My problem with proving safety and efficacy/etc is that it only applies to new foods, and that will mean that we'll never have new foods in reality. That is, unless you don't mind paying per-peanut the kinds of prices drugs are criticized for today.
The fact is we don't know if the reason people are getting diabetes is that tomato sauce is more prevalent than it was in the past (I'm completely making that up - I don't care for refutation but you get my point). However, legislation enacting something like this would never target traditional foods, since nobody would accept having to pay $20 per tomato.
I'm all for government R&D to study food safety. However, we really need to pick and choose - we just can't afford the cost to actually certify the food supply unless the test is as simple as feeding something to rats and seeing if they're still alive in 24 hours. Just about anybody making a "nanofood" or whatever probably does this already - they probably taste test and that would find those kinds of issues too.
Seriously answering these kinds of questions costs a LOT of money - you need tens of thousands of subjects with controlled diets over relatively long periods of time. It just isn't practical to do this on a large scale.
Besides, self-regulating industries are prone to misrepresenting health effects when they have financial interests at stake. CF Vioxx...
Interesting analogy, considering that the pharmaceutical industry is one of the most heavily regulated ones around.:)
Vioxx is more of an example of how even clinical trials with tens of thousands of patients can generate misleading or inconclusive results. 5 keel over in one group, and 7 keel over in another - does that mean something? If you say yes, with 95% confidence, then you're admitting that 1/20th of the drugs that we think are safe might be dangerous, and 1/20th of the stuff that we rejected as too dangerous could have been just fine and people are dying without cures every day today as a result.
Sure, Merck had incentive to spin the results in a particular way, and did do this. However, if you held all painkillers to the same standard you would be able to buy aspirin except for heart problems. A headache never killed anybody, but aspirin does all the time...
Simply making the source available isn't sufficient to make a program GPL-compliant. You also need to redistribute it with terms compatible with the GPL, which means that you need to include with your program a license that allows free redistribution.
Programs distributed via the app store do not include such licenses, since they are built with the iphone SDK, and Apple doesn't permit redistribution of programs built with the SDK.
It doesn't matter that you can build the same program with your own copy of the SDK from their source, or even that you could built it without the SDK. If you distribute a derivative work of the GPL using the Apple SDK, then you need to license THAT BINARY COPY of the program for redistribution.
The bottom line is that if you mix GPL code with the iphone SDK then you can't redistribute the resulting binaries without violating either the SDK terms or the GPL.
Natural monopolies like the last mile should be regulated like electricity or water or any other utility.
Now, your ISP should be a different matter - they run bandwidth from the central office to the internet. They can be fairly unregulated, because the barriers to competition are lower in this space.
When I think about it - I'm not sure the last mile should be fee-metered at all - at least not for dedicated channel technologies like DSL. Maybe for shared-bandwidth technologies like Cable it should be (I'm not sure how FIOS works). A DSL line from the central office to your house costs the same whether it is idle or running at line limit. The cost comes in at the ISP tier, which would be a different company in my proposed scheme.
If you just charged people by the gigabyte, then there would be no need for QoS. If somebody downloaded 14TB per month in torrents the local cable company would just run an OC3 straight to their house with peering to 5 other ISPs to keep the data flowing. After all, every byte the guy downloads is more money in their pocket, so why wouldn't they want to keep the data moving along?
That's how electricity works - the wiring in your house is yours to pay for, but everything up to your house is on the electric company. If you want a 33kV line so that you can pull 20MW of power, your electric company will be more than happy to run one for you as long as you'll use it. Sure, at extremes of scale there are capacity issues that might result in delays, but no electric company doesn't want to sell more electricity.
Your bandwidth bill should be like your electric bill. They charge you $5 per month or whatever as administrative overhead for billing, and then everything else is charged by the gigabyte. Maybe you even let people pick their ISP and just pay a "transmission" charge to their last-mile provider - just like in areas with electrical generation competition. If you did that then competition would easily solve the net neutrality problem since you'd get rid of the natural monopoly on the ISP side.
Forget health care reform (at least lots of people supported it in principle even if they didn't like the specific bill) - how about the bailouts at the end of the Bush presidency?
Congressmen reported that their phones were ringing off the hooks with opposition. The first vote on the bill resulted in a defeat. Then the various powers that be told the representatives who they really served, and they fixed it on the next ballot.
I won't point at any particular party - they were both complicit. The first-past-the-post system we have really results in a state of competition between parties not unlike the competition between your DSL and Cable ISPs. No wonder they get along so well...
Re:Babylon 5 / Firefly / Star Blazers
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Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
That's great.
However, the biggest bore in the show is the maw of the ship. You know, the big gun that they use at the end of every episode to wipe out the bad guys? Maybe they were the ones to invent that meme.
Still, I too enjoyed the show in my youth...
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
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Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
I have to largely agree.
I watched season 1 of Lost, and a few episodes from season 2. They were constantly introducing crazy mysteries, and never resolving anything. It became clear fairly early that the writers really had no idea what was happening, and the main show was just a venue for soul-searching character flashbacks. It was already incoherent, and the little I've read of subsequent seasons suggests that it has only gotten far worse.
Somebody on Slashdot summarized the same problem with BG: "The cylons are back...and they have a plan...and the writers have no idea what it is."
There are two ways to do long-running series: 1. Have a pre-planned story arc. Maybe not every detail, but you know what the overall plan is. This ends up allowing you to have big revelations but have it all make sense. The downside is that you limit yourself to a set number of seasons/etc. Think Babylon 5. 2. Have only a general idea where you're going, but keep the episodes self-contained. Overall arcs are few and far between, or just represent developments along an unchanging front. Think ST-TNG.
The problem with Lost is that it was trying to do both - it wanted to keep making progress, but it didn't have a plan so it just ended up getting really mixed up.
So, do you ever find out what was rustling the trees and ripping the pilot out of the plane in the first episode? Or, did we take all these years to never bother to go there?
The G1 is starting to show its age; but so is the gen-1 iPhone); but some of the tier-2 carrier stuff is looking a little more doubtful.
Yes, but the G1 is only 18 months old, and the gen-1 iPhone is 3 years old. I could argue that the gen-1 iPhone also is still getting better support today than the G1.
When you're selling $500 phones to the public, go get a new one every year isn't really a viable upgrade strategy.
Agreed - smartphone vendors need to understand that these devices have hefty price tags and you can't obsolete them after six months as a result.
I love the forums in the android modding community where fanboys basically suggest that we should all go out and buy a Nexus One. Well, considering that G1s were being sold maybe 6-8 months before the N1 came out, doesn't that seem a bit nuts? Who buys two $500 smartphones in a year?
In the IT industry hardware becomes obsolete. I'm fine with that. However, the device shouldn't be abandoned for upgrades only months after it ships. When not a single Android device is two years old yet, it seems a bit shameful that about 1/3rd of them are not supported on any of the releases for the last 12 months.
Uh, if it manages to maintain mach 6 all the way down I'm sure it will be burned up into ash before it hits the ocean. The air is way too thick near the ground to sustain even supersonic flight without very powerful engines, let alone hypersonic.
The engines on this thing aren't necessarily all that powerful. The problem with conventional jets and ramjets isn't their power, but their top-speed limitations. A scramjet can produce steady power up to a very high speed.
Below 10k feet this thing will probably be unable to generate enough power to maintain any speed at all - if it is going too slow the engines won't get enough compression, and if it is going too fast the drag will exceed the power output.
Scramjets really shine in the upper atmosphere (above 20k feet I guess - and WAY up from there (you can get quite a bit of compression when you're going mach 20)).
Well, unless it has rockets or conventional turbine engines, it won't be powered below maybe 20k feet. This is a scramjet - it needs to be going very fast to operate, and as you go lower the air gets thicker which slows it down. Even high performance fighters with afterburners designed for low-altitude performance have trouble hitting mach 1 near the ground.
It will probably be going fast enough to disintegrate, but not spectacularly so. I'm sure there will be recoverable wreckage.
A few concerns with your proposed assessment of liability:
First, WHY did the supervisor make the call he did? Could it have been because the company awards timely performance without regard to safety? This is like having somebody chop off their hands in a machine, and the company saying that it was their fault for not wearing the provided and required gloves (of course, the company doesn't mention that nobody wears gloves because every week the three slowest workers are fired and gloves slow you down considerably, and nobody is punished for not wearing the gloves).
Second, I'm not a big fan of outsourcing being a way to escape liability. The cheapest people to outsource to will be the ones who don't bother to buy insurance. The outsourcer can pay out dividends any time they make a dime, and then if they lose big they just declare bankruptcy. Companies need to have incentives to outsource to reputable companies, and not just the ones with the cheapest price - otherwise we just have a big race for the bottom. Suppose I buy a set of brakes for my car from flybynite.com for $1.99 (when they normally sell for $50), and then I crash into another car due to brake failure and kill somebody - should I escape liability?
As much as we all like to make fun of the Soviets, why do I get a feeling that something just like this could easily happen at work! Good thing that we don't have huge masses of uranium lying around.
Agreed. And if they didn't spend the money on marketing it isn't like they would spend it on R&D instead. Drug companies all have cash sitting around that they aren't spending on anything, or that they're returning to investors.
There really isn't much innovation in the area of clinical trials, but there is a LOT of cost. That is why there are so few new drugs on the market, and why they are so expensive. It is also why so few serious clinical trials get done in the area of things like supplements, when they could have a big impact on public health.
I dunno. The point under debate was whether the cost of R&D justifies the award of patents.
You seem to be suggesting that we can get rid of patents and then companies can fund R&D with their ad budgets.
What would really happen is that companies would stop both advertising and R&D without the patents. They wouldn't be making much money selling drugs, so why would they spend much money on either?
If anything you'd see an end to R&D long before an end to advertising without patents. How much R&D money gets spent annually on aspirin (a non-patented drug), and how much gets spent on advertising? The world of unpatented treatments has a MUCH higher ratio of advertising to research than the patented world.
If you don't like drug advertising spending, maybe the solution is to educate people to not just buy whatever the TV tells them to. Maybe we can try to get people to stop taking antibiotics for the cold while we're at it.:)
They do both. They wouldn't spend the money on ads if ads didn't have a return on investment, and they wouldn't spend money on R&D if R&D didn't have a return on investment.
If they spent less money on advertising, they probably wouldn't spend a dime more on R&D. They'd just pay it out in dividends, or use it to buy up biotechs or whatever. They'd also make a lot less money which would lead to more consolidation which would lead to higher prices due to less competition.
Complaining about drug industry ad spending is kind of like complaining about the CEO of a pharma company beating his wife. Sure, it is a problem that should be solved, but it isn't like solving that problem is going to do anything to fix the cost of development.
I think the problem is that what exactly are you supposed to attach a shut-off value to? It is like trying to hook a valve onto a cave opening. It isn't like the ocean floor has threads tapped into it and a non-porous barrier surrounding the "pipe".
My understanding of blowouts is that they are caused by gas that makes its way into the pipe. As the gas rises to the surface, it expands, and what was probably a gallon of fluid at the bottom of the well is now a slug of gas the size of the oil platform at the top. It is difficult to manage that expansion.
It's a 5ft diameter hole, and the oil is coming out at something like 150,000 PSI.
That figure is misleading. I think that is the absolute pressure - not the relative pressure. There is around 150,000 psi of water pushing down on the oil trying to keep it from leaking out.
If you just dropped a manhole cover on the hole it would have 150,000 psi of oil pressure on the bottom of it, and around 150,000 psi of water pressure on the top of it. Now, I have no doubt that the oil pressure is slightly higher, but probably not by multiple orders of magnitude as you suggest.
If you dropped a skyscraper on it, it might cut it off - but that's a bit tricky to do.
Well, except for the fact that the column of water above the leak already weighs far more than a skyscraper.
I think the real issue is making some kind of a seal, since you're talking about sand/silt/methane/rock/etc at the bottom. If you just drop a big block of concrete the oil will seep around the edges, probably with fairly little drop in flow rate.
Uh, where would these "malformed or conflicting packets" be coming from? He proposed tapping into the receive serial line only with an isolator. The only effect it will have on the CAN bus is any effect of less than infinite resistance on the connection. What he proposed was a completely passive device.
Now, in practice I'm not sure how useful such a passive tap on the bus would be. I don't know enough about the protocol to know if the bus contains useful diagnostic information all the time, or if it is only transmitted on the bus in response to a query of some kind.
People don't get college degrees in order to go cut down trees, they get them in hopes of making a career in their chosen field. They end up cutting down trees (or, as in my case, driving a truck) only after they've failed to accomplish that goal. Perhaps they didn't make the wisest choice about what to study but sometimes it's kind of hard to know that in advance.
Nonsense. You should only commit to spending $100k to pursue a career AFTER you've figured out that you like the career and are good at it.
The time to figure that out is when you're still in high school, or maybe after high school.
The problem is that kids go to college with no idea of what they want to do, or something that is interesting to them based on having watched TV/etc. Then they get out and find out they're only mediocre at it, and that means they'll never have a decent job, and they're always the first on the layoff list.
Why do kids do this? Simple - they have stupid parents who will pay for it. I'd never fork out that kind of cash to send my kid to school to study something when they haven't already demonstrated a high degree of proficiency in the field (within the constraints of their previous education and experience).
Too many parents send their kids to college in some kind of hope that they'll figure out what they want to do with their lives. If you really want to do that just sign them up for the Navy or whatever - they'll learn how to live on their own and they'll even be paid to do
It's funny, some Linux developers producing a GPL copy of ZFS, despite all the bitching and moaning about how bad Solaris is from the Linux camp over the years?
Well, perhaps you should consider that not all linux devs speak with one voice?
I've been a fan of zfs for the start, and would be running it but for the licensing issues.
I'm happy to have btrfs as an option, and I'm glad to see that they have features that I wanted which zfs could never offer (shrinking zpools, for one - I'd be running xfs but for the fact that it can't be shrunk).
Agreed that I'm not sure I'm ready to run btrfs quite yet. I'd be happy to see it in ubuntu though - let them work out the bugs...:)
It sort of depends. In industries that don't need huge R&D expenditures it is as you say. There are cases where it really does cost tens millions of dollars to actually turn something into a product and then being able to recover the sunk costs is good for society.
Patents really should be set by industry, and they should be set to allow for recovering sunk costs plus a reasonable return. In almost all cases they should be shorter than they are now. In some cases they shouldn't exist at all.
I think the key is to build more tolerance into the app layer.
The biggest problem is replicating the data. If your data is replicated across multiple EC2 availability zones then in theory you can just launch new instances in the new zones and be up and running again. If you have a plan for doing that then you could be up fairly quickly I'd think.
There are different ways to approach this sort of thing. One is trying to keep servers from ever going down. The other is to let them go down anytime they want to and be ready to handle that. The latter really seems more cloud-like to me.
Ah, the beauty of using ephemeral terminology. We can both use the same words and completely disagree about what they mean...:)
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My problem with proving safety and efficacy/etc is that it only applies to new foods, and that will mean that we'll never have new foods in reality. That is, unless you don't mind paying per-peanut the kinds of prices drugs are criticized for today.
The fact is we don't know if the reason people are getting diabetes is that tomato sauce is more prevalent than it was in the past (I'm completely making that up - I don't care for refutation but you get my point). However, legislation enacting something like this would never target traditional foods, since nobody would accept having to pay $20 per tomato.
I'm all for government R&D to study food safety. However, we really need to pick and choose - we just can't afford the cost to actually certify the food supply unless the test is as simple as feeding something to rats and seeing if they're still alive in 24 hours. Just about anybody making a "nanofood" or whatever probably does this already - they probably taste test and that would find those kinds of issues too.
Seriously answering these kinds of questions costs a LOT of money - you need tens of thousands of subjects with controlled diets over relatively long periods of time. It just isn't practical to do this on a large scale.
Besides, self-regulating industries are prone to misrepresenting health effects when they have financial interests at stake. CF Vioxx...
Interesting analogy, considering that the pharmaceutical industry is one of the most heavily regulated ones around. :)
Vioxx is more of an example of how even clinical trials with tens of thousands of patients can generate misleading or inconclusive results. 5 keel over in one group, and 7 keel over in another - does that mean something? If you say yes, with 95% confidence, then you're admitting that 1/20th of the drugs that we think are safe might be dangerous, and 1/20th of the stuff that we rejected as too dangerous could have been just fine and people are dying without cures every day today as a result.
Sure, Merck had incentive to spin the results in a particular way, and did do this. However, if you held all painkillers to the same standard you would be able to buy aspirin except for heart problems. A headache never killed anybody, but aspirin does all the time...
Simply making the source available isn't sufficient to make a program GPL-compliant. You also need to redistribute it with terms compatible with the GPL, which means that you need to include with your program a license that allows free redistribution.
Programs distributed via the app store do not include such licenses, since they are built with the iphone SDK, and Apple doesn't permit redistribution of programs built with the SDK.
It doesn't matter that you can build the same program with your own copy of the SDK from their source, or even that you could built it without the SDK. If you distribute a derivative work of the GPL using the Apple SDK, then you need to license THAT BINARY COPY of the program for redistribution.
The bottom line is that if you mix GPL code with the iphone SDK then you can't redistribute the resulting binaries without violating either the SDK terms or the GPL.
Yup - no debate there.
Natural monopolies like the last mile should be regulated like electricity or water or any other utility.
Now, your ISP should be a different matter - they run bandwidth from the central office to the internet. They can be fairly unregulated, because the barriers to competition are lower in this space.
When I think about it - I'm not sure the last mile should be fee-metered at all - at least not for dedicated channel technologies like DSL. Maybe for shared-bandwidth technologies like Cable it should be (I'm not sure how FIOS works). A DSL line from the central office to your house costs the same whether it is idle or running at line limit. The cost comes in at the ISP tier, which would be a different company in my proposed scheme.
If you just charged people by the gigabyte, then there would be no need for QoS. If somebody downloaded 14TB per month in torrents the local cable company would just run an OC3 straight to their house with peering to 5 other ISPs to keep the data flowing. After all, every byte the guy downloads is more money in their pocket, so why wouldn't they want to keep the data moving along?
That's how electricity works - the wiring in your house is yours to pay for, but everything up to your house is on the electric company. If you want a 33kV line so that you can pull 20MW of power, your electric company will be more than happy to run one for you as long as you'll use it. Sure, at extremes of scale there are capacity issues that might result in delays, but no electric company doesn't want to sell more electricity.
Your bandwidth bill should be like your electric bill. They charge you $5 per month or whatever as administrative overhead for billing, and then everything else is charged by the gigabyte. Maybe you even let people pick their ISP and just pay a "transmission" charge to their last-mile provider - just like in areas with electrical generation competition. If you did that then competition would easily solve the net neutrality problem since you'd get rid of the natural monopoly on the ISP side.
Forget health care reform (at least lots of people supported it in principle even if they didn't like the specific bill) - how about the bailouts at the end of the Bush presidency?
Congressmen reported that their phones were ringing off the hooks with opposition. The first vote on the bill resulted in a defeat. Then the various powers that be told the representatives who they really served, and they fixed it on the next ballot.
I won't point at any particular party - they were both complicit. The first-past-the-post system we have really results in a state of competition between parties not unlike the competition between your DSL and Cable ISPs. No wonder they get along so well...
That's great.
However, the biggest bore in the show is the maw of the ship. You know, the big gun that they use at the end of every episode to wipe out the bad guys? Maybe they were the ones to invent that meme.
Still, I too enjoyed the show in my youth...
I have to largely agree.
I watched season 1 of Lost, and a few episodes from season 2. They were constantly introducing crazy mysteries, and never resolving anything. It became clear fairly early that the writers really had no idea what was happening, and the main show was just a venue for soul-searching character flashbacks. It was already incoherent, and the little I've read of subsequent seasons suggests that it has only gotten far worse.
Somebody on Slashdot summarized the same problem with BG: "The cylons are back...and they have a plan...and the writers have no idea what it is."
There are two ways to do long-running series:
1. Have a pre-planned story arc. Maybe not every detail, but you know what the overall plan is. This ends up allowing you to have big revelations but have it all make sense. The downside is that you limit yourself to a set number of seasons/etc. Think Babylon 5.
2. Have only a general idea where you're going, but keep the episodes self-contained. Overall arcs are few and far between, or just represent developments along an unchanging front. Think ST-TNG.
The problem with Lost is that it was trying to do both - it wanted to keep making progress, but it didn't have a plan so it just ended up getting really mixed up.
So, do you ever find out what was rustling the trees and ripping the pilot out of the plane in the first episode? Or, did we take all these years to never bother to go there?
I've been doing credit card payments ever since Verizon couldn't figure out how to credit my payments to the right account.
Every time I'd send them a check, they'd credit to a different account (yes, I sent them the correct account number), and then they'd send me:
1. A past-due bill with late charges.
2. (Much later) A check to refund my payment.
It was comical - I couldn't get them to take my money. With the credit card system they seem to be able to credit it to the right account...
The G1 is starting to show its age; but so is the gen-1 iPhone); but some of the tier-2 carrier stuff is looking a little more doubtful.
Yes, but the G1 is only 18 months old, and the gen-1 iPhone is 3 years old. I could argue that the gen-1 iPhone also is still getting better support today than the G1.
When you're selling $500 phones to the public, go get a new one every year isn't really a viable upgrade strategy.
Agreed - smartphone vendors need to understand that these devices have hefty price tags and you can't obsolete them after six months as a result.
I love the forums in the android modding community where fanboys basically suggest that we should all go out and buy a Nexus One. Well, considering that G1s were being sold maybe 6-8 months before the N1 came out, doesn't that seem a bit nuts? Who buys two $500 smartphones in a year?
In the IT industry hardware becomes obsolete. I'm fine with that. However, the device shouldn't be abandoned for upgrades only months after it ships. When not a single Android device is two years old yet, it seems a bit shameful that about 1/3rd of them are not supported on any of the releases for the last 12 months.
Uh, if it manages to maintain mach 6 all the way down I'm sure it will be burned up into ash before it hits the ocean. The air is way too thick near the ground to sustain even supersonic flight without very powerful engines, let alone hypersonic.
The engines on this thing aren't necessarily all that powerful. The problem with conventional jets and ramjets isn't their power, but their top-speed limitations. A scramjet can produce steady power up to a very high speed.
Below 10k feet this thing will probably be unable to generate enough power to maintain any speed at all - if it is going too slow the engines won't get enough compression, and if it is going too fast the drag will exceed the power output.
Scramjets really shine in the upper atmosphere (above 20k feet I guess - and WAY up from there (you can get quite a bit of compression when you're going mach 20)).
Well, unless it has rockets or conventional turbine engines, it won't be powered below maybe 20k feet. This is a scramjet - it needs to be going very fast to operate, and as you go lower the air gets thicker which slows it down. Even high performance fighters with afterburners designed for low-altitude performance have trouble hitting mach 1 near the ground.
It will probably be going fast enough to disintegrate, but not spectacularly so. I'm sure there will be recoverable wreckage.
A few concerns with your proposed assessment of liability:
First, WHY did the supervisor make the call he did? Could it have been because the company awards timely performance without regard to safety? This is like having somebody chop off their hands in a machine, and the company saying that it was their fault for not wearing the provided and required gloves (of course, the company doesn't mention that nobody wears gloves because every week the three slowest workers are fired and gloves slow you down considerably, and nobody is punished for not wearing the gloves).
Second, I'm not a big fan of outsourcing being a way to escape liability. The cheapest people to outsource to will be the ones who don't bother to buy insurance. The outsourcer can pay out dividends any time they make a dime, and then if they lose big they just declare bankruptcy. Companies need to have incentives to outsource to reputable companies, and not just the ones with the cheapest price - otherwise we just have a big race for the bottom. Suppose I buy a set of brakes for my car from flybynite.com for $1.99 (when they normally sell for $50), and then I crash into another car due to brake failure and kill somebody - should I escape liability?
As much as we all like to make fun of the Soviets, why do I get a feeling that something just like this could easily happen at work! Good thing that we don't have huge masses of uranium lying around.
Agreed. And if they didn't spend the money on marketing it isn't like they would spend it on R&D instead. Drug companies all have cash sitting around that they aren't spending on anything, or that they're returning to investors.
There really isn't much innovation in the area of clinical trials, but there is a LOT of cost. That is why there are so few new drugs on the market, and why they are so expensive. It is also why so few serious clinical trials get done in the area of things like supplements, when they could have a big impact on public health.
I dunno. The point under debate was whether the cost of R&D justifies the award of patents.
You seem to be suggesting that we can get rid of patents and then companies can fund R&D with their ad budgets.
What would really happen is that companies would stop both advertising and R&D without the patents. They wouldn't be making much money selling drugs, so why would they spend much money on either?
If anything you'd see an end to R&D long before an end to advertising without patents. How much R&D money gets spent annually on aspirin (a non-patented drug), and how much gets spent on advertising? The world of unpatented treatments has a MUCH higher ratio of advertising to research than the patented world.
If you don't like drug advertising spending, maybe the solution is to educate people to not just buy whatever the TV tells them to. Maybe we can try to get people to stop taking antibiotics for the cold while we're at it. :)
They do both. They wouldn't spend the money on ads if ads didn't have a return on investment, and they wouldn't spend money on R&D if R&D didn't have a return on investment.
If they spent less money on advertising, they probably wouldn't spend a dime more on R&D. They'd just pay it out in dividends, or use it to buy up biotechs or whatever. They'd also make a lot less money which would lead to more consolidation which would lead to higher prices due to less competition.
Complaining about drug industry ad spending is kind of like complaining about the CEO of a pharma company beating his wife. Sure, it is a problem that should be solved, but it isn't like solving that problem is going to do anything to fix the cost of development.
I think the problem is that what exactly are you supposed to attach a shut-off value to? It is like trying to hook a valve onto a cave opening. It isn't like the ocean floor has threads tapped into it and a non-porous barrier surrounding the "pipe".
My understanding of blowouts is that they are caused by gas that makes its way into the pipe. As the gas rises to the surface, it expands, and what was probably a gallon of fluid at the bottom of the well is now a slug of gas the size of the oil platform at the top. It is difficult to manage that expansion.
It's a 5ft diameter hole, and the oil is coming out at something like 150,000 PSI.
That figure is misleading. I think that is the absolute pressure - not the relative pressure. There is around 150,000 psi of water pushing down on the oil trying to keep it from leaking out.
If you just dropped a manhole cover on the hole it would have 150,000 psi of oil pressure on the bottom of it, and around 150,000 psi of water pressure on the top of it. Now, I have no doubt that the oil pressure is slightly higher, but probably not by multiple orders of magnitude as you suggest.
If you dropped a skyscraper on it, it might cut it off - but that's a bit tricky to do.
Well, except for the fact that the column of water above the leak already weighs far more than a skyscraper.
I think the real issue is making some kind of a seal, since you're talking about sand/silt/methane/rock/etc at the bottom. If you just drop a big block of concrete the oil will seep around the edges, probably with fairly little drop in flow rate.
Uh, where would these "malformed or conflicting packets" be coming from? He proposed tapping into the receive serial line only with an isolator. The only effect it will have on the CAN bus is any effect of less than infinite resistance on the connection. What he proposed was a completely passive device.
Now, in practice I'm not sure how useful such a passive tap on the bus would be. I don't know enough about the protocol to know if the bus contains useful diagnostic information all the time, or if it is only transmitted on the bus in response to a query of some kind.
People don't get college degrees in order to go cut down trees, they get them in hopes of making a career in their chosen field. They end up cutting down trees (or, as in my case, driving a truck) only after they've failed to accomplish that goal. Perhaps they didn't make the wisest choice about what to study but sometimes it's kind of hard to know that in advance.
Nonsense. You should only commit to spending $100k to pursue a career AFTER you've figured out that you like the career and are good at it.
The time to figure that out is when you're still in high school, or maybe after high school.
The problem is that kids go to college with no idea of what they want to do, or something that is interesting to them based on having watched TV/etc. Then they get out and find out they're only mediocre at it, and that means they'll never have a decent job, and they're always the first on the layoff list.
Why do kids do this? Simple - they have stupid parents who will pay for it. I'd never fork out that kind of cash to send my kid to school to study something when they haven't already demonstrated a high degree of proficiency in the field (within the constraints of their previous education and experience).
Too many parents send their kids to college in some kind of hope that they'll figure out what they want to do with their lives. If you really want to do that just sign them up for the Navy or whatever - they'll learn how to live on their own and they'll even be paid to do
It's funny, some Linux developers producing a GPL copy of ZFS, despite all the bitching and moaning about how bad Solaris is from the Linux camp over the years?
Well, perhaps you should consider that not all linux devs speak with one voice?
I've been a fan of zfs for the start, and would be running it but for the licensing issues.
I'm happy to have btrfs as an option, and I'm glad to see that they have features that I wanted which zfs could never offer (shrinking zpools, for one - I'd be running xfs but for the fact that it can't be shrunk).
Agreed that I'm not sure I'm ready to run btrfs quite yet. I'd be happy to see it in ubuntu though - let them work out the bugs... :)
It sort of depends. In industries that don't need huge R&D expenditures it is as you say. There are cases where it really does cost tens millions of dollars to actually turn something into a product and then being able to recover the sunk costs is good for society.
Patents really should be set by industry, and they should be set to allow for recovering sunk costs plus a reasonable return. In almost all cases they should be shorter than they are now. In some cases they shouldn't exist at all.
I think the key is to build more tolerance into the app layer.
The biggest problem is replicating the data. If your data is replicated across multiple EC2 availability zones then in theory you can just launch new instances in the new zones and be up and running again. If you have a plan for doing that then you could be up fairly quickly I'd think.
There are different ways to approach this sort of thing. One is trying to keep servers from ever going down. The other is to let them go down anytime they want to and be ready to handle that. The latter really seems more cloud-like to me.
Ah, the beauty of using ephemeral terminology. We can both use the same words and completely disagree about what they mean... :)