Quite a few of these "underwater basket weaving" scientists have a significant other, many times with a decent education, and many times in one of these STEM subjects. These STEM folks are highly mobile, while their "underwater basket weaving" partners have to follow the funding. Even if both partners are top scientists in "underwater basket weaving", their off spring many times is more practically oriented, and like it or not, they typically float to the top of the crowd in school and later.

If you want to look at what's happening in the USA now: look at the cultural revolution in China, what it did to their development, and how much pain and effort it cost them to recover from that blunder. Is this really a worthy target to aim for, just out of spite?

They may have a fancy new semiconductor compound to work with, but all these wafers have to be patterned to tiny structures if they are going to build competitive chips. This is where ASML machines come in, and the article suggests nothing that these were recreated or substituted or made irrelevant somehow.

You can ask AI about things, which can be known by deduction. If the problem is random, like "I'll roll my dice, how many eyes will I see?", then AI has no edge on humans or even random guesses. Expecting AI to excel at this is just a sign of someone not understanding what AI can and cannot do.

Therefore throwing a problem at AI is a good marker, how much randomness an experimental outcome contains. The Kentucky horse race seems to be a mixed bag of randomness and visible patterns, AI was somewhat correct but still off. There appears to be less randomness in the first two or three ranks, and more randomness among the lower ranks in this race.

While horse races are inconsequential and not really all that exciting to most, there are similar situations, in which the question "deductible or not" is still open: asset prices, success/failure of business models, effect of educational efforts, The results from these investigation have both financial and political/philosophical consequences.

The main factors appear to be "Is the trajectory of this object governed mostly by the sun's gravity?" and "Is it going to stay on a more or less elliptic trajectory around the sun?", and these factors make a lot more sense than "How close is it to the sun?".

Or a site hosting medical information insisting on using Google analytics to begin with. Maybe that's the much more serious error of judgement than some botched settings. People in this damn industry apparently still haven't gotten the message, that the data they hold can mean life or death for some.

If you are a student at a decent university, and your research leads to patentable matter, the patent belongs to the university, and that university gives you a small part of the profits this patent generates. Most patents generate none at all, so it's a lottery. The rest of the profits gets back into the research system. It's exactly these researchers, which DT47 is chasing out of the country right now.

That tax you quote are the patent fees. The initial patent is only granted for a few years, and in order to extend patent life span to 17 years, you have to throw money at the government a few times, and AFAIK it's more the longer your patent has been active. You may argue, that this "tax" is too low or whatever, but it exists and it is paid, and if a patent holds no promise of financial success, it will join the large rank of patents abandoned long before their 17 year term. Needless to state that expired patents are public domain.

All you have asked for is already in place, no need to destroy a large country's research culture over this.

That "flagged_words" column seems to be quite misleading, if a study "Development of a handheld rapid air sensing system to monitor and quantify SARS-CoV-2 in aerosols in real-time" has "trans" as the only entry in "flagged_words". Columns "project_title" seems to be a better indicator or what was done.

Economy in Europe has split into two parts, and only one of them has deteriorated a lot. Upper middle class with proper education, language skills and work ethics does very well, it's just the other half which drags down the GDP/capita numbers. This poor half was not going to the USA anyway, and the rich half certainly won't be willing to put up with ICE/CBP shenanigans and a government (cheered on by the general population) openly hostile to Europeans when planning a holiday trip.

You forgot the worst part of this: while this scandal has utterly destroyed the lives of the affected (sub)postmasters (including death, as some killed themselves over this travesty of justice), it has so far not had any adverse consequences for the perpetrators. None of them have been inconvenienced beyond some name calling in the media and maybe a few firings. Reckless car drivers have been convicted for murder in Europe, while these crooks don't even have a criminal record yet.

Corporate and political behavior will not change unless such a series of acts carry decade long prison sentences and salary clawbacks for the perpetrators.

One thing, which Microsoft has really been successful in the last 30 years was GUIs. Their UIs were typically slick and efficient, and for each and every Microsoft GUI strangeness I can probably show you 10 worse GTK or KDE UX defects. Yes, Microsoft has a footing in boot loaders, they were also engaged in embedded platforms for a while (is WinCE still a thing?), but that's all beside the point.

If you look at typical code produced in Visual Studio, you'd expect a GUI driven DB connected Windows application deeply embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem. The classical "we support Windows 10 and 11 only" type application. One can easily imagine a code quality checker for such an ecosystem, which would fail miserably in a boot loader. I know, how the code checkers we use all barf up on our custom heap manager "oh noes the pointer arithmetic" "oh noes the int to pointer type cast".

If Copilot can debug WinAMP, then good. If you can aim it at uboot, then it can probably also deal with our heap manager. Well, at least once it goes beyond "oh noes, malloc(size+1)" type warnings.

PS: yes, I know from our kernel devs, that fuzzing and AI generated CVEs are a menace right now, and they typically appear right after (not before, when it would be a lot more useful) release, because this gives you higher street cred somewhere. If Copilot could condense these fuzzer and AI bug reports to extract their useful bits, then go Copilot. Haven't seen that yet, but at least I know, that Copilot has been trained on more than MS Word and WinAMP.

Their cloud offerings still don't have a need for uboot, and they analyzed it anyway. I insist, that this is one of Microsoft's clever marketing ploys to gain market share in the embedded market, something e.g. Google or Amazon seem to have ignored for now despite their much higher investment in embedded in general.

Smart move on Microsoft's side, but I sure hope, that their Copilot learns to find more intricate bugs than malloc(size+1).

As a linux/g++ developer I can give you an explanation: because it tells me, who has no use for Visual Studio and most other products from Microsoft, that I could put this tool to proper use. If a tool can analyze an open source boot loader, then it can likely analyze my own product, too. Thereby they widen their audience quite a bit. The fact, that they analyzed grub2 and not e.g. libqt6 raises eyebrows not only of GUI application programmers, but also of embedded programmers, which is one of the larger C/C++ programmer crowds in general and specifically for linux. I don't think I would have even read the article, had they reported 5 buffer overflows in MS Word or Libreoffice. Pure genius IMHO.

One thing, which did not at all impress me was the finding actually shown in the bleepingcomputer article: malloc(size+1) can at worst produce an inadvertent malloc(0), which could lead to a heap overflow, but that's an error most decent static code checkers would also flag. It would impress me a lot more, if Copilot would have flagged something a bit more difficult.

Trying to read up on AI things I was shocked to discover, that many books on this topic (Tensorflow, pytorch, ...) were written more than 5 years ago. The whole topic didn't get much media attention, which may explain, why media become more and more irrelevant over time, but AI was a big thing in research back then.

The way to stay relevant in my field was to fine tune and better aim that radar. Don't expect SJ Mercury News or SF Chronicle to show you the next big technical topic of interest. Take risks, some "hot topics" won't stay that way, but you still pick up interesting skills on the way.

Did you at least read the summary of this article? The mice were never considered transgender, in fact they were never even asked but given hormones to study their likely effect on humans. It's the humans, which are transgender here, and the term "transgender mice" to describe this research is highly misleading and most likely willfully chosen to be that.

You may be for or against animal experiments, you may or may not accept gender dysphoria in humans, but at least try to stick to the facts when reporting about research.

In my experience it started the other way round. Well established brands suddenly moved their manufacturing offshore, and tried to maintain their established high prices despite the fact, that the transition period provided products with extreme quality deficits. BTDT, changed brands in frustration multiple times. Established brands destroyed their brand reputation by chasing the cheapest manufacturers and tried to keep profits to themselves, after all "they earn the reward for being so smart and offshore the work".

Then there were industry shenanigans, which made it unpleasant to deal with "brand products": planned obsolescence, terrible tech support with hour long wait times, intentionally broken design like DVD players unable to play DVD-R. Look at this still ongoing dumpster fire called "consumer color printers".

Eventually customers figured out, that they were offered a rough deal everywhere and started to aggressively chase the "best=cheapest deal" no matter what. If you paid more, you essentially played lottery, that the odds of a decent product move your way, and most often you lost and just paid more for the same junk.