So, Apple just has to pay Samsung the FRAND licensing fee, which they are refusing to do. I hear it is just a couple of bucks per phone. Everybody else pays that to Samsung, or an equivalent value in cross-licensing other patents.
So the buck stops where on personal responsibility? The teachers? The parents? The friends? With the mortgage bubble, the people who took out loans they could not afford are equally responsible as the people who gave them the loans.
Actually, in both cases the problem was with idiots who loaned money to people not capable of paying it back. Sure, the people accepting the loans were doing wrong, and should bear some of the pain. However, in the end the only reason that any of this stuff happens is because of financial systems (often the result of legislation) that involve people making money at the risk of somebody else's money.
In the case of student loans that is pretty obvious - the bank's money is never at risk, so they'll loan it to anybody. If the kid can't make his $1600/month payment then Uncle Sam will pay it for them, and pay the bank a collection fee to shake down the kid for more. If the bank had to risk its OWN money on that loan, you can bet that they'll be darn sure that little Johnny has a promising future ahead of him before just writing him a check, and the amounts would be much lower, and colleges that want to stay open would find a way to provide a much cheaper education like they did in the 70s.
In the case of the mortgage crisis there were more factors. Much of it came from people with tons of money to invest, little personal stake in the outcome, and tons of agencies paid to tell people what they wanted to hear. Companies were leveraged horribly due to repeat of depression-era controls. Everybody and their uncle has a pension or 401k or something, and all that money has to be invested in something, so anybody who has a scheme that sounds good can get billions of dollars. The result is a financial services sector that dominates the national economy despite producing little of worth. You can yell at mortgage brokers giving out bad loans, but they wouldn't be doing that if others weren't buying up those loans, and they wouldn't be buying if some dumb guy weren't being taken to the cleaners. The dumb guy usually turns out to be a naive investor, or perhaps even an involuntary one like an employee who has a pension - it isn't like the company really cares if they lose it or not as long as Uncle Sam signs off on it.
I'm all for accountability, but the student loan system is anything but.
Bottom line, though, is that I doubt we disagree all that much...
Certainly there are a few people who are disabled by injuries or birth, who do not seem to be capable of taking care of themselves, but the majority of the people in the world excel at something.
Well, you started with everybody, and now you're at a majority. I'll agree that right now a majority are good at something, but a majority is only 50% (I'm sure the real figure is more like 90%).
However, back in the day all you really needed was a strong back to earn a living. Now that really isn't enough unless you are willing and legally able to work for a few dollars per day. As technology marches on, there won't be a single job that won't be automated, certainly including counting, interacting well with customers, and so on. Why read a book written by a human if a book written by a computer is better? I'm sure at some point computers will understand the human condition better than people do. People are just machines - lots of complicated wiring, but entirely finite.
Uh, a journal helps prevent corruption of filesystem metadata by avoiding having it overwritten in place. You even get some benefit for data by doing ordered data writes.
Granted, COW is better still, but we're not quite there yet on btrfs.
Nope - Greg does a decent job with the Gentoo stable kernels. Granted, the current Gentoo stable kernel has a different ext4 bug that can cause panics when files are deleted, which is why I'm running unstable at the moment (I was getting nightly crashes when tmpreaper ran). Oh, the irony.
You are changing the field from natural abilities (which is obviously not fair, but everyone is good at something), to who can get the most effect from the most drugs possible.
Honestly, I think this the crux of the problem with your entire argument. Everybody is NOT good at something. As productivity increases, increasingly more people aren't good at anything (effectively). I suspect we'll actually reach a point where nobody is "good at something" - at least nobody human.
To be successful in modern business you generally need a set of talents that is largely genetic in origin, the willingness to work hard, and often the willingness to make ethical compromises. Depending on the job the degree to which you need to do any of those varies - I don't mean to imply that all jobs require all three of those. However, if you want to get ahead and your competition has more of some of those than you do, then you'll probably lose out.
I think the only issue comes from the fact that we need to work to survive in our current society.
I have no sympathy for someone with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans.
I do. You take some 18 year old kid who has absolutely no idea of the value of money or how hard it is to get a professional job, and you ask them to make a $100k+ financial decision, while showing them TV sitcoms with a bunch of college educated 30-year-olds having fun in an office setting and telling them that they have what it takes to be an astronaut and that they should reach for the stars. All of their friends are going to college, and all their teachers say that this is their best option.
So, you're proposing that the kid ignore the advice of everybody around them. That simply isn't a decision that most kids are going to make. Sure, everybody around them is collectively stupid, but that isn't the kid's fault. What they do share in is the collective desire to imagine the world as they want it to be, and not as it actually is.
That isn't the advice I'd give my kid, but...
And hey, maybe those parents are doing the right thing. After all, if everybody collectively loses their minds then we can have a big bailout and the only people who lose out are those who didn't take advantage of the big bubble.
Well, if the satellite could burn its way to the correct orbit better to let it do so, and then just refuel it when the tank gets low. That beats burning fuel to reach it at point A, and then burning fuel on both to get to point B.
Unless the tanker had quite a bit of fuel any but the smallest inclination changes would be very expensive, unless the orbit was very high at at least one point. It would make far more sense to just launch at the right time than to give the satellite a ton of energy during launch that you just have to get rid of to move it. Now, maybe if the tanker refueled from some asteroid in a very high orbit it might just drag some satellite along for the next refueling run and then drop it back into the correct inclination - it might be cheaper to just boost the thing practically to the moon than to try to change the inclination near the Earth.
Yup. The other thing that is killing them is the whole BYOD thing.
If the company wants to issue me a blackberry no big deal - I'll stick it in my bag and pull it out if I need to do work.
However, companies are getting cheaper. Most don't want to issue phones, but instead ask that employees use their own phones to do work. Well, as you can imagine the typical employee could care less how hard the phone is to remote administer when they're paying for it. If the company's standard HAPPENS to support my phone I might use it to get some extra work done. If not, then I won't.
Then there is the whole thing that even company-issued phones are a bit of a status item. The big manager wants the fancy phone that everybody will envy, not the stodgy one that people will chuckle about when their back is turned. Even though Angry Birds has nothing to do with getting work done, it ends up impacting the purchasing decision.
Baslcally, this thing might work fine if your entire business runs in the Google universe. Otherwise, get a netbook.
Well, sure, but that's really the target market for this. Most businesses don't use Kerberos, don't need VPN, and really could operate on one or two printers. Yes, the fortune 500 company down the street can't work that way, but most businesses don't even have an IT department.
I think the bigger issue is that the thing is useless if you have even a single application that isn't web-based. They really need a solution for running hosted windowed applications (either on the customer's servers, or perhaps on their own - ideally supporting Windows, OSX, and Linux).
I think business is basically the target market. The problem is that they still haven't come out with a way to run remote applications on the thing (Citrix/NX/etc). That means that unless you're 100.00000% cloud-based you can't adopt it.
If you buy a standard laptop it won't have virus immunity, full-disk encryption, enterprise management (policies, accounts, etc), etc right out of the box. With a Chromebook half of that stuff is automatically there, and the rest of the enterprise management features just requires a single log-in to associate the unit with the owner. There is basically zero setup involved, and all your settings sync so devices are completely interchangeable.
I think Google's problem is that they spent all this effort making a solution that is basically 95% done, but they're failing to deliver on the last 5%. I think they might get somewhere with this if they got a solution in place for both linux and windows-based application streaming (Citrix, NX, whatever), and then started marketing this thing towards its eventual niches.
Oh, and they need to work on the price. You at least need to be comparable to similar hardware - you can't go charging some big markup like you're Apple for something that isn't really a "gotta have the new toy" thing. Once you're established I'm sure you could sell for a reasonable profit to businesses, and Aunt Tilly.
Well, I don't know that they have to discount it way cheaper than the comparable netbooks, but they certainly can't charge a premium, which until now they basically have been doing.
For the targeted user the lockdown is a feature, not a bug. I could see buying these if I owned a small business and needed a dozen laptops and used Google Apps or other cloud-based services for everything. They never really followed up on the ability to run apps over a citrix-like interface, which was what was intended to be the solution for the one-offs, which I think is what is really preventing their uptake in this area.
The idea is that you have a computer whose total cost of ownership basically is the price on the sticker. There is no provisioning cost, you get full-disk encryption and all the usual enterprise features (including management/policies), and if somebody loses it you just grab another one out of the supply closet.
Uh, if you want to unlock the thing just flip the switch. That turns off secure boot and gives you sell/root/etc access. You'll even still get auto-updates as long as you don't actually modify the OS partition.
It really isn't targeted at home users - it seems more aimed at small businesses and such that utilize Google Apps.
No idea where the list can be found, but I'd think that something like a prednisone shot would be available from traditional manufacturers.
Not that this necessarily means anything. Several trade magazines have blasted the practice of doctors obtaining things from compounding pharmacies that are otherwise available from conventional manufacturers. I can completely understand the need for alternate sources for unusual medications that otherwise would never be made, but there is really no excuse for using these sources for things which are otherwise manufactured by the book. I read a blog by some guy who works for a generics company that found that they had trouble competing on price since some of those compounders started with materials not classified for human use (orders of magnitude cheaper), while they had to follow proper quality controls and source proper materials (you know, stuff that is controlled so that you don't get mad cow disease, contamination, or who knows what else).
You might have hit on something with the military bit. They stick some giant billion dollar mirror in space and just need some fuel to keep it up. Might let them do more maneuvering to put it where they want it when they want it there, and make it harder to keep track of.
Yup. Granted, others have pointed out that mass will be lower so the amount of fuel required to change velocity will be lower. However, it will still be a significant amount of fuel to get back down. More if the whole thing needs a fancy re-entry shield and the required additional structural strength.
Fair enough, but I'm sure it will still take a fair bit. If the tanker sat is designed to be simple I doubt it would be worth it. Plus now you have to contend with re-entry - that's a lot of extra mass.
Yup, hence the whole point of my post. If you want it to come back down you need way more fuel, since you would have expended the energy to get into geostationary orbit and need to expend it again to come back down...
To get to geostationary orbit there are two energy expenditures. One is from ground to geostationary transfer orbit. The other is from transfer orbit to geostationary orbit.
To get back there is really just one energy expenditure - from geostationary orbit to transfer orbit. The bottom of transfer orbit would be far enough in the atmosphere that drag would do the rest - you don't need to re-circularize it with propellant.
However, no question that you'll need a ton of fuel just to get back to a transfer orbit.
Uh, the last time I got an antibiotic it was prescribe first and wait for the test results to come in later. The alternative is to just let the infection grow until they figure out what works.
Usually they take their best guess, and if in a few days it turns out they're wrong they change approach.
At least, that has been my experience with every doctor I've worked with.
If we "close the formulation loophole" as you suggest, that will put all offlabel and children's doses in the hands of the noble and reputable Big Pharma companies. Won't they choose to skip formulations for which there is no substantial market (children's doses, for instance)? Will they not raise prices mercilessly on a captive market?
Well, if you're going to make a special formulation for three patients per year, SOMEBODY has to pay for it.
Right now it is cheap because somebody just goes into a lab, mixes some stuff up, and mails it off with a note saying that they were careful.
If that were done under the process used for large scale drug manufacture, then what would happen is: 1. Somebody figures out how to mix it all up (not much harder than what was done here), but would document the living daylights out of the process. 2. Somebody figures out how to test the stuff so that anything that could go wrong would be spotted, and documents the living daylights out of that (I doubt the compounding pharmacy does much testing at all). 3. The company follows the process in #1 and #2 to make a whole bunch of doses of the new formulation. 4. The company injects a bunch of healthy volunteers with the new formulation, and collects blood/urine samples at regular intervals. These are tested for drug concentrations. 5. The company does analysis of all this data against corresponding data for the established drug and demonstrates that the new one is just as safe and behaves in the same way. 6. The company sticks containers of the new formulation in a stability chamber for months to years to figure out how long it lasts, following all the tests in #2 to confirm. 7. The company writes up a few thousand pages of reports on all of the above, then waits for the FDA to tell them if it is OK.
Suffice it to say that all costs more than just whipping something together and dropping it in the post. It is also a LOT safer.
I have no issues with compounding pharmacies, but they should be a solution for people who have no alternative, and they should operate on small scales where a mistake harms only a few people. The problem was that the company in question was operating on the scale of a small pharmaceutical plant but without any of the regulatory safeguards. Even the big companies mess up, but usually not this badly (most of the high profile problems have been with the drug itself, and not the quality of its manufacture - that is really a separate matter, though obviously an important one).
There's a need for good compounding pharmacies, and it's a pity that there doesn't seem to be national resolve to regulate them in precisely the same way as other pharmacies or businesses that manufacture stock drugs.
The reason that they're not regulated in the same way is that they probably wouldn't exist if they were. The testing quality controls required for the manufacture of even generic drugs are fairly expensive, and they're recouped because of the economies of scale. If the money was there to be made, you wouldn't need a compounding pharmacy in the first place.
The problem isn't from the existence of compounding pharmacies, but rather that a practice designed to regulate small regional companies making botique products was applied to an industry that has changed so that it operates on a national scale, supplying products that really should stand on their own.
If a compounding pharmacy is the only way to get a particular drug I can understand the need for some laxity. However, when the same drug is available from a traditionally regulated source and that drug is just as appropriate for the particular patient, then the drug with full quality controls should be used. Also, the scale of these companies should be regulated, so that a botched batch gets ten people sick, and not ten thousand. The regs were really written for some guy mixing up solutions in a flask, not in a 50k liter mixer.
I could almost see there being some value in refuel. Maybe also in reposition if a big change is involved (but why would you need to move it anyway?). Take a few pictures of it if you want, since that is fairly cheap.
However, when you start getting into repair you're talking about a massive increase in cost and decrease in reusability of the refueling ship.
And if you don't do repair, then you need to design the satellites to have components that last for decades but a fuel supply which lasts much less - why not just launch it with a lifetime fuel load?
Repositioning only makes sense if it was unplanned and needs more propellant than could be carried by the satellite. If you dock a ship to it and use that to move the satellite, then you need enough fuel to reposition the combined mass of both. It would be smarter to just refuel it and let the satellite move itself.
Oh, and unless you're really patient, moving from satellite to satellite takes a fair bit of fuel (a little nudge goes a long way if you're willing to wait, but with each orbit lasting a day it will be probably weeks between encounters if you don't want to do large burns).
I think that the only way private companies would sign up for this refueling service were if the cost of the service were basically subsidized on the backs of taxpayers. I could be wrong, and that would be wonderful, but this really seems like a solution looking for a product. Sometimes it really is cheaper to just make a new one.
The refueling robots could just drop out of orbit to Earth to be recovered and reused?
That way they can only carry half as much fuel? It takes a lot fuel to get from transfer orbit to geostationary orbit, and just as much fuel to get back down. The energy to get to transfer orbit in the first place is a one-time expense, since atmospheric drag and gravity will get you back down from there.
So, what are you advocating? When the teacher makes a kid do pointless homework they should refuse to do so, and then if the teacher gives them a failing grade find some way to effectively coerce the teacher into changing their behavior as any unpassionate psychopath would?
Sure, you get to choose your attitude, but that doesn't change the fact that a kid is forced to sit for six hours a day in pointless lessons.
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So, Apple just has to pay Samsung the FRAND licensing fee, which they are refusing to do. I hear it is just a couple of bucks per phone. Everybody else pays that to Samsung, or an equivalent value in cross-licensing other patents.
So the buck stops where on personal responsibility? The teachers? The parents? The friends? With the mortgage bubble, the people who took out loans they could not afford are equally responsible as the people who gave them the loans.
Actually, in both cases the problem was with idiots who loaned money to people not capable of paying it back. Sure, the people accepting the loans were doing wrong, and should bear some of the pain. However, in the end the only reason that any of this stuff happens is because of financial systems (often the result of legislation) that involve people making money at the risk of somebody else's money.
In the case of student loans that is pretty obvious - the bank's money is never at risk, so they'll loan it to anybody. If the kid can't make his $1600/month payment then Uncle Sam will pay it for them, and pay the bank a collection fee to shake down the kid for more. If the bank had to risk its OWN money on that loan, you can bet that they'll be darn sure that little Johnny has a promising future ahead of him before just writing him a check, and the amounts would be much lower, and colleges that want to stay open would find a way to provide a much cheaper education like they did in the 70s.
In the case of the mortgage crisis there were more factors. Much of it came from people with tons of money to invest, little personal stake in the outcome, and tons of agencies paid to tell people what they wanted to hear. Companies were leveraged horribly due to repeat of depression-era controls. Everybody and their uncle has a pension or 401k or something, and all that money has to be invested in something, so anybody who has a scheme that sounds good can get billions of dollars. The result is a financial services sector that dominates the national economy despite producing little of worth. You can yell at mortgage brokers giving out bad loans, but they wouldn't be doing that if others weren't buying up those loans, and they wouldn't be buying if some dumb guy weren't being taken to the cleaners. The dumb guy usually turns out to be a naive investor, or perhaps even an involuntary one like an employee who has a pension - it isn't like the company really cares if they lose it or not as long as Uncle Sam signs off on it.
I'm all for accountability, but the student loan system is anything but.
Bottom line, though, is that I doubt we disagree all that much...
Certainly there are a few people who are disabled by injuries or birth, who do not seem to be capable of taking care of themselves, but the majority of the people in the world excel at something.
Well, you started with everybody, and now you're at a majority. I'll agree that right now a majority are good at something, but a majority is only 50% (I'm sure the real figure is more like 90%).
However, back in the day all you really needed was a strong back to earn a living. Now that really isn't enough unless you are willing and legally able to work for a few dollars per day. As technology marches on, there won't be a single job that won't be automated, certainly including counting, interacting well with customers, and so on. Why read a book written by a human if a book written by a computer is better? I'm sure at some point computers will understand the human condition better than people do. People are just machines - lots of complicated wiring, but entirely finite.
Uh, a journal helps prevent corruption of filesystem metadata by avoiding having it overwritten in place. You even get some benefit for data by doing ordered data writes.
Granted, COW is better still, but we're not quite there yet on btrfs.
Nope - Greg does a decent job with the Gentoo stable kernels. Granted, the current Gentoo stable kernel has a different ext4 bug that can cause panics when files are deleted, which is why I'm running unstable at the moment (I was getting nightly crashes when tmpreaper ran). Oh, the irony.
You are changing the field from natural abilities (which is obviously not fair, but everyone is good at something), to who can get the most effect from the most drugs possible.
Honestly, I think this the crux of the problem with your entire argument. Everybody is NOT good at something. As productivity increases, increasingly more people aren't good at anything (effectively). I suspect we'll actually reach a point where nobody is "good at something" - at least nobody human.
To be successful in modern business you generally need a set of talents that is largely genetic in origin, the willingness to work hard, and often the willingness to make ethical compromises. Depending on the job the degree to which you need to do any of those varies - I don't mean to imply that all jobs require all three of those. However, if you want to get ahead and your competition has more of some of those than you do, then you'll probably lose out.
I think the only issue comes from the fact that we need to work to survive in our current society.
I have no sympathy for someone with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans.
I do. You take some 18 year old kid who has absolutely no idea of the value of money or how hard it is to get a professional job, and you ask them to make a $100k+ financial decision, while showing them TV sitcoms with a bunch of college educated 30-year-olds having fun in an office setting and telling them that they have what it takes to be an astronaut and that they should reach for the stars. All of their friends are going to college, and all their teachers say that this is their best option.
So, you're proposing that the kid ignore the advice of everybody around them. That simply isn't a decision that most kids are going to make. Sure, everybody around them is collectively stupid, but that isn't the kid's fault. What they do share in is the collective desire to imagine the world as they want it to be, and not as it actually is.
That isn't the advice I'd give my kid, but...
And hey, maybe those parents are doing the right thing. After all, if everybody collectively loses their minds then we can have a big bailout and the only people who lose out are those who didn't take advantage of the big bubble.
Well, if the satellite could burn its way to the correct orbit better to let it do so, and then just refuel it when the tank gets low. That beats burning fuel to reach it at point A, and then burning fuel on both to get to point B.
Unless the tanker had quite a bit of fuel any but the smallest inclination changes would be very expensive, unless the orbit was very high at at least one point. It would make far more sense to just launch at the right time than to give the satellite a ton of energy during launch that you just have to get rid of to move it. Now, maybe if the tanker refueled from some asteroid in a very high orbit it might just drag some satellite along for the next refueling run and then drop it back into the correct inclination - it might be cheaper to just boost the thing practically to the moon than to try to change the inclination near the Earth.
Yup. The other thing that is killing them is the whole BYOD thing.
If the company wants to issue me a blackberry no big deal - I'll stick it in my bag and pull it out if I need to do work.
However, companies are getting cheaper. Most don't want to issue phones, but instead ask that employees use their own phones to do work. Well, as you can imagine the typical employee could care less how hard the phone is to remote administer when they're paying for it. If the company's standard HAPPENS to support my phone I might use it to get some extra work done. If not, then I won't.
Then there is the whole thing that even company-issued phones are a bit of a status item. The big manager wants the fancy phone that everybody will envy, not the stodgy one that people will chuckle about when their back is turned. Even though Angry Birds has nothing to do with getting work done, it ends up impacting the purchasing decision.
Baslcally, this thing might work fine if your entire business runs in the Google universe. Otherwise, get a netbook.
Well, sure, but that's really the target market for this. Most businesses don't use Kerberos, don't need VPN, and really could operate on one or two printers. Yes, the fortune 500 company down the street can't work that way, but most businesses don't even have an IT department.
I think the bigger issue is that the thing is useless if you have even a single application that isn't web-based. They really need a solution for running hosted windowed applications (either on the customer's servers, or perhaps on their own - ideally supporting Windows, OSX, and Linux).
I think business is basically the target market. The problem is that they still haven't come out with a way to run remote applications on the thing (Citrix/NX/etc). That means that unless you're 100.00000% cloud-based you can't adopt it.
If you buy a standard laptop it won't have virus immunity, full-disk encryption, enterprise management (policies, accounts, etc), etc right out of the box. With a Chromebook half of that stuff is automatically there, and the rest of the enterprise management features just requires a single log-in to associate the unit with the owner. There is basically zero setup involved, and all your settings sync so devices are completely interchangeable.
I think Google's problem is that they spent all this effort making a solution that is basically 95% done, but they're failing to deliver on the last 5%. I think they might get somewhere with this if they got a solution in place for both linux and windows-based application streaming (Citrix, NX, whatever), and then started marketing this thing towards its eventual niches.
Oh, and they need to work on the price. You at least need to be comparable to similar hardware - you can't go charging some big markup like you're Apple for something that isn't really a "gotta have the new toy" thing. Once you're established I'm sure you could sell for a reasonable profit to businesses, and Aunt Tilly.
Well, I don't know that they have to discount it way cheaper than the comparable netbooks, but they certainly can't charge a premium, which until now they basically have been doing.
For the targeted user the lockdown is a feature, not a bug. I could see buying these if I owned a small business and needed a dozen laptops and used Google Apps or other cloud-based services for everything. They never really followed up on the ability to run apps over a citrix-like interface, which was what was intended to be the solution for the one-offs, which I think is what is really preventing their uptake in this area.
The idea is that you have a computer whose total cost of ownership basically is the price on the sticker. There is no provisioning cost, you get full-disk encryption and all the usual enterprise features (including management/policies), and if somebody loses it you just grab another one out of the supply closet.
Uh, if you want to unlock the thing just flip the switch. That turns off secure boot and gives you sell/root/etc access. You'll even still get auto-updates as long as you don't actually modify the OS partition.
It really isn't targeted at home users - it seems more aimed at small businesses and such that utilize Google Apps.
No idea where the list can be found, but I'd think that something like a prednisone shot would be available from traditional manufacturers.
Not that this necessarily means anything. Several trade magazines have blasted the practice of doctors obtaining things from compounding pharmacies that are otherwise available from conventional manufacturers. I can completely understand the need for alternate sources for unusual medications that otherwise would never be made, but there is really no excuse for using these sources for things which are otherwise manufactured by the book. I read a blog by some guy who works for a generics company that found that they had trouble competing on price since some of those compounders started with materials not classified for human use (orders of magnitude cheaper), while they had to follow proper quality controls and source proper materials (you know, stuff that is controlled so that you don't get mad cow disease, contamination, or who knows what else).
You might have hit on something with the military bit. They stick some giant billion dollar mirror in space and just need some fuel to keep it up. Might let them do more maneuvering to put it where they want it when they want it there, and make it harder to keep track of.
Yup. Granted, others have pointed out that mass will be lower so the amount of fuel required to change velocity will be lower. However, it will still be a significant amount of fuel to get back down. More if the whole thing needs a fancy re-entry shield and the required additional structural strength.
Fair enough, but I'm sure it will still take a fair bit. If the tanker sat is designed to be simple I doubt it would be worth it. Plus now you have to contend with re-entry - that's a lot of extra mass.
Yup, hence the whole point of my post. If you want it to come back down you need way more fuel, since you would have expended the energy to get into geostationary orbit and need to expend it again to come back down...
Read my whole post carefully.
To get to geostationary orbit there are two energy expenditures. One is from ground to geostationary transfer orbit. The other is from transfer orbit to geostationary orbit.
To get back there is really just one energy expenditure - from geostationary orbit to transfer orbit. The bottom of transfer orbit would be far enough in the atmosphere that drag would do the rest - you don't need to re-circularize it with propellant.
However, no question that you'll need a ton of fuel just to get back to a transfer orbit.
Uh, the last time I got an antibiotic it was prescribe first and wait for the test results to come in later. The alternative is to just let the infection grow until they figure out what works.
Usually they take their best guess, and if in a few days it turns out they're wrong they change approach.
At least, that has been my experience with every doctor I've worked with.
If we "close the formulation loophole" as you suggest, that will put all offlabel and children's doses in the hands of the noble and reputable Big Pharma companies. Won't they choose to skip formulations for which there is no substantial market (children's doses, for instance)? Will they not raise prices mercilessly on a captive market?
Well, if you're going to make a special formulation for three patients per year, SOMEBODY has to pay for it.
Right now it is cheap because somebody just goes into a lab, mixes some stuff up, and mails it off with a note saying that they were careful.
If that were done under the process used for large scale drug manufacture, then what would happen is:
1. Somebody figures out how to mix it all up (not much harder than what was done here), but would document the living daylights out of the process.
2. Somebody figures out how to test the stuff so that anything that could go wrong would be spotted, and documents the living daylights out of that (I doubt the compounding pharmacy does much testing at all).
3. The company follows the process in #1 and #2 to make a whole bunch of doses of the new formulation.
4. The company injects a bunch of healthy volunteers with the new formulation, and collects blood/urine samples at regular intervals. These are tested for drug concentrations.
5. The company does analysis of all this data against corresponding data for the established drug and demonstrates that the new one is just as safe and behaves in the same way.
6. The company sticks containers of the new formulation in a stability chamber for months to years to figure out how long it lasts, following all the tests in #2 to confirm.
7. The company writes up a few thousand pages of reports on all of the above, then waits for the FDA to tell them if it is OK.
Suffice it to say that all costs more than just whipping something together and dropping it in the post. It is also a LOT safer.
I have no issues with compounding pharmacies, but they should be a solution for people who have no alternative, and they should operate on small scales where a mistake harms only a few people. The problem was that the company in question was operating on the scale of a small pharmaceutical plant but without any of the regulatory safeguards. Even the big companies mess up, but usually not this badly (most of the high profile problems have been with the drug itself, and not the quality of its manufacture - that is really a separate matter, though obviously an important one).
There's a need for good compounding pharmacies, and it's a pity that there doesn't seem to be national resolve to regulate them in precisely the same way as other pharmacies or businesses that manufacture stock drugs.
The reason that they're not regulated in the same way is that they probably wouldn't exist if they were. The testing quality controls required for the manufacture of even generic drugs are fairly expensive, and they're recouped because of the economies of scale. If the money was there to be made, you wouldn't need a compounding pharmacy in the first place.
The problem isn't from the existence of compounding pharmacies, but rather that a practice designed to regulate small regional companies making botique products was applied to an industry that has changed so that it operates on a national scale, supplying products that really should stand on their own.
If a compounding pharmacy is the only way to get a particular drug I can understand the need for some laxity. However, when the same drug is available from a traditionally regulated source and that drug is just as appropriate for the particular patient, then the drug with full quality controls should be used. Also, the scale of these companies should be regulated, so that a botched batch gets ten people sick, and not ten thousand. The regs were really written for some guy mixing up solutions in a flask, not in a 50k liter mixer.
I could almost see there being some value in refuel. Maybe also in reposition if a big change is involved (but why would you need to move it anyway?). Take a few pictures of it if you want, since that is fairly cheap.
However, when you start getting into repair you're talking about a massive increase in cost and decrease in reusability of the refueling ship.
And if you don't do repair, then you need to design the satellites to have components that last for decades but a fuel supply which lasts much less - why not just launch it with a lifetime fuel load?
Repositioning only makes sense if it was unplanned and needs more propellant than could be carried by the satellite. If you dock a ship to it and use that to move the satellite, then you need enough fuel to reposition the combined mass of both. It would be smarter to just refuel it and let the satellite move itself.
Oh, and unless you're really patient, moving from satellite to satellite takes a fair bit of fuel (a little nudge goes a long way if you're willing to wait, but with each orbit lasting a day it will be probably weeks between encounters if you don't want to do large burns).
I think that the only way private companies would sign up for this refueling service were if the cost of the service were basically subsidized on the backs of taxpayers. I could be wrong, and that would be wonderful, but this really seems like a solution looking for a product. Sometimes it really is cheaper to just make a new one.
The refueling robots could just drop out of orbit to Earth to be recovered and reused?
That way they can only carry half as much fuel? It takes a lot fuel to get from transfer orbit to geostationary orbit, and just as much fuel to get back down. The energy to get to transfer orbit in the first place is a one-time expense, since atmospheric drag and gravity will get you back down from there.
So, what are you advocating? When the teacher makes a kid do pointless homework they should refuse to do so, and then if the teacher gives them a failing grade find some way to effectively coerce the teacher into changing their behavior as any unpassionate psychopath would?
Sure, you get to choose your attitude, but that doesn't change the fact that a kid is forced to sit for six hours a day in pointless lessons.