The EU had the same question when limiting credit card processing fees. They simply looked at what the costs were and how much profits those companies were reporting from that part of the business.

You can still make it much harder for them. Physically disabled the write pin on the UEFI flash memory chip, for example. Some vendors let you require a password to upgrade the firmware.

None of it is undefeatable, but you have to consider who you adversary is. If it's just the cops and their IT people, it probably won't take much to thwart them.

There are also more passive measures like making sure you have decent CCTV coverage, so they can't do easily sneak in.

We had a similar thing in the UK with the BBC. Conservatives decided that it wasn't helping them win, so destroyed it. The formerly excellent news service, that held politicians to account and kept the other news services at least a little bit honest, was gutted.

The country is far worse off for it, in ways that cannot easily, if ever, be undone.

Trump and his ilk are doing the same thing in the US.

Perhaps she can donate a portion of that money to an Epstein survivor's fund. It would be a kind gesture.

Seriously, the idea that we know all the practically important physics there is is the kind of thing only somebody who's never done science or engineering would believe.

You seem to be confusing "wanting to get rid of communists" with "wanting their countries to be poor and dangerous".

Industrial R&D is important, but it is in a distrant third place with respect to importance to US scientific leadership after (1) Universities operating with federal grants and (2) Federal research institutions.

It's hard to convince politicians with a zero sum mentality that the kind of public research that benefits humanity also benefits US competitiveness. The mindset shows in launching a new citizenship program for anyone who pays a million bucks while at the same time discouraging foreign graduate students from attending universtiy in the US or even continuing their university careers here. On average each talented graduate student admitted to the US to attend and elite university does way more than someone who could just buy their way in.

That hasn't been true for the last 15 years.

There isn't a lot of effort going into researching DEI, but people who are "not white" are clearly getting discriminated against by the Trump administration, so yea, they would rather go somewhere their work will be appreciated, rather than being treated as if they are less skilled or able to do things just because of their sex, gender, or whatever. Picking people just because they are white and look good on camera is just as much DEI as anything else, because they are picked for their race, even when grossly incompetent.

Commercial applications vs. SCIENCE. R&D is what results in the breakthroughs that end up advancing things. The stuff where "yea, put a lab in space for research that might be dangerous to the planet" isn't necessarily going to be profitable, but it sure will be safer during the scientific discovery phase. SpaceX isn't going to build a pure science station, even if it will be used to get things into orbit.

Now who can argue with that? - I think we're all indebted to Gabby Johnson for clearly stating what needed to be said. - I'm particularly glad that these lovely children were here today to hear that speech. - Not only was it authentic frontier gibberish, it expressed a courage little seen in this day and age!

US Solicitor General John Sauer disagrees.

In the oral arguments for Trump v Slaughter, on Monday, Sauer said this isn't true when Justice Kagan pushed him on it. She said that the Founders clearly intended to have a separation of powers, to which he basically said "Yeah, but with the caveat that they created the 'unitary executive'", by which he seemed to mean that they intended the president to be able to do pretty much anything.

Kagan responded with a nuanced argument about how we have long allowed Congress to delegate limited legislative and judicial functions to the executive branch in the way we allow Congress to delegate the power to create and evaluate federal rules to executive-branch agencies, but that that strategy rests on a "deal" that both limits the scope of said rulemaking and evaluative functions and isolates them to the designated agency. She said that breaking that isolation by allowing the president detailed control over those functions abrogated and invalidated the deal, unconstitutionally concentrating power in ways that were clearly not intended by the Founders.

Sauer disagreed. I'll stop describing the discussion here and invite you to listen to it. The discussion is both fascinating and very accessible, and the linked clip is less than seven minutes long.

The court seems poised to take Sauer's view, which I think is clearly wrong. If they do, it's going to come back and bite conservatives hard when we get an active liberal president, as we inevitably will someday if the Trump administration fails to end democracy in the US.

What's very sad is that we already went through all of this and learned these lessons 150 years ago. After 100 years of experience with a thoroughly-politicized executive branch, we passed the Pentleton Civil Service Reform act in 1883 specifically to insulate most civil servants from presidential interference. Various other laws have subsequently been passed to create protections for federal workers and to establish high-level positions that are explicitly protected from the president. SCOTUS seems bent on overturning all of that and returning us to the pre-Pendleton era.

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and it's looking we're gonna repeat a lot of bad history before we re-learn those 19th-century lessons.

When conservatives, or pseudo-conservatives are continually against education, and research because "they don't like government spending", this is what happens. I understand being against corruption and poor uses of money, but because the majority of people are NOT educated with a focus in science, these people who are against investing in science cause countries to fall behind. You even see it with what has been going on with the space programs from different countries, the ones where conservatives have shut down most of the budget for space programs are the ones who keep falling behind in space. R&D for advanced physics research is the same thing, these conservatives keep looking for an immediate return on the investments, when it is really the applications of what government research comes up with that make the money.

The Internet in large part, is based on what government came up with, but these conservatives would have shut down the R&D back in the 1970s.

If you don't like attacks, then you must hate Donald Trump, who continually attacks others with his nasty little nicknames he comes up with and shows the worst of humanity at every chance he gets.

If it is criminal activity, I expect that Donald Trump will push for a pardon. Drug dealers with money get pardoned for example.