4 ms·

That's dirt cheap for a government actor, and we can be sure that the big governments have been doing this sort of attack for years.

rustybolt 7y ago
It's a lot of money for an academic researcher.
- progval 7y ago
  Researchers in applied fields other than CS spend this kind of money on a regular basis. eg. https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-costs-for-lab-rat-testing-in-the-US https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-costs-for-lab-rat-testing...
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Is it? Multi-million grants are common in academia. A lot of research is expensive. When I worked in a lab the materials alone for a single day's experiment would frequently run into the thousands. E.g. the total human RNA samples we used cost many thousands of dollars per milligram. Admittedly this is a different field, but it's still academia.
  - klmr 7y ago
    > Multi-million grants are common in academia. Not in the way you explain. Multi-million dollar grants are usually awarded over multiple years, and pay for multiple researchers’ salaries, as well as other resources, some of which are expected to outlast the project (e.g. microscopes, or hardware for databases). Burning 75k on a single experiment (which is effectively what was done here) is rare. Note that this is true even for current hot topics such as biomedical (e.g. cancer) research, for which vast chunks of the federal budget have been allocated in multiple countries. Obtaining similar sums in less sexy fields is much harder. And even in biomedical research, multi-million dollar grants are considered large. Most grants are much smaller, they just don’t get talked about as much. Since you mention human RNA samples I assume you know this. You mention the per-milligram cost but this is pretty misleading if you mean to imply that “milligram” is somehow little, because it isn’t: yes, the samples are tiny (≤1 µg of RNA is more typical than milligrams!), but so what? It’s not like we need more.

rustybolt 7y ago

It's a lot of money for an academic researcher.

progval 7y ago
Researchers in applied fields other than CS spend this kind of money on a regular basis. eg. https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-costs-for-lab-rat-testing-in-the-US https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-costs-for-lab-rat-testing...
CydeWeys 7y ago
Is it? Multi-million grants are common in academia. A lot of research is expensive. When I worked in a lab the materials alone for a single day's experiment would frequently run into the thousands. E.g. the total human RNA samples we used cost many thousands of dollars per milligram. Admittedly this is a different field, but it's still academia.
- klmr 7y ago
  > Multi-million grants are common in academia. Not in the way you explain. Multi-million dollar grants are usually awarded over multiple years, and pay for multiple researchers’ salaries, as well as other resources, some of which are expected to outlast the project (e.g. microscopes, or hardware for databases). Burning 75k on a single experiment (which is effectively what was done here) is rare. Note that this is true even for current hot topics such as biomedical (e.g. cancer) research, for which vast chunks of the federal budget have been allocated in multiple countries. Obtaining similar sums in less sexy fields is much harder. And even in biomedical research, multi-million dollar grants are considered large. Most grants are much smaller, they just don’t get talked about as much. Since you mention human RNA samples I assume you know this. You mention the per-milligram cost but this is pretty misleading if you mean to imply that “milligram” is somehow little, because it isn’t: yes, the samples are tiny (≤1 µg of RNA is more typical than milligrams!), but so what? It’s not like we need more.