To go back to the machine analogy, I believe it is sufficient to define a machine as "not failing" if it can be repaired. I agree with you that machines inevitably fail; however, I don't automatically conflate that with permanent failure.
Once the machine has failed to the extent that it cannot sustain the necessary metabolic activity to keep the brain cells alive, I think you will find it hard to to perform meaningful repairs.
If you are claiming that we will never be able to prevent a single, uncontrolled mutant cell from eventually causing death from metastatic disease (or cerebral disruption) then I suggest you are being fatalistic.
Neither. My claim is that out of the many mutant cells that arise in the global human population, there will always be some that succeed to elude the foreseeable future's medical technology and cause an "unrecoverable failure" of the affected individual.
I believe Larry Niven once threw out a plausible stat that "immortality is ~200 years of life", mostly due to the accumulated odds of accidental death.
That number would correspond to a (peacetime) accidental death rate that would be deemed totally unacceptable in most developed countries. Even worldwide (including war zones), if we were to eliminate all causes of death except "Unintentional injuries", you'd end up with an average life expectancy around 500 years (very rough spitball calculation, and ignoring the demographic effects, but still in a different ballpark).
To put it in terms of biological engineering, we may not be able to reduce the risk of metastatic disease to zero, but we may have a practical "cure" that reduces the risk to a practically infinitesimal level.
Then whether the goal is attainable or not depends exclusively on your definition of "practically infinitesimal" (and "immortality" of course), in other words where you move the goal posts. For some (very silly) definitions, it is attained already. For more serious definitions, it becomes difficult to make predictions, though for the foreseeable future, I'm pessimistic.
Finally, to paraphrase the summary, if you live long enough, and nothing else kills you first, then eventually you will be killed by a husk of rabbits.
If that's an analogy, then being killed by a husk of rabbits is incurable.
My rejoinder to you is that history is littered with incorrect pronouncements that certain feats could never be accomplished.
We aren't debating whether some fundamental theorem of mathematics will be overturned, but rather whether some biological engineering problem could *ever* be solved.
Here's another one for you: a mechanism that never fails will never exist. Or if you don't like double negatives: any mechanism that does something will eventually fail to do so. Call it an engineering problem, but it is sufficiently fundamental to me that I want to go on record having said that.
A human body is a mechanism that lives, hence it will eventually fail to do so. Cancer just seems to be the major and most fundamental failure mode, to the best of my current knowledge as a cancer researcher.
Assuming that it doesn't lead to autoimmune problems down the road, I strongly suspect that immunotherapy (programming the immune system to identify the damaged cells and attack them) will become a much more commonplace treatment for cancer, precisely because it cuts off that metastasis process.
The immune system already does that; severely immunodeficient individuals are prone to getting cancer. Cancer is a complicated process - 5 to 7 distinct cell mechanisms (depending on how you count) need to be malfunctioning before one can speak of a life-threatening cancer (at first glance, wikipedia seems to have left a few out). One of them is that the cell must lose the ability to display outwards signs of being cancerous to the immune system, else it will be eliminated in short order. Now, if you're going to modulate the immune system to attack cells that don't display outwards signs of being cancerous, then your assumption that "it doesn't lead to autoimmune problems" will likely turn out false. (Mostly experimental) therapeutic approaches involving the immune system rely on the therapeutic agent recognizing tumor cells and making them recognizable to the immune system in turn. The challenge there is that cancers are diverse and have a high mutation rate - even if you're lucky enough to have an agent on the shelf that recognizes the specific cancer you're having, it may stop working in a few months. So you're again in a place where you can never truly cure each and every patient.
BTW, I'm a cancer researcher. I'm not saying this as an appeal to authority, just to explain where I got this information and to confirm that the view in TFA is somewhat of a consensus in the field. This does not make it a depressing job: as the field progresses we can beat back more cancers for longer with fewer side effects, which is exciting. Some might say that maybe some day we will get so good that 99.9% of people die of other causes before they get the chance to develop a life-threatening cancer we can't cure. However, my (admittedly one-sided) view is that most other age-related causes I can think of are easier to cure than cancer, and that the latter is at #1 to stay (barring a collapse of civilization). And even if I'm proven false, 99.9% is not 100%. We can't cure cancer 100% just like we can't manufacture hard drives with a 0% failure rate. Nature seems to abhor systems that never fail.
If one guy breaks his leg falling from a ladder, and another breaks his leg in a car accident, does the doctor treat that broken leg differently?
Umm... did you really not know that different cancers are treated with different drugs and techniques? The days that all cancer patients got the same chemo are decades behind us, and cancer treatments are actively differentiating.
Ah, but you see, naked mole rats only live 30 years. While that's impressive for a small rodent, and while they do indeed have some impressive cancer resistance mechanisms (resistance, not immunity), if you were to start genetically modifying them to live, say, thrice as long, cases of cancer would inevitably start appearing. To use GP's simplistic terminology, their cellular reproduction mechanism is built to wear down slower, but that doesn't mean it doesn't wear at all.
Also, GP obviously meant cancer in humans. For a mammal, the naked mole rat could hardly be more different from us. They're not warm-blooded and have a sluggish metabolism, a bit like a reptile. Suppose I could magically slow down all processes in your body (including your brain) by a factor 2, and make you live twice as long. Would you accept?
GP's somewhat simplistic statement is essentially correct.
(A draft of) the actual research article is freely available here. Key points not mentioned in the summary:
* the researchers concluded the magnetic field was responsible after observing the dogs lost their directional bias on days with geomagnetic storms, which is pretty cool IMHO
* the researchers did explicitly discuss bias due to the direction of the sun, and the measures they took to eliminate it from their study.
All in all, their findings are not to be taken as gospel (as always with original research), but if confirmed, they could spark a hunt for underlying biochemical mechanism.
One man's "+5 funny satire" is another man's "-5 puerile strawman flamebait". Politically polarized "satire" is bound to offend people on a site with a politically diverse audience. If you knew this, then you fit the definition of a troll; if you didn't, then you're not mature enough for this site. Either way, you're advised to go post your hur-hur-satire with the fine like-minded people at TheBlaze. You're doing nothing but increasing the noise level here.
Valgrind (or more specifically memcheck) is your friend. This kind of stuff is almost always a latent memory error that starts wreaking havoc when the "offending" compiler organizes memory slightly differently. Almost.
Indeed, and to continue along this line, security experts routinely do that, and have not identified many cases of "a proprietary video card driver or wifi chipset" calling home.
Dude, if you really want to go into 1-dimensional left-right political thinking, then radical libertarianism is commonly associated with the political right - at least in the US, where RMS happens to have been born, raised, and spent most of his life. Also, there are better examples of leftists rags than the centre-left Guardian, the news coverage of which is *relatively* fair an balanced, especially compared to a lot of American media (though it's still not my first choice). That last sentence of yours is a pure troll.
Pray tell, who is 'the guy who "listened to what the [users] want"'? Because (assuming you're talking about the US presidential election, you insensitive clod) I sure as hell didn't see him making an appearance amongst the guys who didn't win. Hell, is it even possible say such thing about any politician in a country so deeply divided?!
As for the Philippines, corruption is the cause of the poverty and whatever disasters they suffer, not nature.
Dude, are you living under a rock? As I pointed out in the preceding post you so conveniently ignored, this was an exceptional record-breaking typhoon. No non-corrupt advanced city on earth would have weathered that storm without significant loss of life and human suffering.
As for your point that corruption exacerbates poverty, which in turn exacerbates loss of life and suffering in the case of a natural disaster, that's true of course. But... picture yourself being born in a poor and/or corrupt country. What are you, as an individual, going to do about it? How would you like it if I say (paraphrasing your words): "fuck you, you're corrupt and negligent. Your house was flattened because it was not built to withstand a little [270km/h gust] wind and rain. A well-made house [which you can't possibly afford] would have held up pretty well."
And like the AC said, praying for them doesn't do squat. Try harder.
Unfortunate choice of words, addressed here and here before your post. Referring to that last link, you in particular would benefit from pausing for a moment to think of those people, as you have not displayed the basic empathy to put yourself into their place. "Try harder" indeed.
Also, did you realize you're replying to a post that was made shortly before the typhoon hit any major population center? Since we currently don't have the technical means to artificially deflect or weaken a typhoon, and preparations were in full swing, what would you do? Thinking about these people for a minute is a good humbling experience, and makes one more likely to donate to aid efforts later on.
Slashdot Mirror
To go back to the machine analogy, I believe it is sufficient to define a machine as "not failing" if it can be repaired. I agree with you that machines inevitably fail; however, I don't automatically conflate that with permanent failure.
Once the machine has failed to the extent that it cannot sustain the necessary metabolic activity to keep the brain cells alive, I think you will find it hard to to perform meaningful repairs.
If you are claiming that we will never be able to prevent a single, uncontrolled mutant cell from eventually causing death from metastatic disease (or cerebral disruption) then I suggest you are being fatalistic.
Neither. My claim is that out of the many mutant cells that arise in the global human population, there will always be some that succeed to elude the foreseeable future's medical technology and cause an "unrecoverable failure" of the affected individual.
I believe Larry Niven once threw out a plausible stat that "immortality is ~200 years of life", mostly due to the accumulated odds of accidental death.
That number would correspond to a (peacetime) accidental death rate that would be deemed totally unacceptable in most developed countries. Even worldwide (including war zones), if we were to eliminate all causes of death except "Unintentional injuries", you'd end up with an average life expectancy around 500 years (very rough spitball calculation, and ignoring the demographic effects, but still in a different ballpark).
To put it in terms of biological engineering, we may not be able to reduce the risk of metastatic disease to zero, but we may have a practical "cure" that reduces the risk to a practically infinitesimal level.
Then whether the goal is attainable or not depends exclusively on your definition of "practically infinitesimal" (and "immortality" of course), in other words where you move the goal posts. For some (very silly) definitions, it is attained already. For more serious definitions, it becomes difficult to make predictions, though for the foreseeable future, I'm pessimistic.
a mechanism that has a chance of failure that asymptotically nears zero [emphasis added] as time goes by
IMHO, there is no such thing. The fact that it goes down does not automatically imply that it asymptotically nears zero.
Finally, to paraphrase the summary, if you live long enough, and nothing else kills you first, then eventually you will be killed by a husk of rabbits.
If that's an analogy, then being killed by a husk of rabbits is incurable.
My rejoinder to you is that history is littered with incorrect pronouncements that certain feats could never be accomplished.
We aren't debating whether some fundamental theorem of mathematics will be overturned, but rather whether some biological engineering problem could *ever* be solved.
Here's another one for you: a mechanism that never fails will never exist. Or if you don't like double negatives: any mechanism that does something will eventually fail to do so. Call it an engineering problem, but it is sufficiently fundamental to me that I want to go on record having said that.
A human body is a mechanism that lives, hence it will eventually fail to do so. Cancer just seems to be the major and most fundamental failure mode, to the best of my current knowledge as a cancer researcher.
Assuming that it doesn't lead to autoimmune problems down the road, I strongly suspect that immunotherapy (programming the immune system to identify the damaged cells and attack them) will become a much more commonplace treatment for cancer, precisely because it cuts off that metastasis process.
The immune system already does that; severely immunodeficient individuals are prone to getting cancer. Cancer is a complicated process - 5 to 7 distinct cell mechanisms (depending on how you count) need to be malfunctioning before one can speak of a life-threatening cancer (at first glance, wikipedia seems to have left a few out). One of them is that the cell must lose the ability to display outwards signs of being cancerous to the immune system, else it will be eliminated in short order. Now, if you're going to modulate the immune system to attack cells that don't display outwards signs of being cancerous, then your assumption that "it doesn't lead to autoimmune problems" will likely turn out false. (Mostly experimental) therapeutic approaches involving the immune system rely on the therapeutic agent recognizing tumor cells and making them recognizable to the immune system in turn. The challenge there is that cancers are diverse and have a high mutation rate - even if you're lucky enough to have an agent on the shelf that recognizes the specific cancer you're having, it may stop working in a few months. So you're again in a place where you can never truly cure each and every patient.
BTW, I'm a cancer researcher. I'm not saying this as an appeal to authority, just to explain where I got this information and to confirm that the view in TFA is somewhat of a consensus in the field. This does not make it a depressing job: as the field progresses we can beat back more cancers for longer with fewer side effects, which is exciting. Some might say that maybe some day we will get so good that 99.9% of people die of other causes before they get the chance to develop a life-threatening cancer we can't cure. However, my (admittedly one-sided) view is that most other age-related causes I can think of are easier to cure than cancer, and that the latter is at #1 to stay (barring a collapse of civilization). And even if I'm proven false, 99.9% is not 100%. We can't cure cancer 100% just like we can't manufacture hard drives with a 0% failure rate. Nature seems to abhor systems that never fail.
I think dblll was talking about US intelligence having "external funding", not Boeing.
I think that's exactly what GP meant with the sentence in parentheses following "Atlas Shrugged". See also his #9 and #10.
If one guy breaks his leg falling from a ladder, and another breaks his leg in a car accident, does the doctor treat that broken leg differently?
Umm... did you really not know that different cancers are treated with different drugs and techniques? The days that all cancer patients got the same chemo are decades behind us, and cancer treatments are actively differentiating.
Ah, but you see, naked mole rats only live 30 years. While that's impressive for a small rodent, and while they do indeed have some impressive cancer resistance mechanisms (resistance, not immunity), if you were to start genetically modifying them to live, say, thrice as long, cases of cancer would inevitably start appearing. To use GP's simplistic terminology, their cellular reproduction mechanism is built to wear down slower, but that doesn't mean it doesn't wear at all.
Also, GP obviously meant cancer in humans. For a mammal, the naked mole rat could hardly be more different from us. They're not warm-blooded and have a sluggish metabolism, a bit like a reptile. Suppose I could magically slow down all processes in your body (including your brain) by a factor 2, and make you live twice as long. Would you accept?
GP's somewhat simplistic statement is essentially correct.
They're all just as corrupt, though.
(A draft of) the actual research article is freely available here. Key points not mentioned in the summary:
* the researchers concluded the magnetic field was responsible after observing the dogs lost their directional bias on days with geomagnetic storms, which is pretty cool IMHO
* the researchers did explicitly discuss bias due to the direction of the sun, and the measures they took to eliminate it from their study.
All in all, their findings are not to be taken as gospel (as always with original research), but if confirmed, they could spark a hunt for underlying biochemical mechanism.
One man's "+5 funny satire" is another man's "-5 puerile strawman flamebait". Politically polarized "satire" is bound to offend people on a site with a politically diverse audience. If you knew this, then you fit the definition of a troll; if you didn't, then you're not mature enough for this site. Either way, you're advised to go post your hur-hur-satire with the fine like-minded people at TheBlaze. You're doing nothing but increasing the noise level here.
Well duh! GP did call it a bug, didn't he?
Valgrind (or more specifically memcheck) is your friend. This kind of stuff is almost always a latent memory error that starts wreaking havoc when the "offending" compiler organizes memory slightly differently. Almost.
Indeed, and to continue along this line, security experts routinely do that, and have not identified many cases of "a proprietary video card driver or wifi chipset" calling home.
Dude, if you really want to go into 1-dimensional left-right political thinking, then radical libertarianism is commonly associated with the political right - at least in the US, where RMS happens to have been born, raised, and spent most of his life. Also, there are better examples of leftists rags than the centre-left Guardian, the news coverage of which is *relatively* fair an balanced, especially compared to a lot of American media (though it's still not my first choice). That last sentence of yours is a pure troll.
Nigel, is that you?
Wow that's radical transparency. No wonder Norway is in the top-10 least corrupt countries. Though it seems to come at a steep price privacy-wise...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regressive_tax
You're welcome.
You won't convince a lot of people you're not trolling like that.
But to continue in the same "style":
I see your ad hominid [sic] and raise you a witty reparte [sic].
*facepalm* For the record, that's you calling yourself an ape, not me. Tip: hands are better suited for typing than feet.
Possibly. Good luck getting it to work well on, say, any laptop you bought in the last 2 years or so, though.
No Mr. Gates, trying to make Linux users downgrade to the most perpetually outdated distro in existence won't make them switch to Windows 8 next. :-D
You're thinking CentOS (and derivatives), not Debian. See also.
Pray tell, who is 'the guy who "listened to what the [users] want"'? Because (assuming you're talking about the US presidential election, you insensitive clod) I sure as hell didn't see him making an appearance amongst the guys who didn't win. Hell, is it even possible say such thing about any politician in a country so deeply divided?!
Re: your sig:
If this post is marked Troll, I made a completely offtopic comment that was meant to provoke an emotional response again.
FTFY.
Uh, I was responding to a comment about Sandy and New Jersey.
Short memory much? The person you were defending there was talking about the Philippines.
As for the Philippines, corruption is the cause of the poverty and whatever disasters they suffer, not nature.
Dude, are you living under a rock? As I pointed out in the preceding post you so conveniently ignored, this was an exceptional record-breaking typhoon. No non-corrupt advanced city on earth would have weathered that storm without significant loss of life and human suffering.
As for your point that corruption exacerbates poverty, which in turn exacerbates loss of life and suffering in the case of a natural disaster, that's true of course. But... picture yourself being born in a poor and/or corrupt country. What are you, as an individual, going to do about it? How would you like it if I say (paraphrasing your words): "fuck you, you're corrupt and negligent. Your house was flattened because it was not built to withstand a little [270km/h gust] wind and rain. A well-made house [which you can't possibly afford] would have held up pretty well."
And like the AC said, praying for them doesn't do squat. Try harder.
Unfortunate choice of words, addressed here and here before your post. Referring to that last link, you in particular would benefit from pausing for a moment to think of those people, as you have not displayed the basic empathy to put yourself into their place. "Try harder" indeed.
Also, did you realize you're replying to a post that was made shortly before the typhoon hit any major population center? Since we currently don't have the technical means to artificially deflect or weaken a typhoon, and preparations were in full swing, what would you do? Thinking about these people for a minute is a good humbling experience, and makes one more likely to donate to aid efforts later on.