Health is going to be a major issue in India in 2005. My previous post in this topic talks about what Brazil did out of desperation to get out the trap in which India just went into.
Yes, I am against product patents in medicine (apart from software patents, of course). Leaving public health care access to companies with only profit-maximizing as their primary motives, and giving government granted monopoly( aka patents) to these companies, is a REALLY BAD MOVE, IMO.
Have come back online somewhat after the motherboard of my workstation got fried. It is still in repairs, and I am having to use a spare box that I had loaned to a friend sometime back. I just had to fit the motherboard from the other box with my present hard disks.
Seeing an existing Linux installation adapt to a completely different system, with hardly any problems gives me such a warm fuzzy feeling, coz’ I know the kind of problems that can happen if you do this with, say … Windows XP? ;) Your machine will lockup and you will have to ask for Microsoft’s permission to work in a different machine with the existing installation.
“I’ve always been skeptical of Rediff’s technical chops (they still have a
bug in their email system that I mailed them about 2-3 times many years
ago) so this comes as no surprise:
My friend Srini from Chennai, who runs a logistics firm, booked a domain
name along with some web space on Rediff. Now, my friend wanted to host his
site elsewhere. So, he had to change his DNS entries on Rediff. Guess what?
Rediff does not allow one to change Name Server entries.
How tall are you, compared to dozens of Hollywood celebrities? This site lets you enter your height and then check how you compare to Brad Pitt, Brooke Shields and scores of others.
After a while, the web login began to irritate me. I couldnt any more do the first thing I normally do in the morning - stretch my hands out underneath the rajai(warm blanket), grope for the power button, switch on the computer and squirm back into the cozy blanket waiting for the mails to get downloaded by the time I really get out of bed.
Taking a cue from the practice of region encoding of DVDs, hardware manufacturers in US have started making their products only usable in the country of their production.
H-P has quietly begun implementing “region coding” for its highly lucrative print cartridges for some of its newest printers sold in Europe. Try putting a printer cartridge bought in the U.S. into a new H-P printer configured to use cartridges purchased in Europe and it won’t work. Software in the printer determines the origin of the ink cartridge and whether it will accept it.
It’s perfectly reasonable to plant an explosive-filled suitcase in an airport in order to test security. It is not okay to plant it in someone’s bag without his knowledge and permission. (The explosive residue could remain on the suitcase long after the test, and might be picked up by one of those trace mass spectrometers that detects the chemical residue associated with bombs.) But if you are going to plant plastic explosives in the suitcase of some innocent passenger, shouldn’t you at least write down which suitcase it was?
“Amitav Ghosh, renowned novelist, accompanies the Director on a search through the island of Car Nicobar towards the seafront where the town of Malacca once stood. Discovering in stages how little he had understood the power of the tsunami, the writer finds himself completely unprepared for the experience. This is the concluding part of a special three-article series for The Hindu.”
I turned to follow him and we were heading back towards the blazing palms, when he stopped to
point to a yellow paint box, peeping out of the rubble. “That belonged to Vineeta, my daughter,”
he said, and the flatness of his voice was harder to listen to than an outburst would have been.
“She loved to paint; she was very good at it. She was even given a prize, from Hyderabad.”
This had to happen one day. After AIDS infections in the country has reached alarming levels, Brazil
health organizations have found the monopolistic pricing of Multinational drug companies, impossible
to sustain. Therefore the country has taken the position that they have to break
patents to lift the country out of misery.
India has recently introduced product
patents which is
going into effect from Jan 1 2005. The immediate repurcussion of this is going to felt in a few
months (till existing stocks are cleared) as medicine costs countrywide are going to zoom up.
According to this article:
