If you're looking for a confounding variable to help flesh out your model, I might propose determination; i.e. women in business push themselves harder to succeed because they have something to prove (whether or not anyone's looking.) My undergraduate thesis supervisor was the epitome of this. I was interviewing with a woman while looking at graduate school supervisors, and remarked how skewed the gender balance seemed to be at that school in comparison with my alma mater; her response was that it was the same at all high-end universities, and she believed that women are less likely to apply for such schools because they underestimate their own abilities. Hence you see the truly exceptionally driven people; a tail of the distribution curve that isn't exactly bell-shaped.
Alternatively, they may just put all of the related researchers under surveillance, which seems like the more natural thing to do for them. The physicists aren't their friends, after all; they're just ordinary citizens.
The Daily Mail Helps Prevent Cancer, New Studies Show
"For years, research has shown that the Daily Mail is beneficial in preventing heart attacks. Now new studies support its ability to prevent cancer as well. The studies, involving dozens of unaware readers over many decades, show reductions of cancer incidence (both short- and long-term) and mortality rate as well as a decrease in metastatic cancer. It still is not known exactly how the Daily Mail and cancer are connected, but those between the ages of 55-60 will now likely consider taking low-dose Daily Mail daily for the remainder of their lives, perhaps just the Sport section."
Human communication is predicated on the basis of making assumptions about what others are thinking. There was no other way to respond to your initial comment than to either ask for further clarification of what exactly was going on in your mind, or to make an assumption about what you were saying. The literal statement was "Isn't this old news? I thought HIV was the cure for cancer," which is most closely translated into the question "why are other viruses involved?" because you explicitly named a virus. I sought to be informative by explaining the answer to this question, and left my phrasing open ("the question you were probably actually having") to admit that I was making an assumption about what you were saying. A normal reaction to this mistake would have been to simply to comment that my interpretation was incorrect.
If you react to people making assumptions about your intentions like this on a regular basis, you will not get very far in life. I can read your comment history. I know that just two days ago, on Tuesday, you had to explain your comments were intended as facetious. Are you really so hypocritical as to expect perfectly careful communication from others when you yourself won't do the same? Your subsequent responses have been increasingly laden with insults, cursing, and other abusive language. This is not normal behaviour for healthy, intelligent people unless they are under tremendous stress. Making the (admittedly risky) assumption that you are healthy, intelligent, and capable of talking to at least some people without spitting vitriolic acid like this at others, I seriously think you should figure out and face whatever ancillary factors contributed to your violent reaction toward me, and take time to address those problems before you do something counter-productive to your own well-being.
You were discussing nomenclature and the legality of hacktivism, were you not? I pointed out that, to date, the word "hacktivism" has only been applied to illegal activities, regardless of the underlying etymology and semantics of the word "hacker". The traditional term used to clearly indicate the activity of illegal hacking is "cracking"; hence the more precise word "cracktivism," which, in turn, sounds funny.
I realise what you're saying sounds plausible to you, but it's actually dependent on a whole swath of technical underpinnings that aren't applicable in this situation. There are cases in which co-infection by a normal virus could cause the engineered virus to be produced, but they have limitations. Let's go on a tour.
When UV and other forms of ambient radiation cause mutations in DNA, there is a very limited amount of damage they can do. Typically this consists of damaging a single nucleotide, or causing it to connect with its neighbour (e.g. a thiamine dimer). A given photon can only mess up one atom or bond; they're very small. Normally, when this happens in a cell, the resultant damage is repaired immediately by a special protein complex that functions specifically to seek out and fix such things. Mutations caused in this way are comparatively easy for the cell to fix, because they're predictable in nature and the other side of the chromosome is generally still intact, which is why low radiation doses tend to have no consequences: there are few enough errors that the cell can repair them all.
Viruses work a little differently. Internal to them, they have no functioning proteins that can do repair; they're just bags of water and nucleic acids, and a few pieces of landing gear that will be activated once they reach the cell. If they encounter a mutation, then it won't be found until that happens.
When a virus reaches the cell, it injects its payload, and some mechanism (depending on the different kinds of virus) prepares its payload for delivery. For many medically interesting carrier viruses like HIV, this involves some step in which the virus's nucleic acids must be transcribed into the host's. Viruses are wired to evolve at a very rapid rate, and this do that by causing mutations at this point in the process; essentially, this reverse-transcription process is extremely sloppy. Herpes, by contrast, integrates its genome directly, because it's already in a format (double-stranded DNA) that can be put in place.
The thing I really need to stress here is how the mutations transpire. When you modify a virus's payload, you have complete power to erase what it contains, as long as it has a certain special tag that would lets its ancestor virus reproduce using it. This tag is necessary for the engineered nucleic acid to be copied into the new viral particles. It is not possible for a provirus to spontaneously re-develop all of the necessary machinery for making a complete package. That's equivalent to making a typo in Word and accidentally producing a Shakespearean sonnet. It's a lot of very specific programming, not random noise.
There are two cases in which such a virus could be restored to functionality: (a) if the patient is infected with the original virus, their body will start becoming a factory for the engineered viruses. A viral particle can only contain one chromosome (their size is dependent on their capacity), so the real infection would be forced to pick randomly between the correct viral genome and the engineered one. However, in this case, the produced engineered virus would be exactly like the one that the patient was infected with; it's a full copy of the dysfunctional, engineered genome, and not capable of reproducing. (b) if this patient gets infected in the germline—impossible with most of these viruses because they target other tissues; the germline is not attractive to viruses—then, and only then, a child could be born that naturally produces the engineered virus mixed up with the original one. It should be noted that viruses have been integrated into the human genome many times in the past, and that a large portion of the non-functional DNA in our bodies comes from this.
Let me know if you have any outstanding questions.
Fun science fact: the word "cracktivism" sounds even sillier than "hacktivism."
That being said, the label "hacktivist" has only been applied thus far to groups like LulzSec who trespass on others' computers to make a point; the others are just tech-savvy activists. I'm afraid your hopeful alternative is just a unicorn.
That is the real story. Amiga3D made a slight mistake (the base Amiga system was behind by the time of the release of 486 sound and video cards, not because Microsoft released a new OS), but it was because of a mixture of managerial incompetence and aggressive competition that it lost. And there are most definitely still rabid Amiga fans; they supported the original systems for years and years with PPC-based expansion cards, gradually moving on to new hardware like the Eyetech AmigaOne and Genesi's MorphOS/Pegasos ecosystem.
Nah. Biologists are sticklers about preserving dying Latin forms (hence treating "data" as a plural when the rest of the world has moved it to singular) and because "virus" was uncountable and had no plural in Latin, they're pretty opposed to formulating a Latin plural that was never attested historically. My girlfriend, who moved from studying Classics to Biochemistry, often remarked that many of the newer coinages were fantastically vapid—the whole mitotic cycle is made up of things like 'long phase' and 'big phase'. Chemical names are even sillier.
Actually, wait, sorry. This is all very silly. It's a lot simpler to engineer viruses, and I can't believe I forgot what I was doing. Here's how it works.
1. You find a host cell, in which you have full control of the genome, which is similar enough to the target organism that it can generate the virus (yeast is often sufficient.)
2. Take the inserted block of DNA from some infected tissue. This includes a header (promoter) that the host cell will read and use to generate new copies of the viral genome, which includes the elements that the viral assembly process will use to recognize it as friendly, and hence incorporate it into the capsid. Alter this as you please; just make sure that the host cell has a version of the viral operon(s) that can still produce all of the parts necessary to assemble a virion.
3. Put your new construct into the temporary host, using e.g. electroshock.
4. Profit! The yeast will now produce replication-incompetent virus particles as long as you feed it.
To make a long story short: viruses reproduce entirely by hijacking the cell's machinery to do so. Certain viruses, like retroviruses and adenoviruses, completely integrate into the host cell (in what's called a provirus), and then the cell reads from this embedded set of instructions to produce new viral particles. One of the pieces that gets manufactured is the DNA/RNA payload, and this can be replaced simply by relocating the correct self-recognition elements to a different gene.
This also gets around the "infection by template virus –> active form of the virus" problem because each virion can only incorporate one copy of the integrated payload. Infection by the template virus would cause the patient to produce reproduction-incompetent viruses, in addition to normal copies of the template virus.
Just like bacteria that produce drugs, we already have virus printers.
Yeah, we have a solution to that, too. Viruses aren't alive.:)
However, since writing that I realised that such a treatment could have its reproductive machinery rescued if it co-infects with the natural form of the virus. If the people who were treated with the HIV-based method from the other story actually had AIDS, then anyone infected with HIV from them would also get the modified virus, and hence the B-cell-killing T-cells that made that treatment work.
Here's a textbook on viral engineering; it's paywalled if that sort of thing bothers you, but the details can be found in there. You're certainly right that the methods involved are broadly messy, start with reproduction-competent vectors, and that some bits of the machinery get left behind, but like the cancer itself, the lack of the ability to reproduce prevents them from being able to exploit evolutionary mechanisms to support their survival. I guess the virus might be able to reproduce if the patient happens to have been infected with the original virus previously, or is currently infected by it, however. Presumably, to meet FDA approval, the process will have to be much more controlled to prevent such potential mishaps; I expect we'll even see synthetic virus printers some day.
Woah, woah, woah, slow down, mister. I never paid that guy. I paid someone else. They made up the difference in the day's profits between them. The person whose name is on the card has no proof I bought from them. That's what the whole "dealer A/B" thing was about. Go back and read my second-last post again.
However, your point about this mode of business being quickly made illegal is obviously right.:) I was just trying to make the point that it's possible to have an untraceable transaction. In order for this model to survive, there would have to be a substantial public opinion that such things are used primarily for legitimate purposes, just like BitTorrent or encryption.
Anyway, it's all moot: realistically, people would just use barter.
No, I think that brokers A and B will simply have too much business. They might even be automated. Expecting a broker who performs hundreds of transactions a day to remember who bought a card from them two weeks ago, or which other broker they were paid through, is unreasonable. The broker has no incentive to keep records of their customers.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're looking for a confounding variable to help flesh out your model, I might propose determination; i.e. women in business push themselves harder to succeed because they have something to prove (whether or not anyone's looking.) My undergraduate thesis supervisor was the epitome of this. I was interviewing with a woman while looking at graduate school supervisors, and remarked how skewed the gender balance seemed to be at that school in comparison with my alma mater; her response was that it was the same at all high-end universities, and she believed that women are less likely to apply for such schools because they underestimate their own abilities. Hence you see the truly exceptionally driven people; a tail of the distribution curve that isn't exactly bell-shaped.
I think it becomes sexism when the research in question transitions from a peer-reviewed journal to the popular press.
Alternatively, they may just put all of the related researchers under surveillance, which seems like the more natural thing to do for them. The physicists aren't their friends, after all; they're just ordinary citizens.
The virus can't linger at all. Each copy is destroyed immediately upon use. They're just syringes.
They're not terrorists if they vote for us!
Aww, don't be such a wuss. I hear the vibes are positively electrifying.
Also: now taking theories on why this is in the 'hardware' category instead of 'science'. The less plausible, the better.
Have you heard the new one based on phi? I hear every note is pure gold.
The Daily Mail Helps Prevent Cancer, New Studies Show
"For years, research has shown that the Daily Mail is beneficial in preventing heart attacks. Now new studies support its ability to prevent cancer as well. The studies, involving dozens of unaware readers over many decades, show reductions of cancer incidence (both short- and long-term) and mortality rate as well as a decrease in metastatic cancer. It still is not known exactly how the Daily Mail and cancer are connected, but those between the ages of 55-60 will now likely consider taking low-dose Daily Mail daily for the remainder of their lives, perhaps just the Sport section."
Oy! No citations in a political debate! Facts and non-anecdotal evidence are against the rules!
I haven't even begun.
Human communication is predicated on the basis of making assumptions about what others are thinking. There was no other way to respond to your initial comment than to either ask for further clarification of what exactly was going on in your mind, or to make an assumption about what you were saying. The literal statement was "Isn't this old news? I thought HIV was the cure for cancer," which is most closely translated into the question "why are other viruses involved?" because you explicitly named a virus. I sought to be informative by explaining the answer to this question, and left my phrasing open ("the question you were probably actually having") to admit that I was making an assumption about what you were saying. A normal reaction to this mistake would have been to simply to comment that my interpretation was incorrect.
If you react to people making assumptions about your intentions like this on a regular basis, you will not get very far in life. I can read your comment history. I know that just two days ago, on Tuesday, you had to explain your comments were intended as facetious. Are you really so hypocritical as to expect perfectly careful communication from others when you yourself won't do the same? Your subsequent responses have been increasingly laden with insults, cursing, and other abusive language. This is not normal behaviour for healthy, intelligent people unless they are under tremendous stress. Making the (admittedly risky) assumption that you are healthy, intelligent, and capable of talking to at least some people without spitting vitriolic acid like this at others, I seriously think you should figure out and face whatever ancillary factors contributed to your violent reaction toward me, and take time to address those problems before you do something counter-productive to your own well-being.
You were discussing nomenclature and the legality of hacktivism, were you not? I pointed out that, to date, the word "hacktivism" has only been applied to illegal activities, regardless of the underlying etymology and semantics of the word "hacker". The traditional term used to clearly indicate the activity of illegal hacking is "cracking"; hence the more precise word "cracktivism," which, in turn, sounds funny.
I realise what you're saying sounds plausible to you, but it's actually dependent on a whole swath of technical underpinnings that aren't applicable in this situation. There are cases in which co-infection by a normal virus could cause the engineered virus to be produced, but they have limitations. Let's go on a tour.
When UV and other forms of ambient radiation cause mutations in DNA, there is a very limited amount of damage they can do. Typically this consists of damaging a single nucleotide, or causing it to connect with its neighbour (e.g. a thiamine dimer). A given photon can only mess up one atom or bond; they're very small. Normally, when this happens in a cell, the resultant damage is repaired immediately by a special protein complex that functions specifically to seek out and fix such things. Mutations caused in this way are comparatively easy for the cell to fix, because they're predictable in nature and the other side of the chromosome is generally still intact, which is why low radiation doses tend to have no consequences: there are few enough errors that the cell can repair them all.
Viruses work a little differently. Internal to them, they have no functioning proteins that can do repair; they're just bags of water and nucleic acids, and a few pieces of landing gear that will be activated once they reach the cell. If they encounter a mutation, then it won't be found until that happens.
When a virus reaches the cell, it injects its payload, and some mechanism (depending on the different kinds of virus) prepares its payload for delivery. For many medically interesting carrier viruses like HIV, this involves some step in which the virus's nucleic acids must be transcribed into the host's. Viruses are wired to evolve at a very rapid rate, and this do that by causing mutations at this point in the process; essentially, this reverse-transcription process is extremely sloppy. Herpes, by contrast, integrates its genome directly, because it's already in a format (double-stranded DNA) that can be put in place.
The thing I really need to stress here is how the mutations transpire. When you modify a virus's payload, you have complete power to erase what it contains, as long as it has a certain special tag that would lets its ancestor virus reproduce using it. This tag is necessary for the engineered nucleic acid to be copied into the new viral particles. It is not possible for a provirus to spontaneously re-develop all of the necessary machinery for making a complete package. That's equivalent to making a typo in Word and accidentally producing a Shakespearean sonnet. It's a lot of very specific programming, not random noise.
There are two cases in which such a virus could be restored to functionality: (a) if the patient is infected with the original virus, their body will start becoming a factory for the engineered viruses. A viral particle can only contain one chromosome (their size is dependent on their capacity), so the real infection would be forced to pick randomly between the correct viral genome and the engineered one. However, in this case, the produced engineered virus would be exactly like the one that the patient was infected with; it's a full copy of the dysfunctional, engineered genome, and not capable of reproducing. (b) if this patient gets infected in the germline—impossible with most of these viruses because they target other tissues; the germline is not attractive to viruses—then, and only then, a child could be born that naturally produces the engineered virus mixed up with the original one. It should be noted that viruses have been integrated into the human genome many times in the past, and that a large portion of the non-functional DNA in our bodies comes from this.
Let me know if you have any outstanding questions.
Fun science fact: the word "cracktivism" sounds even sillier than "hacktivism."
That being said, the label "hacktivist" has only been applied thus far to groups like LulzSec who trespass on others' computers to make a point; the others are just tech-savvy activists. I'm afraid your hopeful alternative is just a unicorn.
Whatever is going on in your head, it can't be good for your blood pressure.
That is the real story. Amiga3D made a slight mistake (the base Amiga system was behind by the time of the release of 486 sound and video cards, not because Microsoft released a new OS), but it was because of a mixture of managerial incompetence and aggressive competition that it lost. And there are most definitely still rabid Amiga fans; they supported the original systems for years and years with PPC-based expansion cards, gradually moving on to new hardware like the Eyetech AmigaOne and Genesi's MorphOS/Pegasos ecosystem.
Nah. Biologists are sticklers about preserving dying Latin forms (hence treating "data" as a plural when the rest of the world has moved it to singular) and because "virus" was uncountable and had no plural in Latin, they're pretty opposed to formulating a Latin plural that was never attested historically. My girlfriend, who moved from studying Classics to Biochemistry, often remarked that many of the newer coinages were fantastically vapid—the whole mitotic cycle is made up of things like 'long phase' and 'big phase'. Chemical names are even sillier.
So I did. I'm sure the verb very predictable and not at all important, though.
Actually, wait, sorry. This is all very silly. It's a lot simpler to engineer viruses, and I can't believe I forgot what I was doing. Here's how it works.
1. You find a host cell, in which you have full control of the genome, which is similar enough to the target organism that it can generate the virus (yeast is often sufficient.)
2. Take the inserted block of DNA from some infected tissue. This includes a header (promoter) that the host cell will read and use to generate new copies of the viral genome, which includes the elements that the viral assembly process will use to recognize it as friendly, and hence incorporate it into the capsid. Alter this as you please; just make sure that the host cell has a version of the viral operon(s) that can still produce all of the parts necessary to assemble a virion.
3. Put your new construct into the temporary host, using e.g. electroshock.
4. Profit! The yeast will now produce replication-incompetent virus particles as long as you feed it.
To make a long story short: viruses reproduce entirely by hijacking the cell's machinery to do so. Certain viruses, like retroviruses and adenoviruses, completely integrate into the host cell (in what's called a provirus), and then the cell reads from this embedded set of instructions to produce new viral particles. One of the pieces that gets manufactured is the DNA/RNA payload, and this can be replaced simply by relocating the correct self-recognition elements to a different gene.
This also gets around the "infection by template virus –> active form of the virus" problem because each virion can only incorporate one copy of the integrated payload. Infection by the template virus would cause the patient to produce reproduction-incompetent viruses, in addition to normal copies of the template virus.
Just like bacteria that produce drugs, we already have virus printers.
Yeah, we have a solution to that, too. Viruses aren't alive. :)
However, since writing that I realised that such a treatment could have its reproductive machinery rescued if it co-infects with the natural form of the virus. If the people who were treated with the HIV-based method from the other story actually had AIDS, then anyone infected with HIV from them would also get the modified virus, and hence the B-cell-killing T-cells that made that treatment work.
Y'know, that doesn't usually bother people so much. You may want to think about that.
Here's a textbook on viral engineering; it's paywalled if that sort of thing bothers you, but the details can be found in there. You're certainly right that the methods involved are broadly messy, start with reproduction-competent vectors, and that some bits of the machinery get left behind, but like the cancer itself, the lack of the ability to reproduce prevents them from being able to exploit evolutionary mechanisms to support their survival. I guess the virus might be able to reproduce if the patient happens to have been infected with the original virus previously, or is currently infected by it, however. Presumably, to meet FDA approval, the process will have to be much more controlled to prevent such potential mishaps; I expect we'll even see synthetic virus printers some day.
Woah, woah, woah, slow down, mister. I never paid that guy. I paid someone else. They made up the difference in the day's profits between them. The person whose name is on the card has no proof I bought from them. That's what the whole "dealer A/B" thing was about. Go back and read my second-last post again.
However, your point about this mode of business being quickly made illegal is obviously right. :) I was just trying to make the point that it's possible to have an untraceable transaction. In order for this model to survive, there would have to be a substantial public opinion that such things are used primarily for legitimate purposes, just like BitTorrent or encryption.
Anyway, it's all moot: realistically, people would just use barter.
No, I think that brokers A and B will simply have too much business. They might even be automated. Expecting a broker who performs hundreds of transactions a day to remember who bought a card from them two weeks ago, or which other broker they were paid through, is unreasonable. The broker has no incentive to keep records of their customers.
Woah, chill out! The topic is crap because this is Slashdot. There's no mystery there.
This made my day. Next up, a costume drama set in the late 1980s about 8-bit hackers, complete with proto-leetspeak and greetz in the credits.