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Comment 1) not news, 2) better way to shut things down (Score 3, Interesting) 36

1) This isn't news. The "recent" announcement was posted a year ago. No new links have been added since 2018.

2) A better transition would be to make the forwarding non-automatic for a period of time. Keeping a non-auto-forwarding, read-only (no new entries) link-forwarding service in place for a long time shouldn't be a burden for a company like Google.

As a courtesy, it would be nice to include an explaination/warning that the "short link" was set up in or before 2018 and that the destination link may or may not be what it was back then.

Comment Luckey's answer (Score 1) 230

Luckey is shooting for "turtles all the way down," or, as I put it, "doing it with nothing that is imported at any stage of manufacturing" to the extent humanly possible. Or, in the words of the Federal Trade Commission quoted in the article:

"For a product to be called Made in USA, or claimed to be of domestic origin without qualifications or limits on the claim, the product must be 'all or virtually all' made in the U.S. [which] means that the final assembly or processing of the product occurs in the United States, all significant processing that goes into the product occurs in the United States, and all or virtually all ingredients or components of the product are made and sourced in the United States. That is, the product should contain no - or negligible - foreign content."

Comment What does "made in America" really mean? (Score 2) 230

Does it mean "in name only," where everything except the final screw in the case is done overseas, then someone in America does the "final final assembly" by screwing in the final screw?

Does it mean what we normally thing of as "final assembly," where the circuit boards and non-electronic parts are made overseas, shipped to America, then put together in America?

Does it mean "one more level down," with an American factory soldering the components onto the circuit boards then doing the "final assembly"?

Does it mean making the major chips and maybe custom-formed plastic or metal parts domestically but using imported "commodity/jellybean" electronics, screws, and other similar parts? What counts as a "major chip?" What counts as a "commodity/jellybean part?"

Does it mean manufacturing every manufactured part domestically down to the most commodity screw, but using raw materials that may have come from overseas?

Does it mean using only domestic plastic, glass, and steel, but not caring if the manufacturers of the plastic, glass, and steel use imported feed-stocks (e.g. oil, sand, iron/iron ore, other industrical feed-stocks).

Does it mean doing it with nothing that is imported at any stage of manufacturing save the air, water, or energy that may have crossed a border before it entered the manufacturing process?

How you answer this question makes a difference in the cost of the final product and, likely, the premium the "Make American Manufacturing Great Again" crowd will say they will pay for the final product.

Comment Re:Hopefully (Score 2) 72

If you make it illegal to pay ransomware, what is the business model?

The business model becomes "wreck havoc on companies that are prohibited by law from paying up, to send a message to other countries to not pass such laws" followed by attacks on companies in those countries, accompanied by a "we've got a deal you can't refuse" ransom-payment offer.

Comment Trust and don't verify Re:peak hype (Score 1) 127

We are fully into "Trust, and don't even try to verify" territory at that point.

I've been trusting-and-not-verifying the output of my compilers for almost* my entire programming career.

Someday "AI" vibe-coding will get to that point. For some specific use cases, we may already be there.

* There were those times I suspected a compilier bug or was just curious how the complier implemented something, but both are very rare these days.

Comment But will it be real Coke? (Score 2) 1

Will it be "another product" or will it be "The Real Thing?"

The closest thing we have to "The Real Thing" these days is "Passover Coke" which is available only around Passover and only in certain stores. Look for the yellow cap and "cane sugar" in the ingredients list.

I'm not sure if "Passover Coke" is 100% identical to the pre-corn-syrup coke of the before-times, but it's close enough for me.

The biggest advantage of "Passover Coke" over "Mexican Coke" is the price: It costs the same as regular Coke in 2L plastic bottles. Mexican Coke comes in 0.5L glass bottles with a much-higher cost-per-half-liter.

Submission + - Engineers transform dental floss into needle-free vaccine (science.org)

sciencehabit writes: Flossing may be good for more than getting your dentist off your back—one day, it may also protect you from the flu. In an unorthodox approach to needle-free vaccines, researchers have developed a special kind of floss that can deliver proteins and inactive viruses to mice’s gumlines and trigger immune responses that protect against infectious disease, they report today in Nature Bioengineering.

For many years, scientists have tried to develop alternatives to delivering vaccines via syringes by turning to the moist areas in your mouth and nose where most viruses enter. But it’s tough to develop an effective vaccine that can be administered through those entry points because they have naturally tough defenses against foreign molecules.

To test this idea, researchers at Texas Tech University had to do something no scientist had done before: Try to floss a mouse. It was a “quite difficult” two-person job: One scientist gently pulled the mouse’s jaw down with the metal ring from a keychain while the other administered the floss.

During a test run, the team found that when researchers coated floss with a fluorescently labeled protein, 75% of the protein was successfully delivered to the mouse’s gums. And even 2 months after flossing, the mice had elevated levels of antibodies in their lungs, noses, feces, and spleens, suggesting a robust immune response to the protein.

Next, the engineers added an inactive flu virus—a common vaccine component—to the floss, which in theory could teach the mouse’s body to build up immunity to the flu. Over a 28-day period, the researchers flossed 50 mice with the coated floss every 2 weeks. Then, 4 weeks after the final dose, they infected those mice with the real flu virus. All the mice that were flossed three times survived, whereas all the unvaccinated mice died.

The flossed mice also had a more systemic immune response: Not only were flu antibodies present in their feces and saliva, but the mice had more T cells—the directors of the body’s immune response—in their lungs and spleens, as well as larger lymph nodes. What’s more, the team found flu antibodies in the mice’s bone marrow, signaling that their immune systems were “fully engaged” by the inactive flu virus. Overall, the immune response to the floss resembled the response to vaccines that are sprayed into the nose, such as FluMist.

To gauge whether the method could work in humans, the researchers asked 27 healthy volunteers to floss with dental picks coated with colored food dye. On average, roughly 60% of the dye was delivered to the participants’ gums. They then surveyed the participants on what they thought of the approach. Most said they were open to trying a floss-based vaccine and would prefer it to a shot.

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