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Comment: Re:good riddance (Score 1) 146

by SchroedingersCat (#45625087) Attached to: After FDA Objections, 23andMe Won't Offer Health Information

FDA is fighting a fight it already lost. Just another outdated business model fighting something it struggles to embrace. Just like music industry was fighting Napster. Just like US government was fighting for encryption export controls. The information is out there. opensnp, promethease, even google. Anyone can connect the dots and they technically don't need 23andMe to do that. 23andMe makes it easier to consume that information but it is just a messenger.

You say that "false positives" are catastrophic. I doubt that a woman would perform a double mastectomy on itself. She would get second or third opinion from doctors and surgeons. Consider the alternative for a second - what if a women never learned about this risk and died of cancer a few years later.

Consumers will get the information they need one way or another. There is nothing FDA can do to stop it. Tests can be done offshore if needed. The beauty about genetic tests is that you only need to do it once in your lifetime.

+ - Personal Genomics Firm 23andMe Patents Designer Baby System

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Consumer genomics company 23andMe has developed a system for helping prospective parents choose the traits of their offspring, from disease risk to hair color. The patent — number 8543339, “Gamete donor selection based on genetic calculations” — describes a technology that would take a customer’s preferences for a child’s traits, compute the likely genomic outcomes of combinations between a customer’s sperm or egg and other people’s sex cells, and describe which potential reproductive matches would most likely produce the desired baby."

Comment: Re:Daily? (Score 2) 182

by SchroedingersCat (#41621489) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Often Do You Push To Production?
That's not true. If you have good automated regression, have reasonable coverage and do continuous integration you can cut the release as soon as you have a clean regression. It may take a few hours or a day to prep the release (sign-offs, paperwork, push, etc) but it can be done in parallel. There is always a balance. Prepping the release incurs costs in manpower and resources. Pushing daily may not be practical if cost/benefit is not there. For example if it takes 6 hours to prep the release then doing so for a wording change on the page that get 10 hits per day is not practical. on the other hand, if dev team cranks out dozen cool and exciting features daily it may be worth to staff release and QA automation teams to allow them to prep multiple releases per day.

Comment: Re:Article has it Wrong (Score 1) 480

by SchroedingersCat (#41480791) Attached to: What Should Start-Ups Do With the Brilliant Jerk?
The article describes a spectacular failure of being able to retain and accommodate creative talent. When company grows and management consultants move in and start laying out verticals and org charts then the bureaucracy sets in and top talent leaves because there is too much red tape to deal with. It looks from the article that the company failed to setup non-management vertical and allow people who have no desire to become managers to grow. The thing is that CEO or COO or another acronym would have benefited greatly from direct communication with Brilliant Jerk instead of relying on management vertical to percolate the message through. Lots' of successful tech companies have "distinguished engineers", "product fellows" or other non-management positions that report directly to the top management. Technology changes every 5 years. Getting rid of Brilliant Jerks is a direct path to obsolete products and becoming irrelevant in the marketplace. Examples are readily available: look at RIM, Nokia, Windows Mobile spectacular failures. You just cannot manage you way out of this one.

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