The majority of Monsanto's patents actually deal with the process of generating the transgenic organism and would be unaffected by this ruling. Similarly, any company with patents on a method for testing for a mutation would be similarly unaffected- only patents that explicitly claim a specific sequence would be undermined. Cambia has an awesome tool that will let you search the USPTO databases for whether patents on certain organisms actually claim gene sequences or just reference them.
The fine was for things like storing hazardous waste for too long and improperly labeling things. This isn't so much cutting corners due to cost as laziness on the part of employees responsible for the waste- you see issues like this in almost any academic laboratory, for example. It's a constant struggle to establish and maintain the discipline to remove waste promptly and thoroughly label everything in a workforce.
No, the author is arguing that the role twitter played in the Iranian protests was greatly overblown in western media, FTA:
In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. "It is time to get Twitter's role in the events in Iran right," Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. "Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran." The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. "Western journalists who couldn't reach--or didn't bother reaching?--people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection," she wrote. "Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi."
This will be fairly difficult. If I understand how they're implementing this correctly the decision of priority will not be based purely on content but rather on what content corresponds strongly with whether or not the user reads it quickly / other similar measures of importance. SEO is possible because it relies on generating content that allows a website moving up in rankings rather than also looking at user behavior connected to those websites (which links are clicked on most often for a given search, for example).
It looks like their position on enforcing NN over wireless networks is a "wait-and-see" approach since they suspect that we'll see competition growing between networks and platforms that could have the same effect as regulation. While one may disagree with the degree of competition that exists, it's not an entirely unreasonable position.
To put the 1e32 Joules of energy in perspective, the energy density of matter-antimatter annihilation is roughly 9e16 J/kg. The amount of antimatter/matter reaction mass necessary to accelerate your 100km asteroid to 3% of the speed of light is therefore 1e32 / 9e16 = 1e15 kg or approximately the mass of 9-10 billion Mount Everests.
National Instruments makes a series of nice data acquisition cards in PCI, PCIe and USB form factors. For ~$2k you can get a board with 16-bit resolution, 1.25 MS/s (split between input channels), 2-4 analog outputs (16-bit, 2.86 MS/s), 24-48 1 MHz DIOs. The DAQ drivers are pretty well documented and easy to pull into custom code plus includes basic display and data-logging software in the form of LabVIEW SignalExpress. The main reason to go for one of these over a faster sampling O-scope is the output ports and potential for device control and testing
using one piece of hardware if that's something you'd be interested in.
Tesla Roadster production began in 2008 MSRP- $109,000 Chevy Volt production began in 2010 MSRP- $41k Nissan Leaf production began in 2010 MSRP- $32.8k
With only three models of electric vehicle on or close to the US market, it'd be difficult to make a call as to the impact of the subsidies. Considering that the $7,500 credit brings the cost of the Volt and the Leaf from the cost of a new luxury vehicle down to the average cost of a new mid-end vehicle, it definitely looks like they could make the difference for many individuals considering buying one.
These certainly aren't 0-emission vehicles (grid power isn't 0-emission), but it shifts the economies of efficiencies so that relatively small gains at central facilities can have tremendous trickle down impact. The pressure this will create to shore up infrastructure will drive the creation of local jobs and local expertise in the long run while reducing our reliance on foreign sources of power. Win-win, I'd say.
Cnet even ran a piece over a year ago talking about Lenovo's response to subversion of the facial recognition system at a hacker conference. The general gist of the response was basically "we only use it on consumer grade laptops" and "we're constantly working to improve it".
A non-coffee drinker will also fall below baseline- when they're exhausted / sleepy. The question I was asking is if one could use caffeine to extend the amount of time that they can stay at baseline before becoming tired as a non-caffeine user would at that point.
The more interesting question isn't whether caffeine gets one to above normal levels of energy but whether it can enable a user to remain at baseline for longer periods of time compared to someone not on caffeine.
Actually, this is more of a cure and definitely a form of genetic therapy (although the genetic material isn't incorporated into the patient's genome). The scientists used RNAi in which sequences of RNA complementary to the viral RNA are injected into the patient. When the complementary sequences bind together, they activate innate cellular defenses against double stranded RNA which destroy the genetic material, thus preventing the virus from replicating within the cell. If enough interfering RNA is present in the host for a long enough period of time, the virus will simply burn itself out.
The largest gains would be in fuel costs and life support / living space. One way trips cost about half as much because you don't have to carry nearly as much fuel with you, plus without the need for oxygen, manual interfaces, displays, living spaces, seats, etc. the total mission weight can be drastically reduced.
It would be more accurate to say that the flies perceive light that falls on those receptors fairly non-specifically as smell. To 'see' implies perception of light, but the lack of optics and the low-level organization that exists in photoreceptors, it's unlikely that the flies can perceive anything more detailed than a burst of smell when a light comes on.
Traditional methods of restricting and regulating dangerous technology have more or less worked so far, but the Economist thinks that this time may be different. They are calling for an open system where the 'good guys' can see and counter any dangerous organisms that are released, accidentally or otherwise.
Microorganisms aren't quite like software where vulnerabilities can be easily discovered from source code. Sure, having complete genomic and proteomic data makes finding potential vulnerabilities easier, but drug discovery and development is still extremely difficult and expensive even when such data already exists. A better solution would be to engineer susceptibility to a number of antimicrobials (both artificial and naturally occurring), say 6-9, which could be used in combinations of 2 or 3 which are rotated to prevent the development of resistance. This would be trivial to do from a technical standpoint. Even better would be to include dozens artificial and highly prominent surface markers into any artificial genome that could be used to quickly develop highly effective and selective vaccines should the need arise.
More often than not it ends up in the hands of for-profit drug companies one way or another. Even the money that goes to fund research in academic labs eventually is used to patent the drug compounds by the university and an exclusive license is granted to a pharma company with few or no strings attached about ensuring that the drug is brought to market in a way that actually ensures access to patients. It's kind of a sick process when you think about it since the incentives for all parties involved (scientists, universities, pharma) are stacked to encourage them to charge or be ok with charging ridiculous margins on the drug compound to turn record-breaking profits rather than shooting for a responsible profit margin while ensuring maximal possible patient access. This is done with both public and private financing and is an unintended consequence of the Bayh-Dole act which was meant to ease the commercialization process for technologies coming out of publicly funded research. Groups like Universities Allied for Essential Medicines have been trying to fight this in a grassroots manner by advocating that universities adopt responsible licensing policies where they can include pricing and accessibility targets for which non-compliance can result in revocation of license exclusivity (just one example of what UAEM fights for).
Disclaimer: I am not directly affiliated with UAEM, but have several friends who are.
Searching for "albert einstein's birthday" yields no answer while "albert einstein date of birth" does. Not particularly useful to most people if it can't understand simple queries like that.
Sure, the number sounds impressive but it's still clinically worthless in 99.9% of situations. There are a relatively small number of infectious agents that are life-threatening, of those the likely culprit in most cases can be narrowed down to far fewer than 10 simply based on symptoms. Reimbursement is another issue with these multiplexed test since unless a doctor can demonstrate that looking for every single disease in the the test's repertoire was medically necessary, insurance companies won't fully reimburse hospitals for the cost of the test. In fact since the test is simply based on multiplexed PCR, it would be significantly cheaper and more worthwhile to be able to dynamically define the test parameters and have an instrument dispense only the primer sequences needed to test for the selected diseases. This isn't even interesting- multiplexing PCR has been done for decades, there are just no practical applications for multiplexing 1,000's of primers.
If the growth rate drops off and is replaced by growth in iPads, how in the world is that not a takeover?
I believe most people would refer to that as market saturation. There is a finite number of people needing to purchase a new computer in a given period of time and the explosive growth of netbooks could very well be slowing now that a large percentage of everyone who wants to buy one has. Still, I think the entire debate is baseless because the two products (iPad and netbook) serve very different purposes. The iPad is best suited to enable the consumption of media (movies, music, web, ebooks, etc) whereas netbooks are most often used as simply small, inexpensive notebooks. Every person I know who owns a netbook uses it for work computing- Office, presentations, e-mail, scientific computing, I even use my old Eee 900 for editing and managing photos when I travel.
Slashdot Mirror
The majority of Monsanto's patents actually deal with the process of generating the transgenic organism and would be unaffected by this ruling. Similarly, any company with patents on a method for testing for a mutation would be similarly unaffected- only patents that explicitly claim a specific sequence would be undermined. Cambia has an awesome tool that will let you search the USPTO databases for whether patents on certain organisms actually claim gene sequences or just reference them.
The fine was for things like storing hazardous waste for too long and improperly labeling things. This isn't so much cutting corners due to cost as laziness on the part of employees responsible for the waste- you see issues like this in almost any academic laboratory, for example. It's a constant struggle to establish and maintain the discipline to remove waste promptly and thoroughly label everything in a workforce.
In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. "It is time to get Twitter's role in the events in Iran right," Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. "Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran." The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. "Western journalists who couldn't reach--or didn't bother reaching?--people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection," she wrote. "Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi."
Even better, file 3 DMCA notices against their own website =)
Depends on the laser. Many are commercially available as fiber-lasers emitting ultra-broadband (read:white) light.
Mechanical forces exerted on objects by light have been described since the 1970's and practically demonstrated since 1986.
This will be fairly difficult. If I understand how they're implementing this correctly the decision of priority will not be based purely on content but rather on what content corresponds strongly with whether or not the user reads it quickly / other similar measures of importance. SEO is possible because it relies on generating content that allows a website moving up in rankings rather than also looking at user behavior connected to those websites (which links are clicked on most often for a given search, for example).
It looks like their position on enforcing NN over wireless networks is a "wait-and-see" approach since they suspect that we'll see competition growing between networks and platforms that could have the same effect as regulation. While one may disagree with the degree of competition that exists, it's not an entirely unreasonable position.
To put the 1e32 Joules of energy in perspective, the energy density of matter-antimatter annihilation is roughly 9e16 J/kg. The amount of antimatter/matter reaction mass necessary to accelerate your 100km asteroid to 3% of the speed of light is therefore 1e32 / 9e16 = 1e15 kg or approximately the mass of 9-10 billion Mount Everests.
National Instruments makes a series of nice data acquisition cards in PCI, PCIe and USB form factors. For ~$2k you can get a board with 16-bit resolution, 1.25 MS/s (split between input channels), 2-4 analog outputs (16-bit, 2.86 MS/s), 24-48 1 MHz DIOs. The DAQ drivers are pretty well documented and easy to pull into custom code plus includes basic display and data-logging software in the form of LabVIEW SignalExpress. The main reason to go for one of these over a faster sampling O-scope is the output ports and potential for device control and testing using one piece of hardware if that's something you'd be interested in.
Tesla Roadster production began in 2008 MSRP- $109,000
Chevy Volt production began in 2010 MSRP- $41k
Nissan Leaf production began in 2010 MSRP- $32.8k
With only three models of electric vehicle on or close to the US market, it'd be difficult to make a call as to the impact of the subsidies. Considering that the $7,500 credit brings the cost of the Volt and the Leaf from the cost of a new luxury vehicle down to the average cost of a new mid-end vehicle, it definitely looks like they could make the difference for many individuals considering buying one.
These certainly aren't 0-emission vehicles (grid power isn't 0-emission), but it shifts the economies of efficiencies so that relatively small gains at central facilities can have tremendous trickle down impact. The pressure this will create to shore up infrastructure will drive the creation of local jobs and local expertise in the long run while reducing our reliance on foreign sources of power. Win-win, I'd say.
You mean the Tata Nano?
Cnet even ran a piece over a year ago talking about Lenovo's response to subversion of the facial recognition system at a hacker conference. The general gist of the response was basically "we only use it on consumer grade laptops" and "we're constantly working to improve it".
This has been available on Lenovo IdeaPad laptops since they first launched maybe 2 years ago.
Well, if they're government-supported monopolies who also get their infrastructure subsidized it's only fair the tax-payers get something in return.
A non-coffee drinker will also fall below baseline- when they're exhausted / sleepy. The question I was asking is if one could use caffeine to extend the amount of time that they can stay at baseline before becoming tired as a non-caffeine user would at that point.
The more interesting question isn't whether caffeine gets one to above normal levels of energy but whether it can enable a user to remain at baseline for longer periods of time compared to someone not on caffeine.
Since when does cure = vaccine?
Actually, this is more of a cure and definitely a form of genetic therapy (although the genetic material isn't incorporated into the patient's genome). The scientists used RNAi in which sequences of RNA complementary to the viral RNA are injected into the patient. When the complementary sequences bind together, they activate innate cellular defenses against double stranded RNA which destroy the genetic material, thus preventing the virus from replicating within the cell. If enough interfering RNA is present in the host for a long enough period of time, the virus will simply burn itself out.
The largest gains would be in fuel costs and life support / living space. One way trips cost about half as much because you don't have to carry nearly as much fuel with you, plus without the need for oxygen, manual interfaces, displays, living spaces, seats, etc. the total mission weight can be drastically reduced.
It would be more accurate to say that the flies perceive light that falls on those receptors fairly non-specifically as smell. To 'see' implies perception of light, but the lack of optics and the low-level organization that exists in photoreceptors, it's unlikely that the flies can perceive anything more detailed than a burst of smell when a light comes on.
Traditional methods of restricting and regulating dangerous technology have more or less worked so far, but the Economist thinks that this time may be different. They are calling for an open system where the 'good guys' can see and counter any dangerous organisms that are released, accidentally or otherwise.
Microorganisms aren't quite like software where vulnerabilities can be easily discovered from source code. Sure, having complete genomic and proteomic data makes finding potential vulnerabilities easier, but drug discovery and development is still extremely difficult and expensive even when such data already exists. A better solution would be to engineer susceptibility to a number of antimicrobials (both artificial and naturally occurring), say 6-9, which could be used in combinations of 2 or 3 which are rotated to prevent the development of resistance. This would be trivial to do from a technical standpoint. Even better would be to include dozens artificial and highly prominent surface markers into any artificial genome that could be used to quickly develop highly effective and selective vaccines should the need arise.
More often than not it ends up in the hands of for-profit drug companies one way or another. Even the money that goes to fund research in academic labs eventually is used to patent the drug compounds by the university and an exclusive license is granted to a pharma company with few or no strings attached about ensuring that the drug is brought to market in a way that actually ensures access to patients. It's kind of a sick process when you think about it since the incentives for all parties involved (scientists, universities, pharma) are stacked to encourage them to charge or be ok with charging ridiculous margins on the drug compound to turn record-breaking profits rather than shooting for a responsible profit margin while ensuring maximal possible patient access. This is done with both public and private financing and is an unintended consequence of the Bayh-Dole act which was meant to ease the commercialization process for technologies coming out of publicly funded research. Groups like Universities Allied for Essential Medicines have been trying to fight this in a grassroots manner by advocating that universities adopt responsible licensing policies where they can include pricing and accessibility targets for which non-compliance can result in revocation of license exclusivity (just one example of what UAEM fights for).
Disclaimer: I am not directly affiliated with UAEM, but have several friends who are.
Searching for "albert einstein's birthday" yields no answer while "albert einstein date of birth" does. Not particularly useful to most people if it can't understand simple queries like that.
Sure, the number sounds impressive but it's still clinically worthless in 99.9% of situations. There are a relatively small number of infectious agents that are life-threatening, of those the likely culprit in most cases can be narrowed down to far fewer than 10 simply based on symptoms. Reimbursement is another issue with these multiplexed test since unless a doctor can demonstrate that looking for every single disease in the the test's repertoire was medically necessary, insurance companies won't fully reimburse hospitals for the cost of the test. In fact since the test is simply based on multiplexed PCR, it would be significantly cheaper and more worthwhile to be able to dynamically define the test parameters and have an instrument dispense only the primer sequences needed to test for the selected diseases. This isn't even interesting- multiplexing PCR has been done for decades, there are just no practical applications for multiplexing 1,000's of primers.
If the growth rate drops off and is replaced by growth in iPads, how in the world is that not a takeover?
I believe most people would refer to that as market saturation. There is a finite number of people needing to purchase a new computer in a given period of time and the explosive growth of netbooks could very well be slowing now that a large percentage of everyone who wants to buy one has. Still, I think the entire debate is baseless because the two products (iPad and netbook) serve very different purposes. The iPad is best suited to enable the consumption of media (movies, music, web, ebooks, etc) whereas netbooks are most often used as simply small, inexpensive notebooks. Every person I know who owns a netbook uses it for work computing- Office, presentations, e-mail, scientific computing, I even use my old Eee 900 for editing and managing photos when I travel.