Well they should've read the IP document they signed when they took the funding, then.
Not sure how it works in most fields, but in the one I'm in, it's your boss that gets the funding, not you. So their boss should have told them that. Of course, even if they had, this situation would STILL be ridiculous. It's not like students have much bargaining power, especially when it comes to who gets the rights. Not accepting the bargain would mean the student in question would be working AT a shoe store, not running a software company for them.
I think a better idea might be to force federally-funded schools to do something similar to that. If the government is giving a researcher/professor/whatever a grant from taxes based on his or her past accomplishments, the university gets a huge chunk of it - unless I'm mistaken (and I very well could be.) For the university to then get whatever comes out of that is fundamentally stupid. From my experience, the university does nothing besides initially invest in the researchers. Well, that's not exactly true, they give me parking tickets occasionally too. I should say I'm a grad student, so I'm somewhat talking out of my ass here, and I might be biased (parking tickets!!!) but from what I can tell, the university gets more than their fair share.
I really should have pointed out that I am not myself in bioinformatics or structural biology. You were actually less snarky than need be as someone IN the field correcting someone who is not, so thank you for controlling yourself!
I've heard people say on plenty of occasions that they don't know and don't want to know. They want their head in the sand, just like with music, movies, television, and politics.
Well, keep in mind that most people consider computers a means to an end, not entertainment in and of themselves. To use a car metaphor, if I go to get my oil changed and the guy at Jiffy Lube refers me to a manual as to how to change my oil myself, I would be annoyed and would go to someplace that did their job rather than trying to get me to do it.
I'm aware that tech support is tech SUPPORT, not maintenece, and I'm also aware that it's much more efficient for all involved if people learned how to not screw up their computers, but the people who you were talking about obviously didn't.
My point is that it's not anything so deep as "wanting their head in the sand," it really just comes down to "I don't want to fucking learn how to fix my computer, I want it FIXED and for some reason I think that's your job."
Frankly, it sounds like it may have also been a little bit of your customers got angry at your condescending tone, which they were already probably expecting.
Could the article or summary be a little more vague? I think the "Short-sighted incumbent forces association" might be a little offended by this.
Who exactly is reffered to by "incumbent forces." Is it a specific term in some field I'm not aware of, or is the author intentionally being cryptic because he can't think up any specific examples to support his argument? I think it's far from general to, uh, "innovation." I don't think there's any "incumbent forces" trying to stop innovation in the field of, say, cancer research.
Using that term makes it sound like there's a specific organization out there, whose mission statement is "to hold back the tides are annoying and disruptive (not in a good way) in the short run and oppose 'innovation.'" No? Would that include other things, like not being able to find your shoes as in "This morning, I wanted to go out and innovate, but I couldn't find my shoes, so I didn't."
Guy sounds like he's trying to sell inspirational tapes to paranoid technophiles.
The MS thing is pretty clearly a joke, but I have to honestly ask (showing my ignorance as to open-source), how do open source projects get paid? I thought it was mostly volounteer work.
Get a double major or minor in biology. People who can handle bioinformatics or the computer side of structural biology are in really high demand. Not saying it's moreso than other fields, but I do know you can write your own paycheck with that crossover.
I also don't know if you'd find that interesting. I do, and knowing that your job is working towards the cure for cancer or whatever the goal is I think makes some of the more menial tasks more interesting, but that's just me.
If you're not looking to add a major or minor, you can still likely get into that field and learn whatever you would need on the job about bio. They're that desperate.
That's what the retrorockets are primarily used for. The auto-flamethrower can help with the icy road, and the front-mounted chainsaw ensures that rather than a thousand pound moose, the car only has to deal with two five-hundred pound chunks of moose meat.
Note the wording of the stated goal FTA
Our aim for 2020 is that no one should be killed or injured in a Volvo car.
Are you nuts?!? With 2/3 of the country gone, my 401k is going to be completely ruined! RUINED! It would be a financial catastrophe (in addition to an actual catastrophe)!
While I would in no way consider myself a computer expert of any sort, I do think I'm more informed than a good number of PC users, yet I managed to get infected. I was running antivirus and a firewall, run adaware and spybot regularly, run opera with popups blocked instead of internet explorer, never download anything from e-mail, and thought I was being careful about what I downloaded. Yet I got infected with an annoying one. Still not sure how that happened. Not looking for advice here, so I'm not going to get into specific holes in my defense.
My point is that if you have to be more careful than I am when it comes to computing, this is always going to be a problem, since I don't see my parents or most people I know bothering to be better informed about security. Someone doing it for the masses, targeting the worst offenders first seems like the only realistic way.
Bluetooth is a security nightmare. (Seriously, enable it at your own risk in an urban environment.)
Non-nerd questions: what security risks do bluetooth mice pose in a urban environment? If I'm using a bluetooth mouse on a street corner, someone could gain access to my computer? Wouldn't someone have to be set up nearby looking for someone using a bluetooth device hooked up to a laptop? And the main danger there I'm assuming is they could give themselves remote access via the internet?
Or are you just saying some kid with a bluetooth mouse could annoy me by controlling the pointer on my laptop:-P. I don't use any bluetooth devices anyway, I'm just curious.
Is there a reason for the DRM tag beyond "Spore" was one of the games listed? The list in no way was talking about DRM. Okay, several of the games listed had issues with DRM, that's true. They've been covered. Extensively. And complained about even more. Many times. We know it's important to you. We know you boycotted spore because it had DRM, good for you, I noted that in my log of things slashdotters effectively boycotted, right there on page 3271. But let's keep discussions of DRM to discussions of DRM. Let's stop bringing up DRM and how unfair it is every time someone talks about games.
Clearly we need a government agency to enforce this list, or at least part of it. At the very least, politicians need to be fined thousands of dollars for use of the word "Maverick."
Alternatively, they could just fine news organizations for using catch-phrases more than 20 times a day.
Anything with a strong amount of Nostalgia for it is going to suffer from the fans who still play it proclaiming "they changed it, now it sucks" - See: Fallout 3, or any remake of Master of Magic ever done.
I think it's no different from remakes of anything. Movies and music mostly. Adaptations from one medium to another as well provokes the ire of diehard fans. It doesn't matter how good the finished product is even. A lot of it has to do with nostalgia vs reality. Maybe you played a game a lot as a teen, now that you don't have enough time to get into the sequel or remake you think it's worse. Maybe you loved a book when you were younger, but now that you're more mature, the1faithfully adapted movie doesn't strike you the same way.
Shamefull confession: In high school I thought Matrix 1 was amazing, and not just for the action. Matrix 2 and 3 were about the same, but seemed silly to me by the time they came out. I went back and watched 1, it didn't seem as deep as it did when I was in high school. The same thing goes for videogames (though maybe not pong). When I was in high school I thought "Marathon" was amazing in story and gameplay. Going back, the sprite-based gameplay has not aged well. The story is still quite complex compared to many FPS storylines, but it isn't as great as I had remembered it.
There's also some amount of elitism that unfortunately plagues videogames just as much as anything else, though it's rarer. Popular games tend to get trashed on, in rare cases where sequels are more popular than the first one, you'll have the same "they sold out" mantra that bands experience when they get more popular. I have to admit I can't think of a great example here though I think the final fantasy series gets some of that. I suppose there are some people who actually think that the transition from 6 to 7 was all for the worse, but I think it's hard to argue that FF7 was crap, that just seems like pure elitism to me.
The really old nostalgia games though I think fare better. No one is complaining aboug Megaman 9 ruining the megaman franchise because the 8-bit megaman games were totally dead. I also don't remember anyone complaining about supermario allstars, a remake and collection of supermario bros games for the SNES. I think that may be because the games released so far have generally been very faithful translations which are more updates to better graphics. If they started taking mroe liberties with series, we might see more complaining.
Penny Arcade has broken ground in success and shown how it is possible to build a business model providing a primarily free product. The key is having a product people want.
Geez, you must be new here. Put in the correct format.
1. Make a great product 2. Give it away 3. ??? 4. Profit!
But isn't there regulation on doing this type of research?
There's not really much need, much of the research is prohibitively expensive. You don't really need to worry about your neighbor creating superflu intentionally unless he or she has a lot of disposable income or has inherited his or her own private molecular research facility.
I also found it suspicious that the source was "Supposedly the SFC but can't seem to find it." And a google search for the prof turns up empty aside from those stories. And accomplishing this would lead to a publication in a respected plant journal, not a shady internet buisness.
Moreover, I seriously doubt that the 4 step plan could be accomplished by one guy as a side project in 14 years without either eating up all the funds for whatever it was he was supposed to be researching. Some of the steps sounded like they would be nobel-prize winning projects by themselves, let alone the wholesale import of a complex system to another species. Note that I am not claiming to be a biochemist here, especially not a plant biochemist, and I am also of course unfamiliar with the specifics of THC production.
* Step One:
Biochemically isolate all the required enzymes for the production of THC.
Considering we're still pulling out required enzymes for very basic things with much greater importance, including from organisms that are much easier to obtain than pot, this is a tall order. Some of my fellow students are working on purifying yeast enzymes. It's easy to get gallons of yeast, people have been doing it for centuries. Purification of proteins from yeast is not easy. Getting purified proteins from plants is likely even more difficult. Purifying proteins from a plant that is illegal, without a permit... that's got to be expensive at least. If he's doing it from his home, which he would likely have to be in order not to get FSU in trouble, there are even more problems.
Once purified, you would also have to develop an assay to make sure that you've actually isolated all the required components. You wouldn't want to go through steps 2-4 until you're sure you actually have it. That, again, seems like a monumental task.
It's unlikely but possible. Especially if there is just one gene needed for THC production, although if there were and it were discovered, it would be common knowledge by now, and it doesn't seem to be. Likely because it's not. And that makes sense, who is funding research into the biochemistry of THC production?
The next steps are more feasible, although that's not saying much
* Step Two:
Perform N-terminal sequencing on isolated enzymes, design degenerate PCR (polymerase chain reaction) primers and amplify the genes.
* Step Three:
Clone genes into an agrobacterial vector by introducing the desired piece of DNA into a plasmid containing a transfer or T-DNA. The mixture is transformed into Agrobacterium tumefaciens, a gram negative bacterium.
* Step Four:
Use the Agrobacterium tumefaciens to infect citrus plants after wounding. The transfer DNA will proceed to host cells by a mechanism similar to conjugation. The DNA is randomly integrated into the host genome and will be inherited.
Again, not a biochemist, but this sounds okay in principle. If you're talking about one enzyme, which has actually been discovered, that is a good way to do it. Most biochemical pathways involve dozens of genes, the difficulties associated with transfecting genes typically is multiplied by each gene you are transfecting. If the THC pathway involves something like 20 genes, I would guess (again, not an expert) that you're looking at something which is a project for a post-doc, not even a grad student. I'm not sure 14 years is enough time for that.
All in all I'm extremely skeptical that one guy, even were he working for 14 years full time, could do this, though I am not about to say impossible, and could be way off on some of the above.
What I do find impossible is that the guy did it in his spare time over a grudge and it only made shady internet news. This would be a monumental accomplishment. The guy would get several awards and would be a billionaire in Holland.
Slashdot Mirror
Well they should've read the IP document they signed when they took the funding, then.
Not sure how it works in most fields, but in the one I'm in, it's your boss that gets the funding, not you. So their boss should have told them that. Of course, even if they had, this situation would STILL be ridiculous. It's not like students have much bargaining power, especially when it comes to who gets the rights. Not accepting the bargain would mean the student in question would be working AT a shoe store, not running a software company for them.
I think a better idea might be to force federally-funded schools to do something similar to that. If the government is giving a researcher/professor/whatever a grant from taxes based on his or her past accomplishments, the university gets a huge chunk of it - unless I'm mistaken (and I very well could be.) For the university to then get whatever comes out of that is fundamentally stupid. From my experience, the university does nothing besides initially invest in the researchers. Well, that's not exactly true, they give me parking tickets occasionally too. I should say I'm a grad student, so I'm somewhat talking out of my ass here, and I might be biased (parking tickets!!!) but from what I can tell, the university gets more than their fair share.
How to falsify evolution? Huh? Alabama done proved evolution wrong every day since God created it 4000 years ago!
(I tease you because I love you, Alabama.)
Uh... that one?
Buy an Ipod!
Granted, they didn't actually say that, but it was implicit in their response.
I really should have pointed out that I am not myself in bioinformatics or structural biology. You were actually less snarky than need be as someone IN the field correcting someone who is not, so thank you for controlling yourself!
I've heard people say on plenty of occasions that they don't know and don't want to know. They want their head in the sand, just like with music, movies, television, and politics.
Well, keep in mind that most people consider computers a means to an end, not entertainment in and of themselves. To use a car metaphor, if I go to get my oil changed and the guy at Jiffy Lube refers me to a manual as to how to change my oil myself, I would be annoyed and would go to someplace that did their job rather than trying to get me to do it.
I'm aware that tech support is tech SUPPORT, not maintenece, and I'm also aware that it's much more efficient for all involved if people learned how to not screw up their computers, but the people who you were talking about obviously didn't.
My point is that it's not anything so deep as "wanting their head in the sand," it really just comes down to "I don't want to fucking learn how to fix my computer, I want it FIXED and for some reason I think that's your job."
Frankly, it sounds like it may have also been a little bit of your customers got angry at your condescending tone, which they were already probably expecting.
Could the article or summary be a little more vague? I think the "Short-sighted incumbent forces association" might be a little offended by this.
Who exactly is reffered to by "incumbent forces." Is it a specific term in some field I'm not aware of, or is the author intentionally being cryptic because he can't think up any specific examples to support his argument? I think it's far from general to, uh, "innovation." I don't think there's any "incumbent forces" trying to stop innovation in the field of, say, cancer research.
Using that term makes it sound like there's a specific organization out there, whose mission statement is "to hold back the tides are annoying and disruptive (not in a good way) in the short run and oppose 'innovation.'" No? Would that include other things, like not being able to find your shoes as in "This morning, I wanted to go out and innovate, but I couldn't find my shoes, so I didn't."
Guy sounds like he's trying to sell inspirational tapes to paranoid technophiles.
So...employee discount?
Er... if he's putting together the website, he really wouldn't need a discount, he already has all the stuff on his computer.
if you make your job your life, it will just weigh you down and make you miserable.
Clearly you are not a porn star... of course posting on /. pretty much ruled that out already...
The MS thing is pretty clearly a joke, but I have to honestly ask (showing my ignorance as to open-source), how do open source projects get paid? I thought it was mostly volounteer work.
Get a double major or minor in biology. People who can handle bioinformatics or the computer side of structural biology are in really high demand. Not saying it's moreso than other fields, but I do know you can write your own paycheck with that crossover.
I also don't know if you'd find that interesting. I do, and knowing that your job is working towards the cure for cancer or whatever the goal is I think makes some of the more menial tasks more interesting, but that's just me.
If you're not looking to add a major or minor, you can still likely get into that field and learn whatever you would need on the job about bio. They're that desperate.
That's what the retrorockets are primarily used for. The auto-flamethrower can help with the icy road, and the front-mounted chainsaw ensures that rather than a thousand pound moose, the car only has to deal with two five-hundred pound chunks of moose meat.
Note the wording of the stated goal FTA
My god... twitter IS clippy!!! (dun-dun-DUNN!!!)
Fact: all "first posts" were done by Clippy. MS decided he needed to automatically do that. Over the years he's grown unstable.
So because one unlikely thing happened, another unlikely thing is going to happen? I think I see why you're a marxist.
(kidding of course)
Are you nuts?!? With 2/3 of the country gone, my 401k is going to be completely ruined! RUINED! It would be a financial catastrophe (in addition to an actual catastrophe)!
While I would in no way consider myself a computer expert of any sort, I do think I'm more informed than a good number of PC users, yet I managed to get infected. I was running antivirus and a firewall, run adaware and spybot regularly, run opera with popups blocked instead of internet explorer, never download anything from e-mail, and thought I was being careful about what I downloaded. Yet I got infected with an annoying one. Still not sure how that happened. Not looking for advice here, so I'm not going to get into specific holes in my defense.
My point is that if you have to be more careful than I am when it comes to computing, this is always going to be a problem, since I don't see my parents or most people I know bothering to be better informed about security. Someone doing it for the masses, targeting the worst offenders first seems like the only realistic way.
Bluetooth is a security nightmare. (Seriously, enable it at your own risk in an urban environment.)
Non-nerd questions: what security risks do bluetooth mice pose in a urban environment? If I'm using a bluetooth mouse on a street corner, someone could gain access to my computer? Wouldn't someone have to be set up nearby looking for someone using a bluetooth device hooked up to a laptop? And the main danger there I'm assuming is they could give themselves remote access via the internet?
Or are you just saying some kid with a bluetooth mouse could annoy me by controlling the pointer on my laptop :-P. I don't use any bluetooth devices anyway, I'm just curious.
Is there a reason for the DRM tag beyond "Spore" was one of the games listed? The list in no way was talking about DRM. Okay, several of the games listed had issues with DRM, that's true. They've been covered. Extensively. And complained about even more. Many times. We know it's important to you. We know you boycotted spore because it had DRM, good for you, I noted that in my log of things slashdotters effectively boycotted, right there on page 3271. But let's keep discussions of DRM to discussions of DRM. Let's stop bringing up DRM and how unfair it is every time someone talks about games.
Clearly we need a government agency to enforce this list, or at least part of it. At the very least, politicians need to be fined thousands of dollars for use of the word "Maverick."
Alternatively, they could just fine news organizations for using catch-phrases more than 20 times a day.
Anything with a strong amount of Nostalgia for it is going to suffer from the fans who still play it proclaiming "they changed it, now it sucks" - See: Fallout 3, or any remake of Master of Magic ever done.
I think it's no different from remakes of anything. Movies and music mostly. Adaptations from one medium to another as well provokes the ire of diehard fans. It doesn't matter how good the finished product is even. A lot of it has to do with nostalgia vs reality. Maybe you played a game a lot as a teen, now that you don't have enough time to get into the sequel or remake you think it's worse. Maybe you loved a book when you were younger, but now that you're more mature, the1faithfully adapted movie doesn't strike you the same way.
Shamefull confession: In high school I thought Matrix 1 was amazing, and not just for the action. Matrix 2 and 3 were about the same, but seemed silly to me by the time they came out. I went back and watched 1, it didn't seem as deep as it did when I was in high school. The same thing goes for videogames (though maybe not pong). When I was in high school I thought "Marathon" was amazing in story and gameplay. Going back, the sprite-based gameplay has not aged well. The story is still quite complex compared to many FPS storylines, but it isn't as great as I had remembered it.
There's also some amount of elitism that unfortunately plagues videogames just as much as anything else, though it's rarer. Popular games tend to get trashed on, in rare cases where sequels are more popular than the first one, you'll have the same "they sold out" mantra that bands experience when they get more popular. I have to admit I can't think of a great example here though I think the final fantasy series gets some of that. I suppose there are some people who actually think that the transition from 6 to 7 was all for the worse, but I think it's hard to argue that FF7 was crap, that just seems like pure elitism to me.
The really old nostalgia games though I think fare better. No one is complaining aboug Megaman 9 ruining the megaman franchise because the 8-bit megaman games were totally dead. I also don't remember anyone complaining about supermario allstars, a remake and collection of supermario bros games for the SNES. I think that may be because the games released so far have generally been very faithful translations which are more updates to better graphics. If they started taking mroe liberties with series, we might see more complaining.
Penny Arcade has broken ground in success and shown how it is possible to build a business model providing a primarily free product. The key is having a product people want.
Geez, you must be new here. Put in the correct format.
1. Make a great product
2. Give it away
3. ???
4. Profit!
But isn't there regulation on doing this type of research?
There's not really much need, much of the research is prohibitively expensive. You don't really need to worry about your neighbor creating superflu intentionally unless he or she has a lot of disposable income or has inherited his or her own private molecular research facility.
I also found it suspicious that the source was "Supposedly the SFC but can't seem to find it." And a google search for the prof turns up empty aside from those stories. And accomplishing this would lead to a publication in a respected plant journal, not a shady internet buisness.
Moreover, I seriously doubt that the 4 step plan could be accomplished by one guy as a side project in 14 years without either eating up all the funds for whatever it was he was supposed to be researching. Some of the steps sounded like they would be nobel-prize winning projects by themselves, let alone the wholesale import of a complex system to another species. Note that I am not claiming to be a biochemist here, especially not a plant biochemist, and I am also of course unfamiliar with the specifics of THC production.
Considering we're still pulling out required enzymes for very basic things with much greater importance, including from organisms that are much easier to obtain than pot, this is a tall order. Some of my fellow students are working on purifying yeast enzymes. It's easy to get gallons of yeast, people have been doing it for centuries. Purification of proteins from yeast is not easy. Getting purified proteins from plants is likely even more difficult. Purifying proteins from a plant that is illegal, without a permit... that's got to be expensive at least. If he's doing it from his home, which he would likely have to be in order not to get FSU in trouble, there are even more problems.
Once purified, you would also have to develop an assay to make sure that you've actually isolated all the required components. You wouldn't want to go through steps 2-4 until you're sure you actually have it. That, again, seems like a monumental task.
It's unlikely but possible. Especially if there is just one gene needed for THC production, although if there were and it were discovered, it would be common knowledge by now, and it doesn't seem to be. Likely because it's not. And that makes sense, who is funding research into the biochemistry of THC production?
The next steps are more feasible, although that's not saying much
Again, not a biochemist, but this sounds okay in principle. If you're talking about one enzyme, which has actually been discovered, that is a good way to do it. Most biochemical pathways involve dozens of genes, the difficulties associated with transfecting genes typically is multiplied by each gene you are transfecting. If the THC pathway involves something like 20 genes, I would guess (again, not an expert) that you're looking at something which is a project for a post-doc, not even a grad student. I'm not sure 14 years is enough time for that.
All in all I'm extremely skeptical that one guy, even were he working for 14 years full time, could do this, though I am not about to say impossible, and could be way off on some of the above.
What I do find impossible is that the guy did it in his spare time over a grudge and it only made shady internet news. This would be a monumental accomplishment. The guy would get several awards and would be a billionaire in Holland.