I don't think you get it. Even the link you pointed to only covers the substitute generic for brand, not the reverse.
For this specific case, there are probably going to be at least 3 versions of generic atorvastatin in addition to the "brand-name" liptor: Ranbaxy (india company, the generic currently available outside the usa), Watson (has exclusive for walgreens and cvs), and Teva (the only lab currently plannin a release with no specific Pfizer agreement). There won't be a doctor around that writes a scrip explicitly for one of the other 3 versions, because the won't have any idea which of the 3 generics that a typical pharmacy will stock*** and it's highly likely that no pharmacy will stock all 3. If they think about generics, they will likely only write the prescription for atorvastatin (the drug name). Lipitor is a valid way to fill that prescription and is not illegal at all. Say if you go to walgreens for "generic" you will get the Watson version, you cannot get the Teva version, or the Ranbaxy version. If you went to a pharmacy that didn't have an agreement with Watson and didn't stock their generics, you will get Liptor (at least for the next 6 months***). That won't be illegal either.
The stuff you are misinterpreting is to protect the brand drug, so that if a doctor says use that brand and "dispense as written", the pharmacy must comply. It does not protect the reverse, because that situation isn't covered in the law (nobody is lobbying enough for the reverse protection).
*** slight technicality, due to USA law, only the Watson one will be available immediatly in the USA. Ranbaxy signed an agreement with Pfizer to delay the release of their generic in the USA to settle all legal issues about manufacturing techniques with Pfizer and due to USA legal issues, the first filer (Ranbaxy) gets a 180 day exclusive for the generic FDA approval. Watson licensed the patents from Pfizer so their generic is available right away (with the royalties going to Pfizer).
>Some deals require pharmacies to reject prescriptions for low-cost generics
This is illegal on its face.
-- BMO
This is not illegal on on its face. IANAL, but AFAIK, pharmacist in most juristictions are allow to subsitute unless the written prescription doesn't allow for it. So for the typical prescription, there's no reason they can't subsitute the "real" lipitor for an atorvastatin prescription (rather than what they do all the time in reverse, subsitute a generic for a brand-name). If you don't like the substitution, you can go to another pharmacy.
As I wrote in another post, think about it the other way, why should every pharmacy be forced to stock/dispense every manufacturer's version of all drugs? Pharmacies stock what they think is profitable and enough so that people can usually get what they want. Otherwize people trying to fill prescriptions will go elsewhere (just like any other business). Say you want to buy a sony pc, but walk into a office max and are disappointed they only stock HP pcs because they signed an exculsive agreement for HP pcs? Well, that's the same thing. You can go elsewhere to buy your sony pc (say even maybe on-line), or you can just get the essentially equivalent HP pc from office max. Not only is this not illegal, but most people won't care as they aren't even paying (well, except the insurance co-pay only).
I'm unclear here. Since when did pharmacists suddenly get the right to override a doctor's prescription? How can Pfizer actually get a pharmacist to sign an exclusivity agreement.
A "prescription" is merely a course of treatment recommended by a doctor. A doctor could just write you a prescription to do more exercise, although usually there are drugs involved with many courses of treatment. AFAIK, legally, the prescription applies to the patient, not the pharmacists (e.g., the patient is taking the course of treatment, the doctor or pharmacist is not giving the treatment). Since it is the patient that is taking the treatment, he/she can choose to take the advice of a doctor or pharmacist and substitute a generic (usually to avoid more out-of-pocket costs or comply with insurance authorized courses of treatment for covered expenses).
In most legal juristictions that I know of, a prescription for drugs will by default allow for generic substitutions by the pharmacists, unless the doctor specifically dis-allows it (the actual wording varies from locale to locale, but usually "do-not-substitute" or something similar), so there's technically no reason that a pharmacist can't just subtitute the "real" lipitor even if the doctor writes the generic name (unless the prescription specifically calls out one of the generic formulations which seems unlikely).
Think about this in reverse, do you think it's prudent to require all pharmacies to stock all drugs made from all different vendors when they are essentially the same thing? What if 10 different companies made versions of atorvastatin for sale? No that isn't reasonable, is it? That's why pharmacists are allowed to substitute. Of course a patient can shop around their prescription to various pharmacies to get the lowest price they can (or a specific generic version if they are so inclined), but who do you know does that? But you can...
Pharmacists have exclusive arrangements all the time. Do you think that say target or walgreens has 1000 different suppliers for common high-volume drugs? No, they contract to have their own formulation and sell them in their stores. There is no army of Pfizer folks signing up individual pharmacists for exclusivity, because these pharmacists don't exist. They are all national conglomerates who commonly lock in 1 or 2 suppliers with exclusive agreements for better pricing. That's business.
No need to kill anyone. Limit reproduction and the problem is solved in just a few decades.
That doesn't work in our current economic model where we assume some sort of economic growth to fix the problems of caring for our elderly and sick (e.g., pensions, insurance). Of course if we fix that, you won't need to kill anyone, just all old folks live in poverty and nobody can afford to get sick (or we all collectively take our standard of living down a couple notches).
Japan and some european countries are already dealing with this issue of reduced reproduction rates screwing over their current economic model. Some countries like Canada, Australia, and the USA have historically addressed this problem with immigration.
Currently, China seems to be an outlier in that they seem to be both limiting reproduction and growing, but many suspect that is because they are essentially sucking the wealth out of their trading partners by over-exploiting their natural resources w/o having to deal with the pension and insurance issue too much. In China there is a two-tier system where jobs with good pensions and locations with good health care are only in the larger cities and are not generally available citizens that originate outside the cities. To restrict the pension/insurance issues, citizens aren't allowed to officially move to the cities (although they can be migrant workers there, but generally don't have access to services).
Many are not sure how sustainable this two tier situation is. When you get lots of repressed masses, sometimes the result is a bunch of killing.
thermal plants have better efficiency than explosion engines in car.
Although the thermal plant might have more efficiency, depending on the level of NIMBY, the transmission losses and the overhead of maintaining base-load for the electric grid may make the actual net efficiency closer than anyone may like... Sadly, reality is a must-satisfy condition in this analysis...
SATs are a filter. They don't get you in. If you get a 1600 (or whatever the max is these days) you're now on par with 10,000 other kids who also got a 1600.
Yes 2400 is the max these days... I've been involved with admissions with my school (one of the top-10 depending on the list) and certainly SAT is used as a coarse filter (once above a certain level, the actual score is mostly irrelevant)... Also note that 2400 doesn't necessarily mean "perfect", every year the test is scaled so it may be that missing 1 question is still 2400. Also with the "free-form" math, and essay, it isn't they same test as in the old days... Also, most selective schools also require the "subject" SAT tests (used to be called SAT II, and if compsci, probably at least math 2 and one of the science tests).
Schools are generally more interested in grades/GPA than SAT scores, but even those are conditional (e.g., what courses you took vs GPA is more important than actual numerical GPA, say IB, Honors, or AP classes vs standard classes or underwater basket weaving).
The valedictorian at my highschool, 5.0 GPA (AP scale), 1600 SAT, smartest guy I know, got rejected from MIT. He ended up going to U Penn, now works at Google. Another girl got into MIT with lower GPA and SAT, but she had like 400 extracurriculars and was involved in everything. Just goes to show it's not all grades that count.
It's a little more subtle than just 400 extracurriculars. Typical "selective" schools tend to look for long-running extracurriculars, not just bulk (which tend to either be "fake" because nobody can spend 100 hours a day on extracurriculars, or if not actually fake, not representative of actual participation). Just pick a few extracurriculars and do them for > 3-4 years (starting in middle school), and show some commitment (lead developer for an open source project, lead chair in a band instrument, president of the chess team, even treasurer of NHS, attending math olympics, physics bowl, programming competition events or whatever).
Getting someone letter of recommendation from someone involved in the extracurricular is a really good idea so that they don't know it was some sort of "trophy" extracurricular (where you are a member to list it on your application, but don't really do anything). The generic guidance counselor "this is a smart kid" recommendation isn't really that impressive to a selective school because almost everyone gets one of those. Of course if your counselor knows you really well or can compare you to some other folks that ended up going to the school you are applying to, perhaps the counselor can write a better recommendation.
Just saying...
FWIW, there appears to be a better correlation to ultimate success on the schools that you apply to (not get in), than the school you acutally end up graduating from. So if you are the type that is ambitious enough to apply to a selective school, and you actually do it (rather than treat this whole admissions thing as a "thought experiment"), you might be enough of a do-er (or at least enough self esteem) that will make your more likely to be successful in the future, regardless of the school you attend (or drop out of).
And as a total aside, you have the best chance of getting into any program as a so-called "legacy" admit. Just make it past the filter levels and go to the same school as a parent, uncle, aunt or sibling. A "legacy" admit can get you into nearly any school you have the "pedigree" for...:^(
Truly American that the profiteering going on here to the detriment of citizens.
FTFY.
Cute, but didn't the UK use the totally untested Pandemrix H1N1 w/ special adjuvant vaccinne made by GSK (a UK) company? Of course germany was even more wacked by buying standard vaccinee for the govt officials and Pandemrix for everyone else. Apparently America doesn't have a monopoly on private profiteering to the detriment of citizens... Goverenments of the world unite;^)
You get the floating point arithmetic for free in the brain - the time between a particular neuron firing is inversely proportional to the strength of a particular input. Stronger signals mean shorter pulse times. More precision is gained by having more neurons for than input.
You most certainly do not get floating point arithmetic in the brain, you get analog arithmetic in the brain. Brain style arithmetic is more like fixed point arithmetic (or perhaps some log-transformed version of it), than floating point arithmetic (which has dynamic precision and defined rounding among other properties). Also, most folks don't like CPUs that almost get the same answer depending on what mood the computer is in. Of course if we change the definition of what would be a useful CPU, than maybe we can use something like that.
Makes me wonder what one could do if you tossed traditional 2-D design (Most CPUs do have layers but very much 2D for all that) and went for a more 3D design like in the human brain. Create a miniaturized silicon 'matrix' of semi-conductor connections in a similar way to the human brain, for example.
The 2 main problems with 3d are currently fabrication density (defect issue,, stress, strain, etc) and how to get rid of all that heat. In your brain, that is solved by self-assembly, redundancy and low usage and a circulatory system. The current computing model of a usable CPU (runs an OS, does IEEE floating point arithmetic, does branching/looping) is probably too complex to solve this problem the same way in the forseable future. Of course if we change the definition of what a usuable CPU is, then perhaps this would be more feasable.
On the other hand there is some progress being made on bump stacked or through subtrate vias (TSV) assemblies (sometimes done for DRAM&Flash for cellphones) and even some limited 2-layered silicon devices (instead of the current one layer) of active devices per silicon die.
Stacked silicon die are promising, but there is currently a large overhead for mechanical connection between die so the density isn't very good. Also there's the problem of differing thermal expansion coefficients between the die that cause mechanical instabilities (which currently has to be solved by just putting in even more interconnect area overhead/margin).
The 2-layered devices are usually not done by stacking two active layers on the same wafer (because it's currently hard to grow a new thick uniform layer of silicon on top of existing circutry) , but they are made by patterning on one side, sticking a new clean wafer on top, flipping the stack over, shaving off the new top (used to be the bottom of the original patterned wafer), and then doing a new pattern on the newly shaven surface. As you might imagine, this isn't currently very scalable for more layers as defects will eventually dominate the system.
Neither technique is currently very good for getting the heat out.
People are working on this,and some limited stuff has made it's way out of the lab and into production but none of the 3d stuff is currently much better than just doing the standard planar chip for most typcial CPU projects right now. It's just a niche...
I don't think you understand the theory behind a one-time pad. Basically the one-time pad is unbreakable if the pad is not predictable (not that it is some arbitrary data stream) which usually requires it to be random. If you use some well-known text as a one time pad or a pad stream with non-uniform statistical properties (say attackable via english letter or word frequency analysis), then your one-time pad is not only theoretically breakable, in practice it's probably not very secure either.
For example, if you knew the pad-stream and the plain-text are both english text, you could xor the "encrypted" data with the 4 characters "space", ETAONRS (some of the most frequent letters), and try to recover likely characters and spaces. As we know, knowing the first and last letter of a word, some words are easy to figure out.
For a one-time pad cipher to be throretically unbreakable, the pad-stream must in practice be random (or created using an essentially random source).
Can't say the same for the Palestinians, who once outnumbered the Jews & Christians of the region by about 10:1, but now are outnumbered by the Jews, as Israel grants full rights, citizenship and suffrage to anyone with the right bloodline, no matter where their family has lived for untold generations.
Bit of a difference, really
I think the british settlers were outnumbered by the native "indians" probably more than 10:1, but since the "american" colonies pretty much allowed anyone to come not-regarding their bloodline, no matter where their family has lived for untold generations, it appears on the face of it that the difference was that israel was more picky about it's immigrants (except maybe for the chinese exclusion act or the japanese internment, but I digress)... You are right that is only a bit of a difference, not a big difference.
If you read the original US constitution and the 14ths amendment which granted ex-slaves citizienship rights,, "indians" are not counted as citizens of the US at that time (unless they became US citizens by paying federal taxes). This continued until 1924 when the US govt finally granted US citizenship to indians a mere 1924-1789 = 135 years later... I believe israel was founded 2011-1948= 63 years ago... Not that condone thier current actions, nor am I an apologist for the US's history, but it's important to understand history, no?
If someone patented a way to make a web browser go faster, you would be comfortable with that?
Patents prevent people from being able to build on each others ideas. In a world without software patents, the companies that succeed are the ones that take advantage of everyone else's advancements the best. Patents gum it all up.
No, patents are supposed to be an exchange. In exchange for disclosing the invention to the public where people can build on the idea, you get a short time of exclusivity where the inventor can benefit from investing in making the product come to market either by doing it by her/himself or licensing the product to other more capable companies.
If not for patents, you'd have people hiding/obscuring thier advanced web browser (or other invention) as a trade secrets that need to be reverse engineered only by large firms that can afford to do reverse engineering and the lawyers they employ or buring advances that they made that they cannot immediately profit from. For example, w/o a patent in hand, if say I had came up with say fast way to compile javascript, but I didn't own a browser infrastructure to deploy that in, I might not bother crossing the t's and dotting the i's to bring that technology to fruition as I would know that no-one would pay me for the additional time it took to perfect/deploy the invention and that advance would have to wait until someone else discovered the technique independently. The financial lure of the patent keeps innovation rolling, it doesn't gum it all up.
Of course, the duration of a patent' exclusivity (currently 20 years) is of current debate. It seems like a long time in these fast changing times and is likely a "tax" that slows down the pace of innovation. However, in a world w/o software patents, the companies that succeed are the ones that take advantage of advancements that they co-opt from other companies, which means that the companies that invest in improving their technology are wasting their money. Not sure that is a better outcome.
Erased "1"s are generated by dispersing the electrons from the floating gate using quantum tunnelling using a negative potential on the control gate. Writing data is the process of applying a large postive potential (voltage) to the control gate so that electrons can quantum tunnel (on NAND flash or inserted via hot-injection for NOR flash) to the floating gate to eventually be trapped there when the programming voltage is lowered.
Since an "erased" sector has all of the electrons which might have been trapped on the floating gate dispersed, writing some data to an erased sector will require confining some number of electrons into floating gates (approximatly 1/2 of the floating gates for random data).
In addition, the erased state also erases the error correcting code (ECC) data, so even if you "programmed" a sector to all ones, the ECC needs to be programmed to the correct value (that's how you can tell an erased sector from a sector that is "programmed" to all ones)...
However, the confined electron on the gate is not actually additional "mass" per-se, as it probably originated from somewhere near the battery and when dispersed will go back to the near the battery. Those trapped electrons are not getting sucked from the environment or destroyed (E=mc^2) when dispersed. All they are doing is changing the charge distribution slightly (the electrons trapped on the floating gate merely push out electrons in atoms on nearby insulators not even near the battery). This is like storing a book mark on one page of a book vs another. It doesn't actually change the mass at all. But I digress...
I once looked into getting some, and decided it was too expensive to mess around with. Even though it's billed as "cheaper than milk," that must be in larger quantities. Plus you need to rent the dewar to transport it.
At Caltech, you used to be able to just get liquid nitrogen (or maybe it was the less dangerous liquid "air") self-service at the physical plant anytime 24-7 and put it on your student account (back then for about the price of gas which was about a buck a pound, which probably scales more like the price of milk these days). Maybe if you know someone at a local university they might be able to get some there. We used to just put the LN in an ice-cooler (a thick styrofoam cooler, cheap plastic one generally will not survive, nor will usually a cheap styrofoam one as LN tends to collapse the compressed styrofoam beads and reduces the structural integrity of a cheap cooler) and transport it wrapped in blankets carefully. We didn't use no stinkin' dewar, we usually just walked it back to our house, or just opened the windows on the car and turn on the AC full blast...
You can certainly fast-freeze fresh strawberries (and many other foodstuffs), but thawing food that contains large amounts of water like strawberries produced results that were generally still mushy (because of ice crystals that burst the cell walls during any freezing process). However, they look "better" when in the fast-frozen state than ones frozen more slowly. If you shatter the strawberries (which is what we usually did with LN frozen food), you can just eat (a few) small shards with a spoon which is very interesting. If you save them in the freezer and eat them still in a partially frozen state (of course not LN temperature, but say 1/2 way between freezer/refrigerator temperature), they were generally more palatable than the mushy results you got going back to room temp. You might want to google for Molecular gatronomists as they might have better "recipes" for LN for frozen strawberries, if you are curious...
Although I mostly agree with the part about seeking advice and asking questions, I don't think most folks understand the Challenger Commission. Basically the whole Commission was an exercise in politics (Feynman knew that General Kutyna and the engineering crew at Morton Thiokol knew what was the likely problem was, but they were politically unable to deliver the news, so Feynman simply delivered it for them).
The one thing about this example that is about engineering is that Feynman (a very smart guy by the way), basically laid out for the public to see the all-too-common disconnect between managment and engineering. In this case, NASA managers presenting rosy pictures where the engineers were sweating the cost-cutting/corner-cutting. Since Feynman's job wasn't on the line, he got to ask the questions that many of the engineers dared not ask. Also because he was smart and articulate, he often got the answers where other askers did not.
The moral of this story? Just being smart and asking questions isn't enough... You have to be able to communicate too. If you think people don't like what you are communicating, you'd better have a plan B.
Or maybe not, those Harvey Mudd ones might not be "legit";^) Feynman gave those lectures at Caltech and I'm pretty sure they aren't available on video (only audio and photographs of blackboards). AFAIK, the only videos you can actually see of Feynman giving lectures like this are another lecture series he gave at Cornell.
If you do listen to (or read them), remember that although perhaps inspirational, in Feynman's own words
My own point of view—which, however, does not seem to be shared by most of the people who worked with the students—is pessimistic. I don't think I did very well by the students. When I look at the way the majority of the students handled the problems on the examinations, I think that the system is a failure. Of course, my friends point out to me that there were one or two dozen students who—very surprisingly —understood almost everything in all of the lectures, and who were quite active in working with the material and worrying about the many points in an excited and interested way. These people have now, I believe, a first-rate background in physics—and they are, after all, the ones I was trying to get at. But then, "The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous."
Note that they don't really even use these lectures at Caltech anymore (except as supplementary material).
And BTW, that RPI medal, I think they pretty much give one to 1 person in almost every high-school, so it really doesn't mean that much other than they science teachers at your high-school think you're the best in your high-school class at things that might matter to an engineering school (e.g., good at math and science), don't read too much into it.
Does this mean I should dust off my OCCAM textbooks?
No you should never dust off your OCCAM textbooks;^) No language that requires a folding editor should be used to write modern software. Of course CSP is a fine model for programming, though...
Although the general business activities expenses are mostly deductible, there are many issues that still prevent job sitmulus (as opposed to natural job creation that results when demand goes up, which isn't happening currently in this economy).
First of all, lowering the cost of new entry-level employees (when they are the least productive), is something that would stimulate job creation. Unfortunatly, this is kept artificially high by higher "living-wage" laws. Not that the jobs that are created are all of low wages and are directly affected by this, but this causes wage inflation at the entry level of the economy. If someone can flip burgers at McD's for $10-$12/hour, that might push up the hourly rate of an entry level receptionist to $15/hour. Since entry level employees aren't as productive as their peers, then at some rate level, it makes more sense to pay the more senior person more (or give them more hours), than take the risk on an entry level employee. That's because new employees must overcome the Tax threshold (in addition to their own wages). Unemployment insurance, workers comp, employee training tax, are all working against this new entry level employee as well as their own lack of initial productivity. There's also the risk of having to let that employee go (because of lack of productivity) that will risk higher UI premiums. That tends to keep new-employment lower on average.
Of course we can't go w/o UI or Worker's Comp or ETT, or various other employee oriented (vs worker-hour oriented) infrastructure in a civilized society, so what can be done to reduce the marginal cost of a new employee to a business? Well for one, we can credit these cost against other taxes that are paid by businesses. But wait, we can't do that because nobody wants businesses to pay any lower taxes (even if they are a credit) and no matter what we design, there's bound to be loopholes.
Admittedly nobody has (seriously) suggested these things yet, but in reality any reduction on taxes on businesses is such political poison to the current administration that I doubt it will be looked at. Basically people just have their fingers crossed that somehow demand will pickup and the natural demand forces that result in new job creation will somehow save the day... With the current unemployment overhang, I don't really see how demand will pickup anytime in the near future.
Ironically, when you look at the typical liberal attitude of having government assistance available to all even if some take advantage or abuse it (a classic example is cars for klunkers, earned income credits, or somewhat more controversial food stamps), isn't really transferable to small businesses that create jobs. For example, the latest "job" bill wants to create a new protected class of workers: the long-term unemployed. Why? Because somehow people feel that the long term unemployed may be discriminated against and all things being equal, need to be considered for jobs before folks who currently have jobs (ignoring of course that if the a currently employee person got the job, that creates a vacancy that perhaps a different unemployed person can fill). This is just insanity. Why would a small business even take the chance of opening up a job position given all the liability associated until demand really picks up and they absolutely need to hire someone. No wonder everything is just stalled: nobody wants to take any chances at all. Not the liberals, not the conservatives.
At less than 100,000 units/year, the H.264 royalty rate is zero. From 100,000 to 5,000,000 units/year the rate is $0.20/unit (twenty cents) and above 5,000,000 units/year, the rate is $0.10 (ten cents), until the maximum cap amount of $6.5 million/year is paid.
For now. As has been said elsewhere, in a few years those terms are going to change, and nobody knows what they're going to be yet. If I were planning on being in business then, I'd seriously consider not using H.264. It's a minefield just waiting to be touched off.
yes for "now", but if you actually read the link...
The first term of the License runs through 2010, but the License will be renewable for successive five-year periods for the life of any Portfolio patent on reasonable terms and conditions which may take into account prevailing market conditions, changes in technological environment and available commercial products at the time, but for the protection of licensees, royalty rates applicable to specific license grants or specific licensed products will not increase by more than ten percent (10%) at each renewal.
So the royalty rate can't go up more than 10% every 5 years until the patents expire (which is 2 more times)... However, if it follows the MPEG2 license, it will probably go down to less than 1/2 the price per unit at each 5 year point, but keep the maximum cap.
I think you are mis-representing (or exhibiting a bias against) constitutionalist. For some folks, it would be great to get judges that took novel cases and use them to make novel law. However, to a constitutionalist constructionist, that's the worst way to make laws. In a novel case, often the biases of the facts of a particular case influence the resultant law (defendant might invoke pity via a sob story, or one of the parties personifies evil). To a constitutionalist, it is much better to base a law on a construction that draws from a body of law that can traceback to a point of common societal agreement, often a constitution or other widely respected settled body of general agreement. To a constitutionalist, this helps to assure that the new laws are in-line with previous points of general agreement which improves the likelhood that the decisions will stand the test of time going foward.
That's not to say a constitutionalist views the law as black or white, or new or old. Often a constitutionalist needs to be creative to apply the agreed societal norms to the new situations w/o trying to prejudice the new interpretation with the specific facts of the current cases. I doubt a robot could apply the proper levels of creativity. It's not like developing a mathematical proof. Judgement, insight, wisdom are all necessary. The goal is not to derive the new law from older laws, but to assure the new bodies of law will achieve the same level of general agreement as older laws (otherwize it's likely a bad law).
Of course robots could be use to help pick a few specific biased test-cases with peculiar sets of facts out of a class of cases which can be tailored to specific judges to attempt to trick some judges to rule in certain ways that then can be sold to the highest bidder. They could play both sides of the fence (get people to pay on one side to try the case and pay on the other side to not try the case). Now that would be an interesting use of a robot lawyer...
IANAL, but I think you are confused a bit between copyright and your license to use the work and patents for the ideas...
Your thesis is essentially "automagically" copyrighted the date that you write it (at least in the US). You may gain additional protections by asserting your copyright (via a simple notice asserting copyright), or registering the copyright (with the government). At a minimum, usually people incluse a copyright to clarify ownership. Typically, you own the copyright to your thesis (unless for some reason it can considered a work-for-hire say about some work sponsored by some company like if they paid your tuition or gave you money for research).
If you do own it, you can do whatever you want to license it. You can publish your terms for a license as to what sort of copyrights you are asserting as part of your document, but it isn't actually required (or necessarily binding either athough it can be used as evidence of an implied license). However, if you don't really own it, asserting ownership and including an implied license might get you in trouble (say if the real owner didn't like your giving any rights away with your included license and the infringer simply said that she relied on your statement, you might be on the hook for some damages).
Normally, it would be just enough to say that you have a copyright on it and be done with it. People can still reference it via fair-use and the actual ideas in your thesis may or may-not be patentable (since the US is now a first-to-file country, you are probably screwed in case someone wanted to steal yur ideas) copyright simply doesn't matter in these cases. As a general rule, you can't release your work to the public domain "with-a-catch". If it's public-domain, it's public-domain. If you care about someone stealing it out of the public domain, you really have to assert a copyright on it and keep it (or donate the copyright to someone you trust to keep it).
There is, however, a small technicality that you probably need to have answered first. How would someone stumble upon your thesis? Is it *published* somewhere? or is it just on your own personal website (essentially self-published). If it is published somewhere, the publisher may want to assert some copyright on that (unless is is just a university publication which sometimes doesn't care). For example, if you put a paper in an IEEE journal, the IEEE will want copyright assigned to them (so they can sell the journal) as a condition of publishing your paper. If this is the case, you actually don't have much of a choice in the matter.
At less than 100,000 units/year, the H.264 royalty rate is zero. From 100,000 to 5,000,000 units/year the rate is $0.20/unit (twenty cents) and above 5,000,000 units/year, the rate is $0.10 (ten cents), until the maximum cap amount of $6.5 million/year is paid.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you get it. Even the link you pointed to only covers the substitute generic for brand, not the reverse.
For this specific case, there are probably going to be at least 3 versions of generic atorvastatin in addition to the "brand-name" liptor: Ranbaxy (india company, the generic currently available outside the usa), Watson (has exclusive for walgreens and cvs), and Teva (the only lab currently plannin a release with no specific Pfizer agreement). There won't be a doctor around that writes a scrip explicitly for one of the other 3 versions, because the won't have any idea which of the 3 generics that a typical pharmacy will stock*** and it's highly likely that no pharmacy will stock all 3. If they think about generics, they will likely only write the prescription for atorvastatin (the drug name). Lipitor is a valid way to fill that prescription and is not illegal at all. Say if you go to walgreens for "generic" you will get the Watson version, you cannot get the Teva version, or the Ranbaxy version. If you went to a pharmacy that didn't have an agreement with Watson and didn't stock their generics, you will get Liptor (at least for the next 6 months***). That won't be illegal either.
The stuff you are misinterpreting is to protect the brand drug, so that if a doctor says use that brand and "dispense as written", the pharmacy must comply. It does not protect the reverse, because that situation isn't covered in the law (nobody is lobbying enough for the reverse protection).
*** slight technicality, due to USA law, only the Watson one will be available immediatly in the USA. Ranbaxy signed an agreement with Pfizer to delay the release of their generic in the USA to settle all legal issues about manufacturing techniques with Pfizer and due to USA legal issues, the first filer (Ranbaxy) gets a 180 day exclusive for the generic FDA approval. Watson licensed the patents from Pfizer so their generic is available right away (with the royalties going to Pfizer).
>Some deals require pharmacies to reject prescriptions for low-cost generics
This is illegal on its face.
--
BMO
This is not illegal on on its face. IANAL, but AFAIK, pharmacist in most juristictions are allow to subsitute unless the written prescription doesn't allow for it. So for the typical prescription, there's no reason they can't subsitute the "real" lipitor for an atorvastatin prescription (rather than what they do all the time in reverse, subsitute a generic for a brand-name). If you don't like the substitution, you can go to another pharmacy.
As I wrote in another post, think about it the other way, why should every pharmacy be forced to stock/dispense every manufacturer's version of all drugs? Pharmacies stock what they think is profitable and enough so that people can usually get what they want. Otherwize people trying to fill prescriptions will go elsewhere (just like any other business). Say you want to buy a sony pc, but walk into a office max and are disappointed they only stock HP pcs because they signed an exculsive agreement for HP pcs? Well, that's the same thing. You can go elsewhere to buy your sony pc (say even maybe on-line), or you can just get the essentially equivalent HP pc from office max. Not only is this not illegal, but most people won't care as they aren't even paying (well, except the insurance co-pay only).
I'm unclear here. Since when did pharmacists suddenly get the right to override a doctor's prescription? How can Pfizer actually get a pharmacist to sign an exclusivity agreement.
A "prescription" is merely a course of treatment recommended by a doctor. A doctor could just write you a prescription to do more exercise, although usually there are drugs involved with many courses of treatment. AFAIK, legally, the prescription applies to the patient, not the pharmacists (e.g., the patient is taking the course of treatment, the doctor or pharmacist is not giving the treatment). Since it is the patient that is taking the treatment, he/she can choose to take the advice of a doctor or pharmacist and substitute a generic (usually to avoid more out-of-pocket costs or comply with insurance authorized courses of treatment for covered expenses).
In most legal juristictions that I know of, a prescription for drugs will by default allow for generic substitutions by the pharmacists, unless the doctor specifically dis-allows it (the actual wording varies from locale to locale, but usually "do-not-substitute" or something similar), so there's technically no reason that a pharmacist can't just subtitute the "real" lipitor even if the doctor writes the generic name (unless the prescription specifically calls out one of the generic formulations which seems unlikely).
Think about this in reverse, do you think it's prudent to require all pharmacies to stock all drugs made from all different vendors when they are essentially the same thing? What if 10 different companies made versions of atorvastatin for sale? No that isn't reasonable, is it? That's why pharmacists are allowed to substitute. Of course a patient can shop around their prescription to various pharmacies to get the lowest price they can (or a specific generic version if they are so inclined), but who do you know does that? But you can...
Pharmacists have exclusive arrangements all the time. Do you think that say target or walgreens has 1000 different suppliers for common high-volume drugs? No, they contract to have their own formulation and sell them in their stores. There is no army of Pfizer folks signing up individual pharmacists for exclusivity, because these pharmacists don't exist. They are all national conglomerates who commonly lock in 1 or 2 suppliers with exclusive agreements for better pricing. That's business.
No need to kill anyone. Limit reproduction and the problem is solved in just a few decades.
That doesn't work in our current economic model where we assume some sort of economic growth to fix the problems of caring for our elderly and sick (e.g., pensions, insurance). Of course if we fix that, you won't need to kill anyone, just all old folks live in poverty and nobody can afford to get sick (or we all collectively take our standard of living down a couple notches).
Japan and some european countries are already dealing with this issue of reduced reproduction rates screwing over their current economic model. Some countries like Canada, Australia, and the USA have historically addressed this problem with immigration.
Currently, China seems to be an outlier in that they seem to be both limiting reproduction and growing, but many suspect that is because they are essentially sucking the wealth out of their trading partners by over-exploiting their natural resources w/o having to deal with the pension and insurance issue too much. In China there is a two-tier system where jobs with good pensions and locations with good health care are only in the larger cities and are not generally available citizens that originate outside the cities. To restrict the pension/insurance issues, citizens aren't allowed to officially move to the cities (although they can be migrant workers there, but generally don't have access to services).
Many are not sure how sustainable this two tier situation is. When you get lots of repressed masses, sometimes the result is a bunch of killing.
thermal plants have better efficiency than explosion engines in car.
Although the thermal plant might have more efficiency, depending on the level of NIMBY, the transmission losses and the overhead of maintaining base-load for the electric grid may make the actual net efficiency closer than anyone may like... Sadly, reality is a must-satisfy condition in this analysis...
SATs are a filter. They don't get you in. If you get a 1600 (or whatever the max is these days) you're now on par with 10,000 other kids who also got a 1600.
Yes 2400 is the max these days... I've been involved with admissions with my school (one of the top-10 depending on the list) and certainly SAT is used as a coarse filter (once above a certain level, the actual score is mostly irrelevant)... Also note that 2400 doesn't necessarily mean "perfect", every year the test is scaled so it may be that missing 1 question is still 2400. Also with the "free-form" math, and essay, it isn't they same test as in the old days... Also, most selective schools also require the "subject" SAT tests (used to be called SAT II, and if compsci, probably at least math 2 and one of the science tests).
Schools are generally more interested in grades/GPA than SAT scores, but even those are conditional (e.g., what courses you took vs GPA is more important than actual numerical GPA, say IB, Honors, or AP classes vs standard classes or underwater basket weaving).
The valedictorian at my highschool, 5.0 GPA (AP scale), 1600 SAT, smartest guy I know, got rejected from MIT. He ended up going to U Penn, now works at Google. Another girl got into MIT with lower GPA and SAT, but she had like 400 extracurriculars and was involved in everything. Just goes to show it's not all grades that count.
It's a little more subtle than just 400 extracurriculars. Typical "selective" schools tend to look for long-running extracurriculars, not just bulk (which tend to either be "fake" because nobody can spend 100 hours a day on extracurriculars, or if not actually fake, not representative of actual participation). Just pick a few extracurriculars and do them for > 3-4 years (starting in middle school), and show some commitment (lead developer for an open source project, lead chair in a band instrument, president of the chess team, even treasurer of NHS, attending math olympics, physics bowl, programming competition events or whatever).
Getting someone letter of recommendation from someone involved in the extracurricular is a really good idea so that they don't know it was some sort of "trophy" extracurricular (where you are a member to list it on your application, but don't really do anything). The generic guidance counselor "this is a smart kid" recommendation isn't really that impressive to a selective school because almost everyone gets one of those. Of course if your counselor knows you really well or can compare you to some other folks that ended up going to the school you are applying to, perhaps the counselor can write a better recommendation.
Just saying...
FWIW, there appears to be a better correlation to ultimate success on the schools that you apply to (not get in), than the school you acutally end up graduating from. So if you are the type that is ambitious enough to apply to a selective school, and you actually do it (rather than treat this whole admissions thing as a "thought experiment"), you might be enough of a do-er (or at least enough self esteem) that will make your more likely to be successful in the future, regardless of the school you attend (or drop out of).
And as a total aside, you have the best chance of getting into any program as a so-called "legacy" admit. Just make it past the filter levels and go to the same school as a parent, uncle, aunt or sibling. A "legacy" admit can get you into nearly any school you have the "pedigree" for... :^(
Truly American that the profiteering going on here to the detriment of citizens.
FTFY.
Cute, but didn't the UK use the totally untested Pandemrix H1N1 w/ special adjuvant vaccinne made by GSK (a UK) company? Of course germany was even more wacked by buying standard vaccinee for the govt officials and Pandemrix for everyone else. Apparently America doesn't have a monopoly on private profiteering to the detriment of citizens... Goverenments of the world unite ;^)
And before you go berserk calling me an anti-MSFT troll, you should know that I'm an MCP.
Gasp, you're a Master Control Program? Quick get me a disc before I get de-rezzed.
"You will each become a part of me, and together, we will be complete."
You get the floating point arithmetic for free in the brain - the time between a particular neuron firing is inversely proportional to the strength of a particular input. Stronger signals mean shorter pulse times. More precision is gained by having more neurons for than input.
You most certainly do not get floating point arithmetic in the brain, you get analog arithmetic in the brain. Brain style arithmetic is more like fixed point arithmetic (or perhaps some log-transformed version of it), than floating point arithmetic (which has dynamic precision and defined rounding among other properties). Also, most folks don't like CPUs that almost get the same answer depending on what mood the computer is in. Of course if we change the definition of what would be a useful CPU, than maybe we can use something like that.
Makes me wonder what one could do if you tossed traditional 2-D design (Most CPUs do have layers but very much 2D for all that) and went for a more 3D design like in the human brain. Create a miniaturized silicon 'matrix' of semi-conductor connections in a similar way to the human brain, for example.
The 2 main problems with 3d are currently fabrication density (defect issue,, stress, strain, etc) and how to get rid of all that heat. In your brain, that is solved by self-assembly, redundancy and low usage and a circulatory system. The current computing model of a usable CPU (runs an OS, does IEEE floating point arithmetic, does branching/looping) is probably too complex to solve this problem the same way in the forseable future. Of course if we change the definition of what a usuable CPU is, then perhaps this would be more feasable.
On the other hand there is some progress being made on bump stacked or through subtrate vias (TSV) assemblies (sometimes done for DRAM&Flash for cellphones) and even some limited 2-layered silicon devices (instead of the current one layer) of active devices per silicon die.
Stacked silicon die are promising, but there is currently a large overhead for mechanical connection between die so the density isn't very good. Also there's the problem of differing thermal expansion coefficients between the die that cause mechanical instabilities (which currently has to be solved by just putting in even more interconnect area overhead/margin).
The 2-layered devices are usually not done by stacking two active layers on the same wafer (because it's currently hard to grow a new thick uniform layer of silicon on top of existing circutry) , but they are made by patterning on one side, sticking a new clean wafer on top, flipping the stack over, shaving off the new top (used to be the bottom of the original patterned wafer), and then doing a new pattern on the newly shaven surface. As you might imagine, this isn't currently very scalable for more layers as defects will eventually dominate the system.
Neither technique is currently very good for getting the heat out.
People are working on this,and some limited stuff has made it's way out of the lab and into production but none of the 3d stuff is currently much better than just doing the standard planar chip for most typcial CPU projects right now. It's just a niche...
I don't think you understand the theory behind a one-time pad. Basically the one-time pad is unbreakable if the pad is not predictable (not that it is some arbitrary data stream) which usually requires it to be random. If you use some well-known text as a one time pad or a pad stream with non-uniform statistical properties (say attackable via english letter or word frequency analysis), then your one-time pad is not only theoretically breakable, in practice it's probably not very secure either.
For example, if you knew the pad-stream and the plain-text are both english text, you could xor the "encrypted" data with the 4 characters "space", ETAONRS (some of the most frequent letters), and try to recover likely characters and spaces. As we know, knowing the first and last letter of a word, some words are easy to figure out.
For a one-time pad cipher to be throretically unbreakable, the pad-stream must in practice be random (or created using an essentially random source).
Can't say the same for the Palestinians, who once outnumbered the Jews & Christians of the region by about 10:1, but now are outnumbered by the Jews, as Israel grants full rights, citizenship and suffrage to anyone with the right bloodline, no matter where their family has lived for untold generations.
Bit of a difference, really
I think the british settlers were outnumbered by the native "indians" probably more than 10:1, but since the "american" colonies pretty much allowed anyone to come not-regarding their bloodline, no matter where their family has lived for untold generations, it appears on the face of it that the difference was that israel was more picky about it's immigrants (except maybe for the chinese exclusion act or the japanese internment, but I digress)... You are right that is only a bit of a difference, not a big difference.
If you read the original US constitution and the 14ths amendment which granted ex-slaves citizienship rights,, "indians" are not counted as citizens of the US at that time (unless they became US citizens by paying federal taxes). This continued until 1924 when the US govt finally granted US citizenship to indians a mere 1924-1789 = 135 years later... I believe israel was founded 2011-1948= 63 years ago... Not that condone thier current actions, nor am I an apologist for the US's history, but it's important to understand history, no?
If someone patented a way to make a web browser go faster, you would be comfortable with that?
Patents prevent people from being able to build on each others ideas. In a world without software patents, the companies that succeed are the ones that take advantage of everyone else's advancements the best. Patents gum it all up.
No, patents are supposed to be an exchange. In exchange for disclosing the invention to the public where people can build on the idea, you get a short time of exclusivity where the inventor can benefit from investing in making the product come to market either by doing it by her/himself or licensing the product to other more capable companies.
If not for patents, you'd have people hiding/obscuring thier advanced web browser (or other invention) as a trade secrets that need to be reverse engineered only by large firms that can afford to do reverse engineering and the lawyers they employ or buring advances that they made that they cannot immediately profit from. For example, w/o a patent in hand, if say I had came up with say fast way to compile javascript, but I didn't own a browser infrastructure to deploy that in, I might not bother crossing the t's and dotting the i's to bring that technology to fruition as I would know that no-one would pay me for the additional time it took to perfect/deploy the invention and that advance would have to wait until someone else discovered the technique independently. The financial lure of the patent keeps innovation rolling, it doesn't gum it all up.
Of course, the duration of a patent' exclusivity (currently 20 years) is of current debate. It seems like a long time in these fast changing times and is likely a "tax" that slows down the pace of innovation. However, in a world w/o software patents, the companies that succeed are the ones that take advantage of advancements that they co-opt from other companies, which means that the companies that invest in improving their technology are wasting their money. Not sure that is a better outcome.
Except that the opposite is true in flash memory.
Erased "1"s are generated by dispersing the electrons from the floating gate using quantum tunnelling using a negative potential on the control gate. Writing data is the process of applying a large postive potential (voltage) to the control gate so that electrons can quantum tunnel (on NAND flash or inserted via hot-injection for NOR flash) to the floating gate to eventually be trapped there when the programming voltage is lowered.
Since an "erased" sector has all of the electrons which might have been trapped on the floating gate dispersed, writing some data to an erased sector will require confining some number of electrons into floating gates (approximatly 1/2 of the floating gates for random data).
In addition, the erased state also erases the error correcting code (ECC) data, so even if you "programmed" a sector to all ones, the ECC needs to be programmed to the correct value (that's how you can tell an erased sector from a sector that is "programmed" to all ones)...
However, the confined electron on the gate is not actually additional "mass" per-se, as it probably originated from somewhere near the battery and when dispersed will go back to the near the battery. Those trapped electrons are not getting sucked from the environment or destroyed (E=mc^2) when dispersed. All they are doing is changing the charge distribution slightly (the electrons trapped on the floating gate merely push out electrons in atoms on nearby insulators not even near the battery). This is like storing a book mark on one page of a book vs another. It doesn't actually change the mass at all. But I digress...
I once looked into getting some, and decided it was too expensive to mess around with. Even though it's billed as "cheaper than milk," that must be in larger quantities. Plus you need to rent the dewar to transport it.
At Caltech, you used to be able to just get liquid nitrogen (or maybe it was the less dangerous liquid "air") self-service at the physical plant anytime 24-7 and put it on your student account (back then for about the price of gas which was about a buck a pound, which probably scales more like the price of milk these days). Maybe if you know someone at a local university they might be able to get some there. We used to just put the LN in an ice-cooler (a thick styrofoam cooler, cheap plastic one generally will not survive, nor will usually a cheap styrofoam one as LN tends to collapse the compressed styrofoam beads and reduces the structural integrity of a cheap cooler) and transport it wrapped in blankets carefully. We didn't use no stinkin' dewar, we usually just walked it back to our house, or just opened the windows on the car and turn on the AC full blast...
You can certainly fast-freeze fresh strawberries (and many other foodstuffs), but thawing food that contains large amounts of water like strawberries produced results that were generally still mushy (because of ice crystals that burst the cell walls during any freezing process). However, they look "better" when in the fast-frozen state than ones frozen more slowly. If you shatter the strawberries (which is what we usually did with LN frozen food), you can just eat (a few) small shards with a spoon which is very interesting. If you save them in the freezer and eat them still in a partially frozen state (of course not LN temperature, but say 1/2 way between freezer/refrigerator temperature), they were generally more palatable than the mushy results you got going back to room temp. You might want to google for Molecular gatronomists as they might have better "recipes" for LN for frozen strawberries, if you are curious...
Although I mostly agree with the part about seeking advice and asking questions, I don't think most folks understand the Challenger Commission. Basically the whole Commission was an exercise in politics (Feynman knew that General Kutyna and the engineering crew at Morton Thiokol knew what was the likely problem was, but they were politically unable to deliver the news, so Feynman simply delivered it for them).
The one thing about this example that is about engineering is that Feynman (a very smart guy by the way), basically laid out for the public to see the all-too-common disconnect between managment and engineering. In this case, NASA managers presenting rosy pictures where the engineers were sweating the cost-cutting/corner-cutting. Since Feynman's job wasn't on the line, he got to ask the questions that many of the engineers dared not ask. Also because he was smart and articulate, he often got the answers where other askers did not.
The moral of this story? Just being smart and asking questions isn't enough... You have to be able to communicate too. If you think people don't like what you are communicating, you'd better have a plan B.
I guess I was actually quoting Feynman who was actually quoting Edward Gibbon.
In any case, the quote is certainly notable and pertainate to this discussion...
Or watch the Feynman lectures from Harvey Mudd.
Or maybe not, those Harvey Mudd ones might not be "legit" ;^)
Feynman gave those lectures at Caltech and I'm pretty sure they aren't available on video (only audio and photographs of blackboards). AFAIK, the only videos you can actually see of Feynman giving lectures like this are another lecture series he gave at Cornell.
If you do listen to (or read them), remember that although perhaps inspirational, in Feynman's own words
My own point of view—which, however, does not seem to be shared by most of the people
who worked with the students—is pessimistic. I don't think I did very well by the
students. When I look at the way the majority of the students handled the problems
on the examinations, I think that the system is a failure. Of course, my friends
point out to me that there were one or two dozen students who—very surprisingly
—understood almost everything in all of the lectures, and who were quite active
in working with the material and worrying about the many points in an excited
and interested way. These people have now, I believe, a first-rate background in
physics—and they are, after all, the ones I was trying to get at. But then, "The
power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions
where it is almost superfluous."
Note that they don't really even use these lectures at Caltech anymore (except as supplementary material).
And BTW, that RPI medal, I think they pretty much give one to 1 person in almost every high-school, so it really doesn't mean that much other than they science teachers at your high-school think you're the best in your high-school class at things that might matter to an engineering school (e.g., good at math and science), don't read too much into it.
Hello, speech analysis, I am proud to welcome you to the select club of phrenology, graphology, astrology and numerology.
and economics.
and meteorologists...
Does this mean I should dust off my OCCAM textbooks?
No you should never dust off your OCCAM textbooks ;^) No language that requires a folding editor should be used to write modern software. Of course CSP is a fine model for programming, though...
Although the general business activities expenses are mostly deductible, there are many issues that still prevent job sitmulus (as opposed to natural job creation that results when demand goes up, which isn't happening currently in this economy).
First of all, lowering the cost of new entry-level employees (when they are the least productive), is something that would stimulate job creation. Unfortunatly, this is kept artificially high by higher "living-wage" laws. Not that the jobs that are created are all of low wages and are directly affected by this, but this causes wage inflation at the entry level of the economy. If someone can flip burgers at McD's for $10-$12/hour, that might push up the hourly rate of an entry level receptionist to $15/hour. Since entry level employees aren't as productive as their peers, then at some rate level, it makes more sense to pay the more senior person more (or give them more hours), than take the risk on an entry level employee. That's because new employees must overcome the Tax threshold (in addition to their own wages). Unemployment insurance, workers comp, employee training tax, are all working against this new entry level employee as well as their own lack of initial productivity. There's also the risk of having to let that employee go (because of lack of productivity) that will risk higher UI premiums. That tends to keep new-employment lower on average.
Of course we can't go w/o UI or Worker's Comp or ETT, or various other employee oriented (vs worker-hour oriented) infrastructure in a civilized society, so what can be done to reduce the marginal cost of a new employee to a business? Well for one, we can credit these cost against other taxes that are paid by businesses. But wait, we can't do that because nobody wants businesses to pay any lower taxes (even if they are a credit) and no matter what we design, there's bound to be loopholes.
Admittedly nobody has (seriously) suggested these things yet, but in reality any reduction on taxes on businesses is such political poison to the current administration that I doubt it will be looked at. Basically people just have their fingers crossed that somehow demand will pickup and the natural demand forces that result in new job creation will somehow save the day... With the current unemployment overhang, I don't really see how demand will pickup anytime in the near future.
Ironically, when you look at the typical liberal attitude of having government assistance available to all even if some take advantage or abuse it (a classic example is cars for klunkers, earned income credits, or somewhat more controversial food stamps), isn't really transferable to small businesses that create jobs. For example, the latest "job" bill wants to create a new protected class of workers: the long-term unemployed. Why? Because somehow people feel that the long term unemployed may be discriminated against and all things being equal, need to be considered for jobs before folks who currently have jobs (ignoring of course that if the a currently employee person got the job, that creates a vacancy that perhaps a different unemployed person can fill). This is just insanity. Why would a small business even take the chance of opening up a job position given all the liability associated until demand really picks up and they absolutely need to hire someone. No wonder everything is just stalled: nobody wants to take any chances at all. Not the liberals, not the conservatives.
At less than 100,000 units/year, the H.264 royalty rate is zero.
From 100,000 to 5,000,000 units/year the rate is $0.20/unit (twenty cents)
and above 5,000,000 units/year, the rate is $0.10 (ten cents), until the maximum cap amount of $6.5 million/year is paid.
Source: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf
For now. As has been said elsewhere, in a few years those terms are going to change, and nobody knows what they're going to be yet. If I were planning on being in business then, I'd seriously consider not using H.264. It's a minefield just waiting to be touched off.
yes for "now", but if you actually read the link...
The first term of the License runs through 2010, but the License will be renewable for successive five-year periods for the life of any Portfolio patent on reasonable terms and conditions which may take into account prevailing market conditions, changes in technological environment and available commercial products at the time, but for the protection of licensees, royalty rates applicable to specific license grants or specific licensed products will not increase by more than ten percent (10%) at each renewal.
So the royalty rate can't go up more than 10% every 5 years until the patents expire (which is 2 more times)... However, if it follows the MPEG2 license, it will probably go down to less than 1/2 the price per unit at each 5 year point, but keep the maximum cap.
I think you are mis-representing (or exhibiting a bias against) constitutionalist. For some folks, it would be great to get judges that took novel cases and use them to make novel law. However, to a constitutionalist constructionist, that's the worst way to make laws. In a novel case, often the biases of the facts of a particular case influence the resultant law (defendant might invoke pity via a sob story, or one of the parties personifies evil). To a constitutionalist, it is much better to base a law on a construction that draws from a body of law that can traceback to a point of common societal agreement, often a constitution or other widely respected settled body of general agreement. To a constitutionalist, this helps to assure that the new laws are in-line with previous points of general agreement which improves the likelhood that the decisions will stand the test of time going foward.
That's not to say a constitutionalist views the law as black or white, or new or old. Often a constitutionalist needs to be creative to apply the agreed societal norms to the new situations w/o trying to prejudice the new interpretation with the specific facts of the current cases. I doubt a robot could apply the proper levels of creativity. It's not like developing a mathematical proof. Judgement, insight, wisdom are all necessary. The goal is not to derive the new law from older laws, but to assure the new bodies of law will achieve the same level of general agreement as older laws (otherwize it's likely a bad law).
Of course robots could be use to help pick a few specific biased test-cases with peculiar sets of facts out of a class of cases which can be tailored to specific judges to attempt to trick some judges to rule in certain ways that then can be sold to the highest bidder. They could play both sides of the fence (get people to pay on one side to try the case and pay on the other side to not try the case). Now that would be an interesting use of a robot lawyer...
IANAL, but I think you are confused a bit between copyright and your license to use the work and patents for the ideas...
Your thesis is essentially "automagically" copyrighted the date that you write it (at least in the US). You may gain additional protections by asserting your copyright (via a simple notice asserting copyright), or registering the copyright (with the government). At a minimum, usually people incluse a copyright to clarify ownership. Typically, you own the copyright to your thesis (unless for some reason it can considered a work-for-hire say about some work sponsored by some company like if they paid your tuition or gave you money for research).
If you do own it, you can do whatever you want to license it. You can publish your terms for a license as to what sort of copyrights you are asserting as part of your document, but it isn't actually required (or necessarily binding either athough it can be used as evidence of an implied license). However, if you don't really own it, asserting ownership and including an implied license might get you in trouble (say if the real owner didn't like your giving any rights away with your included license and the infringer simply said that she relied on your statement, you might be on the hook for some damages).
Normally, it would be just enough to say that you have a copyright on it and be done with it. People can still reference it via fair-use and the actual ideas in your thesis may or may-not be patentable (since the US is now a first-to-file country, you are probably screwed in case someone wanted to steal yur ideas) copyright simply doesn't matter in these cases. As a general rule, you can't release your work to the public domain "with-a-catch". If it's public-domain, it's public-domain. If you care about someone stealing it out of the public domain, you really have to assert a copyright on it and keep it (or donate the copyright to someone you trust to keep it).
There is, however, a small technicality that you probably need to have answered first. How would someone stumble upon your thesis? Is it *published* somewhere? or is it just on your own personal website (essentially self-published). If it is published somewhere, the publisher may want to assert some copyright on that (unless is is just a university publication which sometimes doesn't care). For example, if you put a paper in an IEEE journal, the IEEE will want copyright assigned to them (so they can sell the journal) as a condition of publishing your paper. If this is the case, you actually don't have much of a choice in the matter.
At less than 100,000 units/year, the H.264 royalty rate is zero.
From 100,000 to 5,000,000 units/year the rate is $0.20/unit (twenty cents)
and above 5,000,000 units/year, the rate is $0.10 (ten cents), until the maximum cap amount of $6.5 million/year is paid.
Source: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf