That doesn't sound unreasonable - although I can imagine there being a lot of dispute over how the accounting works. Obviously the university will be wanting to show that it funded as much of the R&D as possible, and with researchers working on multiple projects I won't be surprised if every reasearcher spends 60 hours/week on every project on the books...:)
No, generally all of the drugs in a class are priced relatively closely,
Which is exactly what you'd expect if there was competition.
Last time I checked the gas stations in town charged about the same rates too, as did the various toothpaste vendors.
If there were only one source for a drug the price would be higher - competition results in lowering of prices to an efficient level - moderately close to cost.
Note that this is total cost - not marginal cost. That 5 cent pill cost a few hundred million dollars to R&D. That money gets amortized across every pill sold, plus a profit.
Now, due to regulation, the need for large specialized workforces, and demand for novel products pharma has high barriers to entry, so profit margins will be much higher than ballpoint pen vendors, but it isn't like 3 out of every 5 dollars you pay for a pill goes to some rich person.
Except, of course, for the people who can't afford some patented treatment because the lack of competition is keeping the price out of their reach. But who cares about them, right?
Uh, how many drugs are on the market without ANY competition? Most drugs compete with cheap medications - but people aren't satisfied with the cheap meds because the more expensive ones work better. But, would the more expensive meds exist if it weren't for the drug industry that developed them?
They take our money, use it to do research, and then keep the results for themselves. You and I and the rest of the taxpayers are getting screwed.
Uh, most drug company R&D isn't government subsidized. University R&D is a different story, and I'd tend to agree with your point there. However, the drug companies pay in gold for the ideas they buy, and pay in gold to develop them.
In any case, as I've suggested elsewhere there is a simple solution. Just have the NIH start a drug development program in competition with industry, and see how it works. No need to have price fixing, or abolish patents. If the NIH sees some compound that might cure cancer they can dump a few hundred million into clinical trials and see how it pans out. If it works the resulting drug would be released into the public domain and it would be cheaply available like aspirin is. If it doesn't work taxpayers can just foot the bill (well, they're doing that either way). The Europeans can continue to let the US taxpayers foot the R&D costs alone like they're doing currently.
If govt-funded R&D works then there will be lots of cheap drugs, and taxpayers won't mind the huge cost of the R&D. Those who hate the pharma industry can clap as their stocks fall until they're bought by the NIH. If it doesn't work taxpayers will just continue to buy $5 pills the way they are already doing, and nobody is the worse off except for some wasted tax money. And in the end we'll have an actual answer to the question of whether govt-funded drug R&D actually works - rather than endless conjecture.
No reason the public and private systems can't co-exist, and the private competition would probably only make the public system more likely to succeed...
Last time I looked (like on my monthly statement), a post-doc is a salaried position, and pretty well paid too.
Uh, maybe compared to the average college summer job, but post-docs are NOT well-paid by just about any market-based comparison. Most probably make around $30-40k annually - a fraction of what industry would pay a Ph.D. worker.
In a democratic society, the people would actually own what they pay for and would choose to use it for the good of the worlds population.
Then don't sell it! Just keep it in the NIH and develop it all the way to market. But don't sell a license to a company and then turn around and tell them that now that they've spent $500M developing it that you think their product should be priced just above marginal cost.
I don't understand why everybody calls for major overhauls of drug patents, etc. If govt funding is the key then just start up govt labs in competition with industry, and see which model works best in real life. If govt labs churn out dozens of drugs for 1/10th the price, then keep expanding the program. If not then scrap it. In the meantime, just let the drug industry maintain the status quo - they'll die out quickly enough if the govt saves the day, and if the govt falls flat on its face at least we'll still have expensive new drugs rather than no new drugs.
While public funds pay for a lot of medical research, most of the practical development costs are borne by private industry. Most of the leads paid for by taxpayers don't work out, and yet a lot of money gets spent finding that out. When drugs do work out they bear the cost of the ones that didn't. Even if you hand a drug company a compound that is likely to work, it still costs hundreds of millions of dollars to do the clinical trials necessary to sell it legally.
I'm not convinced that a publicly-funded model will work. But go ahead and try it - you could find worse ways to spend a few billion dollars than trying to save lives. And if it works then the program can be expanded to provide cheap drugs for everyone.
Just look at the post office - we don't ban UPS and Fedex just because they make people not want to use express mail - instead we encourage the competition and end up with a federal agency that is half-decently run. If the government solution were the best one nobody would buy from anybody else, but on the other hand there is still cheap mail service for people who don't rate a corporate account with Fedex, and everybody gets a mailbox close to home if not at home.
and that percentage of any profit derrived from the patent should be given back to the grant giving agency to fund future research,
Ok, suppose some compound was discovered which showed some promise as a lead for a cure for cancer. It was 100% government funded. Are you suggesting that 100% of any profits made from the compound be surrendered to the government? Nobody would manufacture it even if every single step of the drug R&D process was completely paid for - even if the pills cost 5 cents to make and sold for $500 dollars you couldn't make a cent from it.
The reality is that when an academic group gets a lead on a possible therapeutic advance, it is often just a proof-of-concept idea, or maybe the discovery of a new pathway or enzyme that might be a target. Sure, this is of tremendous value to discovering a cure for some disease, but much work must be done to actually come up with a drug. Even if a compound cures cancer in mice it will most likely turn out to not work in people, or if it does work it will probably only work with a limited amount of efficacy and only after a lot of tinkering. Once you actually have a decent candidate you can then go ahead and spend a few hundred million dollars to do a clinical trial to find out if it even works.
So, even if you're "just given" the cure for cancer that "freebie" ends up costing you at least a few hudred million dollars (especially if you include the number of other "freebies" that you spent good money on and which didn't pan out). Now you can go ahead and start selling your product, except that since the university that gave the concept to you also gave it to 15 other companies you're in competition right out of the gate. Now, those other 15 companies were a lot smarter - they didn't send a dime on the drug - they just waited to see what the outcome of the clinical trials were. They immediately start selling pills for 20 cents each and make a killing, while the company with hundreds of millions in sunk costs just loses its investment.
If you want to have private industry develop drugs, then you need to reward companies that innovate and spend money on R&D, as opposed to companies that just sit around to reap the rewards of work done by others.
Now, if you want to government fund the ENTIRE drug development process that might be feasible, and then you can just outsource the actual manufacture and get cheap drugs. But there are a few potential drawbacks with this system:
1. You have a single budget for all drug R&D for the nation. That budget tends to get trimmed from time to time (just look at NASA). 2. You don't have much accountability for how that drug R&D money is spent. Expect 50% of it to go to AIDS, of course. Expect about 40% to go to various bureaucrats/preferred-vendors/etc. Right now NIH doesn't have as much of this trouble because its budget is relatively small - when you make it equal to the pharma industry on top of what it does now it will become ripe for corruption. 3. I'm assuming that all this is going to end up being done by the US government, since nobody else seems to do much drug development these days. So, US taxpayers are essentially paying for the world's drug R&D. I'm sure the EU will only be happy to take advantage of the US discoveries though. 4. Scientists working on drug R&D won't get paid nearly as well as they do now, and pay will be based more on seniority than merit (typical govt practice). The best and brightest next generation of potential-scientists will find better things to do with their time.
In any case, there is a simple way to try out government drug R&D without killing the pharma industry. Just create an agency to do the work, and start doing it. When an academic lab is taking bids on a patent the govt could bid and buy the rights for the public, and then develop the drug to completion. Industry would develop some drugs which would be sold under the current system, govt would develop drugs that would be very c
but a for-profit company is unlikely to voluntarily do anything that could imaginably restrict their profits, even if only by a small amount.
I agree that putting a clause as you suggest in the licensing agreement probably wouldn't lower the value of the agreement to a pharma company. However, I disagree that companies won't do ANYTHING voluntarily that would restrict their profits. Most major pharma outfits sell products in the 3rd world for little to no profit - and often at a loss. In part this is to avoid the creation of a 3rd-world black market that could trickle back into the 1st world. Also, in part this helps big pharma outfits to recruit top researchers who care about such things.
I'll agree to that. There was a large-scale project at work which was massively increased in scope from previous attempts that failed, pitched to finish in less than a year, and ended up being a conglomeration of effort from multiple vendors and their various recommended consultants to put it all together. Leadership on this project was highly politicized and not terribly respected technically.
The company had a number of decent project managers who might have been able to make something of it - sure there was no way it would be perfect or get done on the pitched timeline, but maybe it might deliver some value. Forget it though - anybody who had any skills whatsoever did everything they could to stay off the project - leaving the work to those who couldn't get a job elsewhere. The end result was massive cost overruns, a barely-functioning system that was inflexible and very costly to adapt to changing business needs, highly demoralized workers, etc... But it was certainly branded as a success - gotta have something to show for it all!
It is people who put together IT projects, and if you start out with people who have no proven track record with a huge project and run it on politics, and don't ask yourself why all the skilled developers are staying away, then you're going to fail...
I doubt that a process method would be used - they're easy to work around. Nobody spends hundreds of millions of dollars on something that can be easily circumvented.
All the clinical research will probably be performed on a substantially-different molecule that can be patented which does the same thing. The compound studied in this article will probably never be tested for safety or efficacy, unless it is publicly funded.
The biggest expense by far in drug development is the clinical trials, so unless these are performed by the public they just won't happen on a molecule that is in the public domain...
Nobody in his right mind would grade alone, even for money.
Anybody will do just about anything for money - it is just a matter of setting the right price.
If I came up with a grueling grading project that would make you rip your hair out for three weeks without breaks for anything but eating and sleeping, and then offerend you $172 million to perform the work, I'm sure you'd sign up in a heartbeat.
So, the real question isn't whether a capitalistic market can provide a service that we want, rather the question is how much we really want the service in the first place and are we willing to pay for it?
Perhaps if people were able to choose then doctors would have incentive to take the time to provide good service? Staying up on the latest literature takes work - it is much easier to just go into work, see patients, and collect a paycheck. Nobody pays doctors to take the time to care. I was amazed when I had a talk with a doctor in a hospital who was consulting with a friend and they were able to coherently explain the pros and cons of various diabetes treatments rather than just prescribe whatever the insurance preferred.
If you had a choice then doctors would work so that you would choose them, and those who wouldn't bother would go out of business.
Such a system is also much more egalitarian, as it makes good health care accessible to more people. As in all systems those who are willing to pay more get the better care. Now, I'm not 100% sure but I'm guessing that it is illegal to pay doctors in the UK money (most socialist systems have such policies so that they retain the appearance of being socialist). However, the fact is that people willing to pay more get better care in any system - they just don't measure that pay in pounds. Perhaps it is measured in how many days you're willing to spend standing in a line outside the office. Or, perhaps it is measured in how much you're able to influence a local politician to be able to get better care (the old Soviet system). But make no mistake, those who are better able to pay will ALWAYS get better care - Soviet Russia was just as capitalistic as the US, they just measured things in influence instead of rubles.
I'd argue that instead of running the system on bribes people will get better care if you just run the system on cash and stop pretending that everybody is ever treated equally. The government can still offer assistance with payment if you want to be socialistic, but the poor will actually get better care if you let the rich get the best possible care.
A previous post indicated that the problem with storing just an ID number on the passport and querying the rest of the info from a central DB is the problem of giving the whole world access to that DB.
There is a solution:
1. ID reader queries chip to obtain nation of origin. 2. ID reader presents a certificate from the owner with the ID of the reader to the nation of origin, requesting permission to read the passport. Nation of origin authenticates request and provides signed packet with reader ID, valid authorization time range, timestamp, and certificate of nation of origin. This approves that the nation of origin recognizes the reader as a valid one for reading the passports. 3. Reader caches #2 to reduce traffic, and presents this packet to the passport. The passport verifies that the ID reader is approved to query the passport by its nation of origin. 4. Passport returns its ID, certificate, and signed permission to query with some expiration date encoded. 5. Reader presents #4 to nation of origin to query its database. This proves that the passport is physically present. 6. Nation of origin returns signed database entry.
Quick objections might be that this sounds like a lot of round trips, but all but one of these trips could be cached (the reader could be given permission to query passports for a day or more at a time). Another objection might be that every reader would need to get permission from every nation, but this is also not the case - there merely needs to be a chain of trust. So, the US could grant France access to its passports, and then France could delegate access to individual readers.
Various pros and cons exist and I think the actual-implemented solution is not a horrible one. I just wanted to show that a central DB doesn't have to be impossible-to-secure.
This is a general consequence of the US system of government with separate branches. In most democracies the legislature is also the head of the executive branch, and the chief executive serves at the pleasure of parliament.
In the US system the congress makes laws, and the president enforces them. The courts determine if laws were broken and the president enforces the will of the courts. The issue is when the president essentially refuses to listen to the other bodies - ultimately it is the president that controls the military, FBI, and prison system. Congress can say "release everybody from Gitmo", and ultimately it comes down to the fact that the congressmen are in Washington, and Gitmo is in Cuba, and whoever runs the base ultimately decides who they're going to listen to.
In theory if Congress feels the president is neglecting his duty to enforce the law they can move to impeach him. In Europe this is common - just a vote of no-confidence. In the US it is very rare, and the president is directly elected.
Both systems have their pros and cons, and depending on the side you take the current issue could be construed as either. The advantage of the European system is that at least you know who is ultimately in charge - that would be the MPs.
Keep in mind that this is a country that still hasn't figured out separation of church and state...
Greece is generally democratic, but it isn't really a towering symbol of European freedom. So, an article like this should hardly be surprising, when stuff almost as bad as this happens occasionally in the US/UK/Germany/etc.
Most JRE/JDK packages include a netscape plugin. Java has been available 64-bit since the dawn of amd64, but it is debatable how read it is for prime time in general (I'm sure things have improved since the last time I bothered installing it).
So, during the period of time before the significant price drop, the expectation is that thousands of uninsured diabetics will die early, and others without clear coverage for their monthly doses will develop secondary morbidities (feet, eyes, circulatory system...) that could otherwise have been prevented.
Absolutely true. It is also absolutely true that the money most people spend on cable could be used to feed a 3rd-world neighborhood. Does that mean that we should ban TV?
The wealthy will ALWAYS be better cared for than the poor. However, as a result of this new medication in 10 years EVERYBODY will have cheap access to a new medicine that otherwise might not exist - at least not as soon.
Most proposals to make drugs cheaper for everybody will also make drugs like this less likely to be developed, or less likely to be rushed to market. Which is better - saving rich people now and poor people in 10 years, or saving everybody at the same time in 15 years?
The poor will NEVER be as well off as the rich in any unit of measure - education, health, TV-size, car-horsepower, beauty-of-spouses, etc. This has been true in every society - whether capitalist, communist, or socialist.
The question isn't whether things can be made fair - they can't. The question is what system brings the poor quality medicines at affordable prices the fastest. I'd argue that it would be a system that gives first access to the rich, who can actually afford to fund such R&D.
How is an advertiser to determine whether an advertisement is working? By your standards TV advertising is worthless, as nobody clicks through the ads and buys anything.
An ad on youtube has value even if NOBODY EVER clicks on it. The ad is still seen my millions of people, and those people are more likely to buy a particular product when they're out in the real world.
They are responsible for their bottom line, and in the case of Entergy, concealing missing fuel rods happens to be profitable.
I can't say I'm intimately familiar with this story - but I did a little searching online. According to the NRC there doesn't seem to be any kind of foul play involved here. They apparently did an inspection and during auditing they found a discrepancy in the inventory. Later investigation uncovered the missing material in a different container. The material was a bit of an oddity as it did not fit into the standard containers, so it is understandable how stuff like this could get mixed up in a large inventory. That doesn't make it OK, but the fact is that the regulators did in fact spot the issue, make it public, and then ensure the issue was resolved. This is exactly what they should be doing.
Maybe there is more to the story than what was on the NRC website, but searching around there doesn't seem to be. Apparently the site was owned by a previous owner, who Entergy ended up suing to try to get them to pay for the fuel rod hunt (which seems appropriate).
Don't get me wrong - accounting for high level radioactive waste is important, and somebody dropped the ball here. However, it doesn't seem like the situation was mishandled, and it seems like the industry took the situation seriously. If they didn't I'd be all for making them pay dearly for it.
What is the safest way to sequester CO2? Sure, breathing a little of it in won't hurt you at all. On the other hand, dumping trillions of tons of it into the atmosphere WILL cause huge problems.
CO2 is the largest form of waste generated by most forms of power generation. We just don't notice it since we dump it into the air. It isn't really any safer than plutonium in the amounts that we release it - it is just a lot easier to not notice.
Plus, you would imagine that a few things have been learned in the 60 years since Hanford was built.
Yeah, like it is better to have a government agency supervising private industry and keeping them in line than it is to have a government operation under 300 layers of secrecy that nobody is allowed to even look at.
The Hanford mess is a result of nobody bothering to care for decades about management of waste on the site. I heard a talk by somebody who had some involvement with the cleanup efforts. Apparently over the many years of operation all kinds of stuff was pumped into tanks, and records of what that stuff was were not kept accurately. When sludge from the tanks was sent out for analysis it was done in a careless manner - without even rudimentary precautions like sending the same samples to independant labs for duplicate testing.
Basically it was run like a government operation where nobody could get in trouble for making a mess, and unsurprisingly a huge mess resulted. Additionally during the cold war there was the genuine concern that if we had fewer bombs than the Russians it might result in an enemy first strike - so in some sense they might have been right to make safety priority #2 (but there is no excuse for not doing a lot better than they did). After all, an actual nuclear war would have made the leaking tanks at Hanford look like a VERY minor problem.
Bottom line - large-scale nuclear power generation facilities require heavy oversight - by folks who are more interested in exposing problems than covering them up. There is no reason to ban them entirely - any industry has the potential to create disaster (just look at Bhopal) - like anything you just need to make sure that it is cheaper to be safe than to be unsafe.
Cohesive codebase is great for the software vendor, not necessarily good for the software user.
At work we of course pay out the nose for support contracts from various software vendors. Now, I have a love and hate relationship with two vendors, let's call them A and B:
A - Releases new verions and modular code for their product. However, ALL bugs are fixed in patches (often in large roll-up or service-pack style patches as well as individual-bug patches). So, if I'm running version 8.3 when 10.7 is the lastest and greatest I can get a patch for a bug I discover. Now, they're not very proactive about finding bugs in 8.3, but if you report them they'll fix them. (Not much issue with security-related bugs in this kind of app.)
B - Releases new versions only. Report a bug, they're right on it, and you can upgrade to the fixed version free of charge. If you're running version 8.3 they'll be happy to sell you consulting servies to get 10.7 up and running, and you probably won't spend more than a dozen man months testing everything out with the million changes between the versions.
Now, both vendors are fixing their bugs, and both provide "free" upgrades. The problem is that if I have one bug that is causing me headaches I'd rather just fix that bug than deploy a new version of the software, which not only fixes the bug but adds 85 bells and whistles, changes the backend-arch, has a new GUI, and does who knows what else. Oh, it probably comes with a minor data migration effort as an added bonus.
If my users need the latest bells and whistles I'll look at cost/benefits and give them an upgrade if it makes sense. If my users just need a bug fixed I'd rather just fix that one bug and be able to do an hour of regression testing rather than a full-fledged development project.
People like me go with distros like Debian stable in these environments. At home I run Gentoo - if I needed a linux server at work it would be Debian stable or something analogous. I'll upgrade apps when I want to upgrade them, not when the distro decides to make enhancements. The debian maintainers are of like mind, so I'd be more inclined to trust them than somebody who pushes out a new window manager every two months. I have better things to do than regression test 500 changes every week...
Depends on application. I'm using xfs for just about everything these days. One thing it does REALLY well is deletion of large files (multiple GB) - I run mythtv and that happens quite a bit - often while blocking user input. What can take 20 seconds in ext3 takes less that one second in xfs.
The main gripe I've heard about xfs is that it tends to delay writes quite a bit - so you can get in trouble if you lose power.
As far as Reiser goes - well, I'm running on amd64 and I like keeping my data intact...:)
Uh, why are you accepting mail at all? Why not just get a list of the 5 servers used by your friends and whitelist those?
Presumably you're accepting mail because you are servicing people who want to get mail. You should ask them if they have any desire to get mail from technically-inclined folks who might run a mailserver on their DSL modem...
Uh, maybe there are companies somewhere in scale between Honda and Aunt Bessie's snack shack? Using their gmail account to send corporate mail might not be the right solution, but buying an OC-192 line into MAE East might be overkill.
There are lots of anti-spam technologies that don't make it tremendously difficult to actually send normal mail from a small shop.
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That doesn't sound unreasonable - although I can imagine there being a lot of dispute over how the accounting works. Obviously the university will be wanting to show that it funded as much of the R&D as possible, and with researchers working on multiple projects I won't be surprised if every reasearcher spends 60 hours/week on every project on the books... :)
No, generally all of the drugs in a class are priced relatively closely,
Which is exactly what you'd expect if there was competition.
Last time I checked the gas stations in town charged about the same rates too, as did the various toothpaste vendors.
If there were only one source for a drug the price would be higher - competition results in lowering of prices to an efficient level - moderately close to cost.
Note that this is total cost - not marginal cost. That 5 cent pill cost a few hundred million dollars to R&D. That money gets amortized across every pill sold, plus a profit.
Now, due to regulation, the need for large specialized workforces, and demand for novel products pharma has high barriers to entry, so profit margins will be much higher than ballpoint pen vendors, but it isn't like 3 out of every 5 dollars you pay for a pill goes to some rich person.
Except, of course, for the people who can't afford some patented treatment because the lack of competition is keeping the price out of their reach. But who cares about them, right?
Uh, how many drugs are on the market without ANY competition? Most drugs compete with cheap medications - but people aren't satisfied with the cheap meds because the more expensive ones work better. But, would the more expensive meds exist if it weren't for the drug industry that developed them?
They take our money, use it to do research, and then keep the results for themselves. You and I and the rest of the taxpayers are getting screwed.
Uh, most drug company R&D isn't government subsidized. University R&D is a different story, and I'd tend to agree with your point there. However, the drug companies pay in gold for the ideas they buy, and pay in gold to develop them.
In any case, as I've suggested elsewhere there is a simple solution. Just have the NIH start a drug development program in competition with industry, and see how it works. No need to have price fixing, or abolish patents. If the NIH sees some compound that might cure cancer they can dump a few hundred million into clinical trials and see how it pans out. If it works the resulting drug would be released into the public domain and it would be cheaply available like aspirin is. If it doesn't work taxpayers can just foot the bill (well, they're doing that either way). The Europeans can continue to let the US taxpayers foot the R&D costs alone like they're doing currently.
If govt-funded R&D works then there will be lots of cheap drugs, and taxpayers won't mind the huge cost of the R&D. Those who hate the pharma industry can clap as their stocks fall until they're bought by the NIH. If it doesn't work taxpayers will just continue to buy $5 pills the way they are already doing, and nobody is the worse off except for some wasted tax money. And in the end we'll have an actual answer to the question of whether govt-funded drug R&D actually works - rather than endless conjecture.
No reason the public and private systems can't co-exist, and the private competition would probably only make the public system more likely to succeed...
Last time I looked (like on my monthly statement), a post-doc is a salaried position, and pretty well paid too.
Uh, maybe compared to the average college summer job, but post-docs are NOT well-paid by just about any market-based comparison. Most probably make around $30-40k annually - a fraction of what industry would pay a Ph.D. worker.
In a democratic society, the people would actually own what they pay for and would choose to use it for the good of the worlds population.
Then don't sell it! Just keep it in the NIH and develop it all the way to market. But don't sell a license to a company and then turn around and tell them that now that they've spent $500M developing it that you think their product should be priced just above marginal cost.
I don't understand why everybody calls for major overhauls of drug patents, etc. If govt funding is the key then just start up govt labs in competition with industry, and see which model works best in real life. If govt labs churn out dozens of drugs for 1/10th the price, then keep expanding the program. If not then scrap it. In the meantime, just let the drug industry maintain the status quo - they'll die out quickly enough if the govt saves the day, and if the govt falls flat on its face at least we'll still have expensive new drugs rather than no new drugs.
While public funds pay for a lot of medical research, most of the practical development costs are borne by private industry. Most of the leads paid for by taxpayers don't work out, and yet a lot of money gets spent finding that out. When drugs do work out they bear the cost of the ones that didn't. Even if you hand a drug company a compound that is likely to work, it still costs hundreds of millions of dollars to do the clinical trials necessary to sell it legally.
I'm not convinced that a publicly-funded model will work. But go ahead and try it - you could find worse ways to spend a few billion dollars than trying to save lives. And if it works then the program can be expanded to provide cheap drugs for everyone.
Just look at the post office - we don't ban UPS and Fedex just because they make people not want to use express mail - instead we encourage the competition and end up with a federal agency that is half-decently run. If the government solution were the best one nobody would buy from anybody else, but on the other hand there is still cheap mail service for people who don't rate a corporate account with Fedex, and everybody gets a mailbox close to home if not at home.
and that percentage of any profit derrived from the patent should be given back to the grant giving agency to fund future research,
Ok, suppose some compound was discovered which showed some promise as a lead for a cure for cancer. It was 100% government funded. Are you suggesting that 100% of any profits made from the compound be surrendered to the government? Nobody would manufacture it even if every single step of the drug R&D process was completely paid for - even if the pills cost 5 cents to make and sold for $500 dollars you couldn't make a cent from it.
The reality is that when an academic group gets a lead on a possible therapeutic advance, it is often just a proof-of-concept idea, or maybe the discovery of a new pathway or enzyme that might be a target. Sure, this is of tremendous value to discovering a cure for some disease, but much work must be done to actually come up with a drug. Even if a compound cures cancer in mice it will most likely turn out to not work in people, or if it does work it will probably only work with a limited amount of efficacy and only after a lot of tinkering. Once you actually have a decent candidate you can then go ahead and spend a few hundred million dollars to do a clinical trial to find out if it even works.
So, even if you're "just given" the cure for cancer that "freebie" ends up costing you at least a few hudred million dollars (especially if you include the number of other "freebies" that you spent good money on and which didn't pan out). Now you can go ahead and start selling your product, except that since the university that gave the concept to you also gave it to 15 other companies you're in competition right out of the gate. Now, those other 15 companies were a lot smarter - they didn't send a dime on the drug - they just waited to see what the outcome of the clinical trials were. They immediately start selling pills for 20 cents each and make a killing, while the company with hundreds of millions in sunk costs just loses its investment.
If you want to have private industry develop drugs, then you need to reward companies that innovate and spend money on R&D, as opposed to companies that just sit around to reap the rewards of work done by others.
Now, if you want to government fund the ENTIRE drug development process that might be feasible, and then you can just outsource the actual manufacture and get cheap drugs. But there are a few potential drawbacks with this system:
1. You have a single budget for all drug R&D for the nation. That budget tends to get trimmed from time to time (just look at NASA).
2. You don't have much accountability for how that drug R&D money is spent. Expect 50% of it to go to AIDS, of course. Expect about 40% to go to various bureaucrats/preferred-vendors/etc. Right now NIH doesn't have as much of this trouble because its budget is relatively small - when you make it equal to the pharma industry on top of what it does now it will become ripe for corruption.
3. I'm assuming that all this is going to end up being done by the US government, since nobody else seems to do much drug development these days. So, US taxpayers are essentially paying for the world's drug R&D. I'm sure the EU will only be happy to take advantage of the US discoveries though.
4. Scientists working on drug R&D won't get paid nearly as well as they do now, and pay will be based more on seniority than merit (typical govt practice). The best and brightest next generation of potential-scientists will find better things to do with their time.
In any case, there is a simple way to try out government drug R&D without killing the pharma industry. Just create an agency to do the work, and start doing it. When an academic lab is taking bids on a patent the govt could bid and buy the rights for the public, and then develop the drug to completion. Industry would develop some drugs which would be sold under the current system, govt would develop drugs that would be very c
but a for-profit company is unlikely to voluntarily do anything that could imaginably restrict their profits, even if only by a small amount.
I agree that putting a clause as you suggest in the licensing agreement probably wouldn't lower the value of the agreement to a pharma company. However, I disagree that companies won't do ANYTHING voluntarily that would restrict their profits. Most major pharma outfits sell products in the 3rd world for little to no profit - and often at a loss. In part this is to avoid the creation of a 3rd-world black market that could trickle back into the 1st world. Also, in part this helps big pharma outfits to recruit top researchers who care about such things.
I'll agree to that. There was a large-scale project at work which was massively increased in scope from previous attempts that failed, pitched to finish in less than a year, and ended up being a conglomeration of effort from multiple vendors and their various recommended consultants to put it all together. Leadership on this project was highly politicized and not terribly respected technically.
The company had a number of decent project managers who might have been able to make something of it - sure there was no way it would be perfect or get done on the pitched timeline, but maybe it might deliver some value. Forget it though - anybody who had any skills whatsoever did everything they could to stay off the project - leaving the work to those who couldn't get a job elsewhere. The end result was massive cost overruns, a barely-functioning system that was inflexible and very costly to adapt to changing business needs, highly demoralized workers, etc... But it was certainly branded as a success - gotta have something to show for it all!
It is people who put together IT projects, and if you start out with people who have no proven track record with a huge project and run it on politics, and don't ask yourself why all the skilled developers are staying away, then you're going to fail...
I doubt that a process method would be used - they're easy to work around. Nobody spends hundreds of millions of dollars on something that can be easily circumvented.
All the clinical research will probably be performed on a substantially-different molecule that can be patented which does the same thing. The compound studied in this article will probably never be tested for safety or efficacy, unless it is publicly funded.
The biggest expense by far in drug development is the clinical trials, so unless these are performed by the public they just won't happen on a molecule that is in the public domain...
Nobody in his right mind would grade alone, even for money.
Anybody will do just about anything for money - it is just a matter of setting the right price.
If I came up with a grueling grading project that would make you rip your hair out for three weeks without breaks for anything but eating and sleeping, and then offerend you $172 million to perform the work, I'm sure you'd sign up in a heartbeat.
So, the real question isn't whether a capitalistic market can provide a service that we want, rather the question is how much we really want the service in the first place and are we willing to pay for it?
Perhaps if people were able to choose then doctors would have incentive to take the time to provide good service? Staying up on the latest literature takes work - it is much easier to just go into work, see patients, and collect a paycheck. Nobody pays doctors to take the time to care. I was amazed when I had a talk with a doctor in a hospital who was consulting with a friend and they were able to coherently explain the pros and cons of various diabetes treatments rather than just prescribe whatever the insurance preferred.
If you had a choice then doctors would work so that you would choose them, and those who wouldn't bother would go out of business.
Such a system is also much more egalitarian, as it makes good health care accessible to more people. As in all systems those who are willing to pay more get the better care. Now, I'm not 100% sure but I'm guessing that it is illegal to pay doctors in the UK money (most socialist systems have such policies so that they retain the appearance of being socialist). However, the fact is that people willing to pay more get better care in any system - they just don't measure that pay in pounds. Perhaps it is measured in how many days you're willing to spend standing in a line outside the office. Or, perhaps it is measured in how much you're able to influence a local politician to be able to get better care (the old Soviet system). But make no mistake, those who are better able to pay will ALWAYS get better care - Soviet Russia was just as capitalistic as the US, they just measured things in influence instead of rubles.
I'd argue that instead of running the system on bribes people will get better care if you just run the system on cash and stop pretending that everybody is ever treated equally. The government can still offer assistance with payment if you want to be socialistic, but the poor will actually get better care if you let the rich get the best possible care.
A previous post indicated that the problem with storing just an ID number on the passport and querying the rest of the info from a central DB is the problem of giving the whole world access to that DB.
There is a solution:
1. ID reader queries chip to obtain nation of origin.
2. ID reader presents a certificate from the owner with the ID of the reader to the nation of origin, requesting permission to read the passport. Nation of origin authenticates request and provides signed packet with reader ID, valid authorization time range, timestamp, and certificate of nation of origin. This approves that the nation of origin recognizes the reader as a valid one for reading the passports.
3. Reader caches #2 to reduce traffic, and presents this packet to the passport. The passport verifies that the ID reader is approved to query the passport by its nation of origin.
4. Passport returns its ID, certificate, and signed permission to query with some expiration date encoded.
5. Reader presents #4 to nation of origin to query its database. This proves that the passport is physically present.
6. Nation of origin returns signed database entry.
Quick objections might be that this sounds like a lot of round trips, but all but one of these trips could be cached (the reader could be given permission to query passports for a day or more at a time). Another objection might be that every reader would need to get permission from every nation, but this is also not the case - there merely needs to be a chain of trust. So, the US could grant France access to its passports, and then France could delegate access to individual readers.
Various pros and cons exist and I think the actual-implemented solution is not a horrible one. I just wanted to show that a central DB doesn't have to be impossible-to-secure.
Er...nevermind...
This is a general consequence of the US system of government with separate branches. In most democracies the legislature is also the head of the executive branch, and the chief executive serves at the pleasure of parliament.
In the US system the congress makes laws, and the president enforces them. The courts determine if laws were broken and the president enforces the will of the courts. The issue is when the president essentially refuses to listen to the other bodies - ultimately it is the president that controls the military, FBI, and prison system. Congress can say "release everybody from Gitmo", and ultimately it comes down to the fact that the congressmen are in Washington, and Gitmo is in Cuba, and whoever runs the base ultimately decides who they're going to listen to.
In theory if Congress feels the president is neglecting his duty to enforce the law they can move to impeach him. In Europe this is common - just a vote of no-confidence. In the US it is very rare, and the president is directly elected.
Both systems have their pros and cons, and depending on the side you take the current issue could be construed as either. The advantage of the European system is that at least you know who is ultimately in charge - that would be the MPs.
Keep in mind that this is a country that still hasn't figured out separation of church and state...
Greece is generally democratic, but it isn't really a towering symbol of European freedom. So, an article like this should hardly be surprising, when stuff almost as bad as this happens occasionally in the US/UK/Germany/etc.
Maybe here among other places.
Most JRE/JDK packages include a netscape plugin. Java has been available 64-bit since the dawn of amd64, but it is debatable how read it is for prime time in general (I'm sure things have improved since the last time I bothered installing it).
So, during the period of time before the significant price drop, the expectation is that thousands of uninsured diabetics will die early, and others without clear coverage for their monthly doses will develop secondary morbidities (feet, eyes, circulatory system...) that could otherwise have been prevented.
Absolutely true. It is also absolutely true that the money most people spend on cable could be used to feed a 3rd-world neighborhood. Does that mean that we should ban TV?
The wealthy will ALWAYS be better cared for than the poor. However, as a result of this new medication in 10 years EVERYBODY will have cheap access to a new medicine that otherwise might not exist - at least not as soon.
Most proposals to make drugs cheaper for everybody will also make drugs like this less likely to be developed, or less likely to be rushed to market. Which is better - saving rich people now and poor people in 10 years, or saving everybody at the same time in 15 years?
The poor will NEVER be as well off as the rich in any unit of measure - education, health, TV-size, car-horsepower, beauty-of-spouses, etc. This has been true in every society - whether capitalist, communist, or socialist.
The question isn't whether things can be made fair - they can't. The question is what system brings the poor quality medicines at affordable prices the fastest. I'd argue that it would be a system that gives first access to the rich, who can actually afford to fund such R&D.
How is an advertiser to determine whether an advertisement is working? By your standards TV advertising is worthless, as nobody clicks through the ads and buys anything.
An ad on youtube has value even if NOBODY EVER clicks on it. The ad is still seen my millions of people, and those people are more likely to buy a particular product when they're out in the real world.
There is more to advertising than click-throughs.
They are responsible for their bottom line, and in the case of Entergy, concealing missing fuel rods happens to be profitable.
I can't say I'm intimately familiar with this story - but I did a little searching online. According to the NRC there doesn't seem to be any kind of foul play involved here. They apparently did an inspection and during auditing they found a discrepancy in the inventory. Later investigation uncovered the missing material in a different container. The material was a bit of an oddity as it did not fit into the standard containers, so it is understandable how stuff like this could get mixed up in a large inventory. That doesn't make it OK, but the fact is that the regulators did in fact spot the issue, make it public, and then ensure the issue was resolved. This is exactly what they should be doing.
Maybe there is more to the story than what was on the NRC website, but searching around there doesn't seem to be. Apparently the site was owned by a previous owner, who Entergy ended up suing to try to get them to pay for the fuel rod hunt (which seems appropriate).
Don't get me wrong - accounting for high level radioactive waste is important, and somebody dropped the ball here. However, it doesn't seem like the situation was mishandled, and it seems like the industry took the situation seriously. If they didn't I'd be all for making them pay dearly for it.
What is the safest way to sequester CO2? Sure, breathing a little of it in won't hurt you at all. On the other hand, dumping trillions of tons of it into the atmosphere WILL cause huge problems.
CO2 is the largest form of waste generated by most forms of power generation. We just don't notice it since we dump it into the air. It isn't really any safer than plutonium in the amounts that we release it - it is just a lot easier to not notice.
Plus, you would imagine that a few things have been learned in the 60 years since Hanford was built.
Yeah, like it is better to have a government agency supervising private industry and keeping them in line than it is to have a government operation under 300 layers of secrecy that nobody is allowed to even look at.
The Hanford mess is a result of nobody bothering to care for decades about management of waste on the site. I heard a talk by somebody who had some involvement with the cleanup efforts. Apparently over the many years of operation all kinds of stuff was pumped into tanks, and records of what that stuff was were not kept accurately. When sludge from the tanks was sent out for analysis it was done in a careless manner - without even rudimentary precautions like sending the same samples to independant labs for duplicate testing.
Basically it was run like a government operation where nobody could get in trouble for making a mess, and unsurprisingly a huge mess resulted. Additionally during the cold war there was the genuine concern that if we had fewer bombs than the Russians it might result in an enemy first strike - so in some sense they might have been right to make safety priority #2 (but there is no excuse for not doing a lot better than they did). After all, an actual nuclear war would have made the leaking tanks at Hanford look like a VERY minor problem.
Bottom line - large-scale nuclear power generation facilities require heavy oversight - by folks who are more interested in exposing problems than covering them up. There is no reason to ban them entirely - any industry has the potential to create disaster (just look at Bhopal) - like anything you just need to make sure that it is cheaper to be safe than to be unsafe.
Cohesive codebase is great for the software vendor, not necessarily good for the software user.
At work we of course pay out the nose for support contracts from various software vendors. Now, I have a love and hate relationship with two vendors, let's call them A and B:
A - Releases new verions and modular code for their product. However, ALL bugs are fixed in patches (often in large roll-up or service-pack style patches as well as individual-bug patches). So, if I'm running version 8.3 when 10.7 is the lastest and greatest I can get a patch for a bug I discover. Now, they're not very proactive about finding bugs in 8.3, but if you report them they'll fix them. (Not much issue with security-related bugs in this kind of app.)
B - Releases new versions only. Report a bug, they're right on it, and you can upgrade to the fixed version free of charge. If you're running version 8.3 they'll be happy to sell you consulting servies to get 10.7 up and running, and you probably won't spend more than a dozen man months testing everything out with the million changes between the versions.
Now, both vendors are fixing their bugs, and both provide "free" upgrades. The problem is that if I have one bug that is causing me headaches I'd rather just fix that bug than deploy a new version of the software, which not only fixes the bug but adds 85 bells and whistles, changes the backend-arch, has a new GUI, and does who knows what else. Oh, it probably comes with a minor data migration effort as an added bonus.
If my users need the latest bells and whistles I'll look at cost/benefits and give them an upgrade if it makes sense. If my users just need a bug fixed I'd rather just fix that one bug and be able to do an hour of regression testing rather than a full-fledged development project.
People like me go with distros like Debian stable in these environments. At home I run Gentoo - if I needed a linux server at work it would be Debian stable or something analogous. I'll upgrade apps when I want to upgrade them, not when the distro decides to make enhancements. The debian maintainers are of like mind, so I'd be more inclined to trust them than somebody who pushes out a new window manager every two months. I have better things to do than regression test 500 changes every week...
Depends on application. I'm using xfs for just about everything these days. One thing it does REALLY well is deletion of large files (multiple GB) - I run mythtv and that happens quite a bit - often while blocking user input. What can take 20 seconds in ext3 takes less that one second in xfs.
:)
The main gripe I've heard about xfs is that it tends to delay writes quite a bit - so you can get in trouble if you lose power.
As far as Reiser goes - well, I'm running on amd64 and I like keeping my data intact...
Uh, why are you accepting mail at all? Why not just get a list of the 5 servers used by your friends and whitelist those?
Presumably you're accepting mail because you are servicing people who want to get mail. You should ask them if they have any desire to get mail from technically-inclined folks who might run a mailserver on their DSL modem...
Uh, maybe there are companies somewhere in scale between Honda and Aunt Bessie's snack shack? Using their gmail account to send corporate mail might not be the right solution, but buying an OC-192 line into MAE East might be overkill.
There are lots of anti-spam technologies that don't make it tremendously difficult to actually send normal mail from a small shop.