Unfortunately I can't argue too much with this. However, I'm not sure what the alternative is. If you simply kill the drug industry that won't be any better either. A few drugs will become cheap now instead of 10 years from now, and then all the drugs will be cheap but there won't be any new drugs.
Personally I'm all for just having the government do the whole thing, but I think we need to establish that before we just go and kill the drug industry.
Haven't you been paying attention. Making expenses deductible is a subside.
In the US all expenses by a business are "deductible" already. Corporate taxes are on earnings, which is revenue minus expenses. Anything that costs money reduces your taxes.
And the subsidy is a minor one. If I spend $1B on R&D I might save $100M in taxes. That might cause you to spend a bit more on R&D, but you aren't going to spend $1B that you don't think will have a return just so that you can save $100M in taxes.
They already do this, at least with their cars. A big post-9/11 thing was to start siphoning data from sources like municipal cameras, including cameras on cars. A recent Frontline included a ride in a police car - the car had license plate readers attached to it which logged all plates it drove by 24x7. It would also tell the cop if a plate associated with some problem was spotted (warrants, expired, etc). During the video segment driving down a row of parking spots there must have been a dozen lapsed registrations spotted.
There was another Frontline showing modern aerial drone technology. One featured a video database of an entire town for a month (all captured by a drone - enough pixels to just capture the whole town at once at a very usable resolution at any point at any time - not a pan/zoom thing). It might have been Frederick - it was one of the small cities around DC.
So, the government is going to have all this stuff no matter what. The only question is whether anybody else gets to have it.
As much as I'd like to see this stuff not abused, what needs to change is our culture. It is impossible to put the genie back in the bottle.
Imagine a crowdsourced solution like this:
1. I hook up some cameras to my house exterior and car. They log video with timestamps and GPS coordinates. 2. I write some FOSS that processes the video. It generates an xml index of the video of:
a. Filename
b. Timestamp
c. Text (logos, license plates, signs, whatever) present at that timestamp that wasn't present in the previous 30 seconds of video.
d. Faces (identified by GUID) present at that timestamp that weren't present in the previous 30 seconds of video. Face GUIDs would use some standard algorithm so that the same face would generate the same GUID on any video processed. 3. If any new GUIDs show up extract the best photo of the face from the video stream and store that in a file named by GUID. 4. Upload all of the above to a webserver, with RSS feeds for video, index, and face files.
Then somebody sets up a service that subscribes to the feeds, stores the index data in a database, and generates URLs to the distributed video files. Perhaps allow people to supply personal data for the facial GUIDs and license plates, and mine the data for common license-plate to face associations.
All any of this stuff requires is that people just set up cameras on their own property and share the data with the world. None of this requires any technology that isn't a commodity today. The central service does not need any extraordinary storage or processing requirements. This could all be built tomorrow.
If many people supplied data to such a service you'd essentially end up with a FOSS big brother data feed on just about every activity on the planet, free to browse by anybody. It would be impossible to stop, unless you banned the sharing of videos online.
Some of the behaviour in this crowd may be illegal (concert goers smoking marijuana for example) or at least frowned up by the authorities (dissidents gathering to protest).
Is it too much to hope that the end result of this kind of technology is that laws might actually become sane?
When we get to the point where you can go to some website, punch in the name of anybody, and then download their entire life recorded at 7-24 camera angles at any time, maybe people will find better things to do than be nosy.
Right now if you're the unlucky job applicant who has a compromising photo out on Facebook somewhere you just never get any offers. If in the future EVERYBODY has compromising photos online, then employers will just have to learn to ignore it.
Right now if you're the unlucky guy with photographic evidence of speeding you get a ticket. In the future, you'll have a GPS trace of every person in the country, establishing that every person is documented as speeding every day, and maybe we'll develop sane speed limits.
Right now the government already has a database of everything you do thanks to the growing network of cameras coupled with facial recognition. In the future EVERYBODY will have such a database, so Congressmen who don't want people to make a big deal of their taking bribes will need to go easy on their abuse of that data on ordinary people.
Today everybody pretends not to be a schmuck. In the future EVERYBODY will know that EVERYBODY is a schmuck, but maybe we'll just let everybody pretend not to be anyway...
I see technology like this as a big equalizer - not unlike the invention of the gun. Once upon a time only the knights could afford armor and mounts. Then merchants could afford guns and were no longer beholden to pay tribute to every warlord along their trade route.
Actually, maintaining customer preferences is all-around a good idea. If you tend to order one of a few items done a certain way, why not make it easy and just let you pick it off of a touch screen or whatever? They don't have to get your order right, you don't have to spell it out, and you can basically walk up, swipe your card, tap two buttons, and it is ordered/paid. Assuming people read the order, the error rare would be much lower as well.
The other post hit most of the points, but regarding software compatibility.
As long as the game is static-compiled as one big binary then for the most part you can just download, chmod, and run it. It won't be able to modify/bin/bash, but it sure can read your firefox password store and upload it to who-knows-where. It will also eat gobs of RAM, and if glibc was statically linked then it will be sensitive to any system call changes.
As soon as the game is dynamically linked, then it starts becoming distro-specific. To run a dynamically linked program you need appropriate versions of all the libraries it references installed.
Windows games tend to be linked against DLLs that they bundle, except for some commonly-used ones which are often system-wide. That tends to waste some RAM, and it tends to mean that you're at the mercy of the publisher to fix security issues.
In the Linux world it is preferred to get software from the distro, which results in less RAM use as everything is built against the same set of libraries (which means they're resident in RAM once only), and the next time zlib has a security problem you just fix that one library file and every application which uses it is fixed.
If it means it will prevent mass adoption, sure. If it means that Linux will die, then no - that attitude has been around for decades and it hasn't died yet.
If anything, people who know what a kernel is aren't "real" users in that they don't represent the vast overwhelming majority of computer users.
They represent me though, which is all I really care about. I don't contribute to FOSS so that somebody's grandma can use it. I mean, sure, I'm happy if they can and all, but that isn't really the reason I do it. I contribute to FOSS because I find it useful and would like to make it more useful. That generally means that I'm helping to make it more useful for others like me.
Now, the reason Canonical contributes to Linux is that they want to obtain a commercial return. They're not going to get that return by catering to users who are already catered to by Linux. Their target is the grandma most of the established Linux crowd doesn't care about. Their efforts to make Ubuntu more widely accepted are likely to lose their existing user base. From their standpoint it doesn't matter - if they lose a few thousand users to gain millions it is a good commercial trade. However, this is why they get so many complaints on forums like this one.
So, do I want to see Linux succeed? Well, that's a trick question, because as far as I'm concerned it already has.
Oh, and we're using Linux in the context of the traditional Linux distro. If you're talking about Linux the kernel, well, it already is adopted. Chances are it is running on your DVR, car entertainment system, phone, etc already.
However, I'd like to see the NIH funded to do the work and see that process demonstrated as cost-effective/etc before we just kill patents.
If you kill drug patents then companies will axe their R&D almost overnight. They'll milk their existing product line, maybe diversify into generics or other industries, but you'll quickly find any expert who knows anything about how to drug development dedicated to other tasks or finding new work. That is a LOT of lost knowledge, and a decade from that decision there will be a lot of people not being treated for things that could otherwise be treatable. Sure, we'll save money on pills, but you can save even more money if you just let people die in the streets - saving money isn't the main purpose of a healthcare system.
I'd rather see the government operate competitively, and let it make industry gradually obsolete if it becomes successful. That keeps scientists working on drugs, and allows a gradual transition. If the libertarians are right and the government can't do anything right, then that will become evident and the superior private industry won't be impacted at all.
But, I agree, I think that this sort of thing is potentially well-suited to government R&D.
The one exception would be around high-value products (to the consumer) that are politically vulnerable. Think of Viagra. Could you have seen that getting lots of federal dollars? The advantage of private industry is that it lets the consumer pay for the product if they want to buy it. And, there is no reason that this wouldn't continue in certain niches - we could still keep the patent regime, and competition would naturally limit it to areas that for whatever reason the government underserves. Instead of arguing over whether the world needs Viagra we can let those who want it pay for it, and taxpayers don't have to.
1. Don't touch the current drug industry. Just let it run the way it runs under the current patent structure. This means that until something better is in place we'll still have drug R&D.
2. Create a division of the NIH or whatever to fund drug discovery (it could be in cooperation with other first world nations). It would do complete end-to-end R&D from idea to pill, including clinical trials/etc. Its main priority will be return in terms of health outcomes for the population. Any drugs it gets approved would be licensed for free to any US manufacturer that does the work domestically, for 3rd world manufacturers to make for use in the 3rd world only, and for manufacturers in other first-world countries that make similar per-capita investments and reciprocate. This means that pills would be cheap - no patent protection at least within the US. It also means no race to the bottom - first world countries would be expected to reciprocate or pay the US for the work it did.
This would essentially create two parallel competitive drug industries. One would create expensive patented drugs that are self-funding. The other would create free drugs and recoup the expense from taxes. We could collect data on how much gets spent by insurers and taxpayers on both, and use that to decide how much to fund the government R&D. If the government model turns out to be more effective the private industry will go out of business, as it could not compete against cheap drugs that are tax subsidized. If the government model fails, then we will just be where we are today.
A government operation would have no concerns with patentability - they'd just pursue any options that are likely to benefit patients, like natural products.
I think that an approach like this lets you make the transition gradually, pilot it at a small scale, and you don't kill the established industry overnight. If the government model is competitive they could slowly draw off the scientists/etc working for private companies, and we don't have a dramatic loss of knowledge. If the libertarians are right and the government just wastes money, then we can kill it and we're no worse off than we are today.
Most likely the competition will foster innovation in both models.
R&D is an expense. If the company buys a new Learjet it is tax-deductible, simply because it is an expense. Companies are taxed on profits.
I'm not sure how this really matters though. So, maybe R&D is tax-deductible, and maybe it isn't. I don't think a company cares that much whether it can save $100M in taxes before spending $1B in R&D. They care far more if they can charge $5/pill so that they can recoup the expenditure.
It isn't like making something tax deductible will magically make it economically feasible. If a company donated all of its money to a 501c3 organization it would be completely tax-deductible, and any company that did that would immediately go bankrupt just the same. Companies spend money to make money. Taxes might steer spending a little if a company is faced with similar options (do I build my plant in North Carolina or South Carolina?). They aren't going to cause a company to do something that has no hope of a return...
Well, taxpayers are paying the money, just in the form of drug prices.
Both models have their advantages. I'd like to see some Government drug R&D (end-to-end, royalty-free) if for no reason other than seeing for sure if it works. If you spend a few billion dollars on R&D in a fairly open manner something good is likely to come of it at least in terms of spin-offs, and when you compare that to stuff like bombing Arabs it seems like a decent investment.
If it doesn't work out then we can stop arguing about getting rid of the Pharma industry. If it does work out, we won't have to get rid of the Pharma industry as it will be obsolete on its own (if the NIH is coming out with 10 cent pills left and right there won't be a market for $5 ones). Most likely we'll find that each model has advantages and disadvantages, and more drugs will be cheap but some will still be expensive. Along the way both the private and public R&D models are likely to improve from the competition. Consumers win.
What I don't like is the whole "let's just get rid of patents" business. That might be the de facto end result of a government takeover of R&D, but let's start by building the new R&D model before we just sledgehammer the old one. Considering we can't even afford to send a few guys to space any longer it seems like Congress is going to take a while to approve some $100B/yr expansion of federal drug research. Let's start small with some experiments and see how it goes.
Most of the actual research whose fruits end up as drugs are often made by researchers with federal funding. The actual amount of money put into research is much lower than what Pharma wants us to believe, and often R&D involves a significant amount of activities unconnected with Research.
It depends on how you define "research." What's the cost of an idea? Anybody can say the idea was easy to come up with after the fact.
However, most of the costs of drug R&D isn't on the R - it is on the D. An academic lab might have only spent half a million dollars coming up with a drug candidate, but it will take another $10M to prove that it doesn't work. Repeat that a few hundred times and you'll come up with a drug that does work. 95% of the money doesn't get spent discovering drugs - it gets spent figuring out which molecules really are the drugs.
From a researcher's perspective this is boring work, but it is still necessary.
As far as Pharma spending gobs of money on other stuff goes, couldn't agree more and would love to see that reined in. However, it doesn't change the fact that drug discovery is still expensive. I'd love to see the NIH take it over, but look at how much NASA struggles to pay its bills and they're tiny compared to the total R&D spend of the US Pharma industry.
Do you honestly think that is true? That researchers won't do any research suddenly? that all that money collected to help pay for research won't actually be collected any more?
Certainly the researchers paid by Pharma companies (to the tune of tens of billions a year in the US) won't be doing research any longer. Those who work for the NIH would be completely unaffected by a change to the patent system.
There is a lot of ignorance about how the costs break down for drug development. Here is how it works:
1. Government and academic R&D spends a few million to come up with a cure for cancer in mice. Discovery makes front page of NYT.
2. Pharma company pays government or academic lab $100k to license the molecule. Activists point out that this amounts to corporate welfare.
3. Pharma company goes on to spend $10M to show that the molecule will never work in people. Drug dies with no publicity.
That's basically the drug development model - the drugs that actually get marketed are an aberration. Most companies do heavy investment in testing dozens of drug candidates per year (the ones that make it fairly far), and they only release maybe a few per decade. Far more drugs get rejected early in testing before anybody even hears about them.
However, once in a while you get to step 4:
4. Pharma company spends about $100M on the molecule and it works out. Activists point out that the company is making billions per year on a drug that only cost $100M.
You can only spend $100M to get a successful drug if you know in advance which drug will be successful. That only applies if you're copying the work done by some other company (though you don't need all that testing in the first place on a true copy). The reality is that it costs billions to come up with a new drug, because you have to test a lot of stuff that doesn't work.
Drug discovery is a bit like ice hockey, but make the goals about half their current size. Lots of passing and skating, little scoring.
They seem to understand "My right to live trumps your supposed 'right' to make money" pretty damned well, though.
That's kill the goose that laid the golden gate logic. The new drug wouldn't have been tested if the company had known it couldn't be patented in advance. They would only have had the option of using the old drug - an option they would still have had if they had ruled differently (the patent for new drug A2 does not extend the patent on related drug A1).
I do agree that the way we fund drug development is highly regressive. I'm all for public R&D going to license-free drugs. However, don't think that it will somehow magically make the drugs cheaper - it will only change who pays for them.
It means R&D will be spend on NEW medicine. Much less will be spent on slightly improving existing medicine. You do know the R&D stands for research and design. They would have to do some NEW research.
Financially it makes much more sense to take your existing product, make it slightly stronger or last slightly longer and file for a new patent and basically double your patent length.
Yes and no. The patent on the original drug STILL runs out. So, anybody can make the drug that they could have made even if the new drug weren't developed. The only thing that gets patent protection is the tweaked molecule - there is no extension for the original one.
I think the only thing that should matter to patients is whether the new drug is worth it. If it isn't, then don't buy it - just buy the old drug, which would be unpatented and cheap. If it is worth it, then do buy it. If you allow tweaked molecules to be patented then patients get that choice. If you don't allow those patents, then the tweaked molecule will never be developed in the first place, and patients will have no choice but to take the old drug.
That's why I don't have a problem with the whole "me too" drug thing even though it seems like everybody hates it. If the "me too" drug wasn't useful nobody would be taking it - the original drug still has its patent expire when it would otherwise expire. I've known people with drug sensitivity issues and having more options available lets them and their doctors find the option that works best for them. Drugs are approved based on the results of the "average patient" but the fact is that no patient is actually an "average patient."
If you ask me "how much does it cost to find out if this molecule is a good drug?" the answer would probably be around $1M - $100M. Most of the time relatively-inexpensive screening would figure out that it won't work. Other times it would require trials that would be aborted at various points in time, costing up to $100M.
If you ask me "how much was spent just on testing that one drug that was approved last week?" the answer would probably be around $100M. Successful drugs consume the upper limit of the testing costs since they need to go through the full gamut of testing to be approved.
If you ask me "what is the total R&D budget of a typical pharma company over 5 years divided by the number of approved drugs they've had in that period of time?" the answer would be in the billions. The reason for this is that most drugs turn out not to work, so before you can spend the $100M on the drug that works you first have to spend $100M on lots of molecules that don't work.
It really isn't hard to see for yourself. Most drug companies publicize their annual R&D investments (which don't go to stuff like marketing). They certainly publicize drug approvals. Just pick a company and do the math, but makes sure you count actual new drugs, and not just new indications (which are somewhat cheaper to come up with, and certainly lower risk).
Companies do spend more on marketing than research, but the research costs are still astronomical. There are other models, and I'm all for trying some out, but it would make sense to get a new drug discovery model working before simply dismantling the one we already have.
Correction: the price of testing drugs is mostly due to the bribes that need to be applied for them to be approved and the patents granted.
About the closest thing to a bribe you'll see in first-world drug development is the payments to the doctors who participate in the clinical trials. That is actually a considerable part of the trial costs. The payment can't induce them to manipulate the trial results, since the doctors don't have the ability to do this (the trials are double-blind - if they lied and said the patient was doing better than they actually were it would just affect the placebo group as much). However, if you don't throw money at doctors they won't bother to tell their patients about the option of participating in the trial.
Unfortunately, sometimes the money does cause doctors to enroll patients for whom the trials are inappropriate. Companies actually try to stop this, because it is likely to result in a drug NOT being approved (if you give a pill to somebody who is not expected to benefit from it, you add noise to the data which is already quite noisy).
So, while lots of money in the pharma industry gets spent on lots of stuff, the fact remains that it does cost hundreds of millions of dollars to test drug candidates, and most of the time the testing demonstrates that the drug is not safe/effective.
Oh, I'm all for having the NIH competitively do drug development/testing/etc (and making the resulting drugs freely licensable within the US, for use in 3rd world countries, and in 1st world countries that make similar investments and reciprocate). However, I don't think that it will magically make the testing less expensive, unless the whole healthcare system changes so that doctors can be compelled to participate in trials without much additional compensation (that is something that would be more likely to work in a country with nationalized healthcare, though it is worth pointing out that clinical trials tend to happen on a global scale anyway).
In the drug industry the patent system is in part used to let the high-risk/high-cost of development pay for itself. A tweaked molecule might not be very innovative, but it is just as expensive to test. If rulings like this prevail then you simply won't see tweaked molecules developed using private money, even if the resulting drug is a substantial improvement for patients. Again, there are other ways to fund drug development, but I'd like to see those methods employed and demonstrated as successful before we just pull the plug on the drug industry. There is no reason that publicly funded efforts can't just compete with the private ones - the public drugs would be much cheaper for consumers so they'll have no trouble if the R&D labs manage to come up with the goods. The pharma industry has been laying off so many scientists of late that the NIH shouldn't have trouble hiring some...
Thanks. I was talking to them earlier and they were both horrified to hear about your story and appreciative of your concern.
I've actually been through airport security with them a few times. Each time I get rather nervous about how it would go. We actually went through security only a few months after the stroke and I was concerned that we'd get separated and the inability to communicate would get interpreted as non-cooperativeness. Fortunately the agents we dealt with handled things reasonably well, but I did feel like we were rolling the dice even attempting to go through security.
I wish you luck with your suit. There have been a few times when I've felt like I'd end up involved in some kind of ADA lawsuit but fortunately it hasn't happened. I have the greatest respect for those who are doing what they can to make life easier for others!
Don't get too discouraged by some of the other comments around here. It is amazing how many people feel that they can diagnose a medical condition by reading a news article, or for that matter watching somebody get out of their car in a handicapped parking spot.
Tell that to the coast guard who had to go out and save their asses. Think of the taxpayer money wasted and critical emergency personnel that were needed elsewhere.
Well, I'm also of the mindset that rescue personnel should not be put at risk in general. I never got the philosophy of sending a dozen rescue workers up on a mountain to die while trying to save two climbers.
If the rescue can be carried out with reasonable safety margins, then do so. If not, then wait until it can. The government shouldn't be the free insurance provider for people who do not take reasonable care of themselves.
Yes, I need the...something.. you something er um something with them.
In less severe cases, sufferers will use circumlocutions successfully.
Yup, though "something" having two syllables is probably a bit ambitious, and something actually is the right word to describe, well, "something."
Right after their stroke in this case it was more like:
A: I need the house. B: Huh? A: The house. You know. B: Can you explain that a little more? A: (teeth clenching after the 4th back and fourth) You know this... I NEED the house. It is blue. B: (grasping at straws) You mean the apple on the table over there? A: YES! (clearly perceiving that I must be an idiot to not understand them)
Yup, hence why I said these issues were a deficiency in X11. I was referring to some hypothetical design that nobody has actually implemented where there wasn't just two layers defined as they are today.
That is my frustration with Wayland - they're fixing stuff which from an end-user perspective isn't really broken in X11 (just horribly difficult to maintain), and they're breaking stuff that works in X11, and they're not really improving upon it. They're just tossing out use cases which aren't needed to take over 90% of the desktop market, which is all the deep pockets care about.
To me a Linux which takes over 90% of the desktop market but gives up the 0.001% of the market which is only served by Linux is a failure. To others it is a success. Hence all the flame wars.
In this case, yes - a stroke. That is probably the most common cause of this problem. I'm sure there are others.
Being so close to somebody with a disorder like this (and a few other ones that are less prominent) has really helped me to appreciate just how complex the brain is, and really made me rethink just what it means to be intelligent/etc. I used to think of the brain as a black box - just a big lump of gray matter that had inputs and outputs. The reality is that various regions of the brain are remarkably specialized, and intelligence is really the sum total of hundreds or thousands of distinct mental abilities working in concert.
The difference between somebody who is completely nonfunctional and a genius isn't a line - it is an n-dimensional space within which every person is a point (at any moment in time).
Knowing anybody who has to deal with these kinds of problems really gives you an appreciation of just how fortunate we are to be able to banter about on slashdot...
Not so sure about the cloud cover issue though. Are you mixing up laser flares?
To be honest I couldn't find a great deal of documentation about modern locator beacon performance under heavy clouds online. I did find one article that suggested that they're designed to work through heavy clouds.
Anybody who has used satellite TV can testify that in general high-frequency communications through clouds to satellites is iffy. 400MHz is moderately high in frequency, but not nearly as high as what is used for TV and such. Many of the satellites used for location are also in low orbit which is also not the case with TV.
I'm sure somebody had to have given thought to the problem of ensuring a satellite could pick up the locator transmission if it was triggered during a storm.
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Unfortunately I can't argue too much with this. However, I'm not sure what the alternative is. If you simply kill the drug industry that won't be any better either. A few drugs will become cheap now instead of 10 years from now, and then all the drugs will be cheap but there won't be any new drugs.
Personally I'm all for just having the government do the whole thing, but I think we need to establish that before we just go and kill the drug industry.
Haven't you been paying attention. Making expenses deductible is a subside.
In the US all expenses by a business are "deductible" already. Corporate taxes are on earnings, which is revenue minus expenses. Anything that costs money reduces your taxes.
And the subsidy is a minor one. If I spend $1B on R&D I might save $100M in taxes. That might cause you to spend a bit more on R&D, but you aren't going to spend $1B that you don't think will have a return just so that you can save $100M in taxes.
They already do this, at least with their cars. A big post-9/11 thing was to start siphoning data from sources like municipal cameras, including cameras on cars. A recent Frontline included a ride in a police car - the car had license plate readers attached to it which logged all plates it drove by 24x7. It would also tell the cop if a plate associated with some problem was spotted (warrants, expired, etc). During the video segment driving down a row of parking spots there must have been a dozen lapsed registrations spotted.
There was another Frontline showing modern aerial drone technology. One featured a video database of an entire town for a month (all captured by a drone - enough pixels to just capture the whole town at once at a very usable resolution at any point at any time - not a pan/zoom thing). It might have been Frederick - it was one of the small cities around DC.
So, the government is going to have all this stuff no matter what. The only question is whether anybody else gets to have it.
As much as I'd like to see this stuff not abused, what needs to change is our culture. It is impossible to put the genie back in the bottle.
Imagine a crowdsourced solution like this:
1. I hook up some cameras to my house exterior and car. They log video with timestamps and GPS coordinates.
2. I write some FOSS that processes the video. It generates an xml index of the video of:
a. Filename
b. Timestamp
c. Text (logos, license plates, signs, whatever) present at that timestamp that wasn't present in the previous 30 seconds of video.
d. Faces (identified by GUID) present at that timestamp that weren't present in the previous 30 seconds of video. Face GUIDs would use some standard algorithm so that the same face would generate the same GUID on any video processed.
3. If any new GUIDs show up extract the best photo of the face from the video stream and store that in a file named by GUID.
4. Upload all of the above to a webserver, with RSS feeds for video, index, and face files.
Then somebody sets up a service that subscribes to the feeds, stores the index data in a database, and generates URLs to the distributed video files. Perhaps allow people to supply personal data for the facial GUIDs and license plates, and mine the data for common license-plate to face associations.
All any of this stuff requires is that people just set up cameras on their own property and share the data with the world. None of this requires any technology that isn't a commodity today. The central service does not need any extraordinary storage or processing requirements. This could all be built tomorrow.
If many people supplied data to such a service you'd essentially end up with a FOSS big brother data feed on just about every activity on the planet, free to browse by anybody. It would be impossible to stop, unless you banned the sharing of videos online.
Some of the behaviour in this crowd may be illegal (concert goers smoking marijuana for example) or at least frowned up by the authorities (dissidents gathering to protest).
Is it too much to hope that the end result of this kind of technology is that laws might actually become sane?
When we get to the point where you can go to some website, punch in the name of anybody, and then download their entire life recorded at 7-24 camera angles at any time, maybe people will find better things to do than be nosy.
Right now if you're the unlucky job applicant who has a compromising photo out on Facebook somewhere you just never get any offers. If in the future EVERYBODY has compromising photos online, then employers will just have to learn to ignore it.
Right now if you're the unlucky guy with photographic evidence of speeding you get a ticket. In the future, you'll have a GPS trace of every person in the country, establishing that every person is documented as speeding every day, and maybe we'll develop sane speed limits.
Right now the government already has a database of everything you do thanks to the growing network of cameras coupled with facial recognition. In the future EVERYBODY will have such a database, so Congressmen who don't want people to make a big deal of their taking bribes will need to go easy on their abuse of that data on ordinary people.
Today everybody pretends not to be a schmuck. In the future EVERYBODY will know that EVERYBODY is a schmuck, but maybe we'll just let everybody pretend not to be anyway...
I see technology like this as a big equalizer - not unlike the invention of the gun. Once upon a time only the knights could afford armor and mounts. Then merchants could afford guns and were no longer beholden to pay tribute to every warlord along their trade route.
Actually, maintaining customer preferences is all-around a good idea. If you tend to order one of a few items done a certain way, why not make it easy and just let you pick it off of a touch screen or whatever? They don't have to get your order right, you don't have to spell it out, and you can basically walk up, swipe your card, tap two buttons, and it is ordered/paid. Assuming people read the order, the error rare would be much lower as well.
The other post hit most of the points, but regarding software compatibility.
As long as the game is static-compiled as one big binary then for the most part you can just download, chmod, and run it. It won't be able to modify /bin/bash, but it sure can read your firefox password store and upload it to who-knows-where. It will also eat gobs of RAM, and if glibc was statically linked then it will be sensitive to any system call changes.
As soon as the game is dynamically linked, then it starts becoming distro-specific. To run a dynamically linked program you need appropriate versions of all the libraries it references installed.
Windows games tend to be linked against DLLs that they bundle, except for some commonly-used ones which are often system-wide. That tends to waste some RAM, and it tends to mean that you're at the mercy of the publisher to fix security issues.
In the Linux world it is preferred to get software from the distro, which results in less RAM use as everything is built against the same set of libraries (which means they're resident in RAM once only), and the next time zlib has a security problem you just fix that one library file and every application which uses it is fixed.
This elitist attitude is damaging to Linux.
Define "damaging."
If it means it will prevent mass adoption, sure. If it means that Linux will die, then no - that attitude has been around for decades and it hasn't died yet.
If anything, people who know what a kernel is aren't "real" users in that they don't represent the vast overwhelming majority of computer users.
They represent me though, which is all I really care about. I don't contribute to FOSS so that somebody's grandma can use it. I mean, sure, I'm happy if they can and all, but that isn't really the reason I do it. I contribute to FOSS because I find it useful and would like to make it more useful. That generally means that I'm helping to make it more useful for others like me.
Now, the reason Canonical contributes to Linux is that they want to obtain a commercial return. They're not going to get that return by catering to users who are already catered to by Linux. Their target is the grandma most of the established Linux crowd doesn't care about. Their efforts to make Ubuntu more widely accepted are likely to lose their existing user base. From their standpoint it doesn't matter - if they lose a few thousand users to gain millions it is a good commercial trade. However, this is why they get so many complaints on forums like this one.
So, do I want to see Linux succeed? Well, that's a trick question, because as far as I'm concerned it already has.
Oh, and we're using Linux in the context of the traditional Linux distro. If you're talking about Linux the kernel, well, it already is adopted. Chances are it is running on your DVR, car entertainment system, phone, etc already.
Personally I agree.
However, I'd like to see the NIH funded to do the work and see that process demonstrated as cost-effective/etc before we just kill patents.
If you kill drug patents then companies will axe their R&D almost overnight. They'll milk their existing product line, maybe diversify into generics or other industries, but you'll quickly find any expert who knows anything about how to drug development dedicated to other tasks or finding new work. That is a LOT of lost knowledge, and a decade from that decision there will be a lot of people not being treated for things that could otherwise be treatable. Sure, we'll save money on pills, but you can save even more money if you just let people die in the streets - saving money isn't the main purpose of a healthcare system.
I'd rather see the government operate competitively, and let it make industry gradually obsolete if it becomes successful. That keeps scientists working on drugs, and allows a gradual transition. If the libertarians are right and the government can't do anything right, then that will become evident and the superior private industry won't be impacted at all.
But, I agree, I think that this sort of thing is potentially well-suited to government R&D.
The one exception would be around high-value products (to the consumer) that are politically vulnerable. Think of Viagra. Could you have seen that getting lots of federal dollars? The advantage of private industry is that it lets the consumer pay for the product if they want to buy it. And, there is no reason that this wouldn't continue in certain niches - we could still keep the patent regime, and competition would naturally limit it to areas that for whatever reason the government underserves. Instead of arguing over whether the world needs Viagra we can let those who want it pay for it, and taxpayers don't have to.
Absolutely.
My personal solution is this:
1. Don't touch the current drug industry. Just let it run the way it runs under the current patent structure. This means that until something better is in place we'll still have drug R&D.
2. Create a division of the NIH or whatever to fund drug discovery (it could be in cooperation with other first world nations). It would do complete end-to-end R&D from idea to pill, including clinical trials/etc. Its main priority will be return in terms of health outcomes for the population. Any drugs it gets approved would be licensed for free to any US manufacturer that does the work domestically, for 3rd world manufacturers to make for use in the 3rd world only, and for manufacturers in other first-world countries that make similar per-capita investments and reciprocate. This means that pills would be cheap - no patent protection at least within the US. It also means no race to the bottom - first world countries would be expected to reciprocate or pay the US for the work it did.
This would essentially create two parallel competitive drug industries. One would create expensive patented drugs that are self-funding. The other would create free drugs and recoup the expense from taxes. We could collect data on how much gets spent by insurers and taxpayers on both, and use that to decide how much to fund the government R&D. If the government model turns out to be more effective the private industry will go out of business, as it could not compete against cheap drugs that are tax subsidized. If the government model fails, then we will just be where we are today.
A government operation would have no concerns with patentability - they'd just pursue any options that are likely to benefit patients, like natural products.
I think that an approach like this lets you make the transition gradually, pilot it at a small scale, and you don't kill the established industry overnight. If the government model is competitive they could slowly draw off the scientists/etc working for private companies, and we don't have a dramatic loss of knowledge. If the libertarians are right and the government just wastes money, then we can kill it and we're no worse off than we are today.
Most likely the competition will foster innovation in both models.
R&D is an expense. If the company buys a new Learjet it is tax-deductible, simply because it is an expense. Companies are taxed on profits.
I'm not sure how this really matters though. So, maybe R&D is tax-deductible, and maybe it isn't. I don't think a company cares that much whether it can save $100M in taxes before spending $1B in R&D. They care far more if they can charge $5/pill so that they can recoup the expenditure.
It isn't like making something tax deductible will magically make it economically feasible. If a company donated all of its money to a 501c3 organization it would be completely tax-deductible, and any company that did that would immediately go bankrupt just the same. Companies spend money to make money. Taxes might steer spending a little if a company is faced with similar options (do I build my plant in North Carolina or South Carolina?). They aren't going to cause a company to do something that has no hope of a return...
Well, taxpayers are paying the money, just in the form of drug prices.
Both models have their advantages. I'd like to see some Government drug R&D (end-to-end, royalty-free) if for no reason other than seeing for sure if it works. If you spend a few billion dollars on R&D in a fairly open manner something good is likely to come of it at least in terms of spin-offs, and when you compare that to stuff like bombing Arabs it seems like a decent investment.
If it doesn't work out then we can stop arguing about getting rid of the Pharma industry. If it does work out, we won't have to get rid of the Pharma industry as it will be obsolete on its own (if the NIH is coming out with 10 cent pills left and right there won't be a market for $5 ones). Most likely we'll find that each model has advantages and disadvantages, and more drugs will be cheap but some will still be expensive. Along the way both the private and public R&D models are likely to improve from the competition. Consumers win.
What I don't like is the whole "let's just get rid of patents" business. That might be the de facto end result of a government takeover of R&D, but let's start by building the new R&D model before we just sledgehammer the old one. Considering we can't even afford to send a few guys to space any longer it seems like Congress is going to take a while to approve some $100B/yr expansion of federal drug research. Let's start small with some experiments and see how it goes.
Most of the actual research whose fruits end up as drugs are often made by researchers with federal funding. The actual amount of money put into research is much lower than what Pharma wants us to believe, and often R&D involves a significant amount of activities unconnected with Research.
It depends on how you define "research." What's the cost of an idea? Anybody can say the idea was easy to come up with after the fact.
However, most of the costs of drug R&D isn't on the R - it is on the D. An academic lab might have only spent half a million dollars coming up with a drug candidate, but it will take another $10M to prove that it doesn't work. Repeat that a few hundred times and you'll come up with a drug that does work. 95% of the money doesn't get spent discovering drugs - it gets spent figuring out which molecules really are the drugs.
From a researcher's perspective this is boring work, but it is still necessary.
As far as Pharma spending gobs of money on other stuff goes, couldn't agree more and would love to see that reined in. However, it doesn't change the fact that drug discovery is still expensive. I'd love to see the NIH take it over, but look at how much NASA struggles to pay its bills and they're tiny compared to the total R&D spend of the US Pharma industry.
Do you honestly think that is true? That researchers won't do any research suddenly? that all that money collected to help pay for research won't actually be collected any more?
Certainly the researchers paid by Pharma companies (to the tune of tens of billions a year in the US) won't be doing research any longer. Those who work for the NIH would be completely unaffected by a change to the patent system.
There is a lot of ignorance about how the costs break down for drug development. Here is how it works:
1. Government and academic R&D spends a few million to come up with a cure for cancer in mice. Discovery makes front page of NYT.
2. Pharma company pays government or academic lab $100k to license the molecule. Activists point out that this amounts to corporate welfare.
3. Pharma company goes on to spend $10M to show that the molecule will never work in people. Drug dies with no publicity.
That's basically the drug development model - the drugs that actually get marketed are an aberration. Most companies do heavy investment in testing dozens of drug candidates per year (the ones that make it fairly far), and they only release maybe a few per decade. Far more drugs get rejected early in testing before anybody even hears about them.
However, once in a while you get to step 4:
4. Pharma company spends about $100M on the molecule and it works out. Activists point out that the company is making billions per year on a drug that only cost $100M.
You can only spend $100M to get a successful drug if you know in advance which drug will be successful. That only applies if you're copying the work done by some other company (though you don't need all that testing in the first place on a true copy). The reality is that it costs billions to come up with a new drug, because you have to test a lot of stuff that doesn't work.
Drug discovery is a bit like ice hockey, but make the goals about half their current size. Lots of passing and skating, little scoring.
They seem to understand "My right to live trumps your supposed 'right' to make money" pretty damned well, though.
That's kill the goose that laid the golden gate logic. The new drug wouldn't have been tested if the company had known it couldn't be patented in advance. They would only have had the option of using the old drug - an option they would still have had if they had ruled differently (the patent for new drug A2 does not extend the patent on related drug A1).
I do agree that the way we fund drug development is highly regressive. I'm all for public R&D going to license-free drugs. However, don't think that it will somehow magically make the drugs cheaper - it will only change who pays for them.
It means R&D will be spend on NEW medicine. Much less will be spent on slightly improving existing medicine. You do know the R&D stands for research and design. They would have to do some NEW research.
Financially it makes much more sense to take your existing product, make it slightly stronger or last slightly longer and file for a new patent and basically double your patent length.
Yes and no. The patent on the original drug STILL runs out. So, anybody can make the drug that they could have made even if the new drug weren't developed. The only thing that gets patent protection is the tweaked molecule - there is no extension for the original one.
I think the only thing that should matter to patients is whether the new drug is worth it. If it isn't, then don't buy it - just buy the old drug, which would be unpatented and cheap. If it is worth it, then do buy it. If you allow tweaked molecules to be patented then patients get that choice. If you don't allow those patents, then the tweaked molecule will never be developed in the first place, and patients will have no choice but to take the old drug.
That's why I don't have a problem with the whole "me too" drug thing even though it seems like everybody hates it. If the "me too" drug wasn't useful nobody would be taking it - the original drug still has its patent expire when it would otherwise expire. I've known people with drug sensitivity issues and having more options available lets them and their doctors find the option that works best for them. Drugs are approved based on the results of the "average patient" but the fact is that no patient is actually an "average patient."
It depends on how you count failures.
If you ask me "how much does it cost to find out if this molecule is a good drug?" the answer would probably be around $1M - $100M. Most of the time relatively-inexpensive screening would figure out that it won't work. Other times it would require trials that would be aborted at various points in time, costing up to $100M.
If you ask me "how much was spent just on testing that one drug that was approved last week?" the answer would probably be around $100M. Successful drugs consume the upper limit of the testing costs since they need to go through the full gamut of testing to be approved.
If you ask me "what is the total R&D budget of a typical pharma company over 5 years divided by the number of approved drugs they've had in that period of time?" the answer would be in the billions. The reason for this is that most drugs turn out not to work, so before you can spend the $100M on the drug that works you first have to spend $100M on lots of molecules that don't work.
It really isn't hard to see for yourself. Most drug companies publicize their annual R&D investments (which don't go to stuff like marketing). They certainly publicize drug approvals. Just pick a company and do the math, but makes sure you count actual new drugs, and not just new indications (which are somewhat cheaper to come up with, and certainly lower risk).
Companies do spend more on marketing than research, but the research costs are still astronomical. There are other models, and I'm all for trying some out, but it would make sense to get a new drug discovery model working before simply dismantling the one we already have.
Correction: the price of testing drugs is mostly due to the bribes that need to be applied for them to be approved and the patents granted.
About the closest thing to a bribe you'll see in first-world drug development is the payments to the doctors who participate in the clinical trials. That is actually a considerable part of the trial costs. The payment can't induce them to manipulate the trial results, since the doctors don't have the ability to do this (the trials are double-blind - if they lied and said the patient was doing better than they actually were it would just affect the placebo group as much). However, if you don't throw money at doctors they won't bother to tell their patients about the option of participating in the trial.
Unfortunately, sometimes the money does cause doctors to enroll patients for whom the trials are inappropriate. Companies actually try to stop this, because it is likely to result in a drug NOT being approved (if you give a pill to somebody who is not expected to benefit from it, you add noise to the data which is already quite noisy).
So, while lots of money in the pharma industry gets spent on lots of stuff, the fact remains that it does cost hundreds of millions of dollars to test drug candidates, and most of the time the testing demonstrates that the drug is not safe/effective.
Oh, I'm all for having the NIH competitively do drug development/testing/etc (and making the resulting drugs freely licensable within the US, for use in 3rd world countries, and in 1st world countries that make similar investments and reciprocate). However, I don't think that it will magically make the testing less expensive, unless the whole healthcare system changes so that doctors can be compelled to participate in trials without much additional compensation (that is something that would be more likely to work in a country with nationalized healthcare, though it is worth pointing out that clinical trials tend to happen on a global scale anyway).
In the drug industry the patent system is in part used to let the high-risk/high-cost of development pay for itself. A tweaked molecule might not be very innovative, but it is just as expensive to test. If rulings like this prevail then you simply won't see tweaked molecules developed using private money, even if the resulting drug is a substantial improvement for patients. Again, there are other ways to fund drug development, but I'd like to see those methods employed and demonstrated as successful before we just pull the plug on the drug industry. There is no reason that publicly funded efforts can't just compete with the private ones - the public drugs would be much cheaper for consumers so they'll have no trouble if the R&D labs manage to come up with the goods. The pharma industry has been laying off so many scientists of late that the NIH shouldn't have trouble hiring some...
Thanks. I was talking to them earlier and they were both horrified to hear about your story and appreciative of your concern.
I've actually been through airport security with them a few times. Each time I get rather nervous about how it would go. We actually went through security only a few months after the stroke and I was concerned that we'd get separated and the inability to communicate would get interpreted as non-cooperativeness. Fortunately the agents we dealt with handled things reasonably well, but I did feel like we were rolling the dice even attempting to go through security.
I wish you luck with your suit. There have been a few times when I've felt like I'd end up involved in some kind of ADA lawsuit but fortunately it hasn't happened. I have the greatest respect for those who are doing what they can to make life easier for others!
Don't get too discouraged by some of the other comments around here. It is amazing how many people feel that they can diagnose a medical condition by reading a news article, or for that matter watching somebody get out of their car in a handicapped parking spot.
Tell that to the coast guard who had to go out and save their asses. Think of the taxpayer money wasted and critical emergency personnel that were needed elsewhere.
Well, I'm also of the mindset that rescue personnel should not be put at risk in general. I never got the philosophy of sending a dozen rescue workers up on a mountain to die while trying to save two climbers.
If the rescue can be carried out with reasonable safety margins, then do so. If not, then wait until it can. The government shouldn't be the free insurance provider for people who do not take reasonable care of themselves.
Yes, I need the ...something.. you something er um something with them.
In less severe cases, sufferers will use circumlocutions successfully.
Yup, though "something" having two syllables is probably a bit ambitious, and something actually is the right word to describe, well, "something."
Right after their stroke in this case it was more like:
A: I need the house.
B: Huh?
A: The house. You know.
B: Can you explain that a little more?
A: (teeth clenching after the 4th back and fourth) You know this... I NEED the house. It is blue.
B: (grasping at straws) You mean the apple on the table over there?
A: YES! (clearly perceiving that I must be an idiot to not understand them)
You can't do that under X11.
Yup, hence why I said these issues were a deficiency in X11. I was referring to some hypothetical design that nobody has actually implemented where there wasn't just two layers defined as they are today.
That is my frustration with Wayland - they're fixing stuff which from an end-user perspective isn't really broken in X11 (just horribly difficult to maintain), and they're breaking stuff that works in X11, and they're not really improving upon it. They're just tossing out use cases which aren't needed to take over 90% of the desktop market, which is all the deep pockets care about.
To me a Linux which takes over 90% of the desktop market but gives up the 0.001% of the market which is only served by Linux is a failure. To others it is a success. Hence all the flame wars.
Is it from a stroke/embolism?
In this case, yes - a stroke. That is probably the most common cause of this problem. I'm sure there are others.
Being so close to somebody with a disorder like this (and a few other ones that are less prominent) has really helped me to appreciate just how complex the brain is, and really made me rethink just what it means to be intelligent/etc. I used to think of the brain as a black box - just a big lump of gray matter that had inputs and outputs. The reality is that various regions of the brain are remarkably specialized, and intelligence is really the sum total of hundreds or thousands of distinct mental abilities working in concert.
The difference between somebody who is completely nonfunctional and a genius isn't a line - it is an n-dimensional space within which every person is a point (at any moment in time).
Knowing anybody who has to deal with these kinds of problems really gives you an appreciation of just how fortunate we are to be able to banter about on slashdot...
Not so sure about the cloud cover issue though. Are you mixing up laser flares?
To be honest I couldn't find a great deal of documentation about modern locator beacon performance under heavy clouds online. I did find one article that suggested that they're designed to work through heavy clouds.
Anybody who has used satellite TV can testify that in general high-frequency communications through clouds to satellites is iffy. 400MHz is moderately high in frequency, but not nearly as high as what is used for TV and such. Many of the satellites used for location are also in low orbit which is also not the case with TV.
I'm sure somebody had to have given thought to the problem of ensuring a satellite could pick up the locator transmission if it was triggered during a storm.