As a on and off tobacco addict with an addiction-prone brain/personality: Unlike coffee, video games, etc, tobacco addiction is terrible and you can really feel your health declining over a decade and more. It's not so much about dying 10 years earlier that's worrisome, it's about not having much quality of life.
As to being addicted to nicotine itself and consume it in the form of vapour: much less worrisome. Still, it's not great: withdrawal feels awful and is psychologically debilitating.
As to being addicted to nicotine as a high schooler: this is quite bad because the brain is still in heavy development and drug habits picked up in this timeframe tend to stay with you forever. Quite a compromise.
I'm familiar with nicotine addiction. I dipped and smoked a pack a day for 3 years starting as a 16 year old, quit for 5 years, vaped for 2 years, and quit again. That was probably 2 years ago. There are positive effects but it was annoying to need it so I quit. Excessive internet usage, pornography, video games, and coffee have been overall worse for my quality of life than tobacco or nicotine in it's various forms. I did pretty much every category of drug in that time range of 16 - 19 and feel no carryover of habits.
1. normal, up to a point. A lot of work is mostly not enjoyable, that's just a fact.
2. depression or ADHD or something related. If you suspect that, pay a visit to a psychiatrist or a general physician.
3. you don't want to do YOUR kind of work anymore. Maybe you should experiment a little with something different? I switched recently - I was extremelly bored at web programming and switched to Android programming some years ago. Now I have a lot of more fun.
4. your nature (meaning something innate and mostly unfixable (or not?))
Personally, I usually operate in cycles: bouts of excitement and motivation where I'm very productive, then I get tired and start to struggle and half-ass some things.
Not really true for Android as there are alternative ways to distribute Android apps in the form of alternative app repositories like FDroid, Aptoide, Amazon. It is also
possible to sideload apk's without the need for 'rooting', this in contrast to iOS.
True, the Play Store is the nexus of Android app distribution. The fact that it is not the only venue is a big advantage for both Android users as well as developers as it makes it impossible for a single party - be it Google or an entity pressuring Google into acting in a certain way - to keep applications from reaching users. Although only a small fraction of the total flow it is nevertheless significant in what it embodies: freedom from censorship.
I worked at intel in the 90s... Ran the game lab - when they came out with the Celeron, they created SIMD instructions - and they paid (bribed) game companies to optimize their games against the instruction set - fofr $1MM in marketing bonuses.... (i.e. "play gameX on intels celeron based PCs and achieve X% performance gain")
And all of this was to prove that they could produce a <$1,000 machine that a consumer would want (the basis of the celeron proc)
I live in Brazil and generics for drugs which patents are expired are widely available, accounting for 30~40% of all drug market. If I'm not mistaken, we even broke patents in some cases (HIV drugs), which is cool.
It's difficult. On one hand, the pharmco needs to make money to continue on their mission. (What their mission is is another difficult problem, I believe is isn't "shareholder value", that is a cancer on society.) On the other hand, the product alleviates human suffering, sometimes on a large scale.
A case study that everyone should be aware of is the story of Praziquantel in South Korea.
Praziquantel is about the only thing that works against schistosoma, a very debilitating condition. The compound was discovered in the early 1970s in a joint venture between Bayer and Merck KGA. At that time South Korea had a major schistosoma problem, but Merck could not supply at a price Korea was willing to pay (at that time Park Chung-Hee was in power, it was a military dictatorship).
Korean leadership declared praziquantel a national security issue (true) and started manufacturing their own, and in a collaboration between KIST and Shinpoong Pharmaceuticals developed their own process, which was much cheaper than the original Merck isoquinoline route.
The effort was a major part of the development of a domestic pharmaceutical industry. Shinpoong still hold 50 % of the market in praziquantel.
Maximizing profits for shareholders is not the only motivation that we as humans have for creating life saving medicines. There are countless examples throughout history of new drugs being invented without IP laws. This is akin to how advertisers say the internet wouldn't exist without them.
The people who do the actual discovery are not paid an exorbitant amount of money. They mostly just want to do research and solve problems while living a comfortable life. A pharma company making billions in profit isn’t necessary. It’s just the common way it currently is done. There are other ways to accomplish the same goal. We could try to replicate Jonas Salks’ way Of doing things.
I work in drug discovery. You're right that the bench-scientists don't usually get rich. But it's an extraordinarily risky, expensive, and unpredictable business and for every billion dollar drug there's a graveyard of failed companies and projects that didn't make it. The only business reason to take those risks are for a chance at patent-protected profit. And those bench scientists wouldn't have labs to work in if investors and rich companies weren't willing to pay for it.
What about government funding research? It doesn’t have to be just rich people or corporations. It could be all of us in the form of government. I believe that most of a drug’s overall cost is marketing. I might be wrong on this but it is a significant, useless expense. Remove filthy rich profit motive and we might get drug companies that don’t resort to shenanigans.
In an ideal world, I'd agree with you. In the real world, government funding (at least in the US) is often administered by bureaucrats without relevant scientific expertise to ensure proper oversight. Furthermore, the checks and balances for grant awards are lacking at the NIH/NSF/etc. The panels who decide who gets funding and who doesn't comprise researchers who are far from disinterested judges. Some grant approvals are less about scientific merit and more about rubbing elbows with the right people, which ultimately means that political capital becomes more important than substance in a lot of cases. I've seen large grants funded for experiments that from a methodological standpoint, made no sense, and yet the PIs who submitted the proposal were well-established and had connections.
Corporate science, in contrast, just wants results that work and earn money and as a result is more geared towards weeding out fruitless avenues of research. My general impression is that this is sometimes at the expense of creativity, since companies are more risk-averse generally speaking, which limits what is discovered to mostly non-sexy stuff. I also suspect (but am not certain) that replications are performed more routinely, and are just file-drawered / kept as trade secrets and that the current reproducibility crises in some fields (such as cancer research) have been known about for a while in industry.
Rich people just want to cure cancer, childhood obesity, condition X that afflicts them personally. It's hard to get funding for just basic research because philanthropists generally lean towards the applied side of things as well and don't go for the moonshots. It's not the best, but typically there's some common ground for researchers to get money out of them (or some way to make basic research look applied to an undiscerning eye).
You are simply wrong on this. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a new drug, prior to approval and marketing. What percent of a companies budget is spend on marketing versus R&D at a given time is kind of irrelevant because (1) the development costs occur before market and (2) often drugs are in-licensed or acquired after significant expense towards R&D has been expended. They don’t buy all the companies whose products fail (most of them) so that cost isn’t factored in. Making new drugs is very expensive and risky.
Edit: I’m describing the development of novel drugs here. “Me-too” drugs are significantly less risky and probably less costly but there’s still a lot of risk amd expense.
>We found that the premiums pharmaceutical companies earn from charging substantially higher prices for their medications in the US compared to other Western countries generates substantially more than the companies spend globally on their research and development. This finding counters the claim that the higher prices paid by US patients and taxpayers are necessary to fund research and development. Rather, there are billions of dollars left over even after worldwide research budgets are covered. To put the excess revenue in perspective, lowering the magnitude of the US premium to a level where it matches global R&D expenditures across the 15 companies we assessed would have saved US patients, businesses, and taxpayers approximately $40 billion in 2015, a year for which the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reported that total US spending on pharmaceuticals was $325 billion.
I think you're seriously underestimating how much thought goes into the risk-benefit analysis during drug development. The FDA does create some regulatory burden but they certainly aren't the main driver of why drugs fail. Drugs fail because they don't work or they cause unintended toxicity.
I consider myself libertarian to the point where I'm willing to accept the uncomfortable extremes of the ideology that many people have issues accepting. I vehemently defend the right of a corporation or person to do shitty things that I do not necessarily agree with. However, abusing/commandeering regulatory processes to chokeslam competitors out of the market is a clear cut case of a business or individual using government power to engage in practices that would otherwise be impossible.
Because with patents the IP eventually wears out, and IP = expensive drugs = less customers = more ill people = less productive society. I know, I know, the reality is more nuanced, but thus is the core of the counter-argument.
Wouldn't it be preferable to write only a forward declaration of the struct in the header files, and define the structs themselves at the .c files? In other words, wouldn't it be better to define them as Abstract Data Types (ADT) ?
That way, users of the library would have no direct access to the fields of the struct (e.g. hashtable->num_buckets;), they'd have to use a function declared at the correspondent header file. (e.g. get_num_buckets(hashtable);).
Direct access to member fields could break the data structure because data structures always needs to follow certain rules in insertion and deletion.
That's not possible - the compiler needs to know the size so that it can allocate space for the structure.
You can get away with forward declarations of things if you only ever need a pointer to the struct, because the compiler knows how big a pointer is and only needs to know the size of the structure when you dereference it.
You also need to know the size when you allocate it - whether you're using malloc, or allocating statically. As you want to leave control of allocation up to the caller, then the caller needs to know the size.
Theoretically I suppose you could allocate through a macro that used an explicit size number in the header, but going to those lengths to take the struct out of the header seems a bit extreme.
The app Hot Apps Nearby collects a list of installed applications on the phones that have it installed. Then, _anonymously_, it saves that information with a location and shares these with people around.
Then you know every app's popularity in phones (users) nearby - of course, users that also have Hot Apps Nearby installed.
This is a tough one -- inferior alveolar nerve damage is the most common long-term complication in third molar extraction -- I advise about 1% of my patients against extraction based on the proximity of their lower molar roots to this nerve. However, there is great anatomic variation in the course of the IAN such that damage to it can occur even when pre-op radiographs show that there is little risk of hitting it. (Which is to say... SURPRISE, there's a nerve where you didn't expect it!) Sorry to hear it, OP, AND I hope you don't have permanent lingual paresthesia -- having a numb tongue is nearly impossible to acclimate to...
