samdcbu (u/samdcbu) - Readit News

samdcbu commented on Whistleblower Josh Dean of Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems has died seattletimes.com/business... · Posted by u/Freedom2

FrustratedMonky · a year ago

""He was 45, had been in good health and was noted for having a healthy lifestyle.""

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/whistleblower-josh-dea...

From Healthy to Dead in 2 weeks is still pretty extreme. It isn't like pneumonia and MRSA aren't known factors.

Perhaps a 'weaponized' MRSA?

samdcbu · a year ago

Antibiotic resistant MRSA kills thousands of people a year in the US. The idea that he went to the hospital with pneumonia and then contracted antibiotic resistant MRSA from the hospital environment is very plausible.

samdcbu commented on $200M gift propels scientific research in the search for life beyond Earth seti.org/press-release/20... · Posted by u/webmaven

chubot · 2 years ago

Not knowing much about non-profits, I wonder if donations this large ever create political problems for the recipient?

Like I imagine tons of people will be hitting them up for pet projects of varying quality after this announcement.

Though looking at Wikipedia, they have been around since 1984, with many high profile donors, so maybe they are institutionally able to deal with huge variations in budget?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI_Institute

My (uninformed) guess is that $200 M must to be the biggest gift by an order of magnitude, or maybe 2.

Or are these kind of estate gifts split up over multiple years, with strings attached? Either that or you just get one huge check :)

samdcbu · 2 years ago

SETI received ~$28m in donations and contributions in 2022, according to their tax filings [1]

As mentioned in the press release, contribution will be used at least in part as an endowment, providing perpetual funding for ongoing programs.

Also, it is my understanding that large philanthropic gifts, particularly from estates, often come in the form of non-cash assets such as stocks or other financial instruments. So probably not a $200m check, but a very nice nest egg to fund SETI projects for decades to come.

[1] https://www.seti.org/about-us/financials

samdcbu commented on SoftBank paid $1.5B to WeWork lenders days before bankruptcy ft.com/content/020d78ab-c... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

samdcbu · 2 years ago

https://archive.li/oI1A1

samdcbu commented on Comcast squeezing 2Gbps internet speeds through decades-old coaxial cables engadget.com/comcast-star... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

ethbr1 · 2 years ago

Wouldn't this impact their peering agreements?

Summarizing greatly, but user upload = Comcast pays vs user download = Comcast's peers pay them.

I'd assume for last-mile ISPs, peering is a non-negligible source of revenue.

samdcbu · 2 years ago

Most of Comcast’s internet is exchanged through transit-free peering agreements, so only about 1% of Comcast’s outbound traffic requires them to pay for IP transit. And that traffic is mainly overseas, so Comcast is effectively a Tier 1 network in the US. Which means their customers’ outbound traffic doesn’t cost them anything.

For most last-mile ISPs, peering isn’t a revenue source. Small ISPs have to pay for peering and IP transit, and large ISPs have transit-free peering agreements with most, if not all, of the internet.

However, large ISPs that enjoy regional monopolies can refuse to upgrade connections with peered networks in an attempt to force the content providers sending traffic over the peered network to instead peer directly with the ISP.

This tactic is really only feasible for ISPs who have captive customers that are unable to switch to another ISP, as the negotiation process requires the ISP to allow the service it is providing to its actual customers to degrade to such an extent that the content provider is forced to peer directly with the ISP.

samdcbu commented on Comcast squeezing 2Gbps internet speeds through decades-old coaxial cables engadget.com/comcast-star... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

ls612 · 2 years ago

Minneapolis has a private fiber ISP, my brother is in Madison and they too have private fiber available widely. I was under the impression there had been a lot of fiber deployment in cities in the past five years.

samdcbu · 2 years ago

US Internet (private fiber ISP in the Twin Cities) is an anomaly, not the norm. Minneapolis is incredibly lucky to have a local, private ISP that offers fiber to the home at up to 10 gigabit/s. The only other ISPs in the US that I know offer similar services are either municipal ISPs, co-ops, or Google Fiber.

samdcbu commented on Mathematician warns US spies may be weakening next-gen encryption newscientist.com/article/... · Posted by u/stevefan1999

tptacek · 2 years ago

I've been in rooms watching cryptographers trying to figure out what exactly it is Bernstein was saying with that blog post for the past week, and I do not believe that Matthew Sparkes at The New Scientist understands it any better than they do. Since Sparkes doesn't have any direct reporting from Bernstein, and nobody here cares about the NIST quotes, the right thing to do here is to treat this story as a dupe.

samdcbu · 2 years ago

> that blog post for the past week

https://blog.cr.yp.to/20231003-countcorrectly.html

samdcbu commented on MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD: A randomized, placebo-controlled phase 3 trial nature.com/articles/s4159... · Posted by u/beefman

singingfish · 2 years ago

I've been hearing about this for a long time - probably since the late 1990s, so I'm surprised to see that it seems only in the last couple of years that there are phase three trials. I would imagine that the safety profile of MDMA is already well understood / fairly well researched in the 1950s and 1960s

samdcbu · 2 years ago

MDMA was first synthesized in 1912 by Merck. Merck and US Army did several animal trials in the 1950s, but by the end of the decade MDMA was shelved and thought to have no therapeutic benefit. It wasn’t until Sasha Shulgin rediscovered it in 1976 that its therapeutic benefits were discovered, at which point therapists and psychiatrists began quietly using it for psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. In July 1984 the DEA proposed making MDMA a Schedule I controlled substances, which led to outcry from practitioners who requested the DEA hold hearings to provide testimony on MDMA’s therapeutic benefits. While these hearings were ongoing, the DEA used its emergency scheduling authority in May of 1985 to place MDMA in Schedule I.

Animal efficacy and human safety trials of MDMA began in the late 1980s, and the first FDA-approved, placebo controlled, double blind phase I study was published in 1996.

samdcbu commented on The FCC responds to my ATSC 3 encryption complaint – they want to hear from you blog.lon.tv/2023/07/10/th... · Posted by u/tech234a

lasermike026 · 2 years ago

We should do something like the UK does. We should have the American version of the BBC. I hate the networks totally and completely.

samdcbu · 2 years ago

The American version of the BBC: PBS

samdcbu commented on The FCC responds to my ATSC 3 encryption complaint – they want to hear from you blog.lon.tv/2023/07/10/th... · Posted by u/tech234a

mcny · 2 years ago

I think this is one of those things where we should open it up (with limits, I’m not saying we should allow 10kW base stations or something obscene like that) and see what innovation we usher in?

I’m guessing it will be good enough out in the middle of nowhere or something that needs just reliable low speeds?

samdcbu · 2 years ago

If someone is already in the middle of no where, 2.4 GHz congestion isn’t a problem for them.

I’m always for more unlicensed spectrum.

But I strongly disagree with your distaste for the FCC’s reverse auctions of spectrum. Wireless Spectrum is a limited public resource and an auction is a much better way to allocate it than to have those same companies instead hire lobbyists to try to convince the FCC to allocate that spectrum to them.

samdcbu commented on OpenAI came after our domain because we use GPT in it · Posted by u/decide1000

Hamuko · 2 years ago

gptchat.io: The Internet's #1 source for GUID Partition Table talk.

samdcbu · 2 years ago

Finally, somewhere that is covering the issues I care about but that the mainstream media refuses to cover.