I'm starting to think that we should be calling it "contained", not "eradicated". Eradication invites the question "Well then, why do we still need the vaccine?"
It really is eradicated - it's the only human disease we've truly eradicated. There are literally no more cases of smallpox in the wild, period.
The problem is that there are samples of viable virus in the labs of the US and Russia. So - it's eradicated but we have to keep stockpiles of vaccine around anyway. But nobody gets vaccined for it any more; it has an unfavorable risk-benefit ratio when the virus simply does not circulate. Smallpox kills ~30% of people who get infected with it; the first-generation vaccine had a mortality rate of about 1 in 1,000,000.
(There are newer-generation vaccines developed and being developed that have an even better safety profile but we still wouldn't use them because the cost - the literal cost and the side effects and general "meh, why get another shot?"-ness outweighs the benefit of protection against something you don't need protection against.)
mRNA vaccines go from sequenced DNA to vaccine without any need to store or culture the original virus in the lab.
We could destroy our existing stockpile of smallpox and be ready to produce vaccines based on it faster than we could thirty years ago.
We couldn't validate new vaccines without access to the live virus, but then, if we aren't willing to expose hopefully-volunteers to a disease with a 30% mortality rate, we weren't really validating it anyway.
But yeah, I think we could probably unilaterally "disarm" and destroy our smallpox samples, and from a national security standpoint, I don't think we'd be significantly worse off; if the weaponized strain is significantly different from the old strain, enough to bypass vaccination, we'd need samples of the new thing in any case.
I'm not even sure we'd be substantially limiting new research on it, given that smallpox doesn't infect animals, I'm not sure if there's even any animal testing we could do with a live virus.
This is tangential to your point, but smallpox vaccine protects against mpox (the virus formerly known as monkeypox) and the CDC still recommends it for people in certain mpox risk groups.
That kindof makes sense to me: If I drop something into a post office’s mail box (outside or inside) after the day’s last pickup, even if the mail is inside the post office, it’s not going to be touched by USPS hands until the next day that the post office is open.
This can be tricky. For example, at the Stanford post office, the drop boxes outside the post office have Saturday pickup times, but the ones inside the building do not (the signs inside warn about this).
In the past this used to be handled explicitly: courts, tax offices, municipal administrations, and patent or trademark offices had special mailboxes whose internal compartment switched every hour. That way, the time of deposit itself was objectively recorded and legally relevant, even outside office hours.
The same kind of mailbox was sometimes used for bid submissions in tenders, to prove whether an offer was submitted before or after the deadline.
> For example, at the Stanford post office, the drop boxes outside the post office have Saturday pickup times, but the ones inside the building do not (the signs inside warn about this).
That’s counterintuitive though. I can see why people miss the sign.
not familiar with the specific PO at Stanford, but I'm assuming the "ones outside" are the traditional drive up blue boxes that are also emptied/collected from the outside. I could see having these picked up by a truck on the way to a regional office without having the driver also need keys to collect from a location that is not open at the time of collection.
Someone somewhere probably figured out that it’s more efficient to have five drivers ride in a loop all day than to have each post office drain the boxes inside their postal map.
But it’s weird for a pleb to look at a box directly outside an office and assume that office isn’t responsible for that box. Outside a corner coffee shop, sure, but I can see the post office, it’s right there.
Again, your "right there" is just your assumptions you know the inner workings of the USPS. Maybe there was no Saturday pickup at that location until the outside boxes made it possible. This means no increase in that location's budget for paying people to do this. Now, it is part of the regional location (or similar) while at the same time now being able to offer a convenient Saturday pickup for those that use this location.
Not every location offers the same services. It's part of life. The complaining here is coming across as very privileged whining. Do you wish to speak to a manager?
And you’re ignoring the part where you’re blaming the customer for not reading someone else’s mind.
This is feeling like a work argument where the apologists are trying to block UX of DX improvements due to contempt for the people it’ll help and I am full up at the moment. Argue with yourself, I’m out.
well, if there's some "not reading" happening, it's you with the the rest of the comments upstream stating there is signage that clearly states there is no Saturday pickup.
Delivering the mail to a drop box is a task often done under duress. This is the same reason we in software have Five Why’s. Someone sitting calmly outside of the problem will always find a way to blame the victim for not reading the instructions. That doesn’t absolve the builders from their share of the guilt.
The "all nodes connecting to all other nodes" setup reminds me of NUMALink, the interconnect that SGI used on many (most? all?) of their supercomputers. In an ideal configuration, each 4-socket node has two NUMALink connections to every other node. As Jeff says, it's a ton of cables, and you don't have to think of framing or congestion in the same way as with RDMA over Ethernet.
SGI's HW also had ccNUMA (cache-coherent Non-Uniform Memory Access), which, given the latencies possible in systems _physically_ spanning entire rooms, was quite a feat.
The IRIX OS even had functionality to migrate kobs and theor working memory closer to each other to lower the latency of access.
We see echoes of this when companies like high-frequency traders pay attention to motherboard layouts and co-locate and pin the PTS (proprietary trading systems) processes to specific cores based on which DIMMs are on which side of the memory controller.
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