I don't see much problem with being a middle-node (though I have reservations about being an exit node).
However, I cannot get tor to run as a server. I set my server address to a dynamic domain name which will resolve to my outside-the-NAT IP from anywhere on the Internet. That is, anywhere but the host tor is running on - I have the IP in my hosts file so that I can connect to local services using the internet domain name. Tor gives up when it resolves my address setting and gets a private IP.
Is there an easy way to run a server with this setup? Freenet works just fine, as does just about everything else in existance. However, those programs advertise my DNS address, not an IP address (which is hard to figure out).
I guess another option is to make up a dummy DNS address used only for tor and not mess with its resolution...
Clearly running middle-man servers is helpful to the network. However, somebody has to run servers that talk to the outside world. Nobody has an incentive to do that, unless they are in some kind of a legal-haven.
Hence, the network is doomed to die once the lawsuits start getting filed.
At least with Freenet about the only way they can target you is for simply running the software, without any way of knowing what you're hosting...
Uh, I'm not aware of any completely anonymous P2P network comparable to Freenet. GNUnet is probably close if you don't use its content-hosting capabilities.
TOR is hardly anonymous - it requires some poor server operator to stick out their neck downloading heaven-knows-what from web servers in the clear using their IP. Sounds like a recipie for lawsuits if you ask me. Maybe you can argue it and get off the hook, but only after spending tens of thousands of dollars...
About the only thing you can find out about somebody running Freenet is that they're running Freenet. It might be slow, but you really have no idea what they're hosting, what they're retrieving, and what they're passing along.
Of course, the reason that mixmaster has high latency is to defeat traffic analysis. If you see a burst of traffic go from node to node to node, you can trace the connection even if it is encrypted.
Unless the nodes maintain constant noise with junk traffic you need latency...
Clearly I wouldn't want to be associated with that garbage. However, neither system prevents it. The difference is that somebody who innocently ends up spreading it can get sued with TOR, but won't be discovered if they're using Freenet. The guilty get away with it either way.
So, which is better:
1. Guilty get off free. Innocent sent to prison.
2. Guilty get off free. Innocent get off free too.
Clearly it would be better if we could block garbage like this altogether, but nobody has come up with a good way of doing that...
Uh, freenet uses onion routing - how can there be a difference? Nobody knows who is downloading what - if a node gets a request from another node, it doesn't even know what it is downloading, let alone where it is ultimately going.
The main difference that I see is that with TOR, one node eventually makes a non-anonymous and non-encrypted TCP connection to a webserver or the like. If that webserver is part of an ??AA sting operation, whoever is running that node gets sued.
TOR is a system which anonymizes connections. Specifically TCP connections.
Not entirely.
Suppose I'm running a TOR server. Somebody goes and downloads an illegally hosted file. My computer ends up being the last one in the chain, so it goes out and downloads that file. The download is via an unencrypted TCP connection to a webserver or soemthing like that. It turns out to be run by the RIAA in a sting operation, and they sue me for distributing copyrighted content.
Suppose I'm running a Freenet server. Somebody goes and downloads an illegally hosted file. My computer ends up being the one that is hosting the file (unbeknownst to me), so it serves up that file. The RIAA can't tell that I did that, so I don't get sued.
TOR works quickly since it can use the standard web protocols to figure out where to ultimately retrieve data from. It just hides the trail the data takes. Freenet hides everything from source to destination.
I probably wouldn't want to run a TOR server unless I could configure it to not do anything but be part of the routing chain - I'd never let it open traceable TCP connections to heaven-knows-what.
There simply shouldn't be a php.ini. Or if there is one it should be along the lines of the config files other languages use to set up DNS resolution, library load paths, etc.
Imagine if every system had a gcc.ini, a glibc.ini, and so on?
Imagine if allow_pointers, disable_switch_statement, and short_circuit_boolean were system-wide global settings?
Good luck getting enough compatible software on a system to even boot it!
A language should have defined default behavior. If you want to modify the default behavior, this should be done via a directive in the source code of some sort. Then each program can have its own settings. If you have a webserver with 100 programs on it, and one requires register_globals, why enable this for every piece of source on the server?
There is no monopoly status on the concept of the vaccine - anybody can R&D their own and sell it.
There is protection for the exact formulation used. If you set a precedent of allowing others to step in and start selling vaccines that they didn't pay to develop, everybody would stop doing R&D and stand around holding out their hands for a government license. Of course, there would be none, since there wouldn't be a vaccine to license since nobody did R&D on it.
Flu vaccine is an interesting case since it has to be reformulated each year, and is fairly high-risk since the economics of it don't let you flush too many batches trying to get it right, and you have a strict timeline, and nobody knows if it will actually work when it is distributed...
Drug R&D costs are a fairly complex issue. I'm a big fan of open source, and I'd probably love to see an open-drug development effort (I'd probably try to help out). However, the drug industry has a few fundamental differences from the software industry - equipment costs being a big one for starters. Open source is done on a commodity PC that people would own anyway. Nobody buys a $50k HPLC unless they have government funding, or have some way of making that money back.
You're basically advocating that the public research funding. No group of companies would foot the bill (since companies outside the group would spring up and undercut them on costs). Organizations paying for development is possible, but none are really doing it now, so what would make one think that would change? Individuals is always a wild-card - there are probably only 100-200 on the planet who'd even come close to being able to fund anything significant, and if you're already in your 50's, why start on a 30 year R&D program that might extend your life a few years? Better to just let somebody else do it since you'll benefit anyway.
The problem with your method is the tragedy of the commons - it is in every individual's interest to let somebody else do the R&D. It is in every nation's interest to let another nation do the R&D. Kind of like Kyoto - let somebody else reduce emissions.
The free software model doesn't work, since that requires that individual contributions be possible with minimal capital investment (there would be no linux if a computer capable of compiling software cost $100k and it were impossible to make it cheaper). You can't develop drugs without a fairly expensive lab - nobody can do this at home. And the most expensive part is the clinical trials - good luck finding volunteers to drink something you just brewed in the garage.
I'm all for reducing IP laws when other business models which are more efficient are emerging to take their place. With music and software we have GPL-like licenses which have shown themselves to be fairly successful. Note that everybody is pushing for the laws to be changed AFTER the open source model has been proven.
Once somebody comes up with a model for drugs and proves it by actually developing some drugs and shows that it works, then people will line up to get rid of drug patents. Right now people just seem to think that if we get rid of the patents then everything will just magically work out. Sure, it will cause prices to crash right now (and big pharma companies to go out of business), but will it lead to new drugs? Why not get the alternative system in place before we start messing with something that we know at least works reasonably well for average people (though not for poor people).
Trust me, I'm all for open source, and I think it works well. The problem with open-drugs is that the capital costs and expenses are VERY high. And having governments fund it sounds like a recipie for political correctness more than efficiency...
Torrent really wasn't designed to protect annonymity. You query a tracker and you get a list of IPs - all of which can be sued.
Freenet was designed to make it almost impossible to find out who is inserting or requesting files. It is also slower.
Torrent is the best way to get data from point A to point B in the smallest time.
Freenet is the best way to get data from point A to point B when somebody might sue you (rightly or wrongly).
Personally, I'd never use BT to download a file that somebody might threaten to sue over (whether it is a copyrighted MP3 or the Diebold emails). You have no way of who is monitoring your actions...
there *is* someone else to make it. And they can do it cheaper.
Not really - unless you just call making a drug pressing out pills. There wouldn't be a flu shot shortage if people were falling over themselves to make it.
Ironically people were getting arrested for selling flu shots on the black market. The fact that a black market exists demonstrates that people are willing to pay more for the shots. Now, black markets for drugs aren't good due to quality issues, but if the legitimate market were allowed to raise prices, there would be incentives to make more shots, and there wouldn't be a shortage.
For the most part, drug sales aren't a monopoly. Take statins, for example - there are three major products on the market, and that forces prices down. Sure, you pay more for them than Tylenol, but if you want to save money you can choose a generic cholesterol medication (which isn't as effective, but is better than anything even the richest people in the world had available 20 years ago).
The current model is that the rich get drugs first, and then in 10 years everybody else can have them. It raises the standard of living for everyone, while letting the rich pay drug development costs.
It is a shame that people die, but that is just nature. Everybody reading this one day will die one day. Blame God or your parents - I didn't make you mortal. Some people invest in prolonging life, and merely ask for some money in exchange. Are they morally bound to save lives?
The fact of the matter is that everybody reading this post could sponsor a child in another country and save a life. If you already sponsor one, you could sponsor two more. Or 10. Is it morally wrong to buy a DVD when that money could go to feed the poor? Most people accept that there is a balance. Especially when talking about their own money. On the other hand, when somebody else's money is at stake, it is easy to suggest that they be more generous...
Uh huh - a _real_ capitalist would just laugh at the pharma industry at not being able to compete.
Uh, what capitalist business model that does not use intellectual property law can deal with a product that costs $2 billion to R&D (that is probably what is spent for each drug that makes it to market) and 5 cents per unit to manufacture and is commonly sold to maybe 1,000,000 unique people in a year?
Just to break even you have to get $2000 from each person on average. If competitors are allowed to undercut on manufaturing costs, you make $0 per person (since nobody buys from the original innovator).
Pharma either requires patent law and private research, or fully public research with no patents. Either that $2 billion comes from government coffers, or companies must be allowed to recoup it. Alternatively we just don't have any new drugs, which obviously isn't what we want.
Drugs are expensive to develop - you're really not going to solve that problem. All you can do is argue over who pays for it (healthy taxpayers or sick people whose lives are saved by the drug). There really isn't a right or wrong answer, and while the public funding might sound more fair, you still have the problem that a drug developed using UK taxpayer funds can ultimately end up benefitting people in the US who didn't pay a dime for R&D.
(Note - most statistics tend to toss around lower numbers like a few hundred million, but that is just the money spent on the drug itself, and doesn't count the fact that for each drug that makes it to market there are usually 4-5 which had just as much money spent on them just to find out that it doesn't work).
The one thing that something like google is lacking is persistant results sets. When I do serious searching I usually start with broad terms and figure out what it takes to narrow things down to a scale that I'm willing to work with.
Good quality search engines have lots of qualities that Google lacks. You could search for two words located within 3 words of each other. You could search for these two words within 3 words of each other while two other words don't occur within 6 words of each other. Indexes are gennerally well-thought-out and vocabularies are sometimes controlled.
Google allows many of these features, but they're cumbersome to use. If I ran two searches and I want to merge the results I have to be copying down everything I did, and try to concoct some kind of advanced search which combines the two sets of parameters. In a decent professional search tool you just ask it to return "set 1 or set 2" - giving you a set 3 that has any item that appeared in either. This is powerful and easy to use, and there is no comparison with google.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad Google is going into this business. I no longer have free access to just browse the literature any time I feel like it, and this tool would provide that. I just don't think that they'll close down the commercial operations anytime soon.
Personally, I think that all articles written using federal funding should be released into the public domain. The NIH could sponsor journals if none of the commercial journals are willing to publish works that have no copyright. If my tax dollars were used to pay for a study on bumblebee migration patterns, then I should be able to thumb through the report whether or not some bureaucrat thinks that I have a need to know the results. And doing so should not require a trip to some non-public library halfway around the country...
I understand how a radar altimiter works, what a pitot tube is, how a VOR works, etc. I was not implying that you thought that cellphones were like lit sticks of dynamite.
Honestly, I am surprised that a cell phone would have that kind of impact on something like a radar altimiter, since that probably uses a high-gain antenna directed towards the earth, and the cell phone isn't anywhere in the path of the antenna.
My point was only that cell phones either matter or they don't. If they do matter they should be controlled, or controlled in bad weather, or controlled whenever it makes sense to control them. If they don't matter much we shouldn't just say "shame on people who use cell phones". If the radar altimeter is broken I agree that the pilot should still be able to land, but what is the point in having radar altimeters if we aren't goign to make sure that they work?
To me it just sounds like cell phones are treated like some kind of voodoo so that in the event that a plane goes down and a cell phone is found responsible the airline can pretend that they did the right thing by just making an annoucement over the PA...
I'd be surprised if this were the case, but if a cell phone interferes with radar altimeter then they need to have a way to either keep phones off of planes or enforce that they are turned off. Perhaps a cell phone detector of some sort would be in order.
It is really easy to leave a cell phone on without realizing it. Even if passengers are conscientious you can't count on them switching them off.
Either cell phones/laptops/whatever are dangerous or they aren't. If they are, you need to control them, if not you need to quit worrying about them and let people be. Controlling them doesn't mean announcing that if somebody crashes the plane then the airline isn't responsible - it means being able to keep these things off of planes, or control their use.
If cell phones caused planes to fall out of the sky then we'd all have 747's embedded in our roofs by now.
Sure, it should be tested and the impact on cell towers, etc, should be studied. However, if they were that dangerous they would not allow them as carry-ons. It is silly to think that a simple PA annoucement will actually get everybody to shut them down - if it were truly life-threatening then they should confiscate them at the metal detectors like all other contraband.
However, GDP impactst the ability of a country to raise taxes. Federal income can be made much higher if it needs to be. A huge portion of the wealth in the USA is in the hands of people far above poverty levels - that wealth could be tapped without major social disaster. It wouldn't be good for the economy, but it wouldn't cause it to collapse either. And lowering the public debt probably wouldn't hurt the economy in the long run.
I'm not saying that the US debt level is a good thing. I'm just saying that if foreign nations refuse to buy bonds we won't suddenly start living in adobe houses.
Clearly all the benefits of paying off the debt are better obtained by paying it off in a sensible manner, and by restricting government spending now. If the US wanted to pay off the debt it certainly could - it just lacks political willpower at this point...
Obviously trade between allied first-world nations is good for everyone. Nobody of any consequence in the US would advocate defaulting on the debt, and nobody in the US would want to get into a trade war with the whole world. True, the US could probably survive such a war, but over decades it would watch the worldwide standard of living pass it by.
Trade is one of the best things out there for stopping wars - assuming trading partners have a similar stake. Most of the wars of late have involved dictators since their actions are not always rational - very few rational governemnts would choose to get into a war with a major trading partner. When you look at what you stand to gain and what you stand to lose, the stakes are just too high.
Right, but it isn't 70% of GDP - it would only cost 70% of the GDP if for some crazy reason the US chose to recall all its bonds and pay them in a single year - an option the US probably doesn't even have based on the agreements behind the bonds.
If the US wanted to go cold turkey on the debt it would probably cost about 5% of GDP for a decade or two (it would probably take longer than that, but the cost would drop the whole time, so by 20 years out the interest bill is a LOT lower). By cold turkey I mean issuing no new bonds of any kind while still repaying bonds, and recalling them when it makes sense to do so and where the US has that option.
Such an action would probably also cause a drop in interest rates and increased commercial investment - since the US would no longer be a competitor in the bond market. Certainly it would be expensive for the US, but not an instant disaster.
When soldiers are actually dying on a battlefield, the notion of fairness goes out the window. The whole idea of war is to NOT fight fair, but to totally dominate your opponent.
Obviously the US isn't out to start a war with the EU, and they're not going to shoot down Galileo the first time somebody blows up a truck full of explosives in Iraq. However, if the Chinese were to launch an invasion of Taiwan and it was clear that denying the use of Galileo to China would give the US a tactical advantage, then the EU would probably be given an ultimatum - turn it off over China or have it disabled. Most likely the US would try jamming or other temporary measures to disable satellites over the battle zone.
It would really depend on what kind of war the US ended up in. High-precision GPS doesn't have many military applications outside of guiding bombs, and the Chinese don't seem to have made much use of it (probably because they can't rely on high precision GPS being available in any war they fight). If the enemy isn't benefitting from Galileo, then the US probably won't make a big deal about it.
The position of the US on something like Galileo would probably be most comparable to the US position on the delivery of machine parts on a EU-flagged vessel to an enemy at a time of war. Sure, they're dual-use, but that doesn't mean that the ship won't get boarded or even sunk.
Interesting - I wonder if the fact that the SciFinder part is the more unique diminishes the importance of the Scholar part of the brand.
Think about it - if you made a programming language called Rich0's Java, you'd probably get sued. On the other hand, if I made one called Rich0 2 Enterprise Edition it would probably be fine.
I doubt that would happen. Can existing anti-spam directory services (that either track messages or IPs or whatever) charge arbitrary rates? Most are free now.
SSL certificates are essential for e-commerce, and SSL certificate providers don't charge arbitrary rates either. And almost every browser out there lets you add your own certificate authorities (which is often used by companys for intranet use - no sense paying Verisign for internal websites when you can just install your own CA cert on all your workstations).
There is really nothing mandatory about any of this - I'm just saying that if all my legitimate mail happened to be signed already, then I'd be a fool not to use that to my advantage when spam filtering. Obviously it would only work if people started signing by default, and having free mail-address-only verification services would greatly help...
Since Dr. Shi is a professor, the department probably did a minimal background-check before hiring him, and you can trust his identity (at least minimally) based on his e-mail address.
Assuming the email address isn't spoofed...
My usual approach for trusting keys is to see if the same key gets used by the same address over a long period of time, with general acceptance by others (this works well on mailing lists at least). If so, then it is probably trustworthy.
I never trust a key the first time I see it, since it could have been published by anyone.
In any case, it is best to view keys as a verification of an online persona, and not necessarily a true picture of who is typing at the keyboard (unless you've done your key verification offline).
The expense of verifying real-world identities is why there aren't free SSL certs out there...
Well, you could just delete all unsigned mail, and then have a 3rd-party database of bad email signers (similar to current IP-based spam databases).
If spammers had to sign their mail with a key published in a directory, it would greatly diminish their ability to camoflage the sender.
Plus, the keyserver could only allow a limited number of key submissions per day from a given IP - so the spammer needs a bunch of IP addresses to send mail from more than a few addresses per day.
Plus the spammer has to do extra computation and verification work for each group of emails they send out - the key server could require a Turing test for each key submission.
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I don't see much problem with being a middle-node (though I have reservations about being an exit node).
However, I cannot get tor to run as a server. I set my server address to a dynamic domain name which will resolve to my outside-the-NAT IP from anywhere on the Internet. That is, anywhere but the host tor is running on - I have the IP in my hosts file so that I can connect to local services using the internet domain name. Tor gives up when it resolves my address setting and gets a private IP.
Is there an easy way to run a server with this setup? Freenet works just fine, as does just about everything else in existance. However, those programs advertise my DNS address, not an IP address (which is hard to figure out).
I guess another option is to make up a dummy DNS address used only for tor and not mess with its resolution...
Clearly running middle-man servers is helpful to the network. However, somebody has to run servers that talk to the outside world. Nobody has an incentive to do that, unless they are in some kind of a legal-haven.
Hence, the network is doomed to die once the lawsuits start getting filed.
At least with Freenet about the only way they can target you is for simply running the software, without any way of knowing what you're hosting...
Uh, I'm not aware of any completely anonymous P2P network comparable to Freenet. GNUnet is probably close if you don't use its content-hosting capabilities.
TOR is hardly anonymous - it requires some poor server operator to stick out their neck downloading heaven-knows-what from web servers in the clear using their IP. Sounds like a recipie for lawsuits if you ask me. Maybe you can argue it and get off the hook, but only after spending tens of thousands of dollars...
About the only thing you can find out about somebody running Freenet is that they're running Freenet. It might be slow, but you really have no idea what they're hosting, what they're retrieving, and what they're passing along.
Of course, the reason that mixmaster has high latency is to defeat traffic analysis. If you see a burst of traffic go from node to node to node, you can trace the connection even if it is encrypted.
Unless the nodes maintain constant noise with junk traffic you need latency...
Clearly I wouldn't want to be associated with that garbage. However, neither system prevents it. The difference is that somebody who innocently ends up spreading it can get sued with TOR, but won't be discovered if they're using Freenet. The guilty get away with it either way.
So, which is better:
1. Guilty get off free. Innocent sent to prison.
2. Guilty get off free. Innocent get off free too.
Clearly it would be better if we could block garbage like this altogether, but nobody has come up with a good way of doing that...
Uh, freenet uses onion routing - how can there be a difference? Nobody knows who is downloading what - if a node gets a request from another node, it doesn't even know what it is downloading, let alone where it is ultimately going.
The main difference that I see is that with TOR, one node eventually makes a non-anonymous and non-encrypted TCP connection to a webserver or the like. If that webserver is part of an ??AA sting operation, whoever is running that node gets sued.
I think I'll pass on that...
TOR is a system which anonymizes connections. Specifically TCP connections.
Not entirely.
Suppose I'm running a TOR server. Somebody goes and downloads an illegally hosted file. My computer ends up being the last one in the chain, so it goes out and downloads that file. The download is via an unencrypted TCP connection to a webserver or soemthing like that. It turns out to be run by the RIAA in a sting operation, and they sue me for distributing copyrighted content.
Suppose I'm running a Freenet server. Somebody goes and downloads an illegally hosted file. My computer ends up being the one that is hosting the file (unbeknownst to me), so it serves up that file. The RIAA can't tell that I did that, so I don't get sued.
TOR works quickly since it can use the standard web protocols to figure out where to ultimately retrieve data from. It just hides the trail the data takes. Freenet hides everything from source to destination.
I probably wouldn't want to run a TOR server unless I could configure it to not do anything but be part of the routing chain - I'd never let it open traceable TCP connections to heaven-knows-what.
There simply shouldn't be a php.ini. Or if there is one it should be along the lines of the config files other languages use to set up DNS resolution, library load paths, etc.
Imagine if every system had a gcc.ini, a glibc.ini, and so on?
Imagine if allow_pointers, disable_switch_statement, and short_circuit_boolean were system-wide global settings?
Good luck getting enough compatible software on a system to even boot it!
A language should have defined default behavior. If you want to modify the default behavior, this should be done via a directive in the source code of some sort. Then each program can have its own settings. If you have a webserver with 100 programs on it, and one requires register_globals, why enable this for every piece of source on the server?
There is no monopoly status on the concept of the vaccine - anybody can R&D their own and sell it.
There is protection for the exact formulation used. If you set a precedent of allowing others to step in and start selling vaccines that they didn't pay to develop, everybody would stop doing R&D and stand around holding out their hands for a government license. Of course, there would be none, since there wouldn't be a vaccine to license since nobody did R&D on it.
Flu vaccine is an interesting case since it has to be reformulated each year, and is fairly high-risk since the economics of it don't let you flush too many batches trying to get it right, and you have a strict timeline, and nobody knows if it will actually work when it is distributed...
Drug R&D costs are a fairly complex issue. I'm a big fan of open source, and I'd probably love to see an open-drug development effort (I'd probably try to help out). However, the drug industry has a few fundamental differences from the software industry - equipment costs being a big one for starters. Open source is done on a commodity PC that people would own anyway. Nobody buys a $50k HPLC unless they have government funding, or have some way of making that money back.
You're basically advocating that the public research funding. No group of companies would foot the bill (since companies outside the group would spring up and undercut them on costs). Organizations paying for development is possible, but none are really doing it now, so what would make one think that would change? Individuals is always a wild-card - there are probably only 100-200 on the planet who'd even come close to being able to fund anything significant, and if you're already in your 50's, why start on a 30 year R&D program that might extend your life a few years? Better to just let somebody else do it since you'll benefit anyway.
The problem with your method is the tragedy of the commons - it is in every individual's interest to let somebody else do the R&D. It is in every nation's interest to let another nation do the R&D. Kind of like Kyoto - let somebody else reduce emissions.
The free software model doesn't work, since that requires that individual contributions be possible with minimal capital investment (there would be no linux if a computer capable of compiling software cost $100k and it were impossible to make it cheaper). You can't develop drugs without a fairly expensive lab - nobody can do this at home. And the most expensive part is the clinical trials - good luck finding volunteers to drink something you just brewed in the garage.
I'm all for reducing IP laws when other business models which are more efficient are emerging to take their place. With music and software we have GPL-like licenses which have shown themselves to be fairly successful. Note that everybody is pushing for the laws to be changed AFTER the open source model has been proven.
Once somebody comes up with a model for drugs and proves it by actually developing some drugs and shows that it works, then people will line up to get rid of drug patents. Right now people just seem to think that if we get rid of the patents then everything will just magically work out. Sure, it will cause prices to crash right now (and big pharma companies to go out of business), but will it lead to new drugs? Why not get the alternative system in place before we start messing with something that we know at least works reasonably well for average people (though not for poor people).
Trust me, I'm all for open source, and I think it works well. The problem with open-drugs is that the capital costs and expenses are VERY high. And having governments fund it sounds like a recipie for political correctness more than efficiency...
Torrent really wasn't designed to protect annonymity. You query a tracker and you get a list of IPs - all of which can be sued.
Freenet was designed to make it almost impossible to find out who is inserting or requesting files. It is also slower.
Torrent is the best way to get data from point A to point B in the smallest time.
Freenet is the best way to get data from point A to point B when somebody might sue you (rightly or wrongly).
Personally, I'd never use BT to download a file that somebody might threaten to sue over (whether it is a copyrighted MP3 or the Diebold emails). You have no way of who is monitoring your actions...
there *is* someone else to make it. And they can do it cheaper.
Not really - unless you just call making a drug pressing out pills. There wouldn't be a flu shot shortage if people were falling over themselves to make it.
Ironically people were getting arrested for selling flu shots on the black market. The fact that a black market exists demonstrates that people are willing to pay more for the shots. Now, black markets for drugs aren't good due to quality issues, but if the legitimate market were allowed to raise prices, there would be incentives to make more shots, and there wouldn't be a shortage.
For the most part, drug sales aren't a monopoly. Take statins, for example - there are three major products on the market, and that forces prices down. Sure, you pay more for them than Tylenol, but if you want to save money you can choose a generic cholesterol medication (which isn't as effective, but is better than anything even the richest people in the world had available 20 years ago).
The current model is that the rich get drugs first, and then in 10 years everybody else can have them. It raises the standard of living for everyone, while letting the rich pay drug development costs.
It is a shame that people die, but that is just nature. Everybody reading this one day will die one day. Blame God or your parents - I didn't make you mortal. Some people invest in prolonging life, and merely ask for some money in exchange. Are they morally bound to save lives?
The fact of the matter is that everybody reading this post could sponsor a child in another country and save a life. If you already sponsor one, you could sponsor two more. Or 10. Is it morally wrong to buy a DVD when that money could go to feed the poor? Most people accept that there is a balance. Especially when talking about their own money. On the other hand, when somebody else's money is at stake, it is easy to suggest that they be more generous...
Uh huh - a _real_ capitalist would just laugh at the pharma industry at not being able to compete.
Uh, what capitalist business model that does not use intellectual property law can deal with a product that costs $2 billion to R&D (that is probably what is spent for each drug that makes it to market) and 5 cents per unit to manufacture and is commonly sold to maybe 1,000,000 unique people in a year?
Just to break even you have to get $2000 from each person on average. If competitors are allowed to undercut on manufaturing costs, you make $0 per person (since nobody buys from the original innovator).
Pharma either requires patent law and private research, or fully public research with no patents. Either that $2 billion comes from government coffers, or companies must be allowed to recoup it. Alternatively we just don't have any new drugs, which obviously isn't what we want.
Drugs are expensive to develop - you're really not going to solve that problem. All you can do is argue over who pays for it (healthy taxpayers or sick people whose lives are saved by the drug). There really isn't a right or wrong answer, and while the public funding might sound more fair, you still have the problem that a drug developed using UK taxpayer funds can ultimately end up benefitting people in the US who didn't pay a dime for R&D.
(Note - most statistics tend to toss around lower numbers like a few hundred million, but that is just the money spent on the drug itself, and doesn't count the fact that for each drug that makes it to market there are usually 4-5 which had just as much money spent on them just to find out that it doesn't work).
The one thing that something like google is lacking is persistant results sets. When I do serious searching I usually start with broad terms and figure out what it takes to narrow things down to a scale that I'm willing to work with.
Good quality search engines have lots of qualities that Google lacks. You could search for two words located within 3 words of each other. You could search for these two words within 3 words of each other while two other words don't occur within 6 words of each other. Indexes are gennerally well-thought-out and vocabularies are sometimes controlled.
Google allows many of these features, but they're cumbersome to use. If I ran two searches and I want to merge the results I have to be copying down everything I did, and try to concoct some kind of advanced search which combines the two sets of parameters. In a decent professional search tool you just ask it to return "set 1 or set 2" - giving you a set 3 that has any item that appeared in either. This is powerful and easy to use, and there is no comparison with google.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad Google is going into this business. I no longer have free access to just browse the literature any time I feel like it, and this tool would provide that. I just don't think that they'll close down the commercial operations anytime soon.
Personally, I think that all articles written using federal funding should be released into the public domain. The NIH could sponsor journals if none of the commercial journals are willing to publish works that have no copyright. If my tax dollars were used to pay for a study on bumblebee migration patterns, then I should be able to thumb through the report whether or not some bureaucrat thinks that I have a need to know the results. And doing so should not require a trip to some non-public library halfway around the country...
I understand how a radar altimiter works, what a pitot tube is, how a VOR works, etc. I was not implying that you thought that cellphones were like lit sticks of dynamite.
Honestly, I am surprised that a cell phone would have that kind of impact on something like a radar altimiter, since that probably uses a high-gain antenna directed towards the earth, and the cell phone isn't anywhere in the path of the antenna.
My point was only that cell phones either matter or they don't. If they do matter they should be controlled, or controlled in bad weather, or controlled whenever it makes sense to control them. If they don't matter much we shouldn't just say "shame on people who use cell phones". If the radar altimeter is broken I agree that the pilot should still be able to land, but what is the point in having radar altimeters if we aren't goign to make sure that they work?
To me it just sounds like cell phones are treated like some kind of voodoo so that in the event that a plane goes down and a cell phone is found responsible the airline can pretend that they did the right thing by just making an annoucement over the PA...
I'd be surprised if this were the case, but if a cell phone interferes with radar altimeter then they need to have a way to either keep phones off of planes or enforce that they are turned off. Perhaps a cell phone detector of some sort would be in order.
It is really easy to leave a cell phone on without realizing it. Even if passengers are conscientious you can't count on them switching them off.
Either cell phones/laptops/whatever are dangerous or they aren't. If they are, you need to control them, if not you need to quit worrying about them and let people be. Controlling them doesn't mean announcing that if somebody crashes the plane then the airline isn't responsible - it means being able to keep these things off of planes, or control their use.
If cell phones caused planes to fall out of the sky then we'd all have 747's embedded in our roofs by now.
Sure, it should be tested and the impact on cell towers, etc, should be studied. However, if they were that dangerous they would not allow them as carry-ons. It is silly to think that a simple PA annoucement will actually get everybody to shut them down - if it were truly life-threatening then they should confiscate them at the metal detectors like all other contraband.
However, GDP impactst the ability of a country to raise taxes. Federal income can be made much higher if it needs to be. A huge portion of the wealth in the USA is in the hands of people far above poverty levels - that wealth could be tapped without major social disaster. It wouldn't be good for the economy, but it wouldn't cause it to collapse either. And lowering the public debt probably wouldn't hurt the economy in the long run.
I'm not saying that the US debt level is a good thing. I'm just saying that if foreign nations refuse to buy bonds we won't suddenly start living in adobe houses.
Clearly all the benefits of paying off the debt are better obtained by paying it off in a sensible manner, and by restricting government spending now. If the US wanted to pay off the debt it certainly could - it just lacks political willpower at this point...
Obviously trade between allied first-world nations is good for everyone. Nobody of any consequence in the US would advocate defaulting on the debt, and nobody in the US would want to get into a trade war with the whole world. True, the US could probably survive such a war, but over decades it would watch the worldwide standard of living pass it by.
Trade is one of the best things out there for stopping wars - assuming trading partners have a similar stake. Most of the wars of late have involved dictators since their actions are not always rational - very few rational governemnts would choose to get into a war with a major trading partner. When you look at what you stand to gain and what you stand to lose, the stakes are just too high.
Right, but it isn't 70% of GDP - it would only cost 70% of the GDP if for some crazy reason the US chose to recall all its bonds and pay them in a single year - an option the US probably doesn't even have based on the agreements behind the bonds.
If the US wanted to go cold turkey on the debt it would probably cost about 5% of GDP for a decade or two (it would probably take longer than that, but the cost would drop the whole time, so by 20 years out the interest bill is a LOT lower). By cold turkey I mean issuing no new bonds of any kind while still repaying bonds, and recalling them when it makes sense to do so and where the US has that option.
Such an action would probably also cause a drop in interest rates and increased commercial investment - since the US would no longer be a competitor in the bond market. Certainly it would be expensive for the US, but not an instant disaster.
When soldiers are actually dying on a battlefield, the notion of fairness goes out the window. The whole idea of war is to NOT fight fair, but to totally dominate your opponent.
Obviously the US isn't out to start a war with the EU, and they're not going to shoot down Galileo the first time somebody blows up a truck full of explosives in Iraq. However, if the Chinese were to launch an invasion of Taiwan and it was clear that denying the use of Galileo to China would give the US a tactical advantage, then the EU would probably be given an ultimatum - turn it off over China or have it disabled. Most likely the US would try jamming or other temporary measures to disable satellites over the battle zone.
It would really depend on what kind of war the US ended up in. High-precision GPS doesn't have many military applications outside of guiding bombs, and the Chinese don't seem to have made much use of it (probably because they can't rely on high precision GPS being available in any war they fight). If the enemy isn't benefitting from Galileo, then the US probably won't make a big deal about it.
The position of the US on something like Galileo would probably be most comparable to the US position on the delivery of machine parts on a EU-flagged vessel to an enemy at a time of war. Sure, they're dual-use, but that doesn't mean that the ship won't get boarded or even sunk.
Interesting - I wonder if the fact that the SciFinder part is the more unique diminishes the importance of the Scholar part of the brand.
Think about it - if you made a programming language called Rich0's Java, you'd probably get sued. On the other hand, if I made one called Rich0 2 Enterprise Edition it would probably be fine.
I doubt that would happen. Can existing anti-spam directory services (that either track messages or IPs or whatever) charge arbitrary rates? Most are free now.
SSL certificates are essential for e-commerce, and SSL certificate providers don't charge arbitrary rates either. And almost every browser out there lets you add your own certificate authorities (which is often used by companys for intranet use - no sense paying Verisign for internal websites when you can just install your own CA cert on all your workstations).
There is really nothing mandatory about any of this - I'm just saying that if all my legitimate mail happened to be signed already, then I'd be a fool not to use that to my advantage when spam filtering. Obviously it would only work if people started signing by default, and having free mail-address-only verification services would greatly help...
Since Dr. Shi is a professor, the department probably did a minimal background-check before hiring him, and you can trust his identity (at least minimally) based on his e-mail address.
Assuming the email address isn't spoofed...
My usual approach for trusting keys is to see if the same key gets used by the same address over a long period of time, with general acceptance by others (this works well on mailing lists at least). If so, then it is probably trustworthy.
I never trust a key the first time I see it, since it could have been published by anyone.
In any case, it is best to view keys as a verification of an online persona, and not necessarily a true picture of who is typing at the keyboard (unless you've done your key verification offline).
The expense of verifying real-world identities is why there aren't free SSL certs out there...
Well, you could just delete all unsigned mail, and then have a 3rd-party database of bad email signers (similar to current IP-based spam databases).
If spammers had to sign their mail with a key published in a directory, it would greatly diminish their ability to camoflage the sender.
Plus, the keyserver could only allow a limited number of key submissions per day from a given IP - so the spammer needs a bunch of IP addresses to send mail from more than a few addresses per day.
Plus the spammer has to do extra computation and verification work for each group of emails they send out - the key server could require a Turing test for each key submission.