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Seems the State Department is looking for $400 million in armored Teslas. OOPS. They had to go back and strike out Tesla (for now) and make it generic. With 'mericans about to suffer a little pain (medicare, SNAP, services cuts); some folks might be a little upset. Can’t have our Senators, Reps, Govt officers in plain limos. And what better to showcase Full Self Driving bullet proof autonomous vehicles. That they have been know to drive over protesters pedestrians is a plus actually. And with Eloon able to target individual cars, your Representative, Senator, Judge who’s thinking of bucking dear leader might just find his/her vehicle trying to ford the Potomac with the doors locked, windows up, and on fire.
Some unspecified number of years ago, I read a short story wherein the visitor to another world was brought in by the natives and brutally tortured and maimed. When he reached the point where he was blind and crippled and helpless, they made him their ruler, because he had nothing to gain from anything he might do and so would not be motivated by evil ends.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that we could do this (and do, in other species), we just don’t do it in humans because it’s highly unpredictable and highly unethical.
PGT-M just stands for “pre-implantation genetic testing for monogenic disorders”, which is sequencing analysis for various pathogenic mutations or aneuploidy. It’s something that seems to be routinely offered through various fertility clinics. There’s no way in hell anyone is doing CRISPR in these circumstances though.
If it’s possible to achieve a live, healthy human birth by mixing in (say) squid genes with the human ones, that would certainly be interesting and highly newsworthy. I wasn’t aware it had been done (which is what I was trying to say in my previous post).
Ah, I thought you were questioning whether or not it could be done, not whether it had been done. From a purely technical perspective, I’m fairly confident we could make a transgenic human - we’ve done it in sheep, cows, pigs, and some primates, after all - but the “healthy first time” thing would probably be a challenge.
Elmo has been whining about “defunding Wikipedia” again because they can’t be bought, and their front page featured article for today is definitely a poke at him;
People get bent out of shape all the time for having Wikipedia articles they can’t control.
There was a sham “charity” that we made sure to try to represent as fairly as possible in an article given what reliable media sources reported on it. So the article wasn’t especially flattering. A couple of people representing the charity demanded that we essentially use only their press releases as sources. We countered that they were only useful to mention what the charity “claimed” but that we couldn’t exclude what journalists reported about the organization.
So naturally there was a lawsuit, because it’s illegal to repeat what legitimate news organizations report on an organization. The lawsuit was even mentioned in the news which was kind of freaky, and I was one of the people sued. Of course, all they had was my username so it was impossible to actually sue me, and I ignored the frivolous bullshit. Literally, my Wikipedia username was listed as a target.
So this shit happens all the time. The only thing that’s scary here is that the Wikimedia Foundation is based out of San Francisco, and who knows what kind of info Elon can get steal that he can use against them under the cover of DOGE.
I can try to dig through to figure out what organization it was. Maybe if I go to my talk page on Wikipedia I could find it. It was well over a decade ago, maybe 15 years? I can probably find it.
I don’t mind saying the organization and I can find out what happened, the only reason I haven’t said it is because I literally can’t remember.
I found it! It sure took awhile, LOL. It took quite a bit of digging.
Apparently they withdrew the lawsuit because they were afraid that there was going to be some blowback due to SLAPP laws in California. Here is a “report” on Wikipedia discussing the incident:
And I guess it wasn’t well over a decade ago, it was 11 years ago. (I mean, still over a decade ago.)
Here are a couple of news articles about the lawsuit from that time:
Only 4 people were listed by name (those are the people who voluntarily provided their real life identities as editors who were involved in the article). I was part of the list of “Does” mentioned in one of the articles (I assume that’s a “John Doe” reference since they had no idea who any of those people actually are).
(Also: “Yank”? "Yank Barry?" That sounds like something you’d hear in a tale about a pub brawl in Dublin. “Yeh, 'e got 'im by the yankberries, 'e did.”)
The lawsuit was even mentioned in the news which was kind of freaky, and I was one of the people sued. Of course, all they had was my username so it was impossible to actually sue me, and I ignored the frivolous bullshit. 
Literally, my Wikipedia username was listed as a target.