Well, unfortunately, we the United States without a socialized medical program have been subudizing the development of a lot of drugs for the rest world. So we're the ones paying for it $100 a pill at a time. If we don't, who will? As you've said, it takes a lot of money to create a drug. Last I checked the average figure was $800M from development to shelve. At least in the United States. Part of that also has to do with FDA requirements and the burocracy involved with running so many trials, etc.. Not that is a bad thing, but with any drug there are risks that may not be known about until distributed to a larger population group or from prolonged usage that just isn't known at the beginning. But in either case, sometimes that's the price that's paid.
So if the money pot dries up, who is going to pay for the R&D? Governments who already are struggling to pay for universal coverage? When I lived in Germany, it was starting to become a problem. There just isn't enough in the younger generation to pay for the rest and with 0 population growth....
And then where is Governments going to spend the money?
Currently in the United States there is 72 Million people living with high blood pressure. http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?ident ifier=4621 The cause of which is unknown in 90 - 95% of the cases. Probably a combination of diet, excercise, and stress. But how much does each factor cause we still don't know. That is vs. 1 - 2 million with HIV/AIDS. If I am looking at the over all picture, where am I going to allocate the resources. Probably where the money will effect the lives of the most people. After all, that is how socialism works: the greatest good for the greatest number right? I mean all that changes is that people get shafted by the government instead of the HMO.
And not all forms of Diabetes is lifestyle either. My mother, and that entire side of the family, are all diabetics. None are obese and my mother had it since childhood and my uncle developed it later in life. That and we know there is a genetic link. Now being overweight increases the risk, but lifestyle is not the sole factor.
To paraphrase George Carlin, "Hmmm, if I'm planet Earth and have too many humans on it, how am I going to fight back. I dunno, maybe create a virus that is spread sexually and destroys the immune system." Yes, it's crual and mean and all that to say, but if AIDS is just that: mother nature's own defense system against us? Something to ponder at least as every attempt by man to do something about it has worked in prolonging life for a while.
Lastly there is another dirty secret: cure the desiease and guess what, the funding dries up. Same with Cancer. Find a cure and the well's gone. What would the American Cancer Society and other chairty groups do then? Close their doors? Well anyone remember what the March of Dimes was founded to do? Well? The March of Dimes was a charity that supported those with Polio and hoped to one day find a cure. Guess what...they did. And March of Dimes had to find a new cause, birth defects. A nice and general topic that likely will never had an end in terms of need for money.
Had a total of 263 computers, all Macs, and was involved in Video Production. That including 3D rendering and a full post setup with Shake. We had a full time 150 node rendering cluster set up on Qmaster & Xgrid and then the other 103 units would render tasks when available. Now all but 3 units in the building was running Macs, this included the Office and accounting people too. We kept 3 Windows boxes in case we had something come in on MAX that needed to be converted for use in Lightwave. Plus there was a couple tools on Windows that just didn't exist on Mac.
In that business, time was money. The quicker the project rendered, the sooner you could get to the next project in the queue. I was reading the article and scratching my head on some of it. Especially the "points" on render time. How about a real world measurement as in "Seconds it took to render" for the ration. On one of the tools, I believe it was the video encoding, the top line Intel rendered almost 10 minutes faster.
You may say, "Yeah, but you can buy 15 the processors of the low end AMD for the cost of the QuadCore Intel chip". Yes, but when you start adding up all the other costs, I bet the total system costs are like $500 vs. $2000 all things being equal. So your talking a price advantage of 4 to 1. Still, it takes 4 times more space to house those units. (Space does cost money) Not to mention that 4 computers generally are going to produce more heat and draw more power. 1 700watt supply vs 4 500watt supplies. Start adding up those electricity rates over 36 months and start to figure out what the TCO is going to be.
The MERS mission has been an incrediable sucessess that one doesn't hear much about, unless you read slashdot. A 90 day mission that has lasted 3 years and shows no signs of stopping as funding has been approved to at least september and so long as they are showing results, I doubt that is going to change. Most of the costs is in launching and building the damn things. From that stand point, looks like they've gotten their money worth out of them.
Sorry, I'm as mac fan boy as mac fan boys come, but I NEVER buy a first generation Apple product. This comes from experience with the first gen iPod (my best friend got one and had the battery issues) and personal experience with the first gen snow white iBooks. (I wanted to wait, but an upcoming trip abroad forced my hand at the time).
While Apple may have gotten things mostly right, they'll refine things and any problems will be well documented by the time the second gen rolls around.
While my old flip phone may not be super sexy, it will work until Apple gets all the bugs hammered out. Maybe by Christmas or this time next year I'll have one, but until then.
While the folks in the UK can squawk about paying their taxes and not having access to shows, etc. the internet IS worldwide and there are plenty of us across the pond with broadband and no TV tax. Just saying that there could be other reasons here why one may wish to restrict such content.
Still, given that US commerical broadcasters seemingly have found a way to stream content online in acceptable quality and fewer commericals, this strikes me as kind of silly. I'm not sure what ABC uses to stream shows like Lost, but I think it's somekind of Flash media. It works on PC's and Mac's for sure (as I'm on Mac), but Flash is generally playable on Linux from my limited experience (before switching to Mac).
Still there is going to be a lot of people who complain because this is Slashdot and extremely pro-linux. I remember working for a software company in 2000 that ported an application to Linux. And it never seemed like we could make anyone happy since we supported RH and SuSE at the time. We got more complaints from Linux users griping that it wouldn't work on their customed hacked kernal or why isn't Slackware supported, etc. that it really changed my whole approach.
Outside of the server room, Linux is a VERY small install base. When looking how to best spend money to reach the most people, Windows is always going to come first and there are enough mac users (and growing) that support for Mac comes next.
And if your going to support Linux, how about FreeBSD? Or OpenBSD? Or Solaris. Better support all those too. And who knows, there may even be an OpenVMS user or two that needs support also.
Because I think the RIAA can afford to keep this in legal limbo land for a while. Even so, it's nice to see someone go after the RIAA on RICO because there have been instances where they have crossed lines in my opinion. That being said, giving up the copyrights aren't going to happen because the RIAA doesn't hold them. They just represent the folks who do.
What really needs to happen is to get a couple of the hawkish Attourny Generals, like NY's, involved and looking into the RIAA's actions. They, actually, have some power to do something about the RIAA's tactics.
And about the only two from the cast that's back is Bruce Boxlighter and the woman that played the station commander for a season after the show should have ended. Still, no Mira (although she is in lost unless they've killed her off and I missed it) or Jerry Doyle or most of the rest of the cast. I know Doyle does a radio show now, but sort of half expected a cameo....
No indication that it's going to be aired, from what I saw, on Sci-Fi or TNT/TBS/Whoever had the series for most of it's run. That was according to IMDB.
I enjoyed the show and it's what got me into 3D animation and video editing, etc. all those years ago when I remember looking at Lightwave going "$2500 holy shit, that's more than my computer" and Blender was at version 1.8.
If it happens to get aired, I'll probably Tivo it. If not, chances of me ever bothering to rent it or buy it is pretty slim.
Now I'm going to say two words that will automatically get me modded down around here, but Rush Limbauqh had a segment about this on his show a few weeks ago when he was explaining why internet feeds contained minutes of silence during song parodies, etc. and about this new policy and how it was going to kill internet radio and wasn't fair. He explained that for his show, it could easily translate into $36,000 a day worth of royalities that would be hard for even a show with a large audience (and high ad rates) to cover.
I do listen to a lot of Online Radio, primarily KTRS 550, and KMOX out of my home town of St. louis at work. There are some afternoon shows I like to listen too and now since I live out both of their radio range (I can get KMOX sometimes at night, but now that the Cards games have moved...)
Still I listen to more podcasts of shows that aren't in my market like the Tony Kornheiser show and then some of the ESPN shows like PTI.
I had my own radio show on the college radio back in the day, and I remember we were charged by the song, not the number of listeners, but as a low power system, I'm not sure how all those rates are calculated anymore. If that is still the case, this just seems like a way to cut competition for terrestrial radio stations.
Yeah, and during the Cold War there was the big two players. And it was "You US, you give me support and arms, etc.. or I go ask the Soviets." So while the US may not have liked what was going on, at least that country was under our sphere and not the Soviets. This even goes back to Cuba. Castro came to the US first for aid/support and Kennedy told him to kiss off. (The fact that he had taken over a lot of businesses owned by big american companies and the mob didn't help either). So Castro went to the Soviets for aid, said he was a communist, and the Soviet gave him missiles, guns, aid, money, etc.
So yeah, we pulled a lot of stunts during the Cold War that wasn't living up to our ideals, but part of looking at history is trying to understand the lens in which the people of the time viewed the situation, not with the 20/20 glasses of history.
I had the same feelings as an American living in Germany a few years ago. Great country, had a great time, but there were a few things where there was a complete cultural divide and one of those was the freedom of speech. Mien Kampf, or at least parts of it, was required reading back in some of my college classes. Especially the ones dealing with the history around WWII. Yet it remains a banned book back in Germany, and this may have changed, but I remember that it almost took special permission for academic/historical research from the government to read the book. Again, being a product of American values, there was a part of me that just wanted to say, "Yeah, it was a bad time, but burying your heads in the sand trying to forget it isn't good either".
I think there was an equal disconnect in understanding on the part of my German friends of my view that, "I may not agree with what you say, but I'll defend your right to the death to say it." It was interesting to me to realize that freedom of speech is one thing that United States does have that just doesn't seem to exist most other places. Just about every country in Europe has some restriction or another.
"Hate" crimes, "Hate" speech, etc. scare me more than anything else.
I find this interesting that they are debating the formats and everything, yet US broadcasters have found ways of streaming online (through flash video?) okay. And since these are private enterprises, I'd think they'd be even more concerned with protecting IP. Granted, there are usually a couple 30 second ads (at least with Lost) you have to set through, but none the less they've found a way.
Now on the flip side, these are private enterprises and can do pretty much whatever the hell they want in terms of formats, which usually means finding a way to reach the largest audience possible while still protecting the content. But it seems to me that as conventional TV dies, from DVR's and competition from cable/sat channels, they are trying to expand viewer ship and trying to find what works online. I'm not sure anyone's got it quite figured out yet, but are trying.
Yeah, I don't use WMP to play WMV on Mac either. Especially since MS stopped developing the player for mac and gave it out to a 3rd party developer. So now I use the www.flip4mac.com Flip4mac plug-in and view WMV content in Quicktime.
Typically I tell clients to place video on the web in Quicktime if you're looking to hit the largest market segment with only 1 format. But from what they are saying, they want a time bomb that would disable content after x number of days and I'm not sure there is anything out there in Quicktime land that does this.
That being said, several US broadcast networks have been able to figure something out. I watched a number of lost episodes online. Not sure what their format was, but it decent quality and only 2 30 second commericals. I can live with that.
People have been blasting about what "open source" really means, so I decided to go check the dictionary at www.m-w.com and guess what, there was no relevant entry found.
However. the first suggested word I use instead was "oppressors".
I've done editing work for a friend of mine that's a videographer. We've gotten back to the editing bay and realized that we lacked a certain shot or decided to flip a shot here and play more of the scene and did not flip the scene. Or we get back and this shot works better here, but something just isn't quite the same. If it's two seconds long, we are not going to stress about it because only a few are going to notice.
I think the best example of this is from the from the Fellowship of the Rings where the little leaf clasps on the cloaks kept switching which direction they were pointed. I remember sitting in the theater annoyed that it kept happening. On the DVD commentary, Peter Jackson said why they decided to flip scenes, but claimed they never noticed the clasp pointing in different directions. And that was on big budget hollywood film that made tons of money.
I am just in Law School, not a lawyer yet, but have I had Contracts.
Actually, what a lawyer will say is, "Store bought and contracts that you write yourself have a high probability of being nullified in court." When you hire a lawyer to write a contract, it's not so likely to happen. After all, writing contracts, especially by a lawyer that specializes in the field, is what lawyers are supposed to do. When people do it themselves, they can often confuse terms and might use bad word choices like "bi-weekly" instead of "Every other week". Now there are some store bought contracts that work very well, especially for those in the construction field, etc..
However, if a contract is valid, signed, and especially notarized by an official 3rd party, it can still be contested in court, but chances are the plaintiff is going to loose. In reality, like with anything else legal, what is going to happen is lawyers are going to advise some kind of settlement since that is often cheaper than going to court, even if the defendant is correct. Now that is something people don't like to here, especially those that like principles, but say a $15,000 settlement vs. $75,000 in legal fees to take a case to trail...most businessmen know which of those two amounts are less.
I think you got things backwards. People knew about the plane for a long time. Hell it was supposed to be the RS-71 (As RS was the designation for Recon/survalience at the time), but President Johnston flubbed the line at the dedication ceramony and called it the SR-71. No one corrected him and so the name stuck. So the public knew about the plane since the 1960's.
I think you are getting it confused with the F-117, which was kept pretty well secret until the first Gulf War. There was the "F-19" floating around the aviation community by the mid 1980's, famously described in the Clancy Novel Red Storm Rising, so people thought it existed, but they got the shape totally wrong. (Look up the F-19 flight sim over at Wikipedia by Microprose).
Still, I think something replaced the Blackbird a long time ago. The Air Force really didn't argue when the program was cut. Which tells me they had something to replace it and we've heard about Aroua for years much like the F-19 twenty years ago.
I've been asked for my SSN before on job applications and have told them, I'll put it on a W-4 when hired and you can't force me to give it to you because by law the only people I am required to give it out to is the Federal Government.
Maybe one reason why i had trouble finding a job right out of college.
Privacy laws were partly the cause of the VT shootings. That's simplfing it a bit, I know, but this is one of those things that I don't think can go both ways in my book. If we agree that privacy is a good thing, then sorry, events like VT could happen again because of the inability of sharing data. (And with the comming national ID cards and such, I really like the idea of having some strong privacy laws.)
I think that's called the Smart car. It may still run on gas, but can park backing up to a curb. And I guess if you want more style, you can go with a Mini.
This is where people will point out that OSX is a Mach kernal, etc., but basically I agree with the above poster. I got my feet wet with Linux then moved to FreeBSD and then on to OS 10.2 about 5 years ago and never looked back.
With mac/darwin ports, I get all the ease of install of my favorite tool sets just like the ports tree with BSD and I can even purchase that *evil* commercial software like Quickbooks, Office, and *gasp* Photoshop.
I personally found FreeBSD easy to deal with and the ports tree a much better way of installing software than on the Linux systems of the day as there was no standard way to do this between distros. At least with FreeBSD, there was pretty much ONE FreeBSD.
If I was going to set up a simple inexpensive webserver, FreeBSD would still be my first choice on some cheap PC hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
While not impossible to forge and cheat, as they say here in Chicago: vote early, vote often, but I liked the idea of a paper ballot.
Hello! Oka- [gulp, nauseated expression] New teeth. That's weird. So where was I? Oh, that's right -- Barcelona!
So if the money pot dries up, who is going to pay for the R&D? Governments who already are struggling to pay for universal coverage? When I lived in Germany, it was starting to become a problem. There just isn't enough in the younger generation to pay for the rest and with 0 population growth....
And then where is Governments going to spend the money?
Currently in the United States there is 72 Million people living with high blood pressure. http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?ident ifier=4621 The cause of which is unknown in 90 - 95% of the cases. Probably a combination of diet, excercise, and stress. But how much does each factor cause we still don't know. That is vs. 1 - 2 million with HIV/AIDS. If I am looking at the over all picture, where am I going to allocate the resources. Probably where the money will effect the lives of the most people. After all, that is how socialism works: the greatest good for the greatest number right? I mean all that changes is that people get shafted by the government instead of the HMO.
And not all forms of Diabetes is lifestyle either. My mother, and that entire side of the family, are all diabetics. None are obese and my mother had it since childhood and my uncle developed it later in life. That and we know there is a genetic link. Now being overweight increases the risk, but lifestyle is not the sole factor.
To paraphrase George Carlin, "Hmmm, if I'm planet Earth and have too many humans on it, how am I going to fight back. I dunno, maybe create a virus that is spread sexually and destroys the immune system." Yes, it's crual and mean and all that to say, but if AIDS is just that: mother nature's own defense system against us? Something to ponder at least as every attempt by man to do something about it has worked in prolonging life for a while.
Lastly there is another dirty secret: cure the desiease and guess what, the funding dries up. Same with Cancer. Find a cure and the well's gone. What would the American Cancer Society and other chairty groups do then? Close their doors? Well anyone remember what the March of Dimes was founded to do? Well? The March of Dimes was a charity that supported those with Polio and hoped to one day find a cure. Guess what...they did. And March of Dimes had to find a new cause, birth defects. A nice and general topic that likely will never had an end in terms of need for money.
In that business, time was money. The quicker the project rendered, the sooner you could get to the next project in the queue. I was reading the article and scratching my head on some of it. Especially the "points" on render time. How about a real world measurement as in "Seconds it took to render" for the ration. On one of the tools, I believe it was the video encoding, the top line Intel rendered almost 10 minutes faster.
You may say, "Yeah, but you can buy 15 the processors of the low end AMD for the cost of the QuadCore Intel chip". Yes, but when you start adding up all the other costs, I bet the total system costs are like $500 vs. $2000 all things being equal. So your talking a price advantage of 4 to 1. Still, it takes 4 times more space to house those units. (Space does cost money) Not to mention that 4 computers generally are going to produce more heat and draw more power. 1 700watt supply vs 4 500watt supplies. Start adding up those electricity rates over 36 months and start to figure out what the TCO is going to be.
That's just how I look at the data.
The MERS mission has been an incrediable sucessess that one doesn't hear much about, unless you read slashdot. A 90 day mission that has lasted 3 years and shows no signs of stopping as funding has been approved to at least september and so long as they are showing results, I doubt that is going to change. Most of the costs is in launching and building the damn things. From that stand point, looks like they've gotten their money worth out of them.
So an $18 CD vs. a $50 - $60 pop for video games.
While Apple may have gotten things mostly right, they'll refine things and any problems will be well documented by the time the second gen rolls around.
While my old flip phone may not be super sexy, it will work until Apple gets all the bugs hammered out. Maybe by Christmas or this time next year I'll have one, but until then.
Still, given that US commerical broadcasters seemingly have found a way to stream content online in acceptable quality and fewer commericals, this strikes me as kind of silly. I'm not sure what ABC uses to stream shows like Lost, but I think it's somekind of Flash media. It works on PC's and Mac's for sure (as I'm on Mac), but Flash is generally playable on Linux from my limited experience (before switching to Mac).
Still there is going to be a lot of people who complain because this is Slashdot and extremely pro-linux. I remember working for a software company in 2000 that ported an application to Linux. And it never seemed like we could make anyone happy since we supported RH and SuSE at the time. We got more complaints from Linux users griping that it wouldn't work on their customed hacked kernal or why isn't Slackware supported, etc. that it really changed my whole approach.
Outside of the server room, Linux is a VERY small install base. When looking how to best spend money to reach the most people, Windows is always going to come first and there are enough mac users (and growing) that support for Mac comes next.
And if your going to support Linux, how about FreeBSD? Or OpenBSD? Or Solaris. Better support all those too. And who knows, there may even be an OpenVMS user or two that needs support also.
What really needs to happen is to get a couple of the hawkish Attourny Generals, like NY's, involved and looking into the RIAA's actions. They, actually, have some power to do something about the RIAA's tactics.
No indication that it's going to be aired, from what I saw, on Sci-Fi or TNT/TBS/Whoever had the series for most of it's run. That was according to IMDB.
I enjoyed the show and it's what got me into 3D animation and video editing, etc. all those years ago when I remember looking at Lightwave going "$2500 holy shit, that's more than my computer" and Blender was at version 1.8.
If it happens to get aired, I'll probably Tivo it. If not, chances of me ever bothering to rent it or buy it is pretty slim.
I do listen to a lot of Online Radio, primarily KTRS 550, and KMOX out of my home town of St. louis at work. There are some afternoon shows I like to listen too and now since I live out both of their radio range (I can get KMOX sometimes at night, but now that the Cards games have moved...)
Still I listen to more podcasts of shows that aren't in my market like the Tony Kornheiser show and then some of the ESPN shows like PTI.
I had my own radio show on the college radio back in the day, and I remember we were charged by the song, not the number of listeners, but as a low power system, I'm not sure how all those rates are calculated anymore. If that is still the case, this just seems like a way to cut competition for terrestrial radio stations.
So yeah, we pulled a lot of stunts during the Cold War that wasn't living up to our ideals, but part of looking at history is trying to understand the lens in which the people of the time viewed the situation, not with the 20/20 glasses of history.
A hundred years is a blink of the eye to the universe.
I think there was an equal disconnect in understanding on the part of my German friends of my view that, "I may not agree with what you say, but I'll defend your right to the death to say it." It was interesting to me to realize that freedom of speech is one thing that United States does have that just doesn't seem to exist most other places. Just about every country in Europe has some restriction or another.
"Hate" crimes, "Hate" speech, etc. scare me more than anything else.
Now on the flip side, these are private enterprises and can do pretty much whatever the hell they want in terms of formats, which usually means finding a way to reach the largest audience possible while still protecting the content. But it seems to me that as conventional TV dies, from DVR's and competition from cable/sat channels, they are trying to expand viewer ship and trying to find what works online. I'm not sure anyone's got it quite figured out yet, but are trying.
Typically I tell clients to place video on the web in Quicktime if you're looking to hit the largest market segment with only 1 format. But from what they are saying, they want a time bomb that would disable content after x number of days and I'm not sure there is anything out there in Quicktime land that does this.
That being said, several US broadcast networks have been able to figure something out. I watched a number of lost episodes online. Not sure what their format was, but it decent quality and only 2 30 second commericals. I can live with that.
And I live near St. Louis and need a new video camera. For once I can say: Thank you ACLU!
However. the first suggested word I use instead was "oppressors".
I think the best example of this is from the from the Fellowship of the Rings where the little leaf clasps on the cloaks kept switching which direction they were pointed. I remember sitting in the theater annoyed that it kept happening. On the DVD commentary, Peter Jackson said why they decided to flip scenes, but claimed they never noticed the clasp pointing in different directions. And that was on big budget hollywood film that made tons of money.
Actually, what a lawyer will say is, "Store bought and contracts that you write yourself have a high probability of being nullified in court." When you hire a lawyer to write a contract, it's not so likely to happen. After all, writing contracts, especially by a lawyer that specializes in the field, is what lawyers are supposed to do. When people do it themselves, they can often confuse terms and might use bad word choices like "bi-weekly" instead of "Every other week". Now there are some store bought contracts that work very well, especially for those in the construction field, etc..
However, if a contract is valid, signed, and especially notarized by an official 3rd party, it can still be contested in court, but chances are the plaintiff is going to loose. In reality, like with anything else legal, what is going to happen is lawyers are going to advise some kind of settlement since that is often cheaper than going to court, even if the defendant is correct. Now that is something people don't like to here, especially those that like principles, but say a $15,000 settlement vs. $75,000 in legal fees to take a case to trail...most businessmen know which of those two amounts are less.
I think you are getting it confused with the F-117, which was kept pretty well secret until the first Gulf War. There was the "F-19" floating around the aviation community by the mid 1980's, famously described in the Clancy Novel Red Storm Rising, so people thought it existed, but they got the shape totally wrong. (Look up the F-19 flight sim over at Wikipedia by Microprose).
Still, I think something replaced the Blackbird a long time ago. The Air Force really didn't argue when the program was cut. Which tells me they had something to replace it and we've heard about Aroua for years much like the F-19 twenty years ago.
Maybe one reason why i had trouble finding a job right out of college.
Privacy laws were partly the cause of the VT shootings. That's simplfing it a bit, I know, but this is one of those things that I don't think can go both ways in my book. If we agree that privacy is a good thing, then sorry, events like VT could happen again because of the inability of sharing data. (And with the comming national ID cards and such, I really like the idea of having some strong privacy laws.)
I think that's called the Smart car. It may still run on gas, but can park backing up to a curb. And I guess if you want more style, you can go with a Mini.
With mac/darwin ports, I get all the ease of install of my favorite tool sets just like the ports tree with BSD and I can even purchase that *evil* commercial software like Quickbooks, Office, and *gasp* Photoshop.
I personally found FreeBSD easy to deal with and the ports tree a much better way of installing software than on the Linux systems of the day as there was no standard way to do this between distros. At least with FreeBSD, there was pretty much ONE FreeBSD.
If I was going to set up a simple inexpensive webserver, FreeBSD would still be my first choice on some cheap PC hardware.