Affentitten
-
Posts
1,511 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by Affentitten
-
-
We got tasers after a couple of high profile cases where seriously mentally ill people having a psychotic episode had lunged at cops with a butter knife or something and the police had little other option than to gun them down. But since then we've had our share of taser-related deaths, cases of people being handcuffed on the floor and still tasered because they're being verbally abusive and cases of people being tasered like 15 times just for the sheer hell of it.
On the other hand, some of our cops don't even need a taser to have fun http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1319762/Police-release-CCTV-video-Australian-officer-Benjamin-Price-inflicting-water-torture-suspect.html#ixzz129xvpvSq
-
To be honest, as a parent who has had two kids in day care, I would be seriously unhappy if the response of the childcare workers to a tantrum was to call the cops. I mean,a kid going a bit mental is hardly an uncommon thing to run into in your working day, is it?
We're having the same re-examination of tasers here in NSW at the moment. The issue is whether the taser doctrine has shifted from the original concept of non-lethal take-down of an individual threatening to harm others or themself and has morphed into a weapon of 'compliance'. ie. officers tasering people who are resisiting arrest, mouthing off or otherwise just pissing a cop off on a bad day.
-
Sure you can say he blatantly ripped off large chunks from Mars, bringer of war from the planets, but I think he did an excellent "remix".
I wouldn't say "blatant rip-off". The composer admits to making allusions to Holst's work quite simply because it was a piece of music about Romans making war.
Zimmer also said that he challenged himself to write the piece in waltz time (I think 3/4). Mars is 5/4
-
My grandad used to refer to homosexuals as "brown hatters". Perhaps there is a link there?
-
I wonder sometimes too about stuff like parachute training. Except for the insertion of elite recon squads or the like, parachuting is about the least likely delivery method you're going to get these days. Certainly the days of mass drops would be long gone.
-
Yes I think bayonet drills are a bit of a Victorian era hangover and probably always had more to do with upper class fantasies of courage than reality. In a way, the fixed bayonet is more of a psy-ops weapon.
-
I had this one when I was younger
-
As it says, it's regulated by law and low radiactivity stuff for baselining geiger counters. I had a buddy at school who's dad was a mining engineer and they had a jar of yellowcake on their coffee table.
-
I remember years ago seeing in a toy shop a pair of Freddy Krueger gloves with plastic knife blades, blood etc. The packaging screamed out the headline: NOW YOU CAN BE THE BASTARD SON OF 1000 MANIACS!
Just what you want to get your kid for Christmas.
-
"Ballyragget struck the German tank amidships disabling the tank and causing its crew to bail out. "
'Disabling' covers a multitude of outcomes, most of them a long way short of flipping or tipping the King Tiger.
-
T-34 = 26.5 tons
Panther = 45 tons
Tiger 1 = 57 tons
Somebody do the numbers. My guess would be that it's possible, but the Russian crew would be jelly.
-
Not implausible. The most bizarre thing though is that you would have a top secret facility with an isolated computer network, but then have no measures in place to stop staff wandering in and out with USB drives!
-
And as I mentioned waaaay back as well, the supposed mega-destruction of the B-29s happened when they weren't yet even in the AO.
-
Just like ducks, quacks muddy the waters. A couple of years ago a guy was pursued vigorously here in the courts for selling some sort of miracle water that would cure every ill known to man. He was prosecuted because it was just ordinary water with no scientific evidence of its claims. Yet my Yellow pages still lists dozens and dozens of people practising as homepaths quite legally. Go figure.
-
With regard to the rewards due to medical companies for discovering novel inventions/twists I actually think the system sucks. There are cures in existence that need exploting but because they cannot be patented drug companies are not interested in extending them. National universities and research organisations should be funded for this type of research.
Eg
That's what the Medicines Patent Pool has been set up to do. I think it was launched just about a month ago. However it is mainly aimed at HIV meds.
Even with the patents, universities and research organisations are rarely going to have the financial grunt to make progress. The cost of developing and trialling drugs these days has parallels in the cost of developing fighter aircraft. That is to say, the dollars, time and technical deamnds are becoming further and further out of reach. Hence all the super-mergers since 1995 (just like the aircraft industry) and the fact that the start-ups with bright ideas need to sell themselves off to big pharma to make a go of them.
Some of the cost is in the ethics too. You can't go out to Gabon with a half-baked cure and start seeing if it works any more. You need exhaustive testing and approvals on everything from rats to monkeys before you can even go near a human volunteer.
With these sort of costs, which can run over decades, ROI is of course the underlying concern. It's hard to get a drug company interested in developing a cure for some skin disease found only in central Africa when nobody can afford to buy it, or anyway, the company will cop a PR caning for not releasing for free. Not when they can spend the same money developing a diabetes cure that 50% of the Western world will be needing by 2025.
-
Yes Jon I rtfa - hence the edit in my post above.
The articles seem to be saying exactly the opposite of the first sentence in teh 1st post of this thread, to wit:
Which I read as saying that patent protection was allowed.
when DT wrote "The US Justice Department is looking at the granting of patents on genomes. " it read to me that it was about allowing the protection of genomes, and the articles did not tie up with that statement.
FWIW I agree with your read. The OP was confusing.
-
they patent the actual gene??
How does the system justify patenting something that was not invented or created by the entity claiming the patent, and which, moreover, has been created by someone else - specifically the ancestors of the person carrying the gene (all the way back to the protozoa) + random natural variation?
What they're patenting is their work in finding that indicator gene and therefore their right to profit from it. Don't think of it in this case as like a patent on an invention. This is a patent on their IP and competitors making use of it. As the article says though, it's really a "lawyer's trick".
-
The patent on the test/treatment is the 'watertight commercial protection'. .
No it's not. Because tests that slightly differ from your one are much easier to come up with than the original gene mapping and R&D. So for your competitors it's an easier task to profit off your work. Of course, you could look at it and say "Let the market decide". In which case the breast cancer test might end up at $50 a throw instead of $3000. Which is good. Like I say though, the companies might decide it's not worth the ernormous upfront cost.
-
Whilst I garee with the decision, the backside of it is that when companies can't be guaranteed a strong return on the heavy and long-term reserach they put into this stuff, they will be less likely to make the effort. They can of course patent the tests and the like, but what they're looking for is watertight commercial protection.
-
And probably like the Sherman tanks, they were not individually great, but the sheer weight of numbers and the "plenty more where that came from" status was a winner.
-
I don't really see how "The Manhattan Project" counts as a conspiracy theory. Ditto Operation Paperclip. Likewise I don't see how "The Illuminati Conspiracy" turned out to be true.
-
You shouldn't bitch about life in the US. OK, if you're poor, black and sick, the US is not as great as if you're in Holland or Sweden. But it's a hell of a lot better than being poor, black and sick and living in rural Mali.
I read a great book about life in North Korea earlier this year. It's the collected experiences of various defectors. The most poignant moment is when this women (a North Korean surgeon) makes it over the border into China. She stumbles into this village and wanders into a private house courtyard. There's a bowl on the ground filled with rice and a few scraps of chicken. She hungrily devours it, wondering why this food is left out on the ground. Then it dawns on her: a dog in China eats better than a doctor in North Korea.
The book is called "Nothing to Envy". I highly recommend it to anyone here who feels like they're getting a rough deal in life.
-
Apparently the doctoring of radios and TVs to receive outside media is fairly common though, as is the import of black market Chinese stuff. South Korean soap operas are religously followed by many North Koreans, though the official party line is that the soap operas themselves are propaganda, cooked up by the South to depict unimaginable luxury belonging to ordinary citizens. Like microwaves and three meals a day.
-
Appologies lads, i was slightly defensive as im hoping to join the RN soon as a Marine Engineering Officer. Thanks god things have changed.
And in that role you can hopefully continue to make things change and keep the fleet fighting/moving/floating.
Our friend the Taser
in General Discussion Forum
Posted
There could potentially be a disconnect though if the report is giving the official go-ahead for tasers when during the trial period there were breaches of doctrine. ie. saying what they should or shouldn't be used for in the report might just be stating the bleeding obvious and an arse covering exercise. If we all know that these things are being constantly used for compliance, what's the point of just rubber stamping their deployment?