Quantum cryptography is absolutely secure as long as the laws of quantum mechanics are true.
Nope. All quantum "cryptography" tells is that you are the sole recipient of a message. However anyone could have transmitted the photons you received. Before you can trust the photons, you have to confirm the data they carried, using a conventional message authentication code. The overall system is no stronger than that code. TANSTAAFL.
In theory, quantum "cryptography" does raise the bar by stopping passive eavesdropping. In practice, if you have an opponent who can afford to break all possible ciphers in real time, then they can also afford active attacks. (For that matter, they could afford to buy your entire planet and take it apart one atom at a time.)
Well, my comment did say that rebuilding the victim molecule-by-molecule is an approach that would actually work. And realistically, that is what it would take. Retroviruses chop the host DNA up at random and insert other DNA: their own genome, little pieces of their own DNA, random snippets of whatever happened to be lying around, other viruses, and so forth.
But, if the AIDS virus can get in there and mess around with the DNA, then some perhaps some other virus can be engineered to go in and fix it back.
HIV is the genetic equivalent of tossing a grenade into a china shop. Sure, the laws of physics allow you to repair that sort of destruction. However the required action is so pervasive and detailed that you are basically rebuilding from scratch. And that's the easy part. The hard part is that you're working on a living person. They have to remain alive and viable while you're fixing them. That severely constrains the methods that will work.
It's not as if HIV integrates itself into the victims cromosomes,...
Yes, it is. HIV has an enzyme called integrase that cuts a host chromosome and inserts the HIV genome. Here is a paper that talks about retroviral integration. Figure 1 shows a diagram of HIV being spliced in, and Figure 3 is a pretty picture of integrase itself.
Like all other cells, T cells die off and get replaced, so if the patient goes on a treatment that kills off all free HIV (that is, HIV in the act of reproduction), they will eventually be free of it.
Unfortunately, the half-life of the relevant immune cells is measured in years. For a cure you need to wait until the expected number of infected cells is significantly smaller than one, which would take many decades.
Worse, based on the existence of brain damage in HIV victims, there is a good chance that HIV occassionally integrates itself into astrocytes, which live a very long time. Astrocytes are pretty important, too, so you probably would not want an add-on therapy that simply kills all infected cells.
That would not be the claim touted in this story, just another lifelong regimen of pills/injections, probably at a rather high dose and with exciting new side effects.
It is completely plausible to engineer something that can snip selected DNA out of a cell, curing it of HIV. Unfortunately there are millions of infected cells and you have to fix every last one. Even if the failure rate is only 0.01%, that would leave many thousands of infected cells. Inevitably, a random mistake will accidentally transcribe one of the remaining HIV sequences, and the infection will be resurrected.
The reason is that HIV integrates itself into the victim's DNA and hides there, pretty much forever. Short of rebuilding the victim molecule-by-molecule, you can never get rid of HIV. The best you can hope for is to put the virus into remission, and hope people take their pills faithfully enough to prevent a shadow epidemic from forming.
And even if the drug works and is nontoxic, there is another big hurdle: the blood-brain barrier. The brain is extremely picky about which chemicals it lets in, and a lot of drugs just don't make the cut. Unfortunately, HIV is perfectly happy to grow in the brain, where it gradually kills off nerve cells. IIRC the existing anti-HIV drugs have this problem; AIDS-related dementia is a feared complication.
I'm personally more amused by the proposed OWL telescope, which stands for OverWhelmingly Large. It's makes you wonder what they will call the next one after that. The So Enormously Large that Gosh We're All Really Impressed Telescope?
You know so much about LCDs [CCDs?], yet you ignore the Bayer mask technique most every camera uses. This by definition is not a raster format--where each pixel is defined by an RGB value.
This is emphatically true with the Fuji SuperCCDs, which not only use a color mask but also non-square pixels with the dominant axes tilted 45 degrees to the horizontal. Their output is definitely not rastered.
I've always wondered what was complicating just getting a blood test, analyzing it and telling you every imaginable thing about your physical condition.
For one thing, the tests are difficult to do. Many of the most interesting factors are peptide hormones and proteins, for which it is difficult to design tests. Microarray scanners, which look at an array of fluorescent dots that each detect a different molecule, should begin to make a dent in the problem, but the going will be slow. One difficulty is that many hormones come in several varieties that are nearly identical, so cross-reactivity with the tester will be a real challenge (certain peptides, the zoo of steroid hormones).
For another thing, much of the body's inner workings remain a mystery. There are all sorts of incredibly important things floating around in the blood, and we have no idea they even exist.
For yet another thing, defining normal levels is difficult, in some cases impossible. Many body processes operate in negative feedback loops, where chemical levels are adjusted to produce a desired end result. If a person has a slightly insensitive detector for some molecule, and a slightly overactive emitter of it, their level might read as high when nothing is wrong. Worse, many blood levels depend on the exact conditions of the moment: sleep, hormone cycles, meals, psychological stress, minor viral infection, and so forth. Interpreting the results of a complete blood analysis would not be easy.
Actually I think it is pretty simple. Psychopaths simply have a weak link between pain/pleasure and planning. It could be as simple as not enough brain cells in the frontal cortex, or damage to a single bundle of nerves. Schizophrenia? Now that's peculiar. It's not just higher mental processes that are broken: even the basic things like the sense of smell are out of whack, all over the brain. Even if abnormal behavior and suffering were minimal, schizophrenia would still be bizarre.
Migraine is pretty far out there too. The pain is a side effect of dramatic global disruption of the nervous system. (And, BTW, the proper noun form for migraine is sufferer. This is not a matter for further discussion.;-)
It is disorder, it's destructive, it is sick, and those with this disorder do use socializing in a destructive manner, such as manipulation or defrauding.
A large fraction of them can learn and plan well enough not to piss off other people too often. They're irritating, but within the far end of "normal". However they still have great difficulty with long range planning to satisfy happiness goals or avoid suffering.
The APA manual makes it clear not to use biased language.
They're just blowing smoke up our collective ass. Psychopath is an unbiased word. What it is, is emotionally loaded, because many psychopaths are so incredibly obnoxious. Even if they succeed in assigning a new word to the unpleasant condition, that new word will promptly pick up the same emotional load. (Just like "imbecile", "idiot", and "cretin", which were last century's scientific PC substitute for "feeble minded" and "stupid". History repeats itself, endlessly.)
Proper terminology doesn't use biased language like "afflicted with" or refers to a person by the disease, "psychosexuals".
Ideological language movements are usually just a tool of political control. If a change were truly valid, merely publicizing it would suffice; reasonable practitioners would then adopt it out of good sense. (As computer nerds seem to be with "ki" to mean a multiple of 1024, analogous to the metric "k" for factor of 1000. Not only is nobody ramming it down our throats, they're not even publicizing it heavily. It just makes good sense.)
A person with this disorder is often called, a "Psychopath." This however is not the proper term because it's meaning has been changed, and it's actually biased language; it is a label, although "Antisocial Personality Disorder" (ASPD) is a label in itself. It's just considered unethical to call someone a name.
The proper term is still "psychopath", which literally means "sick mind", and accurately describes the condition. The DSM-IV is simply wrong to categorize this disorder by a common prominent symptom, rather than the underlying pathology.
ASPD is named this way because it gives emphasis on the social part of the disorder. However, it is misleading. Most people understand that "antisocial" means to be socially distant, sulking, or whatever. What it really means is "socially distructive."
Which is not accurate. Remember that psychopathy is a spectrum disorder, not a have-it or don't-have-it disorder. While those at the severe end of the spectrum frequently go off the social rails in spectacular and memorable ways, those at the mild end tend to lead lives that are merely bizarre or futile. (Read Hervey Cleckley's The Mask of Sanity for examples of the mild end. This page has a link to a free PDF version.) The essential feature of psychopathy is difficulty learning from pain and pleasure, particularly in using logical inference for such learning. They simply cannot put two and two together, which is consistent with frontal cortex dysfunction. As such, the psychopath is guided more by simple short-range goals, rather than the complex long-range goals that guide the lives of normal people. The antisocial aspect is merely a side effect of the inability to learn from mistakes and rewards. This stands in stark contrast to someone with a true antisocial personality, who derives pleasure from harming others, and who can make complex plans to harm them.
There is a rare genetic disorder where the goal-seeking centers in the brain are wired up backwards. (Argh. Google is no help at all finding the disorder's name.) Kids with it ask for the opposite of what they want, and when they get it are immensely frustrated and angry. At first glance the symptom appears to be antisocial rage to nearly any stimulus. However what they have is not a rage disorder, but an expressiveness disorder. Once the people around them understand it, progress can be made.
Likewise with psychopaths: the antisocial symptoms are fundamentally irrelevant. This is critical because your first encounter with a given psychopath will probably be at a moment when they appear to be functioning well. This is not because they understand the encounter like a normal person, but because they just happen to be neither angry nor euphoric, and are replaying simple behavior patterns from memory (and their memory is often good). Worse, the encounter will only last a few minutes, so you won't have much to go on. It's like playing ten moves into a game of chess. Can you tell that the opponent is only looking one move ahead? Well you had better, or you will be sucked into the psychopath's reality distortion field.
You've never worked at Apple, have you?
From what I understand, management there throws chairs around their offices and threaten to "fucking kill" business opponents.
Or was that some other company?
Forgive me, but your "math" seems more like incomplete statistics. The elderly are typically hit hardest by influenza.
By ordinary influenza. Virulent influenza evokes a powerful response by the immune system, causing a raging viral pneumonia that kills within hours. It therefore hits people with strong immune systems the hardest, which means the young and healthy drop like flies. (The SARS virus does the same thing, which is why it got such attention.) For those with weaker immune systems--such as infants and the elderly--it is just a severe flu.
And the flu isn't a bad way to go. I nearly died from it about twenty-five years ago, and I just wanted to go to sleep.
Pneumonia ain't called the "old man's friend" for nothing.
As for the whole productivity/GDP thing, I think that's more bad statistics. It assumes there are no replacements, and that everyone is productive.
My numbers were just a general estimate, based on mean productivity of the population. Even if you just go by the sunk cost of raising and educating the dead, it's still a huge number. 1918-type pandemics are too rare to make solid predictions anyway.
If you're going to pump billions into preventative medicine, then it should go into further cancer research, but that won't get headlines on prime-time TV.
It is worth noting that several major cancers and other diseases are caused by viruses: cervical cancer, Epstein-Barr leukemias, post-herpetic neuralgia, and probably others. Furthermore, some of the most promising new cancer treatments are based on antibodies, for which we'd like a machine that cranks out custom proteins to order--the same machine I want for vaccine production. Oh, and the same technology would be great for making peptide hormones, a largely unexplored frontier in drug design.
I still want fast turn-around vaccines to fight engineered plauges. I fully expect to see resurrected smallpox on the loose within my lifetime.
If you're going to pump billions into preventative medicine, then it should go into further cancer research,...
And obesity. Type II diabetes and metabolic syndrome aren't as dramatic as a tumor, but they sure suck a lot out of the economy. Keeping blind amputees patched together costs a lot.
If a combination virus includes an avian virulence factor and a human transmissibility factor, you get the Martian Death Flu.
Okay. That still sounds like a mutation to me.
It's more of a new hybrid species, like mules and triticale.
I still haven't heard anything that supports spending the billions you want to put into immediate reaction to a possible threat.
Just spend a few seconds thinking through the math. A bad influenza pandemic would kill around 1% of young, healthy people (1918 flu killed 2.5% of those infected). The U.S. has about 75 million people in the 15-34 age group, so that would mean about a million would die. About $500k/person/lifetime in economic productivity would be lost, destroying roughly $500 billion dollars of future GDP.
I expect a fast-turnaround vaccine system could be implemented for perhaps a billion dollars. So if a severe pandemic occurs more often than every few centuries, buying the vaccine system gives a net profit.
So how often does a severe respiratory virus pandemic occur? Naturally we get a bad one every few decades. We also have to worry about synthetic plagues. Within a decade or three, the cost of gene synthesis will fall to a few cents a base pair, and every death cult in the world will be making custom plagues. Already today, well-funded scientists have built polio and 1918 flu from scratch in the laboratory. Smallpox could be resurrected for possibly as little as a few million dollars, certainly less than $50M. Quick-turn vaccine capability will soon become very important, like long-range bombers in the '50s.
Biology is not my field, but the thing that bothers me is that the virus has to mutate before it will readily transfer between humans.
Not necessarily. What can happen is that avian and human flu can infect one host at the same time. Even by viral standards, influenza is sloppy, so new viruses would be made with genes from both types. If a combination virus includes an avian virulence factor and a human transmissibility factor, you get the Martian Death Flu.
Is a vaccine developed now going to be effective against a virus that doesn't exist yet?
The odds are decent it will. Most genes contain "conserved" regions, stretches of DNA that have to be just so for the gene to work. (Most mutations there break the chemistry.) Even over centuries of mutation, those regions change very little. If you have antibodies to those, your immune system will have a leg up when you get infected, which might mean the difference between misery and death.
For a combination virus, a vaccine ought to be quite effective. It's just a matter of administering avian flu proteins in a vaccine. Unfortunately, most current flu vaccines are made by an obsolete process where the virus is grown in chicken eggs, and avian flu kills the eggs right away. We desperately need turn-key industrial systems for making vaccines. Culturing viruses is too prone to failure.
Only 80 deaths. That is not statisticaly signifigant in any size population.
The significance is that the manner of death was wholly unexpected. Young, strong people virtually never die from sudden lung inflammation. Tuberculosis, yes. Bacterial pneumonia, yes. But their own immune system just suddenly deciding to burn their lungs to the ground? Never happens.
There are litteraly thousands of more deadly illnesses out there, currently active, and currently transmitible between humans.
True, but most of them are either difficult to transmit (HIV, hepatitis A, rabies), are virulent and have obvious symptoms so that quarantine can be effective (ebola), or produce lasting immunity (bacterial meningitis, cholera).
Influenza, however, combines most of the worst things into a single virus. It is an RNA virus, so it mutates rapidly. It has a tiny genome, providing a minimal target for the adaptive immune system. It spreads easily through the air, allowing less-ill carriers to spread it widely (the Tyhoid Mary effect). It starts out by pretending to be the common cold, so carriers ignore it and continue to expose the community. Very few disease organisms combine these factors, and most of those that do (measles, smallpox, diptheria) are mercifully vulnerable to vaccines.
Why should we spend billions on this one virus that has thus for only shown the potential for danger?
Because the potential is real and quantified, not blindy extrapolated from fears. Influenza does regularly sweep across the world, leaving death and destruction in its wake. It does regularly kill people even in wealthy countries. The 1918 pandemic did send millions of strong, healthy adults to their deaths.
Certain strains are right now killing strong, healthy adults. Certain other strains do right now have the molecular factors for extreme transmissibility. It is an absolute guarantee that those strains will fuse in a single infected person, producing a new strain that has both virulence and transmissibility. When that happens, we will have another 1918-style pandemic on our hands.
And unless we can rapidly turn-around production of a strong vaccine, that pandemic will strike down millions of us. On the basis of missed work days alone, it makes sense to pour billions of dollars into preventing a flu pandemic.
However the results I referred to include papers in reasonably respectable scientific journals, a trivial inspection of which shows that there is indeed considerable evidence in favor of the existence of DNA demethylase.
We don't have a lot of things that work very well on fungi (heck, most of our antibiotics come from fungi), but they don't represent a large danger, simply because our insides are usually a bit too warm for them.
Nah, fungi just love warm wet guts. What they don't like is our immune systems. Fungi have many more types of protein than bacteria, and lack the capsule that bacteria hide inside, making them highly susceptible to the human adaptive immune system. With a strong immune system, you can eat live yeast as food. On the other hand, with Soviet Immune Suppresion, yeast eat you!
People link the word 'Here' or 'Article' or 'CNN' and I find that very frustrating.
Anchor tags are generally adjectives, and thus belong with the noun phrase they apply to. Thus we write "This CNN article reports on US officials' claims..." for the same reason would write "A shocking CNN article reports on US officials' claims..."
I want the hypertext to be the most appropriate 2-3 words that tell you exactly what you're clicking on.
Which means that I, like the other literates among your readers, sit there baffled by the story, and then resort to hovering our way through your angry link salad until we find the article that we want to read.
Slashdot Mirror
In theory, quantum "cryptography" does raise the bar by stopping passive eavesdropping. In practice, if you have an opponent who can afford to break all possible ciphers in real time, then they can also afford active attacks. (For that matter, they could afford to buy your entire planet and take it apart one atom at a time.)
Heh. That makes me think of this. Some folks have way too much time on their hands.
Worse, based on the existence of brain damage in HIV victims, there is a good chance that HIV occassionally integrates itself into astrocytes, which live a very long time. Astrocytes are pretty important, too, so you probably would not want an add-on therapy that simply kills all infected cells.
That would not be the claim touted in this story, just another lifelong regimen of pills/injections, probably at a rather high dose and with exciting new side effects.
It is completely plausible to engineer something that can snip selected DNA out of a cell, curing it of HIV. Unfortunately there are millions of infected cells and you have to fix every last one. Even if the failure rate is only 0.01%, that would leave many thousands of infected cells. Inevitably, a random mistake will accidentally transcribe one of the remaining HIV sequences, and the infection will be resurrected.
Joke? You disagree that that's a good place for an asteroid processing plant and launch facility?
The reason is that HIV integrates itself into the victim's DNA and hides there, pretty much forever. Short of rebuilding the victim molecule-by-molecule, you can never get rid of HIV. The best you can hope for is to put the virus into remission, and hope people take their pills faithfully enough to prevent a shadow epidemic from forming.
And even if the drug works and is nontoxic, there is another big hurdle: the blood-brain barrier. The brain is extremely picky about which chemicals it lets in, and a lot of drugs just don't make the cut. Unfortunately, HIV is perfectly happy to grow in the brain, where it gradually kills off nerve cells. IIRC the existing anti-HIV drugs have this problem; AIDS-related dementia is a feared complication.
I'm personally more amused by the proposed OWL telescope, which stands for OverWhelmingly Large. It's makes you wonder what they will call the next one after that. The So Enormously Large that Gosh We're All Really Impressed Telescope?
For another thing, much of the body's inner workings remain a mystery. There are all sorts of incredibly important things floating around in the blood, and we have no idea they even exist.
For yet another thing, defining normal levels is difficult, in some cases impossible. Many body processes operate in negative feedback loops, where chemical levels are adjusted to produce a desired end result. If a person has a slightly insensitive detector for some molecule, and a slightly overactive emitter of it, their level might read as high when nothing is wrong. Worse, many blood levels depend on the exact conditions of the moment: sleep, hormone cycles, meals, psychological stress, minor viral infection, and so forth. Interpreting the results of a complete blood analysis would not be easy.
Migraine is pretty far out there too. The pain is a side effect of dramatic global disruption of the nervous system. (And, BTW, the proper noun form for migraine is sufferer. This is not a matter for further discussion. ;-)
A large fraction of them can learn and plan well enough not to piss off other people too often. They're irritating, but within the far end of "normal". However they still have great difficulty with long range planning to satisfy happiness goals or avoid suffering. They're just blowing smoke up our collective ass. Psychopath is an unbiased word. What it is, is emotionally loaded, because many psychopaths are so incredibly obnoxious. Even if they succeed in assigning a new word to the unpleasant condition, that new word will promptly pick up the same emotional load. (Just like "imbecile", "idiot", and "cretin", which were last century's scientific PC substitute for "feeble minded" and "stupid". History repeats itself, endlessly.) Ideological language movements are usually just a tool of political control. If a change were truly valid, merely publicizing it would suffice; reasonable practitioners would then adopt it out of good sense. (As computer nerds seem to be with "ki" to mean a multiple of 1024, analogous to the metric "k" for factor of 1000. Not only is nobody ramming it down our throats, they're not even publicizing it heavily. It just makes good sense.)There is a rare genetic disorder where the goal-seeking centers in the brain are wired up backwards. (Argh. Google is no help at all finding the disorder's name.) Kids with it ask for the opposite of what they want, and when they get it are immensely frustrated and angry. At first glance the symptom appears to be antisocial rage to nearly any stimulus. However what they have is not a rage disorder, but an expressiveness disorder. Once the people around them understand it, progress can be made.
Likewise with psychopaths: the antisocial symptoms are fundamentally irrelevant. This is critical because your first encounter with a given psychopath will probably be at a moment when they appear to be functioning well. This is not because they understand the encounter like a normal person, but because they just happen to be neither angry nor euphoric, and are replaying simple behavior patterns from memory (and their memory is often good). Worse, the encounter will only last a few minutes, so you won't have much to go on. It's like playing ten moves into a game of chess. Can you tell that the opponent is only looking one move ahead? Well you had better, or you will be sucked into the psychopath's reality distortion field.
I still want fast turn-around vaccines to fight engineered plauges. I fully expect to see resurrected smallpox on the loose within my lifetime.
And obesity. Type II diabetes and metabolic syndrome aren't as dramatic as a tumor, but they sure suck a lot out of the economy. Keeping blind amputees patched together costs a lot.I expect a fast-turnaround vaccine system could be implemented for perhaps a billion dollars. So if a severe pandemic occurs more often than every few centuries, buying the vaccine system gives a net profit.
So how often does a severe respiratory virus pandemic occur? Naturally we get a bad one every few decades. We also have to worry about synthetic plagues. Within a decade or three, the cost of gene synthesis will fall to a few cents a base pair, and every death cult in the world will be making custom plagues. Already today, well-funded scientists have built polio and 1918 flu from scratch in the laboratory. Smallpox could be resurrected for possibly as little as a few million dollars, certainly less than $50M. Quick-turn vaccine capability will soon become very important, like long-range bombers in the '50s.
For a combination virus, a vaccine ought to be quite effective. It's just a matter of administering avian flu proteins in a vaccine. Unfortunately, most current flu vaccines are made by an obsolete process where the virus is grown in chicken eggs, and avian flu kills the eggs right away. We desperately need turn-key industrial systems for making vaccines. Culturing viruses is too prone to failure.
Influenza, however, combines most of the worst things into a single virus. It is an RNA virus, so it mutates rapidly. It has a tiny genome, providing a minimal target for the adaptive immune system. It spreads easily through the air, allowing less-ill carriers to spread it widely (the Tyhoid Mary effect). It starts out by pretending to be the common cold, so carriers ignore it and continue to expose the community. Very few disease organisms combine these factors, and most of those that do (measles, smallpox, diptheria) are mercifully vulnerable to vaccines.
Because the potential is real and quantified, not blindy extrapolated from fears. Influenza does regularly sweep across the world, leaving death and destruction in its wake. It does regularly kill people even in wealthy countries. The 1918 pandemic did send millions of strong, healthy adults to their deaths.Certain strains are right now killing strong, healthy adults. Certain other strains do right now have the molecular factors for extreme transmissibility. It is an absolute guarantee that those strains will fuse in a single infected person, producing a new strain that has both virulence and transmissibility. When that happens, we will have another 1918-style pandemic on our hands.
And unless we can rapidly turn-around production of a strong vaccine, that pandemic will strike down millions of us. On the basis of missed work days alone, it makes sense to pour billions of dollars into preventing a flu pandemic.
However the results I referred to include papers in reasonably respectable scientific journals, a trivial inspection of which shows that there is indeed considerable evidence in favor of the existence of DNA demethylase.