23 Jun 2011
Supreme Court sides with pharmaceutical industry in two decisions

Unbelievable!

By this logic, if I start building Ford Pinto clones, whose patents have expired and so is now a "generic" product, the suckers who buy them can't sue me when they explode in a rear end collision because Ford didn't warn of that danger when they manufactured the Pinto.

The second ruling is even more incredible.

Can doctors now sell their patients medical records? If not, why not? How will this impact the Privacy Rule?

Following this reasoning, lawyers should now be able to sell all of their conversations with clients to the highest bidder. First Amendment, you know. Guess we'll have to wait to see how that proposition fares in the courts.

Justices rule that generic drug makers cannot be sued by injured patients in most cases and that drug manufacturers have a 1st Amendment right to buy private prescription records to use for marketing purposes.

(link) [LA Times]

21:23 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Odin from Lejre? No, it's Freya!

Iron Age figurine

Given the context of the high seat I'd say it's more likely Frigga than Freyja, or perhaps even a spákona, but a fascinating and beautiful find nonetheless.

So you're a metal detectorist and you find a silver figurine at storied Lejre in Denmark. It depicts a person sitting in a high seat whose posts end in two wolves' heads. And on either arm rest sits a raven. The style is typical for about AD 900. So when you hand the thing over to the site manager, he of course exclaims, "Holy shit! It's Odin!". And that's what he tells the press.
Until somebody like me comes along and points out that it's a woman.

(link) [Aardvarchaeology]

20:31 /Asatru | 3 comments | permanent link

Little things Delphi gets right

Having spent my entire working time in the last decade coding in C, C++, Objective C and Delphi (in the broadest sense - Objective Pascal), I can only say that this essay is spot on. It is vastly easier for any coder, at any skill level, to write readable and secure code in Pascal than in any dialect of C.

He makes several good point on syntax, too. How many C programmers have been bitten at one time or another by making an assignment in an if statement without the compiler saying a word? It's also true about hassle free linking - I have code where the main program is in Pascal and several routines were written in C. It was simple to accomplish this. On the other hand, trying to get a C program to link in a Pascal lib or object file can be like pulling teeth.

So for those of you who still labor under the delusion that Pascal is a dead language, washed away by the superior tides of C, read this and weep. Then fire up Delphi or Lazarus and write some clean, secure code for a change...

For those who haven’t seen it yet, due to popular demand, the StackOverflow people created a new site called programmers.stackexchange.com, a site for the more subjective questions that StackOverflow isn’t really designed for. Someone recently set up a poll: What’s your favorite programming language. You can probably guess what my answer was.

(link) [Turbu Tech]

20:16 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link