Yeah, and we both know just how popular "Big Pharm" is with many people. I know it's a propagandist term, but the fact is very few people who haven't thought much about it just see what it costs for their elderly aunt or grandmother to have medicine every month, and they assume "Big Pharm" is the Devil.

Fine, just for yuks, let's say they get 5 years from the date of FDA approval.
No, I don't think that will be enough to solve this particular problem either.

Personally, I'm not sure which side of this "5 year mark" I fall on, particularly since I think there is a "one size fits all" solution. I think this would (eventually) drastically increase the rate of patent application well past the actual new idea rate simply because everyone would be trying to patent not only the finalized idea, but every incremental step leading up to it. Initially this would be a real problem, but eventually this would be mitigated as all the old processes ran out of their patents. While the courts might find far fewer patent cases (compared to the rate of patent grants, anyway), the patent offices themselves would become overwhelmed in a very big way.

Even giving pharmaceutical companies 5 years from FDA approval would have some serious problems though. Now they're trying to regain $40 Million R&D costs - and make a profit - in just 5 years instead of 15 or 20. So now guess what, it's gonna cost 5 times as much for each pill during that time. And because of this, only those very widespread issues will ever be addressed. If you only have 5 years to regain the costs of developing the cure for some rare debilitating disease or condition, you're not going to assume that all 120,000 victims of said problem will be able to come up with $40 Mil in just a short 5 year period. And don't think for a moment that the insurance companies will always cover it. Not until after that 5 year period, anyway.

There are obvious benefits at the individual level and for society as a whole, but there are some pretty tough problems with this idea too. I firmly believe 5 years is perfectly reasonable in some cases, but would cause more strife in others. And I don't think those lines can be strictly drawn along industry lines either.

Like I said, there is no "one size fits all" solution.

Start with the downside:
Inventors and corporations would have to work a lot harder to find that next new idea to get consumers to shell out their cash.
Corporations would still have a leg up on the individual idea hobbyist.
The economy would undergo a massive "adjustment" as corporations burn through their capital, and folks realized what that stock was really worth.
Copyrighted material would not be available to individual artists to fund their retirement, nor to pass on to next of kin.
Pharmaceuticals would be available in generic form much quicker.
Prolific artists (Remember Stephen King and all his pen names?) would hold back some of their work to release in a more steady stream rather than flooding the market (which may also be seen as an upside).

Now the upside:
Inventors and corporations would work a lot harder to find that next new idea to get consumers to shell out their cash.
Consumer cash would buy a lot more goods and entertainment that it currently does.
New ideas and advances would come along much more quickly, after everyone realized they'd been caught flat-footed.
Copyrighted material would experience it's comeback while people still remembered what it was - artists would live to see their own revivals.
Individual inventors would still have an uphill battle with heavy hitting corporations, but they'd at least stand a fighting chance.
Massive drop in patent lawsuits. Why spend billions fighting for something you'll only lose in a few more years anyway?
"Golden Parachutes" would pretty much disappear, as corporate boards realized their economy of scale just got fitted to a much smaller scale.

That's just my speculation. I'm not an economist, lawyer, or inventor, nor am I a patent holder.

Seriously. This is the one post I was looking for to restore my faith in the literacy of the /. crowd ...

As I remember, that was the one story I ready in HS Lit that I actually enjoyed.

Cheers!

I disagree. I'm not trying to discount the real work done by early naturalists and scientists, I'm only pointing out that even they had some very wrong ideas.

I'm not saying I don't have any wrong ideas either. I just happen to think I minimize those wrong ideas by being willing to say I don't know rather than accepting something that doesn't quite pass the BS test, or worse, making it up.

My big hot button is that I think people in this day and age have so much more access to real information and fact, and they still manage to believe the stupidest crap. Just count the bogus urban legend and fake virus emails you get forwarded to you and you'll see the smallest tip of the iceberg.

And I strongly disagree that religion is the best explanation for anything in any circumstance. "I don't know yet" is always a better explanation, except for never. It exhibits the humility many religious folks talk about and so few actually possess, and leaves the question open for some other inquiring mind, rather than putting "case closed" on the subject.

Like I said in another post, it's intellectual laziness.
It's intellectual oppression to boot.

Agreed. It's not science, it's intellectual laziness and a desire to maintain an advantage of some kind by claiming to have all the answers. When an entire community suffers from the same intellectual barriers, it's the first one that provides an answer nobody can argue against, however ridiculous, that gets the upper hand.

No, I don't discount it, I just recognize it for what is is. Insanity or a shameful lack of integrity. Or both.

Did you also read that they were very well versed in those plants and fungi that induced hallucinations? I did.

What a coincidence! Mine too! :D

Just to be clear, I'm not implying you're the town idiot, I meant that comment in a purely hypothetical sense :)

Let's be clear, it's not just "thinking" that started religion, it's uninformed, ignorant thinking that started religion in the first place, and willfully arrogant, uninformed, ignorant thinking that kept it going for so long.

Logical and analytical thinking is putting an end to religion, and it's about bloody (literally) time.

And no, it is not a gift to be simple, it's just being simple. If you want to be the town idiot, you go right ahead, but anybody trying to learn from the town idiot is just trying to be another town idiot.

Not trying to draw the flamers, just posting my view.

Interesting. So they got slammed, and the nancyboy admin decided to 403 that one page. Never seen that response to a slashdot avalanche. I'll dig it up later I suppose.

Oh, by the way, they have LOTS of interesting looking articles from the home page! <evil grin>
Check them out! http://www.datamation.com/

MuaHaHaHa!!

I just know I'm screwing my karma, but what the hell.

Is it just me or did nobody posting here actually read the article?

I know I didn't. Why? Well, the F'n thing is 403'd. How are we supposed to read an article we can't bloody get to?

And since we can't get to this article, are we supposed to just assume there really are 12 ways A is better than B?

And how did this even get posted if the article is no more than a tease?

Sorry for the rant, but I was really wanting to see if there was anything in there I didn't already think of.

Well, I think "what the market will bear" is supposed to be the consensus of value, or at least a best reasonable estimate of what the consensus of the target market is. Not sure if that's really clear on what I mean, so feel free to ignore that ...

I don't really care what the publishing costs are, but I do understand they have an impact on cost. I just don't believe the cost continues to be as high as the price suggests. And I do understand that dropping the price by a buck means they have to sell more to make the same money, but I don't think they're at that sweet spot where adjusting the price either way would negatively affect actual profits. I could be wrong, but if I thought that were the case, I wouldn't have got on here to rant.

And on your last point, I think I agree, but I don't think simply charging the most you can get anyone to pay is the way to market an easily replicated product like a digital copy of anything - like an ebook I download myself - with no physical media whatsoever - like a DVD or CD. Setting the cost better than any competing product, but still somewhere in that bell curve of valuation will get the most copies sold. Given that the "competing product" here is the hard copy, and they price the ebook higher than the physical copy, I have to conclude that they don't want people to buy the ebook instead of the hard copy. They want the die hard ebook fans to buy them in addition to the hard copy. And you are correct - I'm not nearly that big a fan.

I disagree that these formulas from the physical publishing world hold in the digital publishing world. I think the crusty ol' brick-n-mortar publishers still haven't got a handle on how this should work. And price is never set by value, it's set by what the market will bear, which is not always the same thing. Value is a personal factor on the part of the consumer, market price is supposed to be somewhere in the sweet spot of the bell curve of valuation by the target audience.

Regardless, I can't make myself believe that the digital copy of a story is worth more than the physical copy. I don't care what the publishing costs are or what the perceived quality of the stories are or Rowling's (or any author's) skill - or lack thereof as a writer. These books are not more valuable in digital format than in physical format because I cannot sell copies. I also cannot easily lend my copy to another person like I could with a physical book. I still believe that if anyone were doing anything right, the cost of a digital book would be lower and the profit higher.

If the cost were lower, I'd be more inclined to buy them, even though I have the hard copies in my home. I wouldn't be tempted to pirate them and justify that by saying I deserve it because I have the hard copy. I'd be less inclined to get pissed off that the only work left to do with this book is marketing and server costs, and the price goes up. And whatever you say, there are no more publishing costs other than building that first digital copy, which was probably done well before the original physical publish date. Hell, most books are never even put to paper until the manuscript is done these days. Those publishing costs have been paid, and then some. The only costs left to consider are marketing and delivery (server costs) and the "personalization" tags mentioned throughout this thread that link your copy to you. You can't tell me this costs more than $7 for every copy of the box set. If so, someone is getting shellacked, and passing that cost downstream.

That doesn't mean that Rowling and the publishers shouldn't continue to make a profit - they should. Whether she - or anyone else - "needs" the money is not relevant in a capitalist society, whatever anyone says. It just means that either they're starting to gouge the market or they're really doing something wrong in their digital market campaign.

I'll almost certainly continue buying ebooks, but I won't buy them if it's cheaper for me to get a hard copy dropped at my door. I'm not an instant gratification freak either, so I can wait if I need to. And if I decide I don't want to wait, I can just run down to the local B&N and use my membership discount to make it even cheaper.

Funny that membership discount doesn't apply to ebooks, eh?

Never mind that, why the hell does it cost $57.54 for me to buy the ebook collection, but only $50.77 to get the paperback set? The Game of Thrones 4 book set was the same thing - something like 20% more for the ebook. What's up with that?

I think I'm missing the whole point of ebooks here. I went and bought a very expensive little gadget so I could:
(a) Buy more books without having to spend more money (cheaper books + old book budget = more books);
(b) Keep more books on hand without having to raise bookshelves on the other half of my house (save space);

Well, at least (b) still holds, but I have very little interest if it comes at the cost of (a).

Now, sometimes I find an ebook that is considerably less than the hardcopy, and that's good, but that seems to be the exception to the rule - or more precisely, the "nobody books" and "not hyped books". The whole ebook movement is pretty good for independent authors to get their stuff out there, but even so you have to spend $20 on $1 pulp books just to get one or two decent reads. I suspect some of the more well known authors are even throwing a fair bit of chaff out there to get in on that "penny market" (See Patterson's "Witch and Wizard" for a prime example). Frankly that annoys the hell out of me.

As for the ebooks, I'm not interested in spending more money to read it on a tablet, I already spent more money just to get the damn thing. Now the damn thing is better for playing Angry Birds or letting my son watch Phineas and Ferb than anything else.

The whole idea behind e-Readers is that there are a number of advantages over traditional print:

1: You can collect a much bigger library without needing storage or more bookshelves.

2: You can take your whole library with you when you travel.

3: You can read a lot more for a lot less.

The problem is that #1 and #2 are irrelevant in my opinion. When I'm traveling, I travel for a reason, and it's not to read. I'm visiting family, off to a festival with the family, etc.. Naturally, I like to bring something to read, but one or two books and maybe a couple magazines is the most I need. Usually, it's just one book. As for the bookshelf, I really like a physical book - we have over 1000 between myself, my wife, and our 2 kids. It's that sense of permanence mentioned in TFA. I don't need to keep a book charged in order to read it, and I don't have to freak out if I spill a drop of whatever I'm drinking on it.

As for #3, this would be enough for me to at least buy more of my books in electronic format, but that argument is a load of bollocks - and the biggest disappointment in the entire eBook scene. I often find that the paperback print is the same or cheaper than the eBook. For instance, the Game of Thrones paperback bookshelf is currently $21.03 at Barnes and Noble. The eBook for the same collection of 4 stories is $29.99. Both prices are exactly the same at Amazon. Why would I want the eBook?

Granted, there are specials where the opposite is true, and others where I've grabbed eBooks for under $5, or even as low as a dollar, but these are books I would never even bother with a hard copy on - and often I'm glad I didn't waste time going to find it at the bookstore. I'm really trying to justify buying the Nook Color with books, but so far, I'm using it to let my kid watch Phineas and Ferb through Netflix a lot more than I'm reading books on it. As far as that goes, I don't even bother watching Netflix streaming videos on it, because the quality really is poor, and I can do better through the Wii or my laptop.

Are you saying Mitt Romney is a robot planted to take over the country?

I knew it!