Having health insurance be offered by employers/ tied to employment is one of the biggest mistakes in American healthcare policy. It encourages a "consume as much as possible" mindset for employees and disguises the true cost of care. Creating clarity of price and cost in healthcare would be one of the most beneficial shifts.
When the court forced him to turn over the SSL private key for lavabit's servers, Ladar submitted the private key in miniscule font on like 30 printed pages. The gov was not pleased. Mad respect for Mr. Levison. Glad to hear the gag was lifted.
(For those of you who aren't in on the joke, "The Heroes of CRISPR" was written by the director of the Broad Institute, which incidentally has Feng Zheng on its payroll. For that reason Eric Lander has been roundly criticized for attempting to weigh in on the history early. My friends who work in and around Kendall Square say that some of the criticism is overblown, the article points out a lot of people who didn't get much recognition prior, but still... it's a bit skeevy so you might want to take the latter half of the article with a grain of salt as it's not necessarily factually wrong, but the emphasis might be distorted and there is a risk of omissions.)
It might be a good legal overview (I wouldn't know), but the scientific merit is overwhelmingly in Doudna's favor. The actual novelty and value of the method is the ability to edit nucleotides, not whether it can be done in prokaryotes vs. eukaryotes.
In the case where this was a known technique that had significant difficulties in translating to eukaryotic work, then the Broad Institute's work would be significant. That was not, however, the case. Very little needed to change, and the technique has been widely applicable.
Just a quick look though Doudna's publications shows that this is an issue with a great deal of background work behind it, years of effort that fortuitously resulted in an incredible invention. Then, someone comes along, copies your work in some different bugs, and claims ownership. It's really no more complicated than that.
There are two types of LVAD's- continuos flow and pulsed. LVAD's "piggyback" onto the existing heart and provide additional force to the left ventricle (which pumps blood to the body). The biggest issue with LVAD's is immune rejection and plaque buildup. As the body responds to a foreign object it will frequently form plaques on the LVAD's internal valves. It's very challenging to determine if this plaque buildup is occurring without literally opening up the patient's chest via surgery. If the plaque breaks loose, they frequently cause stroke or pulmonary embolisms.
So many people did this at one company I worked for that it became something of a joke for low-level employees to say they were "staying on as an advisor" when they left.
The last paragraph in the article is a real kicker: they're going to have to parse millions of documents to build their case. That's going to take an enormous amount of time and staffing costs. It'll be interesting to see this play out in the courts or if a settlement is reached before trial.
> That's going to take an enormous amount of time and staffing costs.
Is it? Can't they scan all of those docs in, OCR them (or process the electronic docs if they're already in that format), and use e-discovery? I hear so often on HN that legal firms no longer need junior associates or paralegals for that work, as the software can do the heavy lifting.
My wife is in law school. The work software can do is still severely limited. I personally think we are on the cusp of a revolution in this, but we aren't there yet. Watson could probably do it, if it were as important as doctoring.
Software has made major strides. The old way of sending multiple copies between sides to be hand redone for each change required stupid amounts of labor. Now we have Word. But understanding the importance of particular documents still requires humans. For now.
IBM actually has a system trained on a legal corpus, used for tracking down potentially-relevant case and statute law. There isn't a huge amount of client funding in legal AI compared to other applications, and the problems are much harder than more restricted domains like medicine and pharma, but there's enough cash to do some interesting work.
Isn't this an opportunity for a technologically savvy law firm to help the tax office take on the hard work in return for a % of the settlement? We pay whistleblowers rewards for ratting out tax evaders, why wouldn't we pay for expertise if it means increasing the chances of winning. 50% is better than 0% if it means giving them a fighting chance.
I've seen some forensic accounting software that is quite good at uncovering illicit transactions, however in this case they need to prove that Google didn't violate the law but intentionally abuse it so I don't know what they'll even be looking for.
