Great to see Ian in his usual seat.

A big hello to everyone too.

Ahhh....another boinked Boingstats sig....
Mine and Carlos' are broken over on Seti too.
Probably a few others.

Behave all. My main system is being copied over to my new SSHD now, which is going to take 5 hours. Meanwhile my NAS' RAID1 array is rebuilding itself as well, it's at 6% and took an hour to get there. I hope it speeds up at one point, because really it's only got 450GB of data in it, although the array is 4TB big.

I also managed to fetch the flu that's going around. Had 40 degrees Celsius during the night. Am now down to ~38 C, but now other parts that weren't hurting yet are starting to chime in.

The upside of the flu is those several hours with over 120 beats a minute heart beat must've burned some of my fat away. The downside is the hurting and feeling like a very old man. Sorry, all the very old people on here.

celttooth: red matter? four days? Stop talking in code, please.
And since when does your nickname have only one el and three tee's and not two el's and two tee's as I always thought? Huh? Well?

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Ahhh....another boinked Boingstats sig....
Mine and Carlos' are broken over on Seti too.
Probably a few others.

Sufferin Succotash!
Might be most of them. Seems they have been having issues. First the .gif generator broke, now this .......

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Yes!

Welcome back Ian!!! :-)

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Have TARDIS, will travel...
Come along K-9!
Join Calm Chaos
Pluto is still a planet

I've resisted long enough, so I decided to join the 21st century today and get a DVR from the cable company. I'll keep my VHS/DVD recorder and hook it up to the DVR for if I want to save something.

I guess at some point in the future I'll get a smart tv and save everything to the cloud, but I have lots of tapes and DVD's that will still need a way to be played.

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The mind is a weird and mysterious place

I've resisted long enough, so I decided to join the 21st century today and get a DVR from the cable company. I'll keep my VHS/DVD recorder and hook it up to the DVR for if I want to save something.

And fun fact.. if you run out of recording space on the DVR and want to store more... almost all of them these days have an eSATA port (or firewire) on the back. Get yourself an external enclosure that uses eSATA (or firewire), plug it in with an empty HDD in it, and the DVR *should* ask if you would like to format the external drive to use as additional storage space.

I learned this on an old Scientific Atlanta a few years ago. It had 160gb internal (a WD Caviar), and would support up to 2TB on eSATA. Basically, what it will end up doing is at the start of the recording, whichever drive has more free space, that's the one that gets used to save on. At first, it will always be the external, until that gets pretty full.

Only catch is that the filesystem and all the recordings are encrypted with a key that is based on the serial number of the DVR itself--meaning if the DVR craps-out and you get another one.. all the recordings on the external are lost.

And because it is encrypted.. there is no known way to save what's on there. I did a bunch of research on that a few years back. It is an RSA-2048 key and uses at least 3DES for the encryption.

I've resisted long enough, so I decided to join the 21st century today and get a DVR from the cable company. I'll keep my VHS/DVD recorder and hook it up to the DVR for if I want to save something.

And fun fact.. if you run out of recording space on the DVR and want to store more... almost all of them these days have an eSATA port (or firewire) on the back. Get yourself an external enclosure that uses eSATA (or firewire), plug it in with an empty HDD in it, and the DVR *should* ask if you would like to format the external drive to use as additional storage space.

I learned this on an old Scientific Atlanta a few years ago. It had 160gb internal (a WD Caviar), and would support up to 2TB on eSATA. Basically, what it will end up doing is at the start of the recording, whichever drive has more free space, that's the one that gets used to save on. At first, it will always be the external, until that gets pretty full.

Only catch is that the filesystem and all the recordings are encrypted with a key that is based on the serial number of the DVR itself--meaning if the DVR craps-out and you get another one.. all the recordings on the external are lost.

And because it is encrypted.. there is no known way to save what's on there. I did a bunch of research on that a few years back. It is an RSA-2048 key and uses at least 3DES for the encryption.

Interesting. Hundreds more hours of stuff I'll never get around to watching.

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if you run out of recording space on the DVR and want to store more

I'm not worried about running out of space on the DVR. I would watch the stuff before that ever happened, plus I plan to have my current VHS/DVD recorder plugged into it so I can copy things I want to preserve tangibly.

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The mind is a weird and mysterious place

All this talk of temperatures reminded me to let you all know it is 33C here in Sunny Southern California today. :P

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Not sure if this is politics or not, so I'll try here first.

A few days ago I had a nasty attack of stomach cramps and the runs, so I went to the corner shop and bought some Immodium, £5 for 6 tablets. They worked OK, but I still need to tackle the last of the rear end of it (sorry about the terrible pun ...) but they had sold out. Up to the real chemist and his price was £3.50, but he showed me some LoModine capsules at £1.99.

He said the drug itself is the same in both cases, Loperamide hydrochloride, but with Immodium you are paying for fancy packaging, and their TV advertising. He said its the same across a whole range of common drugs. Nothing less than a scandal I reckon !!

On any meds or hygiene products, I always compare the name brands to the "knock-offs", and generally save that 50-60%. Can't say I've ever had cause to regret it ... Thanks goodness that laws require labeling of active ingredients so you can make those kinds of comparisons. Listerene is a great example.
Not a scandal, just the marketplace working as it should and favoring those who choose to take the effort to be informed. Caveat Emptor ...

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I don't know about your country Jim, but over here the average oik in the street would have difficulty reading the back of the packet! Another case is Asprin, popular brands are Disprin, Aspro, and Solprin. In all cases the active ingredient is simply acetylsalicylic acid.

Disprin £3.29 for 32 tablets, supermarkets own 55p for 32 tablets.


Then we have Paracetamol, one brand being Panadol. Active ingredient in both acetaminophen.

Panadol £2.99 for 24 tablets, supermarkets own 25P for 16.

If that is the way thet the market place works, ripping off a gullible public, then it still is a scandal, sorry!

I know I always liked getting to the Bahamas, and stocking up on 222's (aspirin, codeine phosphate and caffeine). Illegal in the US, and illegal to bring back, but OTC down there. Best hangover cure on the planet, and also a favorite with the ladies monthly, I'm told.
Point is, the illusion that government will succeed in saving you from yourself, or your own ignorance, is just that. Illusion. Darwin had it right: survival of the fittest. Ignorance is a crime, it's a life sentence, there is no parole.

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If that is the way thet the market place works, ripping off a gullible public, then it still is a scandal, sorry!

It is called marketing. It uses a tool called advertising to function. It exists because of a government function called a patent which can be used because of tools called courts.

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I don't know about your country Jim, but over here the average oik in the street would have difficulty reading the back of the packet!

Over here, there's a box right on the front that says "Active ingredient: XXX n [units], y%." Then all the ingredients are listed on the back. further, many generics have shelf displays (or even say on the package itself) "Compare to Brand Q" essentially telling you exactly what it's the equivalent of.

If that is the way thet the market place works, ripping off a gullible public, then it still is a scandal, sorry!

What's a scandal is that the public is that gullible.

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Aspirin is the best generic medicine money can buy, imo. I get a 100 pills for $1 vs. $5+ for a brand name version.

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The mind is a weird and mysterious place

It exists because of a government function called a patent which can be used because of tools called courts.

What we are talking about is trademarks and trade names not patents. Courts are only used to deal with infringements of trademarks or patents.

Perhaps in your country they don't issue patents for medicines. They do here. That allows years upon years of Brand GOOD-DRUG advertising to sink into consumers brains. Then when the drug comes off patent and generic becomes available, the public still asks for it by the brand name and that is what they get. Of course the brand name is a trademark while the chemical name isn't. But the public has never heard the chemical name, only the brand name! So if they didn't have a patent there would be no opportunity for the decade of exclusive marketing by a trademark name to happen.

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Stick close to yer desk, and sometimes you shall see, that you one day shall be ruler of the queen's toidee.......

Hope the visits to the loo have avoided you.

GlaxoSmithKline has been hit with a £37m fine.

GSK fine

Paywall!

but http://www.philly.com/philly/business/pharma/20160213_British_regulators_fine_GSK__54_5M.html

GlaxoSmithKline said that it disagreed with the ruling, and the payments were made "to settle costly, complex, and uncertain patent disputes" which allowed the generic products "to enter the market early."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlaxoSmithKline

As of December 2015 it had a market capitalisation of £65 billion

http://www.gsk.com/media/603031/annual-report-2014.pdf
In any case the fine is pocket change.

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I thought everyone in the UK knew to buy the generic brands and not the name brands. Certainly when you have kids the doctor won't prescribe the name brand 'Calpol', but will prescribe the generic paracetamol (acetaminophen) suspension. As its been 15 years since I had a young baby, you can see that people have known about this for a long time.

I haven't bought name brand stuff since goodness knows how long.

It exists because of a government function called a patent which can be used because of tools called courts.

What we are talking about is trademarks and trade names not patents. Courts are only used to deal with infringements of trademarks or patents.

Perhaps in your country they don't issue patents for medicines. They do here. That allows years upon years of Brand GOOD-DRUG advertising to sink into consumers brains. Then when the drug comes off patent and generic becomes available, the public still asks for it by the brand name and that is what they get. Of course the brand name is a trademark while the chemical name isn't. But the public has never heard the chemical name, only the brand name! So if they didn't have a patent there would be no opportunity for the decade of exclusive marketing by a trademark name to happen.

If a drug is prescription, once a generic becomes available, insurance companies pretty much always specify the generic unless the doctor can come up with a REALLY good reason for the brand name.

And therein lies the scam. I recently picked up five scrips. With my high deductible insurance plan, I had to pay the full price for them this time around (next time they'll be covered) as follows: $770.22, $16.45, $11.62, $1124.90, $21.39. Guess which ones are generics.

The drug companies, of course, say it's not a scam, they're charging high prices to recoup the investment they put into developing the drugs, and so they'll have money to invest in the next one.

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