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Comment Re:Science moving forward...country moving backwar (Score 1) 36

The big difference is the profit motive in the absence of a truly free market.

The big difference is the requirement to test them to make sure they work. It's expensive, and most candidates fail.

This is potentially the biggest strenth of a vaccine approach. According to the Internet the flu vaccine costs my government an average of $5.43 cents. Individuals can get it for under $100 in most parts of the world where you have to pay the full cost. The reason it's not stupid expensive, being a new drug with novel components most years, is because the procedure for making flu vaccines is well known and has a special type of approval that lets new variations be used without extensive trials.

Comment Re: Science moving forward...country moving backwa (Score 2) 36

It's not particularly difficult to determine the protein that a bit of DNA codes for. It's more difficult to figure out which of those are going to be reasonable antigens to target, but you don't really have to. Cancer cells aren't unknown pathogens, they're regular old human cells with mutations.

You don't need to do that either though. Cancer mutations aren't infinitely diverse. "Personalized medicine" sounds like a treatment just for you and you alone, and maybe in a Star Trek future it will be, but in the meantime it means a targeted treatment. You'd identify something that occurs in 10% or 1% or 0.01% of a particular type of cancers, make a treatment, and sell that along with a test for that mutation. We've already got several of those based on more traditional immunotherapy. RNA vaccines just make it a lot easier so we'll have lot more options, including ones that target the 1% and 0.01% instead of just the 10%.

Comment Re:I can see the point. (Score 1) 55

USENET was never this bad.

The audience for USENET and slashdot was about 400 times smaller than the people participating in broader social media. It was much harder for a critical mass of fringe ideas/susceptible people to coalesce into isolated circles when the population was just so tiny.

Comment Re:Huh. Do nothing = win? (Score 2) 26

Oh should this bubble pop, it will take out a *lot* with it.

A lot of tech companies have effectively retooled themselves so they don't know how to keep being a functional business without the AI hype spending.

The level of dedication to the LLM game dwarfs the dot-com bubble, and so too will the negative consequences...

Comment Re:Not enough to make a difference (Score 1) 17

It's the boiling frog approach to revenue. Start at an attractive rate and increase it by 'no big deal' until eventually it would be a big deal.

See also, microtransactions.

Companies have learned that customers barely pay attention to the absolute costs, and just note the incrementals they incur in the moment.

Comment Re: Meanwhile (Score 1) 67

Typical "but it works for me, and everyone else is a fool. Ãoe reply.

I am a systems biologist regularly handles tons of genetic, spectroscopic and clinical data. I often want to use a spreadsheet to look at data structure, even it is only to write extraction and curation scripts

Excel is dumpster with a hole rusted through the bottom leaving a trail of garbage everywhere it goes.

"A programmatic scan of leading genomics journals reveals that approximately one-fifth of papers with supplementary Excel gene lists contain erroneous gene name conversions."

https://link.springer.com/arti...

I think it might even be more errors in Excel than 1/5th, but I'll go with your cite.

I like a nice spreadsheet - I use them for design applications in electronics. But some of the stuff I've seen bean counters and a few others always evoke the "Hold on a second, something's not right here!" response.

But many people believe that if it is in Excel, it is correct.

Comment Re: Meanwhile (Score 1) 67

Typical "but it works for me, and everyone else is a fool. âoe reply.

I am a systems biologist regularly handles tons of genetic, spectroscopic and clinical data. I often want to use a spreadsheet to look at data structure, even it is only to write extraction and curation scripts. As much I hate Excel, I have repeatedly seen the Calc is crappier and especially so on MacOS.

People have different requirements and priorities. And MS Office as a whole is like 60 bucks a year. Well worth it to avoid the catastrophe that is Impress. FWIW, Writer seems the least bad component of Libreoffice for my use cases.

You mad bro? You never heard "A fool and his Money are soon parted?

I apologize profusely for introducing humor into a place with humorless people. May you always have to use software you hate.

Comment Re:Meanwhile (Score 1) 67

Also I almost laughed at that one: "Google's free Sheets product, launched in 2006, captured casual use cases like potluck sign-ups but failed to dislodge Excel from enterprise work"... Google apps were excellent for a V1. We've been waiting for a V2 ever since. It is terribly lacking in functionality.

I tried it once ugh - not ready fro prime time. One of my guys seems to love it, he must have a really low bar. I have people on Windows, Mac and Linux. And Microsoft has no solution for that. Unless things have changed a lot, Windows office doesn't do well when trading files. I remember when people were making posters in Poerpoint, the files they made were on a Windows machine, and PowerPoint assumed that was the size print to use. When we changed it to our large format printer on the Macs, it exploded, nothing was where it was supposed to be. Colors wrong, images distorted. Finding where the text disappears to was a game of "Where's Waldo"

Comment Re:LOL! Good luck with that. (Score 1) 129

You're more likely to get your life ruined by a guilty-until-proven-innocent sexual harassment accusation than finding a mate "for life"

The number of truly false accusations against men (or women) for sexual harassment or sexual assault is very, very small, and, if you think about it, no larger for those who attend college than those who don't.

Then there is absolutely zero problem. The falsely accused are of no importance, mere collateral damage in reshaping society.

We are blessed to see that false accusations hardly exist, and when it happens, it is inconsequential.

Except perhaps to the person whose life is destroyed.

Your post reminds me of a local Dentist who was accused of Rape of one of his patients. He was utterly destroyed. She claimed he sedated her, took her to her home and raped her.

He went on trial, and as it turned out, they were having a consensual affair. What happened was they were caught by her husband, so to avoid issues, she claimed rape. The trial was just providing proof of the ongoing affair, and how her story did not add up - like the drugs the Dentist presumably used wouldn't render her unconscious (as well is immediately waking up when her husband found them. Took only an hour, and he was found not guilty.

Meanwhile, the local womanist. crowd went haywire. They either refused to believe it, or the best one - that if they found him not guilty of rape, than the millions of women who were, would not report it. So pretty obvious that lying, destroying a man's career, and if convicted getting 25 years was of no consequence at all.

The same thing has happened to sports teams, one of my favorites was a young lady who had a three way with a couple football players, she was caught and claimed they raped her. Destroyed their lives, even after it was found that she lied. Just a blip on the radar screen of importance.

IOW false reports are irrelevant to justice.

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