If we are designing a submarine for use somewhere exotic and oil-rich wouldn't it make sense to save time by adding the weapons systems now? You know we'll end up needing them, and designing them in after the fact will be much more annoying and probably take longer.
Surely we've reached the point where advertisers can be classified as a highly invasive species of mammalian pests and our attentions turned to exterminating them, no?
If the FOIA request is being made under the applicable state law, what does the FBI do about it? Is there a federal statute somewhere to the effect that 'no state public records law shall be construed as to release anything that might make the terrorists win and so on'? Do they have no official recourse; but a suitable amount of knowledge about how to throw a spanner in the process in a given state?
It would seem that, if they are farming out the operation to a bunch of local cops who aren't cleared to do much beyond write traffic tickets, the data can't be too seriously 'national security' imperiling, nor would the mere interaction with the FBI change the fact that state agents are operating under the open records laws of their state, so how does this work?
I assume that gathering all the names and adding them to an enemies list is an end in itself for the FBI, they get off on that kind of thing; but do they have any other ability to use the data?
In other news, neither 'true communism' nor 'true capitalism' have every actually been implemented, and are thus not failures, economically viable fusion power is no more than two decades away, and the second coming and the earthly kingdom of god are expected within the lifetime of those currently gathered, just as it has been for the past ~2000 years.
Ah, that's your problem. Any external event can produce misery in others; but only you can turn exogenous misery into rich, heady, Schadenfreude by reveling in that exogenous misery. I suspect that some fragment of human decency may have acted as a sensitizing agent and reduced your Schadenfreude conversion efficiency.
The standard of care in these situations is a period of intensive inpatient work in marketing or public relations. Efficacy is excellent, with most patients showing increased conversion efficiency and a marked increase in enthusiasm for exposure to the most titillating varieties of exogenous suffering available; but there are some who contend that 'the cure is worse than the disease' or 'good god, man, what have you done?'.
The tricky bit is that being deflationary and being a useful medium of exchange are somewhat at odds with one another.
To be a useful exchange medium, it has to be fairly easy(and not too costly) to sell things in exchange for it and buy things in exchange for it, ideally with enough liquidity that you'll never experience inconvenience and low enough short and medium term value fluctuation that just carrying some around in case you want to buy something does not become a substantial risk.
If however, most of the interested parties are looking to squirrel it away under their mattresses and wait for deflation to make them rich, you'll have an easy enough time selling any bitcoins you already have; but the ease of obtaining more, and the price you'll pay to do so, will be heavily dominated by the speculative waiting for the stuff to become more valuable. If it becomes too prevalent, that sort of hoarding activity will simultaneously reduce the rate of deflation(since wallets held by amateurs, or actively used in risky connected environments, are the ones that get lost much more often than the ones being held in cold storage by specialists) and help ensure that while bitcoins may become rarer, they are less likely to become more valuable in the process: the world is full of stuff that is getting rarer over time(basically anything 'antique' or 'collectable'). Most of it is virtually worthless, outside of any scrap value or the relatively low buying power of enthusiasts of obscure PEZ dispensers or whatever. Without continued activity using bitcoins as an exchange medium, there is nothing preventing the world's entire supply from dwindling to the status of an obscure techie relic of the early 21st century, maybe worth a few hundred thousand(if the entire set is available, in good condition) to decorate some.com-made-good executive's living room.
Wallets get cracked fairly routinely; but (to the best of my knowledge) only by virtue of being stored on systems that are compromised by some other means. The bitcoin mechanism alone is pretty solid; but that means very little if you can get access to the wallet by attacking the user's system at some other level and then just reading them off the filesystem.
For whatever reason, whoever did the core work on bitcoins appears to have been pretty good; but the quality and competence of most of the surrounding activity and infrastructure are somewhere between 'crap' and 'are you sure that this isn't a parody?'
At least in part, this problem seems to be down to a lack of any sort of way(short of investigative journalism for every project you are interested in) of being able to see what the funding situation is.
As with OpenBSD a while back, it was pretty much 100% everything-as-normal until "Boom, out of money, game over, man, game over." followed by a last minute fundraiser.
There are plenty of projects, GnuPG among them(and OpenBSD, at that time), that I'd be happy to assist; but I don't really have the slightest idea of who is A-OK, who could use some more money in an ideal world, and who is about to burn out and quit for lack of resources.
Is there any sort of mechanism in place, or under discussion, for making resource needs more visible before they become emergencies?
From the sound of it Sony wants a Meaner and leaner attack dog that does more damage and costs less.
I fear that you are correct. The only possible bright spot would be if Sony realized (bear with me here, this is purely hypothetical, not a prediction) that an attack dog that spends all its time throwing lawyers at the next advance in content distribution(in the fine Valenti tradition of accusing the VCR of being the Boston Strangler of the film industry) is actually not as useful as an attack dog that doesn't roll over and wag its tail the moment some rag-tag band of competent but not extraordinary hackers make one of the world's larger movie publishers cry, in public, for weeks on end, with effectively no response from anyone else in the industry.
I doubt that they'll actually do this; but if they decide that the MPAA is better used to protect them from real threats, then even a toothier version of it might actually be good, or at least indifferent. I'm not holding my breath, though.
"Mobile" is basically a trailer for the cryptographically sealed dystopia after the demise of the general purpose computer. Your options are basically 'consume that content, just the way its creator intended you to' or 'walk away'.
Android is slightly better, in that (while it is peddled by a massive surveillance-and-advertising vendor) it is fairly easy to buy a handset that will accept substantial modification without the blessing of the creator. iOS starts from an incrementally less user-hostile place; but Apple's dedication to lockdown is very, very, thorough and relatively competent. Short of using the phone as a VNC/RDP/ICA client and connecting to a real computer, you are mostly SOL.
Given that this technique was introduced, after a long and arduous regulatory process, when the mitochondrially defective could just use donor eggs instead, suggests that there is a demand for children constructed in the "As related to me as possible; but minus the lethal defect" mold. If you drop the "as related to me as possible" requirement, merely getting healthy gametes is much easier(especially sperm, since egg harvesting is a somewhat unpleasant process).
As it happens, (and somewhat surprisingly) the US FDA held off on approving Thalidomide because of animal studies that were coming back with unpleasant suggestions of teratogenic effects.
It's perfectly possible for non-human trials to suggest that a drug or treatment should be kept well away from humans; but it's never entirely possible for a non-human trial to prove that humans won't exhibit an unexpected negative response. I'm very much in favor of paying attention to bad news from non-human trials; but I have no patience for the "Your lab mice haven't proved that it works in humans, ergo it must never be tested on humans!" school of argument.
That's going to end badly. I barely escaped with my life(and several of my most valued colleagues were permanently ontologically disabled or lost all their qualia); when The Incident occurred at the Liebnitz Institute for High Energy Metaphysics. I've seen ugly accidents in physics research, and industrial radiochemistry messes; but nothing nearly as horrific as a monad spallation cascasde exhibiting an unpredicted excursion beyond safe values. I'll never forget the screams.
It certainly isn't my money, so I will STFU; but depending on whether or not it ends up being 'On the NHS' it might be the money of rather a lot of brits.
And, while I'd be deeply unimpressed if this argument is used to suppress a specific fertility technique just because it's 'eww, icky!', I would be more generally supportive of questions about exactly how much money need be spent(by others, the would-be-parent can do as they wish) on attempts to engineer around the various defects that render people less able, or unable, to reproduce.
Proposals to 'forbid the unfit' from reproducing always slippery-slope to nowhere good, often quite quickly, so I would definitely oppose such; but I'm less sold on the idea that "I want children that share genes with me!" is necessarily a medical problem compelling enough to divert medical resources from the various "I'd prefer not to die in agony" cases, especially when young humans are not a terribly scarce resource.
Why would they need a new species classification, much less a genus? Your mitochondrial DNA differs from that of everyone else except your siblings by the same mother, and somehow you share a species label with the rest of us. The products of this technique will still have human nuclear DNA and human mDNA, just without Mom contributing half of the nuclear DNA and all of the mDNA, but instead only the nuclear DNA.
Future historians attempting to use mitochondria to trace female ancestry genetically will curse this development(just as the ones attempting to use Y chromosomes to genetically trace male ancestry would curse a hypothetical 'Y swap' corrective procedure for X-linked genetic disease); but it's hard to see an argument for why the product of this technique would be considered anything other than human.
Watching this 'debate', I've been unsurprised; but depressed, at the quality of 'argument' trotted out. The one that particularly annoys me is the "We can't allow it unless we know that it's totally safe and effective! What about possible side effects?!!".
Guess what, kids, there have been precious few medically relevant developments, ever, that came without some human risk. This doesn't imply endorsement of the Josef Mengele protocol for experimental ethics, it's just a fact that we've (so far, I'm all for somebody who can improve this) been unable to avoid, and even the most by-the-book-and-informed-consent contemporary clinical trials are subject to it to some degree. We can't exactly know if it's actually fully safe and effective in humans by use of animal models and pure reason.
Perhaps more importantly, this is a technique to treat disorders that cause grievous impairment and/or early, unpleasant, death. It has long been a commonplace of medical ethics(and simple commonsense decision making) that you don't want a cure worse than the disease; but that nasty diseases can have cures that you would welcome compared to that disease; but would be horrified by in the context of a less serious one(eg. basically all cancer treatment and most surgery). You calibrate your sense of risk based on what the alternatives are, not based on Ideal Perfect Risk Free. In the case of mitochondrial defects, the alternatives suck.
Finally, if you don't wish to allow treatment of mitochondrial defects(effective treatment, that is, there are various, mostly symptom-easing, treatments of not terribly impressive efficacy for the symptoms of mitochondrial disorders; but only swapping out mitochondria, or advanced and aggressive genetic engineering, show much hope for a cure); what do you propose? Do mitochondrially defective would-be-mothers get to roll the dice and hope for a less-sick baby? Do we start charging them with negligent homicide if they keep spawning horribly doomed offspring even after enough failures to know that trying again is dangerously likely to condemn their child to an ugly and swift death?
If you are concerned about 'germline' genetic engineering, this somewhat-uncomfortably-retro 'eugenic' proposal is the other viable option to preventing mitochondrial disease; but I'm guessing that it won't be too popular.
(All that said, I hope that the treatment does work as well as its backers hope, and doesn't turn out to suffer from the drawbacks its critics fear, and if it does turn out to be too dangerous/imperfectly effective, I think that it should go back to the drawing board; but these phantoms of 'need to know for sure that it works' and 'must be proven safe' seem like disgustingly transparent rhetorical devices, not serious ethical arguments.)
Virtually anywhere with some variant on a 'legal apparatus you'd expect from a developing or developed nation' will have some equivalent of 'Markedly novel medical procedures and drugs need some sort of approval before use' rules in place. The difficulty of getting approval, and level of enforcement, vary sharply.
You can typically get creative with techniques and drugs that are already approved for some other purpose; but bringing a procedure or drug into the fold in the first place typically requires either that it be grandfathered in through age, or go through some sort of approval.
In this case the cellphones received specific attention because a video recording of the pilot and passenger using them survived the crash; but isn't some flavor of "The plane seems to have been fine except for the effects of hitting the ground really fast, the pilot must have fucked up" the standard verdict if inspection of the wreckage, and any cockpit chatter, suggest no mechanical issues and there is no notable weather in the area?
I don't know how much they would chose to nickel-and-dime the customers. If the service is aimed at being an upmarket 'all-annoying-incidentals-included' brand, they'd probably let it slide. If it's anything like flying coach on a major airline, well, the puke will definitely be extra, and the cameras will also use machine vision to ferret out carry on bags and charge for each, and a surcharge will be assessed if you attempt to change the vehicle's radio away from 'sponsored content'.
What they will do is a strategic matter. That they will be able to do it is simply a matter of fact.
As best I can tell, "identity theft" is a brilliant invention on the part of institutions that are too lazy to authenticate people: as if by magic, this construction transforms fraud perpetrated against them into your problem. "Ooh, your identity got stolen, that sucks. Have fun fighting with the credit reporting agencies forever." rather than "Oh, another instance of fraud by impersonation against our pitifully weak systems. Maybe we have to do something about that..."
I have to admit, it's elegant enough that I'd be forced to shake the hand of the person responsible before punching him in the face, just as a gesture of respect for carrying off something that audacious successfully.
Aside from understanding, you also have to care. And not just care; but care enough to overcome the practical inconveniences of doing it properly, especially if everyone around you doesn't understand why you are wasting time with the 'unnecessary' extra steps.
Depending on the situation, not caring can easily be a greater obstacle than not understanding. This is the major reason why the existence of regulations carries weight. Regulations aren't very educational; but it is very, very, easy to understand 'doing X violates The Rules', while the logic behind The Rules can be of any level of complexity, or nonexistent. On the minus side, this means that arbitrarily stupid practices can be incorporated into The Rules without challenge. On the plus side, this means that brutally complex; but necessary, procedures can be laid out without the need to explain them to everyone from first principles.
Aside from the sheer difficulty of litigating against a financial institution(If it is possible for your sister to have signed away her soul to mandatory binding arbitration in the venue of the bank's choice, those terms were probably included in at least one part of the fine print, probably several), there may not be much to go on. Not all states even require disclosure of a customer data breach, much less any particular action, standard of care, or other inconvenience.
You might get somewhere if the bank didn't comply with Connecticut's data breach notification laws; but even that probably won't get you as far as you might want, though it might make some lower mid level peon more likely to comp her a year of credit monitoring just to go away. Any actually-toothy penalties, or not using absurdly insecure channels, though, not so much.
On the plus side, with 'DisplayID' replacing legacy EDID, it should be possible to artificially disable this 'adaptive sync' on any monitor that doesn't have an Nvidia-signed 'G-Sync Supported!' flag purchased by the vendor and flashed into the firmware, thus allowing Nvidia to charge more without the need to include the FPGA!
This clearly, um, incentivises innovation and, er, stuff. It's too bad, really. I could really use a GPU with better thermal efficiency; but Nvidia are being such a bunch of dicks that I feel bad considering them. Surely they could leave the dirty tricks for a generation where they are behind on pure technical aptitude?
Displayport is trying to be several different things to several different people; but in this case 'adaptive sync' serves the purposes of both:
For power-sensitive situations, being able to modify the frame rate can reduce power consumption(especially if combined with 'panel self refresh', also part of the embedded displayport standard, which calls for the panel driver to have enough RAM to store the entire frame so that the display driver and DP link can be shut down entirely if a static image is being displayed, only needing to wake back up when the image needs to be changed.)
The other advantage(and the one that Nvidia would be shooting for) is that it allows you to avoid the 'tearing' you get if your GPU's frame rate differs from your panel's refresh rate and you end up with part of one frame and part of the next frame drawn on the panel at the same time. If you can change the panel refresh rate, you can ensure that it refreshes when, and only when, the GPU has a new frame ready(obviously, you can't push the panel above a certain refresh rate, even if the GPU is doing something simple and could spit out hundreds or thousands of FPS; but it's a lot easier to cap at X FPS than it is to ensure that the framerate never dips under heavy load.)
I'm not a subject matter expert; but I think that it largely depends on location, available food sources, and severity.
Some of those listed(notably pellagra) are diseases that came to prominence because 'traditional' diets are not, in fact, all that stable. European populations, and their colonial offshoots, all have five centuries or less, sometimes a lot less, experience with new world crops. In the case of corn, they adopted the crop from the natives; but did not adopt the local processing techniques. Unluckily for them, the steps the skipped were the ones that provide a corn based diet with enough niacin. From that point until mass supplementation in the 20th century, the problem would crop up periodically among segments of the population that subsisted mostly on corn(which was mostly poor people, contributing to the willingness to put up with the problem).
Scurvy is closer to being an occupational hazard; but also (mostly) a product of dietary disruption. It's too lethal for a population to just put up with; so any diet that actually sustained a population for a few centuries probably prevents it most of the time; but is sure raised hell before food preservation techniques caught up with the increasing length of naval voyages.
Cretinism was a bit trickier because it largely depended on environmental iodine levels, rather than specific crops or food preparation. In areas with adequate soil iodine (or water iodine, for seafood), it just wasn't an issue, in areas with low iodine levels the same basic culture, crops, and diet resulted in frequent goiter and varying levels of debilitating thyroid issues. I don't know of anywhere that is unsuitable for human habitation because of this; but some areas just suffered markedly higher losses than others until supplementation largely solved the problem.
Given that excessive mortality tends to impede the transmission of 'traditions' and the existence of 'descendants', it's a safe bet that any truly traditional diet didn't kill too many of the people who ate it, too fast; but some diets we think of as traditional aren't, and 'not too many or too fast' can be a fairly unpleasant number. I'd argue that micronutrient deficiencies are one area were scientific methods have undoubtedly produced excellent results(albeit often because the introduction of a cool new food preservation scheme, or ultra-cheap diet for soldiers and squalid poor people, inadvertently omitted a nutrient and the resulting mess prompted some R&D on the subject).
Science has been less effective(or all too effective, from the other side) when it comes to avoiding death by overconsumption. Team Food Science is very good at spinning fat, sugar, and modified starch into a whole medley of edible food analogs that store well and sell well, at excitingly low cost; but less good, and less interested, in remediating the resulting mess. Whether this is a 'failure' of science, or a brilliant success at a rather ghastly goal is debatable.
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If we are designing a submarine for use somewhere exotic and oil-rich wouldn't it make sense to save time by adding the weapons systems now? You know we'll end up needing them, and designing them in after the fact will be much more annoying and probably take longer.
Surely we've reached the point where advertisers can be classified as a highly invasive species of mammalian pests and our attentions turned to exterminating them, no?
If the FOIA request is being made under the applicable state law, what does the FBI do about it? Is there a federal statute somewhere to the effect that 'no state public records law shall be construed as to release anything that might make the terrorists win and so on'? Do they have no official recourse; but a suitable amount of knowledge about how to throw a spanner in the process in a given state?
It would seem that, if they are farming out the operation to a bunch of local cops who aren't cleared to do much beyond write traffic tickets, the data can't be too seriously 'national security' imperiling, nor would the mere interaction with the FBI change the fact that state agents are operating under the open records laws of their state, so how does this work?
I assume that gathering all the names and adding them to an enemies list is an end in itself for the FBI, they get off on that kind of thing; but do they have any other ability to use the data?
In other news, neither 'true communism' nor 'true capitalism' have every actually been implemented, and are thus not failures, economically viable fusion power is no more than two decades away, and the second coming and the earthly kingdom of god are expected within the lifetime of those currently gathered, just as it has been for the past ~2000 years.
Ah, that's your problem. Any external event can produce misery in others; but only you can turn exogenous misery into rich, heady, Schadenfreude by reveling in that exogenous misery. I suspect that some fragment of human decency may have acted as a sensitizing agent and reduced your Schadenfreude conversion efficiency.
The standard of care in these situations is a period of intensive inpatient work in marketing or public relations. Efficacy is excellent, with most patients showing increased conversion efficiency and a marked increase in enthusiasm for exposure to the most titillating varieties of exogenous suffering available; but there are some who contend that 'the cure is worse than the disease' or 'good god, man, what have you done?'.
The tricky bit is that being deflationary and being a useful medium of exchange are somewhat at odds with one another.
.com-made-good executive's living room.
To be a useful exchange medium, it has to be fairly easy(and not too costly) to sell things in exchange for it and buy things in exchange for it, ideally with enough liquidity that you'll never experience inconvenience and low enough short and medium term value fluctuation that just carrying some around in case you want to buy something does not become a substantial risk.
If however, most of the interested parties are looking to squirrel it away under their mattresses and wait for deflation to make them rich, you'll have an easy enough time selling any bitcoins you already have; but the ease of obtaining more, and the price you'll pay to do so, will be heavily dominated by the speculative waiting for the stuff to become more valuable. If it becomes too prevalent, that sort of hoarding activity will simultaneously reduce the rate of deflation(since wallets held by amateurs, or actively used in risky connected environments, are the ones that get lost much more often than the ones being held in cold storage by specialists) and help ensure that while bitcoins may become rarer, they are less likely to become more valuable in the process: the world is full of stuff that is getting rarer over time(basically anything 'antique' or 'collectable'). Most of it is virtually worthless, outside of any scrap value or the relatively low buying power of enthusiasts of obscure PEZ dispensers or whatever. Without continued activity using bitcoins as an exchange medium, there is nothing preventing the world's entire supply from dwindling to the status of an obscure techie relic of the early 21st century, maybe worth a few hundred thousand(if the entire set is available, in good condition) to decorate some
Wallets get cracked fairly routinely; but (to the best of my knowledge) only by virtue of being stored on systems that are compromised by some other means. The bitcoin mechanism alone is pretty solid; but that means very little if you can get access to the wallet by attacking the user's system at some other level and then just reading them off the filesystem.
For whatever reason, whoever did the core work on bitcoins appears to have been pretty good; but the quality and competence of most of the surrounding activity and infrastructure are somewhere between 'crap' and 'are you sure that this isn't a parody?'
At least in part, this problem seems to be down to a lack of any sort of way(short of investigative journalism for every project you are interested in) of being able to see what the funding situation is.
As with OpenBSD a while back, it was pretty much 100% everything-as-normal until "Boom, out of money, game over, man, game over." followed by a last minute fundraiser.
There are plenty of projects, GnuPG among them(and OpenBSD, at that time), that I'd be happy to assist; but I don't really have the slightest idea of who is A-OK, who could use some more money in an ideal world, and who is about to burn out and quit for lack of resources.
Is there any sort of mechanism in place, or under discussion, for making resource needs more visible before they become emergencies?
From the sound of it Sony wants a Meaner and leaner attack dog that does more damage and costs less.
I fear that you are correct. The only possible bright spot would be if Sony realized (bear with me here, this is purely hypothetical, not a prediction) that an attack dog that spends all its time throwing lawyers at the next advance in content distribution(in the fine Valenti tradition of accusing the VCR of being the Boston Strangler of the film industry) is actually not as useful as an attack dog that doesn't roll over and wag its tail the moment some rag-tag band of competent but not extraordinary hackers make one of the world's larger movie publishers cry, in public, for weeks on end, with effectively no response from anyone else in the industry.
I doubt that they'll actually do this; but if they decide that the MPAA is better used to protect them from real threats, then even a toothier version of it might actually be good, or at least indifferent. I'm not holding my breath, though.
"Mobile" is basically a trailer for the cryptographically sealed dystopia after the demise of the general purpose computer. Your options are basically 'consume that content, just the way its creator intended you to' or 'walk away'.
Android is slightly better, in that (while it is peddled by a massive surveillance-and-advertising vendor) it is fairly easy to buy a handset that will accept substantial modification without the blessing of the creator. iOS starts from an incrementally less user-hostile place; but Apple's dedication to lockdown is very, very, thorough and relatively competent. Short of using the phone as a VNC/RDP/ICA client and connecting to a real computer, you are mostly SOL.
Given that this technique was introduced, after a long and arduous regulatory process, when the mitochondrially defective could just use donor eggs instead, suggests that there is a demand for children constructed in the "As related to me as possible; but minus the lethal defect" mold. If you drop the "as related to me as possible" requirement, merely getting healthy gametes is much easier(especially sperm, since egg harvesting is a somewhat unpleasant process).
As it happens, (and somewhat surprisingly) the US FDA held off on approving Thalidomide because of animal studies that were coming back with unpleasant suggestions of teratogenic effects.
It's perfectly possible for non-human trials to suggest that a drug or treatment should be kept well away from humans; but it's never entirely possible for a non-human trial to prove that humans won't exhibit an unexpected negative response. I'm very much in favor of paying attention to bad news from non-human trials; but I have no patience for the "Your lab mice haven't proved that it works in humans, ergo it must never be tested on humans!" school of argument.
That's going to end badly. I barely escaped with my life(and several of my most valued colleagues were permanently ontologically disabled or lost all their qualia); when The Incident occurred at the Liebnitz Institute for High Energy Metaphysics. I've seen ugly accidents in physics research, and industrial radiochemistry messes; but nothing nearly as horrific as a monad spallation cascasde exhibiting an unpredicted excursion beyond safe values. I'll never forget the screams.
It certainly isn't my money, so I will STFU; but depending on whether or not it ends up being 'On the NHS' it might be the money of rather a lot of brits.
And, while I'd be deeply unimpressed if this argument is used to suppress a specific fertility technique just because it's 'eww, icky!', I would be more generally supportive of questions about exactly how much money need be spent(by others, the would-be-parent can do as they wish) on attempts to engineer around the various defects that render people less able, or unable, to reproduce.
Proposals to 'forbid the unfit' from reproducing always slippery-slope to nowhere good, often quite quickly, so I would definitely oppose such; but I'm less sold on the idea that "I want children that share genes with me!" is necessarily a medical problem compelling enough to divert medical resources from the various "I'd prefer not to die in agony" cases, especially when young humans are not a terribly scarce resource.
Why would they need a new species classification, much less a genus? Your mitochondrial DNA differs from that of everyone else except your siblings by the same mother, and somehow you share a species label with the rest of us. The products of this technique will still have human nuclear DNA and human mDNA, just without Mom contributing half of the nuclear DNA and all of the mDNA, but instead only the nuclear DNA.
Future historians attempting to use mitochondria to trace female ancestry genetically will curse this development(just as the ones attempting to use Y chromosomes to genetically trace male ancestry would curse a hypothetical 'Y swap' corrective procedure for X-linked genetic disease); but it's hard to see an argument for why the product of this technique would be considered anything other than human.
Watching this 'debate', I've been unsurprised; but depressed, at the quality of 'argument' trotted out. The one that particularly annoys me is the "We can't allow it unless we know that it's totally safe and effective! What about possible side effects?!!".
Guess what, kids, there have been precious few medically relevant developments, ever, that came without some human risk. This doesn't imply endorsement of the Josef Mengele protocol for experimental ethics, it's just a fact that we've (so far, I'm all for somebody who can improve this) been unable to avoid, and even the most by-the-book-and-informed-consent contemporary clinical trials are subject to it to some degree. We can't exactly know if it's actually fully safe and effective in humans by use of animal models and pure reason.
Perhaps more importantly, this is a technique to treat disorders that cause grievous impairment and/or early, unpleasant, death. It has long been a commonplace of medical ethics(and simple commonsense decision making) that you don't want a cure worse than the disease; but that nasty diseases can have cures that you would welcome compared to that disease; but would be horrified by in the context of a less serious one(eg. basically all cancer treatment and most surgery). You calibrate your sense of risk based on what the alternatives are, not based on Ideal Perfect Risk Free. In the case of mitochondrial defects, the alternatives suck.
Finally, if you don't wish to allow treatment of mitochondrial defects(effective treatment, that is, there are various, mostly symptom-easing, treatments of not terribly impressive efficacy for the symptoms of mitochondrial disorders; but only swapping out mitochondria, or advanced and aggressive genetic engineering, show much hope for a cure); what do you propose? Do mitochondrially defective would-be-mothers get to roll the dice and hope for a less-sick baby? Do we start charging them with negligent homicide if they keep spawning horribly doomed offspring even after enough failures to know that trying again is dangerously likely to condemn their child to an ugly and swift death?
If you are concerned about 'germline' genetic engineering, this somewhat-uncomfortably-retro 'eugenic' proposal is the other viable option to preventing mitochondrial disease; but I'm guessing that it won't be too popular.
(All that said, I hope that the treatment does work as well as its backers hope, and doesn't turn out to suffer from the drawbacks its critics fear, and if it does turn out to be too dangerous/imperfectly effective, I think that it should go back to the drawing board; but these phantoms of 'need to know for sure that it works' and 'must be proven safe' seem like disgustingly transparent rhetorical devices, not serious ethical arguments.)
Virtually anywhere with some variant on a 'legal apparatus you'd expect from a developing or developed nation' will have some equivalent of 'Markedly novel medical procedures and drugs need some sort of approval before use' rules in place. The difficulty of getting approval, and level of enforcement, vary sharply.
You can typically get creative with techniques and drugs that are already approved for some other purpose; but bringing a procedure or drug into the fold in the first place typically requires either that it be grandfathered in through age, or go through some sort of approval.
In this case the cellphones received specific attention because a video recording of the pilot and passenger using them survived the crash; but isn't some flavor of "The plane seems to have been fine except for the effects of hitting the ground really fast, the pilot must have fucked up" the standard verdict if inspection of the wreckage, and any cockpit chatter, suggest no mechanical issues and there is no notable weather in the area?
I don't know how much they would chose to nickel-and-dime the customers. If the service is aimed at being an upmarket 'all-annoying-incidentals-included' brand, they'd probably let it slide. If it's anything like flying coach on a major airline, well, the puke will definitely be extra, and the cameras will also use machine vision to ferret out carry on bags and charge for each, and a surcharge will be assessed if you attempt to change the vehicle's radio away from 'sponsored content'.
What they will do is a strategic matter. That they will be able to do it is simply a matter of fact.
As best I can tell, "identity theft" is a brilliant invention on the part of institutions that are too lazy to authenticate people: as if by magic, this construction transforms fraud perpetrated against them into your problem. "Ooh, your identity got stolen, that sucks. Have fun fighting with the credit reporting agencies forever." rather than "Oh, another instance of fraud by impersonation against our pitifully weak systems. Maybe we have to do something about that..."
I have to admit, it's elegant enough that I'd be forced to shake the hand of the person responsible before punching him in the face, just as a gesture of respect for carrying off something that audacious successfully.
Aside from understanding, you also have to care. And not just care; but care enough to overcome the practical inconveniences of doing it properly, especially if everyone around you doesn't understand why you are wasting time with the 'unnecessary' extra steps.
Depending on the situation, not caring can easily be a greater obstacle than not understanding. This is the major reason why the existence of regulations carries weight. Regulations aren't very educational; but it is very, very, easy to understand 'doing X violates The Rules', while the logic behind The Rules can be of any level of complexity, or nonexistent. On the minus side, this means that arbitrarily stupid practices can be incorporated into The Rules without challenge. On the plus side, this means that brutally complex; but necessary, procedures can be laid out without the need to explain them to everyone from first principles.
Aside from the sheer difficulty of litigating against a financial institution(If it is possible for your sister to have signed away her soul to mandatory binding arbitration in the venue of the bank's choice, those terms were probably included in at least one part of the fine print, probably several), there may not be much to go on. Not all states even require disclosure of a customer data breach, much less any particular action, standard of care, or other inconvenience.
You might get somewhere if the bank didn't comply with Connecticut's data breach notification laws; but even that probably won't get you as far as you might want, though it might make some lower mid level peon more likely to comp her a year of credit monitoring just to go away. Any actually-toothy penalties, or not using absurdly insecure channels, though, not so much.
On the plus side, with 'DisplayID' replacing legacy EDID, it should be possible to artificially disable this 'adaptive sync' on any monitor that doesn't have an Nvidia-signed 'G-Sync Supported!' flag purchased by the vendor and flashed into the firmware, thus allowing Nvidia to charge more without the need to include the FPGA!
This clearly, um, incentivises innovation and, er, stuff. It's too bad, really. I could really use a GPU with better thermal efficiency; but Nvidia are being such a bunch of dicks that I feel bad considering them. Surely they could leave the dirty tricks for a generation where they are behind on pure technical aptitude?
Displayport is trying to be several different things to several different people; but in this case 'adaptive sync' serves the purposes of both:
For power-sensitive situations, being able to modify the frame rate can reduce power consumption(especially if combined with 'panel self refresh', also part of the embedded displayport standard, which calls for the panel driver to have enough RAM to store the entire frame so that the display driver and DP link can be shut down entirely if a static image is being displayed, only needing to wake back up when the image needs to be changed.)
The other advantage(and the one that Nvidia would be shooting for) is that it allows you to avoid the 'tearing' you get if your GPU's frame rate differs from your panel's refresh rate and you end up with part of one frame and part of the next frame drawn on the panel at the same time. If you can change the panel refresh rate, you can ensure that it refreshes when, and only when, the GPU has a new frame ready(obviously, you can't push the panel above a certain refresh rate, even if the GPU is doing something simple and could spit out hundreds or thousands of FPS; but it's a lot easier to cap at X FPS than it is to ensure that the framerate never dips under heavy load.)
I'm not a subject matter expert; but I think that it largely depends on location, available food sources, and severity.
Some of those listed(notably pellagra) are diseases that came to prominence because 'traditional' diets are not, in fact, all that stable. European populations, and their colonial offshoots, all have five centuries or less, sometimes a lot less, experience with new world crops. In the case of corn, they adopted the crop from the natives; but did not adopt the local processing techniques. Unluckily for them, the steps the skipped were the ones that provide a corn based diet with enough niacin. From that point until mass supplementation in the 20th century, the problem would crop up periodically among segments of the population that subsisted mostly on corn(which was mostly poor people, contributing to the willingness to put up with the problem).
Scurvy is closer to being an occupational hazard; but also (mostly) a product of dietary disruption. It's too lethal for a population to just put up with; so any diet that actually sustained a population for a few centuries probably prevents it most of the time; but is sure raised hell before food preservation techniques caught up with the increasing length of naval voyages.
Cretinism was a bit trickier because it largely depended on environmental iodine levels, rather than specific crops or food preparation. In areas with adequate soil iodine (or water iodine, for seafood), it just wasn't an issue, in areas with low iodine levels the same basic culture, crops, and diet resulted in frequent goiter and varying levels of debilitating thyroid issues. I don't know of anywhere that is unsuitable for human habitation because of this; but some areas just suffered markedly higher losses than others until supplementation largely solved the problem.
Given that excessive mortality tends to impede the transmission of 'traditions' and the existence of 'descendants', it's a safe bet that any truly traditional diet didn't kill too many of the people who ate it, too fast; but some diets we think of as traditional aren't, and 'not too many or too fast' can be a fairly unpleasant number. I'd argue that micronutrient deficiencies are one area were scientific methods have undoubtedly produced excellent results(albeit often because the introduction of a cool new food preservation scheme, or ultra-cheap diet for soldiers and squalid poor people, inadvertently omitted a nutrient and the resulting mess prompted some R&D on the subject).
Science has been less effective(or all too effective, from the other side) when it comes to avoiding death by overconsumption. Team Food Science is very good at spinning fat, sugar, and modified starch into a whole medley of edible food analogs that store well and sell well, at excitingly low cost; but less good, and less interested, in remediating the resulting mess. Whether this is a 'failure' of science, or a brilliant success at a rather ghastly goal is debatable.