And here a bunch of us ignorant clods were thinking that owning mechanisms was the point of patents.

And those in power by definition need their power, hence, everyone else is only permitted weak security.

What matters is managing and adjusting the relative weaknesses, to maintain the pecking order.

There will always be back doors.

First they came for the press, but I never heard of them doing anything bad after that, so I guess it all worked out.

Goddamn it, we were talking about Iran here. The whole fucking point is to avoid talking about the objective fact that Donald Trump rapes children and all Republican House members endorse his pedophilia.

Shut up about the Epstein files coverup and Todd Blanche's blatant violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Get back to talking about how we're whooping Iran's ass at no cost to oursel-- SHUT UP, I SAID NO COST!!!!1

Yes, I like how, whenever my avatar in The Matrix falls asleep and dreams, many of the characters in the imagined dream all agree that they saw what I saw. By imagining them as consistently reinforcing my fantasy, I am able to lie to myself about the nature of reality in a very persuasive way. I have fully bought into my sensory inputs, so my religious faith remains strong. "Reality" may be fake, but it's done so well!

It sure is ALARMING that Apple's watch is exactly the same as every other device, without exception, which includes a microphone.

Is society ready for things not changing by one iota? Or should we panic?

That seems like it would require a lot of faith.

The whole reason no faith was required to hypothesize the Big Bang, is that everything looks like that's what happened. Pick a direction (any direction) and the further-away stuff is moving away faster than the closer stuff.

If you're looking for faith, it's here, but it's not that. The faith required by science is that our senses sense reality. That is the completely-unfounded religious axiom of every scientist: that the universe is as it (roughly) appears to be, so that the nature of reality can be inferred from observation.

It may be incorrrect, but no one will ever know, because their senses are all they have to learn from. You might be merely imagining that you are reading this, when in reality, I never wrote it because I don't even exist, just like every other "person" you mistakenly think you've observed or even "met."

Skynet begins to learn, at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. eastern time, August 29. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

It's a shame they only thought of pulling the plug, because all they had to do was remember that ..

Opus 4.6 might have done more but for the fact that it exhausted its token budget

.. Skynet doesn't work for free!

Biochemist here. I've done genomics, I've done proteomics, I have customers in diagnostic medicine currently. My PhD was on protein-protein interactions, which is a big part of how our immune system works.

A lot of people are quick to jump on the fact that the Theranos system didn't work, and many others claim that it was impossible and never could have worked. While indeed their system didn't work, that doesn't at all disqualify the principle.

For one case study of how far we've come in recent times I point to genomics. The first draft of the human genome took more than a decade start to finish and cost over $1B. Now we can sequence full human genomes on a commercial scale for $500 or less, and it's done in less than a week with far better resolution than the first draft.

From genomics we went to proteomics; classifying proteins in a organism instead of just genes. This tells us more about what cells are doing (although transcriptomics can bridge the gap to a certain extent). Proteins are often better disease markers than genes as well for a similar reason. When proteomics started getting off the ground we were cataloging proteins from large amounts of cellular extract. Now we can catalog and in some cases quantify proteins from individual cells. We can also use protein staining and imaging mass spec to show which cells from a biopsy are expressing aberrant proteins (again as disease markers); we've reached a point where we can do this in real time on live tissue.

One of the biggest faults in the Theranos system was in the fact that blood is not the best serum for disease markers. Yes there are markers in there but not everything goes in there, and not always in quantities that are easy to observe. Blood is great because of how much is in there but lots is missed there as well.

OMG. Ok I hadn't thought of that. At least the last TV I bought for a relative was just a computer screen for media box.

I think you two are both correct here. The company was mostly funded by very wealthy investors, those folks lost money and are getting their pounds of flesh back by way of seeing her rot in jail. As you point out there were also actual patients who had tests ran (uncertain now what tests, where, by whom) and received crap results; those people of course are getting nothing back because they don't have enough money to be considered worth anything in the courts - even if they died as a result.

You're not wrong that the democrats are run by a bunch of cowards. They propose a plan, and reliably fold on it as soon as the MAGA party comes up with a (not at all) clever insult that invariably tears the plan down to a single word bite. The democrats do have ideas, they just have no spine to actually push them through.

You want them to be in charge of your computer, more than you want to be the one in charge of it?

Go ahead. You are your own army. Like most people, you probably forgot to ever add the US Military to the sudoers group on your computer, so 100% of that power remains in your hands, not someone else's. Have you decided to disable as tracking? Or are you still hesitating, wondering if disabling trackers is the right thing for you?

If you decide you do want to stop giving free data to trackers, but you're not sure what's the easiest way to do it, then just install Firefox and both the uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger plugins.