Get ready to hear the 10-20% figure more, since it seems to be a right-wing meme at the moment. Anyone who has actually been a state IT employee, like myself, knows that it is false and actually a reversal of reality. State IT jobs pay less and have better hours and benefits than private sector IT jobs. For pete's sake, that's why I went to work for the state.
One reason is the U232 decay products, whose hard gamma emissions frighten even the steeliest nuclear scientists and technicians. These facilities require many times the usual amount of shielding to be safe. That said, research is ongoing. There is a lot of thorium around, and countries without uranium can usually scrape some thorium together.
What made this outbreak stand out was not how many people died from the flu, but:
WHO died - young healthy people aged 20-40, not olds or babies.
WHEN they died - after the end of the normal flu season.
HOW FAST the disease spread to other regions. It's on at least three continents by now, probably all of them by week's end.
It is hard to say how many mild cases there were. The 1000 estimate (now over double that) was just people sick enough to see a doctor. Most likely there were 10 or even 100 times this number who stayed home and recovered.
World Health Organization has now raised the worldwide alert level. This has not happened since 1968. No panic is required but national response networks need to kick in. Those bird flu stockpiles will come in handy.
I do not trust the U.S. judicial system to rule with 100% accuracy. Compensating an innocent victim of miscarried justice is impossible after the death penalty has been applied. Again, I do not trust my government with the power to end the life of its citizens. It confuses me that people who rail the loudest against government interference in their lives usually support the death penalty.
Ordinarily I hate spelling trolls, but hot damn, "You are a pendant..." is funny on so many levels. Especially in the context of a Hey Smarty Pants post.
Exactly. "This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. Had this been an actual emergency..." gets broadcast once a month, hell or high water. It's the LAW and part of the US Civil Defence system. There is a more subtle point here though.
Many people are illiterate, retarded, demented, isolated, mentally unstable, very old, or any combination of the above. These people are least likely to have upgraded of their own volition. Many will FREAK when the TV stops working. That's a big section of the populace to be freaking at the same time - tens of millions? What could possibly go wrong?
The 911 emergency call system may be overburdened with outage reports. People who depend on TV may go Full Cold Turkey. Junkies who need a fix are dangerous people. Paranoid, antigovernment, jonesing junkies, on the other hand... If civil order is maintained in all places, I'll eat my hat.
Obama? You reading this? How about setting up your email army with converter boxes and doing some outreach with the olds for starters? (While they're at it, give them each a square of sod and tell them to report to the National Mall.)
Pray you, your significant other or your child never develops a medical illness that will be considered a pre-existing condition by the insurance companies (or any kind of mental illness, but that is a different discussion altogether). Many people with those conditions find it rather expensive, or completely impossible, to change insurers. Fortunately, most (all?) (US) states provide last-resort health insurance for the otherwise uninsurable. Price it sometime, I dare ya. The premiums would be a lot less if the relatively healthy were included in the risk pool. Which of course is why the publically traded HMOs and other insurance businesses do their best to exclude sick people for their risk pools.
I have worked in government with regulators, and have to challenge your statements that they are poorly informed on the issues at hand. Some are, but most are reasonably well informed. One can say the same of the business class, who by the way when hired are not as tightly regulated regarding qualifications, nepotism, or all kinds of discrimination.
Congress (or other legislative bodies) play a minor role in creating and enforcing regulations. Laws are what they do. Regulations are created and enforced (or not) by the executive branch, with some rare exceptions.
LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act with a shaky pen, because he knew the southern wing of the Democratic party would bolt to the Republican party (because they told him so). This would be a much sadder country if he had put party unity ahead of trying to fix race relations.
You kids with your podcasts. Don't remember race riots in the streets and little girls in church getting blown up.
Fast forward 15 years and there are gas lines, 18% interest and US manufacturing is beginning the long slow slide. 400 Americans have been held prisoner in Iran for a year so far and Jimmy's not getting anywhere not negotiating with the terrorists. I'm graduating from high school and getting ready to vote for the first time. I register Democratic but eventually pull the lever (yes, a lever) for Ronnie who is at that moment secretly wrapping up his deal with the mullahs. 1 day after the inauguration, the prisoners are freed. Took a long time for the truth to come out on how that was arranged.
Lots of Democrats went Republican for that election and stayed there. Maybe you were talking about those Republicans. Some went back, like me. People change, times change.
Newton? Forget that slimy backdoor alchemist,
our hopes can only be realized by a Neo-like persona.
Logical and vicious, working the threads
until they snap. Nothing grows in a vacuum.
Lame breeds lazy, but nobody _wants_ to walk through the fire.
Zeno's paradox stings like stones in our shoes...
4/5, 5/6, 6/7 of the way to the goal...
Until time blinks out, never reaching it.
If you know what selects for intelligence, by all means post it here; I've asked every biology teacher I've had since 9th grade and never gotten a reasonable answer.
Intelligence has been defined as that which separates us from animals. There are two attributes humans have evolved that mostly fill that role: language and weapons. Both convey a survival advantage. Will the Goog-entity master either, or both? My bet is on language but God help us if it's the other.
Requisitioning gold from Fort Knox to use for wiring was my favorite bit of trivia.
Not to be pedantic, but it was the US silver bullion stockpile, melted down into magnet cores. And they dammed up most of the Appalachian watershed to get the hydro power to run the magnets. What an amazing megaproject.
Breaking Bad, on AMC. If you have a strong stomach. High School chemistry teacher melts down at his car wash after-school job, and finds a second career in the pharmaceutical industry. Lots more hydrofluoric acid than I ever wanted to see on the small screen.
Circa 1990 I was working in a trailer at a US national laboratory that shall remain nameless. The trailer was on top of a mesa beside a canyon. Wildlife would climb up out of the canyon and forage on the mesa. The construction guys saw a black bear in the back of my truck, foraging I suppose, but anyway.
I would bring my lunch in and sometimes it included fruit. The fruit pits, cores, or skins sat in the trash for a few days (this was in a somewhat remote canyon without daily trash pickup). The server I was working on was a IBM Microchannel 386 running SCO Xenix. SCO wasn't really evil then according to some people I know who worked there and enjoyed the hot tub Fridays, but anyway.
I needed to add a fantastically expensive Microchannel SCSI interface card to support an external WORM drive. Opened up the case with the oh so innovative at the time thumbscrews and what the hell. The case interior was covered with cherry pits, each with one tiny hole. No data loss, no outage. Never did catch the wascally wodent.
I want a vat-grown car. That runs on biofuel. Parked in front of my biohouse. It doesn't have to fly to impress me.
Some high-school kid will design it for me, with BioBricks or the next thing. New, bad laws will be hurriedly enacted.
What a century this will be! Less genocide, please.
I hope you didn't mean to imply that non-USA citizens cannot be convicted in US courts, because they can. Anyway, presumably government added the people on the http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-holyland23oct23,1,1922726.story?coll=la-headlines-nationHoly Land Foundation donor list to the Watch List. Seized the foundation assets and investigated the case for six years but something went wrong with the trial. No guilty verdict. Are the people who donated still worth watching? (And for six years they have been watched in newly allowed ways.) Is there any way to get off the Watch List?
I have to guess that more people in Myanmar/Burma have cellphones than computers, or even access to internet cafes. Even if the cellphone network is state-controlled, most phones these days are little autonomous video cameras. This is one bright spot in our new surveillance society; even the tyrants get caught in the act sometimes.
I hope that the monks who just escaped will someday be able to testify to what they have seen. I also hope that those big man-purses they were carrying were stuffed with SIM cards from thousands of cellphones.
Hazardous in case of skin contact (irritant), of eye contact (irritant), of ingestion, of inhalation...Check for and remove any contact lenses. In case of contact, immediately flush eyes with plenty of water.
So they won't be fogging airports with this stuff anytime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Get ready to hear the 10-20% figure more, since it seems to be a right-wing meme at the moment. Anyone who has actually been a state IT employee, like myself, knows that it is false and actually a reversal of reality. State IT jobs pay less and have better hours and benefits than private sector IT jobs. For pete's sake, that's why I went to work for the state.
One reason is the U232 decay products, whose hard gamma emissions frighten even the steeliest nuclear scientists and technicians. These facilities require many times the usual amount of shielding to be safe. That said, research is ongoing. There is a lot of thorium around, and countries without uranium can usually scrape some thorium together.
What made this outbreak stand out was not how many people died from the flu, but: WHO died - young healthy people aged 20-40, not olds or babies. WHEN they died - after the end of the normal flu season. HOW FAST the disease spread to other regions. It's on at least three continents by now, probably all of them by week's end. It is hard to say how many mild cases there were. The 1000 estimate (now over double that) was just people sick enough to see a doctor. Most likely there were 10 or even 100 times this number who stayed home and recovered. World Health Organization has now raised the worldwide alert level. This has not happened since 1968. No panic is required but national response networks need to kick in. Those bird flu stockpiles will come in handy.
True story: in my neighborhood, the tubes were rooted. 35 feet of root. At last report, the intrusion was traced to stately elms.
I do not trust the U.S. judicial system to rule with 100% accuracy. Compensating an innocent victim of miscarried justice is impossible after the death penalty has been applied. Again, I do not trust my government with the power to end the life of its citizens. It confuses me that people who rail the loudest against government interference in their lives usually support the death penalty.
Ordinarily I hate spelling trolls, but hot damn, "You are a pendant..." is funny on so many levels. Especially in the context of a Hey Smarty Pants post.
Exactly. "This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. Had this been an actual emergency..." gets broadcast once a month, hell or high water. It's the LAW and part of the US Civil Defence system. There is a more subtle point here though.
Many people are illiterate, retarded, demented, isolated, mentally unstable, very old, or any combination of the above. These people are least likely to have upgraded of their own volition. Many will FREAK when the TV stops working. That's a big section of the populace to be freaking at the same time - tens of millions? What could possibly go wrong?
The 911 emergency call system may be overburdened with outage reports. People who depend on TV may go Full Cold Turkey. Junkies who need a fix are dangerous people. Paranoid, antigovernment, jonesing junkies, on the other hand... If civil order is maintained in all places, I'll eat my hat.
Obama? You reading this? How about setting up your email army with converter boxes and doing some outreach with the olds for starters? (While they're at it, give them each a square of sod and tell them to report to the National Mall.)
So it goes.
cal 9 1752
Pray you, your significant other or your child never develops a medical illness that will be considered a pre-existing condition by the insurance companies (or any kind of mental illness, but that is a different discussion altogether). Many people with those conditions find it rather expensive, or completely impossible, to change insurers. Fortunately, most (all?) (US) states provide last-resort health insurance for the otherwise uninsurable. Price it sometime, I dare ya. The premiums would be a lot less if the relatively healthy were included in the risk pool. Which of course is why the publically traded HMOs and other insurance businesses do their best to exclude sick people for their risk pools.
I have worked in government with regulators, and have to challenge your statements that they are poorly informed on the issues at hand. Some are, but most are reasonably well informed. One can say the same of the business class, who by the way when hired are not as tightly regulated regarding qualifications, nepotism, or all kinds of discrimination.
Congress (or other legislative bodies) play a minor role in creating and enforcing regulations. Laws are what they do. Regulations are created and enforced (or not) by the executive branch, with some rare exceptions.
Reaping that whirlwind yet?
How old are you? PAGING DOCTOR MEMORY...
LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act with a shaky pen, because he knew the southern wing of the Democratic party would bolt to the Republican party (because they told him so). This would be a much sadder country if he had put party unity ahead of trying to fix race relations.
You kids with your podcasts. Don't remember race riots in the streets and little girls in church getting blown up.
Fast forward 15 years and there are gas lines, 18% interest and US manufacturing is beginning the long slow slide. 400 Americans have been held prisoner in Iran for a year so far and Jimmy's not getting anywhere not negotiating with the terrorists. I'm graduating from high school and getting ready to vote for the first time. I register Democratic but eventually pull the lever (yes, a lever) for Ronnie who is at that moment secretly wrapping up his deal with the mullahs. 1 day after the inauguration, the prisoners are freed. Took a long time for the truth to come out on how that was arranged.
Lots of Democrats went Republican for that election and stayed there. Maybe you were talking about those Republicans. Some went back, like me. People change, times change.
Once upon a time in a magical land where sensitive data would from time to time vanish and then reappear, the mainframe WAS the sofa.
Newton? Forget that slimy backdoor alchemist,
our hopes can only be realized by a Neo-like persona.
Logical and vicious, working the threads
until they snap. Nothing grows in a vacuum.
Lame breeds lazy, but nobody _wants_ to walk through the fire.
Zeno's paradox stings like stones in our shoes...
4/5, 5/6, 6/7 of the way to the goal...
Until time blinks out, never reaching it.
Intelligence has been defined as that which separates us from animals. There are two attributes humans have evolved that mostly fill that role: language and weapons. Both convey a survival advantage. Will the Goog-entity master either, or both? My bet is on language but God help us if it's the other.
Under UCMJ, desertion is a crime. You signed away your right to free travel. What is the civilian equivalent, my warrior?
Been happening since we started putting radiation detectors on roads. Here's a story from 1984 about an incident that sickened a Juarez neighborhood, yet amazingly killed nobody: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9501E7D71338F932A35756C0A962948260&sec=health&spon=&pagewanted=all
"When a delivery truck took a wrong turn near the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico on Jan. 17, a radiation alarm was tripped."
Breaking Bad, on AMC. If you have a strong stomach. High School chemistry teacher melts down at his car wash after-school job, and finds a second career in the pharmaceutical industry. Lots more hydrofluoric acid than I ever wanted to see on the small screen.
Circa 1990 I was working in a trailer at a US national laboratory that shall remain nameless. The trailer was on top of a mesa beside a canyon. Wildlife would climb up out of the canyon and forage on the mesa. The construction guys saw a black bear in the back of my truck, foraging I suppose, but anyway.
I would bring my lunch in and sometimes it included fruit. The fruit pits, cores, or skins sat in the trash for a few days (this was in a somewhat remote canyon without daily trash pickup). The server I was working on was a IBM Microchannel 386 running SCO Xenix. SCO wasn't really evil then according to some people I know who worked there and enjoyed the hot tub Fridays, but anyway.
I needed to add a fantastically expensive Microchannel SCSI interface card to support an external WORM drive. Opened up the case with the oh so innovative at the time thumbscrews and what the hell. The case interior was covered with cherry pits, each with one tiny hole. No data loss, no outage. Never did catch the wascally wodent.
I want a vat-grown car. That runs on biofuel. Parked in front of my biohouse. It doesn't have to fly to impress me. Some high-school kid will design it for me, with BioBricks or the next thing. New, bad laws will be hurriedly enacted. What a century this will be! Less genocide, please.
The resulting gold would burn a hole in your pocket, were you foolish enough to pocket it.
I hope you didn't mean to imply that non-USA citizens cannot be convicted in US courts, because they can. Anyway, presumably government added the people on the http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-holyland23oct23,1,1922726.story?coll=la-headlines-nationHoly Land Foundation donor list to the Watch List. Seized the foundation assets and investigated the case for six years but something went wrong with the trial. No guilty verdict. Are the people who donated still worth watching? (And for six years they have been watched in newly allowed ways.) Is there any way to get off the Watch List?
I have to guess that more people in Myanmar/Burma have cellphones than computers, or even access to internet cafes. Even if the cellphone network is state-controlled, most phones these days are little autonomous video cameras. This is one bright spot in our new surveillance society; even the tyrants get caught in the act sometimes.
I hope that the monks who just escaped will someday be able to testify to what they have seen. I also hope that those big man-purses they were carrying were stuffed with SIM cards from thousands of cellphones.
So they won't be fogging airports with this stuff anytime soon.