And a lot of what gets reported as ghost guns in the press aren’t 3d printed, they’re commercially-made serialized firearms that have had the serial number obliterated.
Due to how turbulent federal funding has been over the past year, many or most PhD programs are being extremely picky about how many candidates they can extend offers to and are also on the eye for signs that applicants may be trying for the very option you're bringing up.
Interestingly, while on-patent medications in the US tend to be significantly more expensive than elsewhere, generics in the US tend to be less expensive than generics available elsewhere.
The increase in F&A rates is due to the facilities portion, which in the "before times" was negotiated every 4 years with DHHS and had concrete data in the negotiation process to help ensure it was fair. The admin portion for universities has been capped at 26% since 1991.
I read SubiculumCode's post in the same context as bane's, speaking to the current environment.
You're saying that a group having to spend all of its time fundraising has always been true in your lifetime and you link it to your time as a grad student decades ago and earlier when you were an undergrad. Do I have that right? The dominance of fundraising might have been true for your specific experience and viewpoint, but I don't understand your basis for claiming it was universal: it certainly wasn't my experience (R1 engineering, not software) nor my colleagues around that time.
Complaints about fundraising and administrivia have always been plentiful but actual time spent on teaching and service and research were dominant, with the expected proportions of the three legged stool varying based on role and institution. What SubiculumCode and bane and myself are reacting to now is the dramatic shift in how dominant (because funding has been pulled, funding allocation methods have suddenly shifted) and unproductive (fewer summary statements, less or no feedback from SROs and POs, eliminated opportunities for resubmissions) that work has become. The closest I can remember to the current was around the aftermath of the 2008 recession and 2013 government shutdown and that pales in comparison to the disruption of now.
The Clinton era was the golden age for life sciences (can’t speak to others) and it’s been a decline since then, either stagnant or a sharper downturn. Now? Complete operational collapse, a completely different animal altogether, and it’s not one agency it’s all agencies. You seem to be saying that chasing grants is not unprecedented, which has been true since Galileo and the patron system, but that isn’t a profound observation it’s the status quo. What I and others on the ground are saying is that now is a sudden and profound shift, having committed funding pulled or applications in process effectively frozen and simultaneously new awardees decimated, in a way that is impossible to sustain the basic and translational research enterprise. And outside of the feds, there isn’t a viable source of patient capital to turn to on the scale we’ve been operating.
I think there are a couple of misconceptions stated.
One, endowments, this is thoroughly covered by others in past threads about funding on this site and in any number of articles elsewhere. University endowments are directed to specific purposes and largely do not cover basic science, nor can they be redirected to do at will. This is not a discretionary research fund.
Two, the private sector funds projects on time horizons that are far too short for fundamental discoveries to reach a technology readiness level that supports commercial R&D efforts, and in many cases, is unwilling to fund the commercial development too. You're frequently looking at a decade plus for fundamental R&D, with massive upfront costs and no clear commercialization path. Even if you have something that is ready for commercial development, it's still an uphill battle to get across the valley of death with patient capital.
It really depends on what you mean by "decades", but I've been in the system for a generation and what you're saying doesn't match what I see on the ground.
During the doubling of the NIH budget under Clinton and Bush the younger times were great. After, budgets stagnated and things were harder but there was still funding out there. The disruption we're seeing now is a completely different animal: program officers are gone, fewer and less detailed summary statements go out, some programs are on hiatus (SBIR/STTR) and if you have something in the till it was wasted time, &c. NSF is a complete train wreck.
My startup had an STTR in for the last cycle and we can't talk to the program officer about our summary statement, nor can we resubmit, nor are we likely to be funded. That's a lot of lost time and money for a startup that, since we're atoms and not bits, is funded on a shoestring budget. The only time something like this happened in my memory was the shutdown in 2013 and that wasn't even close to the disruption we're seeing now.
Was there ever a recall of the ECU, and if not, why did the UA events go away? Were UA events more common at higher elevations, where there would be more cosmic ray activity?
This story is like Baba Yaga, it comes out from the shadows to scare people every now and then, but Barr’s theory has the interesting property that the ECU would be cleared by the error and so there could never be evidence of the event as he postulated.
I don't think that copyright would apply because the EV1 design largely serves a functional purpose, and design patent infringement would face an uphill battle for the same reasons. For copyright of a "useful article" the functional aspects of the design cannot be protected, only the artistic ("separability"). For design patents, elements of the design that are dictated by function cannot be protected (N.B., there is some nuance there for alternative designs). The strongest exposure for EV1 replicas is probably trade dress, and the iconic design ("secondary meaning") of the EV1 should strengthen those claims.
Also, trademarks do not need to be registered to be enforced, although it is wise to register them.
When I was teaching product development I called this the Mechanical Turk strategy. Completely agree that it isn’t automatically fraud, it can also be a cheap prototype that lets you start testing hypotheses ASAP.
Is it possible that the primary liability for OpenAI is trade dress? If you can produce things in (for example) the style of a Studio Ghibli film, such that an ordinary consumer can’t tell if the source is Studio Ghibli or AI, is that actionable? I feel like I see copyright concerns all the time with AI but rarely is trademark discussed.
The obvious retort would be, if the situation were so favorable for corporations before Bayh-Dole, why were so few licensing deals in place before the passage of Bayh-Dole (fewer than 5% of technologies were licensed)?