You said it. Itâ(TM)s a status symbol. Thatâ(TM)s why it will sell well.

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.

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.

Sounds like capitalism must suck if it canâ(TM)t beat communism.

Why the fuck would you embrace pain that you can easily avoid? Jesus.

Show us how you know essentially nothing about the Ford Pinto without telling us that you know essentially nothing about the Ford Pinto.

On the plus side, at least we still have enough readers on this site to have at least one person who meets that criteria. I guess that's something.

Social media addiction is a subset of screen addiction, and screen addiction is destroying Gen Alpha at an alarming pace. I have so far found zero specialists who can help with this. It's not just a matter of taking screens away, we have literally turned an entire generation into junkies who will lie and cheat to get their fix. The adolescent mind never stood a chance; male or female.

If Meta wants a nicer spot in hell they can at least help with the mess they have profited off of. Help train the next generation of rehab specialists and help people find help. We made big tobacco do it, we can make these monsters do it as well.

That is not a trivial feat in the least. You don't have to give your kids smart phones, you don't have to have a PC at home. You can try to send your kid to a school that deemphasizes technology. And yet your kid will still end up with a screen addiction because it is that consuming. Kids don't have a chance. What today's kids face today is so far beyond what any of us grew up with that there really is no comparison.

My youngest siblings grew up on a heavy diet of Barney and Friends and it drove me up the wall. At least there was only a certain time of the day that was available on broadcast TV. And my 8 bit NES was not portable in any reasonable meaning of the word. Those barriers are gone now and the programming targeting kids makes Barney look like Mr Science.

Uber and Lyft drivers almost certainly wouldn't count on this, as they - with very few exceptions - use GPS to navigate. A taxi is a completely different animal in that regard.

Yet you took the time to reply. You could have chosen to ignore it instead. Glad we can count on folks like you to continue to drive down the signal to noise ratio here.

Yes, I know my ID is also 7 digits long. I don't consider myself longtime, even having read and posted for over 20 years here.

Advertising has been on this site for over 20 years now. The only difference is which ads are here, but that's all automated as well. We see slightly fewer mail order bride ads now, which is a likely a good thing, but otherwise its nothing different. There's no reason for a human to screen them.

I say this often, but honestly when was the last time any new code was written here? Stuff breaks over time but it has been years since anything was added or updated. We all know that of course Unicode is over 20 years past its promised rollout (beating even Duke Nukem Forever in terms of development hell cycle), but really it seems unlikely that there are any software developers left working for this site. I'm not sure there are any full time employees at Slashdot at all anymore.

In other words you can put the complaint in front of more eyes but it won't find any more eyes that can do anything about it.