. I am an Iraq veteran and I can tell you that in 2005, 99% of all civilian deaths came from terrorists.
Anecdotal claims from a soldier in the conflict are not evidence. Please provide a citation for this "99%" figure. Back in 2004 the Iraqi Health Ministry stated that coalition forces were killing twice as many civilians than the insurgents were: More Iraqi Civilians Killed by US Forces Than By Insurgents, Data Shows.
It's a bit more subtle than that. Years ago Red Hat gave up on the desktop as a "product". It was perhaps a mistake, as it was one of the drivers for desktop users switching to Ubuntu, and mindshare is important. It was 2009 before Computerworld announced that Red Hat returns to the Linux desktop.
Red Hat used to be in the desktop business along with all the other Linux distributors. Then, they left. As Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's CEO, explained Red Hat's desktop approach to me last year, "There are companies that sell hundreds of products for millions of dollars and there are companies that sell millions of products for hundreds of dollars. Guess which kind of company Red Hat is?"
.... It's not that Red Hat ever gave up on doing things with the desktop. It's just that Red Hat had no plans on making any money from the desktop with a formal desktop product.
Not really, because it isn't required to be an employee of Canonical in order to be an Ubuntu developer. Most Ubuntu developers are not Canonical employees. Teams like Xubuntu, Edubuntu etc. release fully functional desktop distributions built on Ubuntu without relying on any of their members being fulltime Canonical employees.
Canonical have only pulled funding for one developer. Kubuntu, like all open source projects, will continue as long as there is a community behind it. It appears that Kubuntu hasn't been a commercial success for Canonical despite 7 years of funding. The KDE developer involved, Jonathan Riddell, deserves some respect for acknowledging this and recognising that this is a rational (and probably correct) business decision. I suspect quite a few developers would have reacted with anger at both being laid off and losing funding for their pet project.
What percentage of apps use the NDK? I suspect it isn't that many, but I've never seen a figure. BlueStacks claim that they can run native Android/ARM and Android/X86 code as well as the Dalvik code, so they must be doing some form of ARM emulation at least.
Atheism most decidedly DOES relate humanity to spirituality.
It depends on what you mean by "spirituality". Under the usual definition, most atheists would probably not define themselves as being "spiritual". Put it this way: if an intelligent robot reasoned about the world in a logical way, and came to the conclusion that there probably was no god or gods, based on the available evidence, then you would be unlikely to say that this belief was based on the robot's "spirituality".
Atheism isn't a religion by any definition of "religion" that is in use today. Try it:
Wikipedia: "Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values."
Atheism: no. There is no spiritual or moral component of atheism.
Wikipedia: "Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to explain the origin of life or the universe."
Atheism: no. There are no symbols, no narratives, no creation myths, no attempt to explain the universe.
I could go on, but I think we've established that atheism does not match the (presumably generally accepted) Wikipedia definition.
Let's try another: "The belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, esp. a personal God or gods." Nope.
Dictionary.com gives several definitions. Some don't apply because of the lack of gods etc. The rest don't apply because of the lack of practice - there are no religious practices associated with atheism. Some other definitions include a requirement of "faith" which could qualify, but when we define "faith" in a religious context the definition is something like "Strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof." Kind of a circular definition.
So, here's the thing: what is the definition of "religion" that would include atheism, and is this definition widely accepted? Would it make sense for somebody to say "Yes, I am very religious - I'm an atheist", or would people find that odd? Because if they would find it odd, then it probably isn't a valid definition. And if your definition is too broad, and just includes practicies, beliefs etc. and negates the need to believe in a personal god, then you are going to end up defining sports fans as being a religion (belief - "my team is the best", communal acts/practices - "watching the game" etc.) Apple fans ("Apple is the best", communal acts "queing for new iphone", group spirituality - "mourning of Jobs" etc.).
seeing how simple it is to set up the Android qemu/kvm based SDK in a virtual machine on Linux, I don't know if that itch is really very scratchy.
BlueStacks got over $10m funding, so some people think it's a good idea. It should be really easy to do, too - all the source required is open and already runs on Linux/Android, it just needs porting to Linux/desktop.
please tell us more about this debian chroot solution.
The price does sound a little high, but (assuming the Spark is completely open source) it will hopefully open up a whole new market of cheap clone devices.
the tablet (about $265 USD) will be available for pre-order this week and will start shipping worldwide in May. In terms of specifications, the 7-inch (800x480) multi-touch tablet will run a 1GHz AMLogic ARM processor and Mali-400 GPU and sport 512MB of RAM, 4GB of internal storage (with a microSD slot for expandability), 802/11b/g WiFi, a pair of USB ports, a front-facing 1.3MP webcam, and an audio jack.
The Ainol Novo 7 Paladin has similar hardware specs and been spotted as low as $80, it would be a good candidate for a Linux/Plasma port:
Ingenic JZ4770 Xburst, 1GHz; Vivante GC860 GPU, 8GB Flash, 512MB RAM, Screen Size 7 inch 800X480 supports 1080P HD Video
The Nexus phones aren't locked down. The source is available for the kernel and libraries etc. the only thing you don't get the source for is the Google apps. There are replacements for some e.g. Opera for web browser, various email clients. I don't think there's a replacement for YouTube yet though, though mplayer has been ported now, so it shouldn't be long before we see packaged mplayer frontend apps appearing.
If you're talking about the architecture as a whole, it sometimes does "feel" less accessible, because you neeed to learn a lot of stuff before you are able to build a ROM and swap bits out. It would've been nice if there were a unified backend architecture (Wayland?) and similar base libraries (eg libc) that Android and the Linux distributions were both using, so that cross-platform desktops and their apps would've been easier to develop on desktops and tablets. KDE on desktop & tablet & phone, with cross-compatibility for QT apps (with size specific UI layout) sounds good. Throw in an Android player and a generic backend so non-QT graphical apps work, and it's a potential winner.
Android and traditional "Linux" are not quite the same thing. Imagine taking a generic Linux distribution like Ubuntu, cutting it to the bare minimum, replacing xorg and the desktop with an app launcher, add a web browser and media player, add a Java runtime environment like the JRE linked to an online app market, and then you have something that resembles Android. Command line Linux apps will run on Android, but you will usually have to recompile them if nobody else has (you can cheat though, and say, run Debian in a chroot). Linux graphical apps (X) will not run on Android (you can hypothetically run them through VNC, but it's not great). Apps written for other graphical backends like OpenGL and SDL should work on Android once you get them to compile. Android apps will not run on Linux because there is no Android runtime environment for Linux. At some point I expect we'll see an open source "Android player", but nobody has done it yet (I recall Canonical working on it at one point, but I haven't heard anything about that for a while).
"we make more money with this scheme than your piddly little fines can ever hope to 'punish' us", and "we're not even based in your country, so your laws mean precisely as much as we allow them to"
1. They have the power to fine by an unlimited amount, and the power to increase the original fine over time if the company in question does not become compliant. No corporation has carried out your proposed strategy of just paying the fines - even Microsoft - because it would be stupid.
2. Facebook International is based in Dublin, Ireland, which is part of the E.U..
The site belongs to facebook. It is hosted in the US.
Facebook International HQ is in Dublin, Ireland - which is part of the E.U. They are also currently building a massive data center in Sweden which will handle all traffic from Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
This idea of trying to regulate what people do with the devices they own is simply laughable.
Welcome to the real world, where there are regulations governing businesses, and regulations that cover many of the devices that businesses use. You may also want to educate yourself regarding some of the reasons that Europeans generally support pro-privacy and anti-data-collection laws. You may be surprised to learn that it was a trade union that rose up against the communists and fought for the first free democratic elections in eastern Europe.
Plawski knew what he had to do – without the other destroyers Piorun couldn’t hope to face the Bismarck alone. Now that suprise was lost the Battleship was fast enough to keep Piorun out of torpedo range, the Piorun couldn’t stay in contact with her now. She should radio in Bismarck’s latest position and then, for want of another phrase, get the fuck out of Dodge.
They’d all just have to hope that another ship was close enough to make contact with her again before she managed to slip away again – although given the weather and the darkness Plawski realised that was increasingly unlikely.
It was frustrating and may ultimately mean the British missed their opportunity to intercept, but sadly, that was the only sensible option. Anything else was suicide.
Plawski though for a split second then sighed, smiled and gave his orders to his crew:
“Full speed ahead. All hands to battlestations. We attack.”
As far as I know, the SFLC doesn't have to grant a redistribution license - you already have a license in the GPL - you just have to abide by its terms. You would be correct though *if* the SFLC is using the threat of legal action for past infringement to also demand release of the Linux kernel source.
Busybox copyright is enforced by the SFLC, which sues companies to get them to comply. When negotiating for compliance, they also request that the company in question comply with the GPL2 license on the Linux kernel. Now, for whatever stupid reasons, some companies don't want to release their kernel modifications for Android devices. So they think that by removing Busybox, the SFLC will no longer have a copyright claim that opens them to litigation which results in their releasing their kernel source. This reasoning is flawed, because there is another, much easier way to avoid Busybox litigation: put the source code on your web site. That's all it takes. They could keep their kernel sources, and just put up the Busybox source, and they would achieve the same thing.
The other argument being made by one developer is that enforcement action is pointless, because he hasn't seen any Busybox source opened up from this route that was worth anything. Others disagree, saying there was some useful code, and that it's not just about Busybox - the Busybox enforcement actions have also resulted in kernel drivers being opened up.
So, the "outrage" here is the allegation that Busybox is being rewritten so that companies can violate the copyright of the Linux kernel without being sued by the SFLC.
You can spend months trying to rewrite busybox, or you can just put the source code on your web site. It's not that hard. In fact, Sony already do it. GPL Compliance: put the source on your web site. That's all it takes. It isn't expensive or difficult.
It was in the Barnes and Noble court filing, they said MS wanted more money per device for "Linux patent protection" than they charge to license WP7. I think the exact amounts got redacted in the court filings though.
The Microsoft-created features protected by the patents infringed by the Nook and Nook Color tablet are core to the user experience. For example, the patents we asserted today protect innovations that:
* Give people easy ways to navigate through information provided by their device apps via a separate control window with tabs;
* Enable display of a webpage’s content before the background image is received, allowing users to interact with the page faster;
* Allow apps to superimpose download status on top of the downloading content;
* Permit users to easily select text in a document and adjust that selection; and
* Provide users the ability to annotate text without changing the underlying document.
Microsoft obviously thinks this is pretty advanced stuff. Adjust a text selection? Annotate a document? Tabbed controls? Woah. No wonder they want $30 per device (more than the cost of licensing WP7!).
From your link: "A laboratory in the Netherlands has identified a lethal influenza H5N1 virus strain that is transmitted among ferrets."
The whole argument from your link about it not being as lethal as H5N1 is pure speculation - as he admits, we don't know transmissibility of the strain in humans, because we won't do that experiment. His basic argument is the virulence of the virus in humans is reduced by having the virus be transmitted through non-human hosts. This is not necessarily true - it depends on what species the virus is moving between. If a virus makes the leap from something further from humans (eg fish) to something closer to humans (eg pigs) then it becomes more dangerous to us. His argument may be correct in the case where you have an organism adapted very well to humans and you expose it to non-human transmission selective pressures, then it will probably evolve and become less adapted to humans. But this is not always the situation.
He also says:
Nature is far better at producing viruses that can kill – to think that we can duplicate the enormous diversity and selection pressures that occur in the wild is a severe case of scientific hubris.
Maybe he is right (at the moment) about manually targetted changes - but we are only going to get better at this over time. He has also ignored the practice of laboratory evolution (or synthetic evolution), where nature is used in the lab to evolve or enhance certain characteristics of organisms. For a far-out plan, some rogue biologists could expose humans, see which ones are infected and die first, and then infect others with flu samples taken from those bodies. After repeating for some generations, this selective pressure may well produce a highly lethal and highly transmissible variant.
We don't worry about India having the bomb and last time I checked they were 'brown people' too.
We did. There were sanctions and everything. It was a lot like the current situation with Iran:
President Clinton immediately reacted to the explosions with shock and criticized India's nuclear testing. The American President argued that India’s actions violated the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty endorsed by 149 nations and the 1970 non-proliferation treaty signed by 185 nations. Despite the fact that neither India nor Pakistan has signed the treaties, the President, citing the 1994 Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Act, immediately called for economic sanctions against India including cutting off $40 million in economic and military aid, and all American bank loans. The President also asked the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to cancel all new loans which could cost India around $14.5 billion worth of public projects, including a major modernization of India's often failing electrical system. Moreover, Japan and other industrial nations soon followed the U.S. example and froze on-going projects in India worth over a billion dollars in aid. http://asiasociety.org/countries/conflicts/india-pakistan-relations-50-year-history
And...
guessing wrong... could be a civilization extinction event
How on earth would Iran gaining a nuclear weapon be an extinction level event for our species? "no country in history has ever committed suicide in order to destroy another. And Israel, with 200 nuclear weapons and air, sea and land launchers, could easily destroy Iran if it was attacked." - the Huffington Post "Where will it drop it, this bomb? On Israel? It would not have gone 200 metres into the atmosphere before Tehran would be razed." - Jacques Chirac
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that civilians are still dying in Iraq and our armed forces are not there.
Far far fewer now.
. I am an Iraq veteran and I can tell you that in 2005, 99% of all civilian deaths came from terrorists.
Anecdotal claims from a soldier in the conflict are not evidence. Please provide a citation for this "99%" figure. Back in 2004 the Iraqi Health Ministry stated that coalition forces were killing twice as many civilians than the insurgents were: More Iraqi Civilians Killed by US Forces Than By Insurgents, Data Shows.
Red Hat used to be in the desktop business along with all the other Linux distributors. Then, they left. As Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's CEO, explained Red Hat's desktop approach to me last year, "There are companies that sell hundreds of products for millions of dollars and there are companies that sell millions of products for hundreds of dollars. Guess which kind of company Red Hat is?"
.... It's not that Red Hat ever gave up on doing things with the desktop. It's just that Red Hat had no plans on making any money from the desktop with a formal desktop product.
Not really, because it isn't required to be an employee of Canonical in order to be an Ubuntu developer. Most Ubuntu developers are not Canonical employees. Teams like Xubuntu, Edubuntu etc. release fully functional desktop distributions built on Ubuntu without relying on any of their members being fulltime Canonical employees.
Canonical have only pulled funding for one developer. Kubuntu, like all open source projects, will continue as long as there is a community behind it. It appears that Kubuntu hasn't been a commercial success for Canonical despite 7 years of funding. The KDE developer involved, Jonathan Riddell, deserves some respect for acknowledging this and recognising that this is a rational (and probably correct) business decision. I suspect quite a few developers would have reacted with anger at both being laid off and losing funding for their pet project.
What percentage of apps use the NDK? I suspect it isn't that many, but I've never seen a figure. BlueStacks claim that they can run native Android/ARM and Android/X86 code as well as the Dalvik code, so they must be doing some form of ARM emulation at least.
Atheism most decidedly DOES relate humanity to spirituality.
It depends on what you mean by "spirituality". Under the usual definition, most atheists would probably not define themselves as being "spiritual". Put it this way: if an intelligent robot reasoned about the world in a logical way, and came to the conclusion that there probably was no god or gods, based on the available evidence, then you would be unlikely to say that this belief was based on the robot's "spirituality".
whatever process (e.g. "reason") they employ to arrive at a conclusion leaves them with utter certainty in their views.
This description does not match the majority of atheists, in my experience this kind of statement is more common: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."
Atheism isn't a religion by any definition of "religion" that is in use today. Try it:
Wikipedia: "Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values."
Atheism: no. There is no spiritual or moral component of atheism.
Wikipedia: "Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to explain the origin of life or the universe."
Atheism: no. There are no symbols, no narratives, no creation myths, no attempt to explain the universe.
I could go on, but I think we've established that atheism does not match the (presumably generally accepted) Wikipedia definition.
Let's try another: "The belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, esp. a personal God or gods." Nope.
Dictionary.com gives several definitions. Some don't apply because of the lack of gods etc. The rest don't apply because of the lack of practice - there are no religious practices associated with atheism. Some other definitions include a requirement of "faith" which could qualify, but when we define "faith" in a religious context the definition is something like "Strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof." Kind of a circular definition.
So, here's the thing: what is the definition of "religion" that would include atheism, and is this definition widely accepted? Would it make sense for somebody to say "Yes, I am very religious - I'm an atheist", or would people find that odd? Because if they would find it odd, then it probably isn't a valid definition. And if your definition is too broad, and just includes practicies, beliefs etc. and negates the need to believe in a personal god, then you are going to end up defining sports fans as being a religion (belief - "my team is the best", communal acts/practices - "watching the game" etc.) Apple fans ("Apple is the best", communal acts "queing for new iphone", group spirituality - "mourning of Jobs" etc.).
seeing how simple it is to set up the Android qemu/kvm based SDK in a virtual machine on Linux, I don't know if that itch is really very scratchy.
BlueStacks got over $10m funding, so some people think it's a good idea. It should be really easy to do, too - all the source required is open and already runs on Linux/Android, it just needs porting to Linux/desktop.
please tell us more about this debian chroot solution.
http://www.mayrhofer.eu.org/debian-on-android http://www.saurik.com/id/10
the tablet (about $265 USD) will be available for pre-order this week and will start shipping worldwide in May. In terms of specifications, the 7-inch (800x480) multi-touch tablet will run a 1GHz AMLogic ARM processor and Mali-400 GPU and sport 512MB of RAM, 4GB of internal storage (with a microSD slot for expandability), 802/11b/g WiFi, a pair of USB ports, a front-facing 1.3MP webcam, and an audio jack.
The Ainol Novo 7 Paladin has similar hardware specs and been spotted as low as $80, it would be a good candidate for a Linux/Plasma port:
Ingenic JZ4770 Xburst, 1GHz; Vivante GC860 GPU, 8GB Flash, 512MB RAM, Screen Size 7 inch 800X480 supports 1080P HD Video
The Nexus phones aren't locked down. The source is available for the kernel and libraries etc. the only thing you don't get the source for is the Google apps. There are replacements for some e.g. Opera for web browser, various email clients. I don't think there's a replacement for YouTube yet though, though mplayer has been ported now, so it shouldn't be long before we see packaged mplayer frontend apps appearing.
If you're talking about the architecture as a whole, it sometimes does "feel" less accessible, because you neeed to learn a lot of stuff before you are able to build a ROM and swap bits out. It would've been nice if there were a unified backend architecture (Wayland?) and similar base libraries (eg libc) that Android and the Linux distributions were both using, so that cross-platform desktops and their apps would've been easier to develop on desktops and tablets. KDE on desktop & tablet & phone, with cross-compatibility for QT apps (with size specific UI layout) sounds good. Throw in an Android player and a generic backend so non-QT graphical apps work, and it's a potential winner.
Android and traditional "Linux" are not quite the same thing. Imagine taking a generic Linux distribution like Ubuntu, cutting it to the bare minimum, replacing xorg and the desktop with an app launcher, add a web browser and media player, add a Java runtime environment like the JRE linked to an online app market, and then you have something that resembles Android. Command line Linux apps will run on Android, but you will usually have to recompile them if nobody else has (you can cheat though, and say, run Debian in a chroot). Linux graphical apps (X) will not run on Android (you can hypothetically run them through VNC, but it's not great). Apps written for other graphical backends like OpenGL and SDL should work on Android once you get them to compile. Android apps will not run on Linux because there is no Android runtime environment for Linux. At some point I expect we'll see an open source "Android player", but nobody has done it yet (I recall Canonical working on it at one point, but I haven't heard anything about that for a while).
"Free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don't attack each other. Free nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction."
"You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror."
"Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties."
"we make more money with this scheme than your piddly little fines can ever hope to 'punish' us", and "we're not even based in your country, so your laws mean precisely as much as we allow them to"
1. They have the power to fine by an unlimited amount, and the power to increase the original fine over time if the company in question does not become compliant. No corporation has carried out your proposed strategy of just paying the fines - even Microsoft - because it would be stupid.
2. Facebook International is based in Dublin, Ireland, which is part of the E.U..
"Multinational means multi-jurisdictional too, something to do with having your cake and eating it." [spelling corrected]
Actually, that is not the case at all.
A multinational corporation - by definition - operates in multiple nations, and hence under multiple legal jurisdictions.
Yes, but Facebook is a European company, and it does business in Europe. Either one of those would make it liable to E.U. jurisdiction.
The site belongs to facebook. It is hosted in the US.
Facebook International HQ is in Dublin, Ireland - which is part of the E.U. They are also currently building a massive data center in Sweden which will handle all traffic from Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
This idea of trying to regulate what people do with the devices they own is simply laughable.
Welcome to the real world, where there are regulations governing businesses, and regulations that cover many of the devices that businesses use. You may also want to educate yourself regarding some of the reasons that Europeans generally support pro-privacy and anti-data-collection laws. You may be surprised to learn that it was a trade union that rose up against the communists and fought for the first free democratic elections in eastern Europe.
Plawski knew what he had to do – without the other destroyers Piorun couldn’t hope to face the Bismarck alone. Now that suprise was lost the Battleship was fast enough to keep Piorun out of torpedo range, the Piorun couldn’t stay in contact with her now. She should radio in Bismarck’s latest position and then, for want of another phrase, get the fuck out of Dodge.
They’d all just have to hope that another ship was close enough to make contact with her again before she managed to slip away again – although given the weather and the darkness Plawski realised that was increasingly unlikely.
It was frustrating and may ultimately mean the British missed their opportunity to intercept, but sadly, that was the only sensible option. Anything else was suicide.
Plawski though for a split second then sighed, smiled and gave his orders to his crew:
“Full speed ahead. All hands to battlestations. We attack.”
As far as I know, the SFLC doesn't have to grant a redistribution license - you already have a license in the GPL - you just have to abide by its terms. You would be correct though *if* the SFLC is using the threat of legal action for past infringement to also demand release of the Linux kernel source.
The argument that is being made in a nutshell:
Busybox copyright is enforced by the SFLC, which sues companies to get them to comply. When negotiating for compliance, they also request that the company in question comply with the GPL2 license on the Linux kernel. Now, for whatever stupid reasons, some companies don't want to release their kernel modifications for Android devices. So they think that by removing Busybox, the SFLC will no longer have a copyright claim that opens them to litigation which results in their releasing their kernel source. This reasoning is flawed, because there is another, much easier way to avoid Busybox litigation: put the source code on your web site. That's all it takes. They could keep their kernel sources, and just put up the Busybox source, and they would achieve the same thing.
The other argument being made by one developer is that enforcement action is pointless, because he hasn't seen any Busybox source opened up from this route that was worth anything. Others disagree, saying there was some useful code, and that it's not just about Busybox - the Busybox enforcement actions have also resulted in kernel drivers being opened up.
So, the "outrage" here is the allegation that Busybox is being rewritten so that companies can violate the copyright of the Linux kernel without being sued by the SFLC.
You can spend months trying to rewrite busybox, or you can just put the source code on your web site. It's not that hard. In fact, Sony already do it. GPL Compliance: put the source on your web site. That's all it takes. It isn't expensive or difficult.
It was in the Barnes and Noble court filing, they said MS wanted more money per device for "Linux patent protection" than they charge to license WP7. I think the exact amounts got redacted in the court filings though.
The Microsoft-created features protected by the patents infringed by the Nook and Nook Color tablet are core to the user experience. For example, the patents we asserted today protect innovations that:
* Give people easy ways to navigate through information provided by their device apps via a separate control window with tabs;
* Enable display of a webpage’s content before the background image is received, allowing users to interact with the page faster;
* Allow apps to superimpose download status on top of the downloading content;
* Permit users to easily select text in a document and adjust that selection; and
* Provide users the ability to annotate text without changing the underlying document.
Microsoft obviously thinks this is pretty advanced stuff. Adjust a text selection? Annotate a document? Tabbed controls? Woah. No wonder they want $30 per device (more than the cost of licensing WP7!).
there was no "new strain of the virus", .... here you go, mandatory link to non-brain-damaged content ... http://www.virology.ws/2011/12/06/ferreting-out-influenza-h5n1/
From your link: "A laboratory in the Netherlands has identified a lethal influenza H5N1 virus strain that is transmitted among ferrets."
The whole argument from your link about it not being as lethal as H5N1 is pure speculation - as he admits, we don't know transmissibility of the strain in humans, because we won't do that experiment. His basic argument is the virulence of the virus in humans is reduced by having the virus be transmitted through non-human hosts. This is not necessarily true - it depends on what species the virus is moving between. If a virus makes the leap from something further from humans (eg fish) to something closer to humans (eg pigs) then it becomes more dangerous to us. His argument may be correct in the case where you have an organism adapted very well to humans and you expose it to non-human transmission selective pressures, then it will probably evolve and become less adapted to humans. But this is not always the situation.
He also says:
Nature is far better at producing viruses that can kill – to think that we can duplicate the enormous diversity and selection pressures that occur in the wild is a severe case of scientific hubris.
Maybe he is right (at the moment) about manually targetted changes - but we are only going to get better at this over time. He has also ignored the practice of laboratory evolution (or synthetic evolution), where nature is used in the lab to evolve or enhance certain characteristics of organisms. For a far-out plan, some rogue biologists could expose humans, see which ones are infected and die first, and then infect others with flu samples taken from those bodies. After repeating for some generations, this selective pressure may well produce a highly lethal and highly transmissible variant.
We don't worry about India having the bomb and last time I checked they were 'brown people' too.
We did. There were sanctions and everything. It was a lot like the current situation with Iran:
President Clinton immediately reacted to the explosions with shock and criticized India's nuclear testing. The American President argued that India’s actions violated the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty endorsed by 149 nations and the 1970 non-proliferation treaty signed by 185 nations. Despite the fact that neither India nor Pakistan has signed the treaties, the President, citing the 1994 Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Act, immediately called for economic sanctions against India including cutting off $40 million in economic and military aid, and all American bank loans. The President also asked the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to cancel all new loans which could cost India around $14.5 billion worth of public projects, including a major modernization of India's often failing electrical system. Moreover, Japan and other industrial nations soon followed the U.S. example and froze on-going projects in India worth over a billion dollars in aid. http://asiasociety.org/countries/conflicts/india-pakistan-relations-50-year-history
And...
guessing wrong... could be a civilization extinction event
How on earth would Iran gaining a nuclear weapon be an extinction level event for our species?
"no country in history has ever committed suicide in order to destroy another. And Israel, with 200 nuclear weapons and air, sea and land launchers, could easily destroy Iran if it was attacked." - the Huffington Post
"Where will it drop it, this bomb? On Israel? It would not have gone 200 metres into the atmosphere before Tehran would be razed." - Jacques Chirac