In what sense is that any different than hiring an engineer? You don't necessarily know what particular projects they will work on yet, you just know that you need more people at your company helping you write software or build bridges or whatever.

Surely it's legal for a company who writes software under contract to hire people on H1-Bs because they known that they'll need more developers to fulfill the contracts they'll get next year. How is this different?

Isn't that a position? It's legal to have a business that employs people for the purpose of contracting them out to other companies.

I'm not sure you *should* make it illegal to submit multiple applications. Don't we want the people who are the most in demand to be most likely to get a visa?

Honestly, probably the best way to do this is to somehow auction of the H1-B visa slots (or maybe add a special tax to earnings of said workers and give the visas to whatever workers have the highest salary offers).

Why would contracting an employee out indicate fraud? It's a legal business to hire people to contract them out to other businesses.

I'm not sure whether to call this a flaw or a feature of the lottery process, but if you are a particularly valuable person to employee then many companies should be willing to hire you even if it's only to hire you out as a consultant/temp/whatever to a business who will pay highly.

This isn't some kind of zero-sum fight with the Americans. We all benefit from greater diversity in chip production among western democracies. Yes, there will be competition (and consumers will benefit from that) but almost the whole world wins by making sure that a conflict over Taiwan or elsewhere in the Asian sphere wouldn't risk a global chip shortage.

Almost everyone since you could make an argument that Taiwan losses if they are no longer absolutely critical to global microprocessor manufacture.

What happens if they ever have a bunch of warm days? Does the server keep heating up the water anyway to hottub temperatures?

Ok Ok, I guess it's in England so maybe a long run of sunny warm weather isn't super likely but 62% is a high fraction so aren't there a fair number of days where they might exceed 100%?

It doesn't really seem like that much of a U-turn. I'd be surprised if they don't still claim that they offer important value added services that offfer enhanced reliability etc.. over the open data.

But yes, I guess in an attitudinal sense it's a U-turn even if there's nothing inherently contradictory in thinking that there are places where open source content is lacking and helping improve that content. Though I admit it's pretty different when it's a company than when a coder goes from complaining about a piece of code to fixing it.

Assuming the reporting isn't highly misleading it seems like this search is the one wired reported the FBI admitting was noncompliant. So this isn't some congressman complaining about a legal search but the FBI violating the law. Whether or not there is a good reason to investigate this congressman or they could have gotten a warrant doesn't matter - they broke the law in this search.

Ok, the FBI says it was a misunderstanding of the rules. Fine, but even the greenest new agent is going to realize combing through a congressman's u minimized communications is a big deal so if they can misunderstand here it means they either don't care or the rules/enforcement mechanism are broken. And that's what the other cases in the rest of the article suggest: a pattern of repeated egregious abuse that is pretty hard to explain away as mere misunderstandings. What exactly did the agents think justified the use to investigate people who applied to join the citizen's academy?

True, the more recent reforms give elected officials more protection but that's small comfort for the rest of us. In my opinion, they not only should need to seek a warrant for accessing the unminimized data but there should be a security cleared lawyer whose job is to oppose the warrant.

Unless I'm reading something by someone I know I could care less who wrote it or what they intended. Ultimately what matters is how it affects me as the reader and it doesn't really matter at all if some message or feature was intended, accidental or AI generated.

AI isn't yet able to produce the kid of coherent experience that human authors can but the idea that I'm thinking about what the author must have been thinking and feeling when I read seems to mistake how many of us read.

Already done for risk of diseases. They are just applying the same technique to a slightly different data set. See here for a detailed explanation of what's going on: https://youtu.be/43DDPzM0pHc

Because they are only offering (well right now the similar disease based prediction) it to ppl who are using IVF where they already need to have all these embryos harvested and outside the body. No one has yet been willing to suggest doing this to a natural pregnancy where it might increase risk yet or to harvest embryos that wouldn't already be needed for IVF.

That's just false. To be clear the prediction would probably not be directly of intelligence but of educational attainment (which is actually the better thing to select for) and they have used the massive genetic databases they have to do some pretty reliable regressions.

To be clear, what they really figure out is that, given our evidence, we think this embryo will turn out to academically outperform that one 51% of the time or something. So these aren't huge effects but you can be pretty sure that if you applied these selections to a large population they would increase that trait.

For an indepth technical explanation I recommend this video: https://youtu.be/43DDPzM0pHc

Sure, selecting for IQ is probably less useful than selecting for grit.

But my understanding is that the companies probably wouldn't actually be selecting for IQ directly anyway but likely using educational attainment as a proxy and that factors in things like disposition to put in the work.

I'm not a nutjobs, but I lean pretty far left and I complain about it frequently.

But, what's really going on isn't that people think the fetus was murdered. It's that they have a gut level reaction that says it's worse to kill a pregnant woman (and that if you force someone to miscarry that's really bad) and like almost everyone they don't care about the legal rational, only the results.

That's not clear and the argument proves too much.

Every new technology gives those rich enough to afford it an advantage. Before the cell phone no one could be productive in traffic or grocery store. Before the home PC no one's kids could learn using educational games.

These new techs gave an advantage to those who could afford them while everyone else still had to do without further increasing their advantage. But actually, these technologies have been levelers in the long run. Now even poor kids in the third world can download educational content that was unthinkable in the 80s.

The cost of this is only in the tens of thousands and, like cell phones, allowing it will quickly reduce price via economies of scale. The advantage given is likely less than that offered by sending your kid to an elite private school and it's cheaper.