Slashdot Mirror

What about if a university patents their "discovery" and then in turn licenses it out to a pharmaceutical company to make a; vaccine, drug, diagnostic process or something of similar nature and consequently between the two of them they make millions upon millions of dollars?
Unfortunately we live in a world were medicine and money are tied closely together ([sarcasm]to have it any other way would be EVIL GODLESS SOCIALIST COMMUNISM[/sarcasm]) so if some institution or two are going to make millions and millions of dollars off of your blood then it doesn't seem unfair to ask for a tiny sliver sized slice of the pie.

A lot of those complaining that there is a clique silencing critics are those who:

Believe Alien Lizard Overlords have taken on Human Form to rule our planet and enslave us.
Believe that God Has Revealed The Truth on the godless sciences to them.
Are desperate to avoid loss of money in a scam they're trying to perpetrate on others.

The antics of these toxic elements mean that any attempts to rectify any clique's existence or interference are doing much more harm than good.

Please, give me an example of evil use of the information he revealed.

Now the godless Soviets know we're spying on them, they'll start spying on us!

Grassley has to pander to his base. Verifiable facts, science, and technical achievement make them feed inadequate. He knows exactly what he is doing. Generally the places where the GOP is in control are the places where stupidity is considered a virtue.

You mean, what the entire tech community said was going to happen, happened?

Well, can you blame us? You smug godless heathens tryin' to come all up in here with your fancy liberal college educations* and your liberal science and liberal logic and liberal reality! We got some of that thar magic slave-trackin' RFID doodads you made, and we KNOW that's how they work, but you liberal liberals sabotaged the whole durn thing! I told them they shouldn't work with the powers of the devil, and now they know better! We'll just go back to them cameras that GOD put on this earth for us! That'll show you tech-noh-lodg-ih-cahl bastards!

*: If it helps, treat every occurrence of the word "liberal" as if it had a direct one-to-one mapping with "evil", full stop, no negotiations or reasoning, nor any definition approaching "a manner in which a government and/or society can be run". Just "evil".

At least as probable a scenario would be some fundamentalist with access to nuclear weapons deciding that God wants him to wipe out the godless liberals in NYC.

If we do that they'll think we're a bunch of woofters. They all hate us, because they're godless communists.

It seems like it'd be particularly easy to make other, similar apps to demonize other groups. Why, if this catches on, we'll soon be able to designate our local "godless communists", "racist rightwing nutjobs", and every other demographic imaginable! In a year or two, perhaps we can have an entire social network devoted to the people who despise you most describing you. Society will be vastly better once we are all unwillingly enrolled in Hatebook.

Once again, the godless scientist will throw away millions and billions of tax payer dollars on the completely worthless pursuit of trying to prove that there is no God. The scripture tells us that God created the heavens and the earth. And upon earth and earth alone, He created man. But then you don;t believe that or even care about it, that is until you end up in hell wondering how stupid you had been.

And nowhere in scripture does it say that God didn't create other creatures on other planets, although it does have some passages which might be interpreted as referring to extraterrestrial life, but more likely to other life on other continents, or even just to other peoples in neighboring regions, or even just referring to Gentiles. IE. John 10:16

Once again, the godless scientist will throw away millions and billions of tax payer dollars on the completely worthless pursuit of trying to prove that there is no God. The scripture tells us that God created the heavens and the earth. And upon earth and earth alone, He created man. But then you don;t believe that or even care about it, that is until you end up in hell wondering how stupid you had been.

Send in Seal Team Six to wipe out those godless rebels.

People like you make me fucking sick. Go to the grocery store. Tell me, how many different types and brands of sodas are on the shelf. Now, try telling me we don't got freedom, you fucking godless commie.

I'm sorry, if somebody blows up my camel, I'm going to take umbrage. Doesn't matter what variety of godless infidel you are.

Could not have stated that more distinctly myself. The humanities, themselves, as with guns, are not the problem. The Godless Commie Sodomites of academia (Zinn, &c) can return their Postmodern hooey to the Hell that spawned it.

> Let's say patents were strong and eternal. This could easily lead to land grabs - there's a rush to discover new areas
> that people aren't even thinking about right now and bring them to market so that they can be patented. The value of a
> patent portfolio is high, and so companies may innovate to create such portfolios. Cross-licensing would be the order
> of the day in that environment, but it would hardly mean innovation would be dead.

No, it means we'd be in eternal stagnant IP feudalism, where only companies the size of Sony, Samsung, Apple, and Microsoft were allowed to innovate anything meaningful commercially. Everyone else would be -- at best -- IP sharecroppers forced to kneel before them and grant their patents for a pittance in return for the right to make commercial use of them at all, because just about any conceivable implementation would otherwise infringe upon two dozen other patents.

Think about it. When's the last time a huge corporation held by risk-averse institutional shareholders concerned with maximizing the next quarter's profits truly innovated *anything* that could be described as "disruptive"? The infant Microsoft would have been thrown into the well and drowned by IBM, DEC, Burroughs, Wang, and all the other companies that used to dominate the American computer industry back in the 1970s/80s. Woz would have gotten served a C&D 3 days after showing off his new prototype to the computer club. Commodore would have never existed, because its whole economic foundation was a semiconductor firm who built what was practically a 6800 clone. Fairchild *and* Shockley would have been eternal vassals of Bell Labs.

Big companies owned by institutional investors are almost genetically incapable of disruptive innovation, because it involves risk, and risk means the next quarter's profits might be disrupted. When alliances of similarly risk-averse companies have de-facto veto power over everyone else by virtue of strong patent protection, disruptive innovation stagnates.

In a way, the former Soviet Union is a perfect indirect example. In the Soviet Union, risk-averse bureaucrats had de-facto (if not de-jure) veto power over everything. The same way a company like Sony can unleash its lawyers to stop disruptive media technologies in their tracks in the holy name of IP law, the Soviet government could unleash its army of law enforcement officers and bureaucrats to prevent a Soviet citizen with a disruptive invention from ever doing anything with it. There was actually quite a bit of underground innovation in the Soviet Union... it's just that it was all basically masturbation, because their efforts were stymied at every level (by buraucratic indifference if they were lucky, by aggressive political backlash if they were perceived as presenting a risk to someone in a position of power, no matter how petty or meaningless).

Going back further to the dark ages, how much real innovation occurred when everyone was forced (by law, if not practical necessity) into being vassals under feudalism that subordinated everyone and everything to landed nobility and the Church? Yes, we had people like Kepler, Newton, and Galileo... and their contemporary influence was almost nonexistent. Their discoveries were talked about privately, behind closed doors, and most of their effort was spent trying to avoid getting crushed by those who cared mainly about preserving the status quo. They're revered today, centuries after their deaths, but in their day, they were basically viewed as godless heretics who deserved to burn for their sins, or at least spend a few decades repenting them in a dark prison cell somewhere.

People forget that the US itself was founded as a reaction to the old world order. Pre-Berne, American IP law was almost at a 90-degree angle to European IP law. European IP law viewed IP as a moral right, like being granted land by a sovereign king acting through the grace of God. American IP law, in stark contrast, was scandalously utilitarian. Up until t

You appear to have been edumacated by unionized thugs pretending to be public school teachers, so let me give you a little hand with your "facts"

"the United States is the only country to nuke another country"

First, we were fighting BACK against evil tyrants in a WORLD WAR that had claimed the lives of millions of people. The alternative (a then-planned ground invasion) would have killed even more people than those two nukes did. Furthermore, our enemies were working on nuclear bombs and would have used them on our cities had they gotten them first. The truth is that all the "nukes are evil and in some other weapons category" stuff arose AFTER the war.

"We used our own prisoners and citizens as guinnea pigs to conduct experiments in nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare."

You are probably trying to conflate a few isolated whack-job researchers with national policy. Yeah, some evil docs did a horrendous STD experiment on some black men in the south (terrible, evil, and entirely consistent with the way southern Democrats treated blacks) but NOT national policy. We did not use prisoners in NBC warfare tests; generally we used active-duty military personnel and took the precautions thought to be adequate in those early days of nuclear experimentation (for example, soldiers near nuke blast tests were generally trucked-out of the area before exposure to fallout...when that did not happen it was a screw-up NOT some evil national policy)

"We engaged in propaganda in the extreme"

Every nation on Earth has always used communications to say good things about itself and bad things about its opponents... so what's your point? Even today, every nation on Earth uses propaganda. It depends on how you want to define it, and how offended you want to be about it. In fact, we have no way of knowing if you have written your post as anti-American propaganda to make some other country look better

"rewriting our pledge of allegiance to include "under god" and printed the same on our money as a propaganda war against "godless communism." "

This is a common accusation... but the truth is that at the time, most Americans were Christians and very patriotic and supported this stuff NOT as propaganda but simply as good-old American patriotism. The first time I heard this stuff held-up as propaganda it was by a flea-infested pot smoking worthless bum hippie in the early seventies.

"We engaged in witch hunts, like McCarthy appearing before Congress to say he "held in his hands" a list of known communist co-conspirators."

Ah, yes, the traditional (usually completely partisan and hypocritical) lefty attack in "tailgunner Joe"... Tell me... are you offended that last year during the presidential campaign Democrat senate majority leader Harry Reid paraded around claiming to have secret proof that Mitt Romney had not paid his taxes and saying Romney should prove himself innocent? Sadly for you, after the Berlin wall fell and the old soviet records spilled-out we learned that a number of the people he fingered really were on the communist payroll (try reading one of the books on the subject...) which leads directly to...

"We publicly executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953..."

Now you are just making this too easy. Now that we have the soviet records, we are certain they were communist spies and one of their grandkids even ended-up making a film in which the members of the family and their friends openly admit they were spies. It's a very sad tale, and the two sons of the Rosenbergs (and their grandkids) deserve nothing but sympathy from the public; Traditionally, Americans do not blame kids for the sins of their parents. But the very simple truth is that in the 1920's and 30's Communism was made to look wonderful to many Americans (via propaganda from Soviet-aligned outlets like the New York Times) and with the great depression it was quite natural that many more simple-minded people fell for the lie

For all its flaws and mistakes the U.S. was nothing like the Soviets, not even close, not even now.

Can you provide an example of something that the Soviets did that the United States has not done?

Read up on the Stalin era. Even later Soviet leaders were disgusted.

While you're formulating your answer, consider that the United States is the only country to nuke another country.

And in the odd perverse mathematics of war may have saved lives compared to blockade and starvation or invasion and mass casualties by conventional weapons. The simple fact was that Truman was expecting 500,000 American dead and 5 million Japanese dead if the war continued through conventional means. The atomic bombings were a tragedy, the problem is that the other options may have been far worse. A classic negative-negative decision, all your likely options are bad.

The casualties from mass fire bombings in Tokyo were comparable to an atomic bombing. Read Eugene Sledge's "With The Old Breed" for an account of the fighting on Okinawa. President Truman had such accounts in his mind when he made the decision. Also note that civilian casualties on Okinawa were comparable to an atomic bombing. I realize it is popular today to say that Japan was going to surrender anyway but the historical facts are that the surrender after the atomic bombings and after the emperor's decision nearly failed when a military coup was attempted. The plotter's had to "rescue" the emperor from the bad advice his ministers were providing and prevent his surrender message from going out. We have no idea what would have happened without the atomic bombings, imminent surrender is hardly a foregone conclusion. Again, Truman faced a negative-negative decision, he had no good option, rather one option that may produce fewer casualties (military and civilian) than the others.

We used our own prisoners and citizens as guinnea pigs to conduct experiments in nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare.

Agreed, terrible.

We engaged in propaganda in the extreme, rewriting our pledge of allegiance to include "under god" and printed the same on our money as a propaganda war against "godless communism."

Seriously? This is some great and terrible crime?

We engaged in witch hunts, like McCarthy appearing before Congress to say he "held in his hands" a list of known communist co-conspirators.

McCarthy was a buffoon. The anti-communist witch hunts wrong. But you are making my point for me. These witch hunts were nothing like those under the Soviets. Read up on Soviet gulags.

We publicly executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953, and it wasn't until just a few years ago, in 2008, that the transcripts from a court case widely panned at the time as a "witch hunt" revealed major inconsistencies in the testimony of key witnesses against them.

Decoded 1944 Soviet cables confirmed Julius worked for the Soviets. Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that they helped accelerate the Soviet atomic bomb program. Various Soviet officials eventually confirmed that Julius was a wartime spy.

They had only passed on low value information that was already duplicated elsewhere... mostly hand-drawn sketches.

Primary source or merely a secondary confirmatory source, large contribution or small contribution, its still wartime espionage. Was the penalty excessive, perhaps, but executing a wartime spy is hardly in the same category as executing those who disagree with a government policy, as we saw in large scale during the Stalin era. Again, you are merely confirming the US and Soviet governments were nothing alike. No one is claiming the US government was without flaws and mistakes, just nowhere near the Soviet level. Enlightened leaders like Mikhail Gorbachev were the exception not the rule.

consider that the United States is the only country to nuke another country

A different means to the same end - we actually killed more Japanese in the conventional bombings. If you're going to criticize that (and there is certainly good reason to do so) please discuss how you would have conducted the war instead.

Additionally discuss how several million Germans died towards the end and after WWII because the USSR decided to shrink the eastern part of Germany.

We engaged in propaganda in the extreme, rewriting our pledge of allegiance to include "under god" and printed the same on our money as a propaganda war against "godless communism."

That silly "under God" thing is your idea of extreme propaganda? No, blatant lies are extreme propaganda. Please discuss the relative extents of US and USSR use of such techniques, and the number of people sent to death prisons for disagreeing with the official line.

We engaged in witch hunts, like McCarthy appearing before Congress to say he "held in his hands" a list of known communist co-conspirators.

McCarthy victims lost their jobs, which was an injustice. How many were sent to something like the gulag?

We publicly executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 ... the principle charge against them, the reason they were executed -- passing secrets about how to build the atom bomb, they were innocent of. They had only passed on low value information that was already duplicated elsewhere... mostly hand-drawn sketches.

They weren't innocent (at least not Julius), Sobel didn't say they were innocent, and there are many reasons other than his confession to believe that Julius was guilty. The reason they only passed on "low value information that was already duplicated" was because Ethel's brother Greenglass was a lousy spy. Greenglass and Julius were traitors - just not very effective ones. Ethel was a slightly different story. She probably wasn't guilty of much beyond not ratting out her husband and her brother. I think that may still have qualified for the death penalty, but in the interests of justice I don't think it merited it.

I'd be happy to entertain any significant act that you feel the USSR undertook that didn't have a parallel from the USA.

Does killing tens of millions of your own citizens in forced collectivization, forced relocations, artificial famines and camps that worked their prisoners to death count for anything?

For all its flaws and mistakes the U.S. was nothing like the Soviets, not even close, not even now.

Can you provide an example of something that the Soviets did that the United States has not done?

While you're formulating your answer, consider that the United States is the only country to nuke another country. We used our own prisoners and citizens as guinnea pigs to conduct experiments in nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare. We engaged in propaganda in the extreme, rewriting our pledge of allegiance to include "under god" and printed the same on our money as a propaganda war against "godless communism." We engaged in witch hunts, like McCarthy appearing before Congress to say he "held in his hands" a list of known communist co-conspirators. We publicly executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953, and it wasn't until just a few years ago, in 2008, that the transcripts from a court case widely panned at the time as a "witch hunt" revealed major inconsistencies in the testimony of key witnesses against them. That same year, the government continued to trumpet that a 98 year old man, on his deathbed, recanted and said that the Rosenbergs were spies... but the press quietly buried what he said right after: That the principle charge against them, the reason they were executed -- passing secrets about how to build the atom bomb, they were innocent of. They had only passed on low value information that was already duplicated elsewhere... mostly hand-drawn sketches.

So I'm not sure your claim that the USSR and the USA were significantly different in their propaganda campaigns... In fact, I would argue they were more or less the same, both in substance and quantity. But I'd be happy to entertain any significant act that you feel the USSR undertook that didn't have a parallel from the USA.

The Pledge of Allegiance is not jingoistic in any way.

Except maybe that little bit about 'under God' being added during the McCarthyist 1950's. We can't turn our children into Godless Commies, can we?