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Comment Re:It's still in the gene databases (Score 3, Informative) 294

IANAL and IANAG (I am not a geneticist). However my wife works for Genbank (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Genbank/). She is a geneticist and we've discussed this issue. When a company patents a gene they have the rights to information and usage of that gene. This essentially halts research on the gene, because anything you discover is owned by the company with the patent unless you work out some type of licensing agreement. This is bad for medical research because a company won't study a disease if the gene is owned by another company. Any cure or medication they came up would not be usable without licensing. Considering the high cost of medical research, it's just not worth it do research unless you own the patent. Companies are in the process of patenting every gene they can find in hopes that one of them will be important for instance the genes described in this article that relate to breast cancer.

Comment Re:Oklahoma? (Score 0) 1161

And hopefully someday people will realize they are Just Plain Wrong about the existence of God, but unfortunately that's not as easily proven beyond a reasonable doubt as evolution.
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Unless you've been conducting some unpublished research there is no proof for evolution. It is a theory. Not a theory as in the theory of gravity. You can conduct independent repeatable experiments to back up your theory that bodies with mass attract each other. There have been no experiments much less independent repeatable experiments showing evolution. Natural selection leads to evolution is simply our best hypothesis at the moment.

Comment Re:Hypercard (Score 3, Informative) 148

Because it wasn't. The first hypertext system was the Hypertext Editing System created in 1967. The first graphical browser with point and click interface was the NLS system which was part of the Augment project created in 1968 by Doug Engelbart. There weren't any point and click inteface before then because he also created the mouse as part of that project.

Comment Missing the point? (Score 1) 220

It seems like people are missing the point. Yes there are many clients available to download your email to your local machine. The important part is that you now have a client that blurs the lines between desktop applications and web based applications. Yes I know it's been done before, but not in an application as ubiquitous as Gmail. Occasionally connected applications like this are a step to all those buzz words people keep throwing around like cloud computing and death of the desktop.

Comment Re:Re H1B should go first (Score 2, Insightful) 612

My forefathers came here to live and become citizens, not work a few years and leave. I know that's not the case for all H1Bs many do stay and become US citizens, but most do not.

I've worked with many H1Bs over the years. I'm a contractor in the DC area and they are very popular with government contractors. The government won't convert H1Bs to full time employees so the contractors get a continuous stream of revenue. Many H1Bs are treated like indentured servants. You cram 10 people into a two bedroom apartment and pay them a third to half of what they US counterparts are making. I agree with one of the original posters. If it really is about a lack of qualified people they should require salary parity for H1B workers.

GUI

Submission + - Flex Builder for Linux (adobe.com)

Calsar writes: "I'm at the Adobe Max in Chicago and they just announced that the alpha version of Flex Builder is available for Linux. You can download it now from Adobe Labs at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/flexbuilder_linux/."

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It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

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