Simply because you are forced to pay fines doesn't mean you are "corrupt".
The abstract indicates most of the fines come from "illegal off-label drug promotion" and "overcharging state governments". It could be argued that the first shouldn't even be an issue, and the second, depending on how "overcharging" is defined could be outright fraud on the part of big pharma, fraud on the part of state governments, or something in between.
There is no count of no of people who get disabilities but don't die due to trials failing. Who will pay for these? These pharma companies are steered by greed
I am referring to FDA trials, in the US, which can take over a decade and cost 8- or 9-figure dollar sums. These are required before the drug even comes to market.
US clinical trials often involve a second, parallel clinical trial in India, because it's easy to find lots of poor patients in desperate need of treatment. I think that, at least in some cases, this probably works out well for everyone except the control group.
But if poor Indian patients are going to test these drugs, the GP can certainly argue that poor Indian patients should be able to afford them.
They cannot afford clinical trials in developed countries, so they turn to poorer countries.
India is one of the biggest hub for most of the pharma's clinical trials due to huge poor population. The rules are lax and they take advantage of it. Lot of people die and many turn paralyzed or disabled permanently due to drug's unknown side-effect.
These corrupt pharma companies want to use India as it's test-bed but want to sell the drugs tested here at an abysmal high price such that it is even out of my reach (even though I am well off).
Pentagon declared Wikileaks as a threat to national security.
I we look at The Apache helicopter and Australian internet plans leaks, the government was trying to do something wrong, which Wikileaks exposed. Now they have been declared threat to national security. Great progress in hypocrisy.
That's just about the most generous possible interpretation of what's been happening with Wikileaks.
A less generous interpretation:
* Wikileaks leaked the video that accompanies a detailed transcript (with quotes) of the same video that appeared in the Washington Post many months beforehand --- a PR black eye to be sure, but in no way a revelation.
* Wikileaks has in fact cultivated confidential sources inside DoD and military service agencies that are talking about forwarding cables and other TS-classified material, and is in fact part of a grave threat to national security (which, true, the real "threat" is clearly the negligent lapses in operational security that allow someone like Manning to leak cables in the first place).
In other words: Wikileaks is less valuable to society than it seems, and at the same time the government has a legitimate (if misdirected) concern with them.
I just found the whole story a quite odd - the Wired reporter and his friend's difficult to believe story, this low-level kid, the obvious desire - and leaked plans - of the US to find and punish leakers to discredit Wikileaks.
I don't care that much either. On net, I think Wikileaks is a good thing, but I've never donated and never would until they are more transparent about their own operations. Re that video, the first half wasn't what disturbed me, but rather the firing of the missiles into the building in the second half.
But there's an obvious strategy for the US to discredit Wikileaks, and that's to find someone - anyone - that appears to have leaked to them, and come down hard on them. Finding an oddball kid suits the story they want to tell, irrelevant of how guilty he may be. But the Wired stuff is just off the wall odd.
Doesn't it bother you that without reliable evidence, you can make a similarly credible narrative out of almost anything else? Maybe it was the Bush-era DoD people who leaked the story to discredit the Obama administration! You can't prove a negative.
I'm working under the assumption that someone named Manning did in fact do something stupid with Wikileaks, which did indeed encourage him to do that stupid thing. That Wikileaks is encouraging stupid people to do stupid things is something that bothers me about Wikileaks; that stupid people are given access sufficient to do stupid and damaging things is something that bothers me about the DoD.
I don't think Wikileaks encourages stupid behaviour - as I understand it, the input avenue is primarily an file upload field.
As to evidence (in the legal sense), I don't have any one way or the other that Manning had anything to do with the leak. I just have media reports, which sound really weird, which makes me not give them much weight.
Regardless of how (say) Manning conveyed files to Wikileaks, leaking classified-TS cables is manifestly stupid. One doubts most of the people who might help Wikileaks from inside the DoD have any idea what they're actually doing. My guess is that it all seems unreal, happening as it does on the always fake-seeming Internet using computers that make everything seem like chat room drama.
Do you have evidence that classified top secret cables were leaked? That one is easy to prove. A quick Google search, though, seems to only turn up rumours.
The only direct source of much of the rumours seems to be the completely unbelievable Wired story. The Salon story on Wired's reporting is the primary reason I don't trust it, nor anything implied by it on other sites:
You're saying it's easy to prove that someone likely to have classified-TS access who said they leaked classified-TS information did or did not leak information?
And to support that argument, you're citing Glenn Greenwald?
You earlier spoke of proving a negative; by easy to prove, I meant that this is a positive, and an existence proof is sufficient.
If something was leaked, but noone can point to it, or the consequences of it, is it really leaked?
The way you phrase your sentence about Glenn Greenwald, you seem to imply that I should know something about him. What are you imputing?
It also seems an ad hominem attack. I cited the article as reason to doubt the Wired story; but the article should be attacked on its own merits. And the reason to doubt the leak of TS cables is because I haven't seen evidence that they've been leaked. The video certainly was leaked - I saw it - but I've seen not a peep of these alleged cables.
It doesn't make any sense. Why would a 22-year old kid have access to thousands of top-secret cables? Why should we trust an attention-seeking ex-convict who says he had an IM with a leaker who spontaneously contacted him for the first time ever (randomly choosing him from twitter #wikileaks, of all things), and boasted to him that he leaked such cables? When Wikileaks denies that they have such cables?
When these stories come up in the news, who benefits?
I am absolutely confident that 22 year old kids have access to ridiculous information; I think that's far more of an outrage than any news Wikileaks has "broken" about the DoD.
On the other hand, I think the risk of the US to the world is greater (far greater) than the risk of the world to the US.
The US is in no danger of being attacked or invaded by anyone; one cannot say the same about other countries with respect to the US.
Even something as substantial as 9/11 was only a crime - a monstrous crime - but certainly not an act of war. There isn't any actor with the capability or will to do any serious damage to the US that wouldn't be annihilated by nuclear retribution; the US's security derives from its obvious and plain-sight strengths, not anything it keeps secret.
The real threat to national security is the predominance of special-interest groups who are currently in control of the US Military machine, having it fight un-just, disgusting wars, in the name of the United States of America.
The true threat to national security is the Pentagon itself, which simply wouldn't be necessary if it weren't creating its own reasons for war around the world.
You want real national security? Stand down your soldiers, America. That is the only true way to be secure in your beds, Americans.
No, seriously. The padding is just too much, to the level that it wastes space.I know too much clutter is bad, but that doesn't mean GNOME people have to increase the padding to this extent.
Can we have a middle ground for padding? Nor too less, nor too much.
If you install Gnome Color Chooser you can select 'compact profile' which is a global setting for padding. It shrinks all of your buttons and other white space without you having to edit the theme by hand:
BTW I have always hand tweaked the font, DPI, and all appearance based settings on a fresh install of any GNOME based distro. I am not enraged on the padding issue, but it would be still nice to see optimal configuration out of box.
Just because iPhone doesn't have a physical keyboard - doesn't make physical keyboards evil. Similar logic for trackball.
I have tried using physical keyboard on Blackberry and I felt pretty comfortable. I bet other manufacturers would come out with better physical keyboards. My flatmate has a Thinkpad with a trackball. Initially it was pretty tough to control it. Trackball and physical keyboard isn't bad just because I think it's bad.
So much from a Tumblr lead dev! I expected better.
The red thing on Thinkpads is called trackpoint (or clit, for simplicity). Trackballs are entirely different animals, it is a ball that you move (if you remember old ball mouses, it is basically ball mouse turned on its back, with bigger ball).
This post was brought to you by Thinkpad, with trackpoint as a sole pointing device ;).
This is pretty sensible. If India passed any draconion law, then it would be a trouble for the citizens who are already pissed off by high-prices of content that is pirated.
e.g. The price of buying a track is pretty high. $0.90 for a track in US is acceptable, but not in India where standard of living is not like other countries.
The chief reason piracy is a hit in India is due to stupid pricing. If a book costs $10, then it will surely be pirated by a lot number of people. Classical example was "Harry Potter" books. It was priced at 700INR IIRC. Not everyone can buy it. Pirated books were available at 150-200INR and sold like hot cakes.
Moral of the story:
Fix your damn price and see the sales shoot up.
The same is with music. The T-Series cassettes were prices @ 25INR and sold like hot cakes without a trace of piracy. Then the CD-DVD MP3s came and the stupid pricing started. Who'll buy a CD for 100-200INR if u get free MP3s without any hassles?
