What they are paying for is the metal and labor that went into producing that vehicle. But what if the idea behind a police cruiser was patented as microsoft plans to patent this.
But people patent pieces of police cruisers all the time! Specialized equipment designed to appeal to law enforcement users, integrated security of communications equipment particularly needed by fleet operators, quick release custom shotgun brackets, vehicle-powered rescue hardware... the point is that different companies strive to out-innovate each other and compete for the tax dollars that are going to be spent on such things as municipal emergency equipment. If there is no incentive (profit) waiting for the company that comes up with the best recipe at the best price, then there's nothing to lure in the investment that must be risked in paying people to dream up and prototype such things. That's exactly where patents shine: they encourage private people and companies to take chances and risk loss in order to ultimately produce a better, cheaper, more attractive product.
Municipal governments need well-priced innovative things just like consumers do. If the designers and manufacturers of such things have no expectation that the ideas, and practical exploitation of those ideas into which they've poured their time and money can be made to reward their employees and investors, then what's the point? We should all just work for the government, and hope that a few stellar innovators will still work night and day in that environment to produce fantastic communal products, like the Yugo.
Re:There's a difference between supply and control
on
Microsoft's 911 Patent
·
· Score: 1
My feeling is that no government should allow itself to get into a position where (for example) MS has control over a part of (for example) their emergency infrastructure.
Well, then I imagine you're pretty uncomfortable with all of the companies that actually do provide the things that are critical to our emergency infrastructure. From defense contractors that maintain things like radar systems and water treatment facilities to the big carriers that are the backbone of the internet - those are systems run, day to day, by companies (corporations, to stick with this thread's theme).
It's more a question of employing those companies (or contracting for their services/products) in a way that calls for dire consequences if the drop the ball while delivering those services. Those companies that do control things we all need in an emergency (say, transportation equipment or personnel) definately fall within the bounds of a lot of emergency statutes that dictate the degree to which they can't screw around on the taxpayers' dollars.
Nice, bit o' trolling flamebait, there. But, I'll bite, just to amuse you.
For people living in caves, the Taliban sure did a temporarily efficient job of housing multi-millionaire terrorists capable of sophisticated attacks destroying embassies, killing naval personnel, etc. And cave-dwelling folks like Iraqi operative Ramzi Yousef sure learned, somehow, in his cave, how to work on the WTC attack. By the way, do you even hear the condesencion in your own voice when you call the residents of those countries cave dwellers?
Seriously though, I wonder how many people will die because other people with similar lifesaving products for OS X and Linux won't be able to release them because of this patent
Plus, you should be able to file a seriously profitable law suit because your iPod won't interact with the OnStar network, thus risking your life, which would have been, what, less risky before that product existed (and thus couldn't be used), and but is now more risky because there'll be a new product you don't want to use?
Next they will try to make money from it. An extension to something as important as 911 should not be corporate.
You mean, like the corporately made, and profitable rescue vehicles that are driven to the scene of the emergency? Or the corporately made, and profitable Motorola gear that the responders are using? Or the coporately owned and managed telecomm systems that actually carry the 911 calls? Or the countless consulting and systems integration companies that help build and run the emergency dispatch systems that handle 911 calls?
This Corporate = Inherently Bad sentiment has become an embarassment. So, if the exact same patent had been filed, and business plan had been dreamt up by just Little Old Me, would it be Bad then? How about if me and two other guys formed a small incorporated group to do it? Is it bad then? How about 30 of us? 300? 3000? What exactly is the inherently bad corporate number, anyway? There must be some cosmic constant that much of slashdot is working with, and it should be shared for peer review.
Hmmm. I'm not avoiding a single question, I'm just not giving you the satisfaction of changing the subject and bashing the US just because you clearly like doing so. For what it's worth, I (unlike you) certainly didn't decide that I was going to be somehow more persuasive by making a lame attempt at painting the other half of this conversation as a "displacing," self-country-hating rube. That was your fine handywork, and sure points out how solid your understanding is of the actual conversation. Pointing out that your irrelevent information, no matter how factual, has no bearing on what I'm talking about doesn't mean I'm avoiding a question.
Not responding to
Canada isn't doing anything wrong here and we don't owe the US a squirt
isn't avoiding a question (first, because it's not a question). Rather, it's not bothering to respond, again, to a critique of something I did not say. To recap: someone from Canada complains that the US is handling health care badly, with a side dish of the drug price issue. I respond with the (accurate) observation that one of the reasons drugs are cheap in Canada is because they are not cheap somewhere else. How you draw from that some inference that I think Canada owes the US something means that you've got something else on your mind, and are trying to shoehorn it into this thread. You're just taking the opportunity of any conversation that involves both countries to try to score empty debating points against the US, and hope that the person you're communicating with (or trying to patronize, really) is too dumb to catch you talking around, rather than to, the topic. I especially like the "you're avoiding my questions" line, even as your own initial, oddly out of place list of non-US drug companies fell flat and outside of the discussion of US drug company prices. That attempt at distraction, and silly sort of rhetorical thrashing around typifies those with little of merit to actually say.
Sadam is Al Queda
Yeah, I can see how this [incorrectly spelled] bit of nonsense arises out of the medical import/export discussion. Also an excellent grasp of actual information about what the US, as a population thinks. Why, you probably also imagine that we all think terrorists have come through Canada in an attempt to blow up things in the US... oh wait, they have! Never mind. There, now you can rant about that, too, instead of actually, magically, having something on topic to say, other than that market economies "abuse" people who don't pay for things, and that socialized medicine administered by a government agency somehow isn't "socialized."
You're even further missing the point. I'm not angry, I'm continuing a thread wherein someone from Canada decided to take the opportunity to point out what a lousy health care system is found in the US. My response is that we treat the business of health care like every other business. Extremely expensive, newly developed drugs and other therapies cost money. Lots, and lots of money. Collective (in Canada's case, government mandated) bargaining for the purchase of those products and services is not some wonderland of cheap, quality health care for everyone in Canada. And if the companies involved didn't have other markets out of which to make more margin, they wouldn't dip so low for Canadians. It's not an ideal situation, but it's reality. I suppose the other option would be to, let's see, NOT BUY a $1000-per-dose drug that was only just invented, if I can't afford it. In Canada, perhaps you can afford it because everyone else in the country is buying it for you. I guess I'm just allergic to socialism.
But I'm not angry at US drug companies, or even really at Canadians. I am, though, aware that government purchasing of drugs and equipment is a lot different than private sector purchasing. Personally, I'm willing to pay the price because I'd prefer to have more competition and choices in how things are done. I just don't want people in other countries thinking that the lower prices they're paying are entirely because they're just such clever people, as a country. There are all sorts of aspects to Canadian governance and economics that I don't find completely attractive, and it's in areas like this that I'm willing to pay for the difference.
I suppose I'm also glad that perhaps the US has fewer people practicing ill-advised, mis-informed, cringe-inducing armchair psychology.
Displacement is the redirecting of thoughts feelings and impulses...
Not being a devotee myself, I don't know what the pop-psych label is for the urge to use off-target, condescending babble as a weak ad hominem form of debate. Happily, if this is an identifiable disorder, you can no doubt set up an appointment (with only a wait of a few weeks) for some treatment. Or, come on down here, pay a lot less in taxes, and just pay $100 for an office visit today.
You're completely missing the point. Your list of companies is not news to me. Nor does it change anything in the conversation. I'm not talking about Bayer, or anyone else. I'm talking about US drug companies and how they spend/make their money, in both domestic and international markets. I'm not comparing US drug companies to non-US companies - you're looking for something in this conversation to complain about, and it doesn't exist. You're not in denial, you're reading imaginary posts, I think. You could also site facts about plant growth, Olympic figure skating rules, and the history of the Laplanders (and even be "right" about those facts, and "quick" like you were with the other laundry list), but not have anything meaningful to contribute to the topic of the prices of US-made drugs in Canada.
Wow, you're sure anxious to start meaningless off-topic arguments! A classic bash for no reason, illustrating your take on things.
Regardless, the fact that there are plenty of large non-US drug companies has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion at hand. It is interesing to note, though, that companies like Bayer are also happy to charge higher prices in the US than in Canada or elsewhere. They like that locally free market, too, even if they don't get that sort of latitude elsewhere.
I'm not saying they sell to, say, Poland, at a loss. I'm saying they make more (or most) of their profit margin, as a percentage, in the US. We're the richest economy in the world, and both drugs and other products fetch a higher margin here.
If you know what nameserver their proxy uses, you can do this with nslookup and the 'server' command... No AOL account required.
Right. The problem is, they have dozens of proxies, and who knows how many name servers - with pretty much no way to know where they are. So, it's easier just to tickle their system through their normal user interface. On other name servers, where I DO know the IP address, I've often done just what you say.
Our additude at the time was well screw the AOL users, there's no one importing using AOL anyways
I'd be curious who's the audience for the site(s) you're talking about. I'm pretty uncomfortable calling tens of millions of users unimportant, especially when it comes to e-commerce. Different "additude", I guess. Or attitude, even.
I maintain an ancient AOL account specifically so I can see things the way that some of my customers' customers see them. But it has one other advantage: if I've just made DNS changes to domain I care about, I set up a temporary new A record (like X.whatever.com) and then surf to it through AOL's proxies. This seems to get their name servers to notice that the SOA record is new, and it flushes out the rest of their cache. This seems to work on all sorts of servers, most of the time.
Why the hell are drug companies making you americans subsidise the world?
The better question would be, why do government-run medical systems elsewhere in the world think it's appropriate to demand subsidized pricing?
Are you saying that they have no option to sell drugs at a loss in canada and thus they have to ramp up prices where they can?
That pretty much sums it up!
It is awkward, isn't it? Because of the degree to which other countries socialize (ie, run through the government) their medical systems, sellers of drugs (not just US companies) have to negotiate prices with those governments. It's pretty easy for other coutries to say, "if you want to sell product X in our country, we're only going to pay [some much lower amount]." So, the companies can either cave in and sell for those much lower prices, or suffer the bad press of "denying" their new wonder drugs to other countries' populations.
That sets up a scenario where the drugs, which cost billions of dollars a year to research, test, and manufacture, have to have that product development cycle paid for out of revenue that comes from where they can get the asking price. That's typically in the US.
The US has a (somewhat sketchy, but not too bad) history of not having the government mandate prices for products. It's one of the things that makes the US economy still fairly unique. The problem in an increasingly global marketplace is that specific things like brand new high-end cardio meds or cancer treatments are immediately sought after by everyone (since information about those drugs and treatments is immediately available to anyone that can read), but the single source of those drugs (say, a US manufacturer) has to then juggle the problem of wildly different international medical economies. The US consumer's higher level of disposable income is, by default, where the revenue comes from to pay for the R&D done by US companies. If those companies lose some money providing drugs internationally, it's seen as an unpleasant but unavoidable cost of doing business in a highly visible industry.
So why don't I (as a US consumer) stomp my feet and insist that laws are passed to make sure that I don't have to pay any more money than someone in Canada? Because the only way for that to happen is for the US government to get way, way more involved in a large industry. I'm completely opposed to that, not least because then I'll get to pay more taxes to prop up an even larger bureaucracy, and will see much of the competitive incentive taken out of a vital industry.
My point is that we don't want City-Provided WiFi any more than we want State-Owned Gas Stations. Standard Oil had nothing on what it's like to live under a ridiculous, centrally managed state-owned industry.
And yes: we should all be willing to fight for the liberty to start and run our own businesses. Even if that business turns out to be the only one, for a while, serving a particular market.
We just don't let people suffer because they can't afford healthcare, that line is purely American.
There isn't a single American that, suffering, cannot walk into a hospital for treatment. There are brand new, multi-gazillion-dollar treatments and equipment that (gasp!) cost a lot of money and (gasp!) are used by a small minority of the people. Don't worry, though, you Canadians can still enjoy the products of our most advanced drug companies at heavily subsidized (by US consumers!), artificially low prices. Enjoy! The "suffering" people in the states are only too happy to be your medical beasts of burden.
Why is it always an Anonymous Coward that spouts pointless and not-germaine pro-Socialist tripe like this?
The post was reasonable: if you rely on your city government for your interenet access, you're just begging to get hit with more taxes on that commodity. Why is it that people who hate private companies that are successful enough to be the main player in a given industry have absolutely no trouble with the government being the main player in others? Ah, because those same people think that if only they ran the government, it would finally be done right, and all of the rest of us, who are too dumb to live otherwise, can just cough up our taxes and smile while The City (or State, etc) makes decisions about the wheres, whys, and hows of personal access to information.
No it's not. Look at all the defaced websites out there
I have customers (some are even offices in municipal governments) that rely heavily on public-facing web sites, as well as on intra/extra-net systems and browser-based mail. Those operations would be (and have been) really crippled by DOS and other noise. I've managed to avoid actual defacement, but I've trapped problems with older apps that have SQL pass-through vulnerabilities, that sort of thing. It's astounding how weak some of those designs are, and yes, it does take a pro to build things that are secure. I'm one of those people, so I know what you mean when you say that. But I also really like it when some Red Team finds a hole in something I'm involved with. There just aren't enough hours in the day for me to be all of those people. With national security, the scale is much, much grander. I also spend a good part of my day analyzing international attacks on my e-commerce customers. Organized crime in Russia, China, Korea, and punks in Germany, eastern Europe - all constantly rattling doorknobs and attempting mostly card-synth probes against checkout routines, etc. As long as I stay close to what the crackers are trying, it gives me info I need to keep things robust on the back end.
But since you know the identities of those people, why go to the time/expense of training elite military cracker teams? Why not just have an agent work for the ISP feeding the site that those people use for email?
Because some of them are being backed by national governments, like in Iran, Syria, and North Korea.
That being said, you'll never meet a bigger backer of more human intelligence spending. I just don't see $million spent in the white-hat-cracking department being a $million we can't spend on recruiting and handling local pro-democracy folks in the countries in question. The general populations there are already seeing the light, and desparately want change. So it's not all that hard, especially among the higher-tech circles, to find people who will help on principle, with cash being only frosting on the cake.
On the other hand, if we see a storm of, say, Syrian-government sanctioned cracks coming via, say, Germany, with ties to some action in Iran... we'd for sure want the capacity to stomp all over the networks in question and induce pure misery until it's stopped locally. Just the losses on Wall Street from one day of hobbled trading would pay for cracking fire teams for years.
Hopefully we can agree that teams of crackers are not, by themselves, a magic bullet. But I'd rather have them, and have them juiced up and ready, simply because I think it will matter if, say, China decides it wants to storm Taiwan. But by all means, we should be spending orders of magnitude more on infrastructure protection, both in the government and private sectors.
Actually, I'm a regular Corel user, and like the suite on my Windows box. Call me a non-conformist on a conformist platform, if you must!
I've often wondered why MS didn't get serious in this area. Perhaps they didn't want to hear the flak for taking over another market area... but now they'd definately be the lesser player if they did.
Let's see... you don't like it when there are fewer companies making competitive software, so you must definately not like it now that Adobe and Macromedia are merging. So, if another company, like Microsoft, invests a fortune in turning a company like Corel into new competition for Adobe/Macromedia (essentially a monopoly there, already), how can that be bad?
It's certainly not illegal. If anything, it would be a solid step in keeping some competition alive - something you'd see to support.
So? Who cares if the bad guys take down some websites?
It's not just about web sites, obviously. We're talking about web front ends on cricial apps, SCADA-powered water and electical plants, major financial systems upon which the economy depends. It's all in the same bucket.
Sure you would. Any jackass can kick down a barn. But it takes a carpenter to build one.
Sure, you need a carpenter. But your carpenter will do an even better job (at building a hard-to-wreck barn) if he sits down to talk with
people who spend their entire day deliberately trying to wreck barns, and who know look for the weakest board to kick out. If I can expand on your analogy: a traditional carpenter might build a barn that resists the weather, keeps the hay fresh, is easy to move horses through, etc... but he wouldn't normally spend much time focusing on the likely tactics of would-be barn arsonists. He's going to assume that if someone wants to burn down that barn, it's just going to happen. We're talking, instead, about working on fireproof barns, barns under which people can't dig tunnels, and barns that are conceived of expressly to deal with issues that may not be brought up absent input from pro crackers.
So we have our own jackasses to kick down their barns to "counter" their jackasses kicking down ours? There's not much progress in that.
To the extent that bad guys swap info on public web sites, and coordinate things like multi-plane suicide attacks via web-based email... it's essential.
Technically the USA doesn't have an Official Secrets Act, in fact we have the exact opposite. (Freedom of Information Act) it won't get you anything good though...
Well, we do have the Uniform Code Of Military Justice, and other civilian-facing statutes that absolutely do dictate what your limitations are when you sign up to do classified work. The FOIA certainly will get you "good" stuff, just not in a hurry. That's the whole point. If it was that simple to get everything "good" (by which I have to assume you mean technically cool, etc), then of course everything that the NSA knows how to do would also be in the hands of the North Koreans, etc.
I don't think you'd want these people using all of their resources to attack your network. Script kiddies, they're not.
And a good way to spend millions of taxpayer money.
Yup, because the bad guys are doing exactly the same thing. And you'll never have a better bunch of people to work on countering that sort of stuff than the people who have done a stint entirely focused on causing damage elsewhere. Who would you want taking a new job working on infrastructure protection: the kid right out of IT school, or the guy who's been working without any distraction or budget tightwaddedness who's just spent the last two years thinking up every way he can to crack and damage networks, content, databases, and more?
I'm thinking, for example, of people going from, say, the DC/Baltimore area out to western Maryland or southern Pennsylvania for something like a weekend of skiing. These days, that would typically mean a four-hour, often stop-and-go trip over twisting, hilly roads and some decent highways. A straight, as-the-crow-flies trip would be shorter in miles, flatter in profile, and take only perhaps 30 minutes. Just a random example. I mention that one because my wife and I drove into southern PA just the other weekend, and were able to average only about 30 miles per hour for much of the trip. Fantastically wasteful.
I've counted a few dozen "this is bad" comments. How would everyone feel, at this point, if someone with pockets as deep as MS's were to launch a (real) initiative in this area? Maybe, buying up Corel, and fattening it up to compete? Suddenly, Bill would look, well, just swell. Unless (and this is very unlikely, of course) there were any hypocritical leanings here on slashdot, I'd assume we'd be rooting for a new underdog in a suddenly completely consolidated industry.
Slashdot Mirror
What they are paying for is the metal and labor that went into producing that vehicle. But what if the idea behind a police cruiser was patented as microsoft plans to patent this.
But people patent pieces of police cruisers all the time! Specialized equipment designed to appeal to law enforcement users, integrated security of communications equipment particularly needed by fleet operators, quick release custom shotgun brackets, vehicle-powered rescue hardware... the point is that different companies strive to out-innovate each other and compete for the tax dollars that are going to be spent on such things as municipal emergency equipment. If there is no incentive (profit) waiting for the company that comes up with the best recipe at the best price, then there's nothing to lure in the investment that must be risked in paying people to dream up and prototype such things. That's exactly where patents shine: they encourage private people and companies to take chances and risk loss in order to ultimately produce a better, cheaper, more attractive product.
Municipal governments need well-priced innovative things just like consumers do. If the designers and manufacturers of such things have no expectation that the ideas, and practical exploitation of those ideas into which they've poured their time and money can be made to reward their employees and investors, then what's the point? We should all just work for the government, and hope that a few stellar innovators will still work night and day in that environment to produce fantastic communal products, like the Yugo.
My feeling is that no government should allow itself to get into a position where (for example) MS has control over a part of (for example) their emergency infrastructure.
Well, then I imagine you're pretty uncomfortable with all of the companies that actually do provide the things that are critical to our emergency infrastructure. From defense contractors that maintain things like radar systems and water treatment facilities to the big carriers that are the backbone of the internet - those are systems run, day to day, by companies (corporations, to stick with this thread's theme).
It's more a question of employing those companies (or contracting for their services/products) in a way that calls for dire consequences if the drop the ball while delivering those services. Those companies that do control things we all need in an emergency (say, transportation equipment or personnel) definately fall within the bounds of a lot of emergency statutes that dictate the degree to which they can't screw around on the taxpayers' dollars.
Nice, bit o' trolling flamebait, there. But, I'll bite, just to amuse you.
For people living in caves, the Taliban sure did a temporarily efficient job of housing multi-millionaire terrorists capable of sophisticated attacks destroying embassies, killing naval personnel, etc. And cave-dwelling folks like Iraqi operative Ramzi Yousef sure learned, somehow, in his cave, how to work on the WTC attack. By the way, do you even hear the condesencion in your own voice when you call the residents of those countries cave dwellers?
Seriously though, I wonder how many people will die because other people with similar lifesaving products for OS X and Linux won't be able to release them because of this patent
Plus, you should be able to file a seriously profitable law suit because your iPod won't interact with the OnStar network, thus risking your life, which would have been, what, less risky before that product existed (and thus couldn't be used), and but is now more risky because there'll be a new product you don't want to use?
Next they will try to make money from it. An extension to something as important as 911 should not be corporate.
You mean, like the corporately made, and profitable rescue vehicles that are driven to the scene of the emergency? Or the corporately made, and profitable Motorola gear that the responders are using? Or the coporately owned and managed telecomm systems that actually carry the 911 calls? Or the countless consulting and systems integration companies that help build and run the emergency dispatch systems that handle 911 calls?
This Corporate = Inherently Bad sentiment has become an embarassment. So, if the exact same patent had been filed, and business plan had been dreamt up by just Little Old Me, would it be Bad then? How about if me and two other guys formed a small incorporated group to do it? Is it bad then? How about 30 of us? 300? 3000? What exactly is the inherently bad corporate number, anyway? There must be some cosmic constant that much of slashdot is working with, and it should be shared for peer review.
Hmmm. I'm not avoiding a single question, I'm just not giving you the satisfaction of changing the subject and bashing the US just because you clearly like doing so. For what it's worth, I (unlike you) certainly didn't decide that I was going to be somehow more persuasive by making a lame attempt at painting the other half of this conversation as a "displacing," self-country-hating rube. That was your fine handywork, and sure points out how solid your understanding is of the actual conversation. Pointing out that your irrelevent information, no matter how factual, has no bearing on what I'm talking about doesn't mean I'm avoiding a question.
Not responding to
Canada isn't doing anything wrong here and we don't owe the US a squirt
isn't avoiding a question (first, because it's not a question). Rather, it's not bothering to respond, again, to a critique of something I did not say. To recap: someone from Canada complains that the US is handling health care badly, with a side dish of the drug price issue. I respond with the (accurate) observation that one of the reasons drugs are cheap in Canada is because they are not cheap somewhere else. How you draw from that some inference that I think Canada owes the US something means that you've got something else on your mind, and are trying to shoehorn it into this thread. You're just taking the opportunity of any conversation that involves both countries to try to score empty debating points against the US, and hope that the person you're communicating with (or trying to patronize, really) is too dumb to catch you talking around, rather than to, the topic. I especially like the "you're avoiding my questions" line, even as your own initial, oddly out of place list of non-US drug companies fell flat and outside of the discussion of US drug company prices. That attempt at distraction, and silly sort of rhetorical thrashing around typifies those with little of merit to actually say.
Sadam is Al Queda
Yeah, I can see how this [incorrectly spelled] bit of nonsense arises out of the medical import/export discussion. Also an excellent grasp of actual information about what the US, as a population thinks. Why, you probably also imagine that we all think terrorists have come through Canada in an attempt to blow up things in the US... oh wait, they have! Never mind. There, now you can rant about that, too, instead of actually, magically, having something on topic to say, other than that market economies "abuse" people who don't pay for things, and that socialized medicine administered by a government agency somehow isn't "socialized."
Dear Dr. Oatz,
You're even further missing the point. I'm not angry, I'm continuing a thread wherein someone from Canada decided to take the opportunity to point out what a lousy health care system is found in the US. My response is that we treat the business of health care like every other business. Extremely expensive, newly developed drugs and other therapies cost money. Lots, and lots of money. Collective (in Canada's case, government mandated) bargaining for the purchase of those products and services is not some wonderland of cheap, quality health care for everyone in Canada. And if the companies involved didn't have other markets out of which to make more margin, they wouldn't dip so low for Canadians. It's not an ideal situation, but it's reality. I suppose the other option would be to, let's see, NOT BUY a $1000-per-dose drug that was only just invented, if I can't afford it. In Canada, perhaps you can afford it because everyone else in the country is buying it for you. I guess I'm just allergic to socialism.
But I'm not angry at US drug companies, or even really at Canadians. I am, though, aware that government purchasing of drugs and equipment is a lot different than private sector purchasing. Personally, I'm willing to pay the price because I'd prefer to have more competition and choices in how things are done. I just don't want people in other countries thinking that the lower prices they're paying are entirely because they're just such clever people, as a country. There are all sorts of aspects to Canadian governance and economics that I don't find completely attractive, and it's in areas like this that I'm willing to pay for the difference.
I suppose I'm also glad that perhaps the US has fewer people practicing ill-advised, mis-informed, cringe-inducing armchair psychology.
Displacement is the redirecting of thoughts feelings and impulses...
Not being a devotee myself, I don't know what the pop-psych label is for the urge to use off-target, condescending babble as a weak ad hominem form of debate. Happily, if this is an identifiable disorder, you can no doubt set up an appointment (with only a wait of a few weeks) for some treatment. Or, come on down here, pay a lot less in taxes, and just pay $100 for an office visit today.
You're completely missing the point. Your list of companies is not news to me. Nor does it change anything in the conversation. I'm not talking about Bayer, or anyone else. I'm talking about US drug companies and how they spend/make their money, in both domestic and international markets. I'm not comparing US drug companies to non-US companies - you're looking for something in this conversation to complain about, and it doesn't exist. You're not in denial, you're reading imaginary posts, I think. You could also site facts about plant growth, Olympic figure skating rules, and the history of the Laplanders (and even be "right" about those facts, and "quick" like you were with the other laundry list), but not have anything meaningful to contribute to the topic of the prices of US-made drugs in Canada.
Wow, you're sure anxious to start meaningless off-topic arguments! A classic bash for no reason, illustrating your take on things.
Regardless, the fact that there are plenty of large non-US drug companies has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion at hand. It is interesing to note, though, that companies like Bayer are also happy to charge higher prices in the US than in Canada or elsewhere. They like that locally free market, too, even if they don't get that sort of latitude elsewhere.
I'm not saying they sell to, say, Poland, at a loss. I'm saying they make more (or most) of their profit margin, as a percentage, in the US. We're the richest economy in the world, and both drugs and other products fetch a higher margin here.
If you know what nameserver their proxy uses, you can do this with nslookup and the 'server' command... No AOL account required.
Right. The problem is, they have dozens of proxies, and who knows how many name servers - with pretty much no way to know where they are. So, it's easier just to tickle their system through their normal user interface. On other name servers, where I DO know the IP address, I've often done just what you say.
Our additude at the time was well screw the AOL users, there's no one importing using AOL anyways
I'd be curious who's the audience for the site(s) you're talking about. I'm pretty uncomfortable calling tens of millions of users unimportant, especially when it comes to e-commerce. Different "additude", I guess. Or attitude, even.
I maintain an ancient AOL account specifically so I can see things the way that some of my customers' customers see them. But it has one other advantage: if I've just made DNS changes to domain I care about, I set up a temporary new A record (like X.whatever.com) and then surf to it through AOL's proxies. This seems to get their name servers to notice that the SOA record is new, and it flushes out the rest of their cache. This seems to work on all sorts of servers, most of the time.
Why the hell are drug companies making you americans subsidise the world?
The better question would be, why do government-run medical systems elsewhere in the world think it's appropriate to demand subsidized pricing?
Are you saying that they have no option to sell drugs at a loss in canada and thus they have to ramp up prices where they can?
That pretty much sums it up!
It is awkward, isn't it? Because of the degree to which other countries socialize (ie, run through the government) their medical systems, sellers of drugs (not just US companies) have to negotiate prices with those governments. It's pretty easy for other coutries to say, "if you want to sell product X in our country, we're only going to pay [some much lower amount]." So, the companies can either cave in and sell for those much lower prices, or suffer the bad press of "denying" their new wonder drugs to other countries' populations.
That sets up a scenario where the drugs, which cost billions of dollars a year to research, test, and manufacture, have to have that product development cycle paid for out of revenue that comes from where they can get the asking price. That's typically in the US.
The US has a (somewhat sketchy, but not too bad) history of not having the government mandate prices for products. It's one of the things that makes the US economy still fairly unique. The problem in an increasingly global marketplace is that specific things like brand new high-end cardio meds or cancer treatments are immediately sought after by everyone (since information about those drugs and treatments is immediately available to anyone that can read), but the single source of those drugs (say, a US manufacturer) has to then juggle the problem of wildly different international medical economies. The US consumer's higher level of disposable income is, by default, where the revenue comes from to pay for the R&D done by US companies. If those companies lose some money providing drugs internationally, it's seen as an unpleasant but unavoidable cost of doing business in a highly visible industry.
So why don't I (as a US consumer) stomp my feet and insist that laws are passed to make sure that I don't have to pay any more money than someone in Canada? Because the only way for that to happen is for the US government to get way, way more involved in a large industry. I'm completely opposed to that, not least because then I'll get to pay more taxes to prop up an even larger bureaucracy, and will see much of the competitive incentive taken out of a vital industry.
My point is that we don't want City-Provided WiFi any more than we want State-Owned Gas Stations. Standard Oil had nothing on what it's like to live under a ridiculous, centrally managed state-owned industry.
And yes: we should all be willing to fight for the liberty to start and run our own businesses. Even if that business turns out to be the only one, for a while, serving a particular market.
We just don't let people suffer because they can't afford healthcare, that line is purely American.
There isn't a single American that, suffering, cannot walk into a hospital for treatment. There are brand new, multi-gazillion-dollar treatments and equipment that (gasp!) cost a lot of money and (gasp!) are used by a small minority of the people. Don't worry, though, you Canadians can still enjoy the products of our most advanced drug companies at heavily subsidized (by US consumers!), artificially low prices. Enjoy! The "suffering" people in the states are only too happy to be your medical beasts of burden.
Why is it always an Anonymous Coward that spouts pointless and not-germaine pro-Socialist tripe like this?
The post was reasonable: if you rely on your city government for your interenet access, you're just begging to get hit with more taxes on that commodity. Why is it that people who hate private companies that are successful enough to be the main player in a given industry have absolutely no trouble with the government being the main player in others? Ah, because those same people think that if only they ran the government, it would finally be done right, and all of the rest of us, who are too dumb to live otherwise, can just cough up our taxes and smile while The City (or State, etc) makes decisions about the wheres, whys, and hows of personal access to information.
Coming from the Windows side, I hear this warning constantly, but rarely hear about the practical fallout. OK, splain, Lucy.
No it's not. Look at all the defaced websites out there
I have customers (some are even offices in municipal governments) that rely heavily on public-facing web sites, as well as on intra/extra-net systems and browser-based mail. Those operations would be (and have been) really crippled by DOS and other noise. I've managed to avoid actual defacement, but I've trapped problems with older apps that have SQL pass-through vulnerabilities, that sort of thing. It's astounding how weak some of those designs are, and yes, it does take a pro to build things that are secure. I'm one of those people, so I know what you mean when you say that. But I also really like it when some Red Team finds a hole in something I'm involved with. There just aren't enough hours in the day for me to be all of those people. With national security, the scale is much, much grander. I also spend a good part of my day analyzing international attacks on my e-commerce customers. Organized crime in Russia, China, Korea, and punks in Germany, eastern Europe - all constantly rattling doorknobs and attempting mostly card-synth probes against checkout routines, etc. As long as I stay close to what the crackers are trying, it gives me info I need to keep things robust on the back end.
But since you know the identities of those people, why go to the time/expense of training elite military cracker teams? Why not just have an agent work for the ISP feeding the site that those people use for email?
Because some of them are being backed by national governments, like in Iran, Syria, and North Korea.
That being said, you'll never meet a bigger backer of more human intelligence spending. I just don't see $million spent in the white-hat-cracking department being a $million we can't spend on recruiting and handling local pro-democracy folks in the countries in question. The general populations there are already seeing the light, and desparately want change. So it's not all that hard, especially among the higher-tech circles, to find people who will help on principle, with cash being only frosting on the cake.
On the other hand, if we see a storm of, say, Syrian-government sanctioned cracks coming via, say, Germany, with ties to some action in Iran... we'd for sure want the capacity to stomp all over the networks in question and induce pure misery until it's stopped locally. Just the losses on Wall Street from one day of hobbled trading would pay for cracking fire teams for years.
Hopefully we can agree that teams of crackers are not, by themselves, a magic bullet. But I'd rather have them, and have them juiced up and ready, simply because I think it will matter if, say, China decides it wants to storm Taiwan. But by all means, we should be spending orders of magnitude more on infrastructure protection, both in the government and private sectors.
Actually, I'm a regular Corel user, and like the suite on my Windows box. Call me a non-conformist on a conformist platform, if you must!
I've often wondered why MS didn't get serious in this area. Perhaps they didn't want to hear the flak for taking over another market area... but now they'd definately be the lesser player if they did.
Let's see... you don't like it when there are fewer companies making competitive software, so you must definately not like it now that Adobe and Macromedia are merging. So, if another company, like Microsoft, invests a fortune in turning a company like Corel into new competition for Adobe/Macromedia (essentially a monopoly there, already), how can that be bad?
It's certainly not illegal. If anything, it would be a solid step in keeping some competition alive - something you'd see to support.
So? Who cares if the bad guys take down some websites?
It's not just about web sites, obviously. We're talking about web front ends on cricial apps, SCADA-powered water and electical plants, major financial systems upon which the economy depends. It's all in the same bucket.
Sure you would. Any jackass can kick down a barn. But it takes a carpenter to build one.
Sure, you need a carpenter. But your carpenter will do an even better job (at building a hard-to-wreck barn) if he sits down to talk with people who spend their entire day deliberately trying to wreck barns, and who know look for the weakest board to kick out. If I can expand on your analogy: a traditional carpenter might build a barn that resists the weather, keeps the hay fresh, is easy to move horses through, etc... but he wouldn't normally spend much time focusing on the likely tactics of would-be barn arsonists. He's going to assume that if someone wants to burn down that barn, it's just going to happen. We're talking, instead, about working on fireproof barns, barns under which people can't dig tunnels, and barns that are conceived of expressly to deal with issues that may not be brought up absent input from pro crackers.
So we have our own jackasses to kick down their barns to "counter" their jackasses kicking down ours? There's not much progress in that.
To the extent that bad guys swap info on public web sites, and coordinate things like multi-plane suicide attacks via web-based email... it's essential.
Technically the USA doesn't have an Official Secrets Act, in fact we have the exact opposite. (Freedom of Information Act) it won't get you anything good though...
Well, we do have the Uniform Code Of Military Justice, and other civilian-facing statutes that absolutely do dictate what your limitations are when you sign up to do classified work. The FOIA certainly will get you "good" stuff, just not in a hurry. That's the whole point. If it was that simple to get everything "good" (by which I have to assume you mean technically cool, etc), then of course everything that the NSA knows how to do would also be in the hands of the North Koreans, etc.
Script Kiddies in Uniform
I don't think you'd want these people using all of their resources to attack your network. Script kiddies, they're not.
And a good way to spend millions of taxpayer money.
Yup, because the bad guys are doing exactly the same thing. And you'll never have a better bunch of people to work on countering that sort of stuff than the people who have done a stint entirely focused on causing damage elsewhere. Who would you want taking a new job working on infrastructure protection: the kid right out of IT school, or the guy who's been working without any distraction or budget tightwaddedness who's just spent the last two years thinking up every way he can to crack and damage networks, content, databases, and more?
How will it use "much much less" fuel?
I'm thinking, for example, of people going from, say, the DC/Baltimore area out to western Maryland or southern Pennsylvania for something like a weekend of skiing. These days, that would typically mean a four-hour, often stop-and-go trip over twisting, hilly roads and some decent highways. A straight, as-the-crow-flies trip would be shorter in miles, flatter in profile, and take only perhaps 30 minutes. Just a random example. I mention that one because my wife and I drove into southern PA just the other weekend, and were able to average only about 30 miles per hour for much of the trip. Fantastically wasteful.
I've counted a few dozen "this is bad" comments. How would everyone feel, at this point, if someone with pockets as deep as MS's were to launch a (real) initiative in this area? Maybe, buying up Corel, and fattening it up to compete? Suddenly, Bill would look, well, just swell. Unless (and this is very unlikely, of course) there were any hypocritical leanings here on slashdot, I'd assume we'd be rooting for a new underdog in a suddenly completely consolidated industry.