Well, the beauty of the Constitution is that the people who wrote it figured that times would change, and thus it contained provisions for amending the document.
Do you think that the Federal government should have more powers. Fine, get 2/3rds of congress and 3/4ths of the state legislatures to approve that and now the Federal government can do more. Want a monarchy while you're at it - fine, just get the appropriate parties to vote for it.
The problem is that nobody wants to do that, instead we just ignore the Constitution.
If you look at US history the government was not afraid to amend the Constitution when there was a need. However, in the last 50 years we've stopped doing that, and instead we just ignore the Constitution instead. I don't think we're better off for it.
Now, I'm fine with the government either developing it into a drug and licensing out the manufacture (perhaps for free if it is manufactured in the US), or selling it off in an open auction without spending further money on development. I wouldn't really consider either of those corporate welfare - it just is a matter of who takes on the risk and manages the project...
You repeat about companies buying pre-trial candidates however all trials for Taxol were already done by the NCI.
Ok, so I'll concede that Taxol is a travesty then (assuming you aren't missing some key element).
However, most modern drug licensing deals (with the NIH or otherwise) are not for compounds that are already approved for market use. Usually these deals come very early in the life of a drug.
And again all those costs are income tax deductible. Besides drug companies spend more on marketing than on R&D [eurekalert.org]. Those expenses are tax deductible too.
I think you're missing my point.
Suppose we start with a diamond that we can both agree is worth $1M. Now I place it in a box, and shuffle it on a table with 9 identical boxes that contain nothing. I select one box at random and offer it for auction. Most likely, the box will be purchased for maybe $90k or so - certainly less than $100k.
Now suppose that box turns out to contain the diamond. You'll claim that I was ripped off, since I was offered less than 10% of its value.
I'm pointing out that that box wasn't worth $1M until it was shown to contain the diamond. To be likely to get the diamond the buyer would have had to buy ten boxes (even then with no promise if I had a collection of 100 boxes of which 10 contained diamonds.
Now, if I took a loss on those other nine boxes, sure I could tax deduct it (nothing really magical about that, really, taxes are paid on profits and so if I burn $100 in a furnace I can tax deduct it). However, that doesn't change the fact that a box that has a 10% chance of being worth $1M is really only worth $100k.
Drugs are valued at the future value of profits, multiplied by their probability of success.
The bit about companies spending more on marketing than R&D has nothing at all to do with anything. What does marketing expense have to do with the price paid for a drug? If your point is that companies have more money they could be spending, well, sure they do. I might have $100k in the bank but that doesn't mean that I'm going to spend $50k on a Honda Civic, just because I could. Would I like to see more spent on R&D - sure. Do I have a right to demand that companies spend even a dime on R&D? Well, no, except to the degree that one of my mutual funds might own their stock...
Or, go ahead and have an auto-install process, but don't make it "look for a file on any removable media and run any executable that it references."
Instead, when you insert a disc have the OS's package manager look for an installer file in the proper format, and then the package manager asks the user if they want to install the file. Don't have every software vendor writing their own installers.
Oh, Windows doesn't have a package manager? Well, we should fix that as well. There is no reason that software should need its own install executables. An installer needs to get files into the right (ie standards-driven) process on the drive, and initialize global settings. There is no reason that a centralized package manager can't do that (just look at any linux distro). As a bonus uninstalls become trivial without any vendor support.
At what point was the drug bought, and how much did BMS pay for other compounds that didn't work out?
These kinds of royalty payments aren't unusual if a compound is bought before it has gone through any kinds of trials. If that sum was paid after Phase III trials were complete then of course they managed to get some kind of back room deal.
The reason that compounds are cheap before trials is that most of them turn out not to work. Google for headlines about pharmaceutical companies buying the rights to drugs from small companies. Note how much is being paid for them. Note how many of them there are. Now, Google for drug approvals and see how many of those compounds that were licensed 8 years ago are on the market.
If a company licenses 10 compounds for $35M each, chances are half of them will get canceled, and the other half will end up making $50M/yr or something like that. It is pretty rare for a compound that cost $35M to buy to turn into a $1B/yr drug.
Compounds sold early in development are a bit like buying a car on auction from a catalog - sight-unseen, without any warranty or certification of any kind. A car that might sell for $2k to somebody who can test drive it might sell for $500 sight-unseen. The buyer is taking on a huge risk buying a car without any assurance that it will work, and that will reflect in the price. The same applies to drugs, which are notoriously likely to fail even if everybody is acting in good faith.
That said, the fact that the government is a poor negotiator is a surprise to nobody. My thinking is that the government should run two sets of operations in parallel. When they discover a promising compound, half of the time they auction it on the open market for the highest price (it might not sell for as much as you expect - untested drugs usually don't work out), and half of the time the NIH should just develop the compound to completion (failure or success) and then license the manufacture of the compound non-exclusively (meaning that it will be dirt cheap to buy). Then a comparison can be made of the approaches and the ultimate costs to consumers and success rates/etc.
I think you hit the nail on the head. When people admit problems and fix them we punish them with lawsuits. When they deny a problem for ten years, they often get away with it (or at least they delay the payment for a decade - which is great from a time-value-of-money perspective).
We need to encourage companies to come forward and fix problems, not to bury them.
Yup - people say that the problem with the medical field is that there is too much cost-cutting. The real problem is that there is not enough, and the wrong areas are cut.
Just ask anybody on/. who works in a hospital - doctors do whatever they feel like doing, and nobody can tell them otherwise. In any other industry they'd simply be fired.
Granted, executives running fiefdoms is nothing unique to the medical industry. What is unique in medicine is a lack of competitive pressure. Who shops around to get a good price on surgery?
The thing I don't get is that they don't have any support for SIP (well, there is Gizmo, which is closed to just about everybody). They're inventing fancy web-interfaces for voice calls (anybody know if they work without flash?), but they can't support SIP - a protocol specifically designed to handle these kinds of situations. Indeed, if they used SIP and you ended up calling somebody else using SIP they could save all the bandwidth by directing the phones to just talk to each other.
It seems like Google is tending to take the MS route - they don't just want to provide a service, they want to control how you can access it. Sure, some of their products are more open - maybe they just can't figure out what kind of company they want to be.
Google - please just give us a SIP interface. I don't care if you even advertise it - just bury the settings in some help page and everybody else will build the front-ends for you...
I don't think the United States can "embargo" a Swedish company from selling things to another country.
Sure they can. The word "can" denotes simply the ability to do something. They can enforce such an embargo in a number of ways:
Probably the least likely way is the use of force - they can blockade Iran and unilaterally dictate what can and cannot pass through the blockade. I doubt anybody is going to try to run the blockade, and if they do, it is unlikely they will succeed.
The most likely is by issuing declarations of judgement within the US. Typically when this happens the company just writes a check to avoid the following: If Siemens owns any property in the US (and that can be anything from a building to a company car to a laptop carried by a salesman to a bank account), then it can be targeted for collection. Big companies never avoid collections for this reason - they'd just find their corporate headquarters up for sheriff sale. If they owe you $2M you'd put their corporate headquarters up for sheriff sale, and then the $250M building would get sold to some speculator for $5M, with you getting $2M, the sheriff getting probably a few $100k, and Siemen's getting the rest (at a huge loss to them). Again, it never actually comes down to this for this reason - you don't mess with collections when you have assets.
I think your question really is whether the US "should" be allowed to do this. Well, the problem with that question is who are you asking it, and does the US care what they think?
I'm not a big fan of the US exporting its legal system everywhere, but in this case I really don't mind seeing the likes o Cisco and Siemen's held responsible for their actions in ignoring human rights issues.
What on earth is the harm in NOT borrowing too much money. Borrow a billion dollars to build a bridge, and the project gets done for $750M - what to do with the extra cash. Do we:
A. Repay some of the bond with it (saving tons of public funds in debt repayment).
B. Blow the money on anything remotely bridge-related (let's repaint it 10 times in the first two years, put in a fancy lightshow, and pave it with gold).
Of course, we write the laws so that only B is a valid option...
Well, uh, gee, couldn't they have used the spare money to pay down the bond, thus increasing the borrowing power of the district (and reducing public debt)? Then they could have issued a new bond to pay for stuff they actually needed.
Nothing drives me crazier than the end-of-year spending splurge I see at work. Gee, the money disappears into a black hole if we don't spend it all. No, it just gets returned, HEAVEN FORBID, to the shareholders...
Yup. However, we've done it to ourselves to some extent, with an unwillingness to invest in development.
Great IT employee becomes an IT manager. IT manager avoids teaching anybody else how to be a better IT employee. IT manager figures nobody can grow, and so only hires people with the right skills already. Essentially, the managers have decided to outsource management to other companies. Or, they have redefined management as project management without any aspect of people management.
A coworker was recently reorganized into a new group. In the subsequent six months he only had one in-person meeting with his boss, and maybe 1 or two telephone calls. My boss was on another continent, and in the same amount of time I met him 2-3 times, and spoke with him weekly at least (just for the purpose of catching up, let alone project-related meetings/etc).. Now, if the one guy's boss at the same location can't bother to ever drop by and visit his employee, why would he expect that employee to learn something new. Chances are, the manager has no idea what the employee is even capable of. This kind of situation is pretty common where I work.
Too much of IT has turned into project management. The leaders don't want to develop people, and increasingly they don't want to be bothered with the technology either. So, then they outsource everything. No wonder, they don't want to do the work themselves, and they don't work closely enough with subordinates to learn to trust their judgment.
With enough time, it will undoubtedly become a pseudo religion of it's own.... as demonstrated by it's dedicated clerics such as yourself.
The irony is that the back when universities were created (in Western culture at least), the students were actually considered clerics. They were run by monks, and used to train the children of nobility. The church was actually a bit of a vocational education system as well, as almost all the serious "educated" work of the day was actually performed by clergy. The guy figuring out tax rates was probably a bishop, fully employed by the local lord. That is why kings exercised the right to approve the appointment of bishops at the time - the bishops performed many administrative functions. No wonder, since the clergy were about the only ones who could read at the time...
It'd definitely make an interesting national news story when she has to deal with lots of lawsuits with both the IRS and the City, all because of a $300 license.
Yes, it would. It would also make for a very undesirable legal bill.
Do you really think the IRS cares what the City of Philadelphia thinks? That's as crazy as thinking that the City of Philadelphia cares what the IRS thinks...
Yup - the funny thing was I could tell where your story was going before it got halfway there.
Ditto for the guy above with the story about a guy diving into a boiling spring to save a dog. Can you imagine if he didn't dive in? His wife probably would call him a creep for the rest of his life.
I'm sure men would do equally stupid things if it weren't for some tradition about men being the protectors/etc, and consequently never allowed to back down/etc in the face of stupidity.
As you said, at least you're alive to talk about it...
Actually, the whole universe is essentially one big gas cloud - granted one which is very low density.
Gotta love relativity... Sure, from one perspective the universe stands still and you go whizzing by. From the ship's perspective, you're standing still and having a constant blast of hydrogen and helium hitting you at relativistic speed - we call those cosmic rays. Oh, and don't forget the background radiation. Normally that is microwaves with a blackbody temperature around 4K, but blue-shift that to those speeds and now you're being blasted by X-rays and gamma rays continuously...
The problem is that there are two different governments involved.
She reported the income to the federal government. They're fine with her not having a business license, since they don't issue business licenses. She paid her taxes, so they're happy.
Then the city government (completely independent from the federal government) demanded that she pay up.
Which tax return do you want her to claim all those deductions on? I don't think Philadelphia even has a tax return that you could fill this out for, but if it does do they even allow home-use deductions/etc? If she claims this stuff on her federal taxes then the IRS would go after her for fraudulently claiming to run a business when it is just a hobby.
And yes, it happens all the time in the USA that two different government bodies with jurisdiction over a business demand vehemently that it do two different things at the same time. Just ask all those people who got tax bills and nasty letters from two different states both demanding full payment of taxes due to a border dispute between the states. Sounds like something out of Kashmir...
Uh, sure. Only issue is that fusion is awfully efficient. Something like a hydrogen bomb probably only produces a few kilograms of the stuff. Depending on the technology employed they might need to recycle half of that to replenish the losses from colling their magnets (I'm sure that He recycling isn't 100% efficient).
It is way easier than that - helium is about 25% of the entire ordinary matter content of the universe. It is floating around everywhere. Just pick up any average piece of anything and extract the 25% which is He.
Oh, one minor caveat - this plan won't work if you happen to live in an area which greatly deviates from the average, such as on a terrestrial planet. Also, if you live in an area mostly devoid of matter (like 99.9999% of the universe) it might not be practical. But, hey, it works great for gas giants and stars, and that is most of what you can see up in the sky at night anyway...:)
Well, just weigh the trash as it is collected and charge by the pound. Boom - instant incentive to recycle, and those you consume less pay less, which is a libertarian's dream.
With crazy laws like this I now have an incentive to buy non-recyclable products whenever possible so as to minimize my risk of accidentally getting fined. That is exactly the opposite of what the city needs.
Maybe there would be a push for minimal packaging when people start looking at items in the store and start calculating how much it will cost to throw it out. Maybe food will be sold in more reasonable portions when people realize they have to pay for uneaten leftovers. And so on...
Yup. I figured they probably could also mechanically separate them - just pick out bottles by size/weight/balance sorting of some kind. Then figure out which end is the top, and just chop the whole neck off (ring and all), and put that in the trash. Sure, you waste a bit of recyclable material this way, but at least you get rid of the ring without all that expense.
If there is a way to separate it and get everything, so much the better...
Neither do I, and I never claimed that anything widely used today have been. Perhaps some have, perhaps it has never happened.
I still assert that it is possible, and if you want to assert that it is impossible I'll need a reference to a conclusive experiment or at least widely accepted theory of physics that demonstrates that this is the case. And I don't mean evidence that one particular mode of attack has failed against one particular piece of technology. I mean evidence that a particular piece of technology is theoretically secure against any possible attack.
This is provably the case for the one-time-pad, and it is generally accepted that quantum crypto is secure based on the laws of physics as we currently understand them. However, neither of these technologies are applicable to secure storage.
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Well, the beauty of the Constitution is that the people who wrote it figured that times would change, and thus it contained provisions for amending the document.
Do you think that the Federal government should have more powers. Fine, get 2/3rds of congress and 3/4ths of the state legislatures to approve that and now the Federal government can do more. Want a monarchy while you're at it - fine, just get the appropriate parties to vote for it.
The problem is that nobody wants to do that, instead we just ignore the Constitution.
If you look at US history the government was not afraid to amend the Constitution when there was a need. However, in the last 50 years we've stopped doing that, and instead we just ignore the Constitution instead. I don't think we're better off for it.
And do these protocols work for Google Voice - or only for Google Talk?
If they work for Voice, then I'd agree that this is completely open.
Well, sure, I don't want that either.
Now, I'm fine with the government either developing it into a drug and licensing out the manufacture (perhaps for free if it is manufactured in the US), or selling it off in an open auction without spending further money on development. I wouldn't really consider either of those corporate welfare - it just is a matter of who takes on the risk and manages the project...
You repeat about companies buying pre-trial candidates however all trials for Taxol were already done by the NCI.
Ok, so I'll concede that Taxol is a travesty then (assuming you aren't missing some key element).
However, most modern drug licensing deals (with the NIH or otherwise) are not for compounds that are already approved for market use. Usually these deals come very early in the life of a drug.
And again all those costs are income tax deductible. Besides drug companies spend more on marketing than on R&D [eurekalert.org]. Those expenses are tax deductible too.
I think you're missing my point.
Suppose we start with a diamond that we can both agree is worth $1M. Now I place it in a box, and shuffle it on a table with 9 identical boxes that contain nothing. I select one box at random and offer it for auction. Most likely, the box will be purchased for maybe $90k or so - certainly less than $100k.
Now suppose that box turns out to contain the diamond. You'll claim that I was ripped off, since I was offered less than 10% of its value.
I'm pointing out that that box wasn't worth $1M until it was shown to contain the diamond. To be likely to get the diamond the buyer would have had to buy ten boxes (even then with no promise if I had a collection of 100 boxes of which 10 contained diamonds.
Now, if I took a loss on those other nine boxes, sure I could tax deduct it (nothing really magical about that, really, taxes are paid on profits and so if I burn $100 in a furnace I can tax deduct it). However, that doesn't change the fact that a box that has a 10% chance of being worth $1M is really only worth $100k.
Drugs are valued at the future value of profits, multiplied by their probability of success.
The bit about companies spending more on marketing than R&D has nothing at all to do with anything. What does marketing expense have to do with the price paid for a drug? If your point is that companies have more money they could be spending, well, sure they do. I might have $100k in the bank but that doesn't mean that I'm going to spend $50k on a Honda Civic, just because I could. Would I like to see more spent on R&D - sure. Do I have a right to demand that companies spend even a dime on R&D? Well, no, except to the degree that one of my mutual funds might own their stock...
Or, go ahead and have an auto-install process, but don't make it "look for a file on any removable media and run any executable that it references."
Instead, when you insert a disc have the OS's package manager look for an installer file in the proper format, and then the package manager asks the user if they want to install the file. Don't have every software vendor writing their own installers.
Oh, Windows doesn't have a package manager? Well, we should fix that as well. There is no reason that software should need its own install executables. An installer needs to get files into the right (ie standards-driven) process on the drive, and initialize global settings. There is no reason that a centralized package manager can't do that (just look at any linux distro). As a bonus uninstalls become trivial without any vendor support.
At what point was the drug bought, and how much did BMS pay for other compounds that didn't work out?
These kinds of royalty payments aren't unusual if a compound is bought before it has gone through any kinds of trials. If that sum was paid after Phase III trials were complete then of course they managed to get some kind of back room deal.
The reason that compounds are cheap before trials is that most of them turn out not to work. Google for headlines about pharmaceutical companies buying the rights to drugs from small companies. Note how much is being paid for them. Note how many of them there are. Now, Google for drug approvals and see how many of those compounds that were licensed 8 years ago are on the market.
If a company licenses 10 compounds for $35M each, chances are half of them will get canceled, and the other half will end up making $50M/yr or something like that. It is pretty rare for a compound that cost $35M to buy to turn into a $1B/yr drug.
Compounds sold early in development are a bit like buying a car on auction from a catalog - sight-unseen, without any warranty or certification of any kind. A car that might sell for $2k to somebody who can test drive it might sell for $500 sight-unseen. The buyer is taking on a huge risk buying a car without any assurance that it will work, and that will reflect in the price. The same applies to drugs, which are notoriously likely to fail even if everybody is acting in good faith.
That said, the fact that the government is a poor negotiator is a surprise to nobody. My thinking is that the government should run two sets of operations in parallel. When they discover a promising compound, half of the time they auction it on the open market for the highest price (it might not sell for as much as you expect - untested drugs usually don't work out), and half of the time the NIH should just develop the compound to completion (failure or success) and then license the manufacture of the compound non-exclusively (meaning that it will be dirt cheap to buy). Then a comparison can be made of the approaches and the ultimate costs to consumers and success rates/etc.
I think you hit the nail on the head. When people admit problems and fix them we punish them with lawsuits. When they deny a problem for ten years, they often get away with it (or at least they delay the payment for a decade - which is great from a time-value-of-money perspective).
We need to encourage companies to come forward and fix problems, not to bury them.
Yup - people say that the problem with the medical field is that there is too much cost-cutting. The real problem is that there is not enough, and the wrong areas are cut.
Just ask anybody on /. who works in a hospital - doctors do whatever they feel like doing, and nobody can tell them otherwise. In any other industry they'd simply be fired.
Granted, executives running fiefdoms is nothing unique to the medical industry. What is unique in medicine is a lack of competitive pressure. Who shops around to get a good price on surgery?
The thing I don't get is that they don't have any support for SIP (well, there is Gizmo, which is closed to just about everybody). They're inventing fancy web-interfaces for voice calls (anybody know if they work without flash?), but they can't support SIP - a protocol specifically designed to handle these kinds of situations. Indeed, if they used SIP and you ended up calling somebody else using SIP they could save all the bandwidth by directing the phones to just talk to each other.
It seems like Google is tending to take the MS route - they don't just want to provide a service, they want to control how you can access it. Sure, some of their products are more open - maybe they just can't figure out what kind of company they want to be.
Google - please just give us a SIP interface. I don't care if you even advertise it - just bury the settings in some help page and everybody else will build the front-ends for you...
I don't think the United States can "embargo" a Swedish company from selling things to another country.
Sure they can. The word "can" denotes simply the ability to do something. They can enforce such an embargo in a number of ways:
Probably the least likely way is the use of force - they can blockade Iran and unilaterally dictate what can and cannot pass through the blockade. I doubt anybody is going to try to run the blockade, and if they do, it is unlikely they will succeed.
The most likely is by issuing declarations of judgement within the US. Typically when this happens the company just writes a check to avoid the following: If Siemens owns any property in the US (and that can be anything from a building to a company car to a laptop carried by a salesman to a bank account), then it can be targeted for collection. Big companies never avoid collections for this reason - they'd just find their corporate headquarters up for sheriff sale. If they owe you $2M you'd put their corporate headquarters up for sheriff sale, and then the $250M building would get sold to some speculator for $5M, with you getting $2M, the sheriff getting probably a few $100k, and Siemen's getting the rest (at a huge loss to them). Again, it never actually comes down to this for this reason - you don't mess with collections when you have assets.
I think your question really is whether the US "should" be allowed to do this. Well, the problem with that question is who are you asking it, and does the US care what they think?
I'm not a big fan of the US exporting its legal system everywhere, but in this case I really don't mind seeing the likes o Cisco and Siemen's held responsible for their actions in ignoring human rights issues.
Ah, the insanity of modern laws.
What on earth is the harm in NOT borrowing too much money. Borrow a billion dollars to build a bridge, and the project gets done for $750M - what to do with the extra cash. Do we:
A. Repay some of the bond with it (saving tons of public funds in debt repayment).
B. Blow the money on anything remotely bridge-related (let's repaint it 10 times in the first two years, put in a fancy lightshow, and pave it with gold).
Of course, we write the laws so that only B is a valid option...
Well, uh, gee, couldn't they have used the spare money to pay down the bond, thus increasing the borrowing power of the district (and reducing public debt)? Then they could have issued a new bond to pay for stuff they actually needed.
Nothing drives me crazier than the end-of-year spending splurge I see at work. Gee, the money disappears into a black hole if we don't spend it all. No, it just gets returned, HEAVEN FORBID, to the shareholders...
Yup. However, we've done it to ourselves to some extent, with an unwillingness to invest in development.
Great IT employee becomes an IT manager. IT manager avoids teaching anybody else how to be a better IT employee. IT manager figures nobody can grow, and so only hires people with the right skills already. Essentially, the managers have decided to outsource management to other companies. Or, they have redefined management as project management without any aspect of people management.
A coworker was recently reorganized into a new group. In the subsequent six months he only had one in-person meeting with his boss, and maybe 1 or two telephone calls. My boss was on another continent, and in the same amount of time I met him 2-3 times, and spoke with him weekly at least (just for the purpose of catching up, let alone project-related meetings/etc).. Now, if the one guy's boss at the same location can't bother to ever drop by and visit his employee, why would he expect that employee to learn something new. Chances are, the manager has no idea what the employee is even capable of. This kind of situation is pretty common where I work.
Too much of IT has turned into project management. The leaders don't want to develop people, and increasingly they don't want to be bothered with the technology either. So, then they outsource everything. No wonder, they don't want to do the work themselves, and they don't work closely enough with subordinates to learn to trust their judgment.
With enough time, it will undoubtedly become a pseudo religion of it's own.... as demonstrated by it's dedicated clerics such as yourself.
The irony is that the back when universities were created (in Western culture at least), the students were actually considered clerics. They were run by monks, and used to train the children of nobility. The church was actually a bit of a vocational education system as well, as almost all the serious "educated" work of the day was actually performed by clergy. The guy figuring out tax rates was probably a bishop, fully employed by the local lord. That is why kings exercised the right to approve the appointment of bishops at the time - the bishops performed many administrative functions. No wonder, since the clergy were about the only ones who could read at the time...
It'd definitely make an interesting national news story when she has to deal with lots of lawsuits with both the IRS and the City, all because of a $300 license.
Yes, it would. It would also make for a very undesirable legal bill.
Do you really think the IRS cares what the City of Philadelphia thinks? That's as crazy as thinking that the City of Philadelphia cares what the IRS thinks...
Yup - the funny thing was I could tell where your story was going before it got halfway there.
Ditto for the guy above with the story about a guy diving into a boiling spring to save a dog. Can you imagine if he didn't dive in? His wife probably would call him a creep for the rest of his life.
I'm sure men would do equally stupid things if it weren't for some tradition about men being the protectors/etc, and consequently never allowed to back down/etc in the face of stupidity.
As you said, at least you're alive to talk about it...
It's a bit like fusion, which is always "just 20 years away", in 1960, in 1970, in 1980,... up until today.
So, is your argument that because fusion is clearly physically impossible that artificial intelligence must be as well?
Nobody is claiming that it will be sold in stores next year...
Actually, the whole universe is essentially one big gas cloud - granted one which is very low density.
Gotta love relativity... Sure, from one perspective the universe stands still and you go whizzing by. From the ship's perspective, you're standing still and having a constant blast of hydrogen and helium hitting you at relativistic speed - we call those cosmic rays. Oh, and don't forget the background radiation. Normally that is microwaves with a blackbody temperature around 4K, but blue-shift that to those speeds and now you're being blasted by X-rays and gamma rays continuously...
The problem is that there are two different governments involved.
She reported the income to the federal government. They're fine with her not having a business license, since they don't issue business licenses. She paid her taxes, so they're happy.
Then the city government (completely independent from the federal government) demanded that she pay up.
Which tax return do you want her to claim all those deductions on? I don't think Philadelphia even has a tax return that you could fill this out for, but if it does do they even allow home-use deductions/etc? If she claims this stuff on her federal taxes then the IRS would go after her for fraudulently claiming to run a business when it is just a hobby.
And yes, it happens all the time in the USA that two different government bodies with jurisdiction over a business demand vehemently that it do two different things at the same time. Just ask all those people who got tax bills and nasty letters from two different states both demanding full payment of taxes due to a border dispute between the states. Sounds like something out of Kashmir...
What is the difference between a helium balloon, and one full of your own hot air? Ponder this, and perhaps the answer will become apparent...
Uh, sure. Only issue is that fusion is awfully efficient. Something like a hydrogen bomb probably only produces a few kilograms of the stuff. Depending on the technology employed they might need to recycle half of that to replenish the losses from colling their magnets (I'm sure that He recycling isn't 100% efficient).
It is way easier than that - helium is about 25% of the entire ordinary matter content of the universe. It is floating around everywhere. Just pick up any average piece of anything and extract the 25% which is He.
Oh, one minor caveat - this plan won't work if you happen to live in an area which greatly deviates from the average, such as on a terrestrial planet. Also, if you live in an area mostly devoid of matter (like 99.9999% of the universe) it might not be practical. But, hey, it works great for gas giants and stars, and that is most of what you can see up in the sky at night anyway... :)
Well, just weigh the trash as it is collected and charge by the pound. Boom - instant incentive to recycle, and those you consume less pay less, which is a libertarian's dream.
With crazy laws like this I now have an incentive to buy non-recyclable products whenever possible so as to minimize my risk of accidentally getting fined. That is exactly the opposite of what the city needs.
Maybe there would be a push for minimal packaging when people start looking at items in the store and start calculating how much it will cost to throw it out. Maybe food will be sold in more reasonable portions when people realize they have to pay for uneaten leftovers. And so on...
Yup. I figured they probably could also mechanically separate them - just pick out bottles by size/weight/balance sorting of some kind. Then figure out which end is the top, and just chop the whole neck off (ring and all), and put that in the trash. Sure, you waste a bit of recyclable material this way, but at least you get rid of the ring without all that expense.
If there is a way to separate it and get everything, so much the better...
Neither do I, and I never claimed that anything widely used today have been. Perhaps some have, perhaps it has never happened.
I still assert that it is possible, and if you want to assert that it is impossible I'll need a reference to a conclusive experiment or at least widely accepted theory of physics that demonstrates that this is the case. And I don't mean evidence that one particular mode of attack has failed against one particular piece of technology. I mean evidence that a particular piece of technology is theoretically secure against any possible attack.
This is provably the case for the one-time-pad, and it is generally accepted that quantum crypto is secure based on the laws of physics as we currently understand them. However, neither of these technologies are applicable to secure storage.