Shareholders want their stock price to go up. They can always find some sucker to sell their stock to if the company fortunes start to change.
The problem with the stock market is that it is very short-sighted.
The value of a stock is in theory the book value of the company (that is, what you'd get from selling all the buildings/etc) plus the time-adjuated-value of all future earnings, divided by the number of outstanding shares. So, if the buildings would sell for $1 billion, and it will make $100 million next quarter and then go completely out of business, and it has 1 billion outstanding shares, an appropriate stock prices is about $1.10.
Now, suppose the company has the same book value and number of shares, but won't make any money next quarter, but will be solvent for 100 years, at which time it will have $1 trillion in earnings. The stock price would probably be even lower. Why? Simple - while it will be around, it won't do anything for the investor for the next 100 years. The stock price would steadily rise, and in 100 years it would be worth $1001/share, however the rise would be exponential, and nothing at all would happen for the next 10-20 years (maybe it would go up a dollar in two decades - doubling an investment in 20 years isn't a big deal). It is only growing at about 7% - and you can get most of that kind of growth from a safe investment like a bond.
From an economic perspective, next year's earnings are far more valuable than next decade's. Hence, stock price rises when you cut long-term R&D. It just isn't profitable to invest in those areas.
The problem is that we run companies to make money, not to generate value for society. Society does benefit from technology developed over decades, since the members of society and the people they immediately care about last about 100 years. (That is, just about everybody will either live that long themselves, or at least they really care for somebody who will be around in 100 years.)
Investors also benefit from highly liquid markets. This year invest in HP, next year invest in IBM, and so on. Employees, on the other hand, can't move their families every two years to work for a different R&D lab on the other side of the country because of the oscillating fortunes of various companies. So, those who are investing have incentive to have industry churn which keeps things lean and mean. Those who are working want stability.
I'm not sure what the solution to all this is. The problem is that pure economics don't really address the needs of society here. Or maybe we really just don't need better technology so quickly. I don't know.
One solution might be more public R&D funding. Maybe a nation would invest in a technology and make it available to any company provided that their company stock can only be held by members of that nation. (It doesn't make sense to tax French citizens to benefit "French" companies that are 95% owned by Americans, who then take 95% of the rewards of the research.) That is one problem with research - you benefit more from not spending your own money on it, but rather leaching on somebody else...
While the average consumer only thinks of printers and computers (I doubt most people even realize HP makes calculators), the average engineer or scientist thinks oscilliscope or spectrum analyzer or HPLC or GC or any number of other highly specialized intstruments. Granted, Carly came up with the bright idea of spinning off all those lines.
Granted, HP isn't the best in all of those areas. Actually, they probably aren't the best in most. However, they do make very good products overall, and they are fairly widely used and from an integration perspective they are often a good choice.
Then again, they need to get their UV/Vis software into the 90's. The most recent XP-compatible version of the software they sell is still limited to 8.3 filenames (it was released only months ago). I'm amazed they can find a computer that can support a development platform that can actually compile something that doesn't use win32 or better.
This is somewhat true. We won't put a dent in spam from a legal perspective until a federal agency devotes some serious infrastructure to the job.
I don't think that is true.
Sure, from the standpoint that there are 10,000 people sending mail, if you only bust 2 per year it would take 5000 years.
However, you can look at it another way. Make the sending of a spam message a serious crime. Then, all the FBI agent needs to do is check his home email account, pick one email, and start back-tracing logs to figure out where it came from. Once you track that single email back to a source you send the originator to Levenworth for 10 years. If he was being paid to do it you use RICO and work your way right up the food chain.
Suddenly there are FAR fewer than 10,000 people in the spam business, and they all have to live underground lives.
Right now you can be a mass-spammer and just live in a nice huge house and freely talk about what you do for a living. It is hard to deter people from going into that kind of a lifestyle.
I agree with the other reply, however, that law enforcement should be funded by society for the purpose of protecting it. It should not be a source of revenue...
Creating a BIOS for a new motherboard is something that only the motherboard manufacturer can do.
So, why can't the manufacturer be part of the open source fraternity?
Seriously - if something like this took off the most logical solution would be for everybody to ditch AMI/Phoenix and just support openbios or the like. It should boot windows as well as linux, so no need to support anything else.
It only makes sense for stuff like this to be open.
Not a bad concept. It would be fair if the rules were announced in advance and investors were able to invest accordingly. Obviously some kind of grandfathering clause would need to be worked in for current corporations (perhaps with some kind of transition period).
My main objection to the use of eminent domain is that it will most likely be used sensationally, and inconsistently. Something like Lipitor might get siezed almost without warning, and yet a poorly selling drug is not.
The main issue is that drugs are very expensive to develop, and cheap to make. So, the sunk costs have to be recovered somehow. As long as the rules are laid out before anybody invests anything, people are free to decide whether it is worth investing their money.
Picture buying your dreamhouse and spending a huge sum on it, only to have the government eminent domain your back yard to make it a landfill. Since they didn't take your house they only paid you for the value of the land itself, and as a result your house depreciates completely and now you can't afford to sell it and get out. The system wold be fair if you knew about the landfill before you bought the house. The problem is the arbitrariness of the situation.
Granted, government can't always afford to give advance warning, but drug costs are a long term problem, not a short term one. Rather than just siezing drugs left and right, new rules should be set out which are reasonable, and existing drugs will be off patent in ten years anyway.
When you get bombed by a foreign power you need a short-term solution. When health care costs are rising, you need a long-term solution.
The problem is that politicians are not solving the long term solution of health care. They are solving the short term solution of getting re-elected...
I was referring to the fact that stock prices were far down on the expectation of poor future performance.
Development of pharmaceuticals is fairly expensive and high risk. Selling them is extremely low risk and highly profitable if they're under patent.
I guess the question comes down to whether a pills which lowers cholesterol is worth spending $70 per month to have.
If you think that the drugs could be developed less expensively then perhaps a solution is for the NIH to dabble in drug development. They could then release the resulting drugs into the public domain. Of course, US taxpayers would sitll bear all the costs of medicating the rest of the world (a common complaint about the drug industry). The drugs would certainly be far cheaper (maybe $10-20 per month), but the total cost to taxpayers will probably be comparable. Also, you'd have the side benefit of drug research being directed by special interest groups.
However, as long as industry and government both have to go through the same safety screens and neither benefits unfairly I think that running an experiment like publicly funded drug development probably wouldn't be a bad idea...
Which drugs have a proven history and have well understood consequences? The cheap ones we've been using for years.
Hardly. None of your examples was tested to the standards required of modern medicines. In fact, some of the argument surrounding Vioxx and Celebrex is related to the fact that there is some suspicion that the traditional NSAIDs may also cause heart attacks by the same mechanism. However, they also have the side effect of thinning the blood, so it isn't as noticable.
The fact is that if aspirin were developed today it would be banned from the market. A pain killer that causes lethal stomach bleeds?
Personally, I don't think that any medication should be banned from the market. The FDA should have the power to force drug makers to test their medicines and make information public. Then it should be up to you and me to decide whether something is good for me or not, and up to insurers to decide whether it is worth paying for.
Scissors can stab you in the heart if you trip and fall on them. The solution is simply to be careful when walking with them, not to ban them. The same should apply to potentially hazardous drugs.
Suppose somebody is on their deathbed with two weeks to live, and their stomach is in bad shape. Which is the better pain killer to give them - something that could cause actue stomach damage that could kill them sooner, or something that might damange their heart in a year or two?
If you really wanted impartial data on drug safety, the federal government should just do the testing themselves, and send the bill to the manufacturer.
They should not be advertising to the general populace. The people should not choose their medications based on what they saw on the television or in a magazine.
There should not be ads for cars either - if you need a car you should contact a professional car broker, who will determine the best car for you to drive. There certainly should not be ads for food - look at all the garbage that people eat. Your doctor should prescribe a monthly menu to the day and you should follow it.
Personally, I think that any medication at all should be available over the counter. If you want to be an idiot and take Taxol without checking with a doctor, more power to you.
As for me, I'd talk to a doctor, and I'd talk over my medication options with him. I would not necessarily just do whatever he said. Why? Simple - I know a few pharma sales reps, and they've told me the horror stories about the occasional doctor who just prescribes the medicine peddled by the company that gives away the best perks. It is my life, and while I'm going to consult with competent professionals in the end it is still my life.
While much very basic research is done in a university, most drug development costs are bourne by the pharmaceutical companies.
Usually universities or government labs auction off patent rights to the highest bidder. In that sense, the value of the research is already paid for by the private sector.
However, those rights often don't sell for much. That is simply because basic research usually only hints at possible solutions to a problem - most of these ideas don't pan out. Developing them costs a fortune.
The fact is that pharamceuticals in general aren't doing all that well at the moment. Suggesting that we can eliminate almost all financial reward for these companies and still expect private drug development to take place doesn't make sense.
Perhaps there is merit to the idea that the government should run the drug industry. However, I haven't seen any evidence that they will do a better job of the whole thing.
If we do get rid of drug patents, then any development in the drug industry will be performed by the government - that much is obvious...
Now that the government gets data from Choicepoint and others, and because the government has no legal responsibility to find or fix bad data in its files, the rest of your life could be hobbled by bad data and you won't quite know why.
I couldn't agree more with this problem. For example, if a company interviews people it will probably run their backgrounds. If something questionable comes up, they probably will just toss the application and not bring it up again unless they're desperate to hire the person. They won't contact them to inquire about whether the issues are real - once they do that they open themselves up to discriminatory lawsuits if they don't hire the candidate for any reason.
Generally when a company turns somebody down they don't give any reason at all. If you don't give a reason you don't have to defend whether it was a good reason. If they were to turn you down due to a background-check issue they certainly wouldn't tell you so - if pressed for a reason they'd probably say that they found a candidate with a better fit.
The same almost certainly applies for security clearances. I doubt the government indicates why they are not granted...
I think the main complaint is that they advertise unlimited service, and they aren't up-front about the priority system.
I don't think the other poster is arguing that your DVDs should be delayed so that he can cycle three DVDs every two days. He is arguing that he should be able to cycle his 1.5 discs per day while you still get yours perfectly on time. Certainly if Netflix hired one million shipping employees they could handle both.
Obviously Netflix can't afford to hire an army of employees to handle 1.5 disc/day renters, but that basically means that they don't have unlimited service.
If they simply said in fine print that under typical use you can only rent 12 DVDs per month, nobody would be complaining at all. Then they're not advertising unlimited service.
I'm perfectly happy with Netflix, but I'm not under any illusions that the service is unlimited, and I have been annoyed when at times in the past shipments have gotten delayed or the top-of-list item was not shipped.
and receive movies lower in their Queue more often than our other members
Has anybody else had to game this system?
A few months ago I was repeatedly getting sent 2nd or 3rd choices when the first choice was a new release.
I managed to work around this by deleting everything out of my queue except choice number 1. I essentially had to keep my own queue offline, but it worked.
Apparently they had choice number 1 available, they just chose not to send it to me. As a result, I sometimes have to choose not to reveal to them my 2nd and 3rd choices, which of course makes it harder for them to plan ahead. This is why you don't play games with your customers...
The only problem with this is that it only works if you remove all the CAs from your web-browser and only import certificates for the sites you visit.
Otherwise, unless you check that fingerprint every time you visit the bank you won't know if the page hasn't been replaced by another site that has a Verisign-signed SSL cert. In theory Verisign doesn't just had those out to anybody, but if you trusted them you wouldn't need to verify all those fingerprints in the first place...
Maybe the solution is a simple rules-based approach:
The government always charges $5/month less than the private company.
As a result, everybody switches to the government provider, and prices continue to fall until they hit the cost of doing business profitably. Then the private company stops lowering prices, and quality at the government operation drops since they're charging less than it really costs to operate. Consumers then reach some equilibrium between both providers (cheap but poor or less cheap but good).
If the government operation starts to ossify and becomes worthless, then the private sector will start raising their prices since they can compete on quality. That brings in new government revenue and allows the government to clean up its act and restore equilibrium.
I think something like this could possibly work out over the long run. Anybody see a glaring problem with it?
Someone PLEASE tell me why. Because right now the only thing I can think is that people just don't know how to pronounce "Postgres".
I am using mysql for a few web apps - all FOSS out-of-the-box packages.
The problem is that it seems like most developers haven't figured out how to support any database generically, and as a result you don't get the luxury of using whatever database you like.
Now, if I were developing my own custom code I'd probably take a hard look at postgres. Right now I'm just stuck with what everybody else writes.
I just don't get why people can't use generic SQL and figure out how to make their code database-independant. Most windows apps are written this way precisely so that you can develop it using an Access-database backend with zero data-protection, and then run it in production with some ultra-expensive Oracle setup.
Hmm - doesn't look like it fits my bill (a shame - I'be been looking for a better backup solution and have yet to find it).
Here are my requirements:
1. Backups are encrypted. 2. Backup data can be split across media. 3. Backups can use include/exclude criteria. 4. Corrupted backup files are recoverable. 5. Backups are compressed.
I've yet to find anything free which does all of this. Instead I'm using a short shell script combo of tar/bzip/gpg/split which gets the job done, but not elegantly. I'm not 100% sure how successful #4 would be with this setup. I think gpg has some support for corrupted files.
Honestly, I don't care that much about ECC and all that. My main concern with #4 is that if one byte in the backup file is messed up, I don't lose the ability to read everything else in the file. I can tolerate having one file on my system which gets lost in a disaster...
That's not a problem because the emulator would be feeding the TPM chip the real ROM.
The TPM chip is examing the BIOS before the system even boots. The BIOS examines the OS before it runs, etc. By the time the emulator even starts running, the TPM chip has already stored the state of everything on the system in its protected memory.
The emulator could feed it a new BIOS, but the chip would not accept it, since it knows that the boot sequence is already done. The emulator can emulate the CPU, but the CPU doesn't have any control over the TMP chip. The only reason you can do magical things with an emulated CPU is because it is EMULATED. The TMP chip is not, and you can't emulate it without knowledge of the private key...
Couldn't agree more. I've stayed away from folding/cancer for the same reasons.
My logic is this:
If you're doing something for the general benefit of mankind with the results being free for all to use/extend, then I'll follow your lead and let you use some spare cycles on my PC (which do cost me money since my PC would otherwise throttle the CPU/fan/etc).
If on the other hand you plan on selling your results to the highest bidder then this is a commercial enterprise and you had better be prepared to make me a financial offer for my CPU-time. If said offer turns out to be lower than the cost-per-kWh, then I won't participate. Buy your own cluster for umpteen-million dollars like all the big pharma companies do...
For the cost of Apollo they probably could have had a robot walking around every other crater.
If they only sent as many robots as they sent humans they certainly would have accomplished less.
No question that a human can do more than a robot, but which gets more science done for a 100 billion dollar budget:
1. Sending 100 robots to the Earth's moon, 10 robots to every other moon in the solar system, 50 robots to the heliopause, 5 orbiters around every terrestrial planet, 20 proof-of-concept probes testing exotic power and propulsion systems, 15 orbiting observatories around the earth, and a few radio observatories at Lagrange points around the solar system. (That's an understatement - based on historic costs you probably would get ten times as much done.)
2. Landing six guys on the moon for a few days each.
For what we spent on sending humans to the moon we could have done a LOT more with robots. Voyager cost a small fraction of the Apollo program and it probably generated far greater returns.
Life is about tradeoffs. When you spend money on putting a human in space you have less money to spend on other stuff...
Playing a movie requires making copies too. So does reading a book. In the case of a movie you make a copy of every still frame in the movie onto the surface of a TV screen, and a second copy (yikes - two!) on the back of your retina. In reading a book you skip the screen, but the image is projected onto your retina.
Clearly, calling these "copies" is absurd. The author of a work cannot expect people to buy their work not to be able to read or watch it, and so calling these copies is just silly.
In the same way, calling a single installation of a paid-for software package a copy is just making arguments where they don't need to exist. Was the seller of the software proposing that you were to use it without actually installing it?
This is just a silly legal argument used to justify putting onerous restrictions on the use of legally-bought property beyond those allowed by law...
If you read the license agreements, you will find that there are varying degrees of restrictions.
At home I usually don't read them. When I buy software I don't intend to copy it or distribute it, so I don't need anything that the vendor might be offering me by way of license.
They also restrict what you can run the software on.
Only if you accept the license. I can write up a document that says you can't use your stove to cook anything besides rice, and I can even tape it to your front door. You can consequently just toss it in the trash - you paid for your stove, you can use it however you want. You don't need permission to use something you already bought. Due to copyright law, however, you do need permission to perform the work in public, copy it, or distribute it. This has nothign to do with the license - if the law were revoked you could do all of this without a license as well.
Again we can debate the legality but you DID agree to the restrictions when you used the software.
I never agreed to anything of the kind. There might have been a piece of paper in the box that said something about those terms, but I just tossed it into the trash without reading it. Perhaps a box flashed on the screen asking if the person running the software agreed to a bunch of crazy terms. I could have simply bypassed the box via patching, or had my cat play with the mouse. I clearly didn't agree with the terms, but since I paid for the software I didn't need further permission to use it.
Next time before you stick your foot in your mouth and look like a idiot, learn about what you are discussing..
I spend thousands of dollars a year at my job on licenses. I don't think there is any legal basis behind them, but my employer won't want to be the test case at the Supreme Court, and they can afford them. So we pay for them. Trust me, I know quite a bit about the topic. They pay for maintenance contracts / upgrade contracts / etc. They pay per user, per server, per client, per pixel on the monitor, etc. Then, because of some dispute they pay for something they already paid for all over again. Since they have deep pockets they don't want to be the target of a lawsuit, and I can't blame them. They're paying me, so I go ahead and order the pieces of paper that say we can go ahead and use the software that we paid for under conditions x/y/z.
In general, when you buy something, it BELONGS to you. The person who sold it to you gives up any right to the object at all. With copyright we restrict that you aren't allowed to make copies of a work without a license from the creator, and there are a number of good reasons for this. However, you don't need a license to listen to music, or to project a copy of a movie onto a TV screen, or from there onto the back of your retina. Likewise you shouldn't need a license to use software that you paid for...
Having wine installed inst a license to use their DLL's. And in some cases, even Microsoft applications you have *purchased*. Read your EULA's closely people.
You don't need a license to use any software - only to copy it. If you bought a box with a CD in it from Microsoft, you can use the contents of that box for whatever you want to legally. However, if you want to make copies of it or distribute it you'll need a license. That's how it works with every other copyrighted work in existence...
My comment is not a troll. I was just pointing out how silly it is that something that is supposed to be so "free"--OSS--has a smorgasbord of various licenses attached to it.
Well, you could just release your software without a license at all.
Then under most systems of law you wouldn't be able to copy or distribute it for any purpose whatsoever.
The reason we have long licenses is that most systems of law are written to strongly restrict what you can do with software, and you need a license to unrestrict it.
I was prevented from doing so by the GPL, which seemed to be mindlessly slapped onto every stupid little library for parsing command line arguments that I came across.
Nobody put a gun to your head and forced you to reuse a library. You could always code it yourself (at higher cost and risk of bugs).
Maybe the reason those libraries were released under the GPL was because the programmers who wrote them were interested in getting free access to the work of people like you. You don't seem to mind having free access to their work...
To me the GPL just says, I'm willing to give you something if you're willing to give back.
Slashdot Mirror
Who cares what the long term effects are.
Shareholders want their stock price to go up. They can always find some sucker to sell their stock to if the company fortunes start to change.
The problem with the stock market is that it is very short-sighted.
The value of a stock is in theory the book value of the company (that is, what you'd get from selling all the buildings/etc) plus the time-adjuated-value of all future earnings, divided by the number of outstanding shares. So, if the buildings would sell for $1 billion, and it will make $100 million next quarter and then go completely out of business, and it has 1 billion outstanding shares, an appropriate stock prices is about $1.10.
Now, suppose the company has the same book value and number of shares, but won't make any money next quarter, but will be solvent for 100 years, at which time it will have $1 trillion in earnings. The stock price would probably be even lower. Why? Simple - while it will be around, it won't do anything for the investor for the next 100 years. The stock price would steadily rise, and in 100 years it would be worth $1001/share, however the rise would be exponential, and nothing at all would happen for the next 10-20 years (maybe it would go up a dollar in two decades - doubling an investment in 20 years isn't a big deal). It is only growing at about 7% - and you can get most of that kind of growth from a safe investment like a bond.
From an economic perspective, next year's earnings are far more valuable than next decade's. Hence, stock price rises when you cut long-term R&D. It just isn't profitable to invest in those areas.
The problem is that we run companies to make money, not to generate value for society. Society does benefit from technology developed over decades, since the members of society and the people they immediately care about last about 100 years. (That is, just about everybody will either live that long themselves, or at least they really care for somebody who will be around in 100 years.)
Investors also benefit from highly liquid markets. This year invest in HP, next year invest in IBM, and so on. Employees, on the other hand, can't move their families every two years to work for a different R&D lab on the other side of the country because of the oscillating fortunes of various companies. So, those who are investing have incentive to have industry churn which keeps things lean and mean. Those who are working want stability.
I'm not sure what the solution to all this is. The problem is that pure economics don't really address the needs of society here. Or maybe we really just don't need better technology so quickly. I don't know.
One solution might be more public R&D funding. Maybe a nation would invest in a technology and make it available to any company provided that their company stock can only be held by members of that nation. (It doesn't make sense to tax French citizens to benefit "French" companies that are 95% owned by Americans, who then take 95% of the rewards of the research.) That is one problem with research - you benefit more from not spending your own money on it, but rather leaching on somebody else...
I'm not sure I completely agree.
While the average consumer only thinks of printers and computers (I doubt most people even realize HP makes calculators), the average engineer or scientist thinks oscilliscope or spectrum analyzer or HPLC or GC or any number of other highly specialized intstruments. Granted, Carly came up with the bright idea of spinning off all those lines.
Granted, HP isn't the best in all of those areas. Actually, they probably aren't the best in most. However, they do make very good products overall, and they are fairly widely used and from an integration perspective they are often a good choice.
Then again, they need to get their UV/Vis software into the 90's. The most recent XP-compatible version of the software they sell is still limited to 8.3 filenames (it was released only months ago). I'm amazed they can find a computer that can support a development platform that can actually compile something that doesn't use win32 or better.
Ok, maybe you are onto something after all...
This is somewhat true. We won't put a dent in spam from a legal perspective until a federal agency devotes some serious infrastructure to the job.
I don't think that is true.
Sure, from the standpoint that there are 10,000 people sending mail, if you only bust 2 per year it would take 5000 years.
However, you can look at it another way. Make the sending of a spam message a serious crime. Then, all the FBI agent needs to do is check his home email account, pick one email, and start back-tracing logs to figure out where it came from. Once you track that single email back to a source you send the originator to Levenworth for 10 years. If he was being paid to do it you use RICO and work your way right up the food chain.
Suddenly there are FAR fewer than 10,000 people in the spam business, and they all have to live underground lives.
Right now you can be a mass-spammer and just live in a nice huge house and freely talk about what you do for a living. It is hard to deter people from going into that kind of a lifestyle.
I agree with the other reply, however, that law enforcement should be funded by society for the purpose of protecting it. It should not be a source of revenue...
You saw evolution, I take it.
That movie had some really great moments and a few truly good jokes. If the trailer is still on apple.com you can see them all...
Creating a BIOS for a new motherboard is something that only the motherboard manufacturer can do.
So, why can't the manufacturer be part of the open source fraternity?
Seriously - if something like this took off the most logical solution would be for everybody to ditch AMI/Phoenix and just support openbios or the like. It should boot windows as well as linux, so no need to support anything else.
It only makes sense for stuff like this to be open.
Not a bad concept. It would be fair if the rules were announced in advance and investors were able to invest accordingly. Obviously some kind of grandfathering clause would need to be worked in for current corporations (perhaps with some kind of transition period).
My main objection to the use of eminent domain is that it will most likely be used sensationally, and inconsistently. Something like Lipitor might get siezed almost without warning, and yet a poorly selling drug is not.
The main issue is that drugs are very expensive to develop, and cheap to make. So, the sunk costs have to be recovered somehow. As long as the rules are laid out before anybody invests anything, people are free to decide whether it is worth investing their money.
Picture buying your dreamhouse and spending a huge sum on it, only to have the government eminent domain your back yard to make it a landfill. Since they didn't take your house they only paid you for the value of the land itself, and as a result your house depreciates completely and now you can't afford to sell it and get out. The system wold be fair if you knew about the landfill before you bought the house. The problem is the arbitrariness of the situation.
Granted, government can't always afford to give advance warning, but drug costs are a long term problem, not a short term one. Rather than just siezing drugs left and right, new rules should be set out which are reasonable, and existing drugs will be off patent in ten years anyway.
When you get bombed by a foreign power you need a short-term solution. When health care costs are rising, you need a long-term solution.
The problem is that politicians are not solving the long term solution of health care. They are solving the short term solution of getting re-elected...
I was referring to the fact that stock prices were far down on the expectation of poor future performance.
Development of pharmaceuticals is fairly expensive and high risk. Selling them is extremely low risk and highly profitable if they're under patent.
I guess the question comes down to whether a pills which lowers cholesterol is worth spending $70 per month to have.
If you think that the drugs could be developed less expensively then perhaps a solution is for the NIH to dabble in drug development. They could then release the resulting drugs into the public domain. Of course, US taxpayers would sitll bear all the costs of medicating the rest of the world (a common complaint about the drug industry). The drugs would certainly be far cheaper (maybe $10-20 per month), but the total cost to taxpayers will probably be comparable. Also, you'd have the side benefit of drug research being directed by special interest groups.
However, as long as industry and government both have to go through the same safety screens and neither benefits unfairly I think that running an experiment like publicly funded drug development probably wouldn't be a bad idea...
Which drugs have a proven history and have well understood consequences? The cheap ones we've been using for years.
Hardly. None of your examples was tested to the standards required of modern medicines. In fact, some of the argument surrounding Vioxx and Celebrex is related to the fact that there is some suspicion that the traditional NSAIDs may also cause heart attacks by the same mechanism. However, they also have the side effect of thinning the blood, so it isn't as noticable.
The fact is that if aspirin were developed today it would be banned from the market. A pain killer that causes lethal stomach bleeds?
Personally, I don't think that any medication should be banned from the market. The FDA should have the power to force drug makers to test their medicines and make information public. Then it should be up to you and me to decide whether something is good for me or not, and up to insurers to decide whether it is worth paying for.
Scissors can stab you in the heart if you trip and fall on them. The solution is simply to be careful when walking with them, not to ban them. The same should apply to potentially hazardous drugs.
Suppose somebody is on their deathbed with two weeks to live, and their stomach is in bad shape. Which is the better pain killer to give them - something that could cause actue stomach damage that could kill them sooner, or something that might damange their heart in a year or two?
If you really wanted impartial data on drug safety, the federal government should just do the testing themselves, and send the bill to the manufacturer.
They should not be advertising to the general populace. The people should not choose their medications based on what they saw on the television or in a magazine.
There should not be ads for cars either - if you need a car you should contact a professional car broker, who will determine the best car for you to drive. There certainly should not be ads for food - look at all the garbage that people eat. Your doctor should prescribe a monthly menu to the day and you should follow it.
Personally, I think that any medication at all should be available over the counter. If you want to be an idiot and take Taxol without checking with a doctor, more power to you.
As for me, I'd talk to a doctor, and I'd talk over my medication options with him. I would not necessarily just do whatever he said. Why? Simple - I know a few pharma sales reps, and they've told me the horror stories about the occasional doctor who just prescribes the medicine peddled by the company that gives away the best perks. It is my life, and while I'm going to consult with competent professionals in the end it is still my life.
While much very basic research is done in a university, most drug development costs are bourne by the pharmaceutical companies.
Usually universities or government labs auction off patent rights to the highest bidder. In that sense, the value of the research is already paid for by the private sector.
However, those rights often don't sell for much. That is simply because basic research usually only hints at possible solutions to a problem - most of these ideas don't pan out. Developing them costs a fortune.
The fact is that pharamceuticals in general aren't doing all that well at the moment. Suggesting that we can eliminate almost all financial reward for these companies and still expect private drug development to take place doesn't make sense.
Perhaps there is merit to the idea that the government should run the drug industry. However, I haven't seen any evidence that they will do a better job of the whole thing.
If we do get rid of drug patents, then any development in the drug industry will be performed by the government - that much is obvious...
Now that the government gets data from Choicepoint and others, and because the government has no legal responsibility to find or fix bad data in its files, the rest of your life could be hobbled by bad data and you won't quite know why.
I couldn't agree more with this problem. For example, if a company interviews people it will probably run their backgrounds. If something questionable comes up, they probably will just toss the application and not bring it up again unless they're desperate to hire the person. They won't contact them to inquire about whether the issues are real - once they do that they open themselves up to discriminatory lawsuits if they don't hire the candidate for any reason.
Generally when a company turns somebody down they don't give any reason at all. If you don't give a reason you don't have to defend whether it was a good reason. If they were to turn you down due to a background-check issue they certainly wouldn't tell you so - if pressed for a reason they'd probably say that they found a candidate with a better fit.
The same almost certainly applies for security clearances. I doubt the government indicates why they are not granted...
I think the main complaint is that they advertise unlimited service, and they aren't up-front about the priority system.
I don't think the other poster is arguing that your DVDs should be delayed so that he can cycle three DVDs every two days. He is arguing that he should be able to cycle his 1.5 discs per day while you still get yours perfectly on time. Certainly if Netflix hired one million shipping employees they could handle both.
Obviously Netflix can't afford to hire an army of employees to handle 1.5 disc/day renters, but that basically means that they don't have unlimited service.
If they simply said in fine print that under typical use you can only rent 12 DVDs per month, nobody would be complaining at all. Then they're not advertising unlimited service.
I'm perfectly happy with Netflix, but I'm not under any illusions that the service is unlimited, and I have been annoyed when at times in the past shipments have gotten delayed or the top-of-list item was not shipped.
and receive movies lower in their Queue more often than our other members
Has anybody else had to game this system?
A few months ago I was repeatedly getting sent 2nd or 3rd choices when the first choice was a new release.
I managed to work around this by deleting everything out of my queue except choice number 1. I essentially had to keep my own queue offline, but it worked.
Apparently they had choice number 1 available, they just chose not to send it to me. As a result, I sometimes have to choose not to reveal to them my 2nd and 3rd choices, which of course makes it harder for them to plan ahead. This is why you don't play games with your customers...
The only problem with this is that it only works if you remove all the CAs from your web-browser and only import certificates for the sites you visit.
Otherwise, unless you check that fingerprint every time you visit the bank you won't know if the page hasn't been replaced by another site that has a Verisign-signed SSL cert. In theory Verisign doesn't just had those out to anybody, but if you trusted them you wouldn't need to verify all those fingerprints in the first place...
Maybe the solution is a simple rules-based approach:
The government always charges $5/month less than the private company.
As a result, everybody switches to the government provider, and prices continue to fall until they hit the cost of doing business profitably. Then the private company stops lowering prices, and quality at the government operation drops since they're charging less than it really costs to operate. Consumers then reach some equilibrium between both providers (cheap but poor or less cheap but good).
If the government operation starts to ossify and becomes worthless, then the private sector will start raising their prices since they can compete on quality. That brings in new government revenue and allows the government to clean up its act and restore equilibrium.
I think something like this could possibly work out over the long run. Anybody see a glaring problem with it?
Someone PLEASE tell me why. Because right now the only thing I can think is that people just don't know how to pronounce "Postgres".
I am using mysql for a few web apps - all FOSS out-of-the-box packages.
The problem is that it seems like most developers haven't figured out how to support any database generically, and as a result you don't get the luxury of using whatever database you like.
Now, if I were developing my own custom code I'd probably take a hard look at postgres. Right now I'm just stuck with what everybody else writes.
I just don't get why people can't use generic SQL and figure out how to make their code database-independant. Most windows apps are written this way precisely so that you can develop it using an Access-database backend with zero data-protection, and then run it in production with some ultra-expensive Oracle setup.
It looks quite promising. I have my first trial backup running now...
Hmm - doesn't look like it fits my bill (a shame - I'be been looking for a better backup solution and have yet to find it).
Here are my requirements:
1. Backups are encrypted.
2. Backup data can be split across media.
3. Backups can use include/exclude criteria.
4. Corrupted backup files are recoverable.
5. Backups are compressed.
I've yet to find anything free which does all of this. Instead I'm using a short shell script combo of tar/bzip/gpg/split which gets the job done, but not elegantly. I'm not 100% sure how successful #4 would be with this setup. I think gpg has some support for corrupted files.
Honestly, I don't care that much about ECC and all that. My main concern with #4 is that if one byte in the backup file is messed up, I don't lose the ability to read everything else in the file. I can tolerate having one file on my system which gets lost in a disaster...
That's not a problem because the emulator would be feeding the TPM chip the real ROM.
The TPM chip is examing the BIOS before the system even boots. The BIOS examines the OS before it runs, etc. By the time the emulator even starts running, the TPM chip has already stored the state of everything on the system in its protected memory.
The emulator could feed it a new BIOS, but the chip would not accept it, since it knows that the boot sequence is already done. The emulator can emulate the CPU, but the CPU doesn't have any control over the TMP chip. The only reason you can do magical things with an emulated CPU is because it is EMULATED. The TMP chip is not, and you can't emulate it without knowledge of the private key...
Couldn't agree more. I've stayed away from folding/cancer for the same reasons.
My logic is this:
If you're doing something for the general benefit of mankind with the results being free for all to use/extend, then I'll follow your lead and let you use some spare cycles on my PC (which do cost me money since my PC would otherwise throttle the CPU/fan/etc).
If on the other hand you plan on selling your results to the highest bidder then this is a commercial enterprise and you had better be prepared to make me a financial offer for my CPU-time. If said offer turns out to be lower than the cost-per-kWh, then I won't participate. Buy your own cluster for umpteen-million dollars like all the big pharma companies do...
For the cost of Apollo they probably could have had a robot walking around every other crater.
If they only sent as many robots as they sent humans they certainly would have accomplished less.
No question that a human can do more than a robot, but which gets more science done for a 100 billion dollar budget:
1. Sending 100 robots to the Earth's moon, 10 robots to every other moon in the solar system, 50 robots to the heliopause, 5 orbiters around every terrestrial planet, 20 proof-of-concept probes testing exotic power and propulsion systems, 15 orbiting observatories around the earth, and a few radio observatories at Lagrange points around the solar system. (That's an understatement - based on historic costs you probably would get ten times as much done.)
2. Landing six guys on the moon for a few days each.
For what we spent on sending humans to the moon we could have done a LOT more with robots. Voyager cost a small fraction of the Apollo program and it probably generated far greater returns.
Life is about tradeoffs. When you spend money on putting a human in space you have less money to spend on other stuff...
I'm quite familiar with the argument.
Playing a movie requires making copies too. So does reading a book. In the case of a movie you make a copy of every still frame in the movie onto the surface of a TV screen, and a second copy (yikes - two!) on the back of your retina. In reading a book you skip the screen, but the image is projected onto your retina.
Clearly, calling these "copies" is absurd. The author of a work cannot expect people to buy their work not to be able to read or watch it, and so calling these copies is just silly.
In the same way, calling a single installation of a paid-for software package a copy is just making arguments where they don't need to exist. Was the seller of the software proposing that you were to use it without actually installing it?
This is just a silly legal argument used to justify putting onerous restrictions on the use of legally-bought property beyond those allowed by law...
If you read the license agreements, you will find that there are varying degrees of restrictions.
At home I usually don't read them. When I buy software I don't intend to copy it or distribute it, so I don't need anything that the vendor might be offering me by way of license.
They also restrict what you can run the software on.
Only if you accept the license. I can write up a document that says you can't use your stove to cook anything besides rice, and I can even tape it to your front door. You can consequently just toss it in the trash - you paid for your stove, you can use it however you want. You don't need permission to use something you already bought. Due to copyright law, however, you do need permission to perform the work in public, copy it, or distribute it. This has nothign to do with the license - if the law were revoked you could do all of this without a license as well.
Again we can debate the legality but you DID agree to the restrictions when you used the software.
I never agreed to anything of the kind. There might have been a piece of paper in the box that said something about those terms, but I just tossed it into the trash without reading it. Perhaps a box flashed on the screen asking if the person running the software agreed to a bunch of crazy terms. I could have simply bypassed the box via patching, or had my cat play with the mouse. I clearly didn't agree with the terms, but since I paid for the software I didn't need further permission to use it.
Next time before you stick your foot in your mouth and look like a idiot, learn about what you are discussing..
I spend thousands of dollars a year at my job on licenses. I don't think there is any legal basis behind them, but my employer won't want to be the test case at the Supreme Court, and they can afford them. So we pay for them. Trust me, I know quite a bit about the topic. They pay for maintenance contracts / upgrade contracts / etc. They pay per user, per server, per client, per pixel on the monitor, etc. Then, because of some dispute they pay for something they already paid for all over again. Since they have deep pockets they don't want to be the target of a lawsuit, and I can't blame them. They're paying me, so I go ahead and order the pieces of paper that say we can go ahead and use the software that we paid for under conditions x/y/z.
In general, when you buy something, it BELONGS to you. The person who sold it to you gives up any right to the object at all. With copyright we restrict that you aren't allowed to make copies of a work without a license from the creator, and there are a number of good reasons for this. However, you don't need a license to listen to music, or to project a copy of a movie onto a TV screen, or from there onto the back of your retina. Likewise you shouldn't need a license to use software that you paid for...
Having wine installed inst a license to use their DLL's. And in some
cases, even Microsoft applications you have *purchased*. Read your EULA's closely people.
You don't need a license to use any software - only to copy it. If you bought a box with a CD in it from Microsoft, you can use the contents of that box for whatever you want to legally. However, if you want to make copies of it or distribute it you'll need a license. That's how it works with every other copyrighted work in existence...
My comment is not a troll. I was just pointing out how silly it is that something that is supposed to be so "free"--OSS--has a smorgasbord of various licenses attached to it.
Well, you could just release your software without a license at all.
Then under most systems of law you wouldn't be able to copy or distribute it for any purpose whatsoever.
The reason we have long licenses is that most systems of law are written to strongly restrict what you can do with software, and you need a license to unrestrict it.
I was prevented from doing so by the GPL, which seemed to be mindlessly slapped onto every stupid little library for parsing command line arguments that I came across.
Nobody put a gun to your head and forced you to reuse a library. You could always code it yourself (at higher cost and risk of bugs).
Maybe the reason those libraries were released under the GPL was because the programmers who wrote them were interested in getting free access to the work of people like you. You don't seem to mind having free access to their work...
To me the GPL just says, I'm willing to give you something if you're willing to give back.