If you do the math, it would be cheaper for the government (i.e., cost less in your and my tax dollars) to do away with drug patents altogether and pay for the full development cost of each drug. Not that I support big drug companies or anything, but how are you coming up with that? Logic dictates that governments would be less efficient in producing drugs (like they seem to be with everything else). Further, you are then forced to rely on the current government in power to decide on what avenues (drug development wise) to pursue. If that was the case, you would never get things like the "morning after pill" or anything else that has any controversy behind it.
In fact, market forces cause companies to develop the most profitable drugs, but those are not the drugs we actually need. Really? Well, the market seems to think that we need these drugs, doesn't it?
Drugs that actually cure, that are based on public domain substances... Huh? What are you suggesting? That pharmaceutical companies provide no drugs of non-trivial value to society? Interesting. What about the HIV cocktails like Isentress , Zidovudine ? I could go on and list a 100 more, but I think I have shown my point.
Well, you must not have worked on a journal before. I am on the board for only an open access college journal and though we only publish ~10 articles per year, we still need a big staff doing all the tasks I mentioned and more And we have a fairly high budget. If my university's general funds and outside grants didn't cover our costs, our journal would disappear instantly.
You seem to suggest that Nature (only an example because I happened to be reading something from there), which has over 50 journals to manage, 1000s of reviews to track, 1000s of articles to edit, 1000s of authors to communicate with, servers to host, "standard software packages" to customize and deploy, advertising to attract, subscriptions to manage and keep track of, among other things, costs can be accomplished through a "1/2 admin position" and a "cost of $50k/year!" And you were modded informative?
The argument that the legislation will force journals to go open access might have some merit; however, I don't foresee t. The costs needed to maintain these journals, however, will have to come out of somewhere.
Though in theory the idea sounds great, the issue becomes that there aren't too many open-access journals that are prestigious. This is partly because of the high cost of maintaining scientific peer review. Anybody managing a journal must keep enlist reviewers, make sure reviewers review, edit, do layout, maintain a highly dynamic website and a bunch of other expensive tasks. It makes sense then that there should be a way for journals to recoup their expenses. I don't think forcing top authors to publish in lesser known journals is the way.
A better solution, I feel, would be to ensure that the (NIH grant winning) authors pay an up-front cost to ensure open-access for their articles. Most of the big name publishing groups I'm familiar with (i.e. Science, Nature, Elsevier, etc.) allow this. The cost is usually not prohibitive (~1000 USD) and would be a better solution for ensuring that the science paid for by government agencies is open to everyone.
I was asking myself the same question (parent of this parent as well), why did it take several years for something that was so much of a blatant violation of the Bill of Rights be removed? Does it actually take a challenge (ie lawsuit) for a court to overturn anti-constitutional laws? Yes, it does. In order for any court in the United States to conduct judicial review, at least one person must be harmed by it and have legal standing to present a case in the court. More on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_review_in_the_United_States
NASA, and the United States in general, can see no benefit in a manned mission to the moon without a specific purpose. Seriously, what would be the point? To show that the U.S. can do it? Well, the U.S. already has, wayback in 1969.
What NASA is more interested in at the moment is the possibility of using the moon as a launching point for missions to Mars; perhaps building a lunar base of some kind and also to explore the moon and Mars using automated methods. Just look at the NASA SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) requirements http://sbir.gsfc.nasa.gov/SBIR/sbirsttr2007/solicitation/Chapter_912.html and look at the topics. Exploration systems and space operations are a huge topic of interest, far surpassing any need for a current manned mission.
(Disclosure: The author worked recently on a NASA SBIR Grant under the Exploration Systems category.)
Back in ancient times, the UAW would target ONE company for a strike, in order to get an agreement that could be used later as leverage with the others. Say what you like about the state of the auto industry today, but the tactic worked with great effect.
Next, we have the NRA, and their targeted boycotts. When they were unhappy with Smith and Wesson's push for high-tech gun locks, they instituted a very effective boycott.
...
We can't boycott all of the ISPs at the same time, but we COULD pick one and boycott them. Well, you must realize that at the time the UAW was the ONLY source for automotive workers. Pretty much all of the gun owners were (and still usually are) members of the NRA. So, if the UAW and the NRA instituted a boycott, it would be followed by ALL of the workers at the plant or all of the gun buyers and their business would crawl. In our case, we only have maybe 5% or so of the ISPs customers being us slashdotters so it would not pose any significant loss to an ISP. Better option is to talk to the critters in Congress. Maybe he or she has an event or some sort of town hall type meeting where you can go and voice your opinion.
Though in theory you are correct, in practice the question asked in class would then amount to "Will this be on the 'prereq' test?"
I believe one of my professors has a better idea; no grades but any "competition" is based on recommendations. Though this has the problem of having a "teacher's pet," in general you will see that only top-quality students who work hard and have a good grasp of the subject material will get the good recommendations because if the professor recommends a bad student, he will not be asked again.
More development of wireless access in developing nations seems expected. These nations don't have the resources to make everything landline and so they spend the money trying to improve their network prevalence through wireless methods.
I'm not just making this stuff out of my rear-end. Look at the land-line phone vs cellular phone use in the United States vs. a developing country like India or Pakistan . Cell phone use in developing countries is more prevalent than land-line phones. Why should we expect something different for wireless vs. land-line internet connections?
Am I the only one who thinks this will remove all privacy whatsoever?
Think about it. If Honda develops technology to read brain waves, the ability to read thoughts won't be far behind. And guess what comes with thought reading.. you guessed it! Thought police!
I have to wonder if Bush can claim martial law like Lincoln did way back during the Civil War. If you remember, Lincoln essentially declared an end to free speech for a while and arrested anyone who was suspected of any sort of dissent. They were held without habeaus corpus.
Certainly, Bush has and can claim that we are fighting a war on terrorism and that we need whatever information the NSA/CIA/FBI/DoD need to "protect" us.
The US is becoming a really scary place to live in.
Ask your current representatives how they stand on such issues, ask all prospective candidates, and then vote with your privacy in mind on the upcoming, and every subsequent election.
I don't get why consersatives who don't trust the gov't to guide the economy *do* trust it to manage private info well. If they F-up the economy, aren't they likely to F-up security as well? Somebody please explain this logic to me.
It would be foolish to call the Bush administration just "conservative." They are in fact much more that conservative.. they are associated more with neoconservatism which seeks to be "conservative" i.e. religion, gay rights etc. at all costs -- and that includes giving up liberties and information collection to maintain conservative thought throughout the nation.
What will Yahoo do when in sometime the US government asks them to give them access to people's e-mails for "national security" reasons? If their China policy shows, they will gladly hand over all the information (just like the bloody telecoms) to operate under the nation's "laws." They don't have -- and I doubt ever will have -- any corporate responsibility or regard for their users.
I say switch to Google, they are only slightly better.
Before I say anything, I'm currently a senior in high school and will be attending the University of Pennsylvania next year.
I am really interesting in programming. Like many other/.ers, I could spend my entire day in front of the computer hacking away at something or another. But I really find myself crunched for time. School nowadays is really time consuming especially for some of us highschoolers keen on attending good schools. As of right now, I'm taking 2 classes online in addition to 7 in school and with extra-curricular stuff, I barely manage 3-5 hrs a sleep a night. So, even though I might WANT to program (which I do) I really have no time.
Last summer I was researching lichen and using them to detect changes in the environment. We needed to measure their surface area and used a similar apparatus for doing so. Except, instead of photographing the laser, as the article suggests, we shot them at the lichen and used some calculus to grab surface area.
First, I am currently a high schooler and manage my dad's small business infrastructure (some workstations -- most running (K)Ubuntu depending on the users preference -- and 1 Apache server and 1 file server both running Debian. Additionally, I help out the IT people at my school.
My school's IT Department is fairly well funded -- we have 8 labs with 20 or so computers each; all of the ~350 faculty members have laptops and there is a projector in every classroom. All of the computers (unfortunately) run Windows XP.
The biggest annoyance is that the IT people in my school are idiots. They have a strict policy of "IE only," even though it's well known that other browsers are much better security-wise. But the department members, being idiots and everything, cannot for their life enforce this policy correctly (not that they should but w/e). Other students constantly bring in Portable Firefox and can run it even though they technically shouldn't be able to. We have blocked execution of all outside executables except just renaming "firefox.exe" to "iexplore.exe" can easily circumvent that. I have pointed this out to the IT people numerous times but they refuse to do anything -- even though we have had significant downtime when some kid brought one virused executable (can't remember which one) and renamed it purposefully and downed the network.
Besides that, most of the teachers have install priveleges on the machines loaned to them. Everyday one of them brings it hosed with some oddball virus/spyware/adware/whatever. I can see why sometimes we might want to give admin-priveleges on the laptops we loan to them but they really shouldn't.
Our web server is a joke. 20 GB of space for the whole district! I mean with storage being so cheap these days, I can't figure out why they can't replace the old hard-drive with a fresh 250Gb one. With all the clubs/sports sites and the school sites of the 30 elementary schools, 8 middle schools and 2 high schools, that hard-drive is 99% full and the webmaster is always trying to cut down usage by saying no to a new club or whatever that wants to use that hosting space.
We pay WAY too much for stupid software. For example, our image runs "Geometer's Sketchpad" which I believe costs $20 a license and we 410 or so licenses. Now, the KDE educational suite has a much better alternative -- for free. I have asked the district to at least install Kubuntu on the math computers to save some money but we have MS-Fan boys on the board.
Our filtering software is pretty horrible. We are supposed to block webmail etc. but can't. Just putting in a Linux router at the gateway blocking everything but port 80 and 443 and then blacklisting traffic would be so much more effective.
And then comes our file server. Has all the district's "important" files -- WITHOUT backups. Nope. Not a single backup. It's a disaster waiting to happen.
I sometimes have to wonder how some of the IT people got a job there. Seriously, they have no idea how to manage a restricted environment -- at all.
If the search prize giving algorithm isn't too draconian, we might as well use an extension to search google and yahoo at the same time and use google's search while getting money from yahoo.
I suppose I should have clarified. Did they use these vulnerabilities on their testing? Meaning, did they carry over these vulnerabilities in their sandbox for simulation purposes? I did RTFA
I have to wonder how much MySpace, LiveJournal and other blogsites were effected by this. Did the Cyber Storms use any of these vulnerabilities to test the infrastructure?
I don't think we can call this public attention. Seriously, if our attention actually mattered in changing any policy, don't you think Microsoft would have been extinct by now and that DRM and other things like [insert what Slashdot users think is evil here] would be under public scrutiny? The cliched Joe Sixpack will probably never hear of this; heck, I don't think Joe Sixpack knows what RFID is.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, market forces cause companies to develop the most profitable drugs, but those are not the drugs we actually need. Really? Well, the market seems to think that we need these drugs, doesn't it? Drugs that actually cure, that are based on public domain substances
Well, you must not have worked on a journal before. I am on the board for only an open access college journal and though we only publish ~10 articles per year, we still need a big staff doing all the tasks I mentioned and more And we have a fairly high budget. If my university's general funds and outside grants didn't cover our costs, our journal would disappear instantly. You seem to suggest that Nature (only an example because I happened to be reading something from there), which has over 50 journals to manage, 1000s of reviews to track, 1000s of articles to edit, 1000s of authors to communicate with, servers to host, "standard software packages" to customize and deploy, advertising to attract, subscriptions to manage and keep track of, among other things, costs can be accomplished through a "1/2 admin position" and a "cost of $50k/year!" And you were modded informative?
The argument that the legislation will force journals to go open access might have some merit; however, I don't foresee t. The costs needed to maintain these journals, however, will have to come out of somewhere.
I have modpoints, but I just had to post here.
Though in theory the idea sounds great, the issue becomes that there aren't too many open-access journals that are prestigious. This is partly because of the high cost of maintaining scientific peer review. Anybody managing a journal must keep enlist reviewers, make sure reviewers review, edit, do layout, maintain a highly dynamic website and a bunch of other expensive tasks. It makes sense then that there should be a way for journals to recoup their expenses. I don't think forcing top authors to publish in lesser known journals is the way.
A better solution, I feel, would be to ensure that the (NIH grant winning) authors pay an up-front cost to ensure open-access for their articles. Most of the big name publishing groups I'm familiar with (i.e. Science, Nature, Elsevier, etc.) allow this. The cost is usually not prohibitive (~1000 USD) and would be a better solution for ensuring that the science paid for by government agencies is open to everyone.
NASA, and the United States in general, can see no benefit in a manned mission to the moon without a specific purpose. Seriously, what would be the point? To show that the U.S. can do it? Well, the U.S. already has, wayback in 1969.
What NASA is more interested in at the moment is the possibility of using the moon as a launching point for missions to Mars; perhaps building a lunar base of some kind and also to explore the moon and Mars using automated methods. Just look at the NASA SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) requirements http://sbir.gsfc.nasa.gov/SBIR/sbirsttr2007/solicitation/Chapter_912.html and look at the topics. Exploration systems and space operations are a huge topic of interest, far surpassing any need for a current manned mission.
(Disclosure: The author worked recently on a NASA SBIR Grant under the Exploration Systems category.)
Next, we have the NRA, and their targeted boycotts. When they were unhappy with Smith and Wesson's push for high-tech gun locks, they instituted a very effective boycott.
We can't boycott all of the ISPs at the same time, but we COULD pick one and boycott them. Well, you must realize that at the time the UAW was the ONLY source for automotive workers. Pretty much all of the gun owners were (and still usually are) members of the NRA. So, if the UAW and the NRA instituted a boycott, it would be followed by ALL of the workers at the plant or all of the gun buyers and their business would crawl. In our case, we only have maybe 5% or so of the ISPs customers being us slashdotters so it would not pose any significant loss to an ISP. Better option is to talk to the critters in Congress. Maybe he or she has an event or some sort of town hall type meeting where you can go and voice your opinion.
Though in theory you are correct, in practice the question asked in class would then amount to "Will this be on the 'prereq' test?"
I believe one of my professors has a better idea; no grades but any "competition" is based on recommendations. Though this has the problem of having a "teacher's pet," in general you will see that only top-quality students who work hard and have a good grasp of the subject material will get the good recommendations because if the professor recommends a bad student, he will not be asked again.
More development of wireless access in developing nations seems expected. These nations don't have the resources to make everything landline and so they spend the money trying to improve their network prevalence through wireless methods.
I'm not just making this stuff out of my rear-end. Look at the land-line phone vs cellular phone use in the United States vs. a developing country like India or Pakistan . Cell phone use in developing countries is more prevalent than land-line phones. Why should we expect something different for wireless vs. land-line internet connections?
Am I the only one who thinks this will remove all privacy whatsoever?
Think about it. If Honda develops technology to read brain waves, the ability to read thoughts won't be far behind. And guess what comes with thought reading.. you guessed it! Thought police!
I hope to god my tin foil hat works..
Homer: (in a backstage bathroom, wearing a motion capture suit and microphone) Urinal cake eroding...eroding...GONE!
Oh, think of all the motions that are going uncaptured!
I have to wonder if Bush can claim martial law like Lincoln did way back during the Civil War. If you remember, Lincoln essentially declared an end to free speech for a while and arrested anyone who was suspected of any sort of dissent. They were held without habeaus corpus. Certainly, Bush has and can claim that we are fighting a war on terrorism and that we need whatever information the NSA/CIA/FBI/DoD need to "protect" us. The US is becoming a really scary place to live in.
It would be foolish to call the Bush administration just "conservative." They are in fact much more that conservative.. they are associated more with neoconservatism which seeks to be "conservative" i.e. religion, gay rights etc. at all costs -- and that includes giving up liberties and information collection to maintain conservative thought throughout the nation.
that freedom isn't free
Nope, its worth a buck o'five.
What will Yahoo do when in sometime the US government asks them to give them access to people's e-mails for "national security" reasons? If their China policy shows, they will gladly hand over all the information (just like the bloody telecoms) to operate under the nation's "laws." They don't have -- and I doubt ever will have -- any corporate responsibility or regard for their users.
I say switch to Google, they are only slightly better.
Before I say anything, I'm currently a senior in high school and will be attending the University of Pennsylvania next year.
/.ers, I could spend my entire day in front of the computer hacking away at something or another. But I really find myself crunched for time. School nowadays is really time consuming especially for some of us highschoolers keen on attending good schools. As of right now, I'm taking 2 classes online in addition to 7 in school and with extra-curricular stuff, I barely manage 3-5 hrs a sleep a night. So, even though I might WANT to program (which I do) I really have no time.
I am really interesting in programming. Like many other
Last summer I was researching lichen and using them to detect changes in the environment. We needed to measure their surface area and used a similar apparatus for doing so. Except, instead of photographing the laser, as the article suggests, we shot them at the lichen and used some calculus to grab surface area.
First, I am currently a high schooler and manage my dad's small business infrastructure (some workstations -- most running (K)Ubuntu depending on the users preference -- and 1 Apache server and 1 file server both running Debian. Additionally, I help out the IT people at my school.
My school's IT Department is fairly well funded -- we have 8 labs with 20 or so computers each; all of the ~350 faculty members have laptops and there is a projector in every classroom. All of the computers (unfortunately) run Windows XP.
The biggest annoyance is that the IT people in my school are idiots. They have a strict policy of "IE only," even though it's well known that other browsers are much better security-wise. But the department members, being idiots and everything, cannot for their life enforce this policy correctly (not that they should but w/e). Other students constantly bring in Portable Firefox and can run it even though they technically shouldn't be able to. We have blocked execution of all outside executables except just renaming "firefox.exe" to "iexplore.exe" can easily circumvent that. I have pointed this out to the IT people numerous times but they refuse to do anything -- even though we have had significant downtime when some kid brought one virused executable (can't remember which one) and renamed it purposefully and downed the network.
Besides that, most of the teachers have install priveleges on the machines loaned to them. Everyday one of them brings it hosed with some oddball virus/spyware/adware/whatever. I can see why sometimes we might want to give admin-priveleges on the laptops we loan to them but they really shouldn't.
Our web server is a joke. 20 GB of space for the whole district! I mean with storage being so cheap these days, I can't figure out why they can't replace the old hard-drive with a fresh 250Gb one. With all the clubs/sports sites and the school sites of the 30 elementary schools, 8 middle schools and 2 high schools, that hard-drive is 99% full and the webmaster is always trying to cut down usage by saying no to a new club or whatever that wants to use that hosting space.
We pay WAY too much for stupid software. For example, our image runs "Geometer's Sketchpad" which I believe costs $20 a license and we 410 or so licenses. Now, the KDE educational suite has a much better alternative -- for free. I have asked the district to at least install Kubuntu on the math computers to save some money but we have MS-Fan boys on the board.
Our filtering software is pretty horrible. We are supposed to block webmail etc. but can't. Just putting in a Linux router at the gateway blocking everything but port 80 and 443 and then blacklisting traffic would be so much more effective.
And then comes our file server. Has all the district's "important" files -- WITHOUT backups. Nope. Not a single backup. It's a disaster waiting to happen.
I sometimes have to wonder how some of the IT people got a job there. Seriously, they have no idea how to manage a restricted environment -- at all.
I have to say, the and the closely related hemorragic fever are very deadly. I am glad to see that there are signs to a potential working vaccine for it
If the search prize giving algorithm isn't too draconian, we might as well use an extension to search google and yahoo at the same time and use google's search while getting money from yahoo.
I suppose I should have clarified. Did they use these vulnerabilities on their testing? Meaning, did they carry over these vulnerabilities in their sandbox for simulation purposes? I did RTFA
I have to wonder how much MySpace, LiveJournal and other blogsites were effected by this. Did the Cyber Storms use any of these vulnerabilities to test the infrastructure?
All your base ... nah..
Half your heads are belong to them.
You must be new here. Welcome to Slashdot; no-one reads the story
It now has public attention
I don't think we can call this public attention. Seriously, if our attention actually mattered in changing any policy, don't you think Microsoft would have been extinct by now and that DRM and other things like [insert what Slashdot users think is evil here] would be under public scrutiny? The cliched Joe Sixpack will probably never hear of this; heck, I don't think Joe Sixpack knows what RFID is.