Comment Good Plan (Score 1) 314
Because fortunately there is no history of humanity ever acting with intentional malice. #phew
Comment Re:Marshall, TX (Score 3, Informative) 227
The judges will respond to motions from the defendants to transfer, but in this district Judges Everingham and Ward default to favoring the plaintiff's choice and have consistenly applied a stringent test to those requests. Only if the defendants can show by predefined factors that their proposed venue is "clearly more convenient" than the venue chosen by the plaintiff will they allow a transfer (here's a blog that tracks the court's activity).
The judges don't seem to mind the extra load. In fact they pride themselves how their "streamlining" of the process for trying patent cases has drawn in so much activity. They've fondly nicknamed their court "the rocket docket".
Comment Re:Marshall, TX (Score 1) 227
I don't know how the judges rationalize it but the spin from the lawyers is that "the Eastern District is 'a great venue,' because the judges there are experts on patent matters, and there is always a pool of experienced patent lawyers available to serve as local counsel". I guess it's just Eastern Texas good fortune to have this natural resource of patent lawyer pools.
Another lawyer shares this insight into his clients motivations "they prefer to go to ... where the judges have the expertise"
So the story goes that the ED of Texas gets so many patent cases because they're so experienced and they got this expertise from doing so many patent cases. Rinse, lather, repeat! Ain't circular logic fun?
Comment Don't forget the food! (Score 1) 122
Please tell me the food vendors will be offering an OSI seven layer cake.
Comment Not without the parents (Score 5, Insightful) 801
Unless the proposal includes some tactics for getting the parents involvement, it'll be doomed before it starts.
Education happens outside of the classroom just as much as in it and a child's mindset regarding education (no matter the field) is strongly influenced by their parents' mindset.
Comment Re:I hope they washed their hands after (Score 1) 156
In a word, yes. Salmonella and E.coli have been going at it for some time now--why not this bug?
Of course, as another poster responded, there are other ways the DNA from these UV resistant bugs could get into our more familiar bacteria: transformation and transduction. Transformation would happen even if you killed the bacteria.
Comment Re:I hope they washed their hands after (Score 1) 156
And how long before they can interbreed with the bacteria down here and pass on the UV resistance trait to some that currently plague us? This whole venture doesn't seem terriibly well thought out.
Comment Re:I'm non-plussed (Score 1) 365
Nope, just confused. It appears I'm not alone.
Submission + - Can CDs Be Recycled?
An anonymous reader writes: I was recently doing a closet-cleaning and came across literally hundreds of old software CDs that are no longer usable — both manufactured CDs and CD-Rs. Note that by "not usable", I mean that many of them simply couldn't be read anymore, possibly due to the fact that they'd been stored rather ineptly (no, I wasn't responsible for how they were stored). My question is: Is it possible to reclaim CDs for raw materials? It seems wrong to just throw them out, but are there other things that can be done with them that will allow their raw materials to be reused in some way?
Submission + - Hybrid NVIDIA Chipset Motherboards Launched
MojoKid writes: "Filling the price gap between the high-end nForce 680i SLI and more affordable 650i SLI chipsets, without sacrificing any advanced features, motherboard manufacturer Asus has created a
hybrid motherboard chipset
in cooperation with NVIDIA, dubbed the "Dual X16 SLI". Designed for
the Intel platform, the chipset combination employed on the P5N32-E SLI Plus
motherboard offers true, dual PCI Express x16 electrical connections for graphics, dual
Gig-E LAN support and a slew of other features found on high-end 680i boards.
This article at HotHardware pits the P5N32-E SLI Plus up against an nForce 680i SLI to see if Asus' hybrid chipset approach truly offers all of the performance of the more expensive 680i SLI for a fraction of the cost."
Feed Need Oxygen? Cells Know How To Spend And Save (sciencedaily.com)
Researchers at Johns Hopkins have discovered how cells fine-tune their oxygen use to make do with whatever amount is available at the moment.
Feed Tumors Stopped From Spreading In Mice (sciencedaily.com)
A research team reports that radiation and chemotherapy increase circulating levels of the growth factor TGF-beta, circulating cancer cells, and tumor metastases in a mouse model of metastatic breast cancer.
