There was only one sticky genotype of HCV, Genotype 1. Labeled 1 because it was the primary genotype discovered in white Americans when doctors and labs started separating HCV apart from the generic category of "non-A, non-B viral hepatitis". Genotypes 2-4 actually responded really well to Interferon treatments, I recall G4 having around a 50% cure rate after just 3 months back in the late 90s or early 2000s, when even simple antivirals weren't around to augment it. But G1, whether the TC or CT variant, had a lower than 10% cure rate with Interferon and antivirals. No, I don't know where in the genome that pair of nucleotides is found, but it was an important part of testing G1 in the early parts of 2010.

Now, there are multi-drug, once a day, treatments that have a higher than 95% cure rate for even the toughest of the viruses. Medicare and Medicaid are both paying for even the newest pills on the market. Normal side effects, like nausea or dizziness are below 10%; I've heard doctors tell patients "No, you don't have to call if it feels like the medicine isn't doing anything. That's actually pretty normal and the one month blood work will tell us how well it's working. Yes, seriously, there are very few side effects if you take it with(without) food according to the instructions."

And I'll throw my voice behind the "GET TESTED" bandwagon. Sometimes newborns were given a liter of blood, just because. And if there were any complications, you can be certain you got some, and that often doesn't show up in your medical records in the places that it should. I know one PT who was diagnosed at 4 with "viral non-A, non-B" but didn't get even a drop of blood till age 5; whole family tested clean including a younger sibling not born until after the first hepatitis flare. No blood transfusion listed on any medical record from any hospital, anywhere. Either there was a nurse with a dirty needle, or an unmarked transfusion, or they are one of several thousand patient zeros.

The problem is, they aren't checking people at the borders. They aren't giving border crossers the time to get to a legal place to check in. We have tons of laws and treaties establishing how refugees can cross our border, how they have to do that on their own, and how they have to then report themself to the government; and instead we are arresting them at the border for a crime that is a misdemeanor. Instead of giving them time to make their case about what they are fleeing from, why, and how they got here, we have border patrol and ICE agents just sweeping people up and tossing them in jail.

Oppose illegal immigration all you like, these refugees are trying to do things the legal way and are being stopped and jailed in the middle of the process simply for following the rules.

If you are completely replacing most of a midrange PC every 18 months, it is dramatically more expensive than a console. Even with the extra cost of an online membership.

On the other hand, if you just replace the graphics card when you need to (I'll ditch my 1080 with AIO liquid cooling when the next generation drops) then the cost is a bit close to the cost of a console. But it is still no where close; because by then I'll have probably ditched the intel 7600K for a Zen 2 CPU with better IPC; meaning new mobo and everything. I will be able to keep the case, power supply, storage, and maybe the RAM since I bought pretty high speed stuff late in the 7xxx series life-span

You don't need Threadripper to game on. You don't need the top-end Intel i9 series chip, either.

My i7-7600K does amazingly well at 1080p paired with a GTX1080. I spent extra getting an AIO water-cooled graphics card: EVGA GTX1080 Hydro. I think I spent well under $2000 when everything was done. Just a decent microATX board, 32GB RAM at not-quite top-end clocks for the time.

Sure, if money were no object, if I wanted something really bleeding edge I would probably go for dual GTX2080 Supers in a Zen 2 Threadripper; whenever those come out. But it would be outdated when ever Nvidia releases the next generation of graphics card. Better to just spend a little money on whatever will push your games at 60fps on your display resolution of choice, and worry about "next generation graphics" when those next generation games finally show up.

I hope you are just reading things wrong and aren't so inept at reading (or good at trolling) that you believe something is added to street heroin to kill police officers.

The side product in street heroin, that is so toxic to the police, is fentanyl and it's analogues like remifentanil. Fentanyl is a powerful narcotic, remi is about twice as powerful; both are different from more common medicinal analgesic narcotics in that they are absorbable through the skin. In fact, remifentanil is a really useful surgical drug because the average human can get rid of half of what is in their body every four minutes, even if they have been sedated by it and getting a constant drip for over four hours. But, that hospital dose is measured around 0.025-0.1 (g/kg)/min; meaning a 60kg person might get a whole 87 micrograms over a 4 hour surgery (assuming 0.1(g/kg)/min which would need other sedation as well). That is just about 1/10 of a milligram.

No one, though, is "adding" this to heroin. The problem is that opium poppies are now so controlled that the drug market has switched to producing the drugs from precursor chemicals. The reason this is problematic is that purity can never be 100% in this manner UNLESS the drug maker is using very strict purity control guidelines similar to what the pharmaceutical industry is supposed to do.
So, this cheap heroin imported from who-knows-where brings along chemicals that are very similar to heroin. That includes the whole morphine sub-group, fentanyl and -fentanils (remi-, car- and the rest), prodrugs like codeine, and who knows what else. The stuff that is absorbable through the skin isn't required to be there in that much of a percentage yield; 10 milligrams spilled on the skin could deliver a one hour surgical dose of remifentanil if it made up just 0.25% of the total product, while an overdose would require much, much less than that.

Unfortunately, this is a problem caused by the war on drugs. The CDC admitted they caused people with legitimate pain to go untreated because of the mid-2000 opioid scare and the limiting of medications over the past 5 years. Those people have turned to what ever they could get their hands on because life in extreme pain is not livable. And clean heroin hasn't been available on the streets since the beginning of the war on drugs, the wars in Afghanistan have made it even more rare.

But synthetic chemicals, made in the back alley of Asia, using very well documented chemical processes but with no quality control over the end product? That has just started flowing into the streets and we act like we're powerless to stop it.

Modern feminists do work to critique and counter the arguments of the anti-sex, anti-sexworker feminists of old. The problem is with boys who think "femnazi" is a form of address; who seem willing to ignore modern feminists and focus only on the stuff from twenty years ago that they can nit-pick to prove their points.

of all the times to not have mod points. I'd trade all tomorrows parties for a few mod points right now!

From that link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
6 major classes of antibiotics in this group alone. Unless you are really picky and count Gentamicin and Doxycycline in the same class; having had both the difference is noticeable and cross-resistance is not too high.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Five or more classes, depending on how you divide things up. Sure, beta-lactams cover a huge range, but the cross resistance between Penams and Cephalosporin/Cephamycin is usually pretty low. Then the big guns like Vancomycin in a class of it's own, and the carbapenems somewhere in-between.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Several more classes here. The whole Sulpha family of antibiotics, the whole quinolone group (maybe there is a split between the fluoro- and the non-fluoro-, I haven't had much experience with the non-fluoro group), the two nitro: furan and imidazole, and the rifamycin family.

All said, there are a lot more drugs out there. Many aren't used because of the side-effects or because they are held back for last resort use. There is also the massive problem of penicillin and sulpha allergies, though some studies have shown that many cases of childhood allergic response to penicillin is a one-time thing and the drugs can be useful later in life. The whole Oxazolidinone family is full of active research, the problems with Linezolid is that it is a strong MAOI; hugh number of side effects and interactions with other drugs, and foods. Wiki sites that it is popular now because patients can be switched from IV to oral sooner, since Linezolid is available in an oral form; but that pill form was very expensive ten years ago when I had to pay $1000 for two 500mg pills, which made the stuff something like 18 times the cost of gold or somewhere near the by-weight-cost of inkjet ink.
And then there is the 5th generation cephalosporin drugs, a few being useful against pseudomonas and klebsiella (notoriously limited in the drugs they even respond to) as well as staph A. even when it is MRSA.

So, there is a lot of cutting edge research and new drugs out there. Unfortunately, not all of them are available in the USA right now.

Yes, I used antibiotics in the common sense. I did say I'm not a doctor.

Diflucan is saved in my phones autocorrect. Fluconazole wasn't. I couldn't remember the second vowel; my memory is sometimes junk.

I didn't say a C.albicans infection wasn't a true infection. I know it is. I've had it turn into a kidney infection (long story involving caths, neo-bladder surgeries, and congenital defects). I said that they can be handed out without an exam by some doctors. Some offices want a positive swab culture before they let you just call in and ask, others just ask "have you tried OTC treatments?". I think that can be problematic.

I don't recall who it was at my GP's office who repeated the "can not be resistant" line to me. May have been a practising nurse writing my script, may have been a doctor thinking I wouldn't double-check with someone who deals with the strange amd nasty. Could be they believed the drug reps who love to repeat what ever story they have been told.

As for the other details, thanks for the links. Those paywalls may bug some, but I know the password for the local medical campus wifi and can access most of those. I don't disagree with anything you added. I was replying as a layman; who happens to have some colonization by Vanc-resistant E.coli occasionally (just Vanc resistant. macrobid, cipro, even some mild b-lactums will kill it. And hell no we're not trying to kill it). I've seen the ease with which some doctors want to treat colonies; going to see a nurse, or the ER, for an unrelated problem can result in a resident really wanting to prove themselves by "treating all the things". I've had a consulting specialist schedule me for surgery without my knowledge, because he 'knew' what the real problem was and didn't need to speak to the doctor who's work he was messing with.
There is a lot of ego in the primary and secondary levels of medicine. They see 90 some percent of their patients get better, and sometimes never again see the patients they send further up the chain.
I'm glad to see that tertiary care is on top of this problem. I had heard rumors of the problem years ago, but my primary care center had not and neither had the local ER cleaning staff. The more this gets talked about, the better.

"Can not" is what was repeated to me. I don't recall if it was my GP, one of the nurses, or who.

Why? I have no idea. Maybe they thought it worked like bleach. Maybe the drug reps repeated it so many times that they believed it. Maybe they knew better and were trying to allay my concerns (not knowing I would go over their heads).

Not a doctor, but there is only a little overlap between antibiotics and antifungal medications. This stuff is resistant to Diflucan (I'm not trying to spell the generic name correctly right now), which is often handed out with much less oversight than antibiotics. Any bio-female could probably get a few doses for a yeast infection without seeing their doctor; calling in and asking is all most require since it is a common ailment.

The problem is that many primary care doctors have been told that C. albicans (the common human strain) can not become resistant. I was told the same, only to be corrected by a very indignant Tropical and Infectious Disease specialist who had seen that first line drug become useless in a few cases.

But this doesn't mean we need to panic and shut down Madagascar. There are other classes of drugs, like the old standby nystatin, and other families of antifungal medications in the larger azole drug category. This should be treatable if caught early. The danger is that drugs like nystatin can not be absorbed so they only treat dermal or gastric infections, while amphotericin B (same class) does kidney damage at the effective dose. So someone who has a systemic infection is going to only have treatments available that cause as much damage as they are trying to prevent. And hospital acquired infections can become systemic very quickly.

I have a gmail account that, including the period between first and last name, exactly 10 characters long. Someone, somewhere, with what I presume to be a name similar to my pseudonym signed up for a True Value mailing service. Knowing my local branches of the hardware store chain, I suspect that they ignored whatever this person added to differentiate their account from mine. Why? Because small town hardware stores don't think the part before the @ needs to be more than 10 characters long.

In the last month, though, this person must have planned a trip with someone else as I keep getting notifications about "please check your itinerary". I did try to mess with them, but they are the guest on the trip so the email account is not enough to log in to this trip planner. Otherwise, I might have changed the tickets to my real name, and had a free vacation!

Let's audit our system, then. First, we need to audit the CPU . . . oh, wait, do you have a tunneling electron microscope, cause I don't and we need to be sure that the actual die matches the supposed schematics. So we'll have to buy 10 CPUs from different locations, and analyse 9 of them to trust the 10th one. Yeah, the AMT is in there, but you have to get that first part of the audit done first.

Now, assuming you've gotten that far, and are willing to postpone auditing the AMT for now, it's time to audit the Z170, X99, or whatever chipset you are running. Should buy several motherboards with your desired chipset, just to be sure the motherboard companies are all using the same chips, and that they are all authentic Intel Z170, B170, X99, whatevers; you'll need the VHDL or schematics here, too.

Wow, we're finally out of the motherboard and CPU combination, that's probably taken a few years off our collective lives. Time to audit the USB chip, cause it does have interrupt access to the CPU and even with all the VHDL/Verilog/Schematics there could be one of those hidden register tricks like Kjella mentioned, so we'll need to make sure that it's behaving as it should and not feeding in bad bits. Then over to the HDs, because sprite_tm showed that you could bury some malware into the drive controller and the Equation Group software has been found in those. Wouldn't want one of those chips to go un-audited.

And we have even gotten to the sound chips, the graphics cards or, oh gods, the ethernet/wifi chips. Those bastard internet I/O chips, who knows what kinds of back doors are lodged in those. For all we know, there could be a port knock code in the Intel Gigabit Ethernet chips that causes it to log all HTTPS traffic and send it out over a side channel (do the ethernet chips still have SSL accelerators, or is that a thing of the past? It plays for hyperbole, but I'm not sure where in the hardware the HTTPS decoding gets done anymore).

Seriously, have you audited any of the parts of your computer? Have you read reports from anyone else who has done any auditing? Or is this just a plea for karma? Because you don't sound informative, you sound uninformed. Every chip in your system has to be trusted, and I doubt you have attempted to audit any of them or any of the software or firmware involved either. Even with the code in hand, the long process of determining "which compiler and flags were used to build the TrueCrypt software for windows" experiment a few years ago would show you how you could have all the parts available and still have a hard time proving that the device or software you have came through a trusted source (they did eventually find the flags that built TrueCrypt and the version of MSVC used, but it took a while). That assumes that, for software, the compiler you and your provider use is not backdoored itself. Thompson's "Reflections On Trusting Trust" shows that even if you have the compiler source code, and the code for the project you want to build, and the compiler bootstrap executable, you still can't be sure that it's all "audited safe and clear".

So, there you have it. Yes, you have to trust, because it is literally outside yours, or mine, or damn near anyones to audit every system configuration out there to ensure that everyone and every device is safe. You don't trust Intel, fine. You shouldn't trust AMD, either, for the same reason. And you probably shouldn't trust SlashdotMedia, so until you can audit all of the possible data that you might get sent from the web, you might just want to disconnect from the internet. You know, to be safe from that "potential danger".

yup, uMatrix (as i've got it set) allows /..org cookies, css, images, JS and XHR, frames, and stuff it defines as other. fsdn gets scripts, images, and css to make the page load right. Otherwise, everything is blocked everywhere.

I love of Stallman talks about how much he hates iThings, Losedos, and Swindles, but doesn't explain a thing about why he hates them. Does the Kindle provide a platform to read DRM-laden books that Amazon sells? Yes, it does. It also reads PDFs, mobi, epub, doc and others. You don't have to even buy DRM-laden books for it, I have a ton of books from the Baen library in DRM-free formats.

He seems to also think that childishness is directed at the right target. I'd say he's off for targeting the e-reader instead of the marketplace that makes DRM it's top priority. Then again, of all the marketplaces, Amazon is the only one I know that does have the capability to lend books purchased there, even if it is for a lowly 14 days; no one else seems to have even taken that risk. Maybe, in the words of GPL worship everywhere, you have the source code available to make a website market, go make one that does what you want. Oh, the book publishers don't like that? You have the ability to be a book publisher, go . . .