ColanR

I was under the impression - not having studied much about Jaynes' theory - that it is a well-regarded but falsified theory. That being said, what you describe sounds like an amazing premise for a novel.

IIRC, fake news was originally used by the left, but co-opted by Trump.

I imagine that we don't have sufficiently precise data to plan far enough ahead to launch a mission that can deorbit the debris.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. It's definitely important to be aware of potential biases.

> because he has been undermining the virus from the beginning

No, he wasn't. Where did you get that idea? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/business/china-travel-cor...

What he actually said. He clearly gives caveats to what he's saying: he's not advocating anyone actually do anything. He's talking about further research.

"So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous - whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light...and I think you said that hasn't been checked but you're going to test it....And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside of the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you're going to test that too. Sounds interesting....And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? ...So it'd be interesting to check that....I'm not a doctor. But I'm, like, a person that has a good you-know-what. [Pointing to his head]

Lol. I figured that's the only series that deals with ansible communication. Guess not.

It's a reference to the Enter Chronicles, but the parent wrote that themselves.

Edit; Ender Chronicles...spallig is hard. :)

I think you're leaving out a middle option, which is what I see when I read 'pro-HCQ' - a scientist who thinks we should further investigate HCQ (etc.) as a treatment option. Not someone who thinks it should be used as treatment, not someone who hopes the particular treatment turns out to be effective.

I think that middle option is actually how a scientist would interpret the phrase. I can see why a layman would read it otherwise, though.

The thing is, there are parts of Matlab's syntax which are fantastic, and I would be disappointed if they didn't copy it.

Experts that actually advocate zinc? That's overstating it. The question is whether or not HCQ was the original theory, and zinc and azithromycin were added on later. So here's a collection of studies and trials conceived early on that involved at least both HCQ and zinc. As far as going back in time is possible, that seems pretty reasonable as an indication that the theorized parameters haven't been changed.

March 30: https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04326725?cond=COV...

March 30: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04326725?term=zinc&co...

April 6: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04334512?term=zinc&co...

May 8: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.02.20080036v...

May 1: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04370782?term=zinc&co...

The popular, layman's discussion of HCQ has been buzzwords and watered down, and that's where the idea of HCQ by itself comes from. Far as I know, the experts who think HCQ is viable have been pretty forthcoming from early on with the idea it should be used in combination with zinc & azithromycin.

I wish it wasn't political, but somehow it seems to have gotten that way.

It sounds like you're ignoring the other studies that did show benefit. The people who came up with those studies wanted to save lives, too, just like the people who still think that HCQ is being overlooked.

> You came up with those parameters conveniently after the study was published.

> The fact that people aren’t running more studies is not because there is a global conspiracy.

> satisfying critics who don’t care about the science

> magic combination...magical properties

It seems like you've suddenly made a sharp u-turn from a good-faith discussion into crazy town. I thought we were hashing out differences, and now you're suddenly accusing me of making up excuses, believing in a global conspiracy, being anti-science, and thinking zinc is somehow a miracle drug. I think I should end the conversation here.

>> Any clinical intervention is going to have advocates.

> Honestly I don't really get this at all. Not even a little bit.

It's ok for scientists to think something's true before they have all the evidence lined up - especially in a predominantly empirical field like medicine. That's how new ideas happen.

Have you ever encountered someone who is motivated by altruism? Someone who is motivated by getting the truth out there?

> So to end up having done a whole study on HCQ efficacy but NOT covered the bases on "zinc needed" seems unbelievable.

I'm not sure what you're saying. Are you critiquing the study for not measuring and supplementing zinc in the HCQ cohort?

The parameters within which HCQ is thought to work have been clearly stated. If a study is attempting to evaluate HCQ without following those parameters, then the study is badly designed regardless of when it's being discussed.

Came here to say this. HCQ is the buzzword we use to refer to the treatment, but it's the combination HCQ with zinc or azithromycin that is actually thought to be useful.

Talking about the complexity of modern software might be a tangent. However.

I think that if time and effort were limited by this fragmentation, we would find that we're able to do just fine with browsers that have fewer hours of effort put into them. The current range of second-tier browsers have a ton of strange and interesting ideas about them, but because the web standards they have to support are so complex they simply can't support much of the modern web. I imagine that those standards would be written much more conservatively if the writers knew that it would be impractical for anyone to implement them.

> Wishing that this herculean effort was forced to be duplicated 19 times over just so that you could have alternatives to choose feels kinda perverse.

There is absolutely no reason for you to get personal.

> Are you willing to learn all those 20 different language/runtime/tool chains?

No, and that's exactly my point. Because it would be impossible to support everything, developers and corporations might have to aim for more limited reach. I imagine that would lead to a situation where we have 20 different widely supported kernels, 20 different up-to-date web browsers, 20 different modern OSes, etc. I would love to be able to choose from such a diversity of software alternatives - wouldn't you?

Seems like it could be compared to breaking up a monopoly. When there's one player in town (Java & Android in the two examples I used), any competing ideas never get a chance to succeed: we're still using variations of Java, probably at this point for historical reasons, and Purism etc. is having a real rough go of it. Look at the failed attempts at competing OSes that various phone manufacturers put out. There were some duds, but I mentioned two that could have given Andriod a run for its money if there were more fragmentation in the market - and I think that would have been better for consumers.

> arguing that there is less innovation in programming because you don't own the rights to function names is ridiculous

I applaud the rhetorical flourish, but I think it misses the point. It's not the cause of the fragmentation, but the fragmentation caused by the lost rights that improves the innovation.

That sounds like a win for RISC.

I'm looking forward to when we find some common piece of hardware like this that can also transmit.

> trace transactions

Right now, the business of transaction tracing is booming.

I wonder if Oracle winning would reinvigorate software developement - by which I mean, maybe the resulting fragmentation would leave a lot of room for new ideas to be developed.

e.g.: if this court case was decided before Google made Android, then Google would have had to use something other than Java to do it and they wouldn't have been able to attract such a large developer base to make apps. Maybe they would have come up with a new language, or reused whatever else was viable at the time. But, maybe their OS wouldn't have been so overwhelming in its popularity and other OSes, like PalmOS and the windows phone OS, could have remained alive today. I think there's a lot of people, maybe the majority, who would agree that Android's UI was inferior to one or both of those alternatives.

e.g. #2: looking to the future, the resulting fragmentation could mean that even new OSes will have to be developed (edit - since even kernel APIs could be covered by copyright). That could be pretty bad for open source and hacking in general - except that as another poster has pointed out, closed-down software might turn out to be pretty useless compared to open-source. Maybe Oracle winning could be a really good thing for reinvigorating the development of new paradigms in software.

Interesting quote from the abstract:

> ...the natural origin theory remains supported by several novel coronaviruses published after the start of the outbreak....Here, however, we use in-depth analyses of the available data and literature to prove that these novel animal coronaviruses do not exist in nature and their sequences have been fabricated. In addition, we also offer our insights on the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated naturally from a coronavirus that infected the Mojiang miners.

Makes me think of my own duckduckgo usage. I wonder if Google is the only search engine being leaned on, or if they're just the only one with any publicity around the shared data.

I thought of addressing that, but figured it would be obvious from the tail end of what I quoted:

> There are more than 30 kinds, but only three or four affect people.

There aren't enough cold viruses around to allow for a 0.2% fraction.

Since neither of you cited anything, webmd says parent is right. Looks like you're only off by a factor of 100x. If you're going to call someone out for inconsistencies, might want to get your data right?

> Coronavirus. These tend to do their dirty work in the winter and early spring. The coronavirus is the cause of about 20% of colds. There are more than 30 kinds, but only three or four affect people.

https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/cold-guide/common_cold_ca...

Except that per your comment above, we're talking about the broader subject of "commiting crimes", not paying taxes.