I can't speak about any specific company, but there are several VCs that specialize in life sciences and medicine and have people with the requisite expertise to evaluate claims on their team (or know the people to talk to in order to get it). The average tech VC might not have a deep bench of life sciences people to validate specific tech with, may not know the experts in the field, and may not know how the industry varies from tech.
Similarly, if the company won't validate their tech in peer reviewed journals, they are full of shit. I strongly suspected fraud years before it was acknowledged because Theranos was citing "trade secrets" for why they couldn't release any data about their tech. We don't do trade secrets in medicine or science, and this is precisely why.
The FDA can (and will) audit anything and everything you do for approved drugs/treatments. There are no trade secrets in medicine. This is why companies patent things. You literally can’t hide information about something that’s about to be FDA approved.
As a result, the medical industry is less competitive than other industries. Also, it’s seen as ethically dubious to compete on saving lives. Instead, there’s a lot if in-licensing deals (see above re patents) as opposed to trade secrets.
There are vast amounts of data that you have to disclose to FDA that you are permitted to mark as not for public disclosure. If you ever FOIA records from FDA they are heavily redacted.
You can’t walk into the factory but certainly you can look at a patented drug and get a formula, for example. The Wikipedia article about Sovaldi (sofosbuvir - a Hepatitis C drug) contains the exact chemical formula.
Plus the clinical trial process is extensive. It would be much harder in the present regulatory regime to have a new BS prescription drug than a new BS testing startup, like this one or Theranos. (Old drugs are a little different - some were grandfathered into the current testing regime and evidence for their effectiveness is in some cases limited.)
Certainly there are trade secrets in medicine, but not everywhere.
You are of course allowed to employ SOME obfuscation in research process, but you aren't allowed to shield your product and claims from scrutiny behind them. At the end of the day you have to validate that your product can do what you say it can do publicly through independent analysis, you have to run public trials against existing tech, and you have to explain how your tech works, which Theranos never did. They fought against scrutiny from the greater scientific community from day one; "just trust me it works" is not sufficient proof in science.
This is one reason why we have the patent structure, so people can publicly disclose data for validation purposes and still make a substantial profit.
Plenty of trade secrets in medicine in general (not just US). Parents need to lay out the process, but for some products (biological) the details matter immensely. That’s why even though some biologic drugs went off patent back in 2015 they are only launching the past year or two.
Preach. Boston is damn near overly hostile towards young people. They hyper regulate all activities and services that young people want to participate in or use as you point out, do nothing to reign in housing prices, and then are shocked when they have a hard time retaining talented people after they get their degrees. It's absurd.
>and then are shocked when they have a hard time retaining talented people after they get their degrees.
I mean, come on. Are they shocked? Or is this how the townies want it? My impression is that quite a lot of the "natives" who think of themselves as "True Bostonians(TM)" (ie: not just those of us who've lived here for years, married someone raised here, and own property here) want this place to be the world's most populous (but rather restrictive) college town.
Why would they want more people around to ruin their city by walking around doing things? Come, spend your money like a tourist, fuel their businesses, get your degree if you're one of those workaholic nerds, and get the fuck back out. You can come back eventually if you manage to make the tenure track!
>Boston is damn near overly hostile towards young people.
Massachusetts is overtly hostile to anyone who does not step in line the way a good well behaved cog in the machine should. Making it hard for people to stay out late and get drunk is just a specific instance of that.
When you picture the state as being run by a committee of stodgy puritanical authoritarians who live in Lincoln and Lexington it all makes sense.
It's largely arguing that most of the cybercrime jobs basically are desk jobs. It principally says two things.
First, that most jobs in cybercrime involve selling services to end users and whenever you sell services you not only have to provide customer support which sucks but your customers will have reliability and usability expectations which become annoying to fulfill when you have to maintain your infrastructure in a clandestine way.
Second, most of the positions in criminal orgs involve low skill bitch work because if you had the skills to do the real programming / security / ops work required to do more creative cybercrime then you could easily go get a legitimate job with great pay or go do your own thing.
Under your logic, any time the government breaks a law and harms me, I am automatically entitled to disregard the law as well and retaliate. If government can't follow the law, why should the people? It's pretty easy to see why we don't want to live in a society where rule of law is disregarded.
>Under your logic, any time the government breaks a law and harms me, I am automatically entitled to disregard the law as well and retaliate.
I would reword that to say "any time the government breaks a law and harms me, I HAVE THE OPTION to disregard the law as well and retaliate."
That's just the way it is. It may be stupid to fight your government, but if they beat you down enough you may look at that as your best option.
The question I have about your statement is what do you expect an oppressed people are supposed to do when nothing else works?
Telling them to continue to work within a system that has failed them for hundreds of years seems to be the equivalent of telling them that you don't want to change the status quo.
Well, first I can almost guarantee that the surveillance tech being employed on a predator drone is substantially more advanced and wide ranging than a simple human operated video camera, but I also don't think it's a good idea to have guys with video cameras in helicopters recording protests either unless it's to film illegality. It has a chilling effect on the exercise of free speech. Peaceful protesters really shouldn't be getting surveiled / data gathered during protests shouldn't be getting mined, and unless authorities can guarantee that isn't happening then recording makes me uncomfortable.
Yes, because a police helicopter is different for two reasons: (1) it’s not operated by CBP (who have no jurisdiction here), and (2) a police helicopter doesn’t have Hellfire missile bays.
Putting aside the CBP issue (fair point, agreed, that's weird), it's not like police helicopters haven't been used for pretty bad things in the past - e.g. when Philadelphia firebombed it's citizens in the 80s.
Exactly this and I'm surprised that I had to scroll this far down to find this comment.
Extract this scenario out into meat space. Imagine if a town was running a bulletin board where anyone could post town news and a citizen posted a flyer talking about town crime statistics that were wrong. A town employee noticed and posted an addendum identified as being from the town right next to the flyer saying "actually the real data is X". Should town employees not be allowed to do that?
I would argue that Google has an obligation to be transparent, they do not have an obligation to be neutral. As you state, they are a private entity and can do whatever they want.
If news providers and other knowledge providers are allowed to curate what data they present then I don't think it's reasonable to demand that Google be held to a higher standard. Further, literally nothing is stopping you from creating your own knowledge aggregator if you feel that Google is doing a bad job of displaying pertinent data.
I'm a big proponent of free speech, and have read a bit on the arguments against Big Tech censorship. One of the arguments against Google being able to selectively censor political content, despite being a private company, is that they could be classified as an essential service. I'm obviously getting information from sources opposed to Google's censorship, so I don't know if the wider legal community agrees with that view, but it's worth considering.
Another argument is that they have legal protections as content providers. However, the same protections don't apply to content publishers. If their censorship places them in the publisher category, they could open themselves to lawsuits. YouTube is an example that usually comes up. If a user uploads an illegal video, YouTube has protections against lawsuits. As a publisher, they would have more liability for the content they host.
It's also possible to run a web browser in a docker container which can be interacted with on the host OS. This avoids the permissions issues with solutions like firejail:
