Uh, did I suggest that there should not have been some sort of evacuation assistance? That people should be left to starve in the streets?
My point was that even if there was, many if not most of the people who were left in the city would STILL have been left in the city. Many people for whatever reason choose to ride out natural disasters and many end up dead as a result.
If I were on vacation in New Orleans with my family and my car broke down and a storm was inbound with a 3-day ETA we'd get out of there somehow. My family and my own life are very precious to me and while I'll take assistance if I can find it, in the end I'm not going to sit around waiting for somebody to rescue me when I have the ability to get out of there on my own.
And you can rest assured that NOBODY starves to death in America unless they refuse assistance. All they need to do is just bang on somebody's door and ask them to call the police. The police would make sure they end up being fed somewhere.
Now, it is questionable whether a natural disaster really falls under federal jurisdiction - ideally this should be handled at the state level to the extent possible, although it may be the case that the military in some cases might be able to offer assistance not available elsewhere.
New Orleans was a disaster that was predicted for ages, and despite several days warning people stayed behind. Now, I'll agree that in many cases these were people who could not have gotten out without assistance (like the crazy idea not to evacuate hospitals). However, most of the people who stayed behind could have gotten out if they had wanted to.
If you want people to take you seriously I'd recommend waiting until you've actually met somebody before calling them a "moral lizard". You can care for people and at the same time realize that they might not have been saved simply by a better government response. The best way to save lives in a disaster is evacuation, and since that is before the disaster you'll always have to deal with those who refuse to leave. If you forcibly remove people then you get really bad press when you have hundreds of videos on youtube of police officers dragging elderly people out of their homes kicking and screaming and then the hurricane blows back out to sea. If you want the nanny state to take care of everybody who gets into trouble then don't be surprised when everybody starts getting treated like they're still children...
Uh, given 3 days warning they could have gotten out. Unless you're handicapped you can walk to higher ground in less time than that.
Which isn't to say that the evacuation couldn't have been better-handled. However, I'd say the majority who stayed wanted to stay, and if a bus had pulled up they'd have refused to board. Do you want to round people up at gunpoint to get them out of the city?
I use mythtv to ad-skip all the time, and I've noticed the blank screen before the last commercial in a break on ocassion. I don't think it is intended to deceive - I think this is a result of how commercials get mixed into the video feed. Typically the last commercial in the break is a network promo for another show. I think that these ads come pre-mixed into the feed for the program that you're watching, and the affiliates mix in the rest of the ads. So, that would explain the blank before the last ad without giving the execs credit for being clever.:)
Uh, doesn't direcTV charge $5 for each extra receiver per month? I believe they only charge $6/mo flat for any number of DVRs, but you still pay extra for each unit simply for the access card.
With MythTV unless you really need all those tuners you can just pay base rate+$5/mo for two tuners and then hook up all the TVs you want. Granted, those two tuners are shared for the full house, but unless you're a family of 8 you probably don't need much more than that. And all the programming can be accessed from any TV.
I've used both, and I much prefer Myth.
Which isn't to say that Myth is perfect, or that it is trivial to set up. I don't recommend it to casual friends, but I would recommend it to anybody with a CS degree.
And yes, it does cost a lot more up-front - the result of not having subsidized hardware.
Now, you have the HD Tivo, which is half-decent, but a lot of new DTV customers are getting the R-15, which is useful only as a paperweight (and as a free hard drive for your MythTV box). I wasn't expecting much from mine, and it certainly did NOT meet my expectations - I'd have been happy if it at least recorded the shows I like most of the time, without a complete reset every month. Most people who seem to be happy with their's only seem to watch 5 shows - anybody with a family of 4 with diverse viewing habits ends up in trouble...
Uh, were the points eliminated before or after he answered the question, and before or after he was impeached?
If after, then he certainly was lying, although for various technical reasons he avoided perjury. That makes the issue no longer impeachable, which might be why he was acquitted.
In any case, the main issue wasn't whether Clinton was a nice guy, or had appealing sexual habits. The main issue was whether or not he lied under oath, and determining this required a trial. Now, one could argue whether it had to cost that much, but perjury is hardly a minor issue.
He didn't have sex.... He was never asked if he sodomized her.
He was asked if he had sexual relations with her - not if he had sex.
Sexual relations was defined in this way:
"For the purposes of this deposition, a person engages in sexual relations when the person knowingly engages in or causes:
1. Contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of any person with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person;
2. Contact between any part of the person's body or an object and the genitals or anus of another person; or
3. Contact between the genitals or anus of the person and any part of another person's body.
Contact means intentional touching, either directly or through clothing."
#3 above indicates that if Clinton's genitals touched any part of another person's body, then he had sexual relations with that person. He testified that he did not have sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. For that to be true, he must not have done any of the three items above.
I assumed you were talking about lotteries for private education (the main theme of the thread). Agreed that lotteries probably make sense for public schools.
If a school is filled to capacity, a lottery needs to be undertaken.
If anything is filled to capacity, it means they're not charging enough. Econ-101.:)
And a lottery is a silly way to resolve the matter if a school intentionally keeps their rates low out of a desire for philantropy. Why not just handle it like any college does - take applications and prioritize them on the basis of whatever selection criteria the school chooses to employ?
A lottery will just make the school raise the tuition rates until supply=demand - if they can't select on the basis of education merit or diversity or whatever other lofty goal they want to set, then they'll just select on the basis of income, which is at least correlated with merit to some degree. And then they can use scholarships to select for all those other things.
he got the government to give him $40 Million in taxpayers' money so he could let the American people and the world know Bill Clinton got a blowjob in the Oval Office. What a genius
Uh, look, for as much as I disagree with Ken Starr in general, or might disagree with many of Bush's policies, there was a little more to the Clinton scandal than his sex life.
Remember how this started out - a sexual harassment lawsuit. I forget the details, but the basis of any sexual harassment lawsuit is that somebody with power used this power to influence a decision of a sexual nature with somebody subject to this power. Clinton's insistence that he did not have a sexual relationship with his intern was directly relevant to this case, as an admission of this would have given credibility to the plantiff - he would have had a history of sleeping with his employees which is a no-no where sexual harassment is concerned.
In testifying that he did not have sexual relations with a subordinate he was in fact lying under oath - which is a serious offense. And it wasn't just to save personal embarassment (as if the case were about a car accident and an attorney decided to just randomly bring up the topic) - his lying had a material impact on the case (the case was about his sexual habits, which in the case of an employer is a legally-regulated matter).
So, the issue under trial was whether Clinton had committed perjury, which is an impeachable offense (actually, just about any law violation is - it is up to congress to assess this - heck, they impeached Andrew Johnson for firing his secretary of war).
Now, whether the trial was well-handled can certainly be debated. However, the fact that it dug into the president's sex life was inevitable since the whole matter at issue was that Clinton said he did not have sexual relations with Lewinsky, and yet it appears that he did (does anybody really think that he did not?).
In the end I think that most people would agree that Clinton did have what most people would consider a sexual relationship with Lewinsky, and that he did what most people would consider lying under oath (especially considering the fact that the term "sexual relations" was carefully defined and the definition was specifically brought up when he was asked the question). Those who support him politically, and even many who oppose him, may tend to give him a little allowance mainly out of the reluctance to oust a sitting president over an issue that really has no impact on public policy. In order to give him allowance people need to find some way of finding that he didn't in fact lie under oath (which most people agree is a serious offense), and so they come up with loopholes and such so that they can determine that his action wasn't in fact perjury.
Personally, I think that Clinton's actions reflected bad leadership - he compromised his ability to create political change (the reason he was elected) in order to have a fleeting relationship with a subordinate. If he had slept with anybody who DIDN'T work with him he wouldn't have gotten in this kind of legal trouble (sure, there could be scandal, but not impeachment and all that this entails). His indiscretion resulted in a tremendous loss of political power which did not serve his constituents, who ended up being the losers in the end. Ironically he might be most remembered 100 years from now in history books as one of only two presidents to ever be impeached (probably Anderew Johnson's most-well-known accomplishment). You might argue whether the offense should have been impeached, but if you really want to be a leader who will make a difference, why give your opponents this kind of ammo?
The power can go out, all the machines could fail and the election would go on with hardly a hicup.
Uh, like it did in Florida in 2000? The issue is that ballots created by hand can contain ambiguous votes, and that means that we're debating voter intent when the race comes down to a handful of ballots. In a district with 50,000 people there are probably upwards of 1000 ballots that have some sort of stray mark on them that might or might not be a vote.
There is no paper trail. If you add a printer, then we have issues with a million printers plus paper plus ink on election day.
By having the computer generate the ballot I was suggesting that the official ballot be on paper, but that it be filled out by a computer.
Computer printers are hardly super-unreliable. Every grocery store in america has a cash register that prints fine 99.9% of the time. How often do you have trouble getting a receipt when you're shopping at Walmart? It isn't like this is rocket-science.
And, if a computer fails, you can always fall back to optical-scan ballots.
Then think of poor counties or States which have to ask voters to pay for all this. Which do you think they will do better getting?
How much money did the Florida taxpayers save by using voter-created ballots? Those rooms full of inspectors staring at dimpled chads didn't look cheap, and neither is court time. If a vote comes down to 50 ballots and 300 ballots contain stray marks, then you could be spending a LOT of money paying for the lack of a machine-validated ballot.
There is a great benefit to democracy when everybody in the country isn't arguing over who really won the election. When elections come down to 50 votes out of 50,000,000 then you need a very accurate balloting system to have any hope of knowing who won. Pieces of paper filled out by people who can barely read doesn't really qualify.
Wrong. The voter sticks the filled-out paper ballot into the machine, and the machine beeps and spits it back out. Invalid, try again.
Suppose there is a stray mark in a box, and the reader just ignores it and accepts the ballot. Then in two weeks people are arguing over whether it was intended to be a vote.
I guess you could put a box on each line marked "no vote" - in which case the reader would not accept a ballot that did not have this box filled in if the other spaces were perceived to be blank.
The big problem is when the vote is close, and now you have debates over "voter intent" - you have two dots filled on one line, and none on the next - so did the voter intend to vote for 2 democrats, a repub and a democrat, or maybe a green and a libertarian. The democratic rep will argue the former, since "nobody would vote for two opposites" - when in fact the voter might have done just that (caring about more than party politics).
The big advantage of computers is input validation. And you could still have optical-scan ballots in a box as a backup in case something goes wrong. You could even have the computer generate the ballot.
Uh, they can only be hand-read in the sense that the famous "hanging chad" ballots in Florida could.
What happens when somebody votes for two people for one office by mistake, but leaves the next spot blank. Now you have arguments about which dot was meant for which line.
What happens when a circle has a little line in it, but not solid fill - was that a stray mark or an intended vote?
When an election comes down to 50 votes, you'll have endless debates over hundreds of "partial votes".
The advantage of a computer-generated ballot is that it is validated - the computer ensures that the voter did not cast an illegal vote, therefore you don't have to guess intent once the ballot is filed.
Use the computers to do what computers are good at, and use the simplicity of paper for what it is good for. Don't toss the baby out with the bathwater!
something where the bulk of cost in in the R&D phase
True, but the scale is a bit different.
"R&D" costs for a music artist probably amount to maybe a million dollars - and that is being VERY generous. A few hundred thousand dollars is probably closer, and they probably only spend that on bands that are pretty sure to be hits.
R&D for a drug costs about a hundred-million dollars plus - and then you have to factor in the number of drugs that don't pan out after huge investments. For each drug that does get marketed the better part of a half-billion dollars gets spent in R&D. That is a VERY large up-front investment - much larger than what you'd find being spent by a record company.
Advertise products excessively heavily given their actual value
Uh, I wouldn't say that pharmaceuticals get any more air-time on TV than any other type of product. Are razors and shampoos excessively advertised given their actual value? I'd say their value is a LOT lower, and yet they're probably just as advertised.
In the case of music I'd argue that the branding forms a substantial part of the product's value. Not all music is of equal quality, but a lot of indie bands would do just fine if they could advertise on the radio.
In the case of Pharma there is no question that advertising has an impact on whether you buy Lipitor or Crestor or Zocor, but it isn't like there are a million other pills floating around that would be just as good if they could just get some air time. Most of the value of drugs is created in the R&D and not in the branding. Now, this is discounting generic competition - atorvastatin is a valuable drug regardless of who makes it. The only real question is whether the company that came up with atorvastatin should be rewarded for having done the work, or whether companies should be encouraged to avoid R&D in favor of just becoming chemical supply houses. Obviously if you allow anybody to generically manufacture a brand new drug then most of the differentiating value will come from the advertising. However, the danger in this approach is that it eliminates the incentive to actually research new drugs - who would buy pills for $5 when you could get them for 5 cents? And who would come up with a new drug if it would cost $2-3 per pill to recoup the investment - it wouldn't take generic manufacturers more than a few months to flood the market with cheap copies, and insurance companies would just wait until then before paying for the drug at all.
Exploit the producers of their intellectual property
Not quite sure what you mean here regarding pharma. Most drug researchers are very well paid, and drug R&D is actually a fairly competitive field (just look at all the biotech companies that had their roots in entrepenurial scientists working on shoe-string budgets to come up with drugs that they could license out). Often when people complain about "stolen IP" they are referring to companies reaping the benefits of public R&D, but most drugs that can trace their roots to some concept that came from the NIH still have hundreds of millions of dollars in investment, and most NIH-originated concepts never pan out (at least not on the first try). So, companies still have to spend a lot of money developing drugs. Now, if the NIH came up with a concept, a molecule, and some clinical results for the molecule then I'd argue a company patenting that molecule would be getting a free lunch, but usually what they're getting is pretty blue-sky and most of it doesn't pan out (despite costing quite a bit before this is discovered).
Depends. If you have a hardware firewall running on a non-linux box the ping-of-death would not have worked (assuming the hardware firewall was immune). If you're using iptables I'm not sure if linux was vulnerable. I forget the details but the problem was essentially a buffer-overflow in the TCP/IP stack, so even if the port was closed the kernel would still have to process the packet just to figure out what port it was destined for, and that could potentially trigger a bug.
Put it this way - if a piece of data gets to a computer, then at some level some piece of software/firmware has to figure out what to do with it. If there is a bug in that code, then there might be a possible exploit. The risk is probably proportional to the size and complexity of the code that gets run, so a closed port is far less of a risk than an open one. However, any code could contain a bug - and that includes the TCP stack, the firmware on the NIC, the $20 router on the DSL line, etc.
It doesn't mean that the sky is falling - only that potentially any piece of code (whether in software or hardware) can contain a security vulnerability, and consequently that all vendors need to support their products with updates when necessary.
Uh, how many of these products are being innovated in the countries that are manufacturing them - few if any. So, the innovation is very important, but it is impossible to actually recover these costs unless you have patents/copyrights/etc. Oh, sure, if you're talking about some product that cost 2 man months to develop you can sell support/etc. However, if you're taking something that required 40 engineers working for three years using expensive equipment then there is no question that the R&D is a huge part of the product's cost - it just is the part that only the first-to-market has to do.
The only reason engineers/scientists/etc are paid well is because that is what the market demands. If you could hire them for peanuts it would happen. It isn't like big industry WANTS to pay more for R&D than it needs to.
Uh, do you know how many people would need to be in on such a conspiracy? The folks who came up with the concept, the folks who developed some molecules that might work, tons of people involved in clinical trials, etc. It would probably be just as easy to fake the Apollo landings.
Now, if you think that cancer has been cured in mice - sure, but that is old news. Cancer has probably been cured in mice a thousand times, but until we can start breeding and treating people like mice it will probably take a little longer to work out a cure in humans...:)
Now, there is no question that the Pharma industry focuses its efforts on profitable diseases, and not as much on ones that do not have a promise of profit. However, a cure for diabetes would make a killing, and until humans are immortal there will always be another disesase to cure. And when you discover a cure for some disease you get to profit from it for 10-15 years! By then most CEOs have retired, so they're not going to care all that much about profits 30 years down the road to care...
Uh, could it perhaps just be that the group had a good reputation and the leader got scooped up for a big price, and then quickly afterwards he recruited his former team? And the fact that they're making twice as much isn't that big a deal - everybody knows that you make more in industry than in academia.
What happens whenever a big-shot researcher moves from one university to another...the same thing!
No doubt that Pharma is generally more interested in treatments than cures, but I doubt there in some kind of conspiracy to stifle medical research. And the main reason that they're probably not-so-interested in cures is that it is out of scope - most likely a cure would involve some kind of tissue transplant and not a magic pill that can be mass-produced on a press. Most likely the Toyota Motor Company isn't interested in developing a cure for diabetes either, but I'd hardly call it conspiracy. Pharma does do antibiotic and vaccine R&D, and those would be cures. Of course, they're not very lucrative, so they don't spend much money on it - but can you blame them? If you want R&D performed on non-profitable subjects then call your congressman or an MP and tell them to fund the NIH/whatever. If the NIH is having trouble with their researchers leaving for industry they should pay better...
I believe the wires mentioned in step 1 lead to a small header coil that heats a very small section of magnet wire just above the critical temperature. The resistive load is then the section of magnet wire itself - which now is resistive. However, you wouldn't want to use a "large" resistive load. Standard NMRs run hundreds of amps so you don't want much resistance at all.
If you generate too much heat the situation goes exponentially out of control as the entire magnet rapidly heats up (as each portion of the wire heats it becomes resistive and generates even more heat). Almost instantly you vaporize all the coolant, and a hundred gallons of liquid He displaces a LOT of air when this happens. Basically you have to run for the door and hit the emergency ventilators fast, or you will collapse in a few 10s of seconds.
Haven't seen a quench firsthand but I know folks who have and it is quite an impressive site. I did walk past an NMR lab after a weekend quench and all the computer monitors had psychedelic color schemes.
For those not into magnets, 3.9 tesla isn't all that much - maybe bigger than a typical hospital MRI, but by NMR standards it is pretty small - NMRs go up to around 20 tesla or so, and experimental non-superconducting magnets have gone to 25-30T (or even higher for brief periods). The non-superconducting magnets aren't useful for NMR or a lot of other physics since they tend to fluctuate quite a bit - they use water-cooled electromagnets and a HUGE amount of electricity. I remember reading about one that heated hundreds of gallons of water per minute several tens of degrees C. The really big fields are created by using explosives to forcibly compess one of these large fields to get a much higher field strength, but obviously that is a one-time experiment that doesn't last long.
On the other hand, this magnet is very large in size. High-field NMRs often have bore sizes measured in cm. A hospital MRI is much lower in field strength but obviously needs a bigger hole in the middle - the open MRIs for those who are claustrophobic are even larger.
And that Atlas magnet would make a very nice MRI - you could stand up inside of it! I'm sure it is quite fun to shim the field though!
Yes, but you don't need to solve the whole mess at once. Why not start with some standards:
1. Decide the minimum standards an e-prescription requires, and have the AMA create a CA for doctors that issues SSL certs. Then your doctor can just email you a prescription, that you can forward to your pharmacy. Just stick a GUID on every prescription that gets filed in some central DB to make sure they don't get submitted twice - the central DB would contain no info other than the used GUIDs, so no privacy issues.
2. Doctors could handle scheduling using standard off-the-shelf apps on websites. No need to have one system for every doctor in the country, although in reality most will tend to use one of a few products once the market matures.
And I'm sure somebody smarter than me could come up with 14 other ideas. You don't need to have one massive IT system to fix things - just start with a couple of standards and let small systems evolve to take care of it. The AMA should be leading things, and the US govt could facilitate as well, but let's avoid regulation if we can, shall we?
Oh, and while we're at it - why not address another one of my pet peeves? Why do we even have prescriptions? I'm all for truth in advertising, and I can even see the need for the FD&C act keeping snake oil off the shelves. But if a drug works and is safe if used properly, why does it need to be kept behind bars? I can see insurance companies refusing to pay for drugs that aren't prescribed, but if I want to buy 100 tablets of viagra and use them for fertilizer that should be my own business...
To me Citrix is a system to run legacy applications.
Well, many brand-new apps tend to have all kinds of database latency issues. I've seen very few client-server apps that don't grind to a halt when you put the client and the server on opposite sides of the globe, and replication and other tricks cause all kinds of complications (and many apps don't support them).
Now, if you're truly building from scratch yourself you probably could get it right. But then again maybe it is cheaper to not have to spend as much time optimizing your database browsing routines and instead just spend a little extra on a farm of Citrix servers.
The only issue with Citrix is that you have to have enough servers. You can't run a company of 10,000 people on a bank of 20 servers if they're all using the app at the same time - you need a lot more horsepower.
That is just a result of a company being too cheap. Citrix works great when you have the right ratio of users/server. If an app works just about fine on a 1GHz PC, then you won't be able to put 500 users on a 4-CPU 2GHz server. Sure, you might be able to get away with 10-20, but that's about it.
At work we have a number of Citrix-based apps - some work great and some don't. The difference is when somebody decides to save $10k on an enterprise application by skimping on the servers.
The same thing would happen to google or amazon if they decided to save on servers and cut their hardware budget in half.
Now, citrix probably does have a higher footprint per user, but on the other hand it allows for centralized GUI applications.
Ok, make that "if there were only one source for a desired therapeutic effect" if you want to be pendantic - as others in this thread have pointed out it drugs always have competition - just not with identical molecules.
If a drug competes with 14 other drugs and chicken noodle soup then it won't be expensive. If it is the only cure for a deadly disease it will be expensive - and it is a good thing that it is. If it were not a company might not have bothered to come out with it - why research cures for diseases when you can just come out with the next impotence drug - which people will pay dearly for. Just shows you where everyone's priorities are...:)
If you want to know where the R&D is, just look where the money comes from. Nobody complains about Viagra being too expensive - since it isn't perceived as being essential. As a result companies pour more money into these sorts of programs. We should be willing to pay top dollar for drugs that save lives - then we'll see more innovation on that front...
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Uh, did I suggest that there should not have been some sort of evacuation assistance? That people should be left to starve in the streets?
My point was that even if there was, many if not most of the people who were left in the city would STILL have been left in the city. Many people for whatever reason choose to ride out natural disasters and many end up dead as a result.
If I were on vacation in New Orleans with my family and my car broke down and a storm was inbound with a 3-day ETA we'd get out of there somehow. My family and my own life are very precious to me and while I'll take assistance if I can find it, in the end I'm not going to sit around waiting for somebody to rescue me when I have the ability to get out of there on my own.
And you can rest assured that NOBODY starves to death in America unless they refuse assistance. All they need to do is just bang on somebody's door and ask them to call the police. The police would make sure they end up being fed somewhere.
Now, it is questionable whether a natural disaster really falls under federal jurisdiction - ideally this should be handled at the state level to the extent possible, although it may be the case that the military in some cases might be able to offer assistance not available elsewhere.
New Orleans was a disaster that was predicted for ages, and despite several days warning people stayed behind. Now, I'll agree that in many cases these were people who could not have gotten out without assistance (like the crazy idea not to evacuate hospitals). However, most of the people who stayed behind could have gotten out if they had wanted to.
If you want people to take you seriously I'd recommend waiting until you've actually met somebody before calling them a "moral lizard". You can care for people and at the same time realize that they might not have been saved simply by a better government response. The best way to save lives in a disaster is evacuation, and since that is before the disaster you'll always have to deal with those who refuse to leave. If you forcibly remove people then you get really bad press when you have hundreds of videos on youtube of police officers dragging elderly people out of their homes kicking and screaming and then the hurricane blows back out to sea. If you want the nanny state to take care of everybody who gets into trouble then don't be surprised when everybody starts getting treated like they're still children...
Uh, given 3 days warning they could have gotten out. Unless you're handicapped you can walk to higher ground in less time than that.
Which isn't to say that the evacuation couldn't have been better-handled. However, I'd say the majority who stayed wanted to stay, and if a bus had pulled up they'd have refused to board. Do you want to round people up at gunpoint to get them out of the city?
I use mythtv to ad-skip all the time, and I've noticed the blank screen before the last commercial in a break on ocassion. I don't think it is intended to deceive - I think this is a result of how commercials get mixed into the video feed. Typically the last commercial in the break is a network promo for another show. I think that these ads come pre-mixed into the feed for the program that you're watching, and the affiliates mix in the rest of the ads. So, that would explain the blank before the last ad without giving the execs credit for being clever. :)
Uh, doesn't direcTV charge $5 for each extra receiver per month? I believe they only charge $6/mo flat for any number of DVRs, but you still pay extra for each unit simply for the access card.
With MythTV unless you really need all those tuners you can just pay base rate+$5/mo for two tuners and then hook up all the TVs you want. Granted, those two tuners are shared for the full house, but unless you're a family of 8 you probably don't need much more than that. And all the programming can be accessed from any TV.
I've used both, and I much prefer Myth.
Which isn't to say that Myth is perfect, or that it is trivial to set up. I don't recommend it to casual friends, but I would recommend it to anybody with a CS degree.
And yes, it does cost a lot more up-front - the result of not having subsidized hardware.
Now, you have the HD Tivo, which is half-decent, but a lot of new DTV customers are getting the R-15, which is useful only as a paperweight (and as a free hard drive for your MythTV box). I wasn't expecting much from mine, and it certainly did NOT meet my expectations - I'd have been happy if it at least recorded the shows I like most of the time, without a complete reset every month. Most people who seem to be happy with their's only seem to watch 5 shows - anybody with a family of 4 with diverse viewing habits ends up in trouble...
Uh, were the points eliminated before or after he answered the question, and before or after he was impeached?
If after, then he certainly was lying, although for various technical reasons he avoided perjury. That makes the issue no longer impeachable, which might be why he was acquitted.
In any case, the main issue wasn't whether Clinton was a nice guy, or had appealing sexual habits. The main issue was whether or not he lied under oath, and determining this required a trial. Now, one could argue whether it had to cost that much, but perjury is hardly a minor issue.
He was asked if he had sexual relations with her - not if he had sex.
Sexual relations was defined in this way:
#3 above indicates that if Clinton's genitals touched any part of another person's body, then he had sexual relations with that person. He testified that he did not have sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky. For that to be true, he must not have done any of the three items above.
I assumed you were talking about lotteries for private education (the main theme of the thread). Agreed that lotteries probably make sense for public schools.
If anything is filled to capacity, it means they're not charging enough. Econ-101.
And a lottery is a silly way to resolve the matter if a school intentionally keeps their rates low out of a desire for philantropy. Why not just handle it like any college does - take applications and prioritize them on the basis of whatever selection criteria the school chooses to employ?
A lottery will just make the school raise the tuition rates until supply=demand - if they can't select on the basis of education merit or diversity or whatever other lofty goal they want to set, then they'll just select on the basis of income, which is at least correlated with merit to some degree. And then they can use scholarships to select for all those other things.
Uh, look, for as much as I disagree with Ken Starr in general, or might disagree with many of Bush's policies, there was a little more to the Clinton scandal than his sex life.
Remember how this started out - a sexual harassment lawsuit. I forget the details, but the basis of any sexual harassment lawsuit is that somebody with power used this power to influence a decision of a sexual nature with somebody subject to this power. Clinton's insistence that he did not have a sexual relationship with his intern was directly relevant to this case, as an admission of this would have given credibility to the plantiff - he would have had a history of sleeping with his employees which is a no-no where sexual harassment is concerned.
In testifying that he did not have sexual relations with a subordinate he was in fact lying under oath - which is a serious offense. And it wasn't just to save personal embarassment (as if the case were about a car accident and an attorney decided to just randomly bring up the topic) - his lying had a material impact on the case (the case was about his sexual habits, which in the case of an employer is a legally-regulated matter).
So, the issue under trial was whether Clinton had committed perjury, which is an impeachable offense (actually, just about any law violation is - it is up to congress to assess this - heck, they impeached Andrew Johnson for firing his secretary of war).
Now, whether the trial was well-handled can certainly be debated. However, the fact that it dug into the president's sex life was inevitable since the whole matter at issue was that Clinton said he did not have sexual relations with Lewinsky, and yet it appears that he did (does anybody really think that he did not?).
In the end I think that most people would agree that Clinton did have what most people would consider a sexual relationship with Lewinsky, and that he did what most people would consider lying under oath (especially considering the fact that the term "sexual relations" was carefully defined and the definition was specifically brought up when he was asked the question). Those who support him politically, and even many who oppose him, may tend to give him a little allowance mainly out of the reluctance to oust a sitting president over an issue that really has no impact on public policy. In order to give him allowance people need to find some way of finding that he didn't in fact lie under oath (which most people agree is a serious offense), and so they come up with loopholes and such so that they can determine that his action wasn't in fact perjury.
Personally, I think that Clinton's actions reflected bad leadership - he compromised his ability to create political change (the reason he was elected) in order to have a fleeting relationship with a subordinate. If he had slept with anybody who DIDN'T work with him he wouldn't have gotten in this kind of legal trouble (sure, there could be scandal, but not impeachment and all that this entails). His indiscretion resulted in a tremendous loss of political power which did not serve his constituents, who ended up being the losers in the end. Ironically he might be most remembered 100 years from now in history books as one of only two presidents to ever be impeached (probably Anderew Johnson's most-well-known accomplishment). You might argue whether the offense should have been impeached, but if you really want to be a leader who will make a difference, why give your opponents this kind of ammo?
The power can go out, all the machines could fail and the election would go on with hardly a hicup.
Uh, like it did in Florida in 2000? The issue is that ballots created by hand can contain ambiguous votes, and that means that we're debating voter intent when the race comes down to a handful of ballots. In a district with 50,000 people there are probably upwards of 1000 ballots that have some sort of stray mark on them that might or might not be a vote.
There is no paper trail. If you add a printer, then we have issues with a million printers plus paper plus ink on election day.
By having the computer generate the ballot I was suggesting that the official ballot be on paper, but that it be filled out by a computer.
Computer printers are hardly super-unreliable. Every grocery store in america has a cash register that prints fine 99.9% of the time. How often do you have trouble getting a receipt when you're shopping at Walmart? It isn't like this is rocket-science.
And, if a computer fails, you can always fall back to optical-scan ballots.
Then think of poor counties or States which have to ask voters to pay for all this. Which do you think they will do better getting?
How much money did the Florida taxpayers save by using voter-created ballots? Those rooms full of inspectors staring at dimpled chads didn't look cheap, and neither is court time. If a vote comes down to 50 ballots and 300 ballots contain stray marks, then you could be spending a LOT of money paying for the lack of a machine-validated ballot.
There is a great benefit to democracy when everybody in the country isn't arguing over who really won the election. When elections come down to 50 votes out of 50,000,000 then you need a very accurate balloting system to have any hope of knowing who won. Pieces of paper filled out by people who can barely read doesn't really qualify.
Wrong. The voter sticks the filled-out paper ballot into the machine, and the machine beeps and spits it back out. Invalid, try again.
Suppose there is a stray mark in a box, and the reader just ignores it and accepts the ballot. Then in two weeks people are arguing over whether it was intended to be a vote.
I guess you could put a box on each line marked "no vote" - in which case the reader would not accept a ballot that did not have this box filled in if the other spaces were perceived to be blank.
The big problem is when the vote is close, and now you have debates over "voter intent" - you have two dots filled on one line, and none on the next - so did the voter intend to vote for 2 democrats, a repub and a democrat, or maybe a green and a libertarian. The democratic rep will argue the former, since "nobody would vote for two opposites" - when in fact the voter might have done just that (caring about more than party politics).
The big advantage of computers is input validation. And you could still have optical-scan ballots in a box as a backup in case something goes wrong. You could even have the computer generate the ballot.
Uh, they can only be hand-read in the sense that the famous "hanging chad" ballots in Florida could.
What happens when somebody votes for two people for one office by mistake, but leaves the next spot blank. Now you have arguments about which dot was meant for which line.
What happens when a circle has a little line in it, but not solid fill - was that a stray mark or an intended vote?
When an election comes down to 50 votes, you'll have endless debates over hundreds of "partial votes".
The advantage of a computer-generated ballot is that it is validated - the computer ensures that the voter did not cast an illegal vote, therefore you don't have to guess intent once the ballot is filed.
Use the computers to do what computers are good at, and use the simplicity of paper for what it is good for. Don't toss the baby out with the bathwater!
True, but the scale is a bit different.
"R&D" costs for a music artist probably amount to maybe a million dollars - and that is being VERY generous. A few hundred thousand dollars is probably closer, and they probably only spend that on bands that are pretty sure to be hits.
R&D for a drug costs about a hundred-million dollars plus - and then you have to factor in the number of drugs that don't pan out after huge investments. For each drug that does get marketed the better part of a half-billion dollars gets spent in R&D. That is a VERY large up-front investment - much larger than what you'd find being spent by a record company.
Uh, I wouldn't say that pharmaceuticals get any more air-time on TV than any other type of product. Are razors and shampoos excessively advertised given their actual value? I'd say their value is a LOT lower, and yet they're probably just as advertised.
In the case of music I'd argue that the branding forms a substantial part of the product's value. Not all music is of equal quality, but a lot of indie bands would do just fine if they could advertise on the radio.
In the case of Pharma there is no question that advertising has an impact on whether you buy Lipitor or Crestor or Zocor, but it isn't like there are a million other pills floating around that would be just as good if they could just get some air time. Most of the value of drugs is created in the R&D and not in the branding. Now, this is discounting generic competition - atorvastatin is a valuable drug regardless of who makes it. The only real question is whether the company that came up with atorvastatin should be rewarded for having done the work, or whether companies should be encouraged to avoid R&D in favor of just becoming chemical supply houses. Obviously if you allow anybody to generically manufacture a brand new drug then most of the differentiating value will come from the advertising. However, the danger in this approach is that it eliminates the incentive to actually research new drugs - who would buy pills for $5 when you could get them for 5 cents? And who would come up with a new drug if it would cost $2-3 per pill to recoup the investment - it wouldn't take generic manufacturers more than a few months to flood the market with cheap copies, and insurance companies would just wait until then before paying for the drug at all.
Not quite sure what you mean here regarding pharma. Most drug researchers are very well paid, and drug R&D is actually a fairly competitive field (just look at all the biotech companies that had their roots in entrepenurial scientists working on shoe-string budgets to come up with drugs that they could license out). Often when people complain about "stolen IP" they are referring to companies reaping the benefits of public R&D, but most drugs that can trace their roots to some concept that came from the NIH still have hundreds of millions of dollars in investment, and most NIH-originated concepts never pan out (at least not on the first try). So, companies still have to spend a lot of money developing drugs. Now, if the NIH came up with a concept, a molecule, and some clinical results for the molecule then I'd argue a company patenting that molecule would be getting a free lunch, but usually what they're getting is pretty blue-sky and most of it doesn't pan out (despite costing quite a bit before this is discovered).
Depends. If you have a hardware firewall running on a non-linux box the ping-of-death would not have worked (assuming the hardware firewall was immune). If you're using iptables I'm not sure if linux was vulnerable. I forget the details but the problem was essentially a buffer-overflow in the TCP/IP stack, so even if the port was closed the kernel would still have to process the packet just to figure out what port it was destined for, and that could potentially trigger a bug.
Put it this way - if a piece of data gets to a computer, then at some level some piece of software/firmware has to figure out what to do with it. If there is a bug in that code, then there might be a possible exploit. The risk is probably proportional to the size and complexity of the code that gets run, so a closed port is far less of a risk than an open one. However, any code could contain a bug - and that includes the TCP stack, the firmware on the NIC, the $20 router on the DSL line, etc.
It doesn't mean that the sky is falling - only that potentially any piece of code (whether in software or hardware) can contain a security vulnerability, and consequently that all vendors need to support their products with updates when necessary.
Not all worms require open ports to spread - a worm might target a low-level kernel flaw in the network stack (remember the ping-of-death?).
Uh, how many of these products are being innovated in the countries that are manufacturing them - few if any. So, the innovation is very important, but it is impossible to actually recover these costs unless you have patents/copyrights/etc. Oh, sure, if you're talking about some product that cost 2 man months to develop you can sell support/etc. However, if you're taking something that required 40 engineers working for three years using expensive equipment then there is no question that the R&D is a huge part of the product's cost - it just is the part that only the first-to-market has to do.
The only reason engineers/scientists/etc are paid well is because that is what the market demands. If you could hire them for peanuts it would happen. It isn't like big industry WANTS to pay more for R&D than it needs to.
Uh, do you know how many people would need to be in on such a conspiracy? The folks who came up with the concept, the folks who developed some molecules that might work, tons of people involved in clinical trials, etc. It would probably be just as easy to fake the Apollo landings.
:)
Now, if you think that cancer has been cured in mice - sure, but that is old news. Cancer has probably been cured in mice a thousand times, but until we can start breeding and treating people like mice it will probably take a little longer to work out a cure in humans...
Now, there is no question that the Pharma industry focuses its efforts on profitable diseases, and not as much on ones that do not have a promise of profit. However, a cure for diabetes would make a killing, and until humans are immortal there will always be another disesase to cure. And when you discover a cure for some disease you get to profit from it for 10-15 years! By then most CEOs have retired, so they're not going to care all that much about profits 30 years down the road to care...
Uh, could it perhaps just be that the group had a good reputation and the leader got scooped up for a big price, and then quickly afterwards he recruited his former team? And the fact that they're making twice as much isn't that big a deal - everybody knows that you make more in industry than in academia.
What happens whenever a big-shot researcher moves from one university to another...the same thing!
No doubt that Pharma is generally more interested in treatments than cures, but I doubt there in some kind of conspiracy to stifle medical research. And the main reason that they're probably not-so-interested in cures is that it is out of scope - most likely a cure would involve some kind of tissue transplant and not a magic pill that can be mass-produced on a press. Most likely the Toyota Motor Company isn't interested in developing a cure for diabetes either, but I'd hardly call it conspiracy. Pharma does do antibiotic and vaccine R&D, and those would be cures. Of course, they're not very lucrative, so they don't spend much money on it - but can you blame them? If you want R&D performed on non-profitable subjects then call your congressman or an MP and tell them to fund the NIH/whatever. If the NIH is having trouble with their researchers leaving for industry they should pay better...
I believe the wires mentioned in step 1 lead to a small header coil that heats a very small section of magnet wire just above the critical temperature. The resistive load is then the section of magnet wire itself - which now is resistive. However, you wouldn't want to use a "large" resistive load. Standard NMRs run hundreds of amps so you don't want much resistance at all.
If you generate too much heat the situation goes exponentially out of control as the entire magnet rapidly heats up (as each portion of the wire heats it becomes resistive and generates even more heat). Almost instantly you vaporize all the coolant, and a hundred gallons of liquid He displaces a LOT of air when this happens. Basically you have to run for the door and hit the emergency ventilators fast, or you will collapse in a few 10s of seconds.
Haven't seen a quench firsthand but I know folks who have and it is quite an impressive site. I did walk past an NMR lab after a weekend quench and all the computer monitors had psychedelic color schemes.
For those not into magnets, 3.9 tesla isn't all that much - maybe bigger than a typical hospital MRI, but by NMR standards it is pretty small - NMRs go up to around 20 tesla or so, and experimental non-superconducting magnets have gone to 25-30T (or even higher for brief periods). The non-superconducting magnets aren't useful for NMR or a lot of other physics since they tend to fluctuate quite a bit - they use water-cooled electromagnets and a HUGE amount of electricity. I remember reading about one that heated hundreds of gallons of water per minute several tens of degrees C. The really big fields are created by using explosives to forcibly compess one of these large fields to get a much higher field strength, but obviously that is a one-time experiment that doesn't last long.
On the other hand, this magnet is very large in size. High-field NMRs often have bore sizes measured in cm. A hospital MRI is much lower in field strength but obviously needs a bigger hole in the middle - the open MRIs for those who are claustrophobic are even larger.
And that Atlas magnet would make a very nice MRI - you could stand up inside of it! I'm sure it is quite fun to shim the field though!
Yes, but you don't need to solve the whole mess at once. Why not start with some standards:
1. Decide the minimum standards an e-prescription requires, and have the AMA create a CA for doctors that issues SSL certs. Then your doctor can just email you a prescription, that you can forward to your pharmacy. Just stick a GUID on every prescription that gets filed in some central DB to make sure they don't get submitted twice - the central DB would contain no info other than the used GUIDs, so no privacy issues.
2. Doctors could handle scheduling using standard off-the-shelf apps on websites. No need to have one system for every doctor in the country, although in reality most will tend to use one of a few products once the market matures.
And I'm sure somebody smarter than me could come up with 14 other ideas. You don't need to have one massive IT system to fix things - just start with a couple of standards and let small systems evolve to take care of it. The AMA should be leading things, and the US govt could facilitate as well, but let's avoid regulation if we can, shall we?
Oh, and while we're at it - why not address another one of my pet peeves? Why do we even have prescriptions? I'm all for truth in advertising, and I can even see the need for the FD&C act keeping snake oil off the shelves. But if a drug works and is safe if used properly, why does it need to be kept behind bars? I can see insurance companies refusing to pay for drugs that aren't prescribed, but if I want to buy 100 tablets of viagra and use them for fertilizer that should be my own business...
To me Citrix is a system to run legacy applications.
Well, many brand-new apps tend to have all kinds of database latency issues. I've seen very few client-server apps that don't grind to a halt when you put the client and the server on opposite sides of the globe, and replication and other tricks cause all kinds of complications (and many apps don't support them).
Now, if you're truly building from scratch yourself you probably could get it right. But then again maybe it is cheaper to not have to spend as much time optimizing your database browsing routines and instead just spend a little extra on a farm of Citrix servers.
The only issue with Citrix is that you have to have enough servers. You can't run a company of 10,000 people on a bank of 20 servers if they're all using the app at the same time - you need a lot more horsepower.
That is just a result of a company being too cheap. Citrix works great when you have the right ratio of users/server. If an app works just about fine on a 1GHz PC, then you won't be able to put 500 users on a 4-CPU 2GHz server. Sure, you might be able to get away with 10-20, but that's about it.
At work we have a number of Citrix-based apps - some work great and some don't. The difference is when somebody decides to save $10k on an enterprise application by skimping on the servers.
The same thing would happen to google or amazon if they decided to save on servers and cut their hardware budget in half.
Now, citrix probably does have a higher footprint per user, but on the other hand it allows for centralized GUI applications.
Ok, make that "if there were only one source for a desired therapeutic effect" if you want to be pendantic - as others in this thread have pointed out it drugs always have competition - just not with identical molecules.
:)
If a drug competes with 14 other drugs and chicken noodle soup then it won't be expensive. If it is the only cure for a deadly disease it will be expensive - and it is a good thing that it is. If it were not a company might not have bothered to come out with it - why research cures for diseases when you can just come out with the next impotence drug - which people will pay dearly for. Just shows you where everyone's priorities are...
If you want to know where the R&D is, just look where the money comes from. Nobody complains about Viagra being too expensive - since it isn't perceived as being essential. As a result companies pour more money into these sorts of programs. We should be willing to pay top dollar for drugs that save lives - then we'll see more innovation on that front...