Okay, let's take Pfizer... They spent $5 billion on R&D last year. How much would they have spent without patent protection?
I never claimed that pharmaceutical companies are saints. They are businesses. But I did claim that patent protection is necessary for them to do the R&D.
You ridicule my comments are marketing. Have you ever been in business? Do you understand how it is necessary to sell your product? Do you know how doctors receive their education on new medicines? Yes, they get much of it from marketing.
Do you know how conservatives doctors are? It took a long time for them to switch to using antibiotics to treat helicobacter pylori caused peptic ulcers (the cause of the majority of those ulcers). Patients who saw ads about effective antibiotics could potentially get much better treatment by informing their doctors about the change in treatment.
In a perfect world, advertising wouldn't be necessary. It isn't a perfect world.
Everyone who pays attention knows that capitalism is inefficient in the details, in the sense that it pays a lot for advertisers, pays for cost of capital through interest and dividends, and often competes on equivalent product. But capitalism at a large scale is quite efficient and extremely creative.
Now, this side discussion was about pharmaceutical companies and patents. Take away those patents and please explain why Pfizer would invest $5,000,000,000 in a R&D on a product, only to have every other pharmaceutical company produce the same thing for almost nothing, simply by reverse engineering it (absolutely trivial).
Sorry, but patents aren't a "special consideration" that applies only to pharmaceuticals. And if they are so powerful, why is it that the FDA, whose decisions can destroy a billion dollar R&D investment, doesn't give them more of a pass? Why is it that a few bad outcomes that couldn't be predicted (such as the off label use of Phen-Fen, or is it Fen-Phen) cause them to be lose huge amounts of money to the real powerful lobby - the tort lawyers.
Let's look at one special consideration: the limits on importing drugs from countries where the prices are lower...
Lets say we allow anyone to buy any drug from anywhere (as long as said drug is legal in the US). Drug sales at discount prices to most other countries would end, because Americans would quickly start using the internet to buy all their drugs from the cheapest country, dropping the price below the profit level for the drug company. Then either those companies would violate international patent treaties and get the drugs that way (at which point Americans would again be prohibited from buy them, or at which point the pharmaceutical industry would simply stop doing any R&D), or their people would do without. Meanwhile, Americans would pay higher prices because the total income flow amortizing the drug development would be reduced to only that available from Americans. And, of course, the stockholders who invested in the companies would lose, because the companies would also bear the burden. Bigger and richer countries (like Canada) would see their prices rise to the American level (which IMHO would be a good thing - Canadians and others are free-riding on American drug consumers).
Finally, in response to your ad hominem comments.
My dad is a professor emeritus (semi-retired academic scientist) outside the medical field. My daughter is an academic research scientist in cellular-molecular neuroscientist. I am not in either field, but certainly am a consumer of pharmaceuticals in America.
Creating software is largely the engineering of computer programs. Very little of it involves research. Developing pharmaceuticals relies on vast amounts of research, ranging from work done by NIH to drug prospecting in natural plants to combinatorial chemistry to other stuff.
But the problem that you miss, and that is crucial, is that it takes a huge expense to develop the drugs for market, AFTER the NIH funded research. This is because of the costs of research borne by the companies (on top of publicly funded research), the huge costs of testing drugs, and the vast majority which fail, after significant expenditure, the costs of developing volume production chemistry and factories, and the costs of advertising to let doctors and other knows the details and advantages of the new drugs. Companies will not and should not bear these costs if they cannot have some way of recouping them plus a profit, and in this argument I have yet to see a system other than patents that provide this. Maybe you could provide some suggestions other than just assuming that in some magical way, the NIH (which as far as I know produces no medicines) will provide!
As far as the research community providing the needed work... it doesn't. The research community does research, some of which leads directly to drugs and a lot of which deepens understanding that may indirectly lead to drugs, but it doesn't incur all the rest of the expense needed to actually produce the drugs.
Lets take the analogy of computers and medicine.
Software researchers work in the same sort of environment as medical researchers - an academic one. They do basic research which sometimes leads to an increased understanding of something or a new technique (although not nearly as often as happens with medical research). They do not actually go through the expense necessary to produce their product in many cases, and when they do, they can have an a priori much higher probability that what they invented will actually work. The people who actually produce software usually protect it through copyright (which destroys competition in one sense) or patents (which are granted for way to manhy obvious things and thus are not achieving their purpose in software) or trade secrets (which you can't do with drugs because reverse engineering is too easy, and the drug company scientists want to be able to publish in scientific journals).
The idea that patents destroy competition is correct, within the confines of the patent. And sometimes that is the necessary price to pay. Having much of our medical research controlled by government institutions also destroys competition, because whole areas of inquiries may not be investigated because of the prejudice of a review committee or a bureaucrat or politician. Having the whole drug development process done by the government is a nightmare that I don't wish to experience. It is no accident that private companies develop most of the drugs we have today!
Patents have a purpose. Those who argue against them in the area of drugs need to provide an alternative suggestino with some change of working. I have yet to see that in this thread.
This is certainly true. And the reason is that it takes a huge investment, after the discovery of the drug, before it can be sold. If that investment is public domain (as it would be on an unpatented drug), it usually isn't worth it.
In those cases, perhaps there should be other governmental mechanisms to encourage the investment (like there is with orphan drugs), but too often the government screws these things up and people (like pharmcos) game them.
Pharmos are in the business to make money. They often do well at it. But to make money in a competitive industry, they also have to sell their product. Doctors are overwhelmed with information, and are very conservative. Pharmaceutical company reps cost a lot of money because they themselves have to know a lot about the drugs they sell and often have substantial education. Without those expenses, the drugs wouldn't get into use. The newer practice of advertising direct to consumers may also benefit consumers by advising them of choices their doctors may not be paying attention to.
The pharmcos aren't perfect and they aren't identical and they do some things that may not be right. But the problem they have is real.
The pharmcos have developed a lot of very useful drugs. They have risked huge amounts of money to bring drugs to market, and most of the drugs they invest in it fail.
You may not like their business model, and are free to try your own. Good luck.
As it is, the rest of the world is free-riding on the expenses Americans pay for drugs, because the costs in price controlled countries like Canada are below the total costs of the drugs, and the only reason those drugs are available at all is because the *marginal* cost of selling the drugs there is low.
If you think businesses should be charities, why don't you start one. The advertising budgets of pharmacy companies doesn't change the issue of patentability in the first place.
They are an industry. It costs real money to do research. Huge amounts of it. I suppose you think they should just spend on good things until they are bankrupt, at which point there would be no more drugs for anyone.
Removing patent protection and forcing the research opens means that your are removing all intellectual property protection.
How are you going to pay for the testing? NSF, etc do not do the development and mass clinical testing needed to determine safety, efficacy and cilnical characteristics of medications. They do more basic research, and the private firms (who also do basic research, BTW) then assume all of the risk.
I have seen no proposals that solve this problem other than federalizing the whole drug development process, which would be a catastrophy. We would then have drug development being run by the same kind of people as TIAA, the FDA or NASA.
As far as there being economists who think the world would be better without patents, there are far more economists who believe the world would be better with socialism. Shall we listen to them too?
Patents are one method of protecting intellectual property, and are justified in that they allow capital to invest in property (such as drug research and its results) that otherwise wouldn't attract investment.
The fact that the patent system works poorly in certain areas ( such as software ) does not mean that it is a bad idea in general.
In fact, it is an old and tested idea that was considered so important that the Constitution of the United States *requires* a Patent and Copyright system.
Yes, without patents the problem of unpatentable drugs would continue, and in fact would get much, much worse. Basically, the pharmaceutical industry would be destroyed and no new drugs would come to market.
The policy is a simple business decision involving weighing the costs against the profits, the latter being dramatically reduced by competition which does not have the same upfront costs.
In other words, someone has to do the testing. Without the testing, the drug cannot (or should not) be sold. Whoever does the testing is the loser, because the anybody else can make the same drug and free-ride on the testing of the first company.
Thus the best way to deal with non-patentable drugs is to have some other mechanism to prevent free-riders. Whether that is having the government assume the risk, or requiring the other sellers of the drug to pay royalties to the developer (i.e. something like patents but based on investment rather than originality), or something else.
We are already dealing with a major free-rider problem. Many countries in the world have price-fixing in pharmaceuticals (Canada is a major example). Hence they par far less than their fair share for the cost of drugs developed for the American market. They are being subsidized by the Americans who pay a greater-than-full-price for the medication in order to subsidize these countries all over the world. Thus Europe and Canada and some other countries are, through government action, free-riding on the American consumer. Other countries cannot afford the drugs at full price, and the pharmaceutical companies will sell at lower prices because the price still exceeds their cost of production, which is far less than the total cost of developing, testing, and producing the drug.
I think the FDA may be the wrong way to do things too. Too many people have been denied lifesaving drugs by the FDA, and too many drugs have not been developed because their lack of patentability makes it unprofitable to go through the FDA hurdles.
However, even without the FDA, you want extensive clinical testing. A UL or an FDA with merely advisory powers (I like the idea of having both) would still demand that testing before giving a blessing to the product. Thus there is still a massive upfront cost and massive upfront risk (a drug may go through $800,000,000 of testing and then be shown to be ineffective or dangerous).
But having run products through UL, that is also an upfront burden. Furthermore, patent protection to pharmaceutical companies encourages the distribution of scientific information, since they do not need to conceal their research. The only trade secrets are the process methods for creating the drug.
So I still disagree with your assertion that without patents the drug companies would have many incentives to create new products. They would still have to do the research and screening, and they would still have to do the testing. The testing would probably be just somewhat less bureaucratic. Furthermore, FDA testing provides at least some protection against cut-throat class-action lawyers (although not enough). Liability is another enormous risk for the drug companies, which can be spread over the patent life of the drug if it is patentable, and otherwise is not because competition will rapidly drive the profit margins down.
Thus patents provide protection against free riders. Without patents, the only protection is trade secrets, which inhibit scientific discourse and are not nearly as effective.
There are certainly exceptions to this rule. For example, the pharmaceutical industry, because of its huge upfront costs, often will not develop a perfectly useful drug unless it can patent it. The reason is that without patent protection, other companies will free-ride on the FDA approval process and other startup costs.
Products which are high in intellectual content or up-front cost/risk and low in reproduction cost often need protection or they will not be developed.
There is no doubt in my mind that the patent system, applied to software, is extremely wrong and has the potential to destroy the industry or put it into the hands of gigantic corporations who can use cross-licensing to avoid patent problems.
But not every industry is software.
As to an economist "proving" something... well, give me a break. An economist can throw light on things, and come up with good ideas, but the idea of them proving things is, in most cases, absurd.
First of all, it probably wasn't elected officials, but their bureaucratic minions that actually made the decision. These are people whose computer experience involves running big IBM iron where the punch cards were totalled in the past. So they trust computers.
Are they likely to be smart about electronic voting machines? Not likely.
People want instant results. The networks want to provide them because the people want to have them. There is political pressure to provide results the instant the polls close. And no beaurocrat want's to be seen as "not modern."
So it isn't a conspiracy. It's simply a company selling a product to poorly informed people who don't require the right checks and balances. And the company probably itself doesn't think about these things either, because it doesn't know any better.
Its voters who don't demand a way to check if their own vote was properly tallied (of course, I've yet to have that ability on the mark-sense systems either, which are also probably vulnerable).
It's just government as it operates. Not too smart (even though there are a bunch of smart people scattered through government); not too careful; responding to political pressures with the easiest solution.
The Supreme Court held that computerizing any existing process can be patented. How they rationalize that with non-obviousness is beyond me, but then they rationalize a lot of nonsense (like the Michigan Affirmative Action BS).
This means that people started filing patents on the (obvious) automation of every business practice that could be done on computers, even if the practice was thousands of years old.
In this case, I don't even know if Congress could fix it. The Imperial... errr... Supreme Court makes the rules these days.
Yep. One of the first things they told me in Navy boot camp was that our job was to kill people when necessary.
And that was fine with me, because some people needed killing, in this case, in North Vietnam. I helped do that, although I never was directly involved. I have no regrets. In fact, if I wasn't so old, I go back in because a whole bunch more people need killing if we are to survive in this age of man-portable weapons of mass destruction.
Some people imagine that no violence is needed in the world... that somehow magic will happen and the sociopaths and other bad guys will just decide they'd rather sit around and contemplate their navels.
These people are idiots, ignorant of history, and free riders on the efforts of those of us who pay attention and volunteered to do something about it.
Argh. Hit the preview button, ME, or end up spelling conscience as conscious.
A Sociopath has a lack of conscience. The incidence is between 1 and 5 percent of the population. You know some of these people. They tend to be of above average intelligence and are very good at hiding their sociopathy. They are excellent manipulators. And they would kill you with no mor qualms than you would spray disinfectant on some a bacteria laden surface, but very few of them actually kill people because they don't want to take the risk (although another characteristic is that they tend to be impulsive and risk takers).
You left out the mostly likely: sociopathic personality disorder. Such a person is known as a sociopath or psychopath. The main characteristic amounts to a lack of conscious (no empathy, every other person in the world is there just for the use of the sociopath, people are purely objects).
Another term for such a person is evil.
Examples: Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, Joseph Stalin, Saddam Hussen.
I often hear claims about nefarious activity by NSA, but considering the level of security, I am rather dubious of these claims because it leads to the question of how people broke NSA security enough to find out about this stuff.
If you want industrial espionage, check the French. Air France was discovered to have bugged every seat in first class on every flight for the French security agency. Why first class? Industrial espionage seems an obvious reason, although again, how would you know.
The government doesn't have time to spy on ordinary citizens. Unless it is doing a criminal investigation or a national security (i.e. counter-intelligence/counter-terrorism) case, it isn't going to pay attention to you.
If the rumored key phrase sniffers are out there, then they no doubt have listened to a few of mine and lots of other conversations, just to be annoyed at the waste of time.
Oh, and NSA is allowed to operate inside the US. It is the agency responsible for communications security for the US military, and as such monitors US military communications in the US in addition to providing secure systems.
Many years ago, when I was a radio operator in P-3 Orions, another radio operator in my squadron sent a false MAYDAY as if he were a ship (not aircraft) in distress. A few days later he was in the brig. Can you say "signature analysis" and "broadband recorders"? This was in the late '60s, btw, so you can imagine what sort of technology was used to be able to go back to an arbitrary frequency, pull out the false MAYDAY, and subject it to signal analysis.
The same technique is almost certainly how the KAL-007 shootdown was recorded. Basically, at least in the past and no doubt now, NSA records and archives a whole lot of spectrum in a whole lot of places.
Actually, while I haven't read everything Schneier writes about security, I have seen and read enough to see that he still greatly underrates the expertise of others, and attacks security measures *as if* they are the only obstacle as opposed to part of a system, albeit systems which may not be formally evaluated.
Now I'm sure he has run into lots of people using security methods where they have never run a risk analysis or maybe don't understand the system. That doesn't invalidate the system.
I wish all the critics of security systems would quit demanding that they be perfect.
Every security system known can be broken (including one time pads - if you human engineer a way into getting one of pads - which has been done in the past by secretly capturing one user of a pad, and forcing him to carry on the conversation while relaying the information to his captors).
But the harder a system is to break, the more it deters the use of false or stolen identities.
For example, to replace pictures with biometrics would be stupid. To add biometrics increases the difficulty of the forget. Etc.
A useful authentication system would be one where it takes a lot of work to forge a single identity, and that work would have to be repeated to forge another one. Biometrics in common with other systems have the promise of making such systems.
When I last worked with biometrics (a long time ago), the problem was that you could not get an acceptable false positive rate at the same time that you got an acceptable false negative rate. But when biometrics are combined with other systems, you can allow higher false positives (and hence fewer false negatves = rejections), because the other systems add security. And the whole thing becomes harder to break, making it less worthwhile to break unless you try to protect something way too valuable with it.
Unfortunately, security in computers has often been viewed as identical with cryptography. The result is that serious and smart cryptographers, like Bruce Schnier become "the experts" on security. But mathematics tends to bias people towards openness, provability and precision. Thus many security techniques which do in fact work with real human beings (such as keeping secrets, if you are smart about it) are often decried by them. In other words, Schnier and others make public pronouncements that are out of their true field of expertise.
If you want to find people who truly understand security, check with the military or banks. They have been dealing with security for millenia. They take a different attitude from cryptographers.
They understand that in most systems, security is a cost/risk tradeoff, not an absolute. Hence they use one or more techniques for a particular security need. A simple ID card might get you into a military base, while to get into some facilities requires the ID card, a special ID, the knowledge of safe door combinations, and perhaps personal recognition by another trusted individual. None of these techniques is perfect by itself, but the combination is remarkably formidable.
Thus biometrics represent a a technique that can be used to enhance security. Can it be defeated? Yes, by itself. How easy is it to defeat? It depends on a number of factors, but especially what other security measures are used along with the biometrics, and how their parameters are set.
If you were a gun owner, you would get arrested for reckless endangerment.
What makes you think you know the address of the spammer? Right now, one is using a bogus email address at my domain, and since I get all email to my domain, I see the responses and bounces.
Spammers don't give out their real email addresses, because they know this will happen. Instead, they direct you to an 800 number or a web site.
Oh, and before you go DDOSing their web site, remember that it is probably on an innocent host that doesn't know it has a spammer there, and will only be there for a few days! Your DDOS will just hurt other people (the way Al Qaeda hurt the blog world when the went after the Hagganah blog with DDOS a couple of weeks ago).
In other words, make sure you know that you are sure of your target, before you pull the trigger!
You've got it backwards. You usually don't use unless you test, although one type of bomb dropped on Japan (enriched Uranium) was never tested before use.
The biological weapons were tested on ANIMALS at Fort Detrick in Maryland and Dugway Proving Grounds (Utah), and maybe other locations. No doubt they were also tested against human cell lines at Ft. Detrick. Harmless microbial agents were released in San Francisco and I think New York City to analyze the spread of the agents under city and subway conditions.
The H-bombs were tested in the South Pacific. They were not used, just tested.
If you wish to assert that thest test *was* a use, at it appears, I suggest you try a more reasonable line of reasoning, because that is purely idiotic.
Chemical weapons meaning chemicals produced to kill or seriously injure people quickly. That's pretty much the standard definition. Quickly because that's all that counts on the battlefield. The last known use of chemical weapons was by Saddam Hussein. Before that, it was the Italians in Ethiopia prior to WW-II. Chemical weapons were commonplace in WW-I, although nerve agents were not developed until WW-II, by the Germans, who didn't use them except in their extermination camps.
Biological weapons are normally pathogenic microbial life forms or their natural toxins (such as Botulin toxin, although personally I think of as a chemical weapon, since it isn't alive). We have never used biological weapons, although we did develop them. We destroyed our stocks of them in 1969. The last known use of biological weapons was by the Japanese in China before and during WW-II. The greatest amount of biological weapons were produced by the Soviet Union under Gorbachev by the Vector organization, and were put in ICBM warheads. These included smallpox, anthrax and several others.
DU, if you look at any scientific literature, has no harmful effects unless you are in the tank that gets hit with it.
There was NO fallout in Japan. Those weapons were not planned to cause fallout, and the phenomenon was not known or considered to be harmful until tests injured some people in the Marshall Islands in the '50s (which was, obviously, not a weapons use, but a test).
We used no bio weapons in the Korean war. There was a North Korean propaganda campaign to the effect that we had, and many American prisoners were tortured to elicit confessions of such use (a few were obtained). If you choose to believe the Stalinist regime of (at that time) Kim Il Sung, that's pretty sad.
Re: Agent Orange...See my other article in this thread. It was not a chemical weapon, but an herbicide. It was not designed to kill people, and was sprayed on our own troops, often at their request.
I started this subthread to refute an offhanded (and rather offensive) comment that the US had never produced a weapon that was not subsequently used, which is utter nonsense.
I'm a Vietnam Veteran, I'm just not too scared of the whole thing. TCDD is very deadly to rats, there is no question about that. If I were a rat I would be very scared (of course, I would also be long dead).
However, there is no good epidemiological evidence that it is significantly harmful to man. It is still treated in the US as a horribly deadly carcinogen, in spite of the lack of evidence. Go look closely at your own links and read the *scientific* report from the National Academies instead of all the propaganda.
To give you an idea of research on the subject, consider that there was an accident in a industrial plant in Seveso which released 5 kg of dioxin into the atmosphere. People received the highest doses ever recorded, and many developed chloracne (unlike those in Vietnam). Many small animals died. And yet, here is a quote from Medical and Toxicological Informion Review: "The Serveso 15-year update has been published. The findings, surprising many, including IARC, concluded there were no statistically significant reports of cancer for individuals exposed to Dioxin in 1976. See Epidemiology 8 (1997): 646-652"
There is an entire industry devoted to getting money for Vietnam Veterans because their health problems were "caused by Agent Orange." There are a number of cancers, which, if I get them, I can get compensation for as "Agent Orange" service connected health problem.
The communist government of Vietnam of course blames all birth defects on it.
As far as eye witnesses, that claim is utterly absurd. The ONLY known short term harm of extremely high dosages of dioxins is a non-fatal skin condition known as chloracne. Thats at HIGH DOSAGES, not the trace dosages Americans, Australians and Vietnamese got from the defoliation.
Cancer mortality among Vietnam Veterans is INVERSELY proportional to Agent Orange exposure.
If you carefully read the National Academies reports, they are able to find some associations between *pesticides* and an increased cancer risk - among farmers who use the pesticides a lot for a long time.
They have been unable to find any statistically significant evidence of Agent Orange damage to Vietnam Veterans. Go read the report.
Now, when you consider all the other things going on in Vietnam at the time, and the high level of violence, and the risk level which is so low that it has yet to be reasonably measurable after 35 years, calling AO a chemical weapon is utterly and completely absurd. That's like calling a bulldozer a weapon because it clears jungle.
Notice your own quote "TCDD's are thought to be harmful to man." If there were scientifically valid evidence, that statement would read: "TCDD's are known to be harmful humans." In fact, many of the chemicals we used in our aviation work were more dangerous that AO.
All the evidence indicates that AO was less dangerous than gasoline or oil or many of the other chemicals used by people in their daily lives. Furthermore, the evidence from those who got vastly higher doses than anyone in 'nam is that the slight risk observed is more likely due to the pesticide than the TCDD.
Furthermore, significant amounts of dioxins are produced in nature. One dioxin scare in the US was traced to the clay used in a food processing phase... clay from a many millenia old stratum.
The obvious conclusion is that dioxins may be slightly toxic in low doses, with possibly a very small risk of future cancers, but this has not been proven. They also have known effects, at high dosages, on sex ratios in human births.
This is hardly a chemical weapon!
As to your offensive attitude, mate, I suppose it's what to expect th
Agent Orange was a defoliant, not intended to hurt people or destroy property, and to this day there is no solid scientific evidence that Agent Orange is dangerous, in spite of vast numbers of people exposed and many, many studies.
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Okay, let's take Pfizer... They spent $5 billion on R&D last year. How much would they have spent without patent protection?
I never claimed that pharmaceutical companies are saints. They are businesses. But I did claim that patent protection is necessary for them to do the R&D.
You ridicule my comments are marketing. Have you ever been in business? Do you understand how it is necessary to sell your product? Do you know how doctors receive their education on new medicines? Yes, they get much of it from marketing.
Do you know how conservatives doctors are? It took a long time for them to switch to using antibiotics to treat helicobacter pylori caused peptic ulcers (the cause of the majority of those ulcers). Patients who saw ads about effective antibiotics could potentially get much better treatment by informing their doctors about the change in treatment.
In a perfect world, advertising wouldn't be necessary. It isn't a perfect world.
Everyone who pays attention knows that capitalism is inefficient in the details, in the sense that it pays a lot for advertisers, pays for cost of capital through interest and dividends, and often competes on equivalent product. But capitalism at a large scale is quite efficient and extremely creative.
Now, this side discussion was about pharmaceutical companies and patents. Take away those patents and please explain why Pfizer would invest $5,000,000,000 in a R&D on a product, only to have every other pharmaceutical company produce the same thing for almost nothing, simply by reverse engineering it (absolutely trivial).
Sorry, but patents aren't a "special consideration" that applies only to pharmaceuticals. And if they are so powerful, why is it that the FDA, whose decisions can destroy a billion dollar R&D investment, doesn't give them more of a pass? Why is it that a few bad outcomes that couldn't be predicted (such as the off label use of Phen-Fen, or is it Fen-Phen) cause them to be lose huge amounts of money to the real powerful lobby - the tort lawyers.
Let's look at one special consideration: the limits on importing drugs from countries where the prices are lower...
Lets say we allow anyone to buy any drug from anywhere (as long as said drug is legal in the US). Drug sales at discount prices to most other countries would end, because Americans would quickly start using the internet to buy all their drugs from the cheapest country, dropping the price below the profit level for the drug company. Then either those companies would violate international patent treaties and get the drugs that way (at which point Americans would again be prohibited from buy them, or at which point the pharmaceutical industry would simply stop doing any R&D), or their people would do without. Meanwhile, Americans would pay higher prices because the total income flow amortizing the drug development would be reduced to only that available from Americans. And, of course, the stockholders who invested in the companies would lose, because the companies would also bear the burden. Bigger and richer countries (like Canada) would see their prices rise to the American level (which IMHO would be a good thing - Canadians and others are free-riding on American drug consumers).
Finally, in response to your ad hominem comments.
My dad is a professor emeritus (semi-retired academic scientist) outside the medical field. My daughter is an academic research scientist in cellular-molecular neuroscientist. I am not in either field, but certainly am a consumer of pharmaceuticals in America.
And why is this wrong, if it is the most effective way for it to work?
Creating software is largely the engineering of computer programs. Very little of it involves research. Developing pharmaceuticals relies on vast amounts of research, ranging from work done by NIH to drug prospecting in natural plants to combinatorial chemistry to other stuff.
But the problem that you miss, and that is crucial, is that it takes a huge expense to develop the drugs for market, AFTER the NIH funded research. This is because of the costs of research borne by the companies (on top of publicly funded research), the huge costs of testing drugs, and the vast majority which fail, after significant expenditure, the costs of developing volume production chemistry and factories, and the costs of advertising to let doctors and other knows the details and advantages of the new drugs. Companies will not and should not bear these costs if they cannot have some way of recouping them plus a profit, and in this argument I have yet to see a system other than patents that provide this. Maybe you could provide some suggestions other than just assuming that in some magical way, the NIH (which as far as I know produces no medicines) will provide!
As far as the research community providing the needed work... it doesn't. The research community does research, some of which leads directly to drugs and a lot of which deepens understanding that may indirectly lead to drugs, but it doesn't incur all the rest of the expense needed to actually produce the drugs.
Lets take the analogy of computers and medicine.
Software researchers work in the same sort of environment as medical researchers - an academic one. They do basic research which sometimes leads to an increased understanding of something or a new technique (although not nearly as often as happens with medical research). They do not actually go through the expense necessary to produce their product in many cases, and when they do, they can have an a priori much higher probability that what they invented will actually work. The people who actually produce software usually protect it through copyright (which destroys competition in one sense) or patents (which are granted for way to manhy obvious things and thus are not achieving their purpose in software) or trade secrets (which you can't do with drugs because reverse engineering is too easy, and the drug company scientists want to be able to publish in scientific journals).
The idea that patents destroy competition is correct, within the confines of the patent. And sometimes that is the necessary price to pay. Having much of our medical research controlled by government institutions also destroys competition, because whole areas of inquiries may not be investigated because of the prejudice of a review committee or a bureaucrat or politician. Having the whole drug development process done by the government is a nightmare that I don't wish to experience. It is no accident that private companies develop most of the drugs we have today!
Patents have a purpose. Those who argue against them in the area of drugs need to provide an alternative suggestino with some change of working. I have yet to see that in this thread.
This is certainly true. And the reason is that it takes a huge investment, after the discovery of the drug, before it can be sold. If that investment is public domain (as it would be on an unpatented drug), it usually isn't worth it.
In those cases, perhaps there should be other governmental mechanisms to encourage the investment (like there is with orphan drugs), but too often the government screws these things up and people (like pharmcos) game them.
Pharmos are in the business to make money. They often do well at it. But to make money in a competitive industry, they also have to sell their product. Doctors are overwhelmed with information, and are very conservative. Pharmaceutical company reps cost a lot of money because they themselves have to know a lot about the drugs they sell and often have substantial education. Without those expenses, the drugs wouldn't get into use. The newer practice of advertising direct to consumers may also benefit consumers by advising them of choices their doctors may not be paying attention to.
The pharmcos aren't perfect and they aren't identical and they do some things that may not be right. But the problem they have is real.
The pharmcos have developed a lot of very useful drugs. They have risked huge amounts of money to bring drugs to market, and most of the drugs they invest in it fail.
You may not like their business model, and are free to try your own. Good luck.
As it is, the rest of the world is free-riding on the expenses Americans pay for drugs, because the costs in price controlled countries like Canada are below the total costs of the drugs, and the only reason those drugs are available at all is because the *marginal* cost of selling the drugs there is low.
If you think businesses should be charities, why don't you start one. The advertising budgets of pharmacy companies doesn't change the issue of patentability in the first place.
And my argument is you have no clue.
They are an industry. It costs real money to do research. Huge amounts of it. I suppose you think they should just spend on good things until they are bankrupt, at which point there would be no more drugs for anyone.
I think you are missing the point...
Removing patent protection and forcing the research opens means that your are removing all intellectual property protection.
How are you going to pay for the testing? NSF, etc do not do the development and mass clinical testing needed to determine safety, efficacy and cilnical characteristics of medications. They do more basic research, and the private firms (who also do basic research, BTW) then assume all of the risk.
I have seen no proposals that solve this problem other than federalizing the whole drug development process, which would be a catastrophy. We would then have drug development being run by the same kind of people as TIAA, the FDA or NASA.
As far as there being economists who think the world would be better without patents, there are far more economists who believe the world would be better with socialism. Shall we listen to them too?
Patents are one method of protecting intellectual property, and are justified in that they allow capital to invest in property (such as drug research and its results) that otherwise wouldn't attract investment.
The fact that the patent system works poorly in certain areas ( such as software ) does not mean that it is a bad idea in general.
In fact, it is an old and tested idea that was considered so important that the Constitution of the United States *requires* a Patent and Copyright system.
Yes, without patents the problem of unpatentable drugs would continue, and in fact would get much, much worse. Basically, the pharmaceutical industry would be destroyed and no new drugs would come to market.
The policy is a simple business decision involving weighing the costs against the profits, the latter being dramatically reduced by competition which does not have the same upfront costs.
In other words, someone has to do the testing. Without the testing, the drug cannot (or should not) be sold. Whoever does the testing is the loser, because the anybody else can make the same drug and free-ride on the testing of the first company.
Thus the best way to deal with non-patentable drugs is to have some other mechanism to prevent free-riders. Whether that is having the government assume the risk, or requiring the other sellers of the drug to pay royalties to the developer (i.e. something like patents but based on investment rather than originality), or something else.
We are already dealing with a major free-rider problem. Many countries in the world have price-fixing in pharmaceuticals (Canada is a major example). Hence they par far less than their fair share for the cost of drugs developed for the American market. They are being subsidized by the Americans who pay a greater-than-full-price for the medication in order to subsidize these countries all over the world. Thus Europe and Canada and some other countries are, through government action, free-riding on the American consumer. Other countries cannot afford the drugs at full price, and the pharmaceutical companies will sell at lower prices because the price still exceeds their cost of production, which is far less than the total cost of developing, testing, and producing the drug.
I think the FDA may be the wrong way to do things too. Too many people have been denied lifesaving drugs by the FDA, and too many drugs have not been developed because their lack of patentability makes it unprofitable to go through the FDA hurdles.
However, even without the FDA, you want extensive clinical testing. A UL or an FDA with merely advisory powers (I like the idea of having both) would still demand that testing before giving a blessing to the product. Thus there is still a massive upfront cost and massive upfront risk (a drug may go through $800,000,000 of testing and then be shown to be ineffective or dangerous).
But having run products through UL, that is also an upfront burden. Furthermore, patent protection to pharmaceutical companies encourages the distribution of scientific information, since they do not need to conceal their research. The only trade secrets are the process methods for creating the drug.
So I still disagree with your assertion that without patents the drug companies would have many incentives to create new products. They would still have to do the research and screening, and they would still have to do the testing. The testing would probably be just somewhat less bureaucratic. Furthermore, FDA testing provides at least some protection against cut-throat class-action lawyers (although not enough). Liability is another enormous risk for the drug companies, which can be spread over the patent life of the drug if it is patentable, and otherwise is not because competition will rapidly drive the profit margins down.
Thus patents provide protection against free riders. Without patents, the only protection is trade secrets, which inhibit scientific discourse and are not nearly as effective.
There are certainly exceptions to this rule. For example, the pharmaceutical industry, because of its huge upfront costs, often will not develop a perfectly useful drug unless it can patent it. The reason is that without patent protection, other companies will free-ride on the FDA approval process and other startup costs.
Products which are high in intellectual content or up-front cost/risk and low in reproduction cost often need protection or they will not be developed.
There is no doubt in my mind that the patent system, applied to software, is extremely wrong and has the potential to destroy the industry or put it into the hands of gigantic corporations who can use cross-licensing to avoid patent problems.
But not every industry is software.
As to an economist "proving" something... well, give me a break. An economist can throw light on things, and come up with good ideas, but the idea of them proving things is, in most cases, absurd.
"I will hunt down and castrate your employees unless you take me off your e:mail list".
Now can anyone tell me what on earth is so unreasonable about that?
Perhaps all of the employees are female!
First of all, it probably wasn't elected officials, but their bureaucratic minions that actually made the decision. These are people whose computer experience involves running big IBM iron where the punch cards were totalled in the past. So they trust computers.
Are they likely to be smart about electronic voting machines? Not likely.
People want instant results. The networks want to provide them because the people want to have them. There is political pressure to provide results the instant the polls close. And no beaurocrat want's to be seen as "not modern."
So it isn't a conspiracy. It's simply a company selling a product to poorly informed people who don't require the right checks and balances. And the company probably itself doesn't think about these things either, because it doesn't know any better.
Its voters who don't demand a way to check if their own vote was properly tallied (of course, I've yet to have that ability on the mark-sense systems either, which are also probably vulnerable).
It's just government as it operates. Not too smart (even though there are a bunch of smart people scattered through government); not too careful; responding to political pressures with the easiest solution.
IANAL...but I believe that the following is true:
The Supreme Court held that computerizing any existing process can be patented. How they rationalize that with non-obviousness is beyond me, but then they rationalize a lot of nonsense (like the Michigan Affirmative Action BS).
This means that people started filing patents on the (obvious) automation of every business practice that could be done on computers, even if the practice was thousands of years old.
In this case, I don't even know if Congress could fix it. The Imperial... errr... Supreme Court makes the rules these days.
Yep. One of the first things they told me in Navy boot camp was that our job was to kill people when necessary.
And that was fine with me, because some people needed killing, in this case, in North Vietnam. I helped do that, although I never was directly involved. I have no regrets. In fact, if I wasn't so old, I go back in because a whole bunch more people need killing if we are to survive in this age of man-portable weapons of mass destruction.
Some people imagine that no violence is needed in the world... that somehow magic will happen and the sociopaths and other bad guys will just decide they'd rather sit around and contemplate their navels.
These people are idiots, ignorant of history, and free riders on the efforts of those of us who pay attention and volunteered to do something about it.
Argh. Hit the preview button, ME, or end up spelling conscience as conscious.
A Sociopath has a lack of conscience. The incidence is between 1 and 5 percent of the population. You know some of these people. They tend to be of above average intelligence and are very good at hiding their sociopathy. They are excellent manipulators. And they would kill you with no mor qualms than you would spray disinfectant on some a bacteria laden surface, but very few of them actually kill people because they don't want to take the risk (although another characteristic is that they tend to be impulsive and risk takers).
You left out the mostly likely: sociopathic personality disorder. Such a person is known as a sociopath or psychopath. The main characteristic amounts to a lack of conscious (no empathy, every other person in the world is there just for the use of the sociopath, people are purely objects).
Another term for such a person is evil.
Examples: Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, Joseph Stalin, Saddam Hussen.
And your sources for this are?
I often hear claims about nefarious activity by NSA, but considering the level of security, I am rather dubious of these claims because it leads to the question of how people broke NSA security enough to find out about this stuff.
If you want industrial espionage, check the French. Air France was discovered to have bugged every seat in first class on every flight for the French security agency. Why first class? Industrial espionage seems an obvious reason, although again, how would you know.
The government doesn't have time to spy on ordinary citizens. Unless it is doing a criminal investigation or a national security (i.e. counter-intelligence/counter-terrorism) case, it isn't going to pay attention to you.
If the rumored key phrase sniffers are out there, then they no doubt have listened to a few of mine and lots of other conversations, just to be annoyed at the waste of time.
Oh, and NSA is allowed to operate inside the US. It is the agency responsible for communications security for the US military, and as such monitors US military communications in the US in addition to providing secure systems.
Many years ago, when I was a radio operator in P-3 Orions, another radio operator in my squadron sent a false MAYDAY as if he were a ship (not aircraft) in distress. A few days later he was in the brig. Can you say "signature analysis" and "broadband recorders"? This was in the late '60s, btw, so you can imagine what sort of technology was used to be able to go back to an arbitrary frequency, pull out the false MAYDAY, and subject it to signal analysis.
The same technique is almost certainly how the KAL-007 shootdown was recorded. Basically, at least in the past and no doubt now, NSA records and archives a whole lot of spectrum in a whole lot of places.
Actually, while I haven't read everything Schneier writes about security, I have seen and read enough to see that he still greatly underrates the expertise of others, and attacks security measures *as if* they are the only obstacle as opposed to part of a system, albeit systems which may not be formally evaluated.
Now I'm sure he has run into lots of people using security methods where they have never run a risk analysis or maybe don't understand the system. That doesn't invalidate the system.
He isn't dumb. I'm sure he is learning.
I wish all the critics of security systems would quit demanding that they be perfect.
Every security system known can be broken (including one time pads - if you human engineer a way into getting one of pads - which has been done in the past by secretly capturing one user of a pad, and forcing him to carry on the conversation while relaying the information to his captors).
But the harder a system is to break, the more it deters the use of false or stolen identities.
For example, to replace pictures with biometrics would be stupid. To add biometrics increases the difficulty of the forget. Etc.
A useful authentication system would be one where it takes a lot of work to forge a single identity, and that work would have to be repeated to forge another one. Biometrics in common with other systems have the promise of making such systems.
When I last worked with biometrics (a long time ago), the problem was that you could not get an acceptable false positive rate at the same time that you got an acceptable false negative rate. But when biometrics are combined with other systems, you can allow higher false positives (and hence fewer false negatves = rejections), because the other systems add security. And the whole thing becomes harder to break, making it less worthwhile to break unless you try to protect something way too valuable with it.
Unfortunately, security in computers has often been viewed as identical with cryptography. The result is that serious and smart cryptographers, like Bruce Schnier become "the experts" on security. But mathematics tends to bias people towards openness, provability and precision. Thus many security techniques which do in fact work with real human beings (such as keeping secrets, if you are smart about it) are often decried by them. In other words, Schnier and others make public pronouncements that are out of their true field of expertise.
If you want to find people who truly understand security, check with the military or banks. They have been dealing with security for millenia. They take a different attitude from cryptographers.
They understand that in most systems, security is a cost/risk tradeoff, not an absolute. Hence they use one or more techniques for a particular security need. A simple ID card might get you into a military base, while to get into some facilities requires the ID card, a special ID, the knowledge of safe door combinations, and perhaps personal recognition by another trusted individual. None of these techniques is perfect by itself, but the combination is remarkably formidable.
Thus biometrics represent a a technique that can be used to enhance security. Can it be defeated? Yes, by itself. How easy is it to defeat? It depends on a number of factors, but especially what other security measures are used along with the biometrics, and how their parameters are set.
Sorry, but this is the wrong way to go about it.
If you were a gun owner, you would get arrested for reckless endangerment.
What makes you think you know the address of the spammer? Right now, one is using a bogus email address at my domain, and since I get all email to my domain, I see the responses and bounces.
Spammers don't give out their real email addresses, because they know this will happen. Instead, they direct you to an 800 number or a web site.
Oh, and before you go DDOSing their web site, remember that it is probably on an innocent host that doesn't know it has a spammer there, and will only be there for a few days! Your DDOS will just hurt other people (the way Al Qaeda hurt the blog world when the went after the Hagganah blog with DDOS a couple of weeks ago).
In other words, make sure you know that you are sure of your target, before you pull the trigger!
Please don't do this!
A spammer is currently using an address in my domain (I can tell because I get the bounces to the return address).
So if you were to respond to this spammer, I would get the email. And I am not a spammer!
You've got it backwards. You usually don't use unless you test, although one type of bomb dropped on Japan (enriched Uranium) was never tested before use.
The biological weapons were tested on ANIMALS at Fort Detrick in Maryland and Dugway Proving Grounds (Utah), and maybe other locations. No doubt they were also tested against human cell lines at Ft. Detrick. Harmless microbial agents were released in San Francisco and I think New York City to analyze the spread of the agents under city and subway conditions.
The H-bombs were tested in the South Pacific. They were not used, just tested.
If you wish to assert that thest test *was* a use, at it appears, I suggest you try a more reasonable line of reasoning, because that is purely idiotic.
Chemical weapons meaning chemicals produced to kill or seriously injure people quickly. That's pretty much the standard definition. Quickly because that's all that counts on the battlefield. The last known use of chemical weapons was by Saddam Hussein. Before that, it was the Italians in Ethiopia prior to WW-II. Chemical weapons were commonplace in WW-I, although nerve agents were not developed until WW-II, by the Germans, who didn't use them except in their extermination camps.
Biological weapons are normally pathogenic microbial life forms or their natural toxins (such as Botulin toxin, although personally I think of as a chemical weapon, since it isn't alive). We have never used biological weapons, although we did develop them. We destroyed our stocks of them in 1969. The last known use of biological weapons was by the Japanese in China before and during WW-II. The greatest amount of biological weapons were produced by the Soviet Union under Gorbachev by the Vector organization, and were put in ICBM warheads. These included smallpox, anthrax and several others.
DU, if you look at any scientific literature, has no harmful effects unless you are in the tank that gets hit with it.
There was NO fallout in Japan. Those weapons were not planned to cause fallout, and the phenomenon was not known or considered to be harmful until tests injured some people in the Marshall Islands in the '50s (which was, obviously, not a weapons use, but a test).
We used no bio weapons in the Korean war. There was a North Korean propaganda campaign to the effect that we had, and many American prisoners were tortured to elicit confessions of such use (a few were obtained). If you choose to believe the Stalinist regime of (at that time) Kim Il Sung, that's pretty sad.
Re: Agent Orange...See my other article in this thread. It was not a chemical weapon, but an herbicide. It was not designed to kill people, and was sprayed on our own troops, often at their request.
I started this subthread to refute an offhanded (and rather offensive) comment that the US had never produced a weapon that was not subsequently used, which is utter nonsense.
I'm a Vietnam Veteran, I'm just not too scared of the whole thing. TCDD is very deadly to rats, there is no question about that. If I were a rat I would be very scared (of course, I would also be long dead).
However, there is no good epidemiological evidence that it is significantly harmful to man. It is still treated in the US as a horribly deadly carcinogen, in spite of the lack of evidence. Go look closely at your own links and read the *scientific* report from the National Academies instead of all the propaganda.
To give you an idea of research on the subject, consider that there was an accident in a industrial plant in Seveso which released 5 kg of dioxin into the atmosphere. People received the highest doses ever recorded, and many developed chloracne (unlike those in Vietnam). Many small animals died. And yet, here is a quote from Medical and Toxicological Informion Review: "The Serveso 15-year update has been published. The findings, surprising many, including IARC, concluded there were no statistically significant reports of cancer for individuals exposed to Dioxin in 1976. See Epidemiology 8 (1997): 646-652"
There is an entire industry devoted to getting money for Vietnam Veterans because their health problems were "caused by Agent Orange." There are a number of cancers, which, if I get them, I can get compensation for as "Agent Orange" service connected health problem.
The communist government of Vietnam of course blames all birth defects on it.
As far as eye witnesses, that claim is utterly absurd. The ONLY known short term harm of extremely high dosages of dioxins is a non-fatal skin condition known as chloracne. Thats at HIGH DOSAGES, not the trace dosages Americans, Australians and Vietnamese got from the defoliation.
Cancer mortality among Vietnam Veterans is INVERSELY proportional to Agent Orange exposure.
If you carefully read the National Academies reports, they are able to find some associations between *pesticides* and an increased cancer risk - among farmers who use the pesticides a lot for a long time.
They have been unable to find any statistically significant evidence of Agent Orange damage to Vietnam Veterans. Go read the report.
Now, when you consider all the other things going on in Vietnam at the time, and the high level of violence, and the risk level which is so low that it has yet to be reasonably measurable after 35 years, calling AO a chemical weapon is utterly and completely absurd. That's like calling a bulldozer a weapon because it clears jungle.
Notice your own quote "TCDD's are thought to be harmful to man." If there were scientifically valid evidence, that statement would read: "TCDD's are known to be harmful humans." In fact, many of the chemicals we used in our aviation work were more dangerous that AO.
All the evidence indicates that AO was less dangerous than gasoline or oil or many of the other chemicals used by people in their daily lives. Furthermore, the evidence from those who got vastly higher doses than anyone in 'nam is that the slight risk observed is more likely due to the pesticide than the TCDD.
Furthermore, significant amounts of dioxins are produced in nature. One dioxin scare in the US was traced to the clay used in a food processing phase... clay from a many millenia old stratum.
If you have the ability to read scientific reports, try: Birth Outcomes of Women Exposed to Dioxin in Seveso Italy
The obvious conclusion is that dioxins may be slightly toxic in low doses, with possibly a very small risk of future cancers, but this has not been proven. They also have known effects, at high dosages, on sex ratios in human births.
This is hardly a chemical weapon!
As to your offensive attitude, mate, I suppose it's what to expect th
Not a weapon.
Agent Orange was a defoliant, not intended to hurt people or destroy property, and to this day there is no solid scientific evidence that Agent Orange is dangerous, in spite of vast numbers of people exposed and many, many studies.