Some researchers at Purdue came up with a technique back in May that's probably better than this. It uses a Gallium/Aluminum alloy. Aluminum, when exposed to water, produces hydrogen and aluminum oxide. Normally aluminum produces an aluminum oxide layer immediately on any exposed surface, preventing further reaction. This alloy doesn't have that problem. It's unclear precisely how much platinum they require for this process from the news release, but Platinum is far more expensive than either Aluminum or Gallium. Another advantage is that the Gallium is unaffected and can be reused, while the aluminum oxide can readily be converted back to pure aluminum through Fused Salt Electrolysis. The cost of aluminum would make the cost of using this more than the equivalent of the current ~$3/gallon of gas. If there were enough demand and, using the recycling method, the cost of aluminum could be brought down to make it cheaper than the current cost of gas, however. Of course, electricity for the electrolysis has its own environmental impact...
I was lamenting the passing of the hobbiest chemistry sets long before 9/11. You can still get them in various places and you can get a fairly wide selection of chemicals from a number of sources, including e-bay. Hell, I even bought some concentrated (70%) nitric acid off of e-bay not more than a year ago.
That said, the decline in hobby-level chemistry sets, as I mentioned before, began with the rise in the "new American Dream." You know, the one where you sue somebody for a million dollars. Liability for selling chemistry sets is, without a doubt, astronomical in these days of knee-jerk litigation... Nobody in their right mind would sell something to children that they could easily kill or wound themselves with, quite easily...
From my own personal history, when I had a chemistry set as a child, it came with glass tubing and an alcohol burner. You used it to heat the tubing and bend it into shapes to connect beakers and what have you together... Well, not being old enough to know better, and not patient enough to wait for the tubing to cool down on its own after bending it, I decided it might be best to cool it off in some water. I consider it fortunate I didn't lose an eye when the glass exploded. And that didn't involve any chemicals... Not that the stuff they provided was terribly dangerous, but it's dangerous enough that it's simply not a viable business anymore, is my point...
I recently bought a SATA hard drive from Best Buy. It was shrink-wrapped and everything, but I got home and inside was a nice old, used, IDE drive. I took it back and they let me exchange it, fortunately. They really need to do better about checking their returns... I'd go somewhere else, but the town where I live doesn't have a lot of alternatives.
I would be willing to bet that over the counter sales of Vista, that is, upgrades and personal new system builders, exceeded that for those of any Linux by a fairly wide margin.
Perhaps true, but as someone who writes software for Windows for a living, I managed for about 2 days with Vista before I was overcome by the overwhelming urge to replace it with XP. It is, by far, the suckiest POS OS I've ever uses and I will do everything I can to avoid ever having to use it. Most people I know have had a similar Vista experience. I don't know a single person who has said, "Wow, Vista has really made my computer so much better." On the other hand, a lot of people who upgrade from Windows 98 to XP did say that about XP.
I don't really care about studies with H5N1 - it's obviously not a pandemic strain (witness the current lack of a pandemic). There is absolutely no evidence that vaccines, or any of the currently approved drugs will have any effect on some future pandemic strain.
You clearly don't know the first thing about this stuff. First of all, it's not a pandemic strain YET. It may never be, but if I had to put money on what the next flu pandemic strain is going to be, my money would be on H5N1 and there are a lot of epidemiologists who would agree. Scientists are the ones pushing the H5N1 scare because it poses an enormous threat.
I not been able to find any evidence that Tamiflu or it's cousins have had any impact on influenza/pneumonia death rates in any country,
Then I guess you just haven't looked. It's as simple as that.
It seems that influenza deaths are so rare it's very difficult to conduct a large enough study to determine if these drugs have any impact on mortality.
About 36,000 people a year die of influenza in the U.S. alone. Flu and Pneumonia are the 7th most common cause of death in the U.S. Which just goes to show that you clearly have no clue what you're talking about.
OK, everybody, repeat after me: That will never, ever happen again.
Sorry, but you're simply wrong. I can't put it any nicer than that. Pandemic influenza happens every several decades. The 1918 was a particularly virulent strain, yes, but H5N1 is fatal in roughly 70% of cases. If it evolves into an easily infectious (for humans) variant, that fatality would likely fall, but there's no telling how much. It might fall a little, it might fall a lot. Depending on how contagious it were to become and how fatal it was, hundreds of millions could die. Maybe just a few million. There's just no way to know. You can't predict evolution that accurately. But to sit there and declare that it simply can't happen again is patently wrong.
Sometimes they are trying to do you a damn favor, idiot.
A lot of people seem bent on thinking the media has been hyping flu pandemic to scare people. And maybe they have. I can't vouch for their motives. But flu pandemics happen. History shows us that flu pandemics have happened and anyone who thinks they won't continue happening, simply doesn't know anything about flu pandemics. They're as inevitable as winter. They may not happen as regularly, but they happen often enough. There were 3 flu pandemics in the 20th century, the weakest killing only perhaps 750,000 people and the most virulent killing nearly 40 million.
People (and by people, I don't mean the media, but actual scientists) are worried about H5N1, not because it is spreading quickly to people, it isn't. They are scared because it is spreading to some people and it is fatal in the vast majority of cases (~70%, currently). For people who don't actually know anything about H5N1, wikipedia actually has a pretty good article on it and why people (scientists) are scared about it.
What is already available, will likely not be effective against a pandemic because the reason the flu is pandemic, is because it is able to bypass all available methods of treatment/prevention.
That's just wrong. Flu pandemics don't happen because of vaccines working or not working. Flu pandemics started before vaccines existed and didn't become any less frequent after their creation. In fact, they've only appear to be getting more common because of easier access to the world (flight) and increasing overcrowding in urban areas.
Flu pandemics happen because a particularly virulent strain of the flu evolves. Sometimes it's the evolution of an existing human-infectious strain (like the H1N1 subtype that caused the Spanish Flu pandemic from 1918-1920) or from crossing over from animals (like the avian H2N2 subtype caused the Asian Flu pandemic in '57). The former happened before flu vaccines existed. The latter, after flu vaccines.
Granted, coming up with a vaccine for a pandemic strain would be helpful, but it's unlikely to happen in time because they tend to spread faster than normal flu strains (because of their increased virulence). I don't want to get into the whole thing about how flu strains are chosen for a vaccine and how vaccines works, but suffice it to say, vaccines are usually for several strains that already exist and are predicted to be the most likely to be widely spread, but because it takes so long to incubate the vaccine, the flu must be relatively slow-spreading.
Pandemic influenza strains, on the other hand, spread very quickly. Far too quickly for a vaccine to be created in time. We worried about the H5N1 avian variant because it was very deadly. We can't start creating a vaccine for it until it has evolved into a variant that is easily spread from human to human. Well, that's not entirely true. We could, but it probably wouldn't be effective against the easily spread variant. The vast majority of cases in people (if not all) of H5N1 were from direct contact with infected animals, but it was not easily spread. Had it evolved into an easily spread form (and it still could), then it would very likely become a pandemic influenza variant.
Care to point me to any scientific evidence that Tamiflu, Relenza, or any other such drug in the pipeline will save a single person from a pandemic type flu virus?
Sure, because I have nothing better to do with my time than do the research you clearly haven't done yourself.
First of all, Tamiflu has been shown to not only reduce the duration and severity of flu symptoms, but used as a prophylactic, reduces the chances of catching the flu by 74%. Here are some facts to back that up: Go here and enter these PMIDs: 17535069, 17253479, 17115954.
There's tons more out there and anyone willing to get off their butt and do the research can find it. Now granted, there haven't been any large scale trials with H5N1 in people because not that many people have had H5N1. That said, combination therapies in mice with H5N1 have proven quite effective. There's no guarantee it will work in people, but all the evidence suggests that H5N1 is susceptible to neuraminidase inhibitors like Tamiflu will be effective against H5N1. It won't be 100%, but based on the existing data, I suspect it will have a pretty significant impact.
Now, I've done some of your legwork for you. How about you back up this statement: "Even for non-pandemic strains, the evidence that vaccines and antivirals have had any impact of flu death rates is extremely thin." with some evidence of your own.
Really, the fact that it kind of scared the crap out of people has been a good thing. It made everyone realize that we weren't even remotely prepared. The U.S. and other countries are starting to stockpile influenza antivirals like Tamiflu and Relenza. This was something we've been needing to do for a while and the H5N1 scare has really kicked everyone into action.
Sadly, influenza epidemics are a given. It's not a matter of "if", but "when". There were 3 in the last century and they all happened before good antiviral drugs were available. Stockpiling these drugs could very well save hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives. The short-term economic cost of a pandemic would be huge, but it would seem trivial compared to the long-term cost of the loss of 5-10%, or more, of the population.
It's good we're testing these kinds of scenarios, but my biggest concern was the stockpiling and availability of antivirals which, fortunately, seems to be getting much better...
I'm not really a big gamer and haven't really gone for the FPS stuff much after the first Doom. I've played a few games here and there, but there's one game that I've played off and on for 10 years and can't seem to break the addiction, and that's SubSpace (now known as Continuum). I started playing in '97 when Virgin Interactive had it in beta and while I've gone a few years here and there where I haven't played, I still play it pretty often. I can't really say what it is about it that's so appealing to me, but there isn't another game out there (other than maybe solitaire) that I've continually found engaging like Continuum.
This kind of stuff scares me, for the same reason genetically modified food scares me. We're messing with stuff we don't really understand all that well. I lived in Southern Mexico for a few years and at one point, Hurricane Mitch was hanging off the coast. It stayed there for days. But if you looked at the forecasts at the time, they basically said it was coming straight for the town I lived in, in 2 days. But it said that for about 4 or 5 days straight. Then, suddenly, Mitch shot off South and hit Honduras instead.
Now, let's say, armed with that kind of forecast and a hurricane predicted to hit New Orleans is "modified" however they plan to modify it so that it will miss. But it turns out conditions change and the hurricane hits New Orleans BECAUSE they modified it. There's no way to be sure that the modification is what caused it to hit, because as I mentioned earlier, it's something we don't really understand as well as we like to think. Is the team now responsible for the damage to New Orleans? Are they going to pick up the tab?
This is the kind of stuff where we're just as likely to do damage as to avoid it and frankly, I think it's something we're not ready to be messing with at this point.
No, really, accidents happen. It sucks. People get killed in training accidents in the military all the time, though. Planes, helicopter, humvees, etc crash due to human error and humans die. Sometimes there's a software glitch and that kills people. But on the whole, I suspect software does more to protect the soldiers than it does to harm them. At least if you're on the right end of the gun, so to speak.
If this was a computer error though, it's a ridiculously stupid one that should have never happened. They're saying there was a jam, followed by an explosion, followed by the thing firing uncontrollably. There ought to be sensors on the gun to detect damage and if there's any damage it should simply shut down completely. At least in training. During actual war, you might want to risk it, but it certainly seems an unnecessary risk in training.
That said, 9 people is not an enormous number to die in a training accident. It's fairly large, but troop transport helicopters crash now and then killing everyone on board. Shit happens. War (and training for war) is dangerous business by its very nature. Anyone who expects otherwise is simply unrealistic.
"...and the aftermath of natural disasters, such as Katrina."
Dealing with the aftermath of Katrina wasn't a matter of applying rocket science. It was simply a matter of simple logistics and a government that gives a shit about people. Unfortunately, the U.S. government has shown time and again under this administration that it could care less for the lives of its citizens, let alone the citizens of other countries. These problems can't be fixed by software. They can only be fixed by real leadership, something the people of the U.S. haven't shown much interest in electing...
It doesn't take software to predict that going into Iraq was a huge mistake. Just ask Chaney circa 1994. He knew it would be a major mistake, and he wasn't the only one. A lot of us were yelling and screaming to stop it before it started...
Software can't predict the future nor can they predict what stupid leaders will do. On Sept 10th, could anyone (or more importantly, any software) predict what things would be like in this country today? Even remotely? The war in Iraq, a country completely disconnected from 9/11. Guantanamo, spying on our citizens and other erosions of liberty... I doubt it. A single event and the responses by inept leadership led to a variety of disasters that nothing and nobody could have predicted.
While I don't advocate the killing of spammers, it's hard to argue with results.
Liberal softie! Personally, I advocate crucifying spammers on top of fire ant hills. While I generally don't think the death penalty does much for crime prevention, I'd at least find this very satisfying...
From the article: "National Space Centre scientists predict that regular trips into space will be commonplace in the next five years."
What does that mean? Aren't regular trips into space relatively commonplace today? I mean, certainly as much as they will be (more or less) 5 years from now. Or did I miss the mention of the new Hilton Hotel in orbit?
"Researchers say the final version of the flying wing will contain an electronic system that will take care of some of the steering for the pilot which today can be a little tricky, researchers say."
IANAP, but I figure the landings are probably the trickiest, followed by the take-offs. But there's also the issue of avoiding a bunch of other idiots not looking where they're flying while talking on their cell phones that kind has me concerned. Is it going to have radar and a computer that can avoid smashing into these other human missiles as well?
Why not design a time protocol that's peer-to-peer? Most people, like me and probably 99% of the people on the internet, can make due with time being within a few seconds (or frankly, within a couple of minutes) of accuracy, so if you only have a few nodes at the top that actually get the time from NTP and anyone who actually needs really accurate time using NTP, everyone else can share the time.
Seems to me that would get rid of the need for thousands of servers and would suit the needs of most users.
Why bash candidates for not believing in evolution? I don't care if they believe in it or not. What I DO care about, on the other hand, is whether or not they try to push ID or other equally non-scientific "theories" in classrooms as part of the science curriculum.
Religion is about faith and if someone's faith tells them that evolution is simply a trick God is playing on man to test his faith or whatever, that's fine. That's up to individuals to decide for themselves. I wouldn't force my beliefs on Republicans any more than I want them to try to force their beliefs on me. Taking an approach like, "You must be an idiot if you don't believe in evolution," is just as bad as them trying to push ID on us.
In the words of Rodney King, "can't we all just get along?"
I can see our government (U.S.) using this to simply wipe the memories of our enemies. They'll forget why they hate us and we can simply reprogram them the be our buddies. I mean, it's not like the current administration would consider that inhumane. They don't see anything else as inhumane...
I haven't read the details of the study, but here's what's basically going on, from what I can tell so far... MS is a disease in which the immune system attacks the myelin in Schwann cells. Myelin is an "electrical insulator" in the cell membrane of Schwann cells. Schwann cells wrap around the axons of nerve cells in segments and the electrical signal basically jumps across the Schwann cell segments, increasing the speed of conduction. In MS, the body's immune system sees myelin as a foreign invader and attacks it and slowly consumes the myelin, eventually making the nerves non-functional.
The vaccine is actually a virus. It doesn't say specifically in the article, but I suspect it's an adenovirus because they're pretty good for this kind of thing. The DNA sequence for the Myelin basic protein (MBP) is encoded into the virus. There are actually several variants of MBP and I'm curious if they're introducing just one variant or multiple variants. Anyway, MBP is involved in myelination of nerves. I don't think this part is well understood, but in studies of mice where the gene for myelin basic protein has been removed (mice with a certain gene or genes removed are called knockout mice), they develop diseases similar to MS.
Anyway, it's cool stuff and this kind of technology is really the future of treatment for a lot of diseases. There's a protein called p53 that's involved in the normal regulation of cell death and when the gene for P53 gets mutated, it can lead to cancer. p53 is implicated in roughly half of all cancers. One possible treatment is to come up with an virus with a normal p53 gene encoded in it and use that to turn the cancer cells back into normal cells that die properly. There are a host of other genetic based diseases where this kind of thing could be useful as well.
Nefarious implies intent. It means evil. E. coli (you capitalize phylum, class, order, family and genus, but not species) is not sentient, therefore not evil. Furthermore, you're confusing it with a specific variant of E. coli which is pathogenic. Most variants are not pathogenic and in fact, it is the most common of the intestinal bacterial fauna in humans...
Call me a troll, but it's a geek site. Geeks should know geek stuff and proper capitalization of genus and species is definitely a geek subject as is the nature of E. coli).
I've installed Firefox for various family members and made it their default browser. I go back later and see that they've reverted to using IE and I've never really gotten an explanation as to why. Usually they're not sure how it happened.
I know there are a lot of viruses/trojans that install as browser helper objects and thus only affect IE users. I suspect some of these probably revert the default browser back to IE.
Personally, I can't stand IE. But then, I never bothered to upgrade to 7.0. I find the ability to add keywords to bookmarks and pass parameters one of the best features in Mozart, though this is probably a feature that most novices wouldn't be able to figure out how to setup for themselves. I frequently use IMDB, for example and I can type: "imdb [movie name or star name]" and it pops right up. 'g [whatever]" does a google search. "weather [zip code/city name/whatever]" gives me weather for a place. I probably have a half dozen of these that I use regularly. That and the tabbed windows had me hooked.
I can't imagine IE has anything that outdoes that at this point and I'm so happy with Firefox that I just don't bother checking IE out anymore.
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Some researchers at Purdue came up with a technique back in May that's probably better than this. It uses a Gallium/Aluminum alloy. Aluminum, when exposed to water, produces hydrogen and aluminum oxide. Normally aluminum produces an aluminum oxide layer immediately on any exposed surface, preventing further reaction. This alloy doesn't have that problem. It's unclear precisely how much platinum they require for this process from the news release, but Platinum is far more expensive than either Aluminum or Gallium. Another advantage is that the Gallium is unaffected and can be reused, while the aluminum oxide can readily be converted back to pure aluminum through Fused Salt Electrolysis. The cost of aluminum would make the cost of using this more than the equivalent of the current ~$3/gallon of gas. If there were enough demand and, using the recycling method, the cost of aluminum could be brought down to make it cheaper than the current cost of gas, however. Of course, electricity for the electrolysis has its own environmental impact...
I was lamenting the passing of the hobbiest chemistry sets long before 9/11. You can still get them in various places and you can get a fairly wide selection of chemicals from a number of sources, including e-bay. Hell, I even bought some concentrated (70%) nitric acid off of e-bay not more than a year ago.
That said, the decline in hobby-level chemistry sets, as I mentioned before, began with the rise in the "new American Dream." You know, the one where you sue somebody for a million dollars. Liability for selling chemistry sets is, without a doubt, astronomical in these days of knee-jerk litigation... Nobody in their right mind would sell something to children that they could easily kill or wound themselves with, quite easily...
From my own personal history, when I had a chemistry set as a child, it came with glass tubing and an alcohol burner. You used it to heat the tubing and bend it into shapes to connect beakers and what have you together... Well, not being old enough to know better, and not patient enough to wait for the tubing to cool down on its own after bending it, I decided it might be best to cool it off in some water. I consider it fortunate I didn't lose an eye when the glass exploded. And that didn't involve any chemicals... Not that the stuff they provided was terribly dangerous, but it's dangerous enough that it's simply not a viable business anymore, is my point...
I recently bought a SATA hard drive from Best Buy. It was shrink-wrapped and everything, but I got home and inside was a nice old, used, IDE drive. I took it back and they let me exchange it, fortunately. They really need to do better about checking their returns... I'd go somewhere else, but the town where I live doesn't have a lot of alternatives.
I would be willing to bet that over the counter sales of Vista, that is, upgrades and personal new system builders, exceeded that for those of any Linux by a fairly wide margin.
Perhaps true, but as someone who writes software for Windows for a living, I managed for about 2 days with Vista before I was overcome by the overwhelming urge to replace it with XP. It is, by far, the suckiest POS OS I've ever uses and I will do everything I can to avoid ever having to use it. Most people I know have had a similar Vista experience. I don't know a single person who has said, "Wow, Vista has really made my computer so much better." On the other hand, a lot of people who upgrade from Windows 98 to XP did say that about XP.
I don't really care about studies with H5N1 - it's obviously not a pandemic strain (witness the current lack of a pandemic). There is absolutely no evidence that vaccines, or any of the currently approved drugs will have any effect on some future pandemic strain.
You clearly don't know the first thing about this stuff. First of all, it's not a pandemic strain YET. It may never be, but if I had to put money on what the next flu pandemic strain is going to be, my money would be on H5N1 and there are a lot of epidemiologists who would agree. Scientists are the ones pushing the H5N1 scare because it poses an enormous threat.
I not been able to find any evidence that Tamiflu or it's cousins have had any impact on influenza/pneumonia death rates in any country,
Then I guess you just haven't looked. It's as simple as that.
It seems that influenza deaths are so rare it's very difficult to conduct a large enough study to determine if these drugs have any impact on mortality.
About 36,000 people a year die of influenza in the U.S. alone. Flu and Pneumonia are the 7th most common cause of death in the U.S. Which just goes to show that you clearly have no clue what you're talking about.
OK, everybody, repeat after me: That will never, ever happen again.
Sorry, but you're simply wrong. I can't put it any nicer than that. Pandemic influenza happens every several decades. The 1918 was a particularly virulent strain, yes, but H5N1 is fatal in roughly 70% of cases. If it evolves into an easily infectious (for humans) variant, that fatality would likely fall, but there's no telling how much. It might fall a little, it might fall a lot. Depending on how contagious it were to become and how fatal it was, hundreds of millions could die. Maybe just a few million. There's just no way to know. You can't predict evolution that accurately. But to sit there and declare that it simply can't happen again is patently wrong.
Sometimes they are trying to do you a damn favor, idiot.
A lot of people seem bent on thinking the media has been hyping flu pandemic to scare people. And maybe they have. I can't vouch for their motives. But flu pandemics happen. History shows us that flu pandemics have happened and anyone who thinks they won't continue happening, simply doesn't know anything about flu pandemics. They're as inevitable as winter. They may not happen as regularly, but they happen often enough. There were 3 flu pandemics in the 20th century, the weakest killing only perhaps 750,000 people and the most virulent killing nearly 40 million.
People (and by people, I don't mean the media, but actual scientists) are worried about H5N1, not because it is spreading quickly to people, it isn't. They are scared because it is spreading to some people and it is fatal in the vast majority of cases (~70%, currently). For people who don't actually know anything about H5N1, wikipedia actually has a pretty good article on it and why people (scientists) are scared about it.
What is already available, will likely not be effective against a pandemic because the reason the flu is pandemic, is because it is able to bypass all available methods of treatment/prevention.
That's just wrong. Flu pandemics don't happen because of vaccines working or not working. Flu pandemics started before vaccines existed and didn't become any less frequent after their creation. In fact, they've only appear to be getting more common because of easier access to the world (flight) and increasing overcrowding in urban areas.
Flu pandemics happen because a particularly virulent strain of the flu evolves. Sometimes it's the evolution of an existing human-infectious strain (like the H1N1 subtype that caused the Spanish Flu pandemic from 1918-1920) or from crossing over from animals (like the avian H2N2 subtype caused the Asian Flu pandemic in '57). The former happened before flu vaccines existed. The latter, after flu vaccines.
Granted, coming up with a vaccine for a pandemic strain would be helpful, but it's unlikely to happen in time because they tend to spread faster than normal flu strains (because of their increased virulence). I don't want to get into the whole thing about how flu strains are chosen for a vaccine and how vaccines works, but suffice it to say, vaccines are usually for several strains that already exist and are predicted to be the most likely to be widely spread, but because it takes so long to incubate the vaccine, the flu must be relatively slow-spreading.
Pandemic influenza strains, on the other hand, spread very quickly. Far too quickly for a vaccine to be created in time. We worried about the H5N1 avian variant because it was very deadly. We can't start creating a vaccine for it until it has evolved into a variant that is easily spread from human to human. Well, that's not entirely true. We could, but it probably wouldn't be effective against the easily spread variant. The vast majority of cases in people (if not all) of H5N1 were from direct contact with infected animals, but it was not easily spread. Had it evolved into an easily spread form (and it still could), then it would very likely become a pandemic influenza variant.
Care to point me to any scientific evidence that Tamiflu, Relenza, or any other such drug in the pipeline will save a single person from a pandemic type flu virus?
Sure, because I have nothing better to do with my time than do the research you clearly haven't done yourself.
First of all, Tamiflu has been shown to not only reduce the duration and severity of flu symptoms, but used as a prophylactic, reduces the chances of catching the flu by 74%. Here are some facts to back that up: Go here and enter these PMIDs: 17535069, 17253479, 17115954.
There's tons more out there and anyone willing to get off their butt and do the research can find it. Now granted, there haven't been any large scale trials with H5N1 in people because not that many people have had H5N1. That said, combination therapies in mice with H5N1 have proven quite effective. There's no guarantee it will work in people, but all the evidence suggests that H5N1 is susceptible to neuraminidase inhibitors like Tamiflu will be effective against H5N1. It won't be 100%, but based on the existing data, I suspect it will have a pretty significant impact.
Now, I've done some of your legwork for you. How about you back up this statement: "Even for non-pandemic strains, the evidence that vaccines and antivirals have had any impact of flu death rates is extremely thin." with some evidence of your own.
Really, the fact that it kind of scared the crap out of people has been a good thing. It made everyone realize that we weren't even remotely prepared. The U.S. and other countries are starting to stockpile influenza antivirals like Tamiflu and Relenza. This was something we've been needing to do for a while and the H5N1 scare has really kicked everyone into action.
Sadly, influenza epidemics are a given. It's not a matter of "if", but "when". There were 3 in the last century and they all happened before good antiviral drugs were available. Stockpiling these drugs could very well save hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives. The short-term economic cost of a pandemic would be huge, but it would seem trivial compared to the long-term cost of the loss of 5-10%, or more, of the population.
It's good we're testing these kinds of scenarios, but my biggest concern was the stockpiling and availability of antivirals which, fortunately, seems to be getting much better...
I'm not really a big gamer and haven't really gone for the FPS stuff much after the first Doom. I've played a few games here and there, but there's one game that I've played off and on for 10 years and can't seem to break the addiction, and that's SubSpace (now known as Continuum). I started playing in '97 when Virgin Interactive had it in beta and while I've gone a few years here and there where I haven't played, I still play it pretty often. I can't really say what it is about it that's so appealing to me, but there isn't another game out there (other than maybe solitaire) that I've continually found engaging like Continuum.
This kind of stuff scares me, for the same reason genetically modified food scares me. We're messing with stuff we don't really understand all that well. I lived in Southern Mexico for a few years and at one point, Hurricane Mitch was hanging off the coast. It stayed there for days. But if you looked at the forecasts at the time, they basically said it was coming straight for the town I lived in, in 2 days. But it said that for about 4 or 5 days straight. Then, suddenly, Mitch shot off South and hit Honduras instead.
Now, let's say, armed with that kind of forecast and a hurricane predicted to hit New Orleans is "modified" however they plan to modify it so that it will miss. But it turns out conditions change and the hurricane hits New Orleans BECAUSE they modified it. There's no way to be sure that the modification is what caused it to hit, because as I mentioned earlier, it's something we don't really understand as well as we like to think. Is the team now responsible for the damage to New Orleans? Are they going to pick up the tab?
This is the kind of stuff where we're just as likely to do damage as to avoid it and frankly, I think it's something we're not ready to be messing with at this point.
"...and having direct access to other players' cards allowed him to improve his game substantially."
Yeah, I find knowing the other players cards helps my game as well. Go figure...
No, really, accidents happen. It sucks. People get killed in training accidents in the military all the time, though. Planes, helicopter, humvees, etc crash due to human error and humans die. Sometimes there's a software glitch and that kills people. But on the whole, I suspect software does more to protect the soldiers than it does to harm them. At least if you're on the right end of the gun, so to speak.
If this was a computer error though, it's a ridiculously stupid one that should have never happened. They're saying there was a jam, followed by an explosion, followed by the thing firing uncontrollably. There ought to be sensors on the gun to detect damage and if there's any damage it should simply shut down completely. At least in training. During actual war, you might want to risk it, but it certainly seems an unnecessary risk in training.
That said, 9 people is not an enormous number to die in a training accident. It's fairly large, but troop transport helicopters crash now and then killing everyone on board. Shit happens. War (and training for war) is dangerous business by its very nature. Anyone who expects otherwise is simply unrealistic.
"...and the aftermath of natural disasters, such as Katrina."
Dealing with the aftermath of Katrina wasn't a matter of applying rocket science. It was simply a matter of simple logistics and a government that gives a shit about people. Unfortunately, the U.S. government has shown time and again under this administration that it could care less for the lives of its citizens, let alone the citizens of other countries. These problems can't be fixed by software. They can only be fixed by real leadership, something the people of the U.S. haven't shown much interest in electing...
It doesn't take software to predict that going into Iraq was a huge mistake. Just ask Chaney circa 1994. He knew it would be a major mistake, and he wasn't the only one. A lot of us were yelling and screaming to stop it before it started...
Software can't predict the future nor can they predict what stupid leaders will do. On Sept 10th, could anyone (or more importantly, any software) predict what things would be like in this country today? Even remotely? The war in Iraq, a country completely disconnected from 9/11. Guantanamo, spying on our citizens and other erosions of liberty... I doubt it. A single event and the responses by inept leadership led to a variety of disasters that nothing and nobody could have predicted.
While I don't advocate the killing of spammers, it's hard to argue with results.
Liberal softie! Personally, I advocate crucifying spammers on top of fire ant hills. While I generally don't think the death penalty does much for crime prevention, I'd at least find this very satisfying...
From the article: "National Space Centre scientists predict that regular trips into space will be commonplace in the next five years."
What does that mean? Aren't regular trips into space relatively commonplace today? I mean, certainly as much as they will be (more or less) 5 years from now. Or did I miss the mention of the new Hilton Hotel in orbit?
If there are an infinite number of parallel universes for each possible quantum outcome, why do we only experience -this- one?
I don't understand why so many people responded to the initial poster of this question. He left our universe shortly after he wrote this.
"Researchers say the final version of the flying wing will contain an electronic system that will take care of some of the steering for the pilot which today can be a little tricky, researchers say."
IANAP, but I figure the landings are probably the trickiest, followed by the take-offs. But there's also the issue of avoiding a bunch of other idiots not looking where they're flying while talking on their cell phones that kind has me concerned. Is it going to have radar and a computer that can avoid smashing into these other human missiles as well?
Why not design a time protocol that's peer-to-peer? Most people, like me and probably 99% of the people on the internet, can make due with time being within a few seconds (or frankly, within a couple of minutes) of accuracy, so if you only have a few nodes at the top that actually get the time from NTP and anyone who actually needs really accurate time using NTP, everyone else can share the time.
Seems to me that would get rid of the need for thousands of servers and would suit the needs of most users.
Why bash candidates for not believing in evolution? I don't care if they believe in it or not. What I DO care about, on the other hand, is whether or not they try to push ID or other equally non-scientific "theories" in classrooms as part of the science curriculum.
Religion is about faith and if someone's faith tells them that evolution is simply a trick God is playing on man to test his faith or whatever, that's fine. That's up to individuals to decide for themselves. I wouldn't force my beliefs on Republicans any more than I want them to try to force their beliefs on me. Taking an approach like, "You must be an idiot if you don't believe in evolution," is just as bad as them trying to push ID on us.
In the words of Rodney King, "can't we all just get along?"
I can see our government (U.S.) using this to simply wipe the memories of our enemies. They'll forget why they hate us and we can simply reprogram them the be our buddies. I mean, it's not like the current administration would consider that inhumane. They don't see anything else as inhumane...
I haven't read the details of the study, but here's what's basically going on, from what I can tell so far... MS is a disease in which the immune system attacks the myelin in Schwann cells. Myelin is an "electrical insulator" in the cell membrane of Schwann cells. Schwann cells wrap around the axons of nerve cells in segments and the electrical signal basically jumps across the Schwann cell segments, increasing the speed of conduction. In MS, the body's immune system sees myelin as a foreign invader and attacks it and slowly consumes the myelin, eventually making the nerves non-functional.
The vaccine is actually a virus. It doesn't say specifically in the article, but I suspect it's an adenovirus because they're pretty good for this kind of thing. The DNA sequence for the Myelin basic protein (MBP) is encoded into the virus. There are actually several variants of MBP and I'm curious if they're introducing just one variant or multiple variants. Anyway, MBP is involved in myelination of nerves. I don't think this part is well understood, but in studies of mice where the gene for myelin basic protein has been removed (mice with a certain gene or genes removed are called knockout mice), they develop diseases similar to MS.
Anyway, it's cool stuff and this kind of technology is really the future of treatment for a lot of diseases. There's a protein called p53 that's involved in the normal regulation of cell death and when the gene for P53 gets mutated, it can lead to cancer. p53 is implicated in roughly half of all cancers. One possible treatment is to come up with an virus with a normal p53 gene encoded in it and use that to turn the cancer cells back into normal cells that die properly. There are a host of other genetic based diseases where this kind of thing could be useful as well.
...including the nefarious E.Coli bacteria.
Nefarious implies intent. It means evil. E. coli (you capitalize phylum, class, order, family and genus, but not species) is not sentient, therefore not evil. Furthermore, you're confusing it with a specific variant of E. coli which is pathogenic. Most variants are not pathogenic and in fact, it is the most common of the intestinal bacterial fauna in humans...
Call me a troll, but it's a geek site. Geeks should know geek stuff and proper capitalization of genus and species is definitely a geek subject as is the nature of E. coli).
I've installed Firefox for various family members and made it their default browser. I go back later and see that they've reverted to using IE and I've never really gotten an explanation as to why. Usually they're not sure how it happened.
I know there are a lot of viruses/trojans that install as browser helper objects and thus only affect IE users. I suspect some of these probably revert the default browser back to IE.
Personally, I can't stand IE. But then, I never bothered to upgrade to 7.0. I find the ability to add keywords to bookmarks and pass parameters one of the best features in Mozart, though this is probably a feature that most novices wouldn't be able to figure out how to setup for themselves. I frequently use IMDB, for example and I can type: "imdb [movie name or star name]" and it pops right up. 'g [whatever]" does a google search. "weather [zip code/city name/whatever]" gives me weather for a place. I probably have a half dozen of these that I use regularly. That and the tabbed windows had me hooked.
I can't imagine IE has anything that outdoes that at this point and I'm so happy with Firefox that I just don't bother checking IE out anymore.