Yes, but you miss the larger impact of the ruling, which essentially defines every link on the internet as illegal, so long as the owner of the target site cares to say "boo".
They didn't make anything illegal. This was a civil suit, where one guy was, despite being asked not to, leveraging someone else's material and bandwidth to fatten up his website with owning the content or doing the work or paying the bills. The guy who sued and won had to take an action for this to be stopped by a court, just like any copyright holder would have to in the future... but for now there's a precedent that says (so that everyone can get out of court quicker and spend less on lawyers) "that's some BS, piggybacking on that guy's material and bandwidth, and everyone knows it, so stop now and save us all the same grief in yet another case." Infringing on someone's copyright has always been a no-no. And as usual, it's up to the copyright holder to tell someone to knock it off. This isn't any different. The leech should have just quit while he was ahead, but he's obviously an idiot.
Still a lawsuit seems unnecessary, especially when there are countermeasures out there that work well.
Sort of like if your neigbhor keeps plugging his 2kw Christmas display (off of which he makes money!) into your house's exterior outlet, and no matter how many times you ask him to stop, he keeps doing it, and so you have to buy locks, build fences, and eventually hire an electrician to help you? If someone is doing something completely unreasonable (never mind that it costs you money!), why should your ability to escalate your defenses be your only option in stopping them? Sometimes it actually does make sense to deal with it in civil court - since obviously this guy was too much of a dick to simply stop doing it when asked. It is indeed bad enough when some loser on MySpace hot links some little JPG on your site, but piling on your MPG files has a much bigger impact on your wallet.
No, they provided some recourse for someone who was appropriately annoyed that some other guy was enriching the appearance of his site's by 'providing' material to which he doesn't hold a copyright, for which he wasn't paying bandwidth, and so on. Argue all you want about the nuances, but it doesn't pass the smell test, and that's what the court thought, too.
This is what the "reasonable person" notion is supposed to address. Can a jury collectively decide that a reasonable person would consider the subject's actions to have been carried out with an understanding of right/wrong and consequences? In other words, if the person's mental state (due to something like a tumor, or other demonstrable physiological influence such as off-the-charts post-partem depression, etc) is such that reasonable people can agree that the person can't grasp what they're doing (or have done), then you've got one situation. If the person is reasonably understood to get what they're doing, and choosing not to sweat the consquences or be gambling that they won't get caught, then you've got something else.
Never mind the specifics of a given country or jurisdiction. Juries are sometimes asked to decide if someone was crazy/sick or not, period. Sometimes that backfires. When someone's behavior is so obviously headed towards a trainwreck (especially when you've got tumor-induced predatory peadephilia going on!), anyone close enough to that person to see it happening sure as hell should be acting to stop it. If they can't they need to involve someone who can. Something that dire implies a lack of capacity that should involve medical intervention anyway. Problems with the old meat computer are tricky, though - since obviously you can have people walking, talking, and appearing to operate on some level even as their decision-making machinery is getting twisted way out of proper use by some badness (or, hysterical devotion to a particular operating system, but that's a special case).
However: I suppose I'd rather err on the side of caution and not back things that take us farther towards prior restraint when it comes to subtle behavioral things. I've also known some good-hearted and utterly harmless people that exhibit some (at first glance) awkward behavior that some mom could easily misinterpret. We can't have someone hauled off on her say so, no matter how honestly she's protecting her kids. Let reasonable people - in the form of a jury - make the call if it's after the fact, and let medical professionals in tandem with specially trained judicial panels tackle the before-the-fact stuff when someone is truly acting dangerous. The rest of the vague middle ground is going to have to go into the Shit Happens And You Have To Be Reasonably Alert About People category.
Many an afternoon he can be seen far across the dogyard tearing something into strips and eating it; one just avoids that part of the yard for awhile. Of course, he's a Britanny Spaniel, not a hound.
Hey! He's supposed to be pointing and retrieving that [whatever mammal/bird]! Bad dog!
Um, of course, I live with German Shorthaird Pointers, so no matter pious I try to get about dogs not having their own agenda, I've got NO room to complain about anyone else's dog. Damn German dogs, anyway. Constantly working the angles and looking for legal loopholes to get away with very un-Pointerish things. My only excuse is that the Germans made that breed to be an all-around hunting dog, and they're supposed to have the drive to bring rabbits back to the house on their own, with or without human/shotgun assistance.
My bigger dog's dam actually spent all night once dragging a deer back to the house. Even when they're being bad, they're impressive! *sigh*
Give us thousands of more years and we may evolve more intelligence.
I'm inclined to disagree. We may build more (for ourselves, using biotech), but I really doubt we'll evolve more. Our ethics keep getting in the way, and we've completely arrested natural selection. Further, we've got all sorts of technology, now, that allows not-very-smart people to still be pretty damn productive or self sufficient. All of the evolutionary pressures that used to be needed to make for a more successful cave-dwelling clan are now moot, in terms of species-wide survival. Smart people will marry smart people, sure... but they tend to have fewer kids, and tend to have more autistic ones.
So, my bet is on self-engineering of our brains, and on very smart systems (not necessarily robots... probably something more hive-like, networked).
No, when I'm being rhetorical, I'm being rhetorical. My point, in asking that question, was to illustrate that "murder" is an inappropriate term. Because something's conceivably possible doesn't mean that not doing it is murder. Otherwise everyone should always have one kidney removed in advance, just in case someone else might need it. Every adult should be ready to kill themselves in case their organs might be of use to some child somewhere... right? No. You have to think in terms of what's reasonable. On balance, the existence of healthy, thriving, well-financed drug companies is better than running them out of business. We could wreck the entire US economy by giving all of its money to Africa, too... but that wouldn't really be helpful in the long term, either.
A culture that shifts towards incessant obsession about the possibility or inevitability of some form of suffering somewhere is missing the point. Personal accountability is key, and while we can argue about whether an adult should be having children before they can personally attend to that child's long-term health, or whether an entire village should exist or not, if the place where they live only exists, and only ever will exist by virtue of continual aid from somewhere else... it's all about investment (of blood, sweat, cash, time, family comittment, etc) and the big picture. You can't worry about each instance of suffering if you can't be bothered with the larger reason for much of that suffering: poverty. That poverty is usually the result of regressive/stagnant cultures that are uncomfortable with modern education, or which are under the thumb of corrupt local warlord-types or retrograde religious institutions. Fix those things, and you'll fix a lot of suffering. Fix that suffering, and the unhealthiness of a particular child is then very reasonably within the bounds of his local family and culture to deal with.
Democracy, markets, education, and the further marginalization of medievalist-minded theocratic movements is the key to all of that.
Actually, it's my belief that those diseases are where no free-market system can work. There will simply never be an economic incentive to deal with rare diseases, only a moral and social one. That's something for universities, charities and governments. Businesses *should* do what's good business, and performing expensive research on diseases that affect few people will never be good business.
Then why should you care if a business decides to risk their own money to come up with a drug that they think can be of use in a smaller market, over a period of time? It may dovetail with other research they're doing, or the math may simply work out in conjunction with their larger goal of being a as much of a one-stop-shop as possible. The market only works when people take risks. Deciding, from the "outside," that some things are inappropriate for the market to tackle is, itself, inappropriate. If someone can't take their constitutional right to make use of a patent and make their risk pay off, that's their mistake. But it's a bigger mistake to try to draw arbitrary lines around what you think is, and is not, financially sound for the investors in question.
Yes. Whether the "copycat" company has to pay for the research is irrelevant, as long as they fulfill their role of pressuring the innovating comapny to distribute as fast as possible.
You're still not addressing the very thing you brought up earlier - the desire to have drugs that deal with infrequent or rare illnesses. The market for those products isn't "wide" in scope, and so the only option is to look at it as wide over time.
There is no way to make back all of that research money, even if you could instantly distribute the product to every potential patient walking the earth... because there will only be enough of them over time. The very area you're saying needs more innovation is the one area where a patent is the most important.
which is downright murder when you're talking about medicines
Well, then, what about food? Do you have any food on hand that you don't need right this minute? Do you have money in your account that you're not using right this moment? Are you murdering people elsewhere in the world by not getting it to them? At least get your underlying philosophy straight before refocusing on the regulatory issues.
The most difficult products (those aimed at less-common ailments/conditions) are the ones that will only be consumed over a longer period of time because of the scarcity of patients needing that drug. When you say that someone should just quickly and "widely" distribute their drug to make a bunch of money and thus recoup their investment, what are you saying? That some warehouse somewhere is going to buy 10 years worth of the drug right away, write you a check, and there.. you've won the race? Not even discussing shelf-life issues, the distribution system runs mostly on a just-in-time basis so that nobody in the loop (makers, distributors, pharmacies, patients) have to tie up huge amounts of cash in inventory that's just going to sit there.
For expensive-to-design drugs aimed at smaller audiences, only having time in the market will make back the risked money.
It's currently a far worse business decision to conduct research in extremely aggressive leukemia, versus making the next Viagra. That shouldn't be.
And if you remove a company's prospects for making back their research and regulatory expenses over some period of time, then they'll having no reason to spend millions on a leukemia drug. Your model suggests that they need to make all of their money back in whatever small window of time exists between the world finding out what chemical is in their drug and the next company - who paid nothing to do the research or prove the efficacy of the drug - cranking it out themselves.
It might cost hundreds of millions of dollars to prove that a certain use of a relatively simple compound, administered in a simple way, is an important and safe (for certain patients) therapy. The chemical makeup of that drug will probably be known by competition for years before the testing is even complete. All they have to do, in your system, is wait for someone else to finish paying for all of that heavy lifting, and then come to the shelf with the same drug in a timeframe that makes the original investment on the part of the innovators a guaranteed loss. Even more so when there are fewer patients for a given therapy. Your approach has exactly the opposite impact that you seem to seek... drugs for niche applications and rare diseases are that much less likely to be developed and tested if you guarantee that the person footing the bill has no chance of recouping their investment over the years that it takes to deploy the drug in the relatively small number of cases that require it... because by then, a company that does nothing but piggyback on other people's research will simply make their own and laugh all the way to the bank, at the expense of the innovators and the risk takers.
Patents merely reward having inefficient, slow rollouts
Ask anyone in the industry. The biggest hold-up to rolling out a new drug is the regulatory burden. Second to that is performing sufficient research to make it difficult for a single unhappy patient to bankrupt you in court because of unforeseen complications. No other considerations come close to impacting the cost and sluggishness of the development and time-to-market cycle.
Re:If this is true...
on
The Google Phone?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
though I wonder why company and government officials always decline confirming or denying so called rumors
Well, among things, a company like Google is actually owned by its investors, and shares are publicly traded. The SEC gets very, very testy (as do litigious shareholders and their parasitic lawyers) when a publicly traded company does anything that can be construed as falsely painting a picture of business prospects that might impact the value of a share in the company.
In short, regulations and lawsuits have trained companies to opt for silence, rather than risk being called deceptive - even if they don't start the rumor they're not commenting on. And if someone who works there starts the rumor (or can be said to have leaked something), all sorts of insider-trading ugliness can get bandied about. You get what you reward, and you suppress what you punish.
It's good that you put that in quotes, since part of the competition (in real life) is the competition to raise the capital to embark on creating drugs. It's fantastically expensive. So, when another company can simply start making a drug you researched and tested, without having to invest the time and millions of dollars like you did, that's hardly competition. The patent allows you to make the process worth the risk.
Clarinex is exactly the same drug as Claritin after Claritin passes through your liver once.
So, other than not being the same, it's the same? Regardless... how does your example back up the notion that the people who invest the up-front millions in new drugs should have less protection (in the form of a patent)? How will reducing their ability to recoup their investment cause them to produce more innovative drugs? Big innovation (as opposed to incremental changes in products) costs more money. Chipping away at the money they're making isn't going to be much of an incentive to stay in that line of work, let alone take much larger risks with their stockholders' cash.
Don't bother replying, you won't get a response from me
Fine. Then this is for anyone else who stumbles along.
"Forest/crops" are generally not viewed as an efficient source of electrical energy, which wind power is.
Millions of people use wood stoves to heat their homes. Endless discusssions right here in this forum cover things like corn-based ethanol or saw-grass products, etc. These are not sources that, the day after you cut them down, will be there the same way that wind and solar radiation will. We have to act, plan, zone land, and do a lot of other things to re-new those products... we have to do nothing to wake up in the morning and continue to use tides, sunshine, and wind. Action required, action not required.
Obviously. If you go back far enough in time, of course you'll see the glow from when the dimmer switch is just being turned up. I can't believe we waste perfectly good Science Money on wacky alternative theories, when the EUDS explains this perfectly.
Renewable energy is energy which can be replenished at the same rate it is used.
And the fact that we don't need to take any steps to renew wind or solar, and that there is likely to be vastly more of it available than we could possibly effectively use... the contrast between that and things like forest/crops doesn't strike you as an important distinction?
Is that like getting lost earnestly? Or more like getting lost candidly?
Frankly, I'd like to thank you for actually making my point. Even being a smart-ass works better if you use all of the language's horsepower and richness to your advantage.
Meanwhile all of your renewable examples are merely storage mechanisms for solar energy.
The difference between solar energy (as directly converted to electricity through solar arrays, or used to heat water, etc) and trees (or other crops) don't happen on their own in large, efficiently harvestable forms. If we take down a bunch of trees to use them for lumber or energy, we have to take action to renew that resource if we want to use it again any time soon (or easily).
Don't you hate that time of day when the sun is shining right into your apartment/living room, and putting glare on your monitor/tv? Isn't this going to be a problem for those apartments facing the sun (and turning along with it)?
Elrond - Elf from Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit.)
L. Ron Hubbard - Science Fiction writer who founded a religion on a bet with a bunch of other sci-fi writers and got carried away with himself. (Also wrote westerns.)
No, I prefer Elrond Hubbard. Some things just should be different, and that's one of them, I think.
Talking about this stuff with your kids is far more rational than pushing for a law that makes it "illegal" and hoping the government will do your job for you.
Interestingly, this is also the right approach to take with cars, alcohol, guns, and Elrond Hubbard books.
First off, language is about communication, and requires transmitter and receiver to agree on the meanings of symbols/words. "Renewable energy" is a well recognised term, and does its communciation job perfectly well, even if it doesn't quite match your idea of what "renewable" means
There's nothing at all wrong with language evolving. What I don't like is when it devolves - when two distinct words/phrases used to make the distinction between two similar but importantly different concepts are replaced with one word to cover both of them. Leaving both people in the conversation less able to be sure that the information being exchanged is actually meaningful.
"Renewable" (in practical terms, things like crops for fuel) is not the same thing as "abundantly available" (like radiation from the sun). Can a lot of conversations be had without needing to make the distinction? Sure. Does the average citizen's already feeble grip on precision in communication (especially as it relates to technical and scientific matters - things that many people feel they then must keep in mind while voting or spending money, etc) get damaged by dumbing it down? Very much so. Quit treating people (especially kids) as too dumb to know that similar but subtly (or substantially) different things deserve their own bits of the language, and they won't end up too dumb to be considered articulate when they grow up. More words, more clarity, more synapses in the ol' meat computer. It's good all the way around.
Well, you seem to be actually agreeing with me. Sustainable and renewable (in terms of practical use) are indeed two different things, but similar, certainly. Things like solar energy aren't renewable, per se. They're simply in vast abundance, and are relatively speaking free to use (not counting the mechanisms we have to build to use them). Any discussion among intelligent nerdy types should either make the distinction, or (instead of misusing "renewable" as a catch-all), go ahead and call it "green." Which, while also not technically correct, doesn't stand any chance of teaching people that the word "green" no longer describes certain wavelengths of light that we interpret as that color.
Yes, language changes. But when it changes in a way that reduces clarity, that change should be resisted.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but you miss the larger impact of the ruling, which essentially defines every link on the internet as illegal, so long as the owner of the target site cares to say "boo".
They didn't make anything illegal. This was a civil suit, where one guy was, despite being asked not to, leveraging someone else's material and bandwidth to fatten up his website with owning the content or doing the work or paying the bills. The guy who sued and won had to take an action for this to be stopped by a court, just like any copyright holder would have to in the future... but for now there's a precedent that says (so that everyone can get out of court quicker and spend less on lawyers) "that's some BS, piggybacking on that guy's material and bandwidth, and everyone knows it, so stop now and save us all the same grief in yet another case." Infringing on someone's copyright has always been a no-no. And as usual, it's up to the copyright holder to tell someone to knock it off. This isn't any different. The leech should have just quit while he was ahead, but he's obviously an idiot.
Still a lawsuit seems unnecessary, especially when there are countermeasures out there that work well.
Sort of like if your neigbhor keeps plugging his 2kw Christmas display (off of which he makes money!) into your house's exterior outlet, and no matter how many times you ask him to stop, he keeps doing it, and so you have to buy locks, build fences, and eventually hire an electrician to help you? If someone is doing something completely unreasonable (never mind that it costs you money!), why should your ability to escalate your defenses be your only option in stopping them? Sometimes it actually does make sense to deal with it in civil court - since obviously this guy was too much of a dick to simply stop doing it when asked. It is indeed bad enough when some loser on MySpace hot links some little JPG on your site, but piling on your MPG files has a much bigger impact on your wallet.
Wow. They made the entire Internet illegal.
No, they provided some recourse for someone who was appropriately annoyed that some other guy was enriching the appearance of his site's by 'providing' material to which he doesn't hold a copyright, for which he wasn't paying bandwidth, and so on. Argue all you want about the nuances, but it doesn't pass the smell test, and that's what the court thought, too.
This is what the "reasonable person" notion is supposed to address. Can a jury collectively decide that a reasonable person would consider the subject's actions to have been carried out with an understanding of right/wrong and consequences? In other words, if the person's mental state (due to something like a tumor, or other demonstrable physiological influence such as off-the-charts post-partem depression, etc) is such that reasonable people can agree that the person can't grasp what they're doing (or have done), then you've got one situation. If the person is reasonably understood to get what they're doing, and choosing not to sweat the consquences or be gambling that they won't get caught, then you've got something else.
Never mind the specifics of a given country or jurisdiction. Juries are sometimes asked to decide if someone was crazy/sick or not, period. Sometimes that backfires. When someone's behavior is so obviously headed towards a trainwreck (especially when you've got tumor-induced predatory peadephilia going on!), anyone close enough to that person to see it happening sure as hell should be acting to stop it. If they can't they need to involve someone who can. Something that dire implies a lack of capacity that should involve medical intervention anyway. Problems with the old meat computer are tricky, though - since obviously you can have people walking, talking, and appearing to operate on some level even as their decision-making machinery is getting twisted way out of proper use by some badness (or, hysterical devotion to a particular operating system, but that's a special case).
However: I suppose I'd rather err on the side of caution and not back things that take us farther towards prior restraint when it comes to subtle behavioral things. I've also known some good-hearted and utterly harmless people that exhibit some (at first glance) awkward behavior that some mom could easily misinterpret. We can't have someone hauled off on her say so, no matter how honestly she's protecting her kids. Let reasonable people - in the form of a jury - make the call if it's after the fact, and let medical professionals in tandem with specially trained judicial panels tackle the before-the-fact stuff when someone is truly acting dangerous. The rest of the vague middle ground is going to have to go into the Shit Happens And You Have To Be Reasonably Alert About People category.
Many an afternoon he can be seen far across the dogyard tearing something into strips and eating it; one just avoids that part of the yard for awhile. Of course, he's a Britanny Spaniel, not a hound.
Hey! He's supposed to be pointing and retrieving that [whatever mammal/bird]! Bad dog!
Um, of course, I live with German Shorthaird Pointers, so no matter pious I try to get about dogs not having their own agenda, I've got NO room to complain about anyone else's dog. Damn German dogs, anyway. Constantly working the angles and looking for legal loopholes to get away with very un-Pointerish things. My only excuse is that the Germans made that breed to be an all-around hunting dog, and they're supposed to have the drive to bring rabbits back to the house on their own, with or without human/shotgun assistance.
My bigger dog's dam actually spent all night once dragging a deer back to the house. Even when they're being bad, they're impressive! *sigh*
Give us thousands of more years and we may evolve more intelligence.
I'm inclined to disagree. We may build more (for ourselves, using biotech), but I really doubt we'll evolve more. Our ethics keep getting in the way, and we've completely arrested natural selection. Further, we've got all sorts of technology, now, that allows not-very-smart people to still be pretty damn productive or self sufficient. All of the evolutionary pressures that used to be needed to make for a more successful cave-dwelling clan are now moot, in terms of species-wide survival. Smart people will marry smart people, sure... but they tend to have fewer kids, and tend to have more autistic ones.
So, my bet is on self-engineering of our brains, and on very smart systems (not necessarily robots... probably something more hive-like, networked).
When you're right, you're right.
No, when I'm being rhetorical, I'm being rhetorical. My point, in asking that question, was to illustrate that "murder" is an inappropriate term. Because something's conceivably possible doesn't mean that not doing it is murder. Otherwise everyone should always have one kidney removed in advance, just in case someone else might need it. Every adult should be ready to kill themselves in case their organs might be of use to some child somewhere... right? No. You have to think in terms of what's reasonable. On balance, the existence of healthy, thriving, well-financed drug companies is better than running them out of business. We could wreck the entire US economy by giving all of its money to Africa, too... but that wouldn't really be helpful in the long term, either.
A culture that shifts towards incessant obsession about the possibility or inevitability of some form of suffering somewhere is missing the point. Personal accountability is key, and while we can argue about whether an adult should be having children before they can personally attend to that child's long-term health, or whether an entire village should exist or not, if the place where they live only exists, and only ever will exist by virtue of continual aid from somewhere else... it's all about investment (of blood, sweat, cash, time, family comittment, etc) and the big picture. You can't worry about each instance of suffering if you can't be bothered with the larger reason for much of that suffering: poverty. That poverty is usually the result of regressive/stagnant cultures that are uncomfortable with modern education, or which are under the thumb of corrupt local warlord-types or retrograde religious institutions. Fix those things, and you'll fix a lot of suffering. Fix that suffering, and the unhealthiness of a particular child is then very reasonably within the bounds of his local family and culture to deal with.
Democracy, markets, education, and the further marginalization of medievalist-minded theocratic movements is the key to all of that.
Actually, it's my belief that those diseases are where no free-market system can work. There will simply never be an economic incentive to deal with rare diseases, only a moral and social one. That's something for universities, charities and governments. Businesses *should* do what's good business, and performing expensive research on diseases that affect few people will never be good business.
Then why should you care if a business decides to risk their own money to come up with a drug that they think can be of use in a smaller market, over a period of time? It may dovetail with other research they're doing, or the math may simply work out in conjunction with their larger goal of being a as much of a one-stop-shop as possible. The market only works when people take risks. Deciding, from the "outside," that some things are inappropriate for the market to tackle is, itself, inappropriate. If someone can't take their constitutional right to make use of a patent and make their risk pay off, that's their mistake. But it's a bigger mistake to try to draw arbitrary lines around what you think is, and is not, financially sound for the investors in question.
Yes. Whether the "copycat" company has to pay for the research is irrelevant, as long as they fulfill their role of pressuring the innovating comapny to distribute as fast as possible.
You're still not addressing the very thing you brought up earlier - the desire to have drugs that deal with infrequent or rare illnesses. The market for those products isn't "wide" in scope, and so the only option is to look at it as wide over time.
There is no way to make back all of that research money, even if you could instantly distribute the product to every potential patient walking the earth... because there will only be enough of them over time. The very area you're saying needs more innovation is the one area where a patent is the most important.
which is downright murder when you're talking about medicines
Well, then, what about food? Do you have any food on hand that you don't need right this minute? Do you have money in your account that you're not using right this moment? Are you murdering people elsewhere in the world by not getting it to them? At least get your underlying philosophy straight before refocusing on the regulatory issues.
It would simply give less incentive to be slow
The most difficult products (those aimed at less-common ailments/conditions) are the ones that will only be consumed over a longer period of time because of the scarcity of patients needing that drug. When you say that someone should just quickly and "widely" distribute their drug to make a bunch of money and thus recoup their investment, what are you saying? That some warehouse somewhere is going to buy 10 years worth of the drug right away, write you a check, and there.. you've won the race? Not even discussing shelf-life issues, the distribution system runs mostly on a just-in-time basis so that nobody in the loop (makers, distributors, pharmacies, patients) have to tie up huge amounts of cash in inventory that's just going to sit there.
For expensive-to-design drugs aimed at smaller audiences, only having time in the market will make back the risked money.
It's currently a far worse business decision to conduct research in extremely aggressive leukemia, versus making the next Viagra. That shouldn't be.
And if you remove a company's prospects for making back their research and regulatory expenses over some period of time, then they'll having no reason to spend millions on a leukemia drug. Your model suggests that they need to make all of their money back in whatever small window of time exists between the world finding out what chemical is in their drug and the next company - who paid nothing to do the research or prove the efficacy of the drug - cranking it out themselves.
It might cost hundreds of millions of dollars to prove that a certain use of a relatively simple compound, administered in a simple way, is an important and safe (for certain patients) therapy. The chemical makeup of that drug will probably be known by competition for years before the testing is even complete. All they have to do, in your system, is wait for someone else to finish paying for all of that heavy lifting, and then come to the shelf with the same drug in a timeframe that makes the original investment on the part of the innovators a guaranteed loss. Even more so when there are fewer patients for a given therapy. Your approach has exactly the opposite impact that you seem to seek... drugs for niche applications and rare diseases are that much less likely to be developed and tested if you guarantee that the person footing the bill has no chance of recouping their investment over the years that it takes to deploy the drug in the relatively small number of cases that require it... because by then, a company that does nothing but piggyback on other people's research will simply make their own and laugh all the way to the bank, at the expense of the innovators and the risk takers.
Patents merely reward having inefficient, slow rollouts
Ask anyone in the industry. The biggest hold-up to rolling out a new drug is the regulatory burden. Second to that is performing sufficient research to make it difficult for a single unhappy patient to bankrupt you in court because of unforeseen complications. No other considerations come close to impacting the cost and sluggishness of the development and time-to-market cycle.
though I wonder why company and government officials always decline confirming or denying so called rumors
Well, among things, a company like Google is actually owned by its investors, and shares are publicly traded. The SEC gets very, very testy (as do litigious shareholders and their parasitic lawyers) when a publicly traded company does anything that can be construed as falsely painting a picture of business prospects that might impact the value of a share in the company.
In short, regulations and lawsuits have trained companies to opt for silence, rather than risk being called deceptive - even if they don't start the rumor they're not commenting on. And if someone who works there starts the rumor (or can be said to have leaked something), all sorts of insider-trading ugliness can get bandied about. You get what you reward, and you suppress what you punish.
nasty "competition,"
It's good that you put that in quotes, since part of the competition (in real life) is the competition to raise the capital to embark on creating drugs. It's fantastically expensive. So, when another company can simply start making a drug you researched and tested, without having to invest the time and millions of dollars like you did, that's hardly competition. The patent allows you to make the process worth the risk.
Clarinex is exactly the same drug as Claritin after Claritin passes through your liver once.
So, other than not being the same, it's the same? Regardless... how does your example back up the notion that the people who invest the up-front millions in new drugs should have less protection (in the form of a patent)? How will reducing their ability to recoup their investment cause them to produce more innovative drugs? Big innovation (as opposed to incremental changes in products) costs more money. Chipping away at the money they're making isn't going to be much of an incentive to stay in that line of work, let alone take much larger risks with their stockholders' cash.
Don't bother replying, you won't get a response from me
Fine. Then this is for anyone else who stumbles along.
"Forest/crops" are generally not viewed as an efficient source of electrical energy, which wind power is.
Millions of people use wood stoves to heat their homes. Endless discusssions right here in this forum cover things like corn-based ethanol or saw-grass products, etc. These are not sources that, the day after you cut them down, will be there the same way that wind and solar radiation will. We have to act, plan, zone land, and do a lot of other things to re-new those products... we have to do nothing to wake up in the morning and continue to use tides, sunshine, and wind. Action required, action not required.
Obviously. If you go back far enough in time, of course you'll see the glow from when the dimmer switch is just being turned up. I can't believe we waste perfectly good Science Money on wacky alternative theories, when the EUDS explains this perfectly.
Renewable energy is energy which can be replenished at the same rate it is used.
And the fact that we don't need to take any steps to renew wind or solar, and that there is likely to be vastly more of it available than we could possibly effectively use... the contrast between that and things like forest/crops doesn't strike you as an important distinction?
Get lost frankly.
Is that like getting lost earnestly? Or more like getting lost candidly?
Frankly, I'd like to thank you for actually making my point. Even being a smart-ass works better if you use all of the language's horsepower and richness to your advantage.
Meanwhile all of your renewable examples are merely storage mechanisms for solar energy.
The difference between solar energy (as directly converted to electricity through solar arrays, or used to heat water, etc) and trees (or other crops) don't happen on their own in large, efficiently harvestable forms. If we take down a bunch of trees to use them for lumber or energy, we have to take action to renew that resource if we want to use it again any time soon (or easily).
Don't you hate that time of day when the sun is shining right into your apartment/living room, and putting glare on your monitor/tv? Isn't this going to be a problem for those apartments facing the sun (and turning along with it)?
Yes, yes... curtains are so analog.
Elrond - Elf from Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit.)
L. Ron Hubbard - Science Fiction writer who founded a religion on a bet with a bunch of other sci-fi writers and got carried away with himself. (Also wrote westerns.)
No, I prefer Elrond Hubbard. Some things just should be different, and that's one of them, I think.
Talking about this stuff with your kids is far more rational than pushing for a law that makes it "illegal" and hoping the government will do your job for you.
Interestingly, this is also the right approach to take with cars, alcohol, guns, and Elrond Hubbard books.
First off, language is about communication, and requires transmitter and receiver to agree on the meanings of symbols/words. "Renewable energy" is a well recognised term, and does its communciation job perfectly well, even if it doesn't quite match your idea of what "renewable" means
There's nothing at all wrong with language evolving. What I don't like is when it devolves - when two distinct words/phrases used to make the distinction between two similar but importantly different concepts are replaced with one word to cover both of them. Leaving both people in the conversation less able to be sure that the information being exchanged is actually meaningful.
"Renewable" (in practical terms, things like crops for fuel) is not the same thing as "abundantly available" (like radiation from the sun). Can a lot of conversations be had without needing to make the distinction? Sure. Does the average citizen's already feeble grip on precision in communication (especially as it relates to technical and scientific matters - things that many people feel they then must keep in mind while voting or spending money, etc) get damaged by dumbing it down? Very much so. Quit treating people (especially kids) as too dumb to know that similar but subtly (or substantially) different things deserve their own bits of the language, and they won't end up too dumb to be considered articulate when they grow up. More words, more clarity, more synapses in the ol' meat computer. It's good all the way around.
Well, you seem to be actually agreeing with me. Sustainable and renewable (in terms of practical use) are indeed two different things, but similar, certainly. Things like solar energy aren't renewable, per se. They're simply in vast abundance, and are relatively speaking free to use (not counting the mechanisms we have to build to use them). Any discussion among intelligent nerdy types should either make the distinction, or (instead of misusing "renewable" as a catch-all), go ahead and call it "green." Which, while also not technically correct, doesn't stand any chance of teaching people that the word "green" no longer describes certain wavelengths of light that we interpret as that color.
Yes, language changes. But when it changes in a way that reduces clarity, that change should be resisted.