...in the same way that a Beowulf cluster of Rubix cubes, all running different operating systems and under constant attack from unknown attackers, does. It still provides for endless years of puzzle-solving fun!
You are correct with your analysis that an immunobooster could have consequences if the immune system is not allowed to equilibrate properly. Philosophically, though, I still think it's wiser to work within the bodies' natural immune system than try to pretend it doesn't exist and work alongside it. The latter is the basis of the approach which has given rise to the modern pharmaceutical industry. Most side effects from existing drugs are derived from collateral damage.
The questions you pose about transplants are currently a very interesting study within the circles of tissue engineering. As early as '98 the industry was becoming very adept, at least with artificial skin, at replicating the bodies' natural matrix of proteins while, at the same time, leaving out the markers which commonly trigger deadly immune rejection responses.
Another comment included the abstract from the scientific publication. The research collected data with respect to a bacterial infection. While the immune system does approach bacterial and viral infections differently that is mostly because viruses invade endogenous cells and bacteria are exogenous invaders. The same system of recognizing a bacterial cell is used when recognizing an infected body cell. There are, perhaps, different cell lines of macrophages and lymphocytes to ingest bacteria as opposed to virus producing body cells but the initial system of recognition and activation is similarly alerted.
This is a representation of some very adept work by researchers at Inimex and some well spent funding by CIHR.
The human body has seven systems: muscoskeletal, reproductive, skin, cardiopulmonary, nervous, digestive, and immune. Many of the ailments which people experience--cancer, diabetes, neurodegenerative disorders, prion diseases, leukemia, infections--invade tissues of the six other systems but are ultimately traceable as a deficiency in their own immune system. The immune system is trained as the maintenance arm of the body. When cells become cancerous the immune system is trained to find and remove them. When viruses and bacteria enter the body the immune system is trained to kill them. When plaques build up in the body the immune system is trained to remove them. When cells are starving, or asphyxiated, or agitated it is the immune system which is responsible for transmitting the proper signals systemwide and stimulating other tissues to produce the materials necessary to fix the problem.
The devoted study of immunology, of which the language which cells use to communicate with each other is central, has been pushed aside for many years by the larger, more established, more prestigious research groups both in academia and in the industry. When I worked at Abbott Laboratories, starting in '99, I found that their immunology department had recently been all but terminated in favor of shuffling the money to the devoted disease areas. While treating the diseases as separate from the body has led to some novel treatments (eg. antiangionesis and apoptosis for cancer) it seemed, to me, that a whole boatload of data which pointed to the potential cures available within the body itself were being ignored--not because they lacked scientific merit--but because the social structures within the company (and the industry) were attached to the research paths which were easier for the marketers and PR releases to handle.
To some extent that's the way things must work. The venture capitalists and investors need to know where their money is going or else they aren't going to contribute. That's a sad state of society, though, when one group's ignorance is stifling another group's innovation.
The study of immunology has quite a bit of potential for worldwide medicine. ImClone managed to open the popular path with its approach of monoclonal antibodies, though that segment was somewhat sabotaged by the insider trading scandal. Let's hope that companies like Inimex, and hopefully some companies in the US, will begin to devote greater resources to understanding how the body naturally works and working with it. Many of the detrimental side effects of today's pharmaceuticals are directly related to the immune system's response to those molecules being introduced into the body. The industry has really created its own problem of side effects by buckling in to the demands of the financiers and not holding to the strict scientific principles.
thus far, Mr. Softie has been pretty easy (all things considered) on how much data he sends back home My hypothesis is that Mr. Softie has been pretty comprehensive--and sneaky--about the data which is sent back home. With the extraordinary ease with which databases can be transferred, assimilated, indexed, combined, and mined, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a service out there which can correlate your Windows key with every cookie which has ever been on your system, every IP address you've ever had, every browser you've ever used, and every bit of personal information which can be gleaned from public tax records, DOT records, or lists available from insurance carriers.
eventually investors will panic when they contemplate the very expensive pile of hot air they will have accumulated, and yet again the bubble will burst dramatically In the mean time the people who orchestrated the event, having named themselves the execs and CEOs of both the investment firms and the hot air companies, will have portioned out to themselves a majority of the billions of dollars. The money doesn't just get sucked up--it gets laundered and funnelled back to the top of the pyramid.
This is precisely what has kept me from pursuing a graduate degree. I'd be okay with taking a standardized test or two to demonstrate that I have the scholastic aptitude to absorb the content material but I have absolutely no interest in filling out reams upon reams of paperwork for application for admission to the school, application for admission to a particular program, application for funds to cover housing, application for funds to cover tuition, application for funds to cover materials... and then keeping track of all the deadlines.
I've been looking for a "Hey! You sound like you might be the right man for the job!" type of opportunity for eight years. If I wanted to be an expert in jumping through endless volumes of someone else's paperwork hurdles I wouldn't have chosen to study as a scientist.
A lot of people can't afford a student loan that is sometimes more than their mortgage! And those who can qualify for and afford the risk of the student loan are nearly financially doomed after graduation unless they are already part of the upper class. A middle class salary just isn't middle class anymore. It certainly isn't enough to cover the total cost of living alone, rising insurance rates, rising consumer prices, skyrocketing rents and mortgages, and the constant barrage of "if you're not putting 20% of your paycheck into retirement funds you're sabotaging yourself."
white house dictates so much of Danish foreign policy that it feels like the country is invaded by the US already Which leads to an interesting consideration: Is the US falling behind in innovation because the US is really falling behind in innovation, or is the US falling behind in innovation because all of the major US innovation companies are sending their best ideas to lands where they can avoid US government taxes and intrusion?
Say for example if we beat up all of our prominent researchers here and then send their ideas to research groups overseas? It'd be great for the profit margin but terrible for morale.
I read that part as well and the most prominent thought in my mind was to wonder at what level that focus on innovation is being counted. Sure, the US purports to spend lots of money on some of the important things but very little of that actually makes it to the level of the researchers who would actually do something with it. Most of the venture capital is perpetually recycled back to the upper levels of people who invest it thanks to the "sophistication of financial markets".
A deterioration of the political and regulatory environment in the US prompted the fall Our leaders aren't allowing American scientists to innovate. If it doesn't fit into a corporate ledger, or if the return on a research investment can't be forecast in terms of dollars, then the venture capitalists have little or no interest in it. Scientists, increasingly, are finding themselves denied staffing and funding requests because they're not salesmen. Especially over the last ten years I've seen a trend where MBAs, accountants, marketers, and salesmen are bidding for the highest salaries while the scientists and innovators are seen almost as a necessary evil for doing business.
Until the US fixes its priorities we're going to continue to fall. Perhaps the US can keep buying talent from other nations, with H1-B visas, but unless the scientists are given fruitful environments they simply aren't going to come up with anything new or revolutionary. What encouragement do the nation's thinkers have to keep improving their ideas when the laurels and rewards are going only to the people who manage them like a column of assets? It's plain demoralizing to continually refine a product for a year only to see executive support lost and funding slashed. Graduate students and post-docs, while they provide a significant source of intellectual labor, cannot compete with happy and eager experienced scientists in other parts of the world.
Extreme levels of government regulation, oversight, interaction, and micromanaging are probably a significant contributor to the death of American technological innovation as well.
When I worked for Battelle, and while I was keeping abreast of microchemistry technology being developed worldwide, I had conceptualized a controlled flow reactor which operated using liquid fuel. The theoretical basis was to dissolve the fuel into a liquid matrix and then dilute it. The dilute solution would then be fed through an array of capillary tubes to a reaction chamber which was bombarded with neutrons or laser light. Such a design, if properly tuned, could ensure near 100% fission by controlling the concentration of the fuel and the rate of flow through the tubes. Heat from each individual reaction would be captured by, preferably, liquid nitrogen or liquid helium surrounding the array of capillary tubes. As the liquid nitrogen or helium (serving a dual purpose as a coolant and a heat transfer agent) warmed and evaporated the off gas would be used to spin magnetic turbines, preferably supercooled (by the same liquid) and suspended between magnets to minimize frictional loss of energy.
Many colleagues agreed that the idea was a grand way to maximize nuclear fuel usage and minimize nuclear waste while keeping the entire process in a closed system which wouldn't rely on solid fuel rods or much human interaction. Runaway reactions would be easy to control (by stopping the flow of fuel into the capillaries) and no energy would be wasted. Modern day nuclear reactors lose unending amounts of energy to cooling towers--the water is too hot to dispose of regularly but not hot enough to generate the steam necessary to drive the turbines in those plants. All of the energy in the water between "steam" and "cool" (normal lake/stream water is, what, around 65 deg F?) is just outright wasted.
Come to think of it, why don't they just recycle the hot water so that it doesn't take as much of the fission reaction energy to turn it back into steam? Huh...
My idea for a capillary tube liquid fuel reactor was immediately shot down by a nuclear engineer whose rationale for dismissing it relied not a single bit on science--the fact was that, due to international nuclear regulations and regulations imposed by the US, it simply would not be legal to keep the fuel in a liquid state and nearly impossible to prove to inspectors that the fuel had indeed been spent.
So much for bright ideas. Foiled by people (politicians) who don't know what they're talking about--again.
Seconded. SMTP is more than adequate to maintain a reliable and trustworthy e-mail system. The cases of abuse which I've seen have been proof of concept, red herring, or simple examples of incompetent administrators. Granted many of those administrators are end users with compromised home systems, or administrators who manage, say, 1500 desktops in an office building where ten or twenty of the hacked boxes are in broom closets someplace. That still isn't a flaw in SMTP.
The most important thing that I see for preserving at least some semblance of verifying the source and intent of e-mail is the presence of a reliable chain of custody. The e-mail was received from this IP address, to this mail server, to this relay, to that relay, to this mail daemon, to be delivered to this account. Yes, this information can be spoofed to some extent, but it's sufficient in most cases to at least trace back to the first compromised system (in the case of outright spam/junk/phishing) or at least give a knowledgeable recipient some information to give credence to whether or not the sender might be who they claim to be.
With this in mind I'm really unhappy with Gmail. All mail that I've seen which comes from a Gmail account purports to originate from within the Gmail hive. At least Hotmail and Yahoo still preserve the IP from which the HTTP POST was made.
With respect to PayPal phishing e-mails, in particular, it's quite easy to look at the e-mail headers and say,"Heh. Nah. That doesn't even look close to legitimate."
That's the problem that occurs when the moderators themselves are part of the trolling or misinformation spreading problem. It's pretty sad when it comes to that point. That's when you storm their site HQ with submachine guns.
Not all anonymity is used to troll for fun or spread misinformation. Those two behaviors lead to the defamation of anonymity, though, and that's what causes people to be so upset.
If only there were a way to weed out the trolls and misinformers. Well, there is. It's called moderation. Now what do we do when the mods themselves share opinions with trolls and misinformers? What do we do when the mods actively participate, for whatever reason, in the trolling or the spread of misinformation? Theoretically the mods are objective judges but I don't think that quite plays out into reality.
Just more evidence that the courts are bought and paid for and the attorneys working for the good guys are bought and paid for, as well, or else they're not doing their jobs. Other than the obvious detriments of being placed in prison I see no reason to pay the marijuana laws any heed--and I shamelessly promote others to do the same.
Since when does the federal government have the right to regulate who can do business with whom? "Interstate commerce" wasn't enough to regulate the sale or status of a slave--it took a Constitutional amendment to give Congress that power. How can "interstate commerce" possibly cover this?
Every year, there is a proposal to implement this. What happens is, they spend a couple more million on "studies", and spend the rest on widening the existing roads Congressional inquiries into Patriot HP domestic FBI illegal Enron.bomb wiretaps DMCA comes to mind.
Slashdot Mirror
...in the same way that a Beowulf cluster of Rubix cubes, all running different operating systems and under constant attack from unknown attackers, does. It still provides for endless years of puzzle-solving fun!
I found the assertion that I'm lazy to be false.
:-)
You lose again!
Probably a long time before it will become illegal to give antibiotics to humans for the same reason.
You are correct with your analysis that an immunobooster could have consequences if the immune system is not allowed to equilibrate properly. Philosophically, though, I still think it's wiser to work within the bodies' natural immune system than try to pretend it doesn't exist and work alongside it. The latter is the basis of the approach which has given rise to the modern pharmaceutical industry. Most side effects from existing drugs are derived from collateral damage.
The questions you pose about transplants are currently a very interesting study within the circles of tissue engineering. As early as '98 the industry was becoming very adept, at least with artificial skin, at replicating the bodies' natural matrix of proteins while, at the same time, leaving out the markers which commonly trigger deadly immune rejection responses.
Another comment included the abstract from the scientific publication. The research collected data with respect to a bacterial infection. While the immune system does approach bacterial and viral infections differently that is mostly because viruses invade endogenous cells and bacteria are exogenous invaders. The same system of recognizing a bacterial cell is used when recognizing an infected body cell. There are, perhaps, different cell lines of macrophages and lymphocytes to ingest bacteria as opposed to virus producing body cells but the initial system of recognition and activation is similarly alerted.
This is a representation of some very adept work by researchers at Inimex and some well spent funding by CIHR.
The human body has seven systems: muscoskeletal, reproductive, skin, cardiopulmonary, nervous, digestive, and immune. Many of the ailments which people experience--cancer, diabetes, neurodegenerative disorders, prion diseases, leukemia, infections--invade tissues of the six other systems but are ultimately traceable as a deficiency in their own immune system. The immune system is trained as the maintenance arm of the body. When cells become cancerous the immune system is trained to find and remove them. When viruses and bacteria enter the body the immune system is trained to kill them. When plaques build up in the body the immune system is trained to remove them. When cells are starving, or asphyxiated, or agitated it is the immune system which is responsible for transmitting the proper signals systemwide and stimulating other tissues to produce the materials necessary to fix the problem.
The devoted study of immunology, of which the language which cells use to communicate with each other is central, has been pushed aside for many years by the larger, more established, more prestigious research groups both in academia and in the industry. When I worked at Abbott Laboratories, starting in '99, I found that their immunology department had recently been all but terminated in favor of shuffling the money to the devoted disease areas. While treating the diseases as separate from the body has led to some novel treatments (eg. antiangionesis and apoptosis for cancer) it seemed, to me, that a whole boatload of data which pointed to the potential cures available within the body itself were being ignored--not because they lacked scientific merit--but because the social structures within the company (and the industry) were attached to the research paths which were easier for the marketers and PR releases to handle.
To some extent that's the way things must work. The venture capitalists and investors need to know where their money is going or else they aren't going to contribute. That's a sad state of society, though, when one group's ignorance is stifling another group's innovation.
The study of immunology has quite a bit of potential for worldwide medicine. ImClone managed to open the popular path with its approach of monoclonal antibodies, though that segment was somewhat sabotaged by the insider trading scandal. Let's hope that companies like Inimex, and hopefully some companies in the US, will begin to devote greater resources to understanding how the body naturally works and working with it. Many of the detrimental side effects of today's pharmaceuticals are directly related to the immune system's response to those molecules being introduced into the body. The industry has really created its own problem of side effects by buckling in to the demands of the financiers and not holding to the strict scientific principles.
Even though they're in Vancouver I sent a resume.
This is precisely what has kept me from pursuing a graduate degree. I'd be okay with taking a standardized test or two to demonstrate that I have the scholastic aptitude to absorb the content material but I have absolutely no interest in filling out reams upon reams of paperwork for application for admission to the school, application for admission to a particular program, application for funds to cover housing, application for funds to cover tuition, application for funds to cover materials... and then keeping track of all the deadlines.
I've been looking for a "Hey! You sound like you might be the right man for the job!" type of opportunity for eight years. If I wanted to be an expert in jumping through endless volumes of someone else's paperwork hurdles I wouldn't have chosen to study as a scientist.
Say for example if we beat up all of our prominent researchers here and then send their ideas to research groups overseas? It'd be great for the profit margin but terrible for morale.
I read that part as well and the most prominent thought in my mind was to wonder at what level that focus on innovation is being counted. Sure, the US purports to spend lots of money on some of the important things but very little of that actually makes it to the level of the researchers who would actually do something with it. Most of the venture capital is perpetually recycled back to the upper levels of people who invest it thanks to the "sophistication of financial markets".
Until the US fixes its priorities we're going to continue to fall. Perhaps the US can keep buying talent from other nations, with H1-B visas, but unless the scientists are given fruitful environments they simply aren't going to come up with anything new or revolutionary. What encouragement do the nation's thinkers have to keep improving their ideas when the laurels and rewards are going only to the people who manage them like a column of assets? It's plain demoralizing to continually refine a product for a year only to see executive support lost and funding slashed. Graduate students and post-docs, while they provide a significant source of intellectual labor, cannot compete with happy and eager experienced scientists in other parts of the world.
Extreme levels of government regulation, oversight, interaction, and micromanaging are probably a significant contributor to the death of American technological innovation as well.
When I worked for Battelle, and while I was keeping abreast of microchemistry technology being developed worldwide, I had conceptualized a controlled flow reactor which operated using liquid fuel. The theoretical basis was to dissolve the fuel into a liquid matrix and then dilute it. The dilute solution would then be fed through an array of capillary tubes to a reaction chamber which was bombarded with neutrons or laser light. Such a design, if properly tuned, could ensure near 100% fission by controlling the concentration of the fuel and the rate of flow through the tubes. Heat from each individual reaction would be captured by, preferably, liquid nitrogen or liquid helium surrounding the array of capillary tubes. As the liquid nitrogen or helium (serving a dual purpose as a coolant and a heat transfer agent) warmed and evaporated the off gas would be used to spin magnetic turbines, preferably supercooled (by the same liquid) and suspended between magnets to minimize frictional loss of energy.
Many colleagues agreed that the idea was a grand way to maximize nuclear fuel usage and minimize nuclear waste while keeping the entire process in a closed system which wouldn't rely on solid fuel rods or much human interaction. Runaway reactions would be easy to control (by stopping the flow of fuel into the capillaries) and no energy would be wasted. Modern day nuclear reactors lose unending amounts of energy to cooling towers--the water is too hot to dispose of regularly but not hot enough to generate the steam necessary to drive the turbines in those plants. All of the energy in the water between "steam" and "cool" (normal lake/stream water is, what, around 65 deg F?) is just outright wasted.
Come to think of it, why don't they just recycle the hot water so that it doesn't take as much of the fission reaction energy to turn it back into steam? Huh...
My idea for a capillary tube liquid fuel reactor was immediately shot down by a nuclear engineer whose rationale for dismissing it relied not a single bit on science--the fact was that, due to international nuclear regulations and regulations imposed by the US, it simply would not be legal to keep the fuel in a liquid state and nearly impossible to prove to inspectors that the fuel had indeed been spent.
So much for bright ideas. Foiled by people (politicians) who don't know what they're talking about--again.
Seconded. SMTP is more than adequate to maintain a reliable and trustworthy e-mail system. The cases of abuse which I've seen have been proof of concept, red herring, or simple examples of incompetent administrators. Granted many of those administrators are end users with compromised home systems, or administrators who manage, say, 1500 desktops in an office building where ten or twenty of the hacked boxes are in broom closets someplace. That still isn't a flaw in SMTP.
The most important thing that I see for preserving at least some semblance of verifying the source and intent of e-mail is the presence of a reliable chain of custody. The e-mail was received from this IP address, to this mail server, to this relay, to that relay, to this mail daemon, to be delivered to this account. Yes, this information can be spoofed to some extent, but it's sufficient in most cases to at least trace back to the first compromised system (in the case of outright spam/junk/phishing) or at least give a knowledgeable recipient some information to give credence to whether or not the sender might be who they claim to be.
With this in mind I'm really unhappy with Gmail. All mail that I've seen which comes from a Gmail account purports to originate from within the Gmail hive. At least Hotmail and Yahoo still preserve the IP from which the HTTP POST was made.
With respect to PayPal phishing e-mails, in particular, it's quite easy to look at the e-mail headers and say,"Heh. Nah. That doesn't even look close to legitimate."
AOL was popular.
That's the problem that occurs when the moderators themselves are part of the trolling or misinformation spreading problem. It's pretty sad when it comes to that point. That's when you storm their site HQ with submachine guns.
Not all anonymity is used to troll for fun or spread misinformation. Those two behaviors lead to the defamation of anonymity, though, and that's what causes people to be so upset.
If only there were a way to weed out the trolls and misinformers. Well, there is. It's called moderation. Now what do we do when the mods themselves share opinions with trolls and misinformers? What do we do when the mods actively participate, for whatever reason, in the trolling or the spread of misinformation? Theoretically the mods are objective judges but I don't think that quite plays out into reality.
Just more evidence that the courts are bought and paid for and the attorneys working for the good guys are bought and paid for, as well, or else they're not doing their jobs. Other than the obvious detriments of being placed in prison I see no reason to pay the marijuana laws any heed--and I shamelessly promote others to do the same.
Since when does the federal government have the right to regulate who can do business with whom? "Interstate commerce" wasn't enough to regulate the sale or status of a slave--it took a Constitutional amendment to give Congress that power. How can "interstate commerce" possibly cover this?
Says who?