I can see this becoming a trend. Every headline about a band making millions in a matter of days by distributing their music online, is going to attract the attention of the other musicians. Eventually, they will catch on.
So what do you think will happen when more prominent artists start dropping the labels, realizing that they could make more money if they don't give 95% of their revenue away? I predict that the RIAA will tighten its grip, and try to work with Clearchannel to eliminate non-RIAA affiliated artists get in mass media (radio/TV). I don't think they are going to just sit around and let their cash cows drop out one-by-one.
But it's not a treatment! It's just a couple of pieces of data.
It's a in-vitro study of one tiny aspect of one pathway that MAY be helpful in TRYING to create a treatment.
If a cure is a 20-layer cake, these people have created a recipe for the syrup for the cream, for one of the layers. According to you, that negates the need to buy ingredients, find out the recipes for the other layers, hire the chef, or actually make the cake!
You've missed the point altogether. Please read what I wrote again, then respond.
It's not about what SHOULD happen, but rather what can happen in reality.
Like it or not, but resources are SCARCE. Not everyone can have everything... and expensive healthcare easily falls into that category. But then again, I've already written that, you just chose to ignore it.
It's possible... but ironically it's likely to happen if Africa continues to receive inadequate quantities of drugs. You see, evolution only works this way, when the mutations you're looking for provide a reproductive advantage. If we can treat HIV-infected patients in such a way that allows them to successfully reproduce (and modern medications taken appropriately already do), then there is no selective pressure for such a resistance to develop. Even if a minor selective pressure does exist, it's not significant enough to cause a shift in dominant genes rapidly enough to provide us with natural immunity before our knowledge of biology will surpass the ability of HIV to fight back.
Well, I think you've hit the nail on the head. But consider this - your argument essentially boils down to saying that healthcare is a human right. And for those who are about to spew bile at me for saying that, please read the rest of the post.
Let's compare healthcare to food, for instance. In the civilized world, it's a nearly universal agreement, that people should have enough food to survive. Hence, the different forms of welfare programs, food stamps, etc... We provide people who are poor, with enough money or money equivalents, to obtain sufficient sustenance. We don't, however, provide them with 5-course chef-prepared meals every night.
The problem is, however, that people who flame the government and "corporations" for not providing medication for everyone, are essentially suggesting that we provide full healthcare for everyone... which equates to giving out filet mignon welfare, given the costs of many cutting edge drugs and treatments. Now I don't have a problem with the concept of this "filet mignon welfare"... except that I cannot personally afford it... and neither can you.
So as a society, we will at some point have to face the realization that we cannot provide the highest quality healthcare to every member of our society, no matter how hard we try. I wish I had the solution to this problem, but I do not. If I come up with one, I promise to share it with the world, as there is nothing more I'd like to see, than a world where the only diseases people die of, are ones for which cures and treatments haven't been discovered yet. But that's not a world of today, nor do I envision such a world in the near future.
Science is expensive. Large-scale high-throughput biomedical science is even more expensive. Clinical trials are EVEN MORE expensive. Where do you expect that the money for all of that comes from.
It seems that on Slashdot, the prevalent opinion is that we should all get whatever we want, whenever we want, for free (or nearly free). That's not how the real world works. Many scientists are working on important biological pathways... but it is largely with the financing of the pharmaceutical companies, that they are able to translate their discoveries into drugs.
Could we improve the system? Of course. Should we ban consumer-targeting pharmaceutical advertisement? Absolutely. Should we heavily regulate drug companies? Certainly.
But one thing we should be careful about doing, is assuming that all biomedical science will be miraculously well-financed if drug companies disappear.
They are only immune to one of the subtypes of the virus, due to the mutations of the cellular receptor that the virus uses for entry. There are a variety of strains of the virus that will still infect them, albeit not nearly as productively as those without these mutations.
There are a lot of things that block HIV in cell culture.
Yet after literally hundreds of millions in financing, there isn't yet any real curative treatment. Why? Because HIV is a retrovirus with one of the worst polymerases known. It's just so bad at copying itself, that any treatment applied in-vivo acts only as a selective pressure.
Same is the case for HIV vaccines - even though there ARE conserved regions of the virus, they aren't very good targets, and the ones that are good targets are too antigenically fluid to be targeted.
In the end, my opinion as a virologist is that stopping the spread of HIV, and continuing to develop a larger palette of inhibitors are the proper solutions to the HIV problem. If we treat the people who have been infected, and don't infect any more... HIV will not be a problem after 2 generations.
Well, my numbers come from NYU School of Medicine, where PhD candidates make $27'000 (raised from $25000 a few months ago)... but getting salaried fellowships is pretty hard for a candidate.
I certainly don't think that it qualifies as a "liberal arts college".
Re:What country?
on
Kimchi in Space
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Where do scientists earn $300k/year?
In the U.S., you have to be a tenured department chair, with a Howard Hughes fellowship or the likes of it... in order to make $300k/year as a scientist. I figure about 0.001% of all scientists fit that bill.
Graduate Students: $0 - $25k/year ($40-60k/year in the industry, as a technician) Post Docs: $25k-35k/year ($40-100k/year in the industry, as a junior scientist, i.e. technician) Fellows: $35-50k/year Assistant/Associate professors: $50-60k/year Full Professors w/o fellowships, etc: $60-150k/year
The vast majority of all scientists in the U.S. have trouble making ends meet... not earning $300k/year... and I am talking about the BIOMEDICAL scientists, who are the HIGHEST PAID.
Space can't "[not] conduct heat well" and "[be] chilly" at the same time.
The first part is true - it doesn't conduct heat well... which is a problem for any object that receives sunlight (not weakened by the atmosphere), because it cannot release the heat it receives into the environment, except by radiation. That's why the "day" side of the moon has temperatures in excess of 100C. Same is true for satellites, which is why they are generally covered with reflective panels, to minimize heat absorption. On the other hand, if you colored them black, they'd burn out rather quickly, if not due to sheer temperature, then due to rapid temperature changes, since LEO has a period on the order of 1 hour... and they'd be going from 100C to -200C every hour.
I don't know about quickbooks, but I have never had any trouble using Gimpshop and OpenOffice in lieu of MS or Adobe offerings... and neither has anyone else I've exposed to it.
I call this the "King's New Robes" effect, which is the same logic by which "boutique" products are sold - you can take the same crap, repackage it in a pretty way, and charge 10X as much, and people will flock to buy it by the hundred.
In the past year I've had a lot of success converting frustrated Windows users into Linux people... and simply convincing both Windows and Mac users that Linux was a legitimate operating system. However, I've also frequently run into a scenario where I would be showing somebody my Dell laptop running Ubuntu, and they'd be REALLY excited about the features, the intuitive UI, the eye candy... and then they'd ask me how much it was... and when I told them it was free, they'd be disappointed!
It's a vote on a chance to vote to do something about this problem... not a vote to actually do anything useful. This law is just one more notch on the senator's legislative re-election portfolio. As in: "look, I am for net neutrality, I even co-authored a law!". In the meantime, the law gets stuck in committee, or even if it comes to a vote, and even if it passes, and even if it gets signed by the president, the matter of fact is that all that has happened is that it the question got kicked to the FCC, which will promptly support the telecoms.
As long as you don't run two 30 inch monitors, any name brand video card for about 200 bucks will give you great playable rates at 1680 x 1050.
Evidently, you've never actually PLAYED Crysis. On an AMD64 Dual Core at 2.4GHz, 2GB of RAM, and Nvidia 8800GTS 640MB (>>$200), I needed to reduce my resolution to 1280x1024 and set everything to Medium, to have the framerate not drop into single digits or low teens, and stay at 20-30fps.
While many here on Slashdot seem rather cynical when it comes to adoption of Linux on the desktop, I am not nearly so jaded. Not only am I an example of a non-programmer-type who switched from Windows to Linux, but in the past 12 months, I have seen countless other examples, culminating in a large number of people switching during the early days of the Vista fiasco. They were convinced that if they had to re-learn how to use an operating system, they might as well just switch to Linux.
On a number of non-computer oriented websites I visit, including ones where the majority of the members are over 30 years old, the adoption of Linux has been phenomenal... skyrocketing to >10% within one year.
I think the times for "year of linux on the desktop" jokes is past. There is no reason for the sarcasm. With almost every OEM selling Linux PCs, and AMD/ATI adopting a more pro-Linux approach, I think that there is no reason for sarcasm. This IS the year of Linux on the desktop. We're living it.
"Hey nice laptop you got there. We need to hrm... search it... will have to take it down to forensics... we'll send it to you when we're done..."... a year later...
"Where's my laptop?" "Still searching..." "Can I get it back" "No! National security... 9/11... terrorists... child pornography... gay marriage... cats and dogs living together... enough key words yet?"
Actually, the major research centers didn't even see a penny's worth of an increase. Instead, much of the NIH funding was diverted to arcane projects at unknown colleges, and earmarked for things like research into efficacy of remote prayer... or studies into the effectiveness of abstinence, as a method of HIV prevention.
We read a story about a religious court issuing a secret death sentence to a journalist for reading and distributing ideas about women's rights... yet the majority of the posts regarding this issue are critical of the United States?
Doesn't this seem a bit twisted to you? I'm not defending the US actions in Iraq, or Afghanistan, I am only saying that perhaps that is not the subject of this debate.
I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that when we assign blame, as a community, in the potential murder of this young man, we should blame the murderers... otherwise this looks largely like the criticism of Israel:
- You should not bomb their militants... it kills the militants and sometimes civilians. - But they try to kill our civilians every day! - Yes, but you are better armed and richer, so why don't you defend yourselves?
Or here's another good one:
Two social workers are walking at night in a dangerous part of town. They hear moans from the alley, and they come upon a man who has been severely beaten, robbed, and stabbed repeatedly. One of them social worker looks at the man who's mouthing "help" and says to the other: "Wow, the people who did this to him must be oppressed and need our help".
Slashdot Mirror
Apple released a non-3G iPhone, to ensure that everyone who buys the first iPhone for $500, will buy the iPhone3G for $500, a year later.
I can see this becoming a trend. Every headline about a band making millions in a matter of days by distributing their music online, is going to attract the attention of the other musicians. Eventually, they will catch on.
So what do you think will happen when more prominent artists start dropping the labels, realizing that they could make more money if they don't give 95% of their revenue away? I predict that the RIAA will tighten its grip, and try to work with Clearchannel to eliminate non-RIAA affiliated artists get in mass media (radio/TV). I don't think they are going to just sit around and let their cash cows drop out one-by-one.
I am just going to stop posting, because I feel like I am talking to a wall.
That's the problem I am talking about, except you completely ignored the latter part of my post!
But it's not a treatment! It's just a couple of pieces of data.
It's a in-vitro study of one tiny aspect of one pathway that MAY be helpful in TRYING to create a treatment.
If a cure is a 20-layer cake, these people have created a recipe for the syrup for the cream, for one of the layers. According to you, that negates the need to buy ingredients, find out the recipes for the other layers, hire the chef, or actually make the cake!
You've missed the point altogether. Please read what I wrote again, then respond.
It's not about what SHOULD happen, but rather what can happen in reality.
Like it or not, but resources are SCARCE. Not everyone can have everything... and expensive healthcare easily falls into that category. But then again, I've already written that, you just chose to ignore it.
It's possible... but ironically it's likely to happen if Africa continues to receive inadequate quantities of drugs. You see, evolution only works this way, when the mutations you're looking for provide a reproductive advantage. If we can treat HIV-infected patients in such a way that allows them to successfully reproduce (and modern medications taken appropriately already do), then there is no selective pressure for such a resistance to develop. Even if a minor selective pressure does exist, it's not significant enough to cause a shift in dominant genes rapidly enough to provide us with natural immunity before our knowledge of biology will surpass the ability of HIV to fight back.
Well, I think you've hit the nail on the head. But consider this - your argument essentially boils down to saying that healthcare is a human right. And for those who are about to spew bile at me for saying that, please read the rest of the post.
Let's compare healthcare to food, for instance. In the civilized world, it's a nearly universal agreement, that people should have enough food to survive. Hence, the different forms of welfare programs, food stamps, etc... We provide people who are poor, with enough money or money equivalents, to obtain sufficient sustenance. We don't, however, provide them with 5-course chef-prepared meals every night.
The problem is, however, that people who flame the government and "corporations" for not providing medication for everyone, are essentially suggesting that we provide full healthcare for everyone... which equates to giving out filet mignon welfare, given the costs of many cutting edge drugs and treatments. Now I don't have a problem with the concept of this "filet mignon welfare"... except that I cannot personally afford it... and neither can you.
So as a society, we will at some point have to face the realization that we cannot provide the highest quality healthcare to every member of our society, no matter how hard we try. I wish I had the solution to this problem, but I do not. If I come up with one, I promise to share it with the world, as there is nothing more I'd like to see, than a world where the only diseases people die of, are ones for which cures and treatments haven't been discovered yet. But that's not a world of today, nor do I envision such a world in the near future.
Can we please stop the trolling?
Science is expensive. Large-scale high-throughput biomedical science is even more expensive. Clinical trials are EVEN MORE expensive. Where do you expect that the money for all of that comes from.
It seems that on Slashdot, the prevalent opinion is that we should all get whatever we want, whenever we want, for free (or nearly free). That's not how the real world works. Many scientists are working on important biological pathways... but it is largely with the financing of the pharmaceutical companies, that they are able to translate their discoveries into drugs.
Could we improve the system? Of course.
Should we ban consumer-targeting pharmaceutical advertisement? Absolutely.
Should we heavily regulate drug companies? Certainly.
But one thing we should be careful about doing, is assuming that all biomedical science will be miraculously well-financed if drug companies disappear.
They are only immune to one of the subtypes of the virus, due to the mutations of the cellular receptor that the virus uses for entry. There are a variety of strains of the virus that will still infect them, albeit not nearly as productively as those without these mutations.
There are a lot of things that block HIV in cell culture.
Yet after literally hundreds of millions in financing, there isn't yet any real curative treatment. Why? Because HIV is a retrovirus with one of the worst polymerases known. It's just so bad at copying itself, that any treatment applied in-vivo acts only as a selective pressure.
Same is the case for HIV vaccines - even though there ARE conserved regions of the virus, they aren't very good targets, and the ones that are good targets are too antigenically fluid to be targeted.
In the end, my opinion as a virologist is that stopping the spread of HIV, and continuing to develop a larger palette of inhibitors are the proper solutions to the HIV problem. If we treat the people who have been infected, and don't infect any more... HIV will not be a problem after 2 generations.
Well, my numbers come from NYU School of Medicine, where PhD candidates make $27'000 (raised from $25000 a few months ago)... but getting salaried fellowships is pretty hard for a candidate.
I certainly don't think that it qualifies as a "liberal arts college".
Where do scientists earn $300k/year?
In the U.S., you have to be a tenured department chair, with a Howard Hughes fellowship or the likes of it... in order to make $300k/year as a scientist. I figure about 0.001% of all scientists fit that bill.
Graduate Students: $0 - $25k/year ($40-60k/year in the industry, as a technician)
Post Docs: $25k-35k/year ($40-100k/year in the industry, as a junior scientist, i.e. technician)
Fellows: $35-50k/year
Assistant/Associate professors: $50-60k/year
Full Professors w/o fellowships, etc: $60-150k/year
The vast majority of all scientists in the U.S. have trouble making ends meet... not earning $300k/year... and I am talking about the BIOMEDICAL scientists, who are the HIGHEST PAID.
Space can't "[not] conduct heat well" and "[be] chilly" at the same time.
The first part is true - it doesn't conduct heat well... which is a problem for any object that receives sunlight (not weakened by the atmosphere), because it cannot release the heat it receives into the environment, except by radiation. That's why the "day" side of the moon has temperatures in excess of 100C. Same is true for satellites, which is why they are generally covered with reflective panels, to minimize heat absorption. On the other hand, if you colored them black, they'd burn out rather quickly, if not due to sheer temperature, then due to rapid temperature changes, since LEO has a period on the order of 1 hour... and they'd be going from 100C to -200C every hour.
... a revolutionary, new method of self-destructing secret, space-based satellites. The new method is called overheating, due to a black, dull color.
I don't know about quickbooks, but I have never had any trouble using Gimpshop and OpenOffice in lieu of MS or Adobe offerings... and neither has anyone else I've exposed to it.
I call this the "King's New Robes" effect, which is the same logic by which "boutique" products are sold - you can take the same crap, repackage it in a pretty way, and charge 10X as much, and people will flock to buy it by the hundred.
In the past year I've had a lot of success converting frustrated Windows users into Linux people... and simply convincing both Windows and Mac users that Linux was a legitimate operating system. However, I've also frequently run into a scenario where I would be showing somebody my Dell laptop running Ubuntu, and they'd be REALLY excited about the features, the intuitive UI, the eye candy... and then they'd ask me how much it was... and when I told them it was free, they'd be disappointed!
Not quite... it's more like:
You may blog at the Olympics, as long as you don't write anything that anyone wants to read.
It's a vote on a chance to vote to do something about this problem... not a vote to actually do anything useful. This law is just one more notch on the senator's legislative re-election portfolio. As in: "look, I am for net neutrality, I even co-authored a law!". In the meantime, the law gets stuck in committee, or even if it comes to a vote, and even if it passes, and even if it gets signed by the president, the matter of fact is that all that has happened is that it the question got kicked to the FCC, which will promptly support the telecoms.
Everyone wins... except the customers/voters.
I suppose it's time for a drive-by argument.
While many here on Slashdot seem rather cynical when it comes to adoption of Linux on the desktop, I am not nearly so jaded. Not only am I an example of a non-programmer-type who switched from Windows to Linux, but in the past 12 months, I have seen countless other examples, culminating in a large number of people switching during the early days of the Vista fiasco. They were convinced that if they had to re-learn how to use an operating system, they might as well just switch to Linux.
On a number of non-computer oriented websites I visit, including ones where the majority of the members are over 30 years old, the adoption of Linux has been phenomenal... skyrocketing to >10% within one year.
I think the times for "year of linux on the desktop" jokes is past. There is no reason for the sarcasm. With almost every OEM selling Linux PCs, and AMD/ATI adopting a more pro-Linux approach, I think that there is no reason for sarcasm. This IS the year of Linux on the desktop. We're living it.
Actually, that's the case with the confiscations:
... a year later...
"Hey nice laptop you got there. We need to hrm... search it... will have to take it down to forensics... we'll send it to you when we're done..."
"Where's my laptop?"
"Still searching..."
"Can I get it back"
"No! National security... 9/11... terrorists... child pornography... gay marriage... cats and dogs living together... enough key words yet?"
As far as I understand, they cannot arrest you, because you haven't committed a crime, but they can refuse you entry into the country.
But IANAL.
Actually, the major research centers didn't even see a penny's worth of an increase. Instead, much of the NIH funding was diverted to arcane projects at unknown colleges, and earmarked for things like research into efficacy of remote prayer... or studies into the effectiveness of abstinence, as a method of HIV prevention.
There is something that bothers me here.
We read a story about a religious court issuing a secret death sentence to a journalist for reading and distributing ideas about women's rights... yet the majority of the posts regarding this issue are critical of the United States?
Doesn't this seem a bit twisted to you? I'm not defending the US actions in Iraq, or Afghanistan, I am only saying that perhaps that is not the subject of this debate.
I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that when we assign blame, as a community, in the potential murder of this young man, we should blame the murderers... otherwise this looks largely like the criticism of Israel:
- You should not bomb their militants... it kills the militants and sometimes civilians.
- But they try to kill our civilians every day!
- Yes, but you are better armed and richer, so why don't you defend yourselves?
Or here's another good one:
Two social workers are walking at night in a dangerous part of town. They hear moans from the alley, and they come upon a man who has been severely beaten, robbed, and stabbed repeatedly. One of them social worker looks at the man who's mouthing "help" and says to the other: "Wow, the people who did this to him must be oppressed and need our help".