You can get a SIP account from a VOIP provider and a DID. Point your Google Voice number at the DID and you'll get incoming calls.
IF you are in the USA.
Actually, as long as you get a DID in the USA you can get them anywhere. Google has no way to know where that forwards to.
But it is quite silly to have Google call out to the PSTN, only to route it back into a VOIP call. If they just let you register a SIP address with them they could bypass the phone network entirely. I believe this is mostly done for regulatory reasons - they can avoid collecting various government fees because they argue that their customers already pay them on the lines they forward to.
The IRS is currently targeting groups for political speech the current administration does not approve of.
Every case of this I've seen has involved a group having non-profit status. It is illegal for groups with this status to engage in certain forms of political speech. The US actually has some of the most liberal political advertising laws in the world - almost all of the practices you describe would be outright illegal in the EU, because of campaign finance reform.
If you have a citation of somebody who was persecuted for their personal actions not affiliated with a non-profit organization, I'd be interested in it.
What you can't do is basically collect money for political campaigning and have it treated as tax-deductible by the contributors. That is something an organization has to agree to when they request exempt status. That is why contributions to political parties aren't tax-deductible - they can say anything they like because they're not incorporated as non-partisan non-profits.
So basically, as long as you classify information, you can do whatever you want, because then people aren't allowed to blow the whistle on your illegal activities. So let's just classify everything, and then we won't have any whistleblowers anymore. You could, say, classify that you're torturing people. And does getting your house raided as being prosecuted?
And that is why I think Snowden should be pardoned. The problem is that I can't think of any reasonable compromise. I don't think that it makes sense to have taxpayers to spend a billion dollars coming up with a better bomber and then having its blueprints published on the Internet. I don't think that the need for bombers is going to go away anytime soon either. So, we need to be able to classify information. That can be subjected to abuse, and so we need a way for people to blow the whistle. That is just a contradiction we have to deal with case-by-case.
Actually tell patients "we haven't a shred of evidence that they'll help you since you haven't had a heart attack, but I want you to take it anyway".
That is a bit misleading. How many people who haven't had heart attacks have been tested? And how many would you have to test to really be sure, considering that the likelihood of anybody having a heart attack with or without treatment is quite low?
The fact that statins help some people is evidence that tends to suggest that it will help other people. That isn't absolute proof, but it certainly is suggestive.
As far as cost goes - you can buy a 100-day supply of simvastatin for $10. That's about $40/yr so unless everybody in the US takes them there is no need for the costs to be in the billions of dollars. At $3/month I think that the evidence is more than sufficient to justify the cost. Now, if you want to take a branded statin at $150/month I think that you should think twice about the likely incremental benefits. I think the risks of complications are more reason to consider taking a statin carefully.
Statins are important enough that it is worth better understanding how they work. We're still not sure on the mechanism by which it actually reduces heart events. We know it lowers LDL levels, but other drugs that definitely lower LDL haven't had good outcomes.
So, I'm not suggesting that it isn't worth studying statins. I just think that we need to be careful about blocking drugs from entering the market unless they meet incredibly strict criteria - that might just result in never introducing any drugs to the market. I think we also need to reform how clinical trials are performed to reduce many of the incentives for profiteering (especially by the doctors involved, who often enroll patients who shouldn't be in the studies so that they can be paid more, but certainly also including the companies testing their drugs). Perhaps we need some kind of phased approach, where drugs can be exposed to larger and larger numbers of patients in a more controlled manner that allows the company involved to profit reasonably but which also ensures that as the drug becomes popular our knowledge of it grows as well.
Agreed. I'm an aviation enthusiast. I've never been in the cockpit of an airliner. I'm fairly confident I could reprogram the FMS of one in-flight to fly any route I wished. I've done it on flight sims that are fairly accurate, and they all tend to work about the same way. You just program a destination and a route into the FMS.
Changing the settings on an autopilot doesn't require a genius - which is why half of the guys flying airliners make next to nothing.
Now, manually landing a 777 is a different matter, unless you have lots of runway to spare (just ask the crew of that flight at SFO). I wouldn't trust myself to do that in real life. On the other hand, given a CatIII ILS I could probably get it to autoland. You won't find one of those on a desert airstrip somewhere if your goal is to steal a plane.
So now you just need to bribe a few extra people to clear a plane for flight with a non-functional tracking device installed by maintainence?
That isn't as easy as it sounds. Conspiracies never work when they involve many people - sooner or later somebody talks. If you want to bribe the maintenance crew you might have to involve several people, all of whom will be treated as suspects after you commit your crime. How are they going to explain a million bucks in their bank account? Also, the first thing they're going to suspect is that you're probably going to result in 200 people getting killed - how many people are willing to have that on their conscience for some cash?
It would be like trying to bribe all the employees of a bank to just let you empty the vault. People can only be bribed if their perception of the harm inflicted is compatible with their moral values, and they feel like they're fairly likely to get away with it. Getting info via a bribe tends to be easier. Tampering with safety equipment on a plane is probably going to be rather difficult to pull off.
Just stick it on top of the fuselage. You can't get up there without a crane, and you certainly can't get up there during flight. Sure, anything can be welded on can be removed, but it isn't like terrorists are going to put a crew on a crane while the plane is boarding and not have anybody notice.
1. Why are cockpit voices recorded only in the black box?
Heck, I don't get why they don't record more than 30min of audio. If they ever do recover the black boxes for this flight there is a good chance the voice recorder won't contain anything at all. Pilots object to being recorded as it basically would mean that their employers could subject everything they do to scrutiny (no water cooler talk, etc). I'm all for making the recordings illegal to access except in the event of an accident, but they really should cover the entire flight.
I don't know how low you have to fly a plane to fly "under the radar" but isn't is possible that the pilot or a hijacker flew the plane below radar to somewhere where it is now on the ground?
Depends on where you're going. At sea you can fly at any altitude and be out of radar coverage. Most first-world nations have fairly robust radar coverage of their coastlines for national defense - you're not really going to fly an airliner under that. Poor nations probably have enough coverage to make flying an airliner in difficult. A fighter jet with terrain-following autopilot and radar warning sensors could do it easily enough, but not a 777.
Look up: Obi202. It's a small box that allows you to use Google Voice not just as "call forwarder" but as your primary phone number via VOIP.
Yup, and they advertise that it won't work after May 15th with Google Voice. Apparently Google will be taking steps to block 3rd-party VOIP integration on that date. I'm not quite sure how they'll manage to stop it entirely though, unless they eliminate Hangout support as well.
Tektronix was a great company at one time; everybody in the tech world was impressed with Tektronix oscilloscopes. I suppose the good managers decided to move to other efforts. One problem was that Tektronix was not prepared for lower-cost competitors.
Having known somebody employed by them who was frustrated with the changes at the company, I think there is a bit more to it. Some of it is the sort of thing that hit all of these companies - the MBAs took over.
For Tektronix, however, I really wonder if it wasn't the end of the cold war that really caused a shift in technology spending. If you watch any of those 80s videos on SDI (Star Wars) or other big defense contracts you'll always see Tek blue-green in the equipment racks. Their niche was making the best gear money could buy, and it seemed like Tek was constantly selling stuff to aerospace contractors. If you're building some radar system designed to evade the best jammers the Soviets could build, that is the kind of gear you need to test it. Technology was a huge priority in US military buildup during the cold war. Today that niche is much smaller than it used to be.
But, I'm not in this field personally, so I could be missing something. It seems like great companies often fail once their founders are no longer running them day-to-day. I've always argued that the founder does best (just the result of selection - you wouldn't have heard of the company in the first place if they didn't do a good job). Then their hand-groomed successor takes over and that usually goes reasonably well (the Tim Cook / Ballmer - perhaps the "exception that proves the rule"). Then the executive search committee takes over and it goes all downhill.
Actually, the problems MS has goes all the way back to Gates and the fact that the model just doesn't work any longer - Ballmer has stayed fairly true to the MS of the 90s. Often companies go down because companies abandon the corporate culture that made them successful. I suspect that MS and Apple may fail because they don't abandon it quickly enough.
Re:Google Voice still being actively developed
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Goodbye, Google Voice
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there is also mention of third-party apps which, on android, use various methods to achieve VOIP through Google Voice on the handset, which isnt a feature that Google Voice currently allows (it must route your call via an actual phone call).. these apps have been warned that they will be no longer to do that by May 15th of this year..
Gee, that sounds about as helpful to their customers as retiring Google Reader...
If we're just not going to worry about efficacy anymore, why not just open a snake oil stand?
Who said that I didn't care about efficacy? I fully support outcomes trials for drugs. Statins have outcomes data for people who have had heart attacks. Obviously it is to your benefit to take them if you've had a heart attack.
I'm not entirely sure that it is wise to ban them for people who haven't had heart attacks - they're cheap and I can't really see why they wouldn't benefit. There aren't outcomes data that suggest that administering that defibrillators are effective on people born on a Tuesday in March wearing brown pants, but that isn't a good reason to not use defibrillators on such people.
And I'm all for the NIH doing more trials on drugs to better understand how particular populations benefit from them. I just think that if you want to pick drugs to go after, statins probably aren't the best place to start. If money spent on drugs that seem beneficial but just don't have all the i's dotted comes at the expense of R&D on diseases that don't have treatments, then that R&D could actually be harmful.
And that is basically my point. You can't have rigor simply for its own sake without actually causing harm to people. We already require new drugs to have demonstrated efficacy, and at least in the US the FDA has been pushing harder for outcomes data. Well, that is unless your drug is a "supplement" - in which case snake oil is just fine.
So basically the right to free speech in the US is good as long as it's not against anything the US believes is important. How is that different than any other country? The kool-aid is just a different flavour, doesn't mean it's worse than what the US drinks.
Well, it isn't so much as the topic, but the nature of the "offense." The US goes after copyright violation and the posting of classified documents.
You can TALK about doing those things all you want and not be punished for it. You just can't actually do them.
That is what free expression is about. You can TALK about getting rid of the US military. You can't go setting fires in military bases. You can TALK about establishing a communist society. You can't steal money from the rich and give it to the poor.
I do think that posting classified documents IN GENERAL should remain illegal (we don't really want nuclear bomb plans on the internet), but Snowden and Manning really ought to be pardoned.
I do support the principles behind copyright, but the system needs MAJOR reform. Actually, just reducing the duration to something like 5-10 years might be a huge start on that front, and I'd also ban any kind of exclusive distribution contracts and stipulate that somebody can only obtain copyright protection if they make their work available to anybody at the same price without any bundling requirements. I don't think this would completely fix the problems with copyright in the US, but it would be a HUGE improvement.
It is a clear example of a law against free expression. The US tends to avoid these types of laws, and that is what makes it a useful jurisdiction for control over the internet.
Sure, you and I can agree that the Nazis had nothing useful to say. The problem is that this is a slippery slope, and what is to stop the next ban from being against something we support?
Thinking about it, however, the US does ban the distribution of child pornography. The argument is that this is not so much because of what it expresses, but rather that it can only be created via the commission of a crime, and its supply/demand is directly harmful to the children involved. Some have tried to apply such a ban to materials created without the involvement of children at all (actors who look young, CGI, etc), and that seems somewhat analogous to banning Nazi materials. We can all agree that it is shocking and distasteful, but personally I find a ban on free expression to be even more shocking and distasteful.
On the other hand, if you're just running a typical blog or news site that just posts opinions or journalism, and not movies or classified documents, then the US is about the best place to have your service hosted.
What whistle-blower in the US who didn't post classified information has been prosecuted for it?
Thanks for the link - I wasn't aware of that particular takedown. Even so, that seems a bit like an aberration, but certainly something to be watched lest it become a trend.
the US... is perhaps THE biggest protector of free speech.
How's the kool-aid taste?
So, while I object strongly to government intrusion, and agree that the US is very big on IP-enforcement, I have to agree with the assertion that the US is one of the best jurisdictions from a free speech standpoint.
So, if you're trying to run The Pirate Bay or Wikileaks, US control isn't so good.
On the other hand, if you're just running a typical blog or news site that just posts opinions or journalism, and not movies or classified documents, then the US is about the best place to have your service hosted. You can post Hitler's Greatest Hits, Mohammed Is An Idiot, or McDonalds Makes You Fat to your heart's content. A few of those are likely to get you in trouble almost anywhere else, including in the EU. Some EU nations outright ban Nazi propaganda, and some have fairly strict libel laws.
In the US if you start your blog with "This is all my opinion, but..." there is basically nothing that anybody can do to take it down and make it stay down. There is the whole Streisand Effect, but there are laws to help prevent even that.
Actually, I'd consider the whole legal system probably the biggest problem with US control. Justice is for sale to a degree, but for fairly pure free-speech issues it is almost impossible to lose in a US court.
Oh, sure, I don't question that this is how it actually works today. I'm saying that it SHOULDN'T work that way. The standard should really be that we video everything, and if there is no tape the defendant walks. Since that would effectively mean that anybody could shoot a cop in public and be acquitted if their camera was off, I suspect that would encourage keeping the cameras rolling.
It did not show a mortality benefit, but did demonstrate a reduction in stroke and cardiovascular events. Sure, spending another $100M to demonstrate a mortality outcome would be nice, but I doubt it would really change many minds (unless a number of much longer trials failed to show a benefit - probably at an even higher cost). Mortality is a harder endpoint to hit, since presumably you're likely to run into a heart attack before you run into a lethal heart attack.
Again, you can set the bar as high as you want, but is that the best way to spend your R&D dollars? I do believe that we should focus more on outcomes than markers like cholesterol levels and such, but I think that nitpicking the outcomes probably isn't cost-effective - at least not until we have most of the world's diseases somewhat solved and we just want to refine the solutions.
What makes you say there is no evidence? The results on that trial suggest a 33% reduction in death due to cardiovascular causes, and 23% for all causes. That's just the first one I stumbled upon on Google - I'm by no means an expert. If you have any links to trials that suggest otherwise I'd be interested (preferably non-meta - meta analyses are subject to the kinds of hypothesis-mining problems you go on about later in your post).
It's really quite simple. New drugs need to actually be superior to the existing drugs (and in particular, generics) for the particular patient to even be worth considering.
That is a common statement that I actually disagree with. I know somebody who struggles with drug side-effects and constantly ends up taking what on paper should be sub-optimal therapies because they're still better than nothing and the mainline therapies cannot be tolerated. I don't think that it is ever to give doctors more options. I do think that any drug should be safe and effective compared to placebo, but I don't agree with the general practice of not approving drugs that are inferior to those already on the market. That said, I can see why companies would not pursue these drugs for commercial reasons.
Most of the rest of your post I completely agree with. The lack of reproducability in clinical studies is a big problem. The hypothesis-mining problem is supposed to be prevented by pre-registering trials, but that hasn't gone perfectly. Also, with the sheer number of failed drug candidates out there it stands to reason that sooner or later a few will make it through with problems that are not apparent, even if the companies are completely on the up-and-up.
The problem is that if you raise the bar you drive up the costs so high that we won't have new drugs at all, and that isn't necessarily a better state to be in.
They won't be deleted. There will simply be a recording malfunction. At least, that is what all the records will show. No supervisor is going to sign off on deleting incriminating evidence. Plenty will sign off on a statement that no video could be recovered from the device.
Agreed. There is already precedence - if a corporation destroys documents sought during an investigation the court will treat those documents as if they were incriminating. Video should be no different - absence of video on its face should be sufficient to exclude any testimony by the officer or evidence collected by them.
billions spent on drugs that prove useless for their intended purpose and not a word of compensation, approved drugs turning out to be quite dangerous
Most of the billions that get spent on drugs that turn out to be useless is spent by the companies researching them, and the drugs are cancelled before getting to market. I never really got the whole sue-them-because-I-wouldn't-have-bought-it-if-I-had-known thing. Suppose you take a painkiller and it turns out that it might cause heart attacks. You want your money back. However, you still got the benefit of the painkiller. It seems a bit like wanting to return a car for a full refund after having driven it for 3 years because there was a recall on some particular component. After all, who would have bought a car knowing it had a defective water pump, even if the manufacturer offered to replace it for free? It makes more sense to just compensate the people who had heart attacks.
The real problem is that there is no way to answer with certainty the question, "is this drug safe and effective?" You can answer it with increasingly greater confidence the more money you spend studying it, but the answer is always up for debate. Aspirin would never be allowed on the market if it were discovered today, and neither would most over-the-counter medications of its age (MAYBE ibuprofen would be on the market, but I'm not sure it would be sold without a prescription).
The problem with setting the bar really high is that it does two things. First, any drug that turns out to be safe will take a long time to get to market, and lots of people will suffer untreated in the meantime. If a drug saves lives, then many of those people will die - increased scrutiny on drugs can actually kill people in that sense. Second, raising the bar raises costs, and that means that fewer drugs are cost-effective to develop (whether your motive is profit or not). That means that diseases that don't impact many people don't get treatments.
Medical research simply isn't easy. Studies are really expensive to run, and people are hard to study because you can't lock them in cages like rats and poke at them. There are tons of contradictory studies, and lots of reasons to think that a lot of published data is simply wrong. None of this is some great conspiracy - it is just the nature of studying people.
Yes, that was certainly what I was thinking of. This would be a very common scenario in a large datacenter, but the traffic would be fairly local. Due to latency any datacenter would aim to keep the databases in close proximity to the applications. Nobody would stick their webserver in California and their MySQL database in France. Now, database replication might present an opportunity to tamper with WAN MySQL traffic, but does anybody do anything other than one-way replication using something like MySQL. I'd think that if you were getting into those kinds of problems a different technology would be used.
Do you know how many cheapo hosting companies give you MySQL with your account?
Sure, but why would that traffic go over the internet? You would have your server-side application component talk to the database.
But, I did say "competent." It would not surprise me if some people stick mysql credentials in their javascript code and just manipulate the database from the browser.
Yeah, the dribbles of conflicting info is really odd here. I could see why in a national security situation a country might choose to not say much of anything, but these inconsistent messages seem rather odd.
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You can get a SIP account from a VOIP provider and a DID. Point your Google Voice number at the DID and you'll get incoming calls.
IF you are in the USA.
Actually, as long as you get a DID in the USA you can get them anywhere. Google has no way to know where that forwards to.
But it is quite silly to have Google call out to the PSTN, only to route it back into a VOIP call. If they just let you register a SIP address with them they could bypass the phone network entirely. I believe this is mostly done for regulatory reasons - they can avoid collecting various government fees because they argue that their customers already pay them on the lines they forward to.
The IRS is currently targeting groups for political speech the current administration does not approve of.
Every case of this I've seen has involved a group having non-profit status. It is illegal for groups with this status to engage in certain forms of political speech. The US actually has some of the most liberal political advertising laws in the world - almost all of the practices you describe would be outright illegal in the EU, because of campaign finance reform.
If you have a citation of somebody who was persecuted for their personal actions not affiliated with a non-profit organization, I'd be interested in it.
What you can't do is basically collect money for political campaigning and have it treated as tax-deductible by the contributors. That is something an organization has to agree to when they request exempt status. That is why contributions to political parties aren't tax-deductible - they can say anything they like because they're not incorporated as non-partisan non-profits.
So basically, as long as you classify information, you can do whatever you want, because then people aren't allowed to blow the whistle on your illegal activities. So let's just classify everything, and then we won't have any whistleblowers anymore. You could, say, classify that you're torturing people. And does getting your house raided as being prosecuted?
And that is why I think Snowden should be pardoned. The problem is that I can't think of any reasonable compromise. I don't think that it makes sense to have taxpayers to spend a billion dollars coming up with a better bomber and then having its blueprints published on the Internet. I don't think that the need for bombers is going to go away anytime soon either. So, we need to be able to classify information. That can be subjected to abuse, and so we need a way for people to blow the whistle. That is just a contradiction we have to deal with case-by-case.
Actually tell patients "we haven't a shred of evidence that they'll help you since you haven't had a heart attack, but I want you to take it anyway".
That is a bit misleading. How many people who haven't had heart attacks have been tested? And how many would you have to test to really be sure, considering that the likelihood of anybody having a heart attack with or without treatment is quite low?
The fact that statins help some people is evidence that tends to suggest that it will help other people. That isn't absolute proof, but it certainly is suggestive.
As far as cost goes - you can buy a 100-day supply of simvastatin for $10. That's about $40/yr so unless everybody in the US takes them there is no need for the costs to be in the billions of dollars. At $3/month I think that the evidence is more than sufficient to justify the cost. Now, if you want to take a branded statin at $150/month I think that you should think twice about the likely incremental benefits. I think the risks of complications are more reason to consider taking a statin carefully.
Statins are important enough that it is worth better understanding how they work. We're still not sure on the mechanism by which it actually reduces heart events. We know it lowers LDL levels, but other drugs that definitely lower LDL haven't had good outcomes.
So, I'm not suggesting that it isn't worth studying statins. I just think that we need to be careful about blocking drugs from entering the market unless they meet incredibly strict criteria - that might just result in never introducing any drugs to the market. I think we also need to reform how clinical trials are performed to reduce many of the incentives for profiteering (especially by the doctors involved, who often enroll patients who shouldn't be in the studies so that they can be paid more, but certainly also including the companies testing their drugs). Perhaps we need some kind of phased approach, where drugs can be exposed to larger and larger numbers of patients in a more controlled manner that allows the company involved to profit reasonably but which also ensures that as the drug becomes popular our knowledge of it grows as well.
Agreed. I'm an aviation enthusiast. I've never been in the cockpit of an airliner. I'm fairly confident I could reprogram the FMS of one in-flight to fly any route I wished. I've done it on flight sims that are fairly accurate, and they all tend to work about the same way. You just program a destination and a route into the FMS.
Changing the settings on an autopilot doesn't require a genius - which is why half of the guys flying airliners make next to nothing.
Now, manually landing a 777 is a different matter, unless you have lots of runway to spare (just ask the crew of that flight at SFO). I wouldn't trust myself to do that in real life. On the other hand, given a CatIII ILS I could probably get it to autoland. You won't find one of those on a desert airstrip somewhere if your goal is to steal a plane.
So now you just need to bribe a few extra people to clear a plane for flight with a non-functional tracking device installed by maintainence?
That isn't as easy as it sounds. Conspiracies never work when they involve many people - sooner or later somebody talks. If you want to bribe the maintenance crew you might have to involve several people, all of whom will be treated as suspects after you commit your crime. How are they going to explain a million bucks in their bank account? Also, the first thing they're going to suspect is that you're probably going to result in 200 people getting killed - how many people are willing to have that on their conscience for some cash?
It would be like trying to bribe all the employees of a bank to just let you empty the vault. People can only be bribed if their perception of the harm inflicted is compatible with their moral values, and they feel like they're fairly likely to get away with it. Getting info via a bribe tends to be easier. Tampering with safety equipment on a plane is probably going to be rather difficult to pull off.
Just stick it on top of the fuselage. You can't get up there without a crane, and you certainly can't get up there during flight. Sure, anything can be welded on can be removed, but it isn't like terrorists are going to put a crew on a crane while the plane is boarding and not have anybody notice.
1. Why are cockpit voices recorded only in the black box?
Heck, I don't get why they don't record more than 30min of audio. If they ever do recover the black boxes for this flight there is a good chance the voice recorder won't contain anything at all. Pilots object to being recorded as it basically would mean that their employers could subject everything they do to scrutiny (no water cooler talk, etc). I'm all for making the recordings illegal to access except in the event of an accident, but they really should cover the entire flight.
I don't know how low you have to fly a plane to fly "under the radar" but isn't is possible that the pilot or a hijacker flew the plane below radar to somewhere where it is now on the ground?
Depends on where you're going. At sea you can fly at any altitude and be out of radar coverage. Most first-world nations have fairly robust radar coverage of their coastlines for national defense - you're not really going to fly an airliner under that. Poor nations probably have enough coverage to make flying an airliner in difficult. A fighter jet with terrain-following autopilot and radar warning sensors could do it easily enough, but not a 777.
Look up: Obi202. It's a small box that allows you to use Google Voice not just as "call forwarder" but as your primary phone number via VOIP.
Yup, and they advertise that it won't work after May 15th with Google Voice. Apparently Google will be taking steps to block 3rd-party VOIP integration on that date. I'm not quite sure how they'll manage to stop it entirely though, unless they eliminate Hangout support as well.
Tektronix was a great company at one time; everybody in the tech world was impressed with Tektronix oscilloscopes. I suppose the good managers decided to move to other efforts. One problem was that Tektronix was not prepared for lower-cost competitors.
Having known somebody employed by them who was frustrated with the changes at the company, I think there is a bit more to it. Some of it is the sort of thing that hit all of these companies - the MBAs took over.
For Tektronix, however, I really wonder if it wasn't the end of the cold war that really caused a shift in technology spending. If you watch any of those 80s videos on SDI (Star Wars) or other big defense contracts you'll always see Tek blue-green in the equipment racks. Their niche was making the best gear money could buy, and it seemed like Tek was constantly selling stuff to aerospace contractors. If you're building some radar system designed to evade the best jammers the Soviets could build, that is the kind of gear you need to test it. Technology was a huge priority in US military buildup during the cold war. Today that niche is much smaller than it used to be.
But, I'm not in this field personally, so I could be missing something. It seems like great companies often fail once their founders are no longer running them day-to-day. I've always argued that the founder does best (just the result of selection - you wouldn't have heard of the company in the first place if they didn't do a good job). Then their hand-groomed successor takes over and that usually goes reasonably well (the Tim Cook / Ballmer - perhaps the "exception that proves the rule"). Then the executive search committee takes over and it goes all downhill.
Actually, the problems MS has goes all the way back to Gates and the fact that the model just doesn't work any longer - Ballmer has stayed fairly true to the MS of the 90s. Often companies go down because companies abandon the corporate culture that made them successful. I suspect that MS and Apple may fail because they don't abandon it quickly enough.
there is also mention of third-party apps which, on android, use various methods to achieve VOIP through Google Voice on the handset, which isnt a feature that Google Voice currently allows (it must route your call via an actual phone call).. these apps have been warned that they will be no longer to do that by May 15th of this year..
Gee, that sounds about as helpful to their customers as retiring Google Reader...
If we're just not going to worry about efficacy anymore, why not just open a snake oil stand?
Who said that I didn't care about efficacy? I fully support outcomes trials for drugs. Statins have outcomes data for people who have had heart attacks. Obviously it is to your benefit to take them if you've had a heart attack.
I'm not entirely sure that it is wise to ban them for people who haven't had heart attacks - they're cheap and I can't really see why they wouldn't benefit. There aren't outcomes data that suggest that administering that defibrillators are effective on people born on a Tuesday in March wearing brown pants, but that isn't a good reason to not use defibrillators on such people.
And I'm all for the NIH doing more trials on drugs to better understand how particular populations benefit from them. I just think that if you want to pick drugs to go after, statins probably aren't the best place to start. If money spent on drugs that seem beneficial but just don't have all the i's dotted comes at the expense of R&D on diseases that don't have treatments, then that R&D could actually be harmful.
And that is basically my point. You can't have rigor simply for its own sake without actually causing harm to people. We already require new drugs to have demonstrated efficacy, and at least in the US the FDA has been pushing harder for outcomes data. Well, that is unless your drug is a "supplement" - in which case snake oil is just fine.
So basically the right to free speech in the US is good as long as it's not against anything the US believes is important. How is that different than any other country? The kool-aid is just a different flavour, doesn't mean it's worse than what the US drinks.
Well, it isn't so much as the topic, but the nature of the "offense." The US goes after copyright violation and the posting of classified documents.
You can TALK about doing those things all you want and not be punished for it. You just can't actually do them.
That is what free expression is about. You can TALK about getting rid of the US military. You can't go setting fires in military bases. You can TALK about establishing a communist society. You can't steal money from the rich and give it to the poor.
I do think that posting classified documents IN GENERAL should remain illegal (we don't really want nuclear bomb plans on the internet), but Snowden and Manning really ought to be pardoned.
I do support the principles behind copyright, but the system needs MAJOR reform. Actually, just reducing the duration to something like 5-10 years might be a huge start on that front, and I'd also ban any kind of exclusive distribution contracts and stipulate that somebody can only obtain copyright protection if they make their work available to anybody at the same price without any bundling requirements. I don't think this would completely fix the problems with copyright in the US, but it would be a HUGE improvement.
Banning Nazi propaganda is wrong? Since when?
It is a clear example of a law against free expression. The US tends to avoid these types of laws, and that is what makes it a useful jurisdiction for control over the internet.
Sure, you and I can agree that the Nazis had nothing useful to say. The problem is that this is a slippery slope, and what is to stop the next ban from being against something we support?
Thinking about it, however, the US does ban the distribution of child pornography. The argument is that this is not so much because of what it expresses, but rather that it can only be created via the commission of a crime, and its supply/demand is directly harmful to the children involved. Some have tried to apply such a ban to materials created without the involvement of children at all (actors who look young, CGI, etc), and that seems somewhat analogous to banning Nazi materials. We can all agree that it is shocking and distasteful, but personally I find a ban on free expression to be even more shocking and distasteful.
On the other hand, if you're just running a typical blog or news site that just posts opinions or journalism, and not movies or classified documents, then the US is about the best place to have your service hosted.
Unless, of course, you're a whistle blower. Or, say, protesting against your president.
What whistle-blower in the US who didn't post classified information has been prosecuted for it?
Thanks for the link - I wasn't aware of that particular takedown. Even so, that seems a bit like an aberration, but certainly something to be watched lest it become a trend.
the US ... is perhaps THE biggest protector of free speech.
How's the kool-aid taste?
So, while I object strongly to government intrusion, and agree that the US is very big on IP-enforcement, I have to agree with the assertion that the US is one of the best jurisdictions from a free speech standpoint.
So, if you're trying to run The Pirate Bay or Wikileaks, US control isn't so good.
On the other hand, if you're just running a typical blog or news site that just posts opinions or journalism, and not movies or classified documents, then the US is about the best place to have your service hosted. You can post Hitler's Greatest Hits, Mohammed Is An Idiot, or McDonalds Makes You Fat to your heart's content. A few of those are likely to get you in trouble almost anywhere else, including in the EU. Some EU nations outright ban Nazi propaganda, and some have fairly strict libel laws.
In the US if you start your blog with "This is all my opinion, but..." there is basically nothing that anybody can do to take it down and make it stay down. There is the whole Streisand Effect, but there are laws to help prevent even that.
Actually, I'd consider the whole legal system probably the biggest problem with US control. Justice is for sale to a degree, but for fairly pure free-speech issues it is almost impossible to lose in a US court.
Oh, sure, I don't question that this is how it actually works today. I'm saying that it SHOULDN'T work that way. The standard should really be that we video everything, and if there is no tape the defendant walks. Since that would effectively mean that anybody could shoot a cop in public and be acquitted if their camera was off, I suspect that would encourage keeping the cameras rolling.
Eplerenone is not a statin. It's effects aren't even similar to a statin. Why even cite it?
Doh - The Google failed me...
Ok, another random outcomes trial that actually does contain a statin:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
It did not show a mortality benefit, but did demonstrate a reduction in stroke and cardiovascular events. Sure, spending another $100M to demonstrate a mortality outcome would be nice, but I doubt it would really change many minds (unless a number of much longer trials failed to show a benefit - probably at an even higher cost). Mortality is a harder endpoint to hit, since presumably you're likely to run into a heart attack before you run into a lethal heart attack.
Again, you can set the bar as high as you want, but is that the best way to spend your R&D dollars? I do believe that we should focus more on outcomes than markers like cholesterol levels and such, but I think that nitpicking the outcomes probably isn't cost-effective - at least not until we have most of the world's diseases somewhat solved and we just want to refine the solutions.
Look up the evidence that statins have any effect whatsoever on morbidity or mortality. Hint, there is no such evidence. None at all.
Actually, there are certainly outcome studies for statins. Just picking a random one:
http://www.trialresultscenter....
What makes you say there is no evidence? The results on that trial suggest a 33% reduction in death due to cardiovascular causes, and 23% for all causes. That's just the first one I stumbled upon on Google - I'm by no means an expert. If you have any links to trials that suggest otherwise I'd be interested (preferably non-meta - meta analyses are subject to the kinds of hypothesis-mining problems you go on about later in your post).
It's really quite simple. New drugs need to actually be superior to the existing drugs (and in particular, generics) for the particular patient to even be worth considering.
That is a common statement that I actually disagree with. I know somebody who struggles with drug side-effects and constantly ends up taking what on paper should be sub-optimal therapies because they're still better than nothing and the mainline therapies cannot be tolerated. I don't think that it is ever to give doctors more options. I do think that any drug should be safe and effective compared to placebo, but I don't agree with the general practice of not approving drugs that are inferior to those already on the market. That said, I can see why companies would not pursue these drugs for commercial reasons.
Most of the rest of your post I completely agree with. The lack of reproducability in clinical studies is a big problem. The hypothesis-mining problem is supposed to be prevented by pre-registering trials, but that hasn't gone perfectly. Also, with the sheer number of failed drug candidates out there it stands to reason that sooner or later a few will make it through with problems that are not apparent, even if the companies are completely on the up-and-up.
The problem is that if you raise the bar you drive up the costs so high that we won't have new drugs at all, and that isn't necessarily a better state to be in.
They won't be deleted. There will simply be a recording malfunction. At least, that is what all the records will show. No supervisor is going to sign off on deleting incriminating evidence. Plenty will sign off on a statement that no video could be recovered from the device.
Agreed. There is already precedence - if a corporation destroys documents sought during an investigation the court will treat those documents as if they were incriminating. Video should be no different - absence of video on its face should be sufficient to exclude any testimony by the officer or evidence collected by them.
billions spent on drugs that prove useless for their intended purpose and not a word of compensation, approved drugs turning out to be quite dangerous
Most of the billions that get spent on drugs that turn out to be useless is spent by the companies researching them, and the drugs are cancelled before getting to market. I never really got the whole sue-them-because-I-wouldn't-have-bought-it-if-I-had-known thing. Suppose you take a painkiller and it turns out that it might cause heart attacks. You want your money back. However, you still got the benefit of the painkiller. It seems a bit like wanting to return a car for a full refund after having driven it for 3 years because there was a recall on some particular component. After all, who would have bought a car knowing it had a defective water pump, even if the manufacturer offered to replace it for free? It makes more sense to just compensate the people who had heart attacks.
The real problem is that there is no way to answer with certainty the question, "is this drug safe and effective?" You can answer it with increasingly greater confidence the more money you spend studying it, but the answer is always up for debate. Aspirin would never be allowed on the market if it were discovered today, and neither would most over-the-counter medications of its age (MAYBE ibuprofen would be on the market, but I'm not sure it would be sold without a prescription).
The problem with setting the bar really high is that it does two things. First, any drug that turns out to be safe will take a long time to get to market, and lots of people will suffer untreated in the meantime. If a drug saves lives, then many of those people will die - increased scrutiny on drugs can actually kill people in that sense. Second, raising the bar raises costs, and that means that fewer drugs are cost-effective to develop (whether your motive is profit or not). That means that diseases that don't impact many people don't get treatments.
Medical research simply isn't easy. Studies are really expensive to run, and people are hard to study because you can't lock them in cages like rats and poke at them. There are tons of contradictory studies, and lots of reasons to think that a lot of published data is simply wrong. None of this is some great conspiracy - it is just the nature of studying people.
Yes, that was certainly what I was thinking of. This would be a very common scenario in a large datacenter, but the traffic would be fairly local. Due to latency any datacenter would aim to keep the databases in close proximity to the applications. Nobody would stick their webserver in California and their MySQL database in France. Now, database replication might present an opportunity to tamper with WAN MySQL traffic, but does anybody do anything other than one-way replication using something like MySQL. I'd think that if you were getting into those kinds of problems a different technology would be used.
Do you know how many cheapo hosting companies give you MySQL with your account?
Sure, but why would that traffic go over the internet? You would have your server-side application component talk to the database.
But, I did say "competent." It would not surprise me if some people stick mysql credentials in their javascript code and just manipulate the database from the browser.
Yeah, the dribbles of conflicting info is really odd here. I could see why in a national security situation a country might choose to not say much of anything, but these inconsistent messages seem rather odd.
Why keep changing the story?