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Bashing Pharmacy Companies Costs Lives

It is a popular pastime to portray large pharamceutical companies as monstrous villains because they refuse to give away their products for free.

Research to develop new drugs is expensive and uncertain. It takes on average ten years and $1 billion to get a new drug approved for sale in the US.

Profits from existing drugs make that research and development possible.

Obvious, then, that if we want new development in medicine, we need to help pharmaceutical companies to make a profit.

Instead, review and approval processes, and endless litigation, drain so much money that it is made almost impossible for drug companies to fund ongoing high levels of research.

Demands for affordable health care, and even worse, free health care, (both of which mean ‘If I get sick someone else should pay for it’) may force the end of our recent history of medical miracles, and cause reduced care for most, and no care at all for many of those most in need.

Search Engines

New internet search engines come and go so often that I don’t usually even bother to look at them.

Usually they fail because they do not return relevant usable results. Returning sites clearly related to the search terms entered has been Google’s greatest strength.

Yahoo was for too long compromised by the fact that you had to pay to be listed. That was fine for Yahoo, but meant that many sites useful to searchers could not be found.

That changed, but by the time it did, Google had already established a lead that was too hard to make up.

Another thing Google did well was to make a clear distinction between organic search results and paid search results. Again, this helped users/searchers, so they kept coming back.

But there have been two new entries over the last month which are worth considering.

The first is Wolfram Alpha.

This is not a general search engine. It returns information, not links. But what it does, it does very well. It’s never heard of me, but generally, if you need factual information, or information which can be calculated, Wolfram Alpha is a good place to start. It also has a sense of humour.

The other major newcomer is Microsoft’s Bing.

Microsoft Live Search was always hopeless. I don’t know why, but it just never seemed to return results which were useful.

Bing does a much better job. It is quick to load, pleasant to look at, and clean – that is, the screen is not jumbled up with a whole lot of  useless junk about the latest nude pics of Britney Spears, or why the world is falling apart because of misbehaviour by Australian footballers.

Most importantly, Bing returns relevant and useful results.

My impression is that Google gives more weight to blogs (John Ray agrees), or certainly that Google visits frequently updated sites more often. Perhaps this is because there doesn’t (yet) seem to be any way to send a blog ping to bing. There is a form you can use to submit your site to Bing if it does not appear in their results, and this form might also work as a ping, though I am just guessing about that.

From my brief experiments, it also seems to me that Google gives more weight to incoming links than Bing, while Bing gives more weight to page content. Both methods are reasonable. Google’s will return longer standing, popular results. Bing’s will return sites where the content matches the search terms more closely.

I like Bing. It seems to return more results that relate closely to what I was looking for.

However, for now, Google will stay as my home page.

I couldn’t get maps on Bing to work. But my major reason for staying with Google is that I search for news more than anything else. When you hit the ‘news’ button on Google without entering any search terms, it returns a wide variety of news stories from a wide variety of sources, in a well organised way. Bing returns nothing. This is a major shortcoming, one I hope will be fixed soon.

Results for search term ‘leading conservative blog’ (without quote marks).

Google:  Qohel is first page, third place.

Yahoo:  Qohel is first page, first place.

Bing:   Qohel is first page, first place.

Big Pig

This monstrous pig was shot on a remote property in Western Australia three years ago. It weighed about 500lbs.

Hardly breaking news, but the photo has been around for a while, and a few people thought it was a fake. It’s not.

The property owner shot it while it was eating a dead cow.

Big Pig

Big Pig

Shades of Razorback, one of my favourite Australian films.

Yes I know that means I’m a hopeless bogan. I’m going to see AC/DC too.

International Whores’ Day

In Sydney. No one else seems to have heard of it.

Sex worker Ivy McIntosh said people in her profession were being overcharged when they placed ads in local papers. “I’m paying too much for a measly two inches,” she said in a statement.

OK.

Meanwhile the Salvation Army has apologised for a newspaper advertisement for Red Shield Day. The ad featured a drug addicted prostitute who had been rescued by the Salvos and taken to rehab.

The assorted whores (their word) found the suggestion that someone might be forced into prostitution to feed a drug habit offensive.

In fact there are close links between drug abuse and prostitution.  Annoying as this may be to ‘respectable’ sex workers, pretending otherwise does not help anyone.

The Salvation Army should not have apologised.

No Complaints From The Left About This Murder

Two soldiers have been shot, one killed, at a military recruiting centre in Arkansas.

The suspect, Abdulhakim Muhammad, a person of no particular appearance or religious views, has been arrested.

Police found a small arsenal of weapons in Mr Muhammed’s car, including an assault rifle, a .22 calibre rifle, a .380 calibre automatic pistol and ammunition.

Leaders of the pro-life movement have always called for peaceful protest against the horror of abortion, and have consistently denounced the use of violence in any form. They also consistently condemmed the murder of George Tiller.

Some on the left have openly called for violence against members of the military, and especially military recruiters.

So where are the voices from the left, raised in condemnation of the murder of a young man whose job was to welcome new enlistees back to their home towns?

Phishing Emails

Just received this email claiming to be from the Commonwealth Bank:

We recorded a payment request from “HostGator -www.hostgator.com- Reseller Web Hosting” to enable the charge of $74.95 on your account.

 

Because the order was made from an African internet address, we put an Exception Payment on transaction id #POS PAYM7284 motivated by our Geographical Tracking System.

 

THE PAYMENT IS PENDING FOR THE MOMENT.

 

If you made this transaction or if you just authorize this payment, please ignore or remove this email message. The transaction will be shown on your monthly statement as “HostGator – Reseller Web Hosting”.

 

If you didn’t make this payment and would like to decline the $74.95 billing to your card, please follow the link below to cancel the payment :

 

Cancel this payment (transaction id #POS PAYM7284)  (Warning – this is a phishing site – this warning was not in the email, obviously!)

 

NOTE: Because email is not a secure form of communication, please do not reply to this email.

The link takes you to a very plausible looking pretend Commonwealth Bank website, where you are invited to log in so you can cancel the unauthorised transaction. Once you log in, the owner of the fake site has your internet banking username and password, and can access all your online bank accounts.

Even if you think an email may be genuine, never follow links in emails to your banking website (or to PayPal, Amazon, or any other site where you have a password protected account).

Always open a new browser window, go to the official bank web site, and log in from there.

Avoiding Computer Virus Infection

Over the last few months I have noticed an increasing number of computers infected with the virut family of viruses.

Some of these are very unpleasant. They can cripple your anti-virus software, replicate in various places on your hard drive, disable Windows updates, disable internet access, and delete or modify key Windows system files to the point where your computer becomes so unstable it cannot be used, or will not start at all.

According to viruslist.com, four of the top twenty malicious programmes infecting personal computers in April were members of the virut family. Nimda, a worm which disables your Windows desktop, is also high on the list.

I have also seen donwadup (conficker) infections, and script downloaders (also known as drive-by downloaders) which can infect your computer when you visit a malicious or infected website.

Some of these infections are extremely difficult to remove, because they make hidden copies of themselves. If even one is missed, the computer will be re-infected. Also, they can infect needed Windows system files in ways that cannot be disinfected without destroying the Windows files, so you can end with a clean computer , but a computer that will not start.

Once you are infected by one virus, the chances are that your computer security will be weakened and your computer will quickly have multiple infections.

Prevention

Use a good anti-virus/anti-spyware programme. For ordinary home use, the free versions of AVG or Avira are quite adequate. If you visit porn or gambling sites, or use p2p (file sharing) software, you will need a high end commercial anti-virus like Kaspersky or Vipre.

Keep your anti-virus software up to date. I have just fixed a computer infected with virut ce. This version of virut was only found in the wild for the first time in February. The computer had a good anti-virus programme, but it had not been updated since early February, so the computer had no protection against viruses developed since then.

Keep Windows up to date by allowing Windows Update to run automatically. Computers running automatic updates were at no risk from conficker.

No anti-virus software can protect your computer all the time, from every attack. The highest rated anti-virus products achieve detection rates of up to 97%.

You can still be safe on the internet if you are cautious.

Do not open files or run programmes if you do not know what they are or where they have come from. This includes email attachments. Take care with files from friends, school, and even commercial suppliers. Infections can come from CDs and flash drives as well as the internet.

Do not use p2p software. Or if you must, run a full virus scan after every download. Do not visit porn or gambling sites. Some people will anyway. If you do, make sure your antivirus is up to date beforehand, and run a full scan after you leave the site.

Run a full, deep or maximum security scan every week.

Do not, ever, respond to a pop-up on your screen telling you your computer is infected, and that you need to download or install an anti-virus product. Clicking anywhere on one of those pop-up boxes, including the ‘’No’ button, may give permission to install rogue anti-virus software which will cost you money, slow down your computer, cause lots of dire (but incorrect) warnings and achieve nothing.

Some fake security alerts are very convincing:

Fake Windows Security Alert

Fake Windows Security Alert

More fake alert pictures from Enigma Software.

Do not be fooled! Don’t click anywhere on such an alert. Shut your computer down, restart, and run a full virus scan.

If you are in doubt about whether your computer may be infected, and you still have internet access, visit and run Microsoft’s Onecare Live safety scanner.

Gluing Breasts To Men

And tying penises to women, doesn’t make a man a woman, nor a woman a man.

Andrew Bolt has made some rightly alarmed comments about an Australian court that pretends to help a confused 17 year old girl by ruling she is entitled to have her breasts cut off.

This article from the Sydney Morning Herald tells the story of two people who, confused about their gender as teens, demanded gender re-assignment surgery. Both regretted that decision deeply, and came to feel lasting anger towards the people who allowed their mutilation to proceed.

Teenagers have not yet fully developed their identity, their sense of responsibility, their ability to assess risk and long term consequences. That is why we have laws prohibiting them from drinking, from having sex, from gambling. These laws protect them from abuse, from outcomes and harm which they may not have the ability to foresee.

Yet a court can say that those same teenagers have the right to decide about irreversible mutilating surgery which leaves them neither male nor female.

The Desire for a Sex Change, an article by Dr Richard Fitzgibbons, draws on medical and psychiatric research and catholic theology to explain why gender re-assignment surgery has not been and cannot be a satisfactory solution to what is a psychological problem.

Rudd’s A Ninny. This Makes Him Perfect For UN Secretary-General

So says Piers Ackermann. And so say all of us.

A couple of excerpts:

One of candidate Kevin Rudd’s big selling points other than that he was not John Howard was his experience as an Australian diplomat.

We now know that his experience was limited and it is now blindingly apparent that he is not in the least diplomatic. In his meetings with President Obama, Rudd has behaved like a star struck schoolgirl. Waving and pushing to be included in the camera shot, he looks like a kid with a crush, but that hasn’t cut much ice with the US which is yet to appoint an ambassador to replace Robert McCallum, who left in January…

According to Zhu Feng, one of China’s most influential experts on security, Beijing is finding it hard to deal with Rudd and was more comfortable with John Howard than this prime minister…

With such inept skills, Rudd shows himself to be admirably equipped for the top UN job, which he is said to covet. Given the general dysfunctional nature of the UN, and its myriad global failures, let no-one stand in his way.

I am not sure that Julia Gillard really has left behind her student socialist ideology, but she has done some interesting things in education, and she would be a lot less embarrassing as Prime Minister than Rudd.

Defence Staff: We Didn’t Spy On Fitzgibbon

Well why not?

If it is true that there has been no investigation of Joel Fitzgibbon’s relationship with Helen Liu, then senior defense department staff should be sacked. 

Joel Fitzgibbon is Australia’s Minister of Defense. He is the member of the executive branch of government who is charged with responsibility for funding and policy decisions in relation to Australia’s armed forces.

I would have thought some background checking, and checking of contacts, was the standard for government ministers. Not so they could be removed from office, except in extreme circumstances, but so that appropriate advice could be given and care taken.

Even if that minimal level of checking is not done routinely, there is a responsibility to investigate when serious allegations are made about a government minister’s involvement with a person with close ties to the military or intelligence services of a foreign power.

Helen Liu has paid for multiple trips to China, has made substantial campaign donations, has invited Fitzgibbon to functions at which senior Chinese military personnel were present.

There may have been nothing wrong with any of that, though you might wonder why Liu was going to so much trouble.

The problem, or at least the beginning of the awareness there might be a problem, came when Fitzgibbon lied about the extent of his relationship with Liu, and her gifts to him. People who lie usually do so because they think have something to hide. If they think they have something to hide, they probably do.

There should have been some checking before Mr Fitzgibbon was appointed. Maybe that’s just not the Australian way. But once it was clear he had lied about his relationship with Liu, a full investigation became imperative.

Instead, the Defense Department conducted an investigation into whether there had been an investigation.

Questions which should have been asked about Liu’s loyalties and contacts, and about her generosity to Fitzgibbon, and his indebtedness to her, have still not been asked. Not by the people who should be asking them, anyway.

Now business associates of Helen Liu have revealed that Chinese intelligence agents asked them to do just what Helen Liu has done – form a close relationship with Fitzgibbon, including expensive gifts and trips to China.

Why would Chinese intelligence be interested in having someone form a close relationship with Australia’s defense minister?

Maybe they were just being friendly. As a citizen of Australia, I’d like to know.

You’d think that those responsible for Australia’s security and defense planning would also like to know.

Late Term Abortionist Murdered

Late term abortionist George Tiller has been murdered outside his church in Wichita, Kansas.

The suspect may be a member of the right to life movement.

Left wing blogs have already begun to claim that Christians are delighted, and that this is just the latest in a long series of violent attacks on abortionists.

In fact the reverse is true. Pro life bloggers and leaders of the pro-life movement have been united in condemming the murder of Tiller, as they have been united in condemming any violent attacks on abortionists or their clinics.

I deplore the murder of George Tiller, and any violence against abortionists or their clinics.

I also deplore the far greater number of violent attacks on pro-life people and organisations (despite the fact that the media has a massive blind spot when comes to reporting violent attacks by abortionists and their supporters).

The murder of George Tiller is a tragedy. His family and his community will miss him. The attack on him was wrong, no matter who did it, or why.

That does not mean we should pretend that what he did for a living was OK. What he did for a living was monstrous.

Late term partial-birth abortion means partially delivering a living human baby, inserting a pair of scissors or other implement into its head, then crushing its skull before completing the delivery.

George Tiller’s death was murder, and must be condemmed. What he did for a living was also murder.

Partial Birth Abortion

Partial Birth Abortion

Climate Model Works

One system of climate modelling has a proven history of correct prediction of weather events.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac is going further out on a limb than usual this year, not only forecasting a cooler winter, but looking ahead decades to suggest we are in for global cooling, not warming.

Based on the same time-honored, complex calculations it uses to predict weather, the Almanac hits the newsstands on Tuesday saying a study of solar activity and corresponding records on ocean temperatures and climate point to a cooler, not warmer, climate, for perhaps the next half century.

From a USA Today article of September last year.

The Almanac certainly got the part about a colder Winter right.

WOW Vs Guild Wars

I have both games, and enjoy them both. I have spent a lot more time playing WoW.

Even if you couldn’t care less about either game, or MMORPGS in general, this video is fun to watch. I have no idea how he got his characters to do some of those moves:

Glaciers Growing

Two of the global warming poster stars are declining polar bear populations and shrinking arctic ice.

Disappointingly (for the alarmists) polar numbers have increased dramatically over the last 30 years, and the extent of Arctic ice is increasing.

Another claimed proof of global warming has been that glaciers all over the world are retreating.

Of course even if the world were warming, this would not by itself prove that warming was our fault, or that there was anything we could do to stop it.

Even so, glaciers going backwards, bits dropping off, etc, are pretty dramatic.

But a large number of glaciers have obviously not heard what is expected of them, or are stubbornly refusing to comply. Glaciers from New Zealand to the Himalayas to Greenland are growing.

Climate Change Disasters Cause 300,000 Deaths Per Year

According to the Global Humanitarian Forum.

But actually no.

Dr Roger Pielke calls the report a ‘methodological embarrassment,’ and notes that the report itself says ‘there is not yet any widely accepted global estimate of the share of weather related disasters that are attributable to climate change.’

If no one knows how many weather disasters are due to global warming, what basis exists for making an estimate of deaths due to warming? Well, none.

And since the world isn’t getting any warmer, probably the best estimate of climate change disaster related deaths is zero.

Deaths amongst the world’s poor are more likely to be caused by pointless attempts to mitigate climate change, such as the conversion of food crops into bio-fuel.

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