"Both of those things can be accomplished on your own code too"
Yes, of course. And do you know how the internal app you developed so to allow non-programmers to update content, so PHBs can review the content prior to go public, so you can version contents and pre stablish the date it will go alive, etc. will be called? It will be called a "Content Management System".
So in the end you won't avoid the CMS you'll just develop your own internal one: reinventing the wheel, at a cost, and probably worse.
"Right, because Oracle doesn't currently do what it can to make money off its various lower-end (both compatible and incompatible with the flagship server) database products"
Like? Certainly not BDB which is certainly not in the same niche than Oracle, MySQL, etc. And then there has been in fact noise about Oracle allowing BDB to stagnate.
"Right, because if MySQL slowly stagnates, the people who are interested in an open-source or lower-end database system will instead purchase Oracle's flagship product"
Or they would look for their "free as in beer" Oracle's flagship product versions, yes. Specially if they allow MySQL to slowly stagnate on functionalities but still allow for development of tools for easy migration from MySQL to Oracle.
"rather than moving to less expensive and open source third-party offerings like PostgreSQL."
Point being that "free as in beer" versions of Oracle are not any more expensive than PostgreSQL on adquisition costs and could be cheaper on migration costs as long as Oracle allows for a smooth migration path to arise.
"that hardly means that no one else can subsidize open source development of a MySQL fork from related operations (such as support.)"
Certainly you are right but still it seems you completly missed my point. Please note I never said that I agree with RMS's point of view here; I only stated that RMS's point of view as deduced from his text is *not* what the grandparent said to be and to the point there's nothing on your text reasoning that I'm wrong on that, just that you happen to disagree from RMS's point of view. Well, I disagree here with him too, so what?
"The last application I had trouble installing on Linux, due to glibc versioning problems, was a profiler for WebMethods Integration Server. Something like that is never going to get into the APT repository."
Why not? If it's free software it certainly can go in the "contrib" repo; if it's closed source but still redistributable it will go in "non-free". Being it "niche" doesn't preclude it from being in the repos: usually if it is license-compatible and there's at least one person willing to take the effort to package it, it will be accepted. Even if the packager is not a Debian developer, it will go with the support of the mentors list.
Of course it won't go in the repos if it's closed non-redistributable software but then we come back to square one since I already said that to be a "maybe" case for the fat binary case.
"Really? You cannot possibly imagine that someone making a tiny niche product outside of the purview of the established distributions would want to make binaries available to people?"
Yes I can, but I still don't see how the fat binary will help them anyway.
"Well, fuck you and your narrow minded obtuseness."
Oh, Jesus Christ! Now I see how fat binaries would benefit your example niche! Well, not.
"Or did ease of use suddenly become a closed source model only?"
So now looking at your web page, look for the download page, download by hand your product (which hopefully will be statically linked or at least bundled with a helluva lot of libraries), read for whatever the hell is the setup process your single product has and apply it, somehow becomes easier than opening the GUI for "installing programs" select the one I want to, double click and it's done? Or its, oh, the horror, command line counterpart, `aptitude install foo`, and it's done?
I'll tell you what "ease of use" means for the end user on linux: it means "your program is distributed along my distribution of choice so I can install it using the tools I'm already aware and acustomed to". If you produce, say, a database engine you will have a hard day to make it easier for me than `aptitude install postgresql` unless, of course, your install procedure is `aptitude install yourdatabaseengine`. It really can't come much easier than this. The fact your product is a tiny niche one doesn't preclude it from being at a distro repositories as is the case for the tens of thousands already there.
Unless, of course, you have some issue with your program being distributed from central repositories like, well I don't know... it being closed source?
"Actually, having to maintain packages across several architectures can be tricky at times."
Of course yes. But let's see if the single fat binary reduces complexity.
"Some packages need to be patched to run correctly on different architectures"
And they still will need that. Or do you thing that the ability to produce a single binary will magically make those incompatibilities to disapear?
"the upstream maintainers can accidentally break those patches (e.g. if they are not personally testing on a given architecture)"
That can happen too with a single binary exactly the same way.
"It could even be the case that different architectures have different versions of the same packages, because the distro maintainers are busy trying to get everything to work."
Probably with a reason (like new version needs to be patched to work on this or that platform). How do you think going with a single binary will avoid that problem? It's arguably that in this situation you would end up worse. At least with different binaries you can take the decision of staying with foo 1.1 on arm but promote foo 1.2 on amd64 in the meantime; with a single binary it would mean foo 1.1 for everybody.
"I am not saying that this "universal binary" solution is the answer, but it might help streamline the build process at the distro level."
Still you didn't produce any argument about *how* it could help.
"Not everyone is skilled enough to compile the source on their own"
By "end user" we can understand here "distribution maintainer" which already has the skills to compile the source (and that's not but a part in the lot of things that have to be done in order to integrate some software in a distribution).
"I would think this might be useful for distro maintainers who do not want to maintain separate packages across multiple architectures"
But they have to: they still must build and integrate for their supported platforms, then rebuild when bugs are found or the software is upgraded, then test... It's just the last step (producing the very binary packages) that changes so instead of multiple packages you'd end up with a single multplatform package. The distributor still need (almost) as much disk space and infrastructures as before, but then each and every user will end up with spending much more space in their hard disks (imagine the fat binary for, say, Debian, supporting eleven platforms).
And then, please note that this will allow for single binaries for diferent hardware platforms but not for different version compilations (so it won't be useful to obtain binaries for, say, amd64 for Debian, Red Hat and SUSE).
It seems it will only benefit to those that want to publish their software in an only binary form outside the framework of stablished distributions and that means closed source software. Of course they can look for their bussiness the way they feel better, it's only they don't get my simpathy so I don't give a damn about them.
"asking every bit of equipment to conform to the same standard, and to stick to that standard for more than one product release cycle, is something of a pipe dream."
Yeah... I dream the day they decide, well, I don't know, something like all server-grade equipment to fit into a cabinet 482.6mm wide and heigth by multiples of 44.45mm
"A front line MD should NEVER make final treatment or diagnosis decisions based directly on primary studies."
Not based directly but taking them into account. They in fact, do it.
"if your MD recommends you don't get a flu shot because of a primary study he read about, go see someone else."
So now, you expect *the patient* to know more about the issue than the MD... Not that they are going to tell me what they base their decision exactly on (but, of course, if "who's the doctor here?" is not enough, why spend my time going to the doctor, I could diagnose and treat myself! faster and by your account, quite the same).
"Unless, of course, he's running an ethics board approved study"
The members of the ethical board are going to be MDs and lawyers, so your point is? (are going to be the lawyers the statistics experts?)
"If it was that important to Widenius then why did he sell his company instead of holding onto it?"
Widenius didn't sell it to a big database owner but to a company that were it not that it's in fact bought by Oracle would be exactly the kind of "neutral third party" he is asking for now.
Not to say that Widenius wouldn't sell to Oracle back in the day (I don't know) but that his past actions are well aligned with his current sayings.
"So basically, RMS is concerned that Oracle really would fork MySQL, and end the dual-licensing for any future versions they release."
Where have you read that in RMS's letter?
As I read it, RMS is concerned not because Oracle will close future MySQL development but because they will be the only ones that can profit from dual licensing MySQL and they won't do that because it would make it competing against their cash cow. Oracle would be much better served if they allow MySQL to slowly stagnate -and the point is that they can do it since noone else will be able to cash out the dual license path, than if they close the shop allowing for a faster substitution from another open alternative.
"The government may make my actions illegal, imprison, and/or kill me. Other organizations can't, unless the government gives them the allowance to do so."
Let's rewrite your argument.
Any organization can ban your actions, imprison and/or kill you (and such has been historically the case), unless goverment is enacted with power enough to avoid them doing it. Therefore, the government is the only group that most critically requires being enpowered since it's the only one that can stop all the others.
"Let's I am going to cut your break lines in your car, and rig the throttle so that it goes to full and stays there. i will then call it a test to see and call what happens an accident."
If you did it in good faith, of course is an accident (isn't it an accident a child playing with gunpowder calling it an experiment and blowing his hand away?). How do *you* call "unseeked for and percieved as a bad things"? It might be an accident due to negligence, to criminal negligence even, but still an accident.
"To avoid t happening again all one has to do is use an american or chinese reactor that is designed to turn the reaction off"
Interesting proposition. I'd bet that "properly designed" is the important part even if it's designed by Russian engineers.
"yes there is more than one kind of nuclear reactor. Some are safer than others. Some are designed so that they only produce power under certain situations and turn themselves off when those aren't present."
Yeah, and surely engineers did come to those safer designs by not calling accidents, well, accidents.
"If I tied dynamite to your car's exhaust pipe to see what would happen, would an explosion be an accident?"
If you really didn't know what would happen yes, of course it's an accident. An accident caused by negligence that most probably will open you to civial an penal actions but still an accident. What else do you think it is?
"Tchernobyl, of course, being not an accident but a deliberate test done with security systems shut off. I can't really see how it is even relevant in a discussion about nuclear safety."
Because a system is a system: all parts, people included, are to be taken into consideration.
What I don't see relevant is saying that Chernobyl was not an accident. Was it deliberate, then? Because I see no other options: something is either seeked for or unseeked for. When something is unseeked for and percieved as a bad thing we have a name for it, and such a name is "accident". Once you have an "accident" it comes to be *very* relevant to discuss how it came to happen and how can it be avoided in the future. And no: saying it was people misbehaving is not enough to avoid it to happen again.
"ok then what is the "best effort" treatment in this case?"
I said "treatment" on a general matter; we are talking here about vaccination.
"The fact is that the vaccine its self is the "best effort" here... *if* it works."
The fact is that it is already considered that it, in fact, works, so you can't deprive population at risk from it for an study and you'll have a hard day to challenge the vaccination (you should go with indirect measures like those from the article: death rates were significantly similar on years when people were vaccinated against the majoritary virus and on those where it was missed). That was my point.
And then you end up with MD treating as maeningitis any one that goes with a headache or, even worse, discrediting your symptoms as maeningitis as they "always" mean you got a cold. Statistics *is* a tool for proper diagnostics.
"nonsense. These kind of studies are done all the time, there is absolutely nothing unethical about "them!"
Sorry but you are wrong and you won't be able to find and example to support your point despite what you think.
There's indeed the case that when there's a known effective treatment to any given illness you *can't* use a standard double-blind but you should test your control group with such known treatment since it would be unethical to deprive them from a best-effort treatment. The ill effect here is that you end up without the ability to question the "known to be good" treatment since you can't test against it.
"The point of healthy people taking the vaccine is that then they don't get the flu at all, or get a much milder reaction to it, and thus they don't spread it."
You can bet a person going to work because a milder symptomatic infection will be orders of magnitude more contagious that one at bed because it took it full grade. Still you are right that percolation is the most important point regarding mass vaccination.
"it never happened before. In 50, and for some banks 200 years of data, the statistical algorithms never encountered that situation, so they concluded it to be impossible. You can wine all about it, but that's an entirely correct conclusion."
Uh... in all the recorded History I never died before. Not even once. What's the enterily correct conclusion I should rise from such data?
"So far, every success by science in finding some way to fight disease has ended in option b."
One word: smallpox. I think you have deep misunderstandings both about statistics and biology.
"H1N1 flu is demonstrably lethal to children, healthy young adults, and people under 65 with common preexisting health conditions like asthma or HIV."
What you seem to forget is that seasonal flu -*any* year's seasonal flu, is demonstrably lethal to children, healthy young adults, and people under 65 with common preexisting health conditions like asthma or HIV.
Certainly all this issue seems to be poisoned by sensationalist press beyond repair, one way or another but, to-date, all objective measures seems to point that while H1N1 *could* have been a tragic deathly pandemia it will be no significantly worse than any other seasonal flu (and even its very highly contagious rates owes a significant percentage to the fact that it is actively seeked and diagnosed), but Pandora's box is already opened and it's in no one interest (press, pharma, government) to try to close it now.
"I'm sick and tired of seeing popular magazines make selective and incorrect use of data and invalid logic to draw incorrect conclusions that mislead the public"
That's the way the go with everything, so no surprise there.
Well, that's a myth. Pharma makes big dollars *even* from healthy people. All you need to consider is that "cosmetics" is another name for "pharma".
"They want you in poor health, but not quite ready to die."
That's not exactly true. An overall ill society is not a society that will pay for expensive treatments. Pharma needs a healthy mixture (pun intended) of long-term ill people and healthy people to pay for the treatment; that's why you see a lot of investment on first world-low impact illnesses (when treated) like obesity, hypertension or diabetes or, the best of all, cosmetics (where the "illness" is only in the mind of the buyer) but so little on, say, malaria.
Slashdot Mirror
"Both of those things can be accomplished on your own code too"
Yes, of course. And do you know how the internal app you developed so to allow non-programmers to update content, so PHBs can review the content prior to go public, so you can version contents and pre stablish the date it will go alive, etc. will be called? It will be called a "Content Management System".
So in the end you won't avoid the CMS you'll just develop your own internal one: reinventing the wheel, at a cost, and probably worse.
"Right, because Oracle doesn't currently do what it can to make money off its various lower-end (both compatible and incompatible with the flagship server) database products"
Like? Certainly not BDB which is certainly not in the same niche than Oracle, MySQL, etc. And then there has been in fact noise about Oracle allowing BDB to stagnate.
"Right, because if MySQL slowly stagnates, the people who are interested in an open-source or lower-end database system will instead purchase Oracle's flagship product"
Or they would look for their "free as in beer" Oracle's flagship product versions, yes. Specially if they allow MySQL to slowly stagnate on functionalities but still allow for development of tools for easy migration from MySQL to Oracle.
"rather than moving to less expensive and open source third-party offerings like PostgreSQL."
Point being that "free as in beer" versions of Oracle are not any more expensive than PostgreSQL on adquisition costs and could be cheaper on migration costs as long as Oracle allows for a smooth migration path to arise.
"that hardly means that no one else can subsidize open source development of a MySQL fork from related operations (such as support.)"
Certainly you are right but still it seems you completly missed my point. Please note I never said that I agree with RMS's point of view here; I only stated that RMS's point of view as deduced from his text is *not* what the grandparent said to be and to the point there's nothing on your text reasoning that I'm wrong on that, just that you happen to disagree from RMS's point of view. Well, I disagree here with him too, so what?
"The last application I had trouble installing on Linux, due to glibc versioning problems, was a profiler for WebMethods Integration Server. Something like that is never going to get into the APT repository."
Why not? If it's free software it certainly can go in the "contrib" repo; if it's closed source but still redistributable it will go in "non-free". Being it "niche" doesn't preclude it from being in the repos: usually if it is license-compatible and there's at least one person willing to take the effort to package it, it will be accepted. Even if the packager is not a Debian developer, it will go with the support of the mentors list.
Of course it won't go in the repos if it's closed non-redistributable software but then we come back to square one since I already said that to be a "maybe" case for the fat binary case.
"Really? You cannot possibly imagine that someone making a tiny niche product outside of the purview of the established distributions would want to make binaries available to people?"
Yes I can, but I still don't see how the fat binary will help them anyway.
"Well, fuck you and your narrow minded obtuseness."
Oh, Jesus Christ! Now I see how fat binaries would benefit your example niche! Well, not.
"Or did ease of use suddenly become a closed source model only?"
So now looking at your web page, look for the download page, download by hand your product (which hopefully will be statically linked or at least bundled with a helluva lot of libraries), read for whatever the hell is the setup process your single product has and apply it, somehow becomes easier than opening the GUI for "installing programs" select the one I want to, double click and it's done? Or its, oh, the horror, command line counterpart, `aptitude install foo`, and it's done?
I'll tell you what "ease of use" means for the end user on linux: it means "your program is distributed along my distribution of choice so I can install it using the tools I'm already aware and acustomed to". If you produce, say, a database engine you will have a hard day to make it easier for me than `aptitude install postgresql` unless, of course, your install procedure is `aptitude install yourdatabaseengine`. It really can't come much easier than this. The fact your product is a tiny niche one doesn't preclude it from being at a distro repositories as is the case for the tens of thousands already there.
Unless, of course, you have some issue with your program being distributed from central repositories like, well I don't know... it being closed source?
"Actually, having to maintain packages across several architectures can be tricky at times."
Of course yes. But let's see if the single fat binary reduces complexity.
"Some packages need to be patched to run correctly on different architectures"
And they still will need that. Or do you thing that the ability to produce a single binary will magically make those incompatibilities to disapear?
"the upstream maintainers can accidentally break those patches (e.g. if they are not personally testing on a given architecture)"
That can happen too with a single binary exactly the same way.
"It could even be the case that different architectures have different versions of the same packages, because the distro maintainers are busy trying to get everything to work."
Probably with a reason (like new version needs to be patched to work on this or that platform). How do you think going with a single binary will avoid that problem? It's arguably that in this situation you would end up worse. At least with different binaries you can take the decision of staying with foo 1.1 on arm but promote foo 1.2 on amd64 in the meantime; with a single binary it would mean foo 1.1 for everybody.
"I am not saying that this "universal binary" solution is the answer, but it might help streamline the build process at the distro level."
Still you didn't produce any argument about *how* it could help.
"Not everyone is skilled enough to compile the source on their own"
By "end user" we can understand here "distribution maintainer" which already has the skills to compile the source (and that's not but a part in the lot of things that have to be done in order to integrate some software in a distribution).
"I would think this might be useful for distro maintainers who do not want to maintain separate packages across multiple architectures"
But they have to: they still must build and integrate for their supported platforms, then rebuild when bugs are found or the software is upgraded, then test... It's just the last step (producing the very binary packages) that changes so instead of multiple packages you'd end up with a single multplatform package. The distributor still need (almost) as much disk space and infrastructures as before, but then each and every user will end up with spending much more space in their hard disks (imagine the fat binary for, say, Debian, supporting eleven platforms).
And then, please note that this will allow for single binaries for diferent hardware platforms but not for different version compilations (so it won't be useful to obtain binaries for, say, amd64 for Debian, Red Hat and SUSE).
It seems it will only benefit to those that want to publish their software in an only binary form outside the framework of stablished distributions and that means closed source software. Of course they can look for their bussiness the way they feel better, it's only they don't get my simpathy so I don't give a damn about them.
"asking every bit of equipment to conform to the same standard, and to stick to that standard for more than one product release cycle, is something of a pipe dream."
Yeah... I dream the day they decide, well, I don't know, something like all server-grade equipment to fit into a cabinet 482.6mm wide and heigth by multiples of 44.45mm
"A front line MD should NEVER make final treatment or diagnosis decisions based directly on primary studies."
Not based directly but taking them into account. They in fact, do it.
"if your MD recommends you don't get a flu shot because of a primary study he read about, go see someone else."
So now, you expect *the patient* to know more about the issue than the MD... Not that they are going to tell me what they base their decision exactly on (but, of course, if "who's the doctor here?" is not enough, why spend my time going to the doctor, I could diagnose and treat myself! faster and by your account, quite the same).
"Unless, of course, he's running an ethics board approved study"
The members of the ethical board are going to be MDs and lawyers, so your point is? (are going to be the lawyers the statistics experts?)
"If it was that important to Widenius then why did he sell his company instead of holding onto it?"
Widenius didn't sell it to a big database owner but to a company that were it not that it's in fact bought by Oracle would be exactly the kind of "neutral third party" he is asking for now.
Not to say that Widenius wouldn't sell to Oracle back in the day (I don't know) but that his past actions are well aligned with his current sayings.
"So basically, RMS is concerned that Oracle really would fork MySQL, and end the dual-licensing for any future versions they release."
Where have you read that in RMS's letter?
As I read it, RMS is concerned not because Oracle will close future MySQL development but because they will be the only ones that can profit from dual licensing MySQL and they won't do that because it would make it competing against their cash cow. Oracle would be much better served if they allow MySQL to slowly stagnate -and the point is that they can do it since noone else will be able to cash out the dual license path, than if they close the shop allowing for a faster substitution from another open alternative.
"The government may make my actions illegal, imprison, and/or kill me. Other organizations can't, unless the government gives them the allowance to do so."
Let's rewrite your argument.
Any organization can ban your actions, imprison and/or kill you (and such has been historically the case), unless goverment is enacted with power enough to avoid them doing it. Therefore, the government is the only group that most critically requires being enpowered since it's the only one that can stop all the others.
"I don't understand the mind of anyone who doesn't instinctively grasp the fact that government is the absolute worst way to accomplish a goal."
Maybe they come from Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway...
"To use an example in the context of this story, there's no reason why a regular MD should know how to do epidemiological studies properly."
Opening them to consider biased and unproper statistic studies published by the chem comps as legit.
"Let's I am going to cut your break lines in your car, and rig the throttle so that it goes to full and stays there. i will then call it a test to see and call what happens an accident."
If you did it in good faith, of course is an accident (isn't it an accident a child playing with gunpowder calling it an experiment and blowing his hand away?). How do *you* call "unseeked for and percieved as a bad things"? It might be an accident due to negligence, to criminal negligence even, but still an accident.
"To avoid t happening again all one has to do is use an american or chinese reactor that is designed to turn the reaction off"
Interesting proposition. I'd bet that "properly designed" is the important part even if it's designed by Russian engineers.
"yes there is more than one kind of nuclear reactor. Some are safer than others. Some are designed so that they only produce power under certain situations and turn themselves off when those aren't present."
Yeah, and surely engineers did come to those safer designs by not calling accidents, well, accidents.
"If I tied dynamite to your car's exhaust pipe to see what would happen, would an explosion be an accident?"
If you really didn't know what would happen yes, of course it's an accident. An accident caused by negligence that most probably will open you to civial an penal actions but still an accident. What else do you think it is?
"the horrible incompetence in our elected officials at the national level for the last few decades."
Horrible incompetence, you say? You mean they didn't achieved their own goals? I think I won't accept your explanation.
"Tchernobyl, of course, being not an accident but a deliberate test done with security systems shut off. I can't really see how it is even relevant in a discussion about nuclear safety."
Because a system is a system: all parts, people included, are to be taken into consideration.
What I don't see relevant is saying that Chernobyl was not an accident. Was it deliberate, then? Because I see no other options: something is either seeked for or unseeked for. When something is unseeked for and percieved as a bad thing we have a name for it, and such a name is "accident". Once you have an "accident" it comes to be *very* relevant to discuss how it came to happen and how can it be avoided in the future. And no: saying it was people misbehaving is not enough to avoid it to happen again.
"ok then what is the "best effort" treatment in this case?"
I said "treatment" on a general matter; we are talking here about vaccination.
"The fact is that the vaccine its self is the "best effort" here... *if* it works."
The fact is that it is already considered that it, in fact, works, so you can't deprive population at risk from it for an study and you'll have a hard day to challenge the vaccination (you should go with indirect measures like those from the article: death rates were significantly similar on years when people were vaccinated against the majoritary virus and on those where it was missed). That was my point.
"MDs shouldn't be experts in statistics."
And then you end up with MD treating as maeningitis any one that goes with a headache or, even worse, discrediting your symptoms as maeningitis as they "always" mean you got a cold. Statistics *is* a tool for proper diagnostics.
"nonsense. These kind of studies are done all the time, there is absolutely nothing unethical about "them!"
Sorry but you are wrong and you won't be able to find and example to support your point despite what you think.
There's indeed the case that when there's a known effective treatment to any given illness you *can't* use a standard double-blind but you should test your control group with such known treatment since it would be unethical to deprive them from a best-effort treatment. The ill effect here is that you end up without the ability to question the "known to be good" treatment since you can't test against it.
"The point of healthy people taking the vaccine is that then they don't get the flu at all, or get a much milder reaction to it, and thus they don't spread it."
You can bet a person going to work because a milder symptomatic infection will be orders of magnitude more contagious that one at bed because it took it full grade. Still you are right that percolation is the most important point regarding mass vaccination.
"H1N1 in San Diego is a KILLER... three atypical deaths recently..."
How many atypical deaths did San Diego got last year by these dates? You might be surprised.
"it never happened before. In 50, and for some banks 200 years of data, the statistical algorithms never encountered that situation, so they concluded it to be impossible. You can wine all about it, but that's an entirely correct conclusion."
Uh... in all the recorded History I never died before. Not even once. What's the enterily correct conclusion I should rise from such data?
"So far, every success by science in finding some way to fight disease has ended in option b."
One word: smallpox. I think you have deep misunderstandings both about statistics and biology.
"H1N1 flu is demonstrably lethal to children, healthy young adults, and people under 65 with common preexisting health conditions like asthma or HIV."
What you seem to forget is that seasonal flu -*any* year's seasonal flu, is demonstrably lethal to children, healthy young adults, and people under 65 with common preexisting health conditions like asthma or HIV.
Certainly all this issue seems to be poisoned by sensationalist press beyond repair, one way or another but, to-date, all objective measures seems to point that while H1N1 *could* have been a tragic deathly pandemia it will be no significantly worse than any other seasonal flu (and even its very highly contagious rates owes a significant percentage to the fact that it is actively seeked and diagnosed), but Pandora's box is already opened and it's in no one interest (press, pharma, government) to try to close it now.
"I'm sick and tired of seeing popular magazines make selective and incorrect use of data and invalid logic to draw incorrect conclusions that mislead the public"
That's the way the go with everything, so no surprise there.
"Pharma doesn't make a dime from healthy people."
Well, that's a myth. Pharma makes big dollars *even* from healthy people. All you need to consider is that "cosmetics" is another name for "pharma".
"They want you in poor health, but not quite ready to die."
That's not exactly true. An overall ill society is not a society that will pay for expensive treatments. Pharma needs a healthy mixture (pun intended) of long-term ill people and healthy people to pay for the treatment; that's why you see a lot of investment on first world-low impact illnesses (when treated) like obesity, hypertension or diabetes or, the best of all, cosmetics (where the "illness" is only in the mind of the buyer) but so little on, say, malaria.