IMO, the real battle here is caused by greylisting. Greylisting plus a honeypot database of fake email addresses is clearly the most effective, automatic, general-purpose anti-spam mechanism to come along. Spammers are starting to feel the pinch (even though lots of people are still struggling with old-fashioned "filtering" mechanisms, and are still easy and fun targets).
The spammers who are starting to take on greylisting are doing so by two main mechanisms: massive distribution across IP address space, and direct use of infected PC MTAs.
The IP address spread is fairly simple to understand. If you have 100,000 zombie PCs with 100,000 IP addresses, then clearly you can send 100,000 pieces of spam without ever using the same IP address twice. That makes the honeypot database of greylisting useless, since I rely on waiting to see a given IP address send email to a known "bogus" email address to correctly identify that IP address as a spammer (in the short term, at least).
The direct use of infected PC MTAs is more difficult. If the zombie PC can programmatically use the unspecting owner's own ISP MTA to send the spam, then it becomes very difficult to distinguish that spam from real mail send from a real person (just as botnet click fraud is very difficult for Google to do anything about without also discounting some "real" clicks).
To respond to the massive distributed IP address spammer,
I think a drastic increase in bogus email addresses would help, so that they
have to transmit to 10 or 100 times more addresses in order to hope to reach the
same # of real people. It's easier for website owners to create more bogus email addresses than
it is for the spammers to infect more PCs.
You basically always "drop" mail sent to a bogus address so that the spammer
is convinced it went through and is getting to a "real" person (and probably even sells that address to other spammers as "verified").
That would push the spammers squarely into focussing on using the infected owner's own ISP's MTA for transmission, giving those ISPs an ever-increasing workload of bogus mail to send.
Sorry, but that's where this war is headed anyway: to the point where ISPs will start charging customers to disinfect their PCs once they've been identified as botnet spam transmitters.
I'm going to start slowly increasing my spamming of spammer address databases today (e.g., by injecting more hidden text email addresses onto websites).
Note that this is not a "solution" to spam (so please don't post that cute little form:-).
This is just an effort to push the problem where I think it's going to end up eventually anyway: on the backs of ISPs that have not yet come to view infected customer PCs as "their" problem yet.
First, for 90% of the calls to strcat() in real life, a more "efficient" coding replacement will be more error-prone and will not make the software faster enough to be perceptible by humans.
Second, a big percentage of folks who think they know how to be faster than strcat() have no clue how the disparity between processor speeds and memory fetches has increased over the years, rendering dumb ol' strcat() awfully fast. If the "more efficient" code that doesn't call strcat() causes a couple of main memory fetches, it may well be slower than a dumb ol' call to strcat() on that string that's still in cache.
Nobody knows nuthin' about efficiency unless they've measured.
I am more worried about carcinogenic crap in the ground, in the water and in the air than global warming.
Perhaps some scientific data would ease your worries?
This lecture on what we know and don't know about the
causes of cancer probably holds several surprises.
And, of course, it's always useful to remember what the head of Fred Hutch points out about discovering the causes of cancer:
if it turns out to be behavior, would it help to know?
After all, we know with fair certainty the biggest cause of lung cancer,
and a great many people still take up smoking every year.
That says that only music companies that produce a critical-mass of
quality music can get a share of the tax money.
This will be ascertained, of course, by a government committee that music companies will have to go before to get approval of content before they publish it.
Any content not pre-approved by the government committee will be presumed to not be quality, and will count against their odds of participating in the tax revenue.
Any industry that regularly invites the government into their business just hasn't had a large enough dose of government involvement yet.
Anybody who's ever been stuck in traffic can understand the knee-jerk "those bozos should pay" response.
But anybody who cares about national security and terrorism should be sobered by what happened in this case: an utter failure of threat assessment.
Our ability to survive terrorism is not just reliant on the ability to detect and respond to threats: it's crucial to be able to detect the lack of threats and not respond to them.
What Boston demonstrated is that they are ripe for terrorism.
After all, terrorism is about creating terror, not about inflicting
actual damage.
Boston showed you can terrorize them with some children's toys and no explosives at all.
Of course, the knee-jerk conservative reaction will also include the phrase "abundance of caution" and "we can't take any chances".
The problem is if you have an abundance of caution and can't take any chances, then a real terrorist action can have you dancing all over the place trying to respond to decoy threats and missing the real action.
Correctly assessing situations that are not threatening is just as important to security as correctly assessing situations that are.
Exactly what Dareth said! And "follows the guidelines they use for their projects" does not just refer to how the code is indented/commented. It can mean substantive issues like: pluggable into a test harness, memory management policy, thread safety, error handling policy, avoiding recursion, etc.
All new methods of interfering with cancer are welcome news; only the significance varies.
a) This is a mouse study. A required early step for a cancer treatment, but by no means indicative of significance. We have many, many treatments that cure cancer pretty well in lab mice.
b) The line of attack here is interfering with a growth factor. Unfortunately, cancer is generally good at mutating and "learning about" new growth factors. Hence, the saying "prostate cancer doesn't kill people -- prostate cancer metastasis kills people." It would be unsurprising if this technique joined the (already swollen) ranks of treatments that can successfully lower PSA without actually significantly reducing the number of patients who die, or significantly extending their lives.
c) On the plus side, keep in mind that prostate cancer is a rather indolent cancer (compared to, say, breast cancer). If you ain't got it, the tedious and ancient prescription of eating your vegetables, exercising, and not getting fat are a really good bet for decreasing the odds you'll ever die from it. We now overdetect prostate cancer (find/treat lots of cases that were never going to actually kill anyone), so don't get too anxious about the statistics that say you're pretty likely to get it in your lifetime. You're way more likely to get thyroid cancer -- without ever knowing it or suffering any ill effects from it.
Has anybody ever collected all Bill's foresights since he became wealthy enough to be presumed prescient? I'm sure they would be entertaining reading when put all together sequentially.
My prediction is: Bill will tell us that the next version of Windows after Vista is going to be really secure this time.
Why is there not a cure and treatments are our best option? The same reason that there is no magic bullet for software development, and we all keep futzing along pounding out code with an embarassingly high project failure rate: complexity.
Cancer is not reasonably viewed as a single disease, it's highly unlikely there will ever be "a" cure for it, and thinking that the only problem is how profits are made requires ignoring a whole lot of facts.
How profits are made is one problem in the cancer industry (a nearly direct quote from the head of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle), but it the nuts and bolts technical problems are also enormous. Humans just aren't smart enough to tackle this damn complicated problem effectively. Yet.
And yet, there is the disturbing case of policosanol (just buy some Cuban sugar cane to make it!). Policosanol has the disturbing property that it seems to treat high cholesterol when tested by Cuban-funded studies, but not when tested with non-Cuban dollars.
Also disturbing is the fact that the Cubans discovered a new use for policosanol (increasing BMD for post-menopausal women) at just about exactly the time the cholesterol claim was being shot down by a large study.
Let's not all sign up for the Cuban model of drug development just yet.
In America, in Europe, in Cuba, and (I bet) in Timbuktu, one unfortunately always has to ask "who profits" when evaluating the claims made for any given drug.
Cool! I'll go learn me some bio-engineering. Look at all those courses! Alright, I'll dive into "Molecular and Cellular Pathophysiology".
Shoot, no video lectures. Shoot, no audio lectures. Well, maybe I can pick something up from those extensive lecture notes.
Oh. The lecture notes are like PowerPoint slides.
Oh. "Figure removed for copyright reasons."
OK, well at least it didn't take me more than 10 minutes to learn... that I ain't going to learn much bio-engineering from MIT's current "open" offering. Can we not run this story again until they actually have a fair chunk of content?
This article caught my eye because of a recent conversation about my wife's uncle, who is dying of colon cancer. The in-laws were bemoaning that if he only hadn't gone off chemo once to try lying on a jade bed, that he might have lasted longer -- and maybe a new treatment was coming. I pointed out that there was no point having regets about that, since there's no cure for cancer just around the corner. My mother-in-law snapped "You don't know that!".
Sadly, that's the same magical thinking that makes cancer patients pay $2700 for a jade bed to lie on. It's true that I don't know that no cure for cancer is imminent, just as I don't know that lying on a jade bed won't cure cancer. With magical thinking, all things you can't know for certain are equally possible, but that's just not true. I can assess the likelihood of a near-term cure for cancer and the likelhood that lying on a jade bed will cure cancer, and know that both these things are very, very, unlikely.
I understand the desire to raise money by issuing a press release on a chemical so preliminary that it hasn't even been tested in vivo, but I can't help but cynically think that these same scientists, once they get far enough along to start enumerating the problems with their new chemical, will be issuing press releases cautioning the public not to get their hopes up too soon.
Of course, a less toxic chemotherapy is greatly appealing. Artemisinin had such appeal. Plant-derived, and already used extensively in the treatment of malaria (the malaria parasite has some things in common with cancer, so more than once an anti-malarial drug has been applied to cancer with some success), artemisinin offers an in-vitro story just as exciting as the one listed here. It's still an active area of research, but like all previous compounds that showed absolutely stunning success in the test tube, it's offering a murkier picture when applied to patients.
Much less toxic than standard chemo, though there was that one patient who got brain stem neuropathy.
Or perhaps you would like to try Paw-Paw, an annonaceous acetogenin derived from a plant that likewise offered stunning success in a Petri dish, but not such a stunning miracle in people. Much less toxic than standard chemo, though there is concern it could increase the risk of Parkinson's disease.
Of course, we already have a cure for cancer. If you read the pilot studies of the many, many compounds tested on cancer patients, you will often find that in a "failed" study, there were one or two patients that experienced complete remission, and are still alive. The drug is certainly a failure if it fails to help 99% of patients -- but for that 1% the drug (which will never be developed further!) is a cure for cancer.
We already have a cure for cancer -- we have many cures for cancer, we just don't know which cure works for which patient. That's the root of the drive for "personalized" cancer therapy, where we will actually someday be able to look at your cancer's genes and know exactly what to give you to cure it. Actually, gene testing is already reaching the clinical level, so isn't that exciting?
Well, not so exciting as hoped, once again. The gene mutation theory of cancer is falling apart. The researchers who once thought BRCA was going to offer a simple cause/effect explanation for certain breast cancers keep having to adjust downward their expectations of how often the "cause" actually produces the "effect". Like Einstein throwing in a cosmological constant to make the formula come out right, cancer doctors lean on "penetrance" to make the failed gene theory formula add up. BRCA "causes" breast cancer. Except when it doesn't. We used to think the BRCA theory was ~95% "right". But then it dropped to close to 80% "right". Hmmm.
Most likely, some form of aneuploidy is at work to produce the unpredictability, and uncurability we see in cancer. So, your cancer gets some characteristics from the site of origin (breast, prostate, colon, etc.), but also
Procrastination has no single, simple cause. Or rather, it might have a single, simple cause for you (especially when only considering a specific context, such as homework assignments), but different people in different contexts may suffer from procrastination for quite different reasons.
If you've been a procrastinator for years in multiple areas of your life, it's worth spending some time trying to understand root causes, instead of searching for the "do it now!" quick fix (which often produces only fleeting improvements). A good place to start is with the psychological research presented in the venerable Burka and Yuen's Procrastination: Why You Do It, What to Do About It,
also available at amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.
If you're a pessimist who often frets and fusses at the very beginning of projects when others are working away, worry-free, you might also find useful a read of "The Positive Power of Negative Thinking" bn.com, amazon.com, buy.com. The author makes the case that those of us with a pessimistic explanatory style may be using it to good effect when it comes to getting things done (e.g., worrying can be a form of motivation, and focusing on possible negative outcomes can be an aid to reducing risk of failure).
I highly recommend doing your archiving on the cheapest, poorest quality DVD-R discs you can find. The reason is simple:
thinking you have high-quality media makes you complacent about testing and migrating archived data
Boy, they really still don't get it. I couldn't believe they were trying to protray that their employees using the Google system are competing on an equal playing field with customers using the Google system. Reminds me of when Microsoft publicly claimed that there were no undocumented API functions, and their app programmers were competing on a level field with all other Windows app programmers. Claimed that right up until Andrew Schulman raised his hand and said "Umm, here's some undocumented system functions that Word is using."
Sad to see Google as willing to be slimy as Microsoft. They have every right to let their engineers do AdSense, AdWords, and whatever else for fun and profit. But please don't treat us like idiots and tell us that we're competing with them on a level playing field. Applying a Quality Score to everybody ain't a level playing field when some folks sit in an office next to the guy who knows how the secret Quality Score is calculated. Sheesh.
Sorry, doesn't work. When you've got 50,000 zombie PCs in your botnet, limiting them to 1 outgoing email per 60 seconds just limits the spam to 50,000 per minute. The zombie botnets are already often self-limiting, to avoid detection.
I always feel a little guilty when I read people's spam problems. Graylisting plus a database of honeypot addresses (addresses fed to spammers that no human could have ever seen, a la the CBL) sure let me quit fussing with spam.
No filters (text or otherwise), no false positives, hundreds of spam messages arrive at my server every day, and approximately 1 a day gets through. I can live with that. Sometimes, a legitimate email will get delayed by several hours. Since I often don't check my email for hours at a time, I can live with that too.
I'm sure there must be some problem that keeps this solution from being widely deployed. But if you're geeky enough to run your own mail server, give it a try. It sure beats fussing with all those filters and crap.
Has there been an increase in spam? Huh. I didn't notice.
In addition to the effects of sleep on the brain is the ever-strengthening hypothesis that melatonin helps fight cancer. Pineal gland production of melatonin is suppressed by light (mostly of a particular frequency) hitting the retina.
Thus, we see (observational, but well-powered and not sloppy) studies that associate 9 or more hours of sleep with significantly less breast cancer than in women getting only 8 hours of sleep. We see mouse models in which melatonin-depeleted blood from women stimulates growth of xenograft tumors. There is a known biochemical mechanism by which melatonin can interfere with the growth of cancer.
Finally, I've recently discovered (another geek-turns-doctor case:-) that many cases of "morning stiffness" are actually the result of abnormally high melatonin levels. There is growing speculation that melatonin helps modulate inflammation to keep it from damaging healthy tissue, and also that there is a feedback route from the immune system to the pineal gland. I speculate that melatonin-induced morning stiffness is the body saying "stay down, you idiot, and stay out of the light -- I'm trying to heal you".
One of the reasons sleep evolved may simply be cancer prevention.
While I would love to be awake 24 hours a day, I would not like to raise my odds of getting clinically significant cancer. So, I'll continue to sleep in a darkened bedroom, and will avoid any such drug as this until there's a few decades of evidence that it doesn't increase your odds of dying in a tediously predictable manner.
Why do you want to foil the harvesters? Feeding them bogus addresses helps you build a honeypot database which, combined with graylisting, is just about the most effective anti-spam measure there is.
I need tips on how to get my bogus addresses into more spammers databases!
a) Why on earth would you use Google when you can go directly to PubMed, which is where most of the halfway decent Google results would be anyway?
b) This is not, in general, a great application of search technology. Simple AI is what's needed here. Doctors used to do an extremely poor job of identifying which person in the ER with chest pains was actually having a heart attack. A doctor made a database of cases and symptoms, and then made a simple flowchart that could do a better job of identifying heart attack than some of the most experienced doctors in the country. We need a little more of that.
If you really want to be an amateur physician for a difficult case, spend your time in PubMed, not in Google. Most (but not all!) of the utter crap and cranks are kept out of PubMed, while there is still room for non-conventional wisdom.
This (very old) problem for casinos is entirely analagous to the card-counting situation for blackjack, which we can note has not put any casinos out of business during the 50-odd years it's known to have been around.
In both cases, there are draconian measures that are effective. To wit: in blackjack, a paranoid casino can simply expel players who make widely varying bets, and forbid new players from starting play except at the start of a new shoe. In roulette, the casino can require bets down before releasing the ball.
In both cases, however, casinos have to walk a fine line. They want to encourage the illusion that you *could* win, while eliminating what is, after all, only a tiny minority that is capable of successfully beating the game. Thus, you can walk around Vegas and see signs for blackjack that has a low minimum bet and even that uses a single shoe -- hallmarks for attracting people who think they can count cards.
As with blackjack, the non-random roulette winner is fairly easy to spot. Placing bets that cover a particular segment of the wheel (the best computers right now can narrow it down to about 5 sequential positions) is a somewhat odd bet. When a pit boss notes someone winning by making a series of "segment" bets, he can simply refuse their action (and of course, take their picture and distribute it to other casinos).
The casino doesn't really want to require all bets down before releasing the ball because it slows down play and discourages the illusion that it might really be possible to win.
People who can beat the house at BJ and roulette are to casinos as shoplifters are to stores. In both cases, the business elects to tolerate a certain amount of it in order to avoid imposing measures that will slow down the flow of cash from their "real" customers.
> If my brain has been damaged so much that I can only be roused to
> awareness of my surroundings by a drug that artificially and
> temporarily activates bits and pieces of my brain,
> I just want to die quickly and painlessly.
> Some angiogenesis inhibitors have proven to be very helpful in
> treating cancer, but they are not a cure. They aren't nearly
> as effective in humans as they were in mice, it appears.
They never were supposed to be a cure. They were supposed to keep tumors from growing. People are still then stuck with tumors, but they get to keep living. However, because anti-angiogenic drugs designed to keep tumors stable or very slowly shrink them had to be rated by the same standard as cytotoxic ("We Kill Cells!") therapies, peer-reviewed papers were often required to note that they "did not show a significant therapeutic effect", even if they were actually a big success by cytostatic standards (e.g., they kept tumors from growing).
Virtually nothing in cancer testing is as effective in humans as in mice, since there's very little genetic variation in the mice that are used for cancer testing. In fact, if your new drug doesn't work pretty darn good on mice, then it's pretty much a non-starter for testing on humans.
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IMO, the real battle here is caused by greylisting. Greylisting plus a honeypot database of fake email addresses is clearly the most effective, automatic, general-purpose anti-spam mechanism to come along. Spammers are starting to feel the pinch (even though lots of people are still struggling with old-fashioned "filtering" mechanisms, and are still easy and fun targets).
The spammers who are starting to take on greylisting are doing so by two main mechanisms: massive distribution across IP address space, and direct use of infected PC MTAs.
The IP address spread is fairly simple to understand. If you have 100,000 zombie PCs with 100,000 IP addresses, then clearly you can send 100,000 pieces of spam without ever using the same IP address twice. That makes the honeypot database of greylisting useless, since I rely on waiting to see a given IP address send email to a known "bogus" email address to correctly identify that IP address as a spammer (in the short term, at least).
The direct use of infected PC MTAs is more difficult. If the zombie PC can programmatically use the unspecting owner's own ISP MTA to send the spam, then it becomes very difficult to distinguish that spam from real mail send from a real person (just as botnet click fraud is very difficult for Google to do anything about without also discounting some "real" clicks).
To respond to the massive distributed IP address spammer, I think a drastic increase in bogus email addresses would help, so that they have to transmit to 10 or 100 times more addresses in order to hope to reach the same # of real people. It's easier for website owners to create more bogus email addresses than it is for the spammers to infect more PCs. You basically always "drop" mail sent to a bogus address so that the spammer is convinced it went through and is getting to a "real" person (and probably even sells that address to other spammers as "verified").
That would push the spammers squarely into focussing on using the infected owner's own ISP's MTA for transmission, giving those ISPs an ever-increasing workload of bogus mail to send. Sorry, but that's where this war is headed anyway: to the point where ISPs will start charging customers to disinfect their PCs once they've been identified as botnet spam transmitters.
I'm going to start slowly increasing my spamming of spammer address databases today (e.g., by injecting more hidden text email addresses onto websites). Note that this is not a "solution" to spam (so please don't post that cute little form :-).
This is just an effort to push the problem where I think it's going to end up eventually anyway: on the backs of ISPs that have not yet come to view infected customer PCs as "their" problem yet.
First, for 90% of the calls to strcat() in real life, a more "efficient" coding replacement will be more error-prone and will not make the software faster enough to be perceptible by humans.
Second, a big percentage of folks who think they know how to be faster than strcat() have no clue how the disparity between processor speeds and memory fetches has increased over the years, rendering dumb ol' strcat() awfully fast. If the "more efficient" code that doesn't call strcat() causes a couple of main memory fetches, it may well be slower than a dumb ol' call to strcat() on that string that's still in cache.
Nobody knows nuthin' about efficiency unless they've measured.
Perhaps some scientific data would ease your worries? This lecture on what we know and don't know about the causes of cancer probably holds several surprises.
And, of course, it's always useful to remember what the head of Fred Hutch points out about discovering the causes of cancer: if it turns out to be behavior, would it help to know? After all, we know with fair certainty the biggest cause of lung cancer, and a great many people still take up smoking every year.
That says that only music companies that produce a critical-mass of quality music can get a share of the tax money. This will be ascertained, of course, by a government committee that music companies will have to go before to get approval of content before they publish it. Any content not pre-approved by the government committee will be presumed to not be quality, and will count against their odds of participating in the tax revenue.
Any industry that regularly invites the government into their business just hasn't had a large enough dose of government involvement yet.
Anybody who's ever been stuck in traffic can understand the knee-jerk "those bozos should pay" response.
But anybody who cares about national security and terrorism should be sobered by what happened in this case: an utter failure of threat assessment. Our ability to survive terrorism is not just reliant on the ability to detect and respond to threats: it's crucial to be able to detect the lack of threats and not respond to them.
What Boston demonstrated is that they are ripe for terrorism. After all, terrorism is about creating terror, not about inflicting actual damage. Boston showed you can terrorize them with some children's toys and no explosives at all.
Of course, the knee-jerk conservative reaction will also include the phrase "abundance of caution" and "we can't take any chances". The problem is if you have an abundance of caution and can't take any chances, then a real terrorist action can have you dancing all over the place trying to respond to decoy threats and missing the real action.
Correctly assessing situations that are not threatening is just as important to security as correctly assessing situations that are.
Exactly what Dareth said! And "follows the guidelines they use for their projects" does not just refer to how the code is indented/commented. It can mean substantive issues like: pluggable into a test harness, memory management policy, thread safety, error handling policy, avoiding recursion, etc.
All new methods of interfering with cancer are welcome news; only the significance varies.
a) This is a mouse study. A required early step for a cancer treatment, but by no means indicative of significance. We have many, many treatments that cure cancer pretty well in lab mice.
b) The line of attack here is interfering with a growth factor. Unfortunately, cancer is generally good at mutating and "learning about" new growth factors. Hence, the saying "prostate cancer doesn't kill people -- prostate cancer metastasis kills people." It would be unsurprising if this technique joined the (already swollen) ranks of treatments that can successfully lower PSA without actually significantly reducing the number of patients who die, or significantly extending their lives.
c) On the plus side, keep in mind that prostate cancer is a rather indolent cancer (compared to, say, breast cancer). If you ain't got it, the tedious and ancient prescription of eating your vegetables, exercising, and not getting fat are a really good bet for decreasing the odds you'll ever die from it. We now overdetect prostate cancer (find/treat lots of cases that were never going to actually kill anyone), so don't get too anxious about the statistics that say you're pretty likely to get it in your lifetime. You're way more likely to get thyroid cancer -- without ever knowing it or suffering any ill effects from it.
My prediction is: Bill will tell us that the next version of Windows after Vista is going to be really secure this time.
Cancer is not reasonably viewed as a single disease, it's highly unlikely there will ever be "a" cure for it, and thinking that the only problem is how profits are made requires ignoring a whole lot of facts.
How profits are made is one problem in the cancer industry (a nearly direct quote from the head of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle), but it the nuts and bolts technical problems are also enormous. Humans just aren't smart enough to tackle this damn complicated problem effectively. Yet.
Also disturbing is the fact that the Cubans discovered a new use for policosanol (increasing BMD for post-menopausal women) at just about exactly the time the cholesterol claim was being shot down by a large study.
Let's not all sign up for the Cuban model of drug development just yet.
In America, in Europe, in Cuba, and (I bet) in Timbuktu, one unfortunately always has to ask "who profits" when evaluating the claims made for any given drug.
Shoot, no video lectures. Shoot, no audio lectures. Well, maybe I can pick something up from those extensive lecture notes.
Oh. The lecture notes are like PowerPoint slides.
Oh. "Figure removed for copyright reasons."
OK, well at least it didn't take me more than 10 minutes to learn... that I ain't going to learn much bio-engineering from MIT's current "open" offering. Can we not run this story again until they actually have a fair chunk of content?
Sadly, that's the same magical thinking that makes cancer patients pay $2700 for a jade bed to lie on. It's true that I don't know that no cure for cancer is imminent, just as I don't know that lying on a jade bed won't cure cancer. With magical thinking, all things you can't know for certain are equally possible, but that's just not true. I can assess the likelihood of a near-term cure for cancer and the likelhood that lying on a jade bed will cure cancer, and know that both these things are very, very, unlikely.
I understand the desire to raise money by issuing a press release on a chemical so preliminary that it hasn't even been tested in vivo, but I can't help but cynically think that these same scientists, once they get far enough along to start enumerating the problems with their new chemical, will be issuing press releases cautioning the public not to get their hopes up too soon.
Of course, a less toxic chemotherapy is greatly appealing. Artemisinin had such appeal. Plant-derived, and already used extensively in the treatment of malaria (the malaria parasite has some things in common with cancer, so more than once an anti-malarial drug has been applied to cancer with some success), artemisinin offers an in-vitro story just as exciting as the one listed here. It's still an active area of research, but like all previous compounds that showed absolutely stunning success in the test tube, it's offering a murkier picture when applied to patients. Much less toxic than standard chemo, though there was that one patient who got brain stem neuropathy.
Or perhaps you would like to try Paw-Paw, an annonaceous acetogenin derived from a plant that likewise offered stunning success in a Petri dish, but not such a stunning miracle in people. Much less toxic than standard chemo, though there is concern it could increase the risk of Parkinson's disease.
Of course, we already have a cure for cancer. If you read the pilot studies of the many, many compounds tested on cancer patients, you will often find that in a "failed" study, there were one or two patients that experienced complete remission, and are still alive. The drug is certainly a failure if it fails to help 99% of patients -- but for that 1% the drug (which will never be developed further!) is a cure for cancer.
We already have a cure for cancer -- we have many cures for cancer, we just don't know which cure works for which patient. That's the root of the drive for "personalized" cancer therapy, where we will actually someday be able to look at your cancer's genes and know exactly what to give you to cure it. Actually, gene testing is already reaching the clinical level, so isn't that exciting?
Well, not so exciting as hoped, once again. The gene mutation theory of cancer is falling apart. The researchers who once thought BRCA was going to offer a simple cause/effect explanation for certain breast cancers keep having to adjust downward their expectations of how often the "cause" actually produces the "effect". Like Einstein throwing in a cosmological constant to make the formula come out right, cancer doctors lean on "penetrance" to make the failed gene theory formula add up. BRCA "causes" breast cancer. Except when it doesn't. We used to think the BRCA theory was ~95% "right". But then it dropped to close to 80% "right". Hmmm.
Most likely, some form of aneuploidy is at work to produce the unpredictability, and uncurability we see in cancer. So, your cancer gets some characteristics from the site of origin (breast, prostate, colon, etc.), but also
If you've been a procrastinator for years in multiple areas of your life, it's worth spending some time trying to understand root causes, instead of searching for the "do it now!" quick fix (which often produces only fleeting improvements). A good place to start is with the psychological research presented in the venerable Burka and Yuen's Procrastination: Why You Do It, What to Do About It, also available at amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.
If you're a pessimist who often frets and fusses at the very beginning of projects when others are working away, worry-free, you might also find useful a read of "The Positive Power of Negative Thinking" bn.com, amazon.com, buy.com. The author makes the case that those of us with a pessimistic explanatory style may be using it to good effect when it comes to getting things done (e.g., worrying can be a form of motivation, and focusing on possible negative outcomes can be an aid to reducing risk of failure).
Sad to see Google as willing to be slimy as Microsoft. They have every right to let their engineers do AdSense, AdWords, and whatever else for fun and profit. But please don't treat us like idiots and tell us that we're competing with them on a level playing field. Applying a Quality Score to everybody ain't a level playing field when some folks sit in an office next to the guy who knows how the secret Quality Score is calculated. Sheesh.
Sorry, doesn't work. When you've got 50,000 zombie PCs in your botnet, limiting them to 1 outgoing email per 60 seconds just limits the spam to 50,000 per minute. The zombie botnets are already often self-limiting, to avoid detection.
No filters (text or otherwise), no false positives, hundreds of spam messages arrive at my server every day, and approximately 1 a day gets through. I can live with that. Sometimes, a legitimate email will get delayed by several hours. Since I often don't check my email for hours at a time, I can live with that too.
I'm sure there must be some problem that keeps this solution from being widely deployed. But if you're geeky enough to run your own mail server, give it a try. It sure beats fussing with all those filters and crap.
Has there been an increase in spam? Huh. I didn't notice.
Thus, we see (observational, but well-powered and not sloppy) studies that associate 9 or more hours of sleep with significantly less breast cancer than in women getting only 8 hours of sleep. We see mouse models in which melatonin-depeleted blood from women stimulates growth of xenograft tumors. There is a known biochemical mechanism by which melatonin can interfere with the growth of cancer.
Finally, I've recently discovered (another geek-turns-doctor case :-) that many cases of "morning stiffness" are actually the result of abnormally high melatonin levels. There is growing speculation that melatonin helps modulate inflammation to keep it from damaging healthy tissue, and also that there is a feedback route from the immune system to the pineal gland. I speculate that melatonin-induced morning stiffness is the body saying "stay down, you idiot, and stay out of the light -- I'm trying to heal you".
One of the reasons sleep evolved may simply be cancer prevention.
While I would love to be awake 24 hours a day, I would not like to raise my odds of getting clinically significant cancer. So, I'll continue to sleep in a darkened bedroom, and will avoid any such drug as this until there's a few decades of evidence that it doesn't increase your odds of dying in a tediously predictable manner.
Why do you want to foil the harvesters? Feeding them bogus addresses helps you build a honeypot database which, combined with graylisting, is just about the most effective anti-spam measure there is. I need tips on how to get my bogus addresses into more spammers databases!
a) Why on earth would you use Google when you can go directly to PubMed, which is where most of the halfway decent Google results would be anyway?
b) This is not, in general, a great application of search technology. Simple AI is what's needed here. Doctors used to do an extremely poor job of identifying which person in the ER with chest pains was actually having a heart attack. A doctor made a database of cases and symptoms, and then made a simple flowchart that could do a better job of identifying heart attack than some of the most experienced doctors in the country. We need a little more of that.
If you really want to be an amateur physician for a difficult case, spend your time in PubMed, not in Google. Most (but not all!) of the utter crap and cranks are kept out of PubMed, while there is still room for non-conventional wisdom.
In both cases, there are draconian measures that are effective. To wit: in blackjack, a paranoid casino can simply expel players who make widely varying bets, and forbid new players from starting play except at the start of a new shoe. In roulette, the casino can require bets down before releasing the ball.
In both cases, however, casinos have to walk a fine line. They want to encourage the illusion that you *could* win, while eliminating what is, after all, only a tiny minority that is capable of successfully beating the game. Thus, you can walk around Vegas and see signs for blackjack that has a low minimum bet and even that uses a single shoe -- hallmarks for attracting people who think they can count cards.
As with blackjack, the non-random roulette winner is fairly easy to spot. Placing bets that cover a particular segment of the wheel (the best computers right now can narrow it down to about 5 sequential positions) is a somewhat odd bet. When a pit boss notes someone winning by making a series of "segment" bets, he can simply refuse their action (and of course, take their picture and distribute it to other casinos).
The casino doesn't really want to require all bets down before releasing the ball because it slows down play and discourages the illusion that it might really be possible to win.
People who can beat the house at BJ and roulette are to casinos as shoplifters are to stores. In both cases, the business elects to tolerate a certain amount of it in order to avoid imposing measures that will slow down the flow of cash from their "real" customers.
Needs a few more suffixes. How about wikiableologyville?
> awareness of my surroundings by a drug that artificially and
> temporarily activates bits and pieces of my brain,
> I just want to die quickly and painlessly.
You want to die if we run out of coffee? Geez.
> treating cancer, but they are not a cure. They aren't nearly
> as effective in humans as they were in mice, it appears.
They never were supposed to be a cure. They were supposed to keep tumors from growing. People are still then stuck with tumors, but they get to keep living. However, because anti-angiogenic drugs designed to keep tumors stable or very slowly shrink them had to be rated by the same standard as cytotoxic ("We Kill Cells!") therapies, peer-reviewed papers were often required to note that they "did not show a significant therapeutic effect", even if they were actually a big success by cytostatic standards (e.g., they kept tumors from growing).
Virtually nothing in cancer testing is as effective in humans as in mice, since there's very little genetic variation in the mice that are used for cancer testing. In fact, if your new drug doesn't work pretty darn good on mice, then it's pretty much a non-starter for testing on humans.