This is part of a philosophy I wish more people engaged in.

If you promote excluding yourself from some sort of governmental organization because you don't agree with what they do or have done, then you shouldn't be surprised that the people who are part of the organization don't share your views. The only way to change something is by being part of the change.

The WHO didn't handle the start of the pandemic well. It's clear today that a quarantine of international travelers is a very effective strategy, this is being most dramatically demonstrated by China. We can either be part of the organization and force drafting of better policies... or we can leave and hope someone else does that for us.

I think you're confusing the purpose of copyrights with the purpose of patents. This is common.

Trade secrets and copyrights are not at all mutually exclusive. The purpose of a copyright is not to facilitate dissemination of information or art, but to establish ownership rights. The purpose of a patent is to facilitate dissemination of information in return for a legal monopoly on use. Patents and trade secrets are complimentary while copyright and trade secrets are overlapping.

Often people confuse "fair use" in copyrights with the "research exemption" in patents. You are allowed to make money off of "fair use" of a copyrighted work, for example in satire or as a security researcher. You are not allowed to make money using the "research exemption" in patenting. The US Supreme Court ruled that research universities cannot perform research on patented technology that they do not have a license for as research universities are in the business of contract research. Trade secrets and copyrights do not have this protection. Of course, this is all very rarely enforced, and often confused.

I'm a Califofornia voter!

That's easy, and you could have just searched for this. Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash each paid $30 million into a campaign to write and pass this law. They have no shame.

In the weeks leading up to the election, I was getting multiple texts daily expressing support for this law from "drivers for Uber" or other people claiming to be working via an app. Reading the news a bit, it seems many of these folks were actually workers for the app companies (and of course, the app companies have the phone numbers for most of us now). They had been told that if they wanted to keep working, this law needed to pass. That may be accurate.

I happen to think it's not right that we (California taxpayers) subsidize many of the social responsibilities of these industries, I would like to see a different system in place (there were interesting alternatives waiting in the wings). However, I think this campaign did convince people that yes, Uber would actually go away in California if we treat Uber drivers as Uber employees. Given that choice, people decided to keep Uber running here.

This finding is seriously bad news. Methane is a very strong greenhouse gas, and these undersea clathrates hold tremendous amounts of methane. It is important that we study this some more. Something can be important, but still not the top priority. I would love to hear climate scientists consistently say: "yeah my studies are important, but I would much rather our governments focus on finding a way to stop global warming than pay me for yet another study that's going to tell us what we already know."

I'm a physicist, and the assholes trying to increase their grant budgets or political standing at the expense of a clear public message on climate change piss me off. This has been going on for 20 years. See in this article, that the scientists reporting this data say the next thing to do is "more study." What a bunch of bullshit. The next thing to do is to work harder on stabilizing the climate. If you ever wonder where climate change deniers come from, it's from the consistent call by my fellow scientists for "more study" rather than a consistent call for "more action." Most non-scientists interpret "more study" to mean that scientists are unsure of what is happening. We need to stop saying that. In this case, we know what release of methane from clathrates means; it means we're fucked. Let's not pretend that getting more precise measurements of the release rate is more important than fixing the underlying problem.

Thanks! If I could mod you up, I would.

Of course, reading this, I can see why they left the details out... Attaching fluorescent labels and running samples through a single molecule spectroscope is... well if it works out, that would be nice.

It's always wonderful when you see a press release announcing some great scientific result, only there's no information whatsoever on what the science is or why we should believe this.

There is a point to the discussion of re-infection. There's some interesting science there that is relevant and which should be discussed. You're completely wrong about what the data is showing, but that's ok, Slashdot isn't for immunologists. (I work with immunologists, they've explained the following to me.)

We've had a lot of time to study the initial SARS virus (also a coronavirus). One of the weird things about it was that developing antibodies to SARS resulted in much less disease resistance than normal, and people who were either vaccinated against SARS or had it twice tended to have much worse infections. This is where things get interesting.

When you produce antibodies against a disease, what happens in your body is that those antibodies attach to the disease (the virus in this case) and then trigger an immune system cell called a macrophage to eat the virus. Normally, this destroys the virus. With SARS, it often resulted in the virus infecting the macrophage cell. It's not a good thing when a virus starts infecting your immune system, and that resulted in an inability of humans to develop immunity to SARS, as well as more severe effects of re-infection.

We don't know what's going on with COV-19, it took many years to figure out what was happening with SARS. That we are seeing documented re-infection happen so quickly, and where re-infection is more severe, indicates that developing antibodies against the virus may have the same effects as what was seen with SARS: the impossibility of "immunity" and more severe effects of re-infection.

The media is really very bad at communicating all of this.

It's interesting how close people like this get to that argument before backing up from it.

He says

Which is a pretty good argument for taking some action to break up the cultural isolation of high level academic faculty by doing something like moving a tenured position from a lifetime appointment to "no more than 10 years" (a good idea, but good luck getting that through any academic senate).

Then he goes on to say

There's a couple of ways to interpret that thought. One way might be to think he's suggesting we broadly weaken the government support of higher education. It's hard to believe that's what he thinks. Another way of interpreting that statement would be that he thinks places like Harvard should continue to train children of the privileged in the art of maintaining their position because it's just not that many people, so how can it matter?

If the problem is that the people at the top think they have an earned right to treat the rest of us like crap, then the places that have been teaching those folks that philosophy need to be changed. Strengthening unions is not going to change the horrible philosophy of the people at the top, or ensure the next generation of leaders has a more community oriented point of view.

The idea that only "monopolies" deserve anti-trust investigation is more than 100 years out of date. Those days ended with Teddy Roosevelt. Anti-trust law is about abuse of economic power, price fixing, prevention of open competition in the marketplace, and yes, also abuse of monopoly power. Just because you aren't abusing a monopoly doesn't mean you aren't doing any of the other things that are restricted by anti-trust law.

Some lawyer at Apple needs to look up "vertical restraints" in the anti-trust law.

"Grid power" is also not an energy source, it's how we move energy around. Saying "excess grid power" is like saying "excess road capacity," it's not an actual resource, just a temporary mismatch of supply and demand.

The answer you're looking for is:
- The energy to create the hydrogen will come largely from a combination of solar panels, nuclear power, and fossil fuel burning. The HOPE is that we will eventually replace all of the fossil fuels with renewable sources. By running more things off of electricity, fewer facilities and industries need to be changed to make that switch.

I'm a physicist specializing in electronics and happen to work in bio. I also do a lot of patenting and patent strategy development for my company. The culture around IP in bio is terrible and has contributed to inflated costs and disappointing performance.

In electronics, every device carries with it a huge number of different patents. These patents are often licensed in pre-set groups by manufacturers, enabling a designer to go to many different contract manufacturers and get the same process run. If you're a basic researcher (or a patent troll), you usually understand that your work will not result in a magical widely licensed patent that makes you a lot of money. The total amount of licensing fees paid out to the hundreds of patent holders in electronics is about 5%-10% of the product price.

In bio, holders of key individual patents, whether on the manufacturing or design side, EACH hold out for a 5% royalty. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that there's a major difference in agreeing to split a 10% pie one hundred different ways, and expecting a whole 5% slice of pie yourself.

It's not that there aren't key individual patents in electronics, there are. The companies involved have realized that there's more money to be made and more good to be done in enabling the widest possible consumer goods market.

The sad part of this is that some of the worst players in the bio patent landscape are universities. One of the professors who wrote this article come from University of Massachusetts Amherst. In a very quick Google search, you can see that UMass Amherst licensed a vaccine candidate for Chlamydia in 2005. The conditions of that license were first that the company had already paid $600k to UMass to do the work to find the candidate, then they agreed to pay $75k for UMass lawyers to file the patent, then agreed to pay a percentage of sales with a minimum of $40k per year, starting in 2007. It's now 15 years after that deal was signed, and there's no Chlamydia vaccine out there. This was a horrible deal.

This approach puts too much focus on a single technical approach, leading to more failure and more "binary" style investment and research. It discourages actual innovation, discourages partnering, discourages using multiple patentable ideas together, and prevents the kind of distributed manufacturing we see in electronics. Let's hope this changes. Open is great if we can get it, but it's going to take a long time (or something major...) for the culture here to change.

As pointed out elsewhere, large US chip manufacturers have spent more than $20 billion in stock buybacks. This lack of investment in infrastructure can pretty much be laid at their feet. However, this is still our problem.

(As an aside, let's say we make stock buybacks illegal. What will happen is simply that companies will issue dividends instead. While this removes the ethical problems of stock buybacks, it doesn't change the calculus of internal investment versus investor return.)

Meanwhile, small chip manufacturers (I work with several small fabs), really struggle to get loans, investment, access to hardware, and knowledge of modern processes. There are tools and techniques that I need to use that are common in Asia, not uncommon in Europe, and very rare here. It's not always that it requires more capital. In many cases, the tools used in Asia are better and cheaper than the tools used for "standard" processes in the US. Why is that?

There are PLENTY of people in the US who know how to fab chips. However, almost all of them have been trained in university clean rooms stocked with equipment from a fabrication node that is 40 years out of date (100 mm wafers, 1 micron node). Industry and academic clean rooms (Stanford, Cornell, Georgia Tech... there are ton of them) speak different languages. Because the exchange between industry and academics has generally broken down, we have professors teaching today who have only used fab technology based on that 1980 node, and who were themselves taught by people who only knew technology up to that node. So that node has cemented itself into place. Until recently, you could use old 150 mm lines to bridge that gap when you get out into the real world, but those lines are almost all shut down now. The difference in tooling between 200 mm lines (the current cheap, fully paid for fab lines) and the 100 mm lines universities train people on is tremendous. The philosophy of how to approach fabrication is different. Intel and Qualcomm can afford to retrain everyone, but it's hard for small fabs to find people who know what they're doing. If there's an area the government has failed, it's in managing the grants and programs that were supposed to update university facilities over the last 20 years. We got a lot of newly made equipment for an out of date node.

There are really three things that we're trying to accomplish around chip fab from a government point of view. One, we want to perform chip fab in an environmentally sustainable way. Two, we want to treat workers with respect, including reasonable wages. Three, we want to protect American jobs in this area. We have failed at all three.

Instead of handing over billions to big chip companies, we should institute 0% loan programs for people building and running smaller fabs, tooling companies, and consumable companies in the US (with all the conditions you want on that). We need to take the university facilities programs away from everyone involved in NNCI (National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure) and get it in the hands of someone who's run a professional modern cleanroom, and we need to hold the universities responsible to prioritize education and training in this space over research with those facilities (there is SO MUCH industry driven research). Instead of tariffs, we need to outright ban materials made in ways that violate our environmental protection laws or labor practices. That needs to be the last step, or we're simply hurting every other part of our economy.

None of those things involve handing money over to the large companies.

No one "forces" anyone to do anything in an antitrust violation. All that is required is that Apple has "economic leverage" in negotiating contract terms on their customer (Epic). That is clearly the case. This is why Epic is also going after Google (and likely anyone else with a hardware platform, a large customer base, and a "take it or leave it" attitude toward sales services contract negotiations).

If Apple allowed no outside software at all on the iPhone, but made everything in-house or through contract work, there would be no anti-trust here since the developers of that software would not be customers, but vendors and employees.

If Epic started allowing modders to sell skins in Fortnight, AND tied that to requiring modders to pay to be hosted on the Epic Games store, then they might be subject to the same law (maybe, I don't know how Epic giving away Fortnight plays into that. Would this case go away if Apple gave away iPhones for free? Probably.).

The law in question here is whether Apple is unfairly linking one of their products (the iPhone) to another product (the App Store) without allowing for competition or negotiation. Horizontal integration is allowed in business, but you can't use your position in one market to stifle competition in another. Apple's core argument here might be that selling phones and selling software are now one market (although Apple's main argument so far seems to be that this is a pure contract dispute with no antitrust implications).

In the continuing devolution of the XPRIZE brand, we now have a prize that far too late, is less than 1/100 of what the NIH and NSF government programs are, and is absurdly focused on not developing new technology. Really, $5M for a project like this is absurdly small, particularly when there is absolutely no need to convince investors of the value of a COVID test! The government programs have already gone through application, evaluation, launch, and first milestones. The commercial folks who started working on this last spring are getting ready to launch with millions of tests, and the academic groups developing new tech are working with industry partners (what I do) to scale their inventions next.

Worst, though, it seems the XPRIZE people didn't do their basic homework. The capabilities they want to see "developed" already exist and are in use and commercially available right now. They're looking for a "12 to 60 hour" turnaround time, which is already what the PCR test does. How about 15-30 minutes? That's what I'm being asked for by people who are really paying attention.

500 to a few thousand tests per week is the XPRIZE goal. Again, that's already available via the PCR test through multiple vendors and services. I'm being asked for how we're going to make 10 million tests per week.

They're "locking in" existing technologies and those existing limitations by focusing on techniques such as DNA detection and DNA sequencing (the first 3 of the 5 categories they're sorting teams into are some variation of DNA detection, and only one of the categories "Other" is used for new technologies - this is in stark contrast to how NIH handled this, where they binned projects based on projected costs, scale, and results rather than HOW someone did something). The specific technical problem here is that COVID-19 is an RNA virus and doesn't contain DNA. So special biochemical processes must be run on samples to purify the RNA and copy it into DNA, a set of steps that has always been problematic when dealing with diagnosis of RNA viruses. Mutation in the RNA often requires that you have to re-program your process. Some of the companies that sell the reagents and tools for these processes are sponsors for this prize. Essentially, XPRIZE has now been co-opted by existing industry to provide a barrier against innovation.

I think you've got this a bit backwards.

Patent trolls really are a problem, and if you think Qualcomm is one of them, you've never had to try and deal with a real patent troll. I would love if the patent trolls in my industry decided to work more like Qualcomm. Maybe we could get the drug companies to do that as well. A 3% royalty open to any manufacturer sounds great compared to what we deal with now in biotech.

More, you missed the point of the fight between Apple and Qualcomm. The IP that Qualcomm developed has proven to actually be necessary. The whole disagreement between Apple, Qualcomm, and Intel was resolved because Intel couldn't achieve the same quality and performance as the chips made to Qualcomm's designs. Qualcomm's lawyers losing the trial didn't trigger Apple to agree to Qualcomm's terms, it was Qualcomm's engineers who won that fight.