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Comment Re:$60m is pocket-money (Score 1) 171

True, the cost to bring a single drug to market is far less. Now all you have to do is go back ten years to the benchtop chemist and tell him or her which one of the 500 structures they are working on is that one so they can ignore all the rest.

Uhuh. And what's your point, exactly? You see, mine is that, despite what the libertarian slashbots here would have to believe, the overhead created by government regulation to bring a drug to market is not, in fact, 1 to 1.7B, as the OP would have us believe.

Is the cost of drug *research* high? Of course, just as it is in any cutting-edge research area. The simple fact is that any company involved in such an endeavour is fundamentally gambling, risking millions if not billions of dollars with the expectation that the rewards will far exceed those expenditures. But once a promising compound has been found, the cost to actually run that compound through trials and bring it to market is *far* less than the aggregate cost of R&D.

Comment it only maters so much (Score 1) 1049

I have reseller accounts at some of the larger hosting companies, and manage a lot of domains on the internet, i still use gmail accounts. i actually have several different accounts, most of them forwarding, and with rules setup to star emails sent to other accounts, etc, but i've never cared enough to get my own domain just for me, as a place to store my resume... I will say that when i've applied for jobs, I tend to take the application less seriously when its going to an aol account..

Comment Silly test results... (Score 2, Insightful) 198

"While it's not likely that a smart phone user is going to draw a lot of lines, the test does give some indication of which phones are most likely to properly respond to clicking on a link in a Web browser." I don't suppose they considered instead testing which phones properly respond to clicking on links in Web browsers?

Comment Re:Same Arguments, So Simply Discredit Them (Score 1) 565

The thing about electricity is that people couldn't see that it would service more than just lights.

I think it's safe to assume most people don't realize the full potential of the internet, either. Honestly, I don't feel I know much of anything myself about where the internet is going; there are just too many possibilities to forsee.

Unless you have some WAN technology I don't know about or are accepting the issues of broadband over power, I think it's hard to convince someone that a traditional infrastructure covering--say--all of the Ozarks is going to be worth a whole lot more than the few towns and cities in it that are already covered.

Actually, an interesting possibility for covering very large areas is by using waves in the upper RF ranges. These would allow for huge swaths of sparsely populates land to be covered with relatively high-speed service. Of course, it will never be top-notch service, and that's something one must accept about living in rural areas. However, saying rural areas should be relegated to use minimal or no internet service is absurd. I first managed to get my parents off of dial-up this past summer, upgrading to a wireless signal from a tower ~1 mile away. Even so, they still don't get enough bandwidth to use skype or stream youtube videos smoothly, but the alternative was sticking with terrible dial-up on failing (verizon) landlines. Simply put, we have the technology, but we need to make it profitable for someone to implement.

Comment Re:Sounds familiar (Score 1) 565

The current system isn't great. But under the current system I have a choice of insurance companies and plans, the option to buy services outside of my coverage, the option to not have coverage and just pay for what I want, and even a choice among employers. If there's one insurance company for everyone in the nation I lose most of those choices. Even the availability of non-covered services is threatened -- if there are *no* insurers that cover the service (and since there's only one insurer it's an all-or-nothing game) you have to believe that service would be less available than when *some* insurers covered it.

Comment Re:What (Score 1) 1747

I'm certain that people believe it when a spacecraft launches,

Capricorn 1. There is a significent percentage of the prople that believe the Earth is flat, and that the moon landings were faked on a soundstage.

or their new TV is even thinner.

TV's are like computers. They run on magic, the data flows through tubes, and you can catch a computers virus.

Thing is, do they even realise that is science?

They believe that psychics are real, and those that are caught cheating were just covering for a bad day. Scientists are just geeks who use funny words. Psychics solve crimes and save people in trouble, and scientists read books while wearing coke-bottle glasses.

In their mind science is a term for the fuzzy stuff that they read about in the papers - like is a glass of wine good or bad for you? Are potatoes/fish/eggs/etc good or bad for you? And all the U-turns since. Science is the word they associate with anything that goes wrong or seems to be a stupid waste of money to research.

The media have no clue about how science is supposed to work. If a group of clueless busybodies get together to condemn all our favorite foods just to get in the spotlight, the media will happily follow them, since it fills air time and makes them seem more important when they report the horrors of our food supply.

The media has propagated this view of science, because journalists could never hack the subjects themselves, and they just want to get their own back on those people who could do it.

The media doesn't understand technology, and they follow whoever gives them the most impressive show. They're interested in getting an audience and winning awards, they aren't interested in the truth which gets them neither.

Comment Re:Competitive in the gaming industry?!?! (Score 1) 192

Information such as trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a company on a privileged or confidential basis that, if released, would result in competitive harm to the company, impair the government's ability to obtain like information in the future, or protect the government's interest in compliance with program effectiveness.

I wonder if this is the criteria for the withholding. Could the Army have entered into a NDA with private industry? What I picture is a situation where the Army lays out the budget for the project and a company agrees to write the code (A.I. behavior comes to mind) in return for whatever the Army can pay plus an agreement to not disclose the code. It has been years since I played AA so this theory make not make sense in some aspects.

Comment Re:Yes, Here's Why (Score 1) 1747

You're right that most people aren't going to read the emails, and that's a problem. This is a good story for the media: "HACKED EMAILS REVEAL SCIENTIFIC MISCONDUCT!!" Everyone loves a good juicy witchhunt - rooting out the evildoers hiding under the mask of normalcy. "HACKED EMAILS REVEAL SCIENTISTS ENGAGED IN SCIENCE AND DEBATE" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

So the media blows it out of proportion because it draws eyeballs they can sell to advertisers, and rational people who don't have time to read the emails start to have doubts about this whole global warming thing. I mean, it wouldn't be all over the news unless there was something to it, right?

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