Although I admit I'm a bit out of my depth on BRCA[1,2], but it is my understanding that cDNA (created by the reverse transcriptase process on the RNA which was created by the DNA template), is often a synopsis of the gene somtimes ommitting certain junk sections that do not code for protiens. Kind of like a photocopy of a printout, both have toner on paper, but the photocopy might be subtly different than the original printout.
The supreme court did not rule that cDNA part of Myriad's patent was valid, only that it was possible to patent such a thing. For instance if it was "obvious to a practitioner" on how to create that thing, perhaps that will be its undoing.
If you look at the actual patent, they list a few of the defining markers (15 nucleotides out of thousands) of the gene and a few of the common alternate sequences that would signal a gene mutation if identified using the currently popular PCR style of DNA/cDNA amplification. This may or may not be something obvious, but is certainly not a patent claim on the cDNA created from the DNA. If there was a new non-PCR technique way of isolating a gene you have (BCRA[1,2]) and to tell if it is a mutated one that might cause breast cancer at w/o just looking at these 15/1000 nucleotide signature on cDNA which eliminates all the junk coding in the original gene which also may have some benign inherited SNPs (basically small differences), then it would appear that you have found your way around this patent. So there doesn't appear to be anything on the face of it that is inherently blocking other than it attempts to patent the currently cheap and popular way of performing this action.
Of course many patents are constructed by putting together two otherwize well known things (e.g., PCR/cDNA + gene markers) in a novel/unique way that has some value (e.g., a diagnostic test). Maybe some of the patents are obvious and maybe some of them don't have any cheap work-arounds, but that doesn't apriori make such patent ineligible which is what the SCOTUS ruled on. Of course you are free to argue the ethical point.
Ever notice how sliding a desk across a floor is really heard to do, then gets easier? It's because it's levitating part of the mass on trapped sound waves under the sliding feet...
I don't think so. I think the desk is an example of Stick/slip, not sound wave levitation...
Of course this acoustic levitation stuff isn't new, every few years someone comes up with crap like this... Or somehow suggests that similar standing sound waves which cause sonoluminescence can be used for stuff like cold fusion.
The rumor (depending on who you heard it from) is that Apple...
- is in negotiations to buy UMC outright - is going to be a Fab investment partner in Chartered Semi or Global Foundaries (both are owned by Abu Dhabi's Advanced Technology Investment Co.)
Any of these options would give them a reasonably cutting edge process and the capacity to provide the chips they need. The advantage of Global is that it is a member of the same common platform group as Samsung and IBM. Since Apple already fabs at Samsung, it's quite possible that they can easily port over all their custom ARM cpu designs to Global Foundaries co-owned Fab and tape out SOCs based on one CPU design. The added benefit of using Global Foundaries would be that it would allow them to avoid tipping off Samsung about how many wafers they are running or when they are taping out or what frequency their CPU runs at with what yield... Global is also looking for a partner to help build-out a monster $10B fab in upstate NY. I'm sure they are courting Apple big-time...
Of course, this rumor might be total BS, but at least it makes a modicum of sense...
Held A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated, but cDNA is patent eligible because it is not naturally occurring.
It's is fundamentally unfair to the world to expect unlimited and life-long (or longer) income from your IP (or even worse, from someone else's IP to which you have acquired the 'rights').
Although you are railing against the "purchaser" of the rights, a good part of the value of IP is conferred to the "seller" of the rights (because the purchaser often has to competitively bid to purchase the rights from the seller). Restricting the transfer rights of IP although probably beneficial on the whole will definitely impact the sellers of IP (basically the small companies and inventors) more than the purchasers (who are probably the large companies and will probably be able to pay less for IP since it will have less value to them).
The big patent business is really pits large companies against each other. Some large companies are more manufacturing oriented and less research/development. Some large companies are the other way around. The first time want very little IP protection, the later want more. Although many like to bring up the plight of the little companies, they are basically irrelavant in the discussion. Often they have no way to fully exploit their invention and must sell the rights to some larger company to make money because they lack the capital and expertise.
Case in point: Tylenol. Originally created by a contractor to McNeil Laboratories (a direct marketing company of pharmaceuticals). McNeil was fairly successful with selling Tylenol to doctors and phrarmacies, but they didn't have the expertise to transition a drug to over-the-counter retail sales. Basically McNeil had to sell-out to Johnson and Johnson to make this happen.
IP is a human mental construct that was brought into being to address fairness. The pendulum has swung way too far.
Money is a human mental construct brought into being to address fairness in exchange in value. IP is a state-sponsored monopoly which is thought to promote general welfare (by granting a temporary monopoly in exchange for publication of what would likely be a trade secret), not fairness. You can argue that IP doesn't really promote a net gain in general welfare, but it was never designed to address fairness.
ET3 ~ evacuated tube propulsion Hyperloop ~ pneumatic tube but with magnetic propulsion (air pressure would keep "cars" from colliding instead of being used to pull the cars along)
This is clearly a company set up for the sole purpose of getting a NASA sub-contract for moon exploration. These types of companies are setup all the time to help fleece the American taxpayers. They stuff their board of directors and advisor lists with well known folks with political connections and shake the trees in Washington D.C. until the money "leaves" come raining down. To help them hire lobbyists and last long enough to actually get sub-contracts, they are currently attempting some crowdsource funding techniques (probably having tapped the VC community dry).
The only other plausible explanation is that if you are one of those that believe that a significant number of people believe the moon landing was faked, it might not be so hard to believe that there's money to be made in faking a moon landing from the viewpoint of a "customer". Sort of a Capricorn one, and Disneyland Rocket to the Moon hybrid (rocket really goes to the moon, the people stay on earth, but think they are going to the moon). That's about all they could accomplish based on their current funding.
Rather than be pissed-off, you should see school for what it really is, not a competition between students, but an opportunity to get educated.
If you look back at it, it's rather bizzare to think of education as a contest. So if you happened to be so smart that you didn't have to study and you still got better grades than everyone else, would that matter a bit to your preparation for a future college course (or life). Or in contrast, finding the best opportunities to put in your best effort regardless of the competition, you will perhaps learn better your own strengths and weaknesses as preparation for the future.
Life is really what you make of it. It generally is not what everyone else is doing (or as some might suggest, a race to die with the most ribbons and toys, or that success requires others to fail). The truth is that eventually, nobody really truly cares what you did or even what you are doing, so who are you trying to impress? The answer is generally yourself, so you might as well try as hard as will make you happy or you will live to regret it (a fact that many looking back who do not try as hard as they could will often attest to).
Whats needed is good educators, like Richard Feynman was. What passes for "good educator" these days is pathetic.
I'm not so sure Richard Feynman would agree that he was a "good educator", although he was a great scientist. By many accounts, he mainly enjoyed teaching as an exercise to keep his own mind fresh and as an excuse to re-explore things that he knew very well and hopefully stumble upon a new way of looking at things. On his famous lecture series, he himself stated "I don’t think I did very well by the students" and by some accounts was generally depressed by average scores on the tests the year that he was teaching that class in introductory physics from which the lectures were recorded.
It's not to say that really smart folks can't benefit from learning what he could teach, but that even he would probably recognize that if the students aren't learning, you need to have some different approaches to teaching to truly be a good educator.
FWIW, Having sat through a couple of his lectures (right before he passed away), I can say you come out feeling that you know exactly what he's talking about until you actually put pen to paper and realize, he just made it seem so simple, not that you learned what you needed to learn (I apparently was NOT one of those gifted enough to get it on the first pass). Certainly it takes a great talent to make something so complicated seem so intuitive, but at the same time, that doesn't necessarily make a good education plan.
The irony is that as director, he's likely to have been in the position to push for emergency generators safeguards (although maybe perhaps not the seawall as that happened during construction), but not having done so, he essentially created the situation for which he was deemed a hero.
Perhaps he might have actually sacrificed some of his political brownie points with the Tepco upper management before this tsunami occurred and secured the funds/resources to build better protection for the generators (protected fuel source, waterproof batteries, etc). By towing the party line until the point of criticality, he's the hero, but the ultimate situation may have been of his own making... Which is why I called it ironic.
But what he did was heroic. Especially in a society that empahsizes respect for superiors. In the US, we wouldn't think twice about second guessing a higher up if we thought there was an inherent risk but this is almost unheard of in the Asian culture. Anata ni keii, Yoshida-san.
I find it ironic that often the celebrated hero of most stories is the singular person who undertakes the final risky, but ultimatly successful course of action to save the day in a tragic situation, where real unsung heros would be the many folks who make the sacrifices necessary to plan for and/or mitigate the tragic situations before they happen.
Maybe this obsession for hollywood-style heros is why no heroes ever emerged that would have fought for emergency diesel supplies, or higher seawalls that might have prevented or reduced the scale of this disaster. Such heroes would likely have paid a big price for their second guessing and their sacrifice would likely have gone unrecognized.
Actually, it was slightly more problematic that you describe.
The pension funds, endowments, etc, are required to invest a large portion of their money in securities that are AAA-grade because that is what was required by their charters because the need to reduce their risk profile. As it stood, GNMA (the government backed version of mortgage securities) effectively created a non-treasury AAA-grade mortgage-backed security that had an artifically higher rate than treasuries (both govt backed, but one based on the mortgage interest rate minus a few points), but unfortunatly there weren't enough mortgage-backed AAA-grade securities to go around, because if your "neighbor" investment manager is juicing their return rate with these, you want part of the action yourself, or you'll fall behind and look bad. The investment managers of the pension funds/endowments, etc didn't necessarily want good investments, they just wanted investments that fit their charters and could legally buy, but returned a similar rate of return as the standard AAA-grade mortgage-backed security which were in short supply.
Of course when you tell people you want to buy something, they can often produce what you tell them you want, but that's not always what you really need.
Big pension funds, endowments, etc, basically colluded with the big banks and the rating agencies to manufacture AAA-grade investments out of other crappy mortgage-backed securities + insurance contracts. All this other junk was a cheap knock-off of the GNMA (guaranteed by insurance contracts instead of the government). Of course, unlike the US government, insurance companies (like the greek government when part of the EUROzone) can't print money, so when all hell breaks loose, they need to be bailed out.
You make it seem like these big banks and rating agencies pulled the wool over eyes of the big investment managers of the pension funds and endowments and sold them lemons, but the truth is, they were all colluding together to create this mess. Think of it as if these investment managers as the big-fish gamblers in a back-room, vs Las Vegas. Regulators can help in the Las Vegas case, but neither side really wants regulators in the back-room case (because no big-fish gamblers complain when they are up, but they often cry foul when they are down).
Of course the small pension funds/endowments were the small-timers that got fried because they were mostly just following the trend of the big fish (which sadly, is how most people invest). The reality is the the big fish play a totally different game than the small fish, but the small fish usually don't see it.
The moment a group gets a special entitlement is the moment I don't want to have to deal with that group at all, they become too expensive for me to do business with, they are dangerous and costly with no benefit to me at all.
Since the group of "over-40" get some special entitlement of protection against job discrimination, eventually you won't want to have to deal with yourself anymore because you will be too dangerous and provide no benefit to yourself at all.
I suspect it would probably suck to not want to deal with yourself...
Isn't PCL [wikipedia.org] supposed to be standard?
Although many printers support some variants of PCL6, it's actually a HP thing...
We don't need drivers for keyboard, mouse and some webcams anymore, it's standardized. Why aren't printers and scanners the same way?
Anytime there are new features involved, it takes a while to shake things down to a standard, sometimes that never happens. For example, you might ask why your IR remote for a TV isn't standardized yet. Fortunatly for most users many "universal" remotes have "drivers" for many of the TVs built-in to do the standard thing (e.g., channel up/down, volume), but of course any new feature can't be controlled with the universal remote unless you can "download" them into the (learning) remote. Similarly, nearly all printers and scanners can be run with the in-the-box OS driver, but you don't get to access any of the nifty new features that way. Even the mouse-scroll-wheel feature needed some driver TLC when it first came out...
There's very little incentive for companies to just come out with "standard" devices unless they are total crap. You can just look at the quality level of the "vanilla" keyboard, or the "vanilla" webcam that doesn't need drivers to see what is available in that category: cheaply made and barely functional. That's not to say that the companies that opt for a more premium market are much better (e.g., HP printers), but some manage to do okay (e.g, Canon printers).
FWIW, there is some indication that Noctilucent clouds in the mesosphere have been only been around since the industrial revolution times (since there aren't really any earlier descriptions of the phenomena in recorded history unlike other atmospheric anomolies like auroras or sundogs), so it's a bit presumputous that the effect has been greatly effected by space traffic vs some other human terrestrial source. It is also suspected that since this phenomena appears to also track the solar cycle, the most recent solar cycle (24) got off to a late start (by a couple of years), and they also noted this phenomena was a bit higher than normal the last couple of years and they don't really know much about this phenomena, so it's hard to get too excited about this yet...
On the other hand, there is much more airplane traffic vs space traffic and airplane contrails apparently have a much larger effect.
So, when will women treat men like people and not parasites?
Probably when men treat women like people and not objects/arm-candy... For *all* men and women, that is likely to never. For *some* men and women, that is generally when they are considered grown up.
However, I've made an observation over the years that for some adult people, there is a dysfunctional aversion to generosity that is essentially segregationist (e.g., some men might help another man move, or a woman might take another woman to lunch, but neither would consider doing that for the opposite sex as they think that they are being taken advantage of). Basically, I correlated that type of gender segregation is simply a leading indicator of not being a grown-up.
There is some evidence that humans go through a progression where as babies, where there's essentially no group preference, to toddlers where gender segregation starts to occur. Some theorize that it is this segregation that eventually supports opposite sex attraction and pairing in the adolecent years, by creating a training period in which a person learns the framework of gender and helping them learn about what is desirable in the opposite gender (by presumably learning group-think stereotypes of the other gender by your "clan" or "gang").
Hopefully when a person eventually "grows-up", they can recover from the "gang" mentality and the resulting group-think and assert their own critical thinking, but obviously it's not a foregone outcome. Evolution is against us in this case as many have selected a mate based on group-think criteria and procreated prior to this time, so there isn't much evolutionary pressure against not growing up and remaining in this adolecent state in perpetuity.
Some have theorized that this change of growing-up is merely when the original idea of a person being on a one-dimensional space with masculine and feminine directions we learn as toddlers changes to a multidimensional space of characteristics (each of which can be classified as more masculine or feminine) where people can express higher or lower amounts of that characteristic with a more complex preference profile. But of course this is merely only a theory, but one that I find quite interesting as it supports the notion that some folks can't seem to find anyone "compatible" as they seem to be looking for things in a partner that they don't actually care about (but think other folks care about) and dismiss them as not-good-enough on a seemingly linear scale (e.g. they aren't a "10"), yet they seem ignore characteristics in people you think they might like. Maybe they just haven't grown up enough yet to see past one-dimensional thinking.
Just because a woman (in the article you reference), is the breadwinner, doesn't mean she's a grown-up. She's basically stuck with the prince-charming girl fantasy (just some guys are stuck with equivalent fantasies about girls) that she probably learned as part of the group-think aculturation. We don't all have to grow-up past that point, but at least we should admit it to ourselves rather than blame an unwitting partner for not living up to a stereotype based on group-think.
Being the contrarian I am, I feel tempted to say that we really owe the ability to create a design independent of a single manufacturing process node to the standard-cell asic design process created by VLSI and LSI-Logic and logic synthesis tools (rather than the lambda scalable design rules of Mead-Conway for custom logic which is not really used at all any more).
In the old days, portability was merely done using analog parameters (scaling transistors in a fixed circuit topology). Now days, the design is abstracted at a higher level and resynthesized to target a process node.
If you want a software analogy, the old way of designing was like writing asm code (if you had to target another platform, you were SOL). Mead-Conway was like getting portability through byte-code (non-optimal, but easy to retarget). The modern process is like writing in C and optimally recompiling to your target as needed.
So ARM has the know-how, the access and the pull to have a big say in what happens in the fabs roadmaps.
However, ARM doesn't have the focus to do the best job on every fab and process. A singular company can focus to get the best out of a single fab and process, where ARM needs to balance their resources (and they aren't a huge company to start with ~2K employees vs ~100K for intel)
The problem is that since cores available from ARM don't have a usable I/O cache coherent mechanism, and nearly all users of ARM (except Apple, Marvell, and Qualcomm) use cores from ARM, that means most platforms will necessarily have this flaw.
However, in actuality, all platforms have this flaw because since ARM didn't do it, Apple, Marvell, and Qualcomm implemented the same crappy cache coherency since all the device drivers written for Arm architectures assume that is the standard and any expensive coherency mechanisms other vendors would put it pretty much would be unused by standard drivers.
Fortunately, Arm is coming around to the idea that cache coherency is a good use of transistors, so hopefully, the future isn't as grim...
As for the 80386, it was a different era since the cache wasn't even on the chip back then...
There are 3 from scratch Arm designs where you are talking as if there were 1.
StrongARM: DEC's original ARMv4 compatible designs (SA-110, SA-1100). DEC sold the design/business/name to Intel who sold if for a while and made an upgrade (SA-1110), but later came up with...
XScale: Intel's ARMv5 redesign which had 3 generations (PXA1xx..3xx) and some of their own instruction set instructions (like wireless MMX). Intel sold the business/name to Marvell who sold chips manufactured by Intel, but Marvell already had...
Feroceon: Marvell's own superscalar ARMv5/v6/v7 compatible design that they used as an embedded processor for their Ethernet and Storage business(88Fxxxx, and later PXA9xx). Marvel is in the process of transitioning all of the old Intel business to their own Arm Core (w/ the PXA9xx)
Also, as an architectural licensee (like Intel and Marvell), there is no requirement to "give-back" improvements to Arm. In fact, as an architectural licensee, you can't actually start-with/use/modify Arm's designs. You must design your own from scratch and it must pass their compatibility test suite (earlier architecture tests for v4/v5 allowed for instruction set extensions, but later tests for v6+ do not), but that is all.
On the flip side, if you are a regular licensee, you must use the design Arm gives up pretty much As-Is (although you can make timing fixes and ram wrappers and similar adaptations that don't change the functionality). Although you can request Arm to make modifications for you, they are free to share these modifications with other licensees...
The main reason Intel sold Xscale (for which they had to pay Arm a royalty and to which they couldn't add new functionality) to concentrate on pushing x86 (free from royalties and free to innovate) into the mobile space. Time will tell if this was a good move (although Intel retained their Arm license in case they want to reverse course)...
Small nit: your hypothetical is just merely a coup d'état and overthrow of the government outside the chain of command, not really some orderly suspension of the constitution by the military chain of command. Of course various news sources may whitewash/spin it in various ways as to make it sound more noble, or less scary.
According to the US constitution, the president is the commander in chief and the Joint Chiefs are all appointed by the president (with advise and consent of the senate). Similarly, in the Egyptian constitution (according to most translations), the President of the Republic shall be the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces... [and] shall appoint civil and military personnel (and dismiss them).
On the other hand, the founding fathers of the US (esp., Jefferson) pretty much concluded that there should be a periodic revolution (at least once every 20 years) which apparently has become such an unthinkable thing to many folks. Jefferson also noted "A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." which seems to me directly applicable to the Egyptian situation and plenty good justification for (yet) another revolution. In this sense, revolution doesn't necessarily need to be violent, although often it is, and perhaps that is what scares people about it and makes people want to pretend that they can be somehow defined to occur in an orderly fashion (by merely suspending the constitution), as if authority somehow rests in scribbles on a piece of paper made by some people, rather than the will of the people...
This is the part of the affordiable care plan that makes it "affordable". The idea behind insurance, it is pooled risk
The problem with that theory is that high costs have little to do with "risk pools" and everything to do with increasing shareholder profits. That's why doctors in states that have passed corporate liability limits, I mean "tort reform", pay just as much for malpractice insurance as doctors in states without "tort reform".
The problem with the simplistic insurance shareholder profits theory is that it doesn't really explain non-profit insurance companies (like blue-shield of california, kaiser permanente). If the for-profit one were simply just jacking up the premiums for shareholder profits, you might think that the non-profits would be able to simply undercut them and steal their business. The reality was that most insurance entities were probably simply just stockpiling reserves because they could (via collusion and impotent state regulators) and they could invest those reserves to improve profits.
Although in some states, insurance regulators had the ability to enforce limits on loss-ratio or limit rate hikes, most did not actually choose to do so. One aspect of the affordable care act attempted to federalize the limit of the loss ratio. Sadly, there was really no guarantee that this would make insurance any more affordable in general (the 80% limit that was selected for the ACA was only slightly higher than the industry average at the time). Another way is to attempt to actually reduce healthcare costs, but that was not attempted by the ACA (probably because there really isn't an obvious way to do it kind of like your tort reform example). In contrast, high probability way to significantly increase the affordability was to make sure more folks that would receive negative-value from the pools were paying into the pools (in conjunction with the limit on loss-ratio) and thus the insurance mandate was instituted.
The part of the law that makes sense is that there is no 'individual mandate' provision.
This is the part of the affordiable care plan that makes it "affordable".
The idea behind insurance, it is pooled risk (not a right although it might be argued that access to healthcare is a right). The notion that insurance is the only thing that can assure access to healthcare is the root of the complication. Insurance is merely a financial responsiblility you have to yourself and your family. As with most responsiblities, the more we distort it into a right or a requirement, it loses the ablity to function the way it was intended.
Insurance premiums go in to a pool and claims are paid out (okay, there is generally an investment component, but let's ignore that for now). For an insurance to be viable, the claims and premiums must balance over time that's why the pools have to be large to average out variation. By definition, on average, people must pay in as much as the average expected claim value. The whole social engineering part of this is that not everyone can afford to pay for their expected claim value. The attempt to "socialize" this is to require folks that have a negative expected net value for insurance enter the pool to subsidize the folks that cannot afford their expected claim value. Otherwize it will not be affordable to folks that expect to have more claims than the premiums they pay.
Sadly, most folks expect they should be able to have more claims than the premiums they pay or they won't play. Or more perniciously, they attempt to overclaim to get the value that the "deserve". This desire basically ignores reality and destroys the model.
My opinion is that we probably really need a hybrid system. With the current environment, a small (but growing) set of doctors are going back to "cash-patients". The overhead of insurance processing, and the low-reimbursment rates of medicare really signal that we are pretty far off the market level. Perhaps decoupling catastrophic health insurance from more common preventative health insurance will help. Maybe it should be formulated like flood or earthquake insurance into too-big-to-fail, but still optional pools. All other preventative health insurance should be "market", with subsidies for those that cannot afford it. Trying to combine all this stuff into one policy ignores the unknown catastrophic risk profiles that exist, but still should be socialized.
Sadly, the Affordable care act makes subsidized high-deductable insurance plans non-conforming (both employee and employer need to pay a fine to the irs as if you didn't have any insurance). This was intended to force young healthy folks to subsidize the insurance pools. Unfortunatly, it seems that this is a highly regressive policy, yet one tailored to garner the maximum amount of support rather than to actually attempt to solve a problem. Of course the reason was done this way was to promote certain social agendas (requiring coverage for certain procedures and medical services). That is the mess you get when you put too much in the same pot.
I'm not sure what bank you deal with, but at my bank funds are available the next business day after I deposit, and the first $100 is available immediately. Maybe that's "float", but not enough that I'm going to squawk.
Many banks use a formula to determine the length of funds hold. Usually that formula is based on length of time an account is opened and the average (daily) balance, but there are statutory limits on this (aka Reg CC). Of course for their best customers, deposits are often available immediatly (or at least some of it).
Historically some banks had also taken into consideration if overdraft or other account fees can be generated in the case of a dishonored check (e.g, if you deposit the check and then write against that before it clears, you can get a transfer from savings overdraft fee or minimum balance fees if the hold amount is tweaked), but much of that shady practice was eliminated by the feds. Unfortunatly for those folks that have a habit of bouncing checks (and perhaps fortunatly for the rest of us that suffer from them), banks are allowed to place a hold on the check for a week (and most banks do).
Slashdot Mirror
Although I admit I'm a bit out of my depth on BRCA[1,2], but it is my understanding that cDNA (created by the reverse transcriptase process on the RNA which was created by the DNA template), is often a synopsis of the gene somtimes ommitting certain junk sections that do not code for protiens. Kind of like a photocopy of a printout, both have toner on paper, but the photocopy might be subtly different than the original printout.
The supreme court did not rule that cDNA part of Myriad's patent was valid, only that it was possible to patent such a thing. For instance if it was "obvious to a practitioner" on how to create that thing, perhaps that will be its undoing.
If you look at the actual patent, they list a few of the defining markers (15 nucleotides out of thousands) of the gene and a few of the common alternate sequences that would signal a gene mutation if identified using the currently popular PCR style of DNA/cDNA amplification. This may or may not be something obvious, but is certainly not a patent claim on the cDNA created from the DNA. If there was a new non-PCR technique way of isolating a gene you have (BCRA[1,2]) and to tell if it is a mutated one that might cause breast cancer at w/o just looking at these 15/1000 nucleotide signature on cDNA which eliminates all the junk coding in the original gene which also may have some benign inherited SNPs (basically small differences), then it would appear that you have found your way around this patent. So there doesn't appear to be anything on the face of it that is inherently blocking other than it attempts to patent the currently cheap and popular way of performing this action.
Of course many patents are constructed by putting together two otherwize well known things (e.g., PCR/cDNA + gene markers) in a novel/unique way that has some value (e.g., a diagnostic test). Maybe some of the patents are obvious and maybe some of them don't have any cheap work-arounds, but that doesn't apriori make such patent ineligible which is what the SCOTUS ruled on. Of course you are free to argue the ethical point.
Ever notice how sliding a desk across a floor is really heard to do, then gets easier?
It's because it's levitating part of the mass on trapped sound waves under the sliding feet...
I don't think so. I think the desk is an example of Stick/slip, not sound wave levitation...
Of course this acoustic levitation stuff isn't new, every few years someone comes up with crap like this... Or somehow suggests that similar standing sound waves which cause sonoluminescence can be used for stuff like cold fusion.
The rumor (depending on who you heard it from) is that Apple...
- is in negotiations to buy UMC outright
- is going to be a Fab investment partner in Chartered Semi or Global Foundaries (both are owned by Abu Dhabi's Advanced Technology Investment Co.)
Any of these options would give them a reasonably cutting edge process and the capacity to provide the chips they need. The advantage of Global is that it is a member of the same common platform group as Samsung and IBM. Since Apple already fabs at Samsung, it's quite possible that they can easily port over all their custom ARM cpu designs to Global Foundaries co-owned Fab and tape out SOCs based on one CPU design. The added benefit of using Global Foundaries would be that it would allow them to avoid tipping off Samsung about how many wafers they are running or when they are taping out or what frequency their CPU runs at with what yield... Global is also looking for a partner to help build-out a monster $10B fab in upstate NY. I'm sure they are courting Apple big-time...
Of course, this rumor might be total BS, but at least it makes a modicum of sense...
the court ruled, unanimously, that human genes cannot be patented, though synthetic DNA, created in the laboratory, can be.
If only that were true! Read the SCOTUS decision, already.
Quoting directly from the SCOTUS decision...
Held A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated, but cDNA is patent eligible because it is not naturally occurring.
It's is fundamentally unfair to the world to expect unlimited and life-long (or longer) income from your IP (or even worse, from someone else's IP to which you have acquired the 'rights').
Although you are railing against the "purchaser" of the rights, a good part of the value of IP is conferred to the "seller" of the rights (because the purchaser often has to competitively bid to purchase the rights from the seller). Restricting the transfer rights of IP although probably beneficial on the whole will definitely impact the sellers of IP (basically the small companies and inventors) more than the purchasers (who are probably the large companies and will probably be able to pay less for IP since it will have less value to them).
The big patent business is really pits large companies against each other. Some large companies are more manufacturing oriented and less research/development. Some large companies are the other way around. The first time want very little IP protection, the later want more. Although many like to bring up the plight of the little companies, they are basically irrelavant in the discussion. Often they have no way to fully exploit their invention and must sell the rights to some larger company to make money because they lack the capital and expertise.
Case in point: Tylenol. Originally created by a contractor to McNeil Laboratories (a direct marketing company of pharmaceuticals). McNeil was fairly successful with selling Tylenol to doctors and phrarmacies, but they didn't have the expertise to transition a drug to over-the-counter retail sales. Basically McNeil had to sell-out to Johnson and Johnson to make this happen.
IP is a human mental construct that was brought into being to address fairness. The pendulum has swung way too far.
Money is a human mental construct brought into being to address fairness in exchange in value. IP is a state-sponsored monopoly which is thought to promote general welfare (by granting a temporary monopoly in exchange for publication of what would likely be a trade secret), not fairness. You can argue that IP doesn't really promote a net gain in general welfare, but it was never designed to address fairness.
ET3 ~ evacuated tube propulsion
Hyperloop ~ pneumatic tube but with magnetic propulsion (air pressure would keep "cars" from colliding instead of being used to pull the cars along)
This is clearly a company set up for the sole purpose of getting a NASA sub-contract for moon exploration. These types of companies are setup all the time to help fleece the American taxpayers. They stuff their board of directors and advisor lists with well known folks with political connections and shake the trees in Washington D.C. until the money "leaves" come raining down. To help them hire lobbyists and last long enough to actually get sub-contracts, they are currently attempting some crowdsource funding techniques (probably having tapped the VC community dry).
The only other plausible explanation is that if you are one of those that believe that a significant number of people believe the moon landing was faked, it might not be so hard to believe that there's money to be made in faking a moon landing from the viewpoint of a "customer". Sort of a Capricorn one, and Disneyland Rocket to the Moon hybrid (rocket really goes to the moon, the people stay on earth, but think they are going to the moon). That's about all they could accomplish based on their current funding.
Rather than be pissed-off, you should see school for what it really is, not a competition between students, but an opportunity to get educated.
If you look back at it, it's rather bizzare to think of education as a contest. So if you happened to be so smart that you didn't have to study and you still got better grades than everyone else, would that matter a bit to your preparation for a future college course (or life). Or in contrast, finding the best opportunities to put in your best effort regardless of the competition, you will perhaps learn better your own strengths and weaknesses as preparation for the future.
Life is really what you make of it. It generally is not what everyone else is doing (or as some might suggest, a race to die with the most ribbons and toys, or that success requires others to fail). The truth is that eventually, nobody really truly cares what you did or even what you are doing, so who are you trying to impress? The answer is generally yourself, so you might as well try as hard as will make you happy or you will live to regret it (a fact that many looking back who do not try as hard as they could will often attest to).
Whats needed is good educators, like Richard Feynman was. What passes for "good educator" these days is pathetic.
I'm not so sure Richard Feynman would agree that he was a "good educator", although he was a great scientist. By many accounts, he mainly enjoyed teaching as an exercise to keep his own mind fresh and as an excuse to re-explore things that he knew very well and hopefully stumble upon a new way of looking at things. On his famous lecture series, he himself stated "I don’t think I did very well by the students" and by some accounts was generally depressed by average scores on the tests the year that he was teaching that class in introductory physics from which the lectures were recorded.
It's not to say that really smart folks can't benefit from learning what he could teach, but that even he would probably recognize that if the students aren't learning, you need to have some different approaches to teaching to truly be a good educator.
FWIW, Having sat through a couple of his lectures (right before he passed away), I can say you come out feeling that you know exactly what he's talking about until you actually put pen to paper and realize, he just made it seem so simple, not that you learned what you needed to learn (I apparently was NOT one of those gifted enough to get it on the first pass). Certainly it takes a great talent to make something so complicated seem so intuitive, but at the same time, that doesn't necessarily make a good education plan.
The irony is that as director, he's likely to have been in the position to push for emergency generators safeguards (although maybe perhaps not the seawall as that happened during construction), but not having done so, he essentially created the situation for which he was deemed a hero.
Perhaps he might have actually sacrificed some of his political brownie points with the Tepco upper management before this tsunami occurred and secured the funds/resources to build better protection for the generators (protected fuel source, waterproof batteries, etc). By towing the party line until the point of criticality, he's the hero, but the ultimate situation may have been of his own making... Which is why I called it ironic.
But what he did was heroic. Especially in a society that empahsizes respect for superiors. In the US, we wouldn't think twice about second guessing a higher up if we thought there was an inherent risk but this is almost unheard of in the Asian culture. Anata ni keii, Yoshida-san.
I find it ironic that often the celebrated hero of most stories is the singular person who undertakes the final risky, but ultimatly successful course of action to save the day in a tragic situation, where real unsung heros would be the many folks who make the sacrifices necessary to plan for and/or mitigate the tragic situations before they happen.
Maybe this obsession for hollywood-style heros is why no heroes ever emerged that would have fought for emergency diesel supplies, or higher seawalls that might have prevented or reduced the scale of this disaster. Such heroes would likely have paid a big price for their second guessing and their sacrifice would likely have gone unrecognized.
Actually, it was slightly more problematic that you describe.
The pension funds, endowments, etc, are required to invest a large portion of their money in securities that are AAA-grade because that is what was required by their charters because the need to reduce their risk profile. As it stood, GNMA (the government backed version of mortgage securities) effectively created a non-treasury AAA-grade mortgage-backed security that had an artifically higher rate than treasuries (both govt backed, but one based on the mortgage interest rate minus a few points), but unfortunatly there weren't enough mortgage-backed AAA-grade securities to go around, because if your "neighbor" investment manager is juicing their return rate with these, you want part of the action yourself, or you'll fall behind and look bad. The investment managers of the pension funds/endowments, etc didn't necessarily want good investments, they just wanted investments that fit their charters and could legally buy, but returned a similar rate of return as the standard AAA-grade mortgage-backed security which were in short supply.
Of course when you tell people you want to buy something, they can often produce what you tell them you want, but that's not always what you really need.
Big pension funds, endowments, etc, basically colluded with the big banks and the rating agencies to manufacture AAA-grade investments out of other crappy mortgage-backed securities + insurance contracts. All this other junk was a cheap knock-off of the GNMA (guaranteed by insurance contracts instead of the government). Of course, unlike the US government, insurance companies (like the greek government when part of the EUROzone) can't print money, so when all hell breaks loose, they need to be bailed out.
You make it seem like these big banks and rating agencies pulled the wool over eyes of the big investment managers of the pension funds and endowments and sold them lemons, but the truth is, they were all colluding together to create this mess. Think of it as if these investment managers as the big-fish gamblers in a back-room, vs Las Vegas. Regulators can help in the Las Vegas case, but neither side really wants regulators in the back-room case (because no big-fish gamblers complain when they are up, but they often cry foul when they are down).
Of course the small pension funds/endowments were the small-timers that got fried because they were mostly just following the trend of the big fish (which sadly, is how most people invest). The reality is the the big fish play a totally different game than the small fish, but the small fish usually don't see it.
The moment a group gets a special entitlement is the moment I don't want to have to deal with that group at all, they become too expensive for me to do business with, they are dangerous and costly with no benefit to me at all.
Since the group of "over-40" get some special entitlement of protection against job discrimination, eventually you won't want to have to deal with yourself anymore because you will be too dangerous and provide no benefit to yourself at all.
I suspect it would probably suck to not want to deal with yourself...
Isn't PCL [wikipedia.org] supposed to be standard?
Although many printers support some variants of PCL6, it's actually a HP thing...
We don't need drivers for keyboard, mouse and some webcams anymore, it's standardized. Why aren't printers and scanners the same way?
Anytime there are new features involved, it takes a while to shake things down to a standard, sometimes that never happens. For example, you might ask why your IR remote for a TV isn't standardized yet. Fortunatly for most users many "universal" remotes have "drivers" for many of the TVs built-in to do the standard thing (e.g., channel up/down, volume), but of course any new feature can't be controlled with the universal remote unless you can "download" them into the (learning) remote. Similarly, nearly all printers and scanners can be run with the in-the-box OS driver, but you don't get to access any of the nifty new features that way. Even the mouse-scroll-wheel feature needed some driver TLC when it first came out...
There's very little incentive for companies to just come out with "standard" devices unless they are total crap. You can just look at the quality level of the "vanilla" keyboard, or the "vanilla" webcam that doesn't need drivers to see what is available in that category: cheaply made and barely functional. That's not to say that the companies that opt for a more premium market are much better (e.g., HP printers), but some manage to do okay (e.g, Canon printers).
FWIW, there is some indication that Noctilucent clouds in the mesosphere have been only been around since the industrial revolution times (since there aren't really any earlier descriptions of the phenomena in recorded history unlike other atmospheric anomolies like auroras or sundogs), so it's a bit presumputous that the effect has been greatly effected by space traffic vs some other human terrestrial source. It is also suspected that since this phenomena appears to also track the solar cycle, the most recent solar cycle (24) got off to a late start (by a couple of years), and they also noted this phenomena was a bit higher than normal the last couple of years and they don't really know much about this phenomena, so it's hard to get too excited about this yet...
On the other hand, there is much more airplane traffic vs space traffic and airplane contrails apparently have a much larger effect.
So, when will women treat men like people and not parasites?
Probably when men treat women like people and not objects/arm-candy... For *all* men and women, that is likely to never. For *some* men and women, that is generally when they are considered grown up.
However, I've made an observation over the years that for some adult people, there is a dysfunctional aversion to generosity that is essentially segregationist (e.g., some men might help another man move, or a woman might take another woman to lunch, but neither would consider doing that for the opposite sex as they think that they are being taken advantage of). Basically, I correlated that type of gender segregation is simply a leading indicator of not being a grown-up.
There is some evidence that humans go through a progression where as babies, where there's essentially no group preference, to toddlers where gender segregation starts to occur. Some theorize that it is this segregation that eventually supports opposite sex attraction and pairing in the adolecent years, by creating a training period in which a person learns the framework of gender and helping them learn about what is desirable in the opposite gender (by presumably learning group-think stereotypes of the other gender by your "clan" or "gang").
Hopefully when a person eventually "grows-up", they can recover from the "gang" mentality and the resulting group-think and assert their own critical thinking, but obviously it's not a foregone outcome. Evolution is against us in this case as many have selected a mate based on group-think criteria and procreated prior to this time, so there isn't much evolutionary pressure against not growing up and remaining in this adolecent state in perpetuity.
Some have theorized that this change of growing-up is merely when the original idea of a person being on a one-dimensional space with masculine and feminine directions we learn as toddlers changes to a multidimensional space of characteristics (each of which can be classified as more masculine or feminine) where people can express higher or lower amounts of that characteristic with a more complex preference profile. But of course this is merely only a theory, but one that I find quite interesting as it supports the notion that some folks can't seem to find anyone "compatible" as they seem to be looking for things in a partner that they don't actually care about (but think other folks care about) and dismiss them as not-good-enough on a seemingly linear scale (e.g. they aren't a "10"), yet they seem ignore characteristics in people you think they might like. Maybe they just haven't grown up enough yet to see past one-dimensional thinking.
Just because a woman (in the article you reference), is the breadwinner, doesn't mean she's a grown-up. She's basically stuck with the prince-charming girl fantasy (just some guys are stuck with equivalent fantasies about girls) that she probably learned as part of the group-think aculturation. We don't all have to grow-up past that point, but at least we should admit it to ourselves rather than blame an unwitting partner for not living up to a stereotype based on group-think.
I thought people might find these links amusing in this context...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_road
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_0aAIwcE7A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soKeog0miwk
Being the contrarian I am, I feel tempted to say that we really owe the ability to create a design independent of a single manufacturing process node to the standard-cell asic design process created by VLSI and LSI-Logic and logic synthesis tools (rather than the lambda scalable design rules of Mead-Conway for custom logic which is not really used at all any more).
In the old days, portability was merely done using analog parameters (scaling transistors in a fixed circuit topology). Now days, the design is abstracted at a higher level and resynthesized to target a process node.
If you want a software analogy, the old way of designing was like writing asm code (if you had to target another platform, you were SOL). Mead-Conway was like getting portability through byte-code (non-optimal, but easy to retarget). The modern process is like writing in C and optimally recompiling to your target as needed.
So ARM has the know-how, the access and the pull to have a big say in what happens in the fabs roadmaps.
However, ARM doesn't have the focus to do the best job on every fab and process. A singular company can focus to get the best out of a single fab and process, where ARM needs to balance their resources (and they aren't a huge company to start with ~2K employees vs ~100K for intel)
The problem is that since cores available from ARM don't have a usable I/O cache coherent mechanism, and nearly all users of ARM (except Apple, Marvell, and Qualcomm) use cores from ARM, that means most platforms will necessarily have this flaw.
However, in actuality, all platforms have this flaw because since ARM didn't do it, Apple, Marvell, and Qualcomm implemented the same crappy cache coherency since all the device drivers written for Arm architectures assume that is the standard and any expensive coherency mechanisms other vendors would put it pretty much would be unused by standard drivers.
Fortunately, Arm is coming around to the idea that cache coherency is a good use of transistors, so hopefully, the future isn't as grim...
As for the 80386, it was a different era since the cache wasn't even on the chip back then...
There are 3 from scratch Arm designs where you are talking as if there were 1.
StrongARM: DEC's original ARMv4 compatible designs (SA-110, SA-1100). DEC sold the design/business/name to Intel who sold if for a while and made an upgrade (SA-1110), but later came up with...
XScale: Intel's ARMv5 redesign which had 3 generations (PXA1xx..3xx) and some of their own instruction set instructions (like wireless MMX). Intel sold the business/name to Marvell who sold chips manufactured by Intel, but Marvell already had...
Feroceon: Marvell's own superscalar ARMv5/v6/v7 compatible design that they used as an embedded processor for their Ethernet and Storage business(88Fxxxx, and later PXA9xx). Marvel is in the process of transitioning all of the old Intel business to their own Arm Core (w/ the PXA9xx)
Also, as an architectural licensee (like Intel and Marvell), there is no requirement to "give-back" improvements to Arm. In fact, as an architectural licensee, you can't actually start-with/use/modify Arm's designs. You must design your own from scratch and it must pass their compatibility test suite (earlier architecture tests for v4/v5 allowed for instruction set extensions, but later tests for v6+ do not), but that is all.
On the flip side, if you are a regular licensee, you must use the design Arm gives up pretty much As-Is (although you can make timing fixes and ram wrappers and similar adaptations that don't change the functionality). Although you can request Arm to make modifications for you, they are free to share these modifications with other licensees...
The main reason Intel sold Xscale (for which they had to pay Arm a royalty and to which they couldn't add new functionality) to concentrate on pushing x86 (free from royalties and free to innovate) into the mobile space. Time will tell if this was a good move (although Intel retained their Arm license in case they want to reverse course)...
Small nit: your hypothetical is just merely a coup d'état and overthrow of the government outside the chain of command, not really some orderly suspension of the constitution by the military chain of command. Of course various news sources may whitewash/spin it in various ways as to make it sound more noble, or less scary.
According to the US constitution, the president is the commander in chief and the Joint Chiefs are all appointed by the president (with advise and consent of the senate). Similarly, in the Egyptian constitution (according to most translations), the President of the Republic shall be the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces... [and] shall appoint civil and military personnel (and dismiss them).
On the other hand, the founding fathers of the US (esp., Jefferson) pretty much concluded that there should be a periodic revolution (at least once every 20 years) which apparently has become such an unthinkable thing to many folks. Jefferson also noted "A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." which seems to me directly applicable to the Egyptian situation and plenty good justification for (yet) another revolution. In this sense, revolution doesn't necessarily need to be violent, although often it is, and perhaps that is what scares people about it and makes people want to pretend that they can be somehow defined to occur in an orderly fashion (by merely suspending the constitution), as if authority somehow rests in scribbles on a piece of paper made by some people, rather than the will of the people...
The problem with that theory is that high costs have little to do with "risk pools" and everything to do with increasing shareholder profits. That's why doctors in states that have passed corporate liability limits, I mean "tort reform", pay just as much for malpractice insurance as doctors in states without "tort reform".
The problem with the simplistic insurance shareholder profits theory is that it doesn't really explain non-profit insurance companies (like blue-shield of california, kaiser permanente). If the for-profit one were simply just jacking up the premiums for shareholder profits, you might think that the non-profits would be able to simply undercut them and steal their business. The reality was that most insurance entities were probably simply just stockpiling reserves because they could (via collusion and impotent state regulators) and they could invest those reserves to improve profits.
Although in some states, insurance regulators had the ability to enforce limits on loss-ratio or limit rate hikes, most did not actually choose to do so. One aspect of the affordable care act attempted to federalize the limit of the loss ratio. Sadly, there was really no guarantee that this would make insurance any more affordable in general (the 80% limit that was selected for the ACA was only slightly higher than the industry average at the time). Another way is to attempt to actually reduce healthcare costs, but that was not attempted by the ACA (probably because there really isn't an obvious way to do it kind of like your tort reform example). In contrast, high probability way to significantly increase the affordability was to make sure more folks that would receive negative-value from the pools were paying into the pools (in conjunction with the limit on loss-ratio) and thus the insurance mandate was instituted.
The part of the law that makes sense is that there is no 'individual mandate' provision.
This is the part of the affordiable care plan that makes it "affordable".
The idea behind insurance, it is pooled risk (not a right although it might be argued that access to healthcare is a right). The notion that insurance is the only thing that can assure access to healthcare is the root of the complication. Insurance is merely a financial responsiblility you have to yourself and your family. As with most responsiblities, the more we distort it into a right or a requirement, it loses the ablity to function the way it was intended.
Insurance premiums go in to a pool and claims are paid out (okay, there is generally an investment component, but let's ignore that for now). For an insurance to be viable, the claims and premiums must balance over time that's why the pools have to be large to average out variation. By definition, on average, people must pay in as much as the average expected claim value. The whole social engineering part of this is that not everyone can afford to pay for their expected claim value. The attempt to "socialize" this is to require folks that have a negative expected net value for insurance enter the pool to subsidize the folks that cannot afford their expected claim value. Otherwize it will not be affordable to folks that expect to have more claims than the premiums they pay.
Sadly, most folks expect they should be able to have more claims than the premiums they pay or they won't play. Or more perniciously, they attempt to overclaim to get the value that the "deserve". This desire basically ignores reality and destroys the model.
My opinion is that we probably really need a hybrid system. With the current environment, a small (but growing) set of doctors are going back to "cash-patients". The overhead of insurance processing, and the low-reimbursment rates of medicare really signal that we are pretty far off the market level. Perhaps decoupling catastrophic health insurance from more common preventative health insurance will help. Maybe it should be formulated like flood or earthquake insurance into too-big-to-fail, but still optional pools. All other preventative health insurance should be "market", with subsidies for those that cannot afford it. Trying to combine all this stuff into one policy ignores the unknown catastrophic risk profiles that exist, but still should be socialized.
Sadly, the Affordable care act makes subsidized high-deductable insurance plans non-conforming (both employee and employer need to pay a fine to the irs as if you didn't have any insurance). This was intended to force young healthy folks to subsidize the insurance pools. Unfortunatly, it seems that this is a highly regressive policy, yet one tailored to garner the maximum amount of support rather than to actually attempt to solve a problem. Of course the reason was done this way was to promote certain social agendas (requiring coverage for certain procedures and medical services). That is the mess you get when you put too much in the same pot.
I'm not sure what bank you deal with, but at my bank funds are available the next business day after I deposit, and the first $100 is available immediately. Maybe that's "float", but not enough that I'm going to squawk.
Many banks use a formula to determine the length of funds hold. Usually that formula is based on length of time an account is opened and the average (daily) balance, but there are statutory limits on this (aka Reg CC). Of course for their best customers, deposits are often available immediatly (or at least some of it).
Historically some banks had also taken into consideration if overdraft or other account fees can be generated in the case of a dishonored check (e.g, if you deposit the check and then write against that before it clears, you can get a transfer from savings overdraft fee or minimum balance fees if the hold amount is tweaked), but much of that shady practice was eliminated by the feds. Unfortunatly for those folks that have a habit of bouncing checks (and perhaps fortunatly for the rest of us that suffer from them), banks are allowed to place a hold on the check for a week (and most banks do).