Only Mexicans seem to die from this influenza strain. The one baby that died in the USA was a Mexican child. Other people don't even get particularly ill from it and it seems to be milder than more common strains of flu. WTF?
There are only two logical explanations:
1 - The Mexican flu is a lot more contagious and less lethal than initially thought. Perhaps there are tens of thousands of people in Mexico sick with this flu, with a mortality of less than 1 in 100. In that case there haven't been enough cases outside Mexico for a lot of deaths yet.
2 - Advanced medical care is keeping critically ill patients in the US alive
The suggestion that a virus can only kill Mexicans is just retarded.
Now, they've spent another whackload of money on Win7, and they want corporations to buy it. They want people to move off of the XP platform. This free windows is the bait to get them to switch.
A corporation that will work with an unsupported release candidate of an OS for a year just because it's free deserves the support nightmare its IT department will be looking forward to.
Seriously, the cost a corporate windows licence per seat is not very high compared to the hourly wage of an IT support techie.
Though it's probably unfair to call both Wally, since at least one looks like the hard working kind... he just makes as much progress as a courier on a treadmill.
The hard working kind is the worst, because a manager can't really see why such a team member isn't working out.
I used to work with one of those. This Wally was very smart, a genius in fact; extremely articulate and fluent in several world languages, a PhD, a decade of experience as an architect and developer for various high profile customers. A fantastic work ethic: worked 10 hours a day, meticulously tested everything they checked in so that the countless bugs this person checked in never showed up in normal user testing. Race conditions, memory leaks, thread safety, thousands upon thousands of lines of unreachable code, countless more lines of workarounds for supposed bugs in 3rd party tools that were actually the proper results to their improper input.
SARS was not an example of an overhyped storm in a glass of water nor an example of a lucky escape.
Draconian measures were taken to prevent the disaster from fully breaking out, to the point that China built entire emergency quarantine villages for victims and anyone they had come in contact with. Travel was restricted, markets were closed, potential animal vectors culled.
SARS was an example of an adequate response averting a disaster.
People remember panic stories (Y2k bug, SARS, avian flu), remember that nothing happened to them personally, so they completely forget or disregard all the effort that went into containing these problems.
Added bonus: did someone use any of those antivirals lately to fight the common cold? You're in for a treat: good chance they wont work on you as well as they should when the flue gets here.
Antivirals don't work very well in any case. Tamiflu is considered effective because it was shown to reduce the symptoms by about a day. This means that instead of 10 days, you're only sick for 9.
People who take it for a common cold are seriously not thinking clearly, as it works by inhibiting the synthesis of a protein in the flu virus. This protein isn't present in other viruses, so you're only taking a placebo with real side effects.
Copyright should at best be related to the death of the performer - like at most 5 years after the death of the performer.
Why all the hostility towards copyright? This isn't about software patents.
What you are proposing is that 5 years after an author dies, anyone can do with his work whatever they please, completely disregarding the author's last wishes or the wishes of his heirs.
Imagine that your mother is a publishing poet. Now imagine she passes away. Now imagine that 5 years later, some low class novelty chain publishes your mother's poetry on toilet paper to commemorate the 5th anniversary of her death. Who can stop them? It's public domain after all.
Imagine some white power magazine wants to use one of your mother's poems. They won't need your permission, because after all, it's public domain now. Imagine some advertising agency wants to use your mother's poem to advertise something and make lots of money. They don't even need to ask your permission.
I seriously don't see how 'software patents are bad' (which is supported by some practical and philosophical arguments) has morphed into 'all copyright is bad'. I haven't heard a single rational argument in favor of the latter.
That is because your cities were planned around the car.
Urban Europeans will laugh at the ridiculous concept of driving to work in their 1000+ year old cities. On a bad day it could take half the day to drive a stretch that the underground would take you in 15 minutes, followed by half day of looking for a parking spot that would cost you only as much as a night in a hotel.
Europe does have acceptable public transport because it is the only alternative to buldozering the very heart of their cultural heritage to make way for the SUV. (As a general rule, you don't lightly bulldozer something millions of your people gave their lives for over the centuries)
The US doesn't have acceptable public transport because it has never needed it. There is an abundance of space, and most cities lack a pre-auto-age heart. It's doubtful whether a public transport system could really work now. Some cities are so vast and thinly spread that the cost associated with laying down the infrastructure to make every part accessible by public transport would be measured in numbers of Iraq wars. The metropolitan areas of Chicago and New York are about the size of medium sized European countries. Both in population size and in surface area.
Imagine being asked "do you feel sad" and you live in Hawaii. Is the peer pressure to say yes or no? If you live in a state that is portrayed negatively in the media, and is always compared negatively with such wonderful places such as Hawaii, is there any incentive to say no. You live in a depressing place, you are told, so you have a right to be depressed.
Interesting. I currently live in a western European country that's consistently ranked near the top of the world in any happiness related poll.
Why? Once you've mastered their ridiculous language, are able to read their papers, and they occasionally forget you are an outsider, you discover that they actually hate absolutely everyone and everything; that they are the most miserable and depressed culture ever to have walked the earth.
Then why do they consistently rank near the top in such polls? There is an overpowering, crushing social pressure in this culture to keep up the appearance that everything about this place is the best the world has to offer, and if you can't even be ecstatically happy here, there is no hope for you.
they're switching to English anyway. As someone who has lived in Europe for the last six years I can say from my own anecdotal experience that the more the world gets connected, the more people speak English. (I predict that we'll end up in a world not too linguistically different from Firefly)
Just like the way they all switched to Latin before, which was the common language of higher education on the continent 200 years ago, or to Frankish, which was the lingua franca of 1000 years ago (the term is even derived from it), just like the way all of eastern Europe switched to Russian in the 20th century?
You monolingual and monocultural thinking people can't seem to imagine that there has always been a difference between the language you speak at home and the language you speak to outsiders without everyone inevitably having to become the same.
Besides, two thirds of the world's population lives in Asia now, a share that is growing every day without any sign of slowing down. The continued dominance of English culture is no more certain than the continued dominance of Greek culture was 2200 years ago.
How about thousands of years? Almost every country in Europe has its own language. That can't last long, I'm sure they're all about to switch to English any day now.
I think you have just proved that Java is a fluke. Solaris is... well, it's Solaris. What more need be said?
What more need be said? Well, please elaborate. What exactly is wrong with Solaris, according to you? What exactly is it lacking that other unixes do offer? What is lacking about the many features that other unixes simply do not have? Even an open source version is made available.
- It was posted on SCiAM on 31 march - This isn't remotely a subject that SCiAM would make fun of (a more likely example would be an article claiming irrefutable evidence for intelligent design) - Falling for this, if it were a joke, wouldn't result in a minor embarrassment to be laughed at - Someone already posted links to the scientific articles:
EVERYTHING causes cancer in rats. ALL laboratory rats, provided they don't die prematurely of an infection, will develop tumors.
Pet rats, lab rats, they're funny, fluffy, curious creatures, but boy are they ever susceptible to health problems, especially cancer.
There has been little selection pressure against susceptibility to cancer in their evolution, because rats are just considered so damn tasty by a huge, varied range of predators. In the wild, they won't last more than a year to 18 months, as by that age they start to slow down and fatten up a bit. In addition to that, lab rats (and pet rats) are victims of extreme levels of inbreeding.
...There were 100,106 chemicals in use in the EU in 1981, when the last survey was performed...
Water is a chemical. So are oxygen, nitrogen, glucose, all proteins. You are a big bag of chemicals yourself.
Every single one of them can kill you, given a large enough dose. Think about that. Every time you exhale, you emit a noxious cloud H2O, CO2 and various organic compounds mixed in with the left over air. CO2 has been widely implicated in various environmental threats to the survival of life on earth.
The only way you can avoid being surrounded by chemicals is to retreat to the vacuum of deep space.
Maybe follow that with filling in a circle with all the major degree arcs (0, 30, 45, 60, 90, etc) and then penciling in the tan(), sin(), cos() at those points.
It's a little alarming that you seem to consider 7th grade geometry a) challenging and b) relevant.
While we are banging out math without the calculators, we can swing by the Kwik-E-Mart and buy random amounts of goods, pay for it with a 20 and see who can calculate the change we're going to get back faster, or maybe speed fill in the boxes in a multiplication table that goes up to 12x12.
What if programming is what he actually wants to do? Some people actually choose a profession because they want to do it, not because it has the highest yield of dollars per effort. And some people don't get an opportunity to actually pursue such a career until a little later in life. Sometimes it's our own fault for mistakes that we didn't know we were making at the time. And sometimes it's just a matter of life happening and adjusting our priorities for us.
The OP didn't mention programming. Of course people get a programming job because they enjoy it, but if you're still doing it for a living after 15 to 20 years, it's probably not because it's what you enjoy doing most.
Programming is not some mystical, magical skill, and I wouldn't call it all that creative a job either, and it's not one of the better paying jobs in IT.
People with a university degree in CS usually don't stay programmers for very long; you tend to go to university to get a more responsible (and higher paying) job.
The reason why it's mostly done by young people is because generally if you're still doing it for a living after 15 to 20 years, something probably went wrong in your career advancement.
Anyway, the OP didn't even mention programming but showed an interest in IT. In my experience, a 22 year old project manager, analyst or architect, even if they're quite talented, has more trouble getting taken seriously and getting people to listen to them than a 35 year old.
Ageism exists, yes. If an adult is still doing a kid's job, people wonder what went wrong. If a kid is doing an adult's job, they will have more trouble getting taken seriously.
Take a drive down to the local landfill, dig down quite a bit and you will find that many biodegradable substances that have been there for 20+ years have not really biodegraded at all. This is caused by the fact that the biodegradability of a substance is often dependent on the oxygen available to organisms to breakdown the substance.
Why are you in such a hurry? 20 years is almost nothing on a geological scale. What does it matter if something stays in the ground 20 years, 100 years or 1000, as long as it doesn't cause problems while it's in there. If it doesn't release harmful chemicals, cause a fire or a choking hazard, just let it sit.
If you consider landfills an eyesore, incinerate the garbage instead. Where I live, there is not enough room for landfills, so all garbage is incinerated. The heat from the incinerators is used to generate power and heat homes.
The advantage of these bio degradable materials is that the carbon released into the atmosphere as it decomposes or burns was taken out of the atmosphere as the plant material it was made of was growing, so the net emission would be close to zero. (Not quite zero if fossil fuel was used in the production and transport of the material)
That said, the fact that science cannot find a cause for the incredibly rapid increase of autism in industrialized nations isn't helping matters. People are looking for a common link and keep coming to a solution that is common to these nations and immunization stands out. It may not be true, but it isn't that irrational.
There is a correlation between the rise of autism incidence and the number of McDonalds franchises. This proves that Big Mac consumption causes autism. I believe Pizza Hut may be amplifying the effect, but I don't have hard evidence as of yet.
There is also a strong correlation between the rise in vaccination levels in a population and age related illnesses. 100 years ago, diseases related to old age were very rare, while today, with vaccination levels approaching 100%, almost everyone dies of old age. This proves that the vaccines cause aging.
Stop vaccinations now! Don't cause your children to die of old age!
Slashdot Mirror
Can a doctor explain this?
Only Mexicans seem to die from this influenza strain. The one baby that died in the USA was a Mexican child. Other people don't even get particularly ill from it and it seems to be milder than more common strains of flu. WTF?
There are only two logical explanations:
1 - The Mexican flu is a lot more contagious and less lethal than initially thought. Perhaps there are tens of thousands of people in Mexico sick with this flu, with a mortality of less than 1 in 100. In that case there haven't been enough cases outside Mexico for a lot of deaths yet.
2 - Advanced medical care is keeping critically ill patients in the US alive
The suggestion that a virus can only kill Mexicans is just retarded.
Now, they've spent another whackload of money on Win7, and they want corporations to buy it. They want people to move off of the XP platform. This free windows is the bait to get them to switch.
A corporation that will work with an unsupported release candidate of an OS for a year just because it's free deserves the support nightmare its IT department will be looking forward to.
Seriously, the cost a corporate windows licence per seat is not very high compared to the hourly wage of an IT support techie.
Though it's probably unfair to call both Wally, since at least one looks like the hard working kind... he just makes as much progress as a courier on a treadmill.
The hard working kind is the worst, because a manager can't really see why such a team member isn't working out.
I used to work with one of those. This Wally was very smart, a genius in fact; extremely articulate and fluent in several world languages, a PhD, a decade of experience as an architect and developer for various high profile customers. A fantastic work ethic: worked 10 hours a day, meticulously tested everything they checked in so that the countless bugs this person checked in never showed up in normal user testing. Race conditions, memory leaks, thread safety, thousands upon thousands of lines of unreachable code, countless more lines of workarounds for supposed bugs in 3rd party tools that were actually the proper results to their improper input.
(hopefully this just fizzles out like SARS),
SARS didn't just fizzle out.
SARS was not an example of an overhyped storm in a glass of water nor an example of a lucky escape.
Draconian measures were taken to prevent the disaster from fully breaking out, to the point that China built entire emergency quarantine villages for victims and anyone they had come in contact with. Travel was restricted, markets were closed, potential animal vectors culled.
SARS was an example of an adequate response averting a disaster.
People remember panic stories (Y2k bug, SARS, avian flu), remember that nothing happened to them personally, so they completely forget or disregard all the effort that went into containing these problems.
Added bonus: did someone use any of those antivirals lately to fight the common cold? You're in for a treat: good chance they wont work on you as well as they should when the flue gets here.
Antivirals don't work very well in any case. Tamiflu is considered effective because it was shown to reduce the symptoms by about a day. This means that instead of 10 days, you're only sick for 9.
People who take it for a common cold are seriously not thinking clearly, as it works by inhibiting the synthesis of a protein in the flu virus. This protein isn't present in other viruses, so you're only taking a placebo with real side effects.
Copyright should at best be related to the death of the performer - like at most 5 years after the death of the performer.
Why all the hostility towards copyright? This isn't about software patents.
What you are proposing is that 5 years after an author dies, anyone can do with his work whatever they please, completely disregarding the author's last wishes or the wishes of his heirs.
Imagine that your mother is a publishing poet. Now imagine she passes away. Now imagine that 5 years later, some low class novelty chain publishes your mother's poetry on toilet paper to commemorate the 5th anniversary of her death. Who can stop them? It's public domain after all.
Imagine some white power magazine wants to use one of your mother's poems. They won't need your permission, because after all, it's public domain now. Imagine some advertising agency wants to use your mother's poem to advertise something and make lots of money. They don't even need to ask your permission.
I seriously don't see how 'software patents are bad' (which is supported by some practical and philosophical arguments) has morphed into 'all copyright is bad'. I haven't heard a single rational argument in favor of the latter.
That is because your cities were planned around the car.
Urban Europeans will laugh at the ridiculous concept of driving to work in their 1000+ year old cities. On a bad day it could take half the day to drive a stretch that the underground would take you in 15 minutes, followed by half day of looking for a parking spot that would cost you only as much as a night in a hotel.
Europe does have acceptable public transport because it is the only alternative to buldozering the very heart of their cultural heritage to make way for the SUV. (As a general rule, you don't lightly bulldozer something millions of your people gave their lives for over the centuries)
The US doesn't have acceptable public transport because it has never needed it. There is an abundance of space, and most cities lack a pre-auto-age heart. It's doubtful whether a public transport system could really work now. Some cities are so vast and thinly spread that the cost associated with laying down the infrastructure to make every part accessible by public transport would be measured in numbers of Iraq wars. The metropolitan areas of Chicago and New York are about the size of medium sized European countries. Both in population size and in surface area.
Imagine being asked "do you feel sad" and you live in Hawaii. Is the peer pressure to say yes or no? If you live in a state that is portrayed negatively in the media, and is always compared negatively with such wonderful places such as Hawaii, is there any incentive to say no. You live in a depressing place, you are told, so you have a right to be depressed.
Interesting. I currently live in a western European country that's consistently ranked near the top of the world in any happiness related poll.
Why? Once you've mastered their ridiculous language, are able to read their papers, and they occasionally forget you are an outsider, you discover that they actually hate absolutely everyone and everything; that they are the most miserable and depressed culture ever to have walked the earth.
Then why do they consistently rank near the top in such polls? There is an overpowering, crushing social pressure in this culture to keep up the appearance that everything about this place is the best the world has to offer, and if you can't even be ecstatically happy here, there is no hope for you.
Because it's land locked!
How could anyone possibly be happy more than an hour's drive away from the sea?
they're switching to English anyway. As someone who has lived in Europe for the last six years I can say from my own anecdotal experience that the more the world gets connected, the more people speak English. (I predict that we'll end up in a world not too linguistically different from Firefly)
Just like the way they all switched to Latin before, which was the common language of higher education on the continent 200 years ago, or to Frankish, which was the lingua franca of 1000 years ago (the term is even derived from it), just like the way all of eastern Europe switched to Russian in the 20th century?
You monolingual and monocultural thinking people can't seem to imagine that there has always been a difference between the language you speak at home and the language you speak to outsiders without everyone inevitably having to become the same.
Besides, two thirds of the world's population lives in Asia now, a share that is growing every day without any sign of slowing down. The continued dominance of English culture is no more certain than the continued dominance of Greek culture was 2200 years ago.
Language enclaves generally don't last very long.
How about thousands of years? Almost every country in Europe has its own language. That can't last long, I'm sure they're all about to switch to English any day now.
Don't forget staying thin!
To this day nobody knows how they can consume so much smoke, bread and wine and still be some of the thinnest people in the world!
Preferring small portions of expensive food over affordable supersized meals
I think you have just proved that Java is a fluke. Solaris is... well, it's Solaris. What more need be said?
What more need be said? Well, please elaborate. What exactly is wrong with Solaris, according to you? What exactly is it lacking that other unixes do offer? What is lacking about the many features that other unixes simply do not have? Even an open source version is made available.
Slashdot would, but Scientific American wouldnt
This is not an april fools:
- It was posted on SCiAM on 31 march
- This isn't remotely a subject that SCiAM would make fun of (a more likely example would be an article claiming irrefutable evidence for intelligent design)
- Falling for this, if it were a joke, wouldn't result in a minor embarrassment to be laughed at
- Someone already posted links to the scientific articles:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1182839&cid=27413449
EVERYTHING causes cancer in rats. ALL laboratory rats, provided they don't die prematurely of an infection, will develop tumors.
Pet rats, lab rats, they're funny, fluffy, curious creatures, but boy are they ever susceptible to health problems, especially cancer.
There has been little selection pressure against susceptibility to cancer in their evolution, because rats are just considered so damn tasty by a huge, varied range of predators. In the wild, they won't last more than a year to 18 months, as by that age they start to slow down and fatten up a bit. In addition to that, lab rats (and pet rats) are victims of extreme levels of inbreeding.
...There were 100,106 chemicals in use in the EU in 1981, when the last survey was performed...
Water is a chemical. So are oxygen, nitrogen, glucose, all proteins. You are a big bag of chemicals yourself.
Every single one of them can kill you, given a large enough dose. Think about that. Every time you exhale, you emit a noxious cloud H2O, CO2 and various organic compounds mixed in with the left over air. CO2 has been widely implicated in various environmental threats to the survival of life on earth.
The only way you can avoid being surrounded by chemicals is to retreat to the vacuum of deep space.
Maybe follow that with filling in a circle with all the major degree arcs (0, 30, 45, 60, 90, etc) and then penciling in the tan(), sin(), cos() at those points.
It's a little alarming that you seem to consider 7th grade geometry a) challenging and b) relevant.
While we are banging out math without the calculators, we can swing by the Kwik-E-Mart and buy random amounts of goods, pay for it with a 20 and see who can calculate the change we're going to get back faster, or maybe speed fill in the boxes in a multiplication table that goes up to 12x12.
Again, are you interviewing 7th graders?
What if programming is what he actually wants to do? Some people actually choose a profession because they want to do it, not because it has the highest yield of dollars per effort. And some people don't get an opportunity to actually pursue such a career until a little later in life. Sometimes it's our own fault for mistakes that we didn't know we were making at the time. And sometimes it's just a matter of life happening and adjusting our priorities for us.
The OP didn't mention programming. Of course people get a programming job because they enjoy it, but if you're still doing it for a living after 15 to 20 years, it's probably not because it's what you enjoy doing most.
Programming is not some mystical, magical skill, and I wouldn't call it all that creative a job either, and it's not one of the better paying jobs in IT.
People with a university degree in CS usually don't stay programmers for very long; you tend to go to university to get a more responsible (and higher paying) job.
The reason why it's mostly done by young people is because generally if you're still doing it for a living after 15 to 20 years, something probably went wrong in your career advancement.
Anyway, the OP didn't even mention programming but showed an interest in IT. In my experience, a 22 year old project manager, analyst or architect, even if they're quite talented, has more trouble getting taken seriously and getting people to listen to them than a 35 year old.
Ageism exists, yes. If an adult is still doing a kid's job, people wonder what went wrong. If a kid is doing an adult's job, they will have more trouble getting taken seriously.
Take a drive down to the local landfill, dig down quite a bit and you will find that many biodegradable substances that have been there for 20+ years have not really biodegraded at all. This is caused by the fact that the biodegradability of a substance is often dependent on the oxygen available to organisms to breakdown the substance.
Why are you in such a hurry? 20 years is almost nothing on a geological scale. What does it matter if something stays in the ground 20 years, 100 years or 1000, as long as it doesn't cause problems while it's in there. If it doesn't release harmful chemicals, cause a fire or a choking hazard, just let it sit.
If you consider landfills an eyesore, incinerate the garbage instead. Where I live, there is not enough room for landfills, so all garbage is incinerated. The heat from the incinerators is used to generate power and heat homes.
The advantage of these bio degradable materials is that the carbon released into the atmosphere as it decomposes or burns was taken out of the atmosphere as the plant material it was made of was growing, so the net emission would be close to zero. (Not quite zero if fossil fuel was used in the production and transport of the material)
That said, the fact that science cannot find a cause for the incredibly rapid increase of autism in industrialized nations isn't helping matters. People are looking for a common link and keep coming to a solution that is common to these nations and immunization stands out. It may not be true, but it isn't that irrational.
There is a correlation between the rise of autism incidence and the number of McDonalds franchises. This proves that Big Mac consumption causes autism. I believe Pizza Hut may be amplifying the effect, but I don't have hard evidence as of yet.
There is also a strong correlation between the rise in vaccination levels in a population and age related illnesses. 100 years ago, diseases related to old age were very rare, while today, with vaccination levels approaching 100%, almost everyone dies of old age. This proves that the vaccines cause aging.
Stop vaccinations now! Don't cause your children to die of old age!
The 5 ms latency the manufacturer advertises is not the same as the input lag.
advertised latency: amount of time it takes a pixel to reach a new brightness after getting the signal to switch
input lag: amount of time the signal sent to the pixels lags behind the signal sent to your monitor.
TFA explains a 1 ms latency could come with a 100 ms input lag, which would be great for an LCD Television, but make the screen useless for gaming.
And how many of those applications were granted?
This topic keeps coming up.
It is a folly to think that you can get high qulity talent at dirt cheap wages.
The H1B program is not meant for low wage jobs, but for highly qualified and highly paid personnel.
The program actually includes the requirement that they must be paid the same or higher wage:
http://www.dol.gov/DOL/allcfr/ETA/Title_20/Part_655/20CFR655.731.htm