and now, having read all the politely annoyed posts about this guy - has got me so angry, that I have decided to issue a Fatwa against him and call for all 21st century citizens capable of using cutlery to study their conscience deeply before deciding to charge up their cell phones and descend on this abomination from the middle ages and in a demonstration of righteous power bury the guy in cell phones dialed into the speaking clock so that he may be fried out of existence by the awsome cleansing power of microwave annihilation. And if that doesnt work, the mockery should do the trick.
He may well have a point about the potential risk in 30 to 40 years but it is a fact that of all the avoidable hazards the vast majority of of students are going to die in road traffic accidents.
"Meanwhile, traffic accidents are the leading cause of death among young people (followed by suicide)."
And in addition to the naughty physical and environmental hazards cited, lets ban
Scientific method, Freedom of choice, Pareto of risk, rational thought, Pragmatic thought, can do attitude, self confidence, world class facilities,
Tell you what, even better than that lets just ask the Taliban (or your local Nazi equivalent) to run things, because we have obviously lost the will to live and need someone to tell us what to do.
Or even better - put ME in charge!!!, I can make arbitary loony decisions that make me look like a true leader! No sweat! I'm so far ahead of my time I think the cockroaches should be running the planet!!
Actually I think the call should be to ban College administrations run by Born again, tabloid, wrap them in cotton wool, litigation scared, popularist, ignorant, do-gooder, think of the children, weak, nanny state - MORONS who should be eliminated from the gene pool with extreme prejudice.
On the other hand I guess they can do whatever they like, just so long as it doesnt become fashionable as so often happens with the extreme tail ends of the statistical distribution of ideas.
In a steady state world where the actions you are prepared to take are in line with the idea that all killing is wrong then I agree, all killing is wrong.
However when a war is in progress a different set of rules suddenly become necessary - its a bit like a phase change eg water to ice where the dynamics of the material change dramatically. In this situation the new set of rules say that it is admissable to trade off deaths through strategic decisions. You may be persuaded that firebombing civilian population centers will bring the war to an end much faster and save more lives than those lost to the bombing. The problem is that the decisions are being taken in a non linear, inhuman situation. The only eventual outcome allowed is to win or lose.
Military action is an uncivilsed activity and I look forward to the day when we are all grown up enough not to need it. Its going to take a while.
Face facts. China is going to do things its own way and no ammount of moralistic hand wringing is going to stop them. So Google is going to provided filtered web searches for a regime that we dont happen to like. Its time to wake up and get real. China will overtake the US by the middle of the century, it will have a bigger market, more government spending on arms, more international influence than the US. If you want to influence what they do its time to start doing business with them.
Or were you thinking that a spot of regime change would do the trick??
I am sick to the back teeth of this attitude that says there is a black and white view of the world that is somehow better than pragmatism. Sitting on your high horse and "laying down the law to those heathen savages" is an attitude invented by crusading religious zealots who invaded countries and pitchforked babies untill the population had been subjugated and put to work producing goods for the motherland. Western thought still hangs on to these ideas but the rest of the world is getting sick of it.
Well done Google, ride the tiger of change and do put in that 2 cents worth of "do no evil".
How about saving some money and financing the activity, you know "speculate to accumulate"
Pull your socks up and stop whining. Now if you had cancer and your partner had just died in an automobile wreck I could get quite sympathetic but other than that I figure the gene pool is going to be quite well off without your contribution.
I signed this petition but doubt it will have any effect at all.
Reading the "rules of conduct" for the school it rather appears that the town must be on the point of sliding into Hell.
The extreme overeaction to a minor prank that caused no damage falls in line with the draconian and endless lists of punishments in the schools code of conduct. It seems to me that at least 75% of normal intelligent, motivated and well behaved middle classed teenagers would leave this school with an endless list of bad marks for infringing those rules. Certainly anybody with an ounce of academic ability or self belief would soon have it smashed out of them.
So the conclusion must be either that the place is "so full of drug addled gun toting broken family mentally deficient knife carrying gang member uncontrollable teenage thugs" that it has to be run like a North Korean prison - or that the people running it are suffering from many decades or possibly centuries of interbreeding. Possesion of "Electronic gadgets" is forbidden at school for example, and they are to be confiscated if found and can only be retrieved by the parents. Does this include or exclude mobile phones which these days contain video cameras, music players, internet browsers, FM radios and quite possibly GPS and mapping software for all I know. This place is truely in the dark ages.
Clear guidlines for young people are needed of course but if this school is an example of what it means to live in the "Land of the Free" then I would rather live somewhere with a bit more confidence in and respect for its people. Somewhere in contact with the modern world. Canada or Mexico spring immediately to mind, or anywhere in the third world where the taps work and the power stays on for that matter.
Ugh, what a ghastly place this bit of America seems to be.
Who says I'm an atheist, I just dont like opressive thought police. I certainly do not recommend atheism to anyone despite it being the most likely description of life, it has no language to describe spiritual things and there is no community that you can join, a dull and unattractive lifeview even if it happens to be true.
We watched the US and the Soviets slog it out over the cold war, now the Soviets have lost and gone on to rebuild their society the spotlight turns on the USA. In the cold light of day the difference between the former Soviet Union and the USA is becomming hard to distinguish. No law or principle is too sacred for Mr Bush to overturn by executive dictat. The armed forces are running around unchecked torturing and killing people illegaly. All privacy is being eliminated in the war on terror, and surveillance and monitoring data is being allowed into the hands of cutthroat capitalist corporations who would be happier if their customers only did what they were told. And finaly right wing religious fundamentalists have decided that the population have to be brainwashed into seeing things their way.
You are dead right I am batshit insane and intolerant about what is going on. I was born I thought into the age of reason in the mid twentieth century and am horrified to discover that the world in many ways - is becoming the worst nightmare of the thinkers from the age of reason.
Well I have a cold and I am not in a good mood so I am very pleased that the Law has finaly recognised the asinine rubbish being peddled by Intelligent design as just another advertising campaign dressed up with a few men in white coats adding blue sprinkles to your washing powder. Intelligent Design is being peddled by fraudsters and shamsters. And I am not about to be distracted by the interesting intellectual debate about Intelligent Design being a nice philosophical solution to how the universe works, it would be so comforting to know that some god fellow is behind all that mad complexity. However if ID is being used to discredit boring old hard science and foist a mono-religious view on science then you can count me out, we did our witch burning in the middle ages, it should only be uneducated savages like AlQuaida who cannot live with contradiction.
You are correct to be perturbed by my response to this ID nonsense. In your sheep like mind you cannot understand why random people with random thoughts would like to keep them for themselves rather than letting a corrupt institution like a church tell them what to think.
You are correct, it is a war to the death, or at least it could get that way very quickly. It is not possible to not take a side, the religious right will not allow this. Its all about power, specifically its about the power of man over man.
At the end of the day one side is going to kill the other side - which is probably why people with no faith are so desperately angry to discover that they are due to be burned at the stake for not being interested in something that is patently a mental illness from their perspective. Religion is a mental disease, an infection with a meme, a self replicating thought pattern that destroys rival thought patterns.
Man has a spiritual impulse and it is expressed in many different church mediated belief systems, the very fact that there is a class of these things, indicates that no single one is so sucessfull as to be regarded as the truth, the victors after all get to rewrite history.
Atheists do not need to argue the point when they live in a tolerant secular society. The United States of America is drifting towards an intolerant religious mono-culture as evidenced by this ridiculous Intelligent Design farce. Hence the desperation of the argument.
I packed in watching TV years ago, I own three DVD's. With the internet available who needs TV? "In the Pirkinning" is the funniest film I have seen this year anyway.
I will not buy any device with undefeatable DRM built in and I am not going to pay for low quality MP3 downloads.
I pay to watch live bands and visit big screen movie events. I buy CD's with no copy protection.
I am heartily sick of fat cat media content businesses bleating on about how many millions of dollars they are being cheated out of by fans copying their products. In reality the fans would like to purchase the products but cannot afford to do so. There are no stolen millions of dollars that could be in the hands of media content businesses. If I have 2000 mp3s on my laptop it does not mean that I could afford to buy 2000 singles or even that I am any more interested in hearing those 2000 mp3s than listening to a local radio station. I might be persuaded to pay $10 a month for access to a streaming library of the entirety of all recorded works older than say 10 years. It would have to be very wide ranging though and exclude chart hits if possible, I've already heard the chart hits, heard them repeatedly, ramed down my throat, repeatedly, in supermarkets, repeatedly, I'm going to drive my truck through the reception walls to make a personal complaint at the next station to play "Hotel California" from an automated carrosel (Just kidding - its a fine piece of music - until you have heard it twice a week for 20 years, after which it has emotional impact of that feeling you get just before you vomit, deep familiarily and overwhealming thankfullness that soon - oh so soon it will be gone - just like the contents of my stomach - and that all will be right with the world again, sheer blissfull anticipation in fact).
As pauper sound recording artists with gold disks regularly complain, the media content businesses actually make all the money; the artists get a tenth of the profits if they are lucky. So stuff the self serving inflexible dinosaur industry. Try and spend your money directly on the artists if you can and keep it away from rip off media content brokers.
There may be some people who are adversely affected by an addiction to internet access.
Surely though there are many things that it seems socialy acceptable to be addicted to and there is hardly ever a complaint raised about them.
Its just jealosy methinks, it takes a degree of enthusiasam, knowledge and skill to become addicted to Internet activities.
Pressing a tv remote however is an addiction that takes about as much skill and knowledge as eating - and for some reason this makes it ok.
Society should be more tolerant and more aspirational, Internet addiction should be viewed as no more of a bad thing than addiction to writing bad poetry.
On the other hand I recently heard an argument here in the UK that said that one of the arguments against forcing ISPs to cache all email traffic for later inspection by law enforcement in the "war on terror" is that the volume of spam makes it uneconomic (and the bad guys are using untraceable untappable voip anyway).
It appears that the Internet remains a magnicifently untameable beast still, despite pointy headed attempts like this to control it.
Im very impressed, its a cracking movie, just watched it. Enjoyed it more than the last episode of the Matrix that I had missed and just got around to seeing on a supermarket remaindered DVD. Good acting if you bear in mind that these are Finnish people and not Italians doing the acting. Great makeup, lighting, sets special effects, camera work, sound, music. This is a polished piece of work and funny to boot.
The thing that keeps it fresh all the way through is that its stuffed full of references of all different kinds.
amongst many
Heating the ground with twinklers to keep warm - somebody is going to tell me which original episode of Star Treck had this.
Never on a Thursday - is all the action only supposed to happen on Friday and Saturday night in Finland?.
Endless mindnumbingly dull speeches - Babylon 5
fukov - most nordic people speak english
Vodka sinking Soviet presidents, Viking spirit and vodka. Vodka and vodka. Vodka.
Check out the product placement with fake products, bone achingly funny.
And for my money the space battles looked more like I think they should look than anything Hollywood has come up with. I could spend a good few hours watching each clip repeatedly and working out the storyboard for each one, killer.
Great world movie too, figure out which character relationship bits are traditional american roleplay and which bits are Finnish and which universal.
Works on tons of levels, great entertainment, im putting it in everybodys christmas stocking when I visit my folks and giving everyone I know in Plymouth a copy asap.
Its in my collection of favorite unique classics already.
The bird flu virus is not capable of human transmission currently so you have to catch it from birds in order to die of it.
This means that everybody who comes into contact with birds currently needs to be very vigilent about the health of the birds they come into contact with. The Chinese for example are culling all birds in an area where an outbreak occurs in order to reduce the likelyhood of it spreading. This is working fairly well as it is not clear whether transmission is occuring through the wild bird vector - migration or through transport of livestock. There is some evidence that it is appearing in places where the likelyhood is that it arrived in livestock because it is along railway routes and not bird migration paths. In addition the effect on birds is so virrulent that they are most likely killed before they can move a great distance. So far so good.
However if the outbreaks become more widespread then special measures may be taken to try and stop the spread. This may involve preventing birds bred for food from comming into contact with wild birds and the usual hygene precautions of reducing transportation of live livestock, cleaning vehicles that visit bird food production sites etc. No one knows how effective such a campaign would be against this particular virus would be but such measures have worked well in other animal disease senareos - foot and mouth, BSE etc.
Another useful measure would be to reduce the number of people who catch common human flu. This would help because one method by which H5N1 could become human transmissable would be by antigenic shift - essentialy a person who has bird flu and easily transmissable human flue could inadvertantly become a factory for the creation of a sort of cross stain of the two kinds of flu. The other kind of natural mutation antigenic drift is the slow mutation of H5N1 into something that is human transmissable isnt anything we can do much about but you could say that its been around for a few years now and it hasnt discovered that route - so it may be many more before drift makes it more dangerous.
If a leathal human transmissable strain does appear then the spread can be lessened by washing hands before touching food, or your eyes or mouth as this is a very common vector for viruses to spread. Also anyone who catches it should go into isolation. This is all good stuff which we have all probably got a bit lax about with a plethora of modern treatments for illnesses - there is hardly anything around these days that could kill you from touching a door handle so we dont bother so much with the hand washing thing. Expect a resergance of telephone sanitisers and the smell of bleach.
Incidentally bleach is not likely to encourage a superbug, its a chemical equivalent of running a blowlamp over things and anything that mutates into a form that can live in bleach is more likely to be a chlorine breathing monster of super human intelligence from the planet tharg - a virus just aint going to change enough to survive and even if it did it wouldnt be able to live in people anyway.
So to summarise
Look out for piles of dead birds in the wild and let the vetinary service know if you see any. (currently unlikely unless you live in the far east and one dead bird is not H5N1 so dont overeact if you find one your cat killed)
(Also dont buy illeagaly imported birds from anywhere that have not gone through proper quarrantine)
If you work on a chicken farm then find out what the standard containment procedures are for any bird illnesses, if H5N1 comes to your country then you will be using them.
As a matter of course learn how to clean your hands and practise doing it now, that way you might go a lifetime without catching any kind of flu, never mind bird flu. And one last thing stop picking your nose for goodness sake, one day it might kill you!!!
Thats my take on what we do to prepare for bird flu, corrections and ammendments welcome.
I will second that, SUSE used to be fun. The Novel website now makes it look like a pile of corporate BS, you have to navigate so many layers of synergy you cant find anything any more. On the other hand you cant charge millions for something that is easy to understand, so I guess its just the way of the world
I'm not advocating that debate be stifled, the more debate the better. However I dont expect the golden ratio to assume a special position in a mathematics class, it belongs in an art class about architecture or painting. Similarly I do not expect philosophical interpretation to be sprinkled over science class. You mistake the absence of interpretive meaning in science class for some sort of heathen attack on religion, I content that its not like that at all. Science is about mechanism and you have to look to cultural subjects like literature, history, religion, social science to place interpretation and meaning on the information. For example we seperate english language classes from english literature because one is about mechanism and the other about our culture.
I suspect that what may be happening here is that people do not think that youngsters are being taught enough about christian culture during their education. I can see that this part of education may be constantly under attack because we live in multicultural societies and in bending over backwards to accomodate different points of view have diluted what many parents expect from education. Bear in mind the fact that many minority religions spend a lot of effort in making sure that their children learn about these things in seperate schooling built around their churches. Maybe its time for a sunday school revival.
An interesting observation about Gods plural rather than God singular. Since there are many faiths with many gods which are attached to different cultures - can anyone point out which of these Gods is the God advocated in the ID theory who is responsible for our creation? Or is it asking too much for scientific methodology to distinguish which god is responsible for ID?
I get the feeling that ID is an interesting philosophical idea which suffers from lack of development. Give me a good idea about which god has implemented ID and a coherent explanation of why they should want to do such a thing and I might find it more appealing. For example the Christian god is reported to be interested in my faith and therefore would appear to be misrepresented if those people amongst us who are experts on the christian god spent an inordinate amount of effort pointing out physical proof that the god exists as the architect of ID.
Science and philosophy like church and state make uneasy bedfellows, they are related but it is culture which mediates the relationship, they are not the same thing.
It is a political question that has been raised. If you want to live in a theocracy like Iran then go ahead and teach ID in science class. Personally I would rather live in a secular society which tolerates many faiths and has to live with the awkward compromises that political processes go through in order to accomodate those faiths.
Even better than that you could ask the question "when would you like the 'oil' to run out" as we are so dam smart these days that we have the choice - we can either replace it with something else or spend a great deal of effort turning stone into oil (from shale) or growing it (biodiesel) or invading someone who has some left.
Deciding when it should run out is a question that science cannot answer, our culture has to take that decision, but its going to be much easier to take it with an expectation of a happy outcome if the decision is informed by scientific knowledge rather than a decision informed by a pre scientific meme - even if that pre scientific meme gives us a feel good factor of being 'right'.
Or to put it another way - your best defence against a bird flu pandemic is the technology largely developed by funding for research into biological warfare.
In other words its not the knowledge which should be judged against what is good for society - but the uses to which we put that knowledge. Understanding is absolutely neutral, application demands that we take personal responsibility and pay attention to the consequences and make a judgement. There is only one black and white decision and that one is informed by hindsight, the future can only be probabilities informed by whatever knowledge we have.
Any ethos which demands a black and white view is probably wrong.
Hail Eris etc, I'm doing my best to figure it out myself.
Responsibility is not fun though it can be stimulating and life enhancing, after all you will only exist at this momment once.
I'm not suprised that you take all this with a pinch of salt having looked up your reference to the 76 swine flu debacle. (The disease wasnt dangerous and vaccination was apparently started for political gain - unfortunately a serious disease, GBS seems to have resulted from the vaccinations themselves).
So lets say that what you imply is correct: the United States government is so badly corrupted that all of its institutions are being run by capitalist criminals who are only interested in personal gain and are completely unreliable. (The sort of government that decent people might feel they had to destroy in order to save humanity. I dont think you meant that, but it often sounds like America is going the way of the Roman Empire from the dissafection of its citizens).
So lets ignore local politics for a change and look at the facts
The virus is showing signs of genetic changes and difference in the clinical presentation in different geographic areas. There have been more clusters in northern Vietnam (8) than in southern Vietnam (2). It has been suggested that the virus circulating in northern Vietnam may be able to transmit from human to human more easily.
The age range of cases is becoming wider. The average age of patients in northern Vietnam has increased from approximately 17 years of age in 2004 to approximately 31 years of age in 2005, while the approximate age of cases in southern Vietnam has remained almost unchanged at 15-18 years of age. The age range of infected persons has also increased from less than 1 year of age to greater than 80 years of age in northern Vietnam; while in southern Vietnam, the age range is still 2 to 40 years of age.
In 2004, the case fatality rate in Thailand and Cambodia was 71-100 percent, but is now 34 percent in northern Vietnam. Additionally, there is evidence of several individuals having had asymptomatic infections. As a virus becomes more adapted to humans, the case fatality rate will often decrease, allowing the virus more stable propagation in the human population
Now isnt that interesting? H5N1 is doing all the right things to be in your lungs some time soon. Oh and dont forget that you personally are only 6 degrees of seperation away from these third world peasants, so if they get a rapid human transmissable version, you probably will too. I do hope you are not in the most susceptible age range, 20 - 40.
Never mind, I expect you can afford to buy your own course of Tamiflu imported from India where Cipla is going to make the stuff outside of Roche's patent. A course of 30 pills is about $300 online at the momment.
You mention the need for patents in order to protect "the future"
I think you are underestimating the possibilities of this bird flu.
it could wipe out world stock markets for a decade.
Its in your interests for all governments to catch this one early and effectively, whatever methods they use.
If it appears, then there will be desperate attempts to stop it, for example you can be sure that any country that has a pandemic and is isolateable will have anything that moves over its boarders terminated with extreme predudice. Maybe the rest of the world might agree to wipe the place out with nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately if a human transmissible version of this virus appears then even this will be pointless. Only half a million Americans died in the 1918 pandemic and 50 million worldwide. There was no air travel at the time so it wouldnt be suprising if these figures were a hundred times higher for a pandemic today, it would be everywhere within a week.
The USA is not exactly shining with glory over its disaster preparedness planning since the debacle in New Orleans. I hope that the federal government that many seem to so despise is prepared to manufacture a flu vaccine for you personally. In the UK the government has just announced contracts to make 120 million doses of vaccine, of course they wont be able to make them all for the first wave, but it should be three months before the second wave and that should allow time for at least the surviving medical staff, army and police to get a dose.
Mind you life is full of risks, the media delights in scaring us with the latest one.
Some we live with and over time grow complacent about. Californians have the next big earthquake, New Orleans have had their Leves breached and the Kashmiris have their earthquake. It is instructive to compare the effect of catastrophe on different places, a thousand deaths in Louisiana, 45 thousand in Pakistan and few if any from the little quakes in California.
The thing that appears to have made a difference in these cases is the degree of preparedness. Californian building codes verses Pakistani ones (admittedly they couldnt afford much better ones) and New Orleans mostly got out in time. Also the tsunami which would have had much less effect if people had an hours warning to walk inland.
A bird flu inflenza is a very real threat, by this time next year a third of us could be dead.
Pandemic illnesses and in fact most viral illnesses have been found to have come from cross species transmission, their danger comming from the fact that they have slowly mutated in an animal species into something that the human immune system knows nothing of. The virus itself may once have transfered from human to bird. So when it crosses the interspecies boundary we have no remembered defence, this is the case with bird flu. Up to a third of the individuals who have caught it directly from birds have died. All that remains is for an individual to be carrying a normal easily transmitted human virus to catch bird flu and for the two kinds of virus to exchange components and you get a human influenza that carries the nasty behaviour of bird flu. try a google search for antigenic drift or just have a look at CDC.
I dont know what the risk is of the two virii cross pollinating in this way - but the microbiologists seem worried that this will happen. You would have to find out what the probability of this is before you can say whether a pandemic is imminent and I dont think anybody has reliable figures on this. Governments seem to think it inevitable.
However consider the known risk factors that the media get excited over that we all live with eg Nuclear power station melt down, heart disease, cancer, food dyes, various slightly suspect chemicals in products we come in daily contact with (that give a rat cancer if you feed the rat its own body weight of the chemical), pesticides, being run over by a bus, being struck by lightning etc
It is fashionable to believe that democracy provides power to the citizens, it actualy does no such thing. What it does do is allow ideas to be fought over in the media and the resultant zeit geist pushes the voters pens at the polls.
Elections are seldom about policies, theorys or ideas, they are about the evolutionary breeding properties of the party leader, whether that leader is hefting a big enough stick to repel outsiders from another tribe and whether that leaders attendance at the crop planting ceremony will be auspicious. In other words, will the leader create the correct social standards, defend the realm and keep the economy going as judged on daytime tv.
Power struggles exist wherever there is power, nobody believes that democracy is perfect in any of its incarnations so waving shrouds declaring the EU undemocratic is exactly as persuasive as tabloid hate mongering. Perhaps we should be worried about how democratic things are but at the end of the day only political enthusiasts are realy interested.
The EU is at least adapting to the times it finds itself in, its final purpose is not yet in sight but it can be seen as a natural result of globalisation, harmonisation of law and societies.
Outside observers could be forgiven for thinking that the people of the United States were desperate to get rid of the federal government from the volume of complaints. It never seems to cross anybodys mind that all of the injurious actions of the EU and the American Federal Government would pragmaticaly speaking, mostly get implemented by their client states sooner or later. You cannot compete if your goods and business practises prevent you from trading, so you end up harmonising anyway. What the EU hasnt learned to do yet is to figure out how to handle the imposition of harmonisation which is seen as oppression by some client populations. As it grows these issues become more obvious and the idea of a super state becomes less likely.
The EU is a club full of administrators and it is the job of the member states to keep them under control. Currently there is a requirement for unanimous agreement before anything big is imposed so this is a great way of keeping the thing real. Unfortunately this also leads to glacial change in things that should have died years ago. The common agricultural policy comes to mind here, farming is finished in Europe the same way manufacturing is; the third world wants to grow it and the population wants to eat it so it is inevitable. subsidy for food manufacture will end.
So one of these administrators has declared a harmonising method for flogging music. It appears though that this could lead to unpleasant changes for some. So now you have the difficult question - do you ignore the complaints and bulldoze the project through therebye creating more business and greater profits overall or do you protect the nonuniform existance of niche players in the business ecosystem. Logic dictates that the niches will get destroyed eventually so you may as well get on with it. However it means a change of society for some, some people will lose their prosperity and be forced into poverty.
The laws of competition tell you to get on with it, and from the complaints about injustice surrounding local music tax collection agencies it sounds like no one would care to see them starve for one thing and for another thing there dont seem to be any beneficiarys of the current system standing up for it
People who download music in quantity probably have wider tastes than their purchasing power allows
In my last job I was given a paltry 18Gb of stolen mp3s
Most of it is not to my taste, however I have discovered some new artists whose music I have purchased and the collection is great for people to hunt through at parties, especialy if they like Nordic heavy metal from around the turn of the century.
Also its worth noting that mp3 sound quality is excrement compared to cassette tape so I still need to buy the original WAV files if it is going to be played more than once.
I hope the bitrate on pay for download files is better than my collection of 128kbps files, anyone who professes to love music when listening to these is actually seriously addicted to a particular kind of phasey distortion and for true happieness should probably buy a couple of the very cheapest realistic guitar combos and wire the output of one to the input of the other and listen to everything through this with the volume set to 12. Reducing the eardrum area by poking a knitting needle through it may help also.
Seriously though hasnt anybody else noticed how crap mp3s are?
Yes, and it appears that poor communications is now being highlighted as a significant contributor to the slow response of disaster relief. There is obviously a recognition that the whole communications system needs a rethink. The link reports a briefing to state Sen. Robert Barham on a system for linking networks of support agencies.
Slashdot Mirror
and now, having read all the politely annoyed posts about this guy - has got me so angry, that I have decided to issue a Fatwa against him and call for all 21st century citizens capable of using cutlery to study their conscience deeply before deciding to charge up their cell phones and descend on this abomination from the middle ages and in a demonstration of righteous power bury the guy in cell phones dialed into the speaking clock so that he may be fried out of existence by the awsome cleansing power of microwave annihilation. And if that doesnt work, the mockery should do the trick.
He may well have a point about the potential risk in 30 to 40 years but it is a fact that of all the avoidable hazards the vast majority of of students are going to die in road traffic accidents.
"Meanwhile, traffic accidents are the leading cause of death among young people (followed by suicide)."
http://tinyurl.com/p9mcs
Tsk Tsk.
And in addition to the naughty physical and environmental hazards cited, lets ban
Scientific method,
Freedom of choice,
Pareto of risk,
rational thought,
Pragmatic thought,
can do attitude,
self confidence,
world class facilities,
Tell you what, even better than that lets just ask the Taliban (or your local Nazi equivalent) to run things, because we have obviously lost the will to live and need someone to tell us what to do.
Or even better - put ME in charge!!!, I can make arbitary loony decisions that make me look like a true leader! No sweat! I'm so far ahead of my time I think the cockroaches should be running the planet!!
Actually I think the call should be to ban College administrations run by Born again, tabloid, wrap them in cotton wool, litigation scared, popularist, ignorant, do-gooder, think of the children, weak, nanny state - MORONS who should be eliminated from the gene pool with extreme prejudice.
On the other hand I guess they can do whatever they like, just so long as it doesnt become fashionable as so often happens with the extreme tail ends of the statistical distribution of ideas.
Try a multi project wafer. Xfab semiconductor or google multiproject wafer.
In a steady state world where the actions you are prepared to take are in line with the idea that all killing is wrong then I agree, all killing is wrong.
However when a war is in progress a different set of rules suddenly become necessary - its a bit like a phase change eg water to ice where the dynamics of the material change dramatically. In this situation the new set of rules say that it is admissable to trade off deaths through strategic decisions. You may be persuaded that firebombing civilian population centers will bring the war to an end much faster and save more lives than those lost to the bombing. The problem is that the decisions are being taken in a non linear, inhuman situation. The only eventual outcome allowed is to win or lose.
Military action is an uncivilsed activity and I look forward to the day when we are all grown up enough not to need it. Its going to take a while.
Face facts. China is going to do things its own way and no ammount of moralistic hand wringing is going to stop them. So Google is going to provided filtered web searches for a regime that we dont happen to like. Its time to wake up and get real. China will overtake the US by the middle of the century, it will have a bigger market, more government spending on arms, more international influence than the US. If you want to influence what they do its time to start doing business with them.
Or were you thinking that a spot of regime change would do the trick??
I am sick to the back teeth of this attitude that says there is a black and white view of the world that is somehow better than pragmatism. Sitting on your high horse and "laying down the law to those heathen savages" is an attitude invented by crusading religious zealots who invaded countries and pitchforked babies untill the population had been subjugated and put to work producing goods for the motherland. Western thought still hangs on to these ideas but the rest of the world is getting sick of it.
Well done Google, ride the tiger of change and do put in that 2 cents worth of "do no evil".
Find time to look for a new job?
How about saving some money and financing the activity, you know "speculate to accumulate"
Pull your socks up and stop whining. Now if you had cancer and your partner had just died in an automobile wreck I could get quite sympathetic but other than that I figure the gene pool is going to be quite well off without your contribution.
I signed this petition but doubt it will have any effect at all.
Reading the "rules of conduct" for the school it rather appears that the town must be on the point of sliding into Hell.
The extreme overeaction to a minor prank that caused no damage falls in line with the draconian and endless lists of punishments in the schools code of conduct. It seems to me that at least 75% of normal intelligent, motivated and well behaved middle classed teenagers would leave this school with an endless list of bad marks for infringing those rules. Certainly anybody with an ounce of academic ability or self belief would soon have it smashed out of them.
So the conclusion must be either that the place is "so full of drug addled gun toting broken family mentally deficient knife carrying gang member uncontrollable teenage thugs" that it has to be run like a North Korean prison - or that the people running it are suffering from many decades or possibly centuries of interbreeding. Possesion of "Electronic gadgets" is forbidden at school for example, and they are to be confiscated if found and can only be retrieved by the parents. Does this include or exclude mobile phones which these days contain video cameras, music players, internet browsers, FM radios and quite possibly GPS and mapping software for all I know. This place is truely in the dark ages.
Clear guidlines for young people are needed of course but if this school is an example of what it means to live in the "Land of the Free" then I would rather live somewhere with a bit more confidence in and respect for its people. Somewhere in contact with the modern world. Canada or Mexico spring immediately to mind, or anywhere in the third world where the taps work and the power stays on for that matter.
Ugh, what a ghastly place this bit of America seems to be.
Who says I'm an atheist, I just dont like opressive thought police. I certainly do not recommend atheism to anyone despite it being the most likely description of life, it has no language to describe spiritual things and there is no community that you can join, a dull and unattractive lifeview even if it happens to be true.
We watched the US and the Soviets slog it out over the cold war, now the Soviets have lost and gone on to rebuild their society the spotlight turns on the USA. In the cold light of day the difference between the former Soviet Union and the USA is becomming hard to distinguish. No law or principle is too sacred for Mr Bush to overturn by executive dictat. The armed forces are running around unchecked torturing and killing people illegaly. All privacy is being eliminated in the war on terror, and surveillance and monitoring data is being allowed into the hands of cutthroat capitalist corporations who would be happier if their customers only did what they were told. And finaly right wing religious fundamentalists have decided that the population have to be brainwashed into seeing things their way.
You are dead right I am batshit insane and intolerant about what is going on. I was born I thought into the age of reason in the mid twentieth century and am horrified to discover that the world in many ways - is becoming the worst nightmare of the thinkers from the age of reason.
Well I have a cold and I am not in a good mood so I am very pleased that the Law has finaly recognised the asinine rubbish being peddled by Intelligent design as just another advertising campaign dressed up with a few men in white coats adding blue sprinkles to your washing powder. Intelligent Design is being peddled by fraudsters and shamsters. And I am not about to be distracted by the interesting intellectual debate about Intelligent Design being a nice philosophical solution to how the universe works, it would be so comforting to know that some god fellow is behind all that mad complexity. However if ID is being used to discredit boring old hard science and foist a mono-religious view on science then you can count me out, we did our witch burning in the middle ages, it should only be uneducated savages like AlQuaida who cannot live with contradiction.
You are correct to be perturbed by my response to this ID nonsense. In your sheep like mind you cannot understand why random people with random thoughts would like to keep them for themselves rather than letting a corrupt institution like a church tell them what to think.
You are correct, it is a war to the death, or at least it could get that way very quickly. It is not possible to not take a side, the religious right will not allow this. Its all about power, specifically its about the power of man over man.
At the end of the day one side is going to kill the other side - which is probably why people with no faith are so desperately angry to discover that they are due to be burned at the stake for not being interested in something that is patently a mental illness from their perspective. Religion is a mental disease, an infection with a meme, a self replicating thought pattern that destroys rival thought patterns.
Man has a spiritual impulse and it is expressed in many different church mediated belief systems, the very fact that there is a class of these things, indicates that no single one is so sucessfull as to be regarded as the truth, the victors after all get to rewrite history.
Atheists do not need to argue the point when they live in a tolerant secular society. The United States of America is drifting towards an intolerant religious mono-culture as evidenced by this ridiculous Intelligent Design farce. Hence the desperation of the argument.
I packed in watching TV years ago, I own three DVD's. With the internet available who needs TV? "In the Pirkinning" is the funniest film I have seen this year anyway.
I will not buy any device with undefeatable DRM built in and I am not going to pay for low quality MP3 downloads.
I pay to watch live bands and visit big screen movie events. I buy CD's with no copy protection.
I am heartily sick of fat cat media content businesses bleating on about how many millions of dollars they are being cheated out of by fans copying their products. In reality the fans would like to purchase the products but cannot afford to do so. There are no stolen millions of dollars that could be in the hands of media content businesses. If I have 2000 mp3s on my laptop it does not mean that I could afford to buy 2000 singles or even that I am any more interested in hearing those 2000 mp3s than listening to a local radio station. I might be persuaded to pay $10 a month for access to a streaming library of the entirety of all recorded works older than say 10 years. It would have to be very wide ranging though and exclude chart hits if possible, I've already heard the chart hits, heard them repeatedly, ramed down my throat, repeatedly, in supermarkets, repeatedly, I'm going to drive my truck through the reception walls to make a personal complaint at the next station to play "Hotel California" from an automated carrosel (Just kidding - its a fine piece of music - until you have heard it twice a week for 20 years, after which it has emotional impact of that feeling you get just before you vomit, deep familiarily and overwhealming thankfullness that soon - oh so soon it will be gone - just like the contents of my stomach - and that all will be right with the world again, sheer blissfull anticipation in fact).
As pauper sound recording artists with gold disks regularly complain, the media content businesses actually make all the money; the artists get a tenth of the profits if they are lucky. So stuff the self serving inflexible dinosaur industry. Try and spend your money directly on the artists if you can and keep it away from rip off media content brokers.
There may be some people who are adversely affected by an addiction to internet access.
Surely though there are many things that it seems socialy acceptable to be addicted to and there is hardly ever a complaint raised about them.
Its just jealosy methinks, it takes a degree of enthusiasam, knowledge and skill to become addicted to Internet activities.
Pressing a tv remote however is an addiction that takes about as much skill and knowledge as eating - and for some reason this makes it ok.
Society should be more tolerant and more aspirational, Internet addiction should be viewed as no more of a bad thing than addiction to writing bad poetry.
On the other hand I recently heard an argument here in the UK that said that one of the arguments against forcing ISPs to cache all email traffic for later inspection by law enforcement in the "war on terror" is that the volume of spam makes it uneconomic (and the bad guys are using untraceable untappable voip anyway).
It appears that the Internet remains a magnicifently untameable beast still, despite pointy headed attempts like this to control it.
Im very impressed, its a cracking movie, just watched it. Enjoyed it more than the last episode of the Matrix that I had missed and just got around to seeing on a supermarket remaindered DVD. Good acting if you bear in mind that these are Finnish people and not Italians doing the acting. Great makeup, lighting, sets
special effects, camera work, sound, music. This is a polished piece of work and funny to boot.
The thing that keeps it fresh all the way through is that its stuffed full of references of all different kinds.
amongst many
Heating the ground with twinklers to keep warm - somebody is going to tell me which original episode of Star Treck had this.
Never on a Thursday - is all the action only supposed to happen on Friday and Saturday night in Finland?.
Endless mindnumbingly dull speeches - Babylon 5
fukov - most nordic people speak english
Vodka sinking Soviet presidents, Viking spirit and vodka. Vodka and vodka. Vodka.
Check out the product placement with fake products, bone achingly funny.
And for my money the space battles looked more like I think they should look than anything Hollywood has come up with. I could spend a good few hours watching each clip repeatedly and working out the storyboard for each one, killer.
Great world movie too, figure out which character relationship bits are traditional american roleplay and which bits are Finnish and which universal.
Works on tons of levels, great entertainment, im putting it in everybodys christmas stocking when I visit my folks and giving everyone I know in Plymouth a copy asap.
Its in my collection of favorite unique classics already.
The bird flu virus is not capable of human transmission currently so you have to catch it from birds in order to die of it.
This means that everybody who comes into contact with birds currently needs to be very vigilent about the health of the birds they come into contact with. The Chinese for example are culling all birds in an area where an outbreak occurs in order to reduce the likelyhood of it spreading. This is working fairly well as it is not clear whether transmission is occuring through the wild bird vector - migration or through transport of livestock. There is some evidence that it is appearing in places where the likelyhood is that it arrived in livestock because it is along railway routes and not bird migration paths. In addition the effect on birds is so virrulent that they are most likely killed before they can move a great distance. So far so good.
However if the outbreaks become more widespread then special measures may be taken to try and stop the spread. This may involve preventing birds bred for food from comming into contact with wild birds and the usual hygene precautions of reducing transportation of live livestock, cleaning vehicles that visit bird food production sites etc. No one knows how effective such a campaign would be against this particular virus would be but such measures have worked well in other animal disease senareos - foot and mouth, BSE etc.
Another useful measure would be to reduce the number of people who catch common human flu. This would help because one method by which H5N1 could become human transmissable would be by antigenic shift - essentialy a person who has bird flu and easily transmissable human flue could inadvertantly become a factory for the creation of a sort of cross stain of the two kinds of flu. The other kind of natural mutation antigenic drift is the slow mutation of H5N1 into something that is human transmissable isnt anything we can do much about but you could say that its been around for a few years now and it hasnt discovered that route - so it may be many more before drift makes it more dangerous.
If a leathal human transmissable strain does appear then the spread can be lessened by washing hands before touching food, or your eyes or mouth as this is a very common vector for viruses to spread. Also anyone who catches it should go into isolation. This is all good stuff which we have all probably got a bit lax about with a plethora of modern treatments for illnesses - there is hardly anything around these days that could kill you from touching a door handle so we dont bother so much with the hand washing thing. Expect a resergance of telephone sanitisers and the smell of bleach.
Incidentally bleach is not likely to encourage a superbug, its a chemical equivalent of running a blowlamp over things and anything that mutates into a form that can live in bleach is more likely to be a chlorine breathing monster of super human intelligence from the planet tharg - a virus just aint going to change enough to survive and even if it did it wouldnt be able to live in people anyway.
So to summarise
Look out for piles of dead birds in the wild and let the vetinary service know if you see any. (currently unlikely unless you live in the far east and one dead bird is not H5N1 so dont overeact if you find one your cat killed)
(Also dont buy illeagaly imported birds from anywhere that have not gone through proper quarrantine)
If you work on a chicken farm then find out what the standard containment procedures are for any bird illnesses, if H5N1 comes to your country then you will be using them.
As a matter of course learn how to clean your hands and practise doing it now, that way you might go a lifetime without catching any kind of flu, never mind bird flu. And one last thing stop picking your nose for goodness sake, one day it might kill you!!!
Thats my take on what we do to prepare for bird flu, corrections and ammendments welcome.
I will second that, SUSE used to be fun. The Novel website now makes it look like a pile of corporate BS, you have to navigate so many layers of synergy you cant find anything any more. On the other hand you cant charge millions for something that is easy to understand, so I guess its just the way of the world
I'm not advocating that debate be stifled, the more debate the better. However I dont expect the golden ratio to assume a special position in a mathematics class, it belongs in an art class about architecture or painting. Similarly I do not expect philosophical interpretation to be sprinkled over science class. You mistake the absence of interpretive meaning in science class for some sort of heathen attack on religion, I content that its not like that at all. Science is about mechanism and you have to look to cultural subjects like literature, history, religion, social science to place interpretation and meaning on the information. For example we seperate english language classes from english literature because one is about mechanism and the other about our culture.
I suspect that what may be happening here is that people do not think that youngsters are being taught enough about christian culture during their education. I can see that this part of education may be constantly under attack because we live in multicultural societies and in bending over backwards to accomodate different points of view have diluted what many parents expect from education. Bear in mind the fact that many minority religions spend a lot of effort in making sure that their children learn about these things in seperate schooling built around their churches. Maybe its time for a sunday school revival.
An interesting observation about Gods plural rather than God singular. Since there are many faiths with many gods which are attached to different cultures - can anyone point out which of these Gods is the God advocated in the ID theory who is responsible for our creation? Or is it asking too much for scientific methodology to distinguish which god is responsible for ID?
I get the feeling that ID is an interesting philosophical idea which suffers from lack of development. Give me a good idea about which god has implemented ID and a coherent explanation of why they should want to do such a thing and I might find it more appealing. For example the Christian god is reported to be interested in my faith and therefore would appear to be misrepresented if those people amongst us who are experts on the christian god spent an inordinate amount of effort pointing out physical proof that the god exists as the architect of ID.
Science and philosophy like church and state make uneasy bedfellows, they are related but it is culture which mediates the relationship, they are not the same thing.
It is a political question that has been raised. If you want to live in a theocracy like Iran then go ahead and teach ID in science class. Personally I would rather live in a secular society which tolerates many faiths and has to live with the awkward compromises that political processes go through in order to accomodate those faiths.
Even better than that you could ask the question "when would you like the 'oil' to run out" as we are so dam smart these days that we have the choice - we can either replace it with something else or spend a great deal of effort turning stone into oil (from shale) or growing it (biodiesel) or invading someone who has some left.
Deciding when it should run out is a question that science cannot answer, our culture has to take that decision, but its going to be much easier to take it with an expectation of a happy outcome if the decision is informed by scientific knowledge rather than a decision informed by a pre scientific meme - even if that pre scientific meme gives us a feel good factor of being 'right'.
Or to put it another way - your best defence against a bird flu pandemic is the technology largely developed by funding for research into biological warfare.
In other words its not the knowledge which should be judged against what is good for society - but the uses to which we put that knowledge. Understanding is absolutely neutral, application demands that we take personal responsibility and pay attention to the consequences and make a judgement. There is only one black and white decision and that one is informed by hindsight, the future can only be probabilities informed by whatever knowledge we have.
Any ethos which demands a black and white view is probably wrong.
Hail Eris etc, I'm doing my best to figure it out myself.
Responsibility is not fun though it can be stimulating and life enhancing, after all you will only exist at this momment once.
I'm not suprised that you take all this with a pinch of salt having looked up your reference to the 76 swine flu debacle. (The disease wasnt dangerous and vaccination was apparently started for political gain - unfortunately a serious disease, GBS seems to have resulted from the vaccinations themselves).
So lets say that what you imply is correct: the United States government is so badly corrupted that all of its institutions are being run by capitalist criminals who are only interested in personal gain and are completely unreliable. (The sort of government that decent people might feel they had to destroy in order to save humanity. I dont think you meant that, but it often sounds like America is going the way of the Roman Empire from the dissafection of its citizens).
So lets ignore local politics for a change and look at the facts
The virus is showing signs of genetic changes and difference in the clinical presentation in different geographic areas. There have been more clusters in northern Vietnam (8) than in southern Vietnam (2). It has been suggested that the virus circulating in northern Vietnam may be able to transmit from human to human more easily.
The age range of cases is becoming wider. The average age of patients in northern Vietnam has increased from approximately 17 years of age in 2004 to approximately 31 years of age in 2005, while the approximate age of cases in southern Vietnam has remained almost unchanged at 15-18 years of age. The age range of infected persons has also increased from less than 1 year of age to greater than 80 years of age in northern Vietnam; while in southern Vietnam, the age range is still 2 to 40 years of age.
In 2004, the case fatality rate in Thailand and Cambodia was 71-100 percent, but is now 34 percent in northern Vietnam. Additionally, there is evidence of several individuals having had asymptomatic infections. As a virus becomes more adapted to humans, the case fatality rate will often decrease, allowing the virus more stable propagation in the human population
Now isnt that interesting? H5N1 is doing all the right things to be in your lungs some time soon. Oh and dont forget that you personally are only 6 degrees of seperation away from these third world peasants, so if they get a rapid human transmissable version, you probably will too. I do hope you are not in the most susceptible age range, 20 - 40.
Never mind, I expect you can afford to buy your own course of Tamiflu imported from India where Cipla is going to make the stuff outside of Roche's patent. A course of 30 pills is about $300 online at the momment.
oops - I should have said "antigenic shift" of course.
You mention the need for patents in order to protect "the future"
I think you are underestimating the possibilities of this bird flu.
it could wipe out world stock markets for a decade.
Its in your interests for all governments to catch this one early and effectively, whatever methods they use.
If it appears, then there will be desperate attempts to stop it, for example you can be sure that any country that has a pandemic and is isolateable will have anything that moves over its boarders terminated with extreme predudice. Maybe the rest of the world might agree to wipe the place out with nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately if a human transmissible version of this virus appears then even this will be pointless. Only half a million Americans died in the 1918 pandemic and 50 million worldwide. There was no air travel at the time so it wouldnt be suprising if these figures were a hundred times higher for a pandemic today, it would be everywhere within a week.
The USA is not exactly shining with glory over its disaster preparedness planning since the debacle in New Orleans. I hope that the federal government that many seem to so despise is prepared to manufacture a flu vaccine for you personally. In the UK the government has just announced contracts to make 120 million doses of vaccine, of course they wont be able to make them all for the first wave, but it should be three months before the second wave and that should allow time for at least the surviving medical staff, army and police to get a dose.
Mind you life is full of risks, the media delights in scaring us with the latest one.
Some we live with and over time grow complacent about. Californians have the next big earthquake, New Orleans have had their Leves breached and the Kashmiris have their earthquake. It is instructive to compare the effect of catastrophe on different places, a thousand deaths in Louisiana, 45 thousand in Pakistan and few if any from the little quakes in California.
The thing that appears to have made a difference in these cases is the degree of preparedness. Californian building codes verses Pakistani ones (admittedly they couldnt afford much better ones) and New Orleans mostly got out in time. Also the tsunami which would have had much less effect if people had an hours warning to walk inland.
A bird flu inflenza is a very real threat, by this time next year a third of us could be dead.
Pandemic illnesses and in fact most viral illnesses have been found to have come from cross species transmission, their danger comming from the fact that they have slowly mutated in an animal species into something that the human immune system knows nothing of. The virus itself may once have transfered from human to bird. So when it crosses the interspecies boundary we have no remembered defence, this is the case with bird flu. Up to a third of the individuals who have caught it directly from birds have died. All that remains is for an individual to be carrying a normal easily transmitted human virus to catch bird flu and for the two kinds of virus to exchange components and you get a human influenza that carries the nasty behaviour of bird flu. try a google search for antigenic drift or just have a look at CDC.
I dont know what the risk is of the two virii cross pollinating in this way - but the microbiologists seem worried that this will happen. You would have to find out what the probability of this is before you can say whether a pandemic is imminent and I dont think anybody has reliable figures on this. Governments seem to think it inevitable.
However consider the known risk factors that the media get excited over that we all live with eg Nuclear power station melt down, heart disease, cancer, food dyes, various slightly suspect chemicals in products we come in daily contact with (that give a rat cancer if you feed the rat its own body weight of the chemical), pesticides, being run over by a bus, being struck by lightning etc
- none of these are likely to destroy our
It is fashionable to believe that democracy provides power to the citizens, it actualy does no such thing. What it does do is allow ideas to be fought over in the media and the resultant zeit geist pushes the voters pens at the polls.
Elections are seldom about policies, theorys or ideas, they are about the evolutionary breeding properties of the party leader, whether that leader is hefting a big enough stick to repel outsiders from another tribe and whether that leaders attendance at the crop planting ceremony will be auspicious. In other words, will the leader create the correct social standards, defend the realm and keep the economy going as judged on daytime tv.
Power struggles exist wherever there is power, nobody believes that democracy is perfect in any of its incarnations so waving shrouds declaring the EU undemocratic is exactly as persuasive as tabloid hate mongering. Perhaps we should be worried about how democratic things are but at the end of the day only political enthusiasts are realy interested.
The EU is at least adapting to the times it finds itself in, its final purpose is not yet in sight but it can be seen as a natural result of globalisation, harmonisation of law and societies.
Outside observers could be forgiven for thinking that the people of the United States were desperate to get rid of the federal government from the volume of complaints. It never seems to cross anybodys mind that all of the injurious actions of the EU and the American Federal Government would pragmaticaly speaking, mostly get implemented by their client states sooner or later. You cannot compete if your goods and business practises prevent you from trading, so you end up harmonising anyway. What the EU hasnt learned to do yet is to figure out how to handle the imposition of harmonisation which is seen as oppression by some client populations. As it grows these issues become more obvious and the idea of a super state becomes less likely.
The EU is a club full of administrators and it is the job of the member states to keep them under control. Currently there is a requirement for unanimous agreement before anything big is imposed so this is a great way of keeping the thing real. Unfortunately this also leads to glacial change in things that should have died years ago. The common agricultural policy comes to mind here, farming is finished in Europe the same way manufacturing is; the third world wants to grow it and the population wants to eat it so it is inevitable. subsidy for food manufacture will end.
So one of these administrators has declared a harmonising method for flogging music. It appears though that this could lead to unpleasant changes for some. So now you have the difficult question - do you ignore the complaints and bulldoze the project through therebye creating more business and greater profits overall or do you protect the nonuniform existance of niche players in the business ecosystem. Logic dictates that the niches will get destroyed eventually so you may as well get on with it. However it means a change of society for some, some people will lose their prosperity and be forced into poverty.
The laws of competition tell you to get on with it, and from the complaints about injustice surrounding local music tax collection agencies it sounds like no one would care to see them starve for one thing and for another thing there dont seem to be any beneficiarys of the current system standing up for it
People who download music in quantity probably have wider tastes than their purchasing power allows
In my last job I was given a paltry 18Gb of stolen mp3s
Most of it is not to my taste, however I have discovered some new artists whose music I have purchased and the collection is great for people to hunt through at parties, especialy if they like Nordic heavy metal from around the turn of the century.
Also its worth noting that mp3 sound quality is excrement compared to cassette tape so I still need to buy the original WAV files if it is going to be played more than once.
I hope the bitrate on pay for download files is better than my collection of 128kbps files, anyone who professes to love music when listening to these is actually seriously addicted to a particular kind of phasey distortion and for true happieness should probably buy a couple of the very cheapest realistic guitar combos and wire the output of one to the input of the other and listen to everything through this with the volume set to 12. Reducing the eardrum area by poking a knitting needle through it may help also.
Seriously though hasnt anybody else noticed how crap mp3s are?
http://www.nola.com/newsflash/louisiana/index.ssf? /base/news-19/1126310641289593.xml&storylist=louis iana
Yes, and it appears that poor communications is now being highlighted as a significant contributor to the slow response of disaster relief. There is obviously a recognition that the whole communications system needs a rethink. The link reports a briefing to state Sen. Robert Barham on a system for linking networks of support agencies.