A better wording would be that the enviroments that GI's work in are frequently harsh on equipment. Add in that we frequently work in remote locations where we can't just get another laptop(or whatever) overnighted to us, and you can see why we want tough systems.
Oil company and utility workers have many of the same concerns.
no it's not. researchers keep notes and journals and diaries. anything developed in too short a time to be reflected in a journal is likely to be too trivial/obvious to even deserve a patent.
I'm not a patent professional, but I'm pretty sure that a major company would be able to reverse engineer what might be a decade of research within weeks/months, which when combined with gear-up time, would mean that I have to profit from my discovery within about a year. This discounts corporate espionage which might trigger stuff even sooner. Therefore, I'm less likely to pursue my idea/discovery to fruitation.
in any case, why should the rest of the world care whether you make loads of money for twenty years? if your idea is so useful, then it will be reinvented (and probably in a lot less than 20 years).
Today. Just compare the level of innovation before patent protection to today, with it. We spent centuries more or less static. Again, it's more of a reason to maybe fine tune the system rather than throw it out.
Our differences seem to boil down to your belief that commercial research will continue without loss of funding even if we got rid of the patent system and my belief that the loss of the patent system would mark a dramatic decrease in commercial research funding levels, resulting in less research going on even if the occasional snafu with patents happen today.
it doesn't, actually. it does in some fields (like computers and electronics) but it certainly doesn't in the pharmaceutical field. most new drugs are discovered and developed in government funded labs, at universities and public research orgs, etc. it's only when they have something useful that it's sold (for a pittance, almost given away) to one of the big pharma companies to market and distribute.
And you're incorrect. Drugs are not generally developed by the public sector, they're developed by the private companies. What the public sector generally provides is the underlying chemical and biological basis for whatever condition the pharma develops the drug to treat.
The article didn't say that the company wasn't allowed to conduct 100% testing, I think it was more along the lines of not allowing them to label their meat as 100% tested, which ends up being the same thing.
As for the 100% screened thing, again, this would be misleading. The.gov doesn't like fine print on the food, as there are companies that would try to take advantage of it.
And yeah, there is probably a bit of quality fixing in order to control costs. My thoughts is that this could be handled a different way, but from what I've seen articles frequently get facts wrong.
Password expiration is likely to result in the use of weaker/written-down passwords, and rotation schemes that diminish security while not actually limiting the duration of a breach. Should it be illegal to employ them.
Password expiration has it's uses, as you can also enforce a minimum password complexity policy and require that passwords not be written down(with penalties if you're caught). In any case, we're not playing around with people's lives with password expiration . We are with food safety, which is the purview of the FDA. And please note that I made a negative remark about security theator. I feel that many of the security requirements at the airport are a huge waste of time and manpower.
If the USDA wanted a disclaimer on the packaging explaining the caveat that the testing is not reliable on young cows as used in packaged meat that would be perfectly fine. Of course, the same caveat would apply to ALL distributed meat (whether they employ random spot-testing or 100% testing).
Please note that I was simply responding to the article posted, which seems to be on a site that's fairly anti-FDA. While my generic attitude is to let the company do testing, it's one of the FDA's founding mandate to prevent false claims(coming from the elimination of snake oil type stuff). The restriction on false claims has been extended to include misleading claims. In this case '100% BSE free' would be a false claim, as a majority of the cows would have a test performed on them that would claim BSE free even if the cow is infected, probably near 100% false negative rate. Even '100% tested negative for BSE' would be false, as the test isn't effective on animals younger than 30 months, and most are 12-18 months old.
"The tests are not designed to detect BSE in younger animals," said Andrea McNally, a spokeswoman for the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. "So for Creekstone Farms to use the test to say its product is 100 percent BSE-free would be giving consumers a false sense of food safety, a sense the test is not designed to give."
Now, if/when Creekstone agrees to use a new or existing test that is effective on the younger animals being slaughtered, then I'm sure the FDA will let them conduct 100% testing.
Finally, the Japanese are paranoid and a bit superstitious, and have a strong tendency to protect their local producers. You'd have a better chance at winning a lottery than catching BSE, especially if you don't eat brain products from infected cows. From what I've read you could pretty much eat all the steak and ribs you want, even from infected animals, and never catch the disease.
a) why shouldn't someone who independently comes up with the same or similar idea be able to do whatever they want with it?
Because it's almost impossible to tell the difference between coming up with it independently and copying the earlier one.
b) ideas don't and can't belong to anyone. any monopoly of them is an artificial government-mandated one, a socialist intervention in the marketplace.
Actually, an idea can belong to someone. I have an idea that would revolutionize the world, but I tell it to nobody. It's my idea. While non-obvious, it's easily reverse engineerable so everybody would be able to make it and I'd make no money. Why bother? Now introduce patent laws. Hey, I can tell the world, market my idea and make loads of money for twenty years.
c) the justification for patents is that they encourage innovation and the eventual sharing of ideas. that may have been true a few hundred years ago now, but it's certainly not true today. if anything, patents STIFLE innovation, not encourage it. there's also a sufficient body of public knowledge and a sufficiently widespread ethos of both sharing and research for the common good that there is more than enough "incentive" to research anything that we actually need.
Now, I wouldn't go throwing out the chicken with the egg. I see the problems with patents today as perhaps calling for a fine-tuning rather than thowing out the whole system. Heck, copyright is getting into the technical world with computer code being copyrighted, which has a far longer term than patents. Just as I think that copyrights should be cut in half, I feel that many patents could be reduced in duration. Sure, we have a pretty good public research program, but private industry still comes up with most of the new stuff.
I also think they need to return to the 'working sample' requirement for a patent, and get rid of 'method' patents which cover the idea of a process, not the process itself.
yes, but even then their profits will still be less because they'll have to compete with generic viagra, and studies will have to show that the new drug is even better, etc...
Presumably the knight did leave occasionally. You know, a few days here and there, to gather food if nothing else. It'd add up over several hundred years.
Though the curing of all ills probably would extend life somewhat. 'You know what? That cancer that would've killed you in 20 years? Gone'. Well, that and something along the lines of a professional retuning of the body's systems, fixing up accumulated damage.
Sheeshh... And people wonder why I often point out that the US is not entirely free-market.
Still, if this part is true, I can understand why they didn't let them do it:
USDA has sole control of the testing processes in meat plants. And its officials say they have rejected Creekstone Farms' pleas because the company's tests don't detect mad cow disease in animals younger than 30 months. Most U.S. beef comes from 12- to 18-month-old cows.
Bad science is bad science. Let's not have 'security theator' become 'safety theator'.
From what I've read, you have a better chance of dying from the flu than catch Mad Cow.
Believe it or not, but that's mostly the result of federal regulations. Some of our pollution control regulations were of the form 'you will do X, not you will reduce emissions to Y levels'.
So many of our 'performance' cars are sold from the factory deliberatly tuned to lose performance, thus creating quite a market for aftermarket chips to increase power.
Note: These chips are not generally manufactured or sold by the auto manufacturer itself.
I think the show truck is a serioudl commercial use truck too: I don't think the people running it do it for charity and they must take running it very serious because it can be very dangerous to drive on the ground at such high speeds...
I didn't mean that the truck isn't commercial, it obviously is. But you're comparing a $500k truck, that's standard run is only a few miles and lasts under a minute with an engine meant to power a multi-million dollar ship and move billions of dollars of merchandise for months on end. Basically, how many $500k trucks could you build and still make money off from them, and how many of engines in this class are moving ships carrying goods right now?
I guess they say the diesel engine with cylinders is the most efficient way to burn fuel (which I doubt because it can't be ideal because it loses energy through heat), but that doesn't count the weight into the equation.
Most efficient way to burn [i]cheap[/i] fuel. From what I've read, these things burn stuff ranging from 'filtered crude' to 'stuff barely liquid after refining'. It's nasty stuff, but also half the cost of even cheap 'diesel' fuel like what they feed semis.
If a cylinder block always beats a jet engine in fuel efficiency, those 'jet' airliners would have a different name.
Then why isn't everybody running around with a jet engine? Why do we move cargo in huge sea transports and railroad rather than flying the cargo everywhere in these highly efficient planes? Why is about the only production land vehicle with a turbine the Abrams tank? Why are they powering huge cargo vessels with huge diesel engines instead of turbines if they're so great?
Fuel efficiency is secondary for jet airplanes, the primary concern is the ability to travel at over 600mph. Propellor(Turboprop) planes are still more fuel efficient than jets, but they aren't as fast, and the market has spoken. We'd rather pay some extra money to get to our destination an hour or six faster.
Another factor would be reliability. Given the workload that these diesel engines undergo they'd be having to rebuild the engines monthly and replace them every two years. Not economical.
You're comparing a show truck to a production engine intended for serious commercial use. Fuel efficiency is of great concern.
Even if somebody did tie ten of those jet engines together, the engine would still be biggest in it's class (until somebody builds an even bigger one).
Yes, but such systems add cost and reduce efficiency, and how much electric power do you need for a cargo ship? Slapping a generator onto part of the system shouldn't be difficult. Better yet, use a seperate generator so you keep electricity with the big engine off.
Considering the crud(pretty much straight crude) it's supposed to be able to run on normally, I don't imagine vegatable oil would be much of a problem for it.
As somebody else pointed out, a two stroke has approximately twice the power for the displacement, which means that you could more than halve the weight of the engine for similar performance in a car. After all, once you've eliminated several hundred pounds of engine and associated materials, you need less power for a given amount of performance. Two strokes also don't need quite as many parts as a four stroke, and have some advantages elsewhere.
Now, I remember seeing an ad on television a couple years ago where a group had apparently developed a clean, computer controlled two-stroke marine engine. The EPA apparently includes Direct Fuel Injection 2-Stroke Marine Engines as 'low pollution' for marine use.
Europe and Japan have a very large market for small city cars where the buyers aren't so concerned about power and really don't give a fig about engine size as long as it works well enough on a test drive.
I wish US car makers would stop trumpeting engine size and horsepower quite so much. Believe me, it's a somewhat neglected market because the profit margins aren't out there, but there's quite a segment in the USA that's the same way.
As somebody else said - It'd be a risky development process and there are technological and cost hurdles to meet.
Developing a new drug costs around $1Bn and takes close to 10 years. Here, the patent system works as intended. By granting a limited monopoly on their drug, it rewards the innovators and incites others to do the same.
Whether or not it costs ~$1B to bring a drug to market, the fact is that it's incredibly expensive at this point. Don't forget the millions of dollars poured into drugs that end up being discarded as not effective or too dangerous, before they ever go up for FDA approval. You have to develop the drug, the means to produce the drug, then proceed through tissue, animal, and human trials. Then you have to fund the process needed to get the FDA and other countries's equivalents approval to sell it for human use.
To put it another way, sure, we'd experience a one time benefit if we were to break all those patents. But then companies would be far more cautious about developing new drugs, unwilling to put as much money into research even if it is less than their advertisement budget now. Because it's profit motive that makes the risk represented in medical research worth it to these huge companies. And because it's their money and potential profit at stake, they're very efficient in their research, conspiricy theories aside. Governments and universities can be fairly good at general research, but it's the companies that generally come up with actual treatments.
And what is the advertisement budget for? Getting the word out for the new drug or treatment to doctors and patients, because otherwise it won't be used, leading to no benefit for the people or companies.
As for patenting gene sequences, naturally occuring flowers and such, they're not actually patenting the gene, that's been ruled invalid. What they're patenting is the method to detect the gene, or a modification to a gene that's been patented. Now, there can be some problems with such patents being held as too wide, but we're talking about tweaks here, not throwing out the whole system.
Now, a bounty system would have it's benefits as well, England I know used such a system during the colonial period with some success(develop a system that meets specifications X,Y,Z and we'll pay you $10k). But the government payoffs, to make the risk worth it, would have to be HUGE. Add in that politicians today don't like the bounty system because they can't guarentee the money will go to their favored parties, and it's a tough call to impliment one.
Rather, the Government should only grant patents when they - as the constitution explicitly says- promote progress. The question we need to be asking, then, is "would a lack of patents lead to pharmaceutical companies investing less in research, or would it spur them to invest even more, so they could stay a step ahead of the competition without the 15-20 year lead of patents?" I don't see nearly enough people asking that question.
An important part of the patent system though was the reduction in trade secrets. You see, before patent systems started coming into place, everybody tried to keep their inovations secret. Thus, when an accident occured or the person died, he took the secret with him, and that progress was lost. You also couldn't combine the secrets from multiple sources to come up with a product superior in many respects.
Personally, I think that the patent system is indeed somewhat broken. The patent length for primary medicine developments(IE an entirely new drug or process) is about right. But while incremental developments still need protection, maybe the length of the protection should be less.
With today's analytical methods, the moment the generic company got ahold of a single pill they could start developing a generic. The primary research company would only have a monopoly for a matter of months without patent protection. Meanwhile they've spent millions in research and clinical trials which they have to recoup.
Patent protection is valuable, and I assert that giving them the opportunity to earn gobs of money is the best incentive we have to get them to develop these drugs. Heck, I'd set up pools of bounty money for anybody who can come up with processes meeting my standards (IE Cure for Diabetes is worth $500 million). In exchange for the bounty, the process becomes open and patent free. Each year that the pool isn't claimed, dump some more money into it.
Drugs that have been out longer, were released by a major generic manufacturer(with the money to fight these kinds of attempts), by a generic manufacturer who bought a license to produce the generic form from the original. It happens, often times the original company will provide production tricks to the generic manufacturer. It's cheaper for the generic to buy the license than to figure out everything from scratch or the patent. It's profitable for the patent holder to get a chunk of the generic market as well.
You see, lawsuits like what were named above DO go to court, but they have the problem that if pressed hard they'll often be declared invalid, promptly invalidating their NEW patent.
The really bad lawsuits only happen occasionally.
The sad truth is that while work on prevention and cures do occur, they're generally more difficult than treatment. Replacing a pancreas, then convincing the body's immune cells to not attack it is more difficult than producing tons of insulin
It's old history at this point, but the nozzle was different for leaded gasoline as well.
I remember as a kid yelling at my grandfather who had obtained an adapter so he could fill his unleaded car with leaded. Of course, I also had a tendency to hide grandma's smokes too. She didn't appreciate it, but I didn't want her dying of lung cancer.
Man, I hope nobody ever tells you what happens when you buy stock in a company, or put money in a savings account. You're going to be very disappointed.
Totally different proposition. You see, buying stock gets me interest in a business, which if it's doing what it's supposed to, has money invested into assets to produce a product to sell and make a profit. That profit is then either disbursed to the stockholders(dividends), or used to grow the company(increasing the value of my stock). While the government has been promptly spending the money form the bonds it sells to SS for day to day operations. We don't have any increased infrastructure to show for it.
The stock I buy started as the seed money used to start or grow the company.
Bonds would be closer to the government situation. In which case what's happening is a company issues a bond in order to be able to purchase infrastructure/assets. It's betting that paying the interest of the bond will be less than the profit generated by the additional infrastructure. Still, a business will be making money to cover the bond, if not it'll eventually go bankrupt and investors will lose their money (stockholders first, bondholders next). This isn't true for government, which doesn't really make a profit. Especially the millions it spends on things like a study on ketchup flow rates. I mean, let Del Monte, Heinz and such invest in such a study if they want.
Savings accounts are used to provide money to loan to businesses and individuals. You get a lower interest rate than what's charged because the bank assumes the risk and managerial duties, and still lets you pull your money out anytime you want.
I happen to own stock, owned a bond until I sold it(to buy a house), have money in a savings account, etc...
Have I satisfied you that I know what goes on in investing? And yes, I know it's still more complicated (stuff like how a company's stock price can affect it's ability to get credit comes to mind), but I don't feel like writing a book.
Sure, they're valuable. But here's the point: They're essentially Government Agency S lending money to Government Agency A, who promptly [i]spends the money[/i], in fashions that many contend are wasteful. Now, both agencies are funded by tax dollars.
When the mandataed spending by Agency S reaches the point that income no longer exceeds expenses(which they're predicting will happen in a few years), it's going to want to start cashing in those bonds. Which Agency A will have to cough up, but remember, it doesn't have the money sitting in a bank account somewhere, nor is it a business generating a profit to be used to pay the debt.
So, how are all those Bonds/IOUs going to be paid? Either through taxes, or extra issued bonds to the public, which leads to inflation/higher interest rates which leads to less economic growth. Your social security taxes might not go up, but your general ones will have to unless the rest of government tightens it's belt and stops spending money on all sorts of wasteful stuff.
It's either that or they want us out of the middle east first. They're afraid that attacking us on our home soil would infuriate us again(no matter how small), resulting in more bombs, troops, etc in Arabic Muslim countries.
Instead they're trying the Vietnam tactic. Give us a feeling of security at home(no attacks), while bleeding us in the middleast. They believe that we'll eventually grow tired of the occupation and go home, allowing them to take over Iraq ala Afghanistan and the Taliban. Then they can start attacking us on our own soil again.
In some other ways I believe it's a territorial issue. They want to convert the world to Muslim beliefs, but Iraq and Afghanistan are considered already converted, so by their psyche they have to repel the invaders before they set out to convert more territory.
Ultimately, I feel that our problems could have been lessened by an emphasis on a Marshall Plan type operation. Get the infrastructure built and people employed and you'd have less fighting.
The 'Six Sigma' rate can be extremely good, if you're talking about an individual item as a whole, and extremely bad if you figure it as 'points of possible failure'.
For example, a Six Sigma car will probably still have a defect, somewhere. I can see the engine alone having more than a million possible points of failure.
Like another poster said, basic fastener companies actually do much better than six sigma.
It all comes down to how much it costs to eliminate the failures, whether through better production processes or testing during or after manufacture and how critical the items are(toys can stand much higher failure rates than airplanes), and what the consumer is willing to pay to get the higher reliability.
I see it this way. If I make a good product that lasts 20 years, and my competitors' products only last 5, then I'm going to market the hell out of that. I'll end up outselling my competitors because I simply have a MUCH better product. Less sales for them, more for me.
Ah, the japanese car manufacturer plan. And it worked.
The biggest power draw for a laser printer is likely the fuser, which probably hasn't dropped very much if at all, seeing as how it's a heating element.
On the other hand, think about the energy costs of building a new(cheap) printer every few years, transporting it to the store, etc...
A lot of products have a dropproof/waterproof/dustproof alternative, at an increase in cost. People opt for the cheap model. The consumer makes the choice in the end.
I was thinking about the same thing for his comparison. The IBM XT was mostly a business machine, and a non-portable one at that. If I remember right, cost was ~$3-5k. A Motorola V3 is an ultralight portable phone costing ~$100. Then there's always the chance that he got a lemon phone.
Meanwhile my dad's work uses those walkie-talkie phones. They're about three times as thick, have rubberized padding and seals. Better transmission power in a tougher package. I'm willing to bet they cost at least $200 each.
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A better wording would be that the enviroments that GI's work in are frequently harsh on equipment. Add in that we frequently work in remote locations where we can't just get another laptop(or whatever) overnighted to us, and you can see why we want tough systems.
Oil company and utility workers have many of the same concerns.
no it's not. researchers keep notes and journals and diaries. anything developed in too short a time to be reflected in a journal is likely to be too trivial/obvious to even deserve a patent.
I'm not a patent professional, but I'm pretty sure that a major company would be able to reverse engineer what might be a decade of research within weeks/months, which when combined with gear-up time, would mean that I have to profit from my discovery within about a year. This discounts corporate espionage which might trigger stuff even sooner. Therefore, I'm less likely to pursue my idea/discovery to fruitation.
in any case, why should the rest of the world care whether you make loads of money for twenty years? if your idea is so useful, then it will be reinvented (and probably in a lot less than 20 years).
Today. Just compare the level of innovation before patent protection to today, with it. We spent centuries more or less static. Again, it's more of a reason to maybe fine tune the system rather than throw it out.
Our differences seem to boil down to your belief that commercial research will continue without loss of funding even if we got rid of the patent system and my belief that the loss of the patent system would mark a dramatic decrease in commercial research funding levels, resulting in less research going on even if the occasional snafu with patents happen today.
it doesn't, actually. it does in some fields (like computers and electronics) but it certainly doesn't in the pharmaceutical field. most new drugs are discovered and developed in government funded labs, at universities and public research orgs, etc. it's only when they have something useful that it's sold (for a pittance, almost given away) to one of the big pharma companies to market and distribute.
And you're incorrect. Drugs are not generally developed by the public sector, they're developed by the private companies. What the public sector generally provides is the underlying chemical and biological basis for whatever condition the pharma develops the drug to treat.
Dang Dyslexia. FDA->USDA. Same sort of stuff.
.gov doesn't like fine print on the food, as there are companies that would try to take advantage of it.
The article didn't say that the company wasn't allowed to conduct 100% testing, I think it was more along the lines of not allowing them to label their meat as 100% tested, which ends up being the same thing.
As for the 100% screened thing, again, this would be misleading. The
And yeah, there is probably a bit of quality fixing in order to control costs. My thoughts is that this could be handled a different way, but from what I've seen articles frequently get facts wrong.
Password expiration has it's uses, as you can also enforce a minimum password complexity policy and require that passwords not be written down(with penalties if you're caught). In any case, we're not playing around with people's lives with password expiration . We are with food safety, which is the purview of the FDA. And please note that I made a negative remark about security theator. I feel that many of the security requirements at the airport are a huge waste of time and manpower.
If the USDA wanted a disclaimer on the packaging explaining the caveat that the testing is not reliable on young cows as used in packaged meat that would be perfectly fine. Of course, the same caveat would apply to ALL distributed meat (whether they employ random spot-testing or 100% testing).
Please note that I was simply responding to the article posted, which seems to be on a site that's fairly anti-FDA. While my generic attitude is to let the company do testing, it's one of the FDA's founding mandate to prevent false claims(coming from the elimination of snake oil type stuff). The restriction on false claims has been extended to include misleading claims. In this case '100% BSE free' would be a false claim, as a majority of the cows would have a test performed on them that would claim BSE free even if the cow is infected, probably near 100% false negative rate. Even '100% tested negative for BSE' would be false, as the test isn't effective on animals younger than 30 months, and most are 12-18 months old.
Now, if/when Creekstone agrees to use a new or existing test that is effective on the younger animals being slaughtered, then I'm sure the FDA will let them conduct 100% testing.
Finally, the Japanese are paranoid and a bit superstitious, and have a strong tendency to protect their local producers. You'd have a better chance at winning a lottery than catching BSE, especially if you don't eat brain products from infected cows. From what I've read you could pretty much eat all the steak and ribs you want, even from infected animals, and never catch the disease.
a) why shouldn't someone who independently comes up with the same or similar idea be able to do whatever they want with it?
Because it's almost impossible to tell the difference between coming up with it independently and copying the earlier one.
b) ideas don't and can't belong to anyone. any monopoly of them is an artificial government-mandated one, a socialist intervention in the marketplace.
Actually, an idea can belong to someone. I have an idea that would revolutionize the world, but I tell it to nobody. It's my idea. While non-obvious, it's easily reverse engineerable so everybody would be able to make it and I'd make no money. Why bother? Now introduce patent laws. Hey, I can tell the world, market my idea and make loads of money for twenty years.
c) the justification for patents is that they encourage innovation and the eventual sharing of ideas. that may have been true a few hundred years ago now, but it's certainly not true today. if anything, patents STIFLE innovation, not encourage it. there's also a sufficient body of public knowledge and a sufficiently widespread ethos of both sharing and research for the common good that there is more than enough "incentive" to research anything that we actually need.
Now, I wouldn't go throwing out the chicken with the egg. I see the problems with patents today as perhaps calling for a fine-tuning rather than thowing out the whole system. Heck, copyright is getting into the technical world with computer code being copyrighted, which has a far longer term than patents. Just as I think that copyrights should be cut in half, I feel that many patents could be reduced in duration. Sure, we have a pretty good public research program, but private industry still comes up with most of the new stuff.
I also think they need to return to the 'working sample' requirement for a patent, and get rid of 'method' patents which cover the idea of a process, not the process itself.
yes, but even then their profits will still be less because they'll have to compete with generic viagra, and studies will have to show that the new drug is even better, etc...
Presumably the knight did leave occasionally. You know, a few days here and there, to gather food if nothing else. It'd add up over several hundred years.
Though the curing of all ills probably would extend life somewhat. 'You know what? That cancer that would've killed you in 20 years? Gone'. Well, that and something along the lines of a professional retuning of the body's systems, fixing up accumulated damage.
Still, if this part is true, I can understand why they didn't let them do it:
Bad science is bad science. Let's not have 'security theator' become 'safety theator'.
From what I've read, you have a better chance of dying from the flu than catch Mad Cow.
Believe it or not, but that's mostly the result of federal regulations. Some of our pollution control regulations were of the form 'you will do X, not you will reduce emissions to Y levels'.
So many of our 'performance' cars are sold from the factory deliberatly tuned to lose performance, thus creating quite a market for aftermarket chips to increase power.
Note: These chips are not generally manufactured or sold by the auto manufacturer itself.
I think the show truck is a serioudl commercial use truck too: I don't think the people running it do it for charity and they must take running it very serious because it can be very dangerous to drive on the ground at such high speeds...
I didn't mean that the truck isn't commercial, it obviously is. But you're comparing a $500k truck, that's standard run is only a few miles and lasts under a minute with an engine meant to power a multi-million dollar ship and move billions of dollars of merchandise for months on end. Basically, how many $500k trucks could you build and still make money off from them, and how many of engines in this class are moving ships carrying goods right now?
I guess they say the diesel engine with cylinders is the most efficient way to burn fuel (which I doubt because it can't be ideal because it loses energy through heat), but that doesn't count the weight into the equation.
Most efficient way to burn [i]cheap[/i] fuel. From what I've read, these things burn stuff ranging from 'filtered crude' to 'stuff barely liquid after refining'. It's nasty stuff, but also half the cost of even cheap 'diesel' fuel like what they feed semis.
If a cylinder block always beats a jet engine in fuel efficiency, those 'jet' airliners would have a different name.
Then why isn't everybody running around with a jet engine? Why do we move cargo in huge sea transports and railroad rather than flying the cargo everywhere in these highly efficient planes? Why is about the only production land vehicle with a turbine the Abrams tank? Why are they powering huge cargo vessels with huge diesel engines instead of turbines if they're so great?
Fuel efficiency is secondary for jet airplanes, the primary concern is the ability to travel at over 600mph. Propellor(Turboprop) planes are still more fuel efficient than jets, but they aren't as fast, and the market has spoken. We'd rather pay some extra money to get to our destination an hour or six faster.
Another factor would be reliability. Given the workload that these diesel engines undergo they'd be having to rebuild the engines monthly and replace them every two years. Not economical.
You're comparing a show truck to a production engine intended for serious commercial use. Fuel efficiency is of great concern.
Even if somebody did tie ten of those jet engines together, the engine would still be biggest in it's class (until somebody builds an even bigger one).
Yes, but such systems add cost and reduce efficiency, and how much electric power do you need for a cargo ship? Slapping a generator onto part of the system shouldn't be difficult. Better yet, use a seperate generator so you keep electricity with the big engine off.
Considering the crud(pretty much straight crude) it's supposed to be able to run on normally, I don't imagine vegatable oil would be much of a problem for it.
But why are 2-strokes particularly desirable?
As somebody else pointed out, a two stroke has approximately twice the power for the displacement, which means that you could more than halve the weight of the engine for similar performance in a car. After all, once you've eliminated several hundred pounds of engine and associated materials, you need less power for a given amount of performance. Two strokes also don't need quite as many parts as a four stroke, and have some advantages elsewhere.
Now, I remember seeing an ad on television a couple years ago where a group had apparently developed a clean, computer controlled two-stroke marine engine. The EPA apparently includes Direct Fuel Injection 2-Stroke Marine Engines as 'low pollution' for marine use.
Europe and Japan have a very large market for small city cars where the buyers aren't so concerned about power and really don't give a fig about engine size as long as it works well enough on a test drive.
I wish US car makers would stop trumpeting engine size and horsepower quite so much. Believe me, it's a somewhat neglected market because the profit margins aren't out there, but there's quite a segment in the USA that's the same way.
As somebody else said - It'd be a risky development process and there are technological and cost hurdles to meet.
Developing a new drug costs around $1Bn and takes close to 10 years. Here, the patent system works as intended. By granting a limited monopoly on their drug, it rewards the innovators and incites others to do the same.
Whether or not it costs ~$1B to bring a drug to market, the fact is that it's incredibly expensive at this point. Don't forget the millions of dollars poured into drugs that end up being discarded as not effective or too dangerous, before they ever go up for FDA approval. You have to develop the drug, the means to produce the drug, then proceed through tissue, animal, and human trials. Then you have to fund the process needed to get the FDA and other countries's equivalents approval to sell it for human use.
To put it another way, sure, we'd experience a one time benefit if we were to break all those patents. But then companies would be far more cautious about developing new drugs, unwilling to put as much money into research even if it is less than their advertisement budget now. Because it's profit motive that makes the risk represented in medical research worth it to these huge companies. And because it's their money and potential profit at stake, they're very efficient in their research, conspiricy theories aside. Governments and universities can be fairly good at general research, but it's the companies that generally come up with actual treatments.
And what is the advertisement budget for? Getting the word out for the new drug or treatment to doctors and patients, because otherwise it won't be used, leading to no benefit for the people or companies.
As for patenting gene sequences, naturally occuring flowers and such, they're not actually patenting the gene, that's been ruled invalid. What they're patenting is the method to detect the gene, or a modification to a gene that's been patented. Now, there can be some problems with such patents being held as too wide, but we're talking about tweaks here, not throwing out the whole system.
Now, a bounty system would have it's benefits as well, England I know used such a system during the colonial period with some success(develop a system that meets specifications X,Y,Z and we'll pay you $10k). But the government payoffs, to make the risk worth it, would have to be HUGE. Add in that politicians today don't like the bounty system because they can't guarentee the money will go to their favored parties, and it's a tough call to impliment one.
Rather, the Government should only grant patents when they - as the constitution explicitly says- promote progress. The question we need to be asking, then, is "would a lack of patents lead to pharmaceutical companies investing less in research, or would it spur them to invest even more, so they could stay a step ahead of the competition without the 15-20 year lead of patents?" I don't see nearly enough people asking that question.
An important part of the patent system though was the reduction in trade secrets. You see, before patent systems started coming into place, everybody tried to keep their inovations secret. Thus, when an accident occured or the person died, he took the secret with him, and that progress was lost. You also couldn't combine the secrets from multiple sources to come up with a product superior in many respects.
Personally, I think that the patent system is indeed somewhat broken. The patent length for primary medicine developments(IE an entirely new drug or process) is about right. But while incremental developments still need protection, maybe the length of the protection should be less.
With today's analytical methods, the moment the generic company got ahold of a single pill they could start developing a generic. The primary research company would only have a monopoly for a matter of months without patent protection. Meanwhile they've spent millions in research and clinical trials which they have to recoup.
Patent protection is valuable, and I assert that giving them the opportunity to earn gobs of money is the best incentive we have to get them to develop these drugs. Heck, I'd set up pools of bounty money for anybody who can come up with processes meeting my standards (IE Cure for Diabetes is worth $500 million). In exchange for the bounty, the process becomes open and patent free. Each year that the pool isn't claimed, dump some more money into it.
Drugs that have been out longer, were released by a major generic manufacturer(with the money to fight these kinds of attempts), by a generic manufacturer who bought a license to produce the generic form from the original. It happens, often times the original company will provide production tricks to the generic manufacturer. It's cheaper for the generic to buy the license than to figure out everything from scratch or the patent. It's profitable for the patent holder to get a chunk of the generic market as well.
You see, lawsuits like what were named above DO go to court, but they have the problem that if pressed hard they'll often be declared invalid, promptly invalidating their NEW patent.
The really bad lawsuits only happen occasionally.
The sad truth is that while work on prevention and cures do occur, they're generally more difficult than treatment. Replacing a pancreas, then convincing the body's immune cells to not attack it is more difficult than producing tons of insulin
It's old history at this point, but the nozzle was different for leaded gasoline as well.
I remember as a kid yelling at my grandfather who had obtained an adapter so he could fill his unleaded car with leaded. Of course, I also had a tendency to hide grandma's smokes too. She didn't appreciate it, but I didn't want her dying of lung cancer.
Man, I hope nobody ever tells you what happens when you buy stock in a company, or put money in a savings account. You're going to be very disappointed.
Totally different proposition. You see, buying stock gets me interest in a business, which if it's doing what it's supposed to, has money invested into assets to produce a product to sell and make a profit. That profit is then either disbursed to the stockholders(dividends), or used to grow the company(increasing the value of my stock). While the government has been promptly spending the money form the bonds it sells to SS for day to day operations. We don't have any increased infrastructure to show for it.
The stock I buy started as the seed money used to start or grow the company.
Bonds would be closer to the government situation. In which case what's happening is a company issues a bond in order to be able to purchase infrastructure/assets. It's betting that paying the interest of the bond will be less than the profit generated by the additional infrastructure. Still, a business will be making money to cover the bond, if not it'll eventually go bankrupt and investors will lose their money (stockholders first, bondholders next). This isn't true for government, which doesn't really make a profit. Especially the millions it spends on things like a study on ketchup flow rates. I mean, let Del Monte, Heinz and such invest in such a study if they want.
Savings accounts are used to provide money to loan to businesses and individuals. You get a lower interest rate than what's charged because the bank assumes the risk and managerial duties, and still lets you pull your money out anytime you want.
I happen to own stock, owned a bond until I sold it(to buy a house), have money in a savings account, etc...
Have I satisfied you that I know what goes on in investing? And yes, I know it's still more complicated (stuff like how a company's stock price can affect it's ability to get credit comes to mind), but I don't feel like writing a book.
Sure, they're valuable. But here's the point: They're essentially Government Agency S lending money to Government Agency A, who promptly [i]spends the money[/i], in fashions that many contend are wasteful. Now, both agencies are funded by tax dollars.
When the mandataed spending by Agency S reaches the point that income no longer exceeds expenses(which they're predicting will happen in a few years), it's going to want to start cashing in those bonds. Which Agency A will have to cough up, but remember, it doesn't have the money sitting in a bank account somewhere, nor is it a business generating a profit to be used to pay the debt.
So, how are all those Bonds/IOUs going to be paid? Either through taxes, or extra issued bonds to the public, which leads to inflation/higher interest rates which leads to less economic growth. Your social security taxes might not go up, but your general ones will have to unless the rest of government tightens it's belt and stops spending money on all sorts of wasteful stuff.
With less economic growth, we're all worse off.
It's either that or they want us out of the middle east first. They're afraid that attacking us on our home soil would infuriate us again(no matter how small), resulting in more bombs, troops, etc in Arabic Muslim countries.
Instead they're trying the Vietnam tactic. Give us a feeling of security at home(no attacks), while bleeding us in the middleast. They believe that we'll eventually grow tired of the occupation and go home, allowing them to take over Iraq ala Afghanistan and the Taliban. Then they can start attacking us on our own soil again.
In some other ways I believe it's a territorial issue. They want to convert the world to Muslim beliefs, but Iraq and Afghanistan are considered already converted, so by their psyche they have to repel the invaders before they set out to convert more territory.
Ultimately, I feel that our problems could have been lessened by an emphasis on a Marshall Plan type operation. Get the infrastructure built and people employed and you'd have less fighting.
The 'Six Sigma' rate can be extremely good, if you're talking about an individual item as a whole, and extremely bad if you figure it as 'points of possible failure'.
For example, a Six Sigma car will probably still have a defect, somewhere. I can see the engine alone having more than a million possible points of failure.
Like another poster said, basic fastener companies actually do much better than six sigma.
It all comes down to how much it costs to eliminate the failures, whether through better production processes or testing during or after manufacture and how critical the items are(toys can stand much higher failure rates than airplanes), and what the consumer is willing to pay to get the higher reliability.
I see it this way. If I make a good product that lasts 20 years, and my competitors' products only last 5, then I'm going to market the hell out of that. I'll end up outselling my competitors because I simply have a MUCH better product. Less sales for them, more for me.
Ah, the japanese car manufacturer plan. And it worked.
The biggest power draw for a laser printer is likely the fuser, which probably hasn't dropped very much if at all, seeing as how it's a heating element.
On the other hand, think about the energy costs of building a new(cheap) printer every few years, transporting it to the store, etc...
A lot of products have a dropproof/waterproof/dustproof alternative, at an increase in cost. People opt for the cheap model. The consumer makes the choice in the end.
I was thinking about the same thing for his comparison. The IBM XT was mostly a business machine, and a non-portable one at that. If I remember right, cost was ~$3-5k. A Motorola V3 is an ultralight portable phone costing ~$100. Then there's always the chance that he got a lemon phone.
Meanwhile my dad's work uses those walkie-talkie phones. They're about three times as thick, have rubberized padding and seals. Better transmission power in a tougher package. I'm willing to bet they cost at least $200 each.