I've said it before, I'll say it again. There is no such thing as universeS. If there are multiple universes, then they're all part of the same Universe. This is the equivalent to thinking galaxies as different universes.
If there is evidence of there being multiple universes and they interact with eachother, than they simply make up one Universe and we have our terminology wrong. And if there are multiple universes that do not interact with eachother, than there's no scientific foundation for it to begin with which makes it a load of bs. You can apply this to any other article that discusses "universes" or even "parallel dimensions".
Nonsense. The mere notion that the software exists and that it links with GPL libraries is enough for someone to request the code. Legally (assuming the GPL can stand the test) they'd be required to provide it. For reasons of national security they may decide to ignore the GPL, but thats only because its a catch-22. I highly suggest that all government contractors who develop sensative software not link any libraries that are released under the GPL. In this case, its a sleazy trap to force developers to release their source code.
Where in the GPL License does it say you need to release it only to those you distribute it to? It doesn't. It states that you need to distribute it to whomever requests it.
WTF is the definition of outside parties? Companies can write Top Secret code that is distributed to other companies and even sold. If you link it in to your code, you are required to release the source code. Just because people may not know it exists does not mean you can hold the source proprietary.
A common assumption about FOSS licenses such as GPL is that their transitive user rights means they cannot be used with non-FOSS (e.g., government or proprietary) software. However, this is generally not the case; such mixing can generally be done in various ways. For example, even GPL with its strong protection of transitive user rights provides a number of mechanisms to allow such mixing (Figure 1). Microsoft 5 provides a good example of an innovative use of one such mixing strategy in their Windows Services for Unix (SFU)6 product.
This is an incredibly misleading statement. Nobody has ever assumed that GPL software cannot be used on the same system as proprietary software. This ignores the fact that you cannot link a GPL library into your proprietary code. For a company that writes top secret material, this is somewhat concerning that they would ignore this.
There have been rumors milling around that during WWII the US military was playing around with under-wing/fuselage lighting to camoflage bombers during daytime. It was considered useless at the time, but recently (I think the 80's?) there was a project that combined lighting with photoreceptors (CCD's maybe) where they were able to make a drone virtually invisible above a certain altitude. Rumor is it was classified after a few tests. Anyone heard anything like this?
Perhaps in an extremely ideal world where this would even be remotely feasible. Unfortuntely enforcing this is impossible since every single drug ever manufactured is based off of statistics, not fact. Identifying an individual as definitively surviving some disease as a direct result of a drug is impossible. You can only make assumptions.
Part of Nature? Yes, it is. But what they have discovered is a gene that when located in a person's body will identify whether or not they'll develop cancer. This is a BIG HUGE DEAL. The years that went into this development are at a cost. The company needed to employ multiple PhD's and support staff and sequence mostlikely millions of genes to isolate this one. That all comes at a cost. If we want companies to FIND things like this, we need to provide them with an INCENTIVE!
Drug companies invest on average $800M in EACH drug they produce. This is NOT including any losses from FDA denials or lawsuits they may incur. It takes massive effort to produce these things and it all costs money. The Open Source model will never be able to be applied en masse to this type of research without heavy monitary donations. It takes equipment, people, resources. If we all relied on donated time and goods then we'd all be waiting in lines for toilet paper each week b/c thats essentially communism in essence.
So what if a University made the discovery? Last I checked, Universities were synonymous with Corporations. This is one of the reasons why Princeton's endowment is so huge that they could essentially run the school without charging tuition and still not lose money.
First off, Stallman gives other peoples shit away for free. He consults and charges enormous fees last time I checked.
Secondly, you're not a geneticist b/c you do not have a PhD in Molecular Biology because:
a) you're not smart enough
b) you're too lazy
c) you have no interest in Molecular Biology
In any case, you have no right to insist that someone offer up their life's work for free when they're busting their balls just to pay their student loans.
If Humans were perfect, they'd work for free. Humans are not perfect; they're inherently lazy.
Tutoring kids is an honorable task. It may even keep them off the streets when they get older. It also requires absolutely ZERO financial assistance from you.
Are YOU going to develop cancer treatments for free? My bet is you're too lazy to and not get paid. There are bigger priorities when playing russian roullette, like Child's education, food on the table, rent, car payments, etc. All requiring an income. It doesn't matter WHO you know who died of HIV, Cancer, Ebola, etc, because if there is no monetary incentive to work towards a cure, it simply will not happen at a sustainable pace. There's no argument here, people will only work for money... not whether it saves someone's life or not. Its hypocritical to say otherwise, unless your ass is volunteering your time and effort 40 hours/week, 52 wks/yr to the needy, but I bet you're not!!!... And if you are, then you're either extremely loaded and given your share to society and can sustain yourself or you're a leach of society.
On the contrary, I never said that this guy was NOT potentially sleazy for what he's charging. I merely stated that we do NOT KNOW the cost of the research involved. Average drug costs $800M to develop... who knows how much went into finding the significance of this gene. Biotech is nowhere near cheap, so we really do not know if this person(s) is taking advantage of those poor oppressed Canadians. We also do NOT know that public funding even touched the research on this. We also do NOT know whether this person contributed to the public funding. What we DO know is that this guy needs to make a living and needs to cover the costs of the developments. This is Capitalism and it works for a reason. If we kicked this guy in the balls by not letting him make a profit in the past, then you'd be pissed when you came down with prostate cancer and had no way of predicting it because you removed his motivation and drive to make a buck. It is inherently common sense.
Note: When I refer to this person, you can substitute any company/organization in the industry.
Also, if the HGP put restrictions on how Pfizer et. al. could USE the information, they'd opt to NOT USE IT which defeats the entire purpose of pooling the information together!
You also need to keep in mind that these companies benefitting from it are LARGE donars to projects like this. They're doing way more good than bad which is the way we want it.
Negative. The Human Genome Project was formed for the sake of SHARING the information to MAKE discoveries FASTER. So they charge a butt-load now, but the patent is only good for a few years, after that its useless. You still do NOT know how much money was SPENT on finding this particular gene. You also need to cover all the failed attempts as well! Call it greed, call it whatever you want, but these people need to make money. If they don't, then the gene that causes stupidity will never be found and we'll ALL be screwed.
It wouldn't stop turning. It would just turn much slower, simply because the people who made these discoveries would not have the incentive to do so.
Creating Linux and discovering that a particular gene suggests cancer are two completely different pieces of work. Genetic discoveries require massive amounts of brainpower, equipment and fundamentall, money that the OSS model would never be able to provide.
The world is driven by money, no matter how much it hurts you. People simply will not invest money for research unless there is a RETURN. People will not WORK unless they are paid money. There is no RETURN on a dollar without WORK. Therefore, if you do not receive money for a genetic discover to cover all the failed attempts you've made in the past 10 years then you simply will not get a RETURN on your dollar spent. People do not work for free. I could sit here and write hours worth of code for free to solve peoples problems, but who is then going to pay for my sandwich????
Last time I checked, the majority of nobel prize winners were receiving their reward 20+ years after their work and at the ripe age of 70+. And if you think that winning the nobel prize will cover the costs of all the biological research in the world, then you are an extremely clueless person.
No, they are patenting the technique of looking for that gene for the sake of identifying a future cancer victim. The technique of isolating a particular gene is a totally different story. They are not patenting the gene, but rather the process of looking for that gene to determine risk. Its a process more than it is a physical thing.
Yes the royalty is excessive and somewhat sleazy (or appears to be), but we do not know how much money went into this guys research which is the fundamental issue here. He could be taking people for a ride, of course.
I don't think people understand that there is more to determining the genetic identifier for a disease than just simply saying its gene AGATTACAGAGATAGA.... The Human Genome Project simply puts biologists and chemists in the general neighborhood for identifiers. It does not by any means isolate diseases.
They are patenting the technique of testing for cancer by looking for that particular gene. Not patenting the gene itself. The reason why you cannot develop another test for that gene without violating the patent is because patens use extremely high-level vague languages to cover as much scope as possible.
Most of the groundwork for these discoveries are done using your and my public tax money at universities.
Govt grants are one thing. Universities on the other hand have every right to patent what they've funded. Provide me with proof that the majority of these patent applications come from public funds and I'll say you have an argument.
About patents not existing "years ago", that is inherently false. Patents have existed for over 400 years, throughout which the entire industrial revolution took place. Even Galileo patented things
You go out and do R&D on a drug or gene test for some rampant disease, but you do it for free, on your own dollar and your own time. Then lets see what your argument is. I guarentee you'll demand a royalty for your life's work...
If someone makes a million bucks, its usually because they deserve it. This is of course excluding all the Enron corporate corruption issues that are plaguing the economy today. There's nothing better than a self made millionaire because they've produced something and given us all a job.
On the contrary. Who is going to develop new tests for hereditary diseases if the entire world can legitimately test for it without royalties? How will this encourage research? Money drives the world for a reason. Now I admit that $3500 to test for a certain gene is quite steep, but we do not know how much money was put-forth to determine the offending genes.
If anyone could test for these genes without paying royalties, then the guy who made the discovery will not have ANY incentive to do the same in the future! This applies to drug companies as well. Sure we pay steep prices for them, but an enourmous amount of money goes into their development.
Now on another note, the Canadian health system has much worse problems than this patent issue. If my mother/father died of cancer and I knew this test would determine my risk, I'd fork over the $3500. Hell, people pay more money for lasic surgery but bad eyesight will never kill you.
Gulf War unnecessary??? The Saudi's would've been begging us to take out Saddam if we had let him get away with invading Kuwait. Saudi Arabia is Saddam's ultimate target.
Go bury your head in some collegiate causes until you feel like joining the real world.
Slashdot Mirror
I've said it before, I'll say it again. There is no such thing as universeS. If there are multiple universes, then they're all part of the same Universe. This is the equivalent to thinking galaxies as different universes.
If there is evidence of there being multiple universes and they interact with eachother, than they simply make up one Universe and we have our terminology wrong. And if there are multiple universes that do not interact with eachother, than there's no scientific foundation for it to begin with which makes it a load of bs. You can apply this to any other article that discusses "universes" or even "parallel dimensions".
Someone smoking a cigarette raises my insurance premiums however...
Nonsense. The mere notion that the software exists and that it links with GPL libraries is enough for someone to request the code. Legally (assuming the GPL can stand the test) they'd be required to provide it. For reasons of national security they may decide to ignore the GPL, but thats only because its a catch-22. I highly suggest that all government contractors who develop sensative software not link any libraries that are released under the GPL. In this case, its a sleazy trap to force developers to release their source code.
Where in the GPL License does it say you need to release it only to those you distribute it to? It doesn't. It states that you need to distribute it to whomever requests it.
WTF is the definition of outside parties? Companies can write Top Secret code that is distributed to other companies and even sold. If you link it in to your code, you are required to release the source code. Just because people may not know it exists does not mean you can hold the source proprietary.
Don't be such a GIRL!!!
I think he is running from the Man.
A common assumption about FOSS licenses such as GPL is that their transitive user rights
means they cannot be used with non-FOSS (e.g., government or proprietary) software. However,
this is generally not the case; such mixing can generally be done in various ways. For example,
even GPL with its strong protection of transitive user rights provides a number of mechanisms to
allow such mixing (Figure 1). Microsoft 5 provides a good example of an innovative use of one
such mixing strategy in their Windows Services for Unix (SFU)6 product.
This is an incredibly misleading statement. Nobody has ever assumed that GPL software cannot be used on the same system as proprietary software. This ignores the fact that you cannot link a GPL library into your proprietary code. For a company that writes top secret material, this is somewhat concerning that they would ignore this.
I can't see that getting too far... too much distraction. People can't even be trusted to talk and drive at the same time.
There have been rumors milling around that during WWII the US military was playing around with under-wing/fuselage lighting to camoflage bombers during daytime. It was considered useless at the time, but recently (I think the 80's?) there was a project that combined lighting with photoreceptors (CCD's maybe) where they were able to make a drone virtually invisible above a certain altitude. Rumor is it was classified after a few tests. Anyone heard anything like this?
Perhaps in an extremely ideal world where this would even be remotely feasible. Unfortuntely enforcing this is impossible since every single drug ever manufactured is based off of statistics, not fact. Identifying an individual as definitively surviving some disease as a direct result of a drug is impossible. You can only make assumptions.
Part of Nature? Yes, it is. But what they have discovered is a gene that when located in a person's body will identify whether or not they'll develop cancer. This is a BIG HUGE DEAL. The years that went into this development are at a cost. The company needed to employ multiple PhD's and support staff and sequence mostlikely millions of genes to isolate this one. That all comes at a cost. If we want companies to FIND things like this, we need to provide them with an INCENTIVE!
Drug companies invest on average $800M in EACH drug they produce. This is NOT including any losses from FDA denials or lawsuits they may incur. It takes massive effort to produce these things and it all costs money. The Open Source model will never be able to be applied en masse to this type of research without heavy monitary donations. It takes equipment, people, resources. If we all relied on donated time and goods then we'd all be waiting in lines for toilet paper each week b/c thats essentially communism in essence.
So what if a University made the discovery? Last I checked, Universities were synonymous with Corporations. This is one of the reasons why Princeton's endowment is so huge that they could essentially run the school without charging tuition and still not lose money.
First off, Stallman gives other peoples shit away for free. He consults and charges enormous fees last time I checked.
Secondly, you're not a geneticist b/c you do not have a PhD in Molecular Biology because:
a) you're not smart enough
b) you're too lazy
c) you have no interest in Molecular Biology
In any case, you have no right to insist that someone offer up their life's work for free when they're busting their balls just to pay their student loans.
If Humans were perfect, they'd work for free. Humans are not perfect; they're inherently lazy.
Tutoring kids is an honorable task. It may even keep them off the streets when they get older. It also requires absolutely ZERO financial assistance from you.
Are YOU going to develop cancer treatments for free? My bet is you're too lazy to and not get paid. There are bigger priorities when playing russian roullette, like Child's education, food on the table, rent, car payments, etc. All requiring an income. It doesn't matter WHO you know who died of HIV, Cancer, Ebola, etc, because if there is no monetary incentive to work towards a cure, it simply will not happen at a sustainable pace. There's no argument here, people will only work for money... not whether it saves someone's life or not. Its hypocritical to say otherwise, unless your ass is volunteering your time and effort 40 hours/week, 52 wks/yr to the needy, but I bet you're not!!! ... And if you are, then you're either extremely loaded and given your share to society and can sustain yourself or you're a leach of society.
On the contrary, I never said that this guy was NOT potentially sleazy for what he's charging. I merely stated that we do NOT KNOW the cost of the research involved. Average drug costs $800M to develop... who knows how much went into finding the significance of this gene. Biotech is nowhere near cheap, so we really do not know if this person(s) is taking advantage of those poor oppressed Canadians. We also do NOT know that public funding even touched the research on this. We also do NOT know whether this person contributed to the public funding. What we DO know is that this guy needs to make a living and needs to cover the costs of the developments. This is Capitalism and it works for a reason. If we kicked this guy in the balls by not letting him make a profit in the past, then you'd be pissed when you came down with prostate cancer and had no way of predicting it because you removed his motivation and drive to make a buck. It is inherently common sense.
Note: When I refer to this person, you can substitute any company/organization in the industry.
Also, if the HGP put restrictions on how Pfizer et. al. could USE the information, they'd opt to NOT USE IT which defeats the entire purpose of pooling the information together!
You also need to keep in mind that these companies benefitting from it are LARGE donars to projects like this. They're doing way more good than bad which is the way we want it.
Negative. The Human Genome Project was formed for the sake of SHARING the information to MAKE discoveries FASTER. So they charge a butt-load now, but the patent is only good for a few years, after that its useless. You still do NOT know how much money was SPENT on finding this particular gene. You also need to cover all the failed attempts as well! Call it greed, call it whatever you want, but these people need to make money. If they don't, then the gene that causes stupidity will never be found and we'll ALL be screwed.
It wouldn't stop turning. It would just turn much slower, simply because the people who made these discoveries would not have the incentive to do so.
Creating Linux and discovering that a particular gene suggests cancer are two completely different pieces of work. Genetic discoveries require massive amounts of brainpower, equipment and fundamentall, money that the OSS model would never be able to provide.
The world is driven by money, no matter how much it hurts you. People simply will not invest money for research unless there is a RETURN. People will not WORK unless they are paid money. There is no RETURN on a dollar without WORK. Therefore, if you do not receive money for a genetic discover to cover all the failed attempts you've made in the past 10 years then you simply will not get a RETURN on your dollar spent. People do not work for free. I could sit here and write hours worth of code for free to solve peoples problems, but who is then going to pay for my sandwich????
Last time I checked, the majority of nobel prize winners were receiving their reward 20+ years after their work and at the ripe age of 70+.
And if you think that winning the nobel prize will cover the costs of all the biological research in the world, then you are an extremely clueless person.
No, they are patenting the technique of looking for that gene for the sake of identifying a future cancer victim. The technique of isolating a particular gene is a totally different story. They are not patenting the gene, but rather the process of looking for that gene to determine risk. Its a process more than it is a physical thing.
Yes the royalty is excessive and somewhat sleazy (or appears to be), but we do not know how much money went into this guys research which is the fundamental issue here. He could be taking people for a ride, of course.
I don't think people understand that there is more to determining the genetic identifier for a disease than just simply saying its gene AGATTACAGAGATAGA.... The Human Genome Project simply puts biologists and chemists in the general neighborhood for identifiers. It does not by any means isolate diseases.
They are patenting the technique of testing for cancer by looking for that particular gene. Not patenting the gene itself. The reason why you cannot develop another test for that gene without violating the patent is because patens use extremely high-level vague languages to cover as much scope as possible.
Most of the groundwork for these discoveries are done using your and my public tax money at universities.
Govt grants are one thing. Universities on the other hand have every right to patent what they've funded. Provide me with proof that the majority of these patent applications come from public funds and I'll say you have an argument.
About patents not existing "years ago", that is inherently false. Patents have existed for over 400 years, throughout which the entire industrial revolution took place.
Even Galileo patented things
You go out and do R&D on a drug or gene test for some rampant disease, but you do it for free, on your own dollar and your own time. Then lets see what your argument is. I guarentee you'll demand a royalty for your life's work...
If someone makes a million bucks, its usually because they deserve it. This is of course excluding all the Enron corporate corruption issues that are plaguing the economy today. There's nothing better than a self made millionaire because they've produced something and given us all a job.
On the contrary. Who is going to develop new tests for hereditary diseases if the entire world can legitimately test for it without royalties? How will this encourage research? Money drives the world for a reason. Now I admit that $3500 to test for a certain gene is quite steep, but we do not know how much money was put-forth to determine the offending genes.
If anyone could test for these genes without paying royalties, then the guy who made the discovery will not have ANY incentive to do the same in the future! This applies to drug companies as well. Sure we pay steep prices for them, but an enourmous amount of money goes into their development.
Now on another note, the Canadian health system has much worse problems than this patent issue. If my mother/father died of cancer and I knew this test would determine my risk, I'd fork over the $3500. Hell, people pay more money for lasic surgery but bad eyesight will never kill you.
Gulf War unnecessary??? The Saudi's would've been begging us to take out Saddam if we had let him get away with invading Kuwait. Saudi Arabia is Saddam's ultimate target.
Go bury your head in some collegiate causes until you feel like joining the real world.