Are you kidding? Those are all OTC products. They're cheap and not exclusive. They can't *begin* to compare to the profits from a prescription-only patented antiviral.
You have perhaps heard the recent complaints because Allegra, Claritin, and that lot may become OTC as well. It's the same thing --- Benadryl, Sudafed, and so on work, but the prescription drug works better, costs more, and thus is the real money-maker.
Nobody gets sick from 'em because everyone's vaccinated. That's a cure. Or do you expect us to waste our time developing anti-measles drugs instead of trying to cure the damn adeno/rhinoviridae? (That'd be the common cold. If the companies find a drug that kills it, they'll sell it --- it's too much good PR to pass up.)
Pretty much everything in quantum mechanics is hiding somewhere in the damn thing, nobody can actually solve it for all cases, and it's complex enough to boggle the minds of 99.9% of mortals (yours truly included).
The current crop of email.VBS viruses ought to be considered as examples of social engineering, since they fool the user into screwing up his own system. If you want to drop your IT costs, it's worthwhile to make sure your organization doesn't have to deal with cleaning up after an infestation.
I've found that education is useless to combat these; you can tell people a million times how to recognize a virus, but they still open the attachment because "I didn't know". (There's a very interesting version I've seen recently: it watches the SMTP port, waits for you to send an email, then sends a copy of itself to the same person. No subject, just an attachment. The response from people who got infected? "See what you did to me by using a public computer!")
Anyway, ranting about stupidity aside, has anyone seen a policy that successfully reduces the damage from email worms?
Why, you ask, must Jack Vance, legendary author and contributor of so many memes, be taken out back and shot? Because, as a poster above points out, his books inspired the Dungeons and Dragons magic system.
Jack Vance is personally responsible for the death of uncountable first-level mages who could only memorize one spell a day and just happened to pick the wrong one, not to mention all the adventuring parties wiped out by orcish hordes due to the accidental choice of a Lightning Bolt over an extra Fireball.
The death toll caused by Vance's books is only comparable to the massive damage inflicted by that most terrible hacker weapon, DeCSS. He must be stopped, and stopped now.
True. But that would be a hell of a registration job. The stimulus input lines would have to be at the precise positions over center ganglion cells and their surround cells. We're talking about microns. I would be mightily impressed by such a feat.
I disagree somewhat with your statement. Chances are, if you just plunk a, say, 100x100 array of dumb light->stimulus transducers into the back of the retina, most of those stimulating electrodes are going to be capable of stimulating at least one cell.
I think I understand what you're saying: they'll miss the lateral inhibition components that come in earlier in the retinal pathway. However, there are already some papers that show that you can probably fix that by implementing the local inhibition in the transduction circuitry. Now, how much that adds to the power consumption, I'm not sure offhand; I don't recall the necessary circuits. I wouldn't call it a limiting factor, though.
Logical enough. Did they give any stats, though, on what total percentage of blindness would be amenable to any kind of gene therapy? My guess is that you'd get about 10%. (Which ain't bad, but probably ain't Nobel level either.)
True, it won't be like the Dobelle prosthesis, where there are wires running into the skull. However, the fact remains that the eye is not set up to use ceramic films as its detector. You'll need *something* to transduce the signal into a stimulus for the optic nerve, and that means you're going to need power. Power isn't easy, especially for something like this which has to be very low-heat (boiled eyeball, anyone?). That can probably be handled with something like the4 inductive transfer setups they use for heart pumps, but it's not just "stick it in your eye and forget about it".
Someone above mentioned retinotopic mapping, which is of course a big ol' issue. However, if all they do is detect the light and trigger a stimulus at a corresponding point on the retina (and if there are still ganglion cells left to pick up the current), they should be able to get the mapping "for free".
I actually saw a grant come out of a lab I worked in at CMU that wanted to do something very similar, except that instead of using ceramic films they wanted to use bacterial protein as the light detector. Pretty cool stuff. Didn't get funded, but I'm rewriting the parts I liked and trying to turn it into a thesis.
Reread the article. It's a specific single-gene disorder with about 2,000 patients in the country. The National Federation for the Blind claims that there are about a million blind people in America. In other words, we're talking about 0.2% of blind people being cured. While that's wonderful for them, this isn't a massive breakthrough in the treatment of blindness.
Most blindness isn't genetic. Much of it is due to cataracts and macular degeneration, which are diseases of aging. It's also caused by the complications of chronic diseases, especially diabetes (slow destruction of the vessels of the retina) and AIDS (death of retinal neurons due to cytomegalovirus). All of these except AIDS are not really understood, but are definitely not single-gene disorders that are likely to be amenable to gene therapy. My money's still on the retinal and cortical implant folks.
Those guys over in the Data Storage Systems Center ain't got nothin' on the one true CMU MEMS Lab. Oh, sure, they've got genuine applications that people actually need and that can show a profit and stuff, but we've got weird far-reaching projects like microstructured scaffolds for growing engineered tissues! (Don't bother looking; it's not linked from the page 'cause the website never gets updated.)Why, we've got genuine doctors (with MDs and everything!) working with us to build new biosensors! *And* we've got a display case!
Anyway, I'm sure we'll be turning out profitable projects any day now. No, really. Just wait.
Interesting point. Many IRBs would frown on just randomly beheading a perfectly well monkey. I wonder if they used one that had been "spoiled" by neuroscience training, or if they just have a weak IRB?
1) The article says "and the animal survived for some time after the operation". "Some time" implies to me that it lasted about a week, maybe two, with major intensive care.
2) As the article points out, what they've really got is a head connected to the main neck vessels. All nervous system connections are kaput. What this means is that the brainstem (which has all the centers that regulate your vital organs) does not have a connection to such vital things as the phrenic nerve (which moves the diaphragm up and down). I doubt that this poor beast was able to breathe on its own. Also disconnected would be the vagus nerves, which go to pretty much every vital organ in some way. There's a classic quote in my anatomy textbook: "bilateral destruction of the vagus nerves is sooner or later incompatible with life". Being completely unable to regulate your body means you're basically fucked the next time something goes wrong. Your body could have any number of fatal diseases and you wouldn't feel a damn thing until it started affecting the brain (at which point you're usually terminal anyway).
Could you use this to be immortal? Sure, if you could solve the whole rejection problem and you don't mind having all the joyful life experience of the classical head-in-a-jar. I feel sorry for the monkey. The experiment proves basically nothing, isn't a technique which any rational surgeon or patient would accept as therapeutic, and pretty much just managed to cost a lot of money and cause a poor animal plenty of pain. I'm agreeing with the second gent they quoted --- nerve regeneration looks a lot better.
And the first message from Mars will be...
on
The Dot in .mars
·
· Score: 3
It's worth clarifying that not *every* doctor is out to take your genes. Most doctors are too busy trying to survive managed care, and don't have a clue that this is happening. However, as with everything, there are a few people whose ethics went out the window as soon as they smelled money. There are even large chunks of the medical profession which publically oppose genetic patenting; both the American College of Pathologists and the American College of Medical Genetics say it's immoral. The AMA is working on a statement (it's "concerned"), and the American Medical Student Association might publically oppose it just as soon as I get around to finishing up the statement that says they do.
If being patented bothers you, I strongly encourage you to refuse to consent to any kind of research on your own tissue. We can't force you to sign. Even if you're going in for surgery and we put a tissue claim on the consent form, we *have* to remove that clause if you demand it (or send you to another doctor, which is a lot harder/costlier). In fact, you could probably demand that a consent clause stating that the tissue will *not* be used for research. This situation ain't gonna change until unethical behavior suddenly turns unprofitable, and that'll require active consumerism.
Also of note is that the USPTO, in its recent release of new rules on gene patents, claimed that it couldn't do a damn thing about the patentability of human genes. According to that esteemed institution, Congress has given it a mandate to grant patents on anything that a person makes and brings in. Therefore, if it's the idea of someone taking ownership of part of humanity that bothers you, drop an email to your congressthing asking for a law to declare humanity off-limits.
I dislike scaremongering books, but if it brings this chunk of IP law back to sensibility, I'm willing to tolerate this one.
You're right; we can simulate the behavior of the cells in order to work out control algorithms for them. They've actually done some of that; Daniela has some animations of some of the older modular designs carrying out simple functions like climbing stairs. (I think they're on that webpage link.)
However, as I have learned in my attempts at robotics, simulation often doesn't mean jack shit. It's still basically impossible to simulate all the nastiness of the physical world, so in the end, you've got to put them out there and see what breaks. (As an example: when I took CS88 from her, we built Legobots. The IR sensor I made was actually sensitive to the color of the brick in which it was embedded; it only worked in blue bricks. Probably a function of the absorption/reflection of the dye, but who the hell's going to code that into a simulator?)
Moreover, in the end, if you want to use them, you've gotta make them. Therefore, it makes more sense (IMHO) to deal with the real-world issues up front rather than gluing them into idealized code at the last minute.
WRT to the surfaces... each one *can* do multiple things. Think of them as a set of "motion pixels" with almost-arbitrary pushing abilitity. The same chip can be a conveyor, an agitator, an aligner, or several other things, depending on what the control code tells the pixels to do.
BTW, thinking of Dartmouth in the news... did you realize that our very own Marty Vona, architect of the most recent modular robot unit, is also the man who hacked the Billy Bass? Every time I start to feel competent, I just need to look at what he's up to.
Dartmough? Feh. They mean Dartmouth College, my very own alma mater. I graduated in the same class as the guy who built the little block they show in the picture.
Yes, the idea of miniaturization is kind of hype. OTOH, Daniela trained under Dartmouth's MEMS guy back at Cornell, so she has some contacts in the field. He's already built (years ago, actually) prototypes of these "smart manipulating surfaces". They look like just a flat chip, but when powered, they'll spin things around, act as conveyor belts, and generally create 2D "force fields".
Shrinking the things isn't the issue. Even if they're an inch cubed, they could still be useful, especially if we borrowed from Lego the idea of having a few "special bricks". The problem is control. Can you imagine having to specify your body one cell at a time? These things are going to need to be able to work out where they should be with minimal cues from the central brain. She does have some work in the field (algorithms to move around furniture with a team of robots, all of whom have limited sensing and communications power; also, the stuff I worked on with transportable agents), but there's a long way to go.
I belive that gene patents suck; to me, they represent a statement of ownership over human life, a practice which went out of fashion a hundred years ago. I also buy into the well-known arguments that they harm research and innovation.
Nonetheless, as far as that latter argument, this agreement will probably not be a big deal. If the government has joint ownership of all things produced, they have the right to license it for free use to all persons who receive Federal research grants. Since those grants drive the majority of academic research, researchers aren't hindered. Private firms will, of course, have to pay Celera its fifteen pieces of silver, but I fail to see ethical problems there beyond the existing patent issues.
The article does claim that it's totally resist-less, but I'm not sure I buy that. AFAIK (and I'll admit that I'm not entirely a litho guru, but I did spend the summer developing lithography processes), existing maskless systems such as electron beam still need a resist, even though their mask is a software construct. I can see them maybe injecting dopants directly with an ion beam, but as I understand such things, it wouldn't be possible to create something such as a line of metal. (Working from intuition, you're not going to get a line of nonionic metal if you shoot ions at a wafer; you're going to get adulterated and possibly etched silicon.)
Your idea of altering masks on the fly to route around substrate defects is pretty cool, though. My thought is that it may end up being unprofitable to do, simply because wafers may be relatively cheap enough that the time required to test and reroute is not as cost-efficient as just chucking the chip and starting over. There's also the possibility that elements will have timing constraints which would be broken by rearranging the die. Regardless, it's still a cool idea.
As pointed out in the article, you can't really defeat stuff like this through user education, because Users Are Dumb. Seems to me that you *can* do the sort of risk-reduction that Schneier's always talking about. Therefore, o wise Slashdot users (I'm pretty sure there's one of you somewhere...), when is it reasonable to see a host key change? I can think of:
Installation of new sshd
Upgrade of OS (new software installed)
Serious mucking with hardware configuration (not sure why --- I guess the keygen code uses some parameters as a seed)
I'm also pretty sure that rebooting the system isn't supposed to change the key. So what else is there that can legitimately change a key?
(And yes, I *did* try to RTFM. Checked the SSH specification, but that just says that hosts MUST have keys and MAY have multiple keys. STFW didn't help either; bunch of tech support announcements that some host somewhere was changing its key.)
Silly person, I am not asking if it would disturb your sleep at night, I am asking if you might be a little more worried about getting killed by the zealots than by the students. You see, zealots have guns, which can be used to kill you.
A good point --- us Merkins are lazy. Perhaps what I'm trying to say is that if we *do* revolt, we're more dangerous. I mean, if you were a government peacekeeper, would you rather go up against a bunch of truckers or a bunch of survivalist apocalyptic zealots?
Slashdot Mirror
Are you kidding? Those are all OTC products. They're cheap and not exclusive. They can't *begin* to compare to the profits from a prescription-only patented antiviral.
You have perhaps heard the recent complaints because Allegra, Claritin, and that lot may become OTC as well. It's the same thing --- Benadryl, Sudafed, and so on work, but the prescription drug works better, costs more, and thus is the real money-maker.
A disease is cured when nobody has to suffer from it. Please explain how taking it out before the infection symptoms begin is not a cure.
Nobody gets sick from 'em because everyone's vaccinated. That's a cure. Or do you expect us to waste our time developing anti-measles drugs instead of trying to cure the damn adeno/rhinoviridae? (That'd be the common cold. If the companies find a drug that kills it, they'll sell it --- it's too much good PR to pass up.)
Pretty much everything in quantum mechanics is hiding somewhere in the damn thing, nobody can actually solve it for all cases, and it's complex enough to boggle the minds of 99.9% of mortals (yours truly included).
There's a good example (LaTeX->image) here.
The current crop of email .VBS viruses ought to be considered as examples of social engineering, since they fool the user into screwing up his own system. If you want to drop your IT costs, it's worthwhile to make sure your organization doesn't have to deal with cleaning up after an infestation.
I've found that education is useless to combat these; you can tell people a million times how to recognize a virus, but they still open the attachment because "I didn't know". (There's a very interesting version I've seen recently: it watches the SMTP port, waits for you to send an email, then sends a copy of itself to the same person. No subject, just an attachment. The response from people who got infected? "See what you did to me by using a public computer!")
Anyway, ranting about stupidity aside, has anyone seen a policy that successfully reduces the damage from email worms?
Why, you ask, must Jack Vance, legendary author and contributor of so many memes, be taken out back and shot? Because, as a poster above points out, his books inspired the Dungeons and Dragons magic system.
Jack Vance is personally responsible for the death of uncountable first-level mages who could only memorize one spell a day and just happened to pick the wrong one, not to mention all the adventuring parties wiped out by orcish hordes due to the accidental choice of a Lightning Bolt over an extra Fireball.
The death toll caused by Vance's books is only comparable to the massive damage inflicted by that most terrible hacker weapon, DeCSS. He must be stopped, and stopped now.
True. But that would be a hell of a registration job. The stimulus input lines would have to be at the precise positions over center ganglion cells and their surround cells. We're talking about microns. I would be mightily impressed by such a feat.
I disagree somewhat with your statement. Chances are, if you just plunk a, say, 100x100 array of dumb light->stimulus transducers into the back of the retina, most of those stimulating electrodes are going to be capable of stimulating at least one cell.
I think I understand what you're saying: they'll miss the lateral inhibition components that come in earlier in the retinal pathway. However, there are already some papers that show that you can probably fix that by implementing the local inhibition in the transduction circuitry. Now, how much that adds to the power consumption, I'm not sure offhand; I don't recall the necessary circuits. I wouldn't call it a limiting factor, though.
Logical enough. Did they give any stats, though, on what total percentage of blindness would be amenable to any kind of gene therapy? My guess is that you'd get about 10%. (Which ain't bad, but probably ain't Nobel level either.)
True, it won't be like the Dobelle prosthesis, where there are wires running into the skull. However, the fact remains that the eye is not set up to use ceramic films as its detector. You'll need *something* to transduce the signal into a stimulus for the optic nerve, and that means you're going to need power. Power isn't easy, especially for something like this which has to be very low-heat (boiled eyeball, anyone?). That can probably be handled with something like the4 inductive transfer setups they use for heart pumps, but it's not just "stick it in your eye and forget about it".
Someone above mentioned retinotopic mapping, which is of course a big ol' issue. However, if all they do is detect the light and trigger a stimulus at a corresponding point on the retina (and if there are still ganglion cells left to pick up the current), they should be able to get the mapping "for free".
I actually saw a grant come out of a lab I worked in at CMU that wanted to do something very similar, except that instead of using ceramic films they wanted to use bacterial protein as the light detector. Pretty cool stuff. Didn't get funded, but I'm rewriting the parts I liked and trying to turn it into a thesis.
Reread the article. It's a specific single-gene disorder with about 2,000 patients in the country. The National Federation for the Blind claims that there are about a million blind people in America. In other words, we're talking about 0.2% of blind people being cured. While that's wonderful for them, this isn't a massive breakthrough in the treatment of blindness.
Most blindness isn't genetic. Much of it is due to cataracts and macular degeneration, which are diseases of aging. It's also caused by the complications of chronic diseases, especially diabetes (slow destruction of the vessels of the retina) and AIDS (death of retinal neurons due to cytomegalovirus). All of these except AIDS are not really understood, but are definitely not single-gene disorders that are likely to be amenable to gene therapy. My money's still on the retinal and cortical implant folks.
Those guys over in the Data Storage Systems Center ain't got nothin' on the one true CMU MEMS Lab. Oh, sure, they've got genuine applications that people actually need and that can show a profit and stuff, but we've got weird far-reaching projects like microstructured scaffolds for growing engineered tissues! (Don't bother looking; it's not linked from the page 'cause the website never gets updated.)Why, we've got genuine doctors (with MDs and everything!) working with us to build new biosensors! *And* we've got a display case!
Anyway, I'm sure we'll be turning out profitable projects any day now. No, really. Just wait.
Interesting point. Many IRBs would frown on just randomly beheading a perfectly well monkey. I wonder if they used one that had been "spoiled" by neuroscience training, or if they just have a weak IRB?
1) The article says "and the animal survived for some time after the operation". "Some time" implies to me that it lasted about a week, maybe two, with major intensive care.
2) As the article points out, what they've really got is a head connected to the main neck vessels. All nervous system connections are kaput. What this means is that the brainstem (which has all the centers that regulate your vital organs) does not have a connection to such vital things as the phrenic nerve (which moves the diaphragm up and down). I doubt that this poor beast was able to breathe on its own. Also disconnected would be the vagus nerves, which go to pretty much every vital organ in some way. There's a classic quote in my anatomy textbook: "bilateral destruction of the vagus nerves is sooner or later incompatible with life". Being completely unable to regulate your body means you're basically fucked the next time something goes wrong. Your body could have any number of fatal diseases and you wouldn't feel a damn thing until it started affecting the brain (at which point you're usually terminal anyway).
Could you use this to be immortal? Sure, if you could solve the whole rejection problem and you don't mind having all the joyful life experience of the classical head-in-a-jar. I feel sorry for the monkey. The experiment proves basically nothing, isn't a technique which any rational surgeon or patient would accept as therapeutic, and pretty much just managed to cost a lot of money and cause a poor animal plenty of pain. I'm agreeing with the second gent they quoted --- nerve regeneration looks a lot better.
d00d! w3 0wn j00! @ll y0r r0v3r R b3l0ng 2 us!1! PH34R 0UR M4D SK1LLZ!!!!
It's worth clarifying that not *every* doctor is out to take your genes. Most doctors are too busy trying to survive managed care, and don't have a clue that this is happening. However, as with everything, there are a few people whose ethics went out the window as soon as they smelled money. There are even large chunks of the medical profession which publically oppose genetic patenting; both the American College of Pathologists and the American College of Medical Genetics say it's immoral. The AMA is working on a statement (it's "concerned"), and the American Medical Student Association might publically oppose it just as soon as I get around to finishing up the statement that says they do.
If being patented bothers you, I strongly encourage you to refuse to consent to any kind of research on your own tissue. We can't force you to sign. Even if you're going in for surgery and we put a tissue claim on the consent form, we *have* to remove that clause if you demand it (or send you to another doctor, which is a lot harder/costlier). In fact, you could probably demand that a consent clause stating that the tissue will *not* be used for research. This situation ain't gonna change until unethical behavior suddenly turns unprofitable, and that'll require active consumerism.
Also of note is that the USPTO, in its recent release of new rules on gene patents, claimed that it couldn't do a damn thing about the patentability of human genes. According to that esteemed institution, Congress has given it a mandate to grant patents on anything that a person makes and brings in. Therefore, if it's the idea of someone taking ownership of part of humanity that bothers you, drop an email to your congressthing asking for a law to declare humanity off-limits.
I dislike scaremongering books, but if it brings this chunk of IP law back to sensibility, I'm willing to tolerate this one.
Shouldn't you be graduated by now?
You're right; we can simulate the behavior of the cells in order to work out control algorithms for them. They've actually done some of that; Daniela has some animations of some of the older modular designs carrying out simple functions like climbing stairs. (I think they're on that webpage link.)
However, as I have learned in my attempts at robotics, simulation often doesn't mean jack shit. It's still basically impossible to simulate all the nastiness of the physical world, so in the end, you've got to put them out there and see what breaks. (As an example: when I took CS88 from her, we built Legobots. The IR sensor I made was actually sensitive to the color of the brick in which it was embedded; it only worked in blue bricks. Probably a function of the absorption/reflection of the dye, but who the hell's going to code that into a simulator?)
Moreover, in the end, if you want to use them, you've gotta make them. Therefore, it makes more sense (IMHO) to deal with the real-world issues up front rather than gluing them into idealized code at the last minute.
WRT to the surfaces... each one *can* do multiple things. Think of them as a set of "motion pixels" with almost-arbitrary pushing abilitity. The same chip can be a conveyor, an agitator, an aligner, or several other things, depending on what the control code tells the pixels to do.
BTW, thinking of Dartmouth in the news... did you realize that our very own Marty Vona, architect of the most recent modular robot unit, is also the man who hacked the Billy Bass? Every time I start to feel competent, I just need to look at what he's up to.
Dartmough? Feh. They mean Dartmouth College, my very own alma mater. I graduated in the same class as the guy who built the little block they show in the picture.
Yes, the idea of miniaturization is kind of hype. OTOH, Daniela trained under Dartmouth's MEMS guy back at Cornell, so she has some contacts in the field. He's already built (years ago, actually) prototypes of these "smart manipulating surfaces". They look like just a flat chip, but when powered, they'll spin things around, act as conveyor belts, and generally create 2D "force fields".
Shrinking the things isn't the issue. Even if they're an inch cubed, they could still be useful, especially if we borrowed from Lego the idea of having a few "special bricks". The problem is control. Can you imagine having to specify your body one cell at a time? These things are going to need to be able to work out where they should be with minimal cues from the central brain. She does have some work in the field (algorithms to move around furniture with a team of robots, all of whom have limited sensing and communications power; also, the stuff I worked on with transportable agents), but there's a long way to go.
Her own page on the subject is here.
I belive that gene patents suck; to me, they represent a statement of ownership over human life, a practice which went out of fashion a hundred years ago. I also buy into the well-known arguments that they harm research and innovation.
Nonetheless, as far as that latter argument, this agreement will probably not be a big deal. If the government has joint ownership of all things produced, they have the right to license it for free use to all persons who receive Federal research grants. Since those grants drive the majority of academic research, researchers aren't hindered. Private firms will, of course, have to pay Celera its fifteen pieces of silver, but I fail to see ethical problems there beyond the existing patent issues.
The article does claim that it's totally resist-less, but I'm not sure I buy that. AFAIK (and I'll admit that I'm not entirely a litho guru, but I did spend the summer developing lithography processes), existing maskless systems such as electron beam still need a resist, even though their mask is a software construct. I can see them maybe injecting dopants directly with an ion beam, but as I understand such things, it wouldn't be possible to create something such as a line of metal. (Working from intuition, you're not going to get a line of nonionic metal if you shoot ions at a wafer; you're going to get adulterated and possibly etched silicon.)
Your idea of altering masks on the fly to route around substrate defects is pretty cool, though. My thought is that it may end up being unprofitable to do, simply because wafers may be relatively cheap enough that the time required to test and reroute is not as cost-efficient as just chucking the chip and starting over. There's also the possibility that elements will have timing constraints which would be broken by rearranging the die. Regardless, it's still a cool idea.
At least, it is for my laptop. If you happen to have a Dell, try here for some options. Other manufacturers, ask your OEM.
So sshd has to run as root? Isn't that a big ol' hole waiting for the next kiddie with a sploit?
I'm also pretty sure that rebooting the system isn't supposed to change the key. So what else is there that can legitimately change a key?
(And yes, I *did* try to RTFM. Checked the SSH specification, but that just says that hosts MUST have keys and MAY have multiple keys. STFW didn't help either; bunch of tech support announcements that some host somewhere was changing its key.)
I gotta disagree with you about training and armament making that big a difference. I cite as my key points Chechnya and Vietnam.
Silly person, I am not asking if it would disturb your sleep at night, I am asking if you might be a little more worried about getting killed by the zealots than by the students. You see, zealots have guns, which can be used to kill you.
A good point --- us Merkins are lazy. Perhaps what I'm trying to say is that if we *do* revolt, we're more dangerous. I mean, if you were a government peacekeeper, would you rather go up against a bunch of truckers or a bunch of survivalist apocalyptic zealots?