I'm pretty sure citizenship does entitle you to a passport.
Not exactly. The U.S. government can refuse to grant a passport to a U.S. citizen for various reasons. I've heard that if you owe a lot of unpaid child support they will not grant you one. Various criminal situations can prevent you from getting one, too. So while citizenship qualifies you to receive a passport, owning one is still a privilege that must be granted and can be revoked.
You only need the Visa if you plan on working there. The passport's enough for a visit.
That depends on the country. Many countries grant Americans an implicit visa to travel there for tourism for a specific period of time, but many others do not. India and Vietnam are two examples that immediately come to mind. Some countries will grant you a visa in the airport after you fill out some paperwork, while others require you to apply from outside the country in advance (and waiting periods vary).
They evolve towards the forms that allow the greatest diffusion, which in modern society means the forms that do not put the patient in a bed at home or in a hospital ward.
No. You've missed the point completely.
Rabies exists largely because mammals catch it. Not just humans; mammals. Dogs and raccoons that get rabies become aggressive and tend to bite other animals, passing the rabies. Humans don't. Humans with rabies just get sick and die. Four days after they come down with rabies symptoms, they're completely immobilized and praying for their god.
From this, you could conclude that rabies doesn't really want to be in people; it's more beneficial for rabies to infect dogs and raccoons. And that's true. But guess what? The flu doesn't really want to be in people, either. Influenza wants to live in birds. "Bird flu" is a misnomer. All forms of influenza have a natural reservoir in birds.
That doesn't change the fact the humans get influenza, just like humans get rabies. And in both cases, nothing humans do will eradicate the disease, because the disease doesn't really depend on humans.
There are other examples. Anthrax, for instance, can live as spores in the soil. It will just sit there until something catches it. It doesn't care that the human who catches it ends up in a bed at home or in a hospital. It doesn't have a plan at all. It's foolish to anthropomorphize diseases.
We can't carry out risk analysis everytime research needs to be published, even if it is (wrongly, I believe, in the current context) perceived as dangerous.
But it won't be every time. This is clearly a politicized issue on many levels:
- It feeds into discussions of "the War on Terror" - It triggers people's fears about vaccines, modern medicine, and doctors - It strays into conservatives' beliefs about government funding of science - Because it's science, it fires up debates about universities, education, "ivory-tower academics," etc - The UN is involved, and some people think the UN shouldn't exist (and therefore either the WHO has no right to object, or the research should never have been done, take your pick) - There's a class warfare element (who will get the vaccine?) and in America, at least, that always evokes race (will we get it?) - The race thing in America runs deep (they invented the flu to kill us) - And so on
Nope. It kills 58% of people who are detected to have been infected. There might be hundreds more people who get better quickly and never seek medical attention.
Why is that relevant?
People who don't sicken don't need medical attention. I think that's obvious.
Of those people who sicken from the flu, the ones who are infected with H5N1 die much more often than the people who sicken from other strains.
Suppose they came out with statistics showing that most people who have handguns fired at them don't get hit by the bullet, and of those that do get hit by the bullet, not many die. However, of those people who do get hit by the bullet, hollow-tip bullets cause much more severe injuries than regular ones. Would your conclusion be, "Who cares, I'm Superman"?
My amateur understanding of it is that the particularly deadly strains burn themselves out fairly quick, because a dead person doesn't spread disease like an ambulatory one. Because we have a much better understanding of these things today(transmission, sanitation, incubation, etc), a pandemic in a modern society will be more difficult for a virus to attain and easier to avoid the scorch the earth policy necessary to eradicate it. Granted, small deadly outbreaks can't be stopped, but it would be less likely for it to spread like we've seen before before it burns itself out.
I don't know. Most Americans I've met have serious qualms about calling in sick to work for a cold or flu -- whether it's because they don't want to be perceived as whiners, or they have too much work on their plate, or they get so little vacation that they don't want to lose days that they could otherwise use for much-needed rest. A flu virus could very easily become a pandemic even if it makes you sicken and die in a single day, so long as it makes you walk around with a cough and the sniffles for a few days before that.
Also, in general the idea that diseases evolve to be less virulent over time is a myth. Think about rabies; if you catch full blown rabies (you don't get your shots in time), you're going to die. Mortality for rabies in humans approaches 100 percent. Once you develop symptoms, you'll be dead in a week. So is rabies "pricing itself out of the market"? No. It has existed for all of human history. You don't hear about cases of rabies in major human cities very often, but outside the developed areas, when a human or an animal gets rabies, it's the same rabies it has always been, and it's fatal. And there are many other diseases that have very dire, potentially lethal symptoms in humans. The idea that a living human must keep passing a pathogen to other living humans for it to survive in the long run is, unfortunately, too naïve and simplistic a model of disease.
Right. "Security by obscurity" refers to the assumption that something is secure because you haven't told anyone how to defeat the security. The weakness of this method is obvious: You might not be the only one who knows what you know. Someone might have stolen the method from you by looking over your shoulder, or they might have figured out how to do it on their own.
Cryptography can be security by obscurity. Good cryptography is not. Good cryptography is based on a published, public algorithm that anyone can read and know how to do. And once they learn the method, they get sad, because they realize that they can't run the algorithm to unlock your encryption. To do so they'd need to know not just how to do it, but also the to fill in variables X, Y, and Z... and to do that they'd need some piece of information, or maybe a physical object, or what-have you, which they do not possess.
The information they want to steal is obscured, but that's not the point. The security method is not obscured. It's as plain as day -- plain enough that you have to admit you don't know how to break it.
Cryptography becomes security by obscurity when the creator of the algorithm tries to keep it secret, in the misguided belief that nobody will be able to come up with a method to circumvent it. They might get lucky; it's possible that nobody will ever figure out how to break the encryption. But that's why security by obscurity is frowned upon: You're gambling on the hope that you're smarter than everybody who has an interest in breaking your cryptography, plus everybody who will ever be born who wants to break it. That just doesn't sound like good odds.
So back to this flu virus thing. It's security by obscurity because the scientists haven't invented anything, really. They have developed a method to produce a virus having certain characteristics, which are only slight variations of characteristics that are known to exist in other viruses already. So by censoring this research, they are literally saying that as long as they don't tell anyone how they did it, we will be safe from the possibility that this virus will appear -- which is mind-boggling, when the whole purpose of their experiment was to prove that the novel virus could exist in nature even had they not developed their method. Almost by definition, there must be other ways to produce this virus, or other, similar viruses. Their "secret" is worth nothing.
I'd guess that a lot of that "6 months" involves testing. In other words, if there is a very quickly spreading pandemic that kills over half the people it infects, we could probably say "Let's just pray that there aren't too horrible side effects for most people. Start mass producing the prototype!"
Heh. But you're talking about vaccinating just about everybody on the planet, in a pandemic. Is your proposal that we inject the entire population of the world with an untested medicine, in hopes of preventing disease? I somehow don't think that suggestion would travel far within the WHO.
Also, there's no "prototype vaccine." They know how to make a vaccine that will be effective against any strain of flu, pretty much. They're all just variations of the same thing. The problem is that there are so many different variations (mutations) that they have to predict which one to manufacture in any given year, given the production capacity (labs/factories) available. And you can't just say "keep manufacturing H5N1 vaccine until we have enough for everybody," because it doesn't necessarily have a long shelf life. In fact, they're not really sure how long stockpiled doses would remain effective.
What's more, manufacturing the flu vaccine isn't like manufacturing paint or chairs. The raw materials of the flu vaccine involve living, biological things. The virus itself is alive and must be cultured (before they kill it), and to do that, they grow it inside fertilized chicken eggs -- and as we know, nine chickens don't help you produce a fertilized egg any faster than one does (and to get more chickens, you need more fertilized eggs). So when you estimate how many doses of flu vaccine can be manufactured in a given period of time, it's a little bit like estimating how many cheeseburgers McDonald's can make in the same period of time... while it is possible to "just make more," it's not necessarily as easy as it sounds.
tl;dr -- When scientists talk about how many flu vaccine doses it would be possible to manufacture in a given period, they pretty much know what they're talking about.
All security is through obscurity. If somebody knows your key, or your hiding spot, or what time you have to put down your shotgun to take a crap, you're through. All cryptography does is let you protect a large secret with a smaller one.
I see your point, but you're short circuiting a little bit of common sense to make it.
Someone would have to "know" your key pretty damn well -- and some highly specialized skills besides -- to make a copy of it without having access to the original. And they'd need to be downright brilliant to use their copy if the lock is too far away for them to reach. Lack of physical access is not really "obscurity," in the sense that people mean when they quote that phrase.
And when you need to put your shotgun down to take a crap, the best practice is to hand it to someone else. The thing you want to keep secure can be sitting right there, as long as the guy with the shotgun is just as visible. If you manage to shoot the guy with the shotgun first, it says nothing about "security by obscurity."
So, H5N1 was responsible for 1% of deaths... Why are we so scared of this flu again?
Because, like the GP says, if you catch it you have a worse than 1 in 2 chance of survival. The point is that not many people catch it... yet. But what the recent research showed is that it would not take a tremendous amount of mutation for a form of the disease to arise that could spread much more easily.
If a guy comes along and says, "Your building isn't as safe as you think it is, there aren't enough fire exits," do you laugh and say, "You're stupid! Nobody has ever died in a fire in this building."
If you look at LotR... In Jordan's style the whole fellowship would have been split up and he'd tell Frodo and Sam's story, Merry and Pippin's story, Gandalf's story, Aragon's story...
I think you might wanna go back and read those books again.
I think you must be talking to different PHBs than the ones at any company I ever worked for -- or visited, for that matter. I've never seen a black and red case or superfluous LEDs or any kind of "bling bling" in any business setting. And if it was my business, boring black cases sound just fine to me. (Maybe you weren't around when they were boring beige cases?)
You can't possibly know whether the doxycycline is clearing up the infection or whether it would have gotten better anyway without it.
Yes I damn well can. This article is sensationalist and borderline dangerous.
A number of years ago I developed a strange problem. Every time I ate, about 20 minutes later I would develop a headache. This was a weird headache -- it was dull, throbbing, restricted to one side of my head, but had no other apparent symptoms (like, no visual effects or other things that might be associated with migraines). I had no history of regular headaches before.
I assumed it was some kind of reaction to something I was eating. I began modifying my diet. I cut out coffee. I cut out alcohol. I started looking on the Internet for foods that were commonly known allergy triggers and eliminating them. Nothing seemed to make any difference -- or, if one day I seemed to feel better, the next day I'd eat the same thing and feel worse.
After a couple of weeks of this, the headaches had become really bad. I would eat lunch at my desk, and afterward I'd have to go to the break room and lie down for a half hour or so, just for the headache to subside enough for me to be able to concentrate on my computer screen again. After maybe three and a half weeks, I broke down and went to the doctor.
The first thing the doctor said was, "The good news is it's not a brain tumor." (I didn't really think it was a brain tumor.) Then he asked me whether I had noticed any fever. I said no. He said, "That's odd, because you have a fever right now." He said I had a sinus infection, prescribed me antibiotics, and I went home and dutifully started taking them. I had no history of sinus infections.
BLAM! It was maybe the second, maybe the third day of antibiotics that I felt completely fine. Naturally I kept taking the antibiotics (always finish the whole bottle, kids), but this was one of those cases where I hadn't even realized how sick I was until I got better,
All of a sudden, miraculously, I had energy again. It had never really occurred to me that the reason I was coming home from work, throwing down my jacket, and crashing onto the couch and lying there all night without eating dinner wasn't just because I knew eating dinner would give me a headache, but because I had no more energy to do another single thing. For the last few weeks, I realized, I had been feeling drained, depressed, and weak -- and all of a sudden, it was as if you pulled a bag off my head and showed me sunlight for the first time.
There is not one thing you could say to convince me that antibiotics were not the cure to my condition, or that it would have gone away by itself if I had not taken antibiotics.
Do people often pressure their doctors to give them antibiotics for infections that turn out to be viral? Yes. Does that mean that there's no such thing as a bacterial sinus infection -- as this article seems to be claiming? No. Absolute bullshit. And for this article to present the findings of this study the way it does is irresponsible and does an incredible disservice to people like me, who are either too scared or just too fucking dumb to go to the doctor until they've been suffering for a month.
Because the microbes in question have to be inserted deep into your sinuses (as with a neti pot) for them to have a chance of doing anything to you. That's a far cry from drinking them (at which time they will do absolutely nothing).
Here in San Francisco we have some of the best tap water in the country. I drink it by the gallon.
While I of course don't shortchange folks like that I do put any new build in a flashy case simply because it makes them sell MUCH quicker if there is some bling bling so it really wouldn't be hard for HP to make an "Elite PC" line with some flash and get in the consumers.
Not 1337 PCs. Elite PCs.
"Elite" is a brand name HP already uses for desktop PCs and notebooks for businesses. They're not all that flashy.
That the electrical signals received by the brain from the ear would actually directly correspond to the actual soundwaves received by the ear...
I'm sorry... but in what way is this any more revolutionary in discovery than the telephone?
It's brain research. Plain and simple.
They already have devices that can translate the sound waves received by the ear into electrical impulses that are sent directly to the auditory nerves to be interpreted by the brain. They're called cochlear implants.
This, on the other hand, is reading how the other end of the line interprets the impulses -- what happens within the brain when the electrical impulses are received. We still don't know all that much about how the brain really works. But when you can read changes in the brain with sufficient fidelity to be able to deduce what word the brain is thinking about, you can be pretty sure your hunch about how the brain works is correct.
I'm surprised at all the negativity. This sounds like basically the same thing as when I worked IT and I had my own rep at the mail-order houses like CDW and PC Warehouse. In practice, did it make a damn bit of difference to me whether my official rep took my order or somebody else did? Nope, not really. All my info, including discounts, etc., was in the computer. But it was nice to have a number to call and a specific person with whom I could leave a message if need be, and to be able to say stuff like, "I need more of those things I got on Friday, but listen, one of them already broke" -- without having to walk through some script with an anonymous sales rep. It was just that slight bit more of a human interaction that made the whole transaction a little bit more pleasant, even though I was intellectually aware that it probably wasn't making what I needed to do much easier by any measurable amount.
I don't know what "judder" means, but when you show a Martin Scorcese movie on a big LCD screen at 120Hz, it looks like a videotaped TV soap opera from 1974.
You're doing a cost comparison between a format that's the current technology standard and one that became popular more than 15 years ago. When DVDs were first introduced they most certainly did cost $25 or more, and DVD players were one of the fastest-adopted technology products in modern history. Now the $25+ doesn't seem worth it, but not because nobody would ever pay that price to own a movie, but because they already did -- 15 years ago -- and the difference between the new format and the old doesn't seem sufficient to justify paying that rate anymore (which is what you're saying). It's not just cost, it's cost/benefit.
What's fascinating is that when CDs first came out they said the price of CDs would shrink to reasonable rates. It hasn't. In fact, in many cases you can buy a shrinkwrapped DVD for less than you can buy the soundtrack for the same movie. The price of CDs didn't really "go down" until the big box retailers started doing aggressive sales on brand-new releases by major labels. Then it started shrinking a little more across the board with the advent of iTunes -- which made music a little less expensive, but also introduced lossy compression. So at least with Blu-Ray the format is actually getting better at the same price, and the price of the older format has gone down. That's sort of what you'd expect -- but it's not what has happened with music.
Really? Blu-Ray discs seem cheap enough to me these days. I thought the reasons Blu-Ray wasn't taking off like DVD did were because:
o Everybody already bought the movies they like to see on DVD and they're not replacing DVDs with Blu-Rays
o Using Netflix is way more convenient than messing with discs all the time, even if they don't have all the content you want
o A large portion of the people who own a DVD player and a hi-def TV can't seem to figure out how to set the aspect ratio right on both, so image quality apparently isn't on their minds that much
o Half the time I hear people saying "that TV really sucks" these days, what they mean is that the TV is setup with the highest refresh rate and highest resolution possible, which makes even classic cinema look like cheap soap operas and totally ruins the experience
o I only know one person who owns a 3D TV and he admits he's never watched anything in 3D on it
No electronics industry exec will ever admit this in an interview, but the bottom line seems to be that all the things the electronics industry claims people are demanding from TVs are false. It doesn't have all that much to do with image quality. It has a lot more to do with convenience and cost/benefit (rather than pure cost) -- people just don't see the need for what's being shoved at them. What people want is low-end TVs that do Netflix and Hulu.
I just want to go on record as saying I hate this headline. I didn't pick it. Furthermore, I don't think there's anything in particular about Microsoft developers that makes them "need a style guide" more than anybody else, and that notion had absolutely nothing to do with my column. I just thought it was interesting that a Microsoft style guide exists, that it's available for sale, and that it has some interesting stuff in it about writing for software UIs that a lot of developers probably don't think about. That's about it.
Seriously, storing paper is a ton easier and it works for many purposes. Until you move, or have a fire, or your basement floods
Or your hard drive crashes. Or the DVD-R has bit rot. Or they changed the software and the new version can't load the format you stored it in. No wait -- that's electronic records.
or you need a copy of that letter you received from your insurance company 18-24 months ago confirming a change to your home because they're now claiming they weren't informed you're using natural gas instead of electric heat and are declining a $250,000 insurance claim after the aforementioned fire
Kind of a fringe case, isn't it? But if there's one thing that has remained constant throughout all of human history, it's the threat of weather and fire. What did people do before they had document scanners?
My reaction is, why would you want to go "paper-free"?
Seriously. Are you allergic to paper or something?
It would be one thing if everybody sent you bills and documents electronically and you never had to deal with paper again, but you're talking about scanning things in with a document feeder. WTF?
Seriously. It is much, much harder to keep records electronically than to throw the pieces of paper into a file cabinet and forget about it. This is well documented.
Maybe for a company that produces huge piles and mounds of documents every year it makes sense to want to convert them to electronic formats, but for an individual it makes no sense. And you're not talking about stuff like marriage licenses, now, you're talking about random individual tax records from years ago. WHY are you losing sleep over it?
The mere fact that it's hard for you to figure out how to do it should be a big clue that IT'S AN INCREDIBLE AMOUNT OF WORK THAT YOU WOULDN'T OTHERWISE HAVE TO DO. Are you so bored?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure citizenship does entitle you to a passport.
Not exactly. The U.S. government can refuse to grant a passport to a U.S. citizen for various reasons. I've heard that if you owe a lot of unpaid child support they will not grant you one. Various criminal situations can prevent you from getting one, too. So while citizenship qualifies you to receive a passport, owning one is still a privilege that must be granted and can be revoked.
You only need the Visa if you plan on working there. The passport's enough for a visit.
That depends on the country. Many countries grant Americans an implicit visa to travel there for tourism for a specific period of time, but many others do not. India and Vietnam are two examples that immediately come to mind. Some countries will grant you a visa in the airport after you fill out some paperwork, while others require you to apply from outside the country in advance (and waiting periods vary).
You should travel more.
They evolve towards the forms that allow the greatest diffusion, which in modern society means the forms that do not put the patient in a bed at home or in a hospital ward.
No. You've missed the point completely.
Rabies exists largely because mammals catch it. Not just humans; mammals. Dogs and raccoons that get rabies become aggressive and tend to bite other animals, passing the rabies. Humans don't. Humans with rabies just get sick and die. Four days after they come down with rabies symptoms, they're completely immobilized and praying for their god.
From this, you could conclude that rabies doesn't really want to be in people; it's more beneficial for rabies to infect dogs and raccoons. And that's true. But guess what? The flu doesn't really want to be in people, either. Influenza wants to live in birds. "Bird flu" is a misnomer. All forms of influenza have a natural reservoir in birds.
That doesn't change the fact the humans get influenza, just like humans get rabies. And in both cases, nothing humans do will eradicate the disease, because the disease doesn't really depend on humans.
There are other examples. Anthrax, for instance, can live as spores in the soil. It will just sit there until something catches it. It doesn't care that the human who catches it ends up in a bed at home or in a hospital. It doesn't have a plan at all. It's foolish to anthropomorphize diseases.
We can't carry out risk analysis everytime research needs to be published, even if it is (wrongly, I believe, in the current context) perceived as dangerous.
But it won't be every time. This is clearly a politicized issue on many levels:
- It feeds into discussions of "the War on Terror"
- It triggers people's fears about vaccines, modern medicine, and doctors
- It strays into conservatives' beliefs about government funding of science
- Because it's science, it fires up debates about universities, education, "ivory-tower academics," etc
- The UN is involved, and some people think the UN shouldn't exist (and therefore either the WHO has no right to object, or the research should never have been done, take your pick)
- There's a class warfare element (who will get the vaccine?) and in America, at least, that always evokes race (will we get it?)
- The race thing in America runs deep (they invented the flu to kill us)
- And so on
BTW, if you look at the Stats, the reason it didn't spread wide, it happened in China and other Asian countries that has an authoritarian government.
Actually, if you're still talking about SARS, the reason it didn't spread wide is because it actually wasn't very infectious.
Nope. It kills 58% of people who are detected to have been infected. There might be hundreds more people who get better quickly and never seek medical attention.
Why is that relevant?
People who don't sicken don't need medical attention. I think that's obvious.
Of those people who sicken from the flu, the ones who are infected with H5N1 die much more often than the people who sicken from other strains.
Suppose they came out with statistics showing that most people who have handguns fired at them don't get hit by the bullet, and of those that do get hit by the bullet, not many die. However, of those people who do get hit by the bullet, hollow-tip bullets cause much more severe injuries than regular ones. Would your conclusion be, "Who cares, I'm Superman"?
My amateur understanding of it is that the particularly deadly strains burn themselves out fairly quick, because a dead person doesn't spread disease like an ambulatory one. Because we have a much better understanding of these things today(transmission, sanitation, incubation, etc), a pandemic in a modern society will be more difficult for a virus to attain and easier to avoid the scorch the earth policy necessary to eradicate it. Granted, small deadly outbreaks can't be stopped, but it would be less likely for it to spread like we've seen before before it burns itself out.
I don't know. Most Americans I've met have serious qualms about calling in sick to work for a cold or flu -- whether it's because they don't want to be perceived as whiners, or they have too much work on their plate, or they get so little vacation that they don't want to lose days that they could otherwise use for much-needed rest. A flu virus could very easily become a pandemic even if it makes you sicken and die in a single day, so long as it makes you walk around with a cough and the sniffles for a few days before that.
Also, in general the idea that diseases evolve to be less virulent over time is a myth. Think about rabies; if you catch full blown rabies (you don't get your shots in time), you're going to die. Mortality for rabies in humans approaches 100 percent. Once you develop symptoms, you'll be dead in a week. So is rabies "pricing itself out of the market"? No. It has existed for all of human history. You don't hear about cases of rabies in major human cities very often, but outside the developed areas, when a human or an animal gets rabies, it's the same rabies it has always been, and it's fatal. And there are many other diseases that have very dire, potentially lethal symptoms in humans. The idea that a living human must keep passing a pathogen to other living humans for it to survive in the long run is, unfortunately, too naïve and simplistic a model of disease.
Right. "Security by obscurity" refers to the assumption that something is secure because you haven't told anyone how to defeat the security. The weakness of this method is obvious: You might not be the only one who knows what you know. Someone might have stolen the method from you by looking over your shoulder, or they might have figured out how to do it on their own.
Cryptography can be security by obscurity. Good cryptography is not. Good cryptography is based on a published, public algorithm that anyone can read and know how to do. And once they learn the method, they get sad, because they realize that they can't run the algorithm to unlock your encryption. To do so they'd need to know not just how to do it, but also the to fill in variables X, Y, and Z ... and to do that they'd need some piece of information, or maybe a physical object, or what-have you, which they do not possess.
The information they want to steal is obscured, but that's not the point. The security method is not obscured. It's as plain as day -- plain enough that you have to admit you don't know how to break it.
Cryptography becomes security by obscurity when the creator of the algorithm tries to keep it secret, in the misguided belief that nobody will be able to come up with a method to circumvent it. They might get lucky; it's possible that nobody will ever figure out how to break the encryption. But that's why security by obscurity is frowned upon: You're gambling on the hope that you're smarter than everybody who has an interest in breaking your cryptography, plus everybody who will ever be born who wants to break it. That just doesn't sound like good odds.
So back to this flu virus thing. It's security by obscurity because the scientists haven't invented anything, really. They have developed a method to produce a virus having certain characteristics, which are only slight variations of characteristics that are known to exist in other viruses already. So by censoring this research, they are literally saying that as long as they don't tell anyone how they did it, we will be safe from the possibility that this virus will appear -- which is mind-boggling, when the whole purpose of their experiment was to prove that the novel virus could exist in nature even had they not developed their method. Almost by definition, there must be other ways to produce this virus, or other, similar viruses. Their "secret" is worth nothing.
I'd guess that a lot of that "6 months" involves testing. In other words, if there is a very quickly spreading pandemic that kills over half the people it infects, we could probably say "Let's just pray that there aren't too horrible side effects for most people. Start mass producing the prototype!"
Heh. But you're talking about vaccinating just about everybody on the planet, in a pandemic. Is your proposal that we inject the entire population of the world with an untested medicine, in hopes of preventing disease? I somehow don't think that suggestion would travel far within the WHO.
Also, there's no "prototype vaccine." They know how to make a vaccine that will be effective against any strain of flu, pretty much. They're all just variations of the same thing. The problem is that there are so many different variations (mutations) that they have to predict which one to manufacture in any given year, given the production capacity (labs/factories) available. And you can't just say "keep manufacturing H5N1 vaccine until we have enough for everybody," because it doesn't necessarily have a long shelf life. In fact, they're not really sure how long stockpiled doses would remain effective.
What's more, manufacturing the flu vaccine isn't like manufacturing paint or chairs. The raw materials of the flu vaccine involve living, biological things. The virus itself is alive and must be cultured (before they kill it), and to do that, they grow it inside fertilized chicken eggs -- and as we know, nine chickens don't help you produce a fertilized egg any faster than one does (and to get more chickens, you need more fertilized eggs). So when you estimate how many doses of flu vaccine can be manufactured in a given period of time, it's a little bit like estimating how many cheeseburgers McDonald's can make in the same period of time ... while it is possible to "just make more," it's not necessarily as easy as it sounds.
tl;dr -- When scientists talk about how many flu vaccine doses it would be possible to manufacture in a given period, they pretty much know what they're talking about.
All security is through obscurity. If somebody knows your key, or your hiding spot, or what time you have to put down your shotgun to take a crap, you're through. All cryptography does is let you protect a large secret with a smaller one.
I see your point, but you're short circuiting a little bit of common sense to make it.
Someone would have to "know" your key pretty damn well -- and some highly specialized skills besides -- to make a copy of it without having access to the original. And they'd need to be downright brilliant to use their copy if the lock is too far away for them to reach. Lack of physical access is not really "obscurity," in the sense that people mean when they quote that phrase.
And when you need to put your shotgun down to take a crap, the best practice is to hand it to someone else. The thing you want to keep secure can be sitting right there, as long as the guy with the shotgun is just as visible. If you manage to shoot the guy with the shotgun first, it says nothing about "security by obscurity."
So, H5N1 was responsible for 1% of deaths... Why are we so scared of this flu again?
Because, like the GP says, if you catch it you have a worse than 1 in 2 chance of survival. The point is that not many people catch it ... yet. But what the recent research showed is that it would not take a tremendous amount of mutation for a form of the disease to arise that could spread much more easily.
If a guy comes along and says, "Your building isn't as safe as you think it is, there aren't enough fire exits," do you laugh and say, "You're stupid! Nobody has ever died in a fire in this building."
If you look at LotR ... In Jordan's style the whole fellowship would have been split up and he'd tell Frodo and Sam's story, Merry and Pippin's story, Gandalf's story, Aragon's story...
I think you might wanna go back and read those books again.
And the expanding-storyline theme is amazing. Eight Harry Potter Movies? Really?
I know, right? There were only seven books!
I think you must be talking to different PHBs than the ones at any company I ever worked for -- or visited, for that matter. I've never seen a black and red case or superfluous LEDs or any kind of "bling bling" in any business setting. And if it was my business, boring black cases sound just fine to me. (Maybe you weren't around when they were boring beige cases?)
You can't possibly know whether the doxycycline is clearing up the infection or whether it would have gotten better anyway without it.
Yes I damn well can. This article is sensationalist and borderline dangerous.
A number of years ago I developed a strange problem. Every time I ate, about 20 minutes later I would develop a headache. This was a weird headache -- it was dull, throbbing, restricted to one side of my head, but had no other apparent symptoms (like, no visual effects or other things that might be associated with migraines). I had no history of regular headaches before.
I assumed it was some kind of reaction to something I was eating. I began modifying my diet. I cut out coffee. I cut out alcohol. I started looking on the Internet for foods that were commonly known allergy triggers and eliminating them. Nothing seemed to make any difference -- or, if one day I seemed to feel better, the next day I'd eat the same thing and feel worse.
After a couple of weeks of this, the headaches had become really bad. I would eat lunch at my desk, and afterward I'd have to go to the break room and lie down for a half hour or so, just for the headache to subside enough for me to be able to concentrate on my computer screen again. After maybe three and a half weeks, I broke down and went to the doctor.
The first thing the doctor said was, "The good news is it's not a brain tumor." (I didn't really think it was a brain tumor.) Then he asked me whether I had noticed any fever. I said no. He said, "That's odd, because you have a fever right now." He said I had a sinus infection, prescribed me antibiotics, and I went home and dutifully started taking them. I had no history of sinus infections.
BLAM! It was maybe the second, maybe the third day of antibiotics that I felt completely fine. Naturally I kept taking the antibiotics (always finish the whole bottle, kids), but this was one of those cases where I hadn't even realized how sick I was until I got better,
All of a sudden, miraculously, I had energy again. It had never really occurred to me that the reason I was coming home from work, throwing down my jacket, and crashing onto the couch and lying there all night without eating dinner wasn't just because I knew eating dinner would give me a headache, but because I had no more energy to do another single thing. For the last few weeks, I realized, I had been feeling drained, depressed, and weak -- and all of a sudden, it was as if you pulled a bag off my head and showed me sunlight for the first time.
There is not one thing you could say to convince me that antibiotics were not the cure to my condition, or that it would have gone away by itself if I had not taken antibiotics.
Do people often pressure their doctors to give them antibiotics for infections that turn out to be viral? Yes. Does that mean that there's no such thing as a bacterial sinus infection -- as this article seems to be claiming? No. Absolute bullshit. And for this article to present the findings of this study the way it does is irresponsible and does an incredible disservice to people like me, who are either too scared or just too fucking dumb to go to the doctor until they've been suffering for a month.
Because the microbes in question have to be inserted deep into your sinuses (as with a neti pot) for them to have a chance of doing anything to you. That's a far cry from drinking them (at which time they will do absolutely nothing).
Here in San Francisco we have some of the best tap water in the country. I drink it by the gallon.
While I of course don't shortchange folks like that I do put any new build in a flashy case simply because it makes them sell MUCH quicker if there is some bling bling so it really wouldn't be hard for HP to make an "Elite PC" line with some flash and get in the consumers.
Not 1337 PCs. Elite PCs.
"Elite" is a brand name HP already uses for desktop PCs and notebooks for businesses. They're not all that flashy.
That the electrical signals received by the brain from the ear would actually directly correspond to the actual soundwaves received by the ear...
I'm sorry... but in what way is this any more revolutionary in discovery than the telephone?
It's brain research. Plain and simple.
They already have devices that can translate the sound waves received by the ear into electrical impulses that are sent directly to the auditory nerves to be interpreted by the brain. They're called cochlear implants.
This, on the other hand, is reading how the other end of the line interprets the impulses -- what happens within the brain when the electrical impulses are received. We still don't know all that much about how the brain really works. But when you can read changes in the brain with sufficient fidelity to be able to deduce what word the brain is thinking about, you can be pretty sure your hunch about how the brain works is correct.
I'm surprised at all the negativity. This sounds like basically the same thing as when I worked IT and I had my own rep at the mail-order houses like CDW and PC Warehouse. In practice, did it make a damn bit of difference to me whether my official rep took my order or somebody else did? Nope, not really. All my info, including discounts, etc., was in the computer. But it was nice to have a number to call and a specific person with whom I could leave a message if need be, and to be able to say stuff like, "I need more of those things I got on Friday, but listen, one of them already broke" -- without having to walk through some script with an anonymous sales rep. It was just that slight bit more of a human interaction that made the whole transaction a little bit more pleasant, even though I was intellectually aware that it probably wasn't making what I needed to do much easier by any measurable amount.
I don't know what "judder" means, but when you show a Martin Scorcese movie on a big LCD screen at 120Hz, it looks like a videotaped TV soap opera from 1974.
Yes. Really. $5-$20 for DVD v. $25+ same DRM-Ray.
You're doing a cost comparison between a format that's the current technology standard and one that became popular more than 15 years ago. When DVDs were first introduced they most certainly did cost $25 or more, and DVD players were one of the fastest-adopted technology products in modern history. Now the $25+ doesn't seem worth it, but not because nobody would ever pay that price to own a movie, but because they already did -- 15 years ago -- and the difference between the new format and the old doesn't seem sufficient to justify paying that rate anymore (which is what you're saying). It's not just cost, it's cost/benefit.
What's fascinating is that when CDs first came out they said the price of CDs would shrink to reasonable rates. It hasn't. In fact, in many cases you can buy a shrinkwrapped DVD for less than you can buy the soundtrack for the same movie. The price of CDs didn't really "go down" until the big box retailers started doing aggressive sales on brand-new releases by major labels. Then it started shrinking a little more across the board with the advent of iTunes -- which made music a little less expensive, but also introduced lossy compression. So at least with Blu-Ray the format is actually getting better at the same price, and the price of the older format has gone down. That's sort of what you'd expect -- but it's not what has happened with music.
Cost is why Blu-ray fails.
Really? Blu-Ray discs seem cheap enough to me these days. I thought the reasons Blu-Ray wasn't taking off like DVD did were because:
No electronics industry exec will ever admit this in an interview, but the bottom line seems to be that all the things the electronics industry claims people are demanding from TVs are false. It doesn't have all that much to do with image quality. It has a lot more to do with convenience and cost/benefit (rather than pure cost) -- people just don't see the need for what's being shoved at them. What people want is low-end TVs that do Netflix and Hulu.
I just want to go on record as saying I hate this headline. I didn't pick it. Furthermore, I don't think there's anything in particular about Microsoft developers that makes them "need a style guide" more than anybody else, and that notion had absolutely nothing to do with my column. I just thought it was interesting that a Microsoft style guide exists, that it's available for sale, and that it has some interesting stuff in it about writing for software UIs that a lot of developers probably don't think about. That's about it.
Seriously, storing paper is a ton easier and it works for many purposes. Until you move, or have a fire, or your basement floods
Or your hard drive crashes. Or the DVD-R has bit rot. Or they changed the software and the new version can't load the format you stored it in. No wait -- that's electronic records.
or you need a copy of that letter you received from your insurance company 18-24 months ago confirming a change to your home because they're now claiming they weren't informed you're using natural gas instead of electric heat and are declining a $250,000 insurance claim after the aforementioned fire
Kind of a fringe case, isn't it? But if there's one thing that has remained constant throughout all of human history, it's the threat of weather and fire. What did people do before they had document scanners?
My reaction is, why would you want to go "paper-free"?
Seriously. Are you allergic to paper or something?
It would be one thing if everybody sent you bills and documents electronically and you never had to deal with paper again, but you're talking about scanning things in with a document feeder. WTF?
Seriously. It is much, much harder to keep records electronically than to throw the pieces of paper into a file cabinet and forget about it. This is well documented.
Maybe for a company that produces huge piles and mounds of documents every year it makes sense to want to convert them to electronic formats, but for an individual it makes no sense. And you're not talking about stuff like marriage licenses, now, you're talking about random individual tax records from years ago. WHY are you losing sleep over it?
The mere fact that it's hard for you to figure out how to do it should be a big clue that IT'S AN INCREDIBLE AMOUNT OF WORK THAT YOU WOULDN'T OTHERWISE HAVE TO DO. Are you so bored?