Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2001 11:01:24 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> Cc: Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com>, 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: <3BC72FF4.83203EEE@mindspring.com> References: <20011010233539.G83192@lpt.ens.fr> <007f01c15220$a92e4ee0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> <20011011095845.B475@lpt.ens.fr> <3BC560CC.265B97BC@mindspring.com> <20011011114819.B17422@lpt.ens.fr>
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Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > IBM is doing that for computer/technology reasons, not for medical > research. All leading-edge companies do it, to show what they're > capable of; IBM's last effort was a chess-playing machine which has no > conceivable commercial or social benefit. If Blue Gene actually > recovers an enzyme structure which would be useful medically, I doubt > IBM would get the patent for it, but you know more than me about that, > I'm sure. The commercial reason is that the protein folding problem is the number one problem facing medicine at this point, and it has broad applicatoin, if cracked. The application would be to create any protein you want to create, at a greatly reduced cost. Do not think that there will not be money in it for whoever cracks the problem. And as a matter of fact, I do know a lot about that, but it's despite, not because, of my former association with IBM: the protein folding problem was involved in no less than three of the well over 200 intellectual property exclusions that were listed in my employment contract with IBM (so was the "new" polarization division multiplexing that those German scientists "invented" the other day, according to slashdot: I still have the equipment and the trophy I won for doing that when I was 13 years old for my Jr. High School science fair project). > > Most of the U.S. railway system has, and remains, privatized. > > I said "successfully". Would you call the US railway system > "successful"? Yes. It has been able to help out many countries, every time they were in need, whenever their railway infrastructure was damaged. It moves incredible masses of freight on a daily basis. I can get you a tour of a Union Pacific facility, if you need this fact brought home, or I have contacts to let you spend a working day hanging out at the Central Utah Railroad (we would have to arrange to be in Utah at the same time as another person, but it's manageable). > It's a shambles, and much of the country is not covered at > all. The British railway system too was privatised 10 years > ago, and it was disastrous; the controlling company, Railtrack, > collapsed very recently. For a good working railway system, > try France. Even India has a good solid railway, which doesn't > have much frills and is grossly overstressed, but still does > its job. I think you are mixing passenger railway with freight railway, and concluding because people don't like passenger rail service in the U.S. more than they like getting there quickly by plane, or having daily control over their own schedules (how many dates would you be able to have on the spur of the moment, if you were required to take a relatively slow train home before you could get in your car and drive to the date location?). > > FedEx has been explicitly prohibited from carring ordinary > > letters, since it was less expensive than the alternative, > > the government granted monopoly of the U.S. Postal Service. > > I doubt very much FedEx would be less expensive. I know that > in India many smaller courier services are less expensive than > the Government's "speed post" (not FedEx or DHL, though, they're > much more expensive); but none of them even approach the price > point of ordinary post; I don't think they're forbidden from > doing so, it's just not cost-effective for them to deliver to > remote places all over the country. The number one cash cow for the U.S.P.S. is the postcard and personal letter business. It was not just FedEx that was prohibited from competing in this space, it was _all_ freight carriers. Almost no freight in the U.S. goes by U.S.P.S. these days: they have almost completely lost the freight market. Or from another angle: it wouldn't be prohibited, if the U.S.P.S. agreed with you about them not being able to compete on a cost basis. It's not surprising to me that FedEx and DHL, whose main claim to market share in India is that they are able to send and deliver internationally, would be more expensive. Human intensive labor is incredibly cheap in India, for the old and obvious economic reasons. > In France, too, FedEx and other couriers are more expensive > than the French post's "Chronopost". Ordinary letters within > France cost three francs, or around 40 cents; I doubt any > courier company could approach that price point. You're wrong. If the postal system were not a state monopoly in most countries, it would be easy to compete on purely economic terms, using more modern automation than that used by them. > I don't know what the USPS charges for ordinary letters. > Perhaps the government granted monopoly of the USPS is > merely an inefficient one? It is, but it's cheaper than France for a letter. For a post card, we are talking 20 cents. For first class, which is generally one day delivery anywhere in the U.S., we are talking 39 cents. The majority of the money going into the U.S.P.S. is used to subsidize bulk mail. In the 19th century, and early in the 20th, this was newspapers; more recently, it's advertisements that have no other content. But the bread and butter is person to person communications. There is a nice "First Monday" article on this and other spedning concentrated on person to person communications; for example, from the article, there is more spent on personal (not business) telephone calls in the U.S. per year than the U.S. itself spends on national defense. > > Not patentable: herbs can not be patented; this is why so > > much funded research ignores them entirely: no return on > > investment for investigating them. > > You would know about this example if you were from India, or read the > Indian press, where it has been a major issue for a long time. It is > not the only case; there is a huge catalogue of traditional herbs > whose healing properties have been patented. > > Read > http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/tur-cn.htm > http://www.rediff.com/news/aug/23tur.htm > > The turmeric patents were rejected, but only after protracted > litigation, which most developing countries can ill afford. Other > patents still exist. Developing countries can (and do) simply ignore patents. This seems to be an issue that's really a problem with the WTO, and with India's system, in particular. The U.S. patent office actually worked: it rejected the patent. While I agree that there are assinine abuses of the U.S. patent system, this case was clearly an attempt by people who knew something as a result of regional common knowledge trying to cash in on that knowledge, to the detriment of everyone else. > > > Then the countries most affected by this have to go through > > > expensive and time-consuming litigation to try and overthrow > > > the patent. > > > > That's ridiculous. > > See the above links, again. For more links, just do a search on > google, for example, for "turmeric patent" or "neem patent". It's ridiculous in that countries do not have to overthrow such patents, not because of the process involved in doing that. > > Realize, also, that those countries have the same vested > > interest in finding treatment protocols which never actually > > cure the disease, that the U.S. is claimed to have. > > Realize, also, that your knowledge of "those countries" is extremely > limited and gleaned from a very selective reading. I have averaged a book a day for the last 30 years; I rather doubt my reading is as selective as yours. In any case, I was referring to the financial interest of the countries, like the U.S. and India, which stand to make a much larger amount of money from AIDS treatments than they would, were they to actually cure the disease. India did not approach AIDS drug shipments to Africa as the purely humanitarian endeavor that they claimed: they were making profit, which was less than the profit made by the U.S. companies for the same drugs, and it was a pure case of economic warfare between the pharmaceuticals industries in both countries trying to maintain ownership of a market that they have no real interest in seeing disappear through the auspices of actually curing, rather than treating, AIDS. It is big business, plain and simple, to keep AIDS going, and to provide drugs to the victims that make them feel that it's OK to engage in the behaviours which caused them to become infected in the first place (in the U.S., drug companies run ads and put up billboards showing people with AIDS leading normal lives, as if disease free: there have been increasing numbers of lawsuits in the U.S. to prevent this, for public health reasons). -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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