of their stupidity and you'll be amazed at how quickly they learn.
There is a huge difference between making a law and applying a law, obviously. This is just standards, not what you will actually find when you measure.
But here you go:
Tell me about it - next to your air quality limits, here are the actual figures for High-tech zone, Shijiazhuang at http://aqicn.org/. China: SO2: 20ug/m^3 (60 in urban areas) - actual 60 NOx: 50ug/m^3 - actual 73 PM10: 40ug/m^3 (70 in urban areas) - actual 546!!!!!!! Ozone: 160 ug/m^3 - actual 3 CO: 10000 ug/m^3 - actual 0
Note that this is a point-in-time value. So, the laws are actually somewhat better than the US, but apparently nobody follows the law.
Kyoto would do nothing for this. It did not apply to China or other "developing" nations. This is cited as one of the major reasons the US laughed itself right out of the talks.
While something like Kyoto does make sense, it really is insane to take a global problem and make any local area exempt by-name. By all means exempt countries until they hit some level of per-acre emissions or whatever, but you can't create a long-lasting treaty that hard-codes in the economic status of the countries at the time that it is signed. Corporations can move manufacture wherever they want to. If you made Kyoto apply everywhere except in a single 1 km^2 island in the middle of the pacific you'd quickly see a world record for the tallest factory ever built next to the largest seaport in the world there.
Great, so will the US then also meet EU polution [sic] standards? Or does this rule only apply when you like it?
It only makes sense for the EU to tariff US products that don't have the same level of environmental and labor protection laws behind them. Only somebody with more nationalism than brains would claim otherwise.
In a global economy passing laws to make your workforce and population safer and not placing tariffs on products from countries that do not implement similar controls is just asking for massive unemployment. The level of tariff should of course be proportional to the level of deviation. While the EU would no doubt need to tax US goods as a result, it would be nothing compared to a lot of the products coming out of Asia. Plus, they need to get their free speech laws fixed if they want to avoid some US tariffs (and the US would do well to actually follow its own laws in this regard).
Ok, now I've learned something. Though it is a bit of a derived unit in that it isn't strictly describing temperature itself. You could just as easily talk about the RMS peak velocity of a collection of gas molecules at a temperature if you're going to go that route...
Actually the better telescope (Cost more) is the one with the largest apeture and the lowest focal ratio (lowest mag) because highly curved mirrors needed for lower mag are hard to produce.
I'm really not an expert in telescopes, but from what I've seen you can spend a lot of money on a telescope in almost any focal ratio. Also, strictly speaking lower focal ratio doesn't necessarily mean lower magnification, but it does mean lower magnification for a given aperture. Virtually all telescopes involve compromise from engineering feasibility to siting to cost. A moderately-priced scope with a nice wide FOV might be desirable for scouting for asteroids, while scopes placed in space don't really need as low a focal ratio since they can stare at one point for as long as they need to not worrying about sunrise, air distortion, or weather.
So, telescopes aren't really better or worse so much as better-suited to a particular mission.
But, yes, I've sometimes wondered if it would be neat to have an f/0.001 telescope. You might be able to range asteroids just by looking at the focus setting, or cook a hotdog with the reflected microwave background.
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This was speed chess - Bill Gates had to finish the game in 2min, and Carlson had 30s. Neither could just sit and think about moves.
The clock started out with 30s vs 120s, and it continuously counted down for the active side. I don't know at what point more time would have been given, but it was obviously speed chess. Carlson used half of his time to even win in 9 moves.
Gates played in a 'think only of one move' mode, he has no strategy and doesn't even try to look at the board from POV of his opponent, so this was childs game.
Well, nobody really can strategize in the first few moves - that's why all the serious players memorize books full of opening positions. Any intuition they do have usually just is the result of having studied. There are some strategies that can be employed like steering towards more open/closed play and such, but again it all goes back to the book. Everything is empirical.
Disclaimer - I'm not all that seriously into chess, so I'm certainly open to enlightenment by somebody who is.
Those chess grandmasters study the same books and tables extensively.
Yes but they don't memorize them. Human chess players use pattern recognition and the ability to think stategically. Chess programs don't.
Serious chess player memorize quite a few openers. That's probably why Carlsen used so little clock time - he was still in his opening library and booking up time for the middle game (which is really the only place that serious players spend time). Or, if they did wander out of the library it was only because Gates made a questionable move, and the reason they're questionable is that the book of stats show that they usually lead to losses.
Except that you don't just need to prove that a new drug is safe and effective. You need to prove that it is more effective than existing drugs. Under current regulations, aspirin would not be approved for use.
Well, you need to prove that it is at least comparable in relative safety/efficacy to existing drugs. Certainly agree that Aspirin would never make it today. I do think we're overly risk-averse. Painkillers are important, but when you look at in terms of hard numbers nobody ever died of pain, but lots of people have died of painkillers. There needs to be more to the analysis than just number of ICD codes treated/created.
Also, there really should be incentive to create drugs that are reasonably safe/effective even if they aren't the best. People don't have to buy them if they don't want to, but if somebody has an allergy to the best drug out there it is useful to have alternatives. When I hear people decrying "me-too" drugs I think of a friend of mine who seems to have no end to drug sensitivities and the fact that they often have to three 3-4 drugs before they can settle on something that works. If it were up to some people there would be one choice and it would have to be good enough for everybody...
I hope that they were keeping the staff who didn't know about sealed-source radiotherapy away from the patients...
Think back to the kids who graduated in your class in whatever major you had. Remember that half of them were below-average. The same is true in every profession...
otherwise you don't get approval to market the drug.
Whoops, how does that fit into your market-based narrative? It might take a small handful of people to find and develop a new antibiotic, but it takes a army to test it so that it gets approved by the FDA and similar organizations.
That's exactly the case for almost any drug. Small companies discover them all the time, and the big companies tend to license them and test them.
The alternative is the drug market of the 1930s, or the modern day health supplement market. We'll make sure there are lots of products on the shelf at a great diversity of prices, everybody will be convinced that they make them feel better, and yet public health statistics will show that nobody actually does feel better. Oh, and we'll have the occasional thalidomide or whatever. At least with fenfluramine/phentermine or rofecoxib we had clinical trials which greatly facilitated the detection of the problems - those drugs might have been on the market for decades without them. Indeed, the heart attack risks of rofecoxib are barely detectable in the trial data and were considered controversial when they were first suggested, so they might never have been detected if it were simply marketed.
I personally think we're overly risk-averse about approving new drugs, but you certainly can't completely eliminate the need for clinical trials. If you did NOBODY would do them, because they're 99% of the expense when you factor in the fact that the trials show that almost all drug candidates aren't safe/effective. If you keep the trials you could certainly lower the bar a bit for new drugs, but I doubt it would be effective for an antibiotic. The whole point of a new antibiotic would be to only use it in patients that are resistant to all known antibiotics, so there aren't many of them.
The erectile dysfunction drugs were all initially being developed for other purposes. It was an accident when the first one, during testing for its original purpose, was discovered to help erectile dysfunction. The others were all the similar drugs under study for the original purpose that the first one was being developed for when the news broke.
The #1 cost in developing a new drug is proving that it is safe and effective. You can't do that without knowing what the drug is for. If you develop a drug for one thing, and it turns out it is useful for something else, you still need to do the clinical trials to show that it is safe and effective for that other treatment. That means spending a LOT MORE money. If they had discovered that the drug happens to alleviate some muscle problem that effects 12 people per year chances are they wouldn't have tested it further.
Also, it is hardly true that ALL erectile dysfunction drugs were developed for other purposes. That is certainly true of Viagra, but follow-on drugs were targeted.
So, the fact that drug companies have developed new antibiotics, but haven't made much money is in your mind evidence that market based solutions have failed? And it is evidence that drug companies don't develop them? Maybe the problem is not market based solutions but is rather the government interference in the market?
Well, evidence that drug companies don't develop them is the fact that, well, they don't develop them (Trends in antimicrobial drug development: implications for the future. Spellberg B, Powers JH, Brass EP, Miller LG, Edwards JE Jr
Clin Infect Dis. 2004 May 1; 38(9):1279-86.). We're just arguing over why.
You're suggesting that drug companies would develop them but just haven't stumbled upon any. I'm suggesting that they're not stumbling upon them because they're not looking, because if they did look for them they wouldn't make any money off of them anyway.
As far as government interference in the market goes, the pharmaceutical market is one of the most regulated markets in existence in any nation (though the level of regulation is certainly higher in the first world). If you eliminated the need to prove that a new antibiotic was safe and effective I suspect that it would certainly increase the supply of antibiotics. The problem is that historically when companies were allowed to do this it tended to result in major public health catastrophes. Suppose some company offers an over the counter antibiotic. It turns out it really does work, costs only 50 cents a pill, and of course saves people a trip to the doctor's office. It sells like crazy. Then 15 years later it turns out it causes heart valve problems in 30% of those taking it (which takes a long time to detect since there are no formal clinical trials either pre- or post-market). So, the 10-man pharma company that made the drug goes bankrupt (it doesn't actually take that many people to discover a drug - the manpower is mostly required to test it, and you can outsource manufacture), and the original owners of the company pocketed their profits eons ago. So, medicare or whatever is left footing the bill. Basically thalidomide all over again...
Also, antibiotics are a class of drugs that really do need more interference than we even have today. If somebody came up with a new antibiotic the most sane policy would be to FORBID it from being used in anybody who didn't have an infection that was susceptible to an existing antibiotic. That would greatly reduce the rate at which resistance to the new antibiotic developed. It would also ensure that nobody made any money off of the new antibiotic.
I think the better solution is to just offer a bounty for new antibiotics (backed by full clinical data). If a company develops a new antibiotic the NIH or whatever can buy the rights for $500M and then they can distribute it to hospitals dealing with serious outbreaks. Resistance could be controlled in part by requir
As to "why drug companies don't make new antibiotics", well that would be an interesting theory, if it were true that they do not actually do so. The main reason that it appears that drug companies don't make new antibiotics is because all of the "easy" ones have already been developed.
There have been a couple of new antibiotics over the last 20 years, but if you look at them almost none of them make much money. An "easy" drug costs about as much to develop as a hard one - most of the costs are in the clinical trials and you need to bribe (er, compensate) the doctors to sign up subjects, otherwise you don't get approval to market the drug.
It isn't like erectile dysfunction drugs are super-easy to develop - it is just far more lucrative to do so.
What I'm saying here is hardly controversial in any case - just about any article/documentary/etc covering the rise of drug-resistant bacteria strains mentions these factors.
As far as the "war on coal" goes - I'm all for taxing coal production to account for the externalities. However, I think the general rise of market-based energy production has led to a power grid that is far less robust than it has been in the past. It used to be that utilities could gouge the public as long as they kept the lights on. Now the system operates a lot more like the stock market - where usually things work fine but every once in a while you have a 2008.
That is one of the problems with market-based solutions. The CEOs get bonuses based on this quarter's profits, and they don't have to pay them back when the company tanks next quarter. This leads to a lot of short-sighted risk-taking. If you're the company running on a more expensive fuel for diversification then you get clobbered in the market while your competitors burn gas. Sure, you'll do better if gas prices spike, but chances are that you'll be bankrupt before that happens, or even if gas prices spike your competitors will just beg for a bailout since, gee, who could have seen that coming?
This is why drug companies don't make new antibiotics. 99% of sick people don't need new antibiotics, so there is no incentive to make them. Of course, the 1% who do need them really need them, and one day if some superbug comes along and wipes out 20% of the population we'll look really stupid for not spending a few hundred million on a new antibiotic, but nobody is going to lynch the current congressmen who aren't appropriating money for one...
Just because they have the option to burn gas doesn't necessarily compel them to do so...
Sorry - one other thing. This isn't a bad thing at all. If some utility has the right pipelines so that they can burn either gas or jet fuel, and the former is in super-high demand and the latter isn't, then it is actually good for the public that they burn the jet fuel and alleviate the shortage of jet fuel. That keeps prices on gas lower for homeowners, who can't just use their trusty oil pipeline to operate their jet fuel home heating unit.
Why didn't the generators use the derivatives market to hedge against spikes in gas prices so they'd be able to keep buying as demand/price rose?
Well, they might very well have had hedges to allow them to buy at normal prices, but then they're left with a choice - take that super-expensive gas that they can buy and burn it, or turn around and sell it to somebody else at market price and burn something else. If they can get more selling the gas than it would take to fuel their generators with jet fuel, then they're going to sell the gas and buy jet fuel.
Just because they have the option to burn gas doesn't necessarily compel them to do so...
Nobody, and I mean NOBODY designs environments to run on either Windows or Linux. If there's a significant Windows presence at all, Linux is hunted out like a disease and eradicated from every nook and cranny.
Uh, my fortune-500 employer begs to differ. We're nearly 100% windows on the desktop, and servers are probably at least 50% windows. However, Linux makes up a significant pool of the servers - certainly anything that is J2EE/apache/etc is on pure Linux - and that is a lot of stuff. Oracle might not be on Linux yet - I'm sure that is purely a matter of however the license fees/etc all work - it is a fairly large deployment. Software that runs on Linux is always seen as a plus - it saves money and hassle all-around.
However, I'm not convinced the Surface Pro will take off at my workplace. Relatively few applications actually get deployed to workstations these days - there is a strong preference to either make it web-based or at least stick it behind Citrix. Most of the stuff that is on the workstations are Office-like applications with no real integrations/etc so that leaves a lot of flexibility around OS. As with the GP, it seems like the iPads are popular mostly with folks who do nothing but send out emails, tweak powerpoints/spreadsheets, and attend meetings. That is a lot of people, but usually not the bottom tier of folks who actually do stuff. Nobody runs their lab on an iPad, unless they're almost completely non-automated or their software is web-based and doesn't require much input.
It could be that life "began" on Earth a few times. Perhaps our form of DNA/RNA wasn't even the first, but was the most successful.
The problem with this argument is that it only works if all the other forms of life were completely exterminated. We've found a lot of strange stuff in exotic places, but it all uses the same genetic code/etc as everything else. It seems unlikely to me that life began on earth more than once, unless you use a really weak version of began (like a piece of RNA formed but never did anything - I'd argue it was never alive to start). If life gets going well enough to start replicating and spreading, then I don't really see anything as likely to stop it short of a global cataclysm (and even that isn't a guarantee).
It seems more likely to me that the spread of life happens much faster than the origin of life. So, once life gets started it tends to overrun the planet before it starts anywhere else, scavenging up all the raw materials of life leaving no niche for a competitor starting out from scratch.
But, I can't say I'm really well-read in this specific area, so perhaps somebody has a clever counter-argument already...
Well, controlling space vs air traffic are fairly different problems. Obviously both involve conflict resolution, but space traffic has some factors that make it both easier and harder.
Space traffic tends to maintain an unchanged ballistic trajectory for a very long period of time (days, weeks, months, years). Air traffic tends not to stay in the air for more than a few hours at a time. Air traffic is easy to maneuver - changing course costs very little compared to maintaining course, but space traffic costs nothing when you maintain cost and uses precious fuel when you change course.
So, with space traffic the idea is to plan an orbit that will be forever free of debris, lay claim to it, and put your ship in it, and then make sure you never put something else up which will conflict.
Another factor with air traffic is that the aircraft are piloted and can use collision-avoidance technology. Since maneuver is cheap, and collisions can be spotted a fair distance out, aircraft which are in conflict can steer to avoid a collision. Spacecraft on the other hand are moving at very high speed and changing course significantly on a short time scale is very expensive (both to make the correction and then to get back to the original orbit), so spotting a collision a few miles out is not sufficient - you need to spot an incoming spacecraft MUCH further away, and just figuring out if a spacecraft that far away will even collide is a problem (with aircraft the protective bubble around each one is small enough that you can just afford to dodge anything that enters it - but if you give each spacecraft a much larger bubble then you have to allow for non-conflicting spacecraft to enter it or you can't put up that many ships).
Oh, and with aircraft you can always mandate that all new aircraft will follow rules X/Y/Z and get immediate compliance. With spacecraft a piece of debris might be up there for centuries, so unless you go clean it up any improvements you make to prevent conflicts with junk will take a long time to be effective.
Bottom line - I'd say that aircraft control and spacecraft control are only very loosely connected.
Doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Stock android doesn't have an su on it and there was no convention for having root apps, so the community created one. Well, now we just need to change the SELinux context. There are also frameworks out there for providing other non-stock APIs to root applications on near-stock firmwares. It will be nice if somebody comes up with an easy way to silently disable DevicePolicyManager for selected device managers...
Depends on whether his ingredients are all "generally recognized as safe." If so, then the FDA isn't going to care, as long as the manufacturing conditions are sanitary/etc.
I mean, do you really want the FDA regulating recipe books?
I haven't played an RPG with actual people in eons, but have played computer games, including the Neverwinter games which are probably as good as it gets for a 3.5-based computer game.
The advantage of a ruleset like 3.5 is that it allows for incredible character variety. The downside is that it is basically impossible to balance that variety across all elements of the game universe. Plus, people tend to focus on combat, so if you min/max your characters right and pick every possible complimentary feat/attribute/skill then you can end up with characters that dish out many times the damage per round of a typical player, while being almost invulnerable to attack (perhaps with some glaring weakness that they need another character to buff them for). However, that same character might not be able to do anything useful outside of combat, while some other character might speak 14 languages, or be skilled at exploring, or can create magic items, or whatever.
So, there are pros and cons to a more balanced approach that ends up being simpler, or a more complex approach that allows you to do all kinds of crazy things but at the risk that players can game the system. From what I understand many 3.5 DMs just tell their players they aren't allowed to abuse the rules - if the character min/maxes and picks 37 feats, 4 classes with a -2 ECL, they just tell them to redo their character.
There are lots of spells that are basically useless in a pure-combat or computer-oriented DND universe. Virtually every edition of DND had some kind of clairvoyance/clairaudience spells and when they get applied to a system where everything revolves around combat they just end up giving you some lame modifier. However, in a role-play scenario being able to hear a hushed conversation on the other side of the tavern is obviously useful.
I'd pay ten copper to see that.
So, how many electrum pieces is that again?
Simple solution - tariffs. They shouldn't be punitive - they should just recognize the cost of externalities. So, if it costs $1T/yr to build air filtration units that can clean the air to acceptable levels, then impose that much in tariffs against everything that comes in. They can pollute all they want and it won't hurt planet at all since the US will be removing all that pollution. More likely they'll fix their laws to get rid of the tariffs before companies move their business to a country that does.
While we're at it go ahead and add up the cost of blowing up Iraqi civilians and trying to clean up the carnage and add it as a tax on oil. Suddenly we'll see a lot fewer people cheering as the bombs fall, and a lot more diversification in our energy supply.
You don't need to punish people that do stupid things - you just need to make them pay the price of their stupidity and you'll be amazed at how quickly they learn.
There is a huge difference between making a law and applying a law, obviously. This is just standards, not what you will actually find when you measure.
But here you go:
Tell me about it - next to your air quality limits, here are the actual figures for High-tech zone, Shijiazhuang at http://aqicn.org/.
China:
SO2: 20ug/m^3 (60 in urban areas) - actual 60
NOx: 50ug/m^3 - actual 73
PM10: 40ug/m^3 (70 in urban areas) - actual 546!!!!!!!
Ozone: 160 ug/m^3 - actual 3
CO: 10000 ug/m^3 - actual 0
Note that this is a point-in-time value. So, the laws are actually somewhat better than the US, but apparently nobody follows the law.
Kyoto would do nothing for this. It did not apply to China or other "developing" nations. This is cited as one of the major reasons the US laughed itself right out of the talks.
While something like Kyoto does make sense, it really is insane to take a global problem and make any local area exempt by-name. By all means exempt countries until they hit some level of per-acre emissions or whatever, but you can't create a long-lasting treaty that hard-codes in the economic status of the countries at the time that it is signed. Corporations can move manufacture wherever they want to. If you made Kyoto apply everywhere except in a single 1 km^2 island in the middle of the pacific you'd quickly see a world record for the tallest factory ever built next to the largest seaport in the world there.
Great, so will the US then also meet EU polution [sic] standards? Or does this rule only apply when you like it?
It only makes sense for the EU to tariff US products that don't have the same level of environmental and labor protection laws behind them. Only somebody with more nationalism than brains would claim otherwise.
In a global economy passing laws to make your workforce and population safer and not placing tariffs on products from countries that do not implement similar controls is just asking for massive unemployment. The level of tariff should of course be proportional to the level of deviation. While the EU would no doubt need to tax US goods as a result, it would be nothing compared to a lot of the products coming out of Asia. Plus, they need to get their free speech laws fixed if they want to avoid some US tariffs (and the US would do well to actually follow its own laws in this regard).
Ok, now I've learned something. Though it is a bit of a derived unit in that it isn't strictly describing temperature itself. You could just as easily talk about the RMS peak velocity of a collection of gas molecules at a temperature if you're going to go that route...
Actually the better telescope (Cost more) is the one with the largest apeture and the lowest focal ratio (lowest mag) because highly curved mirrors needed for lower mag are hard to produce.
I'm really not an expert in telescopes, but from what I've seen you can spend a lot of money on a telescope in almost any focal ratio. Also, strictly speaking lower focal ratio doesn't necessarily mean lower magnification, but it does mean lower magnification for a given aperture. Virtually all telescopes involve compromise from engineering feasibility to siting to cost. A moderately-priced scope with a nice wide FOV might be desirable for scouting for asteroids, while scopes placed in space don't really need as low a focal ratio since they can stare at one point for as long as they need to not worrying about sunrise, air distortion, or weather.
So, telescopes aren't really better or worse so much as better-suited to a particular mission.
But, yes, I've sometimes wondered if it would be neat to have an f/0.001 telescope. You might be able to range asteroids just by looking at the focus setting, or cook a hotdog with the reflected microwave background.