As others have pointed out, big pharma spends oodles of money on advertising - including the channel called "your doctor". They also make tons of "luxury" products, e.g. for invented diseases or lifestyle-induced western health problems like "burnout".
I see this as free market in effect: Brazil is willing to pay a certain price for a drug, a manufacturer other than Merck was willing to provide the drug at the suggested price (which Merck already had been willing to offer to Thailand). As for the government-backed intellectual property laws: License abused, license "revoked".
The music industry certainly loses money because of rampant piracy.
No, their incomes become lower than their projections. They do not actually LOSE money unless the pirates remove money the music industry already has.
they should be allowed to make a profit.
Not in a free market. In a free market, profit is a margin a competitor can exploit. Als, in this case, the profit would come from exploiting the needs of sick people. Not a thing I would have on my record at least.
If this happens often enough then drug companies go bankrupt... and others will rise to take their place. This happens in every industry. Just because a company makes a product does not make it mandatory for anyone to actually buy it at the price demanded - especially when (as in this case) another company is willing to sell the product at a lower price.
Anyone who thinks public money will ever be spent on the expensive trials needed to take a single lead target to market doesn't understand the industry.
I am sure the billions upon billions of public money spent on, say, building more nuclear weapons than they will ever need can be channeled to create life-saving drugs. As others have pointed out in this debate, pharmaceutical companies spend on treatments not cures because treatments means more product sold over time.
Brazil "revoking" the patent will only punish brazilian people in the future.
Only whenever corporations start to run the world. Or did you fail to notice that 1) Brazil is allowed to do this under WTO rules, 2) there is a manufacturer who gets to make money on supplying these drugs at the lower price - free market in action, and 3) there is a world of six billion people outside the U.S. who actually can research medicines themselves - and do. And that is without inventing fictional diseases that pampered doctors convince their patients need expensive medicines for.
How is this any different than telling a farmer that you'll be taking his crops because you're hungry?
Because physical property and "intellectual property" are different, both as concepts and as legal entities.
For some reason, people seem to expect that their medicine should magically appear.
No, they expect to not be overcharged by a monopoly when he world is generally moving toward free markets.
Bad news folks, the scientists that create these drugs have to pay for food, housing, education, and healthcare just like everyone else.
And the states that fund most of the research do pay them for it. Why this incessant focus on the U.S. NIH as if the six billion non-Americans had ceased to exist?
Removing the right of the organization to earn a profit
There is no such right. In fact, in a free market, earning a profit means there is a margin for a competitor to sell cheaper than you.
The actual right you seem to miss here is a country's sovereign right to decide the laws within its borders. The world is not run by the corporations - yet, anyway.
Ok, then come up with a reasonable argument as to why the corporation, having been ripped off, should continue to do business?
They should not. If your business model is to exploit the needs of sick and helpless people you do not deserve to do "business". Drug research will still be performed, since governments will have an interest (big pharma doesn't) in keeping people healty (big pharma wants them to remain sick and thus need more medicine).
The industry you so valiantly defend has made a living out of bribing doctors, inventing diseases and performing cruel experiments. If they hadn't also paid off politicans they would have been subject to laws that prevent other industries from acting that way.
Are you MAD? To get a chalk input effect you need an expensive Watcom tablet and a graphics package like Adobe Illustrator. We're taling $1000 or so here. And you need a powerful computer to run it! Far from the $10 goal.:-P
What Mr. Willam Gates III might have said back then is something akin to this:
"Of the one megabyte of addressable memory that IBM's PC architecture uses, DOS allows 640 kilobytes for user programs. This should be enough for most applications."
Remember, people: IBM's architecture, not Microsoft's. And single-application OS with no fancy-schmancy virtual memory or usable multitasking. Also, this was back when memory was a luxury, and applications were written to optimize it as much as possible. VisiCalc for instance was a fully functional spreadsheet in a 27 (or 29?) kilobyte executable.
Price of the iPhone is close to, say, a Nokia "PDA-phone" like the latest in the 900 series. And I doubt Nokia would make them if people didn't buy them. So Apple does not need to lower the price.
I rarely see Windows Mobile-based devices called that, though - or the OS name used in their marketing. They are generally just refered to as "Smart Phones"; though that term also includes Symbian-based phones running S60.
Yes, but the Cingular "deal" is apparently with no price reduction. It's just a temporary initial monopoly on the device. Which will probably be less useful if Apple don't manage to keep the June 11 date.
"...Also, we have a very strong connection with the characters and settings of StarCraft, and we do plan to revisit that universe at some point in the future, but we don't have anything new to announce in that regard at present."
I bolded the other bit you seemed to be missing: at present is not the same as in the next month.
How does "We can't tell you anything yet" get turned into "it has nothing to do with Starcraft"? You are interpreting in a very strange way. I't like Nintendo who denied the existence of the DS Lite a month before its semi-surprising launch.
So, playing analyst are we? The iPod launched as a Mac toy - it used Firewire and could only be updated via a Mac application. But Apple kept at it until they got it right (read: USB and Windows support). The iPod was DISADVANTAGED compared with competing players at the time. The iPhone is an iPod-phone with Safari. Lots of people will want that - more than you seem to believe.
Or in outer space once everything is automatically fabricated by machines. The money-less Federation in Star Trek, as described by Picard in "First Contact", is a communist paradise where everyone gives according to ability and takes according to need.
... aqnd in a free country you are allowed to hold shitty ideas, whether it's communism (which noone have proved RMS supports - like most of the victims of McCarthy) or that Iran should be nuked.
Then again, I guess when you say "communism" you refer to the Chinese and Russian systems, but they were not communist as defined by theory.
Actually, the green or white tourist visa paper you fill out on the plane or in the arrival hall works. I read a story once about someone who had agreed to smuggle some narcotics, and then dutifully checked "yes" on whether he was bringing an illegal substance into the country. He was then dutifully arrested.
Um, this is a media company which has changed owners and the owners want a pro-Putin angle. That's no different from the American media companies which fired journalists at the start of Operation Enduring Quicksand - sorry, Freedom - for being anti-war. Maybe they just got their own Ann Coulter and Bill OReilly? The United States has enough top-level politicans of its own who attack dissenting opinions as "anti-American" or "unpatriotic".
As of the european 1.7 firmware upgrade, the PS3 now plays Okami, Amplitude, GT4 and a buch of others that didn't work on 1.6. Life is good.
(Okami on a PS3 with HDMI cable on a good LCD with the options set to TV-type LCD = sheer beauty)
Of course, instead of trumpeting this significant feature of the update, Sony are harping about the as-of-yet unavailable-in-Europe downloadable PS1 games.
... what happened to charging the music industry's Big Four for cartel activities, or the movie industry over the DVD regions dividing the market into convenient zones (also cartel-like), despite WTO goals of free markets?
Oh, that's right. They paid off the politicans. Is the lobster to your taste, Mr. Hatch?
1) Take an Intel-based Mac from Apple. 2) Install Windows or Linux on it 3) Install virtualization software 4) Create a virtual machine 5) Install MacOSX in this virtual machine
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Except the Walkman and photography.
If this becomes a pattern, then I think you may see that private money to research and testing go down as a result.
Perhaps corporate money will. We might go back to the days when private funding for research was from rich people who want to spend their money in a good way.
As others have pointed out, big pharma spends oodles of money on advertising - including the channel called "your doctor". They also make tons of "luxury" products, e.g. for invented diseases or lifestyle-induced western health problems like "burnout".
I see this as free market in effect: Brazil is willing to pay a certain price for a drug, a manufacturer other than Merck was willing to provide the drug at the suggested price (which Merck already had been willing to offer to Thailand). As for the government-backed intellectual property laws: License abused, license "revoked".
The music industry certainly loses money because of rampant piracy.
... and others will rise to take their place. This happens in every industry. Just because a company makes a product does not make it mandatory for anyone to actually buy it at the price demanded - especially when (as in this case) another company is willing to sell the product at a lower price.
No, their incomes become lower than their projections. They do not actually LOSE money unless the pirates remove money the music industry already has.
they should be allowed to make a profit.
Not in a free market. In a free market, profit is a margin a competitor can exploit. Als, in this case, the profit would come from exploiting the needs of sick people. Not a thing I would have on my record at least.
If this happens often enough then drug companies go bankrupt
Anyone who thinks public money will ever be spent on the expensive trials needed to take a single lead target to market doesn't understand the industry.
I am sure the billions upon billions of public money spent on, say, building more nuclear weapons than they will ever need can be channeled to create life-saving drugs. As others have pointed out in this debate, pharmaceutical companies spend on treatments not cures because treatments means more product sold over time.
Brazil "revoking" the patent will only punish brazilian people in the future.
Only whenever corporations start to run the world. Or did you fail to notice that 1) Brazil is allowed to do this under WTO rules, 2) there is a manufacturer who gets to make money on supplying these drugs at the lower price - free market in action, and 3) there is a world of six billion people outside the U.S. who actually can research medicines themselves - and do. And that is without inventing fictional diseases that pampered doctors convince their patients need expensive medicines for.
How is this any different than telling a farmer that you'll be taking his crops because you're hungry?
Because physical property and "intellectual property" are different, both as concepts and as legal entities.
For some reason, people seem to expect that their medicine should magically appear.
No, they expect to not be overcharged by a monopoly when he world is generally moving toward free markets.
Bad news folks, the scientists that create these drugs have to pay for food, housing, education, and healthcare just like everyone else.
And the states that fund most of the research do pay them for it. Why this incessant focus on the U.S. NIH as if the six billion non-Americans had ceased to exist?
Removing the right of the organization to earn a profit
There is no such right. In fact, in a free market, earning a profit means there is a margin for a competitor to sell cheaper than you.
The actual right you seem to miss here is a country's sovereign right to decide the laws within its borders. The world is not run by the corporations - yet, anyway.
Ok, then come up with a reasonable argument as to why the corporation, having been ripped off, should continue to do business?
They should not. If your business model is to exploit the needs of sick and helpless people you do not deserve to do "business". Drug research will still be performed, since governments will have an interest (big pharma doesn't) in keeping people healty (big pharma wants them to remain sick and thus need more medicine).
The industry you so valiantly defend has made a living out of bribing doctors, inventing diseases and performing cruel experiments. If they hadn't also paid off politicans they would have been subject to laws that prevent other industries from acting that way.
Are you MAD? To get a chalk input effect you need an expensive Watcom tablet and a graphics package like Adobe Illustrator. We're taling $1000 or so here. And you need a powerful computer to run it! Far from the $10 goal. :-P
What Mr. Willam Gates III might have said back then is something akin to this:
"Of the one megabyte of addressable memory that IBM's PC architecture uses, DOS allows 640 kilobytes for user programs. This should be enough for most applications."
Remember, people: IBM's architecture, not Microsoft's. And single-application OS with no fancy-schmancy virtual memory or usable multitasking. Also, this was back when memory was a luxury, and applications were written to optimize it as much as possible. VisiCalc for instance was a fully functional spreadsheet in a 27 (or 29?) kilobyte executable.
Price of the iPhone is close to, say, a Nokia "PDA-phone" like the latest in the 900 series. And I doubt Nokia would make them if people didn't buy them. So Apple does not need to lower the price.
I rarely see Windows Mobile-based devices called that, though - or the OS name used in their marketing. They are generally just refered to as "Smart Phones"; though that term also includes Symbian-based phones running S60.
Yes, but the Cingular "deal" is apparently with no price reduction. It's just a temporary initial monopoly on the device. Which will probably be less useful if Apple don't manage to keep the June 11 date.
So, no subsidy.
I foresee a ThinkGeek T-shirt with the codes on.
"...Also, we have a very strong connection with the characters and settings of StarCraft, and we do plan to revisit that universe at some point in the future, but we don't have anything new to announce in that regard at present."
I bolded the other bit you seemed to be missing: at present is not the same as in the next month.
How does "We can't tell you anything yet" get turned into "it has nothing to do with Starcraft"? You are interpreting in a very strange way. I't like Nintendo who denied the existence of the DS Lite a month before its semi-surprising launch.
This is not going to be iPod mark 2.
So, playing analyst are we? The iPod launched as a Mac toy - it used Firewire and could only be updated via a Mac application. But Apple kept at it until they got it right (read: USB and Windows support). The iPod was DISADVANTAGED compared with competing players at the time. The iPhone is an iPod-phone with Safari. Lots of people will want that - more than you seem to believe.
Actualy that's completely wrong.
Is that a synonym for "sarcasm"? Because that was what it was.
I thought Stallman wrote Bad Emacs and Gosling wrote Good Emacs?
Or in outer space once everything is automatically fabricated by machines. The money-less Federation in Star Trek, as described by Picard in "First Contact", is a communist paradise where everyone gives according to ability and takes according to need.
... aqnd in a free country you are allowed to hold shitty ideas, whether it's communism (which noone have proved RMS supports - like most of the victims of McCarthy) or that Iran should be nuked.
Then again, I guess when you say "communism" you refer to the Chinese and Russian systems, but they were not communist as defined by theory.
Actually, the green or white tourist visa paper you fill out on the plane or in the arrival hall works. I read a story once about someone who had agreed to smuggle some narcotics, and then dutifully checked "yes" on whether he was bringing an illegal substance into the country. He was then dutifully arrested.
Um, this is a media company which has changed owners and the owners want a pro-Putin angle. That's no different from the American media companies which fired journalists at the start of Operation Enduring Quicksand - sorry, Freedom - for being anti-war. Maybe they just got their own Ann Coulter and Bill OReilly? The United States has enough top-level politicans of its own who attack dissenting opinions as "anti-American" or "unpatriotic".
As of the european 1.7 firmware upgrade, the PS3 now plays Okami, Amplitude, GT4 and a buch of others that didn't work on 1.6. Life is good.
(Okami on a PS3 with HDMI cable on a good LCD with the options set to TV-type LCD = sheer beauty)
Of course, instead of trumpeting this significant feature of the update, Sony are harping about the as-of-yet unavailable-in-Europe downloadable PS1 games.
... what happened to charging the music industry's Big Four for cartel activities, or the movie industry over the DVD regions dividing the market into convenient zones (also cartel-like), despite WTO goals of free markets?
Oh, that's right. They paid off the politicans. Is the lobster to your taste, Mr. Hatch?
1) Take an Intel-based Mac from Apple.
2) Install Windows or Linux on it
3) Install virtualization software
4) Create a virtual machine
5) Install MacOSX in this virtual machine
I think the point was: No matter the subject, Microsoft-hate is the modus operandi for /.
Researcher: We have developed a cure for cancer!
Slashdot: God I hate Microsoft.