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Comment Re: Inner monologue (Score 1) 54

Motor neurons dying != brain control of motor neurons dies.

Anyway, you don't need a brain-computer interface for an ALS patient to work. I have a friend in Finland with ALS who works as a consultant on safety for a nuclear reactor startup (he was a nuclear safety engineer before becoming paralyzed). All it takes is an eye tracker.

The biggest problem is the typically short and unpredictable lives of ALS patients. He has lived abnormally long (I think something like 13 years now), but a large part of that is due to him thinking like a nuclear safety engineer (backup on backup on backup, training his nurses to have zero tolerance for error, etc), and still has a close call like once per year or so, and I regularly worry when I don't see him online in a while that something happened that killed him. A tube comes off a life support system. A nurse forgetting to reconnect something. A mucus plug in his airways. Etc. ALS patients' lives are fragile. He does CAD design for parts on his computer (it's too hard to do it with the mouse using the eye tracker, so he designs the shapes programmatically) and orders them 3d printed to correct any deficiencies he finds in his support systems.

ALS patients also have to constantly fight the medical system. Even in a place like Finland that will actually do long-term care for ALS patients (which is very expensive), it shows that it would be much more convenient for them if those danged ALS patients would choose to die (and there's often pressure put on them to do so). One of my friend's goals is to outlive a doctor who told him he would only live a year or two put a lot of effort into getting him to choose death. It was a battle to get long-term ventilator care. It was an even bigger battle to get to use a cough machine and to be able to control the settings on it; without regular, meaningful cough support, your lungs fill with mucus, and you'll probably eventually die of a mucus plug, pneumonia, or whatnot.

By contrast, ALS patients today can actually live a decent life using eye trackers. It's not like before when you had to tediously spell out things one character at a time to a helper holding an E-tran frame. Given that 1 in 500 people will get ALS at some point in their life, we really should be allocating a lot more money toward researching cures, even if purely from a cost-saving perspective.

(One final note: if anyone here starts getting peripheral weakness and worries its ALS: your instinct will be to exercise more. Do just the opposite. If your peripheral neurons are dying, the last thing they need is more work. ALS overwhelmingly strikes active people - one researcher I was reading noted that in her entire career, she's never met a couch potato who got ALS. Take it easy, see a doctor immediately, and if it is ALS, start preparing early, but know that you do not have to be forced to choose to die, so long as you can get care. You can live a decent, productive life if you choose to).

Comment Re:Justice delayed is justice denied (Score 1) 52

That timeframe is ridiculous. There's no reason why the courts can't operate more efficiently than they do other than that the lawyers and judges have no incentive to move things along.

Tell us you don't know how courts operate without telling us you don't know how courts operate.

The parties have to file the appropriate paperwork and there are specified timeframes when they have to be done. For example, the plaintiff files to start the case, the defendant generally has 20 - 30 days to respond. Then the plaintiff has additional days to respond to the defendant's response. And so on. This doesn't even take into consideration the discovery process. Just getting to the point to start a trial can take up to a year with all the back and forth filings, motions, and so on. In many cases, one or both parties will wait until the last moment to file just under the last possible filing date to drag things out.

Then the court has to schedule the case in between all the other cases they're dealing with. The parties may be ready to go to trial on April 1st, but if the first available slot in the court's docket isn't until June 1st, guess when the trial starts.

Comment Re: You know it kind of bugs me (Score 1) 117

Nobody is buying a vanilla android phone and using it as delivered to not use any Google services. If they want that they are at least reflashing, if not buying a phone with an alternate android on it... Which moto claims they will soon offer. Not holding my breath though

Comment Re:It's purchase time (Score 2, Insightful) 13

The U.S. Department of Justice can now set up a cutout and try to buy that data as part of a criminal investigation and sting operation.

Instead they will buy that data as part of an investigation in to who's getting abortions. You forgot who's running this country, they're not interested in catching criminals. That's difficult and expensive compared to declaring victory.

Comment He's always been a piece of shit and always will b (Score 0, Troll) 80

Artificial Intelligence will lead to labour shortages, not the replacement of humans, [...] One goal of space exploration is to move polluting industries off Earth, said Bezos, whose Blue Origin aims to compete with trillionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX in rockets.

Space exploration, which is *checks notes* much better done by automated systems less fragile than us meatbags. Space manufacturing, same. So he waves around an irrelevant distraction and we're supposed to suck on it? We're not that fucking stupid, Temu Lex Luther.

Comment Re: You know it kind of bugs me (Score 1) 117

It may be that you define their pre-installed apps as not crapware, but that's a judgement call, not a statement of technical fact.

Oh no! You can't remove... *checks* the app for moto actions, and an app for notifications!

What I'm talking about is bundled apps like Faceboot. They can be removed.

You don't even buy a Moto phone unless you want Moto actions, so yeah it's a judgement call, but if you already made the call to buy Moto, then you've already made the other call as well.

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