I wonder if it's almost as if in some cases Americans subsidize medical innovation for the rest of the world. We pay the price for the new tech and while our system for whatever reasons keeps prices high, when it's time to sell the tech to other countries the price ends up being lower and so ironically people are going to other countries to get American-made treatments.
It's not "as if" this were the case, this is the case. Most especially with drug discovery. In many cases the only people who pay to recoup the R&D costs of a new drug are Americans, while the rest of the world only pays the marginal costs of production.
P.S. For the drug companies this isn't a big problem because they still make back their development costs and there isn't much they can do when dealing with big state run health care systems. It's not fair but from a practical standpoint it still works. However, it does put the world's healthcare system at risk because people in the US are starting to think that drug companies are screwing them and they want the same deal the rest of the world has, they want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg. Since there's nowhere else for significant profits the obvious result would be a diminishing in drug discovery.
I see a lot of work done in making 3D printers accessible to the point of having one in every home, but I wonder if any home improvement stores have considered having them on-site and using it to gain foot-traffic to buy the additional parts needed to complete the object.
> people keeping their possessions longer simply because they don't have the money to buy new
This is already the case for most of the developing world. However, with increasing automation and outsourcing, it looks as if that is a future that might not be too far away here too. There might simply not be enough jobs to go around and a new class of lifestyle may arise where you need to purchase durable and repairable goods and a market would rise around that need.
What about an easier way for the public to file prior art? If there was a public database of patents under review and anybody could upload things that appear to be prior art to help the reviewers in the process?
So there's a camera at every spot? Seems like overkill when a simple sensor (IR/magnetic) would have gotten pretty much the same information. Instead of letting a camera guess your tag, just number each spot and send the number of the spot to the phone once you park.
So then you actively need to do something on your phone when you park?
Additionally, this tech is better for the car park owners because they can (are?) using the same technology to check for cars parked too long in a spot. For that you need the number plate.
The underlying issue is that some agencies can't for some odd reason or another give out their data. There is either some archaic policy in place or for some historical/contractual reason the data isn't actually owned by the agency but instead by some contractor that provides the technology to generate the data. Some smaller agencies might not even have a department that is aware of that issue/possibility because they once again subcontract it all out and the contractor isn't going to suggest to release data for free to get free projects.
The best way to change that is to request it at the local level. If local developers put pressure on their transit agencies then that will help speed up the process.
I agree. A lot of times the contractor who built the system will either (a) see the value in the data, and put in a clause walling it off, or (b) try to obfuscate the data so it's not easy to get to, so that they'll get more money to free the data.
SF's MUNI had a huge mess on its hands with the whole NextBus thing. Eventually the developers prevailed, but this is SF, where you can't throw a stone without hitting some developer. Imagine the situation in not so tech-heavy cities.
I'm working on deeper stories along these lines. Many of these agencies have signed into extremely long, and closed contracts, that give away ownership of "our" data.
How is removing something that was given to you in a package stealing? If someone gave me a free magazine, but the magazine had ads, you're saying it'd be stealing to rip those pages out?
Magazines are paid for the number of ads they distribute. And the ads DID make it to you, so even if you go through them all and rip them out, you ARE being exposed to them, if only briefly. And the ads can't be all destroyed unilaterally by installing MagazineAdBlock.
If you block ads, you have NO chance of seeing them, and therefore I have no chance of making the $0.03 that's typical from a single click. And worse, if you block those annoying ads, then you have no motivation to BUY the version without ads!
If everyone blocked ads, you would have no more free games to steal. If you don't want ads, buy games without ads. Don't try to hide behind bogus rationalizations. Blocking ads is clearly unethical, even if you don't want to call it stealing, because the developer intends to make money on his product and is giving it to you with the express understanding that it's ad supported.
HTTP is an inherently request-based protocol. The HTML file that I request from the server has links to ads. A stock browser will request those ad links. Ad block tells the browser not to. So it's more like if someone asks you "hey, I have free ice cream bars, want one?" and after you receive it he then asks "It also comes with this ad flyer. Want it too?" and you say "no, thanks" or take it and throw it in the trash immediately. Is it rude? Sure. Is it stealing? If the legality of the transaction was dependent on me accepting the ad, then that should have been negotiated before you sent me HTTP 200. But that's not in the HTTP protocol. If you don't like the protocol or don't think it's fair, don't use it.
Unless I'm mistaken, a default only happens if we don't pay our creditors that service our debt. For August that's supposed to be around $29billion [1]. We have more than enough to cover that (the article predicts ~$150 billion in revenue). Every other expense is legally optional and failing to pay those is in no legal sense of the word a default.
