But the phased arrays themselves are tools to minimize multipath noise, as are other signal processing techniques. Human vision itself would suffer from a lot of confusion from specular reflection of colors onto other objects if we didn't have lots of wetware to cope with it.
They're expensive because they're new, and because people think they're too expensive. A mass market app changes everything. When enough people realize that they can jump us past the jail of single channels per frequency, that chicken/egg problem will get eaten for breakfast.
Of course the Shannon limit per frequency applies. But it's irrelevant when many channels can signal on the same frequency, separated by position. Unless you can see only one object in a room that's colored red, this should be easy to understand.
It's not magic. Phased arrays can distinguish between different transmitters even at frequencies used for radio networks now, with sensible R&D investment. There's nothing "magic" about the higher frequencies that makes them unique for use by phased arrays. It's just a matter of improving the arrays and the parallel signal processing required to use them for this application.
What? We don't need to "open up the spectrum" if we use phased arrays. That's the point: phased arrays don't need reserved bands for exclusive signaling.
The limit on developing phased arrays is that the funders of R&D are already invested for $billions (and lots of political deals) into the reserved frequency model. Which means smaller innovators can't afford to enter their billionaires' club and compete with them. So they're not funding phased array techs that open up everything to everyone who wants it.
Phased arrays can do better than just distinguish different noisy transmitters. They can distinguish different signalers on the same frequency, without the bottleneck. That eliminates the need to segregate signalers by frequency, because they're segregated by position.
Imagine you've got a building full of RFID tags, each with a different code. Then imagine you've got a pair of RFID detectors, which can act like stereo eyes, and see each tag's position in 3D space, by measuring the different time it takes for each tag's light to get to each detector. So now you're imagining a 3D building full of RFID tags. Now imagine each tag isn't a static code to read, but a dynamic "display" in the RF spectrum. That simple phased array of RFID detectors can now detect data transmitted in separate channels, separated by the position of each transmitter. If each detector is itself a phased array, like your eyes' actual retinas are, then the two different images of all the transmitters can be compared for parallax, for even more precise definition of the different channels.
No need for any exclusion registry. Extra data "bandwidth" in the same actual width of band, just by adding more transmitters. The key is lowering the cost of each radio node to cheap enough that whole arrays of them are still affordable. That economic has already arrived, with WiFi very cheap once all the support electronics are shared by all the detectors in the array.
This is the direction all radio networks should be moving in. If the main funders of R&D weren't invested by $billions into the spectrum registry, and the FCC didn't need that registry to exert content control, then we'd probably already be there. But the tech is inevitable. The more people who understand its possibilities, the sooner we'll get it.
When are phased array digital radio networks going to be cheap, fast and reliable enough that "spectrum" is no longer a bottleneck? Different signals can be coded by their 3D location, which is exclusive of other signals by completely familiar physical reality, so there's no need for registration of frequencies other than that required by the signaling protocol itself.
No more treating bandwidth as a limited resource. Other implications are the FCC losing most of its legitimate role, except maybe just to test and regulate health effects of the radiation - and maybe the locations of ugly transceivers. Since the expense of owning and operating a transceiver would drop, the industry wouldn't be in the hands of just the big telcos, which all have mutual interests that are at odds with those of most consumers.
Modern science fiction was born in radio "catalogs" that sold mostly subscriptions to radio wannabes, especially the ones edited by Hugo Gernsback. Science fiction is very much engineering marketing dressed as technoporn, bred to appeal to radio hobbyists.
I'd love to see "alternative code" patches to apps, like patches that delete "Clippy", or replace it with a different character, or add an on/off GUI widget. Several different patches, each targeted to only that single feature/bugfix. Instead we get these bundles of several unrelated patches, just because they're all releasable at the same time, that keep a single bug/feature snapshot in a single version.
So much open source SW could benefit from this. But instead we look for the topheavy "plugin" architectures. If plugins were more portable across different apps that could share that plugged feature, the plugins might be more worth it. But just "pluggable patches" would be a very good way to "roll our own" version of apps, streamlined and hotrodded to our own preferences.
I don't see why the APT system couldn't use a database of optional patches dependent on the main app package to offer the different optional configs directly at the code level, not just config parameters for a monolithic codebase.
NetBank's closure marks the first bank to close since the recent U.S. housing boom deflated.
Other banks have already closed because the owned too many rotten mortgages, including (for example) Greenpoint Mortgage. Greenpoint was owned by a larger, full-service bank, but that distinction wasn't made in this article. As usual, journalists like to portray Internet business as unusual, fly-by-night, and inherently risky in a way that non-Internet businesses of the same kind somehow are not.
The AIDS plague "patient zero" is estimated to have become infected in 1969, the year men returned from the moon.
This plague that has killed millions of people, primarily among homosexual men, perhaps originated in a tiny canister of testosterone-pumped men trapped in a tiny metal can thousands of miles from Earth, with only each other to turn to in conditions of unprecedented stress and lonliness.
Yep, it does sound like the plot from a B movie - by John Waters.
You're defending the abject violation of the Constitution, as ruled by a court. You can play word games, play playground games about "I knew you'd call me a name" all you want. You're a traitor. Publicly stating opinions has consequences, when your opinion is that Habeas Corpus can be suspended, or any other strike against the Constitution.
I'd further mention that under the suspension people are being tortured. Real people. But you won't understand that, or care. It's just some kind of academic game to you. But in the real world in which you do live, whether you deny it or not, your treachery is part of how America is torturing people and otherwise destroying their rights. And so you are destroying America. Along with the Republicans you defend, though you refuse to admit it because by now everyone knows they're traitors. As are you, defending their treason. Of course, since you also can't understand distinctions without difference, you'll try to play more word games about "treachery" and "treason". Who cares? Your kind of abuser doesn't merit fine distinction.
You are helping destroy America. I refuse to live with that. You have cozied up to the idea, so I refuse to live with you. Traitor.
It does, but it's only "password" type fields. Not credit card fields, or other secrets (Social Security#, usernames per realm - except htauth, etc). And it doesn't do anything like the remote key distribution I described.
I'm not talking about just a keychain. You should have been able to tell from my post that I know about the OS/browser tech for "keyrings". And from the message that there's a lot more to what I'm describing than just a master password.
I haven't had my "head buried in the sand", fuck you very much. In fact, I designed and implemented plenty of secure bank intranet, Internet and "extranet" infosystems here in NYC and in Canada, starting over a decade ago. Big ones, sometimes bringing the bank's entire business onto the Internet. Banks have been using the Internet proper for telecom and transactions for several decades now, and were the incubator for quite a lot of WAN tech, including a lot of the Web. They were the common customer for T3s other than telecom, and have plenty of experience securing Internet systems.
But most importantly, they have large liability systems and distributed transaction management. You're already trusting them with your money, for good reason. And though I'd diversify my security to keep my money and my secrets in separate banks, they are the natural repository for each, especially as they're the same stuff now.
So you can wave your flimsy browser keyring around with baseless conceit that you know what you're talking about. And if you just want to be wrong, try not to include an obnoxious insult in your limited snotty response. Some of the rest of us have been bringing those other familiar systems to you for a long time. And will continue to keep your convenience and your security ahead of the curve. If you don't just get in the way.
No, I'm calling you a traitor because you're saying that my calling out these Republicans, for repeatedly enforcing the violations of the Constitution, is "disagreeing".
My mind is huge, but that doesn't mean I have any use for traitors, or people who defend them with claptrap like what you just posted.
You're a traitor, you're a Republican, you're just another Anonymous abuser Coward. Who cares what specific brand of treachery you peddle.
I don't let websites keep my credit card info, or any password other than the one needed to unlock their own site, or any other personal info that is valid outside their own realm, unless their service won't work otherwise.
The Web would be a lot more secure if my browser had a keyring integrated with my own computer, and I kept my secrets on my own computer under my own control. When challenged by any server for a secret, my browser or other client SW I'm using should pull the secret from the keyring and supply it to the server. That service should let me use a master key from any remote terminal to query my own computer, over my home broadband or wherever I keep the secrets. All by a standard protocol that lets me just fill web forms (and other challenges) as I do now, possibly entering the master key and maybe an additional confirmation challenge to let the 3rd parties communicate, but otherwise just as transparent as just filling in the forms.
If a 3rd party server is going to store my secrets, I want it to be my bank. I don't know why banks haven't gotten into this business already, after well over a decade watching their profits multiply from the Web, along with many risks. Maybe Google will push a key distribution protocol like this in partnership with some banks. That would also finally get Google into the payment business to challenge eBay's PayPal, which I hate precisely because its (mostly unregulated) global Internet bank is a monopoly, and I don't trust PayPal with my secrets. If Google does recover from this crack, they might be solid enough to trust.
Today is one of those sad days for you, Anonymous zombie Coward, where you think the destruction of our liberties is happening just on a message board. It's pigs like that who are destroying liberty in real life. And sleepwalkers like you who are letting them get away with it.
The way our system works is that the Constitution is used as the measuring stick only by the Supreme Court, or sometimes its subordinate courts (until appealed to the Supreme). Only when a case is brought and argued all the way through the Court. Until then, Congress can pass any law, and it's up to the Executive (the president or the subordinates they direct) to execute it.
In other words, it's all voodoo. People in the government, like in any society, deal with each other until someone changes the way they deal with things. Except for a rare leader, they're purely reactive.
Since the Republican Congress and Bush had a subsystem all put together to act in violation of the Constitution, all they had to do was suspend Habeas Corpus to get that subsystem to work that way, as that subsystem is looking only at the law. Until someone sues over Habeas Corpus and convinces the Court to strike down that law, that system will keep working uninterrupted.
The real question isn't even such a high bar as the Constitutional Convention you want to know about. Why the fuck hasn't some lawyer taken the MCA to the Supreme Court for a clear declaration that its suspension of Habeas Corpus is unconstitutional? Until that happens, Bush's Executive Branch will keep doing it, and even then they probably have a plan to do it anyway. And then the question will be what it should have been since at latest 2003's Iraq invasion on lies, or January 2007's Democratic takeover of the Congress: why the fuck aren't they impeaching Bush?
The answers are all the same: Americans are spoiled by wealth, even though it's all debt now. We don't care about justice or anything else except winning riches. Maybe not everyone is living that way, but enough are that it defines us that way.
Patenting a "really good idea" doesn't justify protection for making a vast fortune without competition. You're not getting the only justification of patent monopolies: "to promote science and the useful arts". It's not just a way to get rich off an idea. It's a way to protect for the people that progress, which economics would leave exposed to ripoffs by competitors who don't invent, but save their money for competition with the inventor once the inventor has spent some on inventing. The monopoly is a synthetic government compromise of everyone else's protected rights to free expression, including copying, because it's necessary not to ruin the inventor's chances to compete.
Drug marketing is in the province of a small number of incumbent giant corporations. They spend most of their money on marketing and the huge testing bureaucracy. It's a deliverate billionaire's club, designed to keep new competitors out. Which keeps entrepreneurs out. The drugs that get invented and marketed are not in sync with the actual markets, because the system is rigged by the incumbents ot protect their prejudiced agendas. The huge profits keep drugs out of the hands of many sick people, because the profit they represent isn't as big as some other market niches. You're fighting to keep that system, instead of one both more entrepreneurial and more available to more sick people.
As for the audit costs, you go and explain how high they'll be. It'll be easy for me to show how the costs of the current patent system are higher, especially in stifling priceless innovation.
Like I said, the inventors can help pay the costs of protecting their monopolies. If they choose trade secrets, though reverse engineering and corporate espionage are cheaper then most inventing, then their inventions will mostly enter the public domain that much sooner. There isn't an infrastructure or culture for a "guild system", so that's not a meaningful risk.
But I guess our basic disagreement is that you think that "preserving a patent monopoly system" is "just fine". I don't want to just tear something down, though copyright is way too protective of content monopolies at the expense of our rights, similar to patents. I want to free science and the useful arts from the patent monopolism that you seem to like. We're not going to agree on anything with those different values.
No, I think the basic economics incorporated in the Constitution, that lets vultures rip off inventors after the inventor has spent some money (and other resources) on producing the invention, while the vultures can start spending in competition with the inventor, is still true now. Not as strongly, not as long needed to protect the inventor after the invention is produced, but still necessary to protect the inventor.
The world is so full of shortsighted ripoff pros that the reputation benefits you mention wouldn't compare to the benefits of ripping inventors off. But we've got to go from one extreme, permanent monopolies that inhibit progress in science and the useful arts, to something closer to moderation. To go to another extreme will be at least as dangerous.
Biotech patents are largely a scam. While patenting the devices used to produce their molecules, substances and devices are patentable, their output cannot be when it's identical to (or trivially different from) a natural substance. For the patent to govern anything but their invented procedure and devices, it would also have to prohibit the natural stuff, but clearly it can't.
There's a lot of reasons biotech patenters like the current system. Electronics patents are different partly because their investment return time, and obsolescence time, is much shorter. And because they typically don't get to stand anymore on the shoulders of giant scientists without paying them, the way biotech inventors do.
When the biotech industry is more like the electronics industry, more entrenched, it will see the current patent system like they do. Until then, they're screwing everyone, including themselves down the line when they'll probably be as powerless as the electronics industry is now to change it, trying to compete with the next new kids on the block.
You said the extractable value vs development cost makes no sense. It makes perfect sense to me, and "profit" is a perfectly sensible way to measure the value of the patent in returning on its investment to promote its "science" or its "art". If you're going to argue, do so. You haven't.
$1.5M is plenty of money to do what you're talking about. I've done it for less, and without a patent. The accounting for return on asset investment value is also well established. The audit requirements aren't nearly as onerous as unrestricted patent monopolies.
We're talking about preserving a patent monopoly system. If inventors don't want to take on even some costs of protecting their monopolies, they're welcome to compete without them.
It's not a limit on how profitable the device can be. It's a limit on how profitable a monopoly on a device can be. The Constitution carves out an exception to free expression only "to promote science and the useful arts". 90% profit is an extremely generous limit on a government created monopoly.
A $150K investment that returns $1.5 millions sounds like enough upside to promote any science or useful arts.
You're somehow equating a patent to an invention. Which is at the core of what's broken in our system.
Slashdot Mirror
But the phased arrays themselves are tools to minimize multipath noise, as are other signal processing techniques. Human vision itself would suffer from a lot of confusion from specular reflection of colors onto other objects if we didn't have lots of wetware to cope with it.
Where's my 2-way wrist radio, which we'd now call a "wristphone"? Starring another Modern innovation, the videophone?
I might not whine about no flying cars as much, if we could just get some of the cheaper items that don't crash into neighbors' roofs.
They're expensive because they're new, and because people think they're too expensive. A mass market app changes everything. When enough people realize that they can jump us past the jail of single channels per frequency, that chicken/egg problem will get eaten for breakfast.
Of course the Shannon limit per frequency applies. But it's irrelevant when many channels can signal on the same frequency, separated by position. Unless you can see only one object in a room that's colored red, this should be easy to understand.
It's not magic. Phased arrays can distinguish between different transmitters even at frequencies used for radio networks now, with sensible R&D investment. There's nothing "magic" about the higher frequencies that makes them unique for use by phased arrays. It's just a matter of improving the arrays and the parallel signal processing required to use them for this application.
What? We don't need to "open up the spectrum" if we use phased arrays. That's the point: phased arrays don't need reserved bands for exclusive signaling.
The limit on developing phased arrays is that the funders of R&D are already invested for $billions (and lots of political deals) into the reserved frequency model. Which means smaller innovators can't afford to enter their billionaires' club and compete with them. So they're not funding phased array techs that open up everything to everyone who wants it.
Phased arrays can do better than just distinguish different noisy transmitters. They can distinguish different signalers on the same frequency, without the bottleneck. That eliminates the need to segregate signalers by frequency, because they're segregated by position.
Imagine you've got a building full of RFID tags, each with a different code. Then imagine you've got a pair of RFID detectors, which can act like stereo eyes, and see each tag's position in 3D space, by measuring the different time it takes for each tag's light to get to each detector. So now you're imagining a 3D building full of RFID tags. Now imagine each tag isn't a static code to read, but a dynamic "display" in the RF spectrum. That simple phased array of RFID detectors can now detect data transmitted in separate channels, separated by the position of each transmitter. If each detector is itself a phased array, like your eyes' actual retinas are, then the two different images of all the transmitters can be compared for parallax, for even more precise definition of the different channels.
No need for any exclusion registry. Extra data "bandwidth" in the same actual width of band, just by adding more transmitters. The key is lowering the cost of each radio node to cheap enough that whole arrays of them are still affordable. That economic has already arrived, with WiFi very cheap once all the support electronics are shared by all the detectors in the array.
This is the direction all radio networks should be moving in. If the main funders of R&D weren't invested by $billions into the spectrum registry, and the FCC didn't need that registry to exert content control, then we'd probably already be there. But the tech is inevitable. The more people who understand its possibilities, the sooner we'll get it.
When are phased array digital radio networks going to be cheap, fast and reliable enough that "spectrum" is no longer a bottleneck? Different signals can be coded by their 3D location, which is exclusive of other signals by completely familiar physical reality, so there's no need for registration of frequencies other than that required by the signaling protocol itself.
No more treating bandwidth as a limited resource. Other implications are the FCC losing most of its legitimate role, except maybe just to test and regulate health effects of the radiation - and maybe the locations of ugly transceivers. Since the expense of owning and operating a transceiver would drop, the industry wouldn't be in the hands of just the big telcos, which all have mutual interests that are at odds with those of most consumers.
Modern science fiction was born in radio "catalogs" that sold mostly subscriptions to radio wannabes, especially the ones edited by Hugo Gernsback. Science fiction is very much engineering marketing dressed as technoporn, bred to appeal to radio hobbyists.
I'd love to see "alternative code" patches to apps, like patches that delete "Clippy", or replace it with a different character, or add an on/off GUI widget. Several different patches, each targeted to only that single feature/bugfix. Instead we get these bundles of several unrelated patches, just because they're all releasable at the same time, that keep a single bug/feature snapshot in a single version.
So much open source SW could benefit from this. But instead we look for the topheavy "plugin" architectures. If plugins were more portable across different apps that could share that plugged feature, the plugins might be more worth it. But just "pluggable patches" would be a very good way to "roll our own" version of apps, streamlined and hotrodded to our own preferences.
I don't see why the APT system couldn't use a database of optional patches dependent on the main app package to offer the different optional configs directly at the code level, not just config parameters for a monolithic codebase.
When you get to 8, let me know, because you'll be eligible for upgrading to suicide bomber.
Other banks have already closed because the owned too many rotten mortgages, including (for example) Greenpoint Mortgage. Greenpoint was owned by a larger, full-service bank, but that distinction wasn't made in this article. As usual, journalists like to portray Internet business as unusual, fly-by-night, and inherently risky in a way that non-Internet businesses of the same kind somehow are not.
The AIDS plague "patient zero" is estimated to have become infected in 1969, the year men returned from the moon.
This plague that has killed millions of people, primarily among homosexual men, perhaps originated in a tiny canister of testosterone-pumped men trapped in a tiny metal can thousands of miles from Earth, with only each other to turn to in conditions of unprecedented stress and lonliness.
Yep, it does sound like the plot from a B movie - by John Waters.
Blah blah Anonymous blah Coward blah.
You're defending the abject violation of the Constitution, as ruled by a court. You can play word games, play playground games about "I knew you'd call me a name" all you want. You're a traitor. Publicly stating opinions has consequences, when your opinion is that Habeas Corpus can be suspended, or any other strike against the Constitution.
I'd further mention that under the suspension people are being tortured. Real people. But you won't understand that, or care. It's just some kind of academic game to you. But in the real world in which you do live, whether you deny it or not, your treachery is part of how America is torturing people and otherwise destroying their rights. And so you are destroying America. Along with the Republicans you defend, though you refuse to admit it because by now everyone knows they're traitors. As are you, defending their treason. Of course, since you also can't understand distinctions without difference, you'll try to play more word games about "treachery" and "treason". Who cares? Your kind of abuser doesn't merit fine distinction.
You are helping destroy America. I refuse to live with that. You have cozied up to the idea, so I refuse to live with you. Traitor.
It does, but it's only "password" type fields. Not credit card fields, or other secrets (Social Security#, usernames per realm - except htauth, etc). And it doesn't do anything like the remote key distribution I described.
I'm not talking about just a keychain. You should have been able to tell from my post that I know about the OS/browser tech for "keyrings". And from the message that there's a lot more to what I'm describing than just a master password.
I haven't had my "head buried in the sand", fuck you very much. In fact, I designed and implemented plenty of secure bank intranet, Internet and "extranet" infosystems here in NYC and in Canada, starting over a decade ago. Big ones, sometimes bringing the bank's entire business onto the Internet. Banks have been using the Internet proper for telecom and transactions for several decades now, and were the incubator for quite a lot of WAN tech, including a lot of the Web. They were the common customer for T3s other than telecom, and have plenty of experience securing Internet systems.
But most importantly, they have large liability systems and distributed transaction management. You're already trusting them with your money, for good reason. And though I'd diversify my security to keep my money and my secrets in separate banks, they are the natural repository for each, especially as they're the same stuff now.
So you can wave your flimsy browser keyring around with baseless conceit that you know what you're talking about. And if you just want to be wrong, try not to include an obnoxious insult in your limited snotty response. Some of the rest of us have been bringing those other familiar systems to you for a long time. And will continue to keep your convenience and your security ahead of the curve. If you don't just get in the way.
No, I'm calling you a traitor because you're saying that my calling out these Republicans, for repeatedly enforcing the violations of the Constitution, is "disagreeing".
My mind is huge, but that doesn't mean I have any use for traitors, or people who defend them with claptrap like what you just posted.
You're a traitor, you're a Republican, you're just another Anonymous abuser Coward. Who cares what specific brand of treachery you peddle.
I don't let websites keep my credit card info, or any password other than the one needed to unlock their own site, or any other personal info that is valid outside their own realm, unless their service won't work otherwise.
The Web would be a lot more secure if my browser had a keyring integrated with my own computer, and I kept my secrets on my own computer under my own control. When challenged by any server for a secret, my browser or other client SW I'm using should pull the secret from the keyring and supply it to the server. That service should let me use a master key from any remote terminal to query my own computer, over my home broadband or wherever I keep the secrets. All by a standard protocol that lets me just fill web forms (and other challenges) as I do now, possibly entering the master key and maybe an additional confirmation challenge to let the 3rd parties communicate, but otherwise just as transparent as just filling in the forms.
If a 3rd party server is going to store my secrets, I want it to be my bank. I don't know why banks haven't gotten into this business already, after well over a decade watching their profits multiply from the Web, along with many risks. Maybe Google will push a key distribution protocol like this in partnership with some banks. That would also finally get Google into the payment business to challenge eBay's PayPal, which I hate precisely because its (mostly unregulated) global Internet bank is a monopoly, and I don't trust PayPal with my secrets. If Google does recover from this crack, they might be solid enough to trust.
Today is one of those sad days for you, Anonymous zombie Coward, where you think the destruction of our liberties is happening just on a message board. It's pigs like that who are destroying liberty in real life. And sleepwalkers like you who are letting them get away with it.
The way our system works is that the Constitution is used as the measuring stick only by the Supreme Court, or sometimes its subordinate courts (until appealed to the Supreme). Only when a case is brought and argued all the way through the Court. Until then, Congress can pass any law, and it's up to the Executive (the president or the subordinates they direct) to execute it.
In other words, it's all voodoo. People in the government, like in any society, deal with each other until someone changes the way they deal with things. Except for a rare leader, they're purely reactive.
Since the Republican Congress and Bush had a subsystem all put together to act in violation of the Constitution, all they had to do was suspend Habeas Corpus to get that subsystem to work that way, as that subsystem is looking only at the law. Until someone sues over Habeas Corpus and convinces the Court to strike down that law, that system will keep working uninterrupted.
The real question isn't even such a high bar as the Constitutional Convention you want to know about. Why the fuck hasn't some lawyer taken the MCA to the Supreme Court for a clear declaration that its suspension of Habeas Corpus is unconstitutional? Until that happens, Bush's Executive Branch will keep doing it, and even then they probably have a plan to do it anyway. And then the question will be what it should have been since at latest 2003's Iraq invasion on lies, or January 2007's Democratic takeover of the Congress: why the fuck aren't they impeaching Bush?
The answers are all the same: Americans are spoiled by wealth, even though it's all debt now. We don't care about justice or anything else except winning riches. Maybe not everyone is living that way, but enough are that it defines us that way.
Moderation 0
50% Troll
50% Interesting
Traitor TrollMods hate the Constitution. Once again in today's halfway to hell America, evil gets its "fair balance" with the good.
Patenting a "really good idea" doesn't justify protection for making a vast fortune without competition. You're not getting the only justification of patent monopolies: "to promote science and the useful arts". It's not just a way to get rich off an idea. It's a way to protect for the people that progress, which economics would leave exposed to ripoffs by competitors who don't invent, but save their money for competition with the inventor once the inventor has spent some on inventing. The monopoly is a synthetic government compromise of everyone else's protected rights to free expression, including copying, because it's necessary not to ruin the inventor's chances to compete.
Drug marketing is in the province of a small number of incumbent giant corporations. They spend most of their money on marketing and the huge testing bureaucracy. It's a deliverate billionaire's club, designed to keep new competitors out. Which keeps entrepreneurs out. The drugs that get invented and marketed are not in sync with the actual markets, because the system is rigged by the incumbents ot protect their prejudiced agendas. The huge profits keep drugs out of the hands of many sick people, because the profit they represent isn't as big as some other market niches. You're fighting to keep that system, instead of one both more entrepreneurial and more available to more sick people.
As for the audit costs, you go and explain how high they'll be. It'll be easy for me to show how the costs of the current patent system are higher, especially in stifling priceless innovation.
Like I said, the inventors can help pay the costs of protecting their monopolies. If they choose trade secrets, though reverse engineering and corporate espionage are cheaper then most inventing, then their inventions will mostly enter the public domain that much sooner. There isn't an infrastructure or culture for a "guild system", so that's not a meaningful risk.
But I guess our basic disagreement is that you think that "preserving a patent monopoly system" is "just fine". I don't want to just tear something down, though copyright is way too protective of content monopolies at the expense of our rights, similar to patents. I want to free science and the useful arts from the patent monopolism that you seem to like. We're not going to agree on anything with those different values.
No, I think the basic economics incorporated in the Constitution, that lets vultures rip off inventors after the inventor has spent some money (and other resources) on producing the invention, while the vultures can start spending in competition with the inventor, is still true now. Not as strongly, not as long needed to protect the inventor after the invention is produced, but still necessary to protect the inventor.
The world is so full of shortsighted ripoff pros that the reputation benefits you mention wouldn't compare to the benefits of ripping inventors off. But we've got to go from one extreme, permanent monopolies that inhibit progress in science and the useful arts, to something closer to moderation. To go to another extreme will be at least as dangerous.
Biotech patents are largely a scam. While patenting the devices used to produce their molecules, substances and devices are patentable, their output cannot be when it's identical to (or trivially different from) a natural substance. For the patent to govern anything but their invented procedure and devices, it would also have to prohibit the natural stuff, but clearly it can't.
There's a lot of reasons biotech patenters like the current system. Electronics patents are different partly because their investment return time, and obsolescence time, is much shorter. And because they typically don't get to stand anymore on the shoulders of giant scientists without paying them, the way biotech inventors do.
When the biotech industry is more like the electronics industry, more entrenched, it will see the current patent system like they do. Until then, they're screwing everyone, including themselves down the line when they'll probably be as powerless as the electronics industry is now to change it, trying to compete with the next new kids on the block.
You said the extractable value vs development cost makes no sense. It makes perfect sense to me, and "profit" is a perfectly sensible way to measure the value of the patent in returning on its investment to promote its "science" or its "art". If you're going to argue, do so. You haven't.
$1.5M is plenty of money to do what you're talking about. I've done it for less, and without a patent. The accounting for return on asset investment value is also well established. The audit requirements aren't nearly as onerous as unrestricted patent monopolies.
We're talking about preserving a patent monopoly system. If inventors don't want to take on even some costs of protecting their monopolies, they're welcome to compete without them.
It's not a limit on how profitable the device can be. It's a limit on how profitable a monopoly on a device can be. The Constitution carves out an exception to free expression only "to promote science and the useful arts". 90% profit is an extremely generous limit on a government created monopoly.
A $150K investment that returns $1.5 millions sounds like enough upside to promote any science or useful arts.
You're somehow equating a patent to an invention. Which is at the core of what's broken in our system.