Agreed with you in general but the grandparent was right about the use of field gradients in MRI. In NMR as you indicated they tend to only be used for shimming, solvent suppression, and some more exotic experiments (I think diffusion measurements are one - molecule moves during experiment it is affected by gradient pulses - if it doesn't move pulses cancel out - possibly useful in measuring small molecule binding to big molecule).
MRI does use field gradients - because it needs some way of measuring T1/T2 relaxation as a function of position in 3D space. I'm certainly not an expert in MRI but I'm guessing the principle is that with a gradient the Larmor frequency varies with position in 3D space, so with a couple of pulses with varied gradients you can elucidate the contribution of any piece of 3D space to the overall signal, since they're all resonating at different frequencies (which of course are all measured separately at the same time on an FT-NMR). Wikipedia has a description of this - it is short on details but it seems reasonable.
I did cringe at the 2.4GHz reference. Microwaves excite electrons, NMR/MRI/NQR excite nuclei. Both have energy levels under various conditions (the latter need an external magnetic field for this), and so they are susceptible to spectroscopy. However, the mechanisms are very different, and the energies involved are very different as well (even in a very powerful field nuclei are only slightly reactive to RF, but electrons and photons go together with no effort at all).
Note - I'm a bit rusty on my NMR, and haven't been active in the field for a while, but I do have enough experience to be somewhat dangerous...
I was a bit young at the time, but I heard a story about a neighbor who had messed with his meter and it resulted in some interesting firewords up on the telephone poles. The electric and fire companies were not too happy. This isn't really firsthand so I can't vouch for accuracy, but messing with the mains on the wrong side of the circuit breaker doesn't sound terribly safe to me.
I tend to be a free-market guy, but the rebates in this case might not be as horrible as they sound. Mainly because they help adjust an externality. Your electricity bill is artificially low due to the fact that taxes are used to pay for wars in the middle east, environmental cleanup, and some aspects of power distribution/etc. Solar power helps reduce these government costs, so a rebate isn't a bad idea.
Perhaps a more free-market way to handle it would be to offer no subsidies for solar panels, but attach a tariff to oil imports (to cover military spending in the middle east), require polluters and carbon-emitters to pay fees related to their emissions, and impose taxes on utilities associated with infrastructure (this is already largely done).
Then those who use "dirty" power pay the cleanup costs, and "green hippies" who have electric cars don't have to pay for wars in Iraq. The market price for electricity would reflect its true cost to society, and consumers could easily figure out if it makes more sense to buy it or make it yourself.
Now, in one sense the rebate might be better - a bunch of taxes that rise the cost of gas/electricity are going to impact the poor heavily. So, using a combination of income taxes and rebates might be more progressive. I won't open the whole progressive tax debate here - this is a value judgement that society must make. However, whether or not you favor a progressive system there is a market-based solution. (An alternative to rebates for solar cells might be rebates to the poor to assist with higher electricity costs.)
A free market is great, but it doesn't work well if there are externalities. These are often best corrected using taxes of some sort. That's the take-home lesson, and taxes sometimes have a net-beneficial effect on the economy as a result.
Have you ever read your ISP contract? Most of them have a clause which effectively says "we don't actually have to provide you with any kind of service at all".
All the more reason to regulate. And I consider myself fairly free-market oriented.
You can put whatever you want in a contract, it doesn't mean that you can enforce it...
But the end-user CAN redistribute the parts of the code that were GPL v2+ under GPL v2 or v3. They just can't redistribute the parts that were written GPL v2-only under v3. Ie, they can go back to the same sources you used when you changed the license to get the previous license.
Agreed the "keep intact all notices that refer to this license" bit is an issue. However, in the sentence "either version 2 of the license, or (at your option) any later version" only the portion "version 2 of the license" refers to "this license" - that is GPL v2. The rest refers to some hypothetical later version that may or may not exist.
I don't think removing licenses when redistributing is generally an issue. I certainly don't think it was the intention of the license authors to make it an issue. Of course, IANAL, so YMMV...
It probably depends on the target. A HEAT round only penetrates a target with what is probably a pencil-sized stream of plasma. Even a sabot round is only a few inches across. Either will give a tank a very bad day.
Against buildings it might not be a great weapon (unless you drop 50 of these at a time at 1 meter intervals - that would make a mess). Against equipment it will probably be very effective - I doubt a radar, SAM battery, or vehicle would survive a direct hit (granted, you need a very accurate shot - since you need a direct hit unlike most bombs/etc - GPS might not be enough). If you can fire 1000 rounds for the cost of a cruise missile you could still wipe out a building for comparable cost (1000 randomly-fired rounds hitting a building will almost certainly collapse it - or make it useless in any event). And without blast effects you don't kill as many civilians - bullets are safer than bombs.
If the carrier wants to stay at sea indefinetly, it is afforded that opportunity by the support ships, not the nuclear reactor.
Well, I'm not sure how it is done in practice, but if a destroyer needs refit every three months, and a carrier every three years, the simple solution is every three months send out a new destroyer, and when it arrives send one back. The carrier stays put. Individual ships in a fleet can be replaced without the whole fleet moving.
Now, in wartime you'd probably need convoys since you probably don't want individual oilers and destroyers just sailing across the ocean alone.
Honestly, I'm not sure how much this sort of thinking justifies nuclear carriers, but it does give them a little flexibility (especially in peacetime).
Sure, under those unique (and not very useful from a military point of view) circumstances you can make 180 degree course change - because the total magnitude of the change is vanishingly small, as virtually all of your energy is in the vertical. This however is *not* true of a howitzer laid to any useful angle - which has a substantive horizontal component.
Ok, so it is just a matter of doing the math - at any particular range a shell will be able to correct for some amount of azimuth error.
Just the same I agree that 40 degrees seems a bit high. I did see the episode in question, but I'm guessing the error was only 10-20 degrees. They did mention that the off-angle capability might be useful for attacking targets that are shielded by terrain/obstacles along a ballistic trajectory, and unless the obstacle is a telephone pole I imagine that means they need more than a few degrees.
1. Donated items are already fully tax-deductible for their true value at time of donation. Granted, for a 4-year-old PC that is probably $50, and for something that doesn't work the value is probably even lower.
2. If items are going to get donated it would probably be to a local charity like a thrift store - no shipping costs. But, that works great for a Mom and Pop company - not so much so for a major corporation like Google. I'm sure their local thrift store would tell them to buzz off after the junk collection fills 50% of the store (ie, after a week).
3. Many companies outsource disposal of stuff like computers, office furniture, etc. Dovebid is a good example of such a company - you give them junk, they figure out what to do with it. The junk either gets donated, sold, or trashed as appropriate.
4. As others have pointed out, most places that actually would have use for a "free" $50 PC, don't have the money to pay for the shipping. So, companies like Google would actually lose money to donate the PC, vs not spending anything to trash them. Even if you had recycling fees they might end up being cheaper than shipping to Africa. And if it wasn't you'd find a million "charities" accepting PCs in Africa, pocketing part of the shipping costs, and just dumping the PCs somewhere. Half of the shipping cost is probably getting the PC to some remote village, and how is anybody going to know whether it is happening?
Hey, I don't think bandwidth is free at all - it has a cost.
That's why I pay money every month for my DSL line.
If I get VoIP and it doesn't work, the reason would be because my ISP has charged me for a level of bandwidth that they can't actually deliver. I'm fine with oversubscribing within reason, but if I'm interactively trying to send data at 64kbps this shouldn't be a problem on a 3M/768k line. If it is, then the ISP is breaching their contract.
In fact, QOS encourages ISPs to underinvest in bandwidth. If Yahoo pays Verizon for their pages faster, but Verizon has tons of spare bandwidth and MSN loads just as fast, Yahoo will be ticked and cancel their subscription. But, if Verizon makes sure things are extra-tight then Yahoo gets a competitive advantage from paying them. As a result, as a consumer I get slow access to anybody who hasn't paid the extra fee to Verizon. And yet I'm still paying for best-effort access to the Internet (not Yahoo), at what is supposed to be a certain typical rate.
If 5% of the time I don't get my full bandwidth that is fine. If 90% of the time I don't, that is false advertising.
Now, in any other business I'd just take my business someplace else. However, due to the nature of the market, and the nature of its regulatory model, I can only get high bandwidth with low latency from 1-2 companies. To me that is a market that needs regulation. And it seems that common-carrier is the way it should work.
What is next, turnpikes inspecting trucks and charging a tariff based on the value of the goods they are hauling? With the fees to be paid by the trucker, the guy who made the goods, the guy receiving the goods, and the company that made the truck?
Re:Financial hedging and commoditization of bandwi
on
Google's Sinister(?) Plans
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Excellent - the natural progression of this would be to run one cable from each computer on the internet to every other computer on the internet - so as to not have to pay to share cables. And if the major ISPs get their way it might be cheaper that way too.
Gotta love technological steps backwards. I always thought the whole point of packet-switching is that you DON'T need 3 bazillion circuits between point A and point B. But we'll end up having them anyway since every ISP is going to be at 1% utilization but charging and arm and a leg just the same.
While that definitely helps alleviate the risk, might I suggest that you're better off buying this in a formulation that was designed and tested to be suitable for human consumption...?
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
That is the standard FSF license text.
It states that I can redistribute your code using EITHER v2 OR (AT MY OPTION) any later version.
I choose the former.
What's the problem?
The viral clause of the GPLv2 states:
You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
"this License" would mean GPLv2 - since that is what I copied it out of. I can choose to dual-license the product under GPLv3+ as well, but I don't have to.
If I download a copy of MySQL and make some changes I'm not required to distribute those changes under the proprietary MySQL license - even though the original product was dual-licensed. Dual-licensing means that the end-user can pick EITHER license at their option. They can also continue to use both. They can't add any new ones (without permission). But they can take away, as long as they keep one (you need a license of some sort to redistribute).
Well, it definitely is bloated - 302M on my system. I tend to get misc errors any time I open a file as an added bonus (but then again I get those on my MS Office install on my windows box - that and the windows installer popping up constantly).
The build process for Openoffice is about as fragile as it gets. I hear the code is a nightmare to work on.
Don't get me wrong - I use it, but I do tend to use koffice as much as I can. I don't think OpenOffice is a lost cause, but I do think that it has a number of issues that really need to be cleaned up, and I wouldn't consider it a shining beacon of open source quality. Not surprising since it started out being closed source.
Linus has already made his final decision on version - he made it back in the early 90s when he didn't use the or-later clause. The only way he can adopt v3 is if he gets permission from every contributor (or in some case their heirs) to change the license, and strips out any code lacking said permission.
Sun is in a better position - they can pick v3 now, and assuming they require assignment of copyright they can still relicense under v4/5/6/etc later.
GPLv2 code could be merged with v2orlater code safely - it just needs to be released under v2. Somebody could take the v2orlater code and re-release it under a v3orlater/v3 license.
Somebody who has released their code as v2orlater has already given permission for somebody to re-relase it as v2 - the wording says "v2, or a later version at the user's discretion" or something along those lines.
But, I agree that you could not incorporate v2-only code in a v3-only product, or vice-versa.
Uh, considering that pharma manufacturers have trouble making sterile injections correctly, I'd be pretty hesitant to just whip up a batch in my bathtub.
Companies often end up flushing thousands of gallons of product into the sewer as a result of failed quality tests. All it takes is one bacterium to ruin a batch.
Pills are pretty easy to make comparatively-speaking, although lots of stuff can still go wrong. Injections are a different story - if you whip one up in your kitchen you'll be experimenting with civil-war medicine...
I tend to disagree with you regarding the relative contributions of private and public R&D. There is a big difference between a molecule with activity in an assay and a drug.
However, I do agree with your proposal re patents on the outcome of public R&D. That only seems reasonable to me. Alternative molecules probably should be patentable, but the public sector should also carry their R&D further (up to FDA approval if possible).
I'm opposed to changes in the patent regime, but I don't see a problem with public and private competition - it should only help consumers.
Now, after this has been doing on for 10 years I think we should look at what we're spending publicly vs what we're getting. If it would be cheaper to scrap the public R&D and just pay retail for drugs we should do so. Most likely there will be some sort of balance. On the other hand, if the NIH is giving taxpayers more bang for the buck then EXPAND EXPAND EXPAND. But allow the private sector to compete - it keeps the bureaucrats honest.
I just hope the knee-jerk ban-drug-patents crowed doesn't win out. I think that this would be tragic for the public - it is just a tragedy that we won't actually witness (nobody counts lives lost to diseases that don't have cures - only ones lost to diseases that have unaffordable cures). The public and private sectors don't have to be mutually-exclusive, and competition never hurt anyone.
I'm a big fan of the pharma status quo, and am opposed to patent reform.
However, I'd support your idea 100%. If we want to explore the idea of cheap medicines the answer is to allow both public and private R&D. Public R&D would lead to cheap public-domain drugs. Private R&D would lead to expensive patented drugs. Consumers would get everything they have today, and more. Then, society can look at the costs of public R&D and decide how to best use it (maybe it should be expanded, maybe it is too expensive and we should just accept expensive drugs or just let the government reimburse for them, or maybe the public should focus on certain areas that lack private investment).
Nothing is free - it might be cheaper to have unpatented drugs, or it might be cheaper to pay $5/pill but save all the taxpayer R&D costs. The way to find out is to try both and see what works - not to just knee-jerk ban the pharma industry. Competition is best for the consumer - a ban is good for bureaucrats who don't want to compete. If bureaucrats compete well consumers will get rid of expensive pharma, but there will always be private industry to keep the NIH honest.
A drug like this might be a good starting point. However, don't be surprised if the government spends half a billion dollars just to find out that it causes kidney failure - this happens all the time in private pharma R&D.
I would like to see a law passed that says that if a cure if found and not distributed within a viable time frame to the general public (lets say 10 years), the company can be charged with genocide.
Great idea!
I have another one. Require all high school students to take a medical aptitude test. If they're capable of administering an injection then if they don't spend the next 30 years treating homeless people (for $10k/year of government funding) they should be charged with GENOCIDE!!!! After all, if somebody is capable of saving lives, and chooses not to, then they're just a greedy bastard!
Yes, but insulin is already approved for market use, so nobody had to pay for clinical trials. That means that all you need to do is make it cheaply enough to make a profit, which isn't hard.
This is a new drug, which means a few hundred million dollars in clinical trials. If somebody picks up the bill for getting the drug approved, I'm sure lots of companies would sell it, and it would be cheap.
Hmmm, so please explain why the atmospheric N-Test ban has worked and continues to work?
A few issues:
1. Atmospheric tests aren't essential to national security, so it wasn't a huge thing to give up. France had an alliance with the US, and didn't really need all that many bombs anyway. If world war 3 breaks out, it isn't like the combined arsenals of Britain, France, China, India, and Pakistan (and maybe one or two others) are going to have any significant effect - they probably won't make up 1% of the bombs dropped.
2. Nuclear bombs are very expensive. The US and USSR were interested in taking steps to reduce the speed of proliferation in a balanced way. The ban saved them money.
3. Only 5 nations were involved (practically speaking). Much easier to get 5 people to agree than 500. Much easier to make sure 5 people aren't cheating. Much easier for 4 people to make it worth the 5th's while if they don't want to go along.
4. We're talking about nuclear war (indirectly) - if a small nation like France wanted to derail the efforts the other nations would go out of their way behind closed doors to make sure they were taken care of. I don't see all the developing nations of the world passing around a hat to convince the US to go along with Kyoto, but I could see the US and USSR throwing a few bones to France.
Nations tend to ratify treaties in accordance with perceived self-interest. They will accept some loss if it gets them some gain. They won't accept a huge loss if they perceive it won't get them far in the long run.
If you want to get somebody to go along with something you need to either:
1. Convince them it is worth their while to do so. 2. Beat them with a big stick until it doesn't matter if they go along with it. 3. Achieve #1 by convincing them that you can and will do #2.
Right now nobody is bothering to do 1, 2, or 3 with regard to Kyoto, so it isn't surprising that the US isn't going along with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed with you in general but the grandparent was right about the use of field gradients in MRI. In NMR as you indicated they tend to only be used for shimming, solvent suppression, and some more exotic experiments (I think diffusion measurements are one - molecule moves during experiment it is affected by gradient pulses - if it doesn't move pulses cancel out - possibly useful in measuring small molecule binding to big molecule).
MRI does use field gradients - because it needs some way of measuring T1/T2 relaxation as a function of position in 3D space. I'm certainly not an expert in MRI but I'm guessing the principle is that with a gradient the Larmor frequency varies with position in 3D space, so with a couple of pulses with varied gradients you can elucidate the contribution of any piece of 3D space to the overall signal, since they're all resonating at different frequencies (which of course are all measured separately at the same time on an FT-NMR). Wikipedia has a description of this - it is short on details but it seems reasonable.
I did cringe at the 2.4GHz reference. Microwaves excite electrons, NMR/MRI/NQR excite nuclei. Both have energy levels under various conditions (the latter need an external magnetic field for this), and so they are susceptible to spectroscopy. However, the mechanisms are very different, and the energies involved are very different as well (even in a very powerful field nuclei are only slightly reactive to RF, but electrons and photons go together with no effort at all).
Note - I'm a bit rusty on my NMR, and haven't been active in the field for a while, but I do have enough experience to be somewhat dangerous...
I was a bit young at the time, but I heard a story about a neighbor who had messed with his meter and it resulted in some interesting firewords up on the telephone poles. The electric and fire companies were not too happy. This isn't really firsthand so I can't vouch for accuracy, but messing with the mains on the wrong side of the circuit breaker doesn't sound terribly safe to me.
I tend to be a free-market guy, but the rebates in this case might not be as horrible as they sound. Mainly because they help adjust an externality. Your electricity bill is artificially low due to the fact that taxes are used to pay for wars in the middle east, environmental cleanup, and some aspects of power distribution/etc. Solar power helps reduce these government costs, so a rebate isn't a bad idea.
Perhaps a more free-market way to handle it would be to offer no subsidies for solar panels, but attach a tariff to oil imports (to cover military spending in the middle east), require polluters and carbon-emitters to pay fees related to their emissions, and impose taxes on utilities associated with infrastructure (this is already largely done).
Then those who use "dirty" power pay the cleanup costs, and "green hippies" who have electric cars don't have to pay for wars in Iraq. The market price for electricity would reflect its true cost to society, and consumers could easily figure out if it makes more sense to buy it or make it yourself.
Now, in one sense the rebate might be better - a bunch of taxes that rise the cost of gas/electricity are going to impact the poor heavily. So, using a combination of income taxes and rebates might be more progressive. I won't open the whole progressive tax debate here - this is a value judgement that society must make. However, whether or not you favor a progressive system there is a market-based solution. (An alternative to rebates for solar cells might be rebates to the poor to assist with higher electricity costs.)
A free market is great, but it doesn't work well if there are externalities. These are often best corrected using taxes of some sort. That's the take-home lesson, and taxes sometimes have a net-beneficial effect on the economy as a result.
Have you ever read your ISP contract? Most of them have a clause which effectively says "we don't actually have to provide you with any kind of service at all".
All the more reason to regulate. And I consider myself fairly free-market oriented.
You can put whatever you want in a contract, it doesn't mean that you can enforce it...
But the end-user CAN redistribute the parts of the code that were GPL v2+ under GPL v2 or v3. They just can't redistribute the parts that were written GPL v2-only under v3. Ie, they can go back to the same sources you used when you changed the license to get the previous license.
Agreed the "keep intact all notices that refer to this license" bit is an issue. However, in the sentence "either version 2 of the license, or (at your option) any later version" only the portion "version 2 of the license" refers to "this license" - that is GPL v2. The rest refers to some hypothetical later version that may or may not exist.
I don't think removing licenses when redistributing is generally an issue. I certainly don't think it was the intention of the license authors to make it an issue. Of course, IANAL, so YMMV...
It probably depends on the target. A HEAT round only penetrates a target with what is probably a pencil-sized stream of plasma. Even a sabot round is only a few inches across. Either will give a tank a very bad day.
Against buildings it might not be a great weapon (unless you drop 50 of these at a time at 1 meter intervals - that would make a mess). Against equipment it will probably be very effective - I doubt a radar, SAM battery, or vehicle would survive a direct hit (granted, you need a very accurate shot - since you need a direct hit unlike most bombs/etc - GPS might not be enough). If you can fire 1000 rounds for the cost of a cruise missile you could still wipe out a building for comparable cost (1000 randomly-fired rounds hitting a building will almost certainly collapse it - or make it useless in any event). And without blast effects you don't kill as many civilians - bullets are safer than bombs.
Better still, just try to steer the boat... :)
If the carrier wants to stay at sea indefinetly, it is afforded that opportunity by the support ships, not the nuclear reactor.
Well, I'm not sure how it is done in practice, but if a destroyer needs refit every three months, and a carrier every three years, the simple solution is every three months send out a new destroyer, and when it arrives send one back. The carrier stays put. Individual ships in a fleet can be replaced without the whole fleet moving.
Now, in wartime you'd probably need convoys since you probably don't want individual oilers and destroyers just sailing across the ocean alone.
Honestly, I'm not sure how much this sort of thinking justifies nuclear carriers, but it does give them a little flexibility (especially in peacetime).
Multi-stage air gun? Sounds like something out of the Mythbusters...
Sure, under those unique (and not very useful from a military point of view) circumstances you can make 180 degree course change - because the total magnitude of the change is vanishingly small, as virtually all of your energy is in the vertical. This however is *not* true of a howitzer laid to any useful angle - which has a substantive horizontal component.
Ok, so it is just a matter of doing the math - at any particular range a shell will be able to correct for some amount of azimuth error.
Just the same I agree that 40 degrees seems a bit high. I did see the episode in question, but I'm guessing the error was only 10-20 degrees. They did mention that the off-angle capability might be useful for attacking targets that are shielded by terrain/obstacles along a ballistic trajectory, and unless the obstacle is a telephone pole I imagine that means they need more than a few degrees.
A few issues:
1. Donated items are already fully tax-deductible for their true value at time of donation. Granted, for a 4-year-old PC that is probably $50, and for something that doesn't work the value is probably even lower.
2. If items are going to get donated it would probably be to a local charity like a thrift store - no shipping costs. But, that works great for a Mom and Pop company - not so much so for a major corporation like Google. I'm sure their local thrift store would tell them to buzz off after the junk collection fills 50% of the store (ie, after a week).
3. Many companies outsource disposal of stuff like computers, office furniture, etc. Dovebid is a good example of such a company - you give them junk, they figure out what to do with it. The junk either gets donated, sold, or trashed as appropriate.
4. As others have pointed out, most places that actually would have use for a "free" $50 PC, don't have the money to pay for the shipping. So, companies like Google would actually lose money to donate the PC, vs not spending anything to trash them. Even if you had recycling fees they might end up being cheaper than shipping to Africa. And if it wasn't you'd find a million "charities" accepting PCs in Africa, pocketing part of the shipping costs, and just dumping the PCs somewhere. Half of the shipping cost is probably getting the PC to some remote village, and how is anybody going to know whether it is happening?
Hey, I don't think bandwidth is free at all - it has a cost.
That's why I pay money every month for my DSL line.
If I get VoIP and it doesn't work, the reason would be because my ISP has charged me for a level of bandwidth that they can't actually deliver. I'm fine with oversubscribing within reason, but if I'm interactively trying to send data at 64kbps this shouldn't be a problem on a 3M/768k line. If it is, then the ISP is breaching their contract.
In fact, QOS encourages ISPs to underinvest in bandwidth. If Yahoo pays Verizon for their pages faster, but Verizon has tons of spare bandwidth and MSN loads just as fast, Yahoo will be ticked and cancel their subscription. But, if Verizon makes sure things are extra-tight then Yahoo gets a competitive advantage from paying them. As a result, as a consumer I get slow access to anybody who hasn't paid the extra fee to Verizon. And yet I'm still paying for best-effort access to the Internet (not Yahoo), at what is supposed to be a certain typical rate.
If 5% of the time I don't get my full bandwidth that is fine. If 90% of the time I don't, that is false advertising.
Now, in any other business I'd just take my business someplace else. However, due to the nature of the market, and the nature of its regulatory model, I can only get high bandwidth with low latency from 1-2 companies. To me that is a market that needs regulation. And it seems that common-carrier is the way it should work.
What is next, turnpikes inspecting trucks and charging a tariff based on the value of the goods they are hauling? With the fees to be paid by the trucker, the guy who made the goods, the guy receiving the goods, and the company that made the truck?
Excellent - the natural progression of this would be to run one cable from each computer on the internet to every other computer on the internet - so as to not have to pay to share cables. And if the major ISPs get their way it might be cheaper that way too.
Gotta love technological steps backwards. I always thought the whole point of packet-switching is that you DON'T need 3 bazillion circuits between point A and point B. But we'll end up having them anyway since every ISP is going to be at 1% utilization but charging and arm and a leg just the same.
While that definitely helps alleviate the risk, might I suggest that you're better off buying this in a formulation that was designed and tested to be suitable for human consumption...?
That is the standard FSF license text.
It states that I can redistribute your code using EITHER v2 OR (AT MY OPTION) any later version.
I choose the former.
What's the problem?
The viral clause of the GPLv2 states:
"this License" would mean GPLv2 - since that is what I copied it out of. I can choose to dual-license the product under GPLv3+ as well, but I don't have to.
If I download a copy of MySQL and make some changes I'm not required to distribute those changes under the proprietary MySQL license - even though the original product was dual-licensed. Dual-licensing means that the end-user can pick EITHER license at their option. They can also continue to use both. They can't add any new ones (without permission). But they can take away, as long as they keep one (you need a license of some sort to redistribute).
Well, it definitely is bloated - 302M on my system. I tend to get misc errors any time I open a file as an added bonus (but then again I get those on my MS Office install on my windows box - that and the windows installer popping up constantly).
The build process for Openoffice is about as fragile as it gets. I hear the code is a nightmare to work on.
Don't get me wrong - I use it, but I do tend to use koffice as much as I can. I don't think OpenOffice is a lost cause, but I do think that it has a number of issues that really need to be cleaned up, and I wouldn't consider it a shining beacon of open source quality. Not surprising since it started out being closed source.
Linus has already made his final decision on version - he made it back in the early 90s when he didn't use the or-later clause. The only way he can adopt v3 is if he gets permission from every contributor (or in some case their heirs) to change the license, and strips out any code lacking said permission.
Sun is in a better position - they can pick v3 now, and assuming they require assignment of copyright they can still relicense under v4/5/6/etc later.
GPLv2 code could be merged with v2orlater code safely - it just needs to be released under v2. Somebody could take the v2orlater code and re-release it under a v3orlater/v3 license.
Somebody who has released their code as v2orlater has already given permission for somebody to re-relase it as v2 - the wording says "v2, or a later version at the user's discretion" or something along those lines.
But, I agree that you could not incorporate v2-only code in a v3-only product, or vice-versa.
Uh, considering that pharma manufacturers have trouble making sterile injections correctly, I'd be pretty hesitant to just whip up a batch in my bathtub.
Companies often end up flushing thousands of gallons of product into the sewer as a result of failed quality tests. All it takes is one bacterium to ruin a batch.
Pills are pretty easy to make comparatively-speaking, although lots of stuff can still go wrong. Injections are a different story - if you whip one up in your kitchen you'll be experimenting with civil-war medicine...
I tend to disagree with you regarding the relative contributions of private and public R&D. There is a big difference between a molecule with activity in an assay and a drug.
However, I do agree with your proposal re patents on the outcome of public R&D. That only seems reasonable to me. Alternative molecules probably should be patentable, but the public sector should also carry their R&D further (up to FDA approval if possible).
I'm opposed to changes in the patent regime, but I don't see a problem with public and private competition - it should only help consumers.
Now, after this has been doing on for 10 years I think we should look at what we're spending publicly vs what we're getting. If it would be cheaper to scrap the public R&D and just pay retail for drugs we should do so. Most likely there will be some sort of balance. On the other hand, if the NIH is giving taxpayers more bang for the buck then EXPAND EXPAND EXPAND. But allow the private sector to compete - it keeps the bureaucrats honest.
I just hope the knee-jerk ban-drug-patents crowed doesn't win out. I think that this would be tragic for the public - it is just a tragedy that we won't actually witness (nobody counts lives lost to diseases that don't have cures - only ones lost to diseases that have unaffordable cures). The public and private sectors don't have to be mutually-exclusive, and competition never hurt anyone.
I'm a big fan of the pharma status quo, and am opposed to patent reform.
However, I'd support your idea 100%. If we want to explore the idea of cheap medicines the answer is to allow both public and private R&D. Public R&D would lead to cheap public-domain drugs. Private R&D would lead to expensive patented drugs. Consumers would get everything they have today, and more. Then, society can look at the costs of public R&D and decide how to best use it (maybe it should be expanded, maybe it is too expensive and we should just accept expensive drugs or just let the government reimburse for them, or maybe the public should focus on certain areas that lack private investment).
Nothing is free - it might be cheaper to have unpatented drugs, or it might be cheaper to pay $5/pill but save all the taxpayer R&D costs. The way to find out is to try both and see what works - not to just knee-jerk ban the pharma industry. Competition is best for the consumer - a ban is good for bureaucrats who don't want to compete. If bureaucrats compete well consumers will get rid of expensive pharma, but there will always be private industry to keep the NIH honest.
A drug like this might be a good starting point. However, don't be surprised if the government spends half a billion dollars just to find out that it causes kidney failure - this happens all the time in private pharma R&D.
I would like to see a law passed that says that if a cure if found and not distributed within a viable time frame to the general public (lets say 10 years), the company can be charged with genocide.
Great idea!
I have another one. Require all high school students to take a medical aptitude test. If they're capable of administering an injection then if they don't spend the next 30 years treating homeless people (for $10k/year of government funding) they should be charged with GENOCIDE!!!! After all, if somebody is capable of saving lives, and chooses not to, then they're just a greedy bastard!
Viola - the health crisis is solved!
Yes, but insulin is already approved for market use, so nobody had to pay for clinical trials. That means that all you need to do is make it cheaply enough to make a profit, which isn't hard.
This is a new drug, which means a few hundred million dollars in clinical trials. If somebody picks up the bill for getting the drug approved, I'm sure lots of companies would sell it, and it would be cheap.
Hmmm, so please explain why the atmospheric N-Test ban has worked and continues to work?
A few issues:
1. Atmospheric tests aren't essential to national security, so it wasn't a huge thing to give up. France had an alliance with the US, and didn't really need all that many bombs anyway. If world war 3 breaks out, it isn't like the combined arsenals of Britain, France, China, India, and Pakistan (and maybe one or two others) are going to have any significant effect - they probably won't make up 1% of the bombs dropped.
2. Nuclear bombs are very expensive. The US and USSR were interested in taking steps to reduce the speed of proliferation in a balanced way. The ban saved them money.
3. Only 5 nations were involved (practically speaking). Much easier to get 5 people to agree than 500. Much easier to make sure 5 people aren't cheating. Much easier for 4 people to make it worth the 5th's while if they don't want to go along.
4. We're talking about nuclear war (indirectly) - if a small nation like France wanted to derail the efforts the other nations would go out of their way behind closed doors to make sure they were taken care of. I don't see all the developing nations of the world passing around a hat to convince the US to go along with Kyoto, but I could see the US and USSR throwing a few bones to France.
Nations tend to ratify treaties in accordance with perceived self-interest. They will accept some loss if it gets them some gain. They won't accept a huge loss if they perceive it won't get them far in the long run.
If you want to get somebody to go along with something you need to either:
1. Convince them it is worth their while to do so.
2. Beat them with a big stick until it doesn't matter if they go along with it.
3. Achieve #1 by convincing them that you can and will do #2.
Right now nobody is bothering to do 1, 2, or 3 with regard to Kyoto, so it isn't surprising that the US isn't going along with it.
Which are obviously acceptable to the users of the system. What's the problem?
:)
That's a good one. Considering that a huge percentage of windows users just violate the license openly I'd say there is a problem.