It's why I don't eat US beef, because the US views the problem as something to fix in the PR dept., not something to fix on the farm.
I heard that a US beef distributer wanted to do 100% testing of its beef so that it could market them as 100% tested mad-cow free. The USDA balked at this since it would put other distributers at a disadvantage. Although distributers pay for their own testing the USDA is somehow involved with this and were able to prevent the testing from taking place.
Gotta love the "free market" - where government watchdogs prevent industry from taking steps to improve its own safety. All in the name of lower costs. As if consumers can't decide for themselves whether they'd rather buy $1.99/lb untested beef or $2.09/lb tested beef. Just put them both on the shelf and customer decide...
What you can patent is the method (and apparatus) of manufactoring that drug, you can also trademark the name.
Not true - at least not in the US. You can patent the molecule and its use. Google patent 4661483 for an example - the manufacturing process is not claimed - just the molecules themselves.
The reason for this is simple - you can make the same molecule about 47 different ways, so there is little point to patenting the manufacturing process. Sure, some processes are non-optimal, but when pills are sold for $5 each and cost $0.40 to make, does it really matter if the non-optimal process means you can only make them for $0.80 each?
If only manufacturing processes were patentable you'd see a flood of generics on the market.
In addition to patent protection in itself, the US FDA will not approve a generic version of a patented molecule until the patent runs out. If a court rules a patent invalid the FDA will defer to the court.
Drug patents are the only reason that new drugs cost so much in the US, and are the only reason that pharmaceutical R&D is profitable.
An interesting point is that in India (due to the sacredness of life in bhudism and hinduism) its illegal to have a patent on something that can be used to save lives.
You are correct regarding India. This is why branded drug makers don't make any money in India. If similar rules were adopted worldwide they wouldn't make any money at all. The end result of this would be a net loss of life, which would be ironic considering the intended purpose of the Indian law. (On a side note, does any major religion not claim to consider life sacred?)
In a sense life is priceless. However, every time somebody dies in a hospital due to a lack of availability of treatment in one way or another a price has been placed on life. Sure, some countries make health care "free", but people still die when 10 people need surgery and only 9 doctors are available - if doctors' salaries were doubled that problem might not occur as often. Every country puts a price on life, the only thing they don't do is talk about it.
No country can afford to grant its population immortality - at least not with present technology. The rational thing to do is figure out the fairest and most effective way to dole out care, with the goal of saving as many lives as possible for a reasonable cost. Reasoned choices are the best way to work this out - not rhetoric about it being immoral to refuse to save a life when it is physically possible to have done so, or being immoral to make a profit on saving lives. By such logic it should be immoral for doctors to take vacation days, doctors should be interned at their hospitals to ensure availability, and children should be tested for aptitude in medical skills and compelled to enter the field if they have such ability.
I think that with some reform we could be saving a whole lot more lives than we are now. However, making it impossible to profit from health care probably won't have the desired effect.
Schering-Plough tried to sue keep the generics off the market, but the FTC shut them down. They also tried the trick I mentioned patenting the a substance that the body creates when taking claritin or the generic form, (that's what Clarinex is) but this didn't compel any courts to rule in their favor. Thus the generics can now be had. So it looks like Schering-Plough is not hesitant to use their legal team to boost profits. The generic companies did everything by the book so why make them face these expensive legal challenges?
While I'm completely opposed to abolishing drug patents I'm also completely in favor of reforms to stop behavior like this. Once a patent runs out the market should be free - period. I can accept small exceptions like pediatric extensions, since it trades a benefit to society for a cost to society. However, gimmicks like the one you mentioned only hurt consumers and line the pockets of one company, which has already received its just compensation. The FTC should fine a year's sales in cases like this - that would make companies back off of garbage like this REALLY fast - the fine could be given to the competitors they hurt, and a year's worth of patented drug sales would be incentive for ANY generic company to stick it out in court.
As you pointed out, not all companies resort to gimmicks to cheat the system. We need to reward right behavior, and punish wrong behavior. Then the market will fall in line.
The thing that bothers me is the drive to abolish patents entirely. Even me-too drugs are godsends to people with drug allergies or reactions - my wife went through two brands of statins before settling on a third - if it weren't for the me-toos she'd be at far more risk of a heart attack.
Plus, as you've illustrated they lead to competition. Lipitor and Crestor are both patented, but due to generic competition they are under heavy price pressure. Consumers can get newer innovative medicines for only a little more than a cheap generic.
All your points are valid - ultimately it comes down to whether it is the job of society to help people in spite of themselves.
I agree with your point on antibiotics - this would be an externality that would be difficult to deal with in an open market for drugs.
I disagree with your point on supply shortages. Other than some initial surges in orders (which could be mitigated with some sort of phased deregulation) there is no reason to think that any drug could not be manufactured in sufficient quantity to meet demand as long as the price is free to float. We don't have quotas on buying gas to prevent people from spending a fortune on it and then just burning it in their backyards. Likewise, if I want to buy gauze pads at Walmart and throw them away it isn't going to cause a huge shortage. People will naturally avoid wasting things, especially when they cost money. If demand surges briefly then prices can rise, and those who need drugs for life-threatening conditions will be the only ones paying for them. After a short time supply will increase and prices will fall.
I'm still not convinced that deregulating perscription drug access isn't the right move. That doesn't mean getting rid of the FDA - I'm all for safe and effective drugs (even though we allow thousands of supplements to bypass these rules).
That's hardly the same thing. If it lowers it and is a different drug, that's fine.
That's how the current system works. You don't get 14 patents for the same molecule. It is pretty odd to even get 2 patents for the same molecule, and I can agree with steps to control this in the relatively rare situations where this happens.
(I'll admit I don't have time to do an in-depth bit of research on what these two drugs are, so I'm assuming they're 2 different chemicals)
They are in fact different chemicals. You don't assign different generic names to the same compound, even if it is used for multiple purposes.
If it does what it does and does it more effectively, odds are that it has a different mechanism, and therefore is unique.
In this case I do not believe that the newer drugs use a different mechanism. They just use the same mechanism more effectively. Typically newer drugs are more selective, have better pharmacokinetic properties (half-life, etc), and cause fewer side effects.
I don't follow how two different drugs lowering cholesterol, for instance, need to reference each other at all in the brief description.
In this case there is about a 10-year gap in technology - both drugs do the same thing, but the newer drug works much better and almost nobody takes the older drug as a result. The newer drug still cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, and this probably would not have happened without a patent - especially when there is already another drug on the market (even if the other drug is far inferior). Without a patent you'd probably only get a year to try to recoup your investment - and even the biggest blockbusters typically take more than a year to recoup their R&D costs, since doctors rarely switch all their patients to a new drug the day it comes out (and this is a good thing - a little conservatism isn't a bad thing where lives are concerned).
Witness the large amounts of "cross-licensing" schemes in the software world for an example of how patents are being devalued.
Hey, I'm all for banning software patents. With software anybody in their living room can do R&D, and development costs are measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, to a few million. Copyright law is sufficient to protect software investments - since a copycat company needs to spend about as much as the innovator to catch up. With drugs it is far different - development costs are measured in hundreds of millions of dollars, and a copycat company need only spend a very small fraction of that to catch up. As a result, if drugs weren't patented everybody would sit and wait for somebody else to do the hard work and then reap the rewards - except nobody would do the hard work.
The only way you're going to be able to have patent-free medicines is to greatly reduce the sunk costs associated with developing them. That either means a huge change in regulation (allow companies to put drugs on the market without human safety data), or some huge increase in technology (allowing safety data to be collected without clinical trials). Everybody would love the latter, but until it arrives I'm not sure we really want to accept the former.
The only other thing that would work is government-subsidized R&D - but the cost of that would be rather large, and I'm not convinced it would work. However, there is no need to abolish patents to try that out - just go ahead and spend on R&D with the stipulation that any discovered molecules must enter the public domain. Then you can see how it works in practice while letting private industry maintain the status quo...
(I was finally forced to switch away from ReiserFS because Myth and ReiserFS do not cooperate well, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that XFS is actually more responsive, even though (like most filesystems) it wastes a lot of storage space.)
Ok, drifting slightly offtopic I admit - but I am using xfs for myth (for the same reasons - plus small files aren't a big issue with digital video). I'm about to migrate everything over to ext3 for a few reasons:
1. Better support in linux in general. 2. Can be resized larger OR SMALLER. (Though I admit the online resizing of xfs is great.) 3. Better data protection with its journal behavior. 4. XFS zeros out any open file in the event of a crash. When I discovered this behavior I IMMEDIATELY migrated everything but myth off of it (I don't have hundreds of gigs of spare space, so myth will take a little longer).
xfs has its uses, but I'm not thrilled about what I've read so far in terms of data reliability, and I'd like the flexibility to resize in either direction (with lvm it is nice to be able to repartition on demand).
Uh, what is the worst that could happen? People would kill themselves. A victimless crime.
If somebody wants to kill themselves that is none of my business. Sure, I'd give them some free advice that if they have a serious problem they might want to talk to a doctor about it, but in the end if they just want to take some pills why should that be illegal?
I laugh even more at the thought that it is illegal to dispense vetrinary medicine without a prescription. This is just a nanny-state mentality - we can't let people suffer the harm of a lost pet - better to put the pet to sleep since nobody can afford to pay thousands for treatment.
But people assume the latest and greatest is better and are prepared to pay more.
And what is wrong about that? If they have money to burn and want to burn it, why stop them? The same thing causes people to buy a BMW when a Toyota would get them to work just fine.
No insurance company would pay for a drug that offered no new beneifts over something that was available over-the-counter. And that is why Clarinex is only bringing in a fraction of what Claritin used to make.
The people who buy stuff like Clarinex aren't the same people deciding whether to buy medicine or food.
Should only the FIRST drug that lowers cholesterol be patentable? Should the rest not have billions of R&D spending? What happens if you are allergic to the first drug, and there are no others. What if some other drug works 10 times as well - is that not innovative. How about 5X, or 2X, or 1.5X - where do you draw the line?
If you don't want to take "me-too" drugs then don't - the originals are all still available. Why take atorvastatin (Mevacor) when you can take lovastatin (Crestor) - other than the fact that the former works much better and causes fewer side effects. If that wasn't worth the R&D investment and the extra $5/pill then just take your chances with the older technology.
Nobody is forced to take expensive medicines. They take them because they work better. If people want to spend more money to get safer and better drugs, why shouldn't they be allowed to do so? If you get rid of the patents on me-too drugs then there won't be many of them, and you'll be stuck with lovastatin when you could have atorvastatin.
And often those me-too drugs are the result of competition. Two companies race to the market, one beats the other by two weeks - should the loser not get a patent at all and lose ALL of their investment? The end-result of that is that whoever is behind just drops the drug much ealier in development and works on something else, and then instead of having two pills on the market for a condition you have one - and guess what that does to prices? Right now if huge-insurance-company doesn't like the price on Crestor they can make a deal with Pfizer and switch all their customers to Lipitor, and vice-versa. This keeps prices down. If you get rid of the me-too drugs then you create total monopolies, rather than competitive ones. That certainly won't make drugs any cheaper!
Uh, they do. Just look at the patent records, and the marketing records, and see what drugs show up in one and not the other.
Sure, not all the details are published, but for late-stage failures (the ones that would cost a fortune if duplicated) everything tends to be very public, which is why companies with late-stage failures tend to have their stock tank.
Doctor: Would you like to volunteer for this clinical trial? Patient: Sure, what are you giving me and what will it do for me? Doctor: No idea - the guys running the trial can't do either. The last doctor who asked too many questions was shot by the mob.
Sounds like a good idea to me...:)
The reason we have patents is so that companies can do business legally have have legal recourse when somebody breaks confidentiality. If there were no patent then anybody could sell trade secrets without fear of legal harm.
In order to conduct business in pharma you have to tell thousands of people what your drug is, what it does, and often some details about how you go about making it. This is important for regulatory purposes among others (so that countries can decide whether to let you do the trials).
Just like with processors, there is a large enough cost of entry for medicine manufacturing that patent protection is not going to be the prime motivation for innovation.
Uh, there isn't that much cost of entry at all. When somebody brings a new medicine to the market you just buy a bottle of the pills for $100 or whatever. Then you pull out the prescribing info which contains the molecular formula and a list of ingredients for the formulation. It might take you six months to come up with a process for making the molecule, and the rest is pretty trivial. Six months later you have a marketing application filed in the US (the only country that matters), and you're working on the other countries. You might spend a few million dollars total in the process.
Meanwhile the go-first company has spent a fortune on advertising making the market ripe. The drug is finally ramping up to a point where it looks like 100 million pills a year might be sold soon. That would be a blockbuster by today's standards. You come in and offer those pills for 5 cents above marginal cost, making millions of dollars per year - you recoup your "R&D" costs in less than a year.
Hundreds of companies run on exactly this business model, but right now they can't step in until after a patent expires. Without patents they would do it on day one.
It costs a whole lot more to develop a new drug than a new CPU, and it costs a whole lot less to replicate it.
When was the last time a big Pharma ran a net loss, let alone went bankrupt? If they're in the business of spending money to save lives, that should happen a lot more often.
Uh, why? Is there some reason that the business of saving lives should be unprofitable. Is it a sin to make money while saving a life? Should somebody who is smart and intelligent avoid saving lives at all costs since it will be likely to result in personal bankruptcy? Should people study science "only for the love of science" and not because they'd like to be able to afford to raise a family?
There is an easy way to tell what somebody considers important - just look at where they invest their time and their money. If they say that saving lives is important, but devote neither time nor money to it, then their real attitude is that they consider impressing people by talking about saving lives is important (since that is what they are actually spending their time on).
When a nation says that it is willing to spend $30 on a sports ticket, but it is unwilling to spend $5 to prolong the life of a diabetic by a single day, then it is saying that entertainment is more valuable than a person's life. I find it ironic that people decry the pharmaceutical industry with the accusation that they trade dollars for lives, and yet those same people aren't willing to kick in the bucks necessary to actually save those lives themselves. Instead we all sit around and try to imagine a world where hundreds of scientists would all mobilize to cure diseases while making $5 per hour, and where thousands of volunteers would try out new medicines without being compensated at all, and where doctors around the world would participate in clinical trials without compensation (this last category being one of the costliest aspects of drug development).
The drug industry is a competitive industry - it is unlikely that productivity would rise in the absence of patents, and it is very plausible that it would drop sharply.
In any case, there is no need to repeal patents to have public medicine - simply direct the NIH to develop unpatented drugs and see what happens. You can then look at the costs and benefits and see if this model makes sense, while the private drug industry maintains the status quo. If it does make sense, ramp up the public spending, and let the private industry do what it does now - people will have hundreds of "free" drugs to choose from (assuming the public process works), while still having a number of expensive ones to choose from as well. Then the market can decide. If the public process doesn't work out so well then we haven't lost anything. If the public process can't compete on its own merits, then simply abolishing private R&D wouldn't have solved the real problem.
But enter the market with a generic of a drug formerly in a superbowl ad and the big company lawyers will sue you into submission.
Uh, last time I checked you could get generic loratadine in every Walmart in the country. Claritin certainly was highly advertised.
Simvastatin is available generically despite the fact that Zocor was once the biggest-selling drug around. It has caused a price drop on all statins as a result.
Tons of generic medicines make it on the market without issue. There are a few scumbag innovators who tend to use legal loopholes, but these are more the exception than the rule, and I'd gladly support legislation to punish this sort of activity. Fair is fair - if a company wants to develop a drug in exchange for a patent of limited duration that sounds like a fair deal, but when the time runs out then the compound should enter the public domain. After 15 years nobody should be screaming about unpaid R&D costs...
Because as I understand it, new drugs rarely offer "no additional benefit".
Well, wasn't that the whole point of the rant? If the new drugs do offer additional benefits, then shouldn't we be encouraging them to be made?
Nobody forces anybody to take a pill. If the pills being discovered today are not much better than the ones from 10 years ago, then insurance companies would refuse to pay for them. The 10-year-old pills are FAR cheaper, and often are cheaper in the US than elsewhere.
You can't have it both ways. Personally, I think that me-too drugs are great for consumers. They create competition, which means lower prices (when two companies make similar drugs they have to compete for customers). Additionally, if you're allergic or resistant to a drug you should be thankful that some evil pharma company decided to come up with a redundant molecule...
And the next thing you know a copy of an IEEE spec will cost you $10,000 and will be heavily copy-protected with all kinds of rewards to turn in people around the office that photocopy them.
One thing that bugs me to death is government-mandated use of non-open standards (ie ones you can't access without paying a fee).
Just try and post the National Electric Code on your website and see what happens.
Laws should be free for anyone to read - you should not have to pay to understand the laws that you will be punished if you violate.
Ok, I'll have to beg forgiveness about not knowing about these projects. Then again, it might be because I don't know of a single application that supports them.
Hmm - checking my gentoo portage repository about the only things that do are programming libraries and languages.
Once programmers start using unix odbc then perhaps I'll consider using it as well. Is there some reason nobody is? Just about everything on windows uses it (but not everything - this issue is by no means restricted to linux and we have an app that only runs on one specific (old) version of Oracle because the coders thought it wise to use all kinds of proprietary extensions).
I've been wanting to switch to postgres for a long time, but do you know what the main thing is that is holding me back?
THERE IS NO ODBC FOR LINUX (or equivalent).
Why should apps that use a db be linked against libraries that are db-specific? Why not make everything modular. Then developers can stick to ANSI SQL and let the user pick whatever database they want (mysql, posgres, oracle, sql-server, access, whatever).
Right now all of my apps support mysql, and a few support postgres. So either I run two database servers and maintain/upgrade/understand both of them, or I just run mysql and hope that the app devs are good since the DB won't protect them if they want to break their referential integrity.
Mysql has come a long way, though, and it concerns me less than I used to. Before I had to cringe whenever I went to their website and was treated to articles that amounted to "well, transactions are overrated anyway - they slow everything down". Well, sure, but what exactly is the point of using a database in the first place?
Uh, I'd be shocked if Humulin is no longer readily available. The reason nobody sells animal insulin is that it is expensive to make, and prone to causing allergies and other problems due to the fact that it isn't human.
Humulin is recombinantly produced human insulin and is completely identical to what your body naturally makes (well, if you aren't type-1 diabetic anyway).
The reason your mother was moved to multiple shots was not due to some deficiency in recombinant and chemically-modified insulin, but rather in order to obtain better controls over blood sugar levels. Two shots of regular insulin leads to peaks and valleys in sugar levels.
If you just want fewer shots per day tell your mother to ask about Lantus, which is an insulin derivative designed to maintain a steady state over 24 hours. That can be given once per day to control basal insulin levels. You will still get glucose peaks after meals since the level of insulin is remaining constant throughout the day. The solution to that is to supplement with fast-acting insulin analogs taken at meal time.
There are also lots of pills out there which can help with Type-2 diabetes when it isn't totally out of control. Some are helpful even when combined with insulin.
Type-1 diabetes can be controlled today as well as it was in the 80s with only one shot per day. However, the reason diabetics are getting many shots of various drugs is because it controls sugar much better, and this has been shown to improve life expectancy.
Disclaimer - I'm not a doctor, but my wife is diabetic and I'm a biochemist and naturally I'm interested in such things...
It is still the ultimate weak signal communication mode
Well, maybe without the assistance of a computer. I'm sure a digital technology with error correction would enable communications at lower power than morse. Morse is essentially a form of digital communications designed to be understood by a person. It also has the advantage that you could probably build a practical radio rig out of stuff you'd find lying around the house (unlike a computer).
I'll one-up you on that. I have an MS in Chemistry and I couldn't tell you the atomic weight of Tungsten, or even its Atomic number. I imagine that it is a transition metal, and if for some reason I was doing Tungsten chemistry I'd probably take the time to learn a heck of a lot more than fits in a 2cm square box.
Sure, I have most of the abbreviations memorized, and weights/series memorized for the more common elements. And guess what - I didn't have to memorize them to pass a test! I'm sure that many reading/. didn't start out coding in java, and may not have ever taken a test, but I'm sure that quite a few have half of the normally-used classes memorized as well.
When I see kids being forced to cram atomic numbers for a chemistry exam I cringe. No wonder nobody goes into the sciences these days! Make them memorize some facts, and don't bother to worry about whether they understand why things work that way... Are we teaching them science (the process of advancing knowledge in a systematic way), or magic (reciting mysterious incantations carefully lest you end up a newt)?
I know a ham operator (extra class), and while he can key at 60WPM he tends to spend more time doing PACTOR/AMTOR these days, or using computer-assistance with the code. Actually, he has been trending away from operating at all since it seems like all the regulars are dying off (they just disappear and you don't hear about them again). It would seem that the FCC is doing the right thing in trying to transform the hobby.
Consider that 50 years ago ham radio was cutting edge. People who now build PCs and PHP applications used to build radios and operate networks/relays/repeaters. Now ham radio has the perception of being ancient technology (although I know that it doesn't have to be that way). Memorizing morse code is about as useful as requiring knowledge of x86 assembly to program a computer, or knowledge of UUCP email addresses to use gmail. That doesn't make either of those things useless - but they aren't essential either and if you want to study functional programming you won't find much use in memorizing indirect memory indexing modes.
Backend - records video, stores video, runs database.
Frontend - UI and plays video.
The only link between them is the network.
So yes, you need a video card and sound card on your frontend, or some other integrated solution that provides both. I'm using an epia front-end, which has integrated video with TV-out and SPDIF digital audio out.
Or if you want simple you can run the backend and frontend on a single box, but then you need a bigger box in the living room, and lots of cables/tuners/etc. I keep all the hardware in the office, and only have the frontend in the living room. Either way you can add additional front-ends in other rooms and even add additional backends to get more tuners.
So, if I use public key authentication, and the public key is then cracked, no problem, I've already used it to authenticate. The cracked key is now useless to the attacker.
Only if you can generate and communicate securely a new public key every time the link goes down. I guess it is possible in theory. Also - this assumes that you can't crack a public key in realtime - unlikely but theoretically possible. If an interceptor can crack asymmetric crypto quickly enough then you won't be able to spot him.
If you don't reauthenticate frequently there might also be attacks that depend on timing and switching the channel back and forth from a direct conneciton to an intercepted/retransmitted one. These could probably be defeated with good design (simultaneous key-exchange and authentication).
Keep in mind this was the 80s - back when many companies didn't spend nearly as much on employee safety. These days due to legal liabilities, superfund, and massive industrial disasters they spend a whole lot more, but brass wrenches might not have been so common back then, or otherwise available to meet some spec.
For all I know, it could have been a waste, but I've also learned not to jump to conclusions too quickly...
I heard a story from a friend about an order of Kimwipes (small lint-free wipes used in many lab applications - lens paper essentially). They ordered six boxes expecting to get six boxes the size of a tissue box. Instead they got six shipping boxes containing hundreds of tissue-sized boxes each. Every cabinet in the building got stuffed with Kimwipes...
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It's why I don't eat US beef, because the US views the problem as something to fix in the PR dept., not something to fix on the farm.
I heard that a US beef distributer wanted to do 100% testing of its beef so that it could market them as 100% tested mad-cow free. The USDA balked at this since it would put other distributers at a disadvantage. Although distributers pay for their own testing the USDA is somehow involved with this and were able to prevent the testing from taking place.
Gotta love the "free market" - where government watchdogs prevent industry from taking steps to improve its own safety. All in the name of lower costs. As if consumers can't decide for themselves whether they'd rather buy $1.99/lb untested beef or $2.09/lb tested beef. Just put them both on the shelf and customer decide...
What you can patent is the method (and apparatus) of manufactoring that drug, you can also trademark the name.
Not true - at least not in the US. You can patent the molecule and its use. Google patent 4661483 for an example - the manufacturing process is not claimed - just the molecules themselves.
The reason for this is simple - you can make the same molecule about 47 different ways, so there is little point to patenting the manufacturing process. Sure, some processes are non-optimal, but when pills are sold for $5 each and cost $0.40 to make, does it really matter if the non-optimal process means you can only make them for $0.80 each?
If only manufacturing processes were patentable you'd see a flood of generics on the market.
In addition to patent protection in itself, the US FDA will not approve a generic version of a patented molecule until the patent runs out. If a court rules a patent invalid the FDA will defer to the court.
Drug patents are the only reason that new drugs cost so much in the US, and are the only reason that pharmaceutical R&D is profitable.
An interesting point is that in India (due to the sacredness of life in bhudism and hinduism) its illegal to have a patent on something that can be used to save lives.
You are correct regarding India. This is why branded drug makers don't make any money in India. If similar rules were adopted worldwide they wouldn't make any money at all. The end result of this would be a net loss of life, which would be ironic considering the intended purpose of the Indian law. (On a side note, does any major religion not claim to consider life sacred?)
In a sense life is priceless. However, every time somebody dies in a hospital due to a lack of availability of treatment in one way or another a price has been placed on life. Sure, some countries make health care "free", but people still die when 10 people need surgery and only 9 doctors are available - if doctors' salaries were doubled that problem might not occur as often. Every country puts a price on life, the only thing they don't do is talk about it.
No country can afford to grant its population immortality - at least not with present technology. The rational thing to do is figure out the fairest and most effective way to dole out care, with the goal of saving as many lives as possible for a reasonable cost. Reasoned choices are the best way to work this out - not rhetoric about it being immoral to refuse to save a life when it is physically possible to have done so, or being immoral to make a profit on saving lives. By such logic it should be immoral for doctors to take vacation days, doctors should be interned at their hospitals to ensure availability, and children should be tested for aptitude in medical skills and compelled to enter the field if they have such ability.
I think that with some reform we could be saving a whole lot more lives than we are now. However, making it impossible to profit from health care probably won't have the desired effect.
Schering-Plough tried to sue keep the generics off the market, but the FTC shut them down. They also tried the trick I mentioned patenting the a substance that the body creates when taking claritin or the generic form, (that's what Clarinex is) but this didn't compel any courts to rule in their favor. Thus the generics can now be had. So it looks like Schering-Plough is not hesitant to use their legal team to boost profits. The generic companies did everything by the book so why make them face these expensive legal challenges?
While I'm completely opposed to abolishing drug patents I'm also completely in favor of reforms to stop behavior like this. Once a patent runs out the market should be free - period. I can accept small exceptions like pediatric extensions, since it trades a benefit to society for a cost to society. However, gimmicks like the one you mentioned only hurt consumers and line the pockets of one company, which has already received its just compensation. The FTC should fine a year's sales in cases like this - that would make companies back off of garbage like this REALLY fast - the fine could be given to the competitors they hurt, and a year's worth of patented drug sales would be incentive for ANY generic company to stick it out in court.
As you pointed out, not all companies resort to gimmicks to cheat the system. We need to reward right behavior, and punish wrong behavior. Then the market will fall in line.
The thing that bothers me is the drive to abolish patents entirely. Even me-too drugs are godsends to people with drug allergies or reactions - my wife went through two brands of statins before settling on a third - if it weren't for the me-toos she'd be at far more risk of a heart attack.
Plus, as you've illustrated they lead to competition. Lipitor and Crestor are both patented, but due to generic competition they are under heavy price pressure. Consumers can get newer innovative medicines for only a little more than a cheap generic.
All your points are valid - ultimately it comes down to whether it is the job of society to help people in spite of themselves.
I agree with your point on antibiotics - this would be an externality that would be difficult to deal with in an open market for drugs.
I disagree with your point on supply shortages. Other than some initial surges in orders (which could be mitigated with some sort of phased deregulation) there is no reason to think that any drug could not be manufactured in sufficient quantity to meet demand as long as the price is free to float. We don't have quotas on buying gas to prevent people from spending a fortune on it and then just burning it in their backyards. Likewise, if I want to buy gauze pads at Walmart and throw them away it isn't going to cause a huge shortage. People will naturally avoid wasting things, especially when they cost money. If demand surges briefly then prices can rise, and those who need drugs for life-threatening conditions will be the only ones paying for them. After a short time supply will increase and prices will fall.
I'm still not convinced that deregulating perscription drug access isn't the right move. That doesn't mean getting rid of the FDA - I'm all for safe and effective drugs (even though we allow thousands of supplements to bypass these rules).
That's hardly the same thing. If it lowers it and is a different drug, that's fine.
That's how the current system works. You don't get 14 patents for the same molecule. It is pretty odd to even get 2 patents for the same molecule, and I can agree with steps to control this in the relatively rare situations where this happens.
(I'll admit I don't have time to do an in-depth bit of research on what these two drugs are, so I'm assuming they're 2 different chemicals)
They are in fact different chemicals. You don't assign different generic names to the same compound, even if it is used for multiple purposes.
If it does what it does and does it more effectively, odds are that it has a different mechanism, and therefore is unique.
In this case I do not believe that the newer drugs use a different mechanism. They just use the same mechanism more effectively. Typically newer drugs are more selective, have better pharmacokinetic properties (half-life, etc), and cause fewer side effects.
I don't follow how two different drugs lowering cholesterol, for instance, need to reference each other at all in the brief description.
In this case there is about a 10-year gap in technology - both drugs do the same thing, but the newer drug works much better and almost nobody takes the older drug as a result. The newer drug still cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, and this probably would not have happened without a patent - especially when there is already another drug on the market (even if the other drug is far inferior). Without a patent you'd probably only get a year to try to recoup your investment - and even the biggest blockbusters typically take more than a year to recoup their R&D costs, since doctors rarely switch all their patients to a new drug the day it comes out (and this is a good thing - a little conservatism isn't a bad thing where lives are concerned).
Witness the large amounts of "cross-licensing" schemes in the software world for an example of how patents are being devalued.
Hey, I'm all for banning software patents. With software anybody in their living room can do R&D, and development costs are measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, to a few million. Copyright law is sufficient to protect software investments - since a copycat company needs to spend about as much as the innovator to catch up. With drugs it is far different - development costs are measured in hundreds of millions of dollars, and a copycat company need only spend a very small fraction of that to catch up. As a result, if drugs weren't patented everybody would sit and wait for somebody else to do the hard work and then reap the rewards - except nobody would do the hard work.
The only way you're going to be able to have patent-free medicines is to greatly reduce the sunk costs associated with developing them. That either means a huge change in regulation (allow companies to put drugs on the market without human safety data), or some huge increase in technology (allowing safety data to be collected without clinical trials). Everybody would love the latter, but until it arrives I'm not sure we really want to accept the former.
The only other thing that would work is government-subsidized R&D - but the cost of that would be rather large, and I'm not convinced it would work. However, there is no need to abolish patents to try that out - just go ahead and spend on R&D with the stipulation that any discovered molecules must enter the public domain. Then you can see how it works in practice while letting private industry maintain the status quo...
(I was finally forced to switch away from ReiserFS because Myth and ReiserFS do not cooperate well, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that XFS is actually more responsive, even though (like most filesystems) it wastes a lot of storage space.)
Ok, drifting slightly offtopic I admit - but I am using xfs for myth (for the same reasons - plus small files aren't a big issue with digital video). I'm about to migrate everything over to ext3 for a few reasons:
1. Better support in linux in general.
2. Can be resized larger OR SMALLER. (Though I admit the online resizing of xfs is great.)
3. Better data protection with its journal behavior.
4. XFS zeros out any open file in the event of a crash. When I discovered this behavior I IMMEDIATELY migrated everything but myth off of it (I don't have hundreds of gigs of spare space, so myth will take a little longer).
xfs has its uses, but I'm not thrilled about what I've read so far in terms of data reliability, and I'd like the flexibility to resize in either direction (with lvm it is nice to be able to repartition on demand).
Uh, what is the worst that could happen? People would kill themselves. A victimless crime.
If somebody wants to kill themselves that is none of my business. Sure, I'd give them some free advice that if they have a serious problem they might want to talk to a doctor about it, but in the end if they just want to take some pills why should that be illegal?
I laugh even more at the thought that it is illegal to dispense vetrinary medicine without a prescription. This is just a nanny-state mentality - we can't let people suffer the harm of a lost pet - better to put the pet to sleep since nobody can afford to pay thousands for treatment.
What's a fair price for a drug that can increase health and prevent death?
Didn't you read the article - FREE! Life is too precious to require people to pay money to prolong it.
Now get out their and spend your money on drug R&D!
But people assume the latest and greatest is better and are prepared to pay more.
And what is wrong about that? If they have money to burn and want to burn it, why stop them? The same thing causes people to buy a BMW when a Toyota would get them to work just fine.
No insurance company would pay for a drug that offered no new beneifts over something that was available over-the-counter. And that is why Clarinex is only bringing in a fraction of what Claritin used to make.
The people who buy stuff like Clarinex aren't the same people deciding whether to buy medicine or food.
Should only the FIRST drug that lowers cholesterol be patentable? Should the rest not have billions of R&D spending? What happens if you are allergic to the first drug, and there are no others. What if some other drug works 10 times as well - is that not innovative. How about 5X, or 2X, or 1.5X - where do you draw the line?
If you don't want to take "me-too" drugs then don't - the originals are all still available. Why take atorvastatin (Mevacor) when you can take lovastatin (Crestor) - other than the fact that the former works much better and causes fewer side effects. If that wasn't worth the R&D investment and the extra $5/pill then just take your chances with the older technology.
Nobody is forced to take expensive medicines. They take them because they work better. If people want to spend more money to get safer and better drugs, why shouldn't they be allowed to do so? If you get rid of the patents on me-too drugs then there won't be many of them, and you'll be stuck with lovastatin when you could have atorvastatin.
And often those me-too drugs are the result of competition. Two companies race to the market, one beats the other by two weeks - should the loser not get a patent at all and lose ALL of their investment? The end-result of that is that whoever is behind just drops the drug much ealier in development and works on something else, and then instead of having two pills on the market for a condition you have one - and guess what that does to prices? Right now if huge-insurance-company doesn't like the price on Crestor they can make a deal with Pfizer and switch all their customers to Lipitor, and vice-versa. This keeps prices down. If you get rid of the me-too drugs then you create total monopolies, rather than competitive ones. That certainly won't make drugs any cheaper!
Uh, they do. Just look at the patent records, and the marketing records, and see what drugs show up in one and not the other.
Sure, not all the details are published, but for late-stage failures (the ones that would cost a fortune if duplicated) everything tends to be very public, which is why companies with late-stage failures tend to have their stock tank.
Doctor: Would you like to volunteer for this clinical trial?
:)
Patient: Sure, what are you giving me and what will it do for me?
Doctor: No idea - the guys running the trial can't do either. The last doctor who asked too many questions was shot by the mob.
Sounds like a good idea to me...
The reason we have patents is so that companies can do business legally have have legal recourse when somebody breaks confidentiality. If there were no patent then anybody could sell trade secrets without fear of legal harm.
In order to conduct business in pharma you have to tell thousands of people what your drug is, what it does, and often some details about how you go about making it. This is important for regulatory purposes among others (so that countries can decide whether to let you do the trials).
Just like with processors, there is a large enough cost of entry for medicine manufacturing that patent protection is not going to be the prime motivation for innovation.
Uh, there isn't that much cost of entry at all. When somebody brings a new medicine to the market you just buy a bottle of the pills for $100 or whatever. Then you pull out the prescribing info which contains the molecular formula and a list of ingredients for the formulation. It might take you six months to come up with a process for making the molecule, and the rest is pretty trivial. Six months later you have a marketing application filed in the US (the only country that matters), and you're working on the other countries. You might spend a few million dollars total in the process.
Meanwhile the go-first company has spent a fortune on advertising making the market ripe. The drug is finally ramping up to a point where it looks like 100 million pills a year might be sold soon. That would be a blockbuster by today's standards. You come in and offer those pills for 5 cents above marginal cost, making millions of dollars per year - you recoup your "R&D" costs in less than a year.
Hundreds of companies run on exactly this business model, but right now they can't step in until after a patent expires. Without patents they would do it on day one.
It costs a whole lot more to develop a new drug than a new CPU, and it costs a whole lot less to replicate it.
When was the last time a big Pharma ran a net loss, let alone went bankrupt? If they're in the business of spending money to save lives, that should happen a lot more often.
Uh, why? Is there some reason that the business of saving lives should be unprofitable. Is it a sin to make money while saving a life? Should somebody who is smart and intelligent avoid saving lives at all costs since it will be likely to result in personal bankruptcy? Should people study science "only for the love of science" and not because they'd like to be able to afford to raise a family?
There is an easy way to tell what somebody considers important - just look at where they invest their time and their money. If they say that saving lives is important, but devote neither time nor money to it, then their real attitude is that they consider impressing people by talking about saving lives is important (since that is what they are actually spending their time on).
When a nation says that it is willing to spend $30 on a sports ticket, but it is unwilling to spend $5 to prolong the life of a diabetic by a single day, then it is saying that entertainment is more valuable than a person's life. I find it ironic that people decry the pharmaceutical industry with the accusation that they trade dollars for lives, and yet those same people aren't willing to kick in the bucks necessary to actually save those lives themselves. Instead we all sit around and try to imagine a world where hundreds of scientists would all mobilize to cure diseases while making $5 per hour, and where thousands of volunteers would try out new medicines without being compensated at all, and where doctors around the world would participate in clinical trials without compensation (this last category being one of the costliest aspects of drug development).
The drug industry is a competitive industry - it is unlikely that productivity would rise in the absence of patents, and it is very plausible that it would drop sharply.
In any case, there is no need to repeal patents to have public medicine - simply direct the NIH to develop unpatented drugs and see what happens. You can then look at the costs and benefits and see if this model makes sense, while the private drug industry maintains the status quo. If it does make sense, ramp up the public spending, and let the private industry do what it does now - people will have hundreds of "free" drugs to choose from (assuming the public process works), while still having a number of expensive ones to choose from as well. Then the market can decide. If the public process doesn't work out so well then we haven't lost anything. If the public process can't compete on its own merits, then simply abolishing private R&D wouldn't have solved the real problem.
But enter the market with a generic of a drug formerly in a superbowl ad and the big company lawyers will sue you into submission.
Uh, last time I checked you could get generic loratadine in every Walmart in the country. Claritin certainly was highly advertised.
Simvastatin is available generically despite the fact that Zocor was once the biggest-selling drug around. It has caused a price drop on all statins as a result.
Tons of generic medicines make it on the market without issue. There are a few scumbag innovators who tend to use legal loopholes, but these are more the exception than the rule, and I'd gladly support legislation to punish this sort of activity. Fair is fair - if a company wants to develop a drug in exchange for a patent of limited duration that sounds like a fair deal, but when the time runs out then the compound should enter the public domain. After 15 years nobody should be screaming about unpaid R&D costs...
Because as I understand it, new drugs rarely offer "no additional benefit".
Well, wasn't that the whole point of the rant? If the new drugs do offer additional benefits, then shouldn't we be encouraging them to be made?
Nobody forces anybody to take a pill. If the pills being discovered today are not much better than the ones from 10 years ago, then insurance companies would refuse to pay for them. The 10-year-old pills are FAR cheaper, and often are cheaper in the US than elsewhere.
You can't have it both ways. Personally, I think that me-too drugs are great for consumers. They create competition, which means lower prices (when two companies make similar drugs they have to compete for customers). Additionally, if you're allergic or resistant to a drug you should be thankful that some evil pharma company decided to come up with a redundant molecule...
And the next thing you know a copy of an IEEE spec will cost you $10,000 and will be heavily copy-protected with all kinds of rewards to turn in people around the office that photocopy them.
One thing that bugs me to death is government-mandated use of non-open standards (ie ones you can't access without paying a fee).
Just try and post the National Electric Code on your website and see what happens.
Laws should be free for anyone to read - you should not have to pay to understand the laws that you will be punished if you violate.
Ok, I'll have to beg forgiveness about not knowing about these projects. Then again, it might be because I don't know of a single application that supports them.
Hmm - checking my gentoo portage repository about the only things that do are programming libraries and languages.
Once programmers start using unix odbc then perhaps I'll consider using it as well. Is there some reason nobody is? Just about everything on windows uses it (but not everything - this issue is by no means restricted to linux and we have an app that only runs on one specific (old) version of Oracle because the coders thought it wise to use all kinds of proprietary extensions).
ANSI SQL is your friend...
I've been wanting to switch to postgres for a long time, but do you know what the main thing is that is holding me back?
THERE IS NO ODBC FOR LINUX (or equivalent).
Why should apps that use a db be linked against libraries that are db-specific? Why not make everything modular. Then developers can stick to ANSI SQL and let the user pick whatever database they want (mysql, posgres, oracle, sql-server, access, whatever).
Right now all of my apps support mysql, and a few support postgres. So either I run two database servers and maintain/upgrade/understand both of them, or I just run mysql and hope that the app devs are good since the DB won't protect them if they want to break their referential integrity.
Mysql has come a long way, though, and it concerns me less than I used to. Before I had to cringe whenever I went to their website and was treated to articles that amounted to "well, transactions are overrated anyway - they slow everything down". Well, sure, but what exactly is the point of using a database in the first place?
Uh, I'd be shocked if Humulin is no longer readily available. The reason nobody sells animal insulin is that it is expensive to make, and prone to causing allergies and other problems due to the fact that it isn't human.
Humulin is recombinantly produced human insulin and is completely identical to what your body naturally makes (well, if you aren't type-1 diabetic anyway).
The reason your mother was moved to multiple shots was not due to some deficiency in recombinant and chemically-modified insulin, but rather in order to obtain better controls over blood sugar levels. Two shots of regular insulin leads to peaks and valleys in sugar levels.
If you just want fewer shots per day tell your mother to ask about Lantus, which is an insulin derivative designed to maintain a steady state over 24 hours. That can be given once per day to control basal insulin levels. You will still get glucose peaks after meals since the level of insulin is remaining constant throughout the day. The solution to that is to supplement with fast-acting insulin analogs taken at meal time.
There are also lots of pills out there which can help with Type-2 diabetes when it isn't totally out of control. Some are helpful even when combined with insulin.
Type-1 diabetes can be controlled today as well as it was in the 80s with only one shot per day. However, the reason diabetics are getting many shots of various drugs is because it controls sugar much better, and this has been shown to improve life expectancy.
Disclaimer - I'm not a doctor, but my wife is diabetic and I'm a biochemist and naturally I'm interested in such things...
It is still the ultimate weak signal communication mode
Well, maybe without the assistance of a computer. I'm sure a digital technology with error correction would enable communications at lower power than morse. Morse is essentially a form of digital communications designed to be understood by a person. It also has the advantage that you could probably build a practical radio rig out of stuff you'd find lying around the house (unlike a computer).
I'll one-up you on that. I have an MS in Chemistry and I couldn't tell you the atomic weight of Tungsten, or even its Atomic number. I imagine that it is a transition metal, and if for some reason I was doing Tungsten chemistry I'd probably take the time to learn a heck of a lot more than fits in a 2cm square box.
/. didn't start out coding in java, and may not have ever taken a test, but I'm sure that quite a few have half of the normally-used classes memorized as well.
Sure, I have most of the abbreviations memorized, and weights/series memorized for the more common elements. And guess what - I didn't have to memorize them to pass a test! I'm sure that many reading
When I see kids being forced to cram atomic numbers for a chemistry exam I cringe. No wonder nobody goes into the sciences these days! Make them memorize some facts, and don't bother to worry about whether they understand why things work that way... Are we teaching them science (the process of advancing knowledge in a systematic way), or magic (reciting mysterious incantations carefully lest you end up a newt)?
I know a ham operator (extra class), and while he can key at 60WPM he tends to spend more time doing PACTOR/AMTOR these days, or using computer-assistance with the code. Actually, he has been trending away from operating at all since it seems like all the regulars are dying off (they just disappear and you don't hear about them again). It would seem that the FCC is doing the right thing in trying to transform the hobby.
Consider that 50 years ago ham radio was cutting edge. People who now build PCs and PHP applications used to build radios and operate networks/relays/repeaters. Now ham radio has the perception of being ancient technology (although I know that it doesn't have to be that way). Memorizing morse code is about as useful as requiring knowledge of x86 assembly to program a computer, or knowledge of UUCP email addresses to use gmail. That doesn't make either of those things useless - but they aren't essential either and if you want to study functional programming you won't find much use in memorizing indirect memory indexing modes.
Backend - records video, stores video, runs database.
Frontend - UI and plays video.
The only link between them is the network.
So yes, you need a video card and sound card on your frontend, or some other integrated solution that provides both. I'm using an epia front-end, which has integrated video with TV-out and SPDIF digital audio out.
Or if you want simple you can run the backend and frontend on a single box, but then you need a bigger box in the living room, and lots of cables/tuners/etc. I keep all the hardware in the office, and only have the frontend in the living room. Either way you can add additional front-ends in other rooms and even add additional backends to get more tuners.
So, if I use public key authentication, and the public key is then cracked, no problem, I've already used it to authenticate. The cracked key is now useless to the attacker.
Only if you can generate and communicate securely a new public key every time the link goes down. I guess it is possible in theory. Also - this assumes that you can't crack a public key in realtime - unlikely but theoretically possible. If an interceptor can crack asymmetric crypto quickly enough then you won't be able to spot him.
If you don't reauthenticate frequently there might also be attacks that depend on timing and switching the channel back and forth from a direct conneciton to an intercepted/retransmitted one. These could probably be defeated with good design (simultaneous key-exchange and authentication).
Keep in mind this was the 80s - back when many companies didn't spend nearly as much on employee safety. These days due to legal liabilities, superfund, and massive industrial disasters they spend a whole lot more, but brass wrenches might not have been so common back then, or otherwise available to meet some spec.
For all I know, it could have been a waste, but I've also learned not to jump to conclusions too quickly...
I heard a story from a friend about an order of Kimwipes (small lint-free wipes used in many lab applications - lens paper essentially). They ordered six boxes expecting to get six boxes the size of a tissue box. Instead they got six shipping boxes containing hundreds of tissue-sized boxes each. Every cabinet in the building got stuffed with Kimwipes...