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Comment Re:Easy to say for him (Score 3, Insightful) 93

Yes. This is a pretty straightforward "Guy demands that sellers of complimentary goods accept smaller margins in way that sounds like he cares about user experience".

It may be true that studios and theatres have fallen into a counterproductive trap: there's an obviously self defeating race to the bottom if theatres keep getting squeezed and responding by making the theatre experience worse which then reduces ticket sales and makes their fixed costs even less supportable so they make the experience yet worse; but the studios hold far more of the cards than the theatres do here.

Comment Re:It will never change (Score 1) 93

In an unhelpful sense we know that advertising works by how much is spent on it. What we do not know is whether advertisers justify their cost by influencing consumer behavior as they allege they do; or whether they are exceptionally effective at targeting the people who set ad budgets. Or potentially a mix of the two. Someone is definitely having their behavior influenced in a big way though.

Comment Seems plausible. (Score 2) 91

Given how tightly a lot of meetings are really wrapped up in power (all the ones that could have been an email but are about who you an force to show up and all the ones that could have been an email but are about cutting someone out of the loop in a visible way) it tracks that the desire to be in your meeting while skipping your meeting would come from the top; probably accompanied by some questionable theories about how your management is so valuable that even a mechanized distillation of it will better the minions exposed to it.

Comment Re:How is this possible? (Score 5, Informative) 70

According to the writeup; there are two methods: it is possible for an extension to mark some parts of itself as 'web accessible'; and linkedin has assembled at least one characteristic file for 6,1000-odd extension IDs and attempts to fetch it to confirm/deny the extension's presence.

The other is based on the fact that the whole point of many extensions is to modify the site in some way; but the site normally has largely unfettered access to inspect itself, so they have theirs set up to walk the entire DOM looking for any references to "chrome-extension://" and snagging the IDs if found.

Not exactly a 'declare installed extensions'; but it looks like, out of some combination of supporting the use cases where an extension and page actively interact by design and either not wanting the possibility or not wanting the complexity of trying to enable 'invisible' edits(presumably some sort of 'shadow' DOM mechanism where as far as the site and everything delivered with it knows only its unedited DOM and resources exist; but the one the user sees is an extension-modified copy of that one, which sounds like it could get messy), inferential attacks are fairly easy and powerful.

Comment Living where? (Score 1, Interesting) 197

Where exactly does supporting 3 people on $133k/year count as 'upper middle class'? You could be doing a lot worse, and many are; but that's not just tons of money in a HCOL area; and that's also lower than twice the median salary for full time employees with bachelor's degrees; so you are calling either a single income household doing a bit better than median or a dual income one doing worse 'upper middle class'; which seems pretty ambitious.

Comment Re:Honey, wake up, new hellscape just dropped (Score 1) 87

Realistically, the status quo has arguably outrun the dystopia there. Your phone already does far more than anything you could get into the power envelope of a bracelet or embedded chip implant, and if for some reason you've raised enough eyebrows that you'd be hauled in for an RFID read DNA is a pretty indelible identifier.

It's not 100% ironclad; but penetration is broad enough that you've basically got the majority carrying highly fingerprintable RF beacons and the minority standing out for their relative radio silence and attempts to deal in cash. Expensive and uncomfortable ankle trackers are good business and feel nice and punitive, just to remind the wrong sort of people we aren't happy with them; but you don't really need to impose a surveillance society when it will build itself for you.

Comment Re:Not a 486 thing, but... (Score 1) 132

My (admittedly anecdotal from the totally unscientific sample of random stuff I've had reason to work on) impression is that some 'shared' BMC ports had oddities related to network controller sideband interface speeds, since NC-SI is what the BMC is depending on if the NIC is on someone else's PCIe root. It's not like the BMC actually needs a faster link for much(normal management traffic probably doesn't fill 10mb and mounting virtual media may be literally once-in-a-lifetime) so the actual speed of the NC-SI interface was not a burning priority; but it left things up to the NIC whether it would support remaining at gigabit speeds and just quietly slipping the trickle of shared traffic in(presumably slightly more complex; but seems to be what the newer ones do) or if it would knock the link rate down visibly to simplify the case.

You see little echoes of similar behavior elsewhere. The intel desktop and laptop NICs that support 'vPRO' will be GB or 2.5GB when the system is on; but quietly drop back to 10 or 10/100 when it is off and it's just the management engine listening. Some enterprise vendor USB docks do similar things; looks like a normal USB NIC when the OS is up; but drops to a lower speed and operates quietly over, I think, some sort of oddball vendor-defined messages if one of their systems is plugged in but off.

Comment Why all at once? (Score 2) 48

I assume that, as an exercise, getting 5 simultaneous introductions working makes for a better paper; but is there a reason why you would want that in practice? Especially if there is any wobble in the ratios either randomly, across generations, or in the presence of certain environmental conditions that tweak the plant's metabolism one way or another that sounds like it would be a real pain in the ass to have to re-balance (and, if different patients are deemed to need different combinations even a perfectly stable plant is going to need re-balancing of the outputs) vs. very specifically going for a specific target output per-plant(or e. coli or yeast or whatever is easiest to bioreactor) and then just mixing to taste after purification. Is there some advantage I'm not seeing?

I realize that there are cases where some plant-sourced pharmacological effect looks like it is actually driven not by the identified 'active ingredient'; but by dozens or hundreds of assorted things, and in that case you just have to live with the complexity if you get better results with that than with purified isolates; but if you are deliberately engineering for very specific outputs why a mix of 5?

Comment Re:Brain transplant? (Score 2) 163

Immunology, presumably.

The only donor bodies that aren't going to treat the transplant as an act of war are clones or heavily immunosuppressed; and it's probably more plausible to assume that you'll be able to clone a human like a sheep than assume that you'll be making some fundamental breakthroughs in immunology to deal more elegantly with unmatched hosts.

Comment To what end? (Score 1) 163

I can see the utility of having spare organs in certain emergencies; but how much life extension would you actually get even if the sort of neurosurgery involved in removing a brain and reattaching it to a new host's spinal cord were viable? Is the theory that the assorted ghastly flavors of neurodegeneration are actually to be blamed on older organs and everything will be fine; or is this just a very expensive way to ensure that you skip the various ways peripheral organs can kill you and are assured to be the spryest patient in the dementia ward?

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