Comment Re:Pascal ? (Score 2) 176
A smart programmer. It's a shame that language-wise things have gone so far downhill since then.
To stay on-topic, my father was a sound engineer for most of working years, and he insists that these Sony headphones and their studio monitor series are the best ever made. (disclaimer: linked using my associates tag). They are $75, if you want to stick hard on the $50 limit, these or these are very highly rated as well.
Your father was absolutely correct. The Sony MDR-V6 is the best pair of headphones ever made. They have a frequency range that would make even a top-of-the-line current-day Grado cry.
They are in the business to make money. The most money can be made by marketing a drug that does not cure anything, but must be continued to be taken for as long as a person lives. That's their holy grail.
Cures are useful for killing their competitor's products, but isn't a golden goose that continues laying eggs.
IMO, pharma patent laws should be modified to steer research into what's best for the people, not best for the shareholders. Drop the extended patent terms for anything that isn't curative.
Amen. This is one of the biggest problems with patents. In the pharmaceutical industry, the current system encourages this anti-social behavior. A short enough patent term (like the 5 years suggested by the OP) could conceivably do the trick. If they patent a cure, they'd want to cure as many people as quickly as they can as to maximize ROI.
In the case of products with long development cycles (Pharma, Rockets for man rated launch, etc.) make the patent duration two pronged (this could apply to all patents): 5 years from commercial availability or 20 years total, whichever is shorter. Same for (C), 5/20. I realize there is a simple game of the system: don't start selling until 15 years from patent or copyright grant date, but at least it's an improvement on what we have now, and profit incentives will keep this from happening in many cases. The only real issue with this is the classic: Manufacturer discovers 2 ways to make a widget, method A, which is efficient, and method B, which has an incremental cost of 10% more. The manufacturer patents both methods, thus keeping B away from potential competitors. My plan would not solve this, but at least method A is available in 5 years. It is conceivable that they might start with method B and in 5 years switch to method A, but I think that the shareholders would be all over them for doing that, and if the cost difference is low enough between the two methods that the shareholders wouldn't care, then I think the cost of switching methods would be too high to make such a plan worth it. -nB
The idea works for me. Perhaps the solution to the issue you pose is that if the same organization (or a lateral/vertical division thereof) patents two methods, and only brings one to market, the other patent is invalidated.
"May your future be limited only by your dreams." -- Christa McAuliffe
