Drug patent protection: How long is long enough? A recent Senate committee hearing on Bill S-17, Parliament's effort to comply with international trade rules by extending pharmaceutical patent protection to 20 years, inadvertently opened the door to a broader investigation of the inner workings of the country's pharmaceutical patent legislation.
The Virtual Currency Landscape. Virtual currencies such as Bitcoin are digital representations of value that function as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and/or a store of value. In many cases, virtual currencies are âconvertibleâ currencies; they are not legal tender, but they have an equivalent value in real currency. In terms of value, Bitcoin is the most prominent virtual currency. As of late January 2015, one bitcoin equaled roughly $207 (though the value is volatile), and all bitcoins in circulation totaled $2.85 billion.
Ethereum (virtual currency) Simple version: it's a really, really big computer made of many computers around the world that check each other's results. Anyone can run programs on it, paying only for what they use. Less simple version: A developer platform that makes it easy to build decentralized applications. Ethereum applications always execute the code they say they will - there is no 'security through obscurity'.