Testing can be done under conditions that make cheating impractically hard. It just takes a little effort on the part of those giving the tests.

What's the alternative? Completely subjective grades that are assigned to the students by their teachers?

(That was meant to be rhetorical, since that is obviously even more worthless).

Given the economic opportunities that grades open up, I don't think it is fair to say "they are only cheating themselves." They are cheating others out of work and/or scholarship money, too.

They're calling it Focused Ultra Sound which means using an MRI to guide stimulation of millimeter-scale areas of the brain to disrupt electrical activity there.

So many ads and press releases on a web search but I did find this bibliography:

https://www.zotero.org/groups/...

It's weird how these hospitals don't link papers in the news releases as is common in the West.

Curiously there was an article yesterday about Ultrasound brain imaging so it might be possible to combine the two modalities. This seems like an "obvious to a practitioner" approach though noise cancelation will be needed.

https://alephneuro.com/blog/ul...

We might actually be capable of realizing that headband where you walk into Sick Bay and tell Dr. Crusher you have Holodeck addiction and she slaps it on your forehead for twenty minutes and tells you to lay down and then come back if it recurs.

If you hear "if you can't afford a Macbook Neo you're too poor to be an Apple customer," don't be surprised.

I definitely heard that related to iMessage a decade ago. The 666 304's had some thing about bubble colors.

Microsoft should be sued into oblivion for the amount of e-waste it created from perfectly good machines that were not compatible with its latest OS, after it ended official support for its prior OS.

I'm not going to run it but people have said the kernel handles realtime needs much better than 10.

I do wonder how much of the bloatware needs to be disabled to actually realize that, though.

> Emirates operates these with over 500 passengers

Well they did until the value proposition of Dubai and Abu Dhabi suddenly came into question with three days' food and no way to restock and no sewer system, relying on petroleum-powered sewage trucks to keep people alive.

It sure seems 'convenient' that they suddenly have an insurable loss on very expensive and unprofitable airframes at just the right time.

Let's see what kind of cars the regulators purchase in a few months, or maybe it's just a coincidence.

Lutnik is an Epstein Associate.

AI Surveillance Police State is his ultimate goal.

Americans are getting 'too uppity' (sovereign).

I'm familiar with the backup power design of some of the cell towers where I live.

Let's just say I'm also learning how to build solar Meshcore repeaters and placing them on appropriate hilltops where I can.

You can Royal Decree anything but don't bet your life on it.

Also nobody likes to mention that the big Spanish overvolt grid crash coincided with the arrival of a very large CME. We mustn't rile the natives.

So, why DO people buy Apple? They know it is more expensive. Clearly, they believe they are getting something that is worth that price.

Apple goes to great efforts to protect user privacy. Some of what they do might just be promises and/or lies, but that is still better than the alternatives available, that openly spy on everything they can and sell it to whoever wants to buy it. For people who have the money to afford Apple products, it's worth it.

Of course there are free open source solutions that protect privacy, but they require greater tech knowledge to use and have more compatibility issues (there are always a group of Linux users that get all bent out of shape when someone says this. Too bad. I use Linux a lot and I am very familiar with the issues that crop up that the Linux community likes to pretend don't crop up).

There's also the matter of user experience. When I use windows 11, I fell pushed-around and limited. When I use MacOS, I feel obeyed and empowered. Your mileage may vary, but this was enough for me to buy Apple.

I hate windows enough that my gaming rig runs Linux. I love Apple enough that my "everything serious" machine runs MacOS. Even with these price hikes, I will still go Apple over Windows any day of the week, should I need another machine for any purpose other than gaming.

Who made the call to fire these guys?

Were they Americans who did the firing? Were they Americans who got fired?

It's important to understand the sociology potentially putting huge American enterprises risk

And why would we believe the claim that a 1-year reliability rating had anything to do with this?

Anybody who vaguely understands automotive manufacturing knows that cars that were sold over one year ago were designed several years ago and tooling takes months to years for a new model.

This article seems designed to obfuscate rather than clarify.

This makes me feel like buying a BYD would be less risky.

That is largely true.

But in the case of games, I'm not on your property. And we already discussed servers - I might not even be on your servers.

It might help to clearly separate these two cases: Pure online games with servers hosted exclusively by the game publisher, and the 90% of other games (single player or multiplayer with player-operated servers).

And there we have it, the usual ad hominem of people who have run out of actual arguments. Signaling the end of the discussion, because why the fuck should I bother talking to someone who says such shit?

Goodbye.

No, it's not. Nice of you to cut away the part that already said so. It is HIGHLY relevant if something you purchased becomes unusable due to an action of the seller or not.

If you are new to this planet, this might be news to you, but otherwise: Yes, that is how commercial transactions work. You pay for something, you get to use it.

No, but it absolutely DOES give me not just the permission but the RIGHT to use the thing I paid for for its intended purpose and for any other purpose I see fit. First sale doctrine and so on.

That is correct. But the store could either sell the same game again (in your case where the buyer personally was banned for whatever) or demand a refund from the manufacturer as is common practice when defective goods are returned. Really, there's not much to figure out, this is already a solved problem.

Actually, that is exactly what it means.

Merriam-Webbster: (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/buy)

"to acquire possession, ownership, or rights to the use or services of by payment especially of money : purchase"

Seriously, why are you trying to defend an indefensible position ?

I suppose the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics gives us a reason to posit something similar to "alternate realities." Published physicists who have studied the evidence in much greater depth than I have, and understand the math much better than I do, take this seriously. Were it not for them, I would dismiss it as junk science.

But even if we posit many worlds, the theory doesn't predict any means by which taking drugs would cause one to see things that reside in these completely decohered branches, let alone ones that decohered so long ago that evolution took a completely different path, producing tiny people.

I also suspect that humans bodies that are as small as rats wouldn't actually function properly, as the design would produce mechanical failures given normal human proportions. The brain wouldn't be able to contain nearly as many neurons either, meaning that these "people" would not be capable of speech or abstract thought (or really much more than rats or similar-sized animals are capable of).

The idea continues to be wildly implausible, even under the many-worlds hypothesis.

It's not "every" human brain. It's just "most" human brains.

Be that as it may, you might consider asking Gemini such a question. Of course, answers from AI aren't guaranteed to be accurate, but answers from random posters on Slashdot come with even less of a guarantee.

But here, let me save you the effort by posting Gemini's reply:

While researchers are still isolating the exact chemical compound inside Lanmaoa asiatica—which is unique and unrelated to classical psilocybin "magic mushrooms"—neuroscience and psychiatry offer a fascinating framework for why a chemical can cause such a highly specific, repeatable flaw in human perception.

1. The Disruption of "Size Constancy"
To understand why the people are tiny, we look at a neurological concept called size constancy. Your brain continuously performs complex mathematics to ensure that when a friend walks away from you, you perceive them as moving further away, rather than physically shrinking—even though the actual image hitting your retina is getting smaller. This relies on a highly calibrated feedback loop between the primary visual cortex (V1), which processes raw shapes, and the visual association cortices, which interpret depth, distance, and context. When a toxin disrupts this communication channel, it causes a specific sensory distortion called micropsia. If the brain tries to project an object or a memory into the visual field while the size-constancy machinery is offline, the object defaults to a drastically scaled-down size (often measured at exactly 1 to 2 centimeters by patients).

2. The Brain's "Pareidolia" and Object-Recognition Hardware
Why does the brain specifically manufacture human figures instead of just shrinking the existing room? Human brains possess hyper-specialized, dedicated neural architecture designed to recognize faces and bodies, primarily located in the fusiform face area (FFA) and the extrastriate body area (EBA). This hardware is so sensitive that it causes pareidolia—making us see faces in electrical outlets or burnt toast. When a psychoactive compound overstimulates or uncouples these specific regions, the visual system begins firing "spontaneously." Because these circuits are hardwired exclusively to process human attributes, the hallucination cannot be an abstract geometric pattern. The brain is forced to piece together the chaotic neural static using its strongest, most deeply ingrained template: the human form.

3. The "Release Phenomenon" (Deafferentation)
Lilliputian hallucinations are not exclusive to mushrooms; they are also the hallmark of Charles Bonnet Syndrome (where people losing their eyesight see tiny people) and certain stages of Parkinson’s disease. The leading neurological theory for both is the release phenomenon: Under normal conditions, a steady stream of real-world data from your eyes acts as an "inhibitory" brake, keeping your visual association cortices from running wild. If a toxin suddenly blocks or alters this sensory input, the brain's internal dream-generation software is "released" from its brakes. Left to its own devices, the visual cortex starts pulling random information from memory and projecting it into the physical room. Because the interactive physics engine of the brain is still online, 97% of these hallucinations interact realistically with the environment—marching across actual tables or ducking under tablecloths.

The Neuro-Chemical Frontier: Classical psychedelics like psilocybin primarily bind to serotonin $5\text{-HT}_{2\text{A}}$ receptors, causing geometric distortions and emotional shifts. Because Lanmaoa asiatica causes a clinical syndrome completely distinct from a typical psilocybin trip, scientists believe its active compound targets entirely different pathways—likely involving acetylcholine or gabaergic networks, which directly control attention, reality-monitoring, and visual gating.