Thanks, I didn't know all of that. Does this also have something to do with HCV's ability to "hide" in organs other than the liver? I've been active with the American Liver Foundation and I'm hearing that doctors are starting to prescribe the anti-HCV drugs for longer terms than originally prescribed, as well as combining drugs (like Sovaldi and Daklinza) because of this "stickiness".
The major problem with HIV is that it's a retrovirus.
HCV, like HIV is an RNA virus. HCV can also stay dormant for decades. They used to think that HCV only attacked liver cells, but now they're learning it can "hide" in other organs and structures.
The difference between a retrovirus and flavivirus is less than you think.
It's included for blood donation, but what I'm saying is it should be included in regular blood work. I've heard that as many as 10% of certain age groups might be infected.
I know a couple of people who have lived for decades with HIV. Both are hemophiliacs and got the virus before there was testing of the blood supply. They both lived in the same region of the US and caught the virus about the same time. They have to take tons of medicines to stay alive and they're already being treated for hemophilia, so it sucks for them. If they can finally get cured, that would be great. They're really good people.
It sounds like this new antibody works a little bit like the various treatments they have for Hepatitis C. There are multiple genotypes of HepC and not all the drugs work for all the genotypes, but the medicines interfere with some protein or something and causes the HepC virus to not be able to "hide" from the immune system and it just ends up getting killed off. Completely. A disease that until 2014 couldn't be cured now has a treatment that is 90% effective. One pill a day for 12 to 24 weeks and virtually no side effects. And done. Cure. Completely. Unfortunately it costs like a quarter-million dollars so insurance companies won't let you have the treatment without a fight. They will first say no unless you have at least Stage 4 fibrosis (the stage before your liver starts dying), and then they make you jump through hoops and get multiple blood tests and ultrasounds and sometimes even liver needle biopsies (which actually damage the liver). Then, they'll deny you one more time hoping to run out the clock until you die. But if you have a good GI doctor, he'll go to bat for you and keep sending the prescription until it gets approved.
To give you an idea how stupid our insurance-based system is, it's not even the insurance company that's denying you. It's a company that the insurance company hires called a "Pharmacy Benefits Manager" who are even harder to deal with than the insurance company. Then, they'll do completely random things like force you to use a different specialty pharmacy to get the meds (because you can't get these meds at your regular Walgreens, you have to go through a specialty pharmacy who will deliver the drugs to you, because every bottle of 30 pills is worth like $60,000. It's all really stupid. In Canada, the treatment is a small fraction of the cost. In India, it costs about $400 (but medical tourism doesn't work because the pharma companies have cut a deal with the Indian government to require people to show an Indian passport before they can receive the medication).
I know all this because a musician I play with on a regular basis had HepC. He was getting sicker and sicker and my wife and I helped him a lot dealing with the insurance companies and pharmacy benefits managers and special pharmacies. The freaking medicine acted remarkably fast. Within 4 weeks, a guy who had been positive for HepC for 25 years was coming up negative for the virus on his blood tests. He felt better after only a few weeks. After 24 weeks, he was done. After another few months, he was tested, still negative. Since the liver regenerates, within 8 months, his fibrosis had gone from level 4 to level 3 to 2 and is now at level 1. Yes, it cost the insurance company a couple hundred grand (although it really didn't because the pharma companies make special deals with them where it only really costs a few grand) but it's still a LOT less than a liver transplant, which he would have needed eventually, or liver cancer treatment, which sucks really bad.
I'm sorry to write this long story, but a cure is a cure. I hope eventually they can cure HIV as easily as they can now cure HCV. And if you're a baby boomer or Gen Xer, you should get tested for HepC the next time you get blood drawn. You don't want to wait until your symptomatic to find out you got it.
It's almost as if the editors aren't actually nerds.
Are you kidding? This is one of the nerdiest posts I've seen on Slashdot in a while. I'm re-reading the passage from TFA below, and I cannot imagine how it could be much nerdier.
"Scullion's first upload is a promotional tape for Super Mario All-Stars, given away by Nintendo UK in 1993. It's hosted by Craig Charles, who played Lister in the British sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf. Digitizing his collection keeps that sweet nostalgia content safe from degradation of the magnetic tape, which starts to go downhill within 10 to 25 years. He's capturing them in HD using a 1080p upscaler, at a full 50fps frame rate by converting to HDMI before grabbing "
I like how the Bloomberg article attributes the mediocre reviews of Apple products to "grumpy reviewers". Because of course, it's not possible that Apple's offerings could ever actually be mediocre.
I get your point, but we're talking about a much more mature company in Apple. They weren't always printing money. I'm pretty sure Tesla will be around for a while (no matter what I might think of their cars). Let's see what the comparison is like in 10-15 years.
"For the full year 2016, Jaguar Land Rover U.S. sales were up 24 percent to 105,104 units sold, compared to 85,048 units sold in 2015." That's one model in one country (total 487,065 vehicles in 160 countries), compared to Tesla's entire global portfolio. (76,230).
No, it's not "one model in one country". You're counting all the Jaguars and Range Rovers and Land Rovers. I'm counting just the Jags (which sold around 30,000 in the US last year). Tesla sold over 50,000 in the US last year.
I figured they're a good comparison because they have similar price points to Tesla.
Tesla built a little over 80,000 cars last year, and 60% of them were sold in the US. For comparison, that's about double the number of Jaguars sold in the US last year.
yet SEIU (the I being International) with its highest offices being, well, INTERNATIONAL
SEIU headquarters is in Washington DC. Its highest offices are not, well, INTERNATIONAL, silly. It has one (1) local in Canada (affiliated with the Canadian Labour Congress). It is registered as a non-profit corporation in the United States.
Ah yes, I forgot to calculate our overt addiction with buying never-go-offroad vehicles large enough to be considered military battlefield transport. I stand corrected.
Oh man, I just moved out of Houston, Texas, and the average vehicle had to go better than 6,000 lbs. I've never seen trucks so big in my life, and you can see from the pristine pickup beds that they've never carried anything but groceries. Since people who live in Texas have to constantly try to convince themselves that they like it there, special "Texas Package" models of these trucks are sold by all dealers. This means some variation on the longhorn symbol put on every flat surface of the vehicle, which probably adds another 500 lbs to the total weight. And did I mention that the average weight of a Texan is approximately 400 lbs soaking wet (which they usually are, considering Houston has ungodly heat and humidity).
I believe Hell is having to drive on Houston highways for eternity, with people who have come to believe that driving a truck the size of a locomotive allows them to express all of their inner aggression.
I am actually open to the suggestion that foreigners should be able to influence US elections; but only provided that it is done transparently.
That's worthy of discussion. As long as every dollar that goes into American politics is directly attributable to a human being (not a corporation!). And I mean every dollar. No more pretending that there is some difference between ads that talk about issues with ads that talk about candidates. There should be disclosure of all political money, period. Give me that, and I may be open to foreigners influencing our elections.
Unfortunately, the people in power benefit from obfuscating the sources of their funding, so it will not happen until people start to demand it.
What do you think, when Google bought the HTC employees, do you think they made them strip naked and then had an auction?
Tech workers, you have no idea how precarious your world is. You may think you're on top of the whole capitalism game, but when push comes to shove, you're going to get the shit end of the feudalism stick like everyone else who works for a living.
How can Facebook ads still be in the US when they offshore pretty much all profits to dodge taxes?
Because Facebook is an American company, they are subject to the laws of the United States. At least in theory. Do you think the Trump DOJ has any appetite for enforcing this particular law? I don't.
Obama had 8 years to clean that up and chose not to because he was the high money guy in 2008.
When Obama was president, there was a law in place to cover disclosure of campaign money. It was called McCain-Finegold and got overturned the by the Supreme Court, after which the Republicans took over the House and as I said, then there was no will to pass any laws requiring disclosure of campaign funding.
but, let me guess, it's totally OK for a foreign national to make a donation to a super-pac, right?
No, it's against the law. Unfortunately, Congress has never implemented the disclosure laws that the Supreme Court insisted upon with their Citizens United decision. It's a fucked up situation all around, and there's been zero will from the Republican-controlled Congress to do anything about how easy it is to game our elections with money.
It's been illegal for foreign nationals to purchase campaign ads for US elections since 1972. It's even illegal to sell campaign ads to foreign nationals (putting Facebook in some jeopardy in the event the Justice Department decides to enforce the law).
The letter from Dems to the FEC is a request for information from the commission explaining how they're going to meet this legal obligation in regard to social media advertising.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, I didn't know all of that. Does this also have something to do with HCV's ability to "hide" in organs other than the liver? I've been active with the American Liver Foundation and I'm hearing that doctors are starting to prescribe the anti-HCV drugs for longer terms than originally prescribed, as well as combining drugs (like Sovaldi and Daklinza) because of this "stickiness".
HCV, like HIV is an RNA virus. HCV can also stay dormant for decades. They used to think that HCV only attacked liver cells, but now they're learning it can "hide" in other organs and structures.
The difference between a retrovirus and flavivirus is less than you think.
It's included for blood donation, but what I'm saying is it should be included in regular blood work. I've heard that as many as 10% of certain age groups might be infected.
I know a couple of people who have lived for decades with HIV. Both are hemophiliacs and got the virus before there was testing of the blood supply. They both lived in the same region of the US and caught the virus about the same time. They have to take tons of medicines to stay alive and they're already being treated for hemophilia, so it sucks for them. If they can finally get cured, that would be great. They're really good people.
It sounds like this new antibody works a little bit like the various treatments they have for Hepatitis C. There are multiple genotypes of HepC and not all the drugs work for all the genotypes, but the medicines interfere with some protein or something and causes the HepC virus to not be able to "hide" from the immune system and it just ends up getting killed off. Completely. A disease that until 2014 couldn't be cured now has a treatment that is 90% effective. One pill a day for 12 to 24 weeks and virtually no side effects. And done. Cure. Completely. Unfortunately it costs like a quarter-million dollars so insurance companies won't let you have the treatment without a fight. They will first say no unless you have at least Stage 4 fibrosis (the stage before your liver starts dying), and then they make you jump through hoops and get multiple blood tests and ultrasounds and sometimes even liver needle biopsies (which actually damage the liver). Then, they'll deny you one more time hoping to run out the clock until you die. But if you have a good GI doctor, he'll go to bat for you and keep sending the prescription until it gets approved.
To give you an idea how stupid our insurance-based system is, it's not even the insurance company that's denying you. It's a company that the insurance company hires called a "Pharmacy Benefits Manager" who are even harder to deal with than the insurance company. Then, they'll do completely random things like force you to use a different specialty pharmacy to get the meds (because you can't get these meds at your regular Walgreens, you have to go through a specialty pharmacy who will deliver the drugs to you, because every bottle of 30 pills is worth like $60,000. It's all really stupid. In Canada, the treatment is a small fraction of the cost. In India, it costs about $400 (but medical tourism doesn't work because the pharma companies have cut a deal with the Indian government to require people to show an Indian passport before they can receive the medication).
I know all this because a musician I play with on a regular basis had HepC. He was getting sicker and sicker and my wife and I helped him a lot dealing with the insurance companies and pharmacy benefits managers and special pharmacies. The freaking medicine acted remarkably fast. Within 4 weeks, a guy who had been positive for HepC for 25 years was coming up negative for the virus on his blood tests. He felt better after only a few weeks. After 24 weeks, he was done. After another few months, he was tested, still negative. Since the liver regenerates, within 8 months, his fibrosis had gone from level 4 to level 3 to 2 and is now at level 1. Yes, it cost the insurance company a couple hundred grand (although it really didn't because the pharma companies make special deals with them where it only really costs a few grand) but it's still a LOT less than a liver transplant, which he would have needed eventually, or liver cancer treatment, which sucks really bad.
I'm sorry to write this long story, but a cure is a cure. I hope eventually they can cure HIV as easily as they can now cure HCV. And if you're a baby boomer or Gen Xer, you should get tested for HepC the next time you get blood drawn. You don't want to wait until your symptomatic to find out you got it.
I need Walmart to deliver groceries straight into my belly.
I like the Red Hat Chili Peppers.
Are you kidding? This is one of the nerdiest posts I've seen on Slashdot in a while. I'm re-reading the passage from TFA below, and I cannot imagine how it could be much nerdier.
I like how the Bloomberg article attributes the mediocre reviews of Apple products to "grumpy reviewers". Because of course, it's not possible that Apple's offerings could ever actually be mediocre.
I get your point, but we're talking about a much more mature company in Apple. They weren't always printing money. I'm pretty sure Tesla will be around for a while (no matter what I might think of their cars). Let's see what the comparison is like in 10-15 years.
You answered your own question. Tesla is the Apple of cars.
No, it's not "one model in one country". You're counting all the Jaguars and Range Rovers and Land Rovers. I'm counting just the Jags (which sold around 30,000 in the US last year). Tesla sold over 50,000 in the US last year.
I figured they're a good comparison because they have similar price points to Tesla.
Tesla built a little over 80,000 cars last year, and 60% of them were sold in the US. For comparison, that's about double the number of Jaguars sold in the US last year.
SEIU headquarters is in Washington DC. Its highest offices are not, well, INTERNATIONAL, silly. It has one (1) local in Canada (affiliated with the Canadian Labour Congress). It is registered as a non-profit corporation in the United States.
We even have a photo of Donald Trump pointing out his accomplishments.
https://cdn.theatlantic.com/as...
Oh man, I just moved out of Houston, Texas, and the average vehicle had to go better than 6,000 lbs. I've never seen trucks so big in my life, and you can see from the pristine pickup beds that they've never carried anything but groceries. Since people who live in Texas have to constantly try to convince themselves that they like it there, special "Texas Package" models of these trucks are sold by all dealers. This means some variation on the longhorn symbol put on every flat surface of the vehicle, which probably adds another 500 lbs to the total weight. And did I mention that the average weight of a Texan is approximately 400 lbs soaking wet (which they usually are, considering Houston has ungodly heat and humidity).
I believe Hell is having to drive on Houston highways for eternity, with people who have come to believe that driving a truck the size of a locomotive allows them to express all of their inner aggression.
OK, now we're gonna have to fight.
That's worthy of discussion. As long as every dollar that goes into American politics is directly attributable to a human being (not a corporation!). And I mean every dollar. No more pretending that there is some difference between ads that talk about issues with ads that talk about candidates. There should be disclosure of all political money, period. Give me that, and I may be open to foreigners influencing our elections.
Unfortunately, the people in power benefit from obfuscating the sources of their funding, so it will not happen until people start to demand it.
It is significantly different. In 2000 we had campaign finance laws.
If they bought campaign ads, they broke the law.
What do you think, when Google bought the HTC employees, do you think they made them strip naked and then had an auction?
Tech workers, you have no idea how precarious your world is. You may think you're on top of the whole capitalism game, but when push comes to shove, you're going to get the shit end of the feudalism stick like everyone else who works for a living.
Because Facebook is an American company, they are subject to the laws of the United States. At least in theory. Do you think the Trump DOJ has any appetite for enforcing this particular law? I don't.
Are you advocating for civil rights for foreign nationals? Does that extend to illegal immigrants?
When Obama was president, there was a law in place to cover disclosure of campaign money. It was called McCain-Finegold and got overturned the by the Supreme Court, after which the Republicans took over the House and as I said, then there was no will to pass any laws requiring disclosure of campaign funding.
No, it's against the law. Unfortunately, Congress has never implemented the disclosure laws that the Supreme Court insisted upon with their Citizens United decision. It's a fucked up situation all around, and there's been zero will from the Republican-controlled Congress to do anything about how easy it is to game our elections with money.
It's been illegal for foreign nationals to purchase campaign ads for US elections since 1972. It's even illegal to sell campaign ads to foreign nationals (putting Facebook in some jeopardy in the event the Justice Department decides to enforce the law).
The letter from Dems to the FEC is a request for information from the commission explaining how they're going to meet this legal obligation in regard to social media advertising.