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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.)
And, unfortunate for your vastly overrated modding, neither of those were viruses, but bacteria.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Only if the firewall also performs deep packet inspection. Many bad critters (viruses/bacteria) enter the system by making our firewall(s) think they are innocuous by externally looking link other good critters. It is the payload that is the real problem. If we could teach the body to somehow read the payload before docking with the receptors we could be disease (contracted from viruses/bacteria) free.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
>>>"biological informatics".
Why not just call it "programming"? Whether you're writing code for machine made of sand (silicon) or chemicals should not matter one bit.
Probably for the same reason we separate mathematicians from physicists, and chemists from biologists. There's a lot of specificity in each field that makes specialization worthwhile. Sure, biology is 'just' macro-scale chemistry (which, in turn, is 'just' macro-scale physics), but there are special cases that only happen in cells, as well as a lot of things that never happen in cells.
That doesn't mean that it's a bad thing to have someone with a foot firmly in both fields (computational physics, or biochemistry), but specializing is what allows computer engineers to spend more time on transistors than proteins, while the bioinformatics students learn about RNA without needing to bother with JAVA.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
The rapid spread would have been in part due to refugees fleeing the infected areas, unaware that they were incubating the disease. The plague is also potentially airborne, spreading to the lungs in severe cases and thereby allowing direct transmission between humans, which would allow the refugees to infect locals very fast.
Also, the reason the Black Death is thought to have been caused by bubonic plague is that there are many contemporary illustrations and descriptions of the victims, and they look a lot like modern plague victims. In an admittedly brief search, I couldn't find any reference to VHF producing buboes. Any alternative cause for the Black Death would surely have to produce those in at least a very sizable proportion of cases.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
You don't know what the phrase "selective pressure" means, do you?
Viral strains that are less deadly will reproduce for a longer time in the host before the host dies. In the case of HIV, that means the host will have more sexual partners, giving that less deadly strain more hosts to infect. This less deadly strain then has more hosts with a longer lifespan, developing a cycle of selective pressure upon HIV wherin those strains that are less virulent become more likely to reproduce.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I'm pretty sure one bit can kill you... if your logic levels are 50,000V and -50,000V, anyway.
For AIDS, you only need to have unprotected sex a few times and the virus will be successful. SO if you don't notice symton for a coupl of years, and you are sexually active, that's more then enough for the virus to propagate.
Actually, AIDS is not considered a highly infectious disease. Seriously. If you're having unprotected vaginal sex, it might take a great many times before the virus is successfully transmitted from a woman to a man. Scientists believe the actual rate of infection in such cases may be less than 1 percent. Sooooooooo.... feel better? Wanna risk it? Didn't think so.
Breakfast served all day!