Rather an odd study. Viral DNA apparently present in nearly half the subjects. They went straight to a mouse model before attempting to confirm the (small) effect in a larger, independent human cohort. No evidence that the virus actually infects mammalian cells, which would be an extremely unusual host range (the only precedent of anything similar they could find to cite is in an obscure Ukrainian journal). I'd say 'more research is needed', but maybe that's just the virus talking.
And on that point, has anybody actually isolated and sequenced a confirmed ebola sample from a human subject who died from that specific infection in the affected region?
Yes, there are complete genomes from 78 cases (not necessarily fatal, but with confirmed EVD) in this publication alone:
This genomic sequence cannot be detected in uninfected individuals. It simply isn't there. Run the analysis on a thousand random blood samples from, say, the US or Europe, and you'll never see it. Does that suggest anything to you? (I assume from your language, which is similar to that used by HIV denialists, that it might not!).
The vaccine vector is an Adenovirus, a DNA virus. The recombinant Ebola virus gene it carries will be in the form of DNA, designed to encode the same protein as the original RNA gene in the Ebola virus. It's the protein that is important, since this what the immune system will raise its response against.
Viruses are really damned small, and finding the right organism in an infected cell is anything but easy. Cells are full of all kinds of molecule-sized bits and pieces of shit. As of today, it is not even a certainty that the ebola virus has been positively identified, let alone properly categorized; there have been reports of over 250 mutation variants, any of which might be a mutated ebola virus, or maybe just another virus which might just have been present through the isolation process. Maybe just random bits of crap from a previous disease vector or vaccination injection. Nobody really knows for sure. It's pretty murky down there, and determining which organism causes what effects is a sloppy science, and it takes a huge amount of time and energy to even approximate answers.
Viruses are indeed really damned small, but not much else is true in this paragraph, which is mostly FUD. Nobody outside the ranks of medical conspiracy theorists doubts that the Ebola virus has been positively identified. We are about as certain of this are we are about the identity of, say, a tiger or an oak tree. Its genome has been completely sequenced many times. Yes, mutations have been found in viruses from the current epidemic that weren't found in previous outbreaks. There's nothing surprising about this - we see it every time the virus emerges from the animal reservoir and causes a new outbreak. There is no question of this being just some 'random crap' or anything to do with vaccinations. The mutations occur at specific positions within the well-defined sequence of the viral genome, and if you are so inclined you can go along to the UCSC genome website and see exactly where they are: http://genome.ucsc.edu/cgi-bin...
The specific viral genes selected for insertion into the (adenovirus) vaccine vector weren't chosen at random - the Ebola virus has been studied for decades and there is a great deal of data on the functions of the proteins that its genes encode. Of course we can't know for sure if a new type of vaccine is safe and effective until it is actually tested, but this is a long way from just having some sort of vague hunch that it might be OK, as you seem to be suggesting.
If you like living on the edge where any windows update can obliterate your copy of Windows and make the UI unusable.
Sounds like FUD. Classic Shell, occasionally updated, has been perfectly stable for me over the last 18 months or so of Windows updates. Install and configure Classic Start Menu (switching off all the charms and hot corner nonsense) and spend a few minutes setting file associations to not load any Metro apps, and you've got a perfectly decent version of Windows with some improvements over 7, like faster booting. The window decorations are a bit flat, but I never liked Aero Glass either. Windows 8 ought only to be a problem for inexperienced users who don't yet know how to deal with its annoyances, people stuck with locked down systems, and MS shareholders. Surely most people reading Slashdor don't fall into these categories?
Although I did not mention it in my original post, I am extremely skeptical of the evidence for polio vaccines' effectiveness.
Then I'm afraid it's pretty unlikely we can have a useful discussion. There is still no fully effective cure for entrenched belief in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories (or HIV 'scepticism', if you also subscribe to that).
Unfortunately, history (AZT giving people AIDS, Polio vaccine giving people Polio) suggests we should expect much worse when this kind of rushed drug testing occurs.
Those aren't great examples! AZT has never given anyone AIDS (outside the minds of conspiracy theorists) and remains in use as part of standard anti-retrovial combination therapy. Live polio vaccine can (extremely rarely) revert to a harmful form, but this has to be balanced against its enormously beneficial overall impact. I'm sure the researchers would be delighted if any of the anti-EBOV drugs currently being tested were as effective as AZT is against HIV, or if either of the new recombinant ebola vaccines now in trials (GSK also has one) were as protective as oral polio vaccine is against polio.
Favipiravir - small molecule, presumably made by standard organic synthesis techniques, active against the RNA polymerases (key replication enzymes) of quite a broad range of RNA viruses (including influenza virus).
VSV-EBOV - (what the Canadians are shipping). A vaccine rather than a treatment, made by using molecular cloning to insert specific EBOV proteins into an unrelated, harmless virus. It will be propagated in mammalian cells rather than the tobacco-plant based method used for ZMapp production.
What the Chinese authorities missed is that this event was being used as cover for circumventing the Great Firewall of China using RFC 1149: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc11...
Yes, this. Cameron has plenty of obnoxious policies he can be criticised for, but he's not about to abolish the metric system. This was just an off the cuff response to a question about his personal outlook, not the manifesto for the next election:
In the UK, a few Imperial measures are pretty entrenched (miles for distance, stones for body weight, feet for height, pints for milk and beer) but younger people tend to think in grams rather than pounds and ounces. The metric system has been taught to everyone since Cameron was in primary school, so he'll be perfectly familiar with it, though many of his supporters are from an older age group and the UKIP supporters he's trying to win back are, on average, older again (and probably think of grams as some sort of foreign plot imposed by the EU). But making an occasional gesture like this in an interview is not the same thing as seriously considering a policy change.
Is this connected with the transition from Phase Two to Phase Three? Presumably it must have helped with recruitment:
"Though the coffee chain's specific plans are not known, existing Starbucks franchises across the nation have been locked down with titanium shutters across all windows. In each coffee shop's door hangs the familiar Starbucks logo, slightly altered to present the familiar mermaid figure as a cyclopean mermaid whose all-seeing eye forms the apex of a world-spanning pyramid...Remaining Starbucks employees earmarked for re-training are being taught revised corporate procedures alongside 15,500 new hires recently recruited from such non-traditional sources as the CIA retirement program, Internet bulletin boards frequented by former Eagle Scouts, and the employment section in the back of Soldier Of Fortune magazine."
But there is no denying that these far more technologically sophisticated products offer tempting opportunities for the inclusion of purposefully engineered life-shortening defects.
Like, for example, a $1000 phone with a battery the user can't change...
However when asked about the kids remembering all the user names and passwords the school said they are going to have the kids write them down in a notebook. This seemed like a very bad practice for a classroom and to/from home situation.
Bruce Schneier says:
"Microsoft's Jesper Johansson urged people to write down their passwords.
This is good advice, and I've been saying it for years.
Simply, people can no longer remember passwords good enough to reliably defend against dictionary attacks, and are much more secure if they choose a password too complicated to remember and then write it down. We're all good at securing small pieces of paper. I recommend that people write their passwords down on a small piece of paper, and keep it with their other valuable small pieces of paper: in their wallet."
No, except for the bit about it being underfunded and therefore not as well maintained as it should be. Which is a shame, because it's a fantastic piece of infrastructure, much nicer to ride than (say) most of the London Underground or the NYC Subway.
Check out the Amazon extract ('But amid all the despair and hopelessness, people were working indefatigably to stabilise the nation and alleviate the prevalent tumult; and on 28 August 2298, the sedulousness of these committed inidividual was recompensed.') and you might change your mind. Still, if the original article is accurate there's no justification for his treatment, and the implications are deeply disturbing. Have we been told the full story?
Slashdot Mirror
So, Nikon or Canon?
Rather an odd study. Viral DNA apparently present in nearly half the subjects. They went straight to a mouse model before attempting to confirm the (small) effect in a larger, independent human cohort. No evidence that the virus actually infects mammalian cells, which would be an extremely unusual host range (the only precedent of anything similar they could find to cite is in an obscure Ukrainian journal). I'd say 'more research is needed', but maybe that's just the virus talking.
And on that point, has anybody actually isolated and sequenced a confirmed ebola sample from a human subject who died from that specific infection in the affected region?
Yes, there are complete genomes from 78 cases (not necessarily fatal, but with confirmed EVD) in this publication alone:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
This genomic sequence cannot be detected in uninfected individuals. It simply isn't there. Run the analysis on a thousand random blood samples from, say, the US or Europe, and you'll never see it. Does that suggest anything to you? (I assume from your language, which is similar to that used by HIV denialists, that it might not!).
The vaccine vector is an Adenovirus, a DNA virus. The recombinant Ebola virus gene it carries will be in the form of DNA, designed to encode the same protein as the original RNA gene in the Ebola virus. It's the protein that is important, since this what the immune system will raise its response against.
Viruses are really damned small, and finding the right organism in an infected cell is anything but easy. Cells are full of all kinds of molecule-sized bits and pieces of shit. As of today, it is not even a certainty that the ebola virus has been positively identified, let alone properly categorized; there have been reports of over 250 mutation variants, any of which might be a mutated ebola virus, or maybe just another virus which might just have been present through the isolation process. Maybe just random bits of crap from a previous disease vector or vaccination injection. Nobody really knows for sure. It's pretty murky down there, and determining which organism causes what effects is a sloppy science, and it takes a huge amount of time and energy to even approximate answers.
Viruses are indeed really damned small, but not much else is true in this paragraph, which is mostly FUD. Nobody outside the ranks of medical conspiracy theorists doubts that the Ebola virus has been positively identified. We are about as certain of this are we are about the identity of, say, a tiger or an oak tree. Its genome has been completely sequenced many times. Yes, mutations have been found in viruses from the current epidemic that weren't found in previous outbreaks. There's nothing surprising about this - we see it every time the virus emerges from the animal reservoir and causes a new outbreak. There is no question of this being just some 'random crap' or anything to do with vaccinations. The mutations occur at specific positions within the well-defined sequence of the viral genome, and if you are so inclined you can go along to the UCSC genome website and see exactly where they are: http://genome.ucsc.edu/cgi-bin...
The specific viral genes selected for insertion into the (adenovirus) vaccine vector weren't chosen at random - the Ebola virus has been studied for decades and there is a great deal of data on the functions of the proteins that its genes encode. Of course we can't know for sure if a new type of vaccine is safe and effective until it is actually tested, but this is a long way from just having some sort of vague hunch that it might be OK, as you seem to be suggesting.
Mr Warg faces a sentence of up to six years behind bars.
Could have been worse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If you like living on the edge where any windows update can obliterate your copy of Windows and make the UI unusable.
Sounds like FUD. Classic Shell, occasionally updated, has been perfectly stable for me over the last 18 months or so of Windows updates. Install and configure Classic Start Menu (switching off all the charms and hot corner nonsense) and spend a few minutes setting file associations to not load any Metro apps, and you've got a perfectly decent version of Windows with some improvements over 7, like faster booting. The window decorations are a bit flat, but I never liked Aero Glass either. Windows 8 ought only to be a problem for inexperienced users who don't yet know how to deal with its annoyances, people stuck with locked down systems, and MS shareholders. Surely most people reading Slashdor don't fall into these categories?
I bet you're thinking of the Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle from Captain Scarlet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.little-wheels.co.uk...
Why isn't there a designated place for bullshit like this?
There is: http://creationmuseum.org/
Have you met Mr Farage?
Does anyone have any other ways (elaborate or otherwise) around this problem?
Have you tried shopping behind 7 proxies..?
Although I did not mention it in my original post, I am extremely skeptical of the evidence for polio vaccines' effectiveness.
Then I'm afraid it's pretty unlikely we can have a useful discussion. There is still no fully effective cure for entrenched belief in anti-vaccine conspiracy theories (or HIV 'scepticism', if you also subscribe to that).
Unfortunately, history (AZT giving people AIDS, Polio vaccine giving people Polio) suggests we should expect much worse when this kind of rushed drug testing occurs.
Those aren't great examples! AZT has never given anyone AIDS (outside the minds of conspiracy theorists) and remains in use as part of standard anti-retrovial combination therapy. Live polio vaccine can (extremely rarely) revert to a harmful form, but this has to be balanced against its enormously beneficial overall impact. I'm sure the researchers would be delighted if any of the anti-EBOV drugs currently being tested were as effective as AZT is against HIV, or if either of the new recombinant ebola vaccines now in trials (GSK also has one) were as protective as oral polio vaccine is against polio.
There are three very different agents here:
ZMapp - engineered antibodies to EBOV.
Favipiravir - small molecule, presumably made by standard organic synthesis techniques, active against the RNA polymerases (key replication enzymes) of quite a broad range of RNA viruses (including influenza virus).
VSV-EBOV - (what the Canadians are shipping). A vaccine rather than a treatment, made by using molecular cloning to insert specific EBOV proteins into an unrelated, harmless virus. It will be propagated in mammalian cells rather than the tobacco-plant based method used for ZMapp production.
On the other, Oracle charges for certification and will definitely profit from this shift.
I had to re-read that sentence - the first time I didn't notice the 'f' in 'shift' and thought the summary was unusually direct.
Adult diapers.
Anti-convulsives.
Strong tranquilizers
Sixteen pairs of clean underwear.
Dramamine?
Already felt a bit of motion sickness playing it with a standard monitor, though there's a hack for that too (which does seem to help):
http://steamcommunity.com/app/...
What the Chinese authorities missed is that this event was being used as cover for circumventing the Great Firewall of China using RFC 1149: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc11...
Yes, this. Cameron has plenty of obnoxious policies he can be criticised for, but he's not about to abolish the metric system. This was just an off the cuff response to a question about his personal outlook, not the manifesto for the next election:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
In the UK, a few Imperial measures are pretty entrenched (miles for distance, stones for body weight, feet for height, pints for milk and beer) but younger people tend to think in grams rather than pounds and ounces. The metric system has been taught to everyone since Cameron was in primary school, so he'll be perfectly familiar with it, though many of his supporters are from an older age group and the UKIP supporters he's trying to win back are, on average, older again (and probably think of grams as some sort of foreign plot imposed by the EU). But making an occasional gesture like this in an interview is not the same thing as seriously considering a policy change.
Is this connected with the transition from Phase Two to Phase Three? Presumably it must have helped with recruitment:
"Though the coffee chain's specific plans are not known, existing Starbucks franchises across the nation have been locked down with titanium shutters across all windows. In each coffee shop's door hangs the familiar Starbucks logo, slightly altered to present the familiar mermaid figure as a cyclopean mermaid whose all-seeing eye forms the apex of a world-spanning pyramid...Remaining Starbucks employees earmarked for re-training are being taught revised corporate procedures alongside 15,500 new hires recently recruited from such non-traditional sources as the CIA retirement program, Internet bulletin boards frequented by former Eagle Scouts, and the employment section in the back of Soldier Of Fortune magazine."
http://www.theonion.com/articl...
But there is no denying that these far more technologically sophisticated products offer tempting opportunities for the inclusion of purposefully engineered life-shortening defects.
Like, for example, a $1000 phone with a battery the user can't change...
However when asked about the kids remembering all the user names and passwords the school said they are going to have the kids write them down in a notebook. This seemed like a very bad practice for a classroom and to/from home situation.
Bruce Schneier says:
"Microsoft's Jesper Johansson urged people to write down their passwords.
This is good advice, and I've been saying it for years.
Simply, people can no longer remember passwords good enough to reliably defend against dictionary attacks, and are much more secure if they choose a password too complicated to remember and then write it down. We're all good at securing small pieces of paper. I recommend that people write their passwords down on a small piece of paper, and keep it with their other valuable small pieces of paper: in their wallet."
https://www.schneier.com/blog/...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Is this the actual case?
No, except for the bit about it being underfunded and therefore not as well maintained as it should be. Which is a shame, because it's a fantastic piece of infrastructure, much nicer to ride than (say) most of the London Underground or the NYC Subway.
I was presuming that the nukes in Scotland would be moved south, as the Scots have made it clear they don't want them.
Yes, but have you seen the recently leaked list of key military and economic assets to be targeted by Trident in the event of Scottish independence?:
(1) Alex Salmond's secret command bunker, 'The Salmon's Lair'.
(2) MIRV attack on all Speyside distilleries, centred on Glenlivet.
(3) The Edinburgh Woollen Mill Global Headquarters, Glasgow.
(4) The Gilded Balloon theatre, to neutralise the threat from Edinburgh Fringe elements, once and for all.
(5) Submarine detonation at Loch Ness, in an attempt to create a rampaging Godzilla-style radioactive monster.
I want to read that novel.
Check out the Amazon extract ('But amid all the despair and hopelessness, people were working indefatigably to stabilise the nation and alleviate the prevalent tumult; and on 28 August 2298, the sedulousness of these committed inidividual was recompensed.') and you might change your mind. Still, if the original article is accurate there's no justification for his treatment, and the implications are deeply disturbing. Have we been told the full story?