What they are talking about are the market relevant forces: Insurance companies will pay for prevention if and only if it is cheaper than paying for the treatment/cure. Since 9 times in 10 the vaccine will be paid for by an insurance company (as opposed to the consumer), Merck is charging what the market will bear.

You also seem to forget that drug companies have to research dozens of drugs before they ever get one to market - that $11bn gross looks impressive until you factor in what they paid to get there, and what they'll have to pay before their next big marketable drug.

And how useful is that standard to you if no one can afford to pay for the license required to implement the software to read your archives?

*chinkchink. pause. chink. pause. chinkchink. *

At Chernobyl, this actually happened inside the containment vessel and the resulting explosion ruptured the vessel, leading to a serious release of core radioactives – though this has had basically zero effect on the world in general nor even much impact on the area around Chernobyl.

*faceplam*

I'm pretty pro-nuke/anti-hysteria, but this is just irresponsible. If you want the straight-up story, go to the IAEA page or see the analysis by Ars.

P = VI = I**2 R

When your frequency goes up, so does the number of current spikes due to the high frequency transients. You didn't think a square wave was actually square, did you?

http://www.microsoft.com/About/Legal/EN/US/IntellectualProperty/Trademarks/EN-US.aspx

And this is why the jailbreaking provision is not relevant. Unlocking is a different exercise, and it is addressed in the very next point of the same ruling:

(3) Computer programs, in the form of firmware or software, that enable used wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telecommunications network, when circumvention is initiated by the owner of the copy of the computer program solely in order to connect to a wireless telecommunications network and access to the network is authorized by the operator of the network.

Uh, no. Canada has a worse population density than the US, and we pay for it. I'm paying $50/mo for 14/3 cable internet. Add 13% sales tax to that. Oh, and don't get me started on cell phone service.

You don't do much safety analysis, do you?

Let's see, assume a bad pointer goes in an corrupts the lookup table which identifies what input corresponds to which function. Now your pedals have reversed function. All the logging in the world isn't going to change the fact that the box is now looking at the wrong pin for its input.

Yes, there are certainly things that can be done to mitigate this risk, and some of them may have been implemented. However, the unfortunate truth is that there is no recognized/legislated functional safety standard for the development of automobile software in the US. Some international companies are trying to apply IEC61508 (developed for industrial automation), but compliance is strictly voluntary.

They may be right, but they don't provide sufficient data in TFA to say either way, in fact Toyota has come right out and said that their logger is a debugging tool, and to me that says it is not safety relevant software, and therefore not subject to additional quality controls.