I could see this going two ways. Valve could lock down the box because they're selling it at a loss, anticipating that game sales will offset the cost of the hardware. Alternatively, Valve could sell it unlocked like the PS3 was originally so that people can homebrew their systems. Locking it down makes sense in the traditional console market, but Valve hasn't been very traditional in their operations. There's a heavy emphasis on the players, so they very well could sell it unlocked, even if they're taking a loss on the hardware, because of the goodwill it will generate.

I'm also assuming that the hardware in the box will be good, but nowhere near top of the line. I'd imagine Valve would instead optimize the hardware drivers to make up some of the difference in addition to using economy of scale to get better than average hardware at a good price so as to minimize the loss at sale.

Who can afford the licensing fees to sit around and play music for friends? And if you didn't pay the fees, well, you're stealing from the artist-that's-long-dead's-children-that-continue-to-profit-from-work-they-never-performed! Think of the children!

That will be a very good question. On the other hand, is it really anti-competitive when the product being sold is the hardware with that specific browser? The OS has traditionally been the platform from which everything else was launched. With Chrome OS, they're essentially turning the browser into the platform and the OS is secondary in importance. I think they've got a pretty good argument that the browser is more important than the OS on the hardware, which is very different from the MS IE bundling.

You'd think they'd have accidentally stumbled across more efficient means of making incandescent bulbs while researching methods planned obsolescence in their bulbs. Edison's bulb is still working, but the ones sold in stores burn out within a year? Call me cynical, but the tech to lake long-lasting bulbs has been around for over a century.

The market was willing to except cheap, crappy little bulbs because they burn out infrequently enough that no one realizes just how much they spend on them over the years, but frequently enough that you spend more on those crappy cheapo bulbs than if the manufacturers actually sold more expensive, quality long-lasting bulbs.

If it weren't for the emergence of a competing technology, we'd still be suffering through the annoyance of those dinky bulbs and there'd be no calls for further innovation. Makes you wonder what other household items are crap due to technological complacency.

I'm currently working in an office that primarily serves elderly Hispanic patients. There's one doctor and the support staff. The doctor happens to be a technophile and converted the office to an EMR back in Nov. of 2007. There were a LOT of bumps along the way, but 18 months later, we have other doctors tour our office to see the way we've successfully integrated the EMR into the office workflow.

I started working here a year after the conversion, but I was the first IT-competent person hired since then (I wasn't even hired for IT purposes). As such, I've been able to significantly streamline office practices to the point where lab results are directly inserted into progress notes from Quest, the doctor gets real-time indications of patient insurance drug coverage while prescribing, ePrescribe capabilities which allow the doctor to send the Rx to the pharmacy while noting the medication in the progress note, fax records and progress notes directly from patient charts, etc. Pretty much any piece of paper that passes through the office (billing aside) gets scanned into the patient's chart. We do this both for ease of reference (easier to just pull up the high-quality TIFF than typing in a summary of a consult or diagnostic image) and for legal purposes. The doctor, contrary to some of the other comments, feels much safer legally having everything scanned, titled, timestamped and easily accessible. Oh, not to mention how much time is saved when we're subpoenaed for records and it takes the better part of 30 seconds to do a multi-doc fax.

The only real complaint I have with our EMR is its lack of ability to share records. We still have to fax records (certainly not snailmail!) and burn through reams of paper receiving records from other offices. I would love to see a connectivity standard between EMRs. That may be putting the buggy before the horse, though, with the lack of adoption we've been seeing in our area. Medicare's office a lot of incentive bonuses for using the EMR and ePrescribe, which are a lot more beneficial for early adopters, but still doctors seem to be dragging their feet. Maybe that'll change when they start seeing a 2% penalty tacked onto their Medicare payments in 2014?

Actually, you can thank the other textile industries back in the early 1900s for outlawing hemp. They (rightly) saw that hemp would prove serious competition to them, so they pushed hard to have marijuana, which also happened to have a non-psychotropic variety known as hemp, outlawed because it caused people to go insane! The whole irrational hatred of marijuana is a direct result of cotton farmers and textile manufacturers not wanting to compete with hemp. And you thought the RIAA and MPAA were evil?

Hrm... Woman with nothing to lose and a colossal mountain of debt? She should become a hired assassin. I hear that pays well (untaxed!) and she can work up that $2m in no time, assuming she's good enough not to get caught.

The another alternative is to commit some petty crimes and live off the largess of the state for the rest of her live while flicking off the RIAA.

Or maybe find an unpaid position with housing/healthcare/allowance benefits as compensation? I suspect if she's really intent on telling the RIAA to go eff itself, she could come up with something.

And then there's the obvious Somali pirate option... She'll fit right in!

While you're more than welcome to have a hand at that particular crap shoot, I think I'd rather not risk the myriad assortment of genetic handicaps humans can potentially pass to their offspring. We have no problem breeding pigs, horses, cows, dogs, etc., to be super-fit specimen of their species, so why would we hesitate to do the same to improve the genetic quality of our own species?

Uh, have you not been following the election in Iran or Dr. Tiller's murder or the D.C. Holocaust Memorial shooting? Religion is more than happy to use guns, too.

Anyone who's followed the MMO market for the past few years knows about Blizzard's "released when it's ready" policy, which guarantees the end product will be both fully featured and polished to a dazzling sheen. It's the reason Vivendi lets Blizzard do whatever they want with only minimal corporate guidance. The developers in Blizzard are the ones to set their schedule and if that means monstrously long development cycles, so be it. The end result is hundred million dollar franchises.

I've been looking forward to Jumpgate Evolution since I first learned about it. Having long been both an EVE and WoW player, my expectations are probably a bit on the high side. I've beta'd about two-thirds of all the MMOs that have come out and always observed a serious lack of polish crippling games with otherwise a lot of unrealized potential.

If ND is actually taking the time to polish the game and get it right like they claim they are, it's a smart move on their part. If they can assure a successful launch, they'll succeed where the vast majority of new entries to the MMO market have failed.

They're patenting the sequence of amino acids. They say this is patentable because it excludes the introns and is after the post-transcription modifications. Patent law excludes naturally occurring phenomenon. The sequence is a naturally occurring phenomenon after the excision of the introns (don't ask about the language, we know it's goofy) and post-transcription modifications. It all occurs in nature and is thus unpatentable. However, the USPTO has decided that whatever happens after translation is patentable, which makes no sense from either a legal or scientific standpoint (which I happen to have experience in both).

I was finishing my undergrad degree in Genetics and working for a patent agent writing claims and detailed descriptions for biotech patents when I discovered this loophole in patent law. I was livid as I knew first hand how toxic IP law is to scientific fields and had assumed, based on the explicit language of the law, that my chosen field would be only minimally affected.

Basically, the prosecution is going to have to call on some good expert witnesses to explain every stage of how DNA is translated and transcribed into proteins. They'll need to put it in language a judge/jury can understand while also constantly pointing out what the law currently says you cannot patent a natural occurrence, which a gene sequenced from a living organism most certainly is.

As others have mentioned, custom genes that are made in a lab and did not evolve naturally, those are perfectly reasonable to patent. Hell, even mixing and matching parts of different, naturally-occurring genes into a new gene is reasonably patentable. Patenting a naturally occurring sequence that exactly matches the gene as it has evolved to function in the cell is a gross violation of the law.

Maybe it's just the cryptoanarchist in me, but could this actually be the work of a good-intentioned gray hat hacker fed up with the botnets polluting the internet and deciding to take matters into his own hands?

I remember the article discussing one of the Conficker variations and how security experts at one firm had an opportunity to take over the botnet, if only temporarily, but chose not to do anything but collect data because attempting to "cure" the infected machines could potentially cause data loss, which the company would be liable for. When I read that, I remember thinking, "Man, where's a vigilante security expert when you need one?"

While I'm sure it would be awful for all those grandmothers and AOL users, I can't help but think the net gain would be worth it. In reinstalling their OS, they'd be much more security-conscious and make it harder for reinfections.

Hey, maybe that's what the economy needs! A massive boost to the IT industry as the unsecured masses get their OSes borked and have to get them fixed and files restored.

All that aside, I'm thinking this is probably an example of Hanlon's Razor.

That would actually be more of an argument against adult stem cells than fetal stem cells. The real benefit of fetal stem cells which is poorly expressed by most advocates, imo, is that the cells have not be subjected to a lifetime of environmental exposure to a whole host of carcinogens.

When working with adult stem cells, there's already been a significant level of genetic damage accrued by the time of the cells' harvest. Fetal stem cells, on the other hand, are as close to pristine genetic condition as is possible.

Regarding the issue with FDA testing, simply put, it's impossible. Current FDA guidelines would have every individual person's stem cells, derived from him or herself, go through clinical trials. It's those same poorly conceived guidelines that have made an unassailable barrier against bacteriophage treatments in the US, despite their long and phenomenally effective history against bacterial infections in Eastern Europe.

Furthermore, it's not going to be the pharmaceutical companies that are doing the stem cell treatments. It's going to be university labs and some of the larger hospitals associated with medical schools. We've all heard how cost-prohibitively expensive the clinical trials are for all but high-likelihood-of-success drugs, so can anyone honestly say that they think universities or hospitals, which are always strapped for cash, are going to be able to fund these clinical trials, even with massive NIH grants?

It just won't happen. The only solution is for the FDA to implement standards of treatment for the medical experts working on stem cell treatments. Patients will have to sign a mountain of informed consent forms and from that point on, everyone keeps their fingers crossed. Twenty years down the line, there may be devastating side effects, but there's absolutely no way to clinically test for it *in each individual patient* using either today's technology or Federal guidelines.

I'm pretty sure the poster mean when the experimental results are replicated independently by another lab.

Also, stem cells replicate relatively infrequently. Replication results in minor DNA damage, so the body keeps the source of new cells in as pristine a condition as possible by minimizing stem cell replication. One of the two new cells chills out until needed again while the other replicates as many time as is necessary.

That's actually one of the major concerns for adult stem cells. Taking cells from an adult, which has already endured a lifetime of genetic damage, and using them for a stem cell line is begging for some cancers to pop up. All the nastiest cancers known to man originate from stem cells. Fetal stem cells have the benefit of being the most pristine stem cells you can get.