This is why the OS should let us manage these kinds of situations in a more graceful manner.
Instead of having the choice of "allow app location info" or "don't install app" there should be a third choice - "install the app, but feed it bogus location info" - ditto for internet access or accessing contact info/etc.
Ditto for running services - the OS should have an option to tell the app the service is running fine, and not run the service.
Too much of android amounts to telling the user that the app misbehaves and asking them to accept it, or not use the app.
Sure, but the solution isn't to just keep providing more money. That's just a positive feedback loop, and the results are predictable.
If the federal government wants to provide tons of money for education, then they should get in and get their hands dirty, and start regulating it. If you want federal aid, then you accept federal price controls, or you compete with free public colleges, or whatever.
Frankly I'd prefer that more industries beg the government NOT to step in. Sure, sometimes the government needs to step in, but it shouldn't be to line corporate pockets...
I've never seen any evidence that undergraduate college costs are related to loan/grant/scholarship subsidies... Citation?
When hasn't the price of something been related to the availability of the capital needed to purchase it? Just look at the crash in oil prices when all those speculators lost their shirts on the stock market crash and could no longer afford to trade oil futures. You can also look at the housing bubble - lots of cheap credit means inflated prices. If you think that somehow colleges are immune to the laws of supply and demand I'm going to have to ask you for a citation on that.
That said, I really don't have a problem with providing better access for exceptional students of any background to college. Perhaps the solution is to just cap tuition for programs eligible for financial aid - for example don't allow a college to receive financial aid if it has a full time BS/BA degree program that costs more than $40k for tuition, fees, and books (TOTAL - not per year), and at least 90% of all students admitted should cost that amount or less (so no having teaser rates and then stringing people along for six years or whatever). That will create significant pressure for colleges to contain costs.
The problem is that we increase the amount of federal aid since college is unaffordable. Then colleges raise tuition, and then we raise aid, and so on. If we stopped raising aid, then nobody would attend college, and colleges would QUICKLY drop their tuitions.
I can see it working for sitcoms, or a lot of other made-for-TV content. Barring significant advances in effects technology I can't see it working for big-feature movies. Special effects are just too labor-intensive for something like that, unless you can somehow crowdsource the whole thing at a decent quality level.
State-of-the-art big feature movies often involve editing at the single-frame level - not always painting pixels, but at least tweaking settings/parameters/etc on CGI. It is rare for a top-of-the-line release to just be a matter of filming actors, or creating 3D models and telling them to move here and there and do this and that. It is all the little refinements that make for a seamless production, and which add all the cost.
I'd be happy if the local cinema at least learned what harmonic distortion is, and which gain knob to turn to turn up the volume.
The sound in the theater isn't actually that loud. However, it distorts like crazy on the louder parts. Obviously they have a pre-amp turned up to high and their final gain set too low. You can have loud sound that still actually sounds good - you just need to actually do it right, and invest in speakers/amps that actually are rated for the necessary wattage.
Only problem with prepaid plans it that they're usually much more expensive. I have no issues with after-the-fact billing. I just have problems with selling people services they don't actually want.
No, what I'm saying is that because I don't need a degree to learn how to do one thing, but rather just time spent studying it, then I don't need a degree to learn how to do anything, but instead time spent studying it.
I still assert this is true.
Obviously it takes more time to figure out how to design an engine than change a spark plug. However, are you suggesting that nobody without a university degree has ever done this?
Don't get me wrong - people who are good at things and who spend lots of time on them tend to get degrees in them. However, the degree does not confer the knowledge - at best it validates it, but more often it just validates that you've spent a lot of time and money on it (or opportunity cost at least).
Agreed. I'd go a step further and require everybody to pick a maximum monthly charge when they sign up for their account - it can be as low as whatever number was advertised on the TV set (if they advertise an amount that doesn't cover fees, then the fees are on the telco). The telco can block service if you exceed your amount, but if they provide the service they can't bill you for it, and they can't carry it over to next month either, etc.
If somebody CHOOSES to spend $10k on data roaming that is their choice. I don't think we need price fixing (yet). However, people shouldn't be sold services they have no intention of actually buying. Cell phone companies are like the guys who run up and wash your windows in the city and then demand payment.
Given that serious risks and side effects involved, there's no reason why a untrained person, especially an fool that believes that their lack expertise and training means they know better than experts should treat themselves.
Yes, but the risks are to nobody but themselves, so who are you to tell them what an acceptable level of risk is?
If you want to do that, by all means, cure your infections with a big swig of bleach or some other antibacterial cleaner.
Well, antibiotics are a place where I would draw a line, since they involve risks to people other than those taking them due to resistance. However, in many cases people do more or less what you suggest - because for whatever reason they don't have access to a doctor, or disagree with a doctor's advice, they resort to completely improvised medicine using products completely unsuitable to the task. Instead, if prescription drugs were freely available, they would at least have access to drugs that have clear indications and data regarding side-effects, so that at least the possibility of an informed decision exists.
Sure, maybe somebody self-prescribing might not do as well as somebody acting under a doctor's advice, but they would probably do better than somebody foregoing any medical treatment whatsoever. Maybe somebody wants to take one statin over another because they like the celebrity that is promoting it, but either will work better than whatever supplement they'd end up taking instead.
Your argument is based on a false dichotomy - that people will only choose between following a doctor's order, or self-prescribing pharmaceuticals. By this logic you can block the latter, and thus people will do the former. This argument ignores the third option - that people will just improvise using substances even more dangerous or less effective than pharmaceuticals.
Agreed - security isn't all-or-nothing. It is like having a builder refuse to put a lock on a house door, because the house has windows without bars so the lock is just false security.
By all means the browser should communicate the relative security of a connection, but an ssl connection with a self-signed cert is NO LESS SECURE than a non-ssl connection. The errors generated by a browser would imply that the non-ssl connection is actually more secure. Indeed, if you want to mitm a bank you're probably just best off creating a non-ssl connection with the victim, and relaying the traffic to the bank via ssl. I doubt most users would notice the missing https/etc, and the browser won't given them any warnings, since browser designers treat non-ssl traffic as safe - since it is so ubiquitous.
Yup. I think this is a major weakness of internet protocols - the inability to at least partially secure a connection without completely securing it.
Sure, true security involves encryption, authentication, etc. However, ssl doesn't let you do one without the other. Ditto for WPA/etc. I can't secure a connection to a WiFi router without some kind of shared secret.
We really need to view security as a continuum and not as an on/off thing. Sure, encryption without authentication is less secure than encryption with authentication. However, even with the risk of MITM encryption is still more secure than no encryption at all. Encryption is a lot easier to do than authentication, so there should be at least an option to employ one without the other.
I think we'd have a lot more security if internet protocols were designed with this in mind. There is no reason to have cleartext traffic over the internet at large. Sure, sometimes authentication is too much of a pain to be worth it, but encryption ought to be pretty cheap these days.
Are they really obstructing traffic, or are they just frustrated that if 1000 amateurs beat them to the tornado's path they end up having to wait in line to get there?
On my way home from work I can take photos of thousands of cars obstructing my commute home, but that hardly makes their drivers guilty of traffic violations!
I'll agree that BS degrees are highly correlated with knowledge of a skill. I'll agree further that MS and PhD degrees are even more strongly correlated. However, I do question the causal nature of this relationship.
People who are really into studying the weather are fairly likely to pursue degrees in it. People spend the time getting a PhD because they're already good at something, and they want the recognition for this, and also the experience of working in the particular lab/etc.
I've been boning up on my car knowledge, mainly because I don't like the idea of being so dependent on other experts just to take care of my car, and just as a fun thing to do. I'm amazed at the markups on some of the simplest procedures (changing spark plugs and wires on virtually any car takes 30 min and $50, compared to prices like $200 at a garage). I don't claim to have the expertise of somebody with a certificate in auto repair, but I could easily see that if I kept at it and invested a fair amount of time I could probably rebuild an engine. That's just how it works - if you're smart and you spend your time learning something, you'll become fairly good at it.
I don't knock anybody with a PhD - it takes a lot of time and effort to get one. But, in the end the PhD is just a recognition of something that they have largely achieved on their own, given access to some of the resources needed to do the work. I wouldn't even call it a particularly efficient way of learning how to do real research - it costs a LOT of time and lost opportunity to pursue one.
Does anti-intellectualism exist - sure. Does elitism in academia exist - of course it does. If you want to knock somebody all you want, go ahead, but realize that you might find it hard to get their support as a result. That could translate into shortages of scientists in the future due to anti-intellectualism, or shortage of funding for science today due to elitism. Everybody engages in this kind of nonsense at their own peril.
Relax - 90% of the scientists who actually determine if the drug works, or if it is safe, don't have PhDs. Their supervisors sometimes do - especially in areas where some guy with a PhD avoids promoting anybody who doesn't.
Nothing wrong with PhDs, but these days the ability to design and conduct experiments is just what it takes to get a job doing science in the US. To me the PhD really has just become a selection criteria for people who are determined to have one. It is extremely rare for somebody to seek to obtain one and not actually get it, and you don't really learn anything in the process that you wouldn't learn working in just about any lab doing actual research work (obviously simply cleaning glassware or whatever won't get you these skills).
If you work in a lab, and you don't have basically what it would take to obtain a PhD, then chances are your job will get outsourced to India or China anyway.
If companies that employed scientists could actually award PhDs for significant experience doing genuine research, then most scientists would probably have them. Of course, that will never happen because then the NSF/NIH would have to start paying real salaries to the students doing all their grant work.:)
Sorry, officer, I was driving from point x, to point y, and a tornado came along. Man, I was just trying to find some shelter and figured those experts must know where it is safe to be. While I was there I figured I might snap a photo or two from my iphone.
Just how are you going to make that illegal? Or, do you propose locking people up who really are just driving from point x to point y when a tornado breaks out?
I suspect that for the most part people chase storms because:
1. It's fun. 2. It is interesting science. 3. It is a challenge. 4. You get to play with and improvise lots of neat gear/etc.
Basically it is like any other research program.
Saving lives is just why the rest of us pay tax money to support it. I'm sure the scientists involve like the fact that they're potentially saving lives sometime in the future, but it isn't like we can't get scientists for a dime a dozen to study the migration patterns of butterflies or whatever...
On WP, the final say resides with whoever has the strongest case of OCD or Asperger's. In the event of a tie, whoever has the best admin connections dominates.
Another big issue is drugs whose benefits are hard to quantify.
Drugs that save lives are easy - if it saves more people than it kills (taking into account other drugs as well) then it is allowed on the market.
The problem is drugs that don't save lives, but which still can have serious side effects. Pain killers are a classic example. Nobody NEEDS to take a pain killer, and they have no permanent medical benefit, but they do have permanent side effects (albeit rare). By many standards, then, pain killers should be banned from the market. However, in reality there is more to live than just surviving, and most people would prefer to live migraine-free to the age of 78 than in agony until the age of 80.
Stuff like erectile dysfunction also falls into this camp.
Honestly, I think it is more important for drug risks and rewards to be well-measured (including post-market), than to have some kind of approval gate. I'd rather have the approval gate only be used to ensure that adequate clinical data is available and that manufacturing quality is under control, whether the efficacy and safety profile is good or bad, and let doctors, payers, and patients decide the appropriate risk/reward ratio.
The other problem is that drug safety has actually progressed to the point that it is getting lost in the noise in clinical trials. Major lawsuits for safety problems occur when drugs have risks that still make them far safer than the safest drugs 40 years ago. So, the problem is that it is very hard to determine if drugs are able to meet the increasingly high standards. Sure, there are cases where drugmakers could do more, but in many cases it is just really hard to design clinical trials that can separate signal from noise. At some point if you keep increasing the power of trials we'll all be in clinical trials...
I'm completely fine with it given a few requirements:
1. Informed consent. Emphasis on the informed bit. 2. If you mess yourself up doing this, national healthcare won't pay to fix you back up. Better set aside money to cover that, or buy a private insurance policy (probably expensive) to cover the risks.
Otherwise, it is your body, do what you want with it. The government should only have a say when you want them to start paying the bills, or if fraud is taking place.
I suspect that most of these "clinics" won't get past #1 - others have already done a better job explaining why here.
Indeed, as a US taxpayer I'd prefer this approach. When he is convicted the British taxpayers can pay to keep him in jail.
Ditto for all those 9/11 suspects that the EU wouldn't extradite without a promise to not seek the death penalty. They should have just let them keep them. It isn't like they want them out on the streets either - then they can deal with the legal mess of trying to keep them in jail forever...
You know, I wouldn't have as big a problem with this if the USPTO just required one thing before issuing a patent: a working demonstrative prototype for every claim.
If they had actually cured cancer, I wouldn't mind so much them owning the cure for cancer (after all, in 17 years everybody gets it dirt cheap - a huge win for humanity).
The problem is that they don't have a cure for cancer, and nobody else is going to bother to target this gene for developing a cure for cancer due to the encumbrance. So, humanity loses out in the stifling of future discovery.
If you use the Firmware (in this case an ACPI subsystem) then Windows 7 and Linux on a particular famous brand laptop make an annoying whining noise.
Well, the solution in that case is simple: windows and linux all along shouldn't have bypassed the BIOS. Instead, when people go to buy the laptop they all get annoyed that it is the loudest one on the shelf and skip it. Presumably the vendor wouldn't have shipped it with the bug if previous versions of windows hadn't somehow bypassed it...
Looks a bit hard to get set up - it requires a dedicated server and they don't have instructions for building from source/etc. It seems like you need to run their provided dhcp/tftp server as well, which is an issue unless you don't leave it on your normal network.
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This is why the OS should let us manage these kinds of situations in a more graceful manner.
Instead of having the choice of "allow app location info" or "don't install app" there should be a third choice - "install the app, but feed it bogus location info" - ditto for internet access or accessing contact info/etc.
Ditto for running services - the OS should have an option to tell the app the service is running fine, and not run the service.
Too much of android amounts to telling the user that the app misbehaves and asking them to accept it, or not use the app.
Sure, but the solution isn't to just keep providing more money. That's just a positive feedback loop, and the results are predictable.
If the federal government wants to provide tons of money for education, then they should get in and get their hands dirty, and start regulating it. If you want federal aid, then you accept federal price controls, or you compete with free public colleges, or whatever.
Frankly I'd prefer that more industries beg the government NOT to step in. Sure, sometimes the government needs to step in, but it shouldn't be to line corporate pockets...
I've never seen any evidence that undergraduate college costs are related to loan/grant/scholarship subsidies... Citation?
When hasn't the price of something been related to the availability of the capital needed to purchase it? Just look at the crash in oil prices when all those speculators lost their shirts on the stock market crash and could no longer afford to trade oil futures. You can also look at the housing bubble - lots of cheap credit means inflated prices. If you think that somehow colleges are immune to the laws of supply and demand I'm going to have to ask you for a citation on that.
That said, I really don't have a problem with providing better access for exceptional students of any background to college. Perhaps the solution is to just cap tuition for programs eligible for financial aid - for example don't allow a college to receive financial aid if it has a full time BS/BA degree program that costs more than $40k for tuition, fees, and books (TOTAL - not per year), and at least 90% of all students admitted should cost that amount or less (so no having teaser rates and then stringing people along for six years or whatever). That will create significant pressure for colleges to contain costs.
The problem is that we increase the amount of federal aid since college is unaffordable. Then colleges raise tuition, and then we raise aid, and so on. If we stopped raising aid, then nobody would attend college, and colleges would QUICKLY drop their tuitions.
I can see it working for sitcoms, or a lot of other made-for-TV content. Barring significant advances in effects technology I can't see it working for big-feature movies. Special effects are just too labor-intensive for something like that, unless you can somehow crowdsource the whole thing at a decent quality level.
State-of-the-art big feature movies often involve editing at the single-frame level - not always painting pixels, but at least tweaking settings/parameters/etc on CGI. It is rare for a top-of-the-line release to just be a matter of filming actors, or creating 3D models and telling them to move here and there and do this and that. It is all the little refinements that make for a seamless production, and which add all the cost.
I'd be happy if the local cinema at least learned what harmonic distortion is, and which gain knob to turn to turn up the volume.
The sound in the theater isn't actually that loud. However, it distorts like crazy on the louder parts. Obviously they have a pre-amp turned up to high and their final gain set too low. You can have loud sound that still actually sounds good - you just need to actually do it right, and invest in speakers/amps that actually are rated for the necessary wattage.
Only problem with prepaid plans it that they're usually much more expensive. I have no issues with after-the-fact billing. I just have problems with selling people services they don't actually want.
No, what I'm saying is that because I don't need a degree to learn how to do one thing, but rather just time spent studying it, then I don't need a degree to learn how to do anything, but instead time spent studying it.
I still assert this is true.
Obviously it takes more time to figure out how to design an engine than change a spark plug. However, are you suggesting that nobody without a university degree has ever done this?
Don't get me wrong - people who are good at things and who spend lots of time on them tend to get degrees in them. However, the degree does not confer the knowledge - at best it validates it, but more often it just validates that you've spent a lot of time and money on it (or opportunity cost at least).
Agreed. I'd go a step further and require everybody to pick a maximum monthly charge when they sign up for their account - it can be as low as whatever number was advertised on the TV set (if they advertise an amount that doesn't cover fees, then the fees are on the telco). The telco can block service if you exceed your amount, but if they provide the service they can't bill you for it, and they can't carry it over to next month either, etc.
If somebody CHOOSES to spend $10k on data roaming that is their choice. I don't think we need price fixing (yet). However, people shouldn't be sold services they have no intention of actually buying. Cell phone companies are like the guys who run up and wash your windows in the city and then demand payment.
Given that serious risks and side effects involved, there's no reason why a untrained person, especially an fool that believes that their lack expertise and training means they know better than experts should treat themselves.
Yes, but the risks are to nobody but themselves, so who are you to tell them what an acceptable level of risk is?
If you want to do that, by all means, cure your infections with a big swig of bleach or some other antibacterial cleaner.
Well, antibiotics are a place where I would draw a line, since they involve risks to people other than those taking them due to resistance. However, in many cases people do more or less what you suggest - because for whatever reason they don't have access to a doctor, or disagree with a doctor's advice, they resort to completely improvised medicine using products completely unsuitable to the task. Instead, if prescription drugs were freely available, they would at least have access to drugs that have clear indications and data regarding side-effects, so that at least the possibility of an informed decision exists.
Sure, maybe somebody self-prescribing might not do as well as somebody acting under a doctor's advice, but they would probably do better than somebody foregoing any medical treatment whatsoever. Maybe somebody wants to take one statin over another because they like the celebrity that is promoting it, but either will work better than whatever supplement they'd end up taking instead.
Your argument is based on a false dichotomy - that people will only choose between following a doctor's order, or self-prescribing pharmaceuticals. By this logic you can block the latter, and thus people will do the former. This argument ignores the third option - that people will just improvise using substances even more dangerous or less effective than pharmaceuticals.
Agreed - security isn't all-or-nothing. It is like having a builder refuse to put a lock on a house door, because the house has windows without bars so the lock is just false security.
By all means the browser should communicate the relative security of a connection, but an ssl connection with a self-signed cert is NO LESS SECURE than a non-ssl connection. The errors generated by a browser would imply that the non-ssl connection is actually more secure. Indeed, if you want to mitm a bank you're probably just best off creating a non-ssl connection with the victim, and relaying the traffic to the bank via ssl. I doubt most users would notice the missing https/etc, and the browser won't given them any warnings, since browser designers treat non-ssl traffic as safe - since it is so ubiquitous.
Yup. I think this is a major weakness of internet protocols - the inability to at least partially secure a connection without completely securing it.
Sure, true security involves encryption, authentication, etc. However, ssl doesn't let you do one without the other. Ditto for WPA/etc. I can't secure a connection to a WiFi router without some kind of shared secret.
We really need to view security as a continuum and not as an on/off thing. Sure, encryption without authentication is less secure than encryption with authentication. However, even with the risk of MITM encryption is still more secure than no encryption at all. Encryption is a lot easier to do than authentication, so there should be at least an option to employ one without the other.
I think we'd have a lot more security if internet protocols were designed with this in mind. There is no reason to have cleartext traffic over the internet at large. Sure, sometimes authentication is too much of a pain to be worth it, but encryption ought to be pretty cheap these days.
Are they really obstructing traffic, or are they just frustrated that if 1000 amateurs beat them to the tornado's path they end up having to wait in line to get there?
On my way home from work I can take photos of thousands of cars obstructing my commute home, but that hardly makes their drivers guilty of traffic violations!
I'll agree that BS degrees are highly correlated with knowledge of a skill. I'll agree further that MS and PhD degrees are even more strongly correlated. However, I do question the causal nature of this relationship.
People who are really into studying the weather are fairly likely to pursue degrees in it. People spend the time getting a PhD because they're already good at something, and they want the recognition for this, and also the experience of working in the particular lab/etc.
I've been boning up on my car knowledge, mainly because I don't like the idea of being so dependent on other experts just to take care of my car, and just as a fun thing to do. I'm amazed at the markups on some of the simplest procedures (changing spark plugs and wires on virtually any car takes 30 min and $50, compared to prices like $200 at a garage). I don't claim to have the expertise of somebody with a certificate in auto repair, but I could easily see that if I kept at it and invested a fair amount of time I could probably rebuild an engine. That's just how it works - if you're smart and you spend your time learning something, you'll become fairly good at it.
I don't knock anybody with a PhD - it takes a lot of time and effort to get one. But, in the end the PhD is just a recognition of something that they have largely achieved on their own, given access to some of the resources needed to do the work. I wouldn't even call it a particularly efficient way of learning how to do real research - it costs a LOT of time and lost opportunity to pursue one.
Does anti-intellectualism exist - sure. Does elitism in academia exist - of course it does. If you want to knock somebody all you want, go ahead, but realize that you might find it hard to get their support as a result. That could translate into shortages of scientists in the future due to anti-intellectualism, or shortage of funding for science today due to elitism. Everybody engages in this kind of nonsense at their own peril.
Relax - 90% of the scientists who actually determine if the drug works, or if it is safe, don't have PhDs. Their supervisors sometimes do - especially in areas where some guy with a PhD avoids promoting anybody who doesn't.
Nothing wrong with PhDs, but these days the ability to design and conduct experiments is just what it takes to get a job doing science in the US. To me the PhD really has just become a selection criteria for people who are determined to have one. It is extremely rare for somebody to seek to obtain one and not actually get it, and you don't really learn anything in the process that you wouldn't learn working in just about any lab doing actual research work (obviously simply cleaning glassware or whatever won't get you these skills).
If you work in a lab, and you don't have basically what it would take to obtain a PhD, then chances are your job will get outsourced to India or China anyway.
If companies that employed scientists could actually award PhDs for significant experience doing genuine research, then most scientists would probably have them. Of course, that will never happen because then the NSF/NIH would have to start paying real salaries to the students doing all their grant work. :)
Sorry, officer, I was driving from point x, to point y, and a tornado came along. Man, I was just trying to find some shelter and figured those experts must know where it is safe to be. While I was there I figured I might snap a photo or two from my iphone.
Just how are you going to make that illegal? Or, do you propose locking people up who really are just driving from point x to point y when a tornado breaks out?
I suspect that for the most part people chase storms because:
1. It's fun.
2. It is interesting science.
3. It is a challenge.
4. You get to play with and improvise lots of neat gear/etc.
Basically it is like any other research program.
Saving lives is just why the rest of us pay tax money to support it. I'm sure the scientists involve like the fact that they're potentially saving lives sometime in the future, but it isn't like we can't get scientists for a dime a dozen to study the migration patterns of butterflies or whatever...
On WP, the final say resides with whoever has the strongest case of OCD or Asperger's. In the event of a tie, whoever has the best admin connections dominates.
Perhaps it is possible that the following statements can both be true at the same time:
1. The Chinese are governed by a totalitarian state that oppresses individual freedom and is corrupt, and this isn't right.
2. The US Government is losing its democratic ideals and suffers from corruption, and this also isn't right.
This isn't a who-is-better-us-or-them contest. The fact that the US needs reform doesn't mean that China does not.
Another big issue is drugs whose benefits are hard to quantify.
Drugs that save lives are easy - if it saves more people than it kills (taking into account other drugs as well) then it is allowed on the market.
The problem is drugs that don't save lives, but which still can have serious side effects. Pain killers are a classic example. Nobody NEEDS to take a pain killer, and they have no permanent medical benefit, but they do have permanent side effects (albeit rare). By many standards, then, pain killers should be banned from the market. However, in reality there is more to live than just surviving, and most people would prefer to live migraine-free to the age of 78 than in agony until the age of 80.
Stuff like erectile dysfunction also falls into this camp.
Honestly, I think it is more important for drug risks and rewards to be well-measured (including post-market), than to have some kind of approval gate. I'd rather have the approval gate only be used to ensure that adequate clinical data is available and that manufacturing quality is under control, whether the efficacy and safety profile is good or bad, and let doctors, payers, and patients decide the appropriate risk/reward ratio.
The other problem is that drug safety has actually progressed to the point that it is getting lost in the noise in clinical trials. Major lawsuits for safety problems occur when drugs have risks that still make them far safer than the safest drugs 40 years ago. So, the problem is that it is very hard to determine if drugs are able to meet the increasingly high standards. Sure, there are cases where drugmakers could do more, but in many cases it is just really hard to design clinical trials that can separate signal from noise. At some point if you keep increasing the power of trials we'll all be in clinical trials...
I'm completely fine with it given a few requirements:
1. Informed consent. Emphasis on the informed bit.
2. If you mess yourself up doing this, national healthcare won't pay to fix you back up. Better set aside money to cover that, or buy a private insurance policy (probably expensive) to cover the risks.
Otherwise, it is your body, do what you want with it. The government should only have a say when you want them to start paying the bills, or if fraud is taking place.
I suspect that most of these "clinics" won't get past #1 - others have already done a better job explaining why here.
Indeed, as a US taxpayer I'd prefer this approach. When he is convicted the British taxpayers can pay to keep him in jail.
Ditto for all those 9/11 suspects that the EU wouldn't extradite without a promise to not seek the death penalty. They should have just let them keep them. It isn't like they want them out on the streets either - then they can deal with the legal mess of trying to keep them in jail forever...
You know, I wouldn't have as big a problem with this if the USPTO just required one thing before issuing a patent: a working demonstrative prototype for every claim.
If they had actually cured cancer, I wouldn't mind so much them owning the cure for cancer (after all, in 17 years everybody gets it dirt cheap - a huge win for humanity).
The problem is that they don't have a cure for cancer, and nobody else is going to bother to target this gene for developing a cure for cancer due to the encumbrance. So, humanity loses out in the stifling of future discovery.
If you use the Firmware (in this case an ACPI subsystem) then Windows 7 and Linux on a particular famous brand laptop make an annoying whining noise.
Well, the solution in that case is simple: windows and linux all along shouldn't have bypassed the BIOS. Instead, when people go to buy the laptop they all get annoyed that it is the loudest one on the shelf and skip it. Presumably the vendor wouldn't have shipped it with the bug if previous versions of windows hadn't somehow bypassed it...
Looks a bit hard to get set up - it requires a dedicated server and they don't have instructions for building from source/etc. It seems like you need to run their provided dhcp/tftp server as well, which is an issue unless you don't leave it on your normal network.
Well, the logic at that time was that the driver only exposed an API at a low level and wasn't buggy.
So, there wasn't a need to update the BIOS all the time.
Why exactly should drivers require frequent updates? When was the last time you flashed the firmware on your hard drive, or whatever?
In any case, the approach has its limitations as you indicate.