Easy. Split between the first 2 groups. Currently, too much money probably goes to the 3rd group, but there is non-negligible value to an established lab.

The problem is not who to give the money to, the problem is what research ideas to fund. Currently, funding is too risk adverse. Especially in the hard sciences, you have to be able to make claims that your research will have near-medium term economic benefit. This is a great way to allocate a portion of funding, but once a researcher has made a name for themselves in some way, they should be given to go-ahead to pursue more speculative ideas, and then not punish them immediately in the next round of funding if it didn't work out.

Assuming that Facebook is analogous to an infectious disease that will die out, Facebook will die out.

Wow! A deductive truth! They didn't even need to do the study!

This sentiment is such crap. The US constitution is not a sacred document that defines what is morally right and wrong. It is morally wrong to spy on Merkel's poops, or any human being in the world for that matter, without reasonable cause. Excessive spying on anyone should bother you.

Uh... first of all, there is an extraordinary business opportunity to give this drug to EVERY BABY FOREVERMORE. And so a company that isn't already in the diabetes business will go for it. Regulatory roadblocks are nothing that big industry players don't know how to deal with. That is, unless the Finns didn't patent the vaccine, in which case big pharma touch it. Then it will have to be government funded trials, but you can bet there would be major philanthropy dollars and influence if this got to stage 3 trials, which make up the vast majority of the costs.

Thank you, please upvote this someone.

Insurance companies, hospitals, and doctors all profit from prescribing a $20000 surgery when a $1000 drug will work 95+% as well, or even better than the surgery. Without our own personal WATSON, no amount of information a layman receives will help us make an informed decision. The only solution is a government-administered single payer system for all essential healthcare for everyone. Private insurance can top it up for those who can afford it.

This is neat... but this device is probably not going to be useful in the field anytime soon. The tests described were performed on pre-purified, pre-stained, pre-smeared virus. These steps still require a lab to perform. And if you are already in a lab, might as well use a nice microscope. This is the real problem in point-of-care diagnostics, and the reason we don't all have our own personal medical tricorders yet. Big advances are still needed.

I don't think you understand what market cap is. Market cap=share price x #of shares. Assuming share number is constant, the main variable here is share price. This number is largely a measure of *anticipated* growth and profit by investors, and investors anticipate a lot from Apple. It is not proportional to current revenue or profit. The other stats you gave don't actually support your argument. At the keynote, Jobs said that in total, Apple has paid out 2.5 billion dollars to app developers. If that's 70% of the revenue from apps, Apple's 30% is ~1.1 billion dollars, over the whole life of the app store. I'm not sure how much they've made in media sales, but I suspect it's in a similar order of magnitude. Conversely, Jobs also said they had sold 200 million iOS devices. At an average price of, say, $300, reportedly large profit margins, say, .33 (and these numbers are conservative, don't forget recent lower iphone prices means apple is getting kickbacks from carriers for long term plans; planless iphones are still expensive), Apple has a net revenue of 60 billion dollars and profit of 20 billion dollars from iOS devices since the iPhone came out. I'd say that's where their money is coming from: device sales.

What's with the Canada flag on the story? Not only is there not mention of Canada anywhere in the story, it's kind of annoying that whenever there's a tech development in Canada, Slashdot editors seem to assert that the most important feature of this development is that it is Canadian, rather than the cool tech. This is kind of condescending. Don't forget who won the recession.

While it may seem to many that this is a complete and utter non-story, I think there are deeper racial issues that arise. See? Black iPhones are a metaphor for black people. White iPhones are a metaphor for white people. It's so obvious when you think about it. Perhaps this Apple product release signifies the splitting of a community along an arbitrary line, forcing people to chose sides, or worse, have their side chosen for them. We must thank Apple and Slashdot for bringing this issue to light, and make sure to discuss this until we can reach the true, fundamental meaning of the event.

Seven words is for the verbose! More than two words and you've fucked up! I'm so hardcore!!!!!

They need a control group that wears the phones but has transmitting functions turned off or the phone turned off all together. Perhaps the reported result is due to the mechanical abrasion of wearing the phone.

The summary seems to indicate that the statements "foreign tech workers and scientists represent exceptional ability and are thus vital to American innovation" and "those admitted are no more able, productive, or innovative than America's homegrown talent" are in contradiction. This is not the case. American companies can be the most successful in the world by accumulating as much brainpower as possible. This is done by hiring both Americans AND foreigners. I.e, hire the best people for the job, giving advantage to those who will work for less. America and the West are going to have to sooner or later get over the fact that in a global economy, you can't get employment favoritism simply because you live in a certain country that you happen to think is "better" than other countries. You need to have higher productivity than those you are competing against, and unfortunately, higher American living costs might put you out of luck.

Unintuitive editing. I tried it a few times, and kept ruining waves with new sections or comments that I couldn't delete, and I had trouble keeping things organized. If the product had been easier to learn without instruction manuals, I would be using it a lot, but as it stands I don't have the patience to learn it and get anyone I want to collaborate to learn it too. It was just too much effort.

Right, because rich people are inherently more knowledgeable...

I read through the whole slide set, and it was very insightful as to the subdivisions of the network and the influences therein. The conclusions were pretty strong, however there is one issue that could make it difficult to create tools that will be the next Facebook. The problem is that although people in the studies privately categorized their "friends" into different groups and different closeness, I don't think they would be willing to share information on the closeness-level of relationships and the categories in some cases. In fact, I would be hesitant to do that on my own facebook profile if there were options, as people might see my computer. Furthermore, I would also be hesitant to post status updates that were addressed to a specific group of people, for fear of leaving the others out. What if I had to confess to someone I like that I do, in fact, use Facebook a lot, but I simply don't include them in my interactions there? The slides mention that people have workarounds like using entirely different networking services to comunicate with different groups, and I don't see this changing without an innovative implementation of a social network.