I'd argue that while software patents are a net loss, the rest of the patent system has been quite successful for the US, doing more or less what it's intended to do. Certainly, it's worked a lot better at fostering innovation than in countries with very weak patent enforcement mechanisms like China.
I should point out that innovation is *not* universally a good thing - not all innovations work in the end. For example, much of the financial crisis was caused by innovation in finance that failed in the long term. (Although it should be noted that America dominates finance because of that innovation.)
As for copyright issues, that's not really a matter of innovation and thus not particularly relevant here. It's little wonder that America, being dominant in entertainment production is the keenest to protect its product. You'll notice that in Europe, each region is protecting their particular culinary specialties, etc. It is to be expected that every nation protects what they can (and America has the ability to push that protection elsewhere (other countries attempt to do this as well, but with notably less success)).
As for out-sourcing, this is a global phenomena. It's unsurprising that it causes a lot of dislocation and misery (and incidentally raises a billion Chinese out of poverty, but never mind them), as almost all major economic re-alignments do. However, it should be noted that in the absence of out-sourcing, manufacturing was likely to take a huge hit (albeit not as big as did occur) as mechanization took hold and required fewer people. Companies that didn't use lots of robots, etc. were already being forced to slash wages or increase prices. Either way, just as farm mechanization wiped out millions upon millions of jobs, the same thing was and is happening to manufacturing. And, yes, it's a real challenge to figure out how people who are not information workers by inclination are going to earn a middle-class living. But this is not new - heck, I wrote a high school paper on exactly this subject in the 70's.
Since I am not an American, nor live in America, I'm actually rather grateful for America's military budget. Let's just say I'm familiar with the concept of Finlandization, and the US is one of the only examples I can think of small countries adjacent to a powerful country where Finlandization didn't occur on any scale worthy of the term. (Call me cynical, but the natural state of political affairs is for the larger, more powerful countries to absolutely dictate policy to the smaller ones. The US pushes, not dictates, policy, and often doesn't get its way. I certainly didn't see the USSR have the same problems with countries in its sphere of influence, and I fully expect that once China dominates its region will enforce rather more cooperation. The USA's willingness to let weak countries like my own dictate their own affairs and allow an independent foreign policy is a historical aberration, and one I am rather grateful for.
I'm sorry, but I have to call into question your claim that America isn't innovative any more.
While the rest of the world is *gradually* catching up, which dilutes the appearance of American innovation, there's still a huge amount of research done in America. More to the point, if you start looking deeply into almost any industry, you'll find that it's massively changed over the last 10-20 years, and mostly a result of American innovations.
Farming, manufacturing, chemistry, medical advances, business processes, transportation, finance, electronics (again phones, tablets, internet, etc.) have all made huge recent strides in innovation thanks to American advances. The only real change is that instead of having a virtual monopoly on such advances, American advances are now beginning to share the stage with other countries.
Don't confuse other countries advances with American decline. We should be celebrating, not sorrowing.
Well, given the vast majority of Android phones on the market aren't the latest version and aren't ever going to be upgraded, and the fact that Android is doing very nicely, I would say you're greatly exaggerating the importance of being up-to-date. I think you'd be far more accurate using "very few people" to refer to the number of people who know or care about staying up-to-date.
And truthfully, the Apple owners only care about staying up to date because it happens automatically and it gets lots of publicity.
Well, given the arrests, if I get another call, I'll be seriously attempted to answer something like..
Scammer: I'm calling from Microsoft and....
Me: Wait a moment, its all over Google News in the last hour. They're raiding 23 workplaces all over India for you guys... Oh, right. Google India is probably blocking it until they're finished the raids... Wait... There, I've got it up here on my screen. OH MY GOD!
They've updated. The police have found bodies! OH MY GOD. Lots of bodies. Why? Why? Oh Jesus. [Reading] Police suspect the criminals decided to eliminate all witnesses who could testify against them. Oh My God. Jesus. 48 men and 6 women in 3 locations? Dear God, what sort of psychos are you working for? Look it up. Look it up on American Google, if you can get through.
Oh God. I'm so sorry. Oh God. This is crazy! They used machetes in one location! I'm so sorry. You don't deserve this. Nobody deserves this. I'm so sorry.
Click.
Actually, I don't think I'd have the guts to pull that off. But oh boy, am I tempted.
Interestingly enough, when I smelled scam a year ago and asked for particulars (company name and address) I was given them! The company was a pronounced like Symantec but spelled differently. I Googled them after hanging up and found about 40 want ads from them looking for tech support people in India... Even the scammers use the internet to recruit.
I've received about 30 of these calls over the last year. The last time (yesterday) I lambasted the salesman for working for fraudsters, I was told "Well, don't blame me when your computer breaks down". *sigh*
What I want to know is how or why their credit card privileges weren't terminated a year ago.
Which is why the phrase "he stole my idea" and "he stole my sale" don't exist in the English language. Oh wait...
Now, if you think about it, I *am* wrong. In each case, there *was* deprivation.
And if you think *really* think about it, you'll understand there's deprivation in the case of piracy - the deprivation of the right to commercially exploit one's work.
Such a right may not be worth a huge amount for each customer, but a theft of pennies adds up when thousands or millions are engaged in the practice.
Just be a bit careful that you aren't showing anything that a previous customer might consider confidential.
Nothing can freak out a customer like a demonstration that you will reveal their confidential information at the drop of a hat.
(Saw this happen when a company competing for a contract blithely showed pre-publication work they were doing for a direct competitor. When called on it, they said that of course, the work for *us* would be held in complete confidentiality...)
I suppose it hasn't occurred to you that many slow drivers drive at that speed because that is their maximum *safe* speed. For older drivers (50-60+) in either bad conditions or a challenging driving environment, driving at the speed limit may well not be safe for either them (and consequently others they would endanger).
I know, it's a terrible curse to have to endure the inconveniences that other people's infirmities may cause you - how dare they pollute your roads with their presence. However, even worse, in 40 years you'll find that all the good drivers have been replaced by inconsiderate speed demons who just about kill themselves and you trying to pass in unsafe conditions because they can't handle the idea that you're driving at a safe speed...
More to the point, it's the *opposite* of unscrupulous - the poster is fulfilling his place in the marketplace and the company programs are operating as intended.
He gets cheap stuff because price is important to him and the company makes some minimal profit, while the rest of us who prefer leisure time to saving a few bucks pay more. These discounts are meant to allow a company to capture both ends of the market at the same time, rather than going with only the low end and making little money, or going with the high-end, and losing a bunch of price sensitive customers.
Nothing wrong with having a program with a few holes in it, as long as the customers have to work for the discount.
That said, while price discrimination tends to increase customer satisfaction over all, human logic is dysfunctional enough that many people feel enraged when they learned they paid more than someone else instead of simply enjoying their consumer surplus.
Kind of like the people who sell a little early in a rising market, making millions, and then when the markets kept going up, become distraught because they could have made many more millions.
Well, I'm certainly not going to criticize your parenting skills: If you can get a teenager to do his own formatting and re-installation, you're miles above most of us:-).
As for your son's decision to value convenience over security, if he's willing to pay the price, I'd have a hard time arguing. (Okay, since he'd be bringing the infection inside *my* firewall, I would be arguing...)
Anyway, whenever I'm starting to get a bit huffy about users not willing to learn anything more than the bare minimum to do what they want, I try to remember how I must look to the person who services my car, who repeatedly begs me to take better care of it when all I care about is that it gets me from A to B occasionally without actually exploding. (He claims my car is safe, but it *should* be purring, All it would take is n hours of my time.)
Anyway, fair enough, for what it's worth, I apologize for my snarky tone (and I'll try not to be too envious about having *two* sons who actually fix their machines themselves - my sons chose locked down machines over having to actually spend a few hours going through the effort of learning how to repair them).
Now, pull your head out of your ass, and think "security" instead of "convenience".
I cannot help but notice that you posted this on Slashdot, indicating that you have chosen to connect to the Internet instead of using pen and paper, thus choosing "convenience" over "security". Where does this place your head?
Every user must choose the *tradeoff* between convenience and security, and it will differ depending upon needs and desires. Claiming that anyone whose particular choice in this trade-off doesn't match your own has their head up their backside is not only insulting,but indicative that you have no real concept of the wider concept of security and the costs in incurs.
(Okay, you probably have a very good concept of the cost, where it applies to you. Perhaps you might consider extending the same consideration to others.)
So should I feel guilty if I don't actually buy whatever your advertisers are selling?
If I want the product (content in this case), it's up to the producer to set the cost. In the case of the web, the price is there, although it's unwritten and unenforced, but it's still there, and that price is to accept the delivered advertising.
There are those sites which make it pretty clear that the 'price' they expect is that I buy something from the advertisers, or that I accept ads that heavily diminish the value they provide. I don't accept that price (unenforced though it is), and I don't patronize the sites.
I had to teach my children at around age 10 that you do not accept a favor if there's an unspoken assumption that you will do something in return that you are not willing to do. Accepting that favor when you don't intend to honor the tacit contract would be dishonorable (i.e. be a jerk). There are lots of caveats (especially to a 10 year old who may not understand the price), but the general principle was pretty clear once they had a few examples.
If a 10 year old can understand it, it's not that difficult a concept. If you don't like the price, don't accept the favor. On the part of the web, that's easy - don't repeatedly visit a page if you don't intend to accept the price.
but anyone who looks at your site is free to look at whatever they want to look at, and not one thing more
Yes, they are free to do so. But the expectation in both print and web is that you will accept delivery of the ads, although you may skip over them at your leisure.
Of course, given the technology, you are free to refuse delivery of the web ads as well, but while entirely legal, it does make you something of a jerk in exactly the same way as any others who take advantage of the honor system to avoid contributing to the services they enjoy. Of course, outrageous conduct on the content providers side also invalidates the convention, but you made it crystal clear that you feel entirely justified to take what you can under any circumstance, not just when the convention is broken.
I feel no need to support any site by downloading things I want. If a site goes out of business because no one looked at its ads, well I'm sorry to hear that, but I'm sure I can find the content I want elsewhere.
I guess we know who been enjoying the weekly donuts, but wouldn't dream of chipping in. After all, if they were serious about wanting people to pay something, they'd charge them per donut...
I understand that "if they aren't actively preventing me from taking it, then it's not stealing" attitude is probably common enough, but I'm not certain it's wise to trumpet the fact that you have no compunction about taking what you can and giving back nothing unless you're forced to. "I'm a jerk and I don't feel guilty" isn't probably the message you want to send to others.
Your attempt to justify your leeching is, well, sad. Do not attempt to justify your choice to block all ads, no matter how well-behaved, on the basis of those who are forced to block ads because of the technology they are using, or their disabilities (!), or the fact that some ads are so outrageous that they themselves over-step the unwritten, but very real social compact between reader and content-provider.
Of course, I have to say that blocking all ads is pretty small potatoes jerkiness (although it is still being a jerk), but your post really managed to emphasize the worst of the attitude behind it.
(By the way, if you're actually a 14 year old convinced "the world is all stupid & evil & out to get me, so why shouldn't I be a jerk?", then I retract all of the above snarkiness and apologize for taking your post seriously.)
before you get too far along, realize that a LOT of what is listed as cost of 'r&d' is really advertising, marketing, kickbacks and payoffs. universities also contribute a HUGE amount.
Agreed and agreed. However, what the universities contribute is of an essentially different nature from what drug companies do.
the profits are so high and the cost so truly low...
Costs so low? This doesn't square with anything we know about drug development. Do you have any figures to back up this assertion?
if you want to get right down to it, public health is an infrastructure as much as roads, electricity and clean water is. the fact that we attach profit to this kind of DISGUSTS ME, no end.
Ah, this is where we disagree. I consider increasing health-care outcomes more important than ensuring that no-one profits from health-care. I find it far more productive to yoke greed so that it produces results the results I want (in the long-term) than to simply do without.
But then I've never been part of the "far better everyone suffer than someone unjustly gain" movement.
not every fucking thing in life has to be for-profit. fuck you if you disagree.
No, not everything does. But when the desire for profits and what I would like to see happen, align in roughly the same direction, it makes sense to take advantage of the situation rather than do without. From my stand-point, I've gotten other, richer people's ability and willingness to pay for advanced medical technology (on the order of a trillion dollars over 20 years), to pay for my now affordable health-care. I get it later, but the price is right...
(As for water + roads + electricity - it depends. If you need a *new* network, then for-profit tends to work better and faster. For operating an existing monopoly, private enterprise operates pretty badly.)
"shove your taxes up your a$$ and keep your hands off MY money" mentality, and funding for public research dries up
While this attitude may be endemic in the US, it's not throughout the rest of the world, and yet very little product development research gets done publicly anywhere. The problem is that there are different types of research, and not terribly surprisingly, the government tends to fund most cheap basic non-risky research, while leaving expensive high-risk research for the private sector. I'll make the claim that you cannot expect government to fund any research where the base expectation is that 9 out of 10 expensive projects will *fail*.
It's not a matter of badly educated populace - it's a matter that if we the populace could decide where to spend $95 billion dollars last year, we wouldn't spend it on research. There are vastly better short-term ways to relieve human suffering that are desperately needed. So the research doesn't get done.
Another way of looking at it, is that the reason I have a $50 cell phone now is because we allowed companies to sell $5,000 dollar cell phones 30+ years ago, which made it worth-while to invest in the technology. Admittedly medical research is a lot more emotionally volatile, and my impulse is against denying treatment to those who can't afford it, but if I look at the long term (and the past), I am a hell of a lot better off because of that system, even though I won't be able to afford most of the latest innovations.
(By the way, I'm not nearly as big a fan of long-term protection of lower-cost, non-risky technology - 99% of software and business method patents could be thrown out and I don't think we'd see any substantial difference in technological progress in those fields. But I cannot see any way of replacing the $95 billion worth of medical research that occurs each year without extracting it from paying customers, which means patents, and limited access for some years.)
For better or worse, medical research is now a *massively* expensive, high risk proposition. In other words, poison for any government that wants to remain in power.
Isn't motivation irrelevant? After all, it doesn't affect what's offered.
In the end, I think what's important is whether we would have these (and other) set of valuable tests if Myriad had not invested the considerable amount of money necessary to take the research from basic research to viable medical test.
If that's the case, then the end result is that for now, a fair number of people who can afford it get the benefits now and the rest of us get it when the patent runs out, as opposed to nobody *ever* getting the benefit.
Honestly, I don't think one can expect the government to invest billions in product development (which often fails).
So, we're left with what works, rather than what would be optimal in an ideal world.
Well, Lewis and Clark and NASA would not get funded if the chance of success was a good deal less than 1 in 10. As for the internet, the technology that I am using to post this has been covered by thousands of patents over the years and created by thousands of companies, all of which were trying to make big bucks.
This is not to say that government has no place in research funding - ala Arpanet and any amount of cheap, basic research. But expecting government to essentially buy multi-million dollar product-development lottery tickets, which, if we remove the financial incentives will *never* make back the money is unrealistic. It doesn't take a genius to know that a government that spent ~$100 billion/year on medical research, the *vast* majority of which failed, would be in the cross-hairs of the opposition and the voters. Far wiser (politically) not to spend the money given that no voter is going to punish you for the medical innovations that never happened.
Honestly, given our reality, do you see any other method of getting close to 100 billion dollars worth of research done?
Medical and scientific progress shouldn't depend on the ability to turn a profit.
Except it does, and it always will. A government that chooses dozens upon dozens of projects, all of which produce nothing (most medical research fails) is putting itself in the cross-hairs of the opposition, who will go to town with a long list of "wasted" millions on "junk projects".
As someone who has been on the periphery of government funding of science, it's always amused me that the government wants to know what you'll discover before they'll fund you. Perfectly acceptable for an organization that *must* be risk averse. Utterly terrible for high-stakes, low success probability research. Ideal for basic research which in general is much cheaper and doesn't have any direct financial benefits.
Commercial medical research is not the best option (see orphan diseases), but realistically speaking, it's the only option.
Do you mean that it's far better that everybody go without this discovery forever, than a large number of people (who can afford it, naturally) benefit during the patent period, and then everybody benefit from it afterwards?
Or would you prefer to believe that in the absence of commercial medical research, government, which by their very nature don't tend to make risky investments that are unlikely to payoff, will miraculously somehow start funding expensive medical research?
I'm a Canadian, and I like my cheap medical care. But it would be the height of hypocrisy to ignore the fact that almost all the medical developments that are likely to keep me healthy into old age wouldn't exist if there wasn't the good old greed of the American medical system. Of course, there are some notable exceptions, but in general, if someone isn't going to make money from it (with the significant chance of a lot of money), then people aren't going to take the risk of expensive research with high probability of failure.
The choice for genetic research isn't between expensive vs. cheap. It's between expensive now + cheap later vs. not available at all.
Funny, I just read a story about how HSBC had basically locked a young women's college fund (~$10K) away until she personally visits their offices in Great Britian along with appropriate documentation. (They closed the branches in her country...) It will cost her half the money (and a week's wages) to go and collect it.
So, not *everybody* is happy with a bank making absolutely sure that they don't give it to the wrong people:-).
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, after you describe the physical mechanism behind every physical disease.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, anyone?
> but the cost of crime* is invariably far higher than the cost of policing.
Homeland Security
'It's evolving literally to be a single platform,'
It's a floor wax and a dessert topping!
I'd argue that while software patents are a net loss, the rest of the patent system has been quite successful for the US, doing more or less what it's intended to do. Certainly, it's worked a lot better at fostering innovation than in countries with very weak patent enforcement mechanisms like China.
I should point out that innovation is *not* universally a good thing - not all innovations work in the end. For example, much of the financial crisis was caused by innovation in finance that failed in the long term. (Although it should be noted that America dominates finance because of that innovation.)
As for copyright issues, that's not really a matter of innovation and thus not particularly relevant here. It's little wonder that America, being dominant in entertainment production is the keenest to protect its product. You'll notice that in Europe, each region is protecting their particular culinary specialties, etc. It is to be expected that every nation protects what they can (and America has the ability to push that protection elsewhere (other countries attempt to do this as well, but with notably less success)).
As for out-sourcing, this is a global phenomena. It's unsurprising that it causes a lot of dislocation and misery (and incidentally raises a billion Chinese out of poverty, but never mind them), as almost all major economic re-alignments do. However, it should be noted that in the absence of out-sourcing, manufacturing was likely to take a huge hit (albeit not as big as did occur) as mechanization took hold and required fewer people. Companies that didn't use lots of robots, etc. were already being forced to slash wages or increase prices. Either way, just as farm mechanization wiped out millions upon millions of jobs, the same thing was and is happening to manufacturing. And, yes, it's a real challenge to figure out how people who are not information workers by inclination are going to earn a middle-class living. But this is not new - heck, I wrote a high school paper on exactly this subject in the 70's.
Since I am not an American, nor live in America, I'm actually rather grateful for America's military budget. Let's just say I'm familiar with the concept of Finlandization, and the US is one of the only examples I can think of small countries adjacent to a powerful country where Finlandization didn't occur on any scale worthy of the term. (Call me cynical, but the natural state of political affairs is for the larger, more powerful countries to absolutely dictate policy to the smaller ones. The US pushes, not dictates, policy, and often doesn't get its way. I certainly didn't see the USSR have the same problems with countries in its sphere of influence, and I fully expect that once China dominates its region will enforce rather more cooperation. The USA's willingness to let weak countries like my own dictate their own affairs and allow an independent foreign policy is a historical aberration, and one I am rather grateful for.
I'm sorry, but I have to call into question your claim that America isn't innovative any more.
While the rest of the world is *gradually* catching up, which dilutes the appearance of American innovation, there's still a huge amount of research done in America. More to the point, if you start looking deeply into almost any industry, you'll find that it's massively changed over the last 10-20 years, and mostly a result of American innovations.
Farming, manufacturing, chemistry, medical advances, business processes, transportation, finance, electronics (again phones, tablets, internet, etc.) have all made huge recent strides in innovation thanks to American advances. The only real change is that instead of having a virtual monopoly on such advances, American advances are now beginning to share the stage with other countries.
Don't confuse other countries advances with American decline. We should be celebrating, not sorrowing.
Well, given the vast majority of Android phones on the market aren't the latest version and aren't ever going to be upgraded, and the fact that Android is doing very nicely, I would say you're greatly exaggerating the importance of being up-to-date. I think you'd be far more accurate using "very few people" to refer to the number of people who know or care about staying up-to-date.
And truthfully, the Apple owners only care about staying up to date because it happens automatically and it gets lots of publicity.
Well, given the arrests, if I get another call, I'll be seriously attempted to answer something like..
Scammer: I'm calling from Microsoft and ....
Me: Wait a moment, its all over Google News in the last hour. They're raiding 23 workplaces all over India for you guys... Oh, right. Google India is probably blocking it until they're finished the raids... Wait... There, I've got it up here on my screen. OH MY GOD!
They've updated. The police have found bodies! OH MY GOD. Lots of bodies. Why? Why? Oh Jesus. [Reading] Police suspect the criminals decided to eliminate all witnesses who could testify against them. Oh My God. Jesus. 48 men and 6 women in 3 locations? Dear God, what sort of psychos are you working for? Look it up. Look it up on American Google, if you can get through.
Oh God. I'm so sorry. Oh God. This is crazy! They used machetes in one location! I'm so sorry. You don't deserve this. Nobody deserves this. I'm so sorry.
Click.
Actually, I don't think I'd have the guts to pull that off. But oh boy, am I tempted.
Interestingly enough, when I smelled scam a year ago and asked for particulars (company name and address) I was given them! The company was a pronounced like Symantec but spelled differently. I Googled them after hanging up and found about 40 want ads from them looking for tech support people in India... Even the scammers use the internet to recruit.
I've received about 30 of these calls over the last year. The last time (yesterday) I lambasted the salesman for working for fraudsters, I was told "Well, don't blame me when your computer breaks down". *sigh*
What I want to know is how or why their credit card privileges weren't terminated a year ago.
Which is why the phrase "he stole my idea" and "he stole my sale" don't exist in the English language. Oh wait...
Now, if you think about it, I *am* wrong. In each case, there *was* deprivation.
And if you think *really* think about it, you'll understand there's deprivation in the case of piracy - the deprivation of the right to commercially exploit one's work.
Such a right may not be worth a huge amount for each customer, but a theft of pennies adds up when thousands or millions are engaged in the practice.
Just be a bit careful that you aren't showing anything that a previous customer might consider confidential.
Nothing can freak out a customer like a demonstration that you will reveal their confidential information at the drop of a hat.
(Saw this happen when a company competing for a contract blithely showed pre-publication work they were doing for a direct competitor. When called on it, they said that of course, the work for *us* would be held in complete confidentiality...)
I suppose it hasn't occurred to you that many slow drivers drive at that speed because that is their maximum *safe* speed. For older drivers (50-60+) in either bad conditions or a challenging driving environment, driving at the speed limit may well not be safe for either them (and consequently others they would endanger).
I know, it's a terrible curse to have to endure the inconveniences that other people's infirmities may cause you - how dare they pollute your roads with their presence. However, even worse, in 40 years you'll find that all the good drivers have been replaced by inconsiderate speed demons who just about kill themselves and you trying to pass in unsafe conditions because they can't handle the idea that you're driving at a safe speed...
More to the point, it's the *opposite* of unscrupulous - the poster is fulfilling his place in the marketplace and the company programs are operating as intended.
He gets cheap stuff because price is important to him and the company makes some minimal profit, while the rest of us who prefer leisure time to saving a few bucks pay more. These discounts are meant to allow a company to capture both ends of the market at the same time, rather than going with only the low end and making little money, or going with the high-end, and losing a bunch of price sensitive customers.
Nothing wrong with having a program with a few holes in it, as long as the customers have to work for the discount.
That said, while price discrimination tends to increase customer satisfaction over all, human logic is dysfunctional enough that many people feel enraged when they learned they paid more than someone else instead of simply enjoying their consumer surplus.
Kind of like the people who sell a little early in a rising market, making millions, and then when the markets kept going up, become distraught because they could have made many more millions.
Well, I'm certainly not going to criticize your parenting skills: If you can get a teenager to do his own formatting and re-installation, you're miles above most of us :-).
As for your son's decision to value convenience over security, if he's willing to pay the price, I'd have a hard time arguing. (Okay, since he'd be bringing the infection inside *my* firewall, I would be arguing...)
Anyway, whenever I'm starting to get a bit huffy about users not willing to learn anything more than the bare minimum to do what they want, I try to remember how I must look to the person who services my car, who repeatedly begs me to take better care of it when all I care about is that it gets me from A to B occasionally without actually exploding. (He claims my car is safe, but it *should* be purring, All it would take is n hours of my time.)
Anyway, fair enough, for what it's worth, I apologize for my snarky tone (and I'll try not to be too envious about having *two* sons who actually fix their machines themselves - my sons chose locked down machines over having to actually spend a few hours going through the effort of learning how to repair them).
Now, pull your head out of your ass, and think "security" instead of "convenience".
I cannot help but notice that you posted this on Slashdot, indicating that you have chosen to connect to the Internet instead of using pen and paper, thus choosing "convenience" over "security". Where does this place your head?
Every user must choose the *tradeoff* between convenience and security, and it will differ depending upon needs and desires. Claiming that anyone whose particular choice in this trade-off doesn't match your own has their head up their backside is not only insulting,but indicative that you have no real concept of the wider concept of security and the costs in incurs.
(Okay, you probably have a very good concept of the cost, where it applies to you. Perhaps you might consider extending the same consideration to others.)
So should I feel guilty if I don't actually buy whatever your advertisers are selling?
If I want the product (content in this case), it's up to the producer to set the cost. In the case of the web, the price is there, although it's unwritten and unenforced, but it's still there, and that price is to accept the delivered advertising.
There are those sites which make it pretty clear that the 'price' they expect is that I buy something from the advertisers, or that I accept ads that heavily diminish the value they provide. I don't accept that price (unenforced though it is), and I don't patronize the sites.
I had to teach my children at around age 10 that you do not accept a favor if there's an unspoken assumption that you will do something in return that you are not willing to do. Accepting that favor when you don't intend to honor the tacit contract would be dishonorable (i.e. be a jerk). There are lots of caveats (especially to a 10 year old who may not understand the price), but the general principle was pretty clear once they had a few examples.
If a 10 year old can understand it, it's not that difficult a concept. If you don't like the price, don't accept the favor. On the part of the web, that's easy - don't repeatedly visit a page if you don't intend to accept the price.
but anyone who looks at your site is free to look at whatever they want to look at, and not one thing more
Yes, they are free to do so. But the expectation in both print and web is that you will accept delivery of the ads, although you may skip over them at your leisure.
Of course, given the technology, you are free to refuse delivery of the web ads as well, but while entirely legal, it does make you something of a jerk in exactly the same way as any others who take advantage of the honor system to avoid contributing to the services they enjoy. Of course, outrageous conduct on the content providers side also invalidates the convention, but you made it crystal clear that you feel entirely justified to take what you can under any circumstance, not just when the convention is broken.
I feel no need to support any site by downloading things I want. If a site goes out of business because no one looked at its ads, well I'm sorry to hear that, but I'm sure I can find the content I want elsewhere.
I guess we know who been enjoying the weekly donuts, but wouldn't dream of chipping in. After all, if they were serious about wanting people to pay something, they'd charge them per donut...
I understand that "if they aren't actively preventing me from taking it, then it's not stealing" attitude is probably common enough, but I'm not certain it's wise to trumpet the fact that you have no compunction about taking what you can and giving back nothing unless you're forced to. "I'm a jerk and I don't feel guilty" isn't probably the message you want to send to others.
Your attempt to justify your leeching is, well, sad. Do not attempt to justify your choice to block all ads, no matter how well-behaved, on the basis of those who are forced to block ads because of the technology they are using, or their disabilities (!), or the fact that some ads are so outrageous that they themselves over-step the unwritten, but very real social compact between reader and content-provider.
Of course, I have to say that blocking all ads is pretty small potatoes jerkiness (although it is still being a jerk), but your post really managed to emphasize the worst of the attitude behind it.
(By the way, if you're actually a 14 year old convinced "the world is all stupid & evil & out to get me, so why shouldn't I be a jerk?", then I retract all of the above snarkiness and apologize for taking your post seriously.)
before you get too far along, realize that a LOT of what is listed as cost of 'r&d' is really advertising, marketing, kickbacks and payoffs.
universities also contribute a HUGE amount.
Agreed and agreed. However, what the universities contribute is of an essentially different nature from what drug companies do.
the profits are so high and the cost so truly low...
Costs so low? This doesn't square with anything we know about drug development. Do you have any figures to back up this assertion?
if you want to get right down to it, public health is an infrastructure as much as roads, electricity and clean water is. the fact that we attach profit to this kind of DISGUSTS ME, no end.
Ah, this is where we disagree. I consider increasing health-care outcomes more important than ensuring that no-one profits from health-care. I find it far more productive to yoke greed so that it produces results the results I want (in the long-term) than to simply do without.
But then I've never been part of the "far better everyone suffer than someone unjustly gain" movement.
not every fucking thing in life has to be for-profit. fuck you if you disagree.
No, not everything does. But when the desire for profits and what I would like to see happen, align in roughly the same direction, it makes sense to take advantage of the situation rather than do without. From my stand-point, I've gotten other, richer people's ability and willingness to pay for advanced medical technology (on the order of a trillion dollars over 20 years), to pay for my now affordable health-care. I get it later, but the price is right...
(As for water + roads + electricity - it depends. If you need a *new* network, then for-profit tends to work better and faster. For operating an existing monopoly, private enterprise operates pretty badly.)
"shove your taxes up your a$$ and keep your hands off MY money" mentality, and funding for public research dries up
While this attitude may be endemic in the US, it's not throughout the rest of the world, and yet very little product development research gets done publicly anywhere. The problem is that there are different types of research, and not terribly surprisingly, the government tends to fund most cheap basic non-risky research, while leaving expensive high-risk research for the private sector. I'll make the claim that you cannot expect government to fund any research where the base expectation is that 9 out of 10 expensive projects will *fail*.
It's not a matter of badly educated populace - it's a matter that if we the populace could decide where to spend $95 billion dollars last year, we wouldn't spend it on research. There are vastly better short-term ways to relieve human suffering that are desperately needed. So the research doesn't get done.
Another way of looking at it, is that the reason I have a $50 cell phone now is because we allowed companies to sell $5,000 dollar cell phones 30+ years ago, which made it worth-while to invest in the technology. Admittedly medical research is a lot more emotionally volatile, and my impulse is against denying treatment to those who can't afford it, but if I look at the long term (and the past), I am a hell of a lot better off because of that system, even though I won't be able to afford most of the latest innovations.
(By the way, I'm not nearly as big a fan of long-term protection of lower-cost, non-risky technology - 99% of software and business method patents could be thrown out and I don't think we'd see any substantial difference in technological progress in those fields. But I cannot see any way of replacing the $95 billion worth of medical research that occurs each year without extracting it from paying customers, which means patents, and limited access for some years.)
Plenty of govn't funded research too.
Indeed, But not near $100 billion dollars worth.
For better or worse, medical research is now a *massively* expensive, high risk proposition. In other words, poison for any government that wants to remain in power.
Isn't motivation irrelevant? After all, it doesn't affect what's offered.
In the end, I think what's important is whether we would have these (and other) set of valuable tests if Myriad had not invested the considerable amount of money necessary to take the research from basic research to viable medical test.
If that's the case, then the end result is that for now, a fair number of people who can afford it get the benefits now and the rest of us get it when the patent runs out, as opposed to nobody *ever* getting the benefit.
Honestly, I don't think one can expect the government to invest billions in product development (which often fails).
So, we're left with what works, rather than what would be optimal in an ideal world.
Well, Lewis and Clark and NASA would not get funded if the chance of success was a good deal less than 1 in 10. As for the internet, the technology that I am using to post this has been covered by thousands of patents over the years and created by thousands of companies, all of which were trying to make big bucks.
This is not to say that government has no place in research funding - ala Arpanet and any amount of cheap, basic research. But expecting government to essentially buy multi-million dollar product-development lottery tickets, which, if we remove the financial incentives will *never* make back the money is unrealistic. It doesn't take a genius to know that a government that spent ~$100 billion/year on medical research, the *vast* majority of which failed, would be in the cross-hairs of the opposition and the voters. Far wiser (politically) not to spend the money given that no voter is going to punish you for the medical innovations that never happened.
Honestly, given our reality, do you see any other method of getting close to 100 billion dollars worth of research done?
Medical and scientific progress shouldn't depend on the ability to turn a profit.
Except it does, and it always will. A government that chooses dozens upon dozens of projects, all of which produce nothing (most medical research fails) is putting itself in the cross-hairs of the opposition, who will go to town with a long list of "wasted" millions on "junk projects".
As someone who has been on the periphery of government funding of science, it's always amused me that the government wants to know what you'll discover before they'll fund you. Perfectly acceptable for an organization that *must* be risk averse. Utterly terrible for high-stakes, low success probability research. Ideal for basic research which in general is much cheaper and doesn't have any direct financial benefits.
Commercial medical research is not the best option (see orphan diseases), but realistically speaking, it's the only option.
Do you mean that it's far better that everybody go without this discovery forever, than a large number of people (who can afford it, naturally) benefit during the patent period, and then everybody benefit from it afterwards?
Or would you prefer to believe that in the absence of commercial medical research, government, which by their very nature don't tend to make risky investments that are unlikely to payoff, will miraculously somehow start funding expensive medical research?
I'm a Canadian, and I like my cheap medical care. But it would be the height of hypocrisy to ignore the fact that almost all the medical developments that are likely to keep me healthy into old age wouldn't exist if there wasn't the good old greed of the American medical system. Of course, there are some notable exceptions, but in general, if someone isn't going to make money from it (with the significant chance of a lot of money), then people aren't going to take the risk of expensive research with high probability of failure.
The choice for genetic research isn't between expensive vs. cheap. It's between expensive now + cheap later vs. not available at all.
Funny, I just read a story about how HSBC had basically locked a young women's college fund (~$10K) away until she personally visits their offices in Great Britian along with appropriate documentation. (They closed the branches in her country...) It will cost her half the money (and a week's wages) to go and collect it.
So, not *everybody* is happy with a bank making absolutely sure that they don't give it to the wrong people :-).