But, of course, He didn't intend for the listener to understand that He thought of Himself as a literal door. Do you suppose it is also possible for God the Father to speak and not intend it to be interpreted literally?
I think everyone is paying too much attention to some small amount of people who actually are the "dumb science-hating" fundamentalists the/. crowd characterize as mainstream right-wing christian americans.
Welcome to hardball politics, where your opponents latch on to extremist nutjobs in order to tar you as a nutjob yourself. And it will continue to be so as long as conservatives fail to make the case that anti-science kookery is not a necessary part of conservatism. And I say that as a conservative, my friend.
Insofar as there are some who find the methodological materialism of science offensive, they are indeed opposed to the entirety of science, whether intentionally or not.
I guarantee every single one of the 51 percent is a so-called Christian.
You would be wrong. The vast majority would be, but of course Islamic creationism is quite alive and well, even in this country - that Harun Yahya nutjob was invited to testify before the Kansas Board of Education during their hearings on the ID nonsense.
Carries no weight with them, insofar as the vast majority of people likely to raise a stink about this kind of thing are evangelicals and not Catholics - in fact, there's a certain amount of overlap between anti-evolution folks and anti-Catholic folks. For them, the fact that the Church does not require a literal reading of Genesis of Catholics is just one more piece of evidence that the RC Church is the Whore of Babylon. All kinds of worms under that particular rock...
I thought I posted a reply, but the Gods of the Ether apparently swallowed it:)
Anyway, what you seem to be getting at is that everyone who's ever sold or grown a potato should be writing a check to Peru.
And if not, what's the answer? How do you reward the natives for somehow discovering that people who chew the unripe berries of the Ixtaplopchtl bush never get the sniffles, while simultaneously not creating a disincentive for someone to turn the Ixtaplopchtl berry into a useful medicine?
A good point. Where does it end, insofar as it's basically a zero-investment "forever" patent?
The other thing that occurs to me is that there's been so much cultural cross-pollination (literally and figuratively) throughout history, that it looks like it's damn near impossible for anyone to avoid getting tangled in it. Aside from potatoes, corn is a staple part of the Peruvian diet, both for human and livestock consumption. Uh-oh, that's trouble - corn was domesticated, as nearly as anyone can tell, in central Mexico around 5000 BC. Does Peru want to start paying Mexico for its continued use of corn and corn derivatives? Or do they figure this is a one-way street?
There have been worse proposals, no doubt, but this one is not an especially good one in any respect:)
Option 3) The pharmaceuticals start growing the plants on their own in other countries without paying anything to the country the plant came from.
That's basically what they do now. But that doesn't allow certain parties to get a slice of the pie, which is why...
Or are the countries trying to claim a patent on the platns/animals that came about naturally?
...these countries are trying to do more or less exactly that. Basically, the assertion is that they have some sort of collective ownership rights to plants etc. that come from their regions, and any/all derivatives of those plants that are found to be useful - "useful" meaning "profitable", of course.
The other thing is that they'd like to claim that there's some sort of ownership rights inherent in the techniques employed by natives around the world, such that if you learn something useful from them and their folk remedies, you should have to pay for it. I tend to doubt that this is solely for the benefit of said tribesmen - the Peruvian government will no doubt assure everyone that any such monies are for the benefit of the natives, but my guess is that they'll still want the check made out to "Peru". Basically, people have figured out that there's at least the potential to make money off of what the natives know, and now everyone's angling to get their cut. There's no saints or angels here, as far as I can tell;)
Yeah, but you can't just send a bundle of leaves to the pharmacy and let doctors know your miracle is now available. It takes time and money to find the miracle compound - assuming it exists, and it may be that you end up wasting that time and money to find nothing - it takes time and money to synthesize it, it takes time and money to test it for safety and efficacy, it takes time and money to mass-produce it and get it into the hands of sick people. Plus, you have to cover all the time and money you spent on medicines that didn't pan out.
Now, if you can't recoup that investment because anyone can come along and make knockoffs for 10% of what you can - they don't have to bother with R&D, successful or failed, because you were thoughtful enough to do that for them - who's going to bother spending all that time and money to find new medicines? What's the point when your investment in research and development is a guaranteed loser?
Getting rid of patents on drugs is one of those things that sounds great in principle, but in practice, it means a lot less new medicine. Between research and testing and production and marketing, it's not unusual for drug companies to spend $750 million on bringing one new drug to market. Dunno about you, but I don't have that kind of money lying around, and the people who do aren't going to invest it in something if they don't think they can get it back. They'll go find someplace else to invest it, and there'll be that much less money for new medicine.
Lets be fair, the lab didn't want to help anyone with their knowledge except themselves and their shareholders.
Yeah, they get helped, and all the people who receive the medicine they create get helped, considering that they wouldn't have had it otherwise. Drug companies make money for themselves and their shareholders because they make things people want to buy - i.e., by helping sick people get well.
They are about stealing knowledge from other cultures/sources and pretending to discover the wheel...
If I observe you, a native tribesman, using some herb to cure toothaches, and I then extract and patent some new painkiller from the herb, how is that "stealing" knowledge from you?
...pretend[ing] to have some kind of special rights to exploit it over anyone else's.
Ah, but don't you see? That's exactly what these countries are claiming for themselves. They're claiming that, because the potato came from Peru, Peru therefore should own a piece of everything that ever comes from the potato, because they have (or want, anyway) "some kind of special rights to exploit it over anyone else's". You've nailed the problem, but you have the wrong villain;)
That's not what I asked. For a while, under this very patent system you object to, Bristol-Myers held a couple of patents on Taxol, before they were eventually invalidated. But even while they were still in force, that didn't stop anyone who wanted from going out and eating the bark of the Pacific Yew, or making the leaves into tea, or whatever folk remedy you care to think of. Object if you want, but at least try to ground objections in reality.
So, suddenly because someone send a researcher to the rain forest, to learn how indigenous people used some plants, they suddenly have exclusives right to the product of those plants, and you pretend that even them (i.e. the people that have used the plants forever) have to pay royalties?
Any actual examples of that ever happening? Bayer held a patent on aspirin when it was first created, but that did not prevent anyone who was so inclined from going out and eating the bark of the willow tree from whence it came.
No. Let's review what we're talking about here - basically, the idea is that countries should somehow have rights to anything and everything that's created from something that once upon a time kinda sorta originated somewhere in the vicinity of what would one day be their country - i.e., they don't want to patent the cancer cure, they want to patent the tree it comes from, and thereby claim ownership of the cancer cure too. It's great if you're the sort of country that has a lot of trees but doesn't actually do anything with them, but for those places that actually, you know, create things, there's no incentive at all to sign on to such a thing.
The odds of this sort of IP protection being accepted worldwide: about zero. Anyone feel like sending a royalty payment to Peru each time you eat a potato? Didn't think so.
Similarly, the odds of this causing some sort of moral crisis on the part of US and other Western governments: about zero. Like I said, let's wish for a pony while we're enjoying this rich, satisfying fantasy life.
What you are saying is, that companies selling PCs are actually complicit in the act of pirating and sharing music ?
Goofy analogy. No, when someone sells you a computer, they don't know that you'll use it to pirate music, or commit identity theft, or whatever - maybe you will, maybe you won't, and they don't have any control over it regardless. When these guys sell a thousand of their chips to some computer manufacturer, they know goddamn well that the buyer is going to use these things to rip people off - that's the only possible reason someone would buy these things, to rip people off.
In order to make any of these matches fair, you should force a restart after every single kill or give everyone all of the weapons at the start..and NOT INCLUDE SINGLE power-ups...I mean things like double/quad damage because only one person can have that at a time...totally unfair. Play even and then see who is the best.
Adrenaline Gamer (HLDM mod - HL2DM is supposedly in development) in Arena mode does exactly that. I'm not a huge AG player, but some of the folks on there are terrifyingly good.
Interesting - I happen to have Studio 9 on the Win2k box in front of me, and sure enough, it craps out if you try to start it from a user-level account. I got it to go further, sort of, by giving that account explicit permission to modify \Program Files\Pinnacle, but it still crapped out before starting, so my guess is that it's trying to touch something, maybe in the reg, that it doesn't have permission to touch.
Anyway, I run it successfully under a power user level account, so if you have XP Pro, you could try kicking the account up to a power user, and that should get it. Of course, there's not a heck of a lot of difference between power user and administrator privs - power users can't modify HKLM in the registry, nor can they access other users' files without explicit permission, but that's about it, so running as a power user may sort of defeat the purpose of limiting their privs in the first place. HTH - cheers!:)
Most of the moral decisions that I make have nothing to do with perceived consequences; I choose to act a certain way because my moral convictions dictate that I should do so.
That's fine, but I assume you're not about to tell me that amoral people don't exist...
Imagine the evolutionary turn that could create - it would put much more emphasis on critical thinking, and if it weren't for fear, I think we'd end up with a smarter society.
And/or a much smaller society, as you say;)
The other thing that occurs to me is that I think that for many (if not most) people there are certain situations where fear of the consequences is one of the main things that keeps them (us) from behaving badly. Take away that fear, and pretty much the only thing that's left is the relatively straightforward and cold calculus of "can I get away with this?" And unfortunately, there already doesn't seem to be a shortage of people who think that yes, they are clever or careful enough to get away with some bad act - absent fear, they'd have one less restraint on their behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
But, of course, He didn't intend for the listener to understand that He thought of Himself as a literal door. Do you suppose it is also possible for God the Father to speak and not intend it to be interpreted literally?
Welcome to hardball politics, where your opponents latch on to extremist nutjobs in order to tar you as a nutjob yourself. And it will continue to be so as long as conservatives fail to make the case that anti-science kookery is not a necessary part of conservatism. And I say that as a conservative, my friend.
So when Christ said "I am the door" (John 10:9), do you suppose he had hinges and a doorknob?
Insofar as there are some who find the methodological materialism of science offensive, they are indeed opposed to the entirety of science, whether intentionally or not.
You would be wrong. The vast majority would be, but of course Islamic creationism is quite alive and well, even in this country - that Harun Yahya nutjob was invited to testify before the Kansas Board of Education during their hearings on the ID nonsense.
Carries no weight with them, insofar as the vast majority of people likely to raise a stink about this kind of thing are evangelicals and not Catholics - in fact, there's a certain amount of overlap between anti-evolution folks and anti-Catholic folks. For them, the fact that the Church does not require a literal reading of Genesis of Catholics is just one more piece of evidence that the RC Church is the Whore of Babylon. All kinds of worms under that particular rock...
Anyway, what you seem to be getting at is that everyone who's ever sold or grown a potato should be writing a check to Peru.
And if not, what's the answer? How do you reward the natives for somehow discovering that people who chew the unripe berries of the Ixtaplopchtl bush never get the sniffles, while simultaneously not creating a disincentive for someone to turn the Ixtaplopchtl berry into a useful medicine?
The other thing that occurs to me is that there's been so much cultural cross-pollination (literally and figuratively) throughout history, that it looks like it's damn near impossible for anyone to avoid getting tangled in it. Aside from potatoes, corn is a staple part of the Peruvian diet, both for human and livestock consumption. Uh-oh, that's trouble - corn was domesticated, as nearly as anyone can tell, in central Mexico around 5000 BC. Does Peru want to start paying Mexico for its continued use of corn and corn derivatives? Or do they figure this is a one-way street?
There have been worse proposals, no doubt, but this one is not an especially good one in any respect :)
That's basically what they do now. But that doesn't allow certain parties to get a slice of the pie, which is why...
Or are the countries trying to claim a patent on the platns/animals that came about naturally?
The other thing is that they'd like to claim that there's some sort of ownership rights inherent in the techniques employed by natives around the world, such that if you learn something useful from them and their folk remedies, you should have to pay for it. I tend to doubt that this is solely for the benefit of said tribesmen - the Peruvian government will no doubt assure everyone that any such monies are for the benefit of the natives, but my guess is that they'll still want the check made out to "Peru". Basically, people have figured out that there's at least the potential to make money off of what the natives know, and now everyone's angling to get their cut. There's no saints or angels here, as far as I can tell ;)
Now, if you can't recoup that investment because anyone can come along and make knockoffs for 10% of what you can - they don't have to bother with R&D, successful or failed, because you were thoughtful enough to do that for them - who's going to bother spending all that time and money to find new medicines? What's the point when your investment in research and development is a guaranteed loser?
Getting rid of patents on drugs is one of those things that sounds great in principle, but in practice, it means a lot less new medicine. Between research and testing and production and marketing, it's not unusual for drug companies to spend $750 million on bringing one new drug to market. Dunno about you, but I don't have that kind of money lying around, and the people who do aren't going to invest it in something if they don't think they can get it back. They'll go find someplace else to invest it, and there'll be that much less money for new medicine.
Yeah, they get helped, and all the people who receive the medicine they create get helped, considering that they wouldn't have had it otherwise. Drug companies make money for themselves and their shareholders because they make things people want to buy - i.e., by helping sick people get well.
If I observe you, a native tribesman, using some herb to cure toothaches, and I then extract and patent some new painkiller from the herb, how is that "stealing" knowledge from you?
Ah, but don't you see? That's exactly what these countries are claiming for themselves. They're claiming that, because the potato came from Peru, Peru therefore should own a piece of everything that ever comes from the potato, because they have (or want, anyway) "some kind of special rights to exploit it over anyone else's". You've nailed the problem, but you have the wrong villain ;)
That's not what I asked. For a while, under this very patent system you object to, Bristol-Myers held a couple of patents on Taxol, before they were eventually invalidated. But even while they were still in force, that didn't stop anyone who wanted from going out and eating the bark of the Pacific Yew, or making the leaves into tea, or whatever folk remedy you care to think of. Object if you want, but at least try to ground objections in reality.
Any actual examples of that ever happening? Bayer held a patent on aspirin when it was first created, but that did not prevent anyone who was so inclined from going out and eating the bark of the willow tree from whence it came.
No. Let's review what we're talking about here - basically, the idea is that countries should somehow have rights to anything and everything that's created from something that once upon a time kinda sorta originated somewhere in the vicinity of what would one day be their country - i.e., they don't want to patent the cancer cure, they want to patent the tree it comes from, and thereby claim ownership of the cancer cure too. It's great if you're the sort of country that has a lot of trees but doesn't actually do anything with them, but for those places that actually, you know, create things, there's no incentive at all to sign on to such a thing.
Similarly, the odds of this causing some sort of moral crisis on the part of US and other Western governments: about zero. Like I said, let's wish for a pony while we're enjoying this rich, satisfying fantasy life.
Goofy analogy. No, when someone sells you a computer, they don't know that you'll use it to pirate music, or commit identity theft, or whatever - maybe you will, maybe you won't, and they don't have any control over it regardless. When these guys sell a thousand of their chips to some computer manufacturer, they know goddamn well that the buyer is going to use these things to rip people off - that's the only possible reason someone would buy these things, to rip people off.
Adrenaline Gamer (HLDM mod - HL2DM is supposedly in development) in Arena mode does exactly that. I'm not a huge AG player, but some of the folks on there are terrifyingly good.
Two years, and you still don't have anything new to say?
Just for kicks, I tried firing up Ulead's Videostudio 8 under a user-level account, and it shit the bed too. Ah, well....
Anyway, I run it successfully under a power user level account, so if you have XP Pro, you could try kicking the account up to a power user, and that should get it. Of course, there's not a heck of a lot of difference between power user and administrator privs - power users can't modify HKLM in the registry, nor can they access other users' files without explicit permission, but that's about it, so running as a power user may sort of defeat the purpose of limiting their privs in the first place. HTH - cheers! :)
That deal died, I believe - Claria is still Claria, and not a division of MS, last I checked.
That's fine, but I assume you're not about to tell me that amoral people don't exist...
There's a lot of those these days - which one did you mean?
Sorry, couldn't resist ;)
And/or a much smaller society, as you say ;)
The other thing that occurs to me is that I think that for many (if not most) people there are certain situations where fear of the consequences is one of the main things that keeps them (us) from behaving badly. Take away that fear, and pretty much the only thing that's left is the relatively straightforward and cold calculus of "can I get away with this?" And unfortunately, there already doesn't seem to be a shortage of people who think that yes, they are clever or careful enough to get away with some bad act - absent fear, they'd have one less restraint on their behavior.