Microsoft Will 'Solve' Cancer Within The Next 10 Years By Treating It Like A Computer Virus, Says Company (independent.co.uk) 259
Microsoft is serious about finding a cure for cancer. In June, Microsoft researchers published a paper that shows how analyzing online activities can provide clues as to a person's chances of having cancer. They were able to identify internet users who had pancreatic cancer even before they'd been diagnosed, all from analyzing web query logs. Several months later, researchers on behalf of the company now say they will "solve" cancer within the next 10 years by treating it like a computer virus that invades and corrupts the body's cells. The goal is to monitor the bad cells and potentially reprogram them to be healthy again. The Independent reports: The company has built a "biological computation" unit that says its ultimate aim is to make cells into living computers. As such, they could be programmed and reprogrammed to treat any diseases, such as cancer. In the nearer term, the unit is using advanced computing research to try and set computers to work learning about drugs and diseases and suggesting new treatments to help cancer patients. The team hopes to be able to use machine learning technologies -- computers that can think and learn like humans -- to read through the huge amounts of cancer research and come to understand the disease and the drugs that treat it. At the moment, so much cancer research is published that it is impossible for any doctor to read it all. But since computers can read and understand so much more quickly, the systems will be able to read through all of the research and then put that to work on specific people's situations. It does that by bringing together biology, math and computing. Microsoft says the solution could be with us within the next five or ten years.
BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HA!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Try Again (Score:2)
It amazes me how many times the patch to fix the problem, doesn't fix the problem.
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We'll probably see medical jargon appearing in our software now.
"Windows has detected a malignant usb program. The prognosis is that you have a 85% chance that your personal data will be on a Russian server in 10 minutes. Immediate curative treatment in the form of Knowledge Base #A345-BB321 is required. Press Yes to accept the DNR and proceed with the treatment."
Note that there will be no "Cancel" option.
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Quite a few cancers are caused by virusses. See HPV for an example.
It's possible the number is much larger -we're only just getting the ability to really study this stuff.
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Yeah, I read that title first thing in the morning and I very nearly spit orange juice all over the laptop.
Seriously though, cancer is a very ancient disease. It comes from when the very first lonely cells decided to band together to increase survival, over 3 billion years ago. They figured out pretty quickly that group rules were necessary, like some cells go some places, others need to suicide at the right time, etc... And when a cell doesn't obey those ground rules and starts reproducing on its own, th
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Hey I'm no oncologist but you make it sound like magic. Eradicate is the wrong word, as in , "destroy completely". What we have is an epidemic of cancer, and if we can figure out why that is, in the complex biochemistry, we'll go a long way to stopping that epidemic. As for why Microsoft would be any better at this than anyone else is beyond me. The answer may already be known, just unrecognised. Anyone read, "Tripping Over the Truth" by Christofferson ?
Re:BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HA!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
> What we have is an epidemic of cancer
Nope. We really don't. The increase in cancer cases over time tracks *exactly* the increases in human lifespan. We've always been equally prone to it (barring isolated and regionally limited edge-cases) - but until quite recently almost everybody got killed by something else first.
Now that we survive most virusses, bacteria and parasites and have basically eradicated just about all our natural predators (with the exception of the mosquito) - we actually live long enough for cancer to happen, and the more people live long - the more get it.
That said - cancer is not a disease and does not have a cause. Cancer is a collective noun for a whole host of diseases all with different causes, which just happen to have one, single tiny thing in common. The reason we haven't cured cancer is because nothing could possibly do that - no single treatment can deal with so many different diseases, all with different causes (many of which are unknown). Even the shotgun treatments of radiation and chemo are not useful on all of them.
On the other hand we are making massive progress in curing and preventing specific cancers. In the last few years, for the first time in history, we actually developed a vaccine that can completely prevent several cancers (HPV vaccines grant effective immunity against cervical cancer and several types of throat and lip cancers). The reason is that we discovered that a specific virus causes these cancers - and could create a vaccine against that virus.
Gene-targetted treatments are already greatly increasing life expectancy, survival rates and quality of life of many cancer patients - with far less negative side effects than the shotgun treatments. More experimental treatments using things like magnetofluids are being investigated which may offer new and uniquely safe types of surgical treatments which are viable on a much larger set of cancers.
We are making progress - but this is a war against a massive army with a huge variety of different batallayons and there is no one attack to defeat it, not single battle will win this war. Lots of small victories that add up - that's the way to do it, and it won't happen quickly, but it is already happening much quicker than we could have hoped even a decade ago.
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Well, they are probably just using the wrong words that everyone else uses ever since the 1970s when the "war on cancer" was started.
Curing cancer is probably impossible, because as you say, you would need to monitor the activity of billions of cells to make sure each one is doing what it's supposed to.
Making cancer a chronic condition that can be stabilized without the massive side effects of current treatments (chemo, radiation, surgery) would be a massive gain. Instead of feeling like shit for months wh
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Not to mention there is a reason why evolution has not given us any defenses against it. It's part of the very structures evolution use in the first place, and furthermore it very rarely affects reproduction. Even things like testicular cancer usually happens late enough in life that you could have had kids already. Since so few cancers actually prevent you from first having kids - not only do genes with a propensity for cancer not get eradicated but there is also no evolutionary pressure be better at survi
They can start with Windows10 (Score:3)
Most users agree that Windows10 should be treated like a virus, so if M$ could rid the world of that one it would be a great service to humanity.
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Well I don't think it's fair to say they haven't been trying at all, but they didn't put nearly enough effort into it from the start. (their OS was originally marketed to businesses, and they operated for a long time under the assumption that somehow this made the network totally trustworthy) Unix came from an academic setting, and there you are full of geeky, talented, bored students looking for a challenge or a vent, and that makes your network more hostile than the internet of today.
So they evolved in a
Think and learn like humans (Score:3, Insightful)
If your definition of a human is a retarded 4-year-old that can be trained to name colors with 75% accuracy, yes.
We're not there, we're not even close; "machine learning" is just the new buzzword in town, rising from the ashes of "big data".
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If your definition of a human is a retarded 4-year-old that can be trained to name colors with 75% accuracy, yes.
We're not there, we're not even close; "machine learning" is just the new buzzword in town, rising from the ashes of "big data".
Big data itself was a phoenix from the ashes of AI.
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AI was a phoenix from the ashes of expert systems.
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Machine learning has been a thing much longer than big data. Don't believe me? Look at the age of the major ML journals. You'll see they predate big data by a while.
No matter how clueless we are ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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So, Windows, then...
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Re:No matter how clueless we are ... (Score:5, Insightful)
personally, i would say cancer is much more like wallstreet fatcats.
a mutation in the rules governing proper behavior causes them to consume all available resources, send ssignals to the regulatory system that they are essential and need protection, while earnestly believing they are the most important part of the system while destroying it from the inside, due to the removal of a system to terminate that behavior early.
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personally, i would say cancer is much more like wallstreet fatcats.
a mutation in the rules governing proper behavior causes them to consume all available resources, send ssignals to the regulatory system that they are essential and need protection, while earnestly believing they are the most important part of the system while destroying it from the inside, due to the removal of a system to terminate that behavior early.
Hey, that's pretty good. I'll have to remember that.
Re:No matter how clueless we are ... (Score:5, Insightful)
NoNoNoNo. The underlying assumption that computers and humans are fundamentally similar is completely incorrect. The term 'computer virus' is a reasonable analogy but you can't push it so far that you impute that the mechanisms are the same. Cancer is way more complex that 'reprogramming a cell'. It involves cell homeostasis mechanisms that have no analogous function in hardware or software.
"It’s not just an analogy, it’s a deep mathematical insight. Biology and computing are disciplines which seem like chalk and cheese but which have very deep connections on the most fundamental level.”
(FTFA) Oh yeah. Prove it. Or even give us something other than executive level bullshit.
Perhaps when you have computers that can handle errors more gracefully than "PC LOAD LETTER" I might think about taking him seriously. But we've barely moved past that level at present.
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NoNoNoNo. The underlying assumption that computers and humans are fundamentally similar is completely incorrect. The term 'computer virus' is a reasonable analogy but you can't push it so far that you impute that the mechanisms are the same. Cancer is way more complex that 'reprogramming a cell'. It involves cell homeostasis mechanisms that have no analogous function in hardware or software.
I agree with your statement here wholeheartedly, which is why I'm struggling to understand how the fuck Microsoft could even make this statement with a straight face, much less offer any evidence to back it up:
"They were able to identify internet users who had pancreatic cancer even before they'd been diagnosed, all from analyzing web query logs."
I mean seriously, they can't even protect or prevent a computer running Windows from getting infected, so I fail to see how we should give them any credibility w
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Who let the CS kids into the Hubris Reserve? (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously guys; I'm glad you care about curing cancer and all; but what flavor of insanity drives this level of optimism about your chances?
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How about just keeping them off Windows? (Score:2)
K?
Oblig xkcd. (Score:4, Informative)
Researcher Translation.
https://xkcd.com/678/ [xkcd.com]
Bill Gates and SPAM (Score:5, Informative)
In 2004 Bill claimed SPAM would be eradicated in 2 years. http://www.informationweek.com/spam-will-be-solved-in-2-years--gates/d/d-id/1022817?
That went very well....
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He was right. It was effectively eradicated, at least as far as users were concerned, by 2006. Though the credit for that goes to Google, not Microsoft.
Solved like computer viruses? (Score:2)
Why not work on gravity and faster-than-light? (Score:5, Insightful)
If we can solve the problem of cancer within 10 years by treating it as a computer virus, why not treat gravity as a computer virus and come up with practical, cheap antigravity? Or that pesky light-speed limit, we need to beat that, and 10 years sounds about right
Re:Why not work on gravity and faster-than-light? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a pitch to bolster the image of invasive data-mining, promising a blue-sky reward in return for watching peoples' browser activity.
That is the only viral thing about this story--their greed.
The *only* way to eliminate cancer.... (Score:2)
I imagine that this might be theoretically possible, but I don't expect that our sun will still be burning if or when it is achieved.
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I don't see how you can "force" cells in an organism to perform 100% identical copies, unless you genetically alter its DNA and put in place a new and better cell division mechanism. Which seems pretty far-fetched, in the same ballpark as creating Dyson spheres and Ringworlds.
You could probably treat cancer with a 100% success rate when they occur (which isn't quite the same as eliminating it, but close enough) with millions of advanced nanobots that swim around in your body and kill (or render impotent) ca
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Just specially tailor some cytoplasmic parasites to need cancer cells as hosts. Do to cancer what wolbachia does to insect cells.
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I imagine that this might be theoretically possible, but I don't expect that our sun will still be burning if or when it is achieved.
What if we replaced every single cell in your body one by one with a synthetic one controlled by nanomachines designed to execute every cellular process the same way that a biological cell would, however, the nanomachines controlling the cell would have a software program, instead of being controlled by the DNA, and during cell division, the clone would be a Digital cop
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you just described a cellular drm scheme you need to be distoried before the MPAA get ahold of you.
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eg AIDS could be called "solved" since you can now live a long and relatively normal life while infected.
Error free copies wouldn't work. (Score:2)
The DNA damage that leads to cancer doesn't exclusively happen during copying. Sometimes free radicals just damage your DNA, or radiation does, or just heat, or other chemical action. You not only have to copy 100% correct but correctly repair errors 100% of the time.
In order to fix both issues to extremely high probability, we'd need to have SIX strands of DNA. In case of damage to one, the repair happens according to the majority opinion of the correct sequence. If there's no majority opinion, (all th
Re:The *only* way to eliminate cancer.... (Score:4, Informative)
Not at all. Cancerous and pre-cancerous cells arise in the body all the time. It's the body's ability to eliminate such cells that protects you from cancer, but sometimes those mechanisms fail.
When this plan goes awry... (Score:2)
False positives (Score:2)
False positives are a major problem with computer antivirus
At least when the computer AV goes haywire, though, and renders the machine unbootable, you can always restore from backup and start over again.
You can't exactly do that with a human, if the antivirus accidentally kills off important parts of a vital system such as the brain.
Also..... it sounds like snakeoil. The human immune system is a highly-advanced highly-intelligent defense system with memory that learns much like the human mind does, and
Elephants have a defense against cancer (Score:4, Interesting)
And it's surprisingly simple. And they need it, because they have so many more cells than people do they would have a high risk of cancer without some sort of defense.
http://www.nature.com/news/how... [nature.com]
To summarize the contents of the link, elephants just have 20 copies of the p53 gene. To incite cancer, all the copies would have to be disabled, via the most common cancer generating mutation mechanism.
If you want to engineer people to be cancer resistant, it might be as simple as introducing more copies of the p53 gene into our genome.
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And it's surprisingly simple. And they need it, because they have so many more cells than people do they would have a high risk of cancer without some sort of defense.
http://www.nature.com/news/how... [nature.com]
To summarize the contents of the link, elephants just have 20 copies of the p53 gene. To incite cancer, all the copies would have to be disabled, via the most common cancer generating mutation mechanism.
If you want to engineer people to be cancer resistant, it might be as simple as introducing more copies of the p53 gene into our genome.
the p16 and p27 genes of the naked mole rat perform a similar function and we human have just the p16 and a crappier version too.
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Maybe SP2 will fix that, along with the stupid respiration control bodge.
Detecting some cancer by data mining is one thing. (Score:3)
There's a longstanding history of that kind of thing. Marketers having been data mining to detect when women are pregnant for years now and their methods are creepily accurate.
The thing is, though, that pregnancy is one thing. Pancreatic cancer is one thing. Cancer *in general* is more like a mixed bag of similar phenomena. We've pretty much converted many individual types of cancers that were a death sentence twenty years ago into curable illnesses. But others remain intractable. So saying "curing cancer" is a bit like saying "curing infection". Curing *the whole category* will require a truly fundamental progress in biology.
In fact it may require multidisciplinary breakthroughs. There's lots of things that kill tumor cells, but don't work on tumors.
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Curing *the whole category* will require a truly fundamental progress in biology.
Why, though? At this point it seems just as likely that we'll find a miracle cure to cure all cancers as it is that we'll just figure out treatments for every kind one by one.
Great: Windows Body Edition (Score:2)
... its ultimate aim is to make cells into living computers.
Adding a new edition to the Windows line up: Enterprise, Professional, Home, Body
(Notice: Do not engage in activities, like driving, while the mandatory updates are being applied as there have been reports of CPU utilization rates of 100% for extended periods of time. We expect this issue to be resolved in a future update.)
Will they perform a chemistry (Score:2)
Microsoft possesses no such technology (Score:2)
"Machine learning" is apparently the new nanotech.
Unlikely (Score:3)
Such hubris from a corporation that can't even get its flagship OS to keep time properly: Windows 10 will have a time-related brainfart if not connected to the internet when it tries to update system time and change the system time to some arbitrary time in the immediate past, usually several hours at a minimum. Such crap.
Eliminate Ambient Authority in the Human Body? (Score:2)
Ambient Authority is the root cause of most of the woes of modern computing. Your OS of choice doesn't know how to even ask "which files should this program have access to, for this instance", and just gives programs free run to do as they please... until this is fixed, we're going to have virii.
Cancer on the other hand is a situation where a cell already has resources it's supposed to have, but doesn't get rate limited in the use of them, allow it to grow, divide, and multiply.
Two fundamentally different p
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First fundamental problem: It's viruses. In English at least. In Latin, it would not be viri either because virus is neuter and only masculine nouns on -us become -i in the second declination. Virus is of the third declination (neuter). Another example is opus. It becomes opera. Not opi. Opi may put you to sleep similar to many Opera, but it is still something different.
The Latin plural of virus is vira, by the way. Viri would be the genitive singular. Virii is ... probably a problem with your keyboard, I d
All is well until someone drops, suffering from (Score:2)
the blue gene of death.
Takes vapoware ... (Score:2)
... to an entirely new level.
Just like SPAM. (Score:2)
Like they solved computer viruses? (Score:2)
In other words, ignore it long enough 'til some other companies come along to do it for them, then buy one randomly?
Sooo (Score:2)
Like a virus you say? (Score:2)
As usual (Score:2)
All my lifetime there have been news every few years about how this company or that is just about to find a cure for cancer and then nothing ever happens. I can assure you that the cure for cancer will not be found in the next 100 years. Of course there will be advances in how cancer is treated but a full blown cure is not going to happen.
Not optimistic, but... (Score:3)
The language is deliberately vague, because of course this is mostly a marketing stunt for Microsoft; after all, what does 'solve cancer' mean? But to be fair, we are in fact beginning to understand many of the factors that make up several cancer diseases, and sometimes it is beneficial to focus on a far away goal, even if it isn't entirely realistic in the timeframe.
Cancer, I think, will always be with us - in a snes it always IS; some would say that all of us have cancer, all the time, because there is always a certain proportion of new cells that have genetic faults, and some of them have the potential to become cancerous - what saves us is a good immune system. It makes intuitive sense, I think, because as we get older, our immune system becomes less efficient, and then we are less likely to stop all cancer cells, which explains why cancer is much more common in older people.
There is, however, reasons to hope that we can at some point find a single or a few common traits that unite all types of cancer and make them curable; I have certainly seen articles that hint at something that could give us that. But in 10 years? I don't know.
Good luck to them (Score:2)
The difference between Microsoft and many other places trying to cure cancer is Microsoft actually have money. I doubt this will work but why not hope it does?
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Just when you thought M$ weren't Borg after all (Score:2)
Blue Screen of Death. Oh Crap! (Score:2)
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Unless that reprogramming is to forcibly initiate apoptosis of the cell, via protein assisted activation through binding will a known cancerous mRNA in the cytoplasm, i agree completely.
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Microsoft will 'solve' cancer within 10 years by 'reprogramming' diseased cells
I think I've seen this movie before.
It doesn't end well.
Everyone will die when Microsoft does an update, and bitches up our heart and brain drivers.
Re:Oh, sweet Christmas (Score:5, Funny)
"Have you tried dying and being reincarnated?"
-- Tech Support
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Being born twice is not any more extraordinary than being born once.
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Microsoft will 'solve' cancer within 10 years by 'reprogramming' diseased cells
I think I've seen this movie before.
It doesn't end well.
Everyone will die when Microsoft does an update, and bitches up our heart and brain drivers.
BSOD as apocalypse?
It certainly fits!
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Is this the new buzz phrase for companies? Everything is always 5-10 years away, just you see!
Not yet. "5-10 years away" will be the buzzwords 5-10 years away.
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Is this the new buzz phrase for companies? Everything is always 5-10 years away, just you see!
That's it! Of course! Just as soon as we have fusion powered holographic storage this will be a trivial problem to solve.
Re:We're doomed (Score:5, Funny)
2026: Microsoft is widely blamed for unleashing the vampiric zombie cancer plague that has wiped out most of humanity.
Re:We're doomed (Score:5, Funny)
2026: Microsoft is widely blamed for unleashing the vampiric zombie cancer plague that has wiped out most of humanity.
microsoft gets defeated in 2030 by an army led by general protection fault.
we have no records dated after that.
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And you definitely do not want anyone to use the backdoor Microsoft will leave in "just in case".
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2026: Microsoft is widely blamed for unleashing the vampiric zombie cancer plague that has wiped out most of humanity.
Microsoft - giving "The Blue Screen Of Death" a whole new meaning.
Re:We're doomed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:We're doomed (Score:4, Insightful)
Am I the only one who is scared about the fact that these clueless fuckwits have enough data on us to diagnose which of us has prostate cancer?
Diagnosing that someone has prostate cancer because they've googled "symptoms of prostate cancer" isn't rocket surgery.
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To solve cancer in the way you propose would require going to triple or quadruple stranded DNA.
OTOH, it probably is possible to solve it be signing each chromosome with a hash-tag and using error correcting code to kill and that don't match properly. But that would tend to get rid of epigenetic codes, and thus there wouldn't be any differentiation between a liver cell and a kidney cell...we'd need to be giant sponges.
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To solve cancer in the way you propose would require going to triple or quadruple stranded DNA.
Did you read the post you're replying to? It really looks like you didn't.
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Or would that depend on age? Cleaning cells at age 12 would have little effect, as mutations are fewer, but in 80+, it would result in de
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Or would that depend on age? Cleaning cells at age 12 would have little effect, as mutations are fewer, but in 80+, it would result in death,
That's because cancer is a side-effect of living. When you can figure out how to prevent mutations in cell division, you would have cured cancer, but that same tech also gives immortality.
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Solve the replication issue, to eliminate replication errors, and you'll eliminate cancer. As "aging" is linked to telomeres, solve the replication issue, and you might solve aging as well.
That's because cancer is a side-effect of living. When you can figure out how to prevent mutations in cell division, you would have cured cancer, but that same tech also gives immortality.
Is there an echo?
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Nobody even knew. Chairs were thrown, we did the monkey-boy dance, and everyone had a good laugh about how ridiculous it all was.
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and you have a Bing dick."
So close, and yet so far.
Windows 10 is a virus according to your definition (Score:3)
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Windows forcefully installed itself onto some people's computers without asking.
I didn't think anyone actually believed those people.
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Well, probably you can get that cure for free... if you agree to get some electrodes planted into your brain. What they do? Why would you want to know, the cure (and the electrodes!) are FREE!
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Former #4 guy at Microsoft, Allchin, who also headed up Vista, said Open Source is un-American, and Legislators need to be educated to the danger.
Can Microsoft get rid of cancer as effectively as it got rid of Linux and Open Source?
Try to Embrace, Extend and Extinguish cancer.
But these days Microsoft Loves Linux. Just like Sharks love Fish, and Foxes love Chickens. Maybe next: Microsoft Loves Cancer!
Maybe Microsoft can