Indeed, I believe that many conservative christian scholars accept the end of Mark as not being canonical.
For those who ask, "Why would Mark leave that bit out?" - the Bible is literature as well as history/theology. Why did Lucas end the Empire Strikes Back on the note it ends on? It wasn't intended to merely be a historical recording of everything that happened during the life of Christ. If you look at how the disciples are portrayed in Mark vs the other gospels you get a very different picture - and dropping the post-resurrection part of the story plays into this (since that is when they finally "got it").
The Biblical authors wrote what they wrote for a reason - they had agendas. So, it is a bit of a mistake to interpret everything as if it were a courtroom transcript. Elements of stories that are left out from one account to another don't necessarily reflect error so much as literary design.
But hey - it is so much easier to regurgitate whatever you read in some blog or slashdot post about how Biblical scholars (not all of them believers) don't know what they're doing...:)
Right, but what does any of that have to do with energy privitazation? The issues you bring up could happen with any company in any industry. I'm all for serious jail time for corporate officers to defraud investors/employees/etc.
If your point is that unrestrained companies can do bad things - I agree completely. That's just human nature (and it applies no less to those in government posts). The important thing is to have a system of checks and balances to restrain abuses of power.
On the other hand, interstellar space isn't totally empty, it contains the occasional microwave background photon. If you're moving fast enough, you experience them as the not-so-occasional hard-gamma-ray background photon. Plan on LOTS of shielding.
But the consumers weren't hurt when Enron blew itself up. Sure, the investors lost their shirts, but nobody forces you to buy stock (unlike taxes).
Unless you're referring to the days of Grey-outs. That wasn't really Enron per-se - that was a classic case of private companies taking advantage of dumb government loopholes. You don't think that if the government runs the entire show that they won't be giving out favors?
At least with private industry you have a government to perform oversight. When the government runs the show, there is no independant oversight.
True, but we're not looking for planets in distant galaxies - we're looking for it in our backyard. There isn't an astronomical number of stars in a 1000LY radius.
Yeah. At one point I was wondering if the movie would actually ever end. I was half-eager for the people on the boat to hit the trigger just so I could go to the bathroom sooner...
First, it was completely contrived and forced. I could not believe the Joker could have set that up even after suspending all reason.
Hey - if they guy can plant 487 bombs in a hospital and rig the whole building up for an implosion without being noticed, maybe the boats aren't such a big deal.
For me the real question is how this guy gets anybody to follow him at all. He kills his henchmen left and right, and they're obviously not in it for the money since the Joker doesn't really aim to make any (and really, there have to be easier and safer ways to make money). Certainly the city doesn't have that many psychopaths bent on chaos.
Regardless, it was an enjoyable movie, and I was willing to suspect disbelief just for the fact that the movie actually bothered to question human nature. What did bother me was that nobody pushed the button on either boat. That just isn't human nature, as you've pointed out.
I thought the best scene was the showdown between batman on cycle and Joker carrying a machine gun. It just highlighted the stupidity of the concept that a law enforcement officer shouldn't just shoot a guy who is in the active process of gunning down civilians.
With the gun in his hands the Joker was an immediate threat to the life of the civilians in the area. The fact that Batman couldn't just bring himself to shoot the guy is a perversion of justice - not an example of it.
To kill a prisoner who has been captured would be wrong. To not shoot a criminal who is in the act of killing and threatening others (including yourself) is also wrong. Batman doesn't seem to have an issue with planting bombs on windows that could kill anybody at random, or firing missiles on a street surrounded by buildings. He just seems to avoid firing when it is likely that he'll actually kill the one person causing all the meyham.
You extrapolated beyond what I said. Yes, I did say you can afford 1.1 * $n. I did not, however, say you could apply that indefinitely.
Nope, but mathematicians for hundreds of years have.
Given:
1. Customer can afford $n. 2. If customer can afford $n then he can afford $n+1.
Then customer can afford anything. The same principle would apply with multiplication - it just takes less time to get to infinity (whatever that means).:)
It has to extend indefinitely - or not at all. You say that if somebody can afford $10 he can afford $11, but that if he can afford $11 he can't necessarily afford $12.10. So, if he can afford $80, can he or can't he afford $88, or does that depend on whether you happened to run the calculation on $80/1.1?
It is a clever idea, and it would take a moderate amount of sophistication to allow it to not cause problems with being attached in parallel with the mains. Also, designing it to be at least moderately safe to operate would take some effort.
I'm not sure that the patent would hold up under a challenge. However, these would be used primarily by corporations of some sort (government, private investigators, etc) and they're not going to want to have their employees handling jury-rigged contraptions with 600W passing through them. They're going to look for something reputable. Plus, if the hard drive contains critical intelligence on a terrorist cell you're going to want to use tools that are reliable. Saving $100 on your interim power supply doesn't sound too good when it causes you to lose all the intel you could have gathered from an operation that involved a whole truck full of commandos and who knows how much background intelligence-gathering.
I always scratch my head over the profileration concerns with breeder reactors.
How much do we spend every year fighting wars to secure the middle east? How much money would we save on oil if we had dependable nuclear power?
Ok, take about 0.0001% of that money, and you could have a whole garrison of crack commandos that have training in nuclear physics stationed at every nuclear power plant in the country. Is it really that hard to secure a reactor? You could also have 8 layers of inspectors accounting for every mg of radioactive materials so that you'd need to bribe so many people to steal it that it would be cheaper to just build your own reactor. All of this would probably be unnecessarily wasteful, but even if you're paranoid enough to pay for it we'd be still saving a bundle compared to the status quo. And far less of those commandos would die securing the power plants than die every year securing Iraq...
Its easy - every time an explorer enters the tunnels they end up dying from an ancient curse. Pretty soon people stop wandering into the tunnels until somebody figures out what is going on.
There are lots of dangerous places in the world. How many billions of dollars are going to be wasted to prevent a few people from hypothetically being killed 10,000 years from now in a hypothetical stone age civilization after some kind of hypothetical calamity that destroys modern technology?
I have better things to worry about, like the thousands/millions of people dying needlessly today. Maybe if energy were a whole lot cheaper we might save a few of them almost by accident due to things like food/medicine being marginally cheaper. I suspect a whole lot more people would be helped in this way than in theorizing about cavemen wandering the earth in 10,000 years...
Uh, I think you have a lot of misconceptions about how the drug industry works. Either that or you have a very limited definition of R&D. Patents are awarded as soon as a molecue has some activity in an in-vitro assay. At that point maybe a few hundred thousand dollars have been spent on R&D for that molecule. After his point most molecules go through a few more hundred thousand dollars of testing only to be abandoned. The few that make it pasts this go on to clinical trials. A successful drug ends up costing about $500M.
Most of the true innovation happens before the patent is awarded. Most of the cost happens after it is awarded. And when it is all done it might never make it to market.
Sure, you can fund the drug industry through donantions, and it would probably produce as many drugs as a typical non-profit does today.
You paint silly stories of companies suing grandmothers. Of course that won't happen. If the US allows compulsory licensing of drugs or lifts import restrictions to that degree the drug industry will just find something else to do besides discovering drugs. Thousands of scientists will be unemployed, and few will pursue these careers. Public health won't suffer a bit compared to what it is today - it might actualy benefit a little. However, it won't improve nearly as much as it could improve with the status quo.
There are lots of ways to reform the health care industry. Destroying it isn't one of them...
Sounds like what they should sell the consumer is:
1. A computer, with some of their own software preinstalled (basically a fancy bootloader/installer). Nothing copyrighted by anybody but themselves.
2. A shrink-wrapped box of OS X.
3. A CD containing the software in #1 for later reinstallations.
When you boot the computer it asks you to insert the OS X install CD. The CD is used to install and on-the-fly patch the OS X operating system onto the computer. Upon the next boot the computer is running OS X.
The vendor hasn't copied a thing that belongs to anybody else - they haven't even opened the box so there is really no way you could argue that they agreed to any license of any kind. However, they have made it very easy for the end-user to install and patch OS X to run on the computer. And it isn't entirely clear that the end user is doing anything that isn't covered by fair use, as what they end up doing is for personal use only and is not further distributed.
Of course, all of this is the result of some really dumb court decisions...
Why do drug companies develop drugs in the first place? Because a population has a demand for a cure or alleviation to an illness. Drug companies can function perfectly as a service industry by selling their expertise to develop new drugs.... They won't pursue any type of cure that cannot be patented
You do realize that these two statements are contradictions. If a company won't pursue a cure that can't be patented, and you effectively eliminate the patents, then they're not going to pursure any cures at all. I do agree that the industry could live on as a subcontractor to government R&D, and actually I think that this might be the best future for the industry. However, that isn't really what we have today, and I'm not convinced that the best way to get from here to there is to just gut the patent system (even if leaving it in place in a shadow of its current form).
Patents only have disadvantages for society as a whole...It doesn't effect in the least the few brilliant scientists who are devoted to solving problems, and patents only get in the way of those people.
I'm not convinced this is the case. Surely the drug industry as it currently exists would not be doing any of the R&D they are doing if it weren't for patents. The scientists doing the work actually do benefit, since the industry profits are what give them their paychecks. No, they don't get a percentage of the action, but they also aren't asked to give back their paychecks if after 15 years of work they don't personally invent a blockbuster. The companies know that if they employ 1000 scientists they'll probably come up with one blockbuster a year. They know that only one of the scientists will come up with that blockbuster, but they can't predict which so they pay them all well and maybe give the guy who discovers the cure for cancer a $20k bonus. If they could get the scientists to work for free and give the guy who discovers the big drug $20M I'm sure they'd be happy to do that - but most scientists would take steady pay over a chance at a fortune. Those who would rather take the risk start their own biotechs, and when those work out the scientists actually do make out well - due to patents.
Just like a salary, a patent is a risk-mitigation tool. A patent is a contract society makes with an inventor - it says that if you spend a billion dollars and come up with a really great idea, that society will pay you enough to make back the billion and a nice profit on top of that. The only other way to get a billion dollars for R&D is to have government fund the work and tax people for it. The big problem with that is while I can give you a million reasons why the government should be able to do a better job than industry, for whatever reason they seem to get it wrong quite a bit of the time. And if you think that government regulators go easy on industry, just look at how well the government polices itself - if a company had the environmental impact of Hanford there would probably be people in jail.
I think the best solution has a number of components:
1. Maintain the status quo with the drug industry. Don't kill the goose that laid the golden egg. But...
2. Start doing true end-to-end drug development in the NIH, with the resulting drugs being in the public domain. These dirt-cheap drugs would compete with the drugs produced by industry, keeping prices lower. However, if government R&D drops the ball we still have the status quo to fall back on.
3. The NIH should look to outsource R&D to drug companies where it makes sense, but the NIH should maintain the patent rights to the drugs (which will then be free to everybody). This could lead to the transition that you allude to if the NIH is successful.
4. Government should help the indigent with the cost of drugs. The biggest problem with healthcare isn't the costs per se, but how they are borne.
5. Without going into more details the whole healthcare system needs a lo
You can't keep most products as trade secrets - almost any product can be reverse-engineered today for a fraction of the original R&D cost. So, this kind of move would probably get rid of patents altogether. I'm not convinced this is the best solution to the current problems.
Well, the solution to that is simple enough. Prevent competitors from making the pill with the new coating, but allow them to make the pill with the old coating, or whatever.
I think that is actually how it works, but some unethical companies use various loopholes to tie up competitors in litigation over what is essentially legal activity, and regulators allow the loopholes to remain.
Not all pharma companies actually stoop to these tactics. Some have gone on the record stating that they will only enforce their patents for the original period, and the six-month extension granted for pediatric studies (which is a true quid pro quo - society gets valuable clinical data in children in return for six months of profits for the drug maker).
I can think of a few flaws with this idea, even though I like some of it:
1. The results with the drug industry would be huge and probably not what is intended. Why have drug patents at all when it costs $500M to fully develop a drug and probably only $1-2M to come up with a new process for making a drug. Drug companies would just sit and wait for somebody else to invent drugs and then find a new way to make them, and there would be no new drugs unless the government did all the work. If you want that then just get rid of the patents so that companies don't waste time just coming up with new ways of manufacturing the same pill.
2. You would STILL have software patents. Early software patents tended to use hardware implementations of an algorithm due to the uncertainty of whether software patents would stick. Somebody would actually invent a machine that would do a quicksort using gears/levers/etc to get a patent on the idea. What a waste of time and it gets us nowhere in terms of reform.
3. Patents are still useful in certain industries and situations. If you're going to make it really easy to get around them you might as well get rid of them, which can actually hamper innovation. Patents have advantages and disadvantages - the goal is to maximize the one and minimize the other. What we don't want to do is toss out the baby with the bath water...
I doubt most US workers are super-concerned when a US company opens a research division in Germany or France. I have some peers in a variety of first-world nations and I never feel like they're used primarily to be exploited for their low wages/etc. I doubt most Europeans feel that kind of concern about the US either (although US workers are exploited to a greater degree than is permissible in most of Europe).
The issue is the body-shop mentality with nations that have drastically lower standards of living, environmental standards, labor standards, etc.
The simple solution is for the US to team up with other first-world nations that share common vulnerability to this tactic (most of Europe comes to mind), and establish a list with tariff rates for various nations. These rates would be added as taxes to the hours worked by any workers hired (directly or indirectly) by a company in one of the listed nations. The tax must be payed once if a company wishes to do business in one of the affiliated nations. The revenue would be split by those nations to some degree (perhaps equally unless the company were headquartered in one of the nations). Revenue collection isn't the primary goal so much as penalizing behavior, but revenue could be used to aid the displaced.
Ok, exactly what setting on a cheap consumer router would cause it to randomly stop working at intervals?:)
I have a cheap linksys router that had similar issues - every few days it would randomly hang. It would drive me nuts since I like to remotely connect to my home network, and I can't exactly reboot the router from outside the house.
In the end I just ended up getting another NIC and running shorewall on a linux box. I only use the linksys box as a wireless access point. Even so, it still needs an occassional reboot every few months (and it literally is ONLY a wireless access point - it isn't even running a dhcp server any longer).
Cheap consumer products often have cheap firmware. Sometimes the companies finally get it right, but they may not port the new code back to ancient sub-models of their devices. The good-old linksys wrt54g probably has about 15 revisions to it so it is quite possible that only some of them have the more serious issues.
For another story of an appliance that should "just work" I have a pair of satellite receivers that every few weeks just starts outputting a black screen (sometimes both go out at once, sometimes only one goes out). It drives me nuts since it runs into my mythtv backend and I get blank recordings. I actually have a cron job set up to check the video output hourly and scan for blank frames (script provided by somebody more clever than me - best use of aalib I've seen), and I'm tempted to set up some X10 gear to reboot the receivers automatically - there is no way to fix hte problem short of pulling the plug for a few seconds.
And don't get me started on consumer DVRs - most work just fine until they stop working right, or they miss a show, or they start running slow, or whatever.:) I easily spent more setting up mythtv on a budget than just buying the DVR supplied by the satellite provider, but when something goes wrong I can actually do something about it now.
But if reporters did that they'd get scooped! It is so much better just to grab a press release, edit it slightly, and hit publish. Boom - you get all the clicks from your sensational story and the advertisers don't really care if it ends up being true as long as they get impressions...
Please vote in a way that will cause the worst candidate to be elected, so that things will become so bad that electoral reform will be passed".... not a very compelling argument, I'm afraid.
Ironically I've been told the same thing by many friends - who all voted for Bush.
Half the country is hell-bent on avoiding the disaster that would occur if McCain were elected. The other half is hell-bent on avoiding the disaster that would occur if Obama were elected. The only thing they can all agree on is that it is somehow even worse to vote for somebody other than the two of them...
If it takes off the 3D store is loaded with 35,000 other avatars looking for the same stuff. The checkout line also has 1000 other avatars standing in it.
The beauty of the website model is that when I got to amazon.com as far as I can tell I'm their only customer, except when I look at reviews. If I run a search I see the product I asked for - not that it is is in aisle 387,321 - row 3.
If I want to collaborate with a coworker a telephone and webex does the trick just fine. We don't need to find an available virtual conference room, spend time walking there, and then spend a ton of time either typing in chat mode or using voice interfaces punctuated with trying to manipulate our avatars to express ourselves.
The 3d adds a lot of glitz and not much functionality. Kind of like a lawn mower with a voice interface - neat for the first day but then you just want to mow your lawn without getting into a coversation about your fuel mixture.
I suspect that whoever makes the copies is required to comply with the license and make source available. That could include pointing to somebody else who provides them free of charge, but if for whatever reason ubuntu.com closed shop I'd think that whoever packages the Best Buy boxes would need to mirror it.
Now, if Best Buy just buys boxes of ubuntu for $5 and sells it for $20 then they're free of any obligation. You don't need a license to sell software - just to copy it.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, I believe that many conservative christian scholars accept the end of Mark as not being canonical.
For those who ask, "Why would Mark leave that bit out?" - the Bible is literature as well as history/theology. Why did Lucas end the Empire Strikes Back on the note it ends on? It wasn't intended to merely be a historical recording of everything that happened during the life of Christ. If you look at how the disciples are portrayed in Mark vs the other gospels you get a very different picture - and dropping the post-resurrection part of the story plays into this (since that is when they finally "got it").
The Biblical authors wrote what they wrote for a reason - they had agendas. So, it is a bit of a mistake to interpret everything as if it were a courtroom transcript. Elements of stories that are left out from one account to another don't necessarily reflect error so much as literary design.
But hey - it is so much easier to regurgitate whatever you read in some blog or slashdot post about how Biblical scholars (not all of them believers) don't know what they're doing... :)
Right, but what does any of that have to do with energy privitazation? The issues you bring up could happen with any company in any industry. I'm all for serious jail time for corporate officers to defraud investors/employees/etc.
If your point is that unrestrained companies can do bad things - I agree completely. That's just human nature (and it applies no less to those in government posts). The important thing is to have a system of checks and balances to restrain abuses of power.
On the other hand, interstellar space isn't totally empty, it contains the occasional microwave background photon. If you're moving fast enough, you experience them as the not-so-occasional hard-gamma-ray background photon. Plan on LOTS of shielding.
But the consumers weren't hurt when Enron blew itself up. Sure, the investors lost their shirts, but nobody forces you to buy stock (unlike taxes).
Unless you're referring to the days of Grey-outs. That wasn't really Enron per-se - that was a classic case of private companies taking advantage of dumb government loopholes. You don't think that if the government runs the entire show that they won't be giving out favors?
At least with private industry you have a government to perform oversight. When the government runs the show, there is no independant oversight.
True, but we're not looking for planets in distant galaxies - we're looking for it in our backyard. There isn't an astronomical number of stars in a 1000LY radius.
Yeah. At one point I was wondering if the movie would actually ever end. I was half-eager for the people on the boat to hit the trigger just so I could go to the bathroom sooner...
First, it was completely contrived and forced. I could not believe the Joker could have set that up even after suspending all reason.
Hey - if they guy can plant 487 bombs in a hospital and rig the whole building up for an implosion without being noticed, maybe the boats aren't such a big deal.
For me the real question is how this guy gets anybody to follow him at all. He kills his henchmen left and right, and they're obviously not in it for the money since the Joker doesn't really aim to make any (and really, there have to be easier and safer ways to make money). Certainly the city doesn't have that many psychopaths bent on chaos.
Regardless, it was an enjoyable movie, and I was willing to suspect disbelief just for the fact that the movie actually bothered to question human nature. What did bother me was that nobody pushed the button on either boat. That just isn't human nature, as you've pointed out.
I thought the best scene was the showdown between batman on cycle and Joker carrying a machine gun. It just highlighted the stupidity of the concept that a law enforcement officer shouldn't just shoot a guy who is in the active process of gunning down civilians.
With the gun in his hands the Joker was an immediate threat to the life of the civilians in the area. The fact that Batman couldn't just bring himself to shoot the guy is a perversion of justice - not an example of it.
To kill a prisoner who has been captured would be wrong. To not shoot a criminal who is in the act of killing and threatening others (including yourself) is also wrong. Batman doesn't seem to have an issue with planting bombs on windows that could kill anybody at random, or firing missiles on a street surrounded by buildings. He just seems to avoid firing when it is likely that he'll actually kill the one person causing all the meyham.
You extrapolated beyond what I said. Yes, I did say you can afford 1.1 * $n. I did not, however, say you could apply that indefinitely.
Nope, but mathematicians for hundreds of years have.
Given:
1. Customer can afford $n.
2. If customer can afford $n then he can afford $n+1.
Then customer can afford anything. The same principle would apply with multiplication - it just takes less time to get to infinity (whatever that means). :)
It has to extend indefinitely - or not at all. You say that if somebody can afford $10 he can afford $11, but that if he can afford $11 he can't necessarily afford $12.10. So, if he can afford $80, can he or can't he afford $88, or does that depend on whether you happened to run the calculation on $80/1.1?
It is a clever idea, and it would take a moderate amount of sophistication to allow it to not cause problems with being attached in parallel with the mains. Also, designing it to be at least moderately safe to operate would take some effort.
I'm not sure that the patent would hold up under a challenge. However, these would be used primarily by corporations of some sort (government, private investigators, etc) and they're not going to want to have their employees handling jury-rigged contraptions with 600W passing through them. They're going to look for something reputable. Plus, if the hard drive contains critical intelligence on a terrorist cell you're going to want to use tools that are reliable. Saving $100 on your interim power supply doesn't sound too good when it causes you to lose all the intel you could have gathered from an operation that involved a whole truck full of commandos and who knows how much background intelligence-gathering.
Sometimes it just pays to do it right...
I always scratch my head over the profileration concerns with breeder reactors.
How much do we spend every year fighting wars to secure the middle east? How much money would we save on oil if we had dependable nuclear power?
Ok, take about 0.0001% of that money, and you could have a whole garrison of crack commandos that have training in nuclear physics stationed at every nuclear power plant in the country. Is it really that hard to secure a reactor? You could also have 8 layers of inspectors accounting for every mg of radioactive materials so that you'd need to bribe so many people to steal it that it would be cheaper to just build your own reactor. All of this would probably be unnecessarily wasteful, but even if you're paranoid enough to pay for it we'd be still saving a bundle compared to the status quo. And far less of those commandos would die securing the power plants than die every year securing Iraq...
Its easy - every time an explorer enters the tunnels they end up dying from an ancient curse. Pretty soon people stop wandering into the tunnels until somebody figures out what is going on.
There are lots of dangerous places in the world. How many billions of dollars are going to be wasted to prevent a few people from hypothetically being killed 10,000 years from now in a hypothetical stone age civilization after some kind of hypothetical calamity that destroys modern technology?
I have better things to worry about, like the thousands/millions of people dying needlessly today. Maybe if energy were a whole lot cheaper we might save a few of them almost by accident due to things like food/medicine being marginally cheaper. I suspect a whole lot more people would be helped in this way than in theorizing about cavemen wandering the earth in 10,000 years...
Uh, I think you have a lot of misconceptions about how the drug industry works. Either that or you have a very limited definition of R&D. Patents are awarded as soon as a molecue has some activity in an in-vitro assay. At that point maybe a few hundred thousand dollars have been spent on R&D for that molecule. After his point most molecules go through a few more hundred thousand dollars of testing only to be abandoned. The few that make it pasts this go on to clinical trials. A successful drug ends up costing about $500M.
Most of the true innovation happens before the patent is awarded. Most of the cost happens after it is awarded. And when it is all done it might never make it to market.
Sure, you can fund the drug industry through donantions, and it would probably produce as many drugs as a typical non-profit does today.
You paint silly stories of companies suing grandmothers. Of course that won't happen. If the US allows compulsory licensing of drugs or lifts import restrictions to that degree the drug industry will just find something else to do besides discovering drugs. Thousands of scientists will be unemployed, and few will pursue these careers. Public health won't suffer a bit compared to what it is today - it might actualy benefit a little. However, it won't improve nearly as much as it could improve with the status quo.
There are lots of ways to reform the health care industry. Destroying it isn't one of them...
Sounds like what they should sell the consumer is:
1. A computer, with some of their own software preinstalled (basically a fancy bootloader/installer). Nothing copyrighted by anybody but themselves.
2. A shrink-wrapped box of OS X.
3. A CD containing the software in #1 for later reinstallations.
When you boot the computer it asks you to insert the OS X install CD. The CD is used to install and on-the-fly patch the OS X operating system onto the computer. Upon the next boot the computer is running OS X.
The vendor hasn't copied a thing that belongs to anybody else - they haven't even opened the box so there is really no way you could argue that they agreed to any license of any kind. However, they have made it very easy for the end-user to install and patch OS X to run on the computer. And it isn't entirely clear that the end user is doing anything that isn't covered by fair use, as what they end up doing is for personal use only and is not further distributed.
Of course, all of this is the result of some really dumb court decisions...
Why do drug companies develop drugs in the first place? Because a population has a demand for a cure or alleviation to an illness. Drug companies can function perfectly as a service industry by selling their expertise to develop new drugs. ...
They won't pursue any type of cure that cannot be patented
You do realize that these two statements are contradictions. If a company won't pursue a cure that can't be patented, and you effectively eliminate the patents, then they're not going to pursure any cures at all. I do agree that the industry could live on as a subcontractor to government R&D, and actually I think that this might be the best future for the industry. However, that isn't really what we have today, and I'm not convinced that the best way to get from here to there is to just gut the patent system (even if leaving it in place in a shadow of its current form).
Patents only have disadvantages for society as a whole...It doesn't effect in the least the few brilliant scientists who are devoted to solving problems, and patents only get in the way of those people.
I'm not convinced this is the case. Surely the drug industry as it currently exists would not be doing any of the R&D they are doing if it weren't for patents. The scientists doing the work actually do benefit, since the industry profits are what give them their paychecks. No, they don't get a percentage of the action, but they also aren't asked to give back their paychecks if after 15 years of work they don't personally invent a blockbuster. The companies know that if they employ 1000 scientists they'll probably come up with one blockbuster a year. They know that only one of the scientists will come up with that blockbuster, but they can't predict which so they pay them all well and maybe give the guy who discovers the cure for cancer a $20k bonus. If they could get the scientists to work for free and give the guy who discovers the big drug $20M I'm sure they'd be happy to do that - but most scientists would take steady pay over a chance at a fortune. Those who would rather take the risk start their own biotechs, and when those work out the scientists actually do make out well - due to patents.
Just like a salary, a patent is a risk-mitigation tool. A patent is a contract society makes with an inventor - it says that if you spend a billion dollars and come up with a really great idea, that society will pay you enough to make back the billion and a nice profit on top of that. The only other way to get a billion dollars for R&D is to have government fund the work and tax people for it. The big problem with that is while I can give you a million reasons why the government should be able to do a better job than industry, for whatever reason they seem to get it wrong quite a bit of the time. And if you think that government regulators go easy on industry, just look at how well the government polices itself - if a company had the environmental impact of Hanford there would probably be people in jail.
I think the best solution has a number of components:
1. Maintain the status quo with the drug industry. Don't kill the goose that laid the golden egg. But...
2. Start doing true end-to-end drug development in the NIH, with the resulting drugs being in the public domain. These dirt-cheap drugs would compete with the drugs produced by industry, keeping prices lower. However, if government R&D drops the ball we still have the status quo to fall back on.
3. The NIH should look to outsource R&D to drug companies where it makes sense, but the NIH should maintain the patent rights to the drugs (which will then be free to everybody). This could lead to the transition that you allude to if the NIH is successful.
4. Government should help the indigent with the cost of drugs. The biggest problem with healthcare isn't the costs per se, but how they are borne.
5. Without going into more details the whole healthcare system needs a lo
You can't keep most products as trade secrets - almost any product can be reverse-engineered today for a fraction of the original R&D cost. So, this kind of move would probably get rid of patents altogether. I'm not convinced this is the best solution to the current problems.
Well, the solution to that is simple enough. Prevent competitors from making the pill with the new coating, but allow them to make the pill with the old coating, or whatever.
I think that is actually how it works, but some unethical companies use various loopholes to tie up competitors in litigation over what is essentially legal activity, and regulators allow the loopholes to remain.
Not all pharma companies actually stoop to these tactics. Some have gone on the record stating that they will only enforce their patents for the original period, and the six-month extension granted for pediatric studies (which is a true quid pro quo - society gets valuable clinical data in children in return for six months of profits for the drug maker).
I can think of a few flaws with this idea, even though I like some of it:
1. The results with the drug industry would be huge and probably not what is intended. Why have drug patents at all when it costs $500M to fully develop a drug and probably only $1-2M to come up with a new process for making a drug. Drug companies would just sit and wait for somebody else to invent drugs and then find a new way to make them, and there would be no new drugs unless the government did all the work. If you want that then just get rid of the patents so that companies don't waste time just coming up with new ways of manufacturing the same pill.
2. You would STILL have software patents. Early software patents tended to use hardware implementations of an algorithm due to the uncertainty of whether software patents would stick. Somebody would actually invent a machine that would do a quicksort using gears/levers/etc to get a patent on the idea. What a waste of time and it gets us nowhere in terms of reform.
3. Patents are still useful in certain industries and situations. If you're going to make it really easy to get around them you might as well get rid of them, which can actually hamper innovation. Patents have advantages and disadvantages - the goal is to maximize the one and minimize the other. What we don't want to do is toss out the baby with the bath water...
I doubt most US workers are super-concerned when a US company opens a research division in Germany or France. I have some peers in a variety of first-world nations and I never feel like they're used primarily to be exploited for their low wages/etc. I doubt most Europeans feel that kind of concern about the US either (although US workers are exploited to a greater degree than is permissible in most of Europe).
The issue is the body-shop mentality with nations that have drastically lower standards of living, environmental standards, labor standards, etc.
The simple solution is for the US to team up with other first-world nations that share common vulnerability to this tactic (most of Europe comes to mind), and establish a list with tariff rates for various nations. These rates would be added as taxes to the hours worked by any workers hired (directly or indirectly) by a company in one of the listed nations. The tax must be payed once if a company wishes to do business in one of the affiliated nations. The revenue would be split by those nations to some degree (perhaps equally unless the company were headquartered in one of the nations). Revenue collection isn't the primary goal so much as penalizing behavior, but revenue could be used to aid the displaced.
Ok, exactly what setting on a cheap consumer router would cause it to randomly stop working at intervals? :)
I have a cheap linksys router that had similar issues - every few days it would randomly hang. It would drive me nuts since I like to remotely connect to my home network, and I can't exactly reboot the router from outside the house.
In the end I just ended up getting another NIC and running shorewall on a linux box. I only use the linksys box as a wireless access point. Even so, it still needs an occassional reboot every few months (and it literally is ONLY a wireless access point - it isn't even running a dhcp server any longer).
Cheap consumer products often have cheap firmware. Sometimes the companies finally get it right, but they may not port the new code back to ancient sub-models of their devices. The good-old linksys wrt54g probably has about 15 revisions to it so it is quite possible that only some of them have the more serious issues.
For another story of an appliance that should "just work" I have a pair of satellite receivers that every few weeks just starts outputting a black screen (sometimes both go out at once, sometimes only one goes out). It drives me nuts since it runs into my mythtv backend and I get blank recordings. I actually have a cron job set up to check the video output hourly and scan for blank frames (script provided by somebody more clever than me - best use of aalib I've seen), and I'm tempted to set up some X10 gear to reboot the receivers automatically - there is no way to fix hte problem short of pulling the plug for a few seconds.
And don't get me started on consumer DVRs - most work just fine until they stop working right, or they miss a show, or they start running slow, or whatever. :) I easily spent more setting up mythtv on a budget than just buying the DVR supplied by the satellite provider, but when something goes wrong I can actually do something about it now.
The hotter the environment, the worse the thermal insulation
Well, when your cable is at 75K the difference between a 273K day and a 313K day isn't that big a deal... :)
But if reporters did that they'd get scooped! It is so much better just to grab a press release, edit it slightly, and hit publish. Boom - you get all the clicks from your sensational story and the advertisers don't really care if it ends up being true as long as they get impressions...
Please vote in a way that will cause the worst candidate to be elected, so that things will become so bad that electoral reform will be passed".... not a very compelling argument, I'm afraid.
Ironically I've been told the same thing by many friends - who all voted for Bush.
Half the country is hell-bent on avoiding the disaster that would occur if McCain were elected. The other half is hell-bent on avoiding the disaster that would occur if Obama were elected. The only thing they can all agree on is that it is somehow even worse to vote for somebody other than the two of them...
Yeah - but you left out the downside:
If it takes off the 3D store is loaded with 35,000 other avatars looking for the same stuff. The checkout line also has 1000 other avatars standing in it.
The beauty of the website model is that when I got to amazon.com as far as I can tell I'm their only customer, except when I look at reviews. If I run a search I see the product I asked for - not that it is is in aisle 387,321 - row 3.
If I want to collaborate with a coworker a telephone and webex does the trick just fine. We don't need to find an available virtual conference room, spend time walking there, and then spend a ton of time either typing in chat mode or using voice interfaces punctuated with trying to manipulate our avatars to express ourselves.
The 3d adds a lot of glitz and not much functionality. Kind of like a lawn mower with a voice interface - neat for the first day but then you just want to mow your lawn without getting into a coversation about your fuel mixture.
I suspect that whoever makes the copies is required to comply with the license and make source available. That could include pointing to somebody else who provides them free of charge, but if for whatever reason ubuntu.com closed shop I'd think that whoever packages the Best Buy boxes would need to mirror it.
Now, if Best Buy just buys boxes of ubuntu for $5 and sells it for $20 then they're free of any obligation. You don't need a license to sell software - just to copy it.