The prequels had many flaws, to put it mildly, but being focus grouped to death prior to production was not one of them. For better or worse, Lucas had a very specific vision, and nobody was able to challenge him on it.

My partner and I recently did a rewatch of all nine movies, the first time I'd seen Episode IX, and my first re-watch of the prequels since the 00s. The prequels are still terrible, with countless cringeworthy moments (Anakin: I killed them all, even the children | Padme: I can fix him) but I found myself playing with my phone a lot less during them than I did during the Disney trilogy. *shrug*

It was fun to see the cast. The ship? Meh. We called the "big reveal" minutes before it happened without any spoilers. The writing was that obvious. I say this as someone who LOVED the Enterprise-D -- still my favorite ship -- that scene had zero emotional weight for us because it was such an obvious/desperate member-berry. Then to see that ship, which moved like, well, a ship (first few seconds of the clip), fly like an F-16 because some idiot thought Star Trek needed to crib from Return of the Jedi. Sigh.

I'll give New Trek props for production values, the bridge looked AMAZING, but the priorities of the production team are all wrong. All you need to know, they spent three months and a small fortune to recreate the set, then had less than two days to complete the shoot before tearing it back down. New Trek is all form and no substance. Here's a shiny thing to distract you from the horrible writing, just turn your brain off and keep giving our streaming service your money.

The sole saving grace to S3 was seeing the cast back together. The conference room scene on the Titan and the poker game at the end. That's it. The story was throughly forgettable. None of the characters (except perhaps Worf) were written correctly. It copied all the bad tropes -- character deaths for shock value, wanton violence, pointless cliffhangers immediately resolved, and mystery box writing -- that made Discovery all but unwatchable. You ultimately could have told the same overarching story (Changelings and Borg team up to take revenge; the old crew unites to stop them) with a solid movie rather than a ten hour faux-miniseries. Image this same team making Wrath of Khan. It'd be ten hours long, you wouldn't met Khan until Hour 8.5, then it'd be neatly wrapped up in 45 minutes.

Anonymity is the real problem with social media/the internet, see the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. It's hardly unique to the Internet. Road rage has been around since the invention of the car and the faux-anonymity of the motor vehicle leads to behaviors that would never happen in a face to face setting.

And at its worst it prices residents out of their own city while destroying the local hospitality industry. For every "common person with an unused spare room showing tourists cool local things" there are at least ten faceless investment firms treating them as de-facto hotel rooms you get the honor of cleaning yourself.

Seriously, AirBnB is your shining example of why we shouldn't view tech bros with extreme skepticism?

Want to talk about the rest of the gig economy which only exists by evading decades of hard won labor rights/regulations?

... well, there won't be any profit here for slashdot. Profitability fell to - or below - zero a long time ago and won't likely ever return. Eventually someone will shut out the lights for the last time.

But of course since Reddit fills in for slashdot for a lot of tech people, here on slashdot we must celebrate when Reddit falters. Because of course bad news for the competition can only be good news for this site, right?

Yes I know I'll be down modded into oblivion on this one, if anyone with mod points is even reading this thread to look for something like this. Go ahead, I can take it. Don't bother trying to convince anyone that I'm somehow not right on this though.

But the last time I was on the job market I encountered quite a few job postings on other sites - including directly from the sites of employers who were posting them - that the companies already had candidates lined up for. There are some companies who have policies that dictate they must openly post a job, even when they have someone lined up for it. It appears that is as far as those policies tend to go though, as they are free to ignore every single one of those applications and leave the applicants in limbo for as long as they'd like.

I recall one company who posted well over a dozen positions over 2 years that I was very well qualified for (I was not unemployed for more than a few months of those 2 years; I was applying earlier when I was less satisfied with the position I held elsewhere at the time) that had a convenient page that allowed me to track how many positions I had applied for, and what happened with them. Unsurprisingly not one of them ever progressed to anything other than "closed".

In a fun turn of events I have been on their campus multiple times as a contractor for my current employer. Now that company is paying far more for me than they would have if they had hired me.

In Soviet Russia, correlation causes YOU!

Except that they aren't doing full genome sequencing (which is vastly more complicated and vastly more expensive). They are sequencing only specific regions of the genome. It would be similar to comparing the Bible to the Koran based on how many times they use the word "Thou". In the end you'll know they're both books and they're different but you won't know the chapter counts or the year of publication.

Not necessarily, and for more than one reason.

• One, it's a different test (genotyping vs karyotyping)
• Two, chromosomes aren't all that stable against shipping and storage (and hence could be degraded by the time they arrive)

That doesn't apply here though. Sequencing technologies are not biased towards or against particular chromosomes, and the chromosomes are not sorted out before sequencing. The whole sample goes in and primers bind to anything they have affinity to. Sequencing then proceeds regardless of whether it starts on chromosome 4, 16, 21, or some other chromosome entirely - as long as the start and end are on the same chromosome. And if you're looking at variable regions within genes, the likelihood of those starting and ending on the same chromosome is exceptionally high.

CBC Marketplace did such a test nearly a year ago... and yes, they even submitted human DNA as well. Quite a few of the tested companies did detect it as "non dog DNA".

Which may just mean that the other company had included some additional tests to look for "non dog DNA", and this company did not. That's a smart control that this company should have thought of, although depending on the scenario it might only tell you about contamination, not complete substitution.

I have quite a bit of experience in molecular biology, including DNA sequencing. In undergrad I was part of a consortium that sequenced ESTs from a couple different species of trees. After grad school I was part of a multi-discipline multi-omics team that handled DNA and protein sequencing data.

I don't work for any of these dog sequencing company, but I know more about Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) than most people. I've seen more DNA sequencing formats and done more DNA assembly than most people as well. There are only so many ways they can do this type of DNA work at a scale that makes it possible for them to turn a profit at the prices they charge. If they had some completely novel new DNA sequencing technology they'd be selling it to research labs and hospitals, not selling it on the cheap for people to identify the parentage of their pets.

It's pretty easy to tell a human from a dog by a karyotype. It's actually quite a bit more difficult by DNA sequencing, especially the kind of rapid sequencing that is used for this kind of work.

A good analogy are the old statements that "humans are 99% chimp", and similarly "humans are 90% banana". The genetic similarities between very different species are profound. To tell one breed of dog from another - where of course the chromosomes are the same - you need to look at certain highly variable regions of the genome. The problem though is that those same highly variable regions exist in our genome.

So what could they do differently? Well they could add a few more control reactions to their sequencing to try to rule out errant DNA. They were operating under the assumption that people were sending in only dog DNA, and now we see what happens when something else goes in. The real challenge though is what to do if you get a sample that has some of each - which could easily happen if a dog owner with a dirty house collects a dog sample in a cavalier manner and ends up sending in some of their DNA along with the DNA of their dog. It appears the company built their method without a terrible amount of concern for that either.

The EU does capitalism better than the US does. What we have in the US is not capitalism. The correct term is crony capitalism.

Gulfstream.

You didn't think they flew commercial with the dirty plebs, did you?

Those products all paid licensing fees to whomever owns the underlying IP. You can find examples where the IP owner decides to be a dick. I'll call out everyone's least favorite, EA, and point out that you can't legally get the SNES version of Sim City on modern hardware via any sales channel that I'm aware of. Of course, there are "gray" options to play it, but you won't find it in the Wii store and there's no (legal) packaged emulator for it on Amazon.

Meme: After years of working in tech the only "smart" device in my house is an inkjet printer. I keep a gun next to it in case it makes a sound I don't recognize.