slapjerkt - Slashdot User

If We Can't Kill Cancer, Can We Control It? 140

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday September 14, 2014 @05:20AM from the thus-began-the-era-of-the-slave-tumors dept.

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from The New Yorker: In April, [Dr. Eytan Stein] presented his findings to a packed auditorium at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, in San Diego. It was the first public airing of the results of AG-221; patients with progressive [acute myelogenous leukemia] had never improved so quickly and definitively. ... The breakthrough is notable in part for the unconventional manner in which the drug attacks its target. There are many kinds of cancer, but treatments have typically combated them in one way only: by attempting to destroy the cancerous cells. Surgery aims to remove the entire growth from the body; chemotherapy drugs are toxic to the cancer cells; radiation generates toxic molecules that break up the cancer cells' DNA and proteins, causing their demise. A more recent approach, immunotherapy, co-opts the body's immune system into attacking and eradicating the tumor. The Agios drug, instead of killing the leukemic cells — immature blood cells gone haywire — coaxes them into maturing into functioning blood cells. Cancerous cells traditionally have been viewed as a lost cause, fit only for destruction. The emerging research on A.M.L. suggests that at least some cancer cells might be redeemable: they still carry their original programming and can be pressed back onto a pathway to health.

Report: Verizon Claimed Public Utility Status To Get Government Perks 140

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday May 29, 2014 @05:37AM from the best-of-both-worlds dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Research for the Public Utility Law Project (PULP) has been released which details 'how Verizon deliberately moves back and forth between regulatory regimes, classifying its infrastructure either like a heavily regulated telephone network or a deregulated information service depending on its needs. The chicanery has allowed Verizon to raise telephone rates, all the while missing commitments for high-speed internet deployment' (PDF). In short, Verizon pushed for the government to give it common carrier privileges under Title II in order to build out its fiber network with tax-payer money. Result: increased service rates on telephone users to subsidize Verizon's 'infrastructure investment.' When it comes to regulations on Verizon's fiber network, however, Verizon has been pushing the government to classify its services as that of information only — i.e., beyond Title II. Verizon has made about $4.4 billion in additional revenue in New York City alone, 'money that's funneled directly from a Title II service to an array of services that currently lie beyond Title II's reach.' And it's all legal. An attorney at advocacy group Public Knowledge said it best: 'To expect that you can come in and use public infrastructure and funds to build a network and then be free of any regulation is absurd....When Verizon itself is describing these activities as a Title II common carrier, how can the FCC look at broadband internet and continue acting as though it's not a telecommunication network?'"

Comment There's no information here. (Score 5, Insightful) 134

by slapjerkt on Sunday April 13, 2014 @08:43AM (#46739311) Attached to: Obama Says He May Or May Not Let the NSA Exploit the Next Heartbleed

The information content of a sentence whose structure is, "I may x or I may not x" is 0.

Comment Look what WE did with that kind of power. (Score 1) 315

by slapjerkt on Sunday April 01, 2001 @05:48AM (#324889) Attached to: Civil Rights For Aliens?

I've noticed a couple of major assumptions in this post and in many of the replies to it, which while providing some super-interesting food for thought, do seem pretty unrealistic ones to make. One is that our opinion of what should happen will really count for anything. In this little "what if" appears the implicit notion that THEY HAVE ARRIVED HERE FIRST. Flash to the history of even our own small little ball Investigate almost any of the episodes where a civilisation crossed a great distance and "discovered" another one who hadn't figured out how to do that yet. (aside -- perhaps they just didn't care to try to figure it out) It seems a fair conclusion that our opinion of what rights to grant/deny THEM will be pretty much moot. To think otherwise is romantic maybe, arrogant definitely. I'm not pitching a xenophobic attitude here. Not the hollywood pre-enactment we keep seeing ("Oh no, the aliens have arrived and they are bent on Universal domination! They eat mice too!") They don't necessarily have to demonstrate our notions of evil in order to wipe us out. They'd just have to follow and be subject to a set of apparenty universal tendencies we've labelled "survival of the fittest". All of this is without even mentioning the fact that we're prejudicing ourselves as to the kind of scale we're talking about. Who says it's gonna be civilisation-to-civilization contact? Ask your neighbourhood chimpanzee how well his/her "basic chimp rights" have been observed so far by the bigger, "smarter" lifeforms who showed up and just sort of... well, took over everything. -- What's that you say, there isn't one in your neighbourhood? Come now, that neighbourhood's huge! Why, thousands of people live there! Surely at least ONE of those families must own a chimp or two... Further scale divergence possibilities: What about slug rights? amoeba rights? "Human rights" could seem just as unfeasable to them as those two do to us. A fellow slug, kf

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