Just so I'm understanding correctly: the amount of HIV virus in the blood is very small after initial infection, so the idea is to use the vaccine to keep the level low (i.e. prevent the virus from ever ramping up again and destroying your immune system)?
So this would prevent infection for those without HIV, and keep HIV dormant for those that already are infected?
That would be the hope - to a first approximation. Unfortunately, the probably recent relapse of the "Boston" patients (who had appeared to have completely cleared HIV infection, after leukaemia treatments IIRC) suggests that the low level that you need to achieve and maintain may be as low as one viron, either circulating in the blood, or passivated in some other cell.
The number of Therapeutic Vaccines is relatively small, but a good example of one such entity is the Rabies Vaccine (which is both a Prophylactic and Therapeutic Vaccine)
Indeed. And having had a pretty rough time from the first dose of the rabies vaccine (prophylactic), I still didn't need persuading to take the second and third doses, despite knowing that I was going to feel like I'd been kicked the length of High Street after each dose. And I know that if I do get exposed to rabies virus, I'll still have some 3 weeks of getting that "kicked the length of High Street" feeling every day as they apply the vaccine in therapeutic mode.
But it sure as hell beats getting full blown rabies. Even if having a fully loaded immune system is only around 70% successful.
Vestibular feedback will not tell you how fast you are going. It will tell you how fast you're accelerating, but that is a different thing. But you'd know that if you'd paid attention at school in your early teens.
Exactly. And might I add that any reasonable company will give the employee a "clean loaner laptop" to take to this wonderful country. That way they do not have to risk loosing their computer.
We don't do it. We just don't move client's (or our) data across the US border. After all, we're in competition with American companies to try to take away the bread from their babies mouths, in their own country. Why would we not expect their government to undermine their productivity by trying to prevent open competition from us?
Need to take client's data into or out of America? That's what our encrypted VPN is about. We've got laptops in America, and several times people going there have taken over properly-laid out keyboards for our desired languages, so that's not an issue. So when we're doing demonstrations, our guys work with a projector (local), an off-the-shelf laptop, and a UK (or Lithuanian, French, Russian or Norwegian, as appropriate) keyboard, and a rodent. Any customised demonstrations or data gets downloaded through the VPN ; likewise for real working data. and the laptop gets ghosted back to it's basic configuration after use and left in the local (US) office.
How implausible is it to imagine that a system could be set up to suck all data off every device (especially solid state storage) as it passes through airport security
(1) the search in question took place on a person travelling on a train, not by air ; trivial, but it's in TFS.
(2)Grounds for implausibility #1 : devices that are switched off and have no batteries or power supplies are rather difficult to read remotely. So take the battery out of your laptop (assuming that you aren't planning on getting a disposable machine on the other side of the border and downloading any data you need via a highly encrypted link) and you're not likely to get your machine slurped.
(3)Grounds for implausibility #2 : bandwidth. I'm just looking to change the hard drive in my laptop for a multi-TB one in the near future - a trivial change these days. Say the device takes 30 seconds to pass through the security machine (I assume that you mean an x-ray machine, and that you're talking about doing it automatically and covertly ; otherwise why not just plug into the thing and tell the passenger to power it up and supply the passwords). So you'd need a wireless system that can transfer at over 5 GB per second. Good luck on that ; I seen no reason to upgrade the laptop's wifi card and/ or it's USB interface and/or it's ethernet system which maxes out at 1/50th of that. (Actually... I'm not sure if the laptop does gigabyte ethernet or not ; I've not got that at home or in the office, so "meh".)
do you really think that the border people will have devices for every device out there? What if I shipped data - important, high value data - on an 8 inch floppy disc? (That's not a typo : 202mm diameter.) Nothing illegal about that. Or less abstrusely, on a vintage 1990 Zip disc? Are they going to have one of those? Which they can power on covertly and load my discs from a closed case in an X-ray machine, and read a device that takes 20 minutes to fill (or empty) in under 30 seconds.
Every transaction is video recorded, so why would there be any mystery about how they got at the USB port?
I've heard of video-recording ATMs but I've never actually noticed a camera in one. Not that I've gone looking for cameras as such, but I do regularly give the fascia of a machine a tug and a shove to check that it's not a fake card skimmer/ reader.
Someone who worked for cash machine manufacturers would be the most likely authors of this software, and masterminds. I'd be looking for anyone who quit recently.
Like, in the last several years? What's the lifetime of these machines "in the field"? Several years I can be certain of (one that I use regularly was subject to an ineffective hammer attack several years ago ; the chipped glass is still the same as it was in 2010) ; and I wouldn't be surprised if it were as high as 8 or 10 years. ISTR seeing OS/2 boot messages on an ATM not too long ago. Sic foncionnatit, nil copulatum. If it works, don't copulatum with it.
Using a living volunteer is a way of being confident that the person who set the explosives, and who is initially also the volunteer, is confident that they've done it right, and that it is going to work. If the person who is asking you to risk your balls trying this sort of thing in a rescue situation doesn't have the confidence in the technique to volunteer themselves, then it isn't likely to be a good technique.
Of course you use props to start with - it's experimentation. But at some point you're going to try it on a live person - that's the only point of the technique. So, the person who is developing the technique volunteers. It's the only way to get something to a state where it's reliable enough for use in the field and the cold and the dark and the stress of a real emergency, and which real victims are likely to have any confidence in submitting to.
You also missed the important point of "volunteer". Payment is zero, and funding doesn't extend to buying sides of meat for a trial. It's spent on important things like equipment, fuel, and... well, that's about it.
Fermented mare's milk is a national drink in Kazakhstan.
... and partly fermented milk of any other sort - including cows - is a very popular drink across the whole of Russia and the Former Soviet Union states - under the name of kephir (ÐÐÑÐÑ ; as if Slashdot will be able to handle non-Latin characters). As long as you're not expecting what looks like milk to taste like milk, it's entirely drinkable and quite nice if you like sour/ bitter drinks.
There's an old joke that "one man's cheese is another man's rotten milk" ; that's doubly true for kephir.
And I'm off to have some Camembert, with it's rind of moulds. Or some Stilton.
How the fuck is passing a law going to get rid of a plant species? Or is ths "poison ivy" (a fine song, BTW. About 1979, wasn't it?) unique in the plant kingdom in reading and abiding by legislative notices?
If you want to get rid of the poison ivy that you perceive to be a problem' then you need to alter the plant's environment so as to make it impossible to live. Whether you do that with chemicals, biological control, or by paving over the lawn (wood, swamp ; I don't know where this stuff grows) with weed-proof membrane and 3ft of asphalt, is your choice. But it's not a legislative one.
How are we going to harness tech and knowledge to create a better world for our children and grand-children?
We are not going to. You may choose to create a better world for your children and grand children, but I am certainly not going to expend any effort to create a better world for your children or grandchildren. But don't expect me to support you.
There are too many people on thiis planet - by somewhere between 4 and 5 billion. I'm not contributing to the problem, but it sounds as if you intend to, or have already.
The TFS's title is insanely wrong. The water in question is in the pore spaces between the grains of ice. It's as ice fee as something that is 90-95% by vilume ice can possibly be. Not very ice-free.
That water moves around in both solid (porosity under a couple of %) ice and less compacted snow (let's call it "firn", because Wegener was German) is well known. Sometimes it moves in large channels - look up "joukullhlaup' for some fun figures - sometimes in small or microscopic ones. But always it remains hydrogen oxide, and so has a very large specific latent heat of crystallisation. So large, in fact, that if you try to freeze a cubic metre of water at zero centigrade into ice at zero centigrade, you relaese enough heat to melt almost a cubic metre of ice (at zero centigrade) into water (at zero centigrade).
So, once you get away from radiative cooling (to space, via the atmosphere) and evaporative cooling (to the atmosphere), then you've only got the relatively slow conductive and convective cooling routes to get rid of that latent heat of crystallisation. Since ice - as solid ice, or as compacted snow or firn - is actually a pretty decent insulator (build a snow hole and see!), then it's not really astonishing that water can persist as a pore fluid in ice for long periods.
Speaking as a geologist and mountaineer , I'd steer clear of trying to define "firn" without agreeing some other dfinitions frst. How compact is the "compact" in compacted snow? What measuring technology would you use - cone penetratometer, edge penetratometer, pulling a ice screw out? At what temperature, ambient, or a standardised on? What intergranular (or intragranular) porosity do you consider to be "compact", and what distribution of pore sizes and interconnectivities are you interested in?
Ice (and snow) is / are highly variable materials ; you can get easily tied up in trying to be over precise.
It doesn't surprise me that the journalists and copy editors of the NatGeo were brave enough to put a number on it ; they don't have to be held accountable for what they write.
Personally, I'd go for "firn is when you need to put crampons on, or start cutting steps, to make progress up a 45deg slope. But I woudn't fight over 15 degrees, or the length of the crampon claws, because I don't think it's important.
And how does this affect the fact that agents of the US government have sworn (both in school indoctrination, and in taking their oath of office) to uphold the constitutioin of their country, including the presumption of innocence and the ban on torture?
You are making the extremely popular mistake of confusing hardness and toughness. It may be extremely popular, but it's a mistake nonetheless.
See my posting above concerning the erosion of diamond-coated drill bits by chalk (trigonal calcium carbonate). Diamond is hard, sure. And tough. But Chalk can be much softer, and tougher.
That's like saying that "all beer tastes like piss", or "all food tastes like shit." There is a huge variety of grades and strengths of aluminium and aluminium alloys. Some are, as you say, quite brittle ; some are tremendously strong and have high (and very well understood) fatigue lives (I'm thinking particularly of aircraft skin alloys ; I'm sure there are others.
I'm not a materials scientist, but a practical geologist. Every year I see the stunned look on drilling engineer's faces when drill bits that are coated in diamond (specifically the [111] crystalline plane, grown epitaxially on a silicon nitride substrate) go into the hole to drill nice soft Chalk - a rock that I can crush with my bare hands - and the bit drills very slowly and comes out with it's cutters worn to stubs. That's the accidental variability of nature ; mankind's planned variability in alloys is no less great.
To be honest, it has long reached the point that if you're doing anything with computer security - including runnning an email servic, then you don't dare to use any product made in America, or by Americans, and you cannot trust any person who has American citizenship as they may be subject to pressures that they are forbidden to tell you about.
Obvious solution : every part of your tool chain has got to be open-source, and you've got to employ a multi-nationality team who group-review everything security-related in depth.
If you're talking specifically about web servers, then hardware sources of randomness - e.g. decay counters on a phial of tritium, or a zener diode driven in reverse - should be a feasible solution. Yeah, you still need to validate/ trust the source (and RSA are having severe reputation problems at the moment ; that's a big problem. For them.), but that should be immune to external interference.
The load on your webserver - or the dedicated/dev/random device in your cluster of servers - should be predictable for any serious project - you've got to look at failovers and other such stuff, so you might as well budget for a specifiec quantity of randomness. If the PHB and/ or bean counters don't want to pay for randomness, but instead want to use a cheap pseudo-random number generator... well you're now in familiar territory of justifying a technical recommendation to the morons in charge. Which is your job, as a reisdent nerd.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be the hope - to a first approximation. Unfortunately, the probably recent relapse of the "Boston" patients (who had appeared to have completely cleared HIV infection, after leukaemia treatments IIRC) suggests that the low level that you need to achieve and maintain may be as low as one viron, either circulating in the blood, or passivated in some other cell.
Indeed. And having had a pretty rough time from the first dose of the rabies vaccine (prophylactic), I still didn't need persuading to take the second and third doses, despite knowing that I was going to feel like I'd been kicked the length of High Street after each dose. And I know that if I do get exposed to rabies virus, I'll still have some 3 weeks of getting that "kicked the length of High Street" feeling every day as they apply the vaccine in therapeutic mode.
But it sure as hell beats getting full blown rabies. Even if having a fully loaded immune system is only around 70% successful.
Vestibular feedback will not tell you how fast you are going. It will tell you how fast you're accelerating, but that is a different thing. But you'd know that if you'd paid attention at school in your early teens.
We don't do it. We just don't move client's (or our) data across the US border. After all, we're in competition with American companies to try to take away the bread from their babies mouths, in their own country. Why would we not expect their government to undermine their productivity by trying to prevent open competition from us?
Need to take client's data into or out of America? That's what our encrypted VPN is about. We've got laptops in America, and several times people going there have taken over properly-laid out keyboards for our desired languages, so that's not an issue. So when we're doing demonstrations, our guys work with a projector (local), an off-the-shelf laptop, and a UK (or Lithuanian, French, Russian or Norwegian, as appropriate) keyboard, and a rodent. Any customised demonstrations or data gets downloaded through the VPN ; likewise for real working data. and the laptop gets ghosted back to it's basic configuration after use and left in the local (US) office.
(1) the search in question took place on a person travelling on a train, not by air ; trivial, but it's in TFS.
(2)Grounds for implausibility #1 : devices that are switched off and have no batteries or power supplies are rather difficult to read remotely. So take the battery out of your laptop (assuming that you aren't planning on getting a disposable machine on the other side of the border and downloading any data you need via a highly encrypted link) and you're not likely to get your machine slurped.
(3)Grounds for implausibility #2 : bandwidth. I'm just looking to change the hard drive in my laptop for a multi-TB one in the near future - a trivial change these days. Say the device takes 30 seconds to pass through the security machine (I assume that you mean an x-ray machine, and that you're talking about doing it automatically and covertly ; otherwise why not just plug into the thing and tell the passenger to power it up and supply the passwords). So you'd need a wireless system that can transfer at over 5 GB per second. Good luck on that ; I seen no reason to upgrade the laptop's wifi card and/ or it's USB interface and/or it's ethernet system which maxes out at 1/50th of that. (Actually ... I'm not sure if the laptop does gigabyte ethernet or not ; I've not got that at home or in the office, so "meh".)
do you really think that the border people will have devices for every device out there? What if I shipped data - important, high value data - on an 8 inch floppy disc? (That's not a typo : 202mm diameter.) Nothing illegal about that. Or less abstrusely, on a vintage 1990 Zip disc? Are they going to have one of those? Which they can power on covertly and load my discs from a closed case in an X-ray machine, and read a device that takes 20 minutes to fill (or empty) in under 30 seconds.
Sorry - reality won't play ball with your dreams.
And? Does this have some relevance to the story under discussion, which states :
Who are Diebold, and why should I care about them? They're just another bunch of people who sell shit to foreigners.
So, you didn't RTFA then, did you?
(My emphasis.)
I've heard of video-recording ATMs but I've never actually noticed a camera in one. Not that I've gone looking for cameras as such, but I do regularly give the fascia of a machine a tug and a shove to check that it's not a fake card skimmer/ reader.
Like, in the last several years? What's the lifetime of these machines "in the field"? Several years I can be certain of (one that I use regularly was subject to an ineffective hammer attack several years ago ; the chipped glass is still the same as it was in 2010) ; and I wouldn't be surprised if it were as high as 8 or 10 years. ISTR seeing OS/2 boot messages on an ATM not too long ago. Sic foncionnatit, nil copulatum. If it works, don't copulatum with it.
Of course you use props to start with - it's experimentation. But at some point you're going to try it on a live person - that's the only point of the technique. So, the person who is developing the technique volunteers. It's the only way to get something to a state where it's reliable enough for use in the field and the cold and the dark and the stress of a real emergency, and which real victims are likely to have any confidence in submitting to.
You also missed the important point of "volunteer". Payment is zero, and funding doesn't extend to buying sides of meat for a trial. It's spent on important things like equipment, fuel, and ... well, that's about it.
FTFY
Just because we don't have to listen to his screams doesn't make it any the less fun.
I'm almost tempted to find out Bill Gate's appropriate personal information.
Or the CEO of [insert offending social website's controlling corporation].
... and partly fermented milk of any other sort - including cows - is a very popular drink across the whole of Russia and the Former Soviet Union states - under the name of kephir (ÐÐÑÐÑ ; as if Slashdot will be able to handle non-Latin characters). As long as you're not expecting what looks like milk to taste like milk, it's entirely drinkable and quite nice if you like sour/ bitter drinks.
There's an old joke that "one man's cheese is another man's rotten milk" ; that's doubly true for kephir.
And I'm off to have some Camembert, with it's rind of moulds. Or some Stilton.
If you want to get rid of the poison ivy that you perceive to be a problem' then you need to alter the plant's environment so as to make it impossible to live. Whether you do that with chemicals, biological control, or by paving over the lawn (wood, swamp ; I don't know where this stuff grows) with weed-proof membrane and 3ft of asphalt, is your choice. But it's not a legislative one.
Try using a wire brush and Dettol.
We are not going to. You may choose to create a better world for your children and grand children, but I am certainly not going to expend any effort to create a better world for your children or grandchildren. But don't expect me to support you.
There are too many people on thiis planet - by somewhere between 4 and 5 billion. I'm not contributing to the problem, but it sounds as if you intend to, or have already.
That water moves around in both solid (porosity under a couple of %) ice and less compacted snow (let's call it "firn", because Wegener was German) is well known. Sometimes it moves in large channels - look up "joukullhlaup' for some fun figures - sometimes in small or microscopic ones. But always it remains hydrogen oxide, and so has a very large specific latent heat of crystallisation. So large, in fact, that if you try to freeze a cubic metre of water at zero centigrade into ice at zero centigrade, you relaese enough heat to melt almost a cubic metre of ice (at zero centigrade) into water (at zero centigrade).
So, once you get away from radiative cooling (to space, via the atmosphere) and evaporative cooling (to the atmosphere), then you've only got the relatively slow conductive and convective cooling routes to get rid of that latent heat of crystallisation. Since ice - as solid ice, or as compacted snow or firn - is actually a pretty decent insulator (build a snow hole and see!), then it's not really astonishing that water can persist as a pore fluid in ice for long periods.
Moderately interesting science, reasonable TFA ; terrible TFS.
Ice (and snow) is / are highly variable materials ; you can get easily tied up in trying to be over precise.
It doesn't surprise me that the journalists and copy editors of the NatGeo were brave enough to put a number on it ; they don't have to be held accountable for what they write.
Personally, I'd go for "firn is when you need to put crampons on, or start cutting steps, to make progress up a 45deg slope. But I woudn't fight over 15 degrees, or the length of the crampon claws, because I don't think it's important.
Nope, there's an apostrophe too many.
And how does this affect the fact that agents of the US government have sworn (both in school indoctrination, and in taking their oath of office) to uphold the constitutioin of their country, including the presumption of innocence and the ban on torture?
Please record this result. I do not wish to repeat the experiment..
See my posting above concerning the erosion of diamond-coated drill bits by chalk (trigonal calcium carbonate). Diamond is hard, sure. And tough. But Chalk can be much softer, and tougher.
That's like saying that "all beer tastes like piss", or "all food tastes like shit." There is a huge variety of grades and strengths of aluminium and aluminium alloys. Some are, as you say, quite brittle ; some are tremendously strong and have high (and very well understood) fatigue lives (I'm thinking particularly of aircraft skin alloys ; I'm sure there are others.
I'm not a materials scientist, but a practical geologist. Every year I see the stunned look on drilling engineer's faces when drill bits that are coated in diamond (specifically the [111] crystalline plane, grown epitaxially on a silicon nitride substrate) go into the hole to drill nice soft Chalk - a rock that I can crush with my bare hands - and the bit drills very slowly and comes out with it's cutters worn to stubs. That's the accidental variability of nature ; mankind's planned variability in alloys is no less great.
Obvious solution : every part of your tool chain has got to be open-source, and you've got to employ a multi-nationality team who group-review everything security-related in depth.
The load on your webserver - or the dedicated /dev/random device in your cluster of servers - should be predictable for any serious project - you've got to look at failovers and other such stuff, so you might as well budget for a specifiec quantity of randomness. If the PHB and/ or bean counters don't want to pay for randomness, but instead want to use a cheap pseudo-random number generator ... well you're now in familiar territory of justifying a technical recommendation to the morons in charge. Which is your job, as a reisdent nerd.
Mythbusters proved this a while ago.