

Send a troll doll to Intellectual Ventures - nathantone
http://www.trollthetroll.com/

======
DanBC
I feel uncomfortable with this. What's it actually achieving?

We dig oil out of the ground, transport it to land, turn it into plastic, ship
that to manufacturers, turn it into troll dolls, ship those to suppliers, ship
them to retailers, ship them to customers, ship them to the patent troll, send
it to landfill. (Or, if they have any sense, some children's charity with a
matching donation.)

All through this chain that are a bunch of people paid low wages to shift
product just for some stunt. I'm not opposed to stunts, I just don't think
this is a good stunt.

Instead, show what patent trolls actually stop people doing, and say why it's
bad that these things have been stopped. (Single handed keyboards are one
example.)

And if you're counting bang for buck, $9 can possibly save 18 lives. Oral
Rehydration Salts and zinc cost $0.5 per course, and could prevent about 3/4
of the 1.5 million child deaths from diarrhoea.

[http://www.irinnews.org/Report/94996/GLOBAL-Follow-the-
fizz-...](http://www.irinnews.org/Report/94996/GLOBAL-Follow-the-fizz-save-a-
life)

~~~
JoshuaDavid
> And if you're counting bang for buck, $9 can possibly save 18 lives. Oral
> Rehydration Salts and zinc cost $0.5 per course, and could prevent about 3/4
> of the 1.5 million child deaths from diarrhoea.

If that's actually the case, you should contact Givewell, because that's a
couple of orders of magnitude better than their current best charity ($1,600
per marginal malaria death prevented). Is this just something you read
somewhere, or is there strong evidence that this treatment is actually orders
of magnitude better than bednets? If it's the former, you probably shouldn't
submit it without doing at least a bit of research (and if you don't want to,
I can), whereas if it's the latter, I recommend you submit that charity for
review here: <http://www.givewell.org/submit-for-review>

~~~
DanBC
I gave a link to IRIN (Integrated Regional Information Networks), which is "a
service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs". That
has links to several organisations which are trying to increase uptake of
ORS+zinc. Their biases are clear.

The figure I give is just the cost of a course of ORS+zinc. Givewell will want
to include other costs such as distribution and administration and so on.

------
handelaar
At nine bucks a go, after a week or two they might find it cheaper to buy
their troll dolls from IV's mail room.

~~~
Evbn
And IV already has tools to optimize the pricing on the transactions.

Someone should patent that idea and sell it to IV.

Prior art is in monsastaries that sell captive doves for tourists to free
(which are then recaptured), so it should be easy to transcribe to a patent
for instant approval.

