A cancer treatment that costs mere thousands of dollars is far cheaper than any other actual cancer treatment out there right now. The article mentions that each vaccine is made specifically for each patient (they have to get something from the patient's own cancer cells), so just the development is going to cost some money.

But since cancer typically means tens to hundreds of thousands (and occasionally millions) of dollars in treatment, this could be not game-changing not only in terms of health but for the actual economy. The US currently spends over $200 billion just on cancer treatments every year, and that doesn't count lost wages for those with cancer or those who are supporting them. The US GDP in 2023 was around $27 trillion, meaning that we're spending almost 1% of the GDP on cancer treatments alone. That's a lot of money to go cycling back into the economy.

They don't seem to have completely replaced it, rather just added 18 seconds of text to try to explain themselves. The same clip of the CEO saying that they're not negotiating is still there toward the end.

The excess money is spent on US Treasury bonds. The bonds are held until they must be sold to finance SSA operations (including benefits) or until they mature, and the proceeds are then either spent on SSA operations or reinvested into T-bonds. Social Security currently holds a bit under $3 trillion in such bonds.

One of my favorite Slashdot sigs from other users has long been something like "XML is like violence: if it's not working, use more." It seems some people really took that to heart.

That's because false/fraudulent death claims are about as old as contracts. For anything month-to-month, if you as the executor or other authorized person have access, you just cancel it and be done with it. For anything where the company was expecting ongoing revenue on a contractual basis, they're going to want proof that the customer is dead before they cancel the service. It also helps fend off people who simply want to make trouble for others by interfering with paid services.

That doesn't get into all the other things you need death certificates for: survivor benefits from Social Security, Medicare, the VA, and pensions; at least one for every financial institution; another for each life insurance policy; possibly another to change health insurance coverage; final tax filings, which may require one each for federal, state, county, and city; probably one for probate; and miscellaneous others that inevitably come up specific to the decedent's specific situation.

I haven't watched local TV in the last 11 years. It's been all streaming for me. If something big is happening, it's going to get streamed on the station's website (as with tornado tracking) or on YouTube. If a storm is bad enough or a tornado is near enough to knock out my Internet access, I'm going to be sheltering away from the TV anyway.

You'd think that, but no. When someone dies, I pass on to survivors some advice given to me by a friend who learned just how hard it is to cancel just about anything after death: Order at least 20 and even up to 30 or more death certificates. The number of places that require them to terminate or modify a service is far higher than people realize. Ordering them in bulk is relatively inexpensive, usually about $4-$5 each on top of the original, and that $100-$150 extra can save a lot of time and frustration over the next few weeks and months, not to mention money in additional subscription fees that keep piling up while you're waiting for yet another copy you can send in.

Subsonic works just fine for almost everything now. While supersonic may have its niches, slicing an hour or two off of a domestic flight isn't going to change most uses. Long-distance will differ somewhat, but even then, subsonic is going to be more economical for most uses.

WingetUI is separate from Winget. It's a GUI interface for Winget, but also ties into Scoop, Chocolatey, Pip, and NPM.

WingetUI is even better, as it can pull from multiple repositories, including Chocolatey.

over the deep face of the depths.

"deep" fits neither the words nor the context.

"depths" It says water, not depths.

Aside from the problems of achieving net positive output, there are practical problems that are far from being solved. The laser ignition demonstrated here has no practical path to producing power. Neither does magnetic confinement used in the Z-machine. The tokamak designs that are the primary focus use tritium, which is far more rare than most people realize. There are ideas for doing tritium generation on-site using lithium-6 blankets that capture neutrons and generate tritium (L6 + n -> He4 + T), but this has yet to be proven to work in practice. The Wendelstein 7-X stellarator is supposed to work using only hydrogen and deuterium, but it is also highly experimental, and it's not clear that it will ever achieve net positive output. No one expects anything within the next ten years. ITER is years behind because it's proven much harder than expected: first plasma and full fusion were originally scheduled for 2020 and 2023, respectively, and now those dates are 2025 and 2035. The companies that were all the big news over the last couple of years have only rarely made public admissions that they do not expect net positive output before 2035 or 2040. Once some design has achieved a net positive, it has to be shown to be economically viable, and then the plants themselves have to be constructed. That's another 5-10 years.

Realistically, battery technology will advance so rapidly that fusion research will likely drop back to a niche. Sodium-ion batteries are a major focus right now, with claims of being able to produce 160 Wh/kg batteries for $80/kWh now and $40 within a year or two, with the benefit of no conflict minerals, and in fact, using materials that are available at low cost throughout most of the world. There are iron-oxide flow batteries already in testing (Sacramento, CA, expects to connect theirs to the grid next year after they finish isolated testing) with absurdly low battery costs, though they require much more space. And there are other chemistries being looked at, too.

Battery technologies are where wind and solar were around 2015. There is much promise, and it could take off much, much faster than any of us expect. They could, like some building UPS systems, be the actual issuer of power in many places in a decade, with power plants feeding the batteries and the batteries feeding the grid, keeping a stable supply even as plants come on- and offline. And we may look back at the race for fusion and wonder why it seemed so important.

Heh. Only if you are interested. I'm not here to force my views on anyone.

I'm still here. :) Nothing to comment though.

They weren't virgins as much as we're led to believe. Pre-marital sex has always been a thing.