While that may have helped with the secondary bacterial infections like pneumonia, antibiotics have no effect on the flu virus which also led to many of the deaths.
"The majority of deaths were from bacterial pneumonia, a secondary infection caused by influenza, but the virus also killed people directly, causing massive hemorrhages and edema in the lung."
So, yes, 1918 flu did kill some people directly, which is unusual. Just not the majority. So, the majority would have been helped had penicillin been discovered yet. Um, just like I said.
For further reading, I suggest you review the widely available layman's review of what is know of the 1918 flu. You might further review the number of yearly flu related deaths in the US.
This stat is quoted frequently, but is almost always quoted out of context. Americans pay more for health care than any other "first-world" nation. Americans' life expectancy is not significantly better than many other "first-world" nations (I believe America is around #30 or so for life expectancy globally). HOWEVER, America's overall health and life expectancy for those over the age of 65 is by far the best in the world. Americans pay more for health care . . . but these payments actually produce results.
America pays more per capita that every country in the G8 -- by a wide margin -- for a shorter life expectancy and higher infant mortality rate. No further context needed.
In 2000, the World Health Organization rated the US system as #37 overall and #72 in overall level of health. There was criticism of the way those ratings were compiled, tho, so WHO hasn't issued those ratings in some time. Sound like politics to you?
BTW, there's a ton of information available on US & world health care systems, so there's no need to guess or take the word of some insurance company sponsored shill.
If there's government insurance and private insurance, will I be allowed to opt out of government healthcare (and not be required to pay taxes to support the government healthcare) if I purchase private healthcare?
The only proposal currently on the table is requiring that everyone have insurance. There's no discussion of what insurance you have to have, tho one might argue that there ought to be minimums, e.g., you can't get insurance that doesn't provide for catastrophic care, no matter how stupid you are.
The benefit of requiring everyone to have insurance is that doctors are legally required to render aid if withholding such aid would lead to death, permanent harm, etc. That costs doctors and hospitals, and those costs are passed right along to those who are insured.
Now, the other stupid thing about the US health system is that they (we?) pay more as a country than the rest of the world, for considerably worse care. Where is all that extra money going? Some can be explained by all of the uninsured people who get more or less no early or preventative care (since they can't pay for it), waiting until they might actually die before doctors & hospitals are obliged to intervene.
But the reality is that most of the useless money is going to insurance companies in the form of profits. And that's not likely to change any time soon, since all of the health care reform discussion is simply about requiring everyone to purchase insurange.
"Nearly two" is probably too young to teach about charity, but you're on the right track. I wouldn't suggest letting a nearly two year old play unsupervised on a OLPC G1G1. They are rugged, not impervious! My three year old pealed off a dozen of the keys. She's had the OLPC since last year without previously destroying it, so one would have thought she was OK with it. She had no idea the exploration she was doing was destructive.
Another issue, tho, is that OLPC doesn't really have much software for a two year old, and the browser doesn't come with a reasonably flash alternative. So, if you're going to be closely supervising and surfing to run applications, it seems like using your laptop or desktop is just the thing.
The cap & trade system Obama's talking about is marginally different from the one McCain supports and has supported in the past. From McCain's own site... Personally, I'm a way bigger fan of nuclear over coal, since it's so much cleaner.
And, your link to Obama on home schooling says nothing either way on Obama's opinion on home school.
If I were going to judge, I'd say you've done close to zero homework on your various stances. There's a whole big internet out there which should allow anyone with even a slight interest to hear multiple perspectives and just about any issues. To choose not to suggests to me willful ignorance.
OK, I listened to the responses to the LGBT question. Obama, like most mainstream politicians, doesn't come out for gay marriage, but is otherwise pretty much pro-LGBT civil rights.
McCain's answer... WTF? He's just all over the map. I mean, I more or less know what the McCain position is for LGBT rights, and he kind of touched on it, but why does he throw all that other unrelated crap in there? Was there a minimum answer length? Was he channeling Palin? These are scripted answers, I assume. Who wrote this nutty script?
Personally, I watched the first two presidential debates and the vp debate streaming live from MySpace. I don't use MySpace for anything else. Quality was OK. I like that I get the feed from before & after commercial TV picks it up. More like being in the audience.
News for Nerds. Not news for Republican Talking Points.
It must be the liberal bias. Have you noticed that Anonymous Coward is always bringing up Republican Talking Points(TM)? I'm pretty sure your astroturfing howto specifically requested that you go on the record with the Official Talking Points. Posting them Anonymous Cowardly just dilutes the brand.
some of whom will continue to use the service even after they graduate.
I'm sure that's not the point. I'm sure the point is to begin mining the users accounts immediately. Just because the vendor agrees not to present advertising in the mail interface doesn't mean that tracking is not being done, and that ads presented in other interfaces like search, doubleclick, etc, aren't taking advantage of it. Google is no-way making a long term investment here. They are reaping the rewards day-one.
In some ways the students are a commodity, who are being traded to the external provider in exchange for an externally-hosted service. Senior management may not care about lock-in - they'll be looking at what they can offer students for the least amount of money. If it all works on paper over the next three to five years they may not care about anything else. Sure, you need to pay someone to provision the accounts, but you don't have a box that sucks down power to run and cool and that needs to be patched and backed up.
Except students are the cheap, little users. The abusive users are the faculty & staff. In all likelihood, getting rid of the students will save a tiny fraction of what mail costs. In many scenarios, it costs more because part of the plan is to move the faculty & staff to, e.g., Exchange.
You have someone else to yell at if things break, too.
Because you're paying them to do this outsource? You should maybe review the contract. There's more or less no provision for, e.g., Google to "make whole" your email if they fuck it up. You get what you pay for...
Sounds more like you were a guinea-pig for ZFS, which maybe wasn't the super best choice for a filesystem to host Cyrus. I'm sure everyone else who now can use Cyrus with ZFS thanks you, but it definitely wasn't the most cluefull move. But hey, ZFS is neat-o, I can understand the attraction.
These are the TTLs of the name servers for a domain. One hopes there's more than one. Further, one hopes they are widely separated. This is totally DNS "standard operating procedure". We're not talking about a highly coherent transaction processing system, here. Availability is the goal. Achieved admirably, given the age and design history of DNS...
After all, what happens when a DNS record gets updated? With the new behavior, you won't see the change until your cached record expires.
You don't see that update until the TTL expires. That's why there's a TTL. If you're planning to make a change, lower the TTL well in advance to allow the new TTL to propagate.
As I recall, HP ended telecommuting as a cost cutting measure, i.e., requiring a bunch of people who don't live near HP offices to suddenly start coming in was the functional equivalent of firing them, minus all that messy paperwork. Which kinda contradicts the slant of the summary re: telecommuting's track record. Of course, the article's link about telecommuting at HP goes into detail about how wasn't a telecommuting problem, but HP's massive reorganization (Carly ran HP into the ground?).
In any case, telecommuters should be aware of how vulnerable they are. The day your manager gets sick of you, you'll be on notice to start showing up in the office, even tho you live 600 miles away. I've never seen a telecommuting agreement that didn't have the provision to end with a few days notice on either party's part.
He obviously doesn't understand the issues, so naturally he is just going to default to his party's (or contributor's) position.
If I were in his place and somebody asked me to formulate a position on farming, I would do the same thing.
You wouldn't bother to become even slightly educated? Or obtain competing expert analysis? I know I would. I think this platform is very well considered, and expresses exactly what it's meant to express.
Having both grown up farming both organically and non-organically, as well as currently working in the seeds industry, I can say from both first-hand experience and industry research that that couldn't be more wrong.
Given that a tiny number of seed companies control most seeds (not to mention your use of the term "seed industry"), do you work for... Monstanto?
Most farmers' local markets include a significant (usually majority in my experience) non-organically grown produce.
Most market farmers aren't USDA Certified Organic. On the other hand, the USDA Certification is kind of a joke, and an increasing one at that. On the other hand, many market farmers are decidedly non-industrial. The nice thing about farmers' markets is that you can actually talk to the farmer and hear exactly how they grow, even visit the farms in question. And you can let the farmer know why you bought their goods. And, if you do buy from a particular farmer, they are the ones getting your money, not say, Cargill.
Buying local vs. freighted foods is entirely unconnected to organic/non-organic production. In many cases locally-grown produce has a higher total energy cost of production than foreign-grown produce. The archetypal example of this is tomatoes grown in the UK vs those shipped from Spain.
I don't know of any organic certification that covers carbon footprint. On the other hand, if we had a well regulated free market for food, it would be really odd to ship (most) food from far away when local food is readily available.
I could go on to attack the rest of your points, but as far as I can tell, your running theme is that what's happening today is not only OK, but actually the best it can actually be. Which seems pretty far fetched.
We don't have a liberal media or a conservative media, we have a sensationalist media that caters to the lowest common denominator by trying to place the candidates into a pre-defined mold that has existed for the better part of three decades.
And more to the point, Obama & McCain need to be neck & neck until November 4th, otherwise there's no story. In fact, if they continued to be "neck & neck" until December sometime, that would make pretty good copy as well. Media is not news, it's entertainment -- content used to target you with advertising.
Given that the G1G1 program was basically a charitable gift, I kinda feel like I should ask for my contribution back. I mean, I gave my gift to an educational organization, not a laptop manufacturing firm.
Slashdot Mirror
While that may have helped with the secondary bacterial infections like pneumonia, antibiotics have no effect on the flu virus which also led to many of the deaths.
I'm just going to quote wikipedia, princess:
"The majority of deaths were from bacterial pneumonia, a secondary infection caused by influenza, but the virus also killed people directly, causing massive hemorrhages and edema in the lung."
So, yes, 1918 flu did kill some people directly, which is unusual. Just not the majority. So, the majority would have been helped had penicillin been discovered yet. Um, just like I said.
For further reading, I suggest you review the widely available layman's review of what is know of the 1918 flu. You might further review the number of yearly flu related deaths in the US.
Perhaps what made the 1918 flu so deadly is that it arrived 26 years before penicillin.
How about a massively parallel, cheap, distributed jamming platform?
This stat is quoted frequently, but is almost always quoted out of context. Americans pay more for health care than any other "first-world" nation. Americans' life expectancy is not significantly better than many other "first-world" nations (I believe America is around #30 or so for life expectancy globally). HOWEVER, America's overall health and life expectancy for those over the age of 65 is by far the best in the world. Americans pay more for health care . . . but these payments actually produce results.
America pays more per capita that every country in the G8 -- by a wide margin -- for a shorter life expectancy and higher infant mortality rate. No further context needed.
In 2000, the World Health Organization rated the US system as #37 overall and #72 in overall level of health. There was criticism of the way those ratings were compiled, tho, so WHO hasn't issued those ratings in some time. Sound like politics to you?
BTW, there's a ton of information available on US & world health care systems, so there's no need to guess or take the word of some insurance company sponsored shill.
If there's government insurance and private insurance, will I be allowed to opt out of government healthcare (and not be required to pay taxes to support the government healthcare) if I purchase private healthcare?
The only proposal currently on the table is requiring that everyone have insurance. There's no discussion of what insurance you have to have, tho one might argue that there ought to be minimums, e.g., you can't get insurance that doesn't provide for catastrophic care, no matter how stupid you are.
The benefit of requiring everyone to have insurance is that doctors are legally required to render aid if withholding such aid would lead to death, permanent harm, etc. That costs doctors and hospitals, and those costs are passed right along to those who are insured.
Now, the other stupid thing about the US health system is that they (we?) pay more as a country than the rest of the world, for considerably worse care. Where is all that extra money going? Some can be explained by all of the uninsured people who get more or less no early or preventative care (since they can't pay for it), waiting until they might actually die before doctors & hospitals are obliged to intervene.
But the reality is that most of the useless money is going to insurance companies in the form of profits. And that's not likely to change any time soon, since all of the health care reform discussion is simply about requiring everyone to purchase insurange.
"Nearly two" is probably too young to teach about charity, but you're on the right track. I wouldn't suggest letting a nearly two year old play unsupervised on a OLPC G1G1. They are rugged, not impervious! My three year old pealed off a dozen of the keys. She's had the OLPC since last year without previously destroying it, so one would have thought she was OK with it. She had no idea the exploration she was doing was destructive.
Another issue, tho, is that OLPC doesn't really have much software for a two year old, and the browser doesn't come with a reasonably flash alternative. So, if you're going to be closely supervising and surfing to run applications, it seems like using your laptop or desktop is just the thing.
Really? No St George flags stuck on cars for World Cups? Maybe just not recently...
The cap & trade system Obama's talking about is marginally different from the one McCain supports and has supported in the past. From McCain's own site... Personally, I'm a way bigger fan of nuclear over coal, since it's so much cleaner.
And, your link to Obama on home schooling says nothing either way on Obama's opinion on home school.
If I were going to judge, I'd say you've done close to zero homework on your various stances. There's a whole big internet out there which should allow anyone with even a slight interest to hear multiple perspectives and just about any issues. To choose not to suggests to me willful ignorance.
OK, I listened to the responses to the LGBT question. Obama, like most mainstream politicians, doesn't come out for gay marriage, but is otherwise pretty much pro-LGBT civil rights.
McCain's answer ... WTF? He's just all over the map. I mean, I more or less know what the McCain position is for LGBT rights, and he kind of touched on it, but why does he throw all that other unrelated crap in there? Was there a minimum answer length? Was he channeling Palin? These are scripted answers, I assume. Who wrote this nutty script?
Personally, I watched the first two presidential debates and the vp debate streaming live from MySpace. I don't use MySpace for anything else. Quality was OK. I like that I get the feed from before & after commercial TV picks it up. More like being in the audience.
News for Nerds. Not news for Republican Talking Points.
It must be the liberal bias. Have you noticed that Anonymous Coward is always bringing up Republican Talking Points(TM)? I'm pretty sure your astroturfing howto specifically requested that you go on the record with the Official Talking Points. Posting them Anonymous Cowardly just dilutes the brand.
some of whom will continue to use the service even after they graduate.
I'm sure that's not the point. I'm sure the point is to begin mining the users accounts immediately. Just because the vendor agrees not to present advertising in the mail interface doesn't mean that tracking is not being done, and that ads presented in other interfaces like search, doubleclick, etc, aren't taking advantage of it. Google is no-way making a long term investment here. They are reaping the rewards day-one.
In some ways the students are a commodity, who are being traded to the external provider in exchange for an externally-hosted service. Senior management may not care about lock-in - they'll be looking at what they can offer students for the least amount of money. If it all works on paper over the next three to five years they may not care about anything else. Sure, you need to pay someone to provision the accounts, but you don't have a box that sucks down power to run and cool and that needs to be patched and backed up.
Except students are the cheap, little users. The abusive users are the faculty & staff. In all likelihood, getting rid of the students will save a tiny fraction of what mail costs. In many scenarios, it costs more because part of the plan is to move the faculty & staff to, e.g., Exchange.
You have someone else to yell at if things break, too.
Because you're paying them to do this outsource? You should maybe review the contract. There's more or less no provision for, e.g., Google to "make whole" your email if they fuck it up. You get what you pay for...
Sounds more like you were a guinea-pig for ZFS, which maybe wasn't the super best choice for a filesystem to host Cyrus. I'm sure everyone else who now can use Cyrus with ZFS thanks you, but it definitely wasn't the most cluefull move. But hey, ZFS is neat-o, I can understand the attraction.
Here I thought it was when a guest ate all the chips (crisps in the UK)...
These are the TTLs of the name servers for a domain. One hopes there's more than one. Further, one hopes they are widely separated. This is totally DNS "standard operating procedure". We're not talking about a highly coherent transaction processing system, here. Availability is the goal. Achieved admirably, given the age and design history of DNS...
After all, what happens when a DNS record gets updated? With the new behavior, you won't see the change until your cached record expires.
You don't see that update until the TTL expires. That's why there's a TTL. If you're planning to make a change, lower the TTL well in advance to allow the new TTL to propagate.
As I recall, HP ended telecommuting as a cost cutting measure, i.e., requiring a bunch of people who don't live near HP offices to suddenly start coming in was the functional equivalent of firing them, minus all that messy paperwork. Which kinda contradicts the slant of the summary re: telecommuting's track record. Of course, the article's link about telecommuting at HP goes into detail about how wasn't a telecommuting problem, but HP's massive reorganization (Carly ran HP into the ground?).
In any case, telecommuters should be aware of how vulnerable they are. The day your manager gets sick of you, you'll be on notice to start showing up in the office, even tho you live 600 miles away. I've never seen a telecommuting agreement that didn't have the provision to end with a few days notice on either party's part.
I believe the Clinton administration found that the Iraqi's were likely culpable, and responded in a measured way:
http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/oig/fbilab1/05bush2.htm
He obviously doesn't understand the issues, so naturally he is just going to default to his party's (or contributor's) position.
If I were in his place and somebody asked me to formulate a position on farming, I would do the same thing.
You wouldn't bother to become even slightly educated? Or obtain competing expert analysis? I know I would. I think this platform is very well considered, and expresses exactly what it's meant to express.
Having both grown up farming both organically and non-organically, as well as currently working in the seeds industry, I can say from both first-hand experience and industry research that that couldn't be more wrong.
Given that a tiny number of seed companies control most seeds (not to mention your use of the term "seed industry"), do you work for ... Monstanto?
Most farmers' local markets include a significant (usually majority in my experience) non-organically grown produce.
Most market farmers aren't USDA Certified Organic. On the other hand, the USDA Certification is kind of a joke, and an increasing one at that. On the other hand, many market farmers are decidedly non-industrial. The nice thing about farmers' markets is that you can actually talk to the farmer and hear exactly how they grow, even visit the farms in question. And you can let the farmer know why you bought their goods. And, if you do buy from a particular farmer, they are the ones getting your money, not say, Cargill.
Buying local vs. freighted foods is entirely unconnected to organic/non-organic production. In many cases locally-grown produce has a higher total energy cost of production than foreign-grown produce. The archetypal example of this is tomatoes grown in the UK vs those shipped from Spain.
I don't know of any organic certification that covers carbon footprint. On the other hand, if we had a well regulated free market for food, it would be really odd to ship (most) food from far away when local food is readily available.
I could go on to attack the rest of your points, but as far as I can tell, your running theme is that what's happening today is not only OK, but actually the best it can actually be. Which seems pretty far fetched.
We don't have a liberal media or a conservative media, we have a sensationalist media that caters to the lowest common denominator by trying to place the candidates into a pre-defined mold that has existed for the better part of three decades.
And more to the point, Obama & McCain need to be neck & neck until November 4th, otherwise there's no story. In fact, if they continued to be "neck & neck" until December sometime, that would make pretty good copy as well. Media is not news, it's entertainment -- content used to target you with advertising.
It seems like Qwest might have an actionable case. Perhaps it would get more traction that suing the ones who (illegally) complied.
Earthsea & A Wrinkle in Time, et al.
If I may summarize your stance: it's civilian and thus legal, and they have a right to arm themselves.
Given that the G1G1 program was basically a charitable gift, I kinda feel like I should ask for my contribution back. I mean, I gave my gift to an educational organization, not a laptop manufacturing firm.