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Medicine

23andMe Is Going Public As It Pushes Further Into Healthcare 16

23andMe is becoming a publicly-traded company through a merger with Virgin's VG Acquisition. Engadget reports: The deal values 23andMe at about $3.5 billion and should give the company the finances it wants to boost its personal healthcare and therapeutics plans. It should have over $900 million in cash, for instance. The merger is expected to close in the second quarter of 2021 and will have private $25 million investments from both 23andMe chief Anne Wojcicki and Virgin's Sir Richard Branson.

While 23andMe didn't say much about how its strategy might change by going public, it was keen to promote its contributions to genetic research and its involvement in therapeutic programs for conditions like cardiovascular disease and respiratory issues. As Sir Branson suggested, the public offering could help 23andMe "revolutionize" personalized medicine.
Democrats

What Kamala Harris, Joe Biden's VP Pick, Means For Tech (cnet.com) 521

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: After months of speculation, Joe Biden has picked California Sen. Kamala Harris to be his vice-presidential running mate in the race for the White House. The choice fulfills a pledge from Biden, the Democrats' presumptive nominee for president, to name a woman to his ticket as he seeks to unseat Donald Trump in the November election. [...] Here's what we know about Harris' stance on tech issues:

A California senator and former candidate in the 2020 presidential race, Harris made her name in Washington by grilling Trump nominees and officials from her seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Harris, 55, is known for being a tough-on-crime prosecutor earlier in her career. That toughness, however, didn't carry over to Big Tech companies when she was California attorney general, critics charge. During her time as the state's top law enforcement officer, Facebook and other companies gobbled up smaller competitors. Harris, like regulators under Obama, did little from an antitrust perspective to slow consolidation, which many members of Congress now question.

During her 2020 presidential bid, Harris' stance on consumer protections and antitrust issues weren't as tough as those of some of her rivals, especially Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who called for the breakup of large tech companies, like Facebook and Google. Still, Harris was vocal last year in urging Twitter to ban Trump from the platform for "tweets [that] incite violence, threaten witnesses, and obstruct justice." This was a demand Twitter rejected. She has also been critical of Facebook for not doing more to rid its platform of misinformation.

Comment Re:Yeah, right. (Score 3, Informative) 113

I'm solidly in favor of criticising China for its abuses, but you do know that in the US military you take the medications you're given too, right? You give up even the right to know what they are.

Can confirm. Former soldier. I took lots of crazy pills and shots - they would sometimes not disclose other than 'it's gonna f*ing hurt, and it's for battle prep". Who knows what experiments were run on my body at the time - we all knew we were US Gov property for our enlistment.

Comment Politicians? Led by Trump. (Score 0, Flamebait) 412

We got ourselves into the current situation because of complacency, submission to myopic pressure from the "business" to do nothing and the desire of the political elite to not disturb the inflated stock market.

You really go out of the way to not lay the blame where it rightfully lies - Trump. Trump has said it number of times, he didn't think addressing the virus would have been good for his image.

This is the same guy who ran screaming when someone died in his hotel - his first worry was the floor [1].

[1] We got ourselves into the current situation because of complacency, submission to myopic pressure from the "business" to do nothing and the desire of the political elite to not disturb the inflated stock market.

Comment Re:Indeed we all may get it (Score 1) 440

> But since there are 3 to 5 times as many latent asymptomatic carriers, we are buiding up that immunity.

All well and good for those lucky asymptomatic carriers or the uninfected. But what happens when you or a loved one needs to go to the hospital because of a dangerous but completely handleable medical issue, and there are no doctors or beds because of the coronavirus patients ?

Answer: you suffer as well. The "let everyone get it" thinking is going to get even the lucky ones killed due to the unavailability of medical care.

Not to mention the unlucky folks who get coronavirus and can't get treated, or folks who lose jobs because they can't go to work because they don't know if they have it or not. Or the medical staff who are the most likely to also get the virus (due to overwork), spread it, and bring hospitals to their knees.

The "everyone gets it plan" results in several times more suffering and deaths.

Comment Was it *really* a bad idea? (Score 1) 53

Maybe, just maybe we need more of these examples to show the world that a) it's a bad idea to actually plug this kind of shit in and b) see (a)

My company sends out fake phishing mails to train the workforce (some of them are really clever) so we don't get actually phished. We should see more of this so people aren't caught with their pants down when Russia/China/Facebook/etc actually do something (intentionally|unintentionally) malicious.

Comment Re:MITM (Score 0, Interesting) 83

Maybe, unless you or someone else in your family or say a room mate who uses your computer didn't know any better and ran the easy setup CD that most/many ISPs include with a new modem.

Why would that matter?
Well most of those CDs are now auto installing a proxy TLS/SSL certificate into your root certificate store and then all of a sudden they are middle manning your TLS/SSL connections.

HSTS is supposed to stop this I think but it has its own problems.

Comment Wow and people were worried about Google (Score 1, Insightful) 176

Let's get this straight, I am not a fan of ads nor am I a fan of Google, but WTF ads in your offline mail app? That's as ugly as the monstrosities in that Leaf "gas powered everything" ad (for those of you who don't want to YT it, imagine a gas-powered dentist drill)

There is literally no defense or reason for this nonsense except "just 'cause they can do it".

Comment Re:For sure they are (Score 1) 255

moving power from the desert or a power station to where it is needed causes a ton of inefficiencies (since we don't yet have a room-temperature superconductor).

The answer isn't some holy grail like room temp superconductors, but HDVC [1] - which is available and capable of transmission losses in the order of 3-4%. Compare to an ICE engine of 60% loss of energy or nat-gas plant where loss is more like 30%.

[1] https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 1) 9

> from giving their customers increased capabilities?

You mean profiting further off their customers' data? You kind of got that backwards. Your same argument could have held for Microsoft and it's integration of the IE browser into the OS back in 1998. Guess where that went?

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