Like I said, I don't know what the profit margins are or how little they could sell their drugs for and still turn a profit. But someone has to feed the monster.
Seeing as drug research benefits pretty much everyone, why isn't the government doing it?
Because the government is corrupt, unaccountable, and wasteful?
Not to mention incompetent?
Because they already fund a lot of research in this area, performed by universities?
Because we really don't want life-saving drugs that many of us need in the hands of those that could deny us access to them unless we submit to their will, backed by the coercive power of the state? At least with private companies, the government could compel them to turn over the research/drugs. Who would compel the government to do so?
Because private companies actually have a tremendous incentive to do research on new drugs, since they are extremely profitable?
Yeah, it's not perfect, and it does mean that drugs that can treat rare diseases are extremely expensive because the drug company doesn't sell much of them, but the alternative really isn't an improvement. I always wonder why people get freaked out about highly powerful corporations, but believe highly powerful governments are a safer and better option.
I'm very curious how Obama feels he can do about increasing the participation of third parties in the US political system.
What incentive does Obama (or anyone else in power) have to foster the growth of another political party? You now have essentially one strong enemy; why would you want another? Even if he tried to promote another "conservative" party to steal votes from the Republicans, who's to say that they won't (now or in the future) steal votes from the liberal candidates, too?
Obama believes in central control and unlimited government power, and that is best served by eliminating opposition, not generating more of it.
Mitchell (starring Joe Don Baker). My brother and I quote this episode all the time.
Manos: The Hands of Fate (an MST3K classic, this is where Torgo came from)
I Accuse My Parents (bad movie, great jokes from beginning to end)
Pod People
Angel's Revenge
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (just bad, Bad, BAD)
Gunslinger (starring Beverly Garland), their first western
Rocketship X-M (starring Lloyd Bridges!)
Alien From LA (starring Kathy Ireland (yes, the model)), a piece of crap from Golan-Globus
Godzilla vs. Megalon (the Jet Jaguar movie)
Amazing Colossal Man (the movie is actually considered somewhat of a classic)
Master Ninja I and II (starring Lee Van Cleef and Timothy Van Patten)
The 3 Italian Hercules movies (all equally bad)
The Day the Earth Froze (the Sampo movie; you'll have to watch it to understand)
The Brain That Wouldn't Die (aka the "Jan in the Pan" episode).
Girls Town (starring Mamie Van Doren, Mel Torme, and Paul Anka)
Zombie Nightmare (starring Adam West)
The Giant Spider Invasion (starring Alan Hale, Jr (the skipper from Gilligan's Island)), giant spiders attack Wisconsin
Quest of the Delta Knights
I find the shows from the Scf-Fi Channel years weren't as good - they really missed Frank and Trace. And Pearl Forrester was not so much funny as annoying.
I'm not sure how many of these are commercially available, but God knows there are torrents of pretty much all of them if you look around.
Intelligence Director wants more spy powers. IRS wants fewer tax exemptions. Pope is Catholic.
Really, what do you expect someone in that position to want? Something to make his job harder? Not that I think he should get what he wants, I'm just not surprised he's asking for it.
If this J-liner works to cut expenses in half, would you pay $5,000 to save a few hours?
Yep. A Business-class ticket can go for about that now (sometimes). I won't pay that much for a business class ticket to be on the same interminable 10 hour flight, but I would pay it if I could get there in 4 hours. Anyone that's ever flown to Asia from the US would probably agree with me.
And if you think LA to Tokyo is fun, try Minneapolis to Jakarta sometime! 13 hours to Tokyo, 9 or so to Singapore, an overnight stay (during which you can't sleep because your internal clock is completely at-odds with the local time), and then 1.5 hours to Jakarta. And then 2 hours to get anywhere in Jakarta (traffic is brutal!). I'd love to be able to go straight to Singapore in, say, 6-7 hours. A business-class seat on SQ is generally $5000 or so. I'd consider it if it would cut the trip in half!
That used to work on Microsoft Mail, too. We got several people to stop sending read receipts by default by bouncing 40 or so receipts their way (per recipient, if the message was for more than one person). After the first time (or occasionally two, for the slower users), they never did it again!
Amen. I was happy to see that they didn't try to add anything that wasn't in the book (not that Hollywood would EVER do that, right?), but I did miss the little things. I would have liked to have seen more of the stuff in their classes. They even left out all the stuff that shows what a world-class prick Malfoy is. We don't see any of the interaction with Snape that shows just how much Snape hates Harry. And we don't see any of Fred and George's much-celebrated antics.
Overall, though, I really enjoyed the movie. As a previous poster said, I think another half hour would have done wonders. I think I remember reading that at one point the directors cut was four hours long. If that's true, it should make a hell of a DVD.
Their next-generation Tandem big-iron platform was supposed to use Alphas (it now uses MIPS; another dead architecture). I wonder what will happen now that there will only be one more generation of Alpha.
<sentimental-aside>
I remember about 8 years ago when Alphas were absolutely the fastest things out there. Pentiums were running about 120 MHz; Alphas were up around 300! I had never imagined anything could run that fast without melting! (yeah, yeah, MHz isn't everything, etc. etc....) </sentimental-aside>
Who would buy the expensive (but good) Apple hardware when there was cheaper hardware which did the same job?
Businesses, for one.
IBM hardware (PCs, ThinkPads, etc) is much more expensive; so are Dell and Compaq (the Deskpro stuff). But businesses buy them all the time, because they are "quality" brands, and no one ever got fired for buying them. If Apple could offer x86 machines at a comparable price point to IBM/Dell/etc., along with their reputation for producing quality hardware, they could become a factor int the one market that has consistantly eluded them: the office.
As for consumers, the average consumer would probably not buy Apple hardware, but a lot of knowledgeable PC users might. The ones that care about the quality of what's in their box would probably appreciate Apple's attention to detail.
Trouble is, this would never fly. Steve is WAY too much of a control freak to allow his OS to run on just any old Pentium 90 you've got lying around. And the thought of overclockers tweaking his Apple boxen would mortify him to death!
I signed up with MindSpring DSL in Milwaukee this July, and I have had nothing but positive experiences with their service. They installed when they said they would (4 weeks and 2 days; they said 4 - 6 weeks), and they even handled it well when I had to reschedule the install at the last moment (well, the day before). I'm getting about 700K downstream (128K up). I've had one service outage of about an hour, and a few more that were about 3-5 minutes, but it's been solid otherwise.
On the bad side, the PPPoE client they use, Enternet, doesn't play well with others. When I start up my net connection, my system's responsiveness goes to hell. When I pull down a menu and drag over the items, there is a noticeable lag when switching the highlight from one to another; that lag isn't present when the Enternet client is not running. Also, when I select Start:Settings:Control Panel, the Control Panel can take up to 3 minutes (!) to appear, and the task bar is frozen until it does appear (running Win98SE). Their tech support didn't know what to tell me (of course), but like all of life's annoyances, you find ways to work around the limitations. Like doing my surfing from my Linux box!
All in all, MindSpring has been great. The people I've talked to have all been friendly and (except for the tech support guy I talked to) very knowledgeable. The major delay around here in getting your service installed is waiting for Ameritech to give you your line; Covad (the DSL installer) is real quick once that happens.
Marathon was similar in this regard. It was a FPS, but it had an actual plot and a rich, detailed environment that really drew you into the game. M2 was supposed to be even better; alas, my poor Mac IIsi could barely handle M1, and I didn't have a PC yet so the PC version wasn't an option.
Regarding having jury trial, I don't think that any plain speeding ticket even CAN ever get a jury. It's just too minor to clog up the court system with.
In Wisconsin (and Illinois) you can request a jury trial for speeding ticket cases, but no one ever does. You actually are probably at a disadvantage with a jury; they'll be way too pissed at you for dragging them out of their lives and into jury duty. And for what? So you can save $100 and a few crummy points on your license? They'll hang you quicker than the judge will. IIRC, you have to pay an additional fee to get a jury, too, though it's almost a trivial amount.
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Seeing as drug research benefits pretty much everyone, why isn't the government doing it?
Yeah, it's not perfect, and it does mean that drugs that can treat rare diseases are extremely expensive because the drug company doesn't sell much of them, but the alternative really isn't an improvement. I always wonder why people get freaked out about highly powerful corporations, but believe highly powerful governments are a safer and better option.
What incentive does Obama (or anyone else in power) have to foster the growth of another political party? You now have essentially one strong enemy; why would you want another? Even if he tried to promote another "conservative" party to steal votes from the Republicans, who's to say that they won't (now or in the future) steal votes from the liberal candidates, too?
Obama believes in central control and unlimited government power, and that is best served by eliminating opposition, not generating more of it.
- Mitchell (starring Joe Don Baker). My brother and I quote this episode all the time.
- Manos: The Hands of Fate (an MST3K classic, this is where Torgo came from)
- I Accuse My Parents (bad movie, great jokes from beginning to end)
- Pod People
- Angel's Revenge
- Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (just bad, Bad, BAD)
- Gunslinger (starring Beverly Garland), their first western
- Rocketship X-M (starring Lloyd Bridges!)
- Alien From LA (starring Kathy Ireland (yes, the model)), a piece of crap from Golan-Globus
- Godzilla vs. Megalon (the Jet Jaguar movie)
- Amazing Colossal Man (the movie is actually considered somewhat of a classic)
- Master Ninja I and II (starring Lee Van Cleef and Timothy Van Patten)
- The 3 Italian Hercules movies (all equally bad)
- The Day the Earth Froze (the Sampo movie; you'll have to watch it to understand)
- The Brain That Wouldn't Die (aka the "Jan in the Pan" episode).
- Girls Town (starring Mamie Van Doren, Mel Torme, and Paul Anka)
- Zombie Nightmare (starring Adam West)
- The Giant Spider Invasion (starring Alan Hale, Jr (the skipper from Gilligan's Island)), giant spiders attack Wisconsin
- Quest of the Delta Knights
I find the shows from the Scf-Fi Channel years weren't as good - they really missed Frank and Trace. And Pearl Forrester was not so much funny as annoying. I'm not sure how many of these are commercially available, but God knows there are torrents of pretty much all of them if you look around.Intelligence Director wants more spy powers.
IRS wants fewer tax exemptions.
Pope is Catholic.
Really, what do you expect someone in that position to want? Something to make his job harder? Not that I think he should get what he wants, I'm just not surprised he's asking for it.
Or Metallica (and look where it got them!).
Since Osama Bin Laden ordered that end-table from IKEA and it never arrived.
Never any mod points around when I need them. Fantastic post!
Pfingst
If this J-liner works to cut expenses in half, would you pay $5,000 to save a few hours?
Yep. A Business-class ticket can go for about that now (sometimes). I won't pay that much for a business class ticket to be on the same interminable 10 hour flight, but I would pay it if I could get there in 4 hours. Anyone that's ever flown to Asia from the US would probably agree with me.
And if you think LA to Tokyo is fun, try Minneapolis to Jakarta sometime! 13 hours to Tokyo, 9 or so to Singapore, an overnight stay (during which you can't sleep because your internal clock is completely at-odds with the local time), and then 1.5 hours to Jakarta. And then 2 hours to get anywhere in Jakarta (traffic is brutal!). I'd love to be able to go straight to Singapore in, say, 6-7 hours. A business-class seat on SQ is generally $5000 or so. I'd consider it if it would cut the trip in half!
They mean they can assemble their own computer. They're not sitting there with a bare circuit board and soldering iron putting a motherboard together.
Except I think Perl is his primary language. :-)
That used to work on Microsoft Mail, too. We got several people to stop sending read receipts by default by bouncing 40 or so receipts their way (per recipient, if the message was for more than one person). After the first time (or occasionally two, for the slower users), they never did it again!
Overall, though, I really enjoyed the movie. As a previous poster said, I think another half hour would have done wonders. I think I remember reading that at one point the directors cut was four hours long. If that's true, it should make a hell of a DVD.
You utter bastard :-)
Their next-generation Tandem big-iron platform was supposed to use Alphas (it now uses MIPS; another dead architecture). I wonder what will happen now that there will only be one more generation of Alpha.
<sentimental-aside>
I remember about 8 years ago when Alphas were absolutely the fastest things out there. Pentiums were running about 120 MHz; Alphas were up around 300! I had never imagined anything could run that fast without melting! (yeah, yeah, MHz isn't everything, etc. etc....)
</sentimental-aside>
Simple. You have TAs do it. That's how it was done in the big lectures at Marquette when I was there.
Mark
On Babylon 5, they did just that. The Centauri were bombing the Narn homeworld with asteroids. Nasty.
Mark
Businesses, for one.
IBM hardware (PCs, ThinkPads, etc) is much more expensive; so are Dell and Compaq (the Deskpro stuff). But businesses buy them all the time, because they are "quality" brands, and no one ever got fired for buying them. If Apple could offer x86 machines at a comparable price point to IBM/Dell/etc., along with their reputation for producing quality hardware, they could become a factor int the one market that has consistantly eluded them: the office.
As for consumers, the average consumer would probably not buy Apple hardware, but a lot of knowledgeable PC users might. The ones that care about the quality of what's in their box would probably appreciate Apple's attention to detail.
Trouble is, this would never fly. Steve is WAY too much of a control freak to allow his OS to run on just any old Pentium 90 you've got lying around. And the thought of overclockers tweaking his Apple boxen would mortify him to death!
Mark
On the bad side, the PPPoE client they use, Enternet, doesn't play well with others. When I start up my net connection, my system's responsiveness goes to hell. When I pull down a menu and drag over the items, there is a noticeable lag when switching the highlight from one to another; that lag isn't present when the Enternet client is not running. Also, when I select Start:Settings:Control Panel, the Control Panel can take up to 3 minutes (!) to appear, and the task bar is frozen until it does appear (running Win98SE). Their tech support didn't know what to tell me (of course), but like all of life's annoyances, you find ways to work around the limitations. Like doing my surfing from my Linux box!
All in all, MindSpring has been great. The people I've talked to have all been friendly and (except for the tech support guy I talked to) very knowledgeable. The major delay around here in getting your service installed is waiting for Ameritech to give you your line; Covad (the DSL installer) is real quick once that happens.
Just my ¥2.15 (at the current exchange rate :-) )
Mark
Mark
Pfingst
BTW, I had to do this because my particular platform doesn't support tabs in text files (seriously!). They all get converted to spaces.
Mark
In Wisconsin (and Illinois) you can request a jury trial for speeding ticket cases, but no one ever does. You actually are probably at a disadvantage with a jury; they'll be way too pissed at you for dragging them out of their lives and into jury duty. And for what? So you can save $100 and a few crummy points on your license? They'll hang you quicker than the judge will. IIRC, you have to pay an additional fee to get a jury, too, though it's almost a trivial amount.
Mark
Not at our place, they don't. :-)
Mark