BTW, I do largely agree with what you are saying - I am just saying that the safeguards in place may not be as bad as public perception makes them out to be. There are many more unethical people that would drown out the good research and fair use - even in a field where it takes years of study and a multitude of tests to enter.

If you ever find yourself or a loved one in a situation that they have a disease that local docs can't figure out and they don't refer you out. You need to look into research programs that have industry connections. These are the ones that can lobby the FDA to allow use of an experimental agent and have safety committees to ensure they don't abuse this.

If other nations move ahead because of the removal of safety testing in animals, it would come at a cost that I don't think the American public would be willing to accept to maintain parity.

If anything, American companies will move investment overseas thus maintaining some semblance of ownership over these ideas.

Well, lets take your example - AIDS.

There are over a dozen medications on the market that very effectively control its symptoms and long term effects. This does come at a cost and is currently a lifelong intervention.

There very well be a drug that will one day cure this disease. The issue is - do you try it when there is currently an alternative? Perhaps two decades ago before AZT proved effective, this may have been true. Is it reasonable to float a possible cure to someone when there is known effective therapy available?

So, lets go to something like metastatic cancer. Most therapies for this do not propose to be a cure. Furthermore, anything that can kill far spread cancer cells will invariably have major side effects. Is it reasonable to put someone through this therapy? Maybe. That is the reason that they make exceptions for certain drugs. This is usually not classic "testing" but made on a compassionate basis. Effectiveness of drugs or other therapies are not well studied like this. It becomes a - it worked once before so lets try it again approach.

Sometimes, this can have a detrimental effect on understanding a therapies effectiveness.

Going back to your AIDS example. Someone has end stage AIDS. You decide to try new therapy X ignoring known entities such as immune reconstitution - or perhaps for another disease an equally devestating curative effect in late stages. The patient dies from massive immune response as do all other people who you try this therapy on. Now, this therapy looks rather dangerous and the media takes this and runs. You look bad. The drug looks bad.

Perhaps if you were more thorough and conservative, this drug could have been brought forth as a drug to use after suppressing the HIV infection.

Proper research takes time, resources and money. Rushing something to market would lead to missteps much worse than something like Vioxx (which only adversely affects a small percentage of users - just that when usage is very high, things get noticed).

Well, the issue is more that most of these people who are "dying" are no where near dead. It may take a year or more for them to die. Furthermore, many of these "advances" add only one or two months of survival to someone with a one year survival to begin with. If animal testing is skipped, you may well reduce the time that these people have and for what?

Also, many therapies such as say aspirin during myocardial infarction offer great benefit; however, a new medication that may be "better" than aspirin may only be marginally better. So say only one in 10 above those already taking ASA will benefit. This can be proven to be statistically significant, but if it comes at a high cost, skipping animal studies may harm or kill a lot of people to find out. What if twice as many had life threatening bleeds? No animal study to base this on. Researcher saying likely better than aspirin? I think the US model as slow as it may be - was built out of a good understanding of safety needs as well as patient needs. And yes, there are exceptions made for emergent therapies. For example novalung (http://medgadget.com/archives/2007/02/novalung_ila_me.html) has only been used twice in the US - despite it not being approved. These were true life threatening situations.

Right! And I am allowed to say what it is I am allowed to say!

Right, so you are trying to say that we need to stop Hollywood? I am all for it!

Unfortunately, I think most people will think you are being sarcastic and I am just going for a "funny" mod. I am quite serious, but I will take the funny since people may actually get to see my post about how hollywood has gone too far and we need more exposure of indie films, but now I fear I am off topic.

Watch employees work? No.

You just shut the door and assume everything goes to plan. What?

because it is not embedded in a way that you don't know what is happening and can be turned off. In a world of open source and alternatives, this will push the paranoid to other pastures. I started with slackware years ago and went through mandrake, gentoo and now to ubuntu largely following popular trends (and with the exception of gentoo) and ease of use. This has potential to greatly help the distribution in terms of marketing and convincing others to provide for the segment. So long as it doesn't break basic principles of openness, I probably wouldn't remove it.

WEll, that was my point. You can be spied on by everyone else - it takes out part of the corruption issue. If the camera's are open, it reduces peoples ability to hide the truth - which may not be such a bad thing.

Sure, criminals can use it to know when you are out of the house, but you will be able to catch them when they break in!... wait... ok fine, you win.

How about the high violent crime rate? The fact that people don't stop at lights out of fear? Those are most definitely not wrong. Its better to let robbers have their victims kneel at the corner of the street and be executed than to have a surveillance system.

What people feel is wrong about the surveillance system is the potential for abuse - and their is tons of it, but we don't live in a world where people go down the street holding hands while skipping and singing songs. The very reason people fear surveillance is its potential for abuse by the same villains that walk the street.

Did it ever occur that if surveillance was open and all video was available to all people that it may actually prove beneficial? Openness doesn't need to stop at software. Public areas being truly public may have more benefits than you may think. Perhaps if you could record your own actions through the day, it could counter any interruption or hacking with the grid. There is a lot of room for abuse, but also a lot of room for securing the safety of thousands of people.

um... I believe you are mistaken about a scratchproof screen not being possible. All we need to do is make it from a giant single diamond piece about 10.1" in diagnoal radius and a consistent 1-2mm in thickness.... Should be easy and its only made from carbon so I will guess it will be really cheap.

I thought that was a stack not a queue

a flying spaghetti monster? Is this the proof the church has needed? Maybe this will cause disheavel and split the followers into the flying slime camp vs the orthodox pastrafarians.

Could you imagine a nation whose citizens are not informed about this? They will develop new fears. "Billy, don't look at the sky you might go blind". and then after Billy goes blind from looking at the laser beam, the island gets hit with a tsunami at which point they will accuse Billy of being a prophet of doom.

Well, in conclusion, I think opt-in with formal education about not looking in a particular direction in the sky would be a good thing.