Most of that improvement can be attributed to much more mundane advances in sanitation and agriculture, mechanization replacing humans in dangerous jobs, food quality regulations, and refrigeration.
All of these advances have had a huge impact on life span (many of these thanks to patents), but not so much when you look at the past 50 years. There's no question that medical advances have led to people living several years longer. For instance, someone at 65 years of age could expect to live 14.3 more years on average in 1960, but now expects to live a full 4 years longer (18.4 as of 2003). Look at treatments for diabetes, AIDS, malaria, various cancers, Hepatitis B, heart problems.... not to mention numerous important cardiovascular drugs, antihistamines, NSIADs, improved screening, MRIs, etc.
It would be a much more significant contribution if more people could actually afford it.
All things being equal, sure there would be some improvement. However, most of this country does have some form of insurance and can afford most of the drugs they need. The trouble is that there isn't a magic bullet to allow medical technology firms to collect sufficient revenue (to cover their costs & provide sufficient profits to encourage investment) while allowing everyone painless access to all drugs under the sun.
Also, you should note that in the context of patents, most drugs only have ~10 years of patent protection after they get approval (not to mention that there is often a long ramp up period for sales)... In other words, the only drugs companies enjoy real market powers on are significantly less than 10 years old on average. It doesn't seem terribly consistent to me to argue that drug companies are costing lives by being greedy with their patented meds while at the same time suggesting that not much has happened in the past 10 years.
If you want to limit your criticisms to AIDS and other 3rd world diseases, well that is a slightly different complaint...(and has other issues involved, like their ability to even pay for the drugs at their marginal cost)
And you are a staunch supporter of intellectual property rights, no matter how extreme those rights get?
No. But I think the legal balance with respect to patents is generally pretty good today given fundamental realities of our legal system. This does not mean that I would support "more", e.g., doubling term length. What I do take issue with today is the patent office's lack of qualified examiners in the relevant fields and the lack of resources (too little time to spend reviewing patents). Could certain things be optimized? Yes, but not the kinds of things that slashdot likes to bring up.
The DMCA?
On balance, yes.
UCITA?
All but 2 states have rejected this law and I don't think it is a particularly significant problem on in reality.
Even you would agree some patents, such as Amazon's "one click", go too far.
Yes. However, many of these alleged "bad" patents are widely misunderstood by the slashdot crowd because most never bother to read the patents themselves and even those that theoretically do have zero ability to read the patent, so they walk away without comprehension. They limit themselves to reading the abstract or, worse, the title alone, which both sound very broad as a general rule, and they do not appreciate that the substance of the patent is in the claims. Without a qualified reading the claims of the patent together (and this takes lots of time to do well) you have no idea of how broad the patent is or whether or not prior-art exists. If I were to quiz most slashdot readers on what might violate the infamous one-click patent (never mind what would actually stand up in court) or what might qualify as prior-art, I assure you that most would fail miserably. In short, they see far more "downsides" and "abuses" of such patents than what is actually there (and, of course, few have ever really had to concern themselves with entrepreneurship involving technical innovation so they have no chance to guage the pros and cons empirically).
I have an advantage on most slashdot readers in that I've worked with patents personally and professionally (not to mention the fact that my wife is an atty and a member of the patent bar). In lieu of doing an in-depth analysis for you....here is what Tim O'Reilly, an early and loud critic of the "one-click" patent had to say about it after he had did some research:
"I also do want to point out that I've learned a lot about patents in the past ten days. In talking with Jeff about the details of his patents and why he thought they were original, I was struck by how different his sense of what he had "invented" was from the sense I got by reading the patents themselves, and from commentary I'd read on the net (including my own:-).
In the case of 1-click, the patent claims look to a casual reader as if they broadly cover the use of saved state to make it possible to conduct an e-commerce transaction without forcing the user to identify him or herself. In fact, they cover only the single "point and click" aspect, such that the sale is made without any confirmation step. In short, this patent is far more narrow than it might at first appear. And in fact, Amazon did an incredibly successful job of making 1-click an easy-to-use feature. Most examples of "prior art" that readers sent in to me had various confirmation steps, and were not "1-click" approaches with anything of the slickness that Amazon brought to the table. One e-commerce pioneer claimed that he'd tried a 1-click type of approach several years before Amazon, but had given it up because customers found it confusing. He admitted that the way Amazon implemented it was a significant advance over the way he'd done it. As Jeff has claimed, in hindsight it looks easier to get this right than it did at the time."
If the collisions from the aircraft and the subsequent fire aren't enough to remove almost all the strength from the entire structure of the building, that means something else did. And for that, the most reasonable, plausible explanation I've ever heard is some sort of manual intervention. In other words, controlled demolition.
I lost a long-time friend in the WTC and I had family right next door to it at the time who could very well have been killed... The idea of an elaborate conspiracy is preposterous and is based on psuedo-science at best. I question your motives. However, if you truly want to understand, then why don't you read this: http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.ht m
Done properly, no, he can't. A well secured system would be nearly impossible for an attacker to circumvent in a minute with the resources he would have available. And it would not be too difficult to make the machine ring an alarm if someone tried.
Please describe your "well secured system".
Who will design the alarm? Who will validate the design? Who will ensure that the "alarm" is manufactured to specification? Who will verify the integrity of the alarm throughout the entire cycle? Will anyone be able to shut it off for any reason? How?
Who will write the code? Who will validate the code and check it for flaws? Who will ensure that validated code is accurately compiled, i.e., validate the compiler and/or the binary itself? How will they do this? Who will ensure that said binary is what is actually installed on each machine? How will each and every machine be monitored and audited for any signs of code tampering? Who will be responsible for this? What tools will they use and how do we know they tools are proper?
Who will ensure that the specified CPU contains no relevant bugs or backdoor instructions? How will all CPUs be examined? How will you ensure that they're not switched at some point by some party?
Will the application run on an OS or use any outside code libraries? Who will validate them and ensure their integrity? How?
Who will check the memory/storage unit? How will you ensure that the memory cannot be directly altered by someone before, during, or after voting? How will you read votes off each machine and ensure that all votes are recieved by the counting system (and not by some intermediate party with a fake machine)?
How will the physical integrity of each voting machine be maintained from factory to the time the votes are tabulated?
It is not realistically possible to design an electronic voting system today (baring some fundamental leaps in computer science and engineering) where we can have high confidence that a small group of people could not alter a HUGE number of votes. Even if such a system could be engineered, it would be extremely costly to secure and the average person would have to rely on the assurances of the system designers/maintainers (not just on their integrity, but on their profiency, thoroughness, etc... to a much greater degree than with paper-based voting).
Not if you let people see what their vote was read as after it read.
This violates a fundamental principle of our voting system: that no one can see how you voted. If we created such a system, then people can buy/blackmail/threaten people to vote their way with greater certainty.
I disagree. 1% is still almost 300,000 people by todays figures. Add to that the various academic institutions and liberty groups that would be keen on auditing the code, plus the opposition party(s) who also have more than a passing interest in keeping things fair, AND probably a large number of foreign people who would also have access, I think you have enough eyeballs to ensure the system is sufficiently audited.
I think you miss the point on two counts. First, the point is that the vast majority of voters have no way to even begin to vet the system. That those in the know amounts to several hundred thousand people (probably not even that high) is not necessarily going to assuage to concerns of the majority of the country. The damage to the voting system is real even if it is entirely imagined. It may "work" for a few elections, but all it takes on one highly contested election and some rumors to gain traction...
Second, there is a lot more involved than just vetting several thousand lines of code in some file. You have to validate EVERYTHING to really provide assurances when the stakes are this high -- most importantly you must be able ensure that this holds true out in the FIELD and at EVERY POINT ALONG THE WAY. How can 300K gurus, or whatever #s you wish to pull out of, assure me that the program that your group vetted is the same that is running on my district (one of several hundred thousand machines)? That the compiler hasn't been altered? That the hash program isn't trojanized? How can you assure me that someone hasn't changed the CPU and/or memory you think you verified? That there is no method of directly altering the memory? That there isn't a manufacturing defect with any of those parts? That someone can't change those votes AFTER the votes have been recieved?....It's a hugely complex system to even begin to think about providing the level of needed security.
Electric Voting is a bad idea. It presents very limited benefits and HUGE potential risks (not to mention huge COSTS, if security measures are to be deployed meaningfully).
I'm an open source supporter but not a zealot. I don't have any problem with the existence of closed-source commercial software and I believe it has a right to exist. That being said, there's simply no place for closed-source software in our voting process. Voting is the foundation of our political system, and we can't settle for any ambiguity in its implementation. It's not as if vote counting is a technically demanding job, and there's no argument for keeping secret the process by which it's done.
Ambiguity for who? These e-voting systems are going to be ambiguous for the at least 90% of the population regardless of whether or not the alleged source code is open source. The average voter does not have sufficient understanding of programming to understand the code (never mind truly check for bugs, holes, etc). Even those programmers that might think they are able follow the code, may not appreciate the nuances of the underlying compiler, OS, CPU, memory, I/O ports, etc. Even if you are the extremely rare voter that has the capacity and the time to understand the whole thing, you have no way of verifying that the code that you reviewed previously is actually the what is running on the machine you're about to use, nor do you know that someone can't just tap into the voting machine's memory directly to alter votes en masse or that the CPU doesn't have some quirky bug (or backdoor) embedded in it. In short, you might spend a billion dollars to create a highly secure system up-front, but maintaining the security once they are deployed and out-in-the-field becomes a MUCH more complicated proposition given their huge complexity (relative to mechanical systems) and the fundamental nature of computers (hard to tell if a bit has been altered).
Frankly, electronic voting is a completely unnecessary and near-pointless risk. What is the point? All so we can, what, get our votes tallied a little quicker and eliminate those statistically rare mechanical hiccups that invalidate votes? It's not worth it. There are mechnical measures that would reduce the few problems we have experienced along these lines. They would cost far less and the majority of the population can intuitively appreciate the lack of ambiguity in them. Most importantly, the risk of any kind of massive vote rigging scheme being successfully pulled off would be far far lower (and is with most of our existing paper and punch card voting systems).
Lastly, if we have to go with an electric voting system, I'm unconvinced that open source code publication is really inherently more secure than a well vetted closed source system. I know, I know the mantra "security by obscurity does not work" (flame me if you want), but in this context, I think security + obscurity can work to the advantage of the overall security of the system. Any (fairly) verifiable voting system must reduce complexity as much as is reasonably possible, so the idea that we need a billion people to verify the code seems a little weak to me. Also, with the code and the system architecture being readily accessible to any hacker, it would be that much simpler for someone of moderate skill to know how to construct a trojanized version, modify the data directly, evade counter-measures/detection, etc. Sure, someone might disassemble and reverse-engineer the binary (assuming they gain access), but it takes a hell of a lot of work and that person would be at a substantial disadvantage...
Ok, Smite me now Oh-Gods-of-Slashdot, I dare challenge the open source = always more secure theology...
I generally agree with you wrt to mechanical vs digital voting. That said, I think you're making a bit much of the difference between paper and punch cards... the biggest advantage with paper ballots, imho, is that they can be scanned by a computer more accurately and verified by hand if needed.
Punched cards? An attacker can shove a ten cent piece of steel through the hole for the preferred candidate and invalidate a hundred ballots for the opponent in a few seconds.
I suspect the act of punching a bunch of ballots at once is a tougher than might imagine. Try stacking 100 pieces of paper some time and punching a tool through it cleanly. Even if they're divided up into tens, this is going to take you a whole lot more time and is apt to be error prone. Any sane voting system provides lockboxes and multiple people supervising, so it would require a significant conspiracy to pull this off... especially on a sufficiently wide scale as to sway virtually any Federal election. Furthermore, the act of invalidating a bunch of cards at one or several locations is likely to set off alarm bells especially if those ballots are invalidated in a way such as you describe (with less than clean punches, where perhaps some are off-center, show similar patterns, etc).
Exactly the mentality at least 52% of Americans have.
HAHA - 52% of Americans voted for Bush therefore 52% of Americans hate the environment and an completely uneducated, GET IT? HEHHAHAO
And you claim the Bush voters are the ignorant ones? Did it ever occur to you that intelligent and caring people might have different opinions on the matter? I voted for Bush. I care about the environment. I am far from ignorant.
I, for one, do not believe that Kerry or any of the Democrats had the political will to do anything really significant to address global warming. What's more, I do not trust them to do it in a way that is least damaging to the economy. Talking vaguely about hybrid cars and other such pie in the sky technologies won't get us very far. How about really getting behind nuclear energy? Expressing strong support for carbon trading? Supporting significant gasoline taxes (OK, neither party supports this one) instead of trying to push them down when they go up slightly? How about acknowledging that a couple more hybrid cars on the road isn't going to make a real big difference? How about admitting that most Americans overwhelming purchased faster/heavier/less-efficient cars despite cars getting 2x the MPG being offered by industry (instead of just blaming it on the car companies)? How about admitting that maybe there are bigger issues at stake than just the nominal proposals made by the Dems on the environment? How about acknowledging that the science on global warming is far from well understood (especially several years before)? How about admitting that dramatic cuts in carbon output in the short term will require a dramatic changes in lifestyle for most people in the West and that it could potentially have devastating effects on the world economy?
Nope, it was someone impersonating me in a series of highly improbable events... like your pirate buddies. In all honesty though, I was curious if you made it a habit to spout off sophomoric tirades on the dangers of IP or if this was just an isolated incident.
Was worded as if the prosecution has done all their homework
There is no prosecution -- this is a civil case. The only primary parties here are the plantiff, i.e., RIAA, and defendants.
eg "plaintiffs have verified no wireless router was in use". How?? If a 2nd hub was hooked up to the router to the outside, very hard for an outsider to tell whether that hub is even present, let alone wired or wireless. I would say it's impossible, but I know there are all kinds of security tools that can do amazing things, possibly including mapping out network topologies even across a NAT barrier. So it might be possible. Still, plaintiffs should produce their so-called proof.
Besides the fact that this is a highly improbable explanation, the plaintiffs are conducting discovery. They don't need 100% ironclad proof, only a reasonable expectation that it might lead to evidence relevant to the case. If the courts used this standard, very few civil cases would ever be successful.
And there's "a forensic inspection would allow one to see...whether a file sharing program was downloaded or installed" Maybe, maybe not. A reinstall of Windows, and a couple rounds of filling up the hard drive with other material, as can happen with normal use, and they won't be able to see any such thing.
This "maybe not" has little bearing on the legal proceedings. Though, for the sake of argument, if Windows was simply re-installed on top of the existing partition, it is unlikely to wipe out all the additional files that Kazaa leaves behind plus all the music files found unless the user specifically set about removing said files (and they would have to know where to look). Even then, unless they scrubbed the hard drive afterwards, it is very likely that such efforts would show in a forensic examination (especially given the fact that they described a relatively empty HD).
And then "The inspection... revealed that it was not the computer that was attached to the defendent's Internet account." How can they know that? If they think a MAC address proves it, it's pretty easy to move a network card from one machine to another.
The expert stated that a) the HD of the computer was not the same HD as the one used to share data and b) the HD showed evidence that it configured to connect directly to the internet without a router (registries showing public IP).
As to the assertion that the defendent could not explain the use of the name "jrlindor", oh yes it can be explained. People within range of a wireless router would be neighbors, who might know the defendents. And, perhaps their name and address is listed in the phone book? If so, wouldn't be hard for a war driver to run down that info. If some hacker hijacked the computer, using a vulnerability in Windows, would be trivial to figure out the owner's name if he's put it anywhere on there, such as in Office's defaults, in saved emails, saved Word documents, etc. Probably his name was all over the machine. His name could even have been used as a user ID, in which case one look at the directory C:\Documents and Settings would reveal it.
Even if we assume a wireless existed, despite all the evidence to the contrary, why would someone stealing wireless service from them bother to sign into kazaa with their last name? It one more highly improbable explanation to prevent discovery.
By subpoening the "wrong" hard drive, which turned out to have no evidence of wrongdoing, hasn't the prosecution demonstrated right there that their methods of identifying culprits are unreliable?
Uh no. They can establish with a high degree of reliability that someone using their cable account was committing piracy on Kazaa. They can't identify the specific computer based on their Internet records (WAN IP), but they did narrow it down enough... now that the mother's computer has been ruled out it stands to reason that the son (or his children) used their own computer.
yes, did any of those people pay royalties to Fraunhofer, the owner, or rather, the thief, of the mp3 format? No? Then they're thieves. If instead they'd ripped the music to Ogg Vorbis, they'd be legally fine.
Since some of these laws are way too easy to violate, and violations do no easily measured harm (the theoretic harm the RIAA gets so worked up about is just that-- theoretic), while the laws themselves do plenty of harm, those laws ought to be nullified.
Great, so you won't mind if I steal your social security number then, will you? Hey, and while I'm at it, why don't I create Fallinux--I'll fork the latest Linux kernel and make my own binary release and redistribute it with my own additions? After all the harm of these actions are all just "theoretical".
Finally, how does this Dr. Jacobson sleep at night? A university professor, living off taxpayer money, biting the hand that feeds him. I wonder if some action could be started towards getting him dismissed from his university position? Probably has tenure tho. But maybe if he commits perjury, as seems he might, that would do it?
How are pirates feeding professors, pray tell? I am a tax payer and I don't object.
What's worse is that if the RIAA does the equivalent of planting evidence, finding them out will be much harder than catching this hypothetical cop, because as everyone has been pointing out, logs and such like computer evidence have no security whatsoever, nor even much reliability. So even if they haven't been tampered with in any number of undetectable ways, they might not be accurate. With the cop planting evidence, there's a much better chance it'll be found out.
So what you're saying is any "hacking" crime, online pedophilia, etc should never be prosecuted because the logs "might not be accurate"? Besides, this is a civil case and it is all about the preponderance of the evidence. It's fairly unlikely that this professor would plant evidence and it is very likely that someone on that family did pirate some stuff on Kazaa... This also ignores the fact that the plantiffs can and did subpoena other family members involved for additional evidence (and that many of them were evasive about it).
The onus is on you since you want to change the status quo. The status quo you speak of has not been the status quo for long.
This thread is about patents in general. You never limited your criticisms to software patents.
Europe has never allowed it, tho some are lobbying hard to change the status quo there.
Wrong. Various member states have accepted software patents as early as the 60s (Switzerland, Belgium, France, Austria, Netherlands, etc)--before the US. The EU has not had a uniform law permitting as wide an array of software patents as we do in the US, but many of the member states have allowed software patents (e.g., UK). Furthermore, the European parliment has in-fact allowed "computer-implemented" inventions for some time and they have accepted tens of thousands of such patents. The essential and simplified difference is that it usually does not allow pure algorithms to be patented unless they are tied to some kind of real-world application (esp. devices). Many, if not most, US software patents can be granted under this rule.
Btw, you should also note that mp3 was patented in Germany in 1989.
And just look at history. Patents are relatively recent. There's plenty of innovation by civilizations that never had any concept of intellectual property. For instance the Roman Empire borrowed greatly from Greek civilization, as well as came up with plenty on their own. In engineering, Rome was considered quite advanced.
The concept of free speech and religious freedom is relatively recent too and, hey, you know the French and others managed to overthrow their monarchs despite it... so everything was fine, right? I'm not denying that the Romans, the Greeks, and others did some mighty impressive things, but these innovations were accomplished over many many years. As a rate of innovation it was truly not that impressive. They did not have a large percentage of their people devoted to R&D, most of them weren't even literate,... of course they weretotally pre-industrial, pre-Guttenburg, etc so the comparison is silly in the first place.
And the experiment has been a resounding failure.
Resounding eh? Then where is your proof? Give me at least a well reasoned argument.
Eisenhower warned against the "military industrial complex", now we have a blood sucking lawyer driven intellectual property industry.
The same claim could be made for anti-discrimination laws and tort law. While I would agree that there are blatant and very real abuses of the law, I would also say that no law worth keeping brings just good things. Abuses and hassles are inevitable.
You don't think all those ridiculous EULAs just grow on trees, do you?
I don't stay up all night long worrying about EULAs. Their power, however, can be and generally is derived exclusively from copyrights, not patents by and large, and copyrights have been around for hundreds of years.
A company without a patent portfolio is like an unarmed civilian in a war zone.
There is some truth to this (for companies of a certain size in certain industries), but like I said, no law is entirely good. As much as I hate having to worry about litigous companies, I would hate more to lose the ability to file reasonable patents. What's more, many of these problems pertain to many more obvious and overly-broad patents being allowed through these days that would have been rejected a few decades before. There are largely administrative issues pertaining to the patent office and they can be fixed; an excess of bad patents is not a necessary part of the patent system (although I will say that at least 60% of the abuses slashdot and others point out
No, the world is bigger than that. True, the Linux kernel depends upon Linus Torvalds, Andrew Morton, and a few other individuals. But there is also FreeBSD, which depends on another few individuals. And there's Hurd, which depends (or depended) on yet another group. Then there's Tannenbaum and his Minix OS, and hundreds of other operating systems. None of these people have a monopoly on genius.
Most of the work on these projects are performed by a small number of people and these people are not working in anonymity. Each person is enjoying a heavy amount of credit in their respective communities for their marginal efforts (and often for the secondary effects, e.g, Tannenbaum's connection with Linux). The presence of genius in particular projects, or lack thereof, says nothing about the necessity of individualism.
Same goes for science. If Watson and Crick hadn't discovered DNA when they did, one of several other groups very likely would have in just a few more months. And maybe some of these others did discover DNA first (Rosalind Franklin comes to mind), but Watson and Crick got all the credit, wealth and fame, and the Nobel Prize.
Franklin did not toil anonymously either and she is widely acknowledged as having played a role in the discovery. She was published several times in Nature and other places for her efforts; it is an over-simplification to say that she was "scooped". The Nobel prize could not have been shared with her as she died several years before the prize was awarded (Nobel rules forbid posthumous awards) and because the award was for their work on nucleic acids (not just for the structure of DNA).
Potential giants are all around. If only some of them choose to move towards a particular goal, that is not to say that there aren't a hundred times as many who could've reached those same goals if they chose.
This may be true in some cases. However, it is not feasible to make "What-If" awards. Devalueing scientists' and inventors' marginal contributions would be a far greater violence to progress. The majority of scientists' may live and breath by credit alone (which, in turn, benefits their careers), but the driving force behind commercial innovation is economic reward, which cannot be shared broadly without destroying the entire system.
I appreciate you pointing out the "giants" part of that quote. Maybe Newton should've said, "standing on the shoulders of a giant society".
But he did not say that. In fact, to the contrary, if you read the history on Newton's utterance of this quote (which, btw, variations of it existed long before) you would see that he was essentially crediting Descartes (a particular notable individual) and insulting one of his contemporaries that was trying to take credit for his work (Hooke, who was known to be ill/hunched over) "What Des-Cartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants"
When corporations spread the wealth patents generate amongst the people who worked on a great project, then patents are working to the benefit of society.
No, patents are to the benefit of society when scientists and innovators innovate and in
This is not usually the case on high traction surfaces especially with average drivers. In most scenarios they deliver shorter stops with better control.
There's an implicit assumption here that each advance comes about primarily through the efforts of solitary geniuses, working away in isolation and maybe driving themselves crazy. We have quotes about "standing on the shoulders of giants", and "there is no I in team", but that doesn't stop people from figuring who's the best. This is reinforced by naming theorems, methods, and so on after one or two people, such as Darwinism, and stories such as Frankenstein.
Implicit in your argument is the assumption that the individual is virtually intiguishable from the teaming masses, that they have no marginal value greater than any other part, that they're merely a product of their time and their socio-economic class. You might rephrase your argument to say... "standing on the body parts of a million midgets" instead of "standing of the shoulders of GIANTS".... What a crock of sh*t.
Sure, all great inventors' and scientists' work derive great benefit from the work performed by others. However, these insights aren't derived by some amorphous blob of people going about their daily lives. Innovation comes, by and large, from a handful of exceptional people who do exceptional things. Even small innovation which can scarely be attributed to a specific individual still comes from individuals, who went out on a limb of some sort or other, and most of these individuals don't do it for selfless reasons: it almost always benefits their livelyhood. Without the system which values the individual there would be virtually no collective science to draw from and there would be no new innovation, incremental or otherwise. Even the ever-so-precious OSS system that Slashdot loves to worship depends largely on the work of a few critical individuals, who perform the vast majority of the work, that are either directly employed to do said work or gain great individual notarity for their efforts.
Patents, which always have a few or just one person fingered as the inventor, encourage scooping and secrecy.
The patent may name just several inventors, but the products those patents support support the efforts of many people that are PAID to contribute and/or are RECOGNIZED in various substantive ways for their efforts. Drug development requires MANY people to do A LOT of work. However, all of this work occurs in the framework of the recognition the unique contributions of each person. People that contribute a lot tend to receive better pay than they might otherwise; those that don't get less pay and tend to get weeded out...They don't just get a "check plus" for participation.
I have heard that Asian societies especially are much less individualistic, and we of the West are a bit blind to this aspect of our own societies.
And they developed how many new technologies in the past 500 years outside the framework of named research and patents??? Damn few. It is no coincidence that they've only been making substantial contributions in recent history with the emergence of IP and western-style academic publications.
And I think this individualism in extreme, where patent systems have pushed it, is detrimental to science.
Prove it. Why is it that so much gain has been had in places which recognize the value of intellectual property as they've recognized its value? The theory and the empirical experience argues against your assertion.
We're all forced to play the game, if we want to get anywhere. We all have to be the backstabbing thief, have to keep secrets, keep those competitive advantages. That's what patents have done. We don't have to like it, and many of us researchers and inventors do try to give out credit, as with the customary list of references and citations at the end of every research paper. But surely there are better ways. Change the rules. Play a different game.
You must be 12 years old. The world is populated by people who cant afford anything. The global distribution of wealth is so unequal, 10 percent of the population (mainly here in the "west") owns 85 percent of the worlds assets. So for pretty much 90 percent of the global population, any kind of advanced treatment is inaccessible. Moreover, even the very rich can be financially devastated through a medical issue in the family. I know a texan family myself - oil money - that were rendered broke due to the son of the family suffering a heart attack. He was brough back from the brink of death, massive braindamage, required an insane amount of money to keep alive, and when the money ran out, he died.
And yet somehow we (and most of the world) have been living longer and healthier lives. Most of this country *IS* that 10% and enjoys the benefits of the medical technology that has been developed.
Big Pharma is seriously fucked up - everywhere you look, there is evidence that they are not interested in curing disease, only treating symptoms - you make more money that way. everywhere you look, there is evidence they are not interested in making people better, only in making more money.
What is this evidence, pray tell? There is much evidence to the contrary and solid economic and financial theory to show the flaw in this kind of lazy thinking.
Cancer, for example, is really not an interesting marketplace for big pharma, because most cancers are rather "personalised" - i.e. successful treatment depends on the genetic makeup of the sick individual, so pharma doesn't really look into that, they prefer blanket chemo because that has a higher return on investment.
WTF? Even a perfect charity can't design and obtain approval today for a drug that is only applicable to one person or a very narrow range of people. It's simply not economically viable -- it would make the cost of even the most expensive prescriptions look downright dirt cheap. Even if it were feasible with some huge technological leaps, it's pretty much impossible to obtain regulatory approval with this kind of heavily tailored drug (it requires a COMPLETELY different method of testing).
Even if one accepts your belief that most of their energies are spent on useless medicines (e.g., "penis pills"), why is the onus on them, any more than it is on YOU, to develop "cures"? If they renamed themselves to "impotency drug companies" or simply entered, say, the software business would they be less culpable? Why do you believe they're mututally exclusive? Why can't for-profit companies do things for-profit while, at the same time, allowing do-gooders to do good in markets that they simply don't operate in? And, how, pray-tell, do the drug companies have so much power over the life of your friend if they're merely "treating symptoms"?
you are a dick, and you really have no idea what you are talking about.
I am not the person you are responding to. However, I do know of what I speak. I worked for years in the medical devices business; I'm an entrepreneur; I've worked closely with the drug industry; and I'm involved with the business of actually funding bio-tech startups (and, fyi, "they" actually are interested in cures)...to name a few of my qualifications. Your pie in the sky ideas do not match with the scientific, regulatory, and basic financial hurdles involved with developing drugs.
Advertising for prescription drugs used to be illegal.
I find it ironic that the slashdot crowd, which reflexively profers that information itself is never bad and that consumers should be allowed to do what they want, should be protected from information itself.
After that was "deregulated", it grew to twice the cost of drug R&D.
Wrong.
First, you are blatantly distorting and conflating SG&A costs (Sales, General, and Admistrative) costs as direct-to-consumer advertizing (or "marketing" as the anti-pharma crowd calls it). The SG&A number is basically all costs that aren't those that are directly used to build a particular product or design it. The SG&A figure you cite includes a lot of corporate overhead (e.g., IT, Finance, Legal, Sales, Product Mgmt, etc). What's more, even those costs that you might think of as sales or marketing are largely not consumer advertising. Some examples of things which fall into this category: free drug samples, sales reps visiting doctors, ads in medical journals (for docs), etc. All of these were allowed well before the law regarding direct-to-consumer marketing was changed and they comprise a majority (~90%) of the marketing costs (which itself is an even smaller part of SG&A).
Second, you would be wrong to believe that SG&A costs have skyrocketed relative to R&D costs. They have remained relatively stable since the early 1990s (the relevant laws and guidance regarding DTC changed in the last 90s). For instance, Pfizer's SG&A was 39.4% of revenue in 1991 and is now 33.1% (2005). R&D, for comparison's sake, was 10% in 1990 and 14.5% now. This actually represents a trend in the opposite direction -- far from the picture you paint.
Until the 1980s, drugs developed at Government expense went into the public domain immediately. Now, pharmaceutical companies can buy rights to government-developed drugs
Please. Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Universities and research institutes do not develop and have not developed drugs (with very few exceptions). It takes a lot more study, refinement, manufacturing know-host, clinical testing, (even, *gasp*, marketing) etc to bring a drug to market. Prior to the Bay-Dohl act, there was no significant financial incentive for anyone to spend the money and resources necessary to develop a viable drug. Sure, there were a good number of unrefined ideas sitting around in research papers, but they never were ready (as a general rule) to be used on actual patients. Lastly, there were several laws decades before the Bay-Dohl act that allowed transfer of patents to industry; the problem was that they were ambiguous and rarely taken advantage of.
FTA:|The chief executive of Novartis, a drug company with a history of social responsibility, said "We have no model which would [meet] the need for new drugs in a sustainable way... You can't expect for-profit organizations to do this on a large scale."| I haven't looked at the cost to bring a drug to market (from discovery to preclinical work through to NDA filing) recently, but last I saw it was in the region of $800 million US. Most big pharmas are tweaking the winning compounds they already have rather than pushing riskier candidates through the later stages towards approval. If you can play with the other enantiomer of your already approved product rather than mess with a new molecule, you do that first, assuming you own the rights:) Most of the big pharmas do R&D and spend enormous sums, but the biotechs and biopharmas still do the work on the less favored sons, hoping for a wedding or at least an invite, but as the man from Novartis indicates, it's a business fraught with peril, not many compounds make it through the regulatory authorities like the FDA, EMEA, etc. Pfizer and Lilly and the others do their due diligence and throw seed money at the little guys along with venture capitalists, but sustainability is a big ask when the percentage of compounds receiving approval is as low as it is.
I'm sorry but you are distorting the words of the Novartis CEO whether or not you know it. Please read the article. He was specifically referring to the production of cheap drugs for the 3rd world. More specifically, Novartis was pointing out that government and NGO organizations had failed to meet their commitment to purchase enough of Novartis' anti-maleria medication such that it could be produced at economically sustainable levels (Novartis had to subsidize production by 10m/year -- ignoring R&D costs). If anything, this illustrates some of the pitfalls of these centrally planned & non-capitalistic models of drug development (while they may be a necessary evil for drugs which only have 3rd world markets, like malaria,... it does not mean that they are actually effective)
As for your blathering on line-extensions and what not... your reasoning and facts are flawed. Yes, drug companies prefer easy money to hard money, all things being equal (like everyone). However, your belief is based on the flawed premises. First, line-extensions are low-hanging fruit. They are very cheap to develop and market when compared to finding, developing, and proving the clinical efficacy of wholly new drugs. Second, the revenues of line-extensions are much smaller (like 75% smaller) and they tend to only last a limited amount of time. Many consumers know that their original compound is often as good, don't have the funds to pay extra, and HMOs/insurers/socialized medicine and other entities put a lot of pricing pressure on them (if they pay for the extension at all). Third, the line-extensions really only make financial sense with more popular drugs. Fourth, they tend to earn positive returns in a fairly short amount of time. In other words, your belief that drug companies dump most of their available funds into isn't even logical given the facts. They devote a small percentage of their available capital to line-extensions. However, while this may divert some capital in the short-run, it generates profitable positive returns in a few short years which are inevitably plowed back into serious R&D.
* * * *
Novartis chief in warning on cheap drugs By Andrew Jack in London
Published: September 29 2006 22:04 | Last updated: September 29 2006 22:04
Novartis, the Swiss pharmaceutical group, warned on Friday there was no economically sustainable system that could provide low-cost innovative medicines to the developing world.
Daniel Vasella, the company's chief executive, unve
Either we get ignorance of these interesting articles or ignorance of the submitter's interest in the story?. I believe that's what's called a "false dilemma". All I would ask for is disclosure. A paid WSJ submitter is up front about it, why not PreacherTom and Business Week? Would that be better? Aye.
Because I suspect that "his" submissions would not receive fair treatment. In other words, the editors would be far more likely to judge the submission based on something that has nothing to do with content of the submission.
Why does PreacherTom's employment matter to the story? It has no bearing on the story. Why not just judge each submited article on the quality of the content submitted? If you truly believe in full-disclosure, then the remaining ~99% of submitters should also be required that they disclose their politics, political party, GPL-stance, etc. Most of the articles on this site come from a very leftist/anti-establishment point of view and yet I rarely ever see meaningful disclosure; this despite the fact that it certainly impacts the balance of what is being submitted.
Anyway, back to the name. How about "shill"?
This at least connotes that some kind of swindle is occurring. I, for one, do not believe that is a fair characterization. I believe that this service is somewhat valuable to slashdot and that it has far bigger fish to fry. Slashdot's attitude seems to be that there is no greater problem than someone having a commercial incentive to contribute honest journalism (capitalism, *gasp*), but that republishing outright lies and distortions from a political party and failing to correct them is just fine as long as it agrees with their personal biases.
So are you saying "No, not really: there is no such thing as astroturfing" or "No, not really: I know PreacherTom, and he's neither a paid shill or a figment of the imagination of a Business Week marketeer"? Because if he has a financial/business interest in the story he's submitting, that should be disclosed. As you say, an interesting story is still interesting even if hyped by a "crier", disclosure notwithstanding, right?
Whatever you want to call it it is very different than what is popularly recognized as "astroturfing", i.e., creating a false impression of public sentiment (e.g., false product reviews, fake consumer action groups, etc). There is no real distortion of the truth going on here besides the fact that he isn't disclosing the alleged fact that he has a commercial interest in the magazine he links to. There are far greater problems on slashdot (such as outright reporting of biased facts, horrible ignorance, etc). For instance, just 2 days ago: read this
What's more, the argument can be made (and probably should) that PreacherTom and those like him are doing Slashdot a favor by pointing out articles that are more interesting, more relevant, and more informative to the slashdot readers than what they themselves are able to contribute. Would it be better if slashdot readers simply remained ignorant of everything that businessweek et. al publish? I think not. Is there some fundamental problem with someone making money for performing a service that benefits the readers? Nay.
Just two days ago, the editors published this so-called "article" which claimed that the GAO did a study and "found" that patents are harming innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. Not only was the article they linked to a fairly blatant re-republication of Democratic party spin, but the editors clearly did not even read the actual GAO report. You can see my comments that pointed it out largely fell on deaf ears (Hint: the GAO said nothing like what they claimed).
This is hardly the first time I've seen slashdot do stuff like this. Given a choice between publishing what amounts of outright lies and distortions and a user (be it a lone person or even an organization) submitting articles that favor one particular news organization (particularly not an unreasonable one)... I'd certainly pick the latter. I frankly fail to see the problem with this if there is not a question of accuracy. If slashdot cannot find a more newsworthy article to publish through their usual means, why shouldn't a pro-active news organization help them and profit in the meantime?
How do other countries do it? I often read that the US is falling well behind most other developed nations in rolling out "cheap", high-speed access on a broader scale.
Don't have time to comment on the other stuff right now, but I submit that those countries with significantly higher/better broadband penetration tend to have MUCH greater population density (e.g., Japan, most of Europe, etc) and/or the various governments subsidize it heavily (which I tend to be opposed to).
"Support" model seems to be a misnomer
on
Red Hat Sales Surge
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It seems to me that, contrary to the vision espoused by RMS/GNU/etc, most of these companies which are based around-GPL products truly aren't making their business by selling "support", i.e., actual people delivering support by phone, in person, or by other electric mediums. "Support" instead has devolved into the fairly convoluted idea of delivering a stream of updates while the other GPL/Linux companies really depend on selling closed-source licenses to their GPLd products (e.g., MySQL). I'm glad Redhat is succeeding thus far, but it seems to me a fairly unsustainable business model given the realities....
It seems to me that is only a matter of time until one or several happen:
A) RMS/GNU will complain that Redhat is violating the spirit of the GPL by not providing 100% equal access to free-loaders and then change the GPL
B) One or several competing corporate entities will successfully be able to offer the same updates (so-called "support") by free-loading off Redhat's efforts...
C) Redhat will be forced to include some proprietary software that will truly seperate them from the free-loaders...
Either way, the system seems unlikely to generate the kind of revenues needed to pay for massive improvements to the open source components of the linux platform over the long term... without some pretty fundamental shifts at least.
There are other options than using tax-payer money to provide incentives to companies for rural broadband rollouts.
Such as? Most government incentives usually result in a significant loss of government revenue which ultimately means more taxes (however indirect). Once in a blue moon there is a cash-flow neutral idea (or maybe even positive) that can actually make a real difference... They are unusual though, especially with an effort such this which is very capital intensive and is unlikely to even generate positive cash flows in the future (ignoring the rollout costs).
If you have a particlar idea, then please share it.
I just wish they'd work on getting those of us in the rural areas some decent broadband options.
No offense, but if you want broadband this much you should move to a more-densely populated area where it can be provided to you in an economically viable fashion... or stay-put and wait till technology that allows this becomes available for deployment. Either way, why should tax-payers pay for your choices?
My generation is probably going to be the only generation in human history to live its life mostly free of the mortal fear of dying from bacterial infection. There are virtually no new antibiotics in development.
I happen to have first hand knowledge that contradicts this. I am involved with a company that may very well revolutionize antibiotic treatment -- however it uses a completely novel method to do this. Because it is completely novel and very promising, the drug companies that have been approached have been falling over themselves to get involved.
...is that profits are much lower for drug products, such as vaccines and antibiotics that are extremely effective and "cure" in a small number of doses, than for drugs products that merely help, or palliate.
The invisible hand of the marketplace skews development toward drugs that must be taken forever, such as blood pressure medication, or cholesterol lowering medication, or anti-depressives and so forth. These drugs are godsends if you need them, but the fact remains that drugs that actually save lives, with a small number of doses, are less profitable than drugs that merely improve or prolong them, and need to be taken continuously and repeatedly forever.
It is this warped incentive that needs to be fixed.
While the market for anti-biotics may not be hot today, it is not because "cures mean less money". This is just factually wrong. It is because antibiotics are still very expensive to bring to market and the market for any new antibiotic is not large enough to warrant investment. In other words, the new antibiotic will typically only be used as a last resort. What's more, when it is used enough the market for it can vanish because bacteria often become resistant. In other words, your typical antibiotic in today's market (where most drugs work for most people most of the time) is a fairly unattractive market in and of itself-- even when you ignore alternative uses for those funds.
The reason why really good "cures" aren't very common is because they're very hard to come by and the scientific understanding of the various mechanisms so that we might pro-actively go about finding them is VERY limited. I dare you to show me one published research paper that promised a lot that didn't ultimately fizzle out... The truth is that the drug industry is a highly competitive market. Very few drug companies have such commanding market shares in specific markets they would fail to gain by developing and marketing a cure. What's more, prices are flexible and markets can often be expanded dramatically if a particular cure (or treatment) can be shown to be vastly superior.
Slashdot Mirror
All things being equal, sure there would be some improvement. However, most of this country does have some form of insurance and can afford most of the drugs they need. The trouble is that there isn't a magic bullet to allow medical technology firms to collect sufficient revenue (to cover their costs & provide sufficient profits to encourage investment) while allowing everyone painless access to all drugs under the sun.
Also, you should note that in the context of patents, most drugs only have ~10 years of patent protection after they get approval (not to mention that there is often a long ramp up period for sales)... In other words, the only drugs companies enjoy real market powers on are significantly less than 10 years old on average. It doesn't seem terribly consistent to me to argue that drug companies are costing lives by being greedy with their patented meds while at the same time suggesting that not much has happened in the past 10 years.
If you want to limit your criticisms to AIDS and other 3rd world diseases, well that is a slightly different complaint...(and has other issues involved, like their ability to even pay for the drugs at their marginal cost)
No. But I think the legal balance with respect to patents is generally pretty good today given fundamental realities of our legal system. This does not mean that I would support "more", e.g., doubling term length. What I do take issue with today is the patent office's lack of qualified examiners in the relevant fields and the lack of resources (too little time to spend reviewing patents). Could certain things be optimized? Yes, but not the kinds of things that slashdot likes to bring up.
On balance, yes.
All but 2 states have rejected this law and I don't think it is a particularly significant problem on in reality.
Yes. However, many of these alleged "bad" patents are widely misunderstood by the slashdot crowd because most never bother to read the patents themselves and even those that theoretically do have zero ability to read the patent, so they walk away without comprehension. They limit themselves to reading the abstract or, worse, the title alone, which both sound very broad as a general rule, and they do not appreciate that the substance of the patent is in the claims. Without a qualified reading the claims of the patent together (and this takes lots of time to do well) you have no idea of how broad the patent is or whether or not prior-art exists. If I were to quiz most slashdot readers on what might violate the infamous one-click patent (never mind what would actually stand up in court) or what might qualify as prior-art, I assure you that most would fail miserably. In short, they see far more "downsides" and "abuses" of such patents than what is actually there (and, of course, few have ever really had to concern themselves with entrepreneurship involving technical innovation so they have no chance to guage the pros and cons empirically).
:-).
I have an advantage on most slashdot readers in that I've worked with patents personally and professionally (not to mention the fact that my wife is an atty and a member of the patent bar). In lieu of doing an in-depth analysis for you....here is what Tim O'Reilly, an early and loud critic of the "one-click" patent had to say about it after he had did some research:
"I also do want to point out that I've learned a lot about patents in the past ten days. In talking with Jeff about the details of his patents and why he thought they were original, I was struck by how different his sense of what he had "invented" was from the sense I got by reading the patents themselves, and from commentary I'd read on the net (including my own
In the case of 1-click, the patent claims look to a casual reader as if they broadly cover the use of saved state to make it possible to conduct an e-commerce transaction without forcing the user to identify him or herself. In fact, they cover only the single "point and click" aspect, such that the sale is made without any confirmation step. In short, this patent is far more narrow than it might at first appear. And in fact, Amazon did an incredibly successful job of making 1-click an easy-to-use feature. Most examples of "prior art" that readers sent in to me had various confirmation steps, and were not "1-click" approaches with anything of the slickness that Amazon brought to the table. One e-commerce pioneer claimed that he'd tried a 1-click type of approach several years before Amazon, but had given it up because customers found it confusing. He admitted that the way Amazon implemented it was a significant advance over the way he'd done it. As Jeff has claimed, in hindsight it looks easier to get this right than it did at the time."
In short:
1) the patent is muc
I lost a long-time friend in the WTC and I had family right next door to it at the time who could very well have been killed... The idea of an elaborate conspiracy is preposterous and is based on psuedo-science at best. I question your motives. However, if you truly want to understand, then why don't you read this: http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.h
Who will design the alarm? Who will validate the design? Who will ensure that the "alarm" is manufactured to specification? Who will verify the integrity of the alarm throughout the entire cycle? Will anyone be able to shut it off for any reason? How?
Who will write the code? Who will validate the code and check it for flaws? Who will ensure that validated code is accurately compiled, i.e., validate the compiler and/or the binary itself? How will they do this? Who will ensure that said binary is what is actually installed on each machine? How will each and every machine be monitored and audited for any signs of code tampering? Who will be responsible for this? What tools will they use and how do we know they tools are proper?
Who will ensure that the specified CPU contains no relevant bugs or backdoor instructions? How will all CPUs be examined? How will you ensure that they're not switched at some point by some party?
Will the application run on an OS or use any outside code libraries? Who will validate them and ensure their integrity? How?
Who will check the memory/storage unit? How will you ensure that the memory cannot be directly altered by someone before, during, or after voting? How will you read votes off each machine and ensure that all votes are recieved by the counting system (and not by some intermediate party with a fake machine)?
How will the physical integrity of each voting machine be maintained from factory to the time the votes are tabulated?
It is not realistically possible to design an electronic voting system today (baring some fundamental leaps in computer science and engineering) where we can have high confidence that a small group of people could not alter a HUGE number of votes. Even if such a system could be engineered, it would be extremely costly to secure and the average person would have to rely on the assurances of the system designers/maintainers (not just on their integrity, but on their profiency, thoroughness, etc... to a much greater degree than with paper-based voting).
This violates a fundamental principle of our voting system: that no one can see how you voted. If we created such a system, then people can buy/blackmail/threaten people to vote their way with greater certainty.
Second, there is a lot more involved than just vetting several thousand lines of code in some file. You have to validate EVERYTHING to really provide assurances when the stakes are this high -- most importantly you must be able ensure that this holds true out in the FIELD and at EVERY POINT ALONG THE WAY. How can 300K gurus, or whatever #s you wish to pull out of, assure me that the program that your group vetted is the same that is running on my district (one of several hundred thousand machines)? That the compiler hasn't been altered? That the hash program isn't trojanized? How can you assure me that someone hasn't changed the CPU and/or memory you think you verified? That there is no method of directly altering the memory? That there isn't a manufacturing defect with any of those parts? That someone can't change those votes AFTER the votes have been recieved?....It's a hugely complex system to even begin to think about providing the level of needed security.
Electric Voting is a bad idea. It presents very limited benefits and HUGE potential risks (not to mention huge COSTS, if security measures are to be deployed meaningfully).
Frankly, electronic voting is a completely unnecessary and near-pointless risk. What is the point? All so we can, what, get our votes tallied a little quicker and eliminate those statistically rare mechanical hiccups that invalidate votes? It's not worth it. There are mechnical measures that would reduce the few problems we have experienced along these lines. They would cost far less and the majority of the population can intuitively appreciate the lack of ambiguity in them. Most importantly, the risk of any kind of massive vote rigging scheme being successfully pulled off would be far far lower (and is with most of our existing paper and punch card voting systems).
Lastly, if we have to go with an electric voting system, I'm unconvinced that open source code publication is really inherently more secure than a well vetted closed source system. I know, I know the mantra "security by obscurity does not work" (flame me if you want), but in this context, I think security + obscurity can work to the advantage of the overall security of the system. Any (fairly) verifiable voting system must reduce complexity as much as is reasonably possible, so the idea that we need a billion people to verify the code seems a little weak to me. Also, with the code and the system architecture being readily accessible to any hacker, it would be that much simpler for someone of moderate skill to know how to construct a trojanized version, modify the data directly, evade counter-measures/detection, etc. Sure, someone might disassemble and reverse-engineer the binary (assuming they gain access), but it takes a hell of a lot of work and that person would be at a substantial disadvantage...
Ok, Smite me now Oh-Gods-of-Slashdot, I dare challenge the open source = always more secure theology...
I suspect the act of punching a bunch of ballots at once is a tougher than might imagine. Try stacking 100 pieces of paper some time and punching a tool through it cleanly. Even if they're divided up into tens, this is going to take you a whole lot more time and is apt to be error prone. Any sane voting system provides lockboxes and multiple people supervising, so it would require a significant conspiracy to pull this off... especially on a sufficiently wide scale as to sway virtually any Federal election. Furthermore, the act of invalidating a bunch of cards at one or several locations is likely to set off alarm bells especially if those ballots are invalidated in a way such as you describe (with less than clean punches, where perhaps some are off-center, show similar patterns, etc).
And you claim the Bush voters are the ignorant ones? Did it ever occur to you that intelligent and caring people might have different opinions on the matter? I voted for Bush. I care about the environment. I am far from ignorant.
I, for one, do not believe that Kerry or any of the Democrats had the political will to do anything really significant to address global warming. What's more, I do not trust them to do it in a way that is least damaging to the economy. Talking vaguely about hybrid cars and other such pie in the sky technologies won't get us very far. How about really getting behind nuclear energy? Expressing strong support for carbon trading? Supporting significant gasoline taxes (OK, neither party supports this one) instead of trying to push them down when they go up slightly? How about acknowledging that a couple more hybrid cars on the road isn't going to make a real big difference? How about admitting that most Americans overwhelming purchased faster/heavier/less-efficient cars despite cars getting 2x the MPG being offered by industry (instead of just blaming it on the car companies)? How about admitting that maybe there are bigger issues at stake than just the nominal proposals made by the Dems on the environment? How about acknowledging that the science on global warming is far from well understood (especially several years before)? How about admitting that dramatic cuts in carbon output in the short term will require a dramatic changes in lifestyle for most people in the West and that it could potentially have devastating effects on the world economy?
Nope, it was someone impersonating me in a series of highly improbable events... like your pirate buddies. In all honesty though, I was curious if you made it a habit to spout off sophomoric tirades on the dangers of IP or if this was just an isolated incident.
There is no prosecution -- this is a civil case. The only primary parties here are the plantiff, i.e., RIAA, and defendants.
Besides the fact that this is a highly improbable explanation, the plaintiffs are conducting discovery. They don't need 100% ironclad proof, only a reasonable expectation that it might lead to evidence relevant to the case. If the courts used this standard, very few civil cases would ever be successful.
This "maybe not" has little bearing on the legal proceedings. Though, for the sake of argument, if Windows was simply re-installed on top of the existing partition, it is unlikely to wipe out all the additional files that Kazaa leaves behind plus all the music files found unless the user specifically set about removing said files (and they would have to know where to look). Even then, unless they scrubbed the hard drive afterwards, it is very likely that such efforts would show in a forensic examination (especially given the fact that they described a relatively empty HD).
The expert stated that a) the HD of the computer was not the same HD as the one used to share data and b) the HD showed evidence that it configured to connect directly to the internet without a router (registries showing public IP).
Even if we assume a wireless existed, despite all the evidence to the contrary, why would someone stealing wireless service from them bother to sign into kazaa with their last name? It one more highly improbable explanation to prevent discovery.
Read this document: http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp?filename=umg
The end-user is fairly well insulated from any liability and they certainly would not be found to be willfully violating (the same cannot be said of someone that pirates copyrighted material). The designer of encoder/decode software, however, is certainly responsible and these fees cover the customer's right to use the product.
iTunes, Musicmatch, WinAmp, WMPlayer, Real Audio, and many many others have paid licensing fees and thus most mp3 users have absolutely nothing to worry about in this regard
Great, so you won't mind if I steal your social security number then, will you? Hey, and while I'm at it, why don't I create Fallinux--I'll fork the latest Linux kernel and make my own binary release and redistribute it with my own additions? After all the harm of these actions are all just "theoretical".
How are pirates feeding professors, pray tell? I am a tax payer and I don't object.
So what you're saying is any "hacking" crime, online pedophilia, etc should never be prosecuted because the logs "might not be accurate"? Besides, this is a civil case and it is all about the preponderance of the evidence. It's fairly unlikely that this professor would plant evidence and it is very likely that someone on that family did pirate some stuff on Kazaa... This also ignores the fact that the plantiffs can and did subpoena other family members involved for additional evidence (and that many of them were evasive about it).
This thread is about patents in general. You never limited your criticisms to software patents.
Wrong. Various member states have accepted software patents as early as the 60s (Switzerland, Belgium, France, Austria, Netherlands, etc)--before the US. The EU has not had a uniform law permitting as wide an array of software patents as we do in the US, but many of the member states have allowed software patents (e.g., UK). Furthermore, the European parliment has in-fact allowed "computer-implemented" inventions for some time and they have accepted tens of thousands of such patents. The essential and simplified difference is that it usually does not allow pure algorithms to be patented unless they are tied to some kind of real-world application (esp. devices). Many, if not most, US software patents can be granted under this rule.
Btw, you should also note that mp3 was patented in Germany in 1989.
The concept of free speech and religious freedom is relatively recent too and, hey, you know the French and others managed to overthrow their monarchs despite it... so everything was fine, right? I'm not denying that the Romans, the Greeks, and others did some mighty impressive things, but these innovations were accomplished over many many years. As a rate of innovation it was truly not that impressive. They did not have a large percentage of their people devoted to R&D, most of them weren't even literate,... of course they weretotally pre-industrial, pre-Guttenburg, etc so the comparison is silly in the first place.
Resounding eh? Then where is your proof? Give me at least a well reasoned argument.
The same claim could be made for anti-discrimination laws and tort law. While I would agree that there are blatant and very real abuses of the law, I would also say that no law worth keeping brings just good things. Abuses and hassles are inevitable.
I don't stay up all night long worrying about EULAs. Their power, however, can be and generally is derived exclusively from copyrights, not patents by and large, and copyrights have been around for hundreds of years.
There is some truth to this (for companies of a certain size in certain industries), but like I said, no law is entirely good. As much as I hate having to worry about litigous companies, I would hate more to lose the ability to file reasonable patents. What's more, many of these problems pertain to many more obvious and overly-broad patents being allowed through these days that would have been rejected a few decades before. There are largely administrative issues pertaining to the patent office and they can be fixed; an excess of bad patents is not a necessary part of the patent system (although I will say that at least 60% of the abuses slashdot and others point out
Most of the work on these projects are performed by a small number of people and these people are not working in anonymity. Each person is enjoying a heavy amount of credit in their respective communities for their marginal efforts (and often for the secondary effects, e.g, Tannenbaum's connection with Linux). The presence of genius in particular projects, or lack thereof, says nothing about the necessity of individualism.
2002 Study: The median number of developers in the 100 most popular SourceForge projects was 4 and the mode was 1
Roughly 97% of the Linux kernel contributions are made by 100 developers -- most of whom are paid for their work and/or recieve great acclaim for their efforts. What's more, a little less than 50% of the contributions come from a group of 20 people
Franklin did not toil anonymously either and she is widely acknowledged as having played a role in the discovery. She was published several times in Nature and other places for her efforts; it is an over-simplification to say that she was "scooped". The Nobel prize could not have been shared with her as she died several years before the prize was awarded (Nobel rules forbid posthumous awards) and because the award was for their work on nucleic acids (not just for the structure of DNA).
This may be true in some cases. However, it is not feasible to make "What-If" awards. Devalueing scientists' and inventors' marginal contributions would be a far greater violence to progress. The majority of scientists' may live and breath by credit alone (which, in turn, benefits their careers), but the driving force behind commercial innovation is economic reward, which cannot be shared broadly without destroying the entire system.
But he did not say that. In fact, to the contrary, if you read the history on Newton's utterance of this quote (which, btw, variations of it existed long before) you would see that he was essentially crediting Descartes (a particular notable individual) and insulting one of his contemporaries that was trying to take credit for his work (Hooke, who was known to be ill/hunched over) "What Des-Cartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants"
No, patents are to the benefit of society when scientists and innovators innovate and in
Implicit in your argument is the assumption that the individual is virtually intiguishable from the teaming masses, that they have no marginal value greater than any other part, that they're merely a product of their time and their socio-economic class. You might rephrase your argument to say... "standing on the body parts of a million midgets" instead of "standing of the shoulders of GIANTS".... What a crock of sh*t.
Sure, all great inventors' and scientists' work derive great benefit from the work performed by others. However, these insights aren't derived by some amorphous blob of people going about their daily lives. Innovation comes, by and large, from a handful of exceptional people who do exceptional things. Even small innovation which can scarely be attributed to a specific individual still comes from individuals, who went out on a limb of some sort or other, and most of these individuals don't do it for selfless reasons: it almost always benefits their livelyhood. Without the system which values the individual there would be virtually no collective science to draw from and there would be no new innovation, incremental or otherwise. Even the ever-so-precious OSS system that Slashdot loves to worship depends largely on the work of a few critical individuals, who perform the vast majority of the work, that are either directly employed to do said work or gain great individual notarity for their efforts.
The patent may name just several inventors, but the products those patents support support the efforts of many people that are PAID to contribute and/or are RECOGNIZED in various substantive ways for their efforts. Drug development requires MANY people to do A LOT of work. However, all of this work occurs in the framework of the recognition the unique contributions of each person. People that contribute a lot tend to receive better pay than they might otherwise; those that don't get less pay and tend to get weeded out...They don't just get a "check plus" for participation.
And they developed how many new technologies in the past 500 years outside the framework of named research and patents??? Damn few. It is no coincidence that they've only been making substantial contributions in recent history with the emergence of IP and western-style academic publications.
Prove it. Why is it that so much gain has been had in places which recognize the value of intellectual property as they've recognized its value? The theory and the empirical experience argues against your assertion.
Oh nonsense. This
What is this evidence, pray tell? There is much evidence to the contrary and solid economic and financial theory to show the flaw in this kind of lazy thinking.
WTF? Even a perfect charity can't design and obtain approval today for a drug that is only applicable to one person or a very narrow range of people. It's simply not economically viable -- it would make the cost of even the most expensive prescriptions look downright dirt cheap. Even if it were feasible with some huge technological leaps, it's pretty much impossible to obtain regulatory approval with this kind of heavily tailored drug (it requires a COMPLETELY different method of testing).
Even if one accepts your belief that most of their energies are spent on useless medicines (e.g., "penis pills"), why is the onus on them, any more than it is on YOU, to develop "cures"? If they renamed themselves to "impotency drug companies" or simply entered, say, the software business would they be less culpable? Why do you believe they're mututally exclusive? Why can't for-profit companies do things for-profit while, at the same time, allowing do-gooders to do good in markets that they simply don't operate in? And, how, pray-tell, do the drug companies have so much power over the life of your friend if they're merely "treating symptoms"?
I am not the person you are responding to. However, I do know of what I speak. I worked for years in the medical devices business; I'm an entrepreneur; I've worked closely with the drug industry; and I'm involved with the business of actually funding bio-tech startups (and, fyi, "they" actually are interested in cures)...to name a few of my qualifications. Your pie in the sky ideas do not match with the scientific, regulatory, and basic financial hurdles involved with developing drugs.
Wrong.
First, you are blatantly distorting and conflating SG&A costs (Sales, General, and Admistrative) costs as direct-to-consumer advertizing (or "marketing" as the anti-pharma crowd calls it). The SG&A number is basically all costs that aren't those that are directly used to build a particular product or design it. The SG&A figure you cite includes a lot of corporate overhead (e.g., IT, Finance, Legal, Sales, Product Mgmt, etc). What's more, even those costs that you might think of as sales or marketing are largely not consumer advertising. Some examples of things which fall into this category: free drug samples, sales reps visiting doctors, ads in medical journals (for docs), etc. All of these were allowed well before the law regarding direct-to-consumer marketing was changed and they comprise a majority (~90%) of the marketing costs (which itself is an even smaller part of SG&A).
Second, you would be wrong to believe that SG&A costs have skyrocketed relative to R&D costs. They have remained relatively stable since the early 1990s (the relevant laws and guidance regarding DTC changed in the last 90s). For instance, Pfizer's SG&A was 39.4% of revenue in 1991 and is now 33.1% (2005). R&D, for comparison's sake, was 10% in 1990 and 14.5% now. This actually represents a trend in the opposite direction -- far from the picture you paint.
Please. Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Universities and research institutes do not develop and have not developed drugs (with very few exceptions). It takes a lot more study, refinement, manufacturing know-host, clinical testing, (even, *gasp*, marketing) etc to bring a drug to market. Prior to the Bay-Dohl act, there was no significant financial incentive for anyone to spend the money and resources necessary to develop a viable drug. Sure, there were a good number of unrefined ideas sitting around in research papers, but they never were ready (as a general rule) to be used on actual patients. Lastly, there were several laws decades before the Bay-Dohl act that allowed transfer of patents to industry; the problem was that they were ambiguous and rarely taken advantage of.
I'm sorry but you are distorting the words of the Novartis CEO whether or not you know it. Please read the article. He was specifically referring to the production of cheap drugs for the 3rd world. More specifically, Novartis was pointing out that government and NGO organizations had failed to meet their commitment to purchase enough of Novartis' anti-maleria medication such that it could be produced at economically sustainable levels (Novartis had to subsidize production by 10m/year -- ignoring R&D costs). If anything, this illustrates some of the pitfalls of these centrally planned & non-capitalistic models of drug development (while they may be a necessary evil for drugs which only have 3rd world markets, like malaria,... it does not mean that they are actually effective)
As for your blathering on line-extensions and what not... your reasoning and facts are flawed. Yes, drug companies prefer easy money to hard money, all things being equal (like everyone). However, your belief is based on the flawed premises. First, line-extensions are low-hanging fruit. They are very cheap to develop and market when compared to finding, developing, and proving the clinical efficacy of wholly new drugs. Second, the revenues of line-extensions are much smaller (like 75% smaller) and they tend to only last a limited amount of time. Many consumers know that their original compound is often as good, don't have the funds to pay extra, and HMOs/insurers/socialized medicine and other entities put a lot of pricing pressure on them (if they pay for the extension at all). Third, the line-extensions really only make financial sense with more popular drugs. Fourth, they tend to earn positive returns in a fairly short amount of time. In other words, your belief that drug companies dump most of their available funds into isn't even logical given the facts. They devote a small percentage of their available capital to line-extensions. However, while this may divert some capital in the short-run, it generates profitable positive returns in a few short years which are inevitably plowed back into serious R&D.
* * * *
Novartis chief in warning on cheap drugs
By Andrew Jack in London
Published: September 29 2006 22:04 | Last updated: September 29 2006 22:04
Novartis, the Swiss pharmaceutical group, warned on Friday there was no economically sustainable system that could provide low-cost innovative medicines to the developing world.
Daniel Vasella, the company's chief executive, unve
Why does PreacherTom's employment matter to the story? It has no bearing on the story. Why not just judge each submited article on the quality of the content submitted? If you truly believe in full-disclosure, then the remaining ~99% of submitters should also be required that they disclose their politics, political party, GPL-stance, etc. Most of the articles on this site come from a very leftist/anti-establishment point of view and yet I rarely ever see meaningful disclosure; this despite the fact that it certainly impacts the balance of what is being submitted.
This at least connotes that some kind of swindle is occurring. I, for one, do not believe that is a fair characterization. I believe that this service is somewhat valuable to slashdot and that it has far bigger fish to fry. Slashdot's attitude seems to be that there is no greater problem than someone having a commercial incentive to contribute honest journalism (capitalism, *gasp*), but that republishing outright lies and distortions from a political party and failing to correct them is just fine as long as it agrees with their personal biases.
What's more, the argument can be made (and probably should) that PreacherTom and those like him are doing Slashdot a favor by pointing out articles that are more interesting, more relevant, and more informative to the slashdot readers than what they themselves are able to contribute. Would it be better if slashdot readers simply remained ignorant of everything that businessweek et. al publish? I think not. Is there some fundamental problem with someone making money for performing a service that benefits the readers? Nay.
Just two days ago, the editors published this so-called "article" which claimed that the GAO did a study and "found" that patents are harming innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. Not only was the article they linked to a fairly blatant re-republication of Democratic party spin, but the editors clearly did not even read the actual GAO report. You can see my comments that pointed it out largely fell on deaf ears (Hint: the GAO said nothing like what they claimed).
This is hardly the first time I've seen slashdot do stuff like this. Given a choice between publishing what amounts of outright lies and distortions and a user (be it a lone person or even an organization) submitting articles that favor one particular news organization (particularly not an unreasonable one)... I'd certainly pick the latter. I frankly fail to see the problem with this if there is not a question of accuracy. If slashdot cannot find a more newsworthy article to publish through their usual means, why shouldn't a pro-active news organization help them and profit in the meantime?
It seems to me that, contrary to the vision espoused by RMS/GNU/etc, most of these companies which are based around-GPL products truly aren't making their business by selling "support", i.e., actual people delivering support by phone, in person, or by other electric mediums. "Support" instead has devolved into the fairly convoluted idea of delivering a stream of updates while the other GPL/Linux companies really depend on selling closed-source licenses to their GPLd products (e.g., MySQL). I'm glad Redhat is succeeding thus far, but it seems to me a fairly unsustainable business model given the realities....
It seems to me that is only a matter of time until one or several happen:
A) RMS/GNU will complain that Redhat is violating the spirit of the GPL by not providing 100% equal access to free-loaders and then change the GPL
B) One or several competing corporate entities will successfully be able to offer the same updates (so-called "support") by free-loading off Redhat's efforts...
C) Redhat will be forced to include some proprietary software that will truly seperate them from the free-loaders...
Either way, the system seems unlikely to generate the kind of revenues needed to pay for massive improvements to the open source components of the linux platform over the long term... without some pretty fundamental shifts at least.
If you have a particlar idea, then please share it.
While the market for anti-biotics may not be hot today, it is not because "cures mean less money". This is just factually wrong. It is because antibiotics are still very expensive to bring to market and the market for any new antibiotic is not large enough to warrant investment. In other words, the new antibiotic will typically only be used as a last resort. What's more, when it is used enough the market for it can vanish because bacteria often become resistant. In other words, your typical antibiotic in today's market (where most drugs work for most people most of the time) is a fairly unattractive market in and of itself-- even when you ignore alternative uses for those funds.
The reason why really good "cures" aren't very common is because they're very hard to come by and the scientific understanding of the various mechanisms so that we might pro-actively go about finding them is VERY limited. I dare you to show me one published research paper that promised a lot that didn't ultimately fizzle out... The truth is that the drug industry is a highly competitive market. Very few drug companies have such commanding market shares in specific markets they would fail to gain by developing and marketing a cure. What's more, prices are flexible and markets can often be expanded dramatically if a particular cure (or treatment) can be shown to be vastly superior.