> Long before operating systems got exciting names based on giant cats and towns in California named after dogs, most of their names were pretty boring.

Ah, yes. Mavericks, California. It's a great little offshore town, just off Pillar Point. I love that town.

Kidding aside, this is a great article.

Related to this story, the Windows 3.0 visual shell was originally not supposed to be Program Manager and File Manager. It was going to be a program called Ruby that I worked on with Alan Cooper and our team.

Ruby was a shell construction kit with a visual editor to lay out forms and components, which we called gizmos. You would drag arrows between gizmos to connect events fired by one gizmo to actions taken on another.

The shell was extensible, with an API for creating gizmos. A really weak area was the command language for the actions to be taken on an event. It was about on the level of batch files if that. But we hoped the API would allow for better command languages to be added along with more gizmos.

BTW, this project was where the phrase "fire an event" came from. I was looking for a name for process of one gizmo sending a message to another. I knew that SQL had triggers, but for some reason I didn't like that name. I got frustrated one night and started firing rubber bands at my screen to help me think. It was a habit I had back then, probably more practical on a tough glass CRT than it is today.

After firing a few rubber bands, I knew what to call it.

(As one might guess, I've always been curious to know if the phrase "fire an event" was used before that. I wasn't aware of it, but who knows.)

Anyway, Ruby didn't become the Windows 3.0 shell after all. The went with ProgMan and FileMan instead. To give Ruby a better command language, they adapted Basic and the result was Visual Basic. Gizmos were renamed "controls" (sigh), and my Gizmo API became the notorious VBX interface (sorry about that).

And we still don't have a programmable visual shell in Windows.

This seems absolutely reasonable. The letter indicates that the FDA has notified 23andMe that their products are not satisfactorily cleared, they're reached out to them several times, and they've offered assistance through a group they specifically set up to help companies in this situation.

Meanwhile, 23andMe went ahead and began marketing and selling their product, despite the FDA's concerns.

Relevant quotes:

> Most of these uses have not been classified and thus require premarket approval or de novo classification, as FDA has explained to you on numerous occasions.

> However, to date, your company has failed to address the issues described during previous interactions with the Agency or provide the additional information identified in our September 13, 2012 letter for (b)(4) and in our November 20, 2012 letter

> To date, 23andMe has failed to provide adequate information to support a determination that the PGS is substantially equivalent to a legally marketed predicate for any of the uses for which you are marketing it; ...

> ...we have proposed modifications to the device’s labeling that could mitigate risks and render certain intended uses appropriate for de novo classification.

> As part of our interactions with you, including more than 14 face-to-face and teleconference meetings, hundreds of email exchanges, and dozens of written communications, we provided you with specific feedback on study protocols and clinical and analytical validation requirements, discussed potential classifications and regulatory pathways (including reasonable submission timelines), provided statistical advice, and discussed potential risk mitigation strategies...

> Thus, months after you submitted your 510(k)s and more than 5 years after you began marketing, you still had not completed some of the studies and had not even started other studies necessary to support a marketing submission for the PGS.

Am I the only one this seems completely reasonable to? There are probably people who take action over the results they get from the service and if the results are incorrect the actions could have negative impact on their health. Therefore the service should have to prove the results are accurate before advertising it as a first step in prevention.

Lawyers can be a pain at times, but sometimes they set up punchlines perfectly:

"We've heard a good bit in this courtroom about public key encryption," said Albright. "Are you familiar with that?

"Yes, I am," said Diffie, in what surely qualified as the biggest understatement of the trial.

"And how is it that you're familiar with public key encryption?"

"I invented it."

I'm surprised at the negativity here. There is nothing conclusive about this test and from what I've seen it does a pretty good job. So one guy got some bad indicators that proved to be nothing, who cares?

My father did 23 and me, without giving any family medical history and it concluded that my father was at a much higher risk factor for things that his mother was ultimately afflicted with. So, it works to some extent.

On the flip side, long story short, I had a CT scan done on my chest that checked out fine, but the doctor that reviewed it said I might have and unrelated problem - Patent Ductus Syndrome. Nothing heart surgery and a lifetime of supply of Coumadin couldn't fix. A few months later I got an Echocardiogram which conclusively said the doctor was wrong.

Quick, stop doing CT scans!!!??? Are we're all so afraid of our own shadow that heroes at the FDA need to protect us?

A Japanese here. I think this article fell into the same trap that many other similar articles fell into. Namely, in trying to make the article interesting, it attributes more to the culture and psyche, ignoring more mandane logical reasons.

One of the primary reasons houses depreciate in value so rapidly in Japan is simply because that is the accounting rules. If you look at http://www1.m-net.ne.jp/k-web/genkasyokyaku/genka-tatemono.h... (and I hope Google Translate translates it well), you see that the typical wooden houses (the kinds you see in California, where I live) depreciate competely in just 20 years in the eyes of tax agency. This has real effect on mortgage.

The rules around the market are different, too. For example, in California most houses are sold and bought as-is. In Japan, the seller is on the hook for up to an year for problems that weren't discovered at the point of sale.

These differences depress the existing house market, and that is made up by the new house market, which in turn translates into a lot more new houses.

I find this report from Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism highly educational. It comes with lots of numbers: http://www.mlit.go.jp/common/001002572.pdf more

All successful startups are lucky, but they're never just lucky. If they were, we could save ourselves a lot of work reading applications and doing interviews. We could just pick randomly instead. If we did that for one batch, you'd really be able to tell the difference, believe me.