Try the UNITED NATIONS trackout devices. Who knows, you may *also* get lucky.

Coke for brains, when was the last time you bought anything that said "made in Africa" on the tag?  Seriously now, check into reality at least once in a while.  Between constant war and fucking everyone else in the village without a rubber, they don't leave much to be desired in the way of a work force.  You'd have to be insane to go looking in those areas for a good factory site.  Those poor abused factory workers in other places are, oddly enough, not starving, but I'm sure you'd prefer they bring about hyper inflation and destroy them by paying US wage scales in countries where people live well off two thousand bucks a year.

Then fewer people will invent.  Technological progress will grind to a halt.  We'll go back to the development rate we had before the patent system.  People smart enough to invent things are a dime a dozen, literally.  It doesn't take a particularly impressive mind to come up with something new.  People that smart, but still stupid enough to spend six years of their life trying to sell one of their inventions before they can quit the other job they're working at to feed themselves are few and far between.  The life of an independant inventor is a lot of work.  If it weren't, they wouldn't all be working at an engineering department in someone elses company.  They've chosen the easy path.  If the guy wanted to own his own inventions, he wouldn't have gone to work for Microsoft.

Lie, flat out.  Companies, I have no idea how many, have patented individual gene sequences.  The entire thing is not patented by a company, it is not all patented by US companies, last I heard they hadn't even finished identifying the whole thing, so it can't all be patented to begin with.  They are allowed to patent gene sequences because patent law says they can.  No law, no patent for "finding" a gene sequence.

Michael Moore is a lying sack of shit.  The movie Sicko illustrates this.  When reporting on the healthcare system of Cuba, one should actually visit the other hospitals in Cuba, the ones with no doctors, walls, floors, plumbing... Yeah, they have a lot of doctors, doctors that don't get paid much, and can't prescribe tylenol for a fever because they don't have any.  This in a country that recieves massive aide in food and medicine from the evil capitalists...

Of course, if he told us how bad the system was, Castro might have locked his fat ass in jail.  It's not like we'd give a shit if he didn't come back, and his supporters all want to worship the crazy fucker.  Perhaps I'm too harsh on the lazy tub of lard, a rich tub of lard thanks to morons like you that watch his trash.

The idea of socialism is an ideal situation, it has no grounding in reality. It is impossible to make everyone equal, and centralizing economic descisions is asking for a dictatorship. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, if an administration is given control over the economy, they could stay in power indefinently by creating an economic crisis and claiming the country is too unstable for an election. Capitalism is individual, you get what you earn. In socialism, you get what others believe you deserve. And africa is another topic completely, but it boils down to this... Others believed intervention in africa would help both the africans and the developed countries, this obviously didnt work. If you are going to stick pictures of starving children in our faces and try to use moral schema to prove a point, you are just as bad as the original imperialists. Essentially reducing africa to an exploitable tool, And as has been mentioned earlier, there is no infrastructure in africa, nothing to be owned. Therefore there is nothing to be shared, so mentioning africa on a thread about socialism versus capitalism makes no logical sense

Genetic manipulations or even cloning won't change the brain weight of anyone through reproduction... intelligence is social context, not neurones stimulated by artificial means, drug induced or robotic in nature. You can buy talent? Keep spending until it's wasted.

But thanks for the laughs.

H1N1-A determined by Alberta's scientists, btw. Vaccines for this strain of the Influenza virus will be mass-produced within 6 months or less. Who's buying it first?

The rich, the Mexicans or the poor?

That's the difference. Between epidemics & extinction of OUR specie.

Sicko might be wrong or right whatever, but I didn't base my argument on a single film. America does not have medicare, Australia for example does. Medicare makes operations free for the victim. Last time I checked America does not have this. A person not so well off can't afford medical bills that he has to pay for. A socialist medical system idoes not have these drawbacks however, the waiting lists can be very long.

How does rewarding inventors halt progress?

I was not talking about Cuba I was talkng about America.

Anyway anti-Cuba rants are just propoganda. Cubans don't have much money, but they get along just fine. There was a TV program about american medical students who chose to live in Cuba because they prefered the lifestyle. These were not isolated incidents. Maybe these accounts are false.

If I was lying, then how come my local Universaty had to stop ALL research on the human genome? It was patented. I'm not lying, maybe my source was though. The Human genome has been mapped. Depending on your definition, the ENTIRE genome has been mapped or only parts of it.

My point was though, should anyone have the right to patent genes? I don't think so. Anyone should be able to study them.

Um..Yes it will? Genetic germ line modification will change baby brain weight, neuron density, microglial activity and stamina, and keep on tickin' through their children. Intelligence is G, or IQ, or a definite measureable quantity that does not change much over a person's lifetime and is primarily geneticly determined.

It's not possible _NOW_. (or at least, it's prohibitivly expensive and socially ostracized) That does not mean costs won't come down....

As things are _NOW_ you can buy a few points of IQ through mass stem cell injections into the neocortex. They do it in China all the time.

Thanks for the ignorance.

I've heard of people in America who had little assistance to do bodily functions while in hospital. I've heard of people who had to lean over the bed to piss because nurses weren't there to help.

I'm not attacking America though. In Britain, Canada and Australia people have to be on long waiting lists to get treatment. The system is efficient but there is alot of room for improvement.

You pay for it in taxes, we pay for it in taxes.  It is illegal for a public hospital to refuse treatment, thus anyone can get treatment simply by showing up at one, money or not.  When someone can't pay for it, the hospital eats the bill and state and federal funds for this purpose help make up the cost.  You have a waiting list, we have freeloaders with unpaid bills that will never be collected.  Since people die on a wait list rather frequently, and die because of unpaid bills rather unfrequently, I'll take my freeloader system.

Although congress is populated almost entirely by morons, instead of having people walk into clinics, they show up at emergency rooms to be guaranteed treatment and cost a fucking fortune even for minor issues...

You said no such thing, taking away patent ownership from an employee contract will remove the motivation to employ people to design thing.  There is no reward for inventors in such an action, everyone not interested in such a risky business will be doing something else that brings a regular paycheck instead.  The Law of Unintended Consequences is called a law for a reason.  Every action has them.

Obviously, since you sourced the statement as coming from the university, I'd be referring to the source of the lies.  Scapegoating an "American" company for all the worlds ills is a common practice.  This should be amusing, you're an Aussie yes?  Whom ever is spreading that nonsense should know better, now that I've gone looking for it, GTG is apparently one of the worst offenders.

My view is that if you design it, you get the patent.  Patenting something you find is hilarious at best, and catastrophic in potential damage.  But then I'm pretty sure I already conveyed this opinion to start with.  I'm not sure why this is your point, you originally blamed capitalism for the existence of patents on human gene sequences.  Your point should be that government is universally corrupt, and will do anything for an endorsement check, including signing the patent rights to your own dna to a company that's never even met you.

Since I know dick about how they actually find the gene sequences and obtain the patents, I may just not have any idea what I'm talking about though.  If removing them removes the reward for studying them, byebye progress.

Might be. BUT:

1) They're breeding less. Why? For most of them everything else comes first. Having kids comes last. Also there is a saying here that goes:"A woman's intelligence is the best contraceptive." So go figure.

and

2) Why shouldn't they? Dunno about you, but when I have a g/f I need to have one that I can actually talk to. One that intellectually stimulates me. Sex is not all there is to a relationship you know.

Also it's a simple effect of social circumstances. Most relationships these days are formed at college/university and at work.

Later sexual affairs might be had with poolboys or postmen, but those hardly ever end in a new full fledged relationship.  

As for capitalism vs. socialism:

Many people these days tend to say that the die-hard capitalism of the US brought upon us the current worldwide financial crisis. That the greed of the bank- and fonds managers that accompies it made everything go haywire.

That might hold some merrit. But in my opinion the lack of control by the gov did it's part too. I'm reading a good book that was written shortly after the collapse of the US real-estate bubble and predicted the financial crisis for 2010 at latest.

It describes pretty well how and why this all happened and how people could have saved a lot of money by seeing and correctly interpreting the signs.

Yes. You have accepted my position, backed it up with more data, then said "What's wrong with that?".

The point is that without an input of good genes the lower classes can never hope to compete with their masters. Once upon a time the masters of the universe would have affairs and get girls pregnant and those genes would 'trickle down'. Now with accountabe breeding laws and genetic testing that is no longer possible. (Or at least not as likely.)

Sure they could randomly mutate into a supergenius.....A process that took 'normal mankind' in western europe 10,000 years to achieve through random mutation AND selective impregnation.

I call bullshit.  Apart from anything else, if you've actually read Orwell's works (meaning more than just Animal Farm) you'll know he was a socialist himself.  His message wasn't that socialism is unattainable but that revolution must be accompanied by eternal vigilence (which I believe Ben Franklin would agree with)

Are we discussing applied Socialism or Theoretical Marxism?  I have to admit, there is a huge difference between the two.