Fun fact, Syncytin-1 is the syncytin used by primates, other branches of mammals have other forms of syncytins, meaning that the event of being infected by a retrovirus that gives mammals proteins necessary for the placenta happened several times in history following the original event and replaced the original syncytin.
(Not sure those proteins are also called syncytins in other mammals but I'm not a biologist so I'm using the limited vocabulary I have)
Saying that before the Top 40 music was reduced to people singing songs badly in pubs and the few who could afford an instrument is a pretty reductive view of musical history.
Well, the ultimate achievement when building an LFS system is to plug it to an existing package manager so you don't have to keep updating stuff manually.
In 50 years, I bet they'll still be looking for python 2 developers to work on old python code...
Or not... it's not like you can't throw a python 3 dev at an old python 2 codebase and tell them to work on it. Even if that probably wouldn't make them very happy about it, they wouldn't be lost.
But I'd bet an arm that there will still be python 2 codebases running in production in the next decades with companies very unwilling to do the work of migrating it.
No, they made a big deal of giving a ten-years period to developers to port their code before depreciating python 2.
But honestly, there are more breaking changes between two versions of ruby than between python 2 and 3. And during the time python 2 was still supported (until the last day of 2019), most features that made it into python 3 and could be backported were backported into python 2.
It will be a pain for those who aren't used to python 2 encoding errors and other nice stuff that they got rid of in 3 to make it a nicer and more robust language. And the will miss the new and shiny features that will make it in new python 3 version after python 2 EOL.
But apart from that, it's almost the same language, they just made the transition from 2 to 3 to be able to introduce some breaking changes in places that unfortunate design choices had made their way into the language and couldn't be rolled back because people running python 2 in production depended on those. So they upped the major version, introduced some breaking changes (but not that much really) and gave developers 10 years of support for the older language so they could port their codebase to the new version.
And porting a python 2 app to a python 3 app isn't such a hard task. But! If you've got a big app that's working now, even if the changes aren't that drastic, you can't be sure that the port won't introduce some hard to find bugs that will be a pain to debug. Hence why plenty of companies are still running python 2 versions of their apps and will do so for the forseeable future.
But, throwing a python 3 dev at a python 2 codebase is totally doable, it's just that the guy or gal will miss the shiny stuff that didn't get backported into 2 and will break their teeth on some behavioral changes between the two languages.
Bah, even if the vaccine was 100% safe and 100% effective antivaxers would claim that it's a death shot that does nothing for your immunity.
But yes, we should definitely be as sure as possible that the vaccine is reasonably safe and effective before getting into large scale vaccination campaigns.
Not because of the antivaxers though. Because it would be incredibly irresponsible not to do so and it could hurt many people.
In France, we have a tool called WinDev which isn't used very much outside of France. It is a proprietary abomination used to create graphical applications (and with sisters tools WebDev and WinDev mobile for web development and mobile development). It completely locks the programmers into their shitty very closed wall garden (for example, you're completely locked into using their own proprietary version control tool and absolutely cannot use an alternative).
Anyway, the coding in their applications is done with their very own proprietary shitty programming language: WLangage (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/WLangage). This language has the particularity of being available in three localizations: English, French and Chinese. And you can mix all three in the same codebase for some extra fun!
It's not very well known outside of France so it's not very surprising that this language isn't cited on the wikipedia page you linked.
To me it seems that in the future they for some reason need to access files that can only be opened on that computer.
If time travel is indeed possible and relatively common, it might be a better business decision to just send someone back in time to fetch a working version of that computer than try to recreate one from archived documentation (if any of it survived).
If there is something special about that computer it can surely just be executed in an emulator running on any future computer that is more powerful and uses less power, like a Raspberry Pi or its future equivalent.
This would still require having the original documentation on how the computer operated. Not to mention, some software (notably some retro console games) rely on quirks or flaws in the silicon itself, and don't actually run on a "perfect" emulator.
If time travel is common and either of these issues is raised then sending someone back to bring the real computer might be the easiest option.
I think it's pretty clear from the scientific data that the covid-19 virus is a recent zoonotic infection that jumped from bats to humans (with possibly another animal in between). How could it possibly have caused any human illness before that?
BTW, covid-19 is the disease (same as the flu). The virus is named SARS-Cov-2.
>I think it's pretty clear from the scientific data that the covid-19 virus is a recent zoonotic infection that jumped from bats to humans (with possibly another animal in between).
I know that's what most think. But, what is the evidence?
If one were to test samples from 'flu' patients from the 1980s, how do we know one wouldn't find SARS-Cov-2 in some samples?
Has anyone done this?
Merely finding similarities between the bat version and human version doesn't tell us anything about how long it's been in the human population. (For that matter, it doesn't tell us if the virus went from bat to human or human to bat... there are for more bats exposed to sources of human viruses than the other way around, you know...)
I can't speak for all western countries but in my country (France) if the government tried to impose quarantine on the same level as China, I'd expect riots.
People here aren't as docile as Chinese people and don't fear their government. If a city was quarantined like Wuhan with the situation turning to shit, many people would take to the street to protest instead of staying nicely confined at home.
And if the government's repression got too harsh there, you'd get protests all around the country in support.
That's why I haven't heard anything from my government about potential large-scale quarantine. They know that here it probably would make the situation worse.
> People here aren't as docile as Chinese people and don't fear their government
Don't underestimate the sense of doing what's good for the community and the patriotism of the Chinese people (and I'm sure many others).
I think they understood what was at stake and what had to be done, and did it but not because they are "docile" or because they "fear their government".
2) i wouldn't be so sure that quarantine measures would be such universally disliked. it'll take a couple deaths and a few tv interviews with medical personnel with an overwhelmed hospital in the background to sway the public emotion in the containment direction. it better be executed well, though, or riots become a serious proposition.
This is France we're talking about. There's already been a recent series of riots where a number of people have suffered debilitating injuries from the heavy riot control tactics - 24 people lost eyes!
Where do you escalate from that? Machine-gunning people in the streets?
Ah yes the famous french protests just about anything they don't like on a given day. It would be supremely stupid and arrogant to go to mass protests when facing such quarantine due to deadly virus like this one, but I have no doubt that's exactly how it would unroll en France.
IMO, this virus isn't as deadly as that. It was reasonable for China to implement such measures because 1) at the time they didn't know how bad it was and 2) their people are actually quite compliant with what their government asks them.
But now, we know this virus isn't ebola's death rate combined with measle's R0. Large scale quarantine like in China is probably overkill and quite risky if your population isn't as docile as populations in authoritarians regimes.
Closing schools, cancelling mass events and asking people to work from home if they can is a more measured approach. Even without that, the apocalypse isn't coming anytime soon.
(Not sure those proteins are also called syncytins in other mammals but I'm not a biologist so I'm using the limited vocabulary I have)