Well, let's see. How's that cure for the common cold working out? Haven't figured it out yet? How about vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE)? Or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)? Multiple sclerosis? How about herpes? Strokes? Blood clots? Well, we gave you a million dollars, so everything must be cured, right?
Let's say you've spent 10 years doing the research, paying hundreds of scientists, lab workers, assistants, administrators, managers, etc. You're in an expensive lab in an expensive building surrounded by expensive equipment. Every time a researcher finds a compound that has some effect, you're designing and running a unique battery of tests to prove its effectiveness, efficiency, toxicity, etc. Let's say you get lucky and finally discover a compound that works in the lab. You run your animal tests, and now it's time for people trials. How many get sick from the first round of your drug and sue you? How much money did you set aside to deal with other problems that crop up?
Would it surprise you to learn that $100,000,000 is actually well below the industry average for the creation of a new class of drugs these days?
And I just loved the way you disparaged existing, effective drugs as "magic water" and in the exact same sentence tossed out "genetic engineering" as if it's the panacea for everything from splinters to cancer.
OK, so let's trot out the old chestnut of pharmaceutical patents. Let's say I invest $100 million to do the research needed to create a new drug, I create it, and the doses cost only $1 to make. Extrapolating from current demand, I will sell a million doses in the next 20 years while my patent is in force. I set my price at $200 per dose; with the costs being $1 in manufacturing and $100 in repaying my investment, so I'm making $99 in profit per dose. After 20 years, I have $99 million dollars in profit.
If I don't have patent protection, as soon as my drug hits the market someone will do an analysis and make a generic clone of it, selling it for $100 a dose, also settling for a $99 profit margin. They would take over 99% of the business from me, leaving me stuck with the tab for about $99.99 million dollars in research investment.
Would any pharmaceutical company ever do research again? Would anyone be trying to cure anything if they thought it would bankrupt them to do so? My guess is that a few celebrities will be affected by some diseases and create "foundations for the cure" efforts on a one-off basis, but in general, innovation in drugs would die without the patent system.
Of course, this is a simplistic picture, and the real world of shady marketing, fraudulent studies, suppressed side effect reporting, drugs to treat imaginary ailments, and all the other unethical stuff the pharmaceutical companies do certainly complicates things. And there are ongoing costs to the inventors and manufacturers of the drug: lawsuits over side effects, wrongful deaths, etc. But at its core, without the patent system these drugs would never be created.
So if we've established that pharmaceutical patents are necessary to drive research that may benefit us as a whole, then at least part of the patent system should at least be salvaged and not dismantled.
The courts have realized that's a problem, and that's why they started requiring a physical machine or transformation in Bilski. If the claim says "determining, via a testing kit, that the patient has an elevated blood count" or "adding, by an FPU of a computing device," then it's impossible to infringe the patent in your head, and injunctive relief is possible: think all you want, do whatever you want with pen and paper, but don't use a testing kit to measure this chemical or use a computer to determine this value.
The difference would be between "use A computer to determine this value" and "use THIS SPECIFIC computer to determine this value." I think if I embedded my grandiose idea in an FPGA's gateway, I have a tangible thing that produces concrete results, and the machine it is a part of should be patentable.
So there's my grandiose idea, that I should obviously patent: "A method for patenting software. Express the software you want to patent by burning it in an FPGA. You have now produced a concrete, tangible machine that meets the physical machine test of Bilski." Now if only I could burn that into a chip...
I'd kind of like to see the backwaters of Kerala done in street view. There are lots of photos individual people have uploaded to Panoramio, but the street view interface is really nice for navigation between pictures.
Yep. definitely miss that interface. Every cable box I've had sucks rocks in comparison.
Maybe Google will improve it, though. Even if all they did was let me create my own channel ordering and use it as the default when I hit "guide", it would go a long way toward improving the usability.
I don't know, I always wanted to try a can of "BEER" brand beer, like they drank on the Rockford files. The label was fairly consistent with real labels, kind of a take-off midway between Budweiser and Miller. It wasn't plain white or generic, it looked like a product, just not one I was familiar with.
No, your assumption is incorrect for the situation of following slow moving bicycles in traffic. Ever notice how a vehicle's mileage is stated in two ways, city MPG and highway MPG, and that city MPG is always less than highway MPG? All the reasons that make city MPG less efficient are present when the drivers have to follow the bikers.
Every time they have to hit their brakes, they waste the energy that went into accelerating the vehicle. Any revolutions the engine produces while idling (at stop signals, or any time the driver has his foot on the clutch or any time the automatic transmission's torque converter clutch is slipping, etc.) is burning energy without effect. Any other incidental energy that's strictly time-based (lights, cabin fans, air conditioning, radio) is wasted by the extra time its being operated. Having to electrically power the engine cooling fans to run when the car is moving slower than the surrounding air can cool the radiator is an additional waste.
There is an optimally fuel efficient speed for every vehicle. Faster than that speed and air resistance wastes fuel. Slower than that speed and it's burning the extras I just mentioned.
And people have to stop thinking that monetary incentive is enough to justify anything. Far from it research shows.
What research would that be? If a little money will be effective on 15% of the population, a lot of money will be effective on 85% of the population.
It's only at the ends of the bell curve where the amount of money doesn't change the rates people will accept for [taking a bribe|selling out their friends|giving up their privacy].
No, if you're planning to commit a crime, download the app and hack it. Watch the images the server is sending to your phone to say "find a match for this image." If you see your picture, you know there's a secret APB out on you, so it's time to run and hide. If you don't see your picture, maybe you got away with it.
First, this system doesn't let everyone "copy it for free." The photos go only to the Theia server. From there, whichever photos they accept would go to the buyers, perhaps the AP or Reuters.
If I'm an average schmuck taking a photo at a sporting event with my camera phone, what are the chances I'll take a good one? Really low. But maybe I'll get that perfect photo of Big Star cracking a smile after scoring the winning point, as he exits the stadium, or whatever. Being average, I probably won't even recognize it's a valuable photo. Let the system upload it to the editors, they sift through the hundreds snapped at the event, and holy cow, they like mine! Here's $500, thanks for taking the picture. I just made money as a lame but lucky guy with a phone. I never would have considered selling it on my own, as I wouldn't even know where to take it.
Oh, I know. I didn't want to get into the whole lockdown / DRM / AppStore / SIM-locking / kill-flexibility-to-stifle-competition bits. That's the extra crap poured in by a company trying to commit evil. Apple and Motorola are certainly notorious for being the worst, but all of the phone makers are complicit with some set of lowlifes such as the RIAA and Verizon.
I've often thought a cool advertisement for HTC would be to show a picture of the various (legitimate) Cydia repositories, and say "Look at all the apps that Apple decided you couldn't have. Our Android phones won't ever lock you out of your own phone."
As you've noted about battery life and radio performance, they are neither shiny nor black, so they were omitted from Apple's design consideration. Which boggles the mind of us engineers who thinks that a cell phone's very utility is defined by its radio performance and battery life.
Contrast that with the Motorola engineer. They put up a laundry list of functions, like "it's got to have 172 hours of battery life, must have a range of 3 miles, talk time of 360 minutes, store 1200 contacts, and weigh less than 100 grams." They then engineer the product, and relentlessly squeeze it smaller and smaller. They expect the design guys will make the case look attractive with the appropriate color finish and bits of chrome, and that the software guys will figure out a pretty UI that will expose the features they've been given in the hardware API.
Engineers may occasionally forget it, but Apple has it ingrained into the core of their business that a piece of technology must be designed to fit the human being first. How it fits your hand, your pocket, how it appears to the eye, consistent UI navigation, etc. As an engineer, I'm often frustrated by the resulting product performing like crap. But I learned long ago that I'm not most people, and that I've never been very good at judging what kind of crap most people will accept or what they'll give up for fashion.
One of my favorite scenes from the movie "Rat Race" was when Whoopi Goldberg followed Kathy Bates' instructions to the freeway without buying a squirrel from her. As they're plunging down the embankment to land in the pile of wrecked cars, they pass a series of hand-lettered signs:
GPS shouldn't get the blame because someone was capable of buying a unit and following it to his doom. That's like blaming the gasoline in his tank for taking him to the middle of the desert.
I am so fucking tired of people trotting out these stupid examples, and blaming the technology. Stupid people are always going to find novel ways to remove themselves from the gene pool. If you think they deserve any attention at all, then celebrate them -- read about them winning Darwin awards and have a laugh. Read about them in Fark (the Florida tag is good for lots of them.) Watch an episode of the Worlds Dumbest <blank>. But just as you don't blame the alligator for biting the guy teasing it with a fish, you don't blame the GPS for showing someone a road that doesn't have services on it. That's just amplifying the stupid with your own comments.
It's certainly not black and white as you make it out to be. If I want to learn a particular area, I learn it, and the GPS becomes a learning aid. If I'm somewhere on business and just want to function in the region without worrying about where everything is, I'll often let the GPS do all the navigation. I'm not a retard, and don't take illegal exits or carpool lanes just because the stupid box thinks it'll get me there; I just don't need to learn the city. I'm not there to memorize their quirky stripes of concrete, I'm there to meet people and take care of business.
I've also found there's a wide variety in the quality of the various mapping tools. Some nav units are pretty good (Garmin), some are pretty bad (Sync), but none of the self-contained boxes I've used are as good as Google Maps at finding optimized routes. And none of the nav units is worth crap as far as parsing addresses. Having to type the number independently from the street is awkward. Having to pick a particular stretch of road based on street number (Sync) is a maddening exercise. Google just figures out how to parse whatever I throw at it, and it does a great job of it.
No, but he can download a monthly subscription to access those "large programs" on the web. Instead of "write once, run everywhere" they're still trying to change the model to "write once, pay monthly and we let you access it from one registered machine."
Yep, the stock terrified American answer to everything. I'm sure that'll prevent all those "Made in America" cell phones from reaching Afghanistan. Every American cell phone factory... hmm... uh, mmm...
TFA also said it could be used at night. Now I'm thinking that a formerly stealthy UAV is going to have a 1kW infrared laser pointing at its belly. By prying out the little IR filter from my cell phone's camera, it can quite clearly see IR. If they deploy these, how long will it take before bad guys are scanning the skies with their modified cell phone cameras? "Hey, look at that glowing thing flying over us. Must be American UAV."
I think he'd be better described as a "trailing analyst." One who has no idea what he's talking about, but can spout nonsense after everyone with a real idea has passed by. I mean really, synchronicity? Eastern philosophies? I Ching? What's next, crystal vibrations and a palm reading? This guy is obviously a regular Sun Tzu of Tzyberwar.
But there is was actually a valid question raised by his pretentious nonsense, though, and that is "Is USCYBERCOM taking the right approach to defending our infrastructure?" I think the first step was the creation of USCYBERCOM. That shows someone is at least taking the problem seriously, and is taking responsibility for our defense. That's a good thing.
Are they doing it correctly? Different question. After listening to Gen. Hayden talk at DEFCON last year about how the internet has no natural geography to use to its advantage (conventional warfare strategies incorporate landscape features like hills, cities, and rivers as part of the battle plan,) and hearing him say that he expected them to figure out the cyberwar equivalent of a Hamburger Hill, well, I didn't gain much confidence that he knows how this whole internet thing works. But he was talking about concepts from a military strategist level, and perhaps was addressing his comments to a more military-minded audience, and he was not speaking as someone who's actually experienced fighting off a DDoS attack or a malware infection. I suspect the people that are in place are substantially more knowledgeable about the cyber battlefield than he appeared.
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Why does a drug cost $100,000,000 to develop?
Well, let's see. How's that cure for the common cold working out? Haven't figured it out yet? How about vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE)? Or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)? Multiple sclerosis? How about herpes? Strokes? Blood clots? Well, we gave you a million dollars, so everything must be cured, right?
Let's say you've spent 10 years doing the research, paying hundreds of scientists, lab workers, assistants, administrators, managers, etc. You're in an expensive lab in an expensive building surrounded by expensive equipment. Every time a researcher finds a compound that has some effect, you're designing and running a unique battery of tests to prove its effectiveness, efficiency, toxicity, etc. Let's say you get lucky and finally discover a compound that works in the lab. You run your animal tests, and now it's time for people trials. How many get sick from the first round of your drug and sue you? How much money did you set aside to deal with other problems that crop up?
Would it surprise you to learn that $100,000,000 is actually well below the industry average for the creation of a new class of drugs these days?
And I just loved the way you disparaged existing, effective drugs as "magic water" and in the exact same sentence tossed out "genetic engineering" as if it's the panacea for everything from splinters to cancer.
Oh, I get it. IHBT. Nice.
OK, so let's trot out the old chestnut of pharmaceutical patents. Let's say I invest $100 million to do the research needed to create a new drug, I create it, and the doses cost only $1 to make. Extrapolating from current demand, I will sell a million doses in the next 20 years while my patent is in force. I set my price at $200 per dose; with the costs being $1 in manufacturing and $100 in repaying my investment, so I'm making $99 in profit per dose. After 20 years, I have $99 million dollars in profit.
If I don't have patent protection, as soon as my drug hits the market someone will do an analysis and make a generic clone of it, selling it for $100 a dose, also settling for a $99 profit margin. They would take over 99% of the business from me, leaving me stuck with the tab for about $99.99 million dollars in research investment.
Would any pharmaceutical company ever do research again? Would anyone be trying to cure anything if they thought it would bankrupt them to do so? My guess is that a few celebrities will be affected by some diseases and create "foundations for the cure" efforts on a one-off basis, but in general, innovation in drugs would die without the patent system.
Of course, this is a simplistic picture, and the real world of shady marketing, fraudulent studies, suppressed side effect reporting, drugs to treat imaginary ailments, and all the other unethical stuff the pharmaceutical companies do certainly complicates things. And there are ongoing costs to the inventors and manufacturers of the drug: lawsuits over side effects, wrongful deaths, etc. But at its core, without the patent system these drugs would never be created.
So if we've established that pharmaceutical patents are necessary to drive research that may benefit us as a whole, then at least part of the patent system should at least be salvaged and not dismantled.
The courts have realized that's a problem, and that's why they started requiring a physical machine or transformation in Bilski. If the claim says "determining, via a testing kit, that the patient has an elevated blood count" or "adding, by an FPU of a computing device," then it's impossible to infringe the patent in your head, and injunctive relief is possible: think all you want, do whatever you want with pen and paper, but don't use a testing kit to measure this chemical or use a computer to determine this value.
The difference would be between "use A computer to determine this value" and "use THIS SPECIFIC computer to determine this value." I think if I embedded my grandiose idea in an FPGA's gateway, I have a tangible thing that produces concrete results, and the machine it is a part of should be patentable.
So there's my grandiose idea, that I should obviously patent: "A method for patenting software. Express the software you want to patent by burning it in an FPGA. You have now produced a concrete, tangible machine that meets the physical machine test of Bilski." Now if only I could burn that into a chip...
They want their dot.com bubble era development culture back.
No, that was me calling. I wanted to go back to the 90s era development culture, as we seemed to get a lot more done back then.
I'd kind of like to see the backwaters of Kerala done in street view. There are lots of photos individual people have uploaded to Panoramio, but the street view interface is really nice for navigation between pictures.
Yep. definitely miss that interface. Every cable box I've had sucks rocks in comparison.
Maybe Google will improve it, though. Even if all they did was let me create my own channel ordering and use it as the default when I hit "guide", it would go a long way toward improving the usability.
I just want to hear his lawyer say "I've seen a few photoshops in my day..."
Come on, Zuckerberg is an "admitted forgerer" [sic]. Someone who is capable of forgerery is capable of anything.
Someone who is capable of forgerery is only capable of producing documents that prove they are capable of anything. There's a difference.
I don't know, I always wanted to try a can of "BEER" brand beer, like they drank on the Rockford files. The label was fairly consistent with real labels, kind of a take-off midway between Budweiser and Miller. It wasn't plain white or generic, it looked like a product, just not one I was familiar with.
Perhaps they finally found "the ass end of space" everyone keeps talking about.
It's not that kind of "chocolate star".
No, your assumption is incorrect for the situation of following slow moving bicycles in traffic. Ever notice how a vehicle's mileage is stated in two ways, city MPG and highway MPG, and that city MPG is always less than highway MPG? All the reasons that make city MPG less efficient are present when the drivers have to follow the bikers.
Every time they have to hit their brakes, they waste the energy that went into accelerating the vehicle. Any revolutions the engine produces while idling (at stop signals, or any time the driver has his foot on the clutch or any time the automatic transmission's torque converter clutch is slipping, etc.) is burning energy without effect. Any other incidental energy that's strictly time-based (lights, cabin fans, air conditioning, radio) is wasted by the extra time its being operated. Having to electrically power the engine cooling fans to run when the car is moving slower than the surrounding air can cool the radiator is an additional waste.
There is an optimally fuel efficient speed for every vehicle. Faster than that speed and air resistance wastes fuel. Slower than that speed and it's burning the extras I just mentioned.
And people have to stop thinking that monetary incentive is enough to justify anything. Far from it research shows.
What research would that be? If a little money will be effective on 15% of the population, a lot of money will be effective on 85% of the population.
It's only at the ends of the bell curve where the amount of money doesn't change the rates people will accept for [taking a bribe|selling out their friends|giving up their privacy].
No, if you're planning to commit a crime, download the app and hack it. Watch the images the server is sending to your phone to say "find a match for this image." If you see your picture, you know there's a secret APB out on you, so it's time to run and hide. If you don't see your picture, maybe you got away with it.
First, this system doesn't let everyone "copy it for free." The photos go only to the Theia server. From there, whichever photos they accept would go to the buyers, perhaps the AP or Reuters.
If I'm an average schmuck taking a photo at a sporting event with my camera phone, what are the chances I'll take a good one? Really low. But maybe I'll get that perfect photo of Big Star cracking a smile after scoring the winning point, as he exits the stadium, or whatever. Being average, I probably won't even recognize it's a valuable photo. Let the system upload it to the editors, they sift through the hundreds snapped at the event, and holy cow, they like mine! Here's $500, thanks for taking the picture. I just made money as a lame but lucky guy with a phone. I never would have considered selling it on my own, as I wouldn't even know where to take it.
Oh, I know. I didn't want to get into the whole lockdown / DRM / AppStore / SIM-locking / kill-flexibility-to-stifle-competition bits. That's the extra crap poured in by a company trying to commit evil. Apple and Motorola are certainly notorious for being the worst, but all of the phone makers are complicit with some set of lowlifes such as the RIAA and Verizon.
I've often thought a cool advertisement for HTC would be to show a picture of the various (legitimate) Cydia repositories, and say "Look at all the apps that Apple decided you couldn't have. Our Android phones won't ever lock you out of your own phone."
As you've noted about battery life and radio performance, they are neither shiny nor black, so they were omitted from Apple's design consideration. Which boggles the mind of us engineers who thinks that a cell phone's very utility is defined by its radio performance and battery life.
Contrast that with the Motorola engineer. They put up a laundry list of functions, like "it's got to have 172 hours of battery life, must have a range of 3 miles, talk time of 360 minutes, store 1200 contacts, and weigh less than 100 grams." They then engineer the product, and relentlessly squeeze it smaller and smaller. They expect the design guys will make the case look attractive with the appropriate color finish and bits of chrome, and that the software guys will figure out a pretty UI that will expose the features they've been given in the hardware API.
Engineers may occasionally forget it, but Apple has it ingrained into the core of their business that a piece of technology must be designed to fit the human being first. How it fits your hand, your pocket, how it appears to the eye, consistent UI navigation, etc. As an engineer, I'm often frustrated by the resulting product performing like crap. But I learned long ago that I'm not most people, and that I've never been very good at judging what kind of crap most people will accept or what they'll give up for fashion.
One of my favorite scenes from the movie "Rat Race" was when Whoopi Goldberg followed Kathy Bates' instructions to the freeway without buying a squirrel from her. As they're plunging down the embankment to land in the pile of wrecked cars, they pass a series of hand-lettered signs:
You
Should
Have
Bought
A
Squirrel
Bullshit. Stupidity kills those people, not GPS.
GPS shouldn't get the blame because someone was capable of buying a unit and following it to his doom. That's like blaming the gasoline in his tank for taking him to the middle of the desert.
I am so fucking tired of people trotting out these stupid examples, and blaming the technology. Stupid people are always going to find novel ways to remove themselves from the gene pool. If you think they deserve any attention at all, then celebrate them -- read about them winning Darwin awards and have a laugh. Read about them in Fark (the Florida tag is good for lots of them.) Watch an episode of the Worlds Dumbest <blank>. But just as you don't blame the alligator for biting the guy teasing it with a fish, you don't blame the GPS for showing someone a road that doesn't have services on it. That's just amplifying the stupid with your own comments.
It's certainly not black and white as you make it out to be. If I want to learn a particular area, I learn it, and the GPS becomes a learning aid. If I'm somewhere on business and just want to function in the region without worrying about where everything is, I'll often let the GPS do all the navigation. I'm not a retard, and don't take illegal exits or carpool lanes just because the stupid box thinks it'll get me there; I just don't need to learn the city. I'm not there to memorize their quirky stripes of concrete, I'm there to meet people and take care of business.
I've also found there's a wide variety in the quality of the various mapping tools. Some nav units are pretty good (Garmin), some are pretty bad (Sync), but none of the self-contained boxes I've used are as good as Google Maps at finding optimized routes. And none of the nav units is worth crap as far as parsing addresses. Having to type the number independently from the street is awkward. Having to pick a particular stretch of road based on street number (Sync) is a maddening exercise. Google just figures out how to parse whatever I throw at it, and it does a great job of it.
No, but he can download a monthly subscription to access those "large programs" on the web. Instead of "write once, run everywhere" they're still trying to change the model to "write once, pay monthly and we let you access it from one registered machine."
The device they were using at the end of the video in TFA showed a cylinder about the size of a soda can. Looked plenty portable to me.
Yep, the stock terrified American answer to everything. I'm sure that'll prevent all those "Made in America" cell phones from reaching Afghanistan. Every American cell phone factory ... hmm ... uh, mmm ...
Does it count if we import them first?
TFA also said it could be used at night. Now I'm thinking that a formerly stealthy UAV is going to have a 1kW infrared laser pointing at its belly. By prying out the little IR filter from my cell phone's camera, it can quite clearly see IR. If they deploy these, how long will it take before bad guys are scanning the skies with their modified cell phone cameras? "Hey, look at that glowing thing flying over us. Must be American UAV."
It's a total joke. What the hell, like we're supposed to care because some numbnutz waited five years to watch a TV show?
I think he'd be better described as a "trailing analyst." One who has no idea what he's talking about, but can spout nonsense after everyone with a real idea has passed by. I mean really, synchronicity? Eastern philosophies? I Ching? What's next, crystal vibrations and a palm reading? This guy is obviously a regular Sun Tzu of Tzyberwar.
But there is was actually a valid question raised by his pretentious nonsense, though, and that is "Is USCYBERCOM taking the right approach to defending our infrastructure?" I think the first step was the creation of USCYBERCOM. That shows someone is at least taking the problem seriously, and is taking responsibility for our defense. That's a good thing.
Are they doing it correctly? Different question. After listening to Gen. Hayden talk at DEFCON last year about how the internet has no natural geography to use to its advantage (conventional warfare strategies incorporate landscape features like hills, cities, and rivers as part of the battle plan,) and hearing him say that he expected them to figure out the cyberwar equivalent of a Hamburger Hill, well, I didn't gain much confidence that he knows how this whole internet thing works. But he was talking about concepts from a military strategist level, and perhaps was addressing his comments to a more military-minded audience, and he was not speaking as someone who's actually experienced fighting off a DDoS attack or a malware infection. I suspect the people that are in place are substantially more knowledgeable about the cyber battlefield than he appeared.