Presumably at some point the clone tanks get blown up, or maybe conscripts ended up being cheaper than clones.

Although it would be more interesting if some random strain of the common flu ended up adapting itself perfectly to that nice monoculture of Fetts, and killed them all off (except for Boba, who got a flu shot).

Practically, the EU branch of their offices needs to be little more than a cubicle with a lawyer and desk.

But oddly enough, on paper it seems a huge portion of Google "exists" in the EU, legally speaking. As far as revenues and expenses go, a huge portion of Google's revenues and expenses are "generated" there, (specifically, Ireland), thanks to an international tax dodge.

Ever try debugging without having something like a log-file available?

No, no. Definitely capable of at least two threads, since when I get a boner my brain still manages to spare processing power to continue breathing. Although if I were to try chewing gum at the same time, there could be trouble.

Any chance we'll be seeing variable frame rate technologies like G-sync / Freesync on the Occulus? There have been some rumors, but I don't think there's been any definitive official announcement yet.

My money is on the sugar/syrup itself, acting through the insulin-like growth factor system. There is substantial evidence that decreased IGF activity lengthens lifespan and reduces cancer risk, while increased activity drives increased cell-division activity and apoptosis.

Found it: http://ajph.aphapublications.o...
"Soda and Cell Aging: Associations Between Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Consumption and Leukocyte Telomere Length in Healthy Adults From the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys"

I would posit that the problem is not that the currently infected individual faces any fate worse than death.

The problem is that lack of high-quality data may forestall the development of more effective therapies, which means you are condemning people infected in the future to death. This latter group seems abstract and hazy, compared to the concrete suffering we can see before us, but eventually the future becomes the now, and we'll have to deal with it.

Researchers may well end up heading down blind alleys, trying to optimize ineffective strategies that end up sucking up resources (money, scientists, labs, mindshare). The history of medicine is full of useless or even harmful therapies that were developed without the benefit of rigorous clinical trials -- difficult to treat conditions like cancer were especially prone to this phenomenon (for instance, the radical mastectomy procedure for breast cancer -- painful, disfiguring and debilitating, developed during an age of heroic surgery... a "gold standard" treatment yet much much later proven to offer no survival benefit in the majority of situations).

Just in case anyone is curious, here is the actual paper: http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/...

Neither the summary or the linked article use the term, but what they're using is known as "convalescent serum". As the parent poster stated above, it's been in use for over a century now, but has only fallen out of fashion in modern times -- mainly because it has been superseded by vaccines and anti-infectives that are cheaper, more reliable, more convenient, and easier to mass-produce.

Trivia note: While Type-O may be the universal blood donor, the ideal serum donor is Type AB.

It's not used much today, because we've largely conquered the disease agents that such an approach works against. Typically, it works well against infectious agents which are highly vulnerable to a Humoral (antibody-mediated) immune response. Co-incidentally, this also means most vaccines work extremely well against those same disease agents. Unfortunately, Ebola doesn't yet have a commercially available vaccine, but I would expect such a vaccine to work well.

There are only a few examples in the West where we still use this approach -- one that I can think of, is the use of anti-HepB sera in infants born to infected mothers, and for emergency prophylaxis of needlestick injuries involving Hepatitis B exposure. For the bulk of the population, Hepatitis B vaccination works well enough (and is far cheaper).

What it doesn't work well against, are infectious agents that don't respond well to natural antibody defenses. For instance, most anti-HIV antibodies do not defend well against HIV, anti-HepC antibodies do not protect against Hepatitis C, nor do anti-TB antibodies protect against Tuberculosis. For those agents, an effective response depends on cell-mediated immunity.

If you follow the money, it'll lead back to a grant funded by the Federal government (in this case, both the U.S. and Canadian governments).

Ebola therapeutics were (and probably still are) anticipated to be a profit-less product segment, as far as the civilian commercial market is concerned. The affected population can't afford any resulting product, plus previous outbreaks were sporadic with small numbers of fatalities. The only potential "customers" -- at the time research was initiated over a decade ago -- were governments who might be interested in stockpiling treatments for future bio-defense use.

Now, a few of the large pharmaceutical companies still maintain and fund tropical-diseases divisions, despite the lack of profitability (for instance, Glaxo's division is largely a legacy of British Colonial days, which they've carried ever since). But I highly doubt a small biotech like Mapp Biopharm would ever do so without being paid most of the cost up-front.

That's actually pretty generous. Usually I hear 4chan referred to in the context of it being another kind of "hole" of the internet.

I wouldn't be surprised if they are. Of course, they are likely also anticipating that long-term, the flow of cash will turn the other way around.

As time go on, this will even out. While the ranks of older physicians are male-dominated, females make up just slightly under half the medical school class in the US. In parts of Europe, they already make up the majority:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03...