It's a group of cells on a plate? What is there here that would be illegal? This isn't any different than growing some rat intestinal lining cells in a petri dish.

How do you source living human brain cells? (Not necessarily trying to make a point, I'm genuinely interested)

You buy them from a supplier.

but to answer your question honestly the supplier keeps stock of them by growing them and storing them. The original cells came from donations.

You could always extract some cells from a biopsy as well, but these guys likely just bought them from sigma or whatever the Australian lab-supply monopoly is.

there are many "immortal" strains of cells that are mass produced and sold to labs, most notably "HeLa" cells. in this case in particular, "iPSCs" cells are used, sourcing skin cells or blood cells (with informed consent of the patient), and using those differentiated (or "specialized") cells to create pluripotent (or "less specialized") cells that can then be transformed into neurons

Where did they get the brain cells from?

Not shocking they seem to have pretty low professional standards. I recently had a friend travelling from the US back to Canada get suddenly thoroughly frisked without warning after the scanners showed some object near her thighs. She didn't have anything but clothes on her body on below the waist. The TSA agent spent time groping around, convinced there was something, then after there couldn't possibly have been an object under her clothes, accepted that (paraphrasing) "there must have been an issue with the scanner".

She called her partner (who I was with at the time) afterwards, upset and shaken by the experience. @TSA in one of the NYC airports: If you're not going to get consent to grope girls, at least let them know that you're about to do it.

It has been my experience that they would call a female agent when they needed to pat down another female. Has this changed?

It was a female agent, that doesn't mean that it's okay to start groping someone without warning.

Yeah, IME they recite a script (I’ve heard it many times) where they explain why they are doing it, what it will involve, and how you can refuse (in that case, it would probably mean not flying that day). And offer to do it in private.

You phrased it as "If you're not going to get consent to grope girls", so why is it relevant that she is female?

Mostly to make a point; more people are likely to care about it not being okay if it's phrased that way. (Something, something, toxic masculinity, "suck it up tough guy, can't handle a little pat-down?")

The fact that the TSA agent a woman doesn't automatically make someone else comfortable with whatever liberties the agent feels like taking. It's still likely worse if it's a man doing it, but sharing a gender isn't an excuse for the agent to do whatever they want.

So you think that's a toxic attitude, but cater to it anyway? It's like saying "I mention she's whites because racists might not care otherwise".

> It's like saying "I mention she's whites because racists might not care otherwise".

Which is a very effective technique.

That's not really an equivalent statement. In general, women do face more harassment and unwanted touching, which often doesn't translate to the "white" example you give.

Because non-white people don't face more harassment from leos?

I'm saying exactly the opposite. Your example statement being equivalent to the one I gave would imply that white people face more harassment, which isn't the case.

But that isn't relevant to the point being made. Say "I mention they are black to pander to black supremists" if you wish.

> "there must have been an issue with the scanner".

That's way better than them asking you twenty times why the scanner went off.

I don't know, I didn't build the fucking thing.

Who would think that? At every corporation where I've worked it's been explicit in both the contract and in HR training that this is explicitly not allowed.

I was chatting with an old classmate at a homecoming a few months ago, and he mentioned that, during the polygraph top get Canadian Top Secret clearance for a co-op job, he had to say how many drinks he had each week. Being a university student, it got brushed aside, but the answer was considered to be alcoholism-level.

In a weird way, that's almost a positive sign, if you view the security-clearance process as mostly being about quickly clearing away secrets that could be used for blackmail down the line, when the person has more authority and more to lose.

P.S.: Further musing: There's a system-design tension between granting access to people that are "perfect" versus "flawed in ways we are aware of and can manage." Where a process ought to land on that spectrum depends on certain assumptions about baseline applicant quality, an estimate of the organization's accuracy at [false/true] [negatives/positives], and the impacts.

If you auto-reject the people who admit to something sub-criminal like cheating on their spouse, that means no applicant will ever admit to it, so you'll end up with more people hid it. In the long run, that means a higher proportion of employees who have something an adversary can use for blackmail, and the blackmail is more-effective because the repercussions are large.

You can get co-op/internship that requires a Top Secret clearance?

There are co-operatives in manufacturing which would need their staff to be security-cleared in order to win government contacts (such as assembling weapons). Perhaps this is what parent is referring to. Co-ops aren't just for groceries :)

In the Canadian university lingo, co-op refers to a (usually paid) internship that you complete as part of your degree. You usually have a couple co-op terms/semesters along with your traditional terms. For example, you may start your degree with two semesters of classes, then a semester of co-op, then one of classes, then another two co-ops, more classes, etc. until you complete the degree requirements. Degrees with a co-op requirement usually will make mention of it (e.g. Software Engineering with co-op).

Oh, that's really interesting. We have them in the UK too, but they're called placements rather than co-ops.

Yep. I worked on the control system for the Virginia class attack sub-marines for my co-op. Also got to ride around in a Seawolf class submarine.

That's pretty cool. I'm guessing you're American, not Canadian, right? I didn't realize American schools had co-ops; I thought they mostly/solely had internships.

Interesting, but I am very sceptical. I'd be interested in seeing actual verified results of how it handles a road with heavy snow, where the only lane references are the wheel tracks of other vehicles, and you can't tell where the road ends and the snow-filled ditch begins.

The issue is that it's no longer actually RISC-V M at the point, you're changing the instruction set. If you're compiling RISC-V M code, that doesn't need the extra NOP.

That being said, the disabling of MUL is being done at a software project level here, not by the CPU vendor. It's in the same linked commit that added in the NOP instructions to the arithmetic routines.

If your software runs on any chip and your chip runs any software, you have a problem, but in embedded cases, you know which chip runs which software, because you designed them together.

This is very true and why I'm not liking that Xilinx is trying to go the other way. It really gets in the way and doesn't work. I know what's connected to what and how, but their system device tree generator doesn't and it yells really loud about that. And I don't even need a device tree, just xparameters.h

* gas, gas, coal, clean beautiful coal, and oil, don't forget about oil, drill, baby drill.

Why would that be any better of a defense than "that preschooler said that I should do it"? People are responsible for their work.

This particular topic is covered in the "Are there billions of fake people?" section of the linked article.

That's not a reasonable solution. Have you used the Patreon app? I use it regularly on Android, and have dozens of audio podcast files downloaded through it.