They are allowed to do anything they want with up to a certain amount of US intellectual property. In order to settle the money due them on complaint, Antigua plans to sell US intellectual property (monetisation).
They need a way to track this so they don't go over the allowed amount, and probably a way to see how much people might pay for stuff, like an auction, in case they have a few hundred thousand dollars left on the limit and need to find a product and buyer to fill the gap.
Compared to my explanation, they used fewer words. And they didn't confuse "IP rights granted as a result of a complaint to the WTO" with "fair use".
Or if you don't like my explanation, you could ask the Antiguan government's PR firm to clarify why they used those words. I'm sure they will be interested in explaining the thought process to random people from the internet. I've heard that Antiguan government PR firms like nothing better.
Not really. It sounds like a position that should have been filled from the beginning is just now getting filled.
Until now, the Medicare agency, led by Marilyn B. Tavenner, was the quarterback, or system integrator, trying to coordinate the work of dozens of contractors.
I'm sure Medicare has things to do other than deal with this mess that wasn't even being written until spring. How they got to that point is a discussion we already had, I'm just pointing out that Medicare is probably not the best choice for driving the technology/solution angle here.
The mythical man month does not directly cover the case of being under-manned until a month after release, then bringing staffing up to where it should be. And certainly if that is the entirety of your contribution, I have to assume you mean the most recognized portions of the concept.
More on point is the difficulty of debugging a live system and making changes that don't cascade to cause more problems, which I don't see happening by the end of November. But an unrealistic schedule, again, is not the mythical man month.
My transaction is between me and the retailer, who will know my name and address. I don't care if that person or company knows it. I do care that HTTPS is probably easier to crack than HTTP plus multiple onion encryptions.
I don't have any "let's blow up the government" posts. And if they are monitoring the store, my activities are legal so I'm not worried. So your straw man argument holds no water.
I would, however, prefer to keep it as quiet as possible, and TOR allows me to at least attempt that. Once again, I don't care about anonymity to the retailer. I'm using onion routing to provide me:
1) multiple layers of encryption 2) external anonymity between me and the retailer
I realize that anyone running an exit node could be intent on revealing my secret, but HTTPS on the last hop is better than a direct connection from my home.
I'm not sure why you felt the need to reply so angrily to this post, especially when you simply misunderstood it. Sounds like either projection or a blind knee-jerk response to what you see as a misuse of TOR. Maybe in a previous life you were an inflatable animal and didn't like being raped. It's no matter to me, but you might want to look into it. The first step to getting better is apologising - I can wait.
We were talking about trusting no one, not how paranoid I might be. Reading research and trusting it does not fit that model. How researchers work is unrelated.
I focused on math because we are talking about verifying the software, which is all about the math. Or at least the software implementation of the math.
We don't care if the fundamentals are wrong, so we don't need 20 years of experience. If an input should be cryptographically random, then trust requires that it be tested scientifically. There are ways to do so, which is how the Dual_EC_DRBG prng defect was found.
If there is better crypto or an attack on existing crypto, that is outside the realm of trust, so irrelevant. Does this implementation match its design and goals? Compared to evaluating crypto on its own merits, that is orders of magnitude simpler, very math heavy, and well within reason for someone with calculus experience, and reading material.
No one should be judging the merits of the crypto itself without years of experience. Trust is simpler, as long as it is an open standard. If its not open, don't trust it.
But now that we have an explanation, it is no longer feel good hippy voodoo bullshit. This is how stuff becomes legitimised, insurance covered, not just fooling yourself therapy. Thanks, science!
Because cracking the onion has to be harder than https?
I'm sure buying piles of fertilizer would set off alarms, but what if I want a variety of inflatable barnyard friends, rubber sheets, that 55 gallon drum of lube, and a celebrity masturbator(male)? I don't want to get that dossier started.
If you operated a business and some of your franchisees did something you didn't know about? Because that is the "that shit" you're talking about.
Franchisees got nailed, customers filed class action, Aarons had no defense due to prior suit.
" September 2012 â" The Federal Trade Commission settles spying claims against the maker of PC Rental Agent, Designerware LLC, as well as seven of Aaronâ(TM)s rent-to-own franchisees. The settlement bars the software maker and the franchisees from further spying. Aaronâ(TM)s, itself, was not part of the FTC matter."
Those are the facts as we know them. But let's pile on the corporations are bad bandwagon, because its more interesting to rehash conventional wisdom than have an original thought.
Nice job missing the point. For typical desktop use, HTML 5 is not a non-choice. Sure you might need a beefy machine to run unreal, but that is the extreme end. And a demo of what is possible.
With client side processing libraries like knockoutjs and datatables, there is no limit on what can be done in the browser. With asm.js, even hard core number crunching can be done
You would not run Seti@home on it, but it is functional.
Simple solution. Find the person with the most reverts, review the last 20 for fairness, and block them for a week. Iterate until people start contributing again.
Perhaps give people a second chance, perhaps not. But this is the most impersonal way to start attacking the problem.
A page with dickheads marked for review, that you can't edit if you are named on, would help.
But the comprehensive solution will be convincing Jimmy there is a problem.
I'm not taking a side here, but I just don't see it. One article you linked mentions it, and I read this on Ars earlier and didn't see any skeuomorphic anything that really stood out.
I love railing on the ediots, but I'm clearly missing something here.
No testing, no test deployment in a mirrored environment, no one validated that the deployment was correct.
If these things are the heart of your income, you take a hash of everything pre-deploy and post-deploy, and make sure it matches everywhere it has to.
Then you validate that the hash list matches everywhere. That's just common sense. I've worked plenty of places where income was not directly tied to what was deployed I developed a manually intensive way to do exactly the same thing - make sure you deploy what should be deployed, nothing less and nothing more.
Is the deployment valid? That's validation. And if you have the ability to lose piles of money by fucking it up, you fucking well validate.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
There was no bypass. The search was reasonable, if you read the decision. It's not that long. They got a proper warrant and executed it correctly.
You read the word "excuse" and immediately knee-jerked your response without actually thinking about whether this was a valid excuse or invalid excuse. There was no excuse, so you attacked an argument that wasn't even there. You may re-read that with "attempt".
And since we are talking about the judge's decision, not the plaintiff's case, the attempt isn't even the topic, it is the judge's reasoning that is in question. Go attack that one.
The Court used the hacker thing almost as an aside, in conjunction with several other points of decision that would have stood on their own. The biggest evidence was by a former investigator who said that typically when someone copies from their employer, they delete files or otherwise cover up their tracks. Granted, it's from an employee of the company, but that does not lessen the argument again in conjunction with other information.
Had the Court ignored the hacker thing, we would not be having this discussion at all, and it would have been a non-controversial decision.
The court, torn on the issue, decides that because he calls himself a 'hacker' he's able to not only steal the code, but cover his tracks. So they better seize his equipment before he gets a chance.
Nope, they issued an order to image the drive and return it, with the image held basically in escrow, to prevent losing evidence. And the decision was based on way more than what you listed here, including an statement by Thuen that he had copied the code. I have a more substantial post, probably further down the page, but you are +5 insightful and probably influencing other opinions based on only having partial information.
But expecting to be able to make a significant contribution to improving security with just a little math is misguided.
That's a huge jump, and a red flag for a shitty argument. As you wrote it, yes it is misguided. You don't have to make a significant contribution, just understand what's already out there. And it's way more than "a little math".
For that matter, will studying the mathematics of RSA make it clear why a chosen ciphertext attack renders RSA with PKCS#1 v1.5 padding vulnerable, and how using Optimal Asymmetric Encryption Padding instead addresses the issue?
Yes. That was simple, wasn't it?
The MD5 collision was an algorithm based on math. The arguments about entropy right now are about some crazy math. It's all about adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing, and maybe some higher order stuff here and there.
But the basic statistical analyses which show whether something may be vulnerable, is all math.
The math for AES can be found on the wikipedia. There are functions, inverses, matrix multiplication, bit shifting. And the choice of substitution boxes for derangement can be proven either good or bad by, you guessed it, math. The current choices for Dual ECC were proven suspect by math.
The advice is not laughable in context- trust no one. And, it's not impossible to learn this stuff, you can either choose to or choose not to. You don't have to find the bugs, but you can know enough to understand when something is right, and when it is wrong, and more importantly, when it is suspect. Don't trust the researchers - verify it yourself. That's not original research, it's just common sense (for the paranoid).
You might have a point if that were the only basis for the decision. The basis of the restraining order was to prevent irreparable harm based on likelihood to succeed with a claim, and that case was well made.
Here's the judge's info, it's right at the bottom of the court order where someone who read it would expect to find it, next to his signature. I doubt it will have the effect you wanted, because this is a decent decision.
B. Lynn Winmill Chief Judge United States District Court
The only real counterargument would be to point to https://github.com/visdom/ which has the open source version, and was registered July of this year. Surely they could just look at the code and see if there was infringement? No, the evidence on the hard drive will be captured and stored pending further developments in the trial. The Court was preserving evidence which would most likely show that any copying was more than incidental.
This was the unquestionably correct decision, and the slashdot headline and summary are woefully oversimplifying in order to cash in on outrage. I hope you have disabled advertising, because Dice should be embarrassed that shit like this end up on the front page, and should certainly not profit from page views.
Direct quotes from the decision follow. Note: this guy worked at the company he is accused of copying from, so access to the original Sophia code is not in question, only whether it was used as a reference.
As for infringement, if there is no evidence of direct copying, âoeproof of infringement involves fact-based showings that the defendant had âaccessâ(TM) to the plaintiff's work and that the two works are âsubstantially similar.â(TM)â Funky Films, Inc. v.Time Warner Entmâ(TM)t Co., 462 F.3d 1072, 1076 (9th Cir. 2006) (citation omitted).
Here, Battelle has put forward adequate circumstantial evidence to permit an inference that defendants copied Sophia. Battelle says Thuen created Visdom in a time period that is impossible without copying; he described Visdom in nearly identical language as was used to describe Sophia; he used the same demonstration videos toshowscase Visdomâ(TM)s functionality as he did to showcase Sophia; he has admitted to copying parts of Sophia; and he has adopted a nearly identical name. Based on this record, the Court concludes that Battelle is likely to prevail on its copyright infringement claim.
...Additionally, the facts show that Thuen previously defied Battelleâ(TM)s instructions to refrain from widely releasing video demonstrations of Sophia on the internet.
...To support this assertion, defendants cite Battelle employee Michael Colson, who testifies as follows: I have 23 years of experience as an investigator for government and private entities and have worked many times on matters where employees have â" without authorization â" taken data from employers for their own purposes. In my experience it is very common for such individuals to simply delete the data when they are confronted with aninvestigation, rather than admit wrongdoing. This is particularly so inregards to those with technical skills to wipe the data in a way which does [not] leave digital footprints. My investigation has revealed that Thuen has (or had) an unauthorized copy of executable Sophia code on his home computer and, from my experience, there is a high risk that he might wipe his computers destroying evidence if he had advance warning.
If you're too stupid to properly understand the quote, read the PC World disclaimer article before going apeshit.
"With all your favorite Windows 8 apps..." does not mean everything will be portable - it doesn't automatically mean any app will even run as-is.
It is standard marketing horseshit indicating that some of your apps won't be available, otherwise they would have shat ALL out with bold and different colors and a brass band and fluffers for all.
I fully expect these to be a re-built subset of applications, not binary compatible but code compatible. Or if it is code compatible, then something like a "Windows CE" subset of targeted API so that certain apps will work and others won't. But I'm going with binary incompatibility for now.
You are parroting numbers that have been debunked. Twitter and Facebook had a long time to get where it was - due to last-minute requirements changes, this by all reports had no real testing.
Twitter and Facebook were all about revealing everything about you except your password to everyone else, while this has HIPAA and piles of other privacy concerns. To say they had different concerns is gross understatement.
The part that changed last minute is the part that is broken - the idea that you have to register first in order to see actual prices. If it were any other site, that could have been phased in, but people had to see the newest code first, which is the stuff most likely to break.
Nothing I have said was sourced anywhere but here, on slashdot, with appropriate citations. Why you felt the need to chime in with incorrect and irrelevant observations I'll never know.
Anyone who blames the cost of health care on outlandishly priced medicine should have their eyelids removed and that article stapled to their face so they can read it several times a day. For perspective, I did the work for everyone.
AZN - $6.3B on revenues of $30B, 21% profit GSK - $8.3 B on $42.5, 20% profit SNY - 6.5B on $47B RHHBY - $10.6B on $51.8B PFE - $14.6B on $59B for 25% those bastards JNJ - 10.9B on 67B LLY - 4B on 22.6B ABT - $6B on $40B MRK - 6.1B on 47.2B BMY - 2B on 18B - 11%, what is this, charity? NVS - 9.6B on 58B AMGN - 4B on 17B
Source: Yahoo finance numbers, the first result that didn't require scripts or images, for 2012 year ending December.
If you want to argue whether $500B in drugs is needed for a year for 7.1 billion people, most of whom either aren't sick or can't see a doctor, that's a different argument.
Every one of you mouthbreathing neckbeards who made a comment about gold plating, bribes, or other ridiculous nonsense need to either learn something about the world, or figure out why you are so resentful of a 20% profit margin.
Ever watch shark tank? They would shit on themselves rather than move over less than 200% profit margin, and then they look for bringing down cost after that. 20% is low for general consumer goods, and of course we aren't talking about consumer goods here but a comparison hopefully helps. The R&D costs are not so far off from the profits - meaning they could double their profits immediately in return for not having anything new to market in 5 years, and considering patents they would be busto in another 10 years. Barely skating by in business terms.
Slashdot Mirror
They are allowed to do anything they want with up to a certain amount of US intellectual property. In order to settle the money due them on complaint, Antigua plans to sell US intellectual property (monetisation).
They need a way to track this so they don't go over the allowed amount, and probably a way to see how much people might pay for stuff, like an auction, in case they have a few hundred thousand dollars left on the limit and need to find a product and buyer to fill the gap.
Compared to my explanation, they used fewer words. And they didn't confuse "IP rights granted as a result of a complaint to the WTO" with "fair use".
Or if you don't like my explanation, you could ask the Antiguan government's PR firm to clarify why they used those words. I'm sure they will be interested in explaining the thought process to random people from the internet. I've heard that Antiguan government PR firms like nothing better.
Not really. It sounds like a position that should have been filled from the beginning is just now getting filled.
I'm sure Medicare has things to do other than deal with this mess that wasn't even being written until spring. How they got to that point is a discussion we already had, I'm just pointing out that Medicare is probably not the best choice for driving the technology/solution angle here.
The mythical man month does not directly cover the case of being under-manned until a month after release, then bringing staffing up to where it should be. And certainly if that is the entirety of your contribution, I have to assume you mean the most recognized portions of the concept.
More on point is the difficulty of debugging a live system and making changes that don't cascade to cause more problems, which I don't see happening by the end of November. But an unrealistic schedule, again, is not the mythical man month.
My transaction is between me and the retailer, who will know my name and address. I don't care if that person or company knows it. I do care that HTTPS is probably easier to crack than HTTP plus multiple onion encryptions.
I don't have any "let's blow up the government" posts. And if they are monitoring the store, my activities are legal so I'm not worried. So your straw man argument holds no water.
I would, however, prefer to keep it as quiet as possible, and TOR allows me to at least attempt that. Once again, I don't care about anonymity to the retailer. I'm using onion routing to provide me:
1) multiple layers of encryption
2) external anonymity between me and the retailer
I realize that anyone running an exit node could be intent on revealing my secret, but HTTPS on the last hop is better than a direct connection from my home.
I'm not sure why you felt the need to reply so angrily to this post, especially when you simply misunderstood it. Sounds like either projection or a blind knee-jerk response to what you see as a misuse of TOR. Maybe in a previous life you were an inflatable animal and didn't like being raped. It's no matter to me, but you might want to look into it. The first step to getting better is apologising - I can wait.
We were talking about trusting no one, not how paranoid I might be. Reading research and trusting it does not fit that model. How researchers work is unrelated.
I focused on math because we are talking about verifying the software, which is all about the math. Or at least the software implementation of the math.
We don't care if the fundamentals are wrong, so we don't need 20 years of experience. If an input should be cryptographically random, then trust requires that it be tested scientifically. There are ways to do so, which is how the Dual_EC_DRBG prng defect was found.
If there is better crypto or an attack on existing crypto, that is outside the realm of trust, so irrelevant. Does this implementation match its design and goals? Compared to evaluating crypto on its own merits, that is orders of magnitude simpler, very math heavy, and well within reason for someone with calculus experience, and reading material.
No one should be judging the merits of the crypto itself without years of experience. Trust is simpler, as long as it is an open standard. If its not open, don't trust it.
Make more sense that way?
But now that we have an explanation, it is no longer feel good hippy voodoo bullshit. This is how stuff becomes legitimised, insurance covered, not just fooling yourself therapy.
Thanks, science!
Because cracking the onion has to be harder than https?
I'm sure buying piles of fertilizer would set off alarms, but what if I want a variety of inflatable barnyard friends, rubber sheets, that 55 gallon drum of lube, and a celebrity masturbator(male)? I don't want to get that dossier started.
If you operated a business and some of your franchisees did something you didn't know about? Because that is the "that shit" you're talking about.
Franchisees got nailed, customers filed class action, Aarons had no defense due to prior suit.
" September 2012 â" The Federal Trade Commission settles spying claims against the maker of PC Rental Agent, Designerware LLC, as well as seven of Aaronâ(TM)s rent-to-own franchisees. The settlement bars the software maker and the franchisees from further spying. Aaronâ(TM)s, itself, was not part of the FTC matter."
Those are the facts as we know them. But let's pile on the corporations are bad bandwagon, because its more interesting to rehash conventional wisdom than have an original thought.
Nice job missing the point. For typical desktop use, HTML 5 is not a non-choice. Sure you might need a beefy machine to run unreal, but that is the extreme end. And a demo of what is possible.
With client side processing libraries like knockoutjs and datatables, there is no limit on what can be done in the browser. With asm.js, even hard core number crunching can be done
You would not run Seti@home on it, but it is functional.
Simple solution. Find the person with the most reverts, review the last 20 for fairness, and block them for a week. Iterate until people start contributing again.
Perhaps give people a second chance, perhaps not. But this is the most impersonal way to start attacking the problem.
A page with dickheads marked for review, that you can't edit if you are named on, would help.
But the comprehensive solution will be convincing Jimmy there is a problem.
And yet we object to standard DRM as if it won't encourage exactly the same fragmentation?
meanwhile, Sprint is trying to match pace with cheap vibrators. Go science!
I'm not taking a side here, but I just don't see it. One article you linked mentions it, and I read this on Ars earlier and didn't see any skeuomorphic anything that really stood out.
I love railing on the ediots, but I'm clearly missing something here.
No testing, no test deployment in a mirrored environment, no one validated that the deployment was correct.
If these things are the heart of your income, you take a hash of everything pre-deploy and post-deploy, and make sure it matches everywhere it has to.
Then you validate that the hash list matches everywhere. That's just common sense. I've worked plenty of places where income was not directly tied to what was deployed I developed a manually intensive way to do exactly the same thing - make sure you deploy what should be deployed, nothing less and nothing more.
Is the deployment valid? That's validation. And if you have the ability to lose piles of money by fucking it up, you fucking well validate.
-1 off topic. Nothing to do with FartbongoCare. Plenty of things to rail on here, left or right wing, without bringing in unrelated nonsense.
See how I used a derogatory term? I'm just like you, we agree, we're friends. Now junk-punch yourself as penance.
No one here gives a shit. My advice is go talk to people who have the most to gain from allowing opt-in content. Namely, the major mail providers.
Bennet went to some marketing demo, got his panties in a bunch, and then as usual complains to Slashtards. We can't help him.
So yeah, non-problem.
I tried not to reply, but asshattery is hard to not reply to.
There was no bypass. The search was reasonable, if you read the decision. It's not that long. They got a proper warrant and executed it correctly.
You read the word "excuse" and immediately knee-jerked your response without actually thinking about whether this was a valid excuse or invalid excuse. There was no excuse, so you attacked an argument that wasn't even there. You may re-read that with "attempt".
And since we are talking about the judge's decision, not the plaintiff's case, the attempt isn't even the topic, it is the judge's reasoning that is in question. Go attack that one.
The Court used the hacker thing almost as an aside, in conjunction with several other points of decision that would have stood on their own. The biggest evidence was by a former investigator who said that typically when someone copies from their employer, they delete files or otherwise cover up their tracks. Granted, it's from an employee of the company, but that does not lessen the argument again in conjunction with other information.
Had the Court ignored the hacker thing, we would not be having this discussion at all, and it would have been a non-controversial decision.
Nope, they issued an order to image the drive and return it, with the image held basically in escrow, to prevent losing evidence. And the decision was based on way more than what you listed here, including an statement by Thuen that he had copied the code. I have a more substantial post, probably further down the page, but you are +5 insightful and probably influencing other opinions based on only having partial information.
That's a huge jump, and a red flag for a shitty argument. As you wrote it, yes it is misguided. You don't have to make a significant contribution, just understand what's already out there. And it's way more than "a little math".
Yes. That was simple, wasn't it?
The MD5 collision was an algorithm based on math. The arguments about entropy right now are about some crazy math. It's all about adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing, and maybe some higher order stuff here and there.
But the basic statistical analyses which show whether something may be vulnerable, is all math.
The math for AES can be found on the wikipedia. There are functions, inverses, matrix multiplication, bit shifting. And the choice of substitution boxes for derangement can be proven either good or bad by, you guessed it, math. The current choices for Dual ECC were proven suspect by math.
The advice is not laughable in context- trust no one. And, it's not impossible to learn this stuff, you can either choose to or choose not to. You don't have to find the bugs, but you can know enough to understand when something is right, and when it is wrong, and more importantly, when it is suspect. Don't trust the researchers - verify it yourself. That's not original research, it's just common sense (for the paranoid).
You might have a point if that were the only basis for the decision. The basis of the restraining order was to prevent irreparable harm based on likelihood to succeed with a claim, and that case was well made.
Here's the judge's info, it's right at the bottom of the court order where someone who read it would expect to find it, next to his signature. I doubt it will have the effect you wanted, because this is a decent decision.
B. Lynn Winmill
Chief Judge
United States District Court
The only real counterargument would be to point to https://github.com/visdom/ which has the open source version, and was registered July of this year. Surely they could just look at the code and see if there was infringement? No, the evidence on the hard drive will be captured and stored pending further developments in the trial. The Court was preserving evidence which would most likely show that any copying was more than incidental.
This was the unquestionably correct decision, and the slashdot headline and summary are woefully oversimplifying in order to cash in on outrage. I hope you have disabled advertising, because Dice should be embarrassed that shit like this end up on the front page, and should certainly not profit from page views.
Direct quotes from the decision follow. Note: this guy worked at the company he is accused of copying from, so access to the original Sophia code is not in question, only whether it was used as a reference.
If you're too stupid to properly understand the quote, read the PC World disclaimer article before going apeshit.
"With all your favorite Windows 8 apps..." does not mean everything will be portable - it doesn't automatically mean any app will even run as-is.
It is standard marketing horseshit indicating that some of your apps won't be available, otherwise they would have shat ALL out with bold and different colors and a brass band and fluffers for all.
I fully expect these to be a re-built subset of applications, not binary compatible but code compatible. Or if it is code compatible, then something like a "Windows CE" subset of targeted API so that certain apps will work and others won't. But I'm going with binary incompatibility for now.
So far, this post is the only source for this quote. here is a great place to start for when you want to use it again, correctly.
Your version loses the essential Jack, but of course the original is not available.
"If you suck on a tit, the movie gets an X rating," he once told an interviewer.
"If you hack the tit off with an axe it will be PG."
I prefer :
"Shoot, shoot, bang, bang, kill, kill, is fine. But show seven sets of genitals, everyone go crazy!" -Francesca Fiore
You are parroting numbers that have been debunked. Twitter and Facebook had a long time to get where it was - due to last-minute requirements changes, this by all reports had no real testing.
Twitter and Facebook were all about revealing everything about you except your password to everyone else, while this has HIPAA and piles of other privacy concerns. To say they had different concerns is gross understatement.
The part that changed last minute is the part that is broken - the idea that you have to register first in order to see actual prices. If it were any other site, that could have been phased in, but people had to see the newest code first, which is the stuff most likely to break.
Nothing I have said was sourced anywhere but here, on slashdot, with appropriate citations. Why you felt the need to chime in with incorrect and irrelevant observations I'll never know.
Anyone who blames the cost of health care on outlandishly priced medicine should have their eyelids removed and that article stapled to their face so they can read it several times a day. For perspective, I did the work for everyone.
AZN - $6.3B on revenues of $30B, 21% profit
GSK - $8.3 B on $42.5, 20% profit
SNY - 6.5B on $47B
RHHBY - $10.6B on $51.8B
PFE - $14.6B on $59B for 25% those bastards
JNJ - 10.9B on 67B
LLY - 4B on 22.6B
ABT - $6B on $40B
MRK - 6.1B on 47.2B
BMY - 2B on 18B - 11%, what is this, charity?
NVS - 9.6B on 58B
AMGN - 4B on 17B
Source: Yahoo finance numbers, the first result that didn't require scripts or images, for 2012 year ending December.
If you want to argue whether $500B in drugs is needed for a year for 7.1 billion people, most of whom either aren't sick or can't see a doctor, that's a different argument.
Every one of you mouthbreathing neckbeards who made a comment about gold plating, bribes, or other ridiculous nonsense need to either learn something about the world, or figure out why you are so resentful of a 20% profit margin.
Ever watch shark tank? They would shit on themselves rather than move over less than 200% profit margin, and then they look for bringing down cost after that. 20% is low for general consumer goods, and of course we aren't talking about consumer goods here but a comparison hopefully helps. The R&D costs are not so far off from the profits - meaning they could double their profits immediately in return for not having anything new to market in 5 years, and considering patents they would be busto in another 10 years. Barely skating by in business terms.
It's not flawed. It is a definition by a computer scientist and theorist, assigning human qualities to non-human artifacts.
Flawed suggests it is somehow relevant, and it is neither.