Like I said, there is another way but I don't see any of you people doing it. So much for your idealism. You sit there and think you're virtuous for not liking the system but you sure as hell won't do a damn thing about it. I side with people who have a plan and put it to work, not big talkers.
Oh my! What a rip! I like Coca Cola. So does Joe Sixpack! Woe is me! What I was really saying is that tons of people think the same way you do, not just Slashdotters.
And get racism straight: its racism when you imply that somebody is inferior because of his race. Implying that someone is better off financially because he is an american white male is not racist. The plantation workers were racist because they called their bosses slaveowners?
Slave owner is a position, not a race. Learn the difference. What you said was racist.
Whatever dude. I'm talking about transforming society to a place where there need not be forms of economic oppression. This requires a radical shift from where we are now, as a socio-economic system. It has nothing to do with me putting money in research. We are talking politics here.
No, we were talking pharmaceuticals and research. Maybe you changed the subject midstream but you certainly never made it seem that way. Oh well, try to defend your defenceless stance. I know it's bullshit.
To the first (italics) poster, agreed. Pretty obvious that the medical system state-side is broken to the core and will continue to be so as long as we (a) think of health care as a luxury (b) make doctors pay out six digits in college costs (c) have doctors cover for negligent staffers that should get the hell out of the industry, but won't, because they can't afford to.
Bullshit. The insurance industry is a far cry from the medical industry. Learn the difference.
Medical technology has come so far...(#1)that we have to import tech from Europe that should have been here years ago, or take trips to Canada to do the same procedure for less money? (#2) That treatment for autism in India is light-years ahead of the US? (#3) That privatized healthcare is bankrupting families?
Oh, not everything in the world is invented here in the US. Is that a big problem for you? Do you think there is no medical industry in Europe? I never said that American healthcare is better than anyone else. Where the hell did you get that from?
99% success rate? WTF? How did you manage to reach up into your asshole deep enough to pull something from your spleen? My mother is dying from fucking lung cancer because her doctor ignored her requests not once, twice, thrice, but FOUR FUCKING TIMES to have her hip joints examined. We're talking about cancer that could have been treated aggressively with a better than 80% survival rate, provided the doctor wasn't a complete fucking quack!
What does fuck does this have to do with the pharmaceutical industry?
Ok, let's also pre-emptively put our cards on the table before you even reply. My wife's back could be permanently fixed with new medical devices that you can't get here in the states (but it's available in Europe), including a complete replacement for defective vertebrae (answers #1). My autistic son fights an uphill battle while people my wife knows from India have been able to all but completely cure their son of it (answers #2). And I'm in debt and nearly bankrupt, not because I bought a house on speculation or too many bigscreen flat TV's or some other bullshit that Americans whine about - no, I'm almost bankrupt from fucking multi-thousand-dollar medical bills (answers #3).
Again, what does this have to do with the pharmacudical industry?
There you go, backed up every one of my assertions with EMPERICAL EXPERIENCE. Attempting to tell me that the didn't happen, or aren't true, would indicate that you have a SEVERE DISCONNECT FROM REALITY because I FUCKING EXPERIENCED IT. In short: stop drinking the goddamn corpo-rightist-facist-mass-media-group-think koolaid. Go do your homework. And get the fuck off my lawn.
No, what you did is tried to substitute empirical evidence with antidote. It just doesn't work that way.
You may be having a tough of it but I know tons of people who did just fine. You're not the only person involved so don't act like you are. Not to mention that most of your bullshit was outside of the circle of the discussion and the fact that you couldn't be bothered to match me point for point. You're trying to blame an industry for something that isn't within their scope.
Sore loser? You're the one that called me Joe Sixpack, so please.
Quote me. Quote me where I called you Joe Sixpack. And does that alone justify your racism?
Its just not the end of line. Its not that its not perfect, its that its fundamentally wrong. And I'm not talking about Pharma, I'm talking about the "free" market. Human suffering cannot be measured by marketeers, and the good of society is rarely associated with profit.
Exactly as I thought, you'll bitch about the model but you won't lift a finger to change it.
I'll do that as soon as you explain to me why it's far more important to develop not one but TWO(!) drugs to get me up and hard for the wife
Why don't you learn the history of these meds first? Viagra was NOT developed to cause erections, it's original development was around hypertension and angina. So they found another use for the compound. Should they have thrown the baby out with the bath water to satisfy you? Also, your rant is along the line of the people who would scream "Why do we have TV entertainment when the airtime could be used for educational purposes? Why do we have malls when we could have wheat fields? Why do we have iPods when we could be using these electronics for building a better world?" Do you care to answer those questions? How dare you use a great invention like the internet to sit on slashdot and comment? How dare Slashdot think that they're important enough to take up server space or bandwidth?
yet there are horrible, terrible, but completely treatable conditions world-wide that we completely ignore because "there's no profit to be had".
If there is a treatment for it what more do you want the pharmaceutical companies to do? It seems that they did their part, they developed a cure. What else would you have them do?
My guess is that if you cared to name a few of these diseases you'd quickly find that people are dying not because of the pharmaceutical companies but because of local customs (call it religion if you like), political situations, miseducation, blackmarket substandard meds, etc etc etc.
Profits or people. And in this case, it's not a "many-shades-of-grey" or "I-can-weasel-out-because-of-circumstances" choice. So...Choose.
It's not shades of grey for you because you see the world in black and white. I have no problem with pharmaceutical companies using their money to try to make more money. That's the nature of capitalism. I choose to let companies do what they can to survive. As much as you bitch and wail about "drugs to get me up and hard" you've completely neglected the tons of drugs that are saving lives and helping people remain functional members of society. Stop putting bullshit spin and outright ignorance into the debate and maybe you'll see that it's not what you make it out to be.
And like I've already told another poster, if you don't like the way pharmaceutical companies conduct their business than start your own. You and millions of people on the street scream there is a better way, prove it!
So it's fair for a pharmaceutical company to have to eat R&D costs because? Please explain this to me and explain how you think future R&D should be handled if they don't have the opportunity to make money from their last venture. As much as you may be on "my side" you're not looking at the reality of the current model nor are you proposing a model that works in another fashion that doesn't require that someone else "just" does this or "just" does that.
What I'm saying is that curing people by using money/profit as the incentive does not work. I would go as far as saying that using profit as an incentive for anything at all is grotesque.
Call it grotesque all you want, but don't say it doesn't work but it sure as hell does. It's not perfect, we don't exist in a Star Trek society, but it does work. Medical technology has come so far in the last couple of decades it should amaze most people. Instead we have people who do nothing but look at the flaws in it and claim that it doesn't work at all. The 1 glaring failure out of the 99 successes and you want to condemn them for it? I bet you don't have as good of a track record as the pharmaceutical industry. If you did you probably wouldn't have the time to waste here bitching about it.
But you are probably a north american white male, so I wont say such things in front of you. I will probably hurt your most basic fetishes.
Ah, the retort of a sore loser. Thanks for the racist sentiments but I'll keep on being a plain old human who has more to be happy for than to bitch about.
It's sad that you tell me to sit and ponder what you have to say but you dismiss me based on my assumed ethnic background. Spoken like a true thinker. If this is the best you can do maybe you need to sit back and ponder some yourself.
Or you can simply refuse treatment. Let's face facts here people, no one forces you to use medication. You can refuse it if you want to and take your chances. That's all up to you.
Changing the way society performs economic relations is not something five people can gather and do. It takes a deep social change to do experiments like the one you propose.
Five people? Fuck, we've had two of you in this thread alone! What about the millions of Joe Sixpacks on the street that bitch about it? Face facts, there's tons of you out there who don't understand nor do you care to understand the industry. Ok, so out of the millions of you guys you think you could pull together a billion dollars and give it a go. If you're successful maybe more would help in the future. You know the numbers are out there, why do you think it's a big news issue? If you can't make a "deep social change" with millions of people and billions of dollars than how can you downplay the process that exists today?
I'm not a naysayer of the drug. I 'm a naysayer of the process. And of the people that say "Oh will please think of billion-dollar-rich-cigar-holding-government-overthrowing Pharma CEOs?"
I'm saying to be realistic about the process. You know there is a viable alternative, I've presented it to you in short form. What's stopping you and the millions of others who are singing the same tune? Go for it!
Don't argue with me about. Just ponder at the fact that deseases like malaria kill millions, while Pharma is fighting poor erections. If you think that makes sense, or that this is the only way society can work, you are too pessimistic.
Why not argue? I've been in this debate many times and I've heard just about all the excuses that come from people about why they hate this and that and why they're unwilling to put their money where their mouth is. You're all fantastic on coming up with a solution but are unwilling to lay down a little green to show us that you have faith in your own solution. Who's the real naysayer here?
And as far as erections? It goes even further to show how very little you understand the industry and how little you invest into your own ideals about exploratory research. Viagra was originally being researched as a compound to lessen hypertension and angina! You mean to tell me that, in the name of exploratory research, if you don't find a solution for one problem you should ignore another? Please. If you do it's a clear sign that you don't understand the real focus of exploratory research at all.
As for malaria? Malaria is not a single disease, much like HIV there are many mutation and variants. There are effective medications for some strains but not for others. A real problem for the sufferers of Malaria is the kinds of jackasses who make up fake drugs and peddle them on the black market. These people are trying to treat themselves with sugar pills thinking that they're curing themselves as the situation only gets worse. How can you blame the pharmaceutical industry for that?
When you invest hundreds of millions of dollars into a project that doesn't earn a single dime it's considered a failure by most peoples standards. Sure, you gain some knowledge from the failure and that's great but money is needed to build off of that knowledge.
Tell you what, you and all the naysayers to this process get together. You all throw some money into a hat and start your own pharmaceutical company and when you come up with cures you go ahead and make them public domain. If you hate the existing system don't just sit on your hands, if you have a solution apply it to the situation.
Yeah, I don't see many reaching for their checkbooks on that. Go figure.
Not initially, no. These people are going to have to depend on the good will of others or maybe help from their insurance or Medicare. But as time goes by the cure will likely cost less and become more effective. This is the trend for nearly all medications. So the early adopter expense will be high, there will hopefully be continued R&D and maybe in a few decades the cure for this will be as common and at the same price of some fairly normal vaccinations.
It's not a perfect solution. No solution is and it's only painfully true when the first couple of version of a solution come in to being.
But it's progress and progress is good enough for me.
Ok, so you're born with a condition outside of your control and someone comes up with a cure or at least an alleviation of the condition and you see yourself as a slave? Oh, sorry, the fact that you have the ability to simply comprehend the situation and respond to it (as misguided as your response may be) shows that you're not suffering like these people are.
Being a member of a family with a severely autistic child (my nephew), I can tell you that giving up a bit of cash to the pharmaceutical industry (that paid for the R&D for the potential cure with no guarantee of success or redemption of that funding) is a small price to pay. It's strikes me not only as odd but also as how downright lunkheaded some members of society are about this. Without profit involved the pharmaceutical industry would dry up fast than a puddle in the desert. If that's what you want why not simply boycott the industry. After all, you've already taken the aloof position of not needing their cures anyway.
I suppose you think it's better to languish in pain and suffering instead of paying your fair dues to an entity that gambled to create a remedy in the first place.
1K to turn someone into a productive member of society and lead a meaningful life? It's a bargain. We're paying more than that to keep rapists alive in jails. Not to mention that as technology moves on it will either cost less or new drug will take it's place being either more effective or less expensive.
My late uncle, a wealthy American senator, had a large bank account in the United States. I currently can not remove the funds due to a legal dispute but an outside source such as yourself may be able to help me. I will let you have the majority of his 23 million dollar bankroll if you simply transfer the funds into your Russian account until I can leave the country. All I need from you is $5000 transfered into my account for verification of your account and processing and legal fees...
Could Mars even hold a large body like the moon? I would think that the mass of a planet would ultimately effect the size of satellite it could hold. Maybe that range is relatively small for Mars. I think it's a bit of a stretch but it would be interesting to know.
While I do agree to your outlook on the 2nd Amendment I just wonder about you're declaring yourself a liberal?
What has happened to us, as a nation, when being a liberal or conservative should matter in what amendments you decide to back? Not you personally but as a nation. I recall once that someone was talking about how they were proud to be members of both the ACLU and the NRA and they did it in such a way to make it seem as if it was a conflict of interests. I don't understand where that ever came into play.
Both liberals and conservatives should hold up these amendments with an equal eye to each of them.
It's a shame that we've let this schism break us of our foundations as citizens of this nation.
Given the general idea of using a rifle in a combat scenario I would sooner use the semi-auto. Auto is a waste of ammo and unless you got a TON of people it's pretty much useless unless your target is fairly close.
Even the Soviets seemed to agree with this as the full-auto position of an AK has to be carefully set from safe, sliding down the safety arm the entire way puts the weapon into semi-automatic. This is so troops under a panic will select the better mode of fire. Nothing like having your guys empty a clip in three seconds under panic fire and likely not hitting a thing.
Handguns are a target of prohibition because they're easily concealed. Ever tried to hide an AK in your coat pocket? AKs and such are still relatively rarely used in crime. Feinstein and crew knew this for a fact when they were busy pushing the ban. It makes you wonder what their real motivation was.
But really, bottom line is that the media likes to skew the facts in gun crime. A guy gets killed with an AK and we hear about it for weeks, two guys get shot with a Glock and it gets reported once and the handgun isn't mentioned at all. The media still has a fascination with gun violence when it happens with a weapon that is consider exotic outside of the gun culture. It's good for the ratings and it helps to push an agenda.
Most of us in the gun culture know that the ban was a joke. Not that it wasn't effective but all it did was raise prices, that was it's only real effect. The day before the ban fell I could have located you a dozen shops within 20 miles of my home that you could have gone to and purchased a legal AK.
And much like the Napster case, these weapons really weren't the force on the street that they are today and the media had a lot to do with it. Just like no one knew of P2P and the ease of free music prior to Lars opening his yap, the public was mostly ignorant of AKs and their ilk prior to the law. Suddenly the word gets out and every Joe Sixpack tries to lay hands on one and [sarcasm] oddly enough [/sarcasm] the crime rate with these weapons increase.
Society would benefit greatly from looking at the criminal instead of obsessing about the tools that they use. It's unfortunate that we still think that we can control human behavior by black marketing... errr... banning inanimate objects.
And please don't think the media is doing this to look out for the citizen on the street. For them it's just a way to drum up business.
Maybe you're an older coder but I think that Java gets some of the nostalgia effect that BASIC use to since it seems to be the first programming course offered. At least from what I've seen it's one of the early languages taught now-a-days. But I really don't know for sure.
It certainly seems to be a fairly easy introduction to OOP.
Efficiency has little to do with this. I guess if you really wanted to get down to it there are other things you'd have to take in consideration but the bottom line is that air travel has not fallen at the same pace, if at all, in overhead as computer manufacturing. With the price of fuel I find it hard to believe it went down at all.
But take the numbers and consider also that it's cheaper to fly and just like anything that is cheap it lowers the bar on who can take advantage of it. Not to say that the rich are a better grade of people but today's airliners are more like cattle cars with record numbers of people flying. As the population becomes more diverse and the numbers increase the number of problems is going to increase as well. Just look at the vehicle accident numbers of heavily traveled roads versus those that see little traffic.
The real question is if it's going to cost any more or less from Pittsburgh (Assuming that they're Chinese hangers). And if it is the same price is it worth it to support fellow Americans?
Slashdot Mirror
Like I said, there is another way but I don't see any of you people doing it. So much for your idealism. You sit there and think you're virtuous for not liking the system but you sure as hell won't do a damn thing about it. I side with people who have a plan and put it to work, not big talkers.
Well, you likened my opinion to Joe Sixpack's.
Oh my! What a rip! I like Coca Cola. So does Joe Sixpack! Woe is me! What I was really saying is that tons of people think the same way you do, not just Slashdotters.
And get racism straight: its racism when you imply that somebody is inferior because of his race. Implying that someone is better off financially because he is an american white male is not racist. The plantation workers were racist because they called their bosses slaveowners?
Slave owner is a position, not a race. Learn the difference. What you said was racist.
Whatever dude. I'm talking about transforming society to a place where there need not be forms of economic oppression. This requires a radical shift from where we are now, as a socio-economic system. It has nothing to do with me putting money in research. We are talking politics here.
No, we were talking pharmaceuticals and research. Maybe you changed the subject midstream but you certainly never made it seem that way. Oh well, try to defend your defenceless stance. I know it's bullshit.
To the first (italics) poster, agreed. Pretty obvious that the medical system state-side is broken to the core and will continue to be so as long as we (a) think of health care as a luxury (b) make doctors pay out six digits in college costs (c) have doctors cover for negligent staffers that should get the hell out of the industry, but won't, because they can't afford to.
Bullshit. The insurance industry is a far cry from the medical industry. Learn the difference.
Medical technology has come so far...(#1)that we have to import tech from Europe that should have been here years ago, or take trips to Canada to do the same procedure for less money? (#2) That treatment for autism in India is light-years ahead of the US? (#3) That privatized healthcare is bankrupting families?
Oh, not everything in the world is invented here in the US. Is that a big problem for you? Do you think there is no medical industry in Europe? I never said that American healthcare is better than anyone else. Where the hell did you get that from?
99% success rate? WTF? How did you manage to reach up into your asshole deep enough to pull something from your spleen? My mother is dying from fucking lung cancer because her doctor ignored her requests not once, twice, thrice, but FOUR FUCKING TIMES to have her hip joints examined. We're talking about cancer that could have been treated aggressively with a better than 80% survival rate, provided the doctor wasn't a complete fucking quack!
What does fuck does this have to do with the pharmaceutical industry?
Ok, let's also pre-emptively put our cards on the table before you even reply. My wife's back could be permanently fixed with new medical devices that you can't get here in the states (but it's available in Europe), including a complete replacement for defective vertebrae (answers #1). My autistic son fights an uphill battle while people my wife knows from India have been able to all but completely cure their son of it (answers #2). And I'm in debt and nearly bankrupt, not because I bought a house on speculation or too many bigscreen flat TV's or some other bullshit that Americans whine about - no, I'm almost bankrupt from fucking multi-thousand-dollar medical bills (answers #3).
Again, what does this have to do with the pharmacudical industry?
There you go, backed up every one of my assertions with EMPERICAL EXPERIENCE. Attempting to tell me that the didn't happen, or aren't true, would indicate that you have a SEVERE DISCONNECT FROM REALITY because I FUCKING EXPERIENCED IT. In short: stop drinking the goddamn corpo-rightist-facist-mass-media-group-think koolaid. Go do your homework. And get the fuck off my lawn.
No, what you did is tried to substitute empirical evidence with antidote. It just doesn't work that way.
You may be having a tough of it but I know tons of people who did just fine. You're not the only person involved so don't act like you are. Not to mention that most of your bullshit was outside of the circle of the discussion and the fact that you couldn't be bothered to match me point for point. You're trying to blame an industry for something that isn't within their scope.
Sore loser? You're the one that called me Joe Sixpack, so please.
Quote me. Quote me where I called you Joe Sixpack. And does that alone justify your racism?
Its just not the end of line. Its not that its not perfect, its that its fundamentally wrong. And I'm not talking about Pharma, I'm talking about the "free" market. Human suffering cannot be measured by marketeers, and the good of society is rarely associated with profit.
Exactly as I thought, you'll bitch about the model but you won't lift a finger to change it.
I'll do that as soon as you explain to me why it's far more important to develop not one but TWO(!) drugs to get me up and hard for the wife
Why don't you learn the history of these meds first? Viagra was NOT developed to cause erections, it's original development was around hypertension and angina. So they found another use for the compound. Should they have thrown the baby out with the bath water to satisfy you? Also, your rant is along the line of the people who would scream "Why do we have TV entertainment when the airtime could be used for educational purposes? Why do we have malls when we could have wheat fields? Why do we have iPods when we could be using these electronics for building a better world?" Do you care to answer those questions? How dare you use a great invention like the internet to sit on slashdot and comment? How dare Slashdot think that they're important enough to take up server space or bandwidth?
yet there are horrible, terrible, but completely treatable conditions world-wide that we completely ignore because "there's no profit to be had".
If there is a treatment for it what more do you want the pharmaceutical companies to do? It seems that they did their part, they developed a cure. What else would you have them do?
My guess is that if you cared to name a few of these diseases you'd quickly find that people are dying not because of the pharmaceutical companies but because of local customs (call it religion if you like), political situations, miseducation, blackmarket substandard meds, etc etc etc.
Profits or people. And in this case, it's not a "many-shades-of-grey" or "I-can-weasel-out-because-of-circumstances" choice. So...Choose.
It's not shades of grey for you because you see the world in black and white. I have no problem with pharmaceutical companies using their money to try to make more money. That's the nature of capitalism. I choose to let companies do what they can to survive. As much as you bitch and wail about "drugs to get me up and hard" you've completely neglected the tons of drugs that are saving lives and helping people remain functional members of society. Stop putting bullshit spin and outright ignorance into the debate and maybe you'll see that it's not what you make it out to be.
And like I've already told another poster, if you don't like the way pharmaceutical companies conduct their business than start your own. You and millions of people on the street scream there is a better way, prove it!
So it's fair for a pharmaceutical company to have to eat R&D costs because? Please explain this to me and explain how you think future R&D should be handled if they don't have the opportunity to make money from their last venture. As much as you may be on "my side" you're not looking at the reality of the current model nor are you proposing a model that works in another fashion that doesn't require that someone else "just" does this or "just" does that.
What I'm saying is that curing people by using money/profit as the incentive does not work. I would go as far as saying that using profit as an incentive for anything at all is grotesque.
Call it grotesque all you want, but don't say it doesn't work but it sure as hell does. It's not perfect, we don't exist in a Star Trek society, but it does work. Medical technology has come so far in the last couple of decades it should amaze most people. Instead we have people who do nothing but look at the flaws in it and claim that it doesn't work at all. The 1 glaring failure out of the 99 successes and you want to condemn them for it? I bet you don't have as good of a track record as the pharmaceutical industry. If you did you probably wouldn't have the time to waste here bitching about it.
But you are probably a north american white male, so I wont say such things in front of you. I will probably hurt your most basic fetishes.
Ah, the retort of a sore loser. Thanks for the racist sentiments but I'll keep on being a plain old human who has more to be happy for than to bitch about.
It's sad that you tell me to sit and ponder what you have to say but you dismiss me based on my assumed ethnic background. Spoken like a true thinker. If this is the best you can do maybe you need to sit back and ponder some yourself.
Or you can simply refuse treatment. Let's face facts here people, no one forces you to use medication. You can refuse it if you want to and take your chances. That's all up to you.
Changing the way society performs economic relations is not something five people can gather and do. It takes a deep social change to do experiments like the one you propose.
Five people? Fuck, we've had two of you in this thread alone! What about the millions of Joe Sixpacks on the street that bitch about it? Face facts, there's tons of you out there who don't understand nor do you care to understand the industry. Ok, so out of the millions of you guys you think you could pull together a billion dollars and give it a go. If you're successful maybe more would help in the future. You know the numbers are out there, why do you think it's a big news issue? If you can't make a "deep social change" with millions of people and billions of dollars than how can you downplay the process that exists today?
I'm not a naysayer of the drug. I 'm a naysayer of the process. And of the people that say "Oh will please think of billion-dollar-rich-cigar-holding-government-overthrowing Pharma CEOs?"
I'm saying to be realistic about the process. You know there is a viable alternative, I've presented it to you in short form. What's stopping you and the millions of others who are singing the same tune? Go for it!
Don't argue with me about. Just ponder at the fact that deseases like malaria kill millions, while Pharma is fighting poor erections. If you think that makes sense, or that this is the only way society can work, you are too pessimistic.
Why not argue? I've been in this debate many times and I've heard just about all the excuses that come from people about why they hate this and that and why they're unwilling to put their money where their mouth is. You're all fantastic on coming up with a solution but are unwilling to lay down a little green to show us that you have faith in your own solution. Who's the real naysayer here?
And as far as erections? It goes even further to show how very little you understand the industry and how little you invest into your own ideals about exploratory research. Viagra was originally being researched as a compound to lessen hypertension and angina! You mean to tell me that, in the name of exploratory research, if you don't find a solution for one problem you should ignore another? Please. If you do it's a clear sign that you don't understand the real focus of exploratory research at all.
As for malaria? Malaria is not a single disease, much like HIV there are many mutation and variants. There are effective medications for some strains but not for others. A real problem for the sufferers of Malaria is the kinds of jackasses who make up fake drugs and peddle them on the black market. These people are trying to treat themselves with sugar pills thinking that they're curing themselves as the situation only gets worse. How can you blame the pharmaceutical industry for that?
When you invest hundreds of millions of dollars into a project that doesn't earn a single dime it's considered a failure by most peoples standards. Sure, you gain some knowledge from the failure and that's great but money is needed to build off of that knowledge.
Tell you what, you and all the naysayers to this process get together. You all throw some money into a hat and start your own pharmaceutical company and when you come up with cures you go ahead and make them public domain. If you hate the existing system don't just sit on your hands, if you have a solution apply it to the situation.
Yeah, I don't see many reaching for their checkbooks on that. Go figure.
Not initially, no. These people are going to have to depend on the good will of others or maybe help from their insurance or Medicare. But as time goes by the cure will likely cost less and become more effective. This is the trend for nearly all medications. So the early adopter expense will be high, there will hopefully be continued R&D and maybe in a few decades the cure for this will be as common and at the same price of some fairly normal vaccinations.
It's not a perfect solution. No solution is and it's only painfully true when the first couple of version of a solution come in to being.
But it's progress and progress is good enough for me.
Ok, so you're born with a condition outside of your control and someone comes up with a cure or at least an alleviation of the condition and you see yourself as a slave? Oh, sorry, the fact that you have the ability to simply comprehend the situation and respond to it (as misguided as your response may be) shows that you're not suffering like these people are.
Being a member of a family with a severely autistic child (my nephew), I can tell you that giving up a bit of cash to the pharmaceutical industry (that paid for the R&D for the potential cure with no guarantee of success or redemption of that funding) is a small price to pay. It's strikes me not only as odd but also as how downright lunkheaded some members of society are about this. Without profit involved the pharmaceutical industry would dry up fast than a puddle in the desert. If that's what you want why not simply boycott the industry. After all, you've already taken the aloof position of not needing their cures anyway.
I suppose you think it's better to languish in pain and suffering instead of paying your fair dues to an entity that gambled to create a remedy in the first place.
1K to turn someone into a productive member of society and lead a meaningful life? It's a bargain. We're paying more than that to keep rapists alive in jails. Not to mention that as technology moves on it will either cost less or new drug will take it's place being either more effective or less expensive.
My good friend,
My late uncle, a wealthy American senator, had a large bank account in the United States. I currently can not remove the funds due to a legal dispute but an outside source such as yourself may be able to help me. I will let you have the majority of his 23 million dollar bankroll if you simply transfer the funds into your Russian account until I can leave the country. All I need from you is $5000 transfered into my account for verification of your account and processing and legal fees...
Could Mars even hold a large body like the moon? I would think that the mass of a planet would ultimately effect the size of satellite it could hold. Maybe that range is relatively small for Mars. I think it's a bit of a stretch but it would be interesting to know.
While I do agree to your outlook on the 2nd Amendment I just wonder about you're declaring yourself a liberal?
What has happened to us, as a nation, when being a liberal or conservative should matter in what amendments you decide to back? Not you personally but as a nation. I recall once that someone was talking about how they were proud to be members of both the ACLU and the NRA and they did it in such a way to make it seem as if it was a conflict of interests. I don't understand where that ever came into play.
Both liberals and conservatives should hold up these amendments with an equal eye to each of them.
It's a shame that we've let this schism break us of our foundations as citizens of this nation.
Yeah, and the other 9 guys carry rifles with semi and 2-round burst. A light machine gun is not the same as a battle or assault rifle.
India was a colony, the British simply left. If we revolt against the government in a peaceful manner where exactly are they going to go?
Given the general idea of using a rifle in a combat scenario I would sooner use the semi-auto. Auto is a waste of ammo and unless you got a TON of people it's pretty much useless unless your target is fairly close.
Even the Soviets seemed to agree with this as the full-auto position of an AK has to be carefully set from safe, sliding down the safety arm the entire way puts the weapon into semi-automatic. This is so troops under a panic will select the better mode of fire. Nothing like having your guys empty a clip in three seconds under panic fire and likely not hitting a thing.
Handguns are a target of prohibition because they're easily concealed. Ever tried to hide an AK in your coat pocket? AKs and such are still relatively rarely used in crime. Feinstein and crew knew this for a fact when they were busy pushing the ban. It makes you wonder what their real motivation was.
But really, bottom line is that the media likes to skew the facts in gun crime. A guy gets killed with an AK and we hear about it for weeks, two guys get shot with a Glock and it gets reported once and the handgun isn't mentioned at all. The media still has a fascination with gun violence when it happens with a weapon that is consider exotic outside of the gun culture. It's good for the ratings and it helps to push an agenda.
Most of us in the gun culture know that the ban was a joke. Not that it wasn't effective but all it did was raise prices, that was it's only real effect. The day before the ban fell I could have located you a dozen shops within 20 miles of my home that you could have gone to and purchased a legal AK.
And much like the Napster case, these weapons really weren't the force on the street that they are today and the media had a lot to do with it. Just like no one knew of P2P and the ease of free music prior to Lars opening his yap, the public was mostly ignorant of AKs and their ilk prior to the law. Suddenly the word gets out and every Joe Sixpack tries to lay hands on one and [sarcasm] oddly enough [/sarcasm] the crime rate with these weapons increase.
Society would benefit greatly from looking at the criminal instead of obsessing about the tools that they use. It's unfortunate that we still think that we can control human behavior by black marketing... errr... banning inanimate objects.
And please don't think the media is doing this to look out for the citizen on the street. For them it's just a way to drum up business.
Maybe you're an older coder but I think that Java gets some of the nostalgia effect that BASIC use to since it seems to be the first programming course offered. At least from what I've seen it's one of the early languages taught now-a-days. But I really don't know for sure.
It certainly seems to be a fairly easy introduction to OOP.
Not to take this out of the OPs hands but...
Efficiency has little to do with this. I guess if you really wanted to get down to it there are other things you'd have to take in consideration but the bottom line is that air travel has not fallen at the same pace, if at all, in overhead as computer manufacturing. With the price of fuel I find it hard to believe it went down at all.
But take the numbers and consider also that it's cheaper to fly and just like anything that is cheap it lowers the bar on who can take advantage of it. Not to say that the rich are a better grade of people but today's airliners are more like cattle cars with record numbers of people flying. As the population becomes more diverse and the numbers increase the number of problems is going to increase as well. Just look at the vehicle accident numbers of heavily traveled roads versus those that see little traffic.
I don't know if this is all it seems to be but: Free paper hangers.
Again, I know nothing about it, or the business really. So it may be completely wrong for what your needs are.
I wasn't replying to your post.
The real question is if it's going to cost any more or less from Pittsburgh (Assuming that they're Chinese hangers). And if it is the same price is it worth it to support fellow Americans?