That's certainly an important difference in general, but I don't see how it's relevant to this article. Here, the issue is not that people are priced out, it's that important, cheap drugs are underproduced.
The Washingtonian article is very sad, but I'm not sure I buy Tabarrok's take on it. He once again harps on GMP regulations, but doesn't Europe have similar regulations? And the very first page of the Washingtonian article mentions a case where 9 patients died because a substitute PN was contaminated - to what extent would reducing oversight lead to even more such incidents? I'm open to the idea that FDA regulations are an issue but it hardly seems like that's the most pressing problem, given all of the other issues with our healthcare system.
It would change a lot if it were true. I find it hard to believe that Microsoft plans to build the expertise necessary to abandon Intel, though. And though they're making inroads into building their own hardware, I don't think they're in any position to abandon their OEMs yet, either.
On the contrary, it's exactly that sort of characterization that I object to. How could complying with court orders be the "worst possible privacy violation"? I'm sympathetic to the argument that the orders are overbroad, or that Microsoft should have appealed the orders and hasn't opposed the orders as stubbornly as it could have (though of course we know very little about what has actually occurred along these lines). But why would responding to a court order be a worse privacy violation than selling information about my online behavior to other companies (in addition to also responding to court orders!)?
I can see how "but maybe that's just me" (and the entirety of the first paragraph) could be read as snarky, but that's not how I meant it. It was a non-rhetorical question: what should a company like Microsoft do when faced with a court order? Does compliance with such orders make "privacy" campaigns nonsensical, if they still have meaningful privacy protections compared to competitors? Also, IANAL, but as far as I know Microsoft can't violate the 4th amendment, only the government can.
Well, did you expect "privacy" to imply that your data would not be released to the government following legal requests for it? I always assumed it meant that they wouldn't share it with other businesses, but maybe that's just me.
Analogously, if one of the major phone providers started selling information to marketers, including what times of day I made phone calls, would it be inappropriate for a competitor to create a marketing campaign around "privacy" highlighting that they don't do similar things? Would you complain that since the government can still get a wiretap and listen to private conversations, there really isn't a meaningful privacy difference?
The problem with this is that it enables weak-willed managers to claim that everyone on their team is great, serving as a kind of grade inflation that makes true high-performers seem less impressive. As I understand it, the curve is only enforced at something like the VP level, so it's not like a team of 10 great engineers is going to be forced to have 2 people scored as underperforming. Are there 200-person groups at Microsoft where everyone's better than average?
How do you ensure that performance is rewarded fairly and consistently across an organization with tens of thousands of engineers? I'm not wild about the concept of stack ranking but I don't see any alternatives that don't have serious drawbacks of their own.
This seems simplistic to me. Doesn't Valve, your favorite poster boy for open allocation, also stack rank? There seem to be several sub-organizations at Microsoft that are harmonious, at least to an outsider's view (e.g. Azure since Scott Guthrie's involvement). As I understand it there's not too much pressure to hit the stack ranking curve until you get up to the several-hundred-report levels.
If you want to understand Microsoft, you could do a lot worse than reading http://hal2020.com/, by a former General Manager at Microsoft. I learn something from pretty much every blog post he writes.
For instance, in his most recent post he discusses how the lack of coordination between the divisions after the 2005 reorg can be viewed as a feature rather than a bug, but also something that now needs to be changed.
What makes this article from May 2012 particularly relevant today? Also, the title of this HN post conveniently drops an important part of the articles actual title ("for all the wrong reasons").
Journals are typically interested in publishing novel results. Why would it be a problem if studies which find that a drug works as expected are not published, as long as they are still submitted to the FDA and assessed there?
Tightly integrated products have many benefits to consumers. Bing isn't being integrated (solely) to "inflate" its market share, it's being integrated to improve the Windows user's experience. Google doesn't even necessarily support all of the APIs that are needed for the integration, and you can always use it via a browser if desired.
The genes for penicillin resistance predate the use of penicillin as an antibiotic. Perhaps there are genes which confer silver resistance which will be increasingly expressed as silver is used as a treatment.
Well, one of the things that hurts Scala on the JVM is the lack of tail call elimination, which the CLR supports. Reified generics and value types are probably also significant improvements.
While there's plenty to disagree with, it pains me to see such rich fodder for an interesting discussion on the design, implementation, and adoption of programming languages languish on the second page of HN while the first page still has a dozen NSA stories.
Hundreds of languages? I don't know, Xamarin's tools seem to indicate that there's a real demand for using C# on a variety of platforms. While not my personal preference, C# is really a wonderfully well-designed language.
Office has changed dramatically since then. The ribbon, while a superficial change, apparently has a huge impact on discoverability of Office features and usage. There's now an online version of the applications, and integration with Skydrive/SharePoint. There are tons of smaller additions that are very useful, too (e.g. Flash Fill in Excel, multi-monitor support in PowerPoint, etc.).
No, that's not remotely plausible even if Myriad had won. They had patented isolated DNA. Biological processes such as human reproduction were always free and clear. Furthermore, your characterization of Monsanto's patents doesn't seem accurate.
And it's not like private sector jobs are necessarily much less repugnant... There are plenty of stories about Silicon Valley excesses, creepy big data projects, etc.