H1N1 influenza viruses have been out of circulation in the human population since about 1978, but have been circulating in the bird and swine populations. That's a lot of virus generations in which to acquire modifications.
Only if you were over the age of 32 (i.e. you had experienced H1N1 before 1978). This thing killed a few thousand kids in the US. It's hard to figure out how many cases there would have been without the vaccination program, but the vaccinations probably prevented a few thousand deaths, prevented 30,000 serious but non-fatal complication, and about $30 billion in sick days.
And H1N1 never should have made it to pandemic
Pandemic relates primarily to the geographic area the flu is found in, the rate of spread in those areas and to new areas. I'm not sure whether it kills old people is on the list of criteria.
The largest risk factor for seasonal flu (and probably H1N1) is exposure to unvaccinated children under the age of 7. If you don't have kids and you're colleagues are smart enough to stay home when they are sick, your risk of getting it is pretty small even without a vaccination.
If you were alive before 1978 and had previous exposure to H1N1 or had the 1970s "swine flu" vaccine, you probably had some immunity. Depending upon the strength of the immunity you might not have developed the disease or developed a case so mild that it was indistinguishable from a mild cold.
Try reading what I wrote rather than what you think I wrote. You seem to be attributing a lot of things I didn't say to me. Nowhere did I describe the detail for the market I proposed, yet you seem to know exactly how it would work.
Your hypothesis seems to be that nobody would ever pay for a game they could get for free. Yet the existence of a retail market for games, despite the fact that DRM has never worked, means that people do, in fact, pay for games, even when they are available for free.
You could also look at the evidence. Valve's test "sales" indicated that the highest profits would be achieved by selling their games at 25% of the list price. Yet rather than optimizing profits, they continue to push for maximum unit price.
Oh well, since you can't be convinced with evidence, I'll let you continue to express your faith in what you think economics is.
Brilliant, why didn't they think of that? Since you are against DRM, they will be auctioning downloads of the game...without DRM, right? And that would work because...why again? Where did you learn economics again?
Apparently I learned it in a better school than you did. I didn't say that piracy would disappear, just that the price should be the one that returns maximum profits in the presence of piracy. It doesn't even necessarily minimize the number of pirated copies. But I can tell you that for most games on the market it would be far less than the $60-70 that new games are priced at. But apparently game distributors don't care about maximizing profits for their shareholders. They care about the per copy price and would rather sell 100,000 copies for $60 than 1,000,000 at $15.
In addition to not understanding what I proposed, you are making the common mistake of assuming that people place no value on fairness or honesty. At the very least you're assuming that people don't place any value on getting a tested and virus free copy from the vendor versus taking the time to find a possibly virus or trojan laden version on a warez tracker. You have to value your time very little to feel that even 15 minutes of your time is worth the $4 that an average indie game should cost. Or the $15 that a big budget commercial game should cost.
Most piracy losses are imaginary. Most pirates are people who wouldn't buy the game even if it were a nickel.
However, the economics of piracy are simple. For any game there is an optimum price for maximizing income. If the game is priced too high, people won't buy it. If it is priced too low, the additional sales don't make up for the lost income. This price is going to be different for any game, though, depending upon demand.
DRM isn't going to change that. Piracy rates on games with DRM are no lower than those without.
The problem is that indie developers look at the prices that the large developers get for games and say "Ultimate Modern Warfare Battlefield Premier Edition" is $70 so I'm going to price "Bouncing Crystaltris Supreme" at $20 so it will be cheap in comparison. The problem is that the optimum price of UMWBPE is actually around $15, but LubiArts can't charge that because everyone knows new games go for $70, and $15 is for the bargain bin. Assuming the ratio of price holds, that would put the optimum price of "Bouncing Crystaltris Supreme" at $4
Unfortunately it appears that nobody in the gaming industry ever took an economics course, so the only solution to piracy you'll get out of them is higher prices and additional DRM.
The best way of pricing, might actually be an auction scheme. Where price is associated with demand, with the seller limiting daily or hourly supply.
Maybe if they had reduced the price of the game to 1/2 what they were charging then the piracy rate might have gone down to 60%. That would earn them twice as much as well.
There is an optimum price that delivers maximum profits in the face of piracy. I doubt anyone in the gaming industry has tried to find it.
Scanning the whole galaxy is a lot easier than FTL travel. All you need is a big freaking telescope. And even with FTL, those probes are going to start with nearby worlds and move out. Unless we're accidentally next door, this world has nothing to offer that a million others don't also have.
Let's put it this way. Suppose we find two "Class M" planets in the solar neighborhood, one with signs of an industrial society, the other appears empty. Where do you think we're going to send our colony ship?
You're missing the point (or stupid). Why would they need to bother wiping us out with gamma beams when there are millions of planets out there that are just like ours, but closer, and uninfested with civilizations that need wiping out.
Since you are obviously either Christian or an explicit sympathizer, why should we expect Christians to harass you? They are too busy harassing people who don't bow to their religion. I have yet to experience a Vegan knocking on my door asking me to join. In fact, here in the heart of vegan country, I have never been harassed by a vegan. I'm pretty sure you're just making up harassment stories to support your point. You aren't Bill O'Reilly are you?
What possesses you to believe that a peaceful, non-economic race of beings with super-light travel actually exists?
I didn't see where the parent to your post suggested any such thing.
Any race of beings with interstellar space flight capability would want trade or conquest
Now who's being an idiot? Life bearing planets are going to be a million times more common those with intelligent species building a civilization. Why would an alien civilization put all the cost and effort into colonizing or conquering a planet that already has a civilization? Why come here to a planet that's already been raped of a significant fraction of its natural resources and has a badly damaged biosphere, when there's a planet with complex life at 1/100th the distance without a civilization on it. To quote a Ferengi, there's no profit in it.
Call it the first rule of economics. Never fly to China to buy something you can get at the grocery store.
That's the problem with the SETI Institute calling themselves "the SETI Institute." The SETI institute is a research institute that works on many types of science. Most of the scientists working at the SETI institute are biologists, chemists, geologists, and astronomers that don't do SETI. They work on other aspects of studying the potential for life in the universe. They also have an education group that designs curricula related to the search for life in the universe. It's even worse when they drop the word "Institute" and call themselves "SETI." Most of the people in the world that do SETI don't work at the SETI institute. But the SETI institute is sometimes credited or blamed for work they didn't do because they have allowed the idea that all SETI is done or overseen by the SETI Institute to become pervasive.
Quality is highly variable with new SATA 1.5TB+ drives. But if you drop down to 750 or 500 GB drives the reliability is indistinguishable from SAS/SCSI/FC. Infant mortality is about the same as SCSI/FC, and once you're past that the drives will usually outlast the machine. True SCSI and FC are still stuck at $0.50/GB for a 320GB drive. SAS isn't even worth talking about since it's the same drives with the same controllers with SAS protocol enabled. I'd rather use double the number of drives at half the price and spend the money on decent raid cards that support raid multiple redundancy. More disks = more spindles = more redundancy = better. Replacing a drive per year isn't a big issue and isn't even a panic when you can survive a double or triple failure. The only place you need to spend the money is if you really need speed. Then thirty-two 130 MB drives in a RAID 10 configuration might be warranted. But please, set aside some hot spares.
If "high speed" cables are tested up to 1080p resolution, they ought to work for lower resolutions as well, right? So why not just make that the new standard?
Five dollar unlabeled cables you find at the flea market work fine with 1080p, so you know it's not a very tough spec to hit. Has anyone ever seen an HDMI cable that couldn't?
It's about what it's always been about: selling essentially identical products under tiered pricing. "You want to do 1080p? You'll need the $75 cable. See, on the purple package it says 1080p. On the blue package it says 1080i. So you'll need the purple package unless you also need digital audio. That's the $100 cable."
Magnitudes are your enemy here. If you shot a.308 rifle out the "back" of the ISS (retrograde to velocity), the bullet probably wouldn't de-orbit.
Actually it would. Quick virial theorem estimate says that bullet would hit the ground even if there wasn't an atmosphere. Shuttle deorbit burns are 250 fps. A.308 round has a muzzle velocity of 2820 fps.
If you shot it straight down (down the radius vector), it would loop around you and come back DOWN at you 1 orbit later and at the same velocity it left!
Not quite. You've given the bullet a small apogee boost, so bullet will have a longer orbital period than the space station and will miss by a good margin. Anyway, those are just details. You've got the basics down.
Alternatively, there are other ways to catch debris if you don;t much care what shape it is in when you catch it. A few layers of metal and some intervening goo, for instance. But aerogel is so light that it's cheaper to send up, it captured comet debris adequately, so it would probably be great to catch a lot of small stuff. Larger items may need a bigger or better 'net'.
There's a big difference between catching an interplanetary dust particle and catching a tiny screw or even a paint chip. A paint chip is going to be a thousand times heavier. A screw will be a million times heavier. So you're talking aerogel that is meters thick. Anything small enough to capture with aerogel is going to be essentially worthless, so there's no money to be made sweeping space of small objects
There must be no debris resulting from the collision, including aerogel. Since you're not going to be able to categorize most particles before impact, you need to design for the largest unidentified piece you might meet. In the end you're talking about hundreds of millions to get rid of a tiny fraction of the problem. You're better off spending that money on prevention.
But it makes me wonder what would happen if you did make the lower 50% of the students retake a particular class.
Average students are going to end up on both sides of the C level (unless you meant the C-D dividing mark), so it's going to lengthen the time they stay in school. I think it would probably turn K-12 into K-20, with only the top 10 percent graduating after 13 years, half graduating by 17 years, and 25 percent going the full 21 years without graduating. Not really an experiment I think we should try.
Do you honestly believe what you are saying? Are you getting this info from AM radio? Safe sex, sure. I think that's appropriate especially given the enormous failure of abstinence-only education. I think you're mistaking the rest for teaching kids how not to be an asshole.
We've always had people graduating high school reading at the third grade level. In fact a lot of people have gotten through high school without being able to read at all. Illiteracy among adults is pretty low in this country, so this certainly isn't a huge fraction of high school graduates.
As far as where the land in the US came from, do you have another theory? I'd be hard pressed to find a part of this country that didn't belong to Native Americans, Hawaiians, or Mexicans. Apart from the Louisiana Purchase which the French stole from the Native Americans for us. Or Alaska, which the Russians stole from the Inuit for us. If you think these have always been ours, your American History is somewhat lacking. I don't recall hearing anyone say that we should give it back.
Regarding lawsuits, isn't it possible people get that from somewhere else (TV maybe)? Or do you have proof of a public school teaching children how to file frivolous lawsuits?
No, just you shouldn't expect the schools to solve problems created by the parent. Read stuff into messages that really isn't there much? Maybe you should have learned how to interpret written language when you were in school.
I never said it was appropriate for every situation. But for nontrivial tests that aren't standardized it's virtually a necessity to adjust grades (unless the test is way too easy) based upon the test difficulty. Most of the time a curve is the only non-subjective way to do the job.
Of course you shouldn't be doing Gaussian curve grading when the distribution is very non-Gaussian.
But if you've got a bathtub curve, that's a strong sign that your course is too easy. There are a bunch of people who have no idea what they are doing in your course, and the people who know what they are doing are smashed against the top end of the scale. The best bet is to scare the lower end out quickly by making things difficult enough that the upper end actually has to do some work. Get the peak of that upper end below 70. Then someone might learn something. Your curve will be much more Gaussian and you'll be teaching appropriate material. Otherwise you're not doing those students any favors, either the ones who already know what you're teaching or the ones who should be somewhere else.
If it's not trivial it will. The reason that the driver's license doesn't have a bell curve is because it's too easy. More than half the people that take it get 100%. That's because it's designed for a minimal level of competence. If it were actually designed to measure your understanding of the rules of the road, the result would be a bell curve.
Slashdot Mirror
H1N1 influenza viruses have been out of circulation in the human population since about 1978, but have been circulating in the bird and swine populations. That's a lot of virus generations in which to acquire modifications.
it was less lethal than the common flu
Only if you were over the age of 32 (i.e. you had experienced H1N1 before 1978). This thing killed a few thousand kids in the US. It's hard to figure out how many cases there would have been without the vaccination program, but the vaccinations probably prevented a few thousand deaths, prevented 30,000 serious but non-fatal complication, and about $30 billion in sick days.
And H1N1 never should have made it to pandemic
Pandemic relates primarily to the geographic area the flu is found in, the rate of spread in those areas and to new areas. I'm not sure whether it kills old people is on the list of criteria.
It's not gone yet?
Influenza is seasonal. It's currently flu season in the southern hemisphere. You probably live in the northern hemisphere.
The largest risk factor for seasonal flu (and probably H1N1) is exposure to unvaccinated children under the age of 7. If you don't have kids and you're colleagues are smart enough to stay home when they are sick, your risk of getting it is pretty small even without a vaccination.
If you were alive before 1978 and had previous exposure to H1N1 or had the 1970s "swine flu" vaccine, you probably had some immunity. Depending upon the strength of the immunity you might not have developed the disease or developed a case so mild that it was indistinguishable from a mild cold.
Try reading what I wrote rather than what you think I wrote. You seem to be attributing a lot of things I didn't say to me. Nowhere did I describe the detail for the market I proposed, yet you seem to know exactly how it would work.
Your hypothesis seems to be that nobody would ever pay for a game they could get for free. Yet the existence of a retail market for games, despite the fact that DRM has never worked, means that people do, in fact, pay for games, even when they are available for free.
You could also look at the evidence. Valve's test "sales" indicated that the highest profits would be achieved by selling their games at 25% of the list price. Yet rather than optimizing profits, they continue to push for maximum unit price.
Oh well, since you can't be convinced with evidence, I'll let you continue to express your faith in what you think economics is.
Brilliant, why didn't they think of that? Since you are against DRM, they will be auctioning downloads of the game...without DRM, right? And that would work because...why again? Where did you learn economics again?
Apparently I learned it in a better school than you did. I didn't say that piracy would disappear, just that the price should be the one that returns maximum profits in the presence of piracy. It doesn't even necessarily minimize the number of pirated copies. But I can tell you that for most games on the market it would be far less than the $60-70 that new games are priced at. But apparently game distributors don't care about maximizing profits for their shareholders. They care about the per copy price and would rather sell 100,000 copies for $60 than 1,000,000 at $15.
In addition to not understanding what I proposed, you are making the common mistake of assuming that people place no value on fairness or honesty. At the very least you're assuming that people don't place any value on getting a tested and virus free copy from the vendor versus taking the time to find a possibly virus or trojan laden version on a warez tracker. You have to value your time very little to feel that even 15 minutes of your time is worth the $4 that an average indie game should cost. Or the $15 that a big budget commercial game should cost.
Most piracy losses are imaginary. Most pirates are people who wouldn't buy the game even if it were a nickel.
However, the economics of piracy are simple. For any game there is an optimum price for maximizing income. If the game is priced too high, people won't buy it. If it is priced too low, the additional sales don't make up for the lost income. This price is going to be different for any game, though, depending upon demand.
DRM isn't going to change that. Piracy rates on games with DRM are no lower than those without.
The problem is that indie developers look at the prices that the large developers get for games and say "Ultimate Modern Warfare Battlefield Premier Edition" is $70 so I'm going to price "Bouncing Crystaltris Supreme" at $20 so it will be cheap in comparison. The problem is that the optimum price of UMWBPE is actually around $15, but LubiArts can't charge that because everyone knows new games go for $70, and $15 is for the bargain bin. Assuming the ratio of price holds, that would put the optimum price of "Bouncing Crystaltris Supreme" at $4
Unfortunately it appears that nobody in the gaming industry ever took an economics course, so the only solution to piracy you'll get out of them is higher prices and additional DRM.
The best way of pricing, might actually be an auction scheme. Where price is associated with demand, with the seller limiting daily or hourly supply.
Maybe if they had reduced the price of the game to 1/2 what they were charging then the piracy rate might have gone down to 60%. That would earn them twice as much as well.
There is an optimum price that delivers maximum profits in the face of piracy. I doubt anyone in the gaming industry has tried to find it.
You forgot "Does the supreme court have the power to strike down laws passed by the Congress and signed by the President?"
Scanning the whole galaxy is a lot easier than FTL travel. All you need is a big freaking telescope. And even with FTL, those probes are going to start with nearby worlds and move out. Unless we're accidentally next door, this world has nothing to offer that a million others don't also have.
Let's put it this way. Suppose we find two "Class M" planets in the solar neighborhood, one with signs of an industrial society, the other appears empty. Where do you think we're going to send our colony ship?
You're missing the point (or stupid). Why would they need to bother wiping us out with gamma beams when there are millions of planets out there that are just like ours, but closer, and uninfested with civilizations that need wiping out.
Since you are obviously either Christian or an explicit sympathizer, why should we expect Christians to harass you? They are too busy harassing people who don't bow to their religion. I have yet to experience a Vegan knocking on my door asking me to join. In fact, here in the heart of vegan country, I have never been harassed by a vegan. I'm pretty sure you're just making up harassment stories to support your point. You aren't Bill O'Reilly are you?
What possesses you to believe that a peaceful, non-economic race of beings with super-light travel actually exists?
I didn't see where the parent to your post suggested any such thing.
Any race of beings with interstellar space flight capability would want trade or conquest
Now who's being an idiot? Life bearing planets are going to be a million times more common those with intelligent species building a civilization. Why would an alien civilization put all the cost and effort into colonizing or conquering a planet that already has a civilization? Why come here to a planet that's already been raped of a significant fraction of its natural resources and has a badly damaged biosphere, when there's a planet with complex life at 1/100th the distance without a civilization on it. To quote a Ferengi, there's no profit in it.
Call it the first rule of economics. Never fly to China to buy something you can get at the grocery store.
That's the problem with the SETI Institute calling themselves "the SETI Institute." The SETI institute is a research institute that works on many types of science. Most of the scientists working at the SETI institute are biologists, chemists, geologists, and astronomers that don't do SETI. They work on other aspects of studying the potential for life in the universe. They also have an education group that designs curricula related to the search for life in the universe. It's even worse when they drop the word "Institute" and call themselves "SETI." Most of the people in the world that do SETI don't work at the SETI institute. But the SETI institute is sometimes credited or blamed for work they didn't do because they have allowed the idea that all SETI is done or overseen by the SETI Institute to become pervasive.
Quality is highly variable with new SATA 1.5TB+ drives. But if you drop down to 750 or 500 GB drives the reliability is indistinguishable from SAS/SCSI/FC. Infant mortality is about the same as SCSI/FC, and once you're past that the drives will usually outlast the machine. True SCSI and FC are still stuck at $0.50/GB for a 320GB drive. SAS isn't even worth talking about since it's the same drives with the same controllers with SAS protocol enabled. I'd rather use double the number of drives at half the price and spend the money on decent raid cards that support raid multiple redundancy. More disks = more spindles = more redundancy = better. Replacing a drive per year isn't a big issue and isn't even a panic when you can survive a double or triple failure. The only place you need to spend the money is if you really need speed. Then thirty-two 130 MB drives in a RAID 10 configuration might be warranted. But please, set aside some hot spares.
HDMI -- DVI plus audio, maybe plus ethernet, with more fragile connectors
FTFY. HTH! HAND!
If "high speed" cables are tested up to 1080p resolution, they ought to work for lower resolutions as well, right? So why not just make that the new standard?
Five dollar unlabeled cables you find at the flea market work fine with 1080p, so you know it's not a very tough spec to hit. Has anyone ever seen an HDMI cable that couldn't?
It's about what it's always been about: selling essentially identical products under tiered pricing. "You want to do 1080p? You'll need the $75 cable. See, on the purple package it says 1080p. On the blue package it says 1080i. So you'll need the purple package unless you also need digital audio. That's the $100 cable."
Magnitudes are your enemy here. If you shot a .308 rifle out the "back" of the ISS (retrograde to velocity), the bullet probably wouldn't de-orbit.
Actually it would. Quick virial theorem estimate says that bullet would hit the ground even if there wasn't an atmosphere. Shuttle deorbit burns are 250 fps. A .308 round has a muzzle velocity of 2820 fps.
If you shot it straight down (down the radius vector), it would loop around you and come back DOWN at you 1 orbit later and at the same velocity it left!
Not quite. You've given the bullet a small apogee boost, so bullet will have a longer orbital period than the space station and will miss by a good margin. Anyway, those are just details. You've got the basics down.
Alternatively, there are other ways to catch debris if you don;t much care what shape it is in when you catch it. A few layers of metal and some intervening goo, for instance. But aerogel is so light that it's cheaper to send up, it captured comet debris adequately, so it would probably be great to catch a lot of small stuff. Larger items may need a bigger or better 'net'.
There's a big difference between catching an interplanetary dust particle and catching a tiny screw or even a paint chip. A paint chip is going to be a thousand times heavier. A screw will be a million times heavier. So you're talking aerogel that is meters thick. Anything small enough to capture with aerogel is going to be essentially worthless, so there's no money to be made sweeping space of small objects
There must be no debris resulting from the collision, including aerogel. Since you're not going to be able to categorize most particles before impact, you need to design for the largest unidentified piece you might meet. In the end you're talking about hundreds of millions to get rid of a tiny fraction of the problem. You're better off spending that money on prevention.
But it makes me wonder what would happen if you did make the lower 50% of the students retake a particular class.
Average students are going to end up on both sides of the C level (unless you meant the C-D dividing mark), so it's going to lengthen the time they stay in school. I think it would probably turn K-12 into K-20, with only the top 10 percent graduating after 13 years, half graduating by 17 years, and 25 percent going the full 21 years without graduating. Not really an experiment I think we should try.
Do you honestly believe what you are saying? Are you getting this info from AM radio? Safe sex, sure. I think that's appropriate especially given the enormous failure of abstinence-only education. I think you're mistaking the rest for teaching kids how not to be an asshole.
We've always had people graduating high school reading at the third grade level. In fact a lot of people have gotten through high school without being able to read at all. Illiteracy among adults is pretty low in this country, so this certainly isn't a huge fraction of high school graduates.
As far as where the land in the US came from, do you have another theory? I'd be hard pressed to find a part of this country that didn't belong to Native Americans, Hawaiians, or Mexicans. Apart from the Louisiana Purchase which the French stole from the Native Americans for us. Or Alaska, which the Russians stole from the Inuit for us. If you think these have always been ours, your American History is somewhat lacking. I don't recall hearing anyone say that we should give it back.
Regarding lawsuits, isn't it possible people get that from somewhere else (TV maybe)? Or do you have proof of a public school teaching children how to file frivolous lawsuits?
No, just you shouldn't expect the schools to solve problems created by the parent. Read stuff into messages that really isn't there much? Maybe you should have learned how to interpret written language when you were in school.
I never said it was appropriate for every situation. But for nontrivial tests that aren't standardized it's virtually a necessity to adjust grades (unless the test is way too easy) based upon the test difficulty. Most of the time a curve is the only non-subjective way to do the job.
Of course you shouldn't be doing Gaussian curve grading when the distribution is very non-Gaussian. But if you've got a bathtub curve, that's a strong sign that your course is too easy. There are a bunch of people who have no idea what they are doing in your course, and the people who know what they are doing are smashed against the top end of the scale. The best bet is to scare the lower end out quickly by making things difficult enough that the upper end actually has to do some work. Get the peak of that upper end below 70. Then someone might learn something. Your curve will be much more Gaussian and you'll be teaching appropriate material. Otherwise you're not doing those students any favors, either the ones who already know what you're teaching or the ones who should be somewhere else.
If it's not trivial it will. The reason that the driver's license doesn't have a bell curve is because it's too easy. More than half the people that take it get 100%. That's because it's designed for a minimal level of competence. If it were actually designed to measure your understanding of the rules of the road, the result would be a bell curve.