Posts by Chaos Buddha
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. . . yeah. If he'd signed off in a blaze of All Black glory, then maybe Marshall would be looking at the whole handprints-in-the-cement-thing.
But when you start to play like poos, and on the cusp of being dropped bail to play for someone else in another country, then . . . ummmn . . . seeya.
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I guess that only leaves the questions of the economics of naturally sourced vs. synthesised (and therefore patentable?), and the impact of molecular biology on effective synthesis.
Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view), there is usually little question of economics here; if you can isolate a novel molecule, then it doesn't matter if it's naturally sourced or synthesized, you can patent it. I think the only restrictions are that it cannot 'occur naturally in state' -- i.e. you can't patent H2O, but you can patent something you've found in and isolated out of H2O -- and it can't be personal, i.e. you can't patent someone's specific cDNA. And let's not go into the molecular chemistry aspect of it all, that sect is filled with balding, bearded old men that run their HPLC's by taste, and can pretty much synthesise whateveryouwant out of whateveryouhave given enough time, and relish the challenge of having to do so with fervent glee.
Apart from that, the world is your mollusc. Meaning 'organisations' such as the US government will try and fund the mapping of the human genome, so they can claim patent rights to it . . . but also meaning organisations such as Venter's Celera Genomics were motivated to do it faster, to effectively make it open source.
Still, this is the-me-wearing-a-white-lab-coat talking (shakes fist at those hassling white lab coat wearers), not me-who-knows-a-lot-about-patent-rights.
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I recall reading somewhere that the majority of medicines in the modern pharmacopeia - i.e., all therapeutic medicines and drugs, both copyrighted and generic - are, rather than being synthesised, still largely derived from naturally-occuring sources. While the definitions I've used are a little sloppy, can anyone clarify this?
. . . I would be very surprised if that were the case.
Nominally, novel therapeutic candidates are primarily identified through screening of a known potential source, for example deer velvet -- traditional Chinese medicine notes that this stuff is a panacea for almost everything, so it's a good starting point. So we get some sample, grind it up, made a DNA library out of it, randomly screen that library for activity through a number of known models, identify hits and search for those against known databases for novelty. If you find something, you file for a patent, then you have a year to prove function.
So in this sense, the initial identification is through 'natural' sources.
Beyond that that, economy reigns supreme. If it's something that needs to be mass produced for human consumption, then there are huge volumes of law dictated how unfeasibly anal you have to be about it, i.e. no batch to batch variation in activity. The best way to achieve this strictness is through a standardised model of synthesis.
As such, I'd be surprised if anything more than a few percent of total products available are actually derived from natural sources. If nothing else, these compounds usually exist at extremely low concentrations in vivo -- given their regulatory nature -- so the extraction process is gonna take a lot of 'material' to give a small amount of 'product'.
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But I have a big problem with someone offering some Vedic remedy which has never been subjected to rigorous trials, containing lord knows what, on the basis that thousands of years of traditional medicine can't be wrong.
. . . but would you have such big a problem if you had some terminal condition, you'd tried all the stuff detailed in medical literature without success, then some young Yogi offered you Vedic Beaver Tail Milk Weed Extract Pills (Tm), and they worked . . ?
That sort of marketing is huge. In this whole argument, we all need to take into account that that sort of person represents some of the consumption . . . sure, it's that kind of person exploi- er, I mean targeted by that side of the industry, but still, that consumer mentality does affect the whole supply-and-demand-curve-ness of it all . . .
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isn't it amazing how many young men on NZD feature pics of their cars in profiles...
. . . well then stay thee away from NZPersonalsdotcom, you'd be surprised as to what some of those young men 'feature' in pictures of their profiles.
My flatmate* joined/perused the site for a while, and he was somewhat amused at the number of women's profiles that made it a point to state that they weren't interested in would-be suitors who sent pictures of their knobs to prospective paramours.
(*names/referenced may have been changed to protect the identity of those involved . . . )
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. . . I've wondered about the p2p thing myself.
In theory -- given that it can be essentially free -- then it would seem to be an accurate yardstick of 'popularity' as without cost/affordability being a factor, then those tunes downloaded are simply those tunes that people want to hear.
However, out-of-theory, does this actually happen? If people are downloading material in terms of albums and/or discographies -- as seems to be the case given the prevalence of such multi-file offerings on most torrent search sites -- then surely much of what is downloaded (i.e. by volume) is more by association than anything else. You hear Peeping Tom's Kill The DJ on the b, jump online, find the album and cue it up. It's catchy, so you flick through Wiki, and find that this Mike Patton chap used to be in some other bands . . . 24hours later you've got the entire back-catalogue of Faith No More, Tomahawk et al. at your fingertips.
Is this a measure of actual, active popularity, or more the flippancy over over-accessibility?
How much of what is downloaded is actually/actively listened to . . ?
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Did anyone else think it was hilarious to see Clayton Cosgrove side-by-side with the 'yoof' from Tauranga last night?
I can't take Cosgrove seriously at all.
I mean, the man is the spitting image of Sam the Eagle from The Muppets, and you're always expecting him to tangent off into a 'this is serious' rant . . .
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and quite willing to conflate the Edgeware Road vehicle homicide and last weekend's drag racing accident
. . . impressive word mofo.
con·flate (kən-flāt')
tr.v. con·flat·ed, con·flat·ing, con·flates1. To bring together; meld or fuse: "The problems [with the biopic] include . . . dates moved around, lovers deleted, many characters conflated into one" (Ty Burr).
2. To combine (two variant texts, for example) into one whole. -
And, serious question seriously meant, how many folks around here actually finance their consumption old skool: You know, saving rather than putting it on a credit card or HP?
A good friend of mine has just finished chemo treatment, and one of the things that struck a chord for her while interacting with other patients was the number who were hit with their own diagnosis at about 90% of the way to saving up for that something big. So you do the hard yards, you save, you scrimp, you're nearly to your dream . . . then *bamm!* Terminal disease. All of that hard work, all of that sacrifice . . . for what?
She's now converted to fully into the 'buy now save later' crowd. This isn't to say that she's irresponsible with her money - rather, she's the type that won't stray too far into the red - but to some degree, why wait until you've accrued enough money for something before you get to enjoy the fruits of your labours, when something like this could just be around the corner . . ?
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He basically said "The guy is guilty, we know he's done this, he's just done a bunch of things to remove evidence (cleaning and painting the boat etc) so it's going to be hard to convict him."
. . . but if it were that simple, if they "knew" Watson had done it, why couldn't they just use that -- i.e. how they knew -- as evidence?
I mean, I'm sure the police *knew* Solomona didn't use unrequired force to beat some kid up a few years back, just like I'm sure the police *knew* Rickards et al weren't out of line recently . . .