4 ms·

Punchline of old joke: Hitting engine with hammer - $1 Knowing where to hit engine with hammer - $9999

dodo53 14y ago
It's a bit more surreal when it's general knowledge what to do with the hammer but you have to license your placement-of-hammer IP.
- ctdonath 14y ago
  More like we were used to hammers as fine art and flyswatters, when someone went "hey! what a great idea!" and patented smacking metal spikes with them. Such is a large part of the patent field: doing obvious things with common objects, before anyone else says "hey, that idea is obvious and the parts common!" and making others pay to do it.
redcap 14y ago
That sounds like a doctor's job - they might prescribe a fairly cheap medicine, but knowing what kind of medicine to use is a different art entirely. Here the only reason why the company is able to charge a large amount of money is because they've gone through the whole process of tests and clinical trials to get the drug available for consumption. That's an entirely different kettle of fish than the expert knowledge $9999 you mention above. The gist of the article isn't about expert knowledge, it's that a fairly simple chemical compound (the name itself gives the simplicity away - dimethyl fumerate is too short to be anything horrendously complicated) is jacked up in price, and that someone suffering from the disease could presumably get the drug made themselves for much less than $50,000 per annum.
- epmatsw 14y ago
  The more I've learned about how the medical system works, the more it seems like the future is going to tend towards replacing doctors with systems like Watson, concentrating knowledge in a quick, easily updatable form and keeping doctors around for patient comfort.
  - nmcfarl 14y ago
    Living with the doctor, I've come to the conclusion that: yes, quite probably this is the future – but this future is going to be about as easy to implement as replacing programmers with Watson.
    - epmatsw 14y ago
      Agreed. I don't see it happening for quite a while.

It's a bit more surreal when it's general knowledge what to do with the hammer but you have to license your placement-of-hammer IP.

ctdonath 14y ago
More like we were used to hammers as fine art and flyswatters, when someone went "hey! what a great idea!" and patented smacking metal spikes with them. Such is a large part of the patent field: doing obvious things with common objects, before anyone else says "hey, that idea is obvious and the parts common!" and making others pay to do it.

redcap 14y ago

That sounds like a doctor's job - they might prescribe a fairly cheap medicine, but knowing what kind of medicine to use is a different art entirely. Here the only reason why the company is able to charge a large amount of money is because they've gone through the whole process of tests and clinical trials to get the drug available for consumption. That's an entirely different kettle of fish than the expert knowledge $9999 you mention above. The gist of the article isn't about expert knowledge, it's that a fairly simple chemical compound (the name itself gives the simplicity away - dimethyl fumerate is too short to be anything horrendously complicated) is jacked up in price, and that someone suffering from the disease could presumably get the drug made themselves for much less than $50,000 per annum.

epmatsw 14y ago
The more I've learned about how the medical system works, the more it seems like the future is going to tend towards replacing doctors with systems like Watson, concentrating knowledge in a quick, easily updatable form and keeping doctors around for patient comfort.
- nmcfarl 14y ago
  Living with the doctor, I've come to the conclusion that: yes, quite probably this is the future – but this future is going to be about as easy to implement as replacing programmers with Watson.
  - epmatsw 14y ago
    Agreed. I don't see it happening for quite a while.