It's even worse than it appears.
Doctors in PPE's are a new class of hero. #
I recently found out there was a season 3 of Narcos. Wow. That goes on my list. Also, I thought this season was the last for Better Call Saul. Imagine my surprise when I got to the end, and nothing was resolved. Okay, I'd better survive this virus thing so I can find out what happens to Lalo and Kim. #
On April 14, a single bottle of hand sanitizer arrived via USPS at my local post office. Ordered via Amazon on March 14. $11.99. Shipped via China Post, China's equivalent of the USPS. It arrived in Hawthorne, CA on March 24 on its way to my kitchen in upstate NY. #
  • I had a pretty terrible Dropbox outage here since Friday, but with help from Daniel Bradley, I was able to get most of my servers connected to Dropbox again. #
  • I just noticed that the server for LO2 got completely trashed in the process. I have no idea how, but I had a backup from yesterday, which I am now restoring. It may take about an hour or so. Any work done between the outage and the restoration will be lost. Sorry. #
  • I'm going to have to stop depending on Dropbox. Obviously the Linux version is not a priority for them, it's breaking a lot these days. I've been a Dropbox user since the beginning. But it's been obvious for a few years that this is no longer a good match. #
  • Update: Well that was pretty good outage-wise. Less than 15 minutes. But data was lost. It seems fortunate this happened after I added the backup command. No excuse for not having copies of your files. #
  • Sometimes I write posts to solicit info from my brain trust, the people who read my blog. Yesterday I wrote about the non-inevitablity of a Covid-19 vaccine, and got two interesting responses. #
  • From correspondent #1.#
    • HIV has a very high mutation rate, it's a constantly changing target, very hard to vaccinate. Fortunately this corona virus is highly conserved (stable), there are many stable proteins you can target. We don't see a reason why that stability would change as it's already spread around the world. #
  • From correspondent #2.#
    • I wanted to offer a few reasons for limited, cautious optimism, and one reason for a little bit of pessimism.#
      • Nobody ever "gets better" from HIV on their own. Our immune systems can't beat it. So it's hard to make a vaccine that teaches our immune systems how to beat it.#
      • We do get better from the flu on our own. But the problem is that the flu is a "modular" virus that can be recombined, so there's always a new version. So flu vaccines work, but there's a new vaccine every year.#
      • Our bodies can beat the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. People usually get better in a few weeks, if they don't die.#
      • Many people who caught the original SARS-CoV virus in 2003 still had antibodies ~10 years later.#
      • The SARS viruses are unusually complex, and in order to replicate correctly, they have pretty good proofreading. So they mutate much more slowly than HIV or the flu.#
    • But there's also one reason to worry:#
      • There are four other coronaviruses that cause about 15% of cases of the common cold. We build immunity to these viruses but it usually doesn't last forever.#
    • So as I understand it, the biggest question with SARS-CoV-2 isn't whether we can teach our bodies to beat it. It's how long our immune system will remember. And whether we can find a low-risk vaccine that doesn't cause other problems.#
  • As always, Scripting News readers are the smartest and best. 🚀#
  • A picture rescued from Facebook. Tompkins Square Park in NYC.
    From left to right, my uncle, Ken Kiesler, his friend Sparky, my grandfather Rudy Kiesler, and me. I'm guessing this is 1989 or 1990.#

© 1994-2020 Dave Winer.

Last update: Sunday April 26, 2020; 5:19 PM EDT.

You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)