Some comparisons with "The Thing" are also pretty hard to ignore.

I doubt we'll see it happen, but I would gladly pay higher taxes to have Canada start up a service like the one you describe, and have it rolled out to the rest of the world, just like CBC. This is exactly what public funding is supposed to do, provide a valuable service that can't be run properly (i.e. with really good, accountable moderation) as a profit-based operation.

The tax burden of CBC is less than fifty bucks per person per year. If I could pay $200 a year for both, it would be cheap at the price. And I would dearly love to see Canada step up to the plate and become a major player in international communications.

There was a good chance of 23andme being able to make full-genome sequencing (which they weren't yet scaled up to) a commoditized service with the privacy protections that need to be ensured for all customers. However the business model collapsed along the way.

Now we see the most predictable outcome - someone who knows they can profit from the data is buying the remains of the company (with the data).

Only in the USA is the genomic data that valuable, and there is one sector of the economy who can benefit from it more than any other. Regeneron knows which industry that is, and while they aren't a direct part of it themselves they know they need to serve it.

Regeneron bought the data to eventually sell it to the Health Insurance Cartel. The Cartel was granted effective license to print money with the passage of the ACA, but they want more power. They still own an overwhelming majority of congress - on both sides of the aisle - but they want more power. With the genomic data they can start rewriting the rules on pre-existing conditions. As all other plans go up in price they can start offering plans that are less expensive if you consent to DNA testing, which will lead to treatment for some conditions being denied.

We can't win as long as the system is set up this way. We can't change it when the people who benefit from it control the people who set the rules.

The Trump administration has been largely a copy-paste production. When they initially wanted to "replace" the ACA back during his first term, their plan was to replace the ACA with the ACA - made better by putting his signature at the end instead of the signature of President Obama. When they were finally called out on that, they quietly dropped their efforts to repeal the ACA, instead focusing on various things they can do in the name of "border security" (nevermind that no effort has been made this term for the wall that he used to talk nonstop about).

You've just made an excellent argument for publicly funded news media like BBC, CBC and such. They might not be perfect, but at least they aren't complete whores.

So Starbucks is going to use AI to "help Starbucks achieve the personalized touch it's looking to bring back to its cafes".

The irony's so thick you could cut it with a spatula.

"Apple has urged Australia not to follow the European Union in mandating iPhone app sideloading, warning that such policies pose serious privacy and security risks."

Of course, we're supposed to forget how Apple has whored itself to totalitarian governments, selling users out in return for child labour and market access.

If there was a benchmark for the speed with which a corporation loots and sells your personal information, I'm sure Google/Alphabet Inc. would be right up there at the top.

The US arms industry is going to need a really good propaganda branch to persuade international customers that its wares don't have some kind of kill switch to render them useless against US armed forces.

It takes a special kind of stupid not to understand the obvious about the United States. It is an end stage corporate kleptocracy staggering toward Third World status. It's like a caterpillar that ran into the wrong kind of wasp. The eggs the wasp laid in it hatched. The larvae have eaten the caterpillar alive, and they're now chowing down on the vital organs before they move out of the empty shell.

This store reflects a retail model that is simply dead now. You don't go in to a surplus store looking for something specific, as you likely won't find it. You go in with general ideas and you see what you find along the way.

Unfortunately very nearly nobody shops like that any more. We have a chain of surplus stores where I live, and the last several times I've gone in I've walked back out empty handed as they didn't have anything I wanted. They had plenty of things that other people want, but nothing I was looking for at the moment. 500 feet of rope in 12 different diameters? Yep they have it but I'm not looking for it. Cartoon character umbrellas? Yep they have it but I'm not looking for it. Firewire cables? Yep them have them but I'm not looking for them. Strange animated movies I've never heard of? Yep lots of those too. The list goes on and on but if they don't have anything I'm looking for then they won't get any money from me.

So fighting back against genocidal Russians by striking 100% military targets makes you a "terrorist"? I think you have a problem with definitions.

And one question: When the Russians attempt their next bombing campaign against civilians in Ukraine, how many planes can they now afford to lose? Apparently, in addition to wiping out about a third of Russia's bombers, Ukraine is now equipped with better air defenses, which with any luck will further reduce the number of Russian planes and military personnel.

The list of 6 speed manual cars sold in the USA is very, very short. If you drop the ones sold by Porsche you cut that list in half. If you then drop the ones from VW (yes I know Porsche is a part of the VW corporate empire but we'll acknowledge them separately here) after that you end up with about 3 vehicles, and you find that even those only offer manual transmissions in very specific configurations.

The bigger news is that this isn't really news, as the manual transmission has been dying a gradual death for decades here. People don't learn it, and they don't want to drive it. On the plus side it makes it a theft deterrent technology for those who do drive it.

I love that the raid was surgically conducted against the armed forces of a vicious Russian dictator. I love that there were no civilian casualties. I love the the weapon of choice was a hobbyist-style drone. I love that the software was open source. But what I love best is that at the very moment Donald Trump and J.D. Vance were heaping abuse on Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, yelling at him, lying about him and dismissing him with the sneering claim that "he has no cards to play", Zelenskyy held his temper. He had to grit his teeth and sit there quietly while those unspeakable cretins humiliated him and his people in front of the whole world.

It must have been at least a little easier to endure the humiliation knowing that preparation for an attack that would eliminate roughly a third of Russia's strategic bomber fleet with the loss of zero Ukrainian lives was in its final stages.

I wonder who they'll get to play Trump and Vance in the movie. Because there absolutely will be a movie. Probably a mini-series, too.

I agree with you 100%, but I've seen far too many situations where nobody did the right thing until all the wrong things had been tried five times each. And to be fair, I was thinking more of the payload than the drone. The trend I'm trying (badly) to describe wouldn't have to involve anything mechanical. One example: we've mapped the human genome. That's the easy part. Even at our current "baby steps" level, there have been a couple of custom designed cures for genetic diseases and a few fake wolves...maybe a fake mammoth soon. As the pace of innovation increases, though, I don't think it will take long before some angry genius with a garage lab designs a disease to fit a particular genetic profile, or a kind of rabies transmissible by non-fertile mosquitoes, or some other horror. I could see particular populations being targeted, or perhaps even certain individuals. At the moment, this is just science fiction, but the technology isn't hard to visualize. It's more on the scale of workable nuclear fusion than faster-than-light travel.

What worries me most is that the trend you describe will probably take the option of a limited terrorist action off the table, and makes something truly catastrophic more likely. Meanwhile, as a society we seem committed to driving more and more people to the point where they feel they have nothing to lose. A lot of Trump voters don't seriously expect him to make things better...they'll be happy enough if he just breaks the system and wipes the smile off the faces of the smug pricks running things.