Factory farming is a natural progression of human culture. We analyze our problems (steak is expensive and difficult to provide on a larger scale). We engineer and deploy solutions (farming).
Without agriculture, humans would never have developped any modern science. Only scientific applications to agriculture freed up enough cultural labor to apply science outside the realm of feeding everyone.
We ate meat before agriculture, and we eat meat now. And every last one of the vegans posting here (and even Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco too) would also eat meat if it were a choice between starving or eating meat.
Is factory farming so morally bankrupt that it cannot be a part of our culture without inordinate cruelty? What if the cows lived as nice a life as any cow could live. Free from predation, largely free from disease, but they still existed to be humanely euthanized at a slaughter house and for food and non-food products for humans? Would it be OK then?
The real issue with stances PETA takes is that they completely ignore the fact that only because of the success of agricultural science do we have a world in which tens of millions of dollars a year are donated to corporate campaign activists who seek to attack the very science that created the world in which they protest.
No, I meant what I wrote. Neuroscience, ed. Dale Purves, 2nd Edition, page 591
Or nearly any american book on linguistics.
A remarkable learning feat is that Americans learn, on average, 14 words each day from age 3 until college graduation. In other languages the rates are similar (but there is some language-to-language change).
Whether or not something is language is an academic topic with relatively standardized criteria. Whether non-humans have EVER used language is a hot topic in academic debate.
Alex clearly grasped abstract concepts and used those in symbolic communication. But that is not nearly enough for language, and is arguably trainable via simple conditioning. For example, understanding what a color is means you understand the concept of color, but does not mean you can use language.
Its a complex topic, and not easily explained to someone who is unfamiliar with linguistics.
This will have similar limits to systems based on EEG and MEG, although it has somewhat worse spatial resolution than either of those.
A principle limitation in brain-machine interfaces can be summed up by noting whether the current incarnation can provide more information that a monitor of a person's eye movements (a few bits per second).
This one will certainly fail that test, and fundamental limitations exist that will prevent its improvement, and those are based on the spatial and temporal resolution available by transcranial optical topography (or near-infrared as the case may be).
..When you can't buy anything flame resistant or UL listed. Or anything, for that matter. Is Washington a big enough state to overcome the costs associated with a differentiated product line? Will companies even make things that can't cost-effectively comply with other regulations and industry liability practices that require flame resistance?
There are other flame retardants that do not accumulate in biological tissue.
The issue here is that many human mothers have accumulated adequate levels of PBDEs in their fatty tissue that their breast milk contains it at high enough levels to cause thyroid dysfunction.
It is a nightmare waiting to happen. PBDEs that accumulate in biological tissue....remind anyone of anything...
Oh yeah, they are closely chemically related to PCB-95 - if anyone remembers...the chemical in Lake Michigan that caused developmental defects in the children of mothers who ate a lot of lake fish....
How do you explain how thin people, who have never smoked in their life and aren't obese that exercise regularly and eat properly, have high blood pressure?
Bad genetics. Or type 1 diabetes (which is also bad genetics). Stress as a contributing factor to steady hypertension (as opposed to spikes in blood pressure) is over-rated.
We all know stressed-out types get hypertension and not too many easy going, yoga types do. All this does is explain the exact chemistry by which some of us are ruining our bodies.
My impression is that adding cigarettes and an extra 50 pounds to that stressed-out type is the kicker.
Then it doesn't even matter if he is stressed out, his blood pressure is still through the roof.
Seriously, hypertension and obesity, and hypertension and smoking, good strong links.
And why would China and India start seriously cutting emissions if the US - by far the larges polluter - couldn't be bothered to do it? You people should stop your pathetic whining and get with the frikking programme here. Take responsibility instead of pointing fingers and shifting blame. Grow up.
Why would you assume that every nation has a right to an equal level of emissions instead of its current level of emissions?
Therein lies the problem. A contract is only a good one if all parties feel like they are being screwed equally. Kyoto is NOT EVEN REMOTELY CLOSE TO A GOOD CONTRACT.
Have you considered the possibility that not dealing with climate change may be more expensive than not doing anything about it? ***
For whom?
China will pass the USA in emissions within 10 years. We are standing still, they are ramping up with four times our population.
Gross domestic product is strongly dependent on usage of cheap energy. If we cap emissions, we force the USA into a quarter-after-quarter recession. Meanwhile, greenhouse gas problems are getting worse and worse because China and India are blowing smokestacks to the stars.
Then we wake up and demand action from China and India. The only problem is they are stronger economically than the USA. While we were in a quarter-after-quarter recession, they were burning fossil fuels like there is no tomorrow, powering up their SUVs, polluting their rivers, and developping their military. And then China tells us to go fock off and there is not a thing we can do about it.
There is NO SOLUTION unless all nations are considered EQUALLY at their CURRENT LEVELS. Treaties like Kyoto give strength to developping nations while chopping off the strongest nations at the knees. Maybe that flies for an international treaty someplace like France, but it will never fly here.
There is also some kinda guilt trip continuously laid upon the USA for its energy usage. We burned oil like there was no tomorrow industrializing after WWII, and brought up the standard of living for the entire planet. EVERY nation emulated the USA and followed suit the best it could. Now we are the bad guys for leading up to a problem that no one saw coming 20 years ago.
Well guess what, the solution will come, but it will not come by the industrialized nations handing half our economies to the developping nations. Keep working on it. And in the meantime, try a farting car, THEY COULD ACTUALLY HELP.
If you look at SO2 and NOx emissions per populated area, the USA is MUCH MUCH better. Our CO2 emissions comes with less SO2 and NOx than almost any other nation! In short, yes we burn a lot of fossil fuels, but we burn it cleaner than anyone.
More to the point, fossil fuel usage, per capita, has been steady in the USA since 1976. We are not the primary source of change that is altering the planet for the last 30 years. We were already there 30 years ago!
Change is heaviest in countries that are industrializing like Mexico, India, and China. Obviously, addressing the scope of the problem would require major changes in all nations. Currently there does not seem to be ANY HOPE of preventing further increases in greenhouse gases as there is nothing on the table to prevent nations that are industrializing from continuing on that track. Any changes that could be made in the USA, Canada, and Western Europe (and Oz and Japan) would pale in comparison to the large increases coming from China and India. And short-sighted, when you consider that capping CO2 emissions will force a quarter-after-quarter recession on all involved nations. And ain't that a pretty picture to consider?
I, for one, welcome our new farting car overlords. They actually could help.
You SHOULD read up on Timothy Ball. You would find he did his thesis work on the historical climate changes in Canada. He was a lecturing faculty member for roughly 16 years (in GEOGRAPHY), and in that time he wrote four peer reviewed papers, none on human contributions to global warming. In the last 10 years, he has been employed full-time as a shill for the oil companies, and comparably has not authored a single peer review paper on human contributions to global warming. Not now, not then, not ever. He gets paid to poke a stick in the side of REAL scientists studying man's contributions to global warming - kinda like a full-time paid heckler.
30-40 years ago they used to collate dialog from conference proceedings, with author names associated with their comments.
It is inspiring and educational in an entirely different way from peer review papers. You can find them in the library, up through the mid 1960s (at least I can find them).
I suspect an open-source model peer review will work well for some high profile journals. The editor would post the manuscript publicly, specifically email a half dozen key people in the field, and use the commentary/feedback to decide on publication. All comments associated with the author's real name. There would be requirements for a lot of feedback, and it being principally positive. If there is not much feedback, the issues are lower impact and should go to a specialist journal. If the feedback is logically tight and principally negative, the paper is rejected. Borderline cases the manuscript is withdrawn, revised, and re-posted.
Obviously this would never work at a specialist journal, because no one would comment, but at a high impact journal it JUST MIGHT WORK. They could even trial it on a limited number of submissions. It would certainly get rid of all the crap that slips between the cracks at the better short-manuscript-length journals like Science and Nature.
The simple solution is an internet-based taxpayer-sponsored library.
It avoids de-privatizing the journals.
It gives the public the access they want for the price they want.
Just hotlink them through Entrez Pubmed, or whatever other search engines people use, and collect use statistics to pay the journals.
The way this query is worded "Free public access to science" suggests that the peer review process and distribution process are inherently worthless. That could not be farther from true. But giving the public access to scientific work is a great idea.
Don't get your hopes too high...there is a fundamental limitation. Each stimulation of the ganglion cells requires power and generates heat. The chips are currently planar, which means a lot of heat is generated for each stimulation. With 16 electrodes dissipating the heat is manageable...ultimately they will hit the high end. Due to the circulation around the retina and aqueous humor, the eye is a poor place to dissipate heat.
However, a 25 or 36 electrode version should be very possible. I don't see anyone volunteering to have an implant placed in their eye...but once implanted, the wearers could easily be programmed to "see" invisible IR or UV light - like Predator.
As a disclaimer, I went to college and graduate school with the CEO of Second Sight, and have worked with the cochlear implant engineers from Advanced Bionics (some of whom are at Second Sight now). The technology has definitely got a big future.
Somewhat more telling that people more interested in ID are also more interested in serving on school boards. What is it about evolution that makes people not interested in the future of their children's schools?
I doubt you can find a single cognitive attribute that cannot be reasonably explained by the distributed patterns of action potentials in the neocortex and its supplemental structures.
This suggests there is something wrong with the current system...
In the current system, journal and libraries charge a fee to 1) pay for editors who have some knowledge of the material 2) pay for the administration of the peer-review process 3) pay for distribution costs
It is not like you really pay for access to the research. There are simply costs associated with ranking the research relative to other research via peer review (and this is essential), and costs associated with distribution.
As it is now, if you have access to a decent library, you have access to all published research...
And if you want to make it all public domain, you need to figure out how to conduct reasonable peer-review/ranking of papers, and distribution using public funds (this is actually the easy part). And how to deal with the journals, some of which make a LOT of money, when you tell them you are eminent domaining their business model...
More interesting is that Paul Ekman of UCSF can spot a liar over 99% of the time, even people trained to avoid it, and he routinely consults law enforcement to train them to do the same.
I worked with someone who was in one of his experiments. He was instructed to pick two of the many offered topics at random, and speak about each for a few minutes. One he was supposed to lie about, the other to tell the truth. And he was instructed to try to fool Ekman. Everyone got nailed.
Let's suppose you set up a bounty system test, looking for a new cure for malaria.
To "cure" malaria, you need to do a lot of scientific studies. That costs money. The X prize will not fund that. Once you have a "test" drug, you need to test in a variety of species. That costs money. the X prize will not fund that. Then you need human trials. The X prize will not fund that.
What the X prize will do is offer you money after you've already cured malaria in exchange for the intellectual property.
How much do you think Eli Lilly or Novartis or Merck would offer you for the same intellectual property? Enough to make you sell to them instead? Or, more likely, since you would almost have to have been working in an academic institution (or in business research), they will control the IP licensing, not you, and there is no way Jose they would take a lesser offer to get the X prize - the patent licensing lawyers at universities are just business lawyers trying to maximize profits.
I just don't see how this suggestion could really be taken seriously, it doesn't address limitations in too much of the related infrastructure. A much more possible idea would be to eminent domain the IP once the drug company has it and compensate the drug company, much the same way that occurs today when drug companies offer IP protected drugs for AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.
That's just not true. Polio, smallpox, almost wiped off the earth. HIV infection has been made manageable, and people are working very hard on vaccines.
The medical system is HUGELY biased to work on treatments for things not working properly, rather than work on prophylaxis. This will never change unless we go to socialized medicine, because people fundamentally go to see a doctor when they are sick, and not to manage their future potential illness burdens.
I also take issue with Durbin saying this indicates a problem with the patent system. If a new drug comes out that offers no additional benefit, but has patent protection, WHY DOESN'T THE CONSUMER BUY THE GENERIC? That is the real problem. Capitalism fundamentally depends on informed consumers. If anything, I would urge Durbin to consider legislation to inform the consumer about non-patent-protected drugs in a reasonable way so they would not waste their money on a slickly marketed new drug that is only just as good as a generic.
When a generic is on the market for three cents a pill, and a trademarked patented new drug is $1 a pill, but does the same thing, why is the consumer buying the trademarked patented drug?
Any why is that viewed as a problem with the patent system?
Then they went on to show a correlation with time as a taxi driver, but it was only significant if they removed one outlier, a process that COULD NOT POSSIBLY HAVE BEEN important to their statistical finding. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/97/8/4398
That part of the brain has neurons that are selectively active for the spatial position of the body in rats and Rhesus monkeys. So it would not be surprising to find it responded to taxi driving experience. But the surprising thing is the much larger reduction in anterior hippocampal volume is being ignored...
I am totally in favor of our new GPS automatic map making overlords!
from what I've seen of Colbert, his whole act seems to be a walking strawman. (The argument kind, not the farm kind.) There doesn't seem to be much else to it, other than trying to be funny about it.
I guess I just don't see the appeal. I don't want to be lectured at, even if it is sugarcoated in humor.
Are you Bill O'Reilly?
Colbert takes the approach of the O'Reilly factor. You know, EVERYTHING twisted and contorted to support the Republican agenda. Then, he takes all the twisting and contorting, and turns it up a notch, so that for anyone paying even a little attention, it is brilliantly facetious, sarcastic, and satirical all rolled into one.
Plus, in his interviews, Colbert is very quick-witted. Unless Penn Jillette is the guest.
Slashdot Mirror
Factory farming is a natural progression of human culture. We analyze our problems (steak is expensive and difficult to provide on a larger scale). We engineer and deploy solutions (farming).
Without agriculture, humans would never have developped any modern science. Only scientific applications to agriculture freed up enough cultural labor to apply science outside the realm of feeding everyone.
We ate meat before agriculture, and we eat meat now. And every last one of the vegans posting here (and even Ingrid Newkirk and Alex Pacheco too) would also eat meat if it were a choice between starving or eating meat.
Is factory farming so morally bankrupt that it cannot be a part of our culture without inordinate cruelty? What if the cows lived as nice a life as any cow could live. Free from predation, largely free from disease, but they still existed to be humanely euthanized at a slaughter house and for food and non-food products for humans? Would it be OK then?
The real issue with stances PETA takes is that they completely ignore the fact that only because of the success of agricultural science do we have a world in which tens of millions of dollars a year are donated to corporate campaign activists who seek to attack the very science that created the world in which they protest.
No, I meant what I wrote. Neuroscience, ed. Dale Purves, 2nd Edition, page 591
Or nearly any american book on linguistics.
A remarkable learning feat is that Americans learn, on average, 14 words each day from age 3 until college graduation. In other languages the rates are similar (but there is some language-to-language change).
Whether or not something is language is an academic topic with relatively standardized criteria. Whether non-humans have EVER used language is a hot topic in academic debate.
Alex clearly grasped abstract concepts and used those in symbolic communication. But that is not nearly enough for language, and is arguably trainable via simple conditioning. For example, understanding what a color is means you understand the concept of color, but does not mean you can use language.
Its a complex topic, and not easily explained to someone who is unfamiliar with linguistics.
Alex used words, but not language.
Language use requires word polymorphisms, grammar, and verbs.
Noted linguists such as Noam Chomsky did not feel that Alex's use of the 100 english words Alex knew constituted a true language.
An average college graduate in the USA has a vocabulary of 100,000 words.
Still, Alex displayed remarkable intelligence for a bird.
This will have similar limits to systems based on EEG and MEG, although it has somewhat worse spatial resolution than either of those.
A principle limitation in brain-machine interfaces can be summed up by noting whether the current incarnation can provide more information that a monitor of a person's eye movements (a few bits per second).
This one will certainly fail that test, and fundamental limitations exist that will prevent its improvement, and those are based on the spatial and temporal resolution available by transcranial optical topography (or near-infrared as the case may be).
..When you can't buy anything flame resistant or UL listed. Or anything, for that matter. Is Washington a big enough state to overcome the costs associated with a differentiated product line? Will companies even make things that can't cost-effectively comply with other regulations and industry liability practices that require flame resistance?
There are other flame retardants that do not accumulate in biological tissue.
The issue here is that many human mothers have accumulated adequate levels of PBDEs in their fatty tissue that their breast milk contains it at high enough levels to cause thyroid dysfunction.
It is a nightmare waiting to happen. PBDEs that accumulate in biological tissue....remind anyone of anything...
Oh yeah, they are closely chemically related to PCB-95 - if anyone remembers...the chemical in Lake Michigan that caused developmental defects in the children of mothers who ate a lot of lake fish....
Its like deja vue all over again.
How do you explain how thin people, who have never smoked in their life and aren't obese that exercise regularly and eat properly, have high blood pressure?
Bad genetics. Or type 1 diabetes (which is also bad genetics). Stress as a contributing factor to steady hypertension (as opposed to spikes in blood pressure) is over-rated.
We all know stressed-out types get hypertension and not too many easy going, yoga types do. All this does is explain the exact chemistry by which some of us are ruining our bodies.
My impression is that adding cigarettes and an extra 50 pounds to that stressed-out type is the kicker.
Then it doesn't even matter if he is stressed out, his blood pressure is still through the roof.
Seriously, hypertension and obesity, and hypertension and smoking, good strong links.
And why would China and India start seriously cutting emissions if the US - by far the larges polluter - couldn't be bothered to do it? You people should stop your pathetic whining and get with the frikking programme here. Take responsibility instead of pointing fingers and shifting blame. Grow up.
Why would you assume that every nation has a right to an equal level of emissions instead of its current level of emissions?
Therein lies the problem. A contract is only a good one if all parties feel like they are being screwed equally. Kyoto is NOT EVEN REMOTELY CLOSE TO A GOOD CONTRACT.
Have you considered the possibility that not dealing with climate change may be more expensive than not doing anything about it? ***
For whom?
China will pass the USA in emissions within 10 years. We are standing still, they are ramping up with four times our population.
Gross domestic product is strongly dependent on usage of cheap energy. If we cap emissions, we force the USA into a quarter-after-quarter recession. Meanwhile, greenhouse gas problems are getting worse and worse because China and India are blowing smokestacks to the stars.
Then we wake up and demand action from China and India. The only problem is they are stronger economically than the USA. While we were in a quarter-after-quarter recession, they were burning fossil fuels like there is no tomorrow, powering up their SUVs, polluting their rivers, and developping their military. And then China tells us to go fock off and there is not a thing we can do about it.
There is NO SOLUTION unless all nations are considered EQUALLY at their CURRENT LEVELS. Treaties like Kyoto give strength to developping nations while chopping off the strongest nations at the knees. Maybe that flies for an international treaty someplace like France, but it will never fly here.
There is also some kinda guilt trip continuously laid upon the USA for its energy usage. We burned oil like there was no tomorrow industrializing after WWII, and brought up the standard of living for the entire planet. EVERY nation emulated the USA and followed suit the best it could. Now we are the bad guys for leading up to a problem that no one saw coming 20 years ago.
Well guess what, the solution will come, but it will not come by the industrialized nations handing half our economies to the developping nations. Keep working on it. And in the meantime, try a farting car, THEY COULD ACTUALLY HELP.
The US is not the worst in emissions per capita. This should be obvious a prior with a few small extremely rich Middle Eastern oil nations.
c ap-environment-co2-emissions-per-capita
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/env_co2_emi_per
If you look at SO2 and NOx emissions per populated area, the USA is MUCH MUCH better. Our CO2 emissions comes with less SO2 and NOx than almost any other nation! In short, yes we burn a lot of fossil fuels, but we burn it cleaner than anyone.
More to the point, fossil fuel usage, per capita, has been steady in the USA since 1976. We are not the primary source of change that is altering the planet for the last 30 years. We were already there 30 years ago!
Change is heaviest in countries that are industrializing like Mexico, India, and China. Obviously, addressing the scope of the problem would require major changes in all nations. Currently there does not seem to be ANY HOPE of preventing further increases in greenhouse gases as there is nothing on the table to prevent nations that are industrializing from continuing on that track. Any changes that could be made in the USA, Canada, and Western Europe (and Oz and Japan) would pale in comparison to the large increases coming from China and India. And short-sighted, when you consider that capping CO2 emissions will force a quarter-after-quarter recession on all involved nations. And ain't that a pretty picture to consider?
I, for one, welcome our new farting car overlords. They actually could help.
You SHOULD read up on Timothy Ball. You would find he did his thesis work on the historical climate changes in Canada. He was a lecturing faculty member for roughly 16 years (in GEOGRAPHY), and in that time he wrote four peer reviewed papers, none on human contributions to global warming. In the last 10 years, he has been employed full-time as a shill for the oil companies, and comparably has not authored a single peer review paper on human contributions to global warming. Not now, not then, not ever. He gets paid to poke a stick in the side of REAL scientists studying man's contributions to global warming - kinda like a full-time paid heckler.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Ball
30-40 years ago they used to collate dialog from conference proceedings, with author names associated with their comments.
It is inspiring and educational in an entirely different way from peer review papers. You can find them in the library, up through the mid 1960s (at least I can find them).
I suspect an open-source model peer review will work well for some high profile journals. The editor would post the manuscript publicly, specifically email a half dozen key people in the field, and use the commentary/feedback to decide on publication. All comments associated with the author's real name. There would be requirements for a lot of feedback, and it being principally positive. If there is not much feedback, the issues are lower impact and should go to a specialist journal. If the feedback is logically tight and principally negative, the paper is rejected. Borderline cases the manuscript is withdrawn, revised, and re-posted.
Obviously this would never work at a specialist journal, because no one would comment, but at a high impact journal it JUST MIGHT WORK. They could even trial it on a limited number of submissions. It would certainly get rid of all the crap that slips between the cracks at the better short-manuscript-length journals like Science and Nature.
Right...
The simple solution is an internet-based taxpayer-sponsored library.
It avoids de-privatizing the journals.
It gives the public the access they want for the price they want.
Just hotlink them through Entrez Pubmed, or whatever other search engines people use, and collect use statistics to pay the journals.
The way this query is worded "Free public access to science" suggests that the peer review process and distribution process are inherently worthless. That could not be farther from true. But giving the public access to scientific work is a great idea.
Don't get your hopes too high...there is a fundamental limitation. Each stimulation of the ganglion cells requires power and generates heat. The chips are currently planar, which means a lot of heat is generated for each stimulation. With 16 electrodes dissipating the heat is manageable...ultimately they will hit the high end. Due to the circulation around the retina and aqueous humor, the eye is a poor place to dissipate heat.
However, a 25 or 36 electrode version should be very possible. I don't see anyone volunteering to have an implant placed in their eye...but once implanted, the wearers could easily be programmed to "see" invisible IR or UV light - like Predator.
As a disclaimer, I went to college and graduate school with the CEO of Second Sight, and have worked with the cochlear implant engineers from Advanced Bionics (some of whom are at Second Sight now). The technology has definitely got a big future.
Somewhat more telling that people more interested in ID are also more interested in serving on school boards. What is it about evolution that makes people not interested in the future of their children's schools?
I doubt you can find a single cognitive attribute that cannot be reasonably explained by the distributed patterns of action potentials in the neocortex and its supplemental structures.
This suggests there is something wrong with the current system...
In the current system, journal and libraries charge a fee to
1) pay for editors who have some knowledge of the material
2) pay for the administration of the peer-review process
3) pay for distribution costs
It is not like you really pay for access to the research. There are simply costs associated with ranking the research relative to other research via peer review (and this is essential), and costs associated with distribution.
As it is now, if you have access to a decent library, you have access to all published research...
And if you want to make it all public domain, you need to figure out how to conduct reasonable peer-review/ranking of papers, and distribution using public funds (this is actually the easy part). And how to deal with the journals, some of which make a LOT of money, when you tell them you are eminent domaining their business model...
More interesting is that Paul Ekman of UCSF can spot a liar over 99% of the time, even people trained to avoid it, and he routinely consults law enforcement to train them to do the same.
e ID=0007F06E-B7AE-1522-B7AE83414B7F0182
http://www.sciammind.com/print_version.cfm?articl
I worked with someone who was in one of his experiments. He was instructed to pick two of the many offered topics at random, and speak about each for a few minutes. One he was supposed to lie about, the other to tell the truth. And he was instructed to try to fool Ekman. Everyone got nailed.
Let's suppose you set up a bounty system test, looking for a new cure for malaria.
To "cure" malaria, you need to do a lot of scientific studies. That costs money. The X prize will not fund that. Once you have a "test" drug, you need to test in a variety of species. That costs money. the X prize will not fund that. Then you need human trials. The X prize will not fund that.
What the X prize will do is offer you money after you've already cured malaria in exchange for the intellectual property.
How much do you think Eli Lilly or Novartis or Merck would offer you for the same intellectual property? Enough to make you sell to them instead? Or, more likely, since you would almost have to have been working in an academic institution (or in business research), they will control the IP licensing, not you, and there is no way Jose they would take a lesser offer to get the X prize - the patent licensing lawyers at universities are just business lawyers trying to maximize profits.
I just don't see how this suggestion could really be taken seriously, it doesn't address limitations in too much of the related infrastructure. A much more possible idea would be to eminent domain the IP once the drug company has it and compensate the drug company, much the same way that occurs today when drug companies offer IP protected drugs for AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.
Wow, and this would be better than the NIH extramural funding system how?
That's just not true. Polio, smallpox, almost wiped off the earth. HIV infection has been made manageable, and people are working very hard on vaccines.
The medical system is HUGELY biased to work on treatments for things not working properly, rather than work on prophylaxis. This will never change unless we go to socialized medicine, because people fundamentally go to see a doctor when they are sick, and not to manage their future potential illness burdens.
I also take issue with Durbin saying this indicates a problem with the patent system. If a new drug comes out that offers no additional benefit, but has patent protection, WHY DOESN'T THE CONSUMER BUY THE GENERIC? That is the real problem. Capitalism fundamentally depends on informed consumers. If anything, I would urge Durbin to consider legislation to inform the consumer about non-patent-protected drugs in a reasonable way so they would not waste their money on a slickly marketed new drug that is only just as good as a generic.
When a generic is on the market for three cents a pill, and a trademarked patented new drug is $1 a pill, but does the same thing, why is the consumer buying the trademarked patented drug?
Any why is that viewed as a problem with the patent system?
Yeah, I was suspicious of it then, too.
The taxi drivers have a 20% reduction in anterior hippocampus. And
a 7-8% increase in posterior hippocampus.
Therefore the brain grows from experience!
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/97/8/4398/F2
Then they went on to show a correlation with time as a taxi driver,
but it was only significant if they removed one outlier, a process
that COULD NOT POSSIBLY HAVE BEEN important to their statistical
finding.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/97/8/4398
That part of the brain has neurons that are selectively active
for the spatial position of the body in rats and Rhesus monkeys. So
it would not be surprising to find it responded to taxi driving
experience. But the surprising thing is the much larger reduction in
anterior hippocampal volume is being ignored...
I am totally in favor of our new GPS automatic map making
overlords!
from what I've seen of Colbert, his whole act seems to be a walking strawman. (The argument kind, not the farm kind.) There doesn't seem to be much else to it, other than trying to be funny about it.
I guess I just don't see the appeal. I don't want to be lectured at, even if it is sugarcoated in humor.
Are you Bill O'Reilly?
Colbert takes the approach of the O'Reilly factor. You know, EVERYTHING twisted and contorted to support the Republican agenda. Then, he takes all the twisting and contorting, and turns it up a notch, so that for anyone paying even a little attention, it is brilliantly facetious, sarcastic, and satirical all rolled into one.
Plus, in his interviews, Colbert is very quick-witted. Unless Penn Jillette is the guest.