Attempting to construct a 'Library of Babel' and put a stake through either patent or copyright on that ground (while almost certainly technically feasible, PRNGs are handy like that) are more or less certain to be tossed out the moment they hit a court that doesn't appreciate some snide CS punk getting clever;
I think if someone managed to create an actual useful prior art document by this method and it was presented to challenge a patent it could be successful - once. That's how long it would take for the federal government to ram through a change in patent law to disallow prior art that has served no purpose other than to serve as prior art - sort of like tax shelters that serve no true business purpose outside of avoiding tax are deemed abusive.
They could just disallow combinatorically generated documents - but that would shit all over Pharma patent claims, so that's a no-go.
While most inventions generated will be nonsensical
There's the first real problem with this idea: prior art has to be findable before it can be submitted as prior art. As it stands, patent searching is manageable only because keyword searches, sorting algorithms, and classification systems shrink down the number of documents to something that actual humans can actually scan and pick over. Those methods would utterly fail in this case because by the time the database has enough records to stand a chance of containing relevant prior art for a claim the search would return way too many spurious results for a human to review.
It will fail hard for pharma patents: the number of possible active pharmaceutical ingredients is up around 10^60 (and that's just small molecules, not biologics!), You can get away with describing LOTS of permutations on a basic "theme" , but not so many that they cover an appreciable amount of the search space.
Another big fail (or win, depending on your point of view): it can only recombine existing ideas.
so why then does this law firm have offices all around the US if they don't tend to deal with US people?
Do you consider US corporations to be US people, my friend? These offices may only have shell companies as clients as opposed to directly working with US citizens.
My guess is that as noted elsewhere on the thread FATCA probably cut down on the use of these schemes by US individuals. So possibly the bulk of records tied to US names are pre-FATCA (old news, so they are getting released later). Post-FATCA probably US individuals have at least another layer or two of companies outside of Panama obscuring the relationship so that banks don't have to worry about complying with FATCA for a US citizen. For the journalists this could mean a lot of dead ends: the name of the ultimate owner isn't in the leaked records.
I think most American news operations were shut out; they're getting the story second hand while many European groups were probably working on this for weeks. The one exception I found is McClatchy:
Any and all false advertisement must be prosecuted. But only after they are made — not per-emptively.
Again - how would anyone prove it?
The same way it is prevented now in most other markets except, for some reason, healthcare.
Because in healthcare there's really no way to prove it without running trials. Are you expecting class action lawyers to run them on contingency?
How does the FDA know today? Oh, they don't! So they ask for evidence and trials and whatnot, right? Well, some consumers may choose to wait for such trials to conclude and for such evidence to emerge. But no one would be legally obligated to.
Oh. Trials. Run by whom? Companies won't - why bother if they can sell the drugs without them? A well run trial just means a risk of having the drug proven unsellable. Consumer Reports? OK. Do you have ~$100B per year to spare to fund that operation, or will they do it based on magazine subscriptions?
So you're ok with follks making and selling fraudulent and ineffective drugs? How exactly would you suggest preventing the practice under your model? If it's "let the market decide", how does the market decide when no one (not the pharmas, not the docs, not the patients, not the lawyers for the class action and malpractice suits: no one) has the information necessary to determine which drugs are worthwhile?
Option 1. Rent a trailer for the cow. Drive to the national park. Hike up the mountain with the cow. Butcher it and remove two steaks, leaving a whole dead cow bleeding all over the place. Move to a different campsite that isn't full of bears and flies eating the rest of your cow.
1. OK: you have cancer. Would you rather enroll in a clinical trial with less than 50% chance of receiving the drug, or just ask for the drug? If most people just choose to take the drug, does the clinical trial ever enroll enough patients to determine its endpoints? Hint: getting enough patients to enroll is already a huge problem in some areas of drug research. Also, if you think that random doctors writing case reports about their uncontrolled, open label uses of an investigational drug yields data that can be used to prove efficacy or safety: think again. It quickly becomes a situation where some data is much worse than no data at all.
Even if you already have a terminal disease, that will kill you in 6 months, you can not be allowed to take a drug, until we've evaluated its safety for 5 years.
Well, you could have a look at how long it takes the FDA to turn around applications on one of the accelerated approval tracks or how they relax safety standards for cancer, or how most cancer drugs fail in phase III because it turns out they are ineffective. But hey, let's just look at what happens with "too much freedom". Mostly: is the goal to create and distribute effective drugs or is the goal to sell whatever you want? Here are the two basic problems.
1. OK: you have cancer. Would you rather enroll in a clinical trial with
2. Let 's let companies sell the drugs before they are approved. This situation would quickly make Shkreli look like an underachiever. How would an investor controlled company approach R&D if a drug could be a source of revenue before you prove whether it works? Simple: gather some hopeful looking phase IIa info to make a drug sellable, then start selling it. Keep running eternal phase III "trials" designed to keep people buying the drug, not to actually prove anything. Look up Stanley Burzynski if you want to see the pioneer for this type of business model. Meanwhile, companies that are doing legit R&D can't get funding from investors and can't find patients to enroll in the trials, because actually seeking approval would be too risky.
You, sir, can be a homicidal maniac and must not be allowed on the street until a diligent government official has determined, you are not a threat to others. Presumption of Innocence is outdated...
I'm not so concerned about your freedom to put random chemicals into your body (though not happy that one way or another, we're in the same insurance pool). I'm more worried about what happens to our medical system when doctors and companies have the freedom to put random chemicals into people's bodies. So more like: You can't have a job driving a bus on public streets and take people's money without a driver's license, and you can't just make and sell buses without bothering to figure out if they do in fact have brakes.
Oh yeah, the 19th century, back when anyone could slap a label on bottle and call it medicine. Which is still what happens if you don't have a safety agency that actually tours the plants, reads the QC documents, tests samples, and then bans/fines companies that try to fake it. We do import drugs and chemicals from all over the world. Just like drugs and chemicals made here, they can be absolute shit if no one is doing due diligence.
For that matter, the machine would not be producing the drugs, it would just be packaging them. The drugs go in to the machine in some sort of loose form and the machine prints them into pills. Manufacturing is serious chemistry that would be hard to do in a fully automated manner in the field.
No and yes: this is a proof of concept chemical synthesizer, it is making the drugs and then adding more ingredients to make the tablets. It can only make a few different drugs because that is probably all that can be made somewhat efficiently with this configuration. On the other hand you're right: it would be ludicrous to actually use this to make drugs for consumption. When it comes to making something simple like benadryl most of the complications aren't in making it safely, the complications are in legally making it safely and then proving that you are doing so. Just because a little robot can make a drug doesn't mean a little robot can submit an Abbreviated New Drug Application to the FDA each time you move it to a new facility.
Whoosh. I was just trying to point out the irony in how people don't like these weapons to be called "assault rifles" by the big bad government, but are comfortable marketing them as assault rifles when they are trying to sell them.
A refrigerator size synthesizer will be a hideously expensive way to make drugs which then can't be legally sold except on the black market. I.e., the FDA has to approve each manufacturing site individually.
This is a proof of concept flow synthesizer that makes the APIs (chemical compounds) and then formulates them with excipients to make the pills. Flow synthesis is definitely going to become more and more useful, but for emergency situations it's absolutely useless. You'd be much better off sending a 50 gallon carboy full of drugs then an easily damaged frig size synthesizer, drums full of solvents and reagents, a generator and gas to run it, etc. It's like sending a 3D printer on a camping trip instead of a box of plastic cutlery.
Slashdot Mirror
Attempting to construct a 'Library of Babel' and put a stake through either patent or copyright on that ground (while almost certainly technically feasible, PRNGs are handy like that) are more or less certain to be tossed out the moment they hit a court that doesn't appreciate some snide CS punk getting clever;
I think if someone managed to create an actual useful prior art document by this method and it was presented to challenge a patent it could be successful - once. That's how long it would take for the federal government to ram through a change in patent law to disallow prior art that has served no purpose other than to serve as prior art - sort of like tax shelters that serve no true business purpose outside of avoiding tax are deemed abusive.
They could just disallow combinatorically generated documents - but that would shit all over Pharma patent claims, so that's a no-go.
While most inventions generated will be nonsensical
There's the first real problem with this idea: prior art has to be findable before it can be submitted as prior art. As it stands, patent searching is manageable only because keyword searches, sorting algorithms, and classification systems shrink down the number of documents to something that actual humans can actually scan and pick over. Those methods would utterly fail in this case because by the time the database has enough records to stand a chance of containing relevant prior art for a claim the search would return way too many spurious results for a human to review.
It will fail hard for pharma patents: the number of possible active pharmaceutical ingredients is up around 10^60 (and that's just small molecules, not biologics!), You can get away with describing LOTS of permutations on a basic "theme" , but not so many that they cover an appreciable amount of the search space.
Another big fail (or win, depending on your point of view): it can only recombine existing ideas.
so why then does this law firm have offices all around the US if they don't tend to deal with US people?
Do you consider US corporations to be US people, my friend? These offices may only have shell companies as clients as opposed to directly working with US citizens.
My guess is that as noted elsewhere on the thread FATCA probably cut down on the use of these schemes by US individuals. So possibly the bulk of records tied to US names are pre-FATCA (old news, so they are getting released later). Post-FATCA probably US individuals have at least another layer or two of companies outside of Panama obscuring the relationship so that banks don't have to worry about complying with FATCA for a US citizen. For the journalists this could mean a lot of dead ends: the name of the ultimate owner isn't in the leaked records.
I think most American news operations were shut out; they're getting the story second hand while many European groups were probably working on this for weeks. The one exception I found is McClatchy:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/
1. No ads
2. Ads are served but there is no tracking of who was served (unless you click).
3. Business as usual.
Any and all false advertisement must be prosecuted. But only after they are made — not per-emptively.
Again - how would anyone prove it?
The same way it is prevented now in most other markets except, for some reason, healthcare.
Because in healthcare there's really no way to prove it without running trials. Are you expecting class action lawyers to run them on contingency?
How does the FDA know today? Oh, they don't! So they ask for evidence and trials and whatnot, right? Well, some consumers may choose to wait for such trials to conclude and for such evidence to emerge. But no one would be legally obligated to.
Oh. Trials. Run by whom? Companies won't - why bother if they can sell the drugs without them? A well run trial just means a risk of having the drug proven unsellable. Consumer Reports? OK. Do you have ~$100B per year to spare to fund that operation, or will they do it based on magazine subscriptions?
So you're ok with follks making and selling fraudulent and ineffective drugs? How exactly would you suggest preventing the practice under your model? If it's "let the market decide", how does the market decide when no one (not the pharmas, not the docs, not the patients, not the lawyers for the class action and malpractice suits: no one) has the information necessary to determine which drugs are worthwhile?
So which do you take camping?
Option 1. Rent a trailer for the cow. Drive to the national park. Hike up the mountain with the cow. Butcher it and remove two steaks, leaving a whole dead cow bleeding all over the place. Move to a different campsite that isn't full of bears and flies eating the rest of your cow.
Option 2. Drive to national park. Hike. eat.
1. OK: you have cancer. Would you rather enroll in a clinical trial with less than 50% chance of receiving the drug, or just ask for the drug? If most people just choose to take the drug, does the clinical trial ever enroll enough patients to determine its endpoints? Hint: getting enough patients to enroll is already a huge problem in some areas of drug research. Also, if you think that random doctors writing case reports about their uncontrolled, open label uses of an investigational drug yields data that can be used to prove efficacy or safety: think again. It quickly becomes a situation where some data is much worse than no data at all.
Even if you already have a terminal disease, that will kill you in 6 months, you can not be allowed to take a drug, until we've evaluated its safety for 5 years.
Well, you could have a look at how long it takes the FDA to turn around applications on one of the accelerated approval tracks or how they relax safety standards for cancer, or how most cancer drugs fail in phase III because it turns out they are ineffective. But hey, let's just look at what happens with "too much freedom". Mostly: is the goal to create and distribute effective drugs or is the goal to sell whatever you want? Here are the two basic problems.
1. OK: you have cancer. Would you rather enroll in a clinical trial with
2. Let 's let companies sell the drugs before they are approved. This situation would quickly make Shkreli look like an underachiever. How would an investor controlled company approach R&D if a drug could be a source of revenue before you prove whether it works? Simple: gather some hopeful looking phase IIa info to make a drug sellable, then start selling it. Keep running eternal phase III "trials" designed to keep people buying the drug, not to actually prove anything. Look up Stanley Burzynski if you want to see the pioneer for this type of business model. Meanwhile, companies that are doing legit R&D can't get funding from investors and can't find patients to enroll in the trials, because actually seeking approval would be too risky.
You, sir, can be a homicidal maniac and must not be allowed on the street until a diligent government official has determined, you are not a threat to others. Presumption of Innocence is outdated...
I'm not so concerned about your freedom to put random chemicals into your body (though not happy that one way or another, we're in the same insurance pool). I'm more worried about what happens to our medical system when doctors and companies have the freedom to put random chemicals into people's bodies. So more like: You can't have a job driving a bus on public streets and take people's money without a driver's license, and you can't just make and sell buses without bothering to figure out if they do in fact have brakes.
Oh yeah, the 19th century, back when anyone could slap a label on bottle and call it medicine. Which is still what happens if you don't have a safety agency that actually tours the plants, reads the QC documents, tests samples, and then bans/fines companies that try to fake it. We do import drugs and chemicals from all over the world. Just like drugs and chemicals made here, they can be absolute shit if no one is doing due diligence.
Hey, it's your backpack. By all means, carry a cow instead of steaks.
oops, hang on: it doesn't make pills, just liquids.
For that matter, the machine would not be producing the drugs, it would just be packaging them. The drugs go in to the machine in some sort of loose form and the machine prints them into pills. Manufacturing is serious chemistry that would be hard to do in a fully automated manner in the field.
No and yes: this is a proof of concept chemical synthesizer, it is making the drugs and then adding more ingredients to make the tablets. It can only make a few different drugs because that is probably all that can be made somewhat efficiently with this configuration. On the other hand you're right: it would be ludicrous to actually use this to make drugs for consumption. When it comes to making something simple like benadryl most of the complications aren't in making it safely, the complications are in legally making it safely and then proving that you are doing so. Just because a little robot can make a drug doesn't mean a little robot can submit an Abbreviated New Drug Application to the FDA each time you move it to a new facility.
Whoosh. I was just trying to point out the irony in how people don't like these weapons to be called "assault rifles" by the big bad government, but are comfortable marketing them as assault rifles when they are trying to sell them.
A refrigerator size synthesizer will be a hideously expensive way to make drugs which then can't be legally sold except on the black market. I.e., the FDA has to approve each manufacturing site individually.
This is a proof of concept flow synthesizer that makes the APIs (chemical compounds) and then formulates them with excipients to make the pills. Flow synthesis is definitely going to become more and more useful, but for emergency situations it's absolutely useless. You'd be much better off sending a 50 gallon carboy full of drugs then an easily damaged frig size synthesizer, drums full of solvents and reagents, a generator and gas to run it, etc. It's like sending a 3D printer on a camping trip instead of a box of plastic cutlery.
That and 86ing Trump would get awfully messy if he has an actual army on stage.
According to the owners, these: https://www.google.com/search?...
Mar. 28, 2016: Dry cleaner lobbyists suddenly swivel from neutering EPA/OSHA laws to subsidizing banana cream ...
Actually, why aren't the Republicans having their convention at a gun show?
Hush, we don't talk about them.
How do you tell the over the top rightists from the parody over the top rightists?