Plenty of European countries do this and it results in a different set of problems. First, to vote for a party which matches your views such a party has to exist, what happens in practice is that parties which aim at large sections of the population form, because they have the greatest chance of election. Second having a parliament full of multiple parties means none of them usually has a clear majority and so you frequently get weak coalition governments. Third it's almost impossible to get rid of politicians because the established ones make sure they are high on the party lists, so they will get in no matter what. This takes away their connection to their constituency and their sense of responsibiity to their electorate.
Don't forget that you can end up with somebody winning who actually represents a small minority--that the majority of people could have easily agreed against, but because they failed on agreeing sufficiently on who else that person won anyway--and you can actually end up with greater polarization than in a two-party system since paradoxically the size of that 'large section of population' is smaller, especially if you indulge in salami tactics & generally aim to divide and conquer...which is a good way to ensure the situation of 'person the majority would vote against winning' will happen.
I don't have the citations where I can get at them anymore, but it's relatively common knowledge in the drug development community that there's a lot of relatively strong candidates that die in development for no other reason than the money required to push them through the FDA tests, meaning that while I agree that the science of genomics is in its infancy, I'm not quite comfortable betting that we might not end up in the very awkward position of simultaneously having genomics being well-accepted in the scientific community with strong, reproducible results being the norm and no FDA-approved tests for the medical community because no company feels it can break even because of the costs and legal issues involved in FDA testing.
Regulatory burden is something to always keep in mind--and there's some failures involved here on the FDA's side. Regulations that significantly increase the costs involved need to actually deliver what they promise, if nothing else because the costs of those regulations are ultimately paid by the very same public they are supposed to protect.
I've not noticed you puffing out your opposition to this, are you simply unaware of the local food movement? Is it only the people who want GMO labeling that earn your ire?
The whole food religion does actually. You could, in a sense, say I'm on a crusade. There is all of about zero proven benefit health to things like organic food and even locally grown food. However both of them cost people more money. I think it is immoral to lie about a benefit of your product when it costs more money.
The whole "local food movement" is what I refer to as the Food Religion. I'm opposed to it just as one might be opposed to Scientology.
GMO food, contrary to popular belief, is actually cheaper than even conventionally non-organic food, and has all of the same nutritional benefit, which comes from a reduction in materials used and a reduction of farmland. Furthermore, now that Monsanto's patents have expired, it's going to get even cheaper.
Until the Food Religion is exposed for what it really is (a big fat fraud) then I'll continue to post in places like this.
You're right on most of this, but locally-grown food is better for you under certain conditions--namely, if you're buying fresh foods, and that's merely because if it's not flash-frozen pretty much all fruits and vegetables will be losing nutritional value with time. The same goes for anything picked not quite ripe and allowed to ripen in transit, though you can often add in flavor to what suffers from the experience.
However, that's...pretty much the only place there's a difference, and it's mostly only worth considering when trying to decide on fresh vs frozen vs only getting it when locally in season. (For some fruits and vegetables, if you want a variety that's tasty you pretty much are stuck buying local because 'ships well' and 'tastes good' seem to be mutually exclusive qualities, even if they don't have to be picked before being ripe and allowed to ripen in transit...)
But notice that the local food movement on the whole doesn't seem to want to talk too much about the other factors involved in making your food nutritious, such as how you cook it, so odds are you're still pouring a good deal of the nutrition down the drain anyway. The movement is weird, but I'll still buy some things only when local and in season because I prefer the flavor.
That said: Fine with GMOs, especially having followed up on the cases where Monsanto looked to get crops destroyed. (They stuck to intentionally-planted, accidental escapees were fine.) I don't care about organic, except in the chemistry sense. The whole non-GMO thing makes very little sense to somebody who knows how to make their own GMOs, anyway. The only important worries there seem to be ones that should be amply handled by being careful to maintain seed banks, and if that's the reason for keeping seed banks that convinces people...well, I will complain that it's the stupid reason that works, but only that.
To be honest, I'd probably get the Ozito, see how long it took me to kill it, decide if I got my money's worth, and then set my budget and my priorities. I may also try to get a chance to work with the Dremel, to see how well I like it. I also keep in mind that sometimes the cheaper tool is the better one--I tend more towards minor bits of hand-sewing, since most of the cases I can get for my electronics are not to my tastes, and I've learned via many contributions to my jar of broken needles that for some reason the most cheap needles last the longest for me. (The jar of broken needles gets recycled and upcycled; I make some small tools myself, because I can.)
I think the assumption is that you can offer customers more useful discounts, but honestly I'd prefer the store be explicit and give me some way to provide direct feedback on the 'personalized' discounts. Things like "Oh, I loved seeing this pop up...except I couldn't wedge it into today's budget so it wasn't used" and "Why do you keep trying to sell me bacon did you not notice I only buy kosher/halal/veg* food?" would be useful feedback for the store, and short of somebody finding out what to browse while in the store to give the tracker the hint...
That's why it must be specific about when, what, and how you can upload it: if it says I have to wait an hour to post it to social media, then I can upload it to a private cloud account immediately...and, in fact, my phone does so automatically. (It's not something hard to set up, and since it's automated I do not need to do a thing.)
This law's only going after a cool-off period, and doesn't seem to aim for anything more than preventing public dissemination of those images before that time is up. You do realize that it's possible to upload things to secure but private places, right? (And then you can open bidding to the media, who might not bother paying you for your footage otherwise.)
In some ways letting people be liable for publishing graphic images of others might be both worse and already quite legal. If the public wants to be treated like professionals, then why not let them enjoy the full experience, including the paperwork burdens involved such as getting releases signed? The current rule for fair game (when you don't need a release) is public space and visible to public. So: lady in skirt on a city street is okay, an upskirt shot of same is not. There is, however, on the liberal side a movement to require consent always, at least if you are photographing a woman... (I wish I was making that up.)
Run it the same way phone numbers are now, just with integrated lookup and fully automated lookup/directory service. I think the last thing I used a printed phone book was as a kludge for adjusting furniture...and I think I've only once used it for its purpose in the past decade. (And that purely because the power company's mobile site was not coughing up the 'report an outrage' number.)
Since you probably missed it because it was mentioned by an AC: "I'm loving it" was deemed too generic. I don't remember the other two well enough, but you can trademark things other than words--I'm not a lawyer, I just actually paid some attention when lawyers talked about these things.
Clicking through to the link in my original post might have helped you here, as this is from the same page:
A trademark, trade mark, or trade-mark is a recognizable sign, design, or expression which identifies products or services of a particular source from those of others, although trademarks used to identify services are usually called service marks.
The page also covers things like just how much you can cover with a trademark--right here.
Before Windows, was window a common term in software?
Yeah, actually, it was.
And the trademark--as you can tell from how it appears in the legalese and as an anon correctly points out--is for specifically Microsoft Windows. You can trademark a phrase without its elements being covered by the trademark, and at least one company deliberately left part of a coinage they could have trademarked in the public domain so it would be safe to discuss the phenomena they were indexing.
The bottom line is, if Sony somehow manages to get this and then tries to harass LPers with this, not only this is probably going to end about as well for Sony as rootkits did but the judge might even literally laugh them out of court. (I suspect quite a few lawyers would take a case like this precisely for the lulz, and in fact you might have some large corporations siding with the LPers because this could establish precedents they don't want.)
So is "Just do it", "I'm loving it" and "Enjoy".
What was your point again?
Offhand? That I know what a generic term is, in this context, or at least how to look up things. Better comparisons would be 'salt' and 'Kleenex,' the latter of which is somewhat famous for having lost its trademark precisely because it became a generic term. Seriously, it's the textbook example.
The ones you mention are, respectively, most likely due to consistencies between ad campaigns, trademarked as a logo, as jingle+logo (and as an anon points out, "I'm loving it" was still too generic), and a logo.
Sony's trying to actually trademark the words themselves, which is just not going to end well since it's already the generic term for an entire genre--it'd be like somebody trying to trademark 'Steampunk' or 'Goth.'
While I'm not a lawyer, I'm pretty sure that "Let's play" by itself is pretty much impossible to trademark
Let us hope...although my guess is that Sony wouldn't have done this without running it by a room full of lawyers. Maybe they were told that they couldn't trademark it, but to "give it a shot anyway" just to see if the courts would fall for it.
Actually, going deeper into trademark law, odds are this went through precisely as many lawyers as their idea of infecting computers with rootkits did--0 lawyers who knew that the correct answer is "As your lawyer, my advice is that you stop taking any illegal drugs." Let's Play is a generic term, and the odds are that it might get past a judge but the endgame will be at least one judge laughing them out of court... They probably ran it past as many (competent) PR people as they did (competent) lawyers, too, because even if this does work it should be obvious that this is a PR disaster in the making.
If they were attempting to get a trademark for a logo using the words "Let's Play," this would instead be the first sign that somebody at Sony actually had a good idea and they might go into outright open support for the phenomenon. It'd not precisely be a bad move: I find them more useful than traditional reviews in deciding if I want to play a game, though some I've spent the most time and effort searching out were by pure word-of-mouth. (I've no idea if anybody's done a Let's Play for those yet.)
While I'm not a lawyer, I'm pretty sure that "Let's play" by itself is pretty much impossible to trademark due to the basic rules of getting a trademark (as put by Wikipedia), though they might be able to claim it in the form of a particular logo incorporating the words...which wouldn't let them go after Let's Plays but might let them start sponsoring/branding their own Let's Play group.
Pinochet, a Hero of Capitalism, Entrepreneur and Job Creator! Vivre Pinochet!!
(Replying in part to remove mismoderation,) Nobody said we had to like him, just that he's one example of dictators not closing a country, and given that the claim was that "It's a dictatorship, of course it's closed" then only one example of a dictator who did not close his country is needed.
Don't blame the unions for what trust-fund babies running daddies company did to the US car industry. If the guy on the shop floor could see the Japanese coming what could he do? Requisition a few hundred million for a new assembly line for a new model?
If he could? He'd then run into the unions sobbing about jobs lost because the new assembly line no longer needs widget adjusters & sprocket polishers and possibly also the issues involved if retooling the current factory would require an extended closure, the EPA refusing to allow the upgrades to the old factory unless it suddenly meets requirements only an entirely new building could manage (never mind that the changes would result in less total pollution), and a nice random boatload of governmental and special interest groups who don't like the idea of building a new factory from the ground up because of the environmental impact (once again, even if it reduces total pollution) and various flavors of woo.
This is roughly what people who were high enough in the companies to both see these problems coming and actually do something about it ran into in many industries, and it doesn't help that the car industry unions' upper levels basically sold out their members' long-term interests in order to secure votes for themselves when union elections came up like the politicians they are. This is a problem that isn't necessarily inherit in the system for nor intrinsic to unions in and of themselves, but it is unfortunately very business as usual for US unions once you get past the local level and probably part of why the IBM union failed to gain traction. (Why join a union if you feel you cannot trust the union's management?)
This a systemic failure, and trying to fix it by changing only one part would be like trying to fix a system error in Windows by changing the color scheme.
On a per-capita basis, Americans produce far more pollution than Chinese, Africans, etc.
Eh? per-capita basis? Who cares?! If your government has to close the schools in your city, and tell the old folks that they should do their morning Tai Chi at home, instead of an open park . . . your country is . . . well, let's just leave it at that.
You should try to visit China sometime . . . in a major city . . . and take a deep breath . . . I never knew that New Jersey smelled so sweet!
I'll stick to things like the smuggled-out videos of the electronics 'recycling' center there, thank you. The only places you can get away with that are ones where you're not financially responsible (even if it's merely an effective immunity) and not even the US has quite been that bad--Love Canal happened because the Niagara Falls Board of Education didn't understand why they were being told that a toxic waste dump isn't a good place to build a school. (Citation; Not the original source I heard about it from, which was a tl;dr summary of what came out long term, and put it as "Chemical company goes 'You want to do what on the toxic waste dump you are insisting on acquiring?' to school board, sells purely because the board didn't get what 'no' means.")
My data use is uneven, so what is a good amount one month could easily enough be not nearly enough the next. Data caps don't really do it for me but I could happily live with a speed limit.
This also is sounding like the deal I've been wanting a cell company to let me make; as long as the throttling doesn't hamper my ability to watch video at a decent quality, I'll trade that for having my data capped. If they were selling it as this I'd be seriously looking at moving.
Your experience may still hold true for small labs, but many research campuses have sequencing cores now with fast turn-around. I give them the tube with DNA and primers, and they email me the sequence data the next day (rarely, it'll take them two days). I hear there's a company in NYC that promises 12-hour turnaround for samples they get in the city. Now, smaller institutions may take more time, but sequencing has been advancing pretty quickly as of late.
I was actually at one of the major research campuses--so they've probably gotten this in, and I've a pretty good guess how the fast turnaround is managed. When I last checked it was in the "whenever we get the bugs worked out" phase of development. It still would be a bit of an annoyance for me, but that's because I loved the parts involved in getting to doing the sequencing, not processing the sequencing data...which is more or less why I gave up being a biochemist when my body decided to no longer react well to ammonia, chlorine, or gloves. (The last lab I worked in was the last lab in large part because the gloves caused part of the skin on my hands to melt off...in very much the literal sense.)
I did read the article, and the thing is that it won't necessarily save time or money if the error rate is higher--with what you're suggesting, if I'm going to be optimistic I might get maybe a fifth of those wells actually being a successful transformation, assuming that my host isn't one where using a 96 well plate actually will lower my success rate. I still won't know if any of those are the sequence I want until I sequence them, and the last part is pretty expensive and time-consuming, especially if you're sending it off in bulk.
Its not important to increase the error rate if the main product you are wasting is cheap DNA sequences.
Wait, what? Nobody wants to increase the error rate here, the point is that if the cost of the lower price is a significantly higher rate of errors, then you'll end up wasting everything else involved in getting to the point where you can check to see if you did get the correct gene in. This is only really going to save time and/or money if its accuracy is sufficiently close to being as good as the previous methods that you come out ahead in the end.
To put it in IT terms which might help here: Since DNA is in fact a means of transmitting data, my question here is entirely how the quality of service is. Do they have equal quality of service? The cheaper method, if it's got better QoS (more likely to get the sequence of bases correct) then it's definitely an improvement and the drop in price is actually probably less important--on the other hand, it might be like going from having your bytes transmitted by a guy operating a switch to attempting to do so via semaphore flags on a foggy day.
my experience is that the time frame is in the month(s) range, especially if the lab doing it for you is swamped.
That is why I mentioned that labs without capabilities to handle the increase amount of work that becomes possible the advantages are of course much less
If your goal is to save time and money, an automated sequencer that is reliable enough and cheap enough that you can do it in-house is probably even more important than this--and that's also a PITA to do right now, since my experience is that you still have to double-check the automated ones by hand because they'll do Weird Things.
The differences is that manufactured DNA becomes cheaper without you investing anything at all, the prices come down by themselves when the company begins the service, a reliable sequencing robot will of course needs money to be put in order and its not necessary if you screen your samples and process the same number as you are doing now but chosen from a larger pool obtained in a shorter time. In many places the whole process is streamlined and one of the important things that restrict the amount of work that can be finished is doing the first steps slowly in order to avoid wasting money in unnecessary sequences.
We're already at the point that we need a 'reliable' sequencing robot. It's worth repeating that the backlogs are pretty much universal--the demand far outstrips current capacity, but it's a laborious process which automation only makes slightly less laborious. Running the PCR machine for a few extra cycles is not really that expensive, having the equipment is, and our 'reliable' sequencing robots still have an error rate because PCR itself has an error rate.
We just don't have some of the required technology--we've got just short of it, but the last piece is missing and may or may not ever exist. I'm not quite going to complain, because it's a job that pays decently except for the utter mind-numbing nature, but... (Basically, imagine your job being "proofread automatic captions for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.")
Also, grant money is like having a company credit card with a painfully low limit: You real
As mentioned in the article the DNA manufacturing makes cheaper only the first part of the process and the main cost remain the same, the advance will most likely save time but not money. For example instead of running a few reaction with the 8 to 10 oligos you felt you could order that week you just make a 96 well plate of reactions each with a different one and check how many give a successful transformation. Of course if that is above your lab capacity then the advantages are not so good.
Still, if this manufacturing becomes common then other things will also become cheaper and more experiments could be done with the same grant (until the grants become smaller since DNA is cheap so you should do with half what you asked).
I did read the article, and the thing is that it won't necessarily save time or money if the error rate is higher--with what you're suggesting, if I'm going to be optimistic I might get maybe a fifth of those wells actually being a successful transformation, assuming that my host isn't one where using a 96 well plate actually will lower my success rate. I still won't know if any of those are the sequence I want until I sequence them, and the last part is pretty expensive and time-consuming, especially if you're sending it off in bulk. With only a few, my experience is that the time frame is in the month(s) range, especially if the lab doing it for you is swamped. (We were rather lucky in the sense that, for us, the sequence itself was the end goal--we were working to add to the gene database yet another version of a rather conserved plant gene, and yeah, it's about as boring as you'd expect. I also am using the success rate for transformations that we had for this.)
If your goal is to save time and money, an automated sequencer that is reliable enough and cheap enough that you can do it in-house is probably even more important than this--and that's also a PITA to do right now, since my experience is that you still have to double-check the automated ones by hand because they'll do Weird Things. It's one of those weird things which can't be quite safely left to automation, so you end up in this case with one highly-trained scientist whose job is about as exciting as watching grass grow but also necessary. Doing it by hand requires more people, is slower, and is even more boring. (It's rather like transcribing, by hand, a really bad chatterbot.)
Also, grant money is like having a company credit card with a painfully low limit: You really can't use it to cover your personal bills if you want to keep it (and your job), and if you're lucky it'll actually cover all that it was given to you to cover. So, this might make it for a time easier to actually cover more of the work with the grant money...but you're funny if you think there's going to be any left over for experiments other than what you got the grant for.
This doesn't cover the things I would want to know--such as what they expect the computer's error rate (think 'mutation' here) because if my cost-per-base is low but I have to order a lot more copies simply to be certain I get the correct sequence, I'm not so sure it's a good idea. Having actually done this as an undergrad, the part that I'd stress out about most is the whole process of checking it--getting the gene into the vector and the vector into the host can be annoyingly finicky.
I think it is a problem with STEM fields in general. The main reason I found (asst. of a lab once) is that STEM fields value independent moxie. This dovetails with many men's nature to be independent.
Women, however, are very social. They generally have no problems sharing victories or working together to achieve something great.
It looks like we do from outside, but from inside? Watch Mean Girls and Heathers, and pick your preferred flavor for Devil Wears Prada--men view women's social interactions through rose-colored wielders' glass, and the bottom line is that while it's not as obvious, just as much if not more snipping, bullying, and generally cruelty happens between women, if not more. Hell, there's some women in the social sciences who found their particular field because they flat-out said no, really, social aggression is a thing and it's not harmless. What it is, is easily ignored compared to physical aggression; it was pretty much invisible before female social scientists pointed it out...and still kind of is, given that we're seeing a shift towards it being both sexes' preferred form of aggression now that we're stomping on physical aggression.
Trust me, it's not that women have no problems sharing victories or working together to achieve something great--it's just that we as a culture are unwilling to recognize in women the same sort of antics that we disapprove of in men.
Your suggested solution involves changing education. This is a favorite tuning knob of many would-be social engineers: diagnose a problem without a study (or with a study made to find exactly that problem, run by people with a vested interest in finding that thing). Specifically, you imply that there's something that schools can do with groups of friends, trying to define the self organizing social groups. This will require a level of policing that is absolutely ludicrous and impractical, and likely very harmful if schoolchildren are denied the ability to choose their friends. School is a tyrannical experience for many, and this plan of yours will just create even more loners, and make them more alone.
Hey, let's be honest here, by doing it through education, you're basically engaging in violation of the human rights of children, engaging in unethical experimentation upon humans (though arguably that'd require you test to see if it actually helps first and thus be an improvement), and are engaging in unlicensed engineering.
That said: I can tell you exactly how well the idea of this will work, because my teachers in middle school decided to do exactly this. I'd been finally managing to work my way into a social group and having friends, and was doing quite well, when my teachers had a flash of 'inspiration' and decided to start regulating who we could sit with at lunch, our primary socialization time.
I found out that my teachers did not know the differences between East Asia and Southeast Asia. (If you don't understand why this is a problem: It's kind of like confusing Mexico with New Mexico, or France and Germany.)
By the time they finally admitted that the experiment was failing to prevent cliques from forming, I was pretty much stuck on the outside: All my efforts to make friends was absolutely undone, and given it was several year's work to finally get in... They also had rather quaint ideas like how bullying was not something that happened, or at least for very long, and how the only thing we were interested in during 6th grade was socializing.
It's also amazing to see how thoroughly socially awkward people are chased down and vilified. Finding one of the few places that socially awkward or autism spectrum people are able to spend their time helping society (in some cases for free, and in most cases for less compensation than they WOULD get, outside of it) and trying to find the correct combinations of matches to set their house on fire, all sacrifices for whatever Diversity-God is currently venerated in social engineering circles.
As the pressure increases, they'll eventually figure out what's going on. Within 10 years, I fear you'll be seeing forks of projects along political lines.
That will be the end result of diagnosing a problem where none exists, prescribing solutions where the term is meaningless, and ultimately vilifying and excluding contributors who don't toe the politically correct line. More divisiveness for no gain.
Honestly the better solution is calling the combatants on both sides overgrown brats and perhaps also encouraging some humor to responses to things like "Tits or GTFO." (SFW honest. And for another type of request: also SFW.) Remember, getting your feathers ruffled is what trolls want, why give them the satisfaction?
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Plenty of European countries do this and it results in a different set of problems. First, to vote for a party which matches your views such a party has to exist, what happens in practice is that parties which aim at large sections of the population form, because they have the greatest chance of election. Second having a parliament full of multiple parties means none of them usually has a clear majority and so you frequently get weak coalition governments. Third it's almost impossible to get rid of politicians because the established ones make sure they are high on the party lists, so they will get in no matter what. This takes away their connection to their constituency and their sense of responsibiity to their electorate.
Don't forget that you can end up with somebody winning who actually represents a small minority--that the majority of people could have easily agreed against, but because they failed on agreeing sufficiently on who else that person won anyway--and you can actually end up with greater polarization than in a two-party system since paradoxically the size of that 'large section of population' is smaller, especially if you indulge in salami tactics & generally aim to divide and conquer...which is a good way to ensure the situation of 'person the majority would vote against winning' will happen.
I don't have the citations where I can get at them anymore, but it's relatively common knowledge in the drug development community that there's a lot of relatively strong candidates that die in development for no other reason than the money required to push them through the FDA tests, meaning that while I agree that the science of genomics is in its infancy, I'm not quite comfortable betting that we might not end up in the very awkward position of simultaneously having genomics being well-accepted in the scientific community with strong, reproducible results being the norm and no FDA-approved tests for the medical community because no company feels it can break even because of the costs and legal issues involved in FDA testing.
Regulatory burden is something to always keep in mind--and there's some failures involved here on the FDA's side. Regulations that significantly increase the costs involved need to actually deliver what they promise, if nothing else because the costs of those regulations are ultimately paid by the very same public they are supposed to protect.
I've not noticed you puffing out your opposition to this, are you simply unaware of the local food movement? Is it only the people who want GMO labeling that earn your ire?
The whole food religion does actually. You could, in a sense, say I'm on a crusade. There is all of about zero proven benefit health to things like organic food and even locally grown food. However both of them cost people more money. I think it is immoral to lie about a benefit of your product when it costs more money.
The whole "local food movement" is what I refer to as the Food Religion. I'm opposed to it just as one might be opposed to Scientology.
GMO food, contrary to popular belief, is actually cheaper than even conventionally non-organic food, and has all of the same nutritional benefit, which comes from a reduction in materials used and a reduction of farmland. Furthermore, now that Monsanto's patents have expired, it's going to get even cheaper.
Until the Food Religion is exposed for what it really is (a big fat fraud) then I'll continue to post in places like this.
You're right on most of this, but locally-grown food is better for you under certain conditions--namely, if you're buying fresh foods, and that's merely because if it's not flash-frozen pretty much all fruits and vegetables will be losing nutritional value with time. The same goes for anything picked not quite ripe and allowed to ripen in transit, though you can often add in flavor to what suffers from the experience.
However, that's...pretty much the only place there's a difference, and it's mostly only worth considering when trying to decide on fresh vs frozen vs only getting it when locally in season. (For some fruits and vegetables, if you want a variety that's tasty you pretty much are stuck buying local because 'ships well' and 'tastes good' seem to be mutually exclusive qualities, even if they don't have to be picked before being ripe and allowed to ripen in transit...)
But notice that the local food movement on the whole doesn't seem to want to talk too much about the other factors involved in making your food nutritious, such as how you cook it, so odds are you're still pouring a good deal of the nutrition down the drain anyway. The movement is weird, but I'll still buy some things only when local and in season because I prefer the flavor.
That said: Fine with GMOs, especially having followed up on the cases where Monsanto looked to get crops destroyed. (They stuck to intentionally-planted, accidental escapees were fine.) I don't care about organic, except in the chemistry sense. The whole non-GMO thing makes very little sense to somebody who knows how to make their own GMOs, anyway. The only important worries there seem to be ones that should be amply handled by being careful to maintain seed banks, and if that's the reason for keeping seed banks that convinces people...well, I will complain that it's the stupid reason that works, but only that.
Is the tool better, or simply more expensive?
Ozito doesn't have much of a marketing budget.
To be honest, I'd probably get the Ozito, see how long it took me to kill it, decide if I got my money's worth, and then set my budget and my priorities. I may also try to get a chance to work with the Dremel, to see how well I like it. I also keep in mind that sometimes the cheaper tool is the better one--I tend more towards minor bits of hand-sewing, since most of the cases I can get for my electronics are not to my tastes, and I've learned via many contributions to my jar of broken needles that for some reason the most cheap needles last the longest for me. (The jar of broken needles gets recycled and upcycled; I make some small tools myself, because I can.)
I think the assumption is that you can offer customers more useful discounts, but honestly I'd prefer the store be explicit and give me some way to provide direct feedback on the 'personalized' discounts. Things like "Oh, I loved seeing this pop up...except I couldn't wedge it into today's budget so it wasn't used" and "Why do you keep trying to sell me bacon did you not notice I only buy kosher/halal/veg* food?" would be useful feedback for the store, and short of somebody finding out what to browse while in the store to give the tracker the hint...
That's why it must be specific about when, what, and how you can upload it: if it says I have to wait an hour to post it to social media, then I can upload it to a private cloud account immediately...and, in fact, my phone does so automatically. (It's not something hard to set up, and since it's automated I do not need to do a thing.)
This law's only going after a cool-off period, and doesn't seem to aim for anything more than preventing public dissemination of those images before that time is up. You do realize that it's possible to upload things to secure but private places, right? (And then you can open bidding to the media, who might not bother paying you for your footage otherwise.)
In some ways letting people be liable for publishing graphic images of others might be both worse and already quite legal. If the public wants to be treated like professionals, then why not let them enjoy the full experience, including the paperwork burdens involved such as getting releases signed? The current rule for fair game (when you don't need a release) is public space and visible to public. So: lady in skirt on a city street is okay, an upskirt shot of same is not. There is, however, on the liberal side a movement to require consent always, at least if you are photographing a woman... (I wish I was making that up.)
Run it the same way phone numbers are now, just with integrated lookup and fully automated lookup/directory service. I think the last thing I used a printed phone book was as a kludge for adjusting furniture...and I think I've only once used it for its purpose in the past decade. (And that purely because the power company's mobile site was not coughing up the 'report an outrage' number.)
A quick check at the US Patent and Trademark Office says it's a live application. The database search is here.
Since you probably missed it because it was mentioned by an AC: "I'm loving it" was deemed too generic. I don't remember the other two well enough, but you can trademark things other than words--I'm not a lawyer, I just actually paid some attention when lawyers talked about these things.
Clicking through to the link in my original post might have helped you here, as this is from the same page:
A trademark, trade mark, or trade-mark is a recognizable sign, design, or expression which identifies products or services of a particular source from those of others, although trademarks used to identify services are usually called service marks.
The page also covers things like just how much you can cover with a trademark--right here.
Before Windows, was window a common term in software?
Yeah, actually, it was.
And the trademark--as you can tell from how it appears in the legalese and as an anon correctly points out--is for specifically Microsoft Windows. You can trademark a phrase without its elements being covered by the trademark, and at least one company deliberately left part of a coinage they could have trademarked in the public domain so it would be safe to discuss the phenomena they were indexing.
The bottom line is, if Sony somehow manages to get this and then tries to harass LPers with this, not only this is probably going to end about as well for Sony as rootkits did but the judge might even literally laugh them out of court. (I suspect quite a few lawyers would take a case like this precisely for the lulz, and in fact you might have some large corporations siding with the LPers because this could establish precedents they don't want.)
Let's Play is a generic term
So is "Just do it", "I'm loving it" and "Enjoy". What was your point again?
Offhand? That I know what a generic term is, in this context, or at least how to look up things. Better comparisons would be 'salt' and 'Kleenex,' the latter of which is somewhat famous for having lost its trademark precisely because it became a generic term. Seriously, it's the textbook example.
The ones you mention are, respectively, most likely due to consistencies between ad campaigns, trademarked as a logo, as jingle+logo (and as an anon points out, "I'm loving it" was still too generic), and a logo.
Sony's trying to actually trademark the words themselves, which is just not going to end well since it's already the generic term for an entire genre--it'd be like somebody trying to trademark 'Steampunk' or 'Goth.'
While I'm not a lawyer, I'm pretty sure that "Let's play" by itself is pretty much impossible to trademark
Let us hope...although my guess is that Sony wouldn't have done this without running it by a room full of lawyers. Maybe they were told that they couldn't trademark it, but to "give it a shot anyway" just to see if the courts would fall for it.
Actually, going deeper into trademark law, odds are this went through precisely as many lawyers as their idea of infecting computers with rootkits did--0 lawyers who knew that the correct answer is "As your lawyer, my advice is that you stop taking any illegal drugs." Let's Play is a generic term, and the odds are that it might get past a judge but the endgame will be at least one judge laughing them out of court... They probably ran it past as many (competent) PR people as they did (competent) lawyers, too, because even if this does work it should be obvious that this is a PR disaster in the making.
If they were attempting to get a trademark for a logo using the words "Let's Play," this would instead be the first sign that somebody at Sony actually had a good idea and they might go into outright open support for the phenomenon. It'd not precisely be a bad move: I find them more useful than traditional reviews in deciding if I want to play a game, though some I've spent the most time and effort searching out were by pure word-of-mouth. (I've no idea if anybody's done a Let's Play for those yet.)
While I'm not a lawyer, I'm pretty sure that "Let's play" by itself is pretty much impossible to trademark due to the basic rules of getting a trademark (as put by Wikipedia), though they might be able to claim it in the form of a particular logo incorporating the words...which wouldn't let them go after Let's Plays but might let them start sponsoring/branding their own Let's Play group.
Pinochet, a Hero of Capitalism, Entrepreneur and Job Creator! Vivre Pinochet!!
(Replying in part to remove mismoderation,) Nobody said we had to like him, just that he's one example of dictators not closing a country, and given that the claim was that "It's a dictatorship, of course it's closed" then only one example of a dictator who did not close his country is needed.
Don't blame the unions for what trust-fund babies running daddies company did to the US car industry. If the guy on the shop floor could see the Japanese coming what could he do? Requisition a few hundred million for a new assembly line for a new model?
If he could? He'd then run into the unions sobbing about jobs lost because the new assembly line no longer needs widget adjusters & sprocket polishers and possibly also the issues involved if retooling the current factory would require an extended closure, the EPA refusing to allow the upgrades to the old factory unless it suddenly meets requirements only an entirely new building could manage (never mind that the changes would result in less total pollution), and a nice random boatload of governmental and special interest groups who don't like the idea of building a new factory from the ground up because of the environmental impact (once again, even if it reduces total pollution) and various flavors of woo.
This is roughly what people who were high enough in the companies to both see these problems coming and actually do something about it ran into in many industries, and it doesn't help that the car industry unions' upper levels basically sold out their members' long-term interests in order to secure votes for themselves when union elections came up like the politicians they are. This is a problem that isn't necessarily inherit in the system for nor intrinsic to unions in and of themselves, but it is unfortunately very business as usual for US unions once you get past the local level and probably part of why the IBM union failed to gain traction. (Why join a union if you feel you cannot trust the union's management?)
This a systemic failure, and trying to fix it by changing only one part would be like trying to fix a system error in Windows by changing the color scheme.
On a per-capita basis, Americans produce far more pollution than Chinese, Africans, etc.
Eh? per-capita basis? Who cares?! If your government has to close the schools in your city, and tell the old folks that they should do their morning Tai Chi at home, instead of an open park . . . your country is . . . well, let's just leave it at that.
You should try to visit China sometime . . . in a major city . . . and take a deep breath . . . I never knew that New Jersey smelled so sweet!
I'll stick to things like the smuggled-out videos of the electronics 'recycling' center there, thank you. The only places you can get away with that are ones where you're not financially responsible (even if it's merely an effective immunity) and not even the US has quite been that bad--Love Canal happened because the Niagara Falls Board of Education didn't understand why they were being told that a toxic waste dump isn't a good place to build a school. (Citation; Not the original source I heard about it from, which was a tl;dr summary of what came out long term, and put it as "Chemical company goes 'You want to do what on the toxic waste dump you are insisting on acquiring?' to school board, sells purely because the board didn't get what 'no' means.")
My data use is uneven, so what is a good amount one month could easily enough be not nearly enough the next. Data caps don't really do it for me but I could happily live with a speed limit.
This also is sounding like the deal I've been wanting a cell company to let me make; as long as the throttling doesn't hamper my ability to watch video at a decent quality, I'll trade that for having my data capped. If they were selling it as this I'd be seriously looking at moving.
Your experience may still hold true for small labs, but many research campuses have sequencing cores now with fast turn-around. I give them the tube with DNA and primers, and they email me the sequence data the next day (rarely, it'll take them two days). I hear there's a company in NYC that promises 12-hour turnaround for samples they get in the city. Now, smaller institutions may take more time, but sequencing has been advancing pretty quickly as of late.
I was actually at one of the major research campuses--so they've probably gotten this in, and I've a pretty good guess how the fast turnaround is managed. When I last checked it was in the "whenever we get the bugs worked out" phase of development. It still would be a bit of an annoyance for me, but that's because I loved the parts involved in getting to doing the sequencing, not processing the sequencing data...which is more or less why I gave up being a biochemist when my body decided to no longer react well to ammonia, chlorine, or gloves. (The last lab I worked in was the last lab in large part because the gloves caused part of the skin on my hands to melt off...in very much the literal sense.)
I did read the article, and the thing is that it won't necessarily save time or money if the error rate is higher--with what you're suggesting, if I'm going to be optimistic I might get maybe a fifth of those wells actually being a successful transformation, assuming that my host isn't one where using a 96 well plate actually will lower my success rate. I still won't know if any of those are the sequence I want until I sequence them, and the last part is pretty expensive and time-consuming, especially if you're sending it off in bulk.
Its not important to increase the error rate if the main product you are wasting is cheap DNA sequences.
Wait, what? Nobody wants to increase the error rate here, the point is that if the cost of the lower price is a significantly higher rate of errors, then you'll end up wasting everything else involved in getting to the point where you can check to see if you did get the correct gene in. This is only really going to save time and/or money if its accuracy is sufficiently close to being as good as the previous methods that you come out ahead in the end.
To put it in IT terms which might help here: Since DNA is in fact a means of transmitting data, my question here is entirely how the quality of service is. Do they have equal quality of service? The cheaper method, if it's got better QoS (more likely to get the sequence of bases correct) then it's definitely an improvement and the drop in price is actually probably less important--on the other hand, it might be like going from having your bytes transmitted by a guy operating a switch to attempting to do so via semaphore flags on a foggy day.
my experience is that the time frame is in the month(s) range, especially if the lab doing it for you is swamped.
That is why I mentioned that labs without capabilities to handle the increase amount of work that becomes possible the advantages are of course much less
If your goal is to save time and money, an automated sequencer that is reliable enough and cheap enough that you can do it in-house is probably even more important than this--and that's also a PITA to do right now, since my experience is that you still have to double-check the automated ones by hand because they'll do Weird Things.
The differences is that manufactured DNA becomes cheaper without you investing anything at all, the prices come down by themselves when the company begins the service, a reliable sequencing robot will of course needs money to be put in order and its not necessary if you screen your samples and process the same number as you are doing now but chosen from a larger pool obtained in a shorter time. In many places the whole process is streamlined and one of the important things that restrict the amount of work that can be finished is doing the first steps slowly in order to avoid wasting money in unnecessary sequences.
We're already at the point that we need a 'reliable' sequencing robot. It's worth repeating that the backlogs are pretty much universal--the demand far outstrips current capacity, but it's a laborious process which automation only makes slightly less laborious. Running the PCR machine for a few extra cycles is not really that expensive, having the equipment is, and our 'reliable' sequencing robots still have an error rate because PCR itself has an error rate.
We just don't have some of the required technology--we've got just short of it, but the last piece is missing and may or may not ever exist. I'm not quite going to complain, because it's a job that pays decently except for the utter mind-numbing nature, but... (Basically, imagine your job being "proofread automatic captions for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.")
Also, grant money is like having a company credit card with a painfully low limit: You real
As mentioned in the article the DNA manufacturing makes cheaper only the first part of the process and the main cost remain the same, the advance will most likely save time but not money. For example instead of running a few reaction with the 8 to 10 oligos you felt you could order that week you just make a 96 well plate of reactions each with a different one and check how many give a successful transformation. Of course if that is above your lab capacity then the advantages are not so good.
Still, if this manufacturing becomes common then other things will also become cheaper and more experiments could be done with the same grant (until the grants become smaller since DNA is cheap so you should do with half what you asked).
I did read the article, and the thing is that it won't necessarily save time or money if the error rate is higher--with what you're suggesting, if I'm going to be optimistic I might get maybe a fifth of those wells actually being a successful transformation, assuming that my host isn't one where using a 96 well plate actually will lower my success rate. I still won't know if any of those are the sequence I want until I sequence them, and the last part is pretty expensive and time-consuming, especially if you're sending it off in bulk. With only a few, my experience is that the time frame is in the month(s) range, especially if the lab doing it for you is swamped. (We were rather lucky in the sense that, for us, the sequence itself was the end goal--we were working to add to the gene database yet another version of a rather conserved plant gene, and yeah, it's about as boring as you'd expect. I also am using the success rate for transformations that we had for this.)
If your goal is to save time and money, an automated sequencer that is reliable enough and cheap enough that you can do it in-house is probably even more important than this--and that's also a PITA to do right now, since my experience is that you still have to double-check the automated ones by hand because they'll do Weird Things. It's one of those weird things which can't be quite safely left to automation, so you end up in this case with one highly-trained scientist whose job is about as exciting as watching grass grow but also necessary. Doing it by hand requires more people, is slower, and is even more boring. (It's rather like transcribing, by hand, a really bad chatterbot.)
Also, grant money is like having a company credit card with a painfully low limit: You really can't use it to cover your personal bills if you want to keep it (and your job), and if you're lucky it'll actually cover all that it was given to you to cover. So, this might make it for a time easier to actually cover more of the work with the grant money...but you're funny if you think there's going to be any left over for experiments other than what you got the grant for.
This doesn't cover the things I would want to know--such as what they expect the computer's error rate (think 'mutation' here) because if my cost-per-base is low but I have to order a lot more copies simply to be certain I get the correct sequence, I'm not so sure it's a good idea. Having actually done this as an undergrad, the part that I'd stress out about most is the whole process of checking it--getting the gene into the vector and the vector into the host can be annoyingly finicky.
I think it is a problem with STEM fields in general. The main reason I found (asst. of a lab once) is that STEM fields value independent moxie. This dovetails with many men's nature to be independent.
Women, however, are very social. They generally have no problems sharing victories or working together to achieve something great.
It looks like we do from outside, but from inside? Watch Mean Girls and Heathers, and pick your preferred flavor for Devil Wears Prada--men view women's social interactions through rose-colored wielders' glass, and the bottom line is that while it's not as obvious, just as much if not more snipping, bullying, and generally cruelty happens between women, if not more. Hell, there's some women in the social sciences who found their particular field because they flat-out said no, really, social aggression is a thing and it's not harmless. What it is, is easily ignored compared to physical aggression; it was pretty much invisible before female social scientists pointed it out...and still kind of is, given that we're seeing a shift towards it being both sexes' preferred form of aggression now that we're stomping on physical aggression.
Trust me, it's not that women have no problems sharing victories or working together to achieve something great--it's just that we as a culture are unwilling to recognize in women the same sort of antics that we disapprove of in men.
Your suggested solution involves changing education. This is a favorite tuning knob of many would-be social engineers: diagnose a problem without a study (or with a study made to find exactly that problem, run by people with a vested interest in finding that thing). Specifically, you imply that there's something that schools can do with groups of friends, trying to define the self organizing social groups. This will require a level of policing that is absolutely ludicrous and impractical, and likely very harmful if schoolchildren are denied the ability to choose their friends. School is a tyrannical experience for many, and this plan of yours will just create even more loners, and make them more alone.
Hey, let's be honest here, by doing it through education, you're basically engaging in violation of the human rights of children, engaging in unethical experimentation upon humans (though arguably that'd require you test to see if it actually helps first and thus be an improvement), and are engaging in unlicensed engineering.
That said: I can tell you exactly how well the idea of this will work, because my teachers in middle school decided to do exactly this. I'd been finally managing to work my way into a social group and having friends, and was doing quite well, when my teachers had a flash of 'inspiration' and decided to start regulating who we could sit with at lunch, our primary socialization time.
I found out that my teachers did not know the differences between East Asia and Southeast Asia. (If you don't understand why this is a problem: It's kind of like confusing Mexico with New Mexico, or France and Germany.)
By the time they finally admitted that the experiment was failing to prevent cliques from forming, I was pretty much stuck on the outside: All my efforts to make friends was absolutely undone, and given it was several year's work to finally get in... They also had rather quaint ideas like how bullying was not something that happened, or at least for very long, and how the only thing we were interested in during 6th grade was socializing.
It's also amazing to see how thoroughly socially awkward people are chased down and vilified. Finding one of the few places that socially awkward or autism spectrum people are able to spend their time helping society (in some cases for free, and in most cases for less compensation than they WOULD get, outside of it) and trying to find the correct combinations of matches to set their house on fire, all sacrifices for whatever Diversity-God is currently venerated in social engineering circles.
As the pressure increases, they'll eventually figure out what's going on. Within 10 years, I fear you'll be seeing forks of projects along political lines.
That will be the end result of diagnosing a problem where none exists, prescribing solutions where the term is meaningless, and ultimately vilifying and excluding contributors who don't toe the politically correct line. More divisiveness for no gain.
Honestly the better solution is calling the combatants on both sides overgrown brats and perhaps also encouraging some humor to responses to things like "Tits or GTFO." (SFW honest. And for another type of request: also SFW.) Remember, getting your feathers ruffled is what trolls want, why give them the satisfaction?