No. As I said, this ignores the basic market dynamics that set the price in the first place.
Riddle me this, if what you say actually applies, why don't they just charge $1+ million? Well, at that point it becomes obvious: people won't pay it.
The demand curve describes how many people are willing to buy the product at a given price point, while the supply indicates how many people can buy the product at a price point. Now, while it is true that a monopoly can control the _quantity_ of the supply, it cannot control the _costs_. The means that the supply and demand curves are actually identical as in a non-monopoly situation. The difference occurs in determining the final market price/quantity. In perfect competition the price is where supply and demand intersect, meaning that no profit is made. In a monopoly, however, the quantity isn't not set by the supply curve, but rather the company itself. The price still follows the demand curve, and the profit is the difference between that and the supply curve. They will, or course, set the quantity produced to maximize profit, but this point is still completely determined by basic market dynamics.
In short, in a market with no competition the value is set based on maximizing profit, while in a market with perfect competition the value is set based on minimizing profit.
Anyways, this post is taking far too long, so to wrap it up, I'll say that what you are missing here is that the supply curve doesn't look like an increasing line like they show you in school, but actually more like a "U". At very small quantities the fixed costs dominate (e.g. R&D), at medium the economics of scale and amortized fixed costs bring the price to a minimum, and then at high quantities limited resources start to drive the cost up once again. The thing about drugs is that the fixed costs are gigantic and the incremental costs and resources are tiny. This means the supply curve ends up looking more like a "\_" than the school example of "/". Draw a graph of that vs a classic demand curve and then set the market to maximize profit. Note how scaling up the demand curve actually drives the cost down.
Well, it also doesn't hurt that when the technology comes out you get the marketing number only.
Sure, the panels are 40c/W, but put them in a box, pay the employees and overhear and then they're $1/W. Install them with a conversion system and batteries and all of a sudden they're $3-$7 per Watt much like they've always really been. (And of course, that's peak, and the average cost it probably more like $10-$25 / Watt.)
Developments like these are positive, to be sure, but the cells themselves are only part of a pretty pricy equation. Even if this tech pans out, it probably won't end up reducing the price much more than 20%. Nice, but no where near the "half" that they like to tell you.
Normally a flywheel is spun by a motor, which can also be used as a generator. So you (super basically!) just wire the flywheel motor into your circuit and when you have excess power it accelerates and when you have excess draw it decelerates.
> Only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were > mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, > or the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
"no true pharmaceutical" ?
I am so lost as to what you are arguing here. Yes, most pure research is done by other entities. (In this particular case the drug was designed by a company called Onyx Pharmaceuticals.) However, that only serves to undermine you point: clearly their budget isn't going to show a large R&D line item then, because they aren't paying "R&D" they're paying their business partner.
Thus, how does this work out to big pharma = evil and justify India's action here? Do you think these knockoffs are paying Onyx for their development costs? Or Bayer for the trial and approval costs (assuming Onyx didn't handle those as well)? What about the liability that Bayer is assuming?
I'm not trying to say that big pharma consists entirely of angels, but if we're taking about cliff notes here, clearly you're the one that didn't spend any time thinking about this. Someone needs to bring drugs to market and it happens to be them. So what if they personally don't (often) have to chemists doing the initial research? They still pay those people, just somewhat more indirectly than if it was their R&D department. And really, I think that it speaks _volumes_ that the people who initially develop these drugs are so quick to let big pharma bring them to market. Clearly it's something they don't have the money and resources to do themselves, or they would.
"BAY 32-9006 was first developed by Onyx Pharmaceuticals. Onyx subsequently partnered with a large and well known drug company, Bayer (Bayer is the "BAY" in BAY 43-9006) to complete development of the drug." -- http://cancerguide.org/rcc_bay43-9006.html
So this was developed by companies, not academia or the NIH.
On the other hand, advertising, by definition, increases profits or it's a waste of money. Thus, advertising actually _decreases_ individual costs because they sell more units and can thus amortize the overhead costs (which are the primary costs) across more units. For example, suppose your overhead is $1000, which cores things like labs, employees, trials, and other failed drugs and the cost to manufacture is $1. If you only sell 100 units, you must charge $11/each to break even. Suppose you then spend $200 on advertising and sell an additional 100. Now your break-even price becomes $7/each. The advertising money actually reduced the unit cost.
Now, I suppose you could argue that they're greedy and will still charge $11/each, but that's blatantly ignoring the basic economics that set the price in the first place. After all, they could be charging $20/unit to start, but the idea is that the 'greed' is an overhead cost, not a unit cost, and therefore also amortized across the units.
A viable argument is that on a macroeconomic scale, this increases the overall cost of healthcare because the drug price does factor in some advertising money. To this I have to say: whatever. That just get's too hard to trace. For advertising, if that ad money isn't in your drugs, it's in your Pepsi. Medically, the drug does some good (kinda part of the approval), maybe those people that missed it had much more costly problems because they didn't know the drug existed and had complications with their un/poorly treated condition.
> 2. Most drug research is academic;
Regardless of the truth in this (hint: it's rather limited), most cost is in bringing the drug to market. It's not as if these hypothetical academics make the compound, solve the engineering issues to produce it, and run all the trials. At best they find the drug compound, and usually it's more the mechanics, leaving the drug company to find the molecule that actually exploits that mechanism without killing people. Oh, and then develop the manufacturing process and run years of trials.
> 3. They can settle for less profit;
I guess. Given how much a crap shoot drug development can be, it's hard to define what exactly 'profit' is. Because often times it's just money to pay for the next year's research when income is down.
> 4. If they won't settle for less profit, someone else will be prepared to take their position in the market.
This is blatantly false. If this was the case then the Indian company would have done that, right? But no, they let Bayer do all the real work and are just spitting out chemicals. Hell, they probably are copying Bayer's manufacturing process as well, right off the friggin' patent. No wonder it's so cheap for them.
Finally, regarding your point 3 in particular, let us not forget the elephant in the room:
LIABILITY
If/when this drug is discovered to be doing something bad, who's responsible? This mindless manufacturer? I'm betting not. The Indian governement? HAHAHA. Bayer is the one at the end of the barrel and they won't have any 'excessive profits' to pay damages with. Woohoo!
And this is, in a nutshell, why I _loathe_ "Climate Change".
We could be talking about cars, or coal power, or plastic, or disposable goods, or you know just about anything else that produces green house gases or is a waste of resources?
But no... No, let's just rewrite the human genome so that people don't really want meat quite as much because........ global warming?
Captain Planet must be kicking himself for teaching us to reuse and recycle when he could have been telling us to radically alter our biochemistry so we eat less meat.
Did it never occur to you that they intentionally crippled their TLER settings _precisely_ because the drives would crap out after 30 days of continuous use in a RAID config? (Well, and because higher TLER is better for single drive configs.) The drives are optimized for slow bulk storage which is why they have long TLER and low RPM and in my experience they do a great job. 90+% of people complaining of failures bought these thinking they could make a cheap RAID despite all the warnings and frankly got what they deserve. It's filling a high compression car with cheap (low octane) gas. Saving a couple bucks buying something not rated for your application never ends well. Don't blame Wester Digital for your own cheapness.
> Society has now successfully established that reaction_time(drunken-driver) leads to more > accidents (especially troublesome because you are not just injuring yourself with your stupidity, > but other, innocent people are killed).
In addition to what was posted just above by AK Marc regarding.15BAC, this is not really true. While slower reaction times do cause a slight increase in accidents, it's rather insignificant. The need to react to unexpected stimuli is actually pretty uncommon in driving, and can not come up at all in many trips. Severe accidents are instead caused by lack of attention or simply bad judgement. For example, you won't run a stop light because of a bad RT (since you have >=3s of warning with a yellow), but you will if you aren't paying attention.
In short, looking a reaction times is incredibly misleading.
You got a lot of joke responses about you not being smart enough to understand, but ironically those jokes are quite right: the people that "aren't smart enough" are precisely people like you.
The first words of the summary are: "The inability of the incompetent to recognize their own limitations..."
This is the answer to your question. It isn't about intelligence (i.e. IQ), so much as it's about understanding the limits of your thought. Even people who are really smart (high IQ) can avoid thinking about governance and learning about what's going on and therefore cannot participate well in a democracy. On the other hand, someone who isn't as smart can be productive by keeping up to date and just spending a lot of time thinking about it. The problem, instead, are those who don't bother to learn much beyond the headlines and never think about the big picture but still feel that their opinions matter. Such people can have any IQ, though it does seem to be more common for people with lower IQs, maybe because people with lower IQs are more common in general, or because they are less willing to admit their limitations. Either way I've long considered knowing what you know and not pushing ignorant opinions to be a much more functional definition of intelligence than IQ, myself.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and figure you aren't actually incompetent and instead just read the headline in an attempt to get the first post (is that better:p). But stuff like this: reading only a headline and then getting all self-righteous over it, is what derails democracy.
It was less that, and more that learning and targeting that platform simply wasn't worth it. All that effort (i.e. additional cost) earns you some niceties, to be sure, but also makes a multi-platform release much more difficult and costly.
Arguably that was even the goal of the cell: to provide a technical carrot for publishers to make really awesome PS3 only titles using the advanced hardware. It wasn't a bad idea, actually, but ultimately the PS3 came out too late and too expensive. Everyone had an Xbox 360, no one had and Xbox 360, and so no developers were willing to sink the time, effort and money into developing for a platform that nobody had. (This has, of course, changed but the damage was done.)
Don't be silly! Of course they'll be interested in supporting the goals of this legislation! Look, it's already generating positive sound bytes for his campaign, and is non committal enough he'll surely still get oodles of corporate contributions!
While that is true, it applies to 'conflicting' 'laws'. I don't want to look up the law creating the TSA (supposing there is one!) but I rather expect that it doesn't require pat-downs and x-rays by law. Instead, it probably just grants some vague sort of powers like 'necessary action to identify threats', leaving the specific implementation to the organization itself. Thus, it wouldn't be unreasonable for a state to say that they don't allow certain methods, which wouldn't exactly conflict: the TSA would just have to use other means (e.g. metal detectors) to accomplish their decreed goals.
So it would hardly be a slam-dunk case. A court would have to address: 1) To what extent do powers granted to a department have the force of law 2) What limits can be placed on those powers before such limits are seen to conflict 3) If the creation of the TSA and their powers is in pursuance of the constitution.
Or perhaps even more to the point, is that meat (and all food) is part of a living thing and contains the nutrients needed to keep that thing alive, which in turn keep us alive when we eat it. When you grow it in the lab, you're simplifying the whole complex metabolism of a living thing into some process fluid that grows some cells in the lab, and the contents food becomes little more than bulked up proteins. How much B12 does it have? How much iron? Omega3s?
The trouble with synthetic meat, as I see it, is that it will only ever be a taste/texture and never a particularly worthwhile food-stuff. After all, it's synthetic and by definition built on a set of ingredients. At the end of the day you might as well save yourself the money and take those ingredients as a multivitamin and eat some fried tofu.
> not susceptible to interference from lawful emissions in other parts of the spectrum.
_Lawful emissions_. GPS uses spectrum within a portion of the L-Band allocated for use in space -> ground communications. This means that future allocations on adjacent bands should be very low power. Indeed, I'd say that's rather the entire point of having a blocked out bit of spectrum for satellite communications: They must be a much lower power, so receivers can't easily filter out much more powerful ground based interference. By blocking ground signals a good distance from satellite ones you make filtration much easier.
GPS receivers were built with the expectation (if not guarantee) that interfering signals would be roughly at the same power as GPS. However, the transmitters Lightsquared was planning to build would be, literally, one million times stronger than GPS on a good day (-70dBm vs -130dBm). So, I'd hardly call such interference 'lawful' just because the FCC thought they could change the law after the devices were built.
Why do you find it so surprising that they do a good enough job of detecting pregnancy that after the better part of a decade they'll have found a case where the girl's father didn't know yet? Keep in mind that the girl is probably trying a lot harder to keep it a secret from her father than she is the store. Especially if he's the type that gets upset enough over stupid coupons implying potential pregnancy to go yell at a store manager? Yeah, I'm sure he's the first person she would tell.
Honestly, I expect this happens quite a lot, but most people aren't hotheaded enough to go yell at a store manager about coupons. (Who would then have to call the them back a couple days later? That strikes me as more creepy than the preggo-score.)
First, I'm guessing you meant 8 x 32bit values, not 8 bytes, which is pretty fair... Technically larger than needed, but probably better than real world with indexing/filesystem/etc overhead. Here's the thing though: It's 24GB PER SAMPLE.
What's the sample rate? Certainly not 1 second like GPS. Maybe 5 minutes? That would be 288 * 24GB = 7TB every day. Now, certainly some compression is possible (e.g. don't record samples if it didn't move in that period) and you could get by with maybe 10min samples, but you'd still be looking at storage on the order of TB/day. Solvable? Sure, but I'd still think that it counts and drowning themselves in data.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Germany "Membership in a Nazi party, incitement of hatred against a segment of the population (Volksverhetzung) and Holocaust denial are illegal in Germany. Publishing, television, public correspondence (including lectures), and music are censored accordingly, with legal consequences that may include jail time."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition "Saudi Arabia completely bans the production, importation or consumption of alcohol and imposes strict penalties on those violating the ban, including weeks to months of imprisonment, and possible lashes."
So.... Wut? They're absurd because... they don't ruffle your ideological feathers?
Are you honestly trying to say that Google should be part of a process that you admit is "extremely difficult and often bloody"? If we're talking about people lives here, why don't we talk about the lives of their employees in these countries, who could be arrested under some kind of 'conspiracy to undermine public welfare' or what have you?
And the real question is, why Google? Why not you? You could run a tor node. You could host simple blogs; it's quite cheap. And you even have the advantage over Google because you don't have any connection to these countries and those don't have to worry about your employees being arrested.
Or right, sorry, you said already: They're big and have the greater responsibility to enforce your morals.
We see they have an office in Australia, which was the domain used in the summary. And quite a few around the globe, of particular note is China, which is so often the center of discussions like these. Also, Thailand, which I believe was brought up with regards to Twitter and blocking posts critical of their king.
Are you suggesting that because their corporate HQ isn't there that "they" aren't there? Or are you suggesting that they don't _need_ to be in those locations, and so could pull out?
Finally, I'll note that you said "enforcing questionable laws". Don't you mean "evil laws"? I mean, if obeying the law is evil, then surely that law is evil, right? Or does it only become evil when enforced by Google because they aren't entire present where the law matters?
I dunno. This always gets so confusing. Like, why isn't Google evil for taking down ads for Canadian pharmaceuticals at the request of the FDA? Actually, I seem to recall people were saying they were evil for allowing the ads in the first place. Maybe it's that HQ thing again... That "good" is upholding American (oh, like specifically the USofAmerican) laws and ideals and "evil" is upholding the laws of other countries in those countries because their HQ is in the USA?
Sez you. Remember back when "Schweddy Balls" was pushing the limit of what was allowed on TV? Remember when McCarthyism made certain _ideas_ essentially illegal?
Censorship is done at the behest of people or their leaders. It's something that comes and goes and people decide what should be visible or not. Sure _sometimes_ it's forced upon a society, but that's usually (and really by definition) the result of a totalitarian government. But really, isn't that the real problem?
When a people decide they don't want guns, or drugs, or prostitution, or gambling, or certain forms of expression they pass laws against them. So you think "censorship" is stupid and wrong because it doesn't hurt anyone. Good for you. I think that most of the aforementioned laws are stupid and wrong and they hurt people more than they help. But you know what? Sometimes people get hurt by things, and they pass laws against them because they feel that the law hurts them less. Yeah, it sucks, but it's not Google's fault, nor is it their duty to change it. This censorship crap is no more "evil" and "slippery slope" than Google, say, not selling booze in Islamic countries or whatever. You don't agree, I don't agree, but if the Germans, for example, are made extremely uncomfortable by Nazi stuff, should Google tell them to piss off when asked to block it?
That actually would be rather mean of them, I think...
They are doing this to follow local laws. Now, I understand that what's moral and legal don't always align, but at what point did *obeying the law* become *evil*! Sure, you can come up with some contrived circumstances, but I highly any will be in play here. This is about blocking content that people and/or their leaders want blocked. Honestly, it seems closer to evil to go against their wishes by not blocking it.
Companies aren't responsible for carrying out your civil disobedience campaign for you.
(And are you, yourself, evil for not running one of your own?)
The trouble is that this 'court order' is simply a grand jury indictment. (I don't know if they got anything else which didn't stem directly from that, but if they did, it doesn't seem to have been reported/relevant.) Grand juries have no due process, and no instruction on the law. The prosecutors just make their completely one-sided case: their arguments, their witnesses, their evidence and the jury decides if it makes enough sense to be discussed in court. Or, and all this happens in secret. Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_juries_in_the_United_States#Criticism
Now, you might say that a completely one-sided court case held in secret where you have little to no legal rights and the jury is only deciding if the argument has merit is better than no case at all. And, sure, it at least requires a little effort. But then consider the consequences: SOPA would have blocked your domain. Here, they seized all their assets, including their domain, and basically dismantled their business so that even if they are found innocent they have still be significantly and irrevocably harmed.
And keep in mind that fair use requires a proper court case to decide. Copyright law basically says that everything even slightly related to a copyrighted work is derivative. (Remember the Scientology takedowns because a sentence or two was used in a critique?) Because of this, any case claiming copyright infringement where the defense is fair use _will_ and _should_ pass a grand jury to be decided in court.
> MegaUpload's shutdown didn't need SOPA to pass...
Let's not get ahead of ourselves. They certainly did a lot a damage and alleged a great many things, but nothing has actually been held up by a court yet.
I've since started to wonder if that's not actually the idea. They make this giant, destructive raid using existing laws. If they win, they've set a precedent for using the current laws in a way that makes SOPA look tame. If they lose, they now have a rock-solid use-case for SOPA: the current laws, unlike everyone argued, are really not enough to take down those that everyone concedes are 'evil pirates'.
It's a bit of a conspiracy theory, to be sure, but _nothing_ gets a controversial law passed like a hyped up case falling apart because it doesn't exist.
And by disagree, you mean he doesn't share the yet untested interpretation of the law used by the authorities.
Maybe the conspiracy juices are flowing here, but I'm starting to wonder if maybe that's not the whole idea. SOPA gets defeated (in a sense), Megaupload gets taken down, and we optimistically say 'see look the tools you already have work'. But it _hasn't actually worked yet_.
What if this action was deliberately stretching the law, knowing that it may well get thrown out. Then they'll come back and say "See, we _need_ SOPA. We tried to take these guys down, guys you all admit to facilitating piracy, but we couldn't do it. We need a law like SOPA."
A bit of a stretch, to be sure. But on the other hand, given the how these things go it seems to fit the timing a lot better than the DoJ just throwing up their hands saying 'oh noes, an online protest is starting. Looks like we better just do this without SOPA even if it makes SOPA look unnecessary.'
The trouble is that regardless of whether or not the uploader has a copy, losing the cloud copy is still a loss to the people it was intended for. Perhaps it could be replaced by the uploader or someone who downloaded it previously, but there is no guarantee of this... People move on, forget that email's password, die, etc. While this loss may not be _actionable_ (e.g. a by a lawsuit), it's foolish to pretend it's not a loss all the same. (And that's not even covering all the effort lost to simply reupoading and correcting the links for all the files you already had uploaded.)
Slashdot Mirror
No. As I said, this ignores the basic market dynamics that set the price in the first place.
Riddle me this, if what you say actually applies, why don't they just charge $1+ million? Well, at that point it becomes obvious: people won't pay it.
The demand curve describes how many people are willing to buy the product at a given price point, while the supply indicates how many people can buy the product at a price point. Now, while it is true that a monopoly can control the _quantity_ of the supply, it cannot control the _costs_. The means that the supply and demand curves are actually identical as in a non-monopoly situation. The difference occurs in determining the final market price/quantity. In perfect competition the price is where supply and demand intersect, meaning that no profit is made. In a monopoly, however, the quantity isn't not set by the supply curve, but rather the company itself. The price still follows the demand curve, and the profit is the difference between that and the supply curve. They will, or course, set the quantity produced to maximize profit, but this point is still completely determined by basic market dynamics.
In short, in a market with no competition the value is set based on maximizing profit, while in a market with perfect competition the value is set based on minimizing profit.
Anyways, this post is taking far too long, so to wrap it up, I'll say that what you are missing here is that the supply curve doesn't look like an increasing line like they show you in school, but actually more like a "U". At very small quantities the fixed costs dominate (e.g. R&D), at medium the economics of scale and amortized fixed costs bring the price to a minimum, and then at high quantities limited resources start to drive the cost up once again. The thing about drugs is that the fixed costs are gigantic and the incremental costs and resources are tiny. This means the supply curve ends up looking more like a "\_" than the school example of "/". Draw a graph of that vs a classic demand curve and then set the market to maximize profit. Note how scaling up the demand curve actually drives the cost down.
Bonus: see the picture on this blog. I didn't read it, so I dunno how good the post is, but I figure the illustration is worth it:
http://economicobjectorvism.wordpress.com/2007/07/27/howto-minimum-efficient-scale/
Well, it also doesn't hurt that when the technology comes out you get the marketing number only.
Sure, the panels are 40c/W, but put them in a box, pay the employees and overhear and then they're $1/W. Install them with a conversion system and batteries and all of a sudden they're $3-$7 per Watt much like they've always really been. (And of course, that's peak, and the average cost it probably more like $10-$25 / Watt.)
Developments like these are positive, to be sure, but the cells themselves are only part of a pretty pricy equation. Even if this tech pans out, it probably won't end up reducing the price much more than 20%. Nice, but no where near the "half" that they like to tell you.
I might be misunderstanding your question, but:
Normally a flywheel is spun by a motor, which can also be used as a generator. So you (super basically!) just wire the flywheel motor into your circuit and when you have excess power it accelerates and when you have excess draw it decelerates.
> Only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were
> mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies,
> or the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
"no true pharmaceutical" ?
I am so lost as to what you are arguing here. Yes, most pure research is done by other entities. (In this particular case the drug was designed by a company called Onyx Pharmaceuticals.) However, that only serves to undermine you point: clearly their budget isn't going to show a large R&D line item then, because they aren't paying "R&D" they're paying their business partner.
Thus, how does this work out to big pharma = evil and justify India's action here? Do you think these knockoffs are paying Onyx for their development costs? Or Bayer for the trial and approval costs (assuming Onyx didn't handle those as well)? What about the liability that Bayer is assuming?
I'm not trying to say that big pharma consists entirely of angels, but if we're taking about cliff notes here, clearly you're the one that didn't spend any time thinking about this. Someone needs to bring drugs to market and it happens to be them. So what if they personally don't (often) have to chemists doing the initial research? They still pay those people, just somewhat more indirectly than if it was their R&D department.
And really, I think that it speaks _volumes_ that the people who initially develop these drugs are so quick to let big pharma bring them to market. Clearly it's something they don't have the money and resources to do themselves, or they would.
Mod parent up.
This is exactly what happened here:
"BAY 32-9006 was first developed by Onyx Pharmaceuticals. Onyx subsequently partnered with a large and well known drug company, Bayer (Bayer is the "BAY" in BAY 43-9006) to complete development of the drug."
-- http://cancerguide.org/rcc_bay43-9006.html
So this was developed by companies, not academia or the NIH.
> Most drug company expenditure is on marketing;
On the other hand, advertising, by definition, increases profits or it's a waste of money. Thus, advertising actually _decreases_ individual costs because they sell more units and can thus amortize the overhead costs (which are the primary costs) across more units.
For example, suppose your overhead is $1000, which cores things like labs, employees, trials, and other failed drugs and the cost to manufacture is $1. If you only sell 100 units, you must charge $11/each to break even. Suppose you then spend $200 on advertising and sell an additional 100. Now your break-even price becomes $7/each. The advertising money actually reduced the unit cost.
Now, I suppose you could argue that they're greedy and will still charge $11/each, but that's blatantly ignoring the basic economics that set the price in the first place. After all, they could be charging $20/unit to start, but the idea is that the 'greed' is an overhead cost, not a unit cost, and therefore also amortized across the units.
A viable argument is that on a macroeconomic scale, this increases the overall cost of healthcare because the drug price does factor in some advertising money. To this I have to say: whatever. That just get's too hard to trace. For advertising, if that ad money isn't in your drugs, it's in your Pepsi. Medically, the drug does some good (kinda part of the approval), maybe those people that missed it had much more costly problems because they didn't know the drug existed and had complications with their un/poorly treated condition.
> 2. Most drug research is academic;
Regardless of the truth in this (hint: it's rather limited), most cost is in bringing the drug to market. It's not as if these hypothetical academics make the compound, solve the engineering issues to produce it, and run all the trials. At best they find the drug compound, and usually it's more the mechanics, leaving the drug company to find the molecule that actually exploits that mechanism without killing people. Oh, and then develop the manufacturing process and run years of trials.
> 3. They can settle for less profit;
I guess. Given how much a crap shoot drug development can be, it's hard to define what exactly 'profit' is. Because often times it's just money to pay for the next year's research when income is down.
> 4. If they won't settle for less profit, someone else will be prepared to take their position in the market.
This is blatantly false. If this was the case then the Indian company would have done that, right? But no, they let Bayer do all the real work and are just spitting out chemicals. Hell, they probably are copying Bayer's manufacturing process as well, right off the friggin' patent. No wonder it's so cheap for them.
Finally, regarding your point 3 in particular, let us not forget the elephant in the room:
LIABILITY
If/when this drug is discovered to be doing something bad, who's responsible? This mindless manufacturer? I'm betting not. The Indian governement? HAHAHA. Bayer is the one at the end of the barrel and they won't have any 'excessive profits' to pay damages with. Woohoo!
And this is, in a nutshell, why I _loathe_ "Climate Change".
We could be talking about cars, or coal power, or plastic, or disposable goods, or you know just about anything else that produces green house gases or is a waste of resources?
But no...
No, let's just rewrite the human genome so that people don't really want meat quite as much because........
global warming?
Captain Planet must be kicking himself for teaching us to reuse and recycle when he could have been telling us to radically alter our biochemistry so we eat less meat.
Did it never occur to you that they intentionally crippled their TLER settings _precisely_ because the drives would crap out after 30 days of continuous use in a RAID config? (Well, and because higher TLER is better for single drive configs.) The drives are optimized for slow bulk storage which is why they have long TLER and low RPM and in my experience they do a great job. 90+% of people complaining of failures bought these thinking they could make a cheap RAID despite all the warnings and frankly got what they deserve. It's filling a high compression car with cheap (low octane) gas. Saving a couple bucks buying something not rated for your application never ends well. Don't blame Wester Digital for your own cheapness.
> Society has now successfully established that reaction_time(drunken-driver) leads to more
> accidents (especially troublesome because you are not just injuring yourself with your stupidity,
> but other, innocent people are killed).
In addition to what was posted just above by AK Marc regarding .15BAC, this is not really true. While slower reaction times do cause a slight increase in accidents, it's rather insignificant. The need to react to unexpected stimuli is actually pretty uncommon in driving, and can not come up at all in many trips. Severe accidents are instead caused by lack of attention or simply bad judgement. For example, you won't run a stop light because of a bad RT (since you have >=3s of warning with a yellow), but you will if you aren't paying attention.
In short, looking a reaction times is incredibly misleading.
You got a lot of joke responses about you not being smart enough to understand, but ironically those jokes are quite right: the people that "aren't smart enough" are precisely people like you.
The first words of the summary are:
"The inability of the incompetent to recognize their own limitations..."
This is the answer to your question. It isn't about intelligence (i.e. IQ), so much as it's about understanding the limits of your thought. Even people who are really smart (high IQ) can avoid thinking about governance and learning about what's going on and therefore cannot participate well in a democracy. On the other hand, someone who isn't as smart can be productive by keeping up to date and just spending a lot of time thinking about it. The problem, instead, are those who don't bother to learn much beyond the headlines and never think about the big picture but still feel that their opinions matter. Such people can have any IQ, though it does seem to be more common for people with lower IQs, maybe because people with lower IQs are more common in general, or because they are less willing to admit their limitations. Either way I've long considered knowing what you know and not pushing ignorant opinions to be a much more functional definition of intelligence than IQ, myself.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and figure you aren't actually incompetent and instead just read the headline in an attempt to get the first post (is that better :p). But stuff like this: reading only a headline and then getting all self-righteous over it, is what derails democracy.
It was less that, and more that learning and targeting that platform simply wasn't worth it. All that effort (i.e. additional cost) earns you some niceties, to be sure, but also makes a multi-platform release much more difficult and costly.
Arguably that was even the goal of the cell: to provide a technical carrot for publishers to make really awesome PS3 only titles using the advanced hardware. It wasn't a bad idea, actually, but ultimately the PS3 came out too late and too expensive. Everyone had an Xbox 360, no one had and Xbox 360, and so no developers were willing to sink the time, effort and money into developing for a platform that nobody had. (This has, of course, changed but the damage was done.)
Don't be silly! Of course they'll be interested in supporting the goals of this legislation!
Look, it's already generating positive sound bytes for his campaign, and is non committal enough he'll surely still get oodles of corporate contributions!
While that is true, it applies to 'conflicting' 'laws'. I don't want to look up the law creating the TSA (supposing there is one!) but I rather expect that it doesn't require pat-downs and x-rays by law. Instead, it probably just grants some vague sort of powers like 'necessary action to identify threats', leaving the specific implementation to the organization itself. Thus, it wouldn't be unreasonable for a state to say that they don't allow certain methods, which wouldn't exactly conflict: the TSA would just have to use other means (e.g. metal detectors) to accomplish their decreed goals.
So it would hardly be a slam-dunk case. A court would have to address:
1) To what extent do powers granted to a department have the force of law
2) What limits can be placed on those powers before such limits are seen to conflict
3) If the creation of the TSA and their powers is in pursuance of the constitution.
Or perhaps even more to the point, is that meat (and all food) is part of a living thing and contains the nutrients needed to keep that thing alive, which in turn keep us alive when we eat it. When you grow it in the lab, you're simplifying the whole complex metabolism of a living thing into some process fluid that grows some cells in the lab, and the contents food becomes little more than bulked up proteins. How much B12 does it have? How much iron? Omega3s?
The trouble with synthetic meat, as I see it, is that it will only ever be a taste/texture and never a particularly worthwhile food-stuff. After all, it's synthetic and by definition built on a set of ingredients. At the end of the day you might as well save yourself the money and take those ingredients as a multivitamin and eat some fried tofu.
> not susceptible to interference from lawful emissions in other parts of the spectrum.
_Lawful emissions_. GPS uses spectrum within a portion of the L-Band allocated for use in space -> ground communications. This means that future allocations on adjacent bands should be very low power. Indeed, I'd say that's rather the entire point of having a blocked out bit of spectrum for satellite communications: They must be a much lower power, so receivers can't easily filter out much more powerful ground based interference. By blocking ground signals a good distance from satellite ones you make filtration much easier.
GPS receivers were built with the expectation (if not guarantee) that interfering signals would be roughly at the same power as GPS. However, the transmitters Lightsquared was planning to build would be, literally, one million times stronger than GPS on a good day (-70dBm vs -130dBm). So, I'd hardly call such interference 'lawful' just because the FCC thought they could change the law after the devices were built.
Why do you find it so surprising that they do a good enough job of detecting pregnancy that after the better part of a decade they'll have found a case where the girl's father didn't know yet? Keep in mind that the girl is probably trying a lot harder to keep it a secret from her father than she is the store. Especially if he's the type that gets upset enough over stupid coupons implying potential pregnancy to go yell at a store manager? Yeah, I'm sure he's the first person she would tell.
Honestly, I expect this happens quite a lot, but most people aren't hotheaded enough to go yell at a store manager about coupons. (Who would then have to call the them back a couple days later? That strikes me as more creepy than the preggo-score.)
First, I'm guessing you meant 8 x 32bit values, not 8 bytes, which is pretty fair... Technically larger than needed, but probably better than real world with indexing/filesystem/etc overhead.
Here's the thing though:
It's 24GB PER SAMPLE.
What's the sample rate? Certainly not 1 second like GPS. Maybe 5 minutes? That would be 288 * 24GB = 7TB every day. Now, certainly some compression is possible (e.g. don't record samples if it didn't move in that period) and you could get by with maybe 10min samples, but you'd still be looking at storage on the order of TB/day. Solvable? Sure, but I'd still think that it counts and drowning themselves in data.
Absurd how?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Germany
"Membership in a Nazi party, incitement of hatred against a segment of the population (Volksverhetzung) and Holocaust denial are illegal in Germany. Publishing, television, public correspondence (including lectures), and music are censored accordingly, with legal consequences that may include jail time."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition
"Saudi Arabia completely bans the production, importation or consumption of alcohol and imposes strict penalties on those violating the ban, including weeks to months of imprisonment, and possible lashes."
So.... Wut? They're absurd because... they don't ruffle your ideological feathers?
Are you honestly trying to say that Google should be part of a process that you admit is "extremely difficult and often bloody"? If we're talking about people lives here, why don't we talk about the lives of their employees in these countries, who could be arrested under some kind of 'conspiracy to undermine public welfare' or what have you?
And the real question is, why Google? Why not you? You could run a tor node. You could host simple blogs; it's quite cheap. And you even have the advantage over Google because you don't have any connection to these countries and those don't have to worry about your employees being arrested.
Or right, sorry, you said already:
They're big and have the greater responsibility to enforce your morals.
Define "not actually in", because after a quick search:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/locations/
We see they have an office in Australia, which was the domain used in the summary. And quite a few around the globe, of particular note is China, which is so often the center of discussions like these. Also, Thailand, which I believe was brought up with regards to Twitter and blocking posts critical of their king.
Are you suggesting that because their corporate HQ isn't there that "they" aren't there? Or are you suggesting that they don't _need_ to be in those locations, and so could pull out?
Finally, I'll note that you said "enforcing questionable laws". Don't you mean "evil laws"? I mean, if obeying the law is evil, then surely that law is evil, right? Or does it only become evil when enforced by Google because they aren't entire present where the law matters?
I dunno. This always gets so confusing. Like, why isn't Google evil for taking down ads for Canadian pharmaceuticals at the request of the FDA? Actually, I seem to recall people were saying they were evil for allowing the ads in the first place. Maybe it's that HQ thing again... That "good" is upholding American (oh, like specifically the USofAmerican) laws and ideals and "evil" is upholding the laws of other countries in those countries because their HQ is in the USA?
> Once censorship starts it doesn't ever stop.
Sez you. Remember back when "Schweddy Balls" was pushing the limit of what was allowed on TV? Remember when McCarthyism made certain _ideas_ essentially illegal?
Censorship is done at the behest of people or their leaders. It's something that comes and goes and people decide what should be visible or not. Sure _sometimes_ it's forced upon a society, but that's usually (and really by definition) the result of a totalitarian government. But really, isn't that the real problem?
When a people decide they don't want guns, or drugs, or prostitution, or gambling, or certain forms of expression they pass laws against them. So you think "censorship" is stupid and wrong because it doesn't hurt anyone. Good for you. I think that most of the aforementioned laws are stupid and wrong and they hurt people more than they help. But you know what? Sometimes people get hurt by things, and they pass laws against them because they feel that the law hurts them less. Yeah, it sucks, but it's not Google's fault, nor is it their duty to change it. This censorship crap is no more "evil" and "slippery slope" than Google, say, not selling booze in Islamic countries or whatever. You don't agree, I don't agree, but if the Germans, for example, are made extremely uncomfortable by Nazi stuff, should Google tell them to piss off when asked to block it?
That actually would be rather mean of them, I think...
They are doing this to follow local laws. Now, I understand that what's moral and legal don't always align, but at what point did *obeying the law* become *evil*! Sure, you can come up with some contrived circumstances, but I highly any will be in play here. This is about blocking content that people and/or their leaders want blocked. Honestly, it seems closer to evil to go against their wishes by not blocking it.
Companies aren't responsible for carrying out your civil disobedience campaign for you.
(And are you, yourself, evil for not running one of your own?)
The trouble is that this 'court order' is simply a grand jury indictment. (I don't know if they got anything else which didn't stem directly from that, but if they did, it doesn't seem to have been reported/relevant.) Grand juries have no due process, and no instruction on the law. The prosecutors just make their completely one-sided case: their arguments, their witnesses, their evidence and the jury decides if it makes enough sense to be discussed in court. Or, and all this happens in secret.
Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_juries_in_the_United_States#Criticism
Now, you might say that a completely one-sided court case held in secret where you have little to no legal rights and the jury is only deciding if the argument has merit is better than no case at all. And, sure, it at least requires a little effort. But then consider the consequences: SOPA would have blocked your domain. Here, they seized all their assets, including their domain, and basically dismantled their business so that even if they are found innocent they have still be significantly and irrevocably harmed.
And keep in mind that fair use requires a proper court case to decide. Copyright law basically says that everything even slightly related to a copyrighted work is derivative. (Remember the Scientology takedowns because a sentence or two was used in a critique?) Because of this, any case claiming copyright infringement where the defense is fair use _will_ and _should_ pass a grand jury to be decided in court.
> MegaUpload's shutdown didn't need SOPA to pass...
Let's not get ahead of ourselves. They certainly did a lot a damage and alleged a great many things, but nothing has actually been held up by a court yet.
I've since started to wonder if that's not actually the idea. They make this giant, destructive raid using existing laws. If they win, they've set a precedent for using the current laws in a way that makes SOPA look tame. If they lose, they now have a rock-solid use-case for SOPA: the current laws, unlike everyone argued, are really not enough to take down those that everyone concedes are 'evil pirates'.
It's a bit of a conspiracy theory, to be sure, but _nothing_ gets a controversial law passed like a hyped up case falling apart because it doesn't exist.
And by disagree, you mean he doesn't share the yet untested interpretation of the law used by the authorities.
Maybe the conspiracy juices are flowing here, but I'm starting to wonder if maybe that's not the whole idea. SOPA gets defeated (in a sense), Megaupload gets taken down, and we optimistically say 'see look the tools you already have work'. But it _hasn't actually worked yet_.
What if this action was deliberately stretching the law, knowing that it may well get thrown out. Then they'll come back and say "See, we _need_ SOPA. We tried to take these guys down, guys you all admit to facilitating piracy, but we couldn't do it. We need a law like SOPA."
A bit of a stretch, to be sure. But on the other hand, given the how these things go it seems to fit the timing a lot better than the DoJ just throwing up their hands saying 'oh noes, an online protest is starting. Looks like we better just do this without SOPA even if it makes SOPA look unnecessary.'
The trouble is that regardless of whether or not the uploader has a copy, losing the cloud copy is still a loss to the people it was intended for. Perhaps it could be replaced by the uploader or someone who downloaded it previously, but there is no guarantee of this... People move on, forget that email's password, die, etc. While this loss may not be _actionable_ (e.g. a by a lawsuit), it's foolish to pretend it's not a loss all the same.
(And that's not even covering all the effort lost to simply reupoading and correcting the links for all the files you already had uploaded.)
Geocities is actually a perfect example. We had notice and special effort was made to preserve the data being lost:
http://www.archive.org/web/geocities.php