Actually: Mr Blair acknowledged that, since 1996, deportations had been blocked as a result of a European Court ruling that article 3 of the convention on human rights prevented people from being sent back to countries where they could face torture
Furthermore, I'd append "never happened" to hasn't happened yet. The Blair administration tried a more politically appealing tack of trying to get individual letters of assurance from the various nations he wished to deport people to. The problem is that these letters have no real force of law behind them, they're only as trustworthy as the government that signed them... and since these are governments that routinely practice torture in the first place, that is to say, "not very".
Oh, and before you deny that this ever happened, here's another link.
So basically, what remains to be seen here is whether the British legal system is going to stand by the spirit of the ECHR, which is to say, not deporting people overseas to face torture, or if they're contented with the latest Blair tack of plausible deniability.
Oh, and as far as the British government being aware of torture. Yup, here's another link: The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, said it was untrue the UK Government did not use information from torture.
He had been told the UK did not use torture itself or ask that any specific person be tortured.
"As long as we kept within that guideline, then if the Uzbeks or the Syrians, or the Egyptians or anyone else tortured someone and gave us the information that was OK," said Mr Murray.
Tony Blair served notice yesterday that he was ready to renounce parts of the European convention on human rights if British and European judges continued to block the deportation of Islamic extremists in the wake of the London bombings.
The remainder of the article, entitled "Blair to curb human rights in war on terror", can be found here
I don't know that the ECoJ can do a hell of a lot in this case. Britain's already willing to pull out of the european convention on human rights so they can deport people to be tortured overseas.
my first system was a Laser 386-SX 25 Mhz with 2 MB of RAM and a 40 MB hard drive. We got it at a pawn shop when I was in high school. Came with Amstrad DOS 3.22... which of course meant the hard drive had to be partitioned into two segments. It later got MS-DOS 6.22 and then, much later when I got a bigger HD, it also got an OEM copy of Windows 3.1 that I got at a computer show.
Mostly I just used it for BBSing (I bought a 2400 baud modem from a friend) and playing with qbasic.
All patent law says is, the person who cares the most gets the prize
...wow...
So your view is that the US Patent Office is basically a sweepstakes, with the supreme right over life and death to thousands or millions (depending on the contest) as the prize. And they decide these contests though some (magical?) caring-meter.
Can't understand why so many people are still so opposed to that system.
Every time we have a winter colder than average, it's attributed to global warming... every time we have a winter warmer than average, it's attributed to global warming.
Unless we get nothing but winters that are the exact average of whatever arbitrary set of statistics they're using at any given time, it's "another piece of evidence supporting the case".
OTOH, most of the first-gen standalone Blu-Ray players are going to cost just as much, so someone with only a vague interest in games might figure "well I'll get that too"
Well... here's one major contradiction:
... but rather it is the problem of the people who care about helping other people not caring enough. After all, there are many people who have waived their patent privileges, or licensed their technologies for little or nothing, out of a spirit of generosity and charity.
And to answer why "the open source..." doesn't leverage the patent system the same way, it's the same reason as, in my previous example, a free speech advocate doesn't "use a sedition law to enhance free speech", or why libraries don't use the Patriot Act to protect records from the government... they're not designed to do that, and they couldn't be made to do so even if they wanted to.
The patent system is designed to keep medication out of the hands of people... if your goal is to get an already developed medicine to the people who need it, the patent system has nothing to offer.
I still get the sense that you're not hearing the part about the patent system being a bad thing. Asking who is using the patent system to save lives is like asking who is using the sedition laws in Australia to protect free speech. They're not only not designed for that purpose, they're designed for a specifically contradictory purpose.
If on the other hand you were shooting for a non-profit that's developing life saving medicines... the first one that springs to mind is the Institute for OneWorld Health. I'm sure it's far from the only one, but it's the biggest one I'm presently aware of.
Doing the work and securing the patent are two seperate actions... the one is a valuable contribution to mankind in general, the other is making sure the government will help you keep this development from benefiting the bulk of mankind for an arbitrarily set period of years.
UNICEF, for what it's worth, is not a research institution, and interestingly enough doesn't really have anything to do with health either. Why they should be expected to have patents on medicines is beyond me, but perhaps you'll enlighten us.
It's not obvious from the article who the "owners" of this actually are... anyone know?
Anyhow, I think the point was a fair one... if true, the discovery is a major one, whoever it is will be making a lot of money off of it... but one would hope they would be nice enough to maybe make a little less profit instead of, say, letting the 4 million poorest people with aids die so they can make an extra 15-20% on what's already going to be an enormous fortune.
In fact though, your suggestion that we "do the work ourselves" brings up one of the major problems with the way the modern IP system is set up... once these people, whoever they are, apply for and recieve a patent, we couldn't "do the work ourselves" if we want to, we're strictly prohibited from replicating this compound... at least until the patent runs out and then the generic version can come out. But if they chose to gouge people (which is legally their right) how many hundreds of thousands will already be dead by the time they can buy it?
Is that original statistic (1-3 years) accurate? I've had two laptops in my life... an NEC Versa P/75 which was running Os/2 Warp (built in 1994 and lasted until I got out of college in 2001), and my current laptop is a Powermac G3 Lombard (built in 1999) running OS 9.22 still works like it's brand new.
I was a little annoyed when the Versa quit out after only 7 years... if I had one quit on me after 12 months, I'd be seriously pissed.
See... again you're completely forgetting that the market isn't a single entity with a single interest. Company A may well wish to charge more, but if they do, Company B may see this as an opportunity to take their market share. I don't know where you're getting this concept of "ideal capitalism", but in any truly free market, any company with a huge profit margin is going to find itself inundated with competition in short order.
I have a counterexamples to present, and that's the medications whose patents have expired and are now available from generic drug makers. As soon as the state stops forbidding competition from making the comparable medication the price plummets. It's not unusual for a drug to go from $20-$25 a pill to $0.75 or less in a matter of days. But the medication is not any less effective now that the patent has expired, which leads me to believe that the artificial limitation of suppliers, and not the inelastic demand is what was inflating the price.
--
I'm sure there are cases of people who can't risk surgery (which doesn't make much sense to me in cases where not getting the surgery is fatal), but there are always waiting lists for organs, and I know for a fact that there are people who are operable and who are denied a spot on those lists because of age or other "secondary conditions".
Which once again shows absolute ignorance of the way an actual free market works. You should be lauded for staying on message, if nothing else.
If capitalism truly worked this way every human being outside of eastern europe who isn't wealthy would've starved to death long ago... and the reason the medical industry couldn't get away with this sort of pricing (outside of the realm of government granted monopolies) is much the same reason as when you go to a farmer's market and ask "how much for these carrots?" he doesn't say "how much've you got?" An all-too-conveniently forgotten thing we like to call competition.
Because it's not just "what the patient is able to pay" that is an upper limit on what you can charge, it's "what would the competition charge him?". We don't have anything but a passing resemblence to a free market system here when it comes to medicine, but if my doctor started charging me $500 for an office call, I'm not going to start wringing my hands and planning my funeral (and wishing that some price-fixing scheme would save me), I start looking for another doctor.
Oh, and second... yes, they do tell patients they aren't worthy of a kidney, or whatever organ they might need, all the time. Oh, sure, they say it nicer... tell the 70-year-old woman she's "too high a risk" (read: too old) to get that kidney, tell the recovering alcoholic that his history of drinking makes him "inelligible" for a new liver. However you want to phrase it, you're telling these people the same thing: you're dying, we could save you, but we don't want to.
But hey, at least they didn't cheapen letting this person die by bringing money into it, right?
I like how easily you conflated "capitalism" with state-created problems like huge legal expenses and government granted monopolies on medication.
Incidentally, no, I don't everyone finds its repugnant to buy a kidney... I think everyone except for someone who needs a kidney and was told they aren't worthy of it finds it repugnant.
They're the ones that socialized all thoes industries in the first place, and privatizations are largely occuring by necessity because those niches are in a shambles at this point.
Socialism really lacks a hard-and-fast definition as it relates to policy, Sure, they generally prefer to nationalize stuff, but that doesn't mean a party like Labour, forced for pragmatic purposes to recognize that a lot of their nationalized industries just flat out don't work particularly well can't still qualify.
And it's not like British Labour is somehow ideologically married to a free market...
It'd make sense if he's from Britain, where the ruling party is indeed the left... and virtually all the same police state measures have been taken (and then some... the US hasn't followed along in shoot-to-kill yet, at least not officially).
Whoever's in charge at any given time is pushing through the police state. Sure, it's a police state slanted towards their own particular agendas, but that's not going to matter much to the average person on the street.
The Republicans love of small government stateside lasted until the day they took power... and probably will magically return the moment there's a democrat in power again. And that Democrat running on a civil libertarian platform? He's going to be pushing through all manner of thought crime legislation and planning his own military adventures the moment he finishes being sworn in.
I'm glad someone else brought this up... I had a pre-Renaissance Europeean History Class where the prof used to come to class in an Israeli Commando uniform and spent a quarter of the course (6 of 24 class periods) talking about the Holocaust.
I later saw a prof who described herself as a "Soviet-style Communist" (and ironically had spent much of her youth with her parents in a Soviet-run Gulag in Kazakhstan) who one day went on a class long rant about the inherent evil nature of people of Germanic descent... and implied that the high crime rate in our city was largely because of it's large German-American population. She went on an unannounced "leave of absence" after that for the rest of the semester, so I'm assuming somebody complained.
It doesn't take much effort to design a comment posting feature that filters profanity. Framing this as some sort of big blow to the concept of weblogs is just silly.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually:
Mr Blair acknowledged that, since 1996, deportations had been blocked as a result of a European Court ruling that article 3 of the convention on human rights prevented people from being sent back to countries where they could face torture
Furthermore, I'd append "never happened" to hasn't happened yet. The Blair administration tried a more politically appealing tack of trying to get individual letters of assurance from the various nations he wished to deport people to. The problem is that these letters have no real force of law behind them, they're only as trustworthy as the government that signed them... and since these are governments that routinely practice torture in the first place, that is to say, "not very".
Oh, and before you deny that this ever happened, here's another link.
So basically, what remains to be seen here is whether the British legal system is going to stand by the spirit of the ECHR, which is to say, not deporting people overseas to face torture, or if they're contented with the latest Blair tack of plausible deniability.
Oh, and as far as the British government being aware of torture. Yup, here's another link:
The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, said it was untrue the UK Government did not use information from torture.
He had been told the UK did not use torture itself or ask that any specific person be tortured.
"As long as we kept within that guideline, then if the Uzbeks or the Syrians, or the Egyptians or anyone else tortured someone and gave us the information that was OK," said Mr Murray.
Tony Blair served notice yesterday that he was ready to renounce parts of the European convention on human rights if British and European judges continued to block the deportation of Islamic extremists in the wake of the London bombings.
The remainder of the article, entitled "Blair to curb human rights in war on terror", can be found here
I don't know that the ECoJ can do a hell of a lot in this case. Britain's already willing to pull out of the european convention on human rights so they can deport people to be tortured overseas.
my first system was a Laser 386-SX 25 Mhz with 2 MB of RAM and a 40 MB hard drive. We got it at a pawn shop when I was in high school. Came with Amstrad DOS 3.22... which of course meant the hard drive had to be partitioned into two segments. It later got MS-DOS 6.22 and then, much later when I got a bigger HD, it also got an OEM copy of Windows 3.1 that I got at a computer show.
Mostly I just used it for BBSing (I bought a 2400 baud modem from a friend) and playing with qbasic.
All patent law says is, the person who cares the most gets the prize
...wow...
So your view is that the US Patent Office is basically a sweepstakes, with the supreme right over life and death to thousands or millions (depending on the contest) as the prize. And they decide these contests though some (magical?) caring-meter.
Can't understand why so many people are still so opposed to that system.
A couple dozen people seems far from a broad trend in a nation of so many millions.
I'd chalk it up to a combination of technophobia and overinterpretting small data sets.
But that would only be a good comparison if we actually paid higher prices for consumer products in the US.
Every time we have a winter colder than average, it's attributed to global warming... every time we have a winter warmer than average, it's attributed to global warming.
Unless we get nothing but winters that are the exact average of whatever arbitrary set of statistics they're using at any given time, it's "another piece of evidence supporting the case".
OTOH, most of the first-gen standalone Blu-Ray players are going to cost just as much, so someone with only a vague interest in games might figure "well I'll get that too"
Well... here's one major contradiction:
... but rather it is the problem of the people who care about helping other people not caring enough.
After all, there are many people who have waived their patent privileges, or licensed their technologies for little or nothing, out of a spirit of generosity and charity.
And to answer why "the open source..." doesn't leverage the patent system the same way, it's the same reason as, in my previous example, a free speech advocate doesn't "use a sedition law to enhance free speech", or why libraries don't use the Patriot Act to protect records from the government... they're not designed to do that, and they couldn't be made to do so even if they wanted to.
The patent system is designed to keep medication out of the hands of people... if your goal is to get an already developed medicine to the people who need it, the patent system has nothing to offer.
And then you arrest a local meteorologist and haul him off to Guantanamo Bay.
If it's any sort of decent cell system they're not all calling the same guy... one guy calls another guy who calls another guy...
I still get the sense that you're not hearing the part about the patent system being a bad thing. Asking who is using the patent system to save lives is like asking who is using the sedition laws in Australia to protect free speech. They're not only not designed for that purpose, they're designed for a specifically contradictory purpose.
If on the other hand you were shooting for a non-profit that's developing life saving medicines... the first one that springs to mind is the Institute for OneWorld Health. I'm sure it's far from the only one, but it's the biggest one I'm presently aware of.
Doing the work and securing the patent are two seperate actions... the one is a valuable contribution to mankind in general, the other is making sure the government will help you keep this development from benefiting the bulk of mankind for an arbitrarily set period of years.
UNICEF, for what it's worth, is not a research institution, and interestingly enough doesn't really have anything to do with health either. Why they should be expected to have patents on medicines is beyond me, but perhaps you'll enlighten us.
It's not obvious from the article who the "owners" of this actually are... anyone know?
Anyhow, I think the point was a fair one... if true, the discovery is a major one, whoever it is will be making a lot of money off of it... but one would hope they would be nice enough to maybe make a little less profit instead of, say, letting the 4 million poorest people with aids die so they can make an extra 15-20% on what's already going to be an enormous fortune.
In fact though, your suggestion that we "do the work ourselves" brings up one of the major problems with the way the modern IP system is set up... once these people, whoever they are, apply for and recieve a patent, we couldn't "do the work ourselves" if we want to, we're strictly prohibited from replicating this compound... at least until the patent runs out and then the generic version can come out. But if they chose to gouge people (which is legally their right) how many hundreds of thousands will already be dead by the time they can buy it?
Nor did I realise that, you know, not liking software piracy made you some kind of bully.
Actually I think the bullying part is where he's making veiled threats and demanding others ostracize them.
But they're probably getting the name and address from an ISP in the first place.
Is that original statistic (1-3 years) accurate? I've had two laptops in my life... an NEC Versa P/75 which was running Os/2 Warp (built in 1994 and lasted until I got out of college in 2001), and my current laptop is a Powermac G3 Lombard (built in 1999) running OS 9.22 still works like it's brand new.
I was a little annoyed when the Versa quit out after only 7 years... if I had one quit on me after 12 months, I'd be seriously pissed.
See... again you're completely forgetting that the market isn't a single entity with a single interest. Company A may well wish to charge more, but if they do, Company B may see this as an opportunity to take their market share. I don't know where you're getting this concept of "ideal capitalism", but in any truly free market, any company with a huge profit margin is going to find itself inundated with competition in short order.
I have a counterexamples to present, and that's the medications whose patents have expired and are now available from generic drug makers. As soon as the state stops forbidding competition from making the comparable medication the price plummets. It's not unusual for a drug to go from $20-$25 a pill to $0.75 or less in a matter of days. But the medication is not any less effective now that the patent has expired, which leads me to believe that the artificial limitation of suppliers, and not the inelastic demand is what was inflating the price.
--
I'm sure there are cases of people who can't risk surgery (which doesn't make much sense to me in cases where not getting the surgery is fatal), but there are always waiting lists for organs, and I know for a fact that there are people who are operable and who are denied a spot on those lists because of age or other "secondary conditions".
Which once again shows absolute ignorance of the way an actual free market works. You should be lauded for staying on message, if nothing else.
If capitalism truly worked this way every human being outside of eastern europe who isn't wealthy would've starved to death long ago... and the reason the medical industry couldn't get away with this sort of pricing (outside of the realm of government granted monopolies) is much the same reason as when you go to a farmer's market and ask "how much for these carrots?" he doesn't say "how much've you got?" An all-too-conveniently forgotten thing we like to call competition.
Because it's not just "what the patient is able to pay" that is an upper limit on what you can charge, it's "what would the competition charge him?". We don't have anything but a passing resemblence to a free market system here when it comes to medicine, but if my doctor started charging me $500 for an office call, I'm not going to start wringing my hands and planning my funeral (and wishing that some price-fixing scheme would save me), I start looking for another doctor.
Oh, and second... yes, they do tell patients they aren't worthy of a kidney, or whatever organ they might need, all the time. Oh, sure, they say it nicer... tell the 70-year-old woman she's "too high a risk" (read: too old) to get that kidney, tell the recovering alcoholic that his history of drinking makes him "inelligible" for a new liver. However you want to phrase it, you're telling these people the same thing: you're dying, we could save you, but we don't want to.
But hey, at least they didn't cheapen letting this person die by bringing money into it, right?
I like how easily you conflated "capitalism" with state-created problems like huge legal expenses and government granted monopolies on medication.
Incidentally, no, I don't everyone finds its repugnant to buy a kidney... I think everyone except for someone who needs a kidney and was told they aren't worthy of it finds it repugnant.
They're the ones that socialized all thoes industries in the first place, and privatizations are largely occuring by necessity because those niches are in a shambles at this point.
Socialism really lacks a hard-and-fast definition as it relates to policy, Sure, they generally prefer to nationalize stuff, but that doesn't mean a party like Labour, forced for pragmatic purposes to recognize that a lot of their nationalized industries just flat out don't work particularly well can't still qualify.
And it's not like British Labour is somehow ideologically married to a free market...
It'd make sense if he's from Britain, where the ruling party is indeed the left... and virtually all the same police state measures have been taken (and then some... the US hasn't followed along in shoot-to-kill yet, at least not officially).
Whoever's in charge at any given time is pushing through the police state. Sure, it's a police state slanted towards their own particular agendas, but that's not going to matter much to the average person on the street.
The Republicans love of small government stateside lasted until the day they took power... and probably will magically return the moment there's a democrat in power again. And that Democrat running on a civil libertarian platform? He's going to be pushing through all manner of thought crime legislation and planning his own military adventures the moment he finishes being sworn in.
I'm glad someone else brought this up... I had a pre-Renaissance Europeean History Class where the prof used to come to class in an Israeli Commando uniform and spent a quarter of the course (6 of 24 class periods) talking about the Holocaust.
I later saw a prof who described herself as a "Soviet-style Communist" (and ironically had spent much of her youth with her parents in a Soviet-run Gulag in Kazakhstan) who one day went on a class long rant about the inherent evil nature of people of Germanic descent... and implied that the high crime rate in our city was largely because of it's large German-American population. She went on an unannounced "leave of absence" after that for the rest of the semester, so I'm assuming somebody complained.
It doesn't take much effort to design a comment posting feature that filters profanity. Framing this as some sort of big blow to the concept of weblogs is just silly.