"half the world doesn't give a fuck about (our) patents."
Ahh, but, if you want to import anything into the U.S. in any quantity (obviously, you could probably smuggle small quantities and get around Customs), you have to respect patents. The U.S. Customs Service *will* seize your unlicensed products which violate patents, at the port of entry, before you can sell the goods on the market, if the patent holder complains to Customs. So, you might try to rip off ARM's designs, but you won't have any luck selling products in the U.S. (or Canada and Europe). You might get away with selling the unlicensed goods in other countries, but then in the future if you wish to start doing business in the U.S., you will likely have to come to a settlement with the patent holder regarding past sales as well as future royalties, before you would be able to start.
Ahh, well, I was asking about an explosive in my original post (with the thought that the explosive might have been used to create the crater in the first place, if it wasn't just all dug out with shovels). After asking about explosives, someone mentioned Thermite, so I was trying to figure out if they were suggesting the Thermite was used as an explosive. You ask a question, you get an answer, you think the answer is in response to *that question*, but I guess maybe it wasn't.
I didn't realize thermite was explosive? I thought it just burned really hot? I've heard of it being used for certain types of welding processes (like railroad tracks), and I've heard of it being used during WW2 to disable enemy artillery pieces (either by welding the aiming mechanism for the gun so it couldn't be re-aimed, or by melting the barrel, so that it was fouled up enough that shells couldn't be safely fired out of the gun [because the shell might get stuck in the barrel, leading to the kinetic energy of the shell causing the barrel to explode]).
Can it also be made explosive? (I suppose anything that can produce enough thermal energy can somehow be turned into an explosive though - contain the thermal energy in some sort of vessel designed to explode when the internal pressure reaches a critical threshold?)
"The Monopoly quantity for any good is always less than the amount produced with competition. The Monopoly price for any good is always higher than the price with any competition."
I agree with that statement, but you are comparing oranges and bananas. I never said the price, by increasing the period of patent protection, would be lower than the price with competition. What I *said* was that I think it is at least possible that the monopoly price with a *longer period* of patent protection would be lower than the monopoly price with a *shorter period*.
I still might concede the point, though. I've thought about it for a bit longer, and while I think I still have a valid point about the potential to increase overall profits by reducing price, I suppose that in the situation of drugs, it might not matter as much - that's because in order for price reductions to increase profits, they have to have a very large impact on demand; so, for example, if you reduce the marginal profit [which, of course, is not the same thing as price] by 50%, you'd need that to produce greater than 100% increase in demand in order for that to translate into greater profits. That might not be true in the case of pharmaceuticals.
I suppose with something like drugs, it may be the case (particularly since health insurance does generally cover most of the cost of even expensive drugs, and I think the figures I've heard tossed out lately are that about 80 percent of U.S. citizens have health insurance) that price doesn't have much impact on demand. If that is the case, then lowering the price wouldn't probably increase demand much, and conversely, high prices might not be having much effect of reducing the demand, so high marginal profit just means higher profits total.
I'm not really assuming any such thing. Actually, I'm assuming that the *potential* market demand (that is, the number of patients that might benefit from the drug) for most drugs is greater than the actual demand in terms of prescriptions sold to patients. (Almost) Any company will reduce its unit price *if* it has reason to believe that by lowering the unit price, it will increase sales enough to both offset the lost revenue and increase revenue overall. Put another way - there are some people who need the drugs, but who do not buy them because they can't afford them, and don't have insurance (or maybe their insurance company won't cover the drug, although I do think there might be laws [at least in the U.S.] requiring insurance to cover necessary drugs; not quite sure about how that works).
I'm willing to bet that if the drug companies had a longer period of exclusivity, they would somewhat reduce prices (perhaps not in the first year or two, though), in order to stimulate market demand during the period of exclusivity. I may be wrong though.
The problem with your reasoning is that it leaves no possibility for a Research and Development for-profit business. Take ARM CPUs for example. Their business model is that they develop designs for real CPU cores (which is, in a sense, a real product, but in another sense, is not). But, they are a 'fabless' semiconductor company - they don't *build* or directly sell any actual products (except for, probably, some demo/marketing units which they ship to manufacturing partners).
They license their CPU designs out to manufacturing partners, who integrate them into all sorts of devices - cell phones, game consoles, netbooks, DVRs, DVD/Blu-Ray players, automated manufacturing devices, medical devices, etc. Anything which needs a CPU could potentially use an ARM CPU design.
So, what is so *wrong* about the ARM business model? I don't think most people would call them a patent troll, and yet without patents, they would collapse overnight. But, by your (rather vague) definition, they wouldn't likely get patent protection?
I know, I'm probably being far too charitable here, but it occurs to me that at least the *possibility* exists that granting longer than 5 years on drug patents *might* lead to cheaper branded drugs? 12 years might still be a bit too long, but here's my reasoning. . .
1) New drugs cost a lot of money to do R&D, and then to get through all the clinical studies and FDA approval.
2) New drugs require the drug companies to market to both doctors and patients (although, it could be argued they should be doing less marketing to patients, and more to doctors, but that's a bit off-topic for this thread). My point is, there is a 'ramp up' period to get drugs up to their 'natural' demand level (by which I mean that enough doctors and patients know about the drug that it is probably being properly prescribed to most of the patient population that needs it). This probably takes 2-5 years, I imagine.
3) The costs of R&D, trials, approval, marketing, *and* reasonable return-on-investement currently have to mostly be done within that 5 year window, which means that the cost, per patient, for the drugs, it would seem to me, must *necessarily* be quite high.
Now, if you allow the drug companies to amortize all of those 'startup' costs for the new drug over a period of say, 8-10 years, shouldn't they be able to reduce the cost-per-patient pretty substantially (assuming that the unit manufacturing costs aren't a substantial fraction [i.e. greater than 75%] of the 'retail' price the patients end up paying, which I kind of think is probably true for most drugs)?
Yeah, it's partly why I don't consider myself a "libertarian", because I disagree to *some* extent, I think, with 'mainstream' libertarian philosphy. But to me, the things I mentioned are just simple extensions of our normal concept of 'criminal law'. But, I see those types of regulations largely as an extension of concepts of law that even libertarians subscribe to.
For example, Truth in Advertising laws. Libertarians would say that it is proper for the government to enforce contracts. I believe the reasoning goes something like this - you can do what ever you want, but when you agree to a contract, you have voluntarily assumed an obligation. Or something like that, right? Well, to me, Advertising is just another type of contract, effectively. If you advertise that you will sell something, and the thing you will sell matches certain specifications, and then the product you actually sell me does not meet those specifications, you have essentially broken a contract, no? So, I shouldn't think libertarians *should* have a problem with such laws.
Protecting human safety - I think libertarians would generally agree that you can't assault other people, or murder them, or through gross negligence, cause them to be injured. So, why should corporations be able to do that which is not right for the individual to do? Libertarianism is NOT anarchy, and so it is fundamentally contradictory to agree that criminal laws are O.K. with regards to individuals, but safety regulations are NOT ok (at least, IMHO).
Preventing gross exploitation of people. . . OK, this one is a fine line. Liberals often take this one too far, and that's where we get the concept of the "Nanny State". Still, as an extreme example, forced labor/slavery, etc should (and are) illegal, and I don't think people have a problem with that (even libertarians). This gets back to protecting individual liberty. But, at the same time, there is such a thing as letting the market determine wages, which for the most part we do in this country. I really don't have a problem with Minimum Wage though, because it's not set so high that it would break the concept of market economics - the vast majority of the people in the U.S. work *above* minimum wage, because of market economics (supply and demand, that is), but a minimum wage protects the most vulnerable people in society - people who have little personal ability to demand higher wages. It's set low enough that there is still *plenty* of incentive for those individuals to take their prosperity into their own hands and do things like get more education, learn new skills, etc. That's just one example.
As for Environmental regulations, I still think this isn't truly contradictory with a basic libertarian philosophy. After all, if you poison the environment and thus cause me harm, you have, it seems to me, violated *my* liberty (at least, in a sense). I believe in liberty up to the point where it hurts others, or interferes with their liberty (which I believe to be consistent with libertarianism?) Environmental regs are just there to prevent industry from hurting other people or their livelyhood (for example, polution might make formerly fertile farmlands or forests barren, or at least non-exploitable (i.e. food could theoretically be grown, but it would be contaminated, so the farmland is thus despoiled).
Do not libertarians believe it is ok to use the power of government to maintain liberty and basic safety for that country's citizens?
"Another fact is that there is simply not enough money in the world to pay for all the infrastructure in all the countries."
I find this statement puzzling. What do you mean? Money is an invented concept, in a sense. We can say that it symbolically represents labor, raw materials, energy, and land.
There is a certain extent to which the total amount of money in the world, in terms of how much currency has been created by governments, is unimportant. The important thing about money isn't that money merely exists, and someone has it, but that it *moves*, that it circulates between people, companies, charities, governments, etc. The real measure of world wealth isn't the number of dollars, yen, euros, etc, but their velocity in moving from person to person.
When the money is moving quickly, we have a good economy. When the money is moving slowly, we have a bad economy.
Now, getting back to your statement. . .
Are you saying there is not enough labor? There might not be enough labor in a year, or in 5 years, but extended far enough out in time, if you start now, eventually you would 'accrue' enough labor over time. Also, there are many, many people in the world who are unemployed or underemployed. Right now, there is a lot of potentially 'untapped' labor available (although, I agree with other posters who have pointed out that most developing nations need to use the labor available to them for much more important and basic things than Internet access).
Are you saying there is not enough raw materials? Maybe not for copper, but the Internet doesn't necessarily require copper. Fiber optic cable is glass fibers, made from silicon (which is the second most common element in the earth's crust, after oxygen). Effectively, we can say that we can never run out of silicon. Of course, having a waveguide for light isn't all you need - you do need computers and power sources, and all of those require electrical conductors. The limits on the supplies of copper might be a problem there, but it may be possible to use other conductors, largely, instead of copper (aluminum? Steel alloys? Not sure, but I bet there's something we can use instead of copper, which is more abundant for most of our conductors and things).
Granted, raw materials resources can be a challenge, but I don't think it's accurate to say there aren't enough raw materials in the world to provide infrastructure to all countries, *eventually* (but, not today, I would agree).
Energy? That's certainly a challenge we face right now, but energy supply is, I really believe, a resolvable problem, but it will take time, investment, and really, just the will to get the job done. I think that between solar (both terrestrial and space-based), wind, other potential renewable energy sources (like ocean temperature gradiants, etc), biomass, and nuclear fission and/or fusion, we do have access to all the energy we could need, but unfortunately, right now, there's not enough determination on the part of all the developed nations to develop those resources fully enough.
As for land, I'm not sure that even much comes into the equation (except for the need to run cabling across the land).
So, again, how is there not enough money, ultimately?
I agree that right now, there are too many economic problems in the world to build out Internet infrastructure to all nations, but I don't see that as an inherent, immutable fact of existence. I think there is at least the potential that *someday*, everyone could have high speed Internet access. Whether that actually comes to pass is anyone's guess.
In this case, in the African nations, the cost of Infrastructure and transport to other Internet connected companies is both relatively large (because of a large geographical area that infrastructure has to be deployed to), and has to be shared by a fairly small population of customers. Even if you tried to 'scale up' in Africa, by lowering the cost, there are many people so utterly poor they could not even afford the equivalent of $5/mo for Internet access. That's not to say African nations don't have wealthy people, but as a friend of mine from Nigeria described it to me, there is essentially no middle class in Nigeria (and I think that might be fairly typical of most of Africa) - you have people who are well connected with the government, oil companies, etc, and are rich, and then you have destitute poor people who are exploited by the rich.
Without a middle class, there's no way the ISP's in Africa can get the economies of scale necessary to make broadband cheaper (and, you know, if the only people who can afford your product are the rich, what is your business incentive to make it cheaper? To a rich person, making hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars a year, $500/mo is 'affordable', and to the poor, $20/mo is 'unaffordable', so why *try* to get broadband down to $20 or $30/mo? In 1st world nations, the pressure to get the price down is that, even though you might reduce your price by, say, 10 percent per month per subscriber, you have a possibility that you might increase the total number of subscribers by 20 percent oor 30 percent, meaning you actually make more money. Not so in Africa.
I'm not a business person, and I'm not an economist, nor a politician.
I believe in the 'free market', but for completely different reasons than stated above. I think the 'free' in free market is the same free as in 'Free Software' - that is, it is about individual and corporate private Freedom/Liberty to make their own decisions, (relatively) free of government interference. I personally don't really care about 'maximizing the efficiency of allocation of resources' (though that might be a desireable side-effect), but I'm pretty strongly pro-free-market, because I am pro-Freedom.
That doesn't mean I don't think there is a place for regulations from the government, but the regulatory role of the government, in my personal philosophy, is more of a policing roll - it shouldn't so much be about telling businesses how to run their business (though there are, I think, some reasonable exceptions), but should be about such things as maintaining honesty (things like truth-in-advertising laws, warranty laws,insider trading laws, etc, to keep people from getting ripped off by con-men, which I think most people, even the staunchest capitalists/libertarians, can generally agree are necessary), protecting human safety (things like OSHA) and preventing gross exploitation of people (minimum wage, etc), protecting the environment/public resources.
I also, though, think that there is also a place for more extensive/invasive regulations when it comes to business products/services, which necessarily, have either a true monopoly, or are necessarily limited to only 2 or 3 competitors per market. So, I am pro-network-neutrality, because there is no real free market (from my earlier definition of what I consider a free market, it follows that a market is only free if anyone can get into a business, if they see an opportunity, so long as they have sufficient investment capital, with no artificial/government limitations on entry into that business) in things like to-the-premises ISPs - only 2 or 3 companies can run cables to homes/businesses (so there is, basically, a monopoly on infrastructure - even if I have a lot of money to invest in infrastructure, I probably would NOT BE ALLOWED, legally, to run cables to your home or business), and for Wireless Internet, again, there's only enough spectrum for a small handful of operators per market (I think it might be slightly easier to get into the Wireless ISP business than the cabled ISP business, but still, there are effectively monopolies on the spectrum).
So, I think that it is appropriate for the government to have a larger regulatory role in industries in which a truly free market does not and cannot exist.
"This means on boot a checker runs from *inside the encrypted volume* to see if anything has changed."
Unless the hacked bootloader deletes or disables the fingerprint checker? Seriously, I can't see how verifying the bootloader *AFTER* you've already provided the password/key to decrypt the volume, offers you *any* protection? At that point, it's pretty much game over, no?
I don't see any conflict between the business models. I mean, if you bought a Disney DVD, and then they stopped selling that movie for a decade, as long as your DVD isn't damaged, you can keep watching the video forever, right? But, *other people* cannot obtain copies.
So, with Keychest, if you bought it, you got it, but if you didn't buy it while it was out, you have to wait another decade to buy it when it goes on sale again? It's not like "The Vault" *removes* your access, currently, to already purchased content.
However, that said, I could totally see Disney trying to move to a model, using this digital platform, where you only have temporary access to the media. I'm sure they'd love that idea. We'll see.
This sounds pretty much exactly like Valve's Steam service, extended to other forms of entertainment. Seems like a lot of people have little problem with Steam, so not sure why they'd have a problem with Keychest? I guess one concern I could come up with is that, I suspect Valve is a *lot* more committed to Steam, than Disney might be to Keychest. While Disney themselves is probably at little risk of going out of business any time soon, I wouldn't be overly surprised if Disney tried this, then a year or two later decided to pull the plug and try something else, when the service doesn't instantly make them hundreds of millions of dollars.
The great thing about science is, it doesn't really matter whether you like/trust someone, or think they're a nutter, does it? If he can demonstrate that he is able to achieve fusion and produce more power out than put in, then he's right. If he can't, then he's wrong. If it works, it works, if it doesn't, it doesn't. What could be better than that? If he claims success, and then other, independent teams can reproduce the results, then that gives us confidence he is correct. If he claims success, but nobody else can ever reproduce it, then that gives us confidence he is (probably) a liar, a nutter, or both.
So, it appears that the VASIMR page shows a diagram where an external power source is applied to the engine (I presume in the form of electricity). Are there any electrical generators currently in existence which would be suitably compact and low enough mass, while at the same time generating sufficient power, to actually power this thing (basic physics tells me that no matter what propulsion method you use, energy is energy, and it takes a LOT of energy to generate large accellerations)? Or is this engine gonna have to sit on the shelf after being developed, while we figure out how to power it?
I suspect this thing would need some sort of small/light power generator that can produce a GW or more of power. So, do we need to first perfect fusion power before we can actually use this engine?
Yes, that's true. But, if you are in America, your choices have been somewhat limited - there's actually been, I think, greater availability of Android handsets *outside* the U.S. than inside the U.S. until recently. For about the past year, if you wanted an Android phone, you had to use T-Mobile, basically. T-Mo is alright, but they are, I think, the 4th largest network in the US, with Sprint, AT&T and Verizon ahead of them. That means that something like 75% of U.S. mobile customers didn't have the option of using an Android handset unless they wanted to switch networks (and people are often hesitant to switch to another network, particularly a smaller network like T-Mo, because they might not get the same coverage they did with the larger network (particularly true if you are outside a major Metro area - but even inside large metros, there can be 'weak spots' and 'dead spots').
I'm not sure about the relative sizes of the Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon networks, but I *think*, in terms of the actual coverage provided by the networks, Verizon is the largest. Sprint just recently announced the HTC Hero which is an Android phone, and now Verizon has the Droid, which means that all the nationals except AT&T have an Android phone, which means that there is a much greater potential market for Android, which means maybe the platform *might* have a chance to succeed, because it's now on 3 networks, with the iPhone only on 1 network. Being available on Verizon, at least in the U.S., really is a *big* deal, and may have impact on the rest of the world, as the platforms's success or failure in the U.S. could strongly impact the phone availability in other countries, long term. That is, if it fails in the U.S., unless it was *huge* everywhere else, the Android phones would likely go off the market, everywhere, in another couple years or so - I mean, I could be wrong, but basic economics theory would seem to suggest that manufacturer's, while necessarily having some different choices/options, probably want to keep the number of models they produce at, relatively speaking, the minimum they can sustain, so that they can benefit from economies of scale. ).
I think information is allowed to be provided to investors, but it has to be done through a public disclosure, where any investor could potentially access the information at the same time, right? Things like press releases/conferences, maybe announcements on a website, tv/radio/internet news, etc. I might be wrong - I'm definitely no expert on securities law, but I think the *point* is to prevent people getting rich (or avoiding losses) from having access to secrets that other investors don't.
Yeah, only do this if you actually *own* a Hero. Something people seem to miss about the GPL sometimes - you only have a legal right to the source code *when someone gives you a binary* of GPL software. Where there is no distribution, there is no violation. So, if you are not either the copyright holder of the software in question, or an owner of an HTC touch (at which point HTC has distributed the software to you in object form), you have no right to demand the source code.
If I had to guess, I would guess that Google is possibly going to leverage the "Google Gears" tech for this (although, that might mean that some cell phones wouldn't be compatible, so perhaps not). Or, maybe they will just offer you a pdf or html download? Time will tell.
Slightly off-topic, but I have a question for the word-geeks out there. Now, I know that technically "Occults", used the way it is in this context, is technically correct (in fact, as far as I can tell, this is the *original* meaning of the word, and the other meanings have developed off of the original meaning, later). However, given that most people probably associate the word "Occult" with mysticism, mightn't it have been better to describing the Sun blocking communication by using the word Occlude, instead of Occult?
I'm going to have to do a little research on this issue, to find out why the *EFF* funded this prize. As an EFF donor, I donate money to them so that they can use it to advance the causes of liberty and privacy. I'm a little puzzled at how them spending $100k of (I presume) *donor money* is advancing the cause of liberty or privacy? Here I thought my money was going to precedent-setting lawsuits and criminal trials, and to lobby congress and educate the press about technology and liberty/privacy issues?
I suppose *maybe* this is somehow tied into the last part (government/public education about the issues) sort of "crypto awareness", since most cryptography is based on large prime numbers, but I'm a bit skeptical at them moment that my donations are being used wisely.
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"half the world doesn't give a fuck about (our) patents."
Ahh, but, if you want to import anything into the U.S. in any quantity (obviously, you could probably smuggle small quantities and get around Customs), you have to respect patents. The U.S. Customs Service *will* seize your unlicensed products which violate patents, at the port of entry, before you can sell the goods on the market, if the patent holder complains to Customs. So, you might try to rip off ARM's designs, but you won't have any luck selling products in the U.S. (or Canada and Europe). You might get away with selling the unlicensed goods in other countries, but then in the future if you wish to start doing business in the U.S., you will likely have to come to a settlement with the patent holder regarding past sales as well as future royalties, before you would be able to start.
Ahh, well, I was asking about an explosive in my original post (with the thought that the explosive might have been used to create the crater in the first place, if it wasn't just all dug out with shovels). After asking about explosives, someone mentioned Thermite, so I was trying to figure out if they were suggesting the Thermite was used as an explosive. You ask a question, you get an answer, you think the answer is in response to *that question*, but I guess maybe it wasn't.
I didn't realize thermite was explosive? I thought it just burned really hot? I've heard of it being used for certain types of welding processes (like railroad tracks), and I've heard of it being used during WW2 to disable enemy artillery pieces (either by welding the aiming mechanism for the gun so it couldn't be re-aimed, or by melting the barrel, so that it was fouled up enough that shells couldn't be safely fired out of the gun [because the shell might get stuck in the barrel, leading to the kinetic energy of the shell causing the barrel to explode]).
Can it also be made explosive? (I suppose anything that can produce enough thermal energy can somehow be turned into an explosive though - contain the thermal energy in some sort of vessel designed to explode when the internal pressure reaches a critical threshold?)
Is Aluminum a part of some common explosive or something?
"The Monopoly quantity for any good is always less than the amount produced with competition. The Monopoly price for any good is always higher than the price with any competition."
I agree with that statement, but you are comparing oranges and bananas. I never said the price, by increasing the period of patent protection, would be lower than the price with competition. What I *said* was that I think it is at least possible that the monopoly price with a *longer period* of patent protection would be lower than the monopoly price with a *shorter period*.
I still might concede the point, though. I've thought about it for a bit longer, and while I think I still have a valid point about the potential to increase overall profits by reducing price, I suppose that in the situation of drugs, it might not matter as much - that's because in order for price reductions to increase profits, they have to have a very large impact on demand; so, for example, if you reduce the marginal profit [which, of course, is not the same thing as price] by 50%, you'd need that to produce greater than 100% increase in demand in order for that to translate into greater profits. That might not be true in the case of pharmaceuticals.
I suppose with something like drugs, it may be the case (particularly since health insurance does generally cover most of the cost of even expensive drugs, and I think the figures I've heard tossed out lately are that about 80 percent of U.S. citizens have health insurance) that price doesn't have much impact on demand. If that is the case, then lowering the price wouldn't probably increase demand much, and conversely, high prices might not be having much effect of reducing the demand, so high marginal profit just means higher profits total.
I'm not really assuming any such thing. Actually, I'm assuming that the *potential* market demand (that is, the number of patients that might benefit from the drug) for most drugs is greater than the actual demand in terms of prescriptions sold to patients. (Almost) Any company will reduce its unit price *if* it has reason to believe that by lowering the unit price, it will increase sales enough to both offset the lost revenue and increase revenue overall. Put another way - there are some people who need the drugs, but who do not buy them because they can't afford them, and don't have insurance (or maybe their insurance company won't cover the drug, although I do think there might be laws [at least in the U.S.] requiring insurance to cover necessary drugs; not quite sure about how that works).
I'm willing to bet that if the drug companies had a longer period of exclusivity, they would somewhat reduce prices (perhaps not in the first year or two, though), in order to stimulate market demand during the period of exclusivity. I may be wrong though.
The problem with your reasoning is that it leaves no possibility for a Research and Development for-profit business. Take ARM CPUs for example. Their business model is that they develop designs for real CPU cores (which is, in a sense, a real product, but in another sense, is not). But, they are a 'fabless' semiconductor company - they don't *build* or directly sell any actual products (except for, probably, some demo/marketing units which they ship to manufacturing partners).
They license their CPU designs out to manufacturing partners, who integrate them into all sorts of devices - cell phones, game consoles, netbooks, DVRs, DVD/Blu-Ray players, automated manufacturing devices, medical devices, etc. Anything which needs a CPU could potentially use an ARM CPU design.
So, what is so *wrong* about the ARM business model? I don't think most people would call them a patent troll, and yet without patents, they would collapse overnight. But, by your (rather vague) definition, they wouldn't likely get patent protection?
I know, I'm probably being far too charitable here, but it occurs to me that at least the *possibility* exists that granting longer than 5 years on drug patents *might* lead to cheaper branded drugs? 12 years might still be a bit too long, but here's my reasoning. . .
1) New drugs cost a lot of money to do R&D, and then to get through all the clinical studies and FDA approval.
2) New drugs require the drug companies to market to both doctors and patients (although, it could be argued they should be doing less marketing to patients, and more to doctors, but that's a bit off-topic for this thread). My point is, there is a 'ramp up' period to get drugs up to their 'natural' demand level (by which I mean that enough doctors and patients know about the drug that it is probably being properly prescribed to most of the patient population that needs it). This probably takes 2-5 years, I imagine.
3) The costs of R&D, trials, approval, marketing, *and* reasonable return-on-investement currently have to mostly be done within that 5 year window, which means that the cost, per patient, for the drugs, it would seem to me, must *necessarily* be quite high.
Now, if you allow the drug companies to amortize all of those 'startup' costs for the new drug over a period of say, 8-10 years, shouldn't they be able to reduce the cost-per-patient pretty substantially (assuming that the unit manufacturing costs aren't a substantial fraction [i.e. greater than 75%] of the 'retail' price the patients end up paying, which I kind of think is probably true for most drugs)?
"That sounds either hybrid or authoritarian."
Yeah, it's partly why I don't consider myself a "libertarian", because I disagree to *some* extent, I think, with 'mainstream' libertarian philosphy. But to me, the things I mentioned are just simple extensions of our normal concept of 'criminal law'. But, I see those types of regulations largely as an extension of concepts of law that even libertarians subscribe to.
For example, Truth in Advertising laws. Libertarians would say that it is proper for the government to enforce contracts. I believe the reasoning goes something like this - you can do what ever you want, but when you agree to a contract, you have voluntarily assumed an obligation. Or something like that, right? Well, to me, Advertising is just another type of contract, effectively. If you advertise that you will sell something, and the thing you will sell matches certain specifications, and then the product you actually sell me does not meet those specifications, you have essentially broken a contract, no? So, I shouldn't think libertarians *should* have a problem with such laws.
Protecting human safety - I think libertarians would generally agree that you can't assault other people, or murder them, or through gross negligence, cause them to be injured. So, why should corporations be able to do that which is not right for the individual to do? Libertarianism is NOT anarchy, and so it is fundamentally contradictory to agree that criminal laws are O.K. with regards to individuals, but safety regulations are NOT ok (at least, IMHO).
Preventing gross exploitation of people. . . OK, this one is a fine line. Liberals often take this one too far, and that's where we get the concept of the "Nanny State". Still, as an extreme example, forced labor/slavery, etc should (and are) illegal, and I don't think people have a problem with that (even libertarians). This gets back to protecting individual liberty. But, at the same time, there is such a thing as letting the market determine wages, which for the most part we do in this country. I really don't have a problem with Minimum Wage though, because it's not set so high that it would break the concept of market economics - the vast majority of the people in the U.S. work *above* minimum wage, because of market economics (supply and demand, that is), but a minimum wage protects the most vulnerable people in society - people who have little personal ability to demand higher wages. It's set low enough that there is still *plenty* of incentive for those individuals to take their prosperity into their own hands and do things like get more education, learn new skills, etc. That's just one example.
As for Environmental regulations, I still think this isn't truly contradictory with a basic libertarian philosophy. After all, if you poison the environment and thus cause me harm, you have, it seems to me, violated *my* liberty (at least, in a sense). I believe in liberty up to the point where it hurts others, or interferes with their liberty (which I believe to be consistent with libertarianism?) Environmental regs are just there to prevent industry from hurting other people or their livelyhood (for example, polution might make formerly fertile farmlands or forests barren, or at least non-exploitable (i.e. food could theoretically be grown, but it would be contaminated, so the farmland is thus despoiled).
Do not libertarians believe it is ok to use the power of government to maintain liberty and basic safety for that country's citizens?
"Another fact is that there is simply not enough money in the world to pay for all the infrastructure in all the countries."
I find this statement puzzling. What do you mean? Money is an invented concept, in a sense. We can say that it symbolically represents labor, raw materials, energy, and land.
There is a certain extent to which the total amount of money in the world, in terms of how much currency has been created by governments, is unimportant. The important thing about money isn't that money merely exists, and someone has it, but that it *moves*, that it circulates between people, companies, charities, governments, etc. The real measure of world wealth isn't the number of dollars, yen, euros, etc, but their velocity in moving from person to person.
When the money is moving quickly, we have a good economy. When the money is moving slowly, we have a bad economy.
Now, getting back to your statement. . .
Are you saying there is not enough labor? There might not be enough labor in a year, or in 5 years, but extended far enough out in time, if you start now, eventually you would 'accrue' enough labor over time. Also, there are many, many people in the world who are unemployed or underemployed. Right now, there is a lot of potentially 'untapped' labor available (although, I agree with other posters who have pointed out that most developing nations need to use the labor available to them for much more important and basic things than Internet access).
Are you saying there is not enough raw materials? Maybe not for copper, but the Internet doesn't necessarily require copper. Fiber optic cable is glass fibers, made from silicon (which is the second most common element in the earth's crust, after oxygen). Effectively, we can say that we can never run out of silicon. Of course, having a waveguide for light isn't all you need - you do need computers and power sources, and all of those require electrical conductors. The limits on the supplies of copper might be a problem there, but it may be possible to use other conductors, largely, instead of copper (aluminum? Steel alloys? Not sure, but I bet there's something we can use instead of copper, which is more abundant for most of our conductors and things).
Granted, raw materials resources can be a challenge, but I don't think it's accurate to say there aren't enough raw materials in the world to provide infrastructure to all countries, *eventually* (but, not today, I would agree).
Energy? That's certainly a challenge we face right now, but energy supply is, I really believe, a resolvable problem, but it will take time, investment, and really, just the will to get the job done. I think that between solar (both terrestrial and space-based), wind, other potential renewable energy sources (like ocean temperature gradiants, etc), biomass, and nuclear fission and/or fusion, we do have access to all the energy we could need, but unfortunately, right now, there's not enough determination on the part of all the developed nations to develop those resources fully enough.
As for land, I'm not sure that even much comes into the equation (except for the need to run cabling across the land).
So, again, how is there not enough money, ultimately?
I agree that right now, there are too many economic problems in the world to build out Internet infrastructure to all nations, but I don't see that as an inherent, immutable fact of existence. I think there is at least the potential that *someday*, everyone could have high speed Internet access. Whether that actually comes to pass is anyone's guess.
What does this post have to do with the article this discussion is about?
I think the term you are looking for is Economy of Scale.
In this case, in the African nations, the cost of Infrastructure and transport to other Internet connected companies is both relatively large (because of a large geographical area that infrastructure has to be deployed to), and has to be shared by a fairly small population of customers. Even if you tried to 'scale up' in Africa, by lowering the cost, there are many people so utterly poor they could not even afford the equivalent of $5/mo for Internet access. That's not to say African nations don't have wealthy people, but as a friend of mine from Nigeria described it to me, there is essentially no middle class in Nigeria (and I think that might be fairly typical of most of Africa) - you have people who are well connected with the government, oil companies, etc, and are rich, and then you have destitute poor people who are exploited by the rich.
Without a middle class, there's no way the ISP's in Africa can get the economies of scale necessary to make broadband cheaper (and, you know, if the only people who can afford your product are the rich, what is your business incentive to make it cheaper? To a rich person, making hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars a year, $500/mo is 'affordable', and to the poor, $20/mo is 'unaffordable', so why *try* to get broadband down to $20 or $30/mo? In 1st world nations, the pressure to get the price down is that, even though you might reduce your price by, say, 10 percent per month per subscriber, you have a possibility that you might increase the total number of subscribers by 20 percent oor 30 percent, meaning you actually make more money. Not so in Africa.
I'm not a business person, and I'm not an economist, nor a politician.
I believe in the 'free market', but for completely different reasons than stated above. I think the 'free' in free market is the same free as in 'Free Software' - that is, it is about individual and corporate private Freedom/Liberty to make their own decisions, (relatively) free of government interference. I personally don't really care about 'maximizing the efficiency of allocation of resources' (though that might be a desireable side-effect), but I'm pretty strongly pro-free-market, because I am pro-Freedom.
That doesn't mean I don't think there is a place for regulations from the government, but the regulatory role of the government, in my personal philosophy, is more of a policing roll - it shouldn't so much be about telling businesses how to run their business (though there are, I think, some reasonable exceptions), but should be about such things as maintaining honesty (things like truth-in-advertising laws, warranty laws,insider trading laws, etc, to keep people from getting ripped off by con-men, which I think most people, even the staunchest capitalists/libertarians, can generally agree are necessary), protecting human safety (things like OSHA) and preventing gross exploitation of people (minimum wage, etc), protecting the environment/public resources.
I also, though, think that there is also a place for more extensive/invasive regulations when it comes to business products/services, which necessarily, have either a true monopoly, or are necessarily limited to only 2 or 3 competitors per market. So, I am pro-network-neutrality, because there is no real free market (from my earlier definition of what I consider a free market, it follows that a market is only free if anyone can get into a business, if they see an opportunity, so long as they have sufficient investment capital, with no artificial/government limitations on entry into that business) in things like to-the-premises ISPs - only 2 or 3 companies can run cables to homes/businesses (so there is, basically, a monopoly on infrastructure - even if I have a lot of money to invest in infrastructure, I probably would NOT BE ALLOWED, legally, to run cables to your home or business), and for Wireless Internet, again, there's only enough spectrum for a small handful of operators per market (I think it might be slightly easier to get into the Wireless ISP business than the cabled ISP business, but still, there are effectively monopolies on the spectrum).
So, I think that it is appropriate for the government to have a larger regulatory role in industries in which a truly free market does not and cannot exist.
So, what does that make me?
"This means on boot a checker runs from *inside the encrypted volume* to see if anything has changed."
Unless the hacked bootloader deletes or disables the fingerprint checker? Seriously, I can't see how verifying the bootloader *AFTER* you've already provided the password/key to decrypt the volume, offers you *any* protection? At that point, it's pretty much game over, no?
I don't see any conflict between the business models. I mean, if you bought a Disney DVD, and then they stopped selling that movie for a decade, as long as your DVD isn't damaged, you can keep watching the video forever, right? But, *other people* cannot obtain copies.
So, with Keychest, if you bought it, you got it, but if you didn't buy it while it was out, you have to wait another decade to buy it when it goes on sale again? It's not like "The Vault" *removes* your access, currently, to already purchased content.
However, that said, I could totally see Disney trying to move to a model, using this digital platform, where you only have temporary access to the media. I'm sure they'd love that idea. We'll see.
This sounds pretty much exactly like Valve's Steam service, extended to other forms of entertainment. Seems like a lot of people have little problem with Steam, so not sure why they'd have a problem with Keychest? I guess one concern I could come up with is that, I suspect Valve is a *lot* more committed to Steam, than Disney might be to Keychest. While Disney themselves is probably at little risk of going out of business any time soon, I wouldn't be overly surprised if Disney tried this, then a year or two later decided to pull the plug and try something else, when the service doesn't instantly make them hundreds of millions of dollars.
The great thing about science is, it doesn't really matter whether you like/trust someone, or think they're a nutter, does it? If he can demonstrate that he is able to achieve fusion and produce more power out than put in, then he's right. If he can't, then he's wrong. If it works, it works, if it doesn't, it doesn't. What could be better than that? If he claims success, and then other, independent teams can reproduce the results, then that gives us confidence he is correct. If he claims success, but nobody else can ever reproduce it, then that gives us confidence he is (probably) a liar, a nutter, or both.
So, it appears that the VASIMR page shows a diagram where an external power source is applied to the engine (I presume in the form of electricity). Are there any electrical generators currently in existence which would be suitably compact and low enough mass, while at the same time generating sufficient power, to actually power this thing (basic physics tells me that no matter what propulsion method you use, energy is energy, and it takes a LOT of energy to generate large accellerations)? Or is this engine gonna have to sit on the shelf after being developed, while we figure out how to power it?
I suspect this thing would need some sort of small/light power generator that can produce a GW or more of power. So, do we need to first perfect fusion power before we can actually use this engine?
Yes, that's true. But, if you are in America, your choices have been somewhat limited - there's actually been, I think, greater availability of Android handsets *outside* the U.S. than inside the U.S. until recently. For about the past year, if you wanted an Android phone, you had to use T-Mobile, basically. T-Mo is alright, but they are, I think, the 4th largest network in the US, with Sprint, AT&T and Verizon ahead of them. That means that something like 75% of U.S. mobile customers didn't have the option of using an Android handset unless they wanted to switch networks (and people are often hesitant to switch to another network, particularly a smaller network like T-Mo, because they might not get the same coverage they did with the larger network (particularly true if you are outside a major Metro area - but even inside large metros, there can be 'weak spots' and 'dead spots').
I'm not sure about the relative sizes of the Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon networks, but I *think*, in terms of the actual coverage provided by the networks, Verizon is the largest. Sprint just recently announced the HTC Hero which is an Android phone, and now Verizon has the Droid, which means that all the nationals except AT&T have an Android phone, which means that there is a much greater potential market for Android, which means maybe the platform *might* have a chance to succeed, because it's now on 3 networks, with the iPhone only on 1 network. Being available on Verizon, at least in the U.S., really is a *big* deal, and may have impact on the rest of the world, as the platforms's success or failure in the U.S. could strongly impact the phone availability in other countries, long term. That is, if it fails in the U.S., unless it was *huge* everywhere else, the Android phones would likely go off the market, everywhere, in another couple years or so - I mean, I could be wrong, but basic economics theory would seem to suggest that manufacturer's, while necessarily having some different choices/options, probably want to keep the number of models they produce at, relatively speaking, the minimum they can sustain, so that they can benefit from economies of scale.
).
There've been a few anonymous reports from Redmond, WA that people have been seeing chairs randomly flying through office windows at MS Headquarters.
I think information is allowed to be provided to investors, but it has to be done through a public disclosure, where any investor could potentially access the information at the same time, right? Things like press releases/conferences, maybe announcements on a website, tv/radio/internet news, etc. I might be wrong - I'm definitely no expert on securities law, but I think the *point* is to prevent people getting rich (or avoiding losses) from having access to secrets that other investors don't.
Yeah, only do this if you actually *own* a Hero. Something people seem to miss about the GPL sometimes - you only have a legal right to the source code *when someone gives you a binary* of GPL software. Where there is no distribution, there is no violation. So, if you are not either the copyright holder of the software in question, or an owner of an HTC touch (at which point HTC has distributed the software to you in object form), you have no right to demand the source code.
If I had to guess, I would guess that Google is possibly going to leverage the "Google Gears" tech for this (although, that might mean that some cell phones wouldn't be compatible, so perhaps not). Or, maybe they will just offer you a pdf or html download? Time will tell.
Slightly off-topic, but I have a question for the word-geeks out there. Now, I know that technically "Occults", used the way it is in this context, is technically correct (in fact, as far as I can tell, this is the *original* meaning of the word, and the other meanings have developed off of the original meaning, later). However, given that most people probably associate the word "Occult" with mysticism, mightn't it have been better to describing the Sun blocking communication by using the word Occlude, instead of Occult?
I'm going to have to do a little research on this issue, to find out why the *EFF* funded this prize. As an EFF donor, I donate money to them so that they can use it to advance the causes of liberty and privacy. I'm a little puzzled at how them spending $100k of (I presume) *donor money* is advancing the cause of liberty or privacy? Here I thought my money was going to precedent-setting lawsuits and criminal trials, and to lobby congress and educate the press about technology and liberty/privacy issues?
I suppose *maybe* this is somehow tied into the last part (government/public education about the issues) sort of "crypto awareness", since most cryptography is based on large prime numbers, but I'm a bit skeptical at them moment that my donations are being used wisely.