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How Many Bits Does It Take To Kill You?
pegr writes "Andrew 'bunnie' Huang, Reverse Engineer, XBox hacker, and generally smart guy, muses over the H1N1/swine flu virus as only a reverse engineer can: 'I now know how to modify the virus sequence to probably make it more deadly.' Not that he would, of course. bunnie has consistently made the esoteric available to us mere mortals, and his overview of the H1N1 virus is a fascinating read from a unique perspective." (Seen today also at the top of Schneier on Security.)
To kill a Snow Leopard.
All depends on how you count, I guess...
It's like evolution is the demo coder and humans are the Amigas.
If only biologists had thought of the idea of treating DNA/RNA sequences as data, and then analyzing their properties statistically and computationally, with an eye towards what effects different modifications to the sequences might be predicted to have. We might call this field something fancy like "biological informatics".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7026801162637347552
I don't know, go ask Mr. Owl.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Sounds like we need a firewall.
Yes, troll feeding is bad, but honestly,
that there was a Swine Flu vaccine back in the 1970's that caused a 300% mortality rate on all the "volunteers,"
This alleged vaccine killed the subject, revived them, killed them a second time, revived them again, and finally killed them off (for good) a third time?
Math is hard, clearly.
Actually, they had a control group who were given a placebo who also died even though they had not even been given the vaccine. Also, the researchers died and through luck these two groups were each the exact same size as the group given the vaccine, thus the 300% mortality rate.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
It's humblings that I could be killed by 3.2kbytes
3.2 kbytes should be enough to kill anyone.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
The protein that gets misfolded in Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (or mad cow) seems to be called just Prion protein and is only 253 amino acids. If bunnie is correct and one amino acid = 6 bits, then thats 1,518 bits.
So you're saying that it would take just 11 posts on Twitter to kill someone?
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
In the case of HIV, that means the host will have more sexual partners, giving that less deadly strain more hosts to infect.
So, wait...getting the HIV will guarantee you more sexual partners? No wonder it's so popular!
Your brain is not a computer.
You started off strong enough, then held on ok for a bit, then lashed out at programmers, logic, and liberals while being apologetic at the same time and never really making a strong point other than when you got to your defense of philosophy as you see it at the end. All, in all, I give it a B-. Now find your enter key and someone other than me might actually read that long son of a bitch of a paragraph you just shat out.
If you can change the constants of the universe, you probably already killed everyone an infinite number of times, preemptively.
What is the sound of an infinite number of voices crying out and suddenly silenced?