Re:I won't die without the patent system
on
The Patent Epidemic
·
· Score: 1
There are many problems with the referenced material and its ultimate source. I'd call it "6 number points having nothing to do with whether patents should be granted".
1) Historical analysis of local patent protection and pharmaceutical company performance. Does not consider that patents protect markets. Briefly, it ignores that any of the cited low-protection country corporations may have US patents (that is, patents in the largest actual market). This is a large enough flaw to make the analysis irrelevant.
2)Patents hinder drug research. Makes a seeming post-hoc-ergo-etc mistake: would the things that these drug companies are locked out of researching even be in human knowledge if patents weren't around? There's no information suggesting that the other companies would have independently discovered the material AND taken it further to fruition than the apparent patent holders.
3. Drug research is 55% publicly funded. Fine. What about the other 45%? I'd say we need it all. Additionally, its metric is "top-selling". We need only look at the COX-3 inhibitor family of drugs to realize sales figures have nothing to do with efficacy. And since when can we dismiss product development research? So I discovered a cancer-curing pill, but I wasted the 48% of the money I spent figuring out how to manufacture the pill?
4. Advertising/admin. Simply not relevant in that it doesn't address the question of whether patents promote the useful arts. I'm sure the Wright brothers spent some money on the sign outside of their bicycle shop, and maybe even employed someone to work the counter, if you know what I'm getting at.
5. Profits. See above.
6. Patents kill in the developing world. Again makes an error about the assumptions- would these treatments have been discovered and available at all if the patent regime didn't exist?
A message below mentions the "Caltech Rose Bowl prank" which is of course a lot like the Harvard "WE SUCK", and earlier. I'd maintain, though, that the Harvard instance is superior due to the direct rivalry. I'd see the Caltech prank as one where they simply altered someone else's card show and visibly took credit for it. If the cards had read "PIZZA" instead of "CALTECH" there would not have been any effective difference- I doubt the Huskies fans even cared about that school after the prank let alone before.
On the Harvard side, though, part of the beauty is that nobody needed to explain or take credit for it. Not to mention that the Yalies got people who would otherwise have done nothing to actively perpetrate the punch line on themselves.
Okay so we all need to write to our legislators. Below is the message I'm sending, please feel free to cut/paste.
Dear Representative Smith,
I am writing as one of your constituents to raise an issue of importance to me personally: Please stuff the Digital Transition Content Security Act of 2005 up your analog hole.
WalMart dropping their DVD rental service isn't surprising- most of their cutthroat and successful business practices center on inventory. WalMart would need to make a huge killing in the DVD rental service market before the investment would pay off better than the same amount put toward more retail dominance.
I'd like to see Amazon call in used dvd's- you get a little labeled sleeve, if they like the quality they add a week to your subscription.
Doesn't exactly inspire and encourage like the Kennedy declaration did, does it?
I'd say the Kennedy speech at Rice is just about the most romanticized, misremembered speech I can think of. Much more about godless communists, only sort of about the moon, in the sense of 'hmm, space exploration... now _there's_ a plausible new reason for spouting more cold war rhetoric'.
"Hostile misuse of space"? "A hostile flag of conquest"? "Weapons of mass destruction"? "New terrifying theater of war"? That's inspiring and encouraging?
I'm no fan of Bush or his various bureaucrats, but whatever anyone's said about this, it's definitely more inspiring than 'we've got to go to the moon to beat the terrorists!'
So rather than being a futuristic "Saved by the Bell"
So my whole plan was to make some joke about Spock being wildly in geeky Vulcan-love with Uhura, like Screech's character and Lisa. Of course, I wanted to do a great job of this, and thought I'd google for plotlines to make it work better.
I can't imagine a worse idea in the space program than terminating these missions to save a half-drop in the bucket of the overall budget.
I've read a fair amount of discussion of how they're approaching the heliopause (the point at which the solar winds begin to be overpowered by interstellar winds) and, as JPL will say, "The thickness of the heliosheath is uncertain and could be tens of AU thick taking several years to traverse."
Considering it'd take billions more dollars and waiting decades to get that piece of data from somewhere else, I'd call it a bargain. I'm sure I don't know the impact of that information, but if something as fundamental as how far our sun's influence really extends is unknown, it seems like it'd be at least somewhat important.
As others mentioned, a well-informed examiner will reject this application. I'd monitor here until an examiner is assigned and email that person.
The opposition idea discussed below, while viable, would require you to have standing and money. Getting the examiner to refuse it with a gentle nudge to the relevant facts would require neither.
Seems to me the application should indeed be refused on this basis, though expecting an examiner to work that out might be asking too much. The idea is that it's deceptively misdescriptive and therefore unregistrable. The only problem I see here is that I'm not sure that MAME is descriptive of the software that we know by that name- that MAME is indeed a mark, just not Foley's mark.
If you read the tax laws you would be surprised at the fact that even if you hit max payments with one employer the moment you switch employers you start all over on the deduction count.
On the assumption that the employee only has one employer. I can think of tons of reasons this makes sense. Illegals sharing ssn's, for instance. The Trust Fund gets to keep all the money since if you don't report the excess tax on your federal forms, you don't get it refunded. What if a prior employer didn't actually pay those taxes? Better to have the individual on the hook than the government _and_ the individual.
The key issue is to provide some means for younger Americans to realize a retirement and should they fail to live to collect it something to pass on to their survivors.
Ah, because the 401k's, 403b's, Roth IRA's, traditional IRA's, etc. we currently have are not available to young Americans and are not transferrable to heirs. Thank God Bush is finding a way to solve that problem.
I loose over $9,000 dollars a year to this non-investment.
I don't even want to get into how much I lose to the Defense Department non-investment every year, or at least every year since January 2001.
If I die before I can collect nothing will come of my "investment" for my family.
Except by dying, you DO collect. Looks like in 2003 over $25 billion was paid out in just such circumstances.
GROW UP.
Get educated on the issues. Stop listening to whoever's filling your head with these falsehoods.
Really, just because some idiotic baby boomers can't comprehend "save some cash for later in life"
I'm going to assume you realize that plenty of low income workers might have trouble funding retirement with non-existent savings.
What I can't believe is that there seems to have been no public discussion of what simple means testing might do to the system. While I don't think it's so crazy that a non-retired, previously-underemployed black woman from Alabama might need Social Security benefits, I'm completely unable to explain why my father-in-law with a $10 million estate gets a check every month.
My last idea on this was to skip the whole privatization line and offer, say, 25% refunds on the taxes paid to individuals that can show they're taking advantage of the other tax-advantaged savings opportunities they have. "Here," says the government, "take this 25%. Sorry it can't be more, but the other 75% pays to prevent poor people from eating cat food. Oh, and it also pays for benefits to future retirees who like the guaranteed benefit idea: by taking this 25% you've agreed to be at the top of the list for future means-tested benefit reductions."
I think this was a court decision (State Street?). I think the reasoning boiled down to the fact that the court believed a business method satisfied all the statutory requirements for patentable material, saw no prohibition against it, and said so.
The 'other side' in some sense, then, is legal inertia- good luck getting a law passed that says no to business method patents once someone's benefitting from them.
It better have been natural selection, anything else is still under patent by Monsanto/Solutia/whatever they became. (US 5,776,760 for example- I think it was in fact filed in Columbia. Not really the right one, but I worked on the filings that essentially tried to lock up every conceivable method of manipulating a plant to tolerate the huge amount of glyphosate they were hoping to dump around it. In anticipation of needing a revenue source once the patents on glyphosate itself ran out, of course.)
It'd light up my mind along the lines of the whole Al Capone/IRS thing, except that a successful patent infringement suit in Columbia is a ridiculous proposition to begin with.
I hate questions like this and would like to try to convince people not to moderate it higher.
How can you help us, as healthcare providers to NOT live in fear of undue lawsuits?
Um, do you really want the two candidates to give you an insurance agent's phone number?
Seriously, this question starts with a much more identifiable political position than any other question I've read so far: that easy access to the courts is a bad thing. There are many people across a very broad spectrum of political bases that would totally disagree with this.
Even the drug-war questions try to take a more unbiased starting point.
I like the analysis that says we all deserve choice, diversity, news coverage not dictated by corporate interests, etc., but one point I wish he had made would be to look at how the spectrum is ours and not Disney's.
I can't quite get over the example of Clear Channel owning 6 stations in North Dakota- it seems like if one company can sit on all that spectrum (and if they can do that all over the country) I ought to be able to get a license just by asking. I can afford a 1000-watt transmitter and some mixers...
An independent buying a media outlet like Ted talks about throughout is one thing, but why shouldn't it be more feasible for someone to just start one up if it's broadcast? Seems like the FCC could even say 'we've lost- Clear Channel, you're now at a billion watts on 100.1, 100.7, 101.3, 101.9, etc. but we're revoking the thousands of local licenses you've got all over the dial all over America.'
Time magazine and blogs
on
Meet Joe Blog
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I'm not sure how to express why I think it's so odd that Time featured that piece, so let me spit out the background of what's got me thinking about it:
Sometime in early 2003 a journalist goes to to northern Iraq ("Iraqi Kurdistan") working for Time. He doesn't seem to get anything published. He asks for and apparently receives permission from his editors to leave things on his blog, which he then sets up and starts contributing to. Somebody in the mainstream press discovers it (Boston Globe?), thinks it's interesting and reports on it, and the guys at Time say 'holy shit, quit posting'.
This seems a very different situation than Time would have us believe from the Andrew Sullivan quote in the piece:"Because we're not trying to sell magazines or papers, we can afford to assail our readers," says Andrew Sullivan, a contributor to TIME and the editor of andrewsullivan.com. "I don't have the pressure of an advertising executive telling me to lay off. It's incredibly liberating." Unless, I guess, your boss tells you to lay off entirely.
I also wonder why they might publish such a 'little guys push big media' article without examining _at all_ what media giants do to control that area, particularly in light of the above.
The pitcher gets too much praise for when most of the work is actually done by his teammates.
I'll agree with this in principle, but in this particular game, it didn't really look like the Diamondbacks needed anybody besides the local high school's 8 to secure the perfect game. See the 27 outs if you're skeptical, but I'll summarize:
13 strikeouts 7 routine fly balls (one was basket-caught, of all things) 4 routine ground ball outs a close out on a leadoff drag bunt and a couple of decent plays by the shortstop. Nothing a big leaguer would take any credit for.
So in this case, while you certainly needed a AA-level first baseman and maybe a AAA-level shortstop, I don't think there was much else going on.
But if you're arguing that you needed warm bodies in the outfield and a third baseman to stand there and do nothing, I guess everybody did contribute.
I'd mod this funny, myself, given this section from the SEC filing:
LETTER FROM THE FOUNDERS "AN OWNER'S MANUAL" FOR GOOGLE'S SHAREHOLDERS
DON'T BE EVIL
Don't be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served--as shareholders and in all other ways--by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.
I mean, if they're promising not to be evil, isn't that good enough? If we had only thought to extract non-evil promises out of companies like Enron....
Looks like they're going with the share auction plan. Seems like the SEC filing is buried, but the key details seem to be:
1) Underwriters manage the auction 2) You pre-qualify, etc. 3)You bid (and can multiple bid - ie, one bid for 9K shares at $20, another bid for 1K shares at $40, you'll get 10K shares if the price is $15) 4)The reject "manipulative" or "speculative" bids 5)They calculate a clearance price that'd sell all the shares offered according to the bids, and accept bids accordingly 6)They determine whether to hand out all the shares bid, give everyone 80% of what they asked for, give the bid/little guys everything they asked for, or let original bid price determine who gets everything they asked for.
I'd be really interested in what some professional equity people think of this process, it seems really interesting to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahhh, so many memories
*Pushes button* And now they're gone.
There are many problems with the referenced material and its ultimate source. I'd call it "6 number points having nothing to do with whether patents should be granted".
1) Historical analysis of local patent protection and pharmaceutical company performance. Does not consider that patents protect markets. Briefly, it ignores that any of the cited low-protection country corporations may have US patents (that is, patents in the largest actual market). This is a large enough flaw to make the analysis irrelevant.
2)Patents hinder drug research. Makes a seeming post-hoc-ergo-etc mistake: would the things that these drug companies are locked out of researching even be in human knowledge if patents weren't around? There's no information suggesting that the other companies would have independently discovered the material AND taken it further to fruition than the apparent patent holders.
3. Drug research is 55% publicly funded. Fine. What about the other 45%? I'd say we need it all. Additionally, its metric is "top-selling". We need only look at the COX-3 inhibitor family of drugs to realize sales figures have nothing to do with efficacy. And since when can we dismiss product development research? So I discovered a cancer-curing pill, but I wasted the 48% of the money I spent figuring out how to manufacture the pill?
4. Advertising/admin. Simply not relevant in that it doesn't address the question of whether patents promote the useful arts. I'm sure the Wright brothers spent some money on the sign outside of their bicycle shop, and maybe even employed someone to work the counter, if you know what I'm getting at.
5. Profits. See above.
6. Patents kill in the developing world. Again makes an error about the assumptions- would these treatments have been discovered and available at all if the patent regime didn't exist?
A message below mentions the "Caltech Rose Bowl prank" which is of course a lot like the Harvard "WE SUCK", and earlier. I'd maintain, though, that the Harvard instance is superior due to the direct rivalry. I'd see the Caltech prank as one where they simply altered someone else's card show and visibly took credit for it. If the cards had read "PIZZA" instead of "CALTECH" there would not have been any effective difference- I doubt the Huskies fans even cared about that school after the prank let alone before.
On the Harvard side, though, part of the beauty is that nobody needed to explain or take credit for it. Not to mention that the Yalies got people who would otherwise have done nothing to actively perpetrate the punch line on themselves.
Okay so we all need to write to our legislators. Below is the message I'm sending, please feel free to cut/paste.
Dear Representative Smith,
I am writing as one of your constituents to raise an issue of importance to me personally:
Please stuff the Digital Transition Content Security Act of 2005 up your analog hole.
Love, etc.
WalMart dropping their DVD rental service isn't surprising- most of their cutthroat and successful business practices center on inventory. WalMart would need to make a huge killing in the DVD rental service market before the investment would pay off better than the same amount put toward more retail dominance.
I'd like to see Amazon call in used dvd's- you get a little labeled sleeve, if they like the quality they add a week to your subscription.
the planet's rotation seems to be slowing!
Of course it is. We keep using it to boost our spacecraft.
Doesn't exactly inspire and encourage like the Kennedy declaration did, does it?
I'd say the Kennedy speech at Rice is just about the most romanticized, misremembered speech I can think of. Much more about godless communists, only sort of about the moon, in the sense of 'hmm, space exploration... now _there's_ a plausible new reason for spouting more cold war rhetoric'.
"Hostile misuse of space"? "A hostile flag of conquest"? "Weapons of mass destruction"? "New terrifying theater of war"? That's inspiring and encouraging?
I'm no fan of Bush or his various bureaucrats, but whatever anyone's said about this, it's definitely more inspiring than 'we've got to go to the moon to beat the terrorists!'
Cynical, I know, but as an ivy-league grad, I think that they might need brainwashing into thinking they got a useful education.
After all, the general public has already been brainwashed that way.
Gee, a website with commentary about video games? Penny Arcade, right? Oh, "Patent Arcade"?
I'd send them a nasty letter for fun.
to install my replacement-by-RMA backup hard drive and complete the new backup.
Unfortunately, I seem to have discovered this week that some media did not last quite that long.
So rather than being a futuristic "Saved by the Bell"
So my whole plan was to make some joke about Spock being wildly in geeky Vulcan-love with Uhura, like Screech's character and Lisa. Of course, I wanted to do a great job of this, and thought I'd google for plotlines to make it work better.
Then I found a description of continuity lapses in "Saved By the Bell".
If I ever thought Trek freaks were out of hand, I have now seen worse.
I can't imagine a worse idea in the space program than terminating these missions to save a half-drop in the bucket of the overall budget.
I've read a fair amount of discussion of how they're approaching the heliopause (the point at which the solar winds begin to be overpowered by interstellar winds) and, as JPL will say, "The thickness of the heliosheath is uncertain and could be tens of AU thick taking several years to traverse."
Considering it'd take billions more dollars and waiting decades to get that piece of data from somewhere else, I'd call it a bargain. I'm sure I don't know the impact of that information, but if something as fundamental as how far our sun's influence really extends is unknown, it seems like it'd be at least somewhat important.
As others mentioned, a well-informed examiner will reject this application. I'd monitor here until an examiner is assigned and email that person.
The opposition idea discussed below, while viable, would require you to have standing and money. Getting the examiner to refuse it with a gentle nudge to the relevant facts would require neither.
Seems to me the application should indeed be refused on this basis, though expecting an examiner to work that out might be asking too much. The idea is that it's deceptively misdescriptive and therefore unregistrable. The only problem I see here is that I'm not sure that MAME is descriptive of the software that we know by that name- that MAME is indeed a mark, just not Foley's mark.
Most spyware is free
Then how do spyware companies make any money?
Volume.
Finally, a situation where the old joke actually makes sense.
There is no such as a trust fund
Yes, there is.
The current beneficiaries are paid from the general fund
No, they're paid from the Old Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund.
If you read the tax laws you would be surprised at the fact that even if you hit max payments with one employer the moment you switch employers you start all over on the deduction count.
On the assumption that the employee only has one employer. I can think of tons of reasons this makes sense. Illegals sharing ssn's, for instance. The Trust Fund gets to keep all the money since if you don't report the excess tax on your federal forms, you don't get it refunded. What if a prior employer didn't actually pay those taxes? Better to have the individual on the hook than the government _and_ the individual.
The key issue is to provide some means for younger Americans to realize a retirement and should they fail to live to collect it something to pass on to their survivors.
Ah, because the 401k's, 403b's, Roth IRA's, traditional IRA's, etc. we currently have are not available to young Americans and are not transferrable to heirs. Thank God Bush is finding a way to solve that problem.
I loose over $9,000 dollars a year to this non-investment.
I don't even want to get into how much I lose to the Defense Department non-investment every year, or at least every year since January 2001.
If I die before I can collect nothing will come of my "investment" for my family.
Except by dying, you DO collect. Looks like in 2003 over $25 billion was paid out in just such circumstances.
GROW UP.
Get educated on the issues. Stop listening to whoever's filling your head with these falsehoods.
Really, just because some idiotic baby boomers can't comprehend "save some cash for later in life"
I'm going to assume you realize that plenty of low income workers might have trouble funding retirement with non-existent savings.
What I can't believe is that there seems to have been no public discussion of what simple means testing might do to the system. While I don't think it's so crazy that a non-retired, previously-underemployed black woman from Alabama might need Social Security benefits, I'm completely unable to explain why my father-in-law with a $10 million estate gets a check every month.
My last idea on this was to skip the whole privatization line and offer, say, 25% refunds on the taxes paid to individuals that can show they're taking advantage of the other tax-advantaged savings opportunities they have. "Here," says the government, "take this 25%. Sorry it can't be more, but the other 75% pays to prevent poor people from eating cat food. Oh, and it also pays for benefits to future retirees who like the guaranteed benefit idea: by taking this 25% you've agreed to be at the top of the list for future means-tested benefit reductions."
Don't trust my non-google-reinforced memory, but:
I think this was a court decision (State Street?). I think the reasoning boiled down to the fact that the court believed a business method satisfied all the statutory requirements for patentable material, saw no prohibition against it, and said so.
The 'other side' in some sense, then, is legal inertia- good luck getting a law passed that says no to business method patents once someone's benefitting from them.
It better have been natural selection, anything else is still under patent by Monsanto/Solutia/whatever they became. (US 5,776,760 for example- I think it was in fact filed in Columbia. Not really the right one, but I worked on the filings that essentially tried to lock up every conceivable method of manipulating a plant to tolerate the huge amount of glyphosate they were hoping to dump around it. In anticipation of needing a revenue source once the patents on glyphosate itself ran out, of course.)
It'd light up my mind along the lines of the whole Al Capone/IRS thing, except that a successful patent infringement suit in Columbia is a ridiculous proposition to begin with.
I hate questions like this and would like to try to convince people not to moderate it higher.
How can you help us, as healthcare providers to NOT live in fear of undue lawsuits?
Um, do you really want the two candidates to give you an insurance agent's phone number?
Seriously, this question starts with a much more identifiable political position than any other question I've read so far: that easy access to the courts is a bad thing. There are many people across a very broad spectrum of political bases that would totally disagree with this.
Even the drug-war questions try to take a more unbiased starting point.
I like the analysis that says we all deserve choice, diversity, news coverage not dictated by corporate interests, etc., but one point I wish he had made would be to look at how the spectrum is ours and not Disney's.
I can't quite get over the example of Clear Channel owning 6 stations in North Dakota- it seems like if one company can sit on all that spectrum (and if they can do that all over the country) I ought to be able to get a license just by asking. I can afford a 1000-watt transmitter and some mixers...
An independent buying a media outlet like Ted talks about throughout is one thing, but why shouldn't it be more feasible for someone to just start one up if it's broadcast? Seems like the FCC could even say 'we've lost- Clear Channel, you're now at a billion watts on 100.1, 100.7, 101.3, 101.9, etc. but we're revoking the thousands of local licenses you've got all over the dial all over America.'
I'm not sure how to express why I think it's so odd that Time featured that piece, so let me spit out the background of what's got me thinking about it:
Sometime in early 2003 a journalist goes to to northern Iraq ("Iraqi Kurdistan") working for Time. He doesn't seem to get anything published. He asks for and apparently receives permission from his editors to leave things on his blog, which he then sets up and starts contributing to. Somebody in the mainstream press discovers it (Boston Globe?), thinks it's interesting and reports on it, and the guys at Time say 'holy shit, quit posting'.
This seems a very different situation than Time would have us believe from the Andrew Sullivan quote in the piece:"Because we're not trying to sell magazines or papers, we can afford to assail our readers," says Andrew Sullivan, a contributor to TIME and the editor of andrewsullivan.com. "I don't have the pressure of an advertising executive telling me to lay off. It's incredibly liberating." Unless, I guess, your boss tells you to lay off entirely.
I also wonder why they might publish such a 'little guys push big media' article without examining _at all_ what media giants do to control that area, particularly in light of the above.
The pitcher gets too much praise for when most of the work is actually done by his teammates.
I'll agree with this in principle, but in this particular game, it didn't really look like the Diamondbacks needed anybody besides the local high school's 8 to secure the perfect game. See the 27 outs if you're skeptical, but I'll summarize:
13 strikeouts
7 routine fly balls (one was basket-caught, of all things)
4 routine ground ball outs
a close out on a leadoff drag bunt
and a couple of decent plays by the shortstop. Nothing a big leaguer would take any credit for.
So in this case, while you certainly needed a AA-level first baseman and maybe a AAA-level shortstop, I don't think there was much else going on.
But if you're arguing that you needed warm bodies in the outfield and a third baseman to stand there and do nothing, I guess everybody did contribute.
I'd mod this funny, myself, given this section from the SEC filing:
LETTER FROM THE FOUNDERS "AN OWNER'S MANUAL" FOR GOOGLE'S SHAREHOLDERS
DON'T BE EVIL
Don't be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served--as shareholders and in all other ways--by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.
I mean, if they're promising not to be evil, isn't that good enough? If we had only thought to extract non-evil promises out of companies like Enron....
Looks like they're going with the share auction plan. Seems like the SEC filing is buried, but the key details seem to be:
1) Underwriters manage the auction
2) You pre-qualify, etc.
3)You bid (and can multiple bid - ie, one bid for 9K shares at $20, another bid for 1K shares at $40, you'll get 10K shares if the price is $15)
4)The reject "manipulative" or "speculative" bids
5)They calculate a clearance price that'd sell all the shares offered according to the bids, and accept bids accordingly
6)They determine whether to hand out all the shares bid, give everyone 80% of what they asked for, give the bid/little guys everything they asked for, or let original bid price determine who gets everything they asked for.
I'd be really interested in what some professional equity people think of this process, it seems really interesting to me.