Seams to me that copyright was and is doomed to failure on the simple grounds of human nature, human culture exists exactly because humans enjoy sharing ideas, creativity influences etc that have meaning to them with others this is how influences get spread within a culture and become identifiable attributes of that culture without that aspect of human nature culture and society itself would completely fail to function properly neither can happen if influences and ideas are not shared between the members of that society.
It is only natural that people were and still do have a natural desire to share those influences that have an impact on them with those around them, it is natural to want those in your social circle to be able to share in those experiences that feel significant and/or influential to yourself so thus any creative work which has the ability to influence people in any meaningful way are also going to become things that people want to share socially with others.
Failing to understand this is what is causing content providers to alienate society itself, trying to stop a society sharing cultural influences generally tends to anger that society for many people trying to tell them they cannot share a good meaningful book with those they are close to is much like trying to tell people they can't share any idea that they find meaningful (ie it is like trying to block freedom of speech and expression, which people are strongly against). The content providers are attacking an aspect of human nature and culture which has grown and been ingrained into the consciousness of every human society for thousands of years and they suddenly expect that they are going to fight such a deep human behavior?
Interestingly however they do seam to realize this about something like sharing a book with a friend but not where it concerns a movie or a song, the internet etc, the problem is it is part of the same human desire to share cultural influences with others which creates the former, anyone that does not understand the human desire even need to share cultural influences with others is doomed to fail, thousands of years of precedent are against you and history of that magnitude is near impossible to defeat no matter how much you scream shout and kick your feet about it.
Sounds like a form of the Streisand effect to me, attempts to sensor content result in the exact opposite, namely drawing attention to, popularizing and increasing the availability of the content, granted it usually referred to a specific piece of content, in this case however by attacking a tracker site linking to large amounts of content they have managed to create this effect on all the content supplied by the site as well as actually enhance the public awareness of the protocol itself.
You are clearly uneducated on the law, viewing video clips does NOT require a TV license any more than using your computer without a TV card to watch your brand new DVD boxed set of Dr. Who does. You need a TV licence to use a TV, DVD player, Video Recorder, PC, laptop or mobile phone to decode and receive live TV signals.
Note, video clips are not a live TV signal (defined due to prescient clarifications as being a live TV BROADCAST) note video clips are NOT a broadcast, they are by definition unicast, you demand content and it is sent to you from the point you requested individually, broadcast is not, broadcast is sent to all at the same time you join at whatever point the stream is at when you join, it is not on demand. Either you are unsure how the rules are defined or you don't understand the concepts of broadcast and/or "TV Signals".
I personally would go only as far as #2 would prefer data between centers was sent over a secure network (the cheapest way to do this would be to take physical drives to the central machine for processing) saves on infrastructure and I am sure for any polling station even a whole hard disk drive would weigh far less than the paper ballots and be easier to move. The main reason for this is considering the resources of your potential attackers, we are not talking about your joe credit card fraudster, your attackers could include the security services that favor a particular candidates position, massive private sector companies which want to swing the result of the election, either of these could expend tens of thousands of man hours and insane amounts of hardware on finding a means to disrupt your system especially over an open network. If you keep the networked communication inside the polling station where physical security can be used this is better, physical security with the backup of technology (note I am thinking here of some kind of secured safe or similar which if you want to be really secure can only be opened by those authorized at the central processing site using a combination of encryption certificates to identify the unlocking hardware and codes controlled by more than one different individual required to open it) can also be used to protect the disks on route to the central server. The higher security on transit would of course be due to the fact that something in transit is at greater risk than something in a previously selected static environment you can plan security for, it is much harder to plan security for every environment between A and B over the public road network.
I do have to counter on one point in the post you link, namely this:
"Next, presumably such images are for your own private use, and not for general distribution to the public."
So, from that are we to infer that you would be supportive of criminalizing people for putting up photos of them and their friends on flickr or facebook? By definition they are public services and will distribute to the public freely.
I could make that argument about pretty much any building built on a public street, architecture strives to make more impressive and unique buildings all the time, what is the point in making interesting unique buildings if you don't intend for them to be seen.
Secondly you also do not walk outside with an expectation of privacy either or do you frequently make a habit of walking down the street preforming actions that you would rather not advertise to all and sundry without at least making some effort to shield yourself from view. If one alters their behavior outside to preserve their privacy when engaging in private actions that clearly indicates they don't expect the street outside in plain view of anyone to be a private place.
By your definition here it would be impossible for a couple of tourists to take their picture on a famous bridge in most major cities, asking all the businesses and homes potentially in view on both sides of the river for permission would be prohibitive.
Google is not walking up to windows, doing so would be as serious as using a zoom lens to access the subjects home to take photos.
In this case Google is doing neither, using a standard lens to take a picture of buildings and streets is hardly a problem, sure using zoom lenses and stuff or walking up to windows to get detailed pictures of people inside their homes would be.
By your definition taking photos of buildings in general would be a crime if there were any people inside said buildings, there is the whole thing of wanting to take photos of the architecture, not to mention the obvious problem of telling people they can't take pictures of their friends ANYWHERE in an urban area as they would also capture shots of buildings, and thus probably people inside those buildings or are people wanting to take photographs supposed to peer into the buildings first to make sure no people are visible?
Exactly if silicon is going to be phased out anywhere in 4 year (note the IF) it will be in extremely high end supercomputer type devices perhaps a decade or so later this might get enough research combined with economies of scale to hit the high end PC market, maybe another decade may go by and the development dollars earned from this will enable them to enter the price range of the rest of the PC market (note here at this point you will most likely have a motherboard with silicon chips with exception only of the CPU and possibly the GPU for high end gaming machines) even probably 50 years later your digital wristwatch will still be silicon it does not need more.
Simply, silicon may begin to find competitors in the high end market for people with deep pockets but it will not die out in lower end devices for decades yet if ever (we need to come up with some very novel ideas before your wristwatch needs tens of gigahertz of processing power).
And here goes another false assumption that metered access means that you automatically pay overages. Take an example during peak time my plan in UK gives 25 GB for £22.99 and has one of two options in the portal, one allows it to automatically charge at £1 per GB for extra bandwidth and runs at full speed, the other ads not such charges but results in speed reductions you can also modify your plan at any time to a different one for £0.75 per GB or move up to the highest package with 40GB for £29.99 you can of course download as much as you like outside peak hours with no restriction, and speed reductions for exceeding your allowance only ever applies to peak hours also, and it is really not hard with most P2P clients to schedule a download to occur overnight, nor with most download managers either.
The last one seams to me like it could be argued for quite some time in a court of law it seams to me unless they actively thrust the terms and conditions in your face before you use the "services" perhaps using a cookie to remember if the user has accepted them before (Interesting argument here over the fact the cookie only identifies the browser in some configurations not the user of the browser, especially if more than one user has the same system login) then it seams to me it would be difficult to claim someone has accepted a contract they were not made aware of. To my knowledge and understanding not a lawyer here but a fluent English speaker and contract to me suggests that the parties are at least complicit in the existence of the contract, I can't understand how someone can be in a binding contract without knowledge the contract exists.
On the other hand I could see an argument of the form that the terms of service are clearly available for the user to access at will, thus can form part of a contract on the implied concept that by using a service you agree to do so in accordance with any published terms attached to the service but then I think for that to hold up very well a formal notice on the bottom of the pages which formed part of the "service" with text to the effect of "By using these services you are agreeing to the [link:"Terms of Service"]" or similar in much the same way as adverts contain disclaimers like "Terms and conditions apply". Either of those would be informing the user that terms applied and invites the user to seek more details however I don't see any such message on the Google search home page at least making this argument seam not to hold water, although I am sure it would be argued anyway.
Human beings are invariably tactile beings, who rely very heavily on our senses so that when we take some action in our environment our brain relies on sensory data to mediate that action, something our technology also needs to replicate in order to suit the beings whom it is intended to be used by.
This is one of the reasons why a completely flat keyboard like some of those roll up models tend to be a pain to type on when using a normal keyboard you get both the physical sensation of the key depression itself and the click sound, both of which allow the brain to deduce that the key depression was successful sure you could look at the screen but there is also the learned behavior aspect the reinforcement mechanism we have learned is the physical sensation and the click change that behavior from the expected and many people are not going to like it very much. Sure people can learn new feedback mechanisms but for the most part people are generally averse to investing energy relearning things unless there is a very compelling reason.
Another example is why many digital cameras replicate the click sound of older cameras again it is a feedback mechanism yes I know some people don't like this one however that is why they have an option to turn it off if you prefer not to have it.
The beep sound of an ATM terminal keypad is probably another example (although I personally hate the tone) because those hard wearing don't give much in the way of physical feedback on their own their movement is far too small to be really noticeable.
One could go though examples all day but the end result is that some people are going to find it somewhat of a transition to loose a form of feedback by the design of these devices, no doubt someone will come up with a software method to appease these users exactly like they did with the digital camera basically (play a sound file to replicate the expected feedback). I think with computers it is also an issue to have a non-visual indicator because there is typically already enough visual information on the screen already, extra visual objects are a less desirable solution there is only a certain amount of visual indicators the mind can take in at one time but it is possible to take in data from other sensory sources at the same time more easily than relying on passing everything through one input channel.
I think that is exactly the reason most likely, lithium type batteries are restricted on aircraft due to the risk of them overloading and catching fire as well and planes are in basically the same situation as in if they burst into flames in flight basically every occupant is dead there is no way to evacuate an airliner plane in flight anymore than you can evacuate a space station (unless they have re-entry pods of some kind?) but even if there was some way to get the people out the multi million dollar piece of hardware is going to be destroyed especially when the fire gets near those big oxygen cylinders.
To be honest I have to say it is disturbing how many millions have been wasted on projects to have been ruined by very simple glitches in software, sure this sort of analysis software is probably quite complex I don't know I didn't write it. But when millions of $CURRENCY is spent on a complex piece of hardware which has a single chance of success it's hardly like we get these probes back to reuse or anything that more care should be taken to ensure the software can do it's job otherwise it is a waste of money building all that expensive hardware, it's not like such mistakes are that infrequent.
However it is not like mistakes like this are just something that happens with NASA, the ESA's first launch of an Ariane 5 launch vehicle resulted in failure due to an issue where a 64 bit floating point number was being stuck into a 16 bit signed integer space within the vehicle guidance system causing it reportedly to attempt to make an extreme and unwarranted cause correction and ultimately end up breaking up with the loss of the launch vehicle and its payload of 4 Cluster Mission spacecraft resulting in a total loss valued at US$370 million. - Ariane 5 Flight 501
That is not perfectly true unless you assume the government is willing to pull out the really big weapons and kill their very source of control and power in mass (note power is useless if there are no people left you have power over) so it then becomes likely that we would be talking infantry perhaps some tanks sure, maybe a few missiles in an attempt to scare the rebellion out of existence but when it boils down to it a thousand armed mob with rifles and handguns against every 20 or so soldiers or a tank and their higher power weapons may kill more but they still can't win.
It also assumes that in the event of a rebellion so large as to actually cause people to engage in direct violence against the government all the military will actually stay on the government side and not defect (with their assault rifles with them) hell, even assumes that there are not enough people in the private sector that if they were involved in such a rebellion they could not arm an army on their own.
Yeah sure, except do you honestly think there probably won't be other protections on their records I would assume something along the lines of state secret, national security etc etc
I would have to tend to agree, unless for instance you have specifically traveled to an area to get married precisely because the target location has few days of rainfall in the season in question then it's ironic because precisely what you planned to avoid happened. The same applies if you pick a holiday location due to the high incidence of good weather and it ends up with an unseasonal storm just when you happen to be there. Of course you could site examples all day.
This is failing to take into account however that the telecommunications lobby are a powerful group in their own right and certainly are not going to lay down without their voices heard while a charge like this is threatening their business.
Would not be technically infeasible I guess monitor a sample of the largest bit torrent trackers and use that to gauge a reference to the percentage of each artists work, of course RIAA would hate this idea, if artists of any size can easily publish online and get their fair share who would need the labels which is who the RIAA mainly work for after all.
Sure, I pay that sum for an online radio station I like to get the stream without the included ads and at a higher bit rate already, so if $5 covered all music I would be happy with that.
So would I, and not because the common cold is a real problem, but more because developing a cure for one of the more highly mutating viruses like the common cold would lead the way to having treatment for most viruses something which right now we can barely do anything about (bar a few of the more dangerous and well funded viruses in research and even they are still lethal, just we might be able to slow them down a bit).
Slashdot Mirror
Don't click the above link, is a GNAA troll site.
Seams to me that copyright was and is doomed to failure on the simple grounds of human nature, human culture exists exactly because humans enjoy sharing ideas, creativity influences etc that have meaning to them with others this is how influences get spread within a culture and become identifiable attributes of that culture without that aspect of human nature culture and society itself would completely fail to function properly neither can happen if influences and ideas are not shared between the members of that society.
It is only natural that people were and still do have a natural desire to share those influences that have an impact on them with those around them, it is natural to want those in your social circle to be able to share in those experiences that feel significant and/or influential to yourself so thus any creative work which has the ability to influence people in any meaningful way are also going to become things that people want to share socially with others.
Failing to understand this is what is causing content providers to alienate society itself, trying to stop a society sharing cultural influences generally tends to anger that society for many people trying to tell them they cannot share a good meaningful book with those they are close to is much like trying to tell people they can't share any idea that they find meaningful (ie it is like trying to block freedom of speech and expression, which people are strongly against). The content providers are attacking an aspect of human nature and culture which has grown and been ingrained into the consciousness of every human society for thousands of years and they suddenly expect that they are going to fight such a deep human behavior?
Interestingly however they do seam to realize this about something like sharing a book with a friend but not where it concerns a movie or a song, the internet etc, the problem is it is part of the same human desire to share cultural influences with others which creates the former, anyone that does not understand the human desire even need to share cultural influences with others is doomed to fail, thousands of years of precedent are against you and history of that magnitude is near impossible to defeat no matter how much you scream shout and kick your feet about it.
Sounds like a form of the Streisand effect to me, attempts to sensor content result in the exact opposite, namely drawing attention to, popularizing and increasing the availability of the content, granted it usually referred to a specific piece of content, in this case however by attacking a tracker site linking to large amounts of content they have managed to create this effect on all the content supplied by the site as well as actually enhance the public awareness of the protocol itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Yes they were.
You are clearly uneducated on the law, viewing video clips does NOT require a TV license any more than using your computer without a TV card to watch your brand new DVD boxed set of Dr. Who does. You need a TV licence to use a TV, DVD player, Video Recorder, PC, laptop or mobile phone to decode and receive live TV signals.
Note, video clips are not a live TV signal (defined due to prescient clarifications as being a live TV BROADCAST) note video clips are NOT a broadcast, they are by definition unicast, you demand content and it is sent to you from the point you requested individually, broadcast is not, broadcast is sent to all at the same time you join at whatever point the stream is at when you join, it is not on demand. Either you are unsure how the rules are defined or you don't understand the concepts of broadcast and/or "TV Signals".
Damn, I wish I had some mod points, you deserve a +1 funny for that IMO.
Anyone not getting the joke see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party
I personally would go only as far as #2 would prefer data between centers was sent over a secure network (the cheapest way to do this would be to take physical drives to the central machine for processing) saves on infrastructure and I am sure for any polling station even a whole hard disk drive would weigh far less than the paper ballots and be easier to move. The main reason for this is considering the resources of your potential attackers, we are not talking about your joe credit card fraudster, your attackers could include the security services that favor a particular candidates position, massive private sector companies which want to swing the result of the election, either of these could expend tens of thousands of man hours and insane amounts of hardware on finding a means to disrupt your system especially over an open network. If you keep the networked communication inside the polling station where physical security can be used this is better, physical security with the backup of technology (note I am thinking here of some kind of secured safe or similar which if you want to be really secure can only be opened by those authorized at the central processing site using a combination of encryption certificates to identify the unlocking hardware and codes controlled by more than one different individual required to open it) can also be used to protect the disks on route to the central server. The higher security on transit would of course be due to the fact that something in transit is at greater risk than something in a previously selected static environment you can plan security for, it is much harder to plan security for every environment between A and B over the public road network.
I do have to counter on one point in the post you link, namely this:
"Next, presumably such images are for your own private use, and not for general distribution to the public."
So, from that are we to infer that you would be supportive of criminalizing people for putting up photos of them and their friends on flickr or facebook? By definition they are public services and will distribute to the public freely.
I could make that argument about pretty much any building built on a public street, architecture strives to make more impressive and unique buildings all the time, what is the point in making interesting unique buildings if you don't intend for them to be seen.
Secondly you also do not walk outside with an expectation of privacy either or do you frequently make a habit of walking down the street preforming actions that you would rather not advertise to all and sundry without at least making some effort to shield yourself from view. If one alters their behavior outside to preserve their privacy when engaging in private actions that clearly indicates they don't expect the street outside in plain view of anyone to be a private place.
By your definition here it would be impossible for a couple of tourists to take their picture on a famous bridge in most major cities, asking all the businesses and homes potentially in view on both sides of the river for permission would be prohibitive.
Google is not walking up to windows, doing so would be as serious as using a zoom lens to access the subjects home to take photos.
In this case Google is doing neither, using a standard lens to take a picture of buildings and streets is hardly a problem, sure using zoom lenses and stuff or walking up to windows to get detailed pictures of people inside their homes would be.
By your definition taking photos of buildings in general would be a crime if there were any people inside said buildings, there is the whole thing of wanting to take photos of the architecture, not to mention the obvious problem of telling people they can't take pictures of their friends ANYWHERE in an urban area as they would also capture shots of buildings, and thus probably people inside those buildings or are people wanting to take photographs supposed to peer into the buildings first to make sure no people are visible?
Exactly if silicon is going to be phased out anywhere in 4 year (note the IF) it will be in extremely high end supercomputer type devices perhaps a decade or so later this might get enough research combined with economies of scale to hit the high end PC market, maybe another decade may go by and the development dollars earned from this will enable them to enter the price range of the rest of the PC market (note here at this point you will most likely have a motherboard with silicon chips with exception only of the CPU and possibly the GPU for high end gaming machines) even probably 50 years later your digital wristwatch will still be silicon it does not need more.
Simply, silicon may begin to find competitors in the high end market for people with deep pockets but it will not die out in lower end devices for decades yet if ever (we need to come up with some very novel ideas before your wristwatch needs tens of gigahertz of processing power).
And here goes another false assumption that metered access means that you automatically pay overages. Take an example during peak time my plan in UK gives 25 GB for £22.99 and has one of two options in the portal, one allows it to automatically charge at £1 per GB for extra bandwidth and runs at full speed, the other ads not such charges but results in speed reductions you can also modify your plan at any time to a different one for £0.75 per GB or move up to the highest package with 40GB for £29.99 you can of course download as much as you like outside peak hours with no restriction, and speed reductions for exceeding your allowance only ever applies to peak hours also, and it is really not hard with most P2P clients to schedule a download to occur overnight, nor with most download managers either.
Are you trying to imply if a person had such treatment they would not be radioactive just like the cat?
The last one seams to me like it could be argued for quite some time in a court of law it seams to me unless they actively thrust the terms and conditions in your face before you use the "services" perhaps using a cookie to remember if the user has accepted them before (Interesting argument here over the fact the cookie only identifies the browser in some configurations not the user of the browser, especially if more than one user has the same system login) then it seams to me it would be difficult to claim someone has accepted a contract they were not made aware of. To my knowledge and understanding not a lawyer here but a fluent English speaker and contract to me suggests that the parties are at least complicit in the existence of the contract, I can't understand how someone can be in a binding contract without knowledge the contract exists.
On the other hand I could see an argument of the form that the terms of service are clearly available for the user to access at will, thus can form part of a contract on the implied concept that by using a service you agree to do so in accordance with any published terms attached to the service but then I think for that to hold up very well a formal notice on the bottom of the pages which formed part of the "service" with text to the effect of "By using these services you are agreeing to the [link:"Terms of Service"]" or similar in much the same way as adverts contain disclaimers like "Terms and conditions apply". Either of those would be informing the user that terms applied and invites the user to seek more details however I don't see any such message on the Google search home page at least making this argument seam not to hold water, although I am sure it would be argued anyway.
Human beings are invariably tactile beings, who rely very heavily on our senses so that when we take some action in our environment our brain relies on sensory data to mediate that action, something our technology also needs to replicate in order to suit the beings whom it is intended to be used by.
This is one of the reasons why a completely flat keyboard like some of those roll up models tend to be a pain to type on when using a normal keyboard you get both the physical sensation of the key depression itself and the click sound, both of which allow the brain to deduce that the key depression was successful sure you could look at the screen but there is also the learned behavior aspect the reinforcement mechanism we have learned is the physical sensation and the click change that behavior from the expected and many people are not going to like it very much. Sure people can learn new feedback mechanisms but for the most part people are generally averse to investing energy relearning things unless there is a very compelling reason.
Another example is why many digital cameras replicate the click sound of older cameras again it is a feedback mechanism yes I know some people don't like this one however that is why they have an option to turn it off if you prefer not to have it.
The beep sound of an ATM terminal keypad is probably another example (although I personally hate the tone) because those hard wearing don't give much in the way of physical feedback on their own their movement is far too small to be really noticeable.
One could go though examples all day but the end result is that some people are going to find it somewhat of a transition to loose a form of feedback by the design of these devices, no doubt someone will come up with a software method to appease these users exactly like they did with the digital camera basically (play a sound file to replicate the expected feedback). I think with computers it is also an issue to have a non-visual indicator because there is typically already enough visual information on the screen already, extra visual objects are a less desirable solution there is only a certain amount of visual indicators the mind can take in at one time but it is possible to take in data from other sensory sources at the same time more easily than relying on passing everything through one input channel.
I think that is exactly the reason most likely, lithium type batteries are restricted on aircraft due to the risk of them overloading and catching fire as well and planes are in basically the same situation as in if they burst into flames in flight basically every occupant is dead there is no way to evacuate an airliner plane in flight anymore than you can evacuate a space station (unless they have re-entry pods of some kind?) but even if there was some way to get the people out the multi million dollar piece of hardware is going to be destroyed especially when the fire gets near those big oxygen cylinders.
To be honest I have to say it is disturbing how many millions have been wasted on projects to have been ruined by very simple glitches in software, sure this sort of analysis software is probably quite complex I don't know I didn't write it. But when millions of $CURRENCY is spent on a complex piece of hardware which has a single chance of success it's hardly like we get these probes back to reuse or anything that more care should be taken to ensure the software can do it's job otherwise it is a waste of money building all that expensive hardware, it's not like such mistakes are that infrequent.
However it is not like mistakes like this are just something that happens with NASA, the ESA's first launch of an Ariane 5 launch vehicle resulted in failure due to an issue where a 64 bit floating point number was being stuck into a 16 bit signed integer space within the vehicle guidance system causing it reportedly to attempt to make an extreme and unwarranted cause correction and ultimately end up breaking up with the loss of the launch vehicle and its payload of 4 Cluster Mission spacecraft resulting in a total loss valued at US$370 million. - Ariane 5 Flight 501
That is not perfectly true unless you assume the government is willing to pull out the really big weapons and kill their very source of control and power in mass (note power is useless if there are no people left you have power over) so it then becomes likely that we would be talking infantry perhaps some tanks sure, maybe a few missiles in an attempt to scare the rebellion out of existence but when it boils down to it a thousand armed mob with rifles and handguns against every 20 or so soldiers or a tank and their higher power weapons may kill more but they still can't win.
It also assumes that in the event of a rebellion so large as to actually cause people to engage in direct violence against the government all the military will actually stay on the government side and not defect (with their assault rifles with them) hell, even assumes that there are not enough people in the private sector that if they were involved in such a rebellion they could not arm an army on their own.
Yeah sure, except do you honestly think there probably won't be other protections on their records I would assume something along the lines of state secret, national security etc etc
I would have to tend to agree, unless for instance you have specifically traveled to an area to get married precisely because the target location has few days of rainfall in the season in question then it's ironic because precisely what you planned to avoid happened. The same applies if you pick a holiday location due to the high incidence of good weather and it ends up with an unseasonal storm just when you happen to be there. Of course you could site examples all day.
This is failing to take into account however that the telecommunications lobby are a powerful group in their own right and certainly are not going to lay down without their voices heard while a charge like this is threatening their business.
Would not be technically infeasible I guess monitor a sample of the largest bit torrent trackers and use that to gauge a reference to the percentage of each artists work, of course RIAA would hate this idea, if artists of any size can easily publish online and get their fair share who would need the labels which is who the RIAA mainly work for after all.
Sure, I pay that sum for an online radio station I like to get the stream without the included ads and at a higher bit rate already, so if $5 covered all music I would be happy with that.
So would I, and not because the common cold is a real problem, but more because developing a cure for one of the more highly mutating viruses like the common cold would lead the way to having treatment for most viruses something which right now we can barely do anything about (bar a few of the more dangerous and well funded viruses in research and even they are still lethal, just we might be able to slow them down a bit).