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Comment Living where? (Score 1, Interesting) 132

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) 77

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) 115

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 1) 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) 162

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) 162

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?

Comment Re:Good! (Score 1) 46

Mostly just in the bulk, low barriers to entry, and pervasiveness(like a lot of things social media). The case of actors actually goes back a long way; state laws regarding compensation of child actors were spurred by the case of one who was popular in the 1920s and litigated with his parents over where the money wasn't in 1939. That case doesn't provide for takedowns; but it's also the case that filmmakers are normally looking for children to play characters; rather than to do 'candid' intense documentaries of them at home; so the degree of public exposure of private life is presumably deemed to be less; with the main issue being children who were...definitely...getting a solid education while on stage finding that all the money was gone when it became their problem.

Child-blogging, by contrast, seems to reward verisimilitude (if not necessarily truth) and invasiveness, relatively pervasive in-home mining for 'content', so presumably seems better served by removal-focused options; though there has definitely been talk about covering the economic angle in line with child actors.

I don't even know what the deal is with child beauty pageants, or how something you'd assume is a salacious bit of slander about what pedophile cabals are totally doing, somewhere, is actually a thing a slice of parents are into, way, way, into. Apparently that's a third rail to someone, though, as the only jurisdiction I'm aware of with significant restrictions on them is France.

Comment Re:The Horse is Already Gone (Score 1) 68

Unless quantum computing becomes cheap and comparatively widely available quite quickly after becoming viable passwords seem like they'll be a manageable problem. Nobody likes rotating them; but it's merely tedious to do and the passwords themselves are of zero interest unless they are still being accepted. If it does go from 'not possible' to 'so cheap we can just go through through in bulk' overnight that could ruin some people's days; but if there's any interval of 'nope, the fancy physics machine in the dilution refrigerator is currently booked by someone with a nation state intelligence budget' you can just rotate older credentials.

Now, if you were hoping that encryption was going to save any secrets that are interesting in and of themselves that got out in encrypted form; then you have a problem. Those can't be readily changed and will just be waiting.

Comment Re:ed-tech (Score 1) 94

Plus the whole 'fucking dystopian' angle. On the one hand we've got people bitching about 'civilizational decline'; but we want 'robot philosophers' teaching children? I'm not against the occasional scantronned multiple choice test; but outsourcing philosophy to save on those oh-so-expensive adjuncts seems like the sort of thing you only do to children being groomed for mindless servitude or because you've entirely given up on humanity as anything but an ingredient in pump and dump schemes.

Comment Re: Next time... (Score 1) 118

I didn't say they don't need calibration.

I said they don't need calibration all the time.

Failure to connect to the cloud should not result in immediate device failure. Manual calibration steps should be possible. Or at least a message "cloud service unavailable, device will stop working in 48h" or similar.

I don't understand why people are willing to bootlick the company in this case. Cloud connected everything is cancer.

Comment Re:Next time... (Score 1) 118

Sure, in this case we can say "fuck you" to drunk drivers and the don't deserve sympathy, but this everything must be cloud connected trend is going to fuck us all eventually.

The problem is that the above sentence requires a person to be able to hold two thoughts in their head at the same time, which appears to be above almost everyone commenting in this thread.

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