... how do people pirate these days? Is Pirate Bay still a thing? Usenet?

Already +5 so I can't mod you up any further but this is art

... what actual open source maintainers think about this.

  So far they've not been very positive about AI generated reports, like this scathing post from the curl maintainer: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdaniel.haxx.se%2Fblog%2F20...

Is it possible that some photons move as waves and others as particles? Are there just... different types of photons?

Feige "doesn't buy" that "superhero fatigue" is "real." However he does admit that 102 hours of Marvel content in six years was "too much" and that "the expansion[of Marvel content]...is certainly what devalued" the content. So which is it? Methinks he fears the "superhero fatigue" meme has become too sticky for his liking (and also for his checkbook,) so he's gonna handwave it away anyway even though he can't escape from the facts.

In fact, it is UNETHICAL to use a placebo control in any clinical trial of an investigational product for which the existing standard of care already includes a product on the market.

In plain English, it is entirely unethical to give participants a placebo to test the efficacy of a new flu vaccine when we already have existing vaccines on the market. Doing so denies participants in the study from accessing effective treatment. If you have to test against a placebo, it will be impossible to recruit participants, because nobody will take the chance to receive placebo when they could just go to the pharmacy and get vaccinated.

There are only two possible explanations for such a position: either gross ignorance of basic scientific and ethical principles for conducting medical research in humans, or deliberate malicious intent to stop all research of investigational drugs. It doesn't actually matter which one is the reason. Both are entirely unacceptable.

The fact that a huge segment of the American population does not understand even the most basic scientific principles is the reason why many people will die needlessly.

I agree that this therapy is not without significant risks, so it's not to be taken lightly.

That said, the long-term health outcomes of T1DM are also significant. So the way I see this development is that it is one more step on the path toward finding a durable, safe, and effective cure. And if approved, it may offer some patients another choice, one that of course should involve an informed discussion with competent healthcare providers.

It's important to keep in mind that healthcare is not a "one size fits all" thing. Two patients that have the same condition can respond very differently to the same therapy. Before the discovery of insulin, diabetics literally just...died. So on the path to understanding this relationship between the individual patient and the selected therapy, medical science can only offer a range of treatment options. At one time, humans believed in bloodletting, lobotomies, and arsenic to treat various illnesses. We built leper colonies. And in some places in the world, menstruation is still considered "dirty." We have made many advances, but there are still many more to be discovered.

I once warned a manager at a smallish company that their fantasy of doing manufacturing would never happen partly because of a lack of QC and the lack of anybody with authority to shut a project down if it was not meeting spec. "We need that guy!" the manager said, and I came back, "If you had that guy you'd fire him the first time he told you something you didn't want to hear." Musk is in a pickle right now and I'm sure he really doesn't want to hear that the tank failed an X-ray inspection and the whole craft needs to be taken apart to make sure it's OK, thereby missing the launch window. And I'm sure the QC guy knows that. So as I warned that guy who once asked for my advice, this is what he got.

I'd rather use a slower browser that honors the user's choice of extensions--in particular those that block malicious content and privacy-violating advertising trackers--than an ostensibly faster browser that is created by a company whose entire business model is to gather as much tracking data about you in order to sell it to advertisers.

There are alternatives to both Firefox and Chrome. But choosing to use Chrome because Firefox isn't perfect is either the height of idiocy, or being paid to promote Google products.

She hunted and pecked through the beginnings of a reasonably successful career as a magazine copywriter back in the day. I tried to tell her it would be worth her while to spend a few hours with Mavis Beacon, but she insisted she had her way of doing things and that was that. Two index fingers, staring at the keyboard instead of the screen. Meanwhile, I was younger than her but did learn touch typing on a manual in high school. Anyway a year or so after I gave up trying to convince her to spend some time learning to type properly, I walked in on her as she was working and she was holding her hands in the home position, index fingers hovering above F and J, eyes on the screen, and doing a good 80 wpm as she pounded out copy. When I pointed this out she looked at her hands and said, "I don't know about any of that, I just adjusted what I was doing to get a little faster." Well, that's why they teach it that way, but some people gotta ice skate uphill, y'know.

Jobs and Wozniak got rich off Apple, Gates and Balmer off Microsoft. Sinclair was already rich. Tandy, Commodore, Atari, and IBM had hugely popular machines but no "rock stars" single-handedly responsible for their development, and bad business decisions ultimately killed them. Similarly Coleco, which had a great chance to undercut the PC with the Adam and its cheap letter quality printer, but they were too ambitious and by the time they worked out their manufacturing problems the PC had taken root. But the PC killed the rest of the industry by killing itself, making the first clones possible which could run object code generated for other manufacturers' machines, which was Microsoft's second stage to orbit after providing Level II Basic for the TRS-80. It wasn't MIcrosoft's intent, but imagine what today's computer ecosystem would look like if all software was still architecture-specific and there were a dozen or more popular models to choose from.
--
Apple and the rest had room to grow because the big names like DEC, Data General, and even IBM were focused on business and saw them as toys. They bought and ate anything that looked like it might compete with them, such as the CP/M office systems which might be a credible threat to minicomputers like the DEC PDP series. That was another gap IBM threaded by being IBM.

Waste Management used to have pretty good customer service, if they missed a pickup you just called, they'd send a truck out. Bin broken, call and they'd come fix it. Easy peasey. Now, all you can get is a call center in India that insists you got service even when you did not. They have missed three pickups in a row now. When my wife finally got a human being after 3+ hours on hold with multiple calls, the rep was completely unsurprised that it ended with a cancellation request and offered no pushback. There are three other companies doing trash pickup in our subdivision, one of them will now get our business, and apparently we're not alone.

Hal's insanity trigger was actually revealed in the book version of 2001 itself.

Birth defects due to thalidomide approval outside of the US were extensive, and you conveniently ignore this. That wasn't some media psyop: 20000 affected embryos for a drug marketed to prevent morning sickness is not something to trivialize, and the fact that it was not approved in the US meant that many American families were spared this horror.

It's ironic that you mention Type I and Type II errors, yet conclude--without any apparent consideration of such errors as they apply to the establishment of efficacy and safety--that somehow "Montana has the right idea." How would they have the right idea if anyone can choose to receive unapproved drugs before any data collection and statistical analysis is performed? That to me suggests you don't have the faintest clue about what a Type I error means.

This is a horrible plan on so many levels.

An investigational treatment that has passed Phase I only has the most basic pharmacokinetic and safety data gathered. There's virtually no efficacy data. The layman who thinks that patients with serious and unmet medical needs should have access to such treatments before efficacy is established, believes so because "what other options do they have?" Their logic is that they should be "free" to try anything.

But the primary reason why this logic is flawed is because a very high proportion of treatments at this stage of clinical development are inadequate--they are either ineffective or unsafe, or both. The second reason--one that never crosses the layman's mind--is that providing such early access would cripple trial enrollment. If even one state passes legislation to circumvent regulatory oversight, then patients will simply demand access through that state, rather than enroll in a trial and deal with the burden of following the trial protocol and procedures. And this will absolutely cause statistical and ethical problems with analyzing efficacy and safety in a trial context. The result will be either a serious delay in securing marketing approval for therapies that do succeed, or even worse, pharmaceutical companies will simply sidestep the regulatory process entirely and just start make marketing claims for untested compounds. After all, why bother spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a development program to secure approval if one state lets people try whatever they want?

One more comment: drug companies do have a pathway for patients in dire need. It's called "compassionate use" or "expanded access." So it's not like there's a brick wall preventing patients from accessing investigational therapies when they do not meet the inclusion criteria for a trial. But opening the floodgates is going to hurt way more people than it might help.