Of course, even experimental drugs have rules. First, they must be free (so no profit motive to delay applying for a marketing license). Second, almost all countries require safety standards and an application demonstrating animal safety.
You couldn't make a profit off of "experimental" drugs under the current regime. Maybe if you totally deregulated things companies would make patients sign waviers. Somehow, I can't see all that leading to a drug utopia. If the main goal is tort reform then congress can fix that in 30 seconds - just exempt any FDA-regulated company from civil suits and make the FDA do all the policing.
Actually, at the time of FDA review, there really wasn't any data suggesting Vioxx was dangerous, was there?
The heart problems really only started turning up a year or two after the drug was on the market, but even then the data wasn't really clear cut - studies showed that Vioxx was more dangerous than Alleve, but no more dangerous than sugar pills - hardly conclusive clear-cut evidence. Certainly cause for concern though, and the FDA was concerned. However, there really wasn't anything all that solid and so not much was done other than to add warnings to the drug label.
It turns out the drug was in fact shown to be more dangerous than placebo, but not until much later. Of course, there were a long line of folks saying "I told you so," but the fact is that if tomorrow aliens landed in front of the White House there would be a long line of folks saying "I told you so" as well - that doesn't mean there is any proof that aliens exist currently.
The actual cause of the Vioxx heart attacks hasn't been worked out fully either. Currently the FDA officially suspects that all non-steroidal anti-inflamatory drugs other than aspirin probably have the same problem (aspirin is a bit unusual since it is cardio-protective - so even if it causes the problem this is probably offset by the benefits). That means that drugs in every household in America are potentially just as dangerous. However, we don't see lawyers lining up to sue the makers of Tylenol and Motrin - and this is because these companies aren't about to do the expensive trials that could prove that their drugs are dangerous.
What the FDA needs to do is just outline some standards for acceptable levels of safety for painkillers. How many people can a painkiller kill before it is deemed unsafe? In other drug classes you can see how many people are saved and how many people are killed and weigh things out. On the other hand, cosmetic drugs or painkillers don't save any lives - does that mean that they should all be banned? After all, all drugs have side effect, and if we don't consider pain relief of sufficient importance to risk such side effects we shouldn't develop these kinds of drugs. Of course, most people would rather take a 1/1,000,000 chance of dying over living with chronic arthritis pain. If Vioxx is in fact no more dangerous than the other drugs still on the market, then there really isn't any reason to ban it at all. Of course, you won't hear that from plaintiff lawyers.
One problem with the tort approach is that ALL drugs have side-effects. How do you determine whether they are tolerable? If it is whatever a jury thinks, then even the cure for cancer would probably land a company in bankrupcy court if it caused patients to break out in pimples or if 1 in 10,000 keel over from a heart attack.
The FDA review process at least gives companies some kind of standard to point at in court. "If the FDA reviewed it, and thought it was safe, then why are companies being punished" - so the argument goes.
There are really two approaches - unregulated and regulated. If you want to regulate drugs, just have one standards body. If you don't want to regulate, than don't make companies jump through hoops to create meaningless bodies to rubber-stamp their drugs. Just let them sell them to whoever will buy them.
The problem is that drug quality controls are VERY expensive. I doubt anybody would bother with them if there weren't regulations. Imagine if you had 100 companies - of which 1 was shoddy in quality. Right now the other 99 would sick the FDA on them. If there were no FDA, instead everybody has to compete on price with a company that cuts corners, and soon everybody is cutting corners. Consumers won't pass up huge cost savings just because a drug probably doesn't work. Why do you think the herbal supplement industry is doing so well? No FDA regulations regarding quality of manufacturing, and generally no scientific evidence of efficacy or safety - and yet the stuff sells like crazy. The reason is simple - a $10 bottle contains a 3 month supply that promises to be equivalent to some branded drug that costs $80/month - and the branded drug advertises side effects while the supplement does not.
My guess is that if there were no FDA, we'd be treating cancer with ginko leaves...
How precise does this system have to be in order to detect the current loss due to an inductive tap? That has to be REALLY low. You'd probably get errors due to random EM all the time if you're depending on your signal quality being that perfect.
The argument is that the Journal apparently had some kind of cutoff date for data, and these particular events happened after that date. Other CV events from before the date were included.
Now, if somebody can show that data after the cutoff was still selectively included if it were positive, and suppressed if it were negative, that would certainly be something. However, in any large trial, if you wait a month there will always be an extra adverse event (whether a drug is safe or not). At some point you need to draw a line.
Merck also claims that the data was made public at a later date.
In the pharma industry, I understand that one of the big principles with presenting data is to religiously follow the rules. If some guideline says not to report data below a particular threshold, then it won't get reported even if it is known that the data is still meaningful. If the guideline says to report above some threshold, then it will get reported even if it is known that it is not meaningful. The whole process has a ton of rules and conventions associated with it, and ever since the Barr decision the trend has been to follow the rules whether it makes sense or not.
If audited by the FDA, they would look at whether Merck followed their published policies to the letter, and whether the policies were declared to the FDA. If so, at worst they might be asked to change their policies in the future.
In theory the whole reason the FDA exists is so that there can be some standard of approval for drugs, and a single regulatory body. The problem with the tort system is that the government can say that a particular action is legal, and at the same time a company can get sued to death for it. There really needs to be a single documented standard for everybody to follow...
To me this looks like the perfect device either to be attached to a keychain, or to just leave in a drive all the time just in case. Or, imagine if you had a thin-client solution with no hard drives - this kind of removable USB storage might be the perfect thing to use to store config data or something along those lines. Then you could upgrade the machine just by swapping it.
Cosmic rays are deflected, true. However, they still go flying through the earth due to their very high velocities. Just about anything slower is blocked by the field. Cosmic rays have VERY high energies - we're talking particle accellerator speeds...
As the parent indicated - EM radiation is not deflected by the earth's magnetic field.
1. It isn't a foregone conclusion that there even has to be an evolutionary advantage to having cancer, as evolution tends to not have much bearing on post-reproductive-aged organisms. There clearly would be a selection against organsisms who have pre-reproductive cancer, as they are less likely to reproduce.
2. One possible evolutionary advantage of cancer is that it gets rid of old parents, thus allowing more food for the young and reproductive offspring. On the other hand, in the case of humans the existance of parents usually confers a benefit to offspring, as parents tend to work to advantage their children. Then again, this is mostly a recent development - 1000 years ago most parents probably just lay in bed all day needing attention from their children.
The only way evolution would get rid of cancer is that if children of cancer victims were less likely to reproduce. I can't think of any reason this would be the case unless you passed a law requiring sterilization of families any time somebody keels over below some threshold age (thus promoting genes for long life). Obviously this isn't going to happen anytime soon...
I use free AVG for now as ClamWin does not yet have realtime scanning. This is a pretty essential feature - if my family were saavy enough to be trusted to scan before loading I probably wouldn't have windows installed in the first place...
Amazon actually tried out something like this. The price database would contain info about cost and current selling price. The system would then offer shoppers a price within so many standard deviations of the mean price. Then, as items sold or didn't sell at a given price, the system would adjust the mean price dynamically.
The problem was that somebody happened to browse the site with two different PCs at the same time and got two different prices. A little research uncovered the new system, and it was labeled as "unfair" since two different people could pay two different prices.
The amazon system probably was designed to go a step further and offer personalized discounts as well - if it figures out that you love Sci-fi it would probably price these products at a premium, and then entice you with super-cheap romance novels.
It is really no different than haggling in a marketplace. If the shopkeeper sees that you just hiked in from the desert and look famished, forget getting a good price on bottled water...
Of course, the whole reason they have DRM is to avoid the doctrine of first-sale and disallow sales of used goods. Why would they let you compete when them when it costs them nothing to sell the n+1th item?
There is a loophole in this idea - and it is similar to one used all the time.
When sleezy-patent-holding-company wants to go after microsoft/mozilla/etc, they don't just sue them. They first sue some little guy who more clearly ripped them off and who has no money to defend themselves. They win that case, and then repeat this several times to build up a precedent. Then they go after a big company, who now has a harder case to make due to the setting of precedent.
If you force patents to be defended the first time they are in court, you'll just see people suing their cousins - who surprisingly will not mount a vigorous defence. Once the first-trial hurdle is passed the awards get returned under the table, and then the real lawsuits start...
Patents are an insidious problem. I'm not sure there is an easy solution, but a good start would be to clean up the patent office, which currently incentivizes blanket issue of patents.
Actually, from your own quote it would be the median. Suppose there are 100 people in the population. Two have an IQ of 1, everybody else has an IQ of 2,3,4...99. The mode is 1, the median and mean are about 50.
The median always splits a population into two groups of equal size (+/-1).
Somebody should design a server that listens on a privileged port. This server can be connected to by a remote server, and iterrogated for the username associated with any outgoing connections to that remote server.
It depends on the nature of the injury, and the hospital (in any country). You really need more than one anecdote per country. Also - if the injury is acute (broken leg, bleeding, heart attack) you will be seen immediately anywhere. The bigger issue is stuff like ingrown toenails, ear infections, eye surgery, etc. You can wait MANY months for these sorts of things in some countries.
They really need to do a dozen comparisons with similar circumstances (urban/rural, injury type, etc) - but in a variety of locations in each country. One data point per country is just an anecdote, and VERY open to selective sampling.
Oh, I know exactly what you meant. My point was that it would be almost impossible to codify into law. Do you put a word limit on the 2nd page? If so, maybe somebody has a genuine need to make theirs longer. If not, why wouldn't they just give you two pages of legalese. The goal of the person writing the EULA is to be UNCLEAR - not for you to understand it.
You'd almost need to have a standard EULA embodied in law (there was such a movement a few years ago which was massively protested by programmers everywhere - it had a number of onerous terms). Otherwise, how do you define standard vs non-standard terms.
Easy-to-understand agreements are a noble principle, but hard to legallly enforce. If you can't enforce it, companies won't follow it...
Uh, atomic transactions are hardly a useless bell-and-whistle item. If you have so many people accessing your DB that you need a cluster, then I can't imagine them not needing transactions, unless they are read-only, and you infrequently do updates.
Transactions are what make DBs such great tools - the system is always consistent. No corruption issues if some process dies halfway through updating a pile of records.
Any system that expects to compete on this scale really needs to support transactions, unless they are in some read-only/nightly-updates niche.
And so you'll just get two copies of the EULA, but with one copy requiring you to check next to each section.
How exactly do you define plain and simple words? How do you define malicious use? EVERY condition in the EULA is designed to limit the liability of the software vendor - if they were all stuff you'd agree to anyway they wouldn't bother to write it down. If they intend to give you free customer service, for example, they don't write it down, since you aren't going to turn it away simply because it wasn't in the EULA...
I think it should be kept in mind also, in our cost/benefit analysis, that petroleum is involved in a LOT of products, many of them life-saving. And certainly many of them contribute to quality of life.
My point is that you don't need to do a cost/benefit analysis. You don't reduce the cost of gas for every good thing that comes out of it. You simply charge more for the bad things. The good things are the reason that we buy it at all.
This will of course make anything that uses plastic more expensive, including medical devices. However, this is still a positive thing. Maybe if we make fewer plastic leg casts fewer people will die in wars, or fewer people will die of asthma. EVERYTHING in life is a trade-off - that is why everything costs money.
I agree that not all costs are easy to quantify. There is no need for precise accounting - simply estimate costs as best as possible.
As far as wars go - why isn't the US invading Rwanda? Easy - no oil. The US occassionally invades non-oil-related nations, but many of the long and messy wars tend to be over oil. That isn't to say that oil should pay for all military expenses - we'd need an army in any case. However, certainly the cost of wars in the middle east should be bourne by oil.
Once you factor in most of the true costs (again, we don't need to split hairs and be perfectly precise), people will still use oil - but only where it makes sense. People will also try to use it more sparingly. Oil companies will try to obtain it from more peaceful areas of the world since these sources would have lower taxes associated with them. Benefits from oil are easy to calculate - the costs are much harder. People also like to ignore the costs - which is why they should be assessed in the price.
I believe they might actually subsidize it directly. And it's good that we do so.
The benefit of petroleum right now far outweighs the negative effects, looking at it in a "cost to benefit" way.
Hey - I'm all for libertarianism, and generally am not a big fan of high taxes. Still, the poster you replied to does have some good points. Oil is artificially cheap only because of externalities - the US taxpayers bear many of the costs associated with acquiring it, and burning it.
As far as cost/benefit ratios go - there is an easy way to see if your statement is true. Let the price of gas reflect the true economic cost of acquiring and burning it. That is, fund wars in the middle east using gas taxes, and fund treatment of disorders likely to be caused by smog with gas taxes. If the cost/benefit ratio is still good, people will still buy gas - and rightly so. If not, people won't buy gas. The government still spends just as much as it did before, but now the costs are borne by the folks who cause the government to incur them.
As far as the argument that the US went into Iraq to stop terrorism goes, think about it a little. If everbody wasn't buying gas from over there, they would be little more than farmers throwing stones (where do you think they get their guns?). The US would also have a lot more international support for cleaning things up if they did have to invade due to terrorist attacks (as was more the case in Afganistan - where people recognized the responsibility of the Taliban). Without everybody fighting over the oil in Iraq there would probably be a lot more consensus on how to handle the social issues (right now the social issues are generally what people fight over while they secretly maneuver on access to oil). The world also wouldn't have to worry about placating all the other local dictatorships that control access to oil.
Oil has a LOT of external costs associated with it. We all pay for these costs anyway - so why not make the price of gas reflect them. It doesn't mean that we're paying any more in taxes - just that people now have incentives to use energy sources that don't have these associated costs. Other energy sources should also be taxed if they lead to externalities.
Ultimately, individual choice will lead to the correct decisions once we stop making incentives for externally-costly options.
It depends on where the vaccines are developed. If it is outside the US then that is probably what will happen. If it is inside the US there would probably be export controls on it - so the other nations will be lucky to get it at all. The US is all into free markets except when there is a disaster. I wouldn't be surprised if the marshalls break into the vaccine plant and just take over if there is a disaster, and pay a token royalty to the company for its service.
This is why most companies couldn't be bothered to actually come up with a cure. In the end they probably won't profit much from it, and could end up in a huge mess.
Honestly, the US should either just put up huge advance rewards for companies who come up with vaccines for stuff like this, or they should just get into the vaccine development business on their own. Either the private or public sector could work, but treating the private sector as if it were the public sector won't work - you need the appropriate strategy for either.
I'm not certain on gas masks - they tend to work based on their absorbant properties, not filtration ability. Any suitable for biological warfare would be OK, provided their filters are sized for viruses and not bacteria.
You'd also need uncontaminated food and water. Water is probably fine as chlorination will probably kill the virus. Food is fine as long as it is not prepared by anybody who is infected. Hiding in your basement might help if you can keep it up long enough - ie until a vaccine is ready - maybe six months later if they work REALLY fast.
Stockpiling something like Tamiflu might help. Too bad it is illegal in most of the developed world due to restrictions on the purchase of prescription drugs. (Something I never understood - what better incentive for cures to pandemics than to let people actually buy them before it breaks out. Why should people have to trust FEMA to have enough doses on-hand? I'm sure Congress will get theirs...) Prescription-only drugs really don't make much sense...
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I remember trying some of this horrible brew.
Then again, this sort of thing is pretty popular in Japan - so maybe its just taste...
Of course, even experimental drugs have rules. First, they must be free (so no profit motive to delay applying for a marketing license). Second, almost all countries require safety standards and an application demonstrating animal safety.
You couldn't make a profit off of "experimental" drugs under the current regime. Maybe if you totally deregulated things companies would make patients sign waviers. Somehow, I can't see all that leading to a drug utopia. If the main goal is tort reform then congress can fix that in 30 seconds - just exempt any FDA-regulated company from civil suits and make the FDA do all the policing.
Actually, at the time of FDA review, there really wasn't any data suggesting Vioxx was dangerous, was there?
The heart problems really only started turning up a year or two after the drug was on the market, but even then the data wasn't really clear cut - studies showed that Vioxx was more dangerous than Alleve, but no more dangerous than sugar pills - hardly conclusive clear-cut evidence. Certainly cause for concern though, and the FDA was concerned. However, there really wasn't anything all that solid and so not much was done other than to add warnings to the drug label.
It turns out the drug was in fact shown to be more dangerous than placebo, but not until much later. Of course, there were a long line of folks saying "I told you so," but the fact is that if tomorrow aliens landed in front of the White House there would be a long line of folks saying "I told you so" as well - that doesn't mean there is any proof that aliens exist currently.
The actual cause of the Vioxx heart attacks hasn't been worked out fully either. Currently the FDA officially suspects that all non-steroidal anti-inflamatory drugs other than aspirin probably have the same problem (aspirin is a bit unusual since it is cardio-protective - so even if it causes the problem this is probably offset by the benefits). That means that drugs in every household in America are potentially just as dangerous. However, we don't see lawyers lining up to sue the makers of Tylenol and Motrin - and this is because these companies aren't about to do the expensive trials that could prove that their drugs are dangerous.
What the FDA needs to do is just outline some standards for acceptable levels of safety for painkillers. How many people can a painkiller kill before it is deemed unsafe? In other drug classes you can see how many people are saved and how many people are killed and weigh things out. On the other hand, cosmetic drugs or painkillers don't save any lives - does that mean that they should all be banned? After all, all drugs have side effect, and if we don't consider pain relief of sufficient importance to risk such side effects we shouldn't develop these kinds of drugs. Of course, most people would rather take a 1/1,000,000 chance of dying over living with chronic arthritis pain. If Vioxx is in fact no more dangerous than the other drugs still on the market, then there really isn't any reason to ban it at all. Of course, you won't hear that from plaintiff lawyers.
One problem with the tort approach is that ALL drugs have side-effects. How do you determine whether they are tolerable? If it is whatever a jury thinks, then even the cure for cancer would probably land a company in bankrupcy court if it caused patients to break out in pimples or if 1 in 10,000 keel over from a heart attack.
The FDA review process at least gives companies some kind of standard to point at in court. "If the FDA reviewed it, and thought it was safe, then why are companies being punished" - so the argument goes.
There are really two approaches - unregulated and regulated. If you want to regulate drugs, just have one standards body. If you don't want to regulate, than don't make companies jump through hoops to create meaningless bodies to rubber-stamp their drugs. Just let them sell them to whoever will buy them.
The problem is that drug quality controls are VERY expensive. I doubt anybody would bother with them if there weren't regulations. Imagine if you had 100 companies - of which 1 was shoddy in quality. Right now the other 99 would sick the FDA on them. If there were no FDA, instead everybody has to compete on price with a company that cuts corners, and soon everybody is cutting corners. Consumers won't pass up huge cost savings just because a drug probably doesn't work. Why do you think the herbal supplement industry is doing so well? No FDA regulations regarding quality of manufacturing, and generally no scientific evidence of efficacy or safety - and yet the stuff sells like crazy. The reason is simple - a $10 bottle contains a 3 month supply that promises to be equivalent to some branded drug that costs $80/month - and the branded drug advertises side effects while the supplement does not.
My guess is that if there were no FDA, we'd be treating cancer with ginko leaves...
How precise does this system have to be in order to detect the current loss due to an inductive tap? That has to be REALLY low. You'd probably get errors due to random EM all the time if you're depending on your signal quality being that perfect.
The argument is that the Journal apparently had some kind of cutoff date for data, and these particular events happened after that date. Other CV events from before the date were included.
Now, if somebody can show that data after the cutoff was still selectively included if it were positive, and suppressed if it were negative, that would certainly be something. However, in any large trial, if you wait a month there will always be an extra adverse event (whether a drug is safe or not). At some point you need to draw a line.
Merck also claims that the data was made public at a later date.
In the pharma industry, I understand that one of the big principles with presenting data is to religiously follow the rules. If some guideline says not to report data below a particular threshold, then it won't get reported even if it is known that the data is still meaningful. If the guideline says to report above some threshold, then it will get reported even if it is known that it is not meaningful. The whole process has a ton of rules and conventions associated with it, and ever since the Barr decision the trend has been to follow the rules whether it makes sense or not.
If audited by the FDA, they would look at whether Merck followed their published policies to the letter, and whether the policies were declared to the FDA. If so, at worst they might be asked to change their policies in the future.
In theory the whole reason the FDA exists is so that there can be some standard of approval for drugs, and a single regulatory body. The problem with the tort system is that the government can say that a particular action is legal, and at the same time a company can get sued to death for it. There really needs to be a single documented standard for everybody to follow...
To me this looks like the perfect device either to be attached to a keychain, or to just leave in a drive all the time just in case. Or, imagine if you had a thin-client solution with no hard drives - this kind of removable USB storage might be the perfect thing to use to store config data or something along those lines. Then you could upgrade the machine just by swapping it.
Cosmic rays are deflected, true. However, they still go flying through the earth due to their very high velocities. Just about anything slower is blocked by the field. Cosmic rays have VERY high energies - we're talking particle accellerator speeds...
As the parent indicated - EM radiation is not deflected by the earth's magnetic field.
Better still, make the user type in "I am intentionally selling $3 billion worth of stock for $45,000 - this is not a mistake."
It probably also wouldn't hurt to have some kind of spending-approval-level system so that trades over some amount get checked.
Double-blind data entry is also not a bad idea (two users have to input the same order, the order is flagged if the input is not identical).
There are a few issues with your question:
1. It isn't a foregone conclusion that there even has to be an evolutionary advantage to having cancer, as evolution tends to not have much bearing on post-reproductive-aged organisms. There clearly would be a selection against organsisms who have pre-reproductive cancer, as they are less likely to reproduce.
2. One possible evolutionary advantage of cancer is that it gets rid of old parents, thus allowing more food for the young and reproductive offspring. On the other hand, in the case of humans the existance of parents usually confers a benefit to offspring, as parents tend to work to advantage their children. Then again, this is mostly a recent development - 1000 years ago most parents probably just lay in bed all day needing attention from their children.
The only way evolution would get rid of cancer is that if children of cancer victims were less likely to reproduce. I can't think of any reason this would be the case unless you passed a law requiring sterilization of families any time somebody keels over below some threshold age (thus promoting genes for long life). Obviously this isn't going to happen anytime soon...
I use free AVG for now as ClamWin does not yet have realtime scanning. This is a pretty essential feature - if my family were saavy enough to be trusted to scan before loading I probably wouldn't have windows installed in the first place...
Amazon actually tried out something like this. The price database would contain info about cost and current selling price. The system would then offer shoppers a price within so many standard deviations of the mean price. Then, as items sold or didn't sell at a given price, the system would adjust the mean price dynamically.
The problem was that somebody happened to browse the site with two different PCs at the same time and got two different prices. A little research uncovered the new system, and it was labeled as "unfair" since two different people could pay two different prices.
The amazon system probably was designed to go a step further and offer personalized discounts as well - if it figures out that you love Sci-fi it would probably price these products at a premium, and then entice you with super-cheap romance novels.
It is really no different than haggling in a marketplace. If the shopkeeper sees that you just hiked in from the desert and look famished, forget getting a good price on bottled water...
Of course, the whole reason they have DRM is to avoid the doctrine of first-sale and disallow sales of used goods. Why would they let you compete when them when it costs them nothing to sell the n+1th item?
There is a loophole in this idea - and it is similar to one used all the time.
When sleezy-patent-holding-company wants to go after microsoft/mozilla/etc, they don't just sue them. They first sue some little guy who more clearly ripped them off and who has no money to defend themselves. They win that case, and then repeat this several times to build up a precedent. Then they go after a big company, who now has a harder case to make due to the setting of precedent.
If you force patents to be defended the first time they are in court, you'll just see people suing their cousins - who surprisingly will not mount a vigorous defence. Once the first-trial hurdle is passed the awards get returned under the table, and then the real lawsuits start...
Patents are an insidious problem. I'm not sure there is an easy solution, but a good start would be to clean up the patent office, which currently incentivizes blanket issue of patents.
maybe you're thinking of the mode?
Actually, from your own quote it would be the median. Suppose there are 100 people in the population. Two have an IQ of 1, everybody else has an IQ of 2,3,4...99. The mode is 1, the median and mean are about 50.
The median always splits a population into two groups of equal size (+/-1).
Somebody should design a server that listens on a privileged port. This server can be connected to by a remote server, and iterrogated for the username associated with any outgoing connections to that remote server.
:)
Oh wait, we just described identd...
It depends on the nature of the injury, and the hospital (in any country). You really need more than one anecdote per country. Also - if the injury is acute (broken leg, bleeding, heart attack) you will be seen immediately anywhere. The bigger issue is stuff like ingrown toenails, ear infections, eye surgery, etc. You can wait MANY months for these sorts of things in some countries.
They really need to do a dozen comparisons with similar circumstances (urban/rural, injury type, etc) - but in a variety of locations in each country. One data point per country is just an anecdote, and VERY open to selective sampling.
Oh, I know exactly what you meant. My point was that it would be almost impossible to codify into law. Do you put a word limit on the 2nd page? If so, maybe somebody has a genuine need to make theirs longer. If not, why wouldn't they just give you two pages of legalese. The goal of the person writing the EULA is to be UNCLEAR - not for you to understand it.
You'd almost need to have a standard EULA embodied in law (there was such a movement a few years ago which was massively protested by programmers everywhere - it had a number of onerous terms). Otherwise, how do you define standard vs non-standard terms.
Easy-to-understand agreements are a noble principle, but hard to legallly enforce. If you can't enforce it, companies won't follow it...
Uh, atomic transactions are hardly a useless bell-and-whistle item. If you have so many people accessing your DB that you need a cluster, then I can't imagine them not needing transactions, unless they are read-only, and you infrequently do updates.
Transactions are what make DBs such great tools - the system is always consistent. No corruption issues if some process dies halfway through updating a pile of records.
Any system that expects to compete on this scale really needs to support transactions, unless they are in some read-only/nightly-updates niche.
Hello sailor!
And so you'll just get two copies of the EULA, but with one copy requiring you to check next to each section.
How exactly do you define plain and simple words? How do you define malicious use? EVERY condition in the EULA is designed to limit the liability of the software vendor - if they were all stuff you'd agree to anyway they wouldn't bother to write it down. If they intend to give you free customer service, for example, they don't write it down, since you aren't going to turn it away simply because it wasn't in the EULA...
I think it should be kept in mind also, in our cost/benefit analysis, that petroleum is involved in a LOT of products, many of them life-saving. And certainly many of them contribute to quality of life.
My point is that you don't need to do a cost/benefit analysis. You don't reduce the cost of gas for every good thing that comes out of it. You simply charge more for the bad things. The good things are the reason that we buy it at all.
This will of course make anything that uses plastic more expensive, including medical devices. However, this is still a positive thing. Maybe if we make fewer plastic leg casts fewer people will die in wars, or fewer people will die of asthma. EVERYTHING in life is a trade-off - that is why everything costs money.
I agree that not all costs are easy to quantify. There is no need for precise accounting - simply estimate costs as best as possible.
As far as wars go - why isn't the US invading Rwanda? Easy - no oil. The US occassionally invades non-oil-related nations, but many of the long and messy wars tend to be over oil. That isn't to say that oil should pay for all military expenses - we'd need an army in any case. However, certainly the cost of wars in the middle east should be bourne by oil.
Once you factor in most of the true costs (again, we don't need to split hairs and be perfectly precise), people will still use oil - but only where it makes sense. People will also try to use it more sparingly. Oil companies will try to obtain it from more peaceful areas of the world since these sources would have lower taxes associated with them. Benefits from oil are easy to calculate - the costs are much harder. People also like to ignore the costs - which is why they should be assessed in the price.
I believe they might actually subsidize it directly. And it's good that we do so.
The benefit of petroleum right now far outweighs the negative effects, looking at it in a "cost to benefit" way.
Hey - I'm all for libertarianism, and generally am not a big fan of high taxes. Still, the poster you replied to does have some good points. Oil is artificially cheap only because of externalities - the US taxpayers bear many of the costs associated with acquiring it, and burning it.
As far as cost/benefit ratios go - there is an easy way to see if your statement is true. Let the price of gas reflect the true economic cost of acquiring and burning it. That is, fund wars in the middle east using gas taxes, and fund treatment of disorders likely to be caused by smog with gas taxes. If the cost/benefit ratio is still good, people will still buy gas - and rightly so. If not, people won't buy gas. The government still spends just as much as it did before, but now the costs are borne by the folks who cause the government to incur them.
As far as the argument that the US went into Iraq to stop terrorism goes, think about it a little. If everbody wasn't buying gas from over there, they would be little more than farmers throwing stones (where do you think they get their guns?). The US would also have a lot more international support for cleaning things up if they did have to invade due to terrorist attacks (as was more the case in Afganistan - where people recognized the responsibility of the Taliban). Without everybody fighting over the oil in Iraq there would probably be a lot more consensus on how to handle the social issues (right now the social issues are generally what people fight over while they secretly maneuver on access to oil). The world also wouldn't have to worry about placating all the other local dictatorships that control access to oil.
Oil has a LOT of external costs associated with it. We all pay for these costs anyway - so why not make the price of gas reflect them. It doesn't mean that we're paying any more in taxes - just that people now have incentives to use energy sources that don't have these associated costs. Other energy sources should also be taxed if they lead to externalities.
Ultimately, individual choice will lead to the correct decisions once we stop making incentives for externally-costly options.
It depends on where the vaccines are developed. If it is outside the US then that is probably what will happen. If it is inside the US there would probably be export controls on it - so the other nations will be lucky to get it at all. The US is all into free markets except when there is a disaster. I wouldn't be surprised if the marshalls break into the vaccine plant and just take over if there is a disaster, and pay a token royalty to the company for its service.
This is why most companies couldn't be bothered to actually come up with a cure. In the end they probably won't profit much from it, and could end up in a huge mess.
Honestly, the US should either just put up huge advance rewards for companies who come up with vaccines for stuff like this, or they should just get into the vaccine development business on their own. Either the private or public sector could work, but treating the private sector as if it were the public sector won't work - you need the appropriate strategy for either.
I'm not certain on gas masks - they tend to work based on their absorbant properties, not filtration ability. Any suitable for biological warfare would be OK, provided their filters are sized for viruses and not bacteria.
You'd also need uncontaminated food and water. Water is probably fine as chlorination will probably kill the virus. Food is fine as long as it is not prepared by anybody who is infected. Hiding in your basement might help if you can keep it up long enough - ie until a vaccine is ready - maybe six months later if they work REALLY fast.
Stockpiling something like Tamiflu might help. Too bad it is illegal in most of the developed world due to restrictions on the purchase of prescription drugs. (Something I never understood - what better incentive for cures to pandemics than to let people actually buy them before it breaks out. Why should people have to trust FEMA to have enough doses on-hand? I'm sure Congress will get theirs...) Prescription-only drugs really don't make much sense...