A plane is being escorted by F-16s. And this causes hundreds of people to flee for their lives by making a mad dash out of their building?
I live in London, on the Heathrow flightpath. There are dozens of commercial flights overhead a day, so many that you don't notice. I've yet to see one escorted by military jets. I would certainly have a very different attitude if I saw a jumbo flanked by two F-15s than one sans fighters.
There are a few upsides to such locked-down regimes.
On the contrary, control of people is difficult, and the population is pretty mobile within China. On the other hand, local officials tend to cover up outbreaks for fear of getting into trouble, and if an outbreak spreads successive levels of government deny it to cover their own impotence.
This is not a crazy anti-government rant, it happened with SARS and H5N1
While we, at least industrialized countries, are far better equipped to deal with another major outbreak than in 1918; I feel taking precautions would be the rational thing to do.
Don't be so sure about it my friend. My parents work in the NHS. The procedure for a flu pandemic assumes that society will collapse, which will likely be a reasonable assessment. All the preparations have been aimed at H5N1, so though the anti-virals stockpiled will most likely work*, the vaccines will not**.
I think this one is the real deal. The death rate is high, considering it's in Mexico, which may not be on a par with the UK in medical treatment but isn't sub-Saharan Africa or rural China either.
The BBC is quoting doctors as saying that this has been around for a week. If people in Mexico City are expressing symptoms, you can bet it's around the world now, by people carrying it during its incubation period. I live in London, and I bet you a tenner that someone, somewhere in this city has this right now.
*There are some reports that anti-virals are ineffective, I think they're hysteria. **They probably wouldn't have anyway.
It uses ODF by default instead of as an addon, which works in most other Office Suites (KOffice)
Except the most popular one by a long way. It doesn't matter if every other office suite in the world supports ODF natively, as long as MS Office doesn't then it's useless to 80%* of office suite users.
*A quick Google didn't produce any reliable figures, so I just used the lowest one.
Except that you really need to run a plant 24/7. You do not want to be starting up and shutting down, as you waste time, energy and matter, as well as wearing down components. So you'd need a more constant source of power or some form of good power storage.
I tend to side with solar-thermal over solar-PV, as clever use of materials can give you a pretty steady output.
So, an iPod touch bought in China is going to set you back RMB1998yuan, according to my poor Mandarin and Apple's China site. This gives about 20E6 iPods Touch for total plant cost.
Converted into local currency; US$229*20E6=$4.58b GBP169*20E6=£3.3b=$4.86b EUR219*20E6=â4.38b=$5.69b*
Note that this back-of-the-envelope calculation doesn't take into account taxes.
Really you need to price it in iPods-bought-in-China. This can then be converted back to whichever local currency used, to give some idea of the cost taking into account purchasing power parity (i.e. $1 in China still goes further than $1 in the US and $1 in the UK can barely buy a packet of crisps these days).
Not to mention the horrendously high energy needed to reduce sand to silicon in the first place, and the inefficient purification processes (which are improving a lot at the moment).
Yeah. The reasoning, as I understand it, is that by reducing marketing costs/increasing marketing power TPB and its peers should even out the selling power of the smaller labels and the majors. This should enable the indies to bypass some of the barriers of entry to the music market and even out the market shares.
It is kind of similar to the long tail. If you believe that TPB is effectively free advertising* then it should have a similar effect to the reduced marginal costs of distribution observed with Amazon and its peers.
Actually, in both cases, we've seen a consolidation and bulking of products in the mass-market. This casts a lot of doubt on the long-tail theory, amongst other things.
As other people have pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, TPB does not provide a music discovery service, so people just take what they know. Also it's more likely that someone will torrent a major record, and the more common something is, the easier it is to download it (an inherent property of any p2p tech). If there are only two Norwegians seeding, the chances are you won't be able to download it even if you wanted to.
*For the record, I believe that TPB et al impose a deadweight loss on creative industries. But that's not actually relevant to my argument, which is why it's relegated to this footnote.
English did; the advent of the printing press led to the decline of several English runic letters, such as thorn and yogh, resulting in such oddities as "ye olde pub' (said 'the old pub') and the surname Menzies (Minghis).
Money can still be made, if the service is good enough and the price is reasonable enough, people will pay, allofmp3.com demonstrated this, as do many private torrent sites.
It's rather easy to keep costs low if you're not bearing any of the costs of production.
Slashdot Mirror
A plane is being escorted by F-16s. And this causes hundreds of people to flee for their lives by making a mad dash out of their building?
I live in London, on the Heathrow flightpath. There are dozens of commercial flights overhead a day, so many that you don't notice. I've yet to see one escorted by military jets. I would certainly have a very different attitude if I saw a jumbo flanked by two F-15s than one sans fighters.
Do 747s often have military escorts over there?
Insightful? This and the GP? Really? How many people here would stay somewhere if they thought they were reasonably likely to die there?
There's a couple of words for a person who does that. One is 'firefighter'. The others are less noble.
I'm not an 'afraid citizen', I'm just aware that there's no reward for bearing unnecessary risk.
This is Slahdot; we all live on the internet. We'd rather lose our air supply than our DSL!
The information can flow, sure, but the public can probably do little about it.
I hate to use the analogy, but look at the Corrupted Blood plague. Actually quite instructive in its own way.
Oseltamivir is the one the NHS has stockpiled, under the brand Tamiflu.
There are a few upsides to such locked-down regimes.
On the contrary, control of people is difficult, and the population is pretty mobile within China. On the other hand, local officials tend to cover up outbreaks for fear of getting into trouble, and if an outbreak spreads successive levels of government deny it to cover their own impotence.
This is not a crazy anti-government rant, it happened with SARS and H5N1
While we, at least industrialized countries, are far better equipped to deal with another major outbreak than in 1918; I feel taking precautions would be the rational thing to do.
Don't be so sure about it my friend. My parents work in the NHS. The procedure for a flu pandemic assumes that society will collapse, which will likely be a reasonable assessment. All the preparations have been aimed at H5N1, so though the anti-virals stockpiled will most likely work*, the vaccines will not**.
I think this one is the real deal. The death rate is high, considering it's in Mexico, which may not be on a par with the UK in medical treatment but isn't sub-Saharan Africa or rural China either.
The BBC is quoting doctors as saying that this has been around for a week. If people in Mexico City are expressing symptoms, you can bet it's around the world now, by people carrying it during its incubation period. I live in London, and I bet you a tenner that someone, somewhere in this city has this right now.
*There are some reports that anti-virals are ineffective, I think they're hysteria.
**They probably wouldn't have anyway.
Just really, really difficult to do legally.
P.S. Ever heard of google?
Please, it's a fairly esoteric piece of knowledge and this is as good a forum to ask it in as any. A bit of civility wouldn't kill you.
It uses ODF by default instead of as an addon, which works in most other Office Suites (KOffice)
Except the most popular one by a long way. It doesn't matter if every other office suite in the world supports ODF natively, as long as MS Office doesn't then it's useless to 80%* of office suite users.
*A quick Google didn't produce any reliable figures, so I just used the lowest one.
Except that you really need to run a plant 24/7. You do not want to be starting up and shutting down, as you waste time, energy and matter, as well as wearing down components. So you'd need a more constant source of power or some form of good power storage.
I tend to side with solar-thermal over solar-PV, as clever use of materials can give you a pretty steady output.
...you've lost me as a customer and no, I won't be buying a Wii again.
How many were you planning on buying?
So, an iPod touch bought in China is going to set you back RMB1998yuan, according to my poor Mandarin and Apple's China site. This gives about 20E6 iPods Touch for total plant cost.
Converted into local currency;
US$229*20E6=$4.58b
GBP169*20E6=£3.3b=$4.86b
EUR219*20E6=â4.38b=$5.69b*
Note that this back-of-the-envelope calculation doesn't take into account taxes.
*Taken from www.apple.com/de
That's not actually as silly as it sounds, though I believe the Big Mac is more traditional.
Really you need to price it in iPods-bought-in-China. This can then be converted back to whichever local currency used, to give some idea of the cost taking into account purchasing power parity (i.e. $1 in China still goes further than $1 in the US and $1 in the UK can barely buy a packet of crisps these days).
Not to mention the horrendously high energy needed to reduce sand to silicon in the first place, and the inefficient purification processes (which are improving a lot at the moment).
Yeah. The reasoning, as I understand it, is that by reducing marketing costs/increasing marketing power TPB and its peers should even out the selling power of the smaller labels and the majors. This should enable the indies to bypass some of the barriers of entry to the music market and even out the market shares.
It is kind of similar to the long tail. If you believe that TPB is effectively free advertising* then it should have a similar effect to the reduced marginal costs of distribution observed with Amazon and its peers.
Actually, in both cases, we've seen a consolidation and bulking of products in the mass-market. This casts a lot of doubt on the long-tail theory, amongst other things.
As other people have pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, TPB does not provide a music discovery service, so people just take what they know. Also it's more likely that someone will torrent a major record, and the more common something is, the easier it is to download it (an inherent property of any p2p tech). If there are only two Norwegians seeding, the chances are you won't be able to download it even if you wanted to.
*For the record, I believe that TPB et al impose a deadweight loss on creative industries. But that's not actually relevant to my argument, which is why it's relegated to this footnote.
English did; the advent of the printing press led to the decline of several English runic letters, such as thorn and yogh, resulting in such oddities as "ye olde pub' (said 'the old pub') and the surname Menzies (Minghis).
Also, they're both in the European Union, so the same directive that got TPB in Sweden can be re-used in the Netherlands.
Money can still be made, if the service is good enough and the price is reasonable enough, people will pay, allofmp3.com demonstrated this, as do many private torrent sites.
It's rather easy to keep costs low if you're not bearing any of the costs of production.
It's a shame they didn't manage to buy Sealand.
+1 Ironic use of the word 'literally' in an extended metaphor.
HIV infection can be prevented.
By taking a shower, according to your soon-to-be-President.
You forgot some fairly widely spoken varients.
Singlish, easily the most incomprehensible dialect, which is an unholy meld of Mandarin and English.
Nigerian English is quite tricky too, though I believe it's technically a pidgin instead of a dialect, most people call it a dialect.
There's Indian English, which when spoken correctly is more elegant than British English, albeit often hidden in an impenetrable accent.
Finally, British English hides a range of confusing and difficult dialects, such as (the nearly-extinct) Cockney, Scouse, Geordie and Scots dialects.
Because English is a non-centralised language, all of these dialects are equal and legitimate uses of English.
You should head over to the Pirate Bay trial threads, there's hundreds.
How many people on /. have tangible girlfriends?
(I couldn't decide on whether to go for the cheap joke or go an a tirade about how you can't steal girlfriends because they are, you know, PEOPLE)