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Comment Re:Good news, needs more science (Score 1) 64

Trust me. No articles are very correct it is just that you are not an expert in the other fields that other articles discuss. Yes this article is wrong but so are the articles on genetic engineering, hard drives, SSD, memory, CPUs, gravity, dark matter and every other subject you could imagine.

Comment Re:New Level of Ransomware (Score 2) 76

What is already happening is these devices are getting hard coded safety envelopes. You would be able to give them commands within that envelope but that would be it. It is not a problem but the medical device companies though they would have to deal with but they seem to be working on the problem pretty efficiently. So you could tell the heart to speed up a little or slow down a little but there would be hard coded controls so that you could not make it stop, run too fast, run too slow, run for very long at an altered setting etc. Insulin pumps etc are doing the same thing.

This is a problem that is taking care of itself fairly quickly. There will not be many vulnerable devices and those will be replaced fairly quickly.

Comment Re:It is a symptom of the industry and human natur (Score 1) 876

Simulink is a graphical programming language designed for engineers to use. That is pretty much the only audience of it. However, if your problem is very complex, it still becomes a horrible mess to read very very quickly. In the end visual programming just does not work very well. Especially in engineering since all of our stuff is math equations anyways.

Comment Re:Labview (Score 1) 876

As soon as the differential equations get very complex is becomes massively easier to just write them in code than to use Simulink. I don't think that Simulink is bad in any way just that if you have a complex problem it becomes at least as hard to read as any code is. I have a problem I am working on right now that is about 7 coupled differential equations and probably another 10 regular functions. Doing it in simulink just does not seem like a good idea.

Comment Re: Abolish software patents (Score 1) 204

I think we would be better if we could do this at a societal level instead of private companies but the system we have is private companies. Many of these ideas actually take close to 10 years to get to market and the FDA is only a small part of that. These new DNA and protein based medications are HARD to make. I don't think the average person has any clue how hard it is to make. If you had an entire swimming pool filled with your raw materials the amount of drug you can get out of that is about the size of a marble.

Worse just getting it is not enough, you also have to purify it, remove all contaminants etc. 2 years is just not enough time to do that.

Comment Re: Abolish software patents (Score 1) 204

There is nothing for them to compete with. These are the first medicines of their type EVER. The problem is that it is so expensive to develop and make these drugs that if the patent only lasted 2 years it would be 8 years before you where even ready to make it that the patent expired and your competitors would be able to work on making it also but at a tiny fraction of the cost.

Comment Re: Abolish software patents (Score 0) 204

DNA, protein and nanotech type drugs are so hard to make that from discovery it often takes about 10 years to put them into production. We are at a point right now where we have figured out a way to make something in a lab but not how to make it at an industrial scale. If you lowered patents to 2 years for this stuff you would stop all work on it.

We have also just started using stuff like CRISPR-CAS to do DNA editing on humans. It is likely to take at least 10 years just to get something approved and that does not cover figure out how to actually make it at scale.

I used to think that drugs should have much shorter protections but since actually taking classes in how to make them, how to get them approved etc and how hard they are to make my views have changed. Sure the short molecule drugs that most traditional pharmaceuticals are may be almost trivially easy to make but the newer biotech types ones are HARD. I mean insanely mind mindbogglingly hard. Many of the protein based drugs start with a 10,000L vat and end up at the end with 4 kg of product. Overall to make that 4 kg takes many millions of dollars for each batch and it does not help many people. However if you ever want that technology to improve then the patents on it have to last long enough to justify what it takes to make it.

Comment Re:First try 2.4 to 2.7 (Score 1) 432

However if those libraries are already installed on your system it should be fairly easy to update them. For zope 2.x the changes in python product code have been fairly minimal across all versions and the python changes from 1.5 to 2.7 are pretty easy to change also. The only big issue I can see is if the system used zclasses and I thought that could still be installed in a modern zope version, just heavily recommended against. However zclasses are normally fairly easy to rebuild as a pure python product.

Comment Re:First try 2.4 to 2.7 (Score 1) 432

Zope 2.x continues to be updated and maintained. It was zope 3.x which was abandoned. You can go to https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Zope2/2.13.21 and download the latest version of zope. It was even discussed to rename zope 2.x to zope 4.x but that was dropped since they thought it would be even more confusing. Zope 2.x has also run on the python 2.7 for a very long time now and so far I have upgraded apps written in zope 2.0 all the way up through 2.13 over the years with very few problems.

Comment Re:The problem isn't GMO (Score 1) 419

I would like to see full disclosure of ALL ingredients. The full chemical information for every single one. Just saying that something has GMO in it is darn close to worthless. What if you know that some GMO tomato variant is very good for you but some corn variant is bad. If all you have is GMO yes or no that tells you nothing. If I know the food has XXX GMO tomato varient, yyy natural strain corn, zzz GMO variant potato etc then that is useful.

Comment Re:Question and answer (Score 3, Interesting) 189

Based on the professional scientists I have worked with they can't do it either. Based on the level of fraud in scientific papers that have been found for new drugs it seems that very very few actually can do it to those thresholds. Sure they can lie at that level but they can't do science at that level.

Comment Re:IBM not immune to webbie disease (Score 3, Insightful) 156

What is worse is that those clueless people have cratered the market for people that actually know what they are doing. I have had customers try to outsource something, fail but then come back and try to negotiate a price in the ballpark of what they outsourced the project for even though the outsourced project did not work. They try to argue that they at least have a ballpark estimate to work from. Even had one customer turn off the ordering system on their site that tied into the inventory tracking system because the new system was just about to go online ... that was about 3 years ago and the new system never did get online at all.

That is a major reason I went back to school to change fields. Well that and how do you get something more exciting than DNA editing to cure diseases?

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