I think we would be better if we could do this at a societal level instead of private companies but the system we have is private companies. Many of these ideas actually take close to 10 years to get to market and the FDA is only a small part of that. These new DNA and protein based medications are HARD to make. I don't think the average person has any clue how hard it is to make. If you had an entire swimming pool filled with your raw materials the amount of drug you can get out of that is about the size of a marble.
Worse just getting it is not enough, you also have to purify it, remove all contaminants etc. 2 years is just not enough time to do that.
There is nothing for them to compete with. These are the first medicines of their type EVER. The problem is that it is so expensive to develop and make these drugs that if the patent only lasted 2 years it would be 8 years before you where even ready to make it that the patent expired and your competitors would be able to work on making it also but at a tiny fraction of the cost.
DNA, protein and nanotech type drugs are so hard to make that from discovery it often takes about 10 years to put them into production. We are at a point right now where we have figured out a way to make something in a lab but not how to make it at an industrial scale. If you lowered patents to 2 years for this stuff you would stop all work on it.
We have also just started using stuff like CRISPR-CAS to do DNA editing on humans. It is likely to take at least 10 years just to get something approved and that does not cover figure out how to actually make it at scale.
I used to think that drugs should have much shorter protections but since actually taking classes in how to make them, how to get them approved etc and how hard they are to make my views have changed. Sure the short molecule drugs that most traditional pharmaceuticals are may be almost trivially easy to make but the newer biotech types ones are HARD. I mean insanely mind mindbogglingly hard. Many of the protein based drugs start with a 10,000L vat and end up at the end with 4 kg of product. Overall to make that 4 kg takes many millions of dollars for each batch and it does not help many people. However if you ever want that technology to improve then the patents on it have to last long enough to justify what it takes to make it.
However if those libraries are already installed on your system it should be fairly easy to update them. For zope 2.x the changes in python product code have been fairly minimal across all versions and the python changes from 1.5 to 2.7 are pretty easy to change also. The only big issue I can see is if the system used zclasses and I thought that could still be installed in a modern zope version, just heavily recommended against. However zclasses are normally fairly easy to rebuild as a pure python product.
I wonder why you can't migrate stuff from Zope 2.5.1 to newer versions? I started with applications from Zope 2.0 and migrated them step by step to 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 etc up through 2.13 and each step was usually a few hours of work or less.
Zope 2.x continues to be updated and maintained. It was zope 3.x which was abandoned. You can go to https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Zope2/2.13.21 and download the latest version of zope. It was even discussed to rename zope 2.x to zope 4.x but that was dropped since they thought it would be even more confusing. Zope 2.x has also run on the python 2.7 for a very long time now and so far I have upgraded apps written in zope 2.0 all the way up through 2.13 over the years with very few problems.
I would like to see full disclosure of ALL ingredients. The full chemical information for every single one. Just saying that something has GMO in it is darn close to worthless. What if you know that some GMO tomato variant is very good for you but some corn variant is bad. If all you have is GMO yes or no that tells you nothing. If I know the food has XXX GMO tomato varient, yyy natural strain corn, zzz GMO variant potato etc then that is useful.
Based on the professional scientists I have worked with they can't do it either. Based on the level of fraud in scientific papers that have been found for new drugs it seems that very very few actually can do it to those thresholds. Sure they can lie at that level but they can't do science at that level.
What is worse is that those clueless people have cratered the market for people that actually know what they are doing. I have had customers try to outsource something, fail but then come back and try to negotiate a price in the ballpark of what they outsourced the project for even though the outsourced project did not work. They try to argue that they at least have a ballpark estimate to work from. Even had one customer turn off the ordering system on their site that tied into the inventory tracking system because the new system was just about to go online
That is a major reason I went back to school to change fields. Well that and how do you get something more exciting than DNA editing to cure diseases?
However works on the galaxy note series of items so long as you are using the spen. However what I have learned is to mostly work on removing hover wherever possible since it is non-obvious to many people. The bootstrap menus do a nice job of making a menu that works without hover and is immediately obvious what it does and how it works.
I haven't had an internship in several years (unrelated illnesses) but when I was still working while doing my undergrad CS degree, I was very forward about suffering depression and anxiety/panic disorders. Not a single person cared in a negative way, and if I missed a meeting because of a panic attack I'd get help from coworkers (programming some stuff for a tai-chi exercise game, seifu was working with us on that one). The other students understood, mostly, and even opened up about their issues.
Part of that is setting, I'm sure. The university undergrad scene is much younger than the "old guard industry programmers". But staying silent just means that the "old guard" never have to learn or accept; they can just go on being ignorant of these issues. And that doesn't help anyone.
It's still a very personal choice. You have to make the decision that fits you best.
In a previous life, I worked with mostly medicated kids in a clinical K-12 setting. It was absolutely the norm for them to be inconsistent with their meds.
I've been told that the segment of people on meds for psychological disorders who go off their meds when they shouldn't, at some point in their treatment, approaches 100 percent. (And when I say "when they shouldn't have," I mean the solution for the problems that inevitably arise ends up being to get back on the meds, or similar ones.)
I could almost believe that. Most of the drugs are still in the "we think this is how they work" category. You have a psychological disturbance that results in paranoia (which can and does happen to people even with no diagnosed illness or even on medication), and the medication is an easy thing to lash out at. Or you experience tons of the listed side effects (either real or imagined, it wouldn't matter) and can't convince a doctor to change the medicine. The latter happened to me, real side effect was losing memory; found notes that I had told the doctor several times over a year, and he did nothing. I called their 'emergency assist' phone, left a message that I would stop unless I heard back from them. Never did, so I went cold turkey and switched doctors after the weekend was over.
Had mine been for anything other than pain and depression and insomnia, that withdrawal could have been hilariously amusing; instead I just sat up reading a book for over 48 hours til I passed out.
But my depression is a strange one; mild sufferers (by the DSM meaning of mild depression or any other illness or axis) of illnesses with no Axis 1 or 2 components who doesn't suffer from delusions aren't likely to stop taking meds that work. Additionally, barring a massive incident, most non-psychosis and non-paranoia disorder sufferers are very likely to stay on a med that works; without something that alters perception of reality, they have no reason to go back to the pain and suffering of before. Incidents like moving (the wait list for a psychiatrist here was over a year!), insurance covering a different doctor, losing a job/house/etc, that are outside the individuals' control shouldn't be counted.
"I am, therefore I am." -- Akira