Yeah this is nonsense, at least for opioid addiction. I've heard many "miracle cures" for it before; all of the treatments we have (apart from Ibogaine which I've not tried) involve substitution and taper, or meds to ease symptoms while your neurons "heal" (readjust to baseline).

There's no way a treatment can make your neurons go back to the pre-dependent state in 20 minutes at least not without this potentially having the capability to be really dangerous to the brain. They make it sound like this guy was full blown dependent, put on this helmet for 20 minutes, then walked out of there fine and dandy no withdrawals fully cured. Ultrasound especially what is it going to wiggle the neurons back the way they were?

And unless the guy was already full blown dopesick he will still have opioids in his system. Was this guy the only patient? None of it makes sense

Yes but one thing that has changed since then - Apple products are now more fashion accessories than anything else; that wasn't true for the general public back then.

People will pay $2000 for a handbag when a $50 handbag is available made of the exact same materials in the exact same factory - why? Because of that logo. Conspicuous consumption - the average human is dumb. Sometimes increasing the price of a luxury/sumptuous good can actually make it more attractive, again "you can show off what you got".

Most people I know who use Apple products do it for the logo alone (despite saying "muh usability", please, modern Apple interfaces are not intuitive and also I've noticed most Apple users barely know how to operate their own products, including teenagers) - and they'll pay an extra $1000 to have that logo.

So any other brand pricing themselves this high would be a disaster, but not for LV, Gucci, or Apple

In school I was issued $5 of printer credits for free each month, if I needed more I had to buy them; this meant you couldn't abuse the privileges by printing out 1000 copies of "CowboyNeal Sucks" over and over.
So you would think they could issue so many searches to the officers and any that go over could be flagged.
This would be an admin headache and cost money so I doubt it will go anywhere. Plus I've always been a proponent of "trust your employees" but it seems in this case that might be a little bit naive.

Because it shows intent - this is what the powers that be want for all of us. It was fun to joke about the UK, believing this was some kooky thing the UK government came up with all by itself. But the truth is the UK was a trial run for this increased surveillance; now they are happy with how it has gone they will roll this out in more Western countries. Utah and I hear Texas will be next; France has done something similar, Red states will start it off in the US but it will spread country wide before long.
Part of it being increased surveillance, the radical anti-porn lunatics can push their agenda, but ultimately I can see you needing a China style Digital ID - you must authenticate to your named account before being allowed Internet Access.

But the big joke is, even in China, people routinely bypass the Great Firewall to such an extent that the bigger barrier for Chinese browsing Western sites is actually the language barrier not the technical barrier. So our "betters" will want even more draconian Internet laws than even China has yet daring to bleat to us about "freedom" because I can buy 9mm ammunition in Walmart. (they fear us having uncensored Internet access more than they fear us having sidearms)

I remember posts on here, in the 90's and early 2000's, about why the Electric Car was impossible, because of the same energy density of gasoline vs batteries reasons as now. Plus a host of other issues, battery degradation, toxic NiCad materials, etc. None of those posters seemed to have conceived that the technology would improve over time and a few of these posters even argued that this energy density problem showed the laws of physics themselves proved a practical electric car is impossible to exist in our universe.

It's sad to see a site of so called tech geeks can be so utterly short sighted

I'm honestly surprised to see on Slashdot so many unscientific pearl-clutching opinions on here when it comes to "Think of the Children!".
People are really saying that seeing information; pixels on a screen, can somehow damage a child or adolescent's brain, yet somehow when they become over 18 this effect magically goes away?
Same with all the anti porn weirdos on here, claiming again these pixels can have a narcotic like effect on the brain (if this is true then watching TV must have the same effect. Such people you can tell have never taken a narcotic in their lives)

They have some weird social/personal issues perhaps a bad upbringing now they wish to push this onto other peoples lives.

The UK has banned social media now for under 16's. Now being a 40+ year old do I personally care that much? Not really. But the OP is correct in everything he says; a pocket computer with Internet access, I'd have loved having something like that aged 14 that is for sure.

That always got me about the supposed "innocent until proven guilty" line people love to trot out; when you can actually be locked up and punished with prison conditions sometimes based on little other than somebodies word, someone misreading a line in a database; etc.

You are then thrown in jail with all the punishments of a full on convict (a lot of cases conditions in jails are actually worse than in prison) - you wear the uniform, often your medical care is stopped, you eat only state trays, you wake up for count; you can be trapped inside this gladiator pit hoping you don't upset anyone and get a pounding; all because someone says you kind of looked like a guy they think they saw do something? You are defacto being punished before being found guilty.

Now sometimes a probable cause hearing might see you out in a couple of days but surely even a couple of days without your medicine, missing work etc is too much?
Of course the problem of - someone is suspected of a murder, evidence is good, but he hasn't had his trial yet - we can't just let them out until trial for them to flee beforehand. But isn't the case of the guy in this story (this happens thousands of times a year, this one is only notable due to the tech angle) a bit much? Was probable cause set way too easy to reach; or was the problem he didn't even get probable cause for an entire month?

Of course I realise nobody cares until it happens to them then all of a sudden it is an outrage!

Exactly. If you use Microsoft software you should expect all of the shenanigans they come up with. Obviously you must think them acceptable to continue using their software. My prime advice to users is - you cannot trust Microsoft software at all so maintain your data with that in mind.

I often sit and wiggle my mouse around in circles around things when I am bored waiting for a process to finish, or on the phone etc; does that make me the companies most productive employee?

As a sysadmin (yes nowadays, I also accept the term digital janitor, digital dogsbody, buttmonkey, handholder general) my mouse movements should show management next to nothing about how productive I am; uptime should be the marker.

I've had poor quality colleagues before try to fool management into thinking they are indespensible, why run a script and fix a problem site wide in 5 minutes before the workday begins, with nobody at all noticing and everyone thinking "that sysadmin, always sitting around doing nothing" when you can run around, fix it manually on each machine, and look the hero for the morning?

Good management should be able to spot this but we all know how rare that is, hence mouse movement strategies

The economics in the UK don't add up for me with no home charging. I can buy an ICE 1.2l second hand car for $5000 all the way down to $1500 if I needed to.
An EV costs at least $10,000 for a second hand one. Chargers near me for fast charge - 70p a KWH. So to charge a typical battery would be $60 vs $30 of fuel for the same range. Or even less range if I want to use the heater in the cold UK winter. The slower charge costs around 40p so is on price parity with gas, but I'd have to sit at a charging station for 5 hours every charge for that.
My workplace has no charging, and if it did - aren't you then beholden to that job for that perk?

For an EV to be realistic - prices at public chargers need to drop by a factor of 10. They need to be much more publically available e.g. lampost chargers (though I can't really see those working in practice when neighbours would fight over them and kids would unplug them). EV's themselves need to get cheap. I'd like a budget EV in the shape of the old 80's hatchbacks with some onboard solar panels but lets be real - they wouldn't sell because people have to buy massive SUV's to show off with instead.

Yeah, £2.5 Billion to be spent on consultants, inquiries, and management bonuses. I predict not a single MW of power will come from this.
Imagine if they spent that £2.5 Billion on a scheme for residential solar or on energy storage using technology we know works.
But it seems most western governments can't handle doing actual work, all they can do is throw massive amounts of money at companies to get very little back.

People round the world; in the workplace and more in their homes, will just be expected to use buggy software prone to crashing and messing up data; it will just be an accepted thing. The days of well made, easy to use, robust software will disappear. I wonder if we'll start seeing more things return to pen and paper as a result?

So people who don't have children or who can parent them responsibly (Device tracking on a smartphone is more than enough for any competent parent) - should be punished because some feckless parents can't parent properly? Oh Nos we all must be logged in and tracked, China style, incase some teenagers might see some boob?

This is all about tracking and censorship, nothing more. Our rulers have wanted to censor the Internet for a long time, but realized they haven't been able to do so without pushback. But now they have found the perfect excuse, their trial run in the UK worked - and now as predicted they will roll this out worldwide.

Get ready to have to be logged in with a verified ID to visit any website going forward. Hope it was worth it so your kid wouldn't go on the hub !

Pretty sure you have replied to a troll bot (someone has made a bot trained on RSilverguns posts and has let is loose on here for some reason, somebody is obviously not a fan of his left wing politics!). But Re: Nuclear - I am opposed to it in my county, the UK, for one reason - the UK Govt and our society in general it seems, has lost the ability to successfully manage large scale complicated projects. And with AI coming into the picture how do we know parts of a new plan haven't been hallicinated into existence, and the safety checkers being AI didn't spot it? Sounds a joke but with more and more insane stories (AI sentencing people to jail etc) it's not so funny any more

Any large scale complicated project requiring specialist knowledge, is almost guaranteed to double or triple its initial budget, run way behind schedule, and have all sorts of unforseen problems crop up as well. HS2, various government IT projects, I can see many instances of failure but not many if any successes.

Our govt will just tender out to the company that offers them the most incentives (corruption exists here in the UK, many of these failures you will find politicians friends and family serving on the board of these corporations) - they won't pick the most competent. Thus you will get a company that cares more for profit than safety or a good product. (Even in a non corrupt procurement this will likely be the case) BUT - even if they tried a fully state managed public sector approach - that too would likely degenerate into fiefdoms, mismanagement, politics.

A Solar or Wind Farm project is something that requires a lot less specialist knowledge, less rare overseas parts, you can do it at many different scales - distributed throughout a county at sub MW scale or multiple MW offshore, they are easy to install and maintain. With energy storage and equipment only getting cheaper (vs Nuclear which is likely to only get more expensive) - Fission is becoming like coal, a 20th century method that is now becoming obsolete. People mention "base load" but that'll disappear with better storage.

Plus to be a tiny bit on topic, with solar/wind, you are a lot less likely for some profit grubbing manager to decide - "I know, let's fire all of our nuclear monitoring technicians, and put an AI agent in charge instead! What could possibly go wrong!"

Like you said with the way our society is headed, can we even be trusted with the power of nuclear fission when some beancounter might well decide "hell a 10% chance of meltdown is worth the extra 20 mil - besides AI is the future everyone is doing it!" - and nobody in government will dare tell these people no?

In the UK at least, for a large swathe of ex mining towns, disability is basically a de facto UBI for a large amount of the population in the area. Areas like Merthyr Tydfil, which had a large mining industry which is now vanished.
You have something like 50% of the population who have been on disability for various things (mental health, something physical that is basically mild or made up) and have been this way since the 1980's - A lot of people who don't live in their middle class cuccoon "round here" will know a family where the grandfather lost their mining job and went on disability, the parents went on disability, and now their kids are on disability, and their kids now have children who are mid-way through school, getting that diagnosis, who probably won't ever see employment either.
This is something the UK govt is actually trying to fight against (the school to sickness pipeline they call it) but the UK govt isn't really what you might call competent...

Now these people are "unemployed" not necessarily "unemployable", now I don't want to call an entire group of people "low IQ" but if AI takes all of the lowest common denominator jobs, and humanoid robots come in to do shelf stacking and floor cleaning, I would move a lot of these people from "Unemployed" to "Unemployable". These are people some of whom can only operate a smartphone because of text to speech (via low IQ and failure of education). Dollar Ton is correct though that current LLM's are a joke and they won't be replacing much, but in the next 10 years, who knows.

A lot of people don't like how unfair the system is - if you can get "in the system" you can even get a vehicle provided by the state, with it often being a luxury brand (something the state again is now trying to reduce). A UBI would be a lot fairer and I bet if instead of a few families being on benefits like this everyone had a UBI, you'd see a lot more people doing part time work to top up instead of entire generations of families living on benefits. And it would help all those people who just won't get benefits too (if you're a single male, good luck. Another unfairness is people with genuine disability have to fight very hard too)

Problem is if you have a family who are used to getting free rent, a car provided at no cost, plus other paid benefits, and you replace all that with just the UBI everyone is getting which will be less, you will have problems. But that will be part of working out the system!