Cells being used for viral replication do not continue to work normally, at least not in the long term.
The viral replication method involves breaking into cells, hijacking the cell's replication mechanisms to produce viruses instead stuff the cell actually wants to produce. The replicated viruses then fill the cell until it bursts.
Yes, some viruses take an awful long time to do this, but they all do this in the end. A cell infected with an actively replicating virus is doomed.
When given the choice between researching a treatment and researching a cure, most companies will select the treatment. This is partially because treatments have a higher long term pay off(you can't charge some one $12,000 for a pill as most folks can't pay, but you can charge them $100 a month for 10 years), but mostly because treatments are a lot easier than cures. A treatment only involves knowing what a disease is doing whereas a cure generally involves knowing how and potentially why. That doesn't mean that no one is research cures, just that more people are researching and marketing treatments.
If a cure drops into the laps of pharmaceutical companies however, they are more than happy to sell it, both in terms of the immediate profits and perhaps from a more cynical perspective that people who are still alive can get sick again later.
In addition, supressing something like this is actually fairly difficult. Most countries have the capacity to seize intellectual property under certain circumstances and the political windfall of releasing a cure for everything is a lot more attractive than the donations of the pharmaceutical companies. Holding back an electric car is fairly easy, holding back a major cure is virtually impossible. You'd have to supress all knowledge of even the existence of the cure.
There's also the slight side not that viruses with extremely high and fast fatality rates are actually selected against biologically because the host doesn't survive long enough to spread the infection.
A virus which behaved in this way would likely kill the host before the resulting clones of itself could be spread.
Which it did. The spanish flu of 1918 killed a lot of people for the same reasons that H1N1 did. That is to say, not because the flu itself was particularly awful, but because people were living in conditions where their survival rates of flu were particularly low. A lot of the spanish flu deaths were soldiers who were stuck in freezing cold trenches with inadequate supplies or people back at home who were living in the same kinds of conditions that the folks in Mexico who died did.
MSRA isn't any nastier than the oldstyle infections it's just difficult to kill with modern medicine. Antibiotic resistent bacteria are going to be a problem in the future if we're not careful with how we use antibiotics, however if we get to the point where antibiotics don't work we'll essentially be back to where we were before they existed. Sure that was pretty awful, but it was where we were before.
Antibiotics have saved more lives than you can count.
For all intents and purposes the entire firefox UI is one gigantic extension, you can change it, play with it, adjust it, pretty much however you want all without having to actually alter the source code in any way shape or form. Sure you still have to deal with APIs changing, but pretty much anything Mozilla can do you can do. Chrome isn't like this, the extensions are limited in what they can do, and the UI is not written in the same language and using the same APIs as your extensions are. Essentially Chrome has extensions, Firefox is extensible.
There are of course pluses and minuses to the whole thing, firefox extensions are able to do a lot more damage to the firefox environment than Chrome ones are, but there's a reason why there's nothing else quite like firebug or no-script on the market for any other browser.
As for open source code being hackable, that's always been a lie. Maintaining your own patch set for any complex product is pretty close to a full time job unless you can get the upstream maintainers to accept your patch into the trunk.
That we're worried about having a credit rating downgrade from the people who graded those junk mortgages and got us into this mess in the first place?
Because like most countries, our Consitution was written in a different age. One where states were relatively autonomous economically and so wanted to remain relatively autonomous politically. It's a different world now and to a large extent federation doesn't work all that much better for us than it does for the US in most things, it's not really all that likely to change any time soon though, and working out where the new line should be drawn is going to take some time. Some things are still state matters, but at the same time states cannot survive separately anymore the way they could a hundred years ago and so a number of state powers are irrational.
But that's not OSX. You can use all the POSIX stuff and you can have the source to your kernel. You do not however have the source to the entire OS, nor is the entire OS POSIX compliant.
If Microsoft went out and replaced the windows kernel with HURD and installed the GNU toolkit on Windows but changed absolutely nothing else(same window manager, same APIs, same toolkits, would Windows be open source?
No I'm saying that adding "on a touch screen" to an idea doesn't make it patentable and that even aside from that "using motion sensors to rotate the screen is not a novel ideal.
To be honest I'm far more pro patent than most of Slashdot and even think that there is a place for software patents. That doesn't mean that a lot of patents aren't BS though, and the vast majority of Apple's mobile patents are BS. That hasn't stopped them from continously wielding them to stifle competition.
What Open Software? OSX isn't open. Safari isn't open. iTunes sure isn't open. iOS is incredibly closed.
What open standards, sure Apple wants HTML5, but they've also patented part of the specification and aren't releasing those patents as is required by the W3C. They're suing their competition into oblivion with patent claims that are more ridiculous than SCO's were.
Sure OSX has a BSD underlay and that BSD underlay is open source being that it's BSD. However OSX is not just the BSD underly, it's all the spiffy UI on top of it and all the apps which apple provides you to run it, absolutely none of which are open source. Yes you can run X-Windows in OSX, but that's not the default UI and it's just as ugly as it is on other BSD systems.
I'm not disagreeing that it's a fairly obvious invention(the patentable device is really accelerometers small enough to fit in a portable device not portable devices which use accelerometer to detect movement), but the flow doesn't work that way. Accelerometers were added to mobile devices to provide this feature not the other way around.
Amazon also can't, and won't, do anything to the documents you manually put on your kindle, 1984 was yanked because it was sold by Amazon improperly, Amazon doesn't back up private documents, nor have they ever yanked them.
Yes mobile devices are selling like hotcakes, but I don't know a single person who had a computer of some sort(laptop, netbook, desktop, etc) before they bought an iPad and doesn't have one now. I don't even know anyone who put off an upgrade or replacement to one of those devices because they bought an iPad.
People like Jobs keep touting the end of the PC, but as far as I've seen and read there's absolutely no evidence of it happening. Sure PC sales are slowing, but that's because everyone who can currently use one and wants one has one. The few people who don't are too poor to buy an iPad either.
Maybe you're seeing stuff I'm not, but I just don't see any evidence of a decline in PC ownership, a decline in the rate of increase in PC ownership sure, but that was coming with or without the new sort of tablets.
The same prediction has been made for years but it's never happened. No one is throwing out their laptop to buy an iPad.
The unfortunate reality is that for at least the next decade or so, the only relief for changing the ease of patent invalidation will come from Congress. It's relatively rare for any sitting SCOTUS to overrule the position of a previous one(though this current one has done it a few times) and to the best of my knowledge unheard of for a court to change its own ruling.
In the current climate it's far more likely for the legislature to make IP protections more stringent than the reverse, and even if they do make patents easier to invalidate, they're very unlikely to outlaw software patents as most of Slashdot seems to desire.
Bush destroyed the economy, Obama has done stuff all to fix it, but he didn't destroy it. The job market follows the same thread.
The only President in the last 30 years to not increase the deficit was Clinton, Obaman inherited the largest deficit and debts have this tendency to grow more rapidly the more of them you have. Again, hasn't really done much about it but given the only realistic solution to the deficit is a tax increase and no one seems to want one of those there's a bit of an excuse there.
Obaman started the war in Libya, he continued the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes he's failed to get out of two of them, and he has started one, but he did not start 3.
Obama hasn't done a particularly good job, but 90% of what you've levelled against Obama was actually done by Dubya. Attributing what George W Bush did to Obama is a pretty classic case of Fox News Bullshit, and makes you a retarded idiot. Hate Obama all you want, he's done a pretty craptacular job, but stop blaming him for what Bush did.
Non obvious is time sensitve. The wheel for instance is something that pretty much every single person on earth can replicate yet it took a ridiculously long time for humans to come up with it.
Nearly everything that's ever been invented is obvious after it's been invented and it's easy to say "oh, that's how I'd have solved it" when you've already seen it solved. The test for obviousness is, "given the same problem would someone else who knows nothing about the original solution come up with the same solution in a reasonable period of time". A lot of patents don't meet those criteria both physical and software, but that doesn't mean that because an idea is obvious after someone else has thought of it that it was obvious before someone else thought of it.
Microsoft took "easier patent validation" to the supreme court, on the side of "easier patent invalidation" and lost. The court decided that the law expclicity states the current requirements and the law is not unconstitutional so it's an issue for the legislature. It's highly unlikely that, barring a significant change in the law, the Supreme Court would even consider hearing a similar case in the forseeable future or that any lower court would side against so recent a decision. Google could certainly push for congress to change the requirements but I wouldn't hold my breath nor guarantee that all of Microsoft's patents would be invalidated even if it were to happen.
Microsoft wants a small payoff to leave Android alone, Oracle wants Davlik to disappear.
Paying off Microsoft doesn't present a problem unless the margins on hardware get much lower than they currently are and so long as carriers subsidize phones heavily that's not likely to happen. Replacing Davlik with a fully conformant JVM along with all of the associated redevelopment and testing both by Google and by 3rd party developers would kill the Android platform as well as ChromeOS and the entire Google plan for world domination. Letting Microsoft shake down the vendors for a bit of dosh just isn't the same level of threat.
Add into that the fact that Google started the Davlik fight with Sun who they thought they could beat and are now facing Oracle who they quite probably won't and Google may not be interested in starting another legal pissing match with a company their own size.
Google are very profitable, but also very vulnerable. The vast majority of their revenue is based around the success of their search tool and the fact that they're the only real player in town in terms of online advertising. They can't really afford to get into a fight to the death with both Oracle and Microsoft, especially with Apple starting to take action to block the import of HTC devices.
In favor of intervention to protect children from what?
The classification review isn't just the internet filter and R18+ for games, it's also about applying a rating system to art and a number of other things. There's also a number of people who are proposing the R18+ rating specifically to protect children, so that 80% means just about nothing.
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Cells being used for viral replication do not continue to work normally, at least not in the long term.
The viral replication method involves breaking into cells, hijacking the cell's replication mechanisms to produce viruses instead stuff the cell actually wants to produce. The replicated viruses then fill the cell until it bursts.
Yes, some viruses take an awful long time to do this, but they all do this in the end. A cell infected with an actively replicating virus is doomed.
The statement is true, so far as it goes.
When given the choice between researching a treatment and researching a cure, most companies will select the treatment. This is partially because treatments have a higher long term pay off(you can't charge some one $12,000 for a pill as most folks can't pay, but you can charge them $100 a month for 10 years), but mostly because treatments are a lot easier than cures. A treatment only involves knowing what a disease is doing whereas a cure generally involves knowing how and potentially why. That doesn't mean that no one is research cures, just that more people are researching and marketing treatments.
If a cure drops into the laps of pharmaceutical companies however, they are more than happy to sell it, both in terms of the immediate profits and perhaps from a more cynical perspective that people who are still alive can get sick again later.
In addition, supressing something like this is actually fairly difficult. Most countries have the capacity to seize intellectual property under certain circumstances and the political windfall of releasing a cure for everything is a lot more attractive than the donations of the pharmaceutical companies. Holding back an electric car is fairly easy, holding back a major cure is virtually impossible. You'd have to supress all knowledge of even the existence of the cure.
There's also the slight side not that viruses with extremely high and fast fatality rates are actually selected against biologically because the host doesn't survive long enough to spread the infection.
A virus which behaved in this way would likely kill the host before the resulting clones of itself could be spread.
Which it did. The spanish flu of 1918 killed a lot of people for the same reasons that H1N1 did. That is to say, not because the flu itself was particularly awful, but because people were living in conditions where their survival rates of flu were particularly low. A lot of the spanish flu deaths were soldiers who were stuck in freezing cold trenches with inadequate supplies or people back at home who were living in the same kinds of conditions that the folks in Mexico who died did.
MSRA isn't any nastier than the oldstyle infections it's just difficult to kill with modern medicine. Antibiotic resistent bacteria are going to be a problem in the future if we're not careful with how we use antibiotics, however if we get to the point where antibiotics don't work we'll essentially be back to where we were before they existed. Sure that was pretty awful, but it was where we were before.
Antibiotics have saved more lives than you can count.
It's an architectural thing.
For all intents and purposes the entire firefox UI is one gigantic extension, you can change it, play with it, adjust it, pretty much however you want all without having to actually alter the source code in any way shape or form. Sure you still have to deal with APIs changing, but pretty much anything Mozilla can do you can do. Chrome isn't like this, the extensions are limited in what they can do, and the UI is not written in the same language and using the same APIs as your extensions are. Essentially Chrome has extensions, Firefox is extensible.
There are of course pluses and minuses to the whole thing, firefox extensions are able to do a lot more damage to the firefox environment than Chrome ones are, but there's a reason why there's nothing else quite like firebug or no-script on the market for any other browser.
As for open source code being hackable, that's always been a lie. Maintaining your own patch set for any complex product is pretty close to a full time job unless you can get the upstream maintainers to accept your patch into the trunk.
That we're worried about having a credit rating downgrade from the people who graded those junk mortgages and got us into this mess in the first place?
Because like most countries, our Consitution was written in a different age. One where states were relatively autonomous economically and so wanted to remain relatively autonomous politically. It's a different world now and to a large extent federation doesn't work all that much better for us than it does for the US in most things, it's not really all that likely to change any time soon though, and working out where the new line should be drawn is going to take some time. Some things are still state matters, but at the same time states cannot survive separately anymore the way they could a hundred years ago and so a number of state powers are irrational.
Well, you might not have noticed, but Victoria and NSW experienced a change of government(and therefor a change of AG) since the original vote.
But that's not OSX. You can use all the POSIX stuff and you can have the source to your kernel. You do not however have the source to the entire OS, nor is the entire OS POSIX compliant.
If Microsoft went out and replaced the windows kernel with HURD and installed the GNU toolkit on Windows but changed absolutely nothing else(same window manager, same APIs, same toolkits, would Windows be open source?
No I'm saying that adding "on a touch screen" to an idea doesn't make it patentable and that even aside from that "using motion sensors to rotate the screen is not a novel ideal.
To be honest I'm far more pro patent than most of Slashdot and even think that there is a place for software patents. That doesn't mean that a lot of patents aren't BS though, and the vast majority of Apple's mobile patents are BS. That hasn't stopped them from continously wielding them to stifle competition.
Apple are not the good guys.
What Open Software? OSX isn't open. Safari isn't open. iTunes sure isn't open. iOS is incredibly closed.
What open standards, sure Apple wants HTML5, but they've also patented part of the specification and aren't releasing those patents as is required by the W3C. They're suing their competition into oblivion with patent claims that are more ridiculous than SCO's were.
Except they're not and never have been.
Sure OSX has a BSD underlay and that BSD underlay is open source being that it's BSD. However OSX is not just the BSD underly, it's all the spiffy UI on top of it and all the apps which apple provides you to run it, absolutely none of which are open source. Yes you can run X-Windows in OSX, but that's not the default UI and it's just as ugly as it is on other BSD systems.
I'm not disagreeing that it's a fairly obvious invention(the patentable device is really accelerometers small enough to fit in a portable device not portable devices which use accelerometer to detect movement), but the flow doesn't work that way. Accelerometers were added to mobile devices to provide this feature not the other way around.
If you're running that Linux Desktop in a VM, there's some kernel patches required to fix the clock drift, Fedora probably has them and Suse doesn't.
Amazon also can't, and won't, do anything to the documents you manually put on your kindle, 1984 was yanked because it was sold by Amazon improperly, Amazon doesn't back up private documents, nor have they ever yanked them.
The thing is none of that is actually true.
Yes mobile devices are selling like hotcakes, but I don't know a single person who had a computer of some sort(laptop, netbook, desktop, etc) before they bought an iPad and doesn't have one now. I don't even know anyone who put off an upgrade or replacement to one of those devices because they bought an iPad.
People like Jobs keep touting the end of the PC, but as far as I've seen and read there's absolutely no evidence of it happening. Sure PC sales are slowing, but that's because everyone who can currently use one and wants one has one. The few people who don't are too poor to buy an iPad either.
Maybe you're seeing stuff I'm not, but I just don't see any evidence of a decline in PC ownership, a decline in the rate of increase in PC ownership sure, but that was coming with or without the new sort of tablets.
The same prediction has been made for years but it's never happened. No one is throwing out their laptop to buy an iPad.
The unfortunate reality is that for at least the next decade or so, the only relief for changing the ease of patent invalidation will come from Congress. It's relatively rare for any sitting SCOTUS to overrule the position of a previous one(though this current one has done it a few times) and to the best of my knowledge unheard of for a court to change its own ruling.
In the current climate it's far more likely for the legislature to make IP protections more stringent than the reverse, and even if they do make patents easier to invalidate, they're very unlikely to outlaw software patents as most of Slashdot seems to desire.
Some of the tea party may be about being thrifty, most of the Tea Party are about "government is bad".
Bush destroyed the economy, Obama has done stuff all to fix it, but he didn't destroy it. The job market follows the same thread.
The only President in the last 30 years to not increase the deficit was Clinton, Obaman inherited the largest deficit and debts have this tendency to grow more rapidly the more of them you have. Again, hasn't really done much about it but given the only realistic solution to the deficit is a tax increase and no one seems to want one of those there's a bit of an excuse there.
Obaman started the war in Libya, he continued the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes he's failed to get out of two of them, and he has started one, but he did not start 3.
Obama hasn't done a particularly good job, but 90% of what you've levelled against Obama was actually done by Dubya. Attributing what George W Bush did to Obama is a pretty classic case of Fox News Bullshit, and makes you a retarded idiot. Hate Obama all you want, he's done a pretty craptacular job, but stop blaming him for what Bush did.
Replacing Davlik with Java would kill android, and letting Davlik continue would kill Java.
There's no peace to be had.
Non obvious is time sensitve. The wheel for instance is something that pretty much every single person on earth can replicate yet it took a ridiculously long time for humans to come up with it.
Nearly everything that's ever been invented is obvious after it's been invented and it's easy to say "oh, that's how I'd have solved it" when you've already seen it solved. The test for obviousness is, "given the same problem would someone else who knows nothing about the original solution come up with the same solution in a reasonable period of time". A lot of patents don't meet those criteria both physical and software, but that doesn't mean that because an idea is obvious after someone else has thought of it that it was obvious before someone else thought of it.
Microsoft took "easier patent validation" to the supreme court, on the side of "easier patent invalidation" and lost. The court decided that the law expclicity states the current requirements and the law is not unconstitutional so it's an issue for the legislature. It's highly unlikely that, barring a significant change in the law, the Supreme Court would even consider hearing a similar case in the forseeable future or that any lower court would side against so recent a decision. Google could certainly push for congress to change the requirements but I wouldn't hold my breath nor guarantee that all of Microsoft's patents would be invalidated even if it were to happen.
Microsoft wants a small payoff to leave Android alone, Oracle wants Davlik to disappear.
Paying off Microsoft doesn't present a problem unless the margins on hardware get much lower than they currently are and so long as carriers subsidize phones heavily that's not likely to happen. Replacing Davlik with a fully conformant JVM along with all of the associated redevelopment and testing both by Google and by 3rd party developers would kill the Android platform as well as ChromeOS and the entire Google plan for world domination. Letting Microsoft shake down the vendors for a bit of dosh just isn't the same level of threat.
Add into that the fact that Google started the Davlik fight with Sun who they thought they could beat and are now facing Oracle who they quite probably won't and Google may not be interested in starting another legal pissing match with a company their own size.
Google are very profitable, but also very vulnerable. The vast majority of their revenue is based around the success of their search tool and the fact that they're the only real player in town in terms of online advertising. They can't really afford to get into a fight to the death with both Oracle and Microsoft, especially with Apple starting to take action to block the import of HTC devices.
In favor of intervention to protect children from what?
The classification review isn't just the internet filter and R18+ for games, it's also about applying a rating system to art and a number of other things. There's also a number of people who are proposing the R18+ rating specifically to protect children, so that 80% means just about nothing.