The major cost of testing a new compound is to prove the drug is safe, i.e doesn't kill the patient, or has any other nasty side effects. Whether it actually does any good is almost left as an afterthought. Since (almost) all of that should be well established by the time someone comes up with an idea for a second use, then no, they should't be able to get a God damned patent for using the same drug for something new. They can got a patent for the drug, that's it.

Say I'm allergic to fish. Say the corporations insert genes from fish in tomatoes. Say those genes now code for proteins I'm allergic to. Do I now have to read the "labeling" on tomatoes hoping that it's safe for me?This and many many more scenarios are ones I can be pretty damn certain will not occur as a result of either accelerated mutation (whether from radiation or chemically induced), or regular old fashioned cross fertilization. You're never going to successfully cross breed a cod and a carrot. (If you want to fuck up a species the old fashioned way you can still have a Belgian Blue to your hearts content).

So you're right. We don't know exactly how the geneticists at Monsanto will manage to screw up next and call it the greatest thing since sliced bread. Their efforts so far; e.g. making crops that tolerate even more herbicides than previous so that even more can be poured into the environment, rather than take a (minuscule) hit to the agricorporations bottom line, tells us all we need to know for the moment, thank you very much. Herbicides that Monsanto patented and sold at a markup. Makes you really trust their motives. Pure as the driven snow, no doubt.

In Europe we pay our farmers enough subsidies already to *not* want to have to put up with that particular crap (i.e. race to the bottom) as well as all the other crap we have to put up with. It's not that we're luddites. It's just that we don't trust Monsanto, or rather, we trust them to put their greed above all else, and we certainly don't trust the FDA (bought and paid for by the very same corporations) to tell *us* that it's OK. We have our own governmental agencies, not quite as deep in the pockets of big business to keep us in the dark quite adequately, thank you.

And we're not exclusively against the kind of bizarre monstrosities that result from gene splicing. You won't find any Belgian blue meat in the Nordic countries either. Even though that genetic aberration was "manufactured" the old fashioned way. We think that line of genes should be taken out of circulation as well. Splicing or not.

Joke or not it's an interesting question. When it comes to fields like chemistry, biology etc. females have been the clear majority for some time (although not at the highest levels), medicin they are now the majority (something like 60% here in Sweden); some fields are holdouts, surgery being one, but I think that's going. The vetrinarians have been slapped on the wrist for trying to accept male students on a quota (otherwise there would be none) so that trend is pretty clear as well.

When it comes to the "TEM" though the picture is bleaker. Even though I had a record 20% females in my (comp. sci./eng.) masters programme this year, the levels have been discouraging for the past 20 years. We might be seeing a small encouraging trend in maths, but it's not much to write home about.

So, that's the billion dollar question. What could/should we do to even out the gender inequality in these fields? In Sweden we've had the debate of not enough women at the highest rungs of corporate leadership for quite some time, but my experience from places like Ericsson, with maybe 20%-30% women, many of them (as much as 80%) in management is that the "problem" isn't necessarily that women don't advance up the corporate leadership ladder (yes there's a "glass ceiling" effect, I'm not denying that), but rather that they don't become technical specialists. The lack of female CEOs isn't nearly as striking as the lack of female nerds when you think about it. I've had ten or so female bosses/project managers/whatnot, but only one socially awkward technically adept female colleague...

I can't help but think that in the "beaker intensive" fields, the picture must be different. There the specialists can't be an all male club, in fact I'd expect the opposite, but don't really have any experiences or facts to base that on.

Indeed. No less than Doug McIlroy thinks so. (Google his name + Linux). He should know. And even if he didn't, he has the credentials to proclaim it so. :-)

Yes, with "sophisticated" I was more referring to the fact that they managed to make Sarin in the first place. This compared to your typical Islamic terrorist organisation that can't even mix proper explosives (or just steal some dynamite for crying out loud). So yes, that's indeed not saying much...

But speaking of the Sarin gas attack. I've always wondered about that. Given that it was the second time they tried it, and given that they were sophisticated enough to make it in the first place one has to wonder about the inept delivery system. I mean it would take someone five minutes to come up with a spray nozzle, tank and a CO2 cartridge. (Add a drop of acid or two to eat through the cartridge and you have a coarse time delay.)

So I can't help but wondering whether the delivery system was designed to be sub optimal, and whether that was an organisational goal or someone working within the organisation against it's goal? Or if they just were that screwed up? (Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist or anything). When I last checked the public sources available to me I didn't find anything hard, apart from similar speculation.

Well, maybe not a major player, but it's been tried. If they only had had a usable delivery system (other than just puncturing the canisters and leaving vapour pressure alone to do it's thing) it might have gotten much uglier than it did.

Many people in the west seem to forget this particular incident. Now, granted they were very sophisticated as terrorist organisations go, but what used to take a nation state is now within reach of a much smaller outfit.

We did. Back in the day. But then we got our PhDs, our associate professorships, and are managing our own research groups. And make more money, and have a more interesting and rewarding job. In short we moved on. We've *been* you. And then we grew up.

We're not particularly impressed when we meet the umpteenth young whippersnapper with that very same attitude, thinking thery're all that and then some. Telling us what we can and can't do, why it's impossible, how expensive it would be if we managed our own Linux computers instead of buying the wonderful overpriced incompetent service from the IT dept.

In fact: we're quite weary of it. And we think what we think about "IT" accordingly.

Linus is a native speaker of Swedish. In fact, one of the nice things about Linux back in the day was that I didn't have to fiddle with keyboard settings, it came with the Swedish layout as a default. :-) And Sweden is very much part of Scandinavia.

(For the humour impared, for these purposes I think it's OK to include Finland in "Scandinavia" as USians often confuse it with "Norden" of which Finland is definately a part. And it's fitting here since socio-economically/politically and structurally Finland is very much part of the Nordic tradition.)

Take it from a Swede, the Finns may be many things, and called many things, but "Scandinavian" isn't usually something we accuse them of being. :-)

I think you mean "nordic", as that usually is how "norden" is translated. As for explaining our relationship I like the old soc.culture.nordic statement: "We're like one big family. Not one big *happy* family mind you, no more like any old family." :-)

As for "Eastern europe" we'll just have to agree to disagree. After all, quoting wikipedia "Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term is highly context-dependent and even volatile, as there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"[1]."

Because it concerns just geography. Not history, language, trade, etc. There are clear delineations that e.g. don't include the russians (many, most of which are "Europeans" by your definition).

Not trolling. Just pointing out that you've made the usual american mistake of trying to understand Europe based on your knowledge of the US. Europe as a concept is very much different from "US with countries instead of states".

And the Italians are a rather interesting case in point. They are rather divisive even as a country, let alone the larger grouping. Don't try to understand pretty much anywhere in terms of what you learned in Italy...

No it doesn't. Poland is an EU-member state. The countries to the east of it are not. Never have been, and probably never will. When the wall came down it was pretty clear which of the eastern european countries that belonged in the EU right of the bat and which didn't. The states you refer to have never been considered part of "Europe" in any sense other than a narrow geographic one. (The one that says that "Europe" runs to the Ural mountains; and even that is in contention). To call Moldova part of Europe would get you laughed out of the room. That would be like me going to the US and say "Yes, I know several of your countrymen, Americans from Mexico and Canada..."

"How could a compiler?" Answer: Start by checking out Cyclone (cyclone.thelanguage.org) for instance and go from there.

Well you could always buy a gun and start shooting up things to vent your frustration. That's something that's damn near impossible here. :-) (Both the buying and discharging a firearm outside a range.)

No, seriously, every place has their ups and downs. I'm just happy that we have one "up" in an area that's at least useful to me... You have others.

Yeah, that would cost me $50. But my "work" computer can only get about 30Mbps and 50 Mbps was the highest uplink I could get when I signed up, so I've stayed with that. Still, I'd call prices in the $30-$50 range reasonable.

I have 50/50 Mbit fiber for about $40/month in Sweden. No caps. This includes IP telephony (pay cheap rate for calls but no subscription fee).

So $100 sounds expensive... :-)