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Comment Re:Sold the 1975 patent in 2012? (Score 1) 19

It's not. Kodak sold a pile of 1000 odd patents to a consortium of tech companies for something like half a billion dollars. It was the accumulated bullshit of thirty years of "transferring a digital image via digital computer network on a Tuesday" type stuff, plus some actual innovation, much of it in algorithms, mixed in.

Comment Re:Cool (Score 1) 19

Hacky: the first of pretty much any gadget is going to be a pile of junk on some engineer's desk. So long as it fits on a desk.

Why secretive? He took an image sensor invented at Bell Labs and manufactured by Fairchild and used it to make an image. Secretive from his bosses maybe, since he managed to put Kodak out of business.

Comment Re:Crrot and Stick (Score 1) 117

"Instant" profit is more like "in five years" or "during my time in charge" profit. That AI "research" is very much aimed at generating profits in the short term. Nobody really cared that much until OpenAI announced something that could potentially cut into Google's ad+search money pipe, then the race was on. It follows precisely the silicon valley software company strategy: write some software, offer it free or steeply discounted at a loss to get users (i.e. "scale") then monetize it with ads.

Comment Re: AI: Humanity's Worst Invention (Score 1) 83

You don't need more than one guy to have a corporation. I have one. But that's really a modern legal and tax thing. Corporations were invented to make it easier for groups of people to act together.

I suspect the "replace the corporation" thing is just dumbassery, but it does potentially have a real meaning as above. You're also correct, other technology has also had that effect. There are lots of one-person operations, incorporated or not, that previously would have required the pooled resources of a group. Automation of all kinds does that. We also have a tendency to just dream bigger, which I'm sure will happen this time around too. And we also have a tendency to invent more bullshit jobs to fill in too.

Comment Re:Science moving forward...country moving backwar (Score 1) 39

The big difference is the profit motive in the absence of a truly free market.

The big difference is the requirement to test them to make sure they work. It's expensive, and most candidates fail.

This is potentially the biggest strenth of a vaccine approach. According to the Internet the flu vaccine costs my government an average of $5.43 cents. Individuals can get it for under $100 in most parts of the world where you have to pay the full cost. The reason it's not stupid expensive, being a new drug with novel components most years, is because the procedure for making flu vaccines is well known and has a special type of approval that lets new variations be used without extensive trials.

Comment Re: Science moving forward...country moving backwa (Score 2) 39

It's not particularly difficult to determine the protein that a bit of DNA codes for. It's more difficult to figure out which of those are going to be reasonable antigens to target, but you don't really have to. Cancer cells aren't unknown pathogens, they're regular old human cells with mutations.

You don't need to do that either though. Cancer mutations aren't infinitely diverse. "Personalized medicine" sounds like a treatment just for you and you alone, and maybe in a Star Trek future it will be, but in the meantime it means a targeted treatment. You'd identify something that occurs in 10% or 1% or 0.01% of a particular type of cancers, make a treatment, and sell that along with a test for that mutation. We've already got several of those based on more traditional immunotherapy. RNA vaccines just make it a lot easier so we'll have lot more options, including ones that target the 1% and 0.01% instead of just the 10%.

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