You nailed the issue. Antibiotics are a diminishing-return prospect, even if you get the government to fund them, and they are completely without profit for private industry.
My feeling is that we should be funding more antibiotics completely on the public dime, but we need to do a MUCH better job managing the antiobiotics we already have.
Even if a $500M antibiotic only saves a few thousand lives per year, that is still "only" a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars per life. That is pretty steep, but I suspect many people who get MRSA are people who might otherwise be healthy, and their treatment is completely short-term. Once you give them an IV for a week or two they're back at work being productive and they should live for the remainder of their lives. Unless the bulk of people who get MRSA only have six months to live, it is still relatively cost-effective. Compared to treating diabetics antibiotics are fairly modest even with the R&D factored in.
I love all of the side effects placebos cause in clinical studies. It would be great to see patient's feedback asking that a sugar pill quit giving them horrible diarrhea.
Yup, I remember the TV ads for Claritin back when it wasn't generic. It had a laundry list of side-effects for legal reasons, followed by "similar to placebo." That basically means that as far as they could tell it has virtually no side-effects at all, but since somebody took it while they had a cold they had to say that it could give you a runny nose.
In fact, the sugar pill is the most dangerous pill of all - it causes everything from sneezing to death and yet it also has next to no health benefits. Then again, most of the time it does better than the drugs (that don't make it to market)...
A:WTF? You did all those ADME and pharmacokinetics studies, body surface area vs body mass dosing calculations, and liver function tests, and you're asking me??
I can actually see the utility in surveying people about that, assuming you manage your selection bias. Just because you did a PK/PD study on 50 people doesn't mean that there isn't a benefit from asking 10k people for their opinions. The first is high-quality info from a few people, and the second is low-quality info from many people. Both have uses, and if there is a big disconnect maybe there is some subpopulation that would warrant another study.
If you CHOOSE to eat more calories than you burn, you will gain weight. If you eat fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight.
Well, duh, but why do people choose to eat more than is healthy for them? While most people aren't this extreme, there are people who literally cannot stop eating unless they're physically restrained - they would eat until they passed out from exhaustion, then wake up and start eating again, probably defecating on the floor next to the table. You can breed mice that do the same thing.
For whatever reason some people eat too much. Sure, it is voluntary, just like anybody can voluntarily saw off their own arm, and if determined you could do it without shedding a tear. For whatever reason people lack the necessary willpower to resist eating. For others it isn't a big deal.
Telling people to eat less would be like me walking up to somebody and telling them to just do better on their math tests, or them telling me to make it onto the varsity ice hockey team. Just because I can walk into a Calculus exam and get the top score without studying doesn't mean that anybody could do it.
Switch to the universal healthcare option and on top of that start funding drug development.
Yup. The societal problem with pharma companies isn't that drugs are expensive - that is just the nature of the beast (we can argue over whether they should be $4/pill or $5/pill, but they aren't going to be 10 cents if costs are accounted for). The problem is who has to bear these costs.
If you had government fund more development and hold the patent rights, then you could have 10 cent pills, and that's before you get into universal healthcare (which is probably still necessary since while they're everybody's favorite whipping boy drugs only are maybe 20% of the total bill). However, in the end taxpayers as a whole won't be saving much money - maybe just on advertising and misuse.
"Or, you can sell it cheap if the people who forked over the original $200M didn't care to make a profit." GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals makes over $8 billion dollars a year on 1 drug alone... Advair. It's $450 for a 30day supply. Their patent has run out, but they either sue or bribe the FDA into scuttling any efforts of anyone that attempts to make a generic.
I'd be the first to agree that things like this need to be reformed. I once heard a talk by some guy saying more companies should try to do what was done with Advair and nearly fell off my chair - that is just pure greed.
I'm fine with companies making a healthy profit since they sunk the costs, until the patent runs out. Once your 17 years or whatever are up, and maybe another year if you toss a bones to the little kids, then you should have to move on. If I had the power to do so I'd put an end to these kinds of games.
Again, I'd love to see more public ownership of drugs as well. We're just not there yet.
You're unwilling to try new approaches, and you don't think anything will come of it. Fine, you're welcome to your opinion.
Companies have been trying new approaches all the time - some work better, and some work worse. However, the problem also keeps getting harder, as new drugs have to be better than existing ones to be worthwhile. Often the new ideas are tried in startups, and some have been successful. However, in the end nobody has made such a huge change in how the game is played that people have noticed, which is why you're looking at this company like they're doing something earth-shaking. Even TFA points out that this is just the next step in something Pfizer was already trying to do.
An idea whose time as come. What a shame no one thought of it, or could make a credible beginning of it, sooner.
Lots of people have thought of it - I remember seeing comments on this on Slashdot years ago.
The beginning doesn't really matter that much - the question is how does it end. Unless somebody gives this company a ton of charity money (perhaps tens to hundreds of millions depending on luck) to actually pursue their work then they'll either collapse without actually coming out with a proven drug, or they'll have to sell out to a private investor in any number of ways, in which case the drug that does come out will cost $5/pill like everything else.
They're just doing the easy stuff right now - the kind of stuff happening in every University and start-up and established pharma company across the country. How many articles have you seen in the last 20 years about some idea that scientists think could cure some major disease? How many panned out remotely as well as was hoped, and how many were cheap for the first 20 years? Curing cancer in a test tube is easy.
Asking doctors and patients what kinds of drugs they'd like to have isn't a bad idea - pharmaceutical companies do it all the time, and perhaps not as often as they should. However, good marketing can't change the state of technology. If you surveyed everybody in my neighborhood I'm sure that a $1000 flying car would be right at the top of everybody's list. You'd waste a great deal of money if you tried to actually invent one, because the technology just isn't there yet.
It isn't like nobody knows what the big disease targets are today. The problem is that nobody knows how to fix them, or if they have ideas they haven't yet found a drug that actually works in practice. That's a really expensive process.
If somebody figured out today that inhibiting some particular protein interaction would make us live to the age of 200, it would probably be 15 years and a few hundred million dollars before somebody got it right. It probably would only take weeks before somebody was inhibiting that interaction in a test tube, but it would take a lot of trial and error and tens of thousands of trial patients to figure out which molecule works in people and doesn't eat away their heart valves or whatever.
Nobody is going to sue them. They'll do just fine when it is just a few low-paid workers working on concepts - that is the cheap part and it is done by all kinds of start-ups/etc.
Eventually they'll get all excited that they have the next cure for cancer and there will be newspaper articles about how it kills cancer cells in a test tube. That probably happens every other week in some lab somewhere across the country. The big question is - does it work in people, and does it have some nasty side-effect? This is a relatively simple question to answer - you just need to kill a few hundred lab rats first (hmm, suddenly operation "Transparency" is either keeping very quiet about this or they're going to be protested into oblivion). Then, if the lab rats do reasonably well you start doing clinical trials.
How do clinical trials work? Simply, you throw a lot of money at a lot of doctors to convince them to take the time to suggest to their patients that the drug might help them. Some doctors will follow the protocol and collect good data. Other doctors will try to get anybody then can find to take the drug whether or not they're a good candidate per the protocol and collect extra fees, and they'll add lots of noise to your data. After you repeat this a few thousand times you'll have run through tens of millions of dollars - mostly spent on getting doctors to participate (most of the patients don't get much of anything), and to some extent on clinical testing (though you don't have to pay lab techs nearly as much as independent doctors.
When that's all done the answer will come back that it doesn't work at all, and you've just wasted $20M. So, you start all over again and burn through another $20M, and then do that another 5-10X until you get lucky. That is assuming somebody keeps dishing out that kind of cash for you to operate. Once you get through all that you can go ahead and put your drug on the market. At that point anybody who gets the sniffles when they take it will probably try to sue you, but assuming you're charging $5/pill you can probably still make a good profit. Of course, then everybody calls you a sellout and talks about how cheap drugs are to make and that some Indian company can do it for 5 cents a pill. Naturally the Indian company didn't fork out $20M 10X over 5-7 years trying to get it right, so its expense base is way lower. Or, you can sell it cheap if the people who forked over the original $200M didn't care to make a profit. More power to them if they can find that kind of money - I think it is probably the future of drug development (though likely with governments paying the bill - right now they almost never pay for trials since they aren't really all that innovative).
Lots of companies discover drugs - including some start-ups that have grown into major companies in the last 15 years. The reason nobody has come out with a brand new medication that costs the same as Tylenol isn't because there is some grand conspiracy. The problem is that the success rate is low, and the cost of clinical trials is very high.
I don't really see the comparison with open source software. It sounds like they're taking suggestions, which is nice, but it isn't like anybody can just whip up some pills in their garage, test them out on homeless people, and report in if they work OK.
Not for top speed or specific impulse, but it certainly matters for force/acceleration. More watts means more particles of propellant being accelerated per unit time, which means more force. In general ion engines are low-power but high-impluse. That means they have low accelerations, but are much more efficient since you need less fuel (and fuel is dead weight when accelerating). If you could have a relatively light nuclear reactor that could provide high power, then you'd have the best of both worlds - high power like a chemical rocket, but relatively high efficiency like an ion engine.
I think whether it is worthwhile depends on the relative mass of nuclear vs solar generators. In space near the sun solar is pretty effective, and very light - much more cost-effective than on the ground on earth. Plus, getting there a few weeks earlier by having a one hour burn vs a one month burn probably doesn't matter much on a mission that is going to last years anyway.
Doing so by recklessly interferring with the ability of others to use a legitimate (and in some cases critical) service is neither an approach nor a mindset I have any degree of respect for.
I dunno - people have almost no ability to influence employer policies. Sure, if you're a top-notch anything you can, but if you're average you just have to go with the flow. If that flow involves doing something onerous, I can't blame people for not wanting to do it. If government isn't willing to regulate stuff that is ridiculous, then people will take the law into their own hands.
It isn't unlike towns that place 35mph speed limits on roads that can tolerate much faster speeds. People will drive the speed they feel is safe (55mph or so), and giving 5 people a month tickets won't have much impact on the other 5k cars per day that drive down the road.
The only way that a majority of people will break laws in a democracy is if it isn't really a democracy.
True enough, but design does tend to speak to long-term maintenance cost. Whether you pay that cost tends to then result in reliability.
Stick a timing belt in a car and you have to take half the engine apart every 60-90k miles like clockwork. Stick a chain in there and you don't.
Sometimes you can upgrade parts, like spark plugs (ugh, they still use non-Pt plugs?). You can use better oil. However, in the end if the design is bad you will spend a lot more money fixing stuff. Now, if you stay on top of it the car will still remain reliable - I never want to drive a car that breaks down randomly. However, given a choice between a car that needs $700/yr in repairs at 200k miles and one that needs $3k/yr I'll take the former.
True, I wasn't considering that sex could just be determined randomly or environmentally. That would seem to be less stable since some tweak in some random gene could cause somebody to have tons of males vs females and so on.
Shrinkage of the Y to remove non-sex chromosomes makes perfect sense, but getting rid of genetic sex determination entirely seems like a pretty bold step.
Also, we're talking about time-scales of millions of years here, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if humans lack DNA entirely in only a few hundred years at the rate things are going. I mean, a few hundred years ago they were debating the fate of Galileo, and it was only 120 years ago that somebody came up with the automobile and the light bulb.
Interesting, although all of the examples that you linked to in that section of the article clearly don't use XY inheritance to determine sex, in all cases it is not mentioned how sex determination actually works. It could be random or environmental I suppose...
Try to keep in mind that the judge's priority here is what is best for the child -- and that is not necessarily what either parent fairly deserves as a result of their behavior.
There is a major problem with this sort of approach. Let's take some random kid in an orphanage. Would that kid be better off or worse off if Bill Gates were paying $1M/yr in child support? Obviously that child would be better off. Let's take the next kid in the orphanage...
So, we've solved the orphanage funding problem - just make Bill Gates pay for every orphan alive on the planet. It's better for the children, after all.
So, genders have been around for hundreds of millions of years - why would anybody think that evolution would suddenly make them go away?
In humans it probably doesn't make so much sense to have lots of sex-linked characteristics, so it makes perfect sense that the contents of the Y chromosome would dwindle over time to just the minimal set of genes necessary to confer gender. After that there should be strong selective pressure to conserve things.
Suppose for the sake of argument somebody is born with a Y' chromosome that doesn't confer maleness. Either they'll have non-functional reproductive organs, or functional female ones. In the former case they're an evolutionary dead-end. In the latter case and they reproduce with an XY man then 25% of their children will be normal XX females, 25% will be Y'Y offspring that won't make it to birth lacking an X chromosome, 25% will be normal XY males, and 25% will be XY' like the mother. So, in 75% of those cases the Y' chromosome is lost. And all that assumes that there aren't any deformities/etc that make reproduction less likely. I can't see how such a situation could ever become dominant. It would likely reach some low frequency equilibrium even if not harmful.
The fact that it hasn't already happened makes me think that it is not likely to do so.
Does it depend on UDP like the DHT protocol on Bittorrent? If so, then it won't work over most anonymizing networks which are TCP-only. That means that while they can't shut down a tracker, they can still sue you for using it.
If TPB goes down then it seems like the only viable anonymous replacement I can see out there is I2P - which is very limited in selection.
A definition might help. Quality means that when you make something it comes out the way you intended it to.
If you intend to make junk, and you make something good, then you have bad quality.
For the IT-minded in the/. crowd - quality means that the product functions in accordance with its specifications. Whether the specifications are any good is a separate matter.
Now, in practice quality does tend to translate into short-term reliability, since nobody designs cars to fail often under warranty. Of course, that is only true to a point - if the cost of avoiding failures is more than the cost of fixing them, then the decision might be to make the specs loose. On the other hand, if you're talking about a rocket where a few parts out of a million breaking causes a total loss then your specs just have to be tight - if you have a million opportunities to fail every time you hit the launch button then per-part reliability needs to be the millionth-root of your overall desired success rate (assuming any failure is fatal).
Disclaimer - I don't work on cars, but I do work in a manufacturing industry which is VERY conscious of quality (cost to fix is high).
I'm not so concerned with reliability during the warranty - I'm interested in how the car will perform when it has 120k+ miles on it. I buy a car about once or twice a decade (multiple car garage), and I expect to drive it until the cost of keeping it running breakdown-free exceeds new car payments.
For me 100k miles is just starting to get broken in. I gave up my last car at about 160k and bought it brand new - I'd still be driving it but for the big crunch in it, and was driving it for a while with the crunch...
You're pretty high-mileage. I can't say my Toyota only needed wiper blades in 150k miles, but that was at 12k per year. After around 80k or so I stared racking up more substantial bills. However, the only thing I really thought was bad was that it used a timing belt. My replacement uses a chain, and I'll probably never buy another car with a belt again...
Yup - just replaced my 2000 Camry the other week due to a collision, otherwise it was going well. It did have a few issues with general wear - I'd say I was spending about $700/yr on maintenance with a medium-expense shop (not a Toyota dealer, but still at a large garage with certified mechanics). Now I'm spending that every two months on loan payments...
Nobody thinks much about linkers any more. That's part of the problem. What's needed is something that organizes the executable file so that the stuff you need to get going loads first, using one big read operation. Linkers which once did that were once common, but are now rare.
I can't vouch for windows, but doesn't Linux already work this way? When you execute a program it mmaps the binary and its libraries into the process address space. If a function gets called before it is loaded it triggers a page fault. If you have a 10GB executable that never runs more than 100kb of procedures, in theory only that small bit of the software ever gets loaded, aside from anything else the read-ahead cache grabs.
Then again, I guess the dynamic linker would trigger quite a few page faults just doing all the relocations - I'm not sure whether it only does them as-needed or all up-front (which would require a page fault on any page containing a function call). That said, I do admit I'm not intimately familiar with the internals of ELF/ld.so/etc. If somebody would like to correct any ignorance here I'm all ears...
Yup. This sounds like the whole "GPL\0 is not the license this module is offered under. This module is proprietary." thing that was going on with some proprietary kernel modules a few years ago. In that case it really didn't have any negative impact to the end-user - just to kernel developers.
While this is a bit of an exploit in P3P, I despise loopholes, so I'm not going to give Google a free pass here...
Slashdot Mirror
You nailed the issue. Antibiotics are a diminishing-return prospect, even if you get the government to fund them, and they are completely without profit for private industry.
My feeling is that we should be funding more antibiotics completely on the public dime, but we need to do a MUCH better job managing the antiobiotics we already have.
Even if a $500M antibiotic only saves a few thousand lives per year, that is still "only" a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars per life. That is pretty steep, but I suspect many people who get MRSA are people who might otherwise be healthy, and their treatment is completely short-term. Once you give them an IV for a week or two they're back at work being productive and they should live for the remainder of their lives. Unless the bulk of people who get MRSA only have six months to live, it is still relatively cost-effective. Compared to treating diabetics antibiotics are fairly modest even with the R&D factored in.
I love all of the side effects placebos cause in clinical studies. It would be great to see patient's feedback asking that a sugar pill quit giving them horrible diarrhea.
Yup, I remember the TV ads for Claritin back when it wasn't generic. It had a laundry list of side-effects for legal reasons, followed by "similar to placebo." That basically means that as far as they could tell it has virtually no side-effects at all, but since somebody took it while they had a cold they had to say that it could give you a runny nose.
In fact, the sugar pill is the most dangerous pill of all - it causes everything from sneezing to death and yet it also has next to no health benefits. Then again, most of the time it does better than the drugs (that don't make it to market)...
A:WTF? You did all those ADME and pharmacokinetics studies, body surface area vs body mass dosing calculations, and liver function tests, and you're asking me??
I can actually see the utility in surveying people about that, assuming you manage your selection bias. Just because you did a PK/PD study on 50 people doesn't mean that there isn't a benefit from asking 10k people for their opinions. The first is high-quality info from a few people, and the second is low-quality info from many people. Both have uses, and if there is a big disconnect maybe there is some subpopulation that would warrant another study.
If you CHOOSE to eat more calories than you burn, you will gain weight. If you eat fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight.
Well, duh, but why do people choose to eat more than is healthy for them? While most people aren't this extreme, there are people who literally cannot stop eating unless they're physically restrained - they would eat until they passed out from exhaustion, then wake up and start eating again, probably defecating on the floor next to the table. You can breed mice that do the same thing.
For whatever reason some people eat too much. Sure, it is voluntary, just like anybody can voluntarily saw off their own arm, and if determined you could do it without shedding a tear. For whatever reason people lack the necessary willpower to resist eating. For others it isn't a big deal.
Telling people to eat less would be like me walking up to somebody and telling them to just do better on their math tests, or them telling me to make it onto the varsity ice hockey team. Just because I can walk into a Calculus exam and get the top score without studying doesn't mean that anybody could do it.
Switch to the universal healthcare option and on top of that start funding drug development.
Yup. The societal problem with pharma companies isn't that drugs are expensive - that is just the nature of the beast (we can argue over whether they should be $4/pill or $5/pill, but they aren't going to be 10 cents if costs are accounted for). The problem is who has to bear these costs.
If you had government fund more development and hold the patent rights, then you could have 10 cent pills, and that's before you get into universal healthcare (which is probably still necessary since while they're everybody's favorite whipping boy drugs only are maybe 20% of the total bill). However, in the end taxpayers as a whole won't be saving much money - maybe just on advertising and misuse.
"Or, you can sell it cheap if the people who forked over the original $200M didn't care to make a profit."
GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals makes over $8 billion dollars a year on 1 drug alone... Advair.
It's $450 for a 30day supply.
Their patent has run out, but they either sue or bribe the FDA into scuttling any efforts of anyone that attempts to make a generic.
I'd be the first to agree that things like this need to be reformed. I once heard a talk by some guy saying more companies should try to do what was done with Advair and nearly fell off my chair - that is just pure greed.
I'm fine with companies making a healthy profit since they sunk the costs, until the patent runs out. Once your 17 years or whatever are up, and maybe another year if you toss a bones to the little kids, then you should have to move on. If I had the power to do so I'd put an end to these kinds of games.
Again, I'd love to see more public ownership of drugs as well. We're just not there yet.
You're unwilling to try new approaches, and you don't think anything will come of it. Fine, you're welcome to your opinion.
Companies have been trying new approaches all the time - some work better, and some work worse. However, the problem also keeps getting harder, as new drugs have to be better than existing ones to be worthwhile. Often the new ideas are tried in startups, and some have been successful. However, in the end nobody has made such a huge change in how the game is played that people have noticed, which is why you're looking at this company like they're doing something earth-shaking. Even TFA points out that this is just the next step in something Pfizer was already trying to do.
An idea whose time as come. What a shame no one thought of it, or could make a credible beginning of it, sooner.
Lots of people have thought of it - I remember seeing comments on this on Slashdot years ago.
The beginning doesn't really matter that much - the question is how does it end. Unless somebody gives this company a ton of charity money (perhaps tens to hundreds of millions depending on luck) to actually pursue their work then they'll either collapse without actually coming out with a proven drug, or they'll have to sell out to a private investor in any number of ways, in which case the drug that does come out will cost $5/pill like everything else.
They're just doing the easy stuff right now - the kind of stuff happening in every University and start-up and established pharma company across the country. How many articles have you seen in the last 20 years about some idea that scientists think could cure some major disease? How many panned out remotely as well as was hoped, and how many were cheap for the first 20 years? Curing cancer in a test tube is easy.
Asking doctors and patients what kinds of drugs they'd like to have isn't a bad idea - pharmaceutical companies do it all the time, and perhaps not as often as they should. However, good marketing can't change the state of technology. If you surveyed everybody in my neighborhood I'm sure that a $1000 flying car would be right at the top of everybody's list. You'd waste a great deal of money if you tried to actually invent one, because the technology just isn't there yet.
It isn't like nobody knows what the big disease targets are today. The problem is that nobody knows how to fix them, or if they have ideas they haven't yet found a drug that actually works in practice. That's a really expensive process.
If somebody figured out today that inhibiting some particular protein interaction would make us live to the age of 200, it would probably be 15 years and a few hundred million dollars before somebody got it right. It probably would only take weeks before somebody was inhibiting that interaction in a test tube, but it would take a lot of trial and error and tens of thousands of trial patients to figure out which molecule works in people and doesn't eat away their heart valves or whatever.
Nobody is going to sue them. They'll do just fine when it is just a few low-paid workers working on concepts - that is the cheap part and it is done by all kinds of start-ups/etc.
Eventually they'll get all excited that they have the next cure for cancer and there will be newspaper articles about how it kills cancer cells in a test tube. That probably happens every other week in some lab somewhere across the country. The big question is - does it work in people, and does it have some nasty side-effect? This is a relatively simple question to answer - you just need to kill a few hundred lab rats first (hmm, suddenly operation "Transparency" is either keeping very quiet about this or they're going to be protested into oblivion). Then, if the lab rats do reasonably well you start doing clinical trials.
How do clinical trials work? Simply, you throw a lot of money at a lot of doctors to convince them to take the time to suggest to their patients that the drug might help them. Some doctors will follow the protocol and collect good data. Other doctors will try to get anybody then can find to take the drug whether or not they're a good candidate per the protocol and collect extra fees, and they'll add lots of noise to your data. After you repeat this a few thousand times you'll have run through tens of millions of dollars - mostly spent on getting doctors to participate (most of the patients don't get much of anything), and to some extent on clinical testing (though you don't have to pay lab techs nearly as much as independent doctors.
When that's all done the answer will come back that it doesn't work at all, and you've just wasted $20M. So, you start all over again and burn through another $20M, and then do that another 5-10X until you get lucky. That is assuming somebody keeps dishing out that kind of cash for you to operate. Once you get through all that you can go ahead and put your drug on the market. At that point anybody who gets the sniffles when they take it will probably try to sue you, but assuming you're charging $5/pill you can probably still make a good profit. Of course, then everybody calls you a sellout and talks about how cheap drugs are to make and that some Indian company can do it for 5 cents a pill. Naturally the Indian company didn't fork out $20M 10X over 5-7 years trying to get it right, so its expense base is way lower. Or, you can sell it cheap if the people who forked over the original $200M didn't care to make a profit. More power to them if they can find that kind of money - I think it is probably the future of drug development (though likely with governments paying the bill - right now they almost never pay for trials since they aren't really all that innovative).
Lots of companies discover drugs - including some start-ups that have grown into major companies in the last 15 years. The reason nobody has come out with a brand new medication that costs the same as Tylenol isn't because there is some grand conspiracy. The problem is that the success rate is low, and the cost of clinical trials is very high.
I don't really see the comparison with open source software. It sounds like they're taking suggestions, which is nice, but it isn't like anybody can just whip up some pills in their garage, test them out on homeless people, and report in if they work OK.
The watt count doesn't matter.
Not for top speed or specific impulse, but it certainly matters for force/acceleration. More watts means more particles of propellant being accelerated per unit time, which means more force. In general ion engines are low-power but high-impluse. That means they have low accelerations, but are much more efficient since you need less fuel (and fuel is dead weight when accelerating). If you could have a relatively light nuclear reactor that could provide high power, then you'd have the best of both worlds - high power like a chemical rocket, but relatively high efficiency like an ion engine.
I think whether it is worthwhile depends on the relative mass of nuclear vs solar generators. In space near the sun solar is pretty effective, and very light - much more cost-effective than on the ground on earth. Plus, getting there a few weeks earlier by having a one hour burn vs a one month burn probably doesn't matter much on a mission that is going to last years anyway.
Doing so by recklessly interferring with the ability of others to use a legitimate (and in some cases critical) service is neither an approach nor a mindset I have any degree of respect for.
I dunno - people have almost no ability to influence employer policies. Sure, if you're a top-notch anything you can, but if you're average you just have to go with the flow. If that flow involves doing something onerous, I can't blame people for not wanting to do it. If government isn't willing to regulate stuff that is ridiculous, then people will take the law into their own hands.
It isn't unlike towns that place 35mph speed limits on roads that can tolerate much faster speeds. People will drive the speed they feel is safe (55mph or so), and giving 5 people a month tickets won't have much impact on the other 5k cars per day that drive down the road.
The only way that a majority of people will break laws in a democracy is if it isn't really a democracy.
True enough, but design does tend to speak to long-term maintenance cost. Whether you pay that cost tends to then result in reliability.
Stick a timing belt in a car and you have to take half the engine apart every 60-90k miles like clockwork. Stick a chain in there and you don't.
Sometimes you can upgrade parts, like spark plugs (ugh, they still use non-Pt plugs?). You can use better oil. However, in the end if the design is bad you will spend a lot more money fixing stuff. Now, if you stay on top of it the car will still remain reliable - I never want to drive a car that breaks down randomly. However, given a choice between a car that needs $700/yr in repairs at 200k miles and one that needs $3k/yr I'll take the former.
True, I wasn't considering that sex could just be determined randomly or environmentally. That would seem to be less stable since some tweak in some random gene could cause somebody to have tons of males vs females and so on.
Shrinkage of the Y to remove non-sex chromosomes makes perfect sense, but getting rid of genetic sex determination entirely seems like a pretty bold step.
Also, we're talking about time-scales of millions of years here, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if humans lack DNA entirely in only a few hundred years at the rate things are going. I mean, a few hundred years ago they were debating the fate of Galileo, and it was only 120 years ago that somebody came up with the automobile and the light bulb.
Interesting, although all of the examples that you linked to in that section of the article clearly don't use XY inheritance to determine sex, in all cases it is not mentioned how sex determination actually works. It could be random or environmental I suppose...
Try to keep in mind that the judge's priority here is what is best for the child -- and that is not necessarily what either parent fairly deserves as a result of their behavior.
There is a major problem with this sort of approach. Let's take some random kid in an orphanage. Would that kid be better off or worse off if Bill Gates were paying $1M/yr in child support? Obviously that child would be better off. Let's take the next kid in the orphanage...
So, we've solved the orphanage funding problem - just make Bill Gates pay for every orphan alive on the planet. It's better for the children, after all.
So, genders have been around for hundreds of millions of years - why would anybody think that evolution would suddenly make them go away?
In humans it probably doesn't make so much sense to have lots of sex-linked characteristics, so it makes perfect sense that the contents of the Y chromosome would dwindle over time to just the minimal set of genes necessary to confer gender. After that there should be strong selective pressure to conserve things.
Suppose for the sake of argument somebody is born with a Y' chromosome that doesn't confer maleness. Either they'll have non-functional reproductive organs, or functional female ones. In the former case they're an evolutionary dead-end. In the latter case and they reproduce with an XY man then 25% of their children will be normal XX females, 25% will be Y'Y offspring that won't make it to birth lacking an X chromosome, 25% will be normal XY males, and 25% will be XY' like the mother. So, in 75% of those cases the Y' chromosome is lost. And all that assumes that there aren't any deformities/etc that make reproduction less likely. I can't see how such a situation could ever become dominant. It would likely reach some low frequency equilibrium even if not harmful.
The fact that it hasn't already happened makes me think that it is not likely to do so.
Does it depend on UDP like the DHT protocol on Bittorrent? If so, then it won't work over most anonymizing networks which are TCP-only. That means that while they can't shut down a tracker, they can still sue you for using it.
If TPB goes down then it seems like the only viable anonymous replacement I can see out there is I2P - which is very limited in selection.
A definition might help. Quality means that when you make something it comes out the way you intended it to.
If you intend to make junk, and you make something good, then you have bad quality.
For the IT-minded in the /. crowd - quality means that the product functions in accordance with its specifications. Whether the specifications are any good is a separate matter.
Now, in practice quality does tend to translate into short-term reliability, since nobody designs cars to fail often under warranty. Of course, that is only true to a point - if the cost of avoiding failures is more than the cost of fixing them, then the decision might be to make the specs loose. On the other hand, if you're talking about a rocket where a few parts out of a million breaking causes a total loss then your specs just have to be tight - if you have a million opportunities to fail every time you hit the launch button then per-part reliability needs to be the millionth-root of your overall desired success rate (assuming any failure is fatal).
Disclaimer - I don't work on cars, but I do work in a manufacturing industry which is VERY conscious of quality (cost to fix is high).
I'm not so concerned with reliability during the warranty - I'm interested in how the car will perform when it has 120k+ miles on it. I buy a car about once or twice a decade (multiple car garage), and I expect to drive it until the cost of keeping it running breakdown-free exceeds new car payments.
For me 100k miles is just starting to get broken in. I gave up my last car at about 160k and bought it brand new - I'd still be driving it but for the big crunch in it, and was driving it for a while with the crunch...
You're pretty high-mileage. I can't say my Toyota only needed wiper blades in 150k miles, but that was at 12k per year. After around 80k or so I stared racking up more substantial bills. However, the only thing I really thought was bad was that it used a timing belt. My replacement uses a chain, and I'll probably never buy another car with a belt again...
Yup - just replaced my 2000 Camry the other week due to a collision, otherwise it was going well. It did have a few issues with general wear - I'd say I was spending about $700/yr on maintenance with a medium-expense shop (not a Toyota dealer, but still at a large garage with certified mechanics). Now I'm spending that every two months on loan payments...
Nobody thinks much about linkers any more. That's part of the problem. What's needed is something that organizes the executable file so that the stuff you need to get going loads first, using one big read operation. Linkers which once did that were once common, but are now rare.
I can't vouch for windows, but doesn't Linux already work this way? When you execute a program it mmaps the binary and its libraries into the process address space. If a function gets called before it is loaded it triggers a page fault. If you have a 10GB executable that never runs more than 100kb of procedures, in theory only that small bit of the software ever gets loaded, aside from anything else the read-ahead cache grabs.
Then again, I guess the dynamic linker would trigger quite a few page faults just doing all the relocations - I'm not sure whether it only does them as-needed or all up-front (which would require a page fault on any page containing a function call). That said, I do admit I'm not intimately familiar with the internals of ELF/ld.so/etc. If somebody would like to correct any ignorance here I'm all ears...
I can at least understand all the plugins and filters for Photoshop.
When they do it for Acrobat it drives me nuts. I'm waiting to see "Reticulating Splines" pop up in that list...
Yup. This sounds like the whole "GPL\0 is not the license this module is offered under. This module is proprietary." thing that was going on with some proprietary kernel modules a few years ago. In that case it really didn't have any negative impact to the end-user - just to kernel developers.
While this is a bit of an exploit in P3P, I despise loopholes, so I'm not going to give Google a free pass here...