there are ways around that through smart planning, variable use, and multiple data files for different variables so not all are in memory at once

There are also packages like ff and others which handle absolutely gigantic files by offloading parts of them to storage and only allocating memory for them (and storage) when required. R certainly has some problems with dealing with huge amounts of data, but they aren't insurmountable for datasets less than 1T.

this research can NEVER be wholly or partially copyrighted/patented. or that the university will not directly or indirectly profit from this research and all data will be made public...

First off, facts cannot be copyrighted. Secondly, in a university setting, research results are generally made publicly available in journal articles, and you can often request the data if you have a legitimate reason to get access to it. Raw data will almost never be made public (although it is often made available to other researchers) as it would be a privacy violation to do so.

Genetic research should always involve informed consent with a description of what the results will be uesd for; I don't personally have a problem with laws that properly legeslate that. However, they should not be so burdensome to make compliance infeasible.

The fact that those doctors are making *MONEY* off it, and her and her family aren't? If it was non-profit and shared with all who needed it, maybe, but as a big money business the HL cell cultures are an insult to 'supposed' medical ethics everywhere.

You're mistaken. HeLa cells are banked by ATCC, which is a non-profit organization which provides the cells to other cell banks which provide them to researchers at cost. The cells themselves are typically not sold for profit. [They are expensive, but that's because media, refrigerant, and people needed to propogate them aren't free.]

We're not talking about the field of medicine, we're talking about the profit center of medicine, the drug companies.

While this does affect big pharma a little bit, the vast majority of genetic testing for association currently occurs in academic settings. This bill has the potential for significantly increasing the difficulty of determining which genetic variants cause important diseases, reducing the ability of researchers in California to participate in research in this field.

If you're a professional, you'd switch the server to single user mode, dump the drive contents to a portable drive, reboot the server, and be on your merry way.

And if you were really a professional, you'd get a search warrant for a complete wiretap on the server, and track all packets coming in and out. You might also compromise the machine so you could obtain all of the unecrypted traffic entering and exiting the machine. But the FBI apparently isn't that smart.

You can be forced to divulge the combination of a safe, but you can be required to open it yourself.

I don't know any jurisdiction which would bother spending the money trying to compel someone to provide the safe combination. They just seize the safe, ask nicely once, and if they were rebuffed, call a lock smith to open it.

The highest UL safe rating is only for 30 minutes of work time, after all.

RTFA. Hell, read the fscking summary: "... compared to healthy sperms stored for the same time in the same temperature away from the computer."

Except that they method they used to maintain temperature didn't involve a laptop in the control area; they attempted to cool the sample kept near the laptop by an air conditioning system. This would introduce significant vibration, a temperature gradient, and potentially alter CO2 and O2 concentrations near the sperm.

It's not like running this control would be difficult, so one can only guess why they didn't bother to do it.

a factory sized bakery is FAR more stringently controlled

Factory sized bakeries are more stringently controlled, both by governmental regulation and for QA purposes. However, because of the magnifying effects of the economies of scale, cheaper ingredients are used wherever possible. Additionally, due to the need to maximize shelf-life, automate production lines, and reduce waste, components that would not normally be added to baked goods by smaller bakers are added in an industrial setting. Finally, while many so-called organic products are not free of contaminants, products produced using normal methods also contain many of these contaminants.

[I]t's just a label change without a quality change.

Paying more for a label is silly, but at least some of the higher end cupcake places I've visited were superior to the standard supermarket cupcakes, both in taste and decoration. Probably not $4 superior, but enough that I would consider paying more for the once or twice a year I buy a cupcake. But then again, I tend to consider cupcakes like this gourmet, so my taste might be suspect.

A "gourmet" cupcake is made in exactly the same oven with exactly the same ingredients as a regular cupcake...

Just like a computer contains the same silicon and rare elements as any other computer, the devil is in how they're assembled and put together, and the skill with which someone makes them. A "working" program is made in exactly the same compiler with exactly the same syntactical constraints as a segfaulting program