IMHO the Harvard administration should have gone to the faculty that teach business ethics and asked THEM for THEIR opinion of the ethics of peeking before frying the applicants.
Fox news was right of center, but not too far. [...]
Fox News is very comercially sucessful because it is the only TV news outlet with a right wing bias.
What happened with Fox News is that they cited left-wing and right-wing think tanks with equal frequency. They came out as slightly right-biased because they used longer quotes from the right-wing tanks. This could be bias. Or it could be that Fox News is sticking to their "fair and balanced" pledge but the arguments of the right-wing tanks need more explaining than those of the left-wing tanks (which already get plenty of coverage in other media).
IMHO Fox News gets its audience, not because it's right-leaning, but because it is the only news venue where a right-leaning viewpoint or any real news that might support a right-wing argument is likely to be aired at all. That means if you want to hear them - either because you're right-leaning or because you don't like having your input filtered - you have only one option.
What happens when a node goes down between several other nodes and the other nodes are now out of range of each other? The network will split and the result will be two seperate networks that are unable to reach each other until the connecting node is up again.
(Assuming they did it right...)
If the connecting node that dies was the ONLY PATH LEFT between you and the guy you want to talk to, yes it splits.
If there is another path available you reroute.
Just like when an earthquake or flood takes out highways and bridges.
Just like the internet used to be - and to a large extent still is in the core.
Some years ago I heard a story about an older handheld device from Motorola. I have absolutely no reason to believe it is true. But it's funny - in a black humor way. (Also: This was 'way back around the Vietnam engagement era, when both police and suppliers of equipment to police and military were quite out-of-favor with the bulk of people of my age, and the butt of many jokes and character assasination stories.)
The device was the early 5-watt VHF police handytalkie - perhaps the first device to use a "rubber duckie" antenna.
There was some question as to the effects of habitually using a 5-watt transmitter with the antenna next to your skull. So when a policeman died from unrelated causes, the person performing the autopsy looked at the brain as well. And found small burns on the brain lining on the side of the policeman's dominant hand.
Motorola's response (so the story goes) was to introduce a 10-watt model.
I know the land attack is old, but still, linking to a.c ? I was not aware/. was a scriptkiddie toolz warehouse.
Not only that, it was unlabeled. That means anybody who follwed the link now has a copy of the malware in their machine's webcache, minimum. And if they saved it (to keep the list of vulnerable configurations, for example) they have the malware itself.
This simultaneously puts a bunch of slashdot readers at legal risk (from false prosecution and/or in-court character assasination, based on evidence from a siezed computer) and gives real baddies plausible deniability.
Broadcast media slams games. They have since they first began to show up. They do it now. They always will.
Their newsrooms hype every study purporting to show a connection between violence and games (while simultaneously burying any making the same connection between violence and TV). Ditto between anything else bad and games. (Low test scores, low income, alcoholism, etc.)
Their made-for-TV movies have main plots or subplots slamming games. Their sitcoms have episodes on games. Their commedians make cracks about games.
They did it to RPGs and the did it to video games. They do similar things to home computers, computer programming, and a number of internet activities (blogs, news outlets, mailing lists, online entertainments, file swapping, social contact facilitating 'ware of every sort, etc.).
Why do they do it?
Because it's their COMPETITION!
Video games and RPGs compete for eyeball time against their shows. This costs them advertising revenue. Online entertainment ditto. Social networking also takes time away from viewing, AND may lead to other non-TV-watching activities far beyond the time spend in front of a screen.
Network news outlets and news-related blogs scoop theirs regularly and expose their errors and malfesance. This reduces both their audience-related revenue and their effectiveness as a political tool.
TV networks are part of media conglomerates. So online "content" production/distribution tools (in addition to the "piracy" issue) pose a threat to their own offline operations.
And so on.
So when you hear them claim things are bad you need to consider the source, and dig down to the underlying meat, to discover whether there's anything behind the hype - or whether it's just something that either matches their current templates for an eyeball-attractor or promotes their own interests by slamming their opposition.
Which is, of course, what we're doing here. B-)
Then you're doing QA wrong.
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QA != Testing
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· Score: 2, Insightful
if QA runs the show: it never ships, as there are always improvements to be made. Always.
Then you're doing QA wrong.
One of the big parts of having a spec and a QA process is to know WHEN TO STOP.
When you get the function of a part right, and the tests have been run and show it's right, you MOVE ON. You only come back to it if the debugging of a later part reveals a hidden bug that the earlier tests missed (or couldn't test without the availability of the later part).
When you've moved on from the last part you're DONE.
My understanding of the ISO 900x standards is that they strive, not so much for quality, as for repeatability and tracability.
The drill is not to make the best product. The drill is to not make later products that are worse - or accidentally different in bad ways - than the current product. If that means documenting your mistakes so you can make them over and over again, the same way every time, that's just fine.
The customer chose your product, warts and all. He built his processes around it (possibly including a wart-removal step). ISO 900x lets him rest assured that he can get more copies without suddenly finding them different in ways that break HIS processes.
Re:Proof it's a good thing for a company
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QA != Testing
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· Score: 2, Informative
The Japanese have been all about quality for many years. Their cars are less expensive yet more reliable. They do things in general at a lower cost, that are more reliable and faster.
And when they started out after WWII their industries were noted for exactly the opposite: mostly cheap stamped metal toys - the first. "Made in Japan" was a synonym for shoddy. (Not their fault particularly - it was the first profitable thing they could do with what was left of their infrastructure after the war.)
They embarked on a long-term process of upgrading, with great attention to the things where they were behind. Quality was their first lack, achieving it became one of their very first targets, and the means to achieve and maintain it became core to their industries.
In the car example they eve[n] build the cars on US soil with these methods, so, it is something we can do and doesn't break ou[r] backs.
They did it with union workers, too. A friend of mine who was a labor union officer put it this way: "The workers give you what you ask for. If you ask for quantity you get quantity. If you ask for quality you get quality. And if you ask for trouble you get trouble." (Implication being that the Japanese had asked for quality while the US companies had been asking for quantity and trouble. B-) )
Key to the rise of Japanese industry were two US figures: Demming and McCarthy.
Demming wrote a book that laid out management techniques for achieving quality, quantity, and labor peace. Most of it worked by having management empower the front-line workers and pay attention to their input: These workers have the direct experience with the company's processes and problems, customers and suppliers, so they're your nerve endings. They are NOT dumb, and there are far more of them than management, so they're more potential sources of good ideas. Management's job is not to come up with all the ideas and push them top-down on the workers, but to enable the workers to get the work done, aid them in implementing those good ideas they generate, and reward and encourage behavior that promotes the company's goals.
This book was introducted to Japan during the reconstruction, and its message was easily grasped. The people in Japanese industry, from management through line workers, became almost cult followers of Demming. His book circulated widely. They implemented his ideas as their core business practices, with excelent results.
But the US was in the height of the Red Scare (also known as the McCarthy era.) The black-listers and witch-hunters could destroy vitrually anyone they turned their eye to. And listening to workers sounded too much like the ideology of the communists, socialists, and "sieze the means of production" radical labor unionists.
Though many of the particular claims McCarthy himself made turned out to be true (though it took the opening of the KGB archives after the fall of the Soviet Union to show it), his hearings and the activities of his followers and wanna-bes created a terrorist-style pressure on executives. Anything that even hinted at Communism or Socialism became taboo. Both Demming's work and any communication from labor toward management (outside formal collective barganing sessions) fell into disfavor among US industry. Quality suffered as a result.
The turnaround for US industry began when Japan's auto industry achieved, first a price, then also a quality advantage over that of the US, displacing its products in the US market.
This served as a wakeup call to management, which began an expensive, painful, and lengthly process of examining and repairing its own house. (It was triply painful because it occurred simultaneously with an energy crisis resulting from a mideast oil embargo and civil unrest as the boomers were drafted into the Vietnam engagement.)
Re:The Falacy of self-documenting code.
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The Code Is The Design
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I agree with parts of your argument but disagree with others.
Documentation that says what code should do merely moves the problem. Now you have to test the documentation.
That's one I disagree with. It's true on its face. But it misses the underlying point of documentation - whether comments or specs.
Having a separate representation to match against during a testing phase is actually a secondary benefit. The primary reason is to require the designers to create two, separate, expressions of the program's intent, in two languages / representation modes that are as distinct as practical.
Thinking in different languages (i.e. english prose vs. C++) gives them more opportunities to "view the bug hiding behind the blind spot from a different angle" and spot it. (If they're written by different people with different blind spots, so much the better.)
The idea is to have the CORRECT behavior documented in at least ONE of the representations. Then the testing process becomes one of finding the discrepancies, determining WHICH representation was right, and correcting the other.
This is surprisingly effective - even when both representations are written by the same person.
Documentation should be an abstraction of the code. It should describe at a higher level what is going on, so that an abstracted understanding can be achieved that is non-obvious by reading the code. This is merely to increase the efficiency of understanding unfamiliar software.
Again this is PART of its purpose - because educating the programmer is part of its purpose. Documentation can give explicit statements of structure that is only implied in the code. Documentation can explain emergent behaviors of assemblies that are non-obvious from the component pieces. Documentation can explain pitfalls which must be avoided - which are represented in the code only by their absense. And so on.
But documentation at a different level of abstraction also "shifts the view angle" and moves the blind spots - again helping to expose the hidden bugs by giving a "correct" representation when the code is incorrect. Documentation can also be redundant, giving more than one extra view.
IMHO the education of programmers is secondary - while the redundant, divergent, expressions of the same algorithm is key.
Testing will always have to be between code and end user expectation.
That I agree with.
Everything in between is fluff for testing.
And as you see above, that I disagree with. The things in between are useful tools to produce two desired effects:
- A desired behavior for the program, in the programmers' mind(s), which is reasonable, internally consistent, and well-vetted.
- A match between the programmers' idea of what the program should do and what it actually does.
The "design it twice in two ways" approach creates the latter two with high confidence. Then the only remaining issue is mismatch between the programmers' and end users' expectation. With bugs constrained to this narrow field they're generally few and quick to fix.
But programmers generally have little trouble understand a reasonable user's expectations when they actually sit down to think about it and write them out. The bulk of bugs come, not from user idea / programmer idea disconnect, but from programmer idea / code disconnect. Thinking of your documentation job as SOLELY addressing the first disconnect risks disaster.
= = = =
Interestingly, your logic DOES correctly state the reason "program proof of correctness" is also a falacy.
- Formal correctness proofs prove, not that the program is correct, but only that the program is consistent with a formal satatement of what is correct. (Again, "grep" might be perfect if you wanted a pattern matcher, but it's definitely broken if you wanted a web browser.)
- To be useable by a correctness proof (whether human or automated), what constitutes corr
It makes it sound like he's talking about coding with no forethought and eschewing all documentation (including all comments) in favor of letting the code be the documentation (the "self-documenting code" falacy that has been touted - and known to be false - since at least the early '70s).
What he's actually arguing is that the steps of the process are misnamed - and that this results in mismanagement. The documents currently called the "design" are just requirements and a high-level / overview documentation of early thoughts. The process currently called "coding" is actually most of the design work.
This is recognized in the silicon industry - where CAD tools have evolved the process of "designing a chip" into something virtually identical to "writing an application". But in the silicon industry the nomenclature is still "designers" for "programmers" - and "verification-" or "design assurance-" engineers for "test engineers".
(The latter, by the way, is a highly skilled specialist {in either software or hardware operations} that many software shops don't use, substituting "testers", or confusing them with testers when they happen to have gotten one by mistake. On the "hard side of the force" such people are normally recognized as high-status (and high-pay) pros - the architect's police force and the designers' respected teammates and designated rescuers.)
The Falacy of self-documenting code.
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· Score: 4, Interesting
But there's no substitute for writing the requirements, feature definitions, scopes and dependencies first, then the comments in the code blocks, then the code, and tar'ing those docs with the source code. The initial hump is steeper, but the total area under the work curve, over the product lifecycle, is much less.
Actually there is: Co-evolving the spec documents, comments, and code. Yes it helps a LOT to plan ahead - and it's a must if you want things to have a chance of getting done in any reasonable time. But trying to cast a spec into concrete in advance of coding is a false economy, too. The spec must remain maleable so the internal problems with it that are discovered during the coding phase can be corrected.
The thing there IS no substitute for is documentation separate from the code itself - whether it's a spec document, good comments, or (preferably) both. Self-documenting code is a falacy - because the code only documents what the code does, not what the code SHOULD do. (Grep is a great program. But it's REALLY broken if what you wanted was cat, or ftp.) Testing doesn't check that a program is "right" - only that it matches a spec. If you're trying to verify correctness of someone else's "self-documenting" code the only thing you can test is the complier. B-)
That applies to you trying to test your OWN code later. You are not the same person you were two months - or even two hours - after you wrote it.
1 fat ass american burning enough fuel to drive around their SUV, compared to 5 german or japanese cars [...]
There are two reasons for SUVs. One is in the cities, the other in the countryside.
In many places in the countryside you need 4-wheel drive, high clearance, and large capacity - period. The US is LARGE. It covers most of a CONTINENT. Some sections are very sparse, with unpaved roads that become mud pits in wet or snowy weather (which they may have often enough to be a major issue), pairs of ruts with take-out-the-pumpkin rocks in the middle the rest of the time. Some have narrow passages. Some have steep slopes. Some have wildly tilted roadways. You need a reliable vehicle that can traverse that, with adequate cargo capacity to supply a home with, for instance, biweekly shopping trips of 50 miles or more, and to carry tools or major appliances.
They're currently calling such vehicles Sports Utility Vehicles: "Sports" because they can be used for recreational offroading or to carry recreational equipment. But the "Utility" is why they are NECESSARY for people in the less built-up areas.
In the cities the prevalence SUVs is the unintended result of federal regulations intended to reduce fuel consumption of passenger cars. The "fleet mileage" requirements killed the station wagon and its flatbed minitruck cousin - the cargo cars of choice for large families and shopping trips - and prevented the design of a replacement vehicle as well. And it also killed anything with the power to tow a trailer. The smallest viable replacement was the next size up - the SUV. That comes under the regulations as a "truck" - the smalles of them - and doesn't count against pasenger car fleet mileage.
(The off-road suspension also helps with the horrendous condition of the freeways in many cities, due to inadequate maintainence. Interestingly, these are sometimes the result of transportation bureaucracies deliberately neglecting maintainence and construction. Sometimes to push for more budget. Sometimes - and admittedly - to try to "encourage" people to switch to mass transportation - typically in regions where the mass transportation is inadequate and/or hazardous.)
Of course many city people buy them because they're fashionable. And that has driven the design of models with comfy suspensions and other car-like rather than truck-like features that make them unsuitable for the original purpose of going on bad roads or off-road. (Off-roaders refer to these as "mall terrain vehicles".) But I'd bet that, if the laws were changed to make mass sales of a smaller, more fuel-efficient, cargo/multipassenger vehicle possible again, many of those would switch at their next vehicle replacement. (And I'd bet it would become the next fad car for those who follow trends rather than think for themselves.)
Meanwhile, killing off the SUVs would literally kill off some farms (which couldn't be served by the NEXT larger truck model due to the land conditions).
Nobody is suggesting that the solution to the problem of global climate change is to "get rid of technology and go back to the stone age". At least not outside the US.
Unfortunately, that's exactly what the proposals of some eco-wackos INSIDE the US amount to. Also: If you look at the K. treaty (which was voted down by ALL the US sentators of BOTH parties, except for one who abstained or was absent) you'll see that - for the US at least - it's also getting close to that.
Both sides of the debate are too set in their thoughts that no amount of data will change their opinions.
Not really.
I, for instance, have been a major skeptic on the "humans caused it all" claims. In part this has been because of claims that the global warming models don't match the data, while other explanations fit much better.
For instance: It's well known that we're on our way out of an ice age and haven't yet gotten to the between-ice-ages temperature. Solar variations have been measured that correlate with weather and (at an equilibrium temperature well over 400 kelvin degrees warmer than the sky background temperature) it doesn't take much solar variation to swing us half a degree. And so on.
According to the Times, this study compares measurable details of the WAY each of the proposed alternative mechanisms would heat the ocean, and found a very close match to the human-emitted greenhouse gas models and broad divergence from the models of the other explanations.
If that is accurate (and the study holds up to scrutiny and its approach continues to match well as more data is collected) it could easily convince me that human activity is a, or the dominant, or possibly even the only, cause of the observed global warming. One or two studies using other approaches that produce similar results could clinch the issue, too.
Science CONSISTS OF making alternaive models, comparing them with data, and abandoning those models that don't match in favor of those that do.
But that alone won't get me to make the leap from "We're heating the planet enough that, over the next century, the ideal regions to grow each crop will be about a quarter of a tier of states farther north than it is now." to "The world is about to end unless we gut all industry and drive the economy down to the hunter-gatherer level."
Especially since China, with several times the US population, is just leapfrogging from farming to full deployment of heavy industry on a level comparable to the US - while other parts of the world aren't far behind. The US could shut down everything and freeze in the dark and it wouldn't be a tenth of what was needed to reverse such trends - IF reversal is actually needed.
If action is actually needed, it seems to me that it will have to be in terms of improved technology and subtle changes, rather than luddite shutting down of all technology. Energy production that doesn't emit greenhouse gasses (such as improved solar, space-based solar, nuclear fission, or fusion) seem like good starts. (We WILL switch to one or more of those as soon as it's cheaper, too. We already are, in some applications where "alternative energy" IS cheaper. Look around you as you drive.) Albedo management and ocean-farming that results in large-scale carbon sequesteration are two more. Or just orbit a few sun shades. (That could freeze the whole planet if it were overdone. B-) )
Meanwhile there's a lot of dots to be connected to get from "humans really ARE the cause of global warming" through ".... and we've got to DO something about it" through "do THIS" to "do it NOW!".
Tony Martin shot and killed a burglar who was running away! His life was not in danger.
I hear that Oregon law recognizes that a burglar, while fleeing a confrontation with a homeowner, may be reasonably believed to be on his way to his car (or home) to pick up a weapon sutiable for eliminating the witness (either immedately therafter or some time later from ambush).
(Especially if he's shouting things like "I'll get you, Bitch! You're dead!" on his way down the sidewalk.)
Thus a person shooting them while fleeing may still be reasonably in fear for their life - either immediately (after he gets the hypothetical shotgun out of the car) or later (when he returns some morning at 4:00 AM).
However this is what I HEAR - from someone from Oregon. IANAL and even if I were IANALPIO (... Practicing In Oregon).
So don't count on this if you're living in Oregon and some day find yourself in a position to bless a fleeing burglar with a new navel in his lower back to balance the old one in front.
Did Europe get the concept of "separation of powers" inverted?
In the US system the whole thrust is to keep the government from running wild and stomping the people.
First the powers are limited.
Second, they are split up among three branches, so each has only its own powers and can't run the whole show.
Third, each branch has various impediments to the use of its powers, to slow them and/or require the cooperation of at least one other branch to get things done.
Fourth, each pair of branches has a mechanism to cooperate and throw a money-wrench into the third.
This sounds like the European system is letting a committee force a new law on the component countries of Europe with no way for any collection of elected legislators to stop it, even though they want to.
If so, the system has a bad bug and needs an ECO.
Maybe this showdown will bring it to the attention of those who can do something about it - before somebody figures out an exploit to turn Europe into a dictatorship (and turn the "bug fix" into yet another war, on a par with the WWs or the US Civil War / War Between the States.)
If you are on probation it means a jury or judge has found you GUILTY of a crime.
Back in the '20s, alcohol prohibition was an attempt to impose one group's idea of morality on the whole population by law. It was unenforcable (at the time). The attempt to impose it funded the rise of organized crime (and also drove the rise of the BATF, which waged a shooting war on the law-scoffing citizens).
Eventually the government threw in the towel. (And one of the crime kingpins and his children, funded by their laundered money, became major powers in the government. He became an ambassador. One son became president and another his attorney general. A third is a senator and a major figure in his party to this day.)
The government immediately turned around and did the same thing by banning some potentially recreational drugs - starting with two that were popular among a relatively small underclass. Thirty years and a civil-rights movement later the drugs in question were popular among the bulk of a generation. The government's bogus pronouncements about the dangers of THOSE drugs led the citizens to distrust their warnings about ALL drugs and experiment with many others, leading to more bans and tighter enforcement.
The perceived success of "civil disobedience" and "passive resistance" in the cases of alcohol prohibition, civil rights, and oppositon to the Vietnam engagement, led to their use against the unpopular drug bans, as well. The opposition thought massive civil disobedience would overload the police, court, and jail systems, again leading the government to throw in the towel.
But this time the popularity of the banned substances wasn't cross-generational. There was an age gap. The users and their supporters were almost entirely young, while the government was in the hands of their elders (who perceived it as a youth-corrupting evil). So the government did NOT throw in the towel, but pushed harder. By the time the youth (or at least those who had avoided jail) began to achieve positions of power the "drug war" was institutionalized. (And with "bipartisan" support how do you vote against it?)
The overloading of the criminal justice system appeared. But the government worked around it:
The system of plea bargaining was established, slashing the load on the courts.
Drug offenses were prioritized for jail time, producing jail overcrowding, which was "solved" by shortening sentences. But with the mandatory minimums for drug offenses it was the "real" criminals - thieves, burglars, muggers, rapists, murderers - who got out progressively earlier, leading to description of the justice system as a "revolving door".
RICO allowed the siezure of the assets, not just of those CONVICTED, but of those ACCUSED, or even randomly when assets were found. This made the "drug war" self-funding (on the same model as the Spanish Inqisition) and created an incentive for police to ignore "real" crime and go after drug offenses.
A major reason alcohol prohibition was unenforcable was the difficulty of "mining" files for information. But the rise of the drug war occurred during the rise and cost reduction of automated information and surveilance technology, eliminating this impediment.
In a series of positive feedback loops both drug-related and non-drug-related crime have escalated to where the US is the country with the highest percentage of its population in prison or otherwise under government control due to conviction for "crimes".
Meanwhile the government culture now refuses to "throw in the towel" on any failed law. Congress continues to pass more laws, banning more things - some of which are quite as unpopular with the current generations as drug bans were with The Boomers. Cryptography, whistle-blowing, fair use, and reverse engineering (to name just four) are all being criminalized, in the classic salami-slice approach. Meanwhile the drug-law forged legal tools are being
ISPs currently aren't treated as "common carriers" under FCC rules. They can, therefore, discriminate for or against any traffic in any arbitrary manner they wish.
But discriminating against the traffic of other VoIP providers when you also provide VoIP yourself is an antitrust violation. That comes under the jurisdiction of the FTC.
The ISP's are the owners of their networks and it is up to them whether or not they want to let Vonage through.
Last time I looked, using market dominance in one of your products to give another of your products an advantage is explicitly banned by federal antitrust law.
It's what got Microsoft in trouble over Internet Explorer.
New port numbers or IP addresses may be simpler, but can also more easily be blocked.
New port numbers aren't necessarily a solution, because someone calling you has to have a way to find you.
Fortunately, while there are default port numbers, they're not hardwired into the protocol. SIP registrars (directories), redirect servers ("i've moved"), proxies (firewall traversers, PBXes), and user agent servers (sip phones doing call forwarding, etc.) can all redirect your sip negotiation to any port they like, not just the default port.
An ISP trying to block someone using an external registrar would pretty much have to identify the SIP session by its content, which means examining the start of every TCP connection or UDP packet (SIP can use either) to figure out if it's a SIP session.
Unfortunately, the upcoming generation of edge routers can DO that. B-(
A SIP device does not qualify as it is not providing service network content or service to anyone out sideo yoru home -- though it receives data, it receives data on behalf of the end user.
First: With respect to the USUAL definition of server and client: A SIP phone that is receiving calls is a server and a SIP phone that is originating calls is a client. (It's even described that way in the RFC.) Of course a typical SIP phone instrument is being both at the same time.
The phone-as-server accepts connections, and provides services such as negotiating the type of streams you are willing to accept, ringing the phone, or telling the remote client that you're busy, might be reached at another site or set of sites (temporarily or permanently), or that you only accept calls if they're first routed through THAT proxy.
Rule of thumb: If an automated agent accepts connections and provides some useful information or activity (even if small) to a distant agent, it's a server. If it initiates connections to distant servers, it's a client.
If they ARE using pieces of the AIDS virus in their construct, I certainly hope one of the changes they made is replacing this error-prone enzyme with a more accurate one from another virus.
Should have RTFAed. It sounds like they are using the transcriptase in question, errors and all, but left out the genes for the rest of the virus - assembling the surface from parts made elsewhere. So the thing doesn't have the mechansim to reproduce - just the mechanism to install the payload genes.
Maybe the parent is flame-bait, but even if this HIV-cure-ish thing DOES cause the body to freak out (although as others are mentioning, our bodies are already constantly fighting off germs and the like), have you EVER seen someone die of cancer?
And malignant melanoma is one of the worst. Fast and deadly. Typically six months from diagnosis to death if it's already metastatic, if I recall correctly.
And it can't be treated by most of the usual chemical and radiation therapies, because they tend to rely on the cancer cells being metabolically weaker than normal cells (due to being stuck in the reproductive stages). But melanoma still manufactures melanin, which is a process that gives it extra energy as a side effect. So it tends to be stronger than its neighbors.
But what happened to the antibody-bound-to-toxin therapies? (Antibody to a receptor found on melanocytes AND melanoma cells, bound to a catalytic toxin or radioactive iodine.) I'd heard those were doing very well - then I stopped hearing about them. Did they not work after all?
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO the Harvard administration should have gone to the faculty that teach business ethics and asked THEM for THEIR opinion of the ethics of peeking before frying the applicants.
Fox news was right of center, but not too far. [...]
Fox News is very comercially sucessful because it is the only TV news outlet with a right wing bias.
What happened with Fox News is that they cited left-wing and right-wing think tanks with equal frequency. They came out as slightly right-biased because they used longer quotes from the right-wing tanks. This could be bias. Or it could be that Fox News is sticking to their "fair and balanced" pledge but the arguments of the right-wing tanks need more explaining than those of the left-wing tanks (which already get plenty of coverage in other media).
IMHO Fox News gets its audience, not because it's right-leaning, but because it is the only news venue where a right-leaning viewpoint or any real news that might support a right-wing argument is likely to be aired at all. That means if you want to hear them - either because you're right-leaning or because you don't like having your input filtered - you have only one option.
What happens when a node goes down between several other nodes and the other nodes are now out of range of each other? The network will split and the result will be two seperate networks that are unable to reach each other until the connecting node is up again.
(Assuming they did it right...)
If the connecting node that dies was the ONLY PATH LEFT between you and the guy you want to talk to, yes it splits.
If there is another path available you reroute.
Just like when an earthquake or flood takes out highways and bridges.
Just like the internet used to be - and to a large extent still is in the core.
Some years ago I heard a story about an older handheld device from Motorola. I have absolutely no reason to believe it is true. But it's funny - in a black humor way. (Also: This was 'way back around the Vietnam engagement era, when both police and suppliers of equipment to police and military were quite out-of-favor with the bulk of people of my age, and the butt of many jokes and character assasination stories.)
The device was the early 5-watt VHF police handytalkie - perhaps the first device to use a "rubber duckie" antenna.
There was some question as to the effects of habitually using a 5-watt transmitter with the antenna next to your skull. So when a policeman died from unrelated causes, the person performing the autopsy looked at the brain as well. And found small burns on the brain lining on the side of the policeman's dominant hand.
Motorola's response (so the story goes) was to introduce a 10-watt model.
I know the land attack is old, but still, linking to a .c ? I was not aware /. was a scriptkiddie toolz warehouse.
Not only that, it was unlabeled. That means anybody who follwed the link now has a copy of the malware in their machine's webcache, minimum. And if they saved it (to keep the list of vulnerable configurations, for example) they have the malware itself.
This simultaneously puts a bunch of slashdot readers at legal risk (from false prosecution and/or in-court character assasination, based on evidence from a siezed computer) and gives real baddies plausible deniability.
Broadcast media slams games. They have since they first began to show up. They do it now. They always will.
Their newsrooms hype every study purporting to show a connection between violence and games (while simultaneously burying any making the same connection between violence and TV). Ditto between anything else bad and games. (Low test scores, low income, alcoholism, etc.)
Their made-for-TV movies have main plots or subplots slamming games. Their sitcoms have episodes on games. Their commedians make cracks about games.
They did it to RPGs and the did it to video games. They do similar things to home computers, computer programming, and a number of internet activities (blogs, news outlets, mailing lists, online entertainments, file swapping, social contact facilitating 'ware of every sort, etc.).
Why do they do it?
Because it's their COMPETITION!
Video games and RPGs compete for eyeball time against their shows. This costs them advertising revenue. Online entertainment ditto. Social networking also takes time away from viewing, AND may lead to other non-TV-watching activities far beyond the time spend in front of a screen.
Network news outlets and news-related blogs scoop theirs regularly and expose their errors and malfesance. This reduces both their audience-related revenue and their effectiveness as a political tool.
TV networks are part of media conglomerates. So online "content" production/distribution tools (in addition to the "piracy" issue) pose a threat to their own offline operations.
And so on.
So when you hear them claim things are bad you need to consider the source, and dig down to the underlying meat, to discover whether there's anything behind the hype - or whether it's just something that either matches their current templates for an eyeball-attractor or promotes their own interests by slamming their opposition.
Which is, of course, what we're doing here. B-)
if QA runs the show: it never ships, as there are always improvements to be made. Always.
Then you're doing QA wrong.
One of the big parts of having a spec and a QA process is to know WHEN TO STOP.
When you get the function of a part right, and the tests have been run and show it's right, you MOVE ON. You only come back to it if the debugging of a later part reveals a hidden bug that the earlier tests missed (or couldn't test without the availability of the later part).
When you've moved on from the last part you're DONE.
My understanding of the ISO 900x standards is that they strive, not so much for quality, as for repeatability and tracability.
The drill is not to make the best product. The drill is to not make later products that are worse - or accidentally different in bad ways - than the current product. If that means documenting your mistakes so you can make them over and over again, the same way every time, that's just fine.
The customer chose your product, warts and all. He built his processes around it (possibly including a wart-removal step). ISO 900x lets him rest assured that he can get more copies without suddenly finding them different in ways that break HIS processes.
The Japanese have been all about quality for many years. Their cars are less expensive yet more reliable. They do things in general at a lower cost, that are more reliable and faster.
And when they started out after WWII their industries were noted for exactly the opposite: mostly cheap stamped metal toys - the first. "Made in Japan" was a synonym for shoddy. (Not their fault particularly - it was the first profitable thing they could do with what was left of their infrastructure after the war.)
They embarked on a long-term process of upgrading, with great attention to the things where they were behind. Quality was their first lack, achieving it became one of their very first targets, and the means to achieve and maintain it became core to their industries.
In the car example they eve[n] build the cars on US soil with these methods, so, it is something we can do and doesn't break ou[r] backs.
They did it with union workers, too. A friend of mine who was a labor union officer put it this way: "The workers give you what you ask for. If you ask for quantity you get quantity. If you ask for quality you get quality. And if you ask for trouble you get trouble." (Implication being that the Japanese had asked for quality while the US companies had been asking for quantity and trouble. B-) )
Key to the rise of Japanese industry were two US figures: Demming and McCarthy.
Demming wrote a book that laid out management techniques for achieving quality, quantity, and labor peace. Most of it worked by having management empower the front-line workers and pay attention to their input: These workers have the direct experience with the company's processes and problems, customers and suppliers, so they're your nerve endings. They are NOT dumb, and there are far more of them than management, so they're more potential sources of good ideas. Management's job is not to come up with all the ideas and push them top-down on the workers, but to enable the workers to get the work done, aid them in implementing those good ideas they generate, and reward and encourage behavior that promotes the company's goals.
This book was introducted to Japan during the reconstruction, and its message was easily grasped. The people in Japanese industry, from management through line workers, became almost cult followers of Demming. His book circulated widely. They implemented his ideas as their core business practices, with excelent results.
But the US was in the height of the Red Scare (also known as the McCarthy era.) The black-listers and witch-hunters could destroy vitrually anyone they turned their eye to. And listening to workers sounded too much like the ideology of the communists, socialists, and "sieze the means of production" radical labor unionists.
Though many of the particular claims McCarthy himself made turned out to be true (though it took the opening of the KGB archives after the fall of the Soviet Union to show it), his hearings and the activities of his followers and wanna-bes created a terrorist-style pressure on executives. Anything that even hinted at Communism or Socialism became taboo. Both Demming's work and any communication from labor toward management (outside formal collective barganing sessions) fell into disfavor among US industry. Quality suffered as a result.
The turnaround for US industry began when Japan's auto industry achieved, first a price, then also a quality advantage over that of the US, displacing its products in the US market.
This served as a wakeup call to management, which began an expensive, painful, and lengthly process of examining and repairing its own house. (It was triply painful because it occurred simultaneously with an energy crisis resulting from a mideast oil embargo and civil unrest as the boomers were drafted into the Vietnam engagement.)
I agree with parts of your argument but disagree with others.
Documentation that says what code should do merely moves the problem. Now you have to test the documentation.
That's one I disagree with. It's true on its face. But it misses the underlying point of documentation - whether comments or specs.
Having a separate representation to match against during a testing phase is actually a secondary benefit. The primary reason is to require the designers to create two, separate, expressions of the program's intent, in two languages / representation modes that are as distinct as practical.
Thinking in different languages (i.e. english prose vs. C++) gives them more opportunities to "view the bug hiding behind the blind spot from a different angle" and spot it. (If they're written by different people with different blind spots, so much the better.)
The idea is to have the CORRECT behavior documented in at least ONE of the representations. Then the testing process becomes one of finding the discrepancies, determining WHICH representation was right, and correcting the other.
This is surprisingly effective - even when both representations are written by the same person.
Documentation should be an abstraction of the code. It should describe at a higher level what is going on, so that an abstracted understanding can be achieved that is non-obvious by reading the code. This is merely to increase the efficiency of understanding unfamiliar software.
Again this is PART of its purpose - because educating the programmer is part of its purpose. Documentation can give explicit statements of structure that is only implied in the code. Documentation can explain emergent behaviors of assemblies that are non-obvious from the component pieces. Documentation can explain pitfalls which must be avoided - which are represented in the code only by their absense. And so on.
But documentation at a different level of abstraction also "shifts the view angle" and moves the blind spots - again helping to expose the hidden bugs by giving a "correct" representation when the code is incorrect. Documentation can also be redundant, giving more than one extra view.
IMHO the education of programmers is secondary - while the redundant, divergent, expressions of the same algorithm is key.
Testing will always have to be between code and end user expectation.
That I agree with.
Everything in between is fluff for testing.
And as you see above, that I disagree with. The things in between are useful tools to produce two desired effects:
- A desired behavior for the program, in the programmers' mind(s), which is reasonable, internally consistent, and well-vetted.
- A match between the programmers' idea of what the program should do and what it actually does.
The "design it twice in two ways" approach creates the latter two with high confidence. Then the only remaining issue is mismatch between the programmers' and end users' expectation. With bugs constrained to this narrow field they're generally few and quick to fix.
But programmers generally have little trouble understand a reasonable user's expectations when they actually sit down to think about it and write them out. The bulk of bugs come, not from user idea / programmer idea disconnect, but from programmer idea / code disconnect. Thinking of your documentation job as SOLELY addressing the first disconnect risks disaster.
= = = =
Interestingly, your logic DOES correctly state the reason "program proof of correctness" is also a falacy.
- Formal correctness proofs prove, not that the program is correct, but only that the program is consistent with a formal satatement of what is correct. (Again, "grep" might be perfect if you wanted a pattern matcher, but it's definitely broken if you wanted a web browser.)
- To be useable by a correctness proof (whether human or automated), what constitutes corr
The article title is misleading.
It makes it sound like he's talking about coding with no forethought and eschewing all documentation (including all comments) in favor of letting the code be the documentation (the "self-documenting code" falacy that has been touted - and known to be false - since at least the early '70s).
What he's actually arguing is that the steps of the process are misnamed - and that this results in mismanagement. The documents currently called the "design" are just requirements and a high-level / overview documentation of early thoughts. The process currently called "coding" is actually most of the design work.
This is recognized in the silicon industry - where CAD tools have evolved the process of "designing a chip" into something virtually identical to "writing an application". But in the silicon industry the nomenclature is still "designers" for "programmers" - and "verification-" or "design assurance-" engineers for "test engineers".
(The latter, by the way, is a highly skilled specialist {in either software or hardware operations} that many software shops don't use, substituting "testers", or confusing them with testers when they happen to have gotten one by mistake. On the "hard side of the force" such people are normally recognized as high-status (and high-pay) pros - the architect's police force and the designers' respected teammates and designated rescuers.)
But there's no substitute for writing the requirements, feature definitions, scopes and dependencies first, then the comments in the code blocks, then the code, and tar'ing those docs with the source code. The initial hump is steeper, but the total area under the work curve, over the product lifecycle, is much less.
Actually there is: Co-evolving the spec documents, comments, and code. Yes it helps a LOT to plan ahead - and it's a must if you want things to have a chance of getting done in any reasonable time. But trying to cast a spec into concrete in advance of coding is a false economy, too. The spec must remain maleable so the internal problems with it that are discovered during the coding phase can be corrected.
The thing there IS no substitute for is documentation separate from the code itself - whether it's a spec document, good comments, or (preferably) both. Self-documenting code is a falacy - because the code only documents what the code does, not what the code SHOULD do. (Grep is a great program. But it's REALLY broken if what you wanted was cat, or ftp.) Testing doesn't check that a program is "right" - only that it matches a spec. If you're trying to verify correctness of someone else's "self-documenting" code the only thing you can test is the complier. B-)
That applies to you trying to test your OWN code later. You are not the same person you were two months - or even two hours - after you wrote it.
1 fat ass american burning enough fuel to drive around their SUV, compared to 5 german or japanese cars [...]
There are two reasons for SUVs. One is in the cities, the other in the countryside.
In many places in the countryside you need 4-wheel drive, high clearance, and large capacity - period. The US is LARGE. It covers most of a CONTINENT. Some sections are very sparse, with unpaved roads that become mud pits in wet or snowy weather (which they may have often enough to be a major issue), pairs of ruts with take-out-the-pumpkin rocks in the middle the rest of the time. Some have narrow passages. Some have steep slopes. Some have wildly tilted roadways. You need a reliable vehicle that can traverse that, with adequate cargo capacity to supply a home with, for instance, biweekly shopping trips of 50 miles or more, and to carry tools or major appliances.
They're currently calling such vehicles Sports Utility Vehicles: "Sports" because they can be used for recreational offroading or to carry recreational equipment. But the "Utility" is why they are NECESSARY for people in the less built-up areas.
In the cities the prevalence SUVs is the unintended result of federal regulations intended to reduce fuel consumption of passenger cars. The "fleet mileage" requirements killed the station wagon and its flatbed minitruck cousin - the cargo cars of choice for large families and shopping trips - and prevented the design of a replacement vehicle as well. And it also killed anything with the power to tow a trailer. The smallest viable replacement was the next size up - the SUV. That comes under the regulations as a "truck" - the smalles of them - and doesn't count against pasenger car fleet mileage.
(The off-road suspension also helps with the horrendous condition of the freeways in many cities, due to inadequate maintainence. Interestingly, these are sometimes the result of transportation bureaucracies deliberately neglecting maintainence and construction. Sometimes to push for more budget. Sometimes - and admittedly - to try to "encourage" people to switch to mass transportation - typically in regions where the mass transportation is inadequate and/or hazardous.)
Of course many city people buy them because they're fashionable. And that has driven the design of models with comfy suspensions and other car-like rather than truck-like features that make them unsuitable for the original purpose of going on bad roads or off-road. (Off-roaders refer to these as "mall terrain vehicles".) But I'd bet that, if the laws were changed to make mass sales of a smaller, more fuel-efficient, cargo/multipassenger vehicle possible again, many of those would switch at their next vehicle replacement. (And I'd bet it would become the next fad car for those who follow trends rather than think for themselves.)
Meanwhile, killing off the SUVs would literally kill off some farms (which couldn't be served by the NEXT larger truck model due to the land conditions).
Nobody is suggesting that the solution to the problem of global climate change is to "get rid of technology and go back to the stone age". At least not outside the US.
Unfortunately, that's exactly what the proposals of some eco-wackos INSIDE the US amount to. Also: If you look at the K. treaty (which was voted down by ALL the US sentators of BOTH parties, except for one who abstained or was absent) you'll see that - for the US at least - it's also getting close to that.
Both sides of the debate are too set in their thoughts that no amount of data will change their opinions.
Not really.
I, for instance, have been a major skeptic on the "humans caused it all" claims. In part this has been because of claims that the global warming models don't match the data, while other explanations fit much better.
For instance: It's well known that we're on our way out of an ice age and haven't yet gotten to the between-ice-ages temperature. Solar variations have been measured that correlate with weather and (at an equilibrium temperature well over 400 kelvin degrees warmer than the sky background temperature) it doesn't take much solar variation to swing us half a degree. And so on.
According to the Times, this study compares measurable details of the WAY each of the proposed alternative mechanisms would heat the ocean, and found a very close match to the human-emitted greenhouse gas models and broad divergence from the models of the other explanations.
If that is accurate (and the study holds up to scrutiny and its approach continues to match well as more data is collected) it could easily convince me that human activity is a, or the dominant, or possibly even the only, cause of the observed global warming. One or two studies using other approaches that produce similar results could clinch the issue, too.
Science CONSISTS OF making alternaive models, comparing them with data, and abandoning those models that don't match in favor of those that do.
But that alone won't get me to make the leap from "We're heating the planet enough that, over the next century, the ideal regions to grow each crop will be about a quarter of a tier of states farther north than it is now." to "The world is about to end unless we gut all industry and drive the economy down to the hunter-gatherer level."
Especially since China, with several times the US population, is just leapfrogging from farming to full deployment of heavy industry on a level comparable to the US - while other parts of the world aren't far behind. The US could shut down everything and freeze in the dark and it wouldn't be a tenth of what was needed to reverse such trends - IF reversal is actually needed.
If action is actually needed, it seems to me that it will have to be in terms of improved technology and subtle changes, rather than luddite shutting down of all technology. Energy production that doesn't emit greenhouse gasses (such as improved solar, space-based solar, nuclear fission, or fusion) seem like good starts. (We WILL switch to one or more of those as soon as it's cheaper, too. We already are, in some applications where "alternative energy" IS cheaper. Look around you as you drive.) Albedo management and ocean-farming that results in large-scale carbon sequesteration are two more. Or just orbit a few sun shades. (That could freeze the whole planet if it were overdone. B-) )
Meanwhile there's a lot of dots to be connected to get from "humans really ARE the cause of global warming" through ".... and we've got to DO something about it" through "do THIS" to "do it NOW!".
Tony Martin shot and killed a burglar who was running away! His life was not in danger.
I hear that Oregon law recognizes that a burglar, while fleeing a confrontation with a homeowner, may be reasonably believed to be on his way to his car (or home) to pick up a weapon sutiable for eliminating the witness (either immedately therafter or some time later from ambush).
(Especially if he's shouting things like "I'll get you, Bitch! You're dead!" on his way down the sidewalk.)
Thus a person shooting them while fleeing may still be reasonably in fear for their life - either immediately (after he gets the hypothetical shotgun out of the car) or later (when he returns some morning at 4:00 AM).
However this is what I HEAR - from someone from Oregon. IANAL and even if I were IANALPIO (... Practicing In Oregon).
So don't count on this if you're living in Oregon and some day find yourself in a position to bless a fleeing burglar with a new navel in his lower back to balance the old one in front.
In the US system the whole thrust is to keep the government from running wild and stomping the people.
First the powers are limited.
Second, they are split up among three branches, so each has only its own powers and can't run the whole show.
Third, each branch has various impediments to the use of its powers, to slow them and/or require the cooperation of at least one other branch to get things done.
Fourth, each pair of branches has a mechanism to cooperate and throw a money-wrench into the third.
This sounds like the European system is letting a committee force a new law on the component countries of Europe with no way for any collection of elected legislators to stop it, even though they want to.
If so, the system has a bad bug and needs an ECO.
Maybe this showdown will bring it to the attention of those who can do something about it - before somebody figures out an exploit to turn Europe into a dictatorship (and turn the "bug fix" into yet another war, on a par with the WWs or the US Civil War / War Between the States.)
Back in the '20s, alcohol prohibition was an attempt to impose one group's idea of morality on the whole population by law. It was unenforcable (at the time). The attempt to impose it funded the rise of organized crime (and also drove the rise of the BATF, which waged a shooting war on the law-scoffing citizens).
Eventually the government threw in the towel. (And one of the crime kingpins and his children, funded by their laundered money, became major powers in the government. He became an ambassador. One son became president and another his attorney general. A third is a senator and a major figure in his party to this day.)
The government immediately turned around and did the same thing by banning some potentially recreational drugs - starting with two that were popular among a relatively small underclass. Thirty years and a civil-rights movement later the drugs in question were popular among the bulk of a generation. The government's bogus pronouncements about the dangers of THOSE drugs led the citizens to distrust their warnings about ALL drugs and experiment with many others, leading to more bans and tighter enforcement.
The perceived success of "civil disobedience" and "passive resistance" in the cases of alcohol prohibition, civil rights, and oppositon to the Vietnam engagement, led to their use against the unpopular drug bans, as well. The opposition thought massive civil disobedience would overload the police, court, and jail systems, again leading the government to throw in the towel.
But this time the popularity of the banned substances wasn't cross-generational. There was an age gap. The users and their supporters were almost entirely young, while the government was in the hands of their elders (who perceived it as a youth-corrupting evil). So the government did NOT throw in the towel, but pushed harder. By the time the youth (or at least those who had avoided jail) began to achieve positions of power the "drug war" was institutionalized. (And with "bipartisan" support how do you vote against it?)
The overloading of the criminal justice system appeared. But the government worked around it:
The system of plea bargaining was established, slashing the load on the courts.
Drug offenses were prioritized for jail time, producing jail overcrowding, which was "solved" by shortening sentences. But with the mandatory minimums for drug offenses it was the "real" criminals - thieves, burglars, muggers, rapists, murderers - who got out progressively earlier, leading to description of the justice system as a "revolving door".
RICO allowed the siezure of the assets, not just of those CONVICTED, but of those ACCUSED, or even randomly when assets were found. This made the "drug war" self-funding (on the same model as the Spanish Inqisition) and created an incentive for police to ignore "real" crime and go after drug offenses.
A major reason alcohol prohibition was unenforcable was the difficulty of "mining" files for information. But the rise of the drug war occurred during the rise and cost reduction of automated information and surveilance technology, eliminating this impediment.
In a series of positive feedback loops both drug-related and non-drug-related crime have escalated to where the US is the country with the highest percentage of its population in prison or otherwise under government control due to conviction for "crimes".
Meanwhile the government culture now refuses to "throw in the towel" on any failed law. Congress continues to pass more laws, banning more things - some of which are quite as unpopular with the current generations as drug bans were with The Boomers. Cryptography, whistle-blowing, fair use, and reverse engineering (to name just four) are all being criminalized, in the classic salami-slice approach. Meanwhile the drug-law forged legal tools are being
ISPs currently aren't treated as "common carriers" under FCC rules. They can, therefore, discriminate for or against any traffic in any arbitrary manner they wish.
But discriminating against the traffic of other VoIP providers when you also provide VoIP yourself is an antitrust violation. That comes under the jurisdiction of the FTC.
The ISP's are the owners of their networks and it is up to them whether or not they want to let Vonage through.
Last time I looked, using market dominance in one of your products to give another of your products an advantage is explicitly banned by federal antitrust law.
It's what got Microsoft in trouble over Internet Explorer.
New port numbers or IP addresses may be simpler, but can also more easily be blocked.
New port numbers aren't necessarily a solution, because someone calling you has to have a way to find you.
Fortunately, while there are default port numbers, they're not hardwired into the protocol. SIP registrars (directories), redirect servers ("i've moved"), proxies (firewall traversers, PBXes), and user agent servers (sip phones doing call forwarding, etc.) can all redirect your sip negotiation to any port they like, not just the default port.
An ISP trying to block someone using an external registrar would pretty much have to identify the SIP session by its content, which means examining the start of every TCP connection or UDP packet (SIP can use either) to figure out if it's a SIP session.
Unfortunately, the upcoming generation of edge routers can DO that. B-(
A SIP device does not qualify as it is not providing service network content or service to anyone out sideo yoru home -- though it receives data, it receives data on behalf of the end user.
First: With respect to the USUAL definition of server and client: A SIP phone that is receiving calls is a server and a SIP phone that is originating calls is a client. (It's even described that way in the RFC.) Of course a typical SIP phone instrument is being both at the same time.
The phone-as-server accepts connections, and provides services such as negotiating the type of streams you are willing to accept, ringing the phone, or telling the remote client that you're busy, might be reached at another site or set of sites (temporarily or permanently), or that you only accept calls if they're first routed through THAT proxy.
Rule of thumb: If an automated agent accepts connections and provides some useful information or activity (even if small) to a distant agent, it's a server. If it initiates connections to distant servers, it's a client.
In other news (Score:2, Funny) SonyEriccsson reported sales increases of its handsets rose
That got modded "funny" but I'm dead serious.
I've been thinking about switching to a non-Nokia phone for my next cellphone upgrade. This clinches it.
It's bad enough that some of the existing phones are subject to attack over bluetooth. Can you imagine them with Microsoft code inside?
Maybe Microsoft WILL clean up their act here. But even if they do, given their track record I won't be able to trust them.
If they ARE using pieces of the AIDS virus in their construct, I certainly hope one of the changes they made is replacing this error-prone enzyme with a more accurate one from another virus.
Should have RTFAed. It sounds like they are using the transcriptase in question, errors and all, but left out the genes for the rest of the virus - assembling the surface from parts made elsewhere. So the thing doesn't have the mechansim to reproduce - just the mechanism to install the payload genes.
Maybe the parent is flame-bait, but even if this HIV-cure-ish thing DOES cause the body to freak out (although as others are mentioning, our bodies are already constantly fighting off germs and the like), have you EVER seen someone die of cancer?
And malignant melanoma is one of the worst. Fast and deadly. Typically six months from diagnosis to death if it's already metastatic, if I recall correctly.
And it can't be treated by most of the usual chemical and radiation therapies, because they tend to rely on the cancer cells being metabolically weaker than normal cells (due to being stuck in the reproductive stages). But melanoma still manufactures melanin, which is a process that gives it extra energy as a side effect. So it tends to be stronger than its neighbors.
But what happened to the antibody-bound-to-toxin therapies? (Antibody to a receptor found on melanocytes AND melanoma cells, bound to a catalytic toxin or radioactive iodine.) I'd heard those were doing very well - then I stopped hearing about them. Did they not work after all?