Not necessarily patentable, but a 'new drug' under FDA rules. (Basically any change to the delivery method or dosage of pills would create a new 'drug' for the FDA.)

OTOH if you want to patent it, you can just combine it with another drug. Or chalk. The latter's what they did to get new life out of the Pepcid patent expiring -- they just added a regular antacid to it, and patented the new drug.

So what you're saying is ... we just need to source the yeast or gengineer our own. It's not like the latter is outside of the realm of possibility nowadays.

Growing a sterile culture in a reactor is ... well, it's average-person hard, but a solid easy-to-mid for someone who's enough of a geek to be sufficiently self-motivated to do so..

For residential areas, and offramps, and such? Yeah. Speed limits are based on safety. The problem is highways and interstates, where they're also based on safety -- safety of cars 60 years ago, for the most part, and the shittiest of cars even then.

If your speedometer is that far off, you've put a different size tire or something on your vehicle and not made adjustments to compensate.

Check via the GPS on your phone, that should give you a much-closer-to-true reading.

That's a speed limit that actually matters.

In residential areas, I tend to drive below the speed limit, particularly if there's anyone out and about.

On the highway, I'm with the rest of the drivers doing 20mph over because the double-nickel's too bloody slow, and at or below 75, the cops just don't give a damn.

In the US there's nothing illegal about downloading or streaming copyrighted content; only supplying it.

Of course, since bittorrent is involved, I'm assuming you're acting as a peer, so you're definitely on the wrong side of the law.

Yeah, you can buy it off Amazon, but I'm wondering how much will actually be needed to run a country's electricity infrastructure. (I'm also assuming that the reaction isn't anywhere close to 100% efficient, as far as using up all of the fuel available, whether it's boron or lithium. Reclaiming unspent lithium would be a bitch, particularly since it'd probably be splattered around as a light powder, pyrophoric powder or coating that could burst into flame upon contact with air.) And remember, unlike with batteries or other chemical transformations, once this lithium's been used, we're not getting it back.

Then there's the storage and processing. Lithium rapidly reacts with oxygen, and even more rapidly reacts with water, including vapor in the air. It's pretty toxic, too. It presents a storage hazard and a health hazard that boron does not. With the boron path, I could foresee reactors that could be plonked down pretty much anywhere and run by a few technicians, mostly just needing only someone to shovel pellets into the hopper and occasionally clear out the reactor chamber.

Then, there's one thing you're missing -- if they can get it working with boron -- great! If they can't, quite -- well, it should be trivial to rework the chamber design and cook up some new pellets using lithium. In this design, the chamber seems to be mostly just for containment and capture of the alpha radiation, and feeding in the pellets. I can't imagine that they'd need to rework the most expensive bit -- the laser -- significantly, so it could be, at worst, a few months of time and maybe a few tens of thousands of dollars to get it changed over to try the easier path. So they lose essentially nothing by trying the hard way first, then the easier way if necessary.

Perhaps you should be a little less obvious about being a troll?

The very high taxes are, in most cases, equivalent to or less than you'd pay for insurance.

It doesn't require months waiting for basic care; this claim is complete horseshit. It may require months waiting for elective procedures. And in any case, it's the same in the US unless you're extremely wealthy or have -extremely- good health insurance.

Me, with my merely very good health insurance, went to the hospital after finding out I bled a not insignificant amount out of my ass when I took a shit. Since I hadn't done anything to precipitate that, and it was accompanied by belly pain, it was, to say the least, alarming. After most of a night they determined that the bleeding had stopped and prescribed a cat scan with a side of barium milkshake. It took a fucking month just to get the cat-scan, then about another fucking month before I had a diagnosis.

I know people in Canada. Yeah, it may require out of pocket expenses, but they're absolutely minimal compared to what we pay in the US, and they've received excellent and prompt health care. Of course, since Canada isn't a monolithic entity and each province is responsible for funding its health system, YMMV.

Yeah, I'm moderately sure that the etymology is something more like "Call a spade a spade, not a shovel, you fancy-pants prat."

I'm not sure if actual black or brown people give a shit about the saying, but I avoid it anyway, nowadays, so I don't get dogpiled by the well-meaning.

Given its previous price, and supposing that demand for the drug hasn't changed significantly for reasons other than price, I think we can assume that a: the previous price was fine or close to it on the scale it was being manufactured, and b: there were enough patients to justify it being manufactured, and c: it made a profit, if a modest one, at that price.

There's no way that one can justify a 100,000% price increase.

AFAIK no. It's just an exercise bike. Even the resistance control is manual. So all you lose is the screen and any information-gathering the thing does.

You're correct, which is part of why I looked at the price of a Pelaton and went: "The fuck?"

(It's not a lever, it's a knob that you have to reach down between your legs and turn to change the resistance.)

At that price I'd expect something automated.

Marginally, but from what I've read, it's got no where near the features one might expect of a standard exercise bike of the same price.

...He built his own "rocket", which first a: didn't make it up as far as you can with a cheapass ultralight, and nowhere near where you could get with a freaking -balloon-, and then b: killed him.

So, you're not exactly contradicting the 'HE SO STUPID' people here.