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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: AI: Humanity's Worst Invention (Score 1) 79

A corporation is a legal concept that lets a group of people own property and act together. Many people are expecting AI to replace corporations, especially in software development because one guy with an idea will be able to do what now requires a bunch of shareholders to pool their resources and hire a bunch of specialists.

Comment Re:18 Inch Tsunami? (Score 1) 28

I mean, it depends on exactly how fast the water is moving (as well as how deep it is; both things matter). If we're talking normal river current (say, 1 foot per second), most adults can stand in eighteen inches and be fine, if it doesn't catch them off guard. If the current is faster, then it doesn't have to be as deep to have essentially the same effect, or if it's deeper, it doesn't have to be as fast.

There are of course some caveats to the above. One is, once you get past about 4-5 feet deep (depending on the person), you're floating or swimming anyway, so additional depth doesn't matter very much at that point; but additional velocity still makes a difference.

Comment Re:Courage of your convictions. (Score 1) 113

No one should express concerns about the environment unless they themselves live fully off-grid, is the most asinine opinion I've read all day.

Excellent! Since you're posting on Slashdot you are clearly not "fully off-grid." Therefore you can't complain about the PCB dump we're putting in your neighbourhood.

Comment Re:Typical company approach to accounting (Score 1) 61

So in essence this boosts their stock price by making them look more profitable than they are.

Sure it does. Any serious investor is going to look at their basic financial statement, not to mention the numerous articles written on the subject, and make an informed decision.

The rest aren't going to give a shit what their profits are. Most of them think revenue is profit anyway.

Comment Re:I must be getting old. (Score 1) 126

Oh, forgot to mention I'm from the Midwest. There's no room in the garage for a _car_ of all things, haha, that would be ridiculous. No, the garage is where we keep the garage stuff. You know, the lawn mower, snow blower, garden tools, step ladder, extension ladder, bicycles, sawhorses, sports gear, extra bricks left over from when the patio was put in, spare pieces of plywood, hedge trimmers, mattocks, old paint buckets, hula hoops, bungee cords, antifreeze, grill, charcoal, lighter fluid, and so on and so forth. There are four people in this household, so the garage is pretty much full. It think there might be a cheap plastic imitation of the Amulet of Yendor out there.

Comment Re: Why was the older version better? (Score 1) 74

Many years ago I experienced what seems to have been a bit flip. Newly compiled C programs on our VAX 11/750 running 4.2BSD Unix suddenly stopped working. It turned out that this was due to an error in the file locore.o, with which they were all linked. The installed version of locore.o differed from a freshly assembled one in a single bit of a single byte. The source file locore.s had not been changed nor had the object file been reassembled. The incorrect bit appears to have arisen spontaneously.

Comment Re: Huh? (Score 1) 203

Not sure. Just when you think you've found it the line slants up again. But humans have limits and Donald Trump is old. His hey day seems to have been in the 80s and 90s. Now he's slowed down and is taking more naps, plus a bunch of his old friends have died or gone to live in group housing. I suppose you could argue that he's taking dirty old man to new heights in his mind.

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It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. - W. K. Clifford, British philosopher, circa 1876

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