We can't build the cells yet but we can build and insert the complete genome into a bacterium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

For 2 reasons.

First, the networks are creditors. They are owed damages. Remember, this is a civil, not criminal matter. Nobody goes to jail but money is owed.

Second, the court and networks do not want a company buying the assets then relaunching a clone version.

Take a look a Netflix as counter example and you could see why it might be worse for the authors.

Before Netflix people would spend large amounts of money building up their DVD library. After Netflix, people would pay a flat rate to rent movies – often lower than what they were paying to build their video library. Thus the overall poll of money spent fell. The the financial recession was a crucial point – people were forced to start renting from Netflix, Amazon, etc. in mass and found that it was good enough. These people won't go back to building libraries.

Do you spend more than $120 a year on books? Is Amazon's services good enough for you? There are a large number of books that I read that are once and done – never to be picked up again. For lighter books I could see this service as a decent replacement for a good chunk of my reading.

Now, I do most of my reading by the library which is even cheaper than Amazon, so I don't see myself shrinking the poo9l that much.

Do we know who the creditors are?

I was under the impression that it was the networks. If that is the case, the primary goal won't be to extract as much cash from the corpse or (as the conspiracies in this thread suggest - which is where my post was pointed to) cheaply take over the company. Rather, it would be to drive a stake through Aereo's heart. Yes, the court is supposed to oversee the process for abuses – but somebody has to contest the issue. I just don't see anybody pushing the issue to hard.

If there are other actors other than the networks, then there would be somebody else to contest the issue.

Probably not. Think of it more of a veto. In order for one network to win the bid on a sweetheart low ball bid – which implies free money - all of the other networks would have to agree. What is the chance of that happening? Zero. The networks are competitors of each other. They would rather see the assets destroyed and burned than one of their competitors getting a free lunch.

It depends on what you mean be "reproduce".

If you are talking about having babies, the technology is science fiction, but near science fiction – not far science fiction like cryogenic freezing people. For example, synthetic life is a viable field of study. We can build bacterium from scratch. We are a long distance from resurrecting mastodons – which we have the DNA for. However the issues we face are known. To reach cryogenics we face many unknown hurdles. That is blue sky territory.

However, "reproduce" could mean reading and understanding the DNA of creatures, a much lower and viable hurdle. Sequencing unknown genomes is expensive but the cost is falling fast. There are many species on the verge of extinction. Better to collect the samples know and sequence latter.

The donors are making about $80 per donation, which in a poor country is good money. And it is whole blood, not plasma.

Nope. This particular cure has a long history so it is well covered by prior art. This was done back in the 70s IIRC.

The big difference is that never before have there been so many survivors or an Ebola epidemic that has run so long. Normally after a few weeks Ebola has burnt itself out. For the few handful of healthy survivors there is nobody left sick.

This time it got to the cities, letting it propagate faster than the carries could die out. Then throw in good palliative care, which is new this time around. IIRC that ups the odds of surviving from 10% to 50%.

What would you suggest? Stronger? Weaker? What?

Personally, I would advocate for a system which had a shorter time period and exposed more of the standards and source code.

Don't look up loss leader, read up on the tragedy of the commons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

If something is free, people will not contribute sufficiently to the resources. Which is the writer's main grip.

There are ways to get around this. You can charge for it, which runs against open source. Yes, one can make money by charging for support. However, while you might charge for support that does not mean you would contribute back to the open source project – so we still have a suboptimal solution. You can force contributions either explicitly (government) or implicitly using social pressure. Social pressure is what is being used now. Social pressure works better in small communities where trust can be built. Not so much in the wilds of the internet.

I am going to nitpick a bit, but the IBM is off point. IBM did not sell off its server line. It sold off it low end commodity server line. It kept the high end line. It about a high end company being in the commodity busses, not about if that line is economically viable – which was the main point.

This? Coming from an agency that could not harpoon a comet at point blank range? It is not like we are talking about rocket science here. No wait – we are – dammit!

On the margin side I am going to have to disagree with you. I assume you are talking about gross margin. Sure, Amazon's gross margin has been going up. The average S&P 500 company has a gross margin of 42%, which has been increasing. I would argue that operation margin would be better than gross margin. There AMZN is at 1% where the S&P is at 14.6%. AMZN's ROI has historically been one of the lowest in the S&P. They are operating a supper thin margins.

As for the R&D - I will have to consider that. At first glance I am a little surprise that the numbers that I am seeing. Personally, I would assume (well, guess) that most of those expenses are capitalized but it does give me food for thought.

You are missing my point in a couple of ways.

I said productivity would go up, I never said the hours worked would go down. Some people like working long hours to own more toys – bigger houses, faster cars, and exotic vacations. However, in the last 50 years the people with the highest productivity are reporting that they are working longer hours and enjoying their life more. More work has become more interesting.

Secondly, you mean you can't think of any menial jobs other than warehouse jobs? Cleaning parks, walking dogs, and teacher's assistants are just a few that come to the top of my head. None of these require a college education. Personally, I am more optimistic about being able to retain people. But if push comes to shove I suspect society can find something more productive to do.

AMZN is not losing money because they are reinvesting back into their operations. That is not how accounting works. "Earnings" is a balance sheet operation; "Investment" is a balance sheet operation. Think about this way – If I invest $100m of profits in US Treasury Notes, how does that affect my earnings? If I invest $100m in property, plant, and equipment, how does that affect my profits? What if I paid out a dividend? It does not – in all cases one's profit is 100m.

The issue is that AMZN is trading profit margin for market share. Expanding quickly today to reap the profits of tomorrow – in theory.