Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 01:58:37 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Rahul Siddharthan" <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> Cc: <cjclark@alum.mit.edu>, "Salvo Bartolotta" <bartequi@neomedia.it>, "P. U. (Uli) Kruppa" <root@pukruppa.de>, <freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Use of the UNIX Trademark Message-ID: <00ad01c15232$ea21a340$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <20011011095845.B475@lpt.ens.fr>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: Rahul Siddharthan [mailto:rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in] >Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2001 12:59 AM >To: Ted Mittelstaedt >Cc: cjclark@alum.mit.edu; Salvo Bartolotta; P. U. (Uli) Kruppa; >freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: Re: Use of the UNIX Trademark > > >Ted Mittelstaedt said on Oct 10, 2001 at 23:47:57: >> The patent system is really designed for the large research teams >> and corporations because they have the legal muscle to defend patent >> infringements whereas the small inventor usually can't. But of >> course, the small inventor often benefits from a patent infringement >> because the big company doing the infringing is just marketing the >> hell out of his device for him, and he can simply wait and if the >> invention becomes successful, then he can usually get a quiet >> out-of-court settlement or even get hired on by the big company. > >This happens fairly rarely. Only because the large companies _usually_ take care before releasing products to have all the patent ducks lined up. > >> The big companies, on the other hand, definitely don't benefit from >> patent infringement of their patents. > >Isn't Unisys a "big company"? It was at one time, anyway. I'm sure >there are plenty of lesser-known cases, but I haven't really followed >them. > Your probably talking about the GIF patent and certainly Unisys lost big on that as for every one person they got money from there were 10 others that stopped using the file format. >> medical information. There's no excuse for not being an informed consumer >> in this area. Today the Internet makes it rediculously easy to check up >> on what your doctor is diagnosing. In fact the newspapers are always >> printing stories of the parents with the kid with the mysterious malady >> that sees 10 doctors who don't know what's wrong who then key the symptoms >> into a search engine and within an hour have 3 possible diagnosis that they >> then yard off to the doctor for confirmation. > >On the other hand, self medication can be extremely dangerous. I didn't say self-medicate. I said that when the doctor tells you to take something that you should check it out for yourself. If you don't like it then get a second opinion. >But if you encourage >patients to start off making self-diagnoses: Once again I didn't say that - I said that the customer (patient) in this case needs to independently verify what the doctor tells them. > >You may think this is a necessary consequence of medicine being big >business, but I think it's a Bad Thing. There's a reason why medical >school takes 5 years or more. > I didn't say it was a good thing, but I definitely think it's a Bad Thing to accept anything that anyone tells you to do to your body without verification, even casual verification. The idea that you need 5 years medical schooling to understand whether what the doctor is doing is correct or not is bullshit. You may need 5 years to be able to do it to other people, but you don't need a lot of time to understand what the doctor is trying to do with YOU for a particular specific circumstance. >> there's a reason your teachers hit you in the head with an eraser to wake >> you up in Biology class. > >Biology class is totally different from medical school. Most of us >did not go to medical school. > your missing the point. It appears to me that many people are uncomfortable with understanding what goes on in their bodies and want to ignore it and have the doctor tell them what to do. If this is their attitude then they get what they deserve when the snake oil salesman sells them a bottle of hair restorer. > >> >Naturally, where the sufferers of the disease are mainly from poor >> >developing countries, there is not much interest in developing drugs >> >for them. >> > >> >> Um - most of those "poor developing countries" have a tremendous and >> critical overpopulation problem. A quarter of them are Catholic and >> we have a Pope that tells people the Pill is bad, well what the heck >> do you expect? Those countries can't get population control going the >> civilized way, so they do it the way the animals do it - they breed like >> rabbits and let disease and famine and war kill off the population >> periodically. > >This is a stupid statement. Yes, overpopulation is bad, but the >diseases existed much before the overpopulation (in fact the >overpopulation is largely *because* of more effective control >of the less dangerous diseases, which has increased lifetimes). No, the overpopulation is a result of the disruption of the traditional way of life in many of these areas. I don't recall reading that the American Indian had significant overpopulation problems and they were around for thousands and thousands of years. >Overpopulation also has little to do with the pill, and more to do >with the fact that in a poor family, children are cheap labour and >hence regarded as valuable assets; especially sons. > And why do you think this is? It's because many of these societies were changed from the nomadic hunter-gatherer/tribal to farmers by ignorant Europeans. Most country borders in Africa today were drawn with total disregard for ancient tribal boundaries, that's why there's been so many civil wars there. Most of the do-gooders and social workers in the Third World have exactly your attitude - overpopulation is either a Good Thing or an Indifferent Thing. Very few are actually out there preaching and telling people it's wrong to have 10 children even though the disasterous results of that are evident all around them. >> It's sickening, but your barking up the wrong tree to blame the drug >> companies about it. Check into it and you will find that in these >> developing countries that 200 years ago, they didn't have these problems. > >Oh, yes, they did. And so did the western world. Check on the plague >in England, for example; but 100 years ago people were even dying of >influenza in the west. Yes and if you check on the Plague you will find that it was a result of crowding too many people into too small a space in cities. This happened because the population of Europe grew. Face it - most of these plague diseases depend on interlocking clusters of people to spread - you have to have a critical mass. This is shown in disease plagues in wild animal populations all the time. As long as the populations are a reasonable level, these infectious diseases are absent. Push the population up past that and they start appearing. Today, we have an array of cancer treatments >which are still of no help if you were diagnosed just a bit too late. Have you ever wondered why the incidence of cancer has skyrocketed in the last 50 years or so? Well it so happens that I've had cancer in my own past (some time ago that is) and when I had it I developed a particular interest in asking doctors what the cause is. Well, guess what - there's no OFFICIAL reason for most cancers. Some are obvious, like smoking causes lung cancer, destroyed ozone causes skin cancer, but most cancer rates have no obvious reason. However without exception, every doctor I talked to told me that unofficially, they all feel that cancer rates for all cancers have risen so dramatically simply because of environmental pollution. You cannot grow up in an environment where every day of your life your driving around in a car breathing in everyone's exhaust fumes and not be affected by it. But there's zero interest in confirming this because if it ever was confirmed the only answer would be to decrease population, and there's way too many religious problems with anyone getting out there and saying that even the US today is tremendously overpopulated. But, it IS overpopulated, very much so. >We still don't have anything for malaria beyond quinine, let alone >some of the more obscure African diseases like ebola. > And it's population pressures that's forcing people to go into the swamps and less desirable living areas with lots of mosquitos to find living space. Not to mention the overfishing that's killing off the natural predators of the mosquito larva to begin with - overfishing because there's too many people that need to be fed. >> >The biggest medical breakthrough in the 20th century was undoubtedly >> >Fleming's discovery of antibiotics. This had nothing to do with >> >patent protection. Nor did Barnard's development of open-heart >> >surgery, or any other major medical advance I can think of, in fact. >> >There is a good case for arguing that patent restrictions *throttle* >> >good research, by making research into improvement of an AIDS drug, >> >for instance, too expensive to be affordable to anyone but a very >> >well-funded multinational. >> > >> >> Today, just about all major medical problems have already had a fair >> bit of research pumped into them. The easy solutions have mostly been >> discovered already. What remains to be done is the harder and more >> expensive work. > >Everything looks easy after someone's done it. Future breakthroughs >will not come from refining the existing drugs and antibiotics, but >from some totally new approach like designing proteins/enzymes for >specific tasks, genetics, or something nobody has thought of. Such >work goes on mainly in universities, not in the pharmaceutical >laboratories. > 19th century technology had no capability to create genetic solutions. You think that a totally new approach is designing enzymes? This is not a totally new approach it's just one more refinement. It's a very sophisticated refinement and it could not have happened without the predicessor work on antibiotics. >> raised by dumping a lot of funding into solving diseases like lung cancer, >> heart disease, AIDS, and things like that. With those three diseases, >> there's already solutions - quit smoking, quit overeating fatty junk foods, >> and quit abusing drugs and sharing needles and having casual sex with >> prostitutes and anyone else that comes swimming by. And above all, get >> off your ass and start exercising. > >Well, cancer can have many causes. Even lung cancer: it can come from >polluted city air. You can't ask everyone to go live in the >mountains. No but you can tell them to have fewer children which will decrease the population and have fewer people generating less pollution. If the population density were to go down enough then they wouldn't have big cities. >Or it can come for reasons unknown. Heart disease can be >hereditary. Ther'es very little heart disease in Asia - or correction there was very little until they started eating McDonalds cheeseburgers regularly. I think it would be more correct to say that the PROPENSITY for heart disease is hereditary. There is far too much evidence that many of these so-called "diseases" are actually natural responses to screwed up lifestyles. I know that people will tar and feather me for saying this but by gun there's a right way to live and a wrong way to live. Freedom must have responsibility and you don't have the right to stuff your face with McDonalds cheeseburgers every day of your life until you keel over with a heart attack at age 55 then expect the rest of us to dump all our tax dollars into funding research into a new medicine that will dissolve your cholesterol and allow you to continue stuffing yourself like a pig with both trotters in the trough. >AIDS is preventable, certainly, but we already have too >many cases to ignore it. > For every dollar spent on AIDS research a dollar should go to pounding the need for condoms into the "sex in the city" crowd as well as jails to throw the addicts into that the cops pull off the street every day. The way it is now, we spend billions on AIDS drugs and when we pick an addict off the street we book and release them so they aren't even forced to go cold turky off their drug of choice. Where is the sense in that?!?! >Funds are needed for medical research, Funds are needed for everything. There always has been far more good deeds needing money to be done than there has been money to throw at them. but a new framework is needed >where those funds are used correctly, not on pandering to the phobias >of the rich while squeezing the poor. How about pandering to the arteries impacted with fast food grease of the rich? >Medicine should be part of the >infrastructure of "public good", like railways and post which have >never been successfully privatised. Only if the emphasis on the medicine is on solving the root of the problem not alleviating the symptom. Today the entire emphasis in Western medicine is fixing the symptom, once that's done your free to go back to your artery-hardening, lung destroying lifestyle if you wish. As long as that's the attitude, the system is fundamentally screwed up and making it a public industry isn't going to change much. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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