But it is the only country in the world where German, French, British and Swiss drug companies profit on their R&D. Developing drugs is very, very expensive but manufacturing is very, very cheap. Which means that once the R&D has been paid for (and to be fair... richly profited from) in the the USA the drug companies can also make also make a nice profit on the side by churning out the cheap manufactured product to those places either too poor or too regulated to pay for the initial R&D.
Should the USA ever adopt a less "disgraceful" model that forces the price of pharmaceuticals down to what is paid in the rest of the world, prices in the rest of the world would have to rise and we'd all be paying something somewhere half way between the current USA and World price for drugs. Yes, getting rid of the rich profit margins would account for some of the discrepancy, but not anywhere near all of it.
So if your in Canada or Europe (or just about anywhere else) stop being so eager to change the USA medical system... you'll kill the goose laying cheap pharmaceuticals
One expert, who is part of the investigation and wants to remain anonymous because the inquiry is at an early stage, told The New York Times he wondered how the hackers could have known to breach security by focusing on the vulnerability in the browser.
He said: 'It would have been hard to prepare for this type of vulnerability.
IF the article is correct about the nature of the vulnerability this quote is the single stupidest and most frightening things I have ever read on the internet.
NIWA explanation for what is going on for the temperature adjustments.
For a single station out of many that were adjusted. I suspect they picked one of the most reasonable adjustments out of the many that were made to present their strongest case.
But even the adjustments for this single station are at least a little problematic. There's no overlapping data between Thorndon and Kelborn so the adjustment is a guess. They took the newest station at the airport for which they have overlapping data with the old station at Kelborn (so that adjustment is not a guess) and applied the same differential to Thorndon because it was at the same elevation. Not a bad basis for a guess, but is it likely that elevation is the only variable between a modern airport and the Thorndon of 100 years ago? Is this one station really representative of all the other stations that have been adjusted? (was there a mid-century trend to move weather stations to higher elevations?)
Heat-island effects will generally be getting worse over time as suburbs and urban centers grow up around weather stations. When this is brought up as a reason for skepticism we're informed that this is a known problem and that the raw data is being adjusted for such affects. Instead when we compare the raw data to the adjusted data we're seeing a general upward adjustment rather than the generally downward one you'd expect because of the increasing heat-island effects. When asked why the trend is generally upward data for a single station which saw an altitude change is trotted out as a justification. Tellingly while adjustments for changes in elevation were made as this station moved around there were no adjustments for the fact that the city is significantly larger than 100 years ago and that the newest station is sitting amidst acres of paved runway.
Let me be clear that I don't think there's any kind of conspiracy. But I do suspect there's a subtle bias towards warming adjustments and away from equally necessary cooling adjustments. Because scientists now expect to see a warming trend if one doesn't show up in their data they're more likely to look for reasons why it didn't and account for them ("Hmm... that's funny this station data exhibits no warming trend. Ahh I see... the elevation changed in the 1920's") while similar factors causing an artificial warming trend in the data are less likely to be accounted for because the data looks like what is expected ("The warming trend for this station is in line with the global trend, I think we can safely assume there's no significant heat island effect in this case").
to call humanity's second greatest invention since Mathematics(*) itself useless.
At what point did he say the internal combustion engine was useless?
We're talking about a technology that allows Joe Average in the US to send a message to Juan Promedio in Spain in less time it took you to read this paragraph...
Oh, you mean the telegraph! or... errr... the telephone? the wireless?
The personal computer and the internet are really great but calling them humanity's 1st and 2nd greatest invention of all time is shortsighted. It's more like: "two greatest inventions that have happened recently enough for me to have personally experienced their impact on society so I think they're better than all those other revolutionary inventions I'm taking for granted".
I recently ran across a set of family stories my grandmother compiled about her childhood as well as those of my grandfather and his siblings... and I concluded that the tropes about us living in an age of unparalleled, ever faster technological advancement simply aren't true, at least not any longer. My Grandfather experienced more, and more significant, technological advances in his life than I have in mine: He was born in 1908. A third of the population (including his family) were farmers, the typical home had no electricity, no phone, no indoor plumbing, no refrigeration (His father, my great grandfather owned a dairy farm, their refrigeration was a spring house, and during transportation a cloth in the wagon over the dairy products to keep them out of the sun). Most if not all appliances and tools used in his home and farm were powered by human or animal muscle. Transportation was by horse or over long distances by locomotive... There were almost no cars, model "T" production began that same year. His lifestyle growing up was very, very different from what we are familiar with today. The year he was born the Wright brothers were conducting demonstration flights in Paris to convince the governments of Europe that heavier than air flight was in fact a reality and might even have practical application. In contrast by the time he was 50 (1958) his life was not significantly different from my own, he lived in a raised ranch in the suburbs (a type of place that didn't exist in his childhood). He commuted to work at an office using a car kept in the garage. His home had electricity, indoor plumbing, phone service, radio and TV and every appliance except a computer that we would expect in a home today. He wasn't part of the "jet set" so the price would be out of his means, but in theory he could have flown via commercial jet when he went on vacation. The 50 years since then (1958-1998) hasn't seen nearly as many revolutionary technological advances, mostly just a lot of evolutionary advances to the technologies my grandfather already enjoyed by '58 . The personal computer and the internet are the big revolutionary advances since then but even those two biggies don't don't yet hold a candle to the impact the automobile had on individuals or society at large.
Scientists will study your brain to learn more about your distant cousin, Man.