I'm a graduating physics major from Princeton University, and we have no programming requirement. I have heard a discussion among some of my fellow physics majors about whether some should be required or not. In the field I did my thesis in (experimental high-energy), programming (and Unix experience) were basic requirements. In other areas, such as Biophysics, I don't see it as being that large of a need, and other students aren't even going into physics after graduation. Princeton does offer an optional sophomore-only seminar on computational programming using Python (side note: a friend of mine regularly got Python to segfault in that class...), but that's about it, and I never took it.
Personally, I think it should be optional, but it should be made clear to undergrads that if they want to get into research, they'll need to know how to program, and so you should strongly suggest they take a course or two in the computer science department.
This probably won't get read, but I need a way to procrastinate my thesis:) I can't say much about the financial aid policies of lesserinstitutions, but I do know my college's financial aid policies pretty well, and the other elite institutions have been catching up to us lately. Just some rough figures for Princeton, the median income for a family on financial aid here is $90,000/year, and the average family on financial aid only pays $10,000/year to Princeton. Our aid policies are all need-based, so it depends on your exact financial situation, but I'm guessing that "upper-middle class" will be somewhere in that range. Also, education is an investment, so you might also want to consider student loans. Princeton doesn't make you take out a loan as part of the aid package either, but if you need a loan to help cover the family contribution, they are available.
The best advice I can give you is, for the most part, apply to colleges without looking at the price tag. Then, when you get your acceptances, look at the aid awards and make a decision then.
Oh, and if you're interested in CS, I just have to say that I'm currently taking Brian Kernighan's class, and it's awesome:)
You forget Exchange's actually killer feature -- the ability to share with other users. That's what's really driving adoption to Exchange at my University. I've found that a lot of people don't really care about the integration of calendaring into their email client. What they care about is the ability to share their emails, their calendar, their contacts, their tasks, etc., with other users.
Currently, Exchange is the only wide-spread server-side app that supports this kind of sharing. Google is getting there, but not with the ease-of-use that Exchange offers (and I never thought I'd say that in reference to an MS product). And right now, MAPI has become a de-facto standard. In the short-run, email clients will need to be able to integrate with MAPI and support sharing the same way Outlook does, or better, before Outlook's dominance is even touched. It's possible to develop a new, open standard, but it would have to offer something much more than Exchange does to get any kind of widespread adoption. But right now, too many companies are too heavily invested in an Exchange infrastructure to move to something else (i.e., all their emails, calendar items, etc. are on an Exchange server, and they won't want to lose them or spend much effort migrating to something else).
Sorry for the flamebait, but you're a moron. Here's why:
1. The software development industry is very different from the drug industry. In particular, look at the costs of bringing something to market. It costs far more to bring a patented drug to market than it does a computer program. So you have higher costs you have to recover.
2. Where does a lot of support for Linux come from? Companies like Red Hat and IBM, who are also competing and want to turn a profit. However, IBM and Red Hat can support different niches of the market without competing directly. This is harder to do with prescription drugs.
3. In effect, cooperation and competition are competing models. Cooperation appears to be working well in software (I'm currently using Firefox on Gentoo), but that model has failed to gain serious traction in the drug industry. If cooperation like this is so great, why hasn't it flourished more? Why aren't we seeing more stories of people cooperating like this working on new drugs?
Sigh, why do I try to promote standard, mainstream economics on/.?
I never said the current system was perfect. I will agree that it (like everything else) is imperfect.
OTOH, be aware that, for example, companies tried to develop cheap generics of patented AIDS drugs for use in Africa. And they didn't go through thorough testing. And it turned out that the drugs weren't as good as the brand-name ones (in this case, it involved taking cocktails of drugs and putting them into one pill -- something even the patent holders hadn't been able to do successfully). In this case, the drugs weren't as effective, which then led to drug-resistant HIV viruses surviving.
Good intentions, yes. But we know where they lead....
Your comment shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the way things work in a capitalist society. Even with this drug, the researchers will have to convince some drug company to manufacture and distribute this drug. How will they do it? By convincing the manufacturer that they will be able to make a profit off of it. Here's the crux of the issue -- you state, As the above example shows, you don't need extra profit to develop a new drug. That's true. But in rare circumstances. The key is when you say "a" new drug. Not many new drugs. Why hasn't this method been used for lots of other patented drugs? Most likely b/c it's impracticable on a large scale.
You're unlikely to replicate the research large drug companies do in academia. Somebody has to pay for the research. The money has to come from somewhere. That somewhere is usually from profits from drugs. And as I said earlier, profits are an indication of social utility -- how much people value the drug. The more profits, the more people value the drug. The larger the profit, the more good the drug does, and the more incentive to produce that drug (which is why capitalism is pretty cool). While you are denying people the drug now, it will be available to them in the future. With most patented medicines, the drug wouldn't have been developed in the first place if the drug companies didn't think they could have turned a profit. As I said, it's better to have the drug available in 14 years or so (or however long patents expire) than not have the drug available at all.
And admittedly, I haven't read the article. However, the summary mentions that the researchers are mimicking the actions of a patented drug. How do you think it was found out that this particular action helped in the first place? I'd be willing to bet my $.02 that it came from commercial drug companies hoping to make a profit.
Bottom line: Drug companies have to make a profit. They have to recover costs (and R&D costs are huge, as are clinical trials, and a lot of money gets spent researching drugs that will never make it to market). Patents ensure this and also incentivize drug companies to develop the most useful medicines.
No, it's not. Inventor's don't have to share anything with the outside world. Patents are simply recognizing the inventor's right to say, "I'll show you how to do X if you promise to do Y." Why shouldn't the inventor have the right do do that? It's his invention after all. There may be specific problems with the implementation of our current patent system, sure. But granting monopolistic privileges in some form is still a good idea and respect's the inventor's rights.
The statement, "We in academic medicine can either choose to use our ideas to make large sums of money for small numbers of people, or to look outwards to the global community and make affordable medicines," is fallacious. Here's why.
1. Drug companies have to turn a profit; otherwise, they don't produce the drugs.
2. The more money a drug company makes off a medicine, the more valuable it is. A drug company's profits are a function of how much people value that drug -- the drug's social utility (this is basic economics).
3. Once the drug companies patents run out, anyone can produce generic medicines cheaply.
Large profits give drug companies an incentive to develop the most useful medicines (the more profit, the more useful it is), and bringing a drug to market is very, very costly, especially in the US with the f*cked up FDA and all that. However, patents do expire after a time, and then everyone can benefit from the cheap medicines.
Look at it this way: What's better -- not having a drug at all, or having the drug be very costly for about 14 years and then having cheap generic equivalents? (While you can make the argument that a specific drug X or Y would still be developed in the absence of profit motives, this is overlooking the fact that reduced profits mean a reduced incentive to produce drugs in the future. This won't apply to every single drug, but rather is a statement about a general trend which does have exceptions.)
The reasoning is fallacious, and I think other replies don't clearly phrase the issue.
When Schilling released cdrools under the GPL, he then granted whoever received it under that license (e.g., Debian) the right to redistribute under the GPL. This cannot be revoked.
However, he can relicense the code he owns the copyright to. But, that license only applies to subsequent distributions of his code, not to distributions under the old copyright.
Simple question, simple answer: If I know that, no matter what I do now, 30 years down the road, I'll have my "fair" share of IPv4 address space, why should I worry about getting it right now? What incentive do I have to purchase address space if I know that either someone will take it away from me by force, or I will get it anyway? It may be seem unfair to fault China for not getting more addresses earlier on, but you also have to remember that institutions like MIT were the driving force behind the internet in the first place. They invested early and helped make it what it is today, so shouldn't they get some reward for what they've done in the past?
Infringement of property rights often seems like a simple solution to a seemingly simple problem, but property rights form the foundation of economic activity.
I've already blogged about it a little here, but I think the reason the DSM got ignored is because it's unsubstantiated. I mean, does the left really need another raTHer-gate/Quran-desecration mess on its hands? Basically, you have somebody gives a piece of paper to the media, and all of a sudden it's absolutely accurate? I'm sorry, but we need more substantiation to it than that.
Go ahead, mod me flamebait and silence me, if you want. I really don't care.
And not just that, but the effect of the DSM has been overblown. IIRC, the big thing about it was that it said intelligence was being fixed around policy. Not that it was being made up, but that they wanted to pursue a specific course of action, and so they chose to emphasize certain intelligence more than others.
And while we're on that vein, let's not forget that we already had a congressional probe which said the Bush administration did NOT lie about what the intelligence said, the intelligence was wrong. Everybody thought Iraq had WMD, including John Kerry!
Uh, did you read what the grandparent actually wrote?
its decay changes water properties. (emphasis mine)
You're right -- it's not chemically reacting, as it's inert, and it's not causing what we think of as nuclear reactions, but radiation can still change water's properties.
Hmm, I could propose this to a Nobel Laureate who got the prize for giving the first indirect evidence of gravity waves, but he probably doesn't need the money. He's also the one who taught me Special Relativity. That being said, just looking at the proof is riddiculous. The x=ct and x'=ct' is absurd and completely unjustified. It's only true in a special case, when v=c. When v=c, you get all kinds of wierd and funny things. Anyway, that's all the time I had to glance over it. If he could legitimely disprove GR, he'd definitely get a Nobel.
No, he did not veto it. But his signature was very reluctant. However, you also have to look at the fact that the person strongly opposing this is a Republican, and the other 2 Republican commissioners are opposing the ruling as well. It's the Democratic commissioners who refuse to support an appeal. RTFA:
One of the reasons it's a good time to (fix this) now is you don't know who's benefiting. Both the Democrats and Republicans used the Internet very effectively in the last campaign.
On page 71 of the report, we find this interesting tidbit:
Mapes eventually tracked down Lieutenant Colonel Killian's son who, according to her notes,
told her that then-Lieutenant Bush had volunteered for active duty in Vietnam but did not have
enough flight hours to qualify.
Other parts in the report indicate that there was no waiting list for pilots.
So, we're supposed to trust CNN, a liberally-biased organization, that they were able to properly weight the exit polls? That, in and of itself, looks like a pretty weak spot in using their exit polls, and provides an explanation for why they've been wrong: the country's demographics have changed for the Conservative, and CNN hasn't caught on/is in denial.
OK, you totally missed the point here. I was exaggerating to mock your point. Of course I realize you don't need continual martial law; however, your post seemed to imply that we needed it (keeping the military in an area in force after we've cleared it out sounds a lot like martial law). Lastly, you never addressed the real points behind the my previous post.
OK, let's get this straight: SOME experts at the Pentagon said we'd need double the troops that we have. Let's not forget that the media was saying the exact same thing about Germany in 1945/46 as they are about Iraq now.
Anyway, I suggest continuing this argument by email so as not to pollute/.'s forums (my email's public). Also, I had a response typed to your previous post, but I don't feel like re-typing it as it's 1:30 a.m. now and I need to get some sleep. In any case, come back when you learn a little bit more about debating and how to find the real argument in something, rather than act as if something purpously riddiculous were totally serious, and then ignore the real meat of the argument.
The great-grandparent post was a troll. The other thing you have to take into consideration here is sampling error. Ukraine was a much different story.
Where do you see that we're retaking the country multiple times? Do you want to suggest that we need to populate the country with marines, enough to hold the ENTIRE country under martial law? There's always going to be places where the enemy will hide, we can't realistically be in them all at the same time. So what if they go back to a place where they've been before. That doesn't necessarily make them harder to kill, and I don't see how holding those places will make it easier to win.
We lost Vietnam due to lack of public support here at home. A more appropriate analogy would be post-World War II, where the media were saying the exact same things about Germany then as they are about Iraq now.
First, you're making the wrong assumption that rich people are conservative. I'm sorry, but that's just plain wrong. Look at this. Yes, I know it's from Rush Limbaugh, but I won't accept an ad hominem attack on him. An anecdote: in my state, Wyoming, only one county went for Kerry: Teton county, home of Jackson Hole, which is where all the rich, out-of-state people live. Teton county has about 15,000 residents and 20,000 people employed there (because people can't afford to live there, so they have to commute). Next, journalists areliberals, and they decide what to report. I think it should open some eyes when you have ABC saying they need to hold Bush to a higher standard of truth than Kerry, or when you have the Newsweek editor or publisher (I can't remember which) saying that positive coverage of Kerry is worth 15% (later revised downward to 5%). Sorry, but the data don't fit your proposed explanation, so the explanation has to be wrong.
I think it's important to tell the whole truth. The media never mentions when we open schools, when we open hospitals, when we improve infrastructure, or anything else like that. The media is only telling one side of the Iraq story, and it's the side designed to harm American morale. Why don't they start reporting on the good things that are happening over there as well?
The Kerry by 20 in PA came from early numbers, and Karl Rove was even quoted mentioning it. They had Kerry tied in North Carolina. However, when the exit polls vary far from months of previous polling, that's got to be pretty telling.
John McCain is liberal relative to most other republicans; the same is true with Arlen Spector. However, in general, they're centrists. That final remark was food for thought. Next, Bill Clinton raised the top income tax rate from George H.W. Bush. Also, economically speaking, Bill Clinton is a moderate, and Barry Goldwater was a social conservative (and a nutcase in my opinion. 1964 was the last time that Wyoming went Democrat). Goldwater suggested doing nothing with the taxes, Clinton raised them. However, this whole analogy is flawed: you're comparing apples to oranges here. Furthermore, Bush made the income tax system MORE progressive. Crunch the numbers instead of relying on baseless allegations about how Bush is only taking care of the wealthy.
As far as the vote in Ukraine goes, they didn't have months worth of polling to compare the exit polls to. We did, and the exit polls were way off, as I mentioned in another post.
Fine. You claim that we have poor planning. However, I have 2 questions to ask you, and until you can answer them, I won't accept your claim that we have poor planning. If the planning is poor, what would you have done differently? Now, you mention more troops, but that brings me to my second question (although it's more an extension of the first question): What would more troops do? I mean, it's not like throwing more troops at a problem will magically solve it, just like throwing money at a problem won't solve it (although some democrats seem to think so). Troops aren't engaged in actual offensive operations, they're being attacked. More troops means more targets to be attacked. I don't see how sending more trooops over there will necessarily improve the situation.
You want to claim that we have poor planning? Fine. Give me more substantive evidence of it other than things aren't going perfectly. Nothing's perfect; just because we have casualties doesn't necessarily mean it's poor planning.
The employees write the stories, they decide what to report. Furthermore, you never address any of the actual warrants of bias in the article which I presented. You just ignore it and try to refute something else with a flawed claim.
As far as exit polls, when you have exit polls showing John Kerry up by 20% in PA, where the previous polls had shown Bush and Kerry in a statistical tie, I think it shows something wrong with the exit polls. Explain how they had results so radically different from previous polls, because assuming the exit polls correct would require changing the laws of statistical probability. One of the reasons I heard the exit polls were off was because they tended to be more concentrated in urban areas, where they could get more people interviewed as more voted there. However, the urban areas tend to be heavily dmeocratic.
Lastly, I'm not saying coverage of the war casualties is "leftist." However, plastering the pictures of coffins of dead soldiers across the news media and the internet definitely has a detrimental effect on the morale of the American people. Showing only the bad effects of the war, never the positive effects (like opening schools, improving infrastructure, etc.) is leftist. Furthermore, it's an invasion of the privacy of the family of the dead soldier, and, as I stated before, ABC is implying that showing the pictures of the coffins is a good thing, which makes me think it's a liberal bias.
One final piece of food for thought: Conservatives tend to think of the news as liberally biased; liberals tend to think of the news as conservatively biased. So, when you think of something as completely fair, that should flag you that it's biased in your favor.
While I agree that the tsunami coverage is coverage of an important event by bloggers, I don't see it making the kind of impact as the other examples of the ABC story. Thus, while it was coverage of a signifigant event, I don't see it as something important in and of itself.
Not just that omission, but the blatent bias in the whole article bugs me. Like this quotation:
Bloggers have taken the lead over traditional media on a number of stories, including racist remarks made by then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., at former Sen. Strom Thurmond's birthday party.
Maybe the remarks had some racial overtones. However, we all know who politicians really are: people who make a career off kissing ass. I think Trent Lott's comment was more about trying to be nice to a 100-year-old guy at his 100th birthday party than anything else. However, they miss several other major stories about what bloggers have done. Furthermore, IIRC, the Trent Lott thing happened in 2002, so maybe they should mention something signifigant that bloggers did in 2004, if they're the people of the year, something more substantial than a passing reference to Howard Dean (oh, wait, their impact was on helping Bush, and ABC can't expose anything that casts the left in a bad light). And then there's this comment:
It was a blogger who got the first photographs of coffins carrying U.S. soldiers arriving in the United States from Iraq.
Again, another story about the leftist bloggers, battling against the evil republicans. I'm sorry, but this just seems one-sided to me. Not just that, but I think the families of those killed in Iraq deserve a bit of privacy, not to have pictures of their loved ones coffins spread all over the internet. However, it's exactly this which ABC is praising as a Good Thing (tm). Also, wouldn't this have also occured in 2003, when the war started?
OK, so I grant that maybe it's possible to do that. However, certain challenges remain, such as getting the right voting machine(s). Nevertheless, you'd still have to get way more people involved in the process, and I don't think you're going to keep them all silent.
The VB script was, according to my understanding of it, elementary. It's really easy to program that kind of stuff; I want to see something that would work in the real situation, as all the little factors add up, including to code bloat.
As far as media bias goes, I quote myself: "most of the media, except Fox and talk radio, were out to defeat Bush." I hate it when people cite fox news as a source of conservative media bias, when you have NPR, ABC, CBS, etc., out there.
As for your counterexample, take Bush and Kerry's distortions of military service in Vietnam. One got reported as if it were the gospel truth from Day one, the other was ignored until the Kerry campaign issued a press release trying to debunk them, and then Swiftboat Veterans for Truth were always mentioned as a "debunked" organization. Also, the media entirely ignored their complaints about Kerry's post-war testimony (SVT formed, IIRC, in mid-April or earlier), which really hurt a lot of American soldiers still in the country who didn't fake/overexaggerate 3 injuries to get 3 purple hearts to get out of Nam using one of the least known and least used military regulations. Also, I'd like to point out that Bush never "lied" under any fair sense of the word; even Michael Moore admits that he never "lied" in the sense of inentionally deceiving us (George Tenet said it was a "slam dunk" that Saddam had WMD stockpiles). Furthermore, when Kerry bases his claims of being an adequate commander-in-chief off of his war record, and when Kerry's campaign centers off how Bush is a bad commander-in-chief, I think that his exaggeration of his war service is a really relevant issue. Moreso than Bush's Guard Service. Furthermore, one study I saw showed that Bush got record negative coverage from the media, especially in the days leading up to the election, while Kerry got record good coverage. I don't see how that's fair at all.
Also, a random rant: To those who bitch about how we could elect a person who lost all 3 debates, I'll say this. As a republican who voted Bush, I watched the first debate (I had classes/road trips during the other two), and I'll admit that Kerry did the better debating, in the sense that Kerry better defended himself. However, in making that complaint, you want people to listen to what the politicians say without taking into consideration any external factors (without questioning what they said); in essense, you're complaining about people not blindly following what Kerry has to say. Yet, you also seem to complain that most Americans are lemmings who'll listen to the government without questioning it. Think about it.
I didn't imply paper receipts would be wasted. My point was just that they weren't a panacea. There are other problems. For example, in 2000, changing one vote per machine would change the outcome. Now, imagine if someone were to somehow counterfeit receipts and feed them into the machine (althoug I suppose printing a barcoded serial number and then scanning it might solve the problem), and then challenge the outcome in court? Farfetched, but, IMHO, entirely more plausible than the situation this story is originally about.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a graduating physics major from Princeton University, and we have no programming requirement. I have heard a discussion among some of my fellow physics majors about whether some should be required or not. In the field I did my thesis in (experimental high-energy), programming (and Unix experience) were basic requirements. In other areas, such as Biophysics, I don't see it as being that large of a need, and other students aren't even going into physics after graduation. Princeton does offer an optional sophomore-only seminar on computational programming using Python (side note: a friend of mine regularly got Python to segfault in that class...), but that's about it, and I never took it.
Personally, I think it should be optional, but it should be made clear to undergrads that if they want to get into research, they'll need to know how to program, and so you should strongly suggest they take a course or two in the computer science department.
This probably won't get read, but I need a way to procrastinate my thesis :) I can't say much about the financial aid policies of lesser institutions, but I do know my college's financial aid policies pretty well, and the other elite institutions have been catching up to us lately. Just some rough figures for Princeton, the median income for a family on financial aid here is $90,000/year, and the average family on financial aid only pays $10,000/year to Princeton. Our aid policies are all need-based, so it depends on your exact financial situation, but I'm guessing that "upper-middle class" will be somewhere in that range. Also, education is an investment, so you might also want to consider student loans. Princeton doesn't make you take out a loan as part of the aid package either, but if you need a loan to help cover the family contribution, they are available.
:)
The best advice I can give you is, for the most part, apply to colleges without looking at the price tag. Then, when you get your acceptances, look at the aid awards and make a decision then.
Oh, and if you're interested in CS, I just have to say that I'm currently taking Brian Kernighan's class, and it's awesome
You forget Exchange's actually killer feature -- the ability to share with other users. That's what's really driving adoption to Exchange at my University. I've found that a lot of people don't really care about the integration of calendaring into their email client. What they care about is the ability to share their emails, their calendar, their contacts, their tasks, etc., with other users.
Currently, Exchange is the only wide-spread server-side app that supports this kind of sharing. Google is getting there, but not with the ease-of-use that Exchange offers (and I never thought I'd say that in reference to an MS product). And right now, MAPI has become a de-facto standard. In the short-run, email clients will need to be able to integrate with MAPI and support sharing the same way Outlook does, or better, before Outlook's dominance is even touched. It's possible to develop a new, open standard, but it would have to offer something much more than Exchange does to get any kind of widespread adoption. But right now, too many companies are too heavily invested in an Exchange infrastructure to move to something else (i.e., all their emails, calendar items, etc. are on an Exchange server, and they won't want to lose them or spend much effort migrating to something else).
Sorry for the flamebait, but you're a moron. Here's why:
/.?
1. The software development industry is very different from the drug industry. In particular, look at the costs of bringing something to market. It costs far more to bring a patented drug to market than it does a computer program. So you have higher costs you have to recover.
2. Where does a lot of support for Linux come from? Companies like Red Hat and IBM, who are also competing and want to turn a profit. However, IBM and Red Hat can support different niches of the market without competing directly. This is harder to do with prescription drugs.
3. In effect, cooperation and competition are competing models. Cooperation appears to be working well in software (I'm currently using Firefox on Gentoo), but that model has failed to gain serious traction in the drug industry. If cooperation like this is so great, why hasn't it flourished more? Why aren't we seeing more stories of people cooperating like this working on new drugs?
Sigh, why do I try to promote standard, mainstream economics on
I never said the current system was perfect. I will agree that it (like everything else) is imperfect.
OTOH, be aware that, for example, companies tried to develop cheap generics of patented AIDS drugs for use in Africa. And they didn't go through thorough testing. And it turned out that the drugs weren't as good as the brand-name ones (in this case, it involved taking cocktails of drugs and putting them into one pill -- something even the patent holders hadn't been able to do successfully). In this case, the drugs weren't as effective, which then led to drug-resistant HIV viruses surviving.
Good intentions, yes. But we know where they lead....
3. Once the drug companies patents run out, anyone can produce generic medicines cheaply.
And how many millions of people will die in the meantime?
And how many millions would have died had the drug never been brought to the market in the first place?
Your comment shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the way things work in a capitalist society. Even with this drug, the researchers will have to convince some drug company to manufacture and distribute this drug. How will they do it? By convincing the manufacturer that they will be able to make a profit off of it. Here's the crux of the issue -- you state, As the above example shows, you don't need extra profit to develop a new drug. That's true. But in rare circumstances. The key is when you say "a" new drug. Not many new drugs. Why hasn't this method been used for lots of other patented drugs? Most likely b/c it's impracticable on a large scale.
You're unlikely to replicate the research large drug companies do in academia. Somebody has to pay for the research. The money has to come from somewhere. That somewhere is usually from profits from drugs. And as I said earlier, profits are an indication of social utility -- how much people value the drug. The more profits, the more people value the drug. The larger the profit, the more good the drug does, and the more incentive to produce that drug (which is why capitalism is pretty cool). While you are denying people the drug now, it will be available to them in the future. With most patented medicines, the drug wouldn't have been developed in the first place if the drug companies didn't think they could have turned a profit. As I said, it's better to have the drug available in 14 years or so (or however long patents expire) than not have the drug available at all.
And admittedly, I haven't read the article. However, the summary mentions that the researchers are mimicking the actions of a patented drug. How do you think it was found out that this particular action helped in the first place? I'd be willing to bet my $.02 that it came from commercial drug companies hoping to make a profit.
Bottom line: Drug companies have to make a profit. They have to recover costs (and R&D costs are huge, as are clinical trials, and a lot of money gets spent researching drugs that will never make it to market). Patents ensure this and also incentivize drug companies to develop the most useful medicines.
No, it's not. Inventor's don't have to share anything with the outside world. Patents are simply recognizing the inventor's right to say, "I'll show you how to do X if you promise to do Y." Why shouldn't the inventor have the right do do that? It's his invention after all. There may be specific problems with the implementation of our current patent system, sure. But granting monopolistic privileges in some form is still a good idea and respect's the inventor's rights.
The statement, "We in academic medicine can either choose to use our ideas to make large sums of money for small numbers of people, or to look outwards to the global community and make affordable medicines," is fallacious. Here's why.
1. Drug companies have to turn a profit; otherwise, they don't produce the drugs.
2. The more money a drug company makes off a medicine, the more valuable it is. A drug company's profits are a function of how much people value that drug -- the drug's social utility (this is basic economics).
3. Once the drug companies patents run out, anyone can produce generic medicines cheaply.
Large profits give drug companies an incentive to develop the most useful medicines (the more profit, the more useful it is), and bringing a drug to market is very, very costly, especially in the US with the f*cked up FDA and all that. However, patents do expire after a time, and then everyone can benefit from the cheap medicines.
Look at it this way: What's better -- not having a drug at all, or having the drug be very costly for about 14 years and then having cheap generic equivalents? (While you can make the argument that a specific drug X or Y would still be developed in the absence of profit motives, this is overlooking the fact that reduced profits mean a reduced incentive to produce drugs in the future. This won't apply to every single drug, but rather is a statement about a general trend which does have exceptions.)
The reasoning is fallacious, and I think other replies don't clearly phrase the issue.
When Schilling released cdrools under the GPL, he then granted whoever received it under that license (e.g., Debian) the right to redistribute under the GPL. This cannot be revoked.
However, he can relicense the code he owns the copyright to. But, that license only applies to subsequent distributions of his code, not to distributions under the old copyright.
Simple question, simple answer:
If I know that, no matter what I do now, 30 years down the road, I'll have my "fair" share of IPv4 address space, why should I worry about getting it right now? What incentive do I have to purchase address space if I know that either someone will take it away from me by force, or I will get it anyway? It may be seem unfair to fault China for not getting more addresses earlier on, but you also have to remember that institutions like MIT were the driving force behind the internet in the first place. They invested early and helped make it what it is today, so shouldn't they get some reward for what they've done in the past?
Infringement of property rights often seems like a simple solution to a seemingly simple problem, but property rights form the foundation of economic activity.
I've already blogged about it a little here, but I think the reason the DSM got ignored is because it's unsubstantiated. I mean, does the left really need another raTHer-gate/Quran-desecration mess on its hands? Basically, you have somebody gives a piece of paper to the media, and all of a sudden it's absolutely accurate? I'm sorry, but we need more substantiation to it than that.
Go ahead, mod me flamebait and silence me, if you want. I really don't care.
And not just that, but the effect of the DSM has been overblown. IIRC, the big thing about it was that it said intelligence was being fixed around policy. Not that it was being made up, but that they wanted to pursue a specific course of action, and so they chose to emphasize certain intelligence more than others.
And while we're on that vein, let's not forget that we already had a congressional probe which said the Bush administration did NOT lie about what the intelligence said, the intelligence was wrong. Everybody thought Iraq had WMD, including John Kerry!
Uh, did you read what the grandparent actually wrote?
its decay changes water properties.
(emphasis mine) You're right -- it's not chemically reacting, as it's inert, and it's not causing what we think of as nuclear reactions, but radiation can still change water's properties.
Hmm, I could propose this to a Nobel Laureate who got the prize for giving the first indirect evidence of gravity waves, but he probably doesn't need the money. He's also the one who taught me Special Relativity. That being said, just looking at the proof is riddiculous. The x=ct and x'=ct' is absurd and completely unjustified. It's only true in a special case, when v=c. When v=c, you get all kinds of wierd and funny things. Anyway, that's all the time I had to glance over it. If he could legitimely disprove GR, he'd definitely get a Nobel.
No, he did not veto it. But his signature was very reluctant. However, you also have to look at the fact that the person strongly opposing this is a Republican, and the other 2 Republican commissioners are opposing the ruling as well. It's the Democratic commissioners who refuse to support an appeal. RTFA:
One of the reasons it's a good time to (fix this) now is you don't know who's benefiting. Both the Democrats and Republicans used the Internet very effectively in the last campaign.
On page 71 of the report, we find this interesting tidbit:
Mapes eventually tracked down Lieutenant Colonel Killian's son who, according to her notes, told her that then-Lieutenant Bush had volunteered for active duty in Vietnam but did not have enough flight hours to qualify.
Other parts in the report indicate that there was no waiting list for pilots.
CNN.com had complete properly weighed exit polls.
/.'s forums (my email's public). Also, I had a response typed to your previous post, but I don't feel like re-typing it as it's 1:30 a.m. now and I need to get some sleep. In any case, come back when you learn a little bit more about debating and how to find the real argument in something, rather than act as if something purpously riddiculous were totally serious, and then ignore the real meat of the argument.
So, we're supposed to trust CNN, a liberally-biased organization, that they were able to properly weight the exit polls? That, in and of itself, looks like a pretty weak spot in using their exit polls, and provides an explanation for why they've been wrong: the country's demographics have changed for the Conservative, and CNN hasn't caught on/is in denial.
OK, you totally missed the point here. I was exaggerating to mock your point. Of course I realize you don't need continual martial law; however, your post seemed to imply that we needed it (keeping the military in an area in force after we've cleared it out sounds a lot like martial law). Lastly, you never addressed the real points behind the my previous post.
OK, let's get this straight: SOME experts at the Pentagon said we'd need double the troops that we have. Let's not forget that the media was saying the exact same thing about Germany in 1945/46 as they are about Iraq now.
Anyway, I suggest continuing this argument by email so as not to pollute
The great-grandparent post was a troll. The other thing you have to take into consideration here is sampling error. Ukraine was a much different story.
Where do you see that we're retaking the country multiple times? Do you want to suggest that we need to populate the country with marines, enough to hold the ENTIRE country under martial law? There's always going to be places where the enemy will hide, we can't realistically be in them all at the same time. So what if they go back to a place where they've been before. That doesn't necessarily make them harder to kill, and I don't see how holding those places will make it easier to win.
We lost Vietnam due to lack of public support here at home. A more appropriate analogy would be post-World War II, where the media were saying the exact same things about Germany then as they are about Iraq now.
First, you're making the wrong assumption that rich people are conservative. I'm sorry, but that's just plain wrong. Look at this. Yes, I know it's from Rush Limbaugh, but I won't accept an ad hominem attack on him. An anecdote: in my state, Wyoming, only one county went for Kerry: Teton county, home of Jackson Hole, which is where all the rich, out-of-state people live. Teton county has about 15,000 residents and 20,000 people employed there (because people can't afford to live there, so they have to commute). Next, journalists are liberals, and they decide what to report. I think it should open some eyes when you have ABC saying they need to hold Bush to a higher standard of truth than Kerry, or when you have the Newsweek editor or publisher (I can't remember which) saying that positive coverage of Kerry is worth 15% (later revised downward to 5%). Sorry, but the data don't fit your proposed explanation, so the explanation has to be wrong.
I think it's important to tell the whole truth. The media never mentions when we open schools, when we open hospitals, when we improve infrastructure, or anything else like that. The media is only telling one side of the Iraq story, and it's the side designed to harm American morale. Why don't they start reporting on the good things that are happening over there as well?
The Kerry by 20 in PA came from early numbers, and Karl Rove was even quoted mentioning it. They had Kerry tied in North Carolina. However, when the exit polls vary far from months of previous polling, that's got to be pretty telling.
John McCain is liberal relative to most other republicans; the same is true with Arlen Spector. However, in general, they're centrists. That final remark was food for thought. Next, Bill Clinton raised the top income tax rate from George H.W. Bush. Also, economically speaking, Bill Clinton is a moderate, and Barry Goldwater was a social conservative (and a nutcase in my opinion. 1964 was the last time that Wyoming went Democrat). Goldwater suggested doing nothing with the taxes, Clinton raised them. However, this whole analogy is flawed: you're comparing apples to oranges here. Furthermore, Bush made the income tax system MORE progressive. Crunch the numbers instead of relying on baseless allegations about how Bush is only taking care of the wealthy.
All right, I'll bite at the troll.
As far as the vote in Ukraine goes, they didn't have months worth of polling to compare the exit polls to. We did, and the exit polls were way off, as I mentioned in another post.
Fine. You claim that we have poor planning. However, I have 2 questions to ask you, and until you can answer them, I won't accept your claim that we have poor planning. If the planning is poor, what would you have done differently? Now, you mention more troops, but that brings me to my second question (although it's more an extension of the first question): What would more troops do? I mean, it's not like throwing more troops at a problem will magically solve it, just like throwing money at a problem won't solve it (although some democrats seem to think so). Troops aren't engaged in actual offensive operations, they're being attacked. More troops means more targets to be attacked. I don't see how sending more trooops over there will necessarily improve the situation.
You want to claim that we have poor planning? Fine. Give me more substantive evidence of it other than things aren't going perfectly. Nothing's perfect; just because we have casualties doesn't necessarily mean it's poor planning.
The employees write the stories, they decide what to report. Furthermore, you never address any of the actual warrants of bias in the article which I presented. You just ignore it and try to refute something else with a flawed claim.
As far as exit polls, when you have exit polls showing John Kerry up by 20% in PA, where the previous polls had shown Bush and Kerry in a statistical tie, I think it shows something wrong with the exit polls. Explain how they had results so radically different from previous polls, because assuming the exit polls correct would require changing the laws of statistical probability. One of the reasons I heard the exit polls were off was because they tended to be more concentrated in urban areas, where they could get more people interviewed as more voted there. However, the urban areas tend to be heavily dmeocratic.
Lastly, I'm not saying coverage of the war casualties is "leftist." However, plastering the pictures of coffins of dead soldiers across the news media and the internet definitely has a detrimental effect on the morale of the American people. Showing only the bad effects of the war, never the positive effects (like opening schools, improving infrastructure, etc.) is leftist. Furthermore, it's an invasion of the privacy of the family of the dead soldier, and, as I stated before, ABC is implying that showing the pictures of the coffins is a good thing, which makes me think it's a liberal bias.
One final piece of food for thought: Conservatives tend to think of the news as liberally biased; liberals tend to think of the news as conservatively biased. So, when you think of something as completely fair, that should flag you that it's biased in your favor.
While I agree that the tsunami coverage is coverage of an important event by bloggers, I don't see it making the kind of impact as the other examples of the ABC story. Thus, while it was coverage of a signifigant event, I don't see it as something important in and of itself.
Not just that omission, but the blatent bias in the whole article bugs me. Like this quotation:
Bloggers have taken the lead over traditional media on a number of stories, including racist remarks made by then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., at former Sen. Strom Thurmond's birthday party.
Maybe the remarks had some racial overtones. However, we all know who politicians really are: people who make a career off kissing ass. I think Trent Lott's comment was more about trying to be nice to a 100-year-old guy at his 100th birthday party than anything else. However, they miss several other major stories about what bloggers have done. Furthermore, IIRC, the Trent Lott thing happened in 2002, so maybe they should mention something signifigant that bloggers did in 2004, if they're the people of the year, something more substantial than a passing reference to Howard Dean (oh, wait, their impact was on helping Bush, and ABC can't expose anything that casts the left in a bad light). And then there's this comment:
It was a blogger who got the first photographs of coffins carrying U.S. soldiers arriving in the United States from Iraq.
Again, another story about the leftist bloggers, battling against the evil republicans. I'm sorry, but this just seems one-sided to me. Not just that, but I think the families of those killed in Iraq deserve a bit of privacy, not to have pictures of their loved ones coffins spread all over the internet. However, it's exactly this which ABC is praising as a Good Thing (tm). Also, wouldn't this have also occured in 2003, when the war started?
OK, so I grant that maybe it's possible to do that. However, certain challenges remain, such as getting the right voting machine(s). Nevertheless, you'd still have to get way more people involved in the process, and I don't think you're going to keep them all silent. The VB script was, according to my understanding of it, elementary. It's really easy to program that kind of stuff; I want to see something that would work in the real situation, as all the little factors add up, including to code bloat.
As far as media bias goes, I quote myself: "most of the media, except Fox and talk radio, were out to defeat Bush." I hate it when people cite fox news as a source of conservative media bias, when you have NPR, ABC, CBS, etc., out there.
As for your counterexample, take Bush and Kerry's distortions of military service in Vietnam. One got reported as if it were the gospel truth from Day one, the other was ignored until the Kerry campaign issued a press release trying to debunk them, and then Swiftboat Veterans for Truth were always mentioned as a "debunked" organization. Also, the media entirely ignored their complaints about Kerry's post-war testimony (SVT formed, IIRC, in mid-April or earlier), which really hurt a lot of American soldiers still in the country who didn't fake/overexaggerate 3 injuries to get 3 purple hearts to get out of Nam using one of the least known and least used military regulations. Also, I'd like to point out that Bush never "lied" under any fair sense of the word; even Michael Moore admits that he never "lied" in the sense of inentionally deceiving us (George Tenet said it was a "slam dunk" that Saddam had WMD stockpiles). Furthermore, when Kerry bases his claims of being an adequate commander-in-chief off of his war record, and when Kerry's campaign centers off how Bush is a bad commander-in-chief, I think that his exaggeration of his war service is a really relevant issue. Moreso than Bush's Guard Service. Furthermore, one study I saw showed that Bush got record negative coverage from the media, especially in the days leading up to the election, while Kerry got record good coverage. I don't see how that's fair at all.
Also, a random rant: To those who bitch about how we could elect a person who lost all 3 debates, I'll say this. As a republican who voted Bush, I watched the first debate (I had classes/road trips during the other two), and I'll admit that Kerry did the better debating, in the sense that Kerry better defended himself. However, in making that complaint, you want people to listen to what the politicians say without taking into consideration any external factors (without questioning what they said); in essense, you're complaining about people not blindly following what Kerry has to say. Yet, you also seem to complain that most Americans are lemmings who'll listen to the government without questioning it. Think about it.
I didn't imply paper receipts would be wasted. My point was just that they weren't a panacea. There are other problems. For example, in 2000, changing one vote per machine would change the outcome. Now, imagine if someone were to somehow counterfeit receipts and feed them into the machine (althoug I suppose printing a barcoded serial number and then scanning it might solve the problem), and then challenge the outcome in court? Farfetched, but, IMHO, entirely more plausible than the situation this story is originally about.