The recent tendency, both here and in South Africa with AIDS, is to chip away at patent protection and to lowball the compensation offered. In the short run this approach plays well before a public when resources are stretched thin. But in the long term, our stock of pharmaceuticals depreciates, and it must be replenished. It takes over a $250 million to bring a new drug to market today, and the revenues derived from a successful drug must cover not only its cost of production, but the costs of experimenting with promising products that never make it to market at all. We rightly do nothing to socialize the costs of pharmaceutical research that leads nowhere. Why then take away the fruits of a high side?

Such suspension of law and rights might almost be justifiable, and of less concern, if we were formally at war, but the government continues to refuse to make such a declaration, rendering the precedent all the more dangerous.

Today, however, we may be facing just such a threat, and one that is largely without historical parallel.

And if, as we get thicker into this grim conflict, the administration deems it necessary to enact more restrictive steps, we need not fear. When our nation is again secure, so too will be our principles.

I hope that he’s right, but one of my concerns is the ill-defined nature of the enterprise on which we seem to have embarked. We do not have a formal declaration of war, nor do we know, ultimately, with whom we are fighting, and I fear that this poorly-defined beginning will make it more difficult to define an end, and that those who benefit from the usurpation of our liberties may find it convenient to continue the crisis. I welcome the sunset provisions in the legislation that has been passed, where they exist, but would like to see them broadened.

Of course, I think that we need a Constitutional amendment stipulating that all federal legislation have sunset provisions…

According to The New Scientist, they’re going to do a scramjet test down under next week.

The scramjet results from the $1.25 million HyShot project, led by the University of Queensland and is due to launch on Thursday 25 October. It will lift off on Terrier-Orion rockets at Woomera, 500 kilometres north of Adelaide.

Lessee, now, how much was NASA’s Hyper-X program again? A couple hundred million? What is that, about two orders of magnitude more? And didn’t their test flight go into the drink?

We’ll see if the test is successful, but apparently, NASA can not only not do it faster, better, cheaper than the private sector, even foreign governments can beat them. Even if their test fails, they can fail much more cheaply than NASA can…