It would be great if this opened the door to sleep aids that activated the brain's natural sleep induction mechanisms, as opposed to today's sleep aids, which are basically just sedative/CNS depressant/muscle relaxers.
The database and internal messaging is at least in part customized IBM software. Howard is friends with IBM Lotus Vice President Jeff Schick and talks about him occasionally. They also seem to use RCS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Computing_Services) Prophet/NexGen software.
As for jokes, I know they don't type (neither Fred nor Benjy can type quickly), and I don't think they hand over pieces of paper (Fred and Benjy sit behind the guests now) -- I believe they have cameras on Benjy and Fred's paper with a live feed to a monitor on Howard's desk.
I'm not sure I buy the premise that a few percentage points tax difference in short term angel investments in Silicon Valley will have any effect. For one, angels are aiming for a relatively rare 5-10X (or more) return, so a few percent of 10X is still nothing. Most of these investments are losers. That's just how VC/angel works. Second, I don't think these types of companies really employ anyone. For example, Twitter employs fewer than 4,000 people.
That's not clear at all -- there's no evidence that information was classified in the first place, but moreover a request to convert to "nonpaper" refers to sending a written summary or briefing. Jake Sullivan is no fool, he's a law professor at Yale. It is equally reasonable to assume that the request to send nonsecure includes an implicit request to not include confidential materials in the "nonpaper" version. Rational and intelligent actors could be assumed to act in a legal way based on this legal request.
It's not actually clear to me that she put national security at risk. During the recent U.S. State Department hack, an unclassified email system was compromised. Most of the emails Clinton sent (99.6%) were not classified at the time, and could have been sent on that email system. Even most of those that were classified were not marked as such, and still could have been sent on the unclassified system in error (which would not have been illegal either, assuming there was no intent).
For me, a better argument has to do with minimizing exposure to freedom of information.
Gross negligence and extreme carelessness are not the same. Gross negligence is a conscious and voluntary disregard of the need to use reasonable care. Clinton clearly understood the need for reasonable care as she took some security measures and asked people not to email her confidential materials. She merely did a poor job executing on the knowledge that care was needed, which in this case is not actually illegal (especially when grave harms did not occur, which is an additional legal factor).
The laws are written around consent because the goal of the law is to enable punishment of people who intend to harm the US government. Note that Comey said that it's the individual's responsibility to know when material is confidential, even if that is not marked. Yet even information that is widely reported on in the media can still be considered confidential. The law is written to protect those who take "careless" or "negligent" actions in light of the difficulty of the task of maintaining confidentiality during the kind of extensive communications required to execute the business of government.
It's really not conceivable to you that, given the way the law is written, her actions are not clearly illegal, while Snowden's were? The laws in question are written around intent, and Snowden's intent was clearly different than Clinton's.
She probably would have lost her clearance and job also. Fortunately for her, she'd already quit and is already applying for a new job that doesn't require security clearance.
The idea that "Sanders' support has been stronger than Hillary's in most areas." must not be true, though, right? Otherwise he would have more votes. I think "more vocal" is accurate, but not actually larger in number.
Republicans shut down the polling sites in Arizona to save money, and also this was decided well before anyone knew Bernie would be a contender. Same with all the voter registry purges. Bernie is right that he attracted a lot of people who don't regularly vote... which explains why they weren't registered to vote. Another of his main supporter groups are college students, who have been being purged from voter rolls for years due to frequent mailing address changes (this happened to me in Pennsylvania in 2008). There are more logical explanations for this than can be mentioned here, Occam's Razor.
Same for exit polls. The author notes that Clinton voters were more likely to vote early, which would logically cause them to be under-represented in exit polls. Also the "enthusiasm gap". Also lots of people have written about how poor exit polls are at predicting outcomes (http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/ten-reasons-why-you-shou...). Exit polls are notoriously bad, which is why they're basically only fodder for the cable news industry.
The weak point in the cryonics movement, in my view, is this:
1) The average life expectancy of a multinational corporation-Fortune 500 or its equivalent-is between 40 and 50 years.
2) The average life expectancy of a civil government is only slightly longer, at a few hundred years (not a lot of data points, admittedly).
3) Cryopreservation is resource-intensive and requires frequent interventions (e.g. needs to be actively maintained, no passive storage solutions).
Taken together, it's doubtful that humans can create institutions long-lived enough to accomplish uninterrupted cryopreservation for any real amount of time. Therefore if humans actually do achieve singularity or end aging at any point in the future, it will most likely be only that generation of humans (or some subset) that enjoy the benefits. The amount of time preceding that moment during which it would be possible to achieve human preservation uninterrupted by the demise of necessary institutions such as companies and governments, is likely to be short, or possibly fully within the life expectancy at that time (everyone born at the start of the era of stability that leads to the "end of death" will be saved from death; people born during the prior era could not have been revived anyway due to the lack of stable institutions to preserve the bodies).
The technique used to develop the therapy is not really what is being patented here. In practice, anyone will be able to use CRISPR for research purposes or to develop therapies. The question is, why would you invest in using this to develop a product when you can't actually sell the therapy? The product in question here is a therapeutic CRISPR composition for use in human cells. Lots of people will still invest in the technology and research because it is so valuable. If you invent a novel variant with better cutting properties, for instance, or a modification that reduces toxicity, those would be novel compositions of matter and could easily be the foundation of a new business venture.
They do a pretty good job regulating drug imports that violate IP, and I suspect they will here as well. The materials in question will be complex human therapeutic compositions, not research materials. I strongly doubt people will be creating therapeutic CRISPR compositions at the workbench (which will also include sophisticated delivery and targeting molecular products).
I'm assuming you're trolling so I will stop responding. CRISPR isn't my field and I'm not going to dig into supplements to disprove your theory, which is that CRISPR is not real somehow? I work in the Church lab. I know tens of researchers personally who use this technology. I am confident that CRISPR is real. However, attempting to prove this to you is a waste of my time.
It's an interesting distinction here. I would argue that the science is already free. The Cas9 protein is a natural product. The guide RNA can be synthesized easily. What is being patented here is use of Cas9/CRISPR to edit human cells. In a general sense that is actually the product, and not merely "the science." In other cases, where the Cas9 protein is engineered to achieve things like lower off-target cutting rate, that is a pretty classical case of human invention.
No pre-existing cells have the mutation at the site you're trying to engineer. It just doesn't happen. Otherwise selection alone would be good enough. But mice cells don't have that much intrinsic variation. Plus a lot of time they're inserting whole genes or larger payloads. The statistical probability of that arising from chance is zero.
There's a huge gap between the scientific breakthrough and the work needed to create a safe and effective therapy. It's not academically interesting, and academic scientists won't do it. It's optimization, not discovery. And what about the cost of the clinical trial, which could be $500m?
Government funded research institutions will continue to provide BREAKTHROUGHS to receive funding.
It's not clear to me what you are saying. Cas9/CRISPR unambiguously cuts the genome at a target site determined by the guide RNA sequence. In the presence of a DNA oligo with partial complementarity to the cut site, the DNA repair mechanism will sometimes incorporate the "payload" oligo, causing the genetic locus to be engineered from one sequence to another, predetermined sequence.
It will take millions of dollars of research to turn this basic bioengineering technique into an approved (safe and effective) human therapy. How do you motivate investors to fund this research without the safety net of a patent to protect that investment from free-loaders?