It would require a professional code of conduct to protect clients' anonymity, but it's not inconceivable. If enough people are concerned about privacy, there may very well be, realistically, too many clients for a given broker to remember. Also, a lot of obfuscation can be accomplished through gifting people indirectly: if broker A gives out $150 to 10 people and broker B gives out $100 to 8 people, then the customers of broker A can repay broker B, and vice versa, and then B can pay A $50 to balance things out. If the client is caught with money from broker A, then his dealer could have been any one of broker B's payers.
Barter! Just buy something for the seller. And if barter's too clumsy, then, um... use little bits of paper with "IOU" written on them?
Actually, you're missing something. The user doesn't need to pay the cashier. The user could pay someone else to buy the card at a small premium. As long as there are enough purchasing brokers and enough users, the user would be anonymous.
In that case, the source of the problem was that the donor virus used was actually just a bunch of Hollywood movies. This made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
To answer the question you were probably actually having: different viruses are more applicable to different cancers. HIV is ideal for blood-borne leukaemia.
Research has shown that that disease was endemic to corporate raiders. As corporate raiding is no longer generally practised (except by large tech conglomerates) the last known sufferer died in 1991. His last words were "My only regret is that I haven't been cryogenically frozen."
The choice of virus is mostly about picking what tissue you want to engineer. In the case of the technique you cited, the researchers made T cells (the immune system's hitmen, if you will) target another class of immune cells called B cells (they're the ones that make antibodies.) The engineering work was specific to the one type of B cell that had gone cancerous (although there were innocent casualties within that type.) HIV-based engineering wouldn't be practical if you were trying to fix cancer in a tissue that's out of reach of T cells, such as the brain or skin.
All viruses used in this manner are wired not to reproduce. It means you need to inject a lot more copies of the virus, but there's no chance of mutation in a virus that can't reproduce. And no, they can't spontaneously redevelop the huge number of genes necessary to reproduce; they don't even have the opportunity to do so. It's completely safe. They're just DNA injectors, and we're exploiting the side-effects that the viruses normally bundle with their (deleted) reproductive payloads. In this case, healthy cells are smart enough to fend off the infection, but cancer cells aren't, which is why they're cancerous in the first place.
All cells have many features that passively block viruses by messing them up. (Sorry, "virii" isn't a word.) A lot of mechanisms for gene regulation work by chopping up transcripts and proteins that are recognized by the cell as having broken down due to heavy use. This conveniently encumbers viral payload delivery, but is usually dysfunctional in cancer.
Just to shut down this line of reasoning: it requires a large number of genes for a virus to reproduce, which the researchers remove completely to make room for the more useful payload. In the case of the HIV-based study being described, that payload rewired one class of immune cells to identify another class of immune cells (which included the cancerous ones) and destroy them. Viruses crippled in this way can't spontaneously develop the ability to reproduce any more than a human eunuch can. Mutations occur during reproduction, which medically-engineered viruses have no opportunity for doing.
Yeah... it was weak. I'm sorry, I was in the middle of battling three deadlines. (Two of them are now winning.) It seemed like a witty thing to throw in there at the time. The true Tao of Slashdot, though, is that you can always make a "Woosh!" comment, and claim there is some inner secret in the previous statement that no one else will ever understand. Sort of like a socially inept version of no soap radio.
How exactly do you evaluate the merits of a webpage's contents? Are you proposing that Google performs exhaustive semantic parsing on every page in their index? Their natural language processing stuff is good, but not that good. The elements that SEO exploits came about solely because analysing pages is ridiculously hard. PageRank was Google's original silver bullet to this problem.
Not a contradiction, just an arms race. If Google remaps the current scoring algorithm so that the best scores are in the middle of the range and high scores are considered garbage, then as long as the field of SEO has to constantly reinvent itself to keep up with Google's mood, you can bet that the vast majority of link farming sites won't be able to keep up. As a result of this, some may even give up, and certainly unmaintained sites with currently-good SEO will become useless. Eventually, of course, Google will have exhausted the twists and turns they can make without compromising utility, but they will have deterred more than a few system-gamers along the way. As long as Google's changes are still useful for humans seeking legitimate pages, this will have a net positive benefit.
We have a saying in bioinformatics: "sadly, that's typical of academic software." It means that the standards the submitter is coding to depend on what field he or she goes into; since we don't know, we can't really say!
It's not. It really, really isn't; personally I was annoyed when they originally announced the games in the running. Very few of the games on the list deserve to be on any list about art—and certainly there aren't many that couldn't be replaced with something better. This suggests that TAOVG is just a publicity stunt to try and get game players to visit and pay attention to the Smithsonian; they're not really giving it equal treatment as an artform.
Yes, 'Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence' came up as result number four in Google—it's supposed to be one of those subtle quips about misusing search algorithms.
As for Dawkins, I must thoroughly confess that I haven't read the book, and my education in biology has been rather poor on the history of concepts in genetics during the sixties, seventies, and eighties. But the subject matter, of treating phenotype as encompassing everything, is certainly what is taught as a standard matter today. Sadly I can't comment on its actual historical significance, or whether Dawkins was late to a concept that was already taking root.
When biochemistry and (later) molecular genetics began as disciplines, there was a great disconnect between what they analysed and what was examined by macro-scale biology: ecology, Mendelian genetics, microbiology, and so on. There wasn't a clear understanding for how proteins and genes gave rise to extremely complex phenomena, and as a result the 'Occam's razor' school of conservative, careful thought led scientists to not think about the problem; instead they kept their area of focus close, and only looked at the immediate effects of genes: their direct products; hence phenotype to a molecular biologist means nothing more than that and the physical structures that arose from them.
In the intervening years, we started to understand a lot more about how things like the brain works; by the end of the 1970s it was no longer an impenetrable mass of irreducible energies, but a comprehensible (if immensely complicated) network of neurons, comprised of distinct tissues just like any other. (This is best known to computer people through the influence it had on AI.) This was the necessary information that made it possible to explain behaviour in terms of simple, well-understood molecular biology.
In essence what Dawkins is saying, then, is: "Look, we've got enough of this stuff figured out; let's update our view of the world to match the facts, and revise this core bit of terminology to appreciate that." It's a pretty big shift in the mindset of the field, because it bridges the gap between traditional biology and laboratory biochemistry.
I figured it was worth saying, just to make the whole point that this symbolic act is ever-so-slightly off-target.
...also, depending on the century, 'protest' may mean 'to speak positively'. The modern usage of protesting is a mangled contraction of protesting against things; previously one would have also protested for them as well. You probably already knew that.
Slashdot Mirror
It would require a professional code of conduct to protect clients' anonymity, but it's not inconceivable. If enough people are concerned about privacy, there may very well be, realistically, too many clients for a given broker to remember. Also, a lot of obfuscation can be accomplished through gifting people indirectly: if broker A gives out $150 to 10 people and broker B gives out $100 to 8 people, then the customers of broker A can repay broker B, and vice versa, and then B can pay A $50 to balance things out. If the client is caught with money from broker A, then his dealer could have been any one of broker B's payers.
Barter! Just buy something for the seller. And if barter's too clumsy, then, um... use little bits of paper with "IOU" written on them?
Actually, you're missing something. The user doesn't need to pay the cashier. The user could pay someone else to buy the card at a small premium. As long as there are enough purchasing brokers and enough users, the user would be anonymous.
In that case, the source of the problem was that the donor virus used was actually just a bunch of Hollywood movies. This made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
To answer the question you were probably actually having: different viruses are more applicable to different cancers. HIV is ideal for blood-borne leukaemia.
Research has shown that that disease was endemic to corporate raiders. As corporate raiding is no longer generally practised (except by large tech conglomerates) the last known sufferer died in 1991. His last words were "My only regret is that I haven't been cryogenically frozen."
The choice of virus is mostly about picking what tissue you want to engineer. In the case of the technique you cited, the researchers made T cells (the immune system's hitmen, if you will) target another class of immune cells called B cells (they're the ones that make antibodies.) The engineering work was specific to the one type of B cell that had gone cancerous (although there were innocent casualties within that type.) HIV-based engineering wouldn't be practical if you were trying to fix cancer in a tissue that's out of reach of T cells, such as the brain or skin.
All viruses used in this manner are wired not to reproduce. It means you need to inject a lot more copies of the virus, but there's no chance of mutation in a virus that can't reproduce. And no, they can't spontaneously redevelop the huge number of genes necessary to reproduce; they don't even have the opportunity to do so. It's completely safe. They're just DNA injectors, and we're exploiting the side-effects that the viruses normally bundle with their (deleted) reproductive payloads. In this case, healthy cells are smart enough to fend off the infection, but cancer cells aren't, which is why they're cancerous in the first place.
All cells have many features that passively block viruses by messing them up. (Sorry, "virii" isn't a word.) A lot of mechanisms for gene regulation work by chopping up transcripts and proteins that are recognized by the cell as having broken down due to heavy use. This conveniently encumbers viral payload delivery, but is usually dysfunctional in cancer.
Incidentally, Valve thought the same thing. It was somewhat of a different method, however.
N... no. There is no mutation.
I am, and you're right.
Also, what's the "D" stand for? Oh, "definitely." Gotcha. Okay.
It can't. Viruses mutate when they reproduce. These viruses have all of the genes for reproduction removed. They're essentially eunuchs.
Nothing exciting. The engineered viruses can't be contagious. Please all classic FUD for military robotics, which are hilariously dangerous.
Just to shut down this line of reasoning: it requires a large number of genes for a virus to reproduce, which the researchers remove completely to make room for the more useful payload. In the case of the HIV-based study being described, that payload rewired one class of immune cells to identify another class of immune cells (which included the cancerous ones) and destroy them. Viruses crippled in this way can't spontaneously develop the ability to reproduce any more than a human eunuch can. Mutations occur during reproduction, which medically-engineered viruses have no opportunity for doing.
Yeah... it was weak. I'm sorry, I was in the middle of battling three deadlines. (Two of them are now winning.) It seemed like a witty thing to throw in there at the time. The true Tao of Slashdot, though, is that you can always make a "Woosh!" comment, and claim there is some inner secret in the previous statement that no one else will ever understand. Sort of like a socially inept version of no soap radio.
Of course that's the speed of sound. It's the speed at which the wind resistance makes sound.
I hear it's a big wooshing noise...
That wooshing noise going past your head isn't the air conditioning. Next time, look at the moderation. :)
Sorry I couldn't help further. Take care!
How exactly do you evaluate the merits of a webpage's contents? Are you proposing that Google performs exhaustive semantic parsing on every page in their index? Their natural language processing stuff is good, but not that good. The elements that SEO exploits came about solely because analysing pages is ridiculously hard. PageRank was Google's original silver bullet to this problem.
Not a contradiction, just an arms race. If Google remaps the current scoring algorithm so that the best scores are in the middle of the range and high scores are considered garbage, then as long as the field of SEO has to constantly reinvent itself to keep up with Google's mood, you can bet that the vast majority of link farming sites won't be able to keep up. As a result of this, some may even give up, and certainly unmaintained sites with currently-good SEO will become useless. Eventually, of course, Google will have exhausted the twists and turns they can make without compromising utility, but they will have deterred more than a few system-gamers along the way. As long as Google's changes are still useful for humans seeking legitimate pages, this will have a net positive benefit.
We have a saying in bioinformatics: "sadly, that's typical of academic software." It means that the standards the submitter is coding to depend on what field he or she goes into; since we don't know, we can't really say!
Excellent! Then I shall encode all of my movies with raw images and PCM audio.
It's not. It really, really isn't; personally I was annoyed when they originally announced the games in the running. Very few of the games on the list deserve to be on any list about art—and certainly there aren't many that couldn't be replaced with something better. This suggests that TAOVG is just a publicity stunt to try and get game players to visit and pay attention to the Smithsonian; they're not really giving it equal treatment as an artform.
Yes, 'Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence' came up as result number four in Google—it's supposed to be one of those subtle quips about misusing search algorithms.
As for Dawkins, I must thoroughly confess that I haven't read the book, and my education in biology has been rather poor on the history of concepts in genetics during the sixties, seventies, and eighties. But the subject matter, of treating phenotype as encompassing everything, is certainly what is taught as a standard matter today. Sadly I can't comment on its actual historical significance, or whether Dawkins was late to a concept that was already taking root.
When biochemistry and (later) molecular genetics began as disciplines, there was a great disconnect between what they analysed and what was examined by macro-scale biology: ecology, Mendelian genetics, microbiology, and so on. There wasn't a clear understanding for how proteins and genes gave rise to extremely complex phenomena, and as a result the 'Occam's razor' school of conservative, careful thought led scientists to not think about the problem; instead they kept their area of focus close, and only looked at the immediate effects of genes: their direct products; hence phenotype to a molecular biologist means nothing more than that and the physical structures that arose from them.
In the intervening years, we started to understand a lot more about how things like the brain works; by the end of the 1970s it was no longer an impenetrable mass of irreducible energies, but a comprehensible (if immensely complicated) network of neurons, comprised of distinct tissues just like any other. (This is best known to computer people through the influence it had on AI.) This was the necessary information that made it possible to explain behaviour in terms of simple, well-understood molecular biology.
In essence what Dawkins is saying, then, is: "Look, we've got enough of this stuff figured out; let's update our view of the world to match the facts, and revise this core bit of terminology to appreciate that." It's a pretty big shift in the mindset of the field, because it bridges the gap between traditional biology and laboratory biochemistry.
I figured it was worth saying, just to make the whole point that this symbolic act is ever-so-slightly off-target.
...also, depending on the century, 'protest' may mean 'to speak positively'. The modern usage of protesting is a mangled contraction of protesting against things; previously one would have also protested for them as well. You probably already knew that.