Thursday, June 19, 2003

General Computing. What pisses me off about the music piracy/blow up the computer thing is this -- the REAL goal of the RIAA is to create a permanent "tax" on media. What they want is for Joe Consumer to pay a few dollars every time he buys blank media. Then, when the media isn't as popular any more (due to high speed interconnects and dropping non-volatile storage) they'll go for a tax on the devices themselves. They're the milkmen of our age -- they once had a role but technology has largely made the record companies irrelevent. Any competent band can record in a home studio for a few thousand bucks, now. You can do the whole thing on just about any PC. Record companies don''t serve artists -- they screw artists. For this society is supposed to pay them a tax, in perpetuity, as they grow progressively more irrelevent? The RIAA is hiding all this under the guise of copyright and IP. It's BS. They're advocating a huge attack on general computation to attain their ends. For the non-technical, consider this: The RIAA does NOT want you to have the ability to do any computation that you please on your general purposes computation device. In fact, they do not want you to have a general purpose computation device. In the past (and currently) you can take your computer and program it to do anything that you want. It is capable of performing any transformation of information from one form to another. The RIAA wants to disable this capability. They want to make it extraordinarily difficult to perform certain transformations. Naturally, most real techies can get around it, but for the average person it will be impossible. It's funny, but there are parallels between gun laws and the information that ricochets inside a computer. The constitution says that I have a right to speak, I have a right to carry a gun. Do I have a constitutional right to TRANSFORM information as I please? To conduct any analysis I please? To use any method I please? RIAA and IP grabbers WILL try to push DRM (digital rights management) into the hardware. They're already trying. Keep in mind that the phase that follows this, if they succeed, is that your computer will MONITOR your use of this material and report it back to...well, whoever. Creepy. Yes, it's somewhat obscure and technical. But you should be scared. 11:16:26 PM    comment []

Gauging Medical Treatments There's a leukemia treatment I was reading about the other day. It costs $28,000 PER DOSE. That is one hell of a lot of money! It isn't guaranteed to work...but we do have a pretty good idea of the probability with which it will work, because of the FDA drug approval process. One of the benefits of having the FDA scrutinize what's going on with medications is that we learn a fair amount about their efficacy. Sometimes this information turns out to be wrong, but usually we have a pretty good idea of what's going on. So, given that we know roughly how effective most prescription medications are, can we not construct a relatively simple formula that will determine what medications are going to be made available? The principal I'm working towards looks something like this: We could spend that $28,000 on that single dose for that single person...but, in terms of the overall good (across many people), we want to save as many lives for our $28,000 as possible. It may turn out that if we instead give out 28 doses of a $1000 medication (even for a different illness entirely) then we are better off. A medication can save a life. Sometimes it can also result in dramatic improvement of quality of life. It seems like it's time that we began to assess medications, and start balancing their effects across multiple medications and multiple people. If you're just looking at one individual, then of course we need to spend everything we can! We need to do the very best thing in all cases for that person. The COST to doing this is that perhaps yes, we've saved our $28,000 person, but we've sacrificed 12 other lives that could have been saved with that money. We need a simplified scoring system. Money is the only way that we can judge these things right now. We can't put a value on human life, but we CAN understand just what we're buying for each dollar spent on medication. And once we've done that, we can begin to divide medications into those that EFFICIENTLY bring health and life to our population, and those that do not. We the people will need to focus our resources on those medications that bring the most good. If you are particularly rich you are certainly welcome to try the INEFFICIENT medications, but it's going to be at your own cost. Under this scheme the government will make up a lists of efficient medications. This also induces price controls on drug companies -- they're not just competing against drugs for a particular illness any more -- they're competing against drugs in a very wide variety of situations. If the people's money is better spent on lower cost, more efficient drugs, then that's where it's going to go. 11:14:48 PM    comment []