Ideally, it should be a hair space (because em dashes in web fonts are borderline illegible without it), but Slashdot does not support Unicode, and   gets silently swallowed by Slashdot's HTML parser. Besides, we all know that AP style is the one true style, and it demands space.

No, an en dash is used for numerical ranges and certain compound hyphentions, not for parentheticals.

I'll go with NHTSA and NASA over the "Barr Group" ambulance chasers, thank you. Barr found that it's possible if you get like a cosmic ray to flip just the right bit you could stick the throttle on (but still not make it overpower the brakes). NHTSA and NASA investigated not just the software but the actual cases. In not a single actual case that they investigated did they find that it wasn't well explained by either stuck pedals or pedal misapplication (mainly the latter).

Could you please make no em dashes the default so that the 1% of us who actually know how to use em dashes correctly — professional writers and language nerds and so on — don't keep getting accused of using ChatGPT?

Thanks,
The aforementioned

Oh hi, I remember chatting with you earlier :) Sorry to hear about your back. If you're ever planning on visiting Iceland, drop me a line, I can make recommendations. :)

It was sane, post Brexit anything is possible.

I did test drive it, but that's the dealer, not the manufacturer. Due to GDPR they wouldn't be able to share it with the manufacturer, or retain it for longer than a few months (for speeding tickets etc to come in).

They could break the rules, but if it then leaked or I found out somehow, they would be in it pretty deep.

Thanks. I try not to get my hopes up, but it does seem like I'm the last year or two we have moved closer on a number of treatments.

There's some fascinating new work on "inverse-vaccines". In the same way that antigens can be flagged as "foreign", they can also be flagged as "non-foreign" by attaching N-acetylgalactosamine (pGal) to them. The liver recognizes that tag and uses it to suppress immune activation against that antigen.

That's not the goal of a vaccine against a dormant virus (destroying B-cells), it's about developing a more capable immune reaction against the virus itself. See for example the shingles vaccine (targets dormant VZV, aka shingles / chickenpox). With a strong immune recognition of the virus, as soon as it tries to reactivate, it's immediately targeted, preventing it from becoming problematic.

Dormant viruses use a combination of (A) techniques to suppress immune recognition of them, and (B) low / no reproduction until your body's immune recognition of them has weakened. Vaccines help deal with both issues.

(BTW, if you're getting up there in age and haven't gotten your shingles vaccine, do so. It's one of the "rougher" vaccines, IMHO (both on my initial and followup doses I had "flu symptoms" for a day, when I normally have no reaction at all to vaccines), but that's *way* better than getting shingles)

The funny thing is that as soon as I saw "[condition] may be linked to a common virus" I thought, "It's Epstein-Barr, isn't it?"

Seems it causes bloody everything under the sun :P

As soon as there's even a clinical trial I can sign up for to get vaccinated against it, I'm getting it. I had mono in my late teens, so I can be expected to have dormant Epstein-Barr in me. A horrible autoimmune condition that my mother has (which leads to among other things her skin regularly feeling like it's on fire) seems to be linked to Epstein-Barr reactivation.

My guess is that the finance team got wind of it, and they're tightening their belt.

If they do end up being that two-faced and there's a Democrat-led Senate and House, that's how you get a 15-person Supreme Court.

Joking aside, the diagnostic criteria is basically "has some of the known symptoms, ruled out everything else". That's why House didn't like it, he thought there was always a root cause, and it looks like science may have discovered it.

The question now is, how do you undo it? Some of the damage may be permanent, but just getting the auto immune system to stop attacking the rest of the body would make a huge difference to a lot of people, and not just people with Lupus.

I know at least three companies that took the opportunity to move as much of their stock and equipment out of the UK, while EU rules were still in place, and then closed up shop here in the UK. Another ended up opening a new facility in Ireland where they re-tested stuff so it could meet EU requirements, as the new British CA mark is pretty much worthless.

Of course it cost them money, but not as much money as they would have lost by staying. And that's with the UK's newly devalued currency making out exports cheaper.