If the box were full of goose shit, and forget about the army, the box itself does not provide any security. The only reason no one has stolen the goose shit is that no one wants the goose shit.
If nobody wants the goose shit, then I guess the goose shit is secure!
The article is entirely about how google does betas. A single company, let alone one of the top 5 in the industry, is hardly representative of the industry as a whole. Though the submission tries to make it sound like it's an industry trend.
MS does betas in public as well, but usually not nearly as long as the Google betas. I work for a commercial software vendor. We don't beta in public, and I think most companies don't. Some of the large companies do, and for good reason. MS pretty much has to beta in public. Their software is used by people with such varied software and hardware configurations it would be nearly impossible to set up a lab that's representative of that.
I'm a pretty fast typist. I can do about 70 words/minute if I really put my mind to it. But there's no way I want to type 30-40 characters every time I need to type a password. I use passwords at least 8-10 times a day. Screw that.
I have a 9 character, mixed case, alphanumeric, that works just fine. Hasn't been hacked yet.
My work password is also a 9 character, mixed case, alphanumeric and it changes every 90 days.
I can deal with 9 characters because I can pump out 9 characters without thinking about it. But typing 30-40 characters and accidentally hitting the wrong key and not realizing and having to type it again? Screw that.
Passwords are safe enough for what they're for. There are so many other points of failure in computer security, a half decent password rule system is more than enough to make the passwords far from the easiest point of failure.
I suppose this qualifies as news, but I guess I'm just kind of annoyed by the way it's handled. The copyright owner of software can define their licenses however they want. If Oracles wants to charge for two CPUs for use on dual cores, fine. That's certainly their right. Economics will handle the rest. If Oracle thinks they'll make more money from dual core licenses than they'll lose from people switching to other products, then it's a smart move and more power to them. If they lose more customers than it was worth, then they screwed up.
But to complain that it's unfair or what qualifies as two CPUs is competely irrelevant. It's Oracle's product and their choice how they license.
Actually, one of the best speedup tips on here isn't in the post itself but in follow-up comments regarding compression of the executeable and.dlls. This makes a huge difference in the startup time for Firefox.
My biggest problem with Firefox however is restoring from minimized. Part of this has to do with the fact that I'm playing around with the cache size. I tried 64mb and that was way too much. I'm down to 32mb and may step it down to 16mb. Between all the other apps I normally run, when I restore it from minimized, with a 64mb cache, it takes about 5-10 seconds to come up sometimes, which is just plaing annoying. I'm not sure why it has to swap the cache back in when it gets restored. Not like the cache is needed to re-render the page. But my 512MB of RAM (max for my laptop), is seeming a bit inadequate at the moment.
Frankly, I'm convinced the space elevator is the way of the future. It's clearly showing significant potential and even NASA has begun to take it seriously.
If they'd spend more money on getting a space elevator built and less money on rockets, we'd be in much better shape.
Let's face it, sticking people or anything else on top of a big firecracker is always going to be really dangerous and really expensive. The space elevator will be cheap (over the long haul) and very safe in comparison.
Why don't we just concentrate on getting that built? Then all you need is little orbital ships that can ferry people and crews around. And since these orbital ships can either be ferried by the elevator or built in orbit from ferried components, you're talking a significantly safer way of dealing with space in almost every way.
Yes, we have some advances to make to actually build it, but if we spent nearly as much money on researching the needed advances as we do on maintaining the space shuttle fleet, we'd probably have the research done pretty quickly.
Its likely already a dead planet... we can use it to test these new processes. What's the worst that can happen? It gets deader?
Do you have proof that it's dead? Last I heard, the jury is still out on whether it's a "dead" planet. The fact is that there's still a pretty reasonable possibility of microbial life on Mars. We've already managed to make a number of species on this planet extinct. So what, we should just start doing it willy nilly wherever we want?
I know, microbes, big deal. But the fact remains that finding microbial life in our solar system and being able to examine it can give us a great deal of information about how life started here on Earth and even give us an idea for how feasible life is elsewhere in the galaxy and universe.
Personally, I'd like to wait until we're pretty damn positive that Mars is dead before we go screwing with its atmosphere. Or at the very lease, collected samples of whatever variety of microbial life it may harbor. Not to mention, it doesn't do anything for us to create a thicker atmosphere without a magnetic field. It'll just be a warmer deadly place.
Wow, that brings back memories of a lifetime ago. About 18 years ago I worked a few levels under Buck in the telecommunications division at the World Bank.
I have to say, the World Bank is not your model of intelligent spending when it comes to this kind of stuff, though. I don't think he was CTO at the time I was there, though he may have been.
You have to understand, the World Bank operates much like a government. Everything is very political, much more than most offices. Advances happen more from a buddy network than from actual accomplishment and the quality of one's work is seldom appreciated as much as the quantity.
For example, if you're a in charge of making loans, the volume of loans you make, and not the security of those loans, is what gets you noticed. Everything in the WB operates that way (or it did when I was there).
Money is pissed away in almost every way. For example, a number of years after working there the first time, I was hired as a contractor to write a very basic time tracking package to keep track of billable ours by employees (departments bill each other for various services provided). They spent about $40,000 for me to write this fairly basic software. Instead, they could have spent a few hundred dollars and bought a much more feature rich shrink-wrapped package. My software, while customized, was largely a matter of customized look and not customized features.
Anyway, I'll have to take any spending advice coming out the World Bank with a brick of salt.
Man, all sensationalism and no meat. And you know, if MS had decided not to support C++ in.NET, he would have come out saying something like, ".NET must have problems if they can't even support C++ in it." Get real. And like anyone uses C++ in.NET anyway. I mean, if you really like doing things the slow and hard way, I suppose you could, but there aren't that many people that do.
Any C++ programmer worth his salt can pick up C# in no time and will realize it's going to save them a ton of time. I still go back to C++ when I need to do unamanged code, and hey, sometimes I have to, but it's pretty infrequent. And it's not like it just transparently blends in with.NET. I mean, it's not difficult to use my managed code, but I'm definitely making a conscious decision to use it. Oh well, pointless article.
Here I am using Firefox to TRY to read the comments of other posters, but the comments bleed over into the sections list and comment separator bars are partway over the text above and below and I can't tell what people wrote.
I would think that Slashdot, being such an open-source advocate, would at least make their page render properly with the most popular open source browser.
But if Slashdot can't be bothered to do it to their page, which is their entire business, how can people expect IBM to do their web-based internal help support which isn't really a source of income for them?
Now admittedly 1 billion is a pretty big price to save Hubble
I agree. I mean, that money could me much better spent pressing our war in Iraq or financing the war to come against Iran. And then we'll need money for our war against North Korea. Screw science, we need to do something good for humanity and have more wars.
There are a few sites that provide the format. There's no visible text because all the text is compressed in CHM files. One of the many advantages over using raw HTML for your online help.
``Secondly, why in the HELL is anyone using HTML files for help documents?''
Why not HTML? Windows help is hypertext, and HTML is the standard for exactly that. I'm all the happier when people use standard formats rather than proprietary ones.
Actually, windows has 3 helps systems. The old.hlp format which has been around since the dinosaurs. Newer applications usually don't use this anymore for any number of reasons, not least of which is that the help compiler uses.rtf documents as the source.
The more common help format these days is the HTMLHelp format which is based on yes, you guessed it, HTML. The advantages of using this are obvious: You can create your help files from HTML which you can also use on a web site. Also, there are a lot more tools for building HTML than RTF. HTML has more functionality, you get scripting support, and so on and so forth.
Then Microsoft also has the format that the MSDN uses. This is sort of an upgraded version of HTMLHelp and like HTMLHelp, it's based on HTML as the source. The files have a different format that allows for more extended functionality, better support for grouping of separate files and better support for very large files, among other things.
Is anyone else sick of all the handwaving from environmentalists? Don't get me wrong. Yes, there are major environmental problems that need addressing, but shit, everything's a global catastrophe right around the corner with these guys. And the problem is, they simply have no idea.
I mean really, they say temperatures are rising because of global warming caused by man-made pollution, but they can't really be sure that's the cause. I mean, I'm not saying it isn't a factor and that it's not a problem. I'm simply saying, we don't really know for sure.
In the past, temperatures have risen and fallen quickly and drastically on this planet, just as the event of this article describes. But why these things happen, we don't really understand. Shit, meteorologists have a hard time telling me if the sun is going to be out tomorrow and now someone's trying to tell me that we're heading for a major climate shift? Come on. I'm sorry, but this is barely worth my time in responding. I've been hearing theories about how we're on the verge of a major climate change for as long as I can remember and the cause is always something different. The truth is, they have no clue and I wish they'd just admit it and stop with all the hand waving.
I mean hell, he even says: "Any prudent person would agree that we don't yet understand the complexities with the climate system and, since we don't, we should be extremely cautious in how much we 'tweak' the system." Well, by the same token, any prudent person would agree that you don't understand squat, so why are you waving your hands around predicting a major climate shift, if you don't understand the complexities with the climate system? I mean, for God's sakem, listen to your own words.
It's all these drastic doom-sayers that make environmentalists look like a bunch of nitwits, and I know environmentalists as a whole aren't a bunch of nitwits. Many of them are very smart and thoughtful people. But they really need to start being much more careful about who they give a listen to and more importantly, who they give a voice to on their behalf.
I've seen a lot of projects take stab at 3D and many of them go about it in a very unnatural way.
SphereXP that someone mentioned earlier, for example, takes regular windows apps and has paper thin windows floating around arbitrarily in 3D. I mean, that just doesn't work. Then you have all these 3D file browsers that cram so many files into this vast 3D mess that unintelligble. You can't read the filenames because there's so much stuff in the way (usually other filenames, but sometimes representations of files or folders) and that's just not natural either.
And I'm not claiming to be an expert on 3D design. I don't know how you'd do a good 3D file browser off the top of my head, nor a 3D desktop. But I can definitely spot the ones that aren't remotely natural or intuitive.
Part of the reason windowed user interfaces work is because the paradigm of a "desktop" makes sense to users. And a desktop is flat. So is a window. So, if you want 3D UI to work, you need to come up with a 3D paradigm that seems natural to the user, and frankly, I just don't know what that paradigm would be.
Re:If they have skills, they'll find jobs in NoVA
on
Massive Layoffs At AOL
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· Score: 1
Yeah, Northern Virginia is an excellent place to be looking for a tech job. I used to live there but decided I'd try my hand at getting a job down here in Northwest Arkansas. I'm now contracting with a company back in Northern Virginia, but at least I get to stay here in Arkansas:-)
And you can keep the Arkansas jokes to yourself. Whatever people may say about the state, NW Arkansas is actually very nice and where I live, pretty liberal.
They'd go work at some company doing some menial programming tasks (like pumping out basic business apps), making decent dollars, but work they can easily do in their sleep. Spend 30 hours of the work week working on games for open source or for profit, get the paying work done in the other 10 hours, and still have plenty of other hours to continue working on your games or doing real life stuff.
And that's ridiculously difficult to do. The few cases that do succeed are usually when the decisions made are corrupt or simply idiotic, rather than through a differing emphasis.
True, but the announcement of a class action suit against a company, regardless of whether the suit will succeed or not, can have disasterous consequences for a company. Generally not with larger ones, but what company wants to open themselves up to a lawsuit? It certainly won't boost their stock price in the short term.
Look, I'm not disagreeing with what should be done. I want to see cheap drugs in the hands of the people that need them, be they in my own country, or other countries. Unfortunately, the way our laws are set up right now, that's very difficult to do and the companies have a very good legal justification for their position as the laws are now.
What the market will bear. What a lovely sentiment. It occurs to me that an antibiotic or vaccine isn't the same as the new Star Wars DVD.
But you're missing the point. This is a corporation, not an individual. It's a corporation which has a legal obligation to make as much money for its stockholders as it legally can. If it fails to do that, the company becomes legally liable and open to class action suits by the stockholders.
I'm not saying it's the most humanitarian thing in the world. Far from it, but drug companies aren't humanitarian organizations.
Now, if people want to start up non-profit drug companies, that would be fantastic. Of course, the'll need startup money to fund development, and of course, they'll need to charge something for the drugs to at least make back what they spent on the R&D, but I think there's little question they could offer drugs at a much nicer price.
The problem is getting that startup capital, which these days, is a major chunk of change. And also, keep in mind that drug R&D, especially by the smaller companies, is a real gamble. Many small drug companies can prosper or die on the results of a single drug development, so you have to have enough money to be able to develop quite a few concurrently to guarantee that no single loss is going to kill the company (the "don't put all your eggs in one basket" principal). The kind of money we're talking about is probably hundreds of millions, possibly billions, in startup for R&D. That's a good chunk of change. Not many people want to throw that kind of money at a non-profit venture, especially one going into something as dicey as drug development.
This is a really nice idea. The problem is that all this research costs money and a lot of it is being done by publicly owned companies. A publicly owned company has an obligation to its stockholders to make profit and generally to maximize that profit. That's not just someone's idea, but that's actually the law.
So, this research costs money and it's being done by companies that are obligated to make a profit off of this research they've paid for. So, they sell the results of that research for insanely large amounts of money.
Now, we say, "that's just insanely priced," but in economic terms, that's "what the market will bear," which in layman's terms means that enough people are willing to pay that "insane price" that it's worth it to keep it at that price.
This all follows very standard formulas that apply to most industries, not just drug companies. So, we sit around and talk about the evil of the drug companies, but the fact is, they're just doing their job as the law specifies.
I have no problem with us changing the law, but it's kind of like changing the rules of the game after the game has started. All the players hurt by the new rules cry foul, for obvious reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
If the box were full of goose shit, and forget about the army, the box itself does not provide any security. The only reason no one has stolen the goose shit is that no one wants the goose shit.
If nobody wants the goose shit, then I guess the goose shit is secure!
OMG!! THAT MEANS IT'S SECURE!!!
Define secure. As far as I'm concerned, it hasn't been hacked yet, so it's secure enough for me.
The article is entirely about how google does betas. A single company, let alone one of the top 5 in the industry, is hardly representative of the industry as a whole. Though the submission tries to make it sound like it's an industry trend.
MS does betas in public as well, but usually not nearly as long as the Google betas. I work for a commercial software vendor. We don't beta in public, and I think most companies don't. Some of the large companies do, and for good reason. MS pretty much has to beta in public. Their software is used by people with such varied software and hardware configurations it would be nearly impossible to set up a lab that's representative of that.
I'm a pretty fast typist. I can do about 70 words/minute if I really put my mind to it. But there's no way I want to type 30-40 characters every time I need to type a password. I use passwords at least 8-10 times a day. Screw that.
I have a 9 character, mixed case, alphanumeric, that works just fine. Hasn't been hacked yet.
My work password is also a 9 character, mixed case, alphanumeric and it changes every 90 days.
I can deal with 9 characters because I can pump out 9 characters without thinking about it. But typing 30-40 characters and accidentally hitting the wrong key and not realizing and having to type it again? Screw that.
Passwords are safe enough for what they're for. There are so many other points of failure in computer security, a half decent password rule system is more than enough to make the passwords far from the easiest point of failure.
I suppose this qualifies as news, but I guess I'm just kind of annoyed by the way it's handled. The copyright owner of software can define their licenses however they want. If Oracles wants to charge for two CPUs for use on dual cores, fine. That's certainly their right. Economics will handle the rest. If Oracle thinks they'll make more money from dual core licenses than they'll lose from people switching to other products, then it's a smart move and more power to them. If they lose more customers than it was worth, then they screwed up.
But to complain that it's unfair or what qualifies as two CPUs is competely irrelevant. It's Oracle's product and their choice how they license.
If I'm not mistaken, the Milky way and the Andromeda galaxy will collide
You are correct. And a simulation of that can be found here in mpeg format.
Actually, one of the best speedup tips on here isn't in the post itself but in follow-up comments regarding compression of the executeable and .dlls. This makes a huge difference in the startup time for Firefox.
My biggest problem with Firefox however is restoring from minimized. Part of this has to do with the fact that I'm playing around with the cache size. I tried 64mb and that was way too much. I'm down to 32mb and may step it down to 16mb. Between all the other apps I normally run, when I restore it from minimized, with a 64mb cache, it takes about 5-10 seconds to come up sometimes, which is just plaing annoying. I'm not sure why it has to swap the cache back in when it gets restored. Not like the cache is needed to re-render the page. But my 512MB of RAM (max for my laptop), is seeming a bit inadequate at the moment.
Frankly, I'm convinced the space elevator is the way of the future. It's clearly showing significant potential and even NASA has begun to take it seriously.
If they'd spend more money on getting a space elevator built and less money on rockets, we'd be in much better shape.
Let's face it, sticking people or anything else on top of a big firecracker is always going to be really dangerous and really expensive. The space elevator will be cheap (over the long haul) and very safe in comparison.
Why don't we just concentrate on getting that built? Then all you need is little orbital ships that can ferry people and crews around. And since these orbital ships can either be ferried by the elevator or built in orbit from ferried components, you're talking a significantly safer way of dealing with space in almost every way.
Yes, we have some advances to make to actually build it, but if we spent nearly as much money on researching the needed advances as we do on maintaining the space shuttle fleet, we'd probably have the research done pretty quickly.
Its likely already a dead planet... we can use it to test these new processes. What's the worst that can happen? It gets deader?
Do you have proof that it's dead? Last I heard, the jury is still out on whether it's a "dead" planet. The fact is that there's still a pretty reasonable possibility of microbial life on Mars. We've already managed to make a number of species on this planet extinct. So what, we should just start doing it willy nilly wherever we want?
I know, microbes, big deal. But the fact remains that finding microbial life in our solar system and being able to examine it can give us a great deal of information about how life started here on Earth and even give us an idea for how feasible life is elsewhere in the galaxy and universe.
Personally, I'd like to wait until we're pretty damn positive that Mars is dead before we go screwing with its atmosphere. Or at the very lease, collected samples of whatever variety of microbial life it may harbor. Not to mention, it doesn't do anything for us to create a thicker atmosphere without a magnetic field. It'll just be a warmer deadly place.
Wow, that brings back memories of a lifetime ago. About 18 years ago I worked a few levels under Buck in the telecommunications division at the World Bank.
I have to say, the World Bank is not your model of intelligent spending when it comes to this kind of stuff, though. I don't think he was CTO at the time I was there, though he may have been.
You have to understand, the World Bank operates much like a government. Everything is very political, much more than most offices. Advances happen more from a buddy network than from actual accomplishment and the quality of one's work is seldom appreciated as much as the quantity.
For example, if you're a in charge of making loans, the volume of loans you make, and not the security of those loans, is what gets you noticed. Everything in the WB operates that way (or it did when I was there).
Money is pissed away in almost every way. For example, a number of years after working there the first time, I was hired as a contractor to write a very basic time tracking package to keep track of billable ours by employees (departments bill each other for various services provided). They spent about $40,000 for me to write this fairly basic software. Instead, they could have spent a few hundred dollars and bought a much more feature rich shrink-wrapped package. My software, while customized, was largely a matter of customized look and not customized features.
Anyway, I'll have to take any spending advice coming out the World Bank with a brick of salt.
Man, all sensationalism and no meat. And you know, if MS had decided not to support C++ in .NET, he would have come out saying something like, ".NET must have problems if they can't even support C++ in it." Get real. And like anyone uses C++ in .NET anyway. I mean, if you really like doing things the slow and hard way, I suppose you could, but there aren't that many people that do.
.NET. I mean, it's not difficult to use my managed code, but I'm definitely making a conscious decision to use it. Oh well, pointless article.
Any C++ programmer worth his salt can pick up C# in no time and will realize it's going to save them a ton of time. I still go back to C++ when I need to do unamanged code, and hey, sometimes I have to, but it's pretty infrequent. And it's not like it just transparently blends in with
Here I am using Firefox to TRY to read the comments of other posters, but the comments bleed over into the sections list and comment separator bars are partway over the text above and below and I can't tell what people wrote.
I would think that Slashdot, being such an open-source advocate, would at least make their page render properly with the most popular open source browser.
But if Slashdot can't be bothered to do it to their page, which is their entire business, how can people expect IBM to do their web-based internal help support which isn't really a source of income for them?
Now admittedly 1 billion is a pretty big price to save Hubble
I agree. I mean, that money could me much better spent pressing our war in Iraq or financing the war to come against Iran. And then we'll need money for our war against North Korea. Screw science, we need to do something good for humanity and have more wars.
JDJ's suggestions include indicators from 2004 such as the doubling of Google's share price in just
Was this guy in a cave during the dot bomb? I would see this a very scary flashback, not a sign of industry health.
There are a few sites that provide the format. There's no visible text because all the text is compressed in CHM files. One of the many advantages over using raw HTML for your online help.
I'm particularly fond of their
current map of usenet done with ascii art.
I'll give $5.00 to the first person to provide an updated ascii art usenet map.
``Secondly, why in the HELL is anyone using HTML files for help documents?''
.hlp format which has been around since the dinosaurs. Newer applications usually don't use this anymore for any number of reasons, not least of which is that the help compiler uses .rtf documents as the source.
Why not HTML? Windows help is hypertext, and HTML is the standard for exactly that. I'm all the happier when people use standard formats rather than proprietary ones.
Actually, windows has 3 helps systems. The old
The more common help format these days is the HTMLHelp format which is based on yes, you guessed it, HTML. The advantages of using this are obvious: You can create your help files from HTML which you can also use on a web site. Also, there are a lot more tools for building HTML than RTF. HTML has more functionality, you get scripting support, and so on and so forth.
Then Microsoft also has the format that the MSDN uses. This is sort of an upgraded version of HTMLHelp and like HTMLHelp, it's based on HTML as the source. The files have a different format that allows for more extended functionality, better support for grouping of separate files and better support for very large files, among other things.
Is anyone else sick of all the handwaving from environmentalists? Don't get me wrong. Yes, there are major environmental problems that need addressing, but shit, everything's a global catastrophe right around the corner with these guys. And the problem is, they simply have no idea.
I mean really, they say temperatures are rising because of global warming caused by man-made pollution, but they can't really be sure that's the cause. I mean, I'm not saying it isn't a factor and that it's not a problem. I'm simply saying, we don't really know for sure.
In the past, temperatures have risen and fallen quickly and drastically on this planet, just as the event of this article describes. But why these things happen, we don't really understand. Shit, meteorologists have a hard time telling me if the sun is going to be out tomorrow and now someone's trying to tell me that we're heading for a major climate shift? Come on. I'm sorry, but this is barely worth my time in responding. I've been hearing theories about how we're on the verge of a major climate change for as long as I can remember and the cause is always something different. The truth is, they have no clue and I wish they'd just admit it and stop with all the hand waving.
I mean hell, he even says: "Any prudent person would agree that we don't yet understand the complexities with the climate system and, since we don't, we should be extremely cautious in how much we 'tweak' the system." Well, by the same token, any prudent person would agree that you don't understand squat, so why are you waving your hands around predicting a major climate shift, if you don't understand the complexities with the climate system? I mean, for God's sakem, listen to your own words.
It's all these drastic doom-sayers that make environmentalists look like a bunch of nitwits, and I know environmentalists as a whole aren't a bunch of nitwits. Many of them are very smart and thoughtful people. But they really need to start being much more careful about who they give a listen to and more importantly, who they give a voice to on their behalf.
I've seen a lot of projects take stab at 3D and many of them go about it in a very unnatural way.
SphereXP that someone mentioned earlier, for example, takes regular windows apps and has paper thin windows floating around arbitrarily in 3D. I mean, that just doesn't work. Then you have all these 3D file browsers that cram so many files into this vast 3D mess that unintelligble. You can't read the filenames because there's so much stuff in the way (usually other filenames, but sometimes representations of files or folders) and that's just not natural either.
And I'm not claiming to be an expert on 3D design. I don't know how you'd do a good 3D file browser off the top of my head, nor a 3D desktop. But I can definitely spot the ones that aren't remotely natural or intuitive.
Part of the reason windowed user interfaces work is because the paradigm of a "desktop" makes sense to users. And a desktop is flat. So is a window. So, if you want 3D UI to work, you need to come up with a 3D paradigm that seems natural to the user, and frankly, I just don't know what that paradigm would be.
Yeah, Northern Virginia is an excellent place to be looking for a tech job. I used to live there but decided I'd try my hand at getting a job down here in Northwest Arkansas. I'm now contracting with a company back in Northern Virginia, but at least I get to stay here in Arkansas :-)
And you can keep the Arkansas jokes to yourself. Whatever people may say about the state, NW Arkansas is actually very nice and where I live, pretty liberal.
They'd go work at some company doing some menial programming tasks (like pumping out basic business apps), making decent dollars, but work they can easily do in their sleep. Spend 30 hours of the work week working on games for open source or for profit, get the paying work done in the other 10 hours, and still have plenty of other hours to continue working on your games or doing real life stuff.
NASA has trouble hitting Mars, and it's a planet. They're going to hit a comet? Anyone taking odds on this?
And that's ridiculously difficult to do. The few cases that do succeed are usually when the decisions made are corrupt or simply idiotic, rather than through a differing emphasis.
True, but the announcement of a class action suit against a company, regardless of whether the suit will succeed or not, can have disasterous consequences for a company. Generally not with larger ones, but what company wants to open themselves up to a lawsuit? It certainly won't boost their stock price in the short term.
Look, I'm not disagreeing with what should be done. I want to see cheap drugs in the hands of the people that need them, be they in my own country, or other countries. Unfortunately, the way our laws are set up right now, that's very difficult to do and the companies have a very good legal justification for their position as the laws are now.
What the market will bear. What a lovely sentiment. It occurs to me that an antibiotic or vaccine isn't the same as the new Star Wars DVD.
But you're missing the point. This is a corporation, not an individual. It's a corporation which has a legal obligation to make as much money for its stockholders as it legally can. If it fails to do that, the company becomes legally liable and open to class action suits by the stockholders.
I'm not saying it's the most humanitarian thing in the world. Far from it, but drug companies aren't humanitarian organizations.
Now, if people want to start up non-profit drug companies, that would be fantastic. Of course, the'll need startup money to fund development, and of course, they'll need to charge something for the drugs to at least make back what they spent on the R&D, but I think there's little question they could offer drugs at a much nicer price.
The problem is getting that startup capital, which these days, is a major chunk of change. And also, keep in mind that drug R&D, especially by the smaller companies, is a real gamble. Many small drug companies can prosper or die on the results of a single drug development, so you have to have enough money to be able to develop quite a few concurrently to guarantee that no single loss is going to kill the company (the "don't put all your eggs in one basket" principal). The kind of money we're talking about is probably hundreds of millions, possibly billions, in startup for R&D. That's a good chunk of change. Not many people want to throw that kind of money at a non-profit venture, especially one going into something as dicey as drug development.
This is a really nice idea. The problem is that all this research costs money and a lot of it is being done by publicly owned companies. A publicly owned company has an obligation to its stockholders to make profit and generally to maximize that profit.
That's not just someone's idea, but that's actually the law.
So, this research costs money and it's being done by companies that are obligated to make a profit off of this research they've paid for. So, they sell the results of that research for insanely large amounts of money.
Now, we say, "that's just insanely priced," but in economic terms, that's "what the market will bear," which in layman's terms means that enough people are willing to pay that "insane price" that it's worth it to keep it at that price.
This all follows very standard formulas that apply to most industries, not just drug companies. So, we sit around and talk about the evil of the drug companies, but the fact is, they're just doing their job as the law specifies.
I have no problem with us changing the law, but it's kind of like changing the rules of the game after the game has started. All the players hurt by the new rules cry foul, for obvious reasons.