People forget why they initially implemented the CSM system. Initially, CCP was so isolated (geographically and otherwise) from their playerbase that they didn't even care when one of their developers helped his Alliance get access to the richest region of the game (Delve) and gave them exclusive rights to blueprints that gave them monopoly rights to some of the most powerful ships in the game. After they got called out on it, and it looked like their subscriber numbers might drop, they brought in the CSM system to help hold them accountable.
It's worked. They're a lot more in tune with what players want than ever, and while the stuff from the new patch seems to be utter failure, the core game is solid. People are actually debating ideas with the knowledge that someone is going to pass them along.
The system isn't perfect - the community representative for faction warfare is intentionally filtering out player suggestions so she can help her own Alliance - but it's created a stronger game. The skill queue system means that my friends and I can log in when it suits us, log off to do other things, and not have to babysit the game every time a game finishes. That's directly due to the CSM system.
I feel that nobody in this world is evil at the core.
Then you're scarily mistaken. Antisocial personality disorder has a known biological component. If you lack the biological components for empathy, or if they are twisted out of true, or if your arousal mechanisms are depressed (which is the case with APD) then there is a probability that you will grow up cold, manipulative, and outright evil. APD is a spectrum, with some people having just enough arousal depression to allow them to live a mostly normal life, but engage in risk-taking behaviors (such as mountain climbing or firefighting), while other people from very early childhood take every opportunity to harm others whenever it tickles their sick, twisted little pleasure centers.
This kid is in that latter group. You need to get out of your pie-in-the-sky "It's all nurture" mentality and realize that sometimes evolution hands us a goddamned raw deal, and sometimes that raw deal hurts other people too.
He got himself kicked out of every group he was in... because he did things like beating up disabled children, assault and battery, and general defiance. He damaged other people, constantly. That is not something that can be tolerated. If my child was in an art or drama group and found some asshole kid beating up his classmates, beating up him, disrupting activities, and the like, I'm not going to let my child be in that situation - either he goes or my child does. That is what every rational parent should do.
If you RTFA, you would know that the real trouble was the system's refusal to lock him away from other children and even his own parents because they were socialized to believe that it's never the kid's fault, and that parents are always abusers. They were too lenient, not too restrictive.
Yeah, a kid died. I wonder how much of that has to do with permissive government policies instituted by people with philosophies much like your own.
Um, look, genius, the step-parents already did that. Did you read the part about the art classes, drama, etc.?
We tried to get him interested and involved in extracurricular activities, like hockey, drama, music, art, anything, but he got himself kicked out of every group he was in with his "make me" attitude.
Some people are born bad. Some people, via some combination of nature, environment, and truly random factors, are rotten to the core.
Your attempt to place yourself morally over these people (and if you read your post, it's pretty fucking elitist) is kind of pathetic.
This is precisely Citizendium's problem. It's a project "for academics, by academics," not "for the people, by the people." As someone else pointed out, the Biology article looks like a lecture to a bunch of bored freshmen. There is this feeling that academics are somehow better than everyone else. Hell, academics aren't so wonderful - "academics" are denying global warming and boosting intelligent design. The key is to look at the argument and evaluate the argument, and all Citizendium does is give some asshole the practical ability to override your argument and say "I'm more important than you are, fuck off." Somehow, Sanger expects the "Constables" to step up in favor of the "average joe." Lovely, when the Constables come from the same pool of elitists - many of whom were banned from Wikipedia for being assholes - that founded the project.
It's a bad attitude. It privileges credentials over knowledge, and that's simply anti-egalitarian and anti-knowledge.
You don't have to be an employee to be a shill. He treats your elitist, bureaucratic, censorious, top-down "collaborative" effort like it's the best damned thing since sliced bread.
Any wiki whose core, founding membership was comprised mostly of people who were banned from Wikipedia for being absolute jerks (with yourself excluded), mixed with an unhealthy amount of elitism, is not going to turn out to be puppied and rainbows.
It isn't so clear in that point. First, check a more accurate version. Second, notice that these are people who abandoned their natural inclination - within the context of idolatry, as explained in the previous verses. Paul is making an oblique attack on temple prostitution, not on homosexuality itself.
This is as silly a statement as "I do not take as many showers as most people, so my water is not as wet." The immune system works differently than how your muscles do, it does not function in a "use it or lose it" manner. When you are exposed to an antigen, you develop an acquired immune response to it allowing you to fight it faster in future exposures. This is not an issue with the avian flu because it is different from the other flu viruses that are, or have recently been, circulating through human populations (nobody has acquired immunity except for the people who have been infected and have lived). Whether or not people have been exposed to other germs will not change the immune response to a new flu virus. Additionally, during the 1918 flu those with the healthiest immune systems (people in their 20's and 30's) were more likely to die from flu infection (google "cytokine storm" to find out more). So your trite generalization does not apply to this situation.
From what I knew when I wrote the post (and my intellecual situation stands roughly the same), the situation is more complex than that. The immune system functions according to both specific and nonspecific principles, and while in order to trigger the specific response you need to have antibodies already in place, the nonspecific response is independent of prior exposure to that particular pathogen. Cytokine storms (which I am aware of, thank you) are characteristic of the initial, nonspecific (innate, if you will) response. An optimally functioning immune system will have considerable amounts of interleukin-1 receptor antagonist stockpiles and production capacity so as to prevent cytokine storms; however, the only way to build up that sort of resistance is to have had multiple cytokine-inducing infections previously that were appropriately mediated. With that reprieve, the adaptive immune system (the one they tell you about in high school, mediated by T-cells and B-cells and the like) has a chance to kick in, which is usually quickly followed by the abatement of interleukin and the other cytokines.
Furthermore, one has to take into account the complex interaction of phagocytes with viral infections. An immune system that has been subjected to multiple infections will have more phagocytes active. If there are enough phagocytes, viral infections like bird flu will not have a chance to multiply quickly due to being consumed by the phagocytes, lessening the cytokine response (as there is no longer as much of a need to trigger it). When there aren't enough phagocytes, but there is adequate phagocyte production capability, you run into the devastating septic shock that bird flu and the 1918 influenza are likely to produce- because then not only do you have the cytokine storms, but you also get tissue death from phagocytes consuming healthy as well as infected cells. It's harder to shut off phagocyte production than to start it, and the phagocytes become overaggressive.
To sum up: certain portions of the immune system are not directly affected by frequency of exposure to non-related pathogens, that is true. However, other portions are affected, particularly in the innate response period. So, perhaps you and the grandparent poster are right, in that a healthy immune system will be detrimental to surviving the next pandemic-level flu, and that prior infections won't be of help in fighting it off. However, there are immunological factors working against us related to our behavior regarding infectious diseases.
You said it right there: "Scurvy is no longer common." Guess what, rickets isn't either. Vitamin deficiency diseases in the "civilized world" are not common. Making generalization about the quality of processed foods does not change that fact. Also, the terms "vitamin" and "nutrient" cannot be used interchangeably as they do not mean the same thing.
Except that, at least for vitamin C (one of the easiest vitamins to get!) vitamin deficiency and depletion is actually fairly common
If the disease is highly infectious, and if they're on the Shinkansen (not the normal Tokyo subway line, for this demonstration), a standing sick person could aerosolize virus-infused particles into a car packed with up to 100 standing people (scroll down to the bottom). The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport posts guidelines to congestion in Tokyo subway cars; according to local sources many trains run at over 200% capacity. Tokyo subway cars are roughly the same size as the average-sized New York subway car (save for the large R143 mega-cars, which while Japanese-designed are not suitable for use in Japan). A narrow-width New York City subway car can fit a hundred people in rush hour; the comparatively smaller Japanese (who also cram more tightly into the cars) can reach 150% that capacity.
Re:Factors in our favor
on
A Flu Pandemic?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Factors working against us:
* As a whole, people do not get as sick as in previous generations. The constant fuss over cleanliness reduces the general health of the immune system because of its lack of exposure to many diseases.
* Vitamin deficiencies are not as rare as one might think; while scurvy is no longer common, most people in the civilized world consume processed foods, which generally lack vital nutrients. As such, their body mass is maintained or expanded, but the gains made in nutritional science have not, as a whole, trickled down very far into the general population.
* Palliative diseases are of little use against a virus that causes tissue death in the lungs, encephalitis, and destruction of tissue membranes due to necrosis and apoptosis. H5N1 appears to cause a broad-spectrum attack on the human body in ways that aren't helped by rehydration or salt balance.
* The vast majority of people may live in their own bedrooms, but are more likely to congregate in large, relatively cramped areas for work, school (especially school!), and purchasing. The rise of mass transit means that especially in urban areas, people are crammed together for long periods of time sharing the same air. For instance, in Tokyo, one person could infect sixty to a hundred people on the ride to the Akihabara district with one sneeze. Same in New York on the A, 4/5/6, 1/2, or 7 lines.
Furthermore, many more people live in apartments with central ventilation. One infectious person can thus infect dozens, even hundreds, of people with whom he has no direct contact.
* International and cross-continental travel is much more common, leading to the possibility of faster spread. If the virus has a long presymptomatic infectious period, one overnight flight from China could lead to an infection that spreads through half of San Francisco and hopscotches to New York within a matter of days, catching public health authorities off guard.
* A virus that spreads via aerosolized particles isn't as susceptible to sanitary conditions as many other diseases. It helps, but isn't as useful in preventative care as you suggest.
Re:The late, great, Scientific American
on
A Flu Pandemic?
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· Score: 1
Do you have a specific factual criticism of the article? I found it particularly helpful in understanding a difficult topic, and while I don't believe that I, personally, am at a lot of risk (mostly because I'm very willing to stay indoors as much as necessary), based on what looks to me like a fairly level-headed article, I can make the necessary health decisions to keep myself and those I love safe with a minimum amount of stress.
They explain a) why bird flu is dangerous, b) how social, economic, and biological factors make a flu pandemic particularly dangerous, and c) how long we could expect to have to deal with a pandemic, and the patterns of time in which the most infections and fatalities are most likely to occur.
Science doesn't exist in a vacuum. Now, if the article is false or misleading in some way, please let the rest of us now. But if you're upset at them for bringing up the fact that this is a very dangerous virus, based on all indicators so far, that doesn't strike me as very helpful or very insightful.
First, right now it isn't "California" as a whole suing Sony. An attorney has filed a class action lawsuit, and California citizens (and the world as a whole) will benefit. It would be nice if the California Attorney General would lend the government's support in an amicus curiae brief, but in media-rich California that isn't likely to happen. The representatives of the people of California haven't really weighed in on the matter yet, sadly.
Second, a New York law firm will be next to join the bandwagon. Things are heating up faster than the article summary indicates
Third, all of these lawsuits are going to hit Sony *hard*, right in the wallet. Any financial benefit they might have gained from their DRM will be lost unless the lawyers involved immediately drop their cases.
Finally, Sony really doesn't have any solid defense against the charge that they violated the Consumer Protection Against Consumer Spyware Act, *unless* the act specifies that spyware can only be classified as such if it submits personally identifiable information back to the authors or a third party. I'm not too clear on that regard- anyone have information they can add on that count?
Actually, it was the Jedi Academy series by Kevin J. Anderson. The Thrawn Trilogy (including Heir to the Empire) was written by Timothy Zahn. Also, in the Corellian Sector trilogy (written by Barbara Hambly?), Centerpoint Station in Han Solo's birth system blew up a bunch of stars.
Although, given the people they had working on the Death Star project, it's not inconceivable to me that a future generation of Death Star could have blown up stars. I figure it'll happen in some post-New Jedi Order crap book.
I'm not a big fan of software or method patents in the slightest. However, if you have to make a method patent... barring prior art *within the realm of computer and video games*, this patent looks like a fairly reasonable one.
Call of Cthulhu and even Unearthed Arcana from d20 have implemeneted sanity points with varying effects. However, to my knowledge it had not been implemented in an interactive computer gaming environment prior to Nintendo's work, and it was an innovative solution. Although a method patent is unreasonable by its very nature, Nintendo and its programmers did some innovative work and that deserves legal respect.
You know, I kind of regret writing that. I'll feel really filthy in the morning.
And when you want to install something that isn't on that list, or which isn't scheduled to reach "Click-'N'-Run" or Debian's apt list for another couple weeks or months, you have problems. Problems including having to fuddle around with make, or with half-arsed installers putting things in odd subdirectories that have little to do with where you pointed them to. I mean, it may be proprietary, but InstallShield Wizard at least puts everything in one place.
For the record, never touched Slackware; I have, however, attempted to use various versions of Mandrake, Knoppix, SuSE (I evangelized their product with *very* embarrassing results), and various other "user-friendly" distros of the month.
I've edited my registry twice to enable hidden options. That's it. I have crashes, but it's clearly a hardware problem. Plus, when I made the changes, it actually worked as promised.
When I experimented with Linux, though... ugh..conf files appearing everywhere, files scattered around my system, changes that were "guaranteed to work" but didn't... You get what you pay for. Crashed more often than Windows XP, too, and of course Linux is absolutely worthless for any kind of serious gaming- unless you want to shell out money for WineX, or play the handful of commercial games that have Linux clients, or pray that the latest flavor of Wine will work.
I was incredibly excited that I was getting all this cool stuff for free. Except... the stuff really wasn't all that cool. Every program that didn't come with the operating system was a pain to install, and almost all of them required compiling. Icons had to be created manually.
I'm sure one day Linux will be a good desktop platform. However, every time I've dipped my foot in the water since, I've had good cause to be disappointed. In the meantime, there's Windows XP, which blows but does what I want it to and rarely gives me trouble.
I like the idea in general, but there are some things that need addressing:
1) How will the system handle cases where an idea is stolen from an employee by a corporation or by another party? 2) Because of the implementation of method patents, how will the USPTO handle prior art for business or coding methods? 3) Will the bill also put the USPTO fees in a lockbox to stop patent examiner losses? 4) What little abuses and other nastiness is hidden within the bill?
I have similar qualms about it- however, if Google makes it clear that "Flag as objectionable" is only to be used for spam or flooding, and that they will *not*, under any circumstance, censor anything but spam, then it isn't a big deal.
Blogger has certain terms of service, which include not being a spamming retard. They don't want to pay to host spam. Do *you* want to pay to host spam? Fine, then; do it on your own servers. Spammers don't have to use Blogger to screw over the internet; they can buy their own boxes and set them up. They still have the right to free (as in freedom) commercial speech; they just don't have the right to use other people's resources to spread their free (as in beer) speech.
It's the same in Orange County, and Polk, from what I understand.
School Boards appear to have figured out that successful sports teams get them in the papers, and get nice fat donations from the parents of the kids on the sports teams. Not enough to cover the amounts they're siphoning out of academics, but certain enough to look good on fundraisers' resumes.
NASA appears to be taking the opposite approach. The Hubble is beloved by astronomers and laymen alike, but NASA's killing it for cheaper projects. For once, I rather wish that NASA and Florida school boards would switch their budgeting priorities.
After all, the NASA Astros would make a kick-ass football team:-)
Maybe they are suggesting decommisioning the Hubble for the same reason that schools often cut extracurricular sports first when budgets get tight
Pardon me... but what schools are you speaking of? At least in Florida, the first things they cut are sciences and arts; extracurricular sports are the last to go. Even when they can't afford classrooms for all of the students, they still build new stadiums.
Hubble is our most powerful telescope... and while telescopic observations aren't exactly going to bring about a revolution in telecommunications, if we're going to study the heavens, planet-watching strikes me as a damned good goal.
It *is* a problem with Linux, because it's functionality that the operating system lacks. Whether you'd like to admit it or not, gamers want to play games, and games are still overwhelmingly developed for Windows. Linux could have the best gaming libraries in the gaming world- which it doesn't, but that's beside the point- and it would still be useless to gamers, so long as it doesn't have full DirectX support. They can't run the games they want to play. Changing that status quo is probably impossible.
It isn't sufficient to run Halo, Diablo II, Alpha Centauri (which works off something else entirely on Linux), Baldur's Gate II, or anything else not developed specifically for it. As such, it doesn't help.
Slashdot Mirror
People forget why they initially implemented the CSM system. Initially, CCP was so isolated (geographically and otherwise) from their playerbase that they didn't even care when one of their developers helped his Alliance get access to the richest region of the game (Delve) and gave them exclusive rights to blueprints that gave them monopoly rights to some of the most powerful ships in the game. After they got called out on it, and it looked like their subscriber numbers might drop, they brought in the CSM system to help hold them accountable.
It's worked. They're a lot more in tune with what players want than ever, and while the stuff from the new patch seems to be utter failure, the core game is solid. People are actually debating ideas with the knowledge that someone is going to pass them along.
The system isn't perfect - the community representative for faction warfare is intentionally filtering out player suggestions so she can help her own Alliance - but it's created a stronger game. The skill queue system means that my friends and I can log in when it suits us, log off to do other things, and not have to babysit the game every time a game finishes. That's directly due to the CSM system.
You were there too? I was impressed by how very little they were willing to say about their game, and how obnoxious their booth people were.
The Warhammer Fantasy game looks exactly like WoW; you're right. Just more depressing.
I feel that nobody in this world is evil at the core.
Then you're scarily mistaken. Antisocial personality disorder has a known biological component. If you lack the biological components for empathy, or if they are twisted out of true, or if your arousal mechanisms are depressed (which is the case with APD) then there is a probability that you will grow up cold, manipulative, and outright evil. APD is a spectrum, with some people having just enough arousal depression to allow them to live a mostly normal life, but engage in risk-taking behaviors (such as mountain climbing or firefighting), while other people from very early childhood take every opportunity to harm others whenever it tickles their sick, twisted little pleasure centers.
This kid is in that latter group. You need to get out of your pie-in-the-sky "It's all nurture" mentality and realize that sometimes evolution hands us a goddamned raw deal, and sometimes that raw deal hurts other people too.
He got himself kicked out of every group he was in... because he did things like beating up disabled children, assault and battery, and general defiance. He damaged other people, constantly. That is not something that can be tolerated. If my child was in an art or drama group and found some asshole kid beating up his classmates, beating up him, disrupting activities, and the like, I'm not going to let my child be in that situation - either he goes or my child does. That is what every rational parent should do.
If you RTFA, you would know that the real trouble was the system's refusal to lock him away from other children and even his own parents because they were socialized to believe that it's never the kid's fault, and that parents are always abusers. They were too lenient, not too restrictive.
Yeah, a kid died. I wonder how much of that has to do with permissive government policies instituted by people with philosophies much like your own.
Um, look, genius, the step-parents already did that. Did you read the part about the art classes, drama, etc.?
We tried to get him interested and involved in extracurricular activities, like hockey, drama, music, art, anything, but he got himself kicked out of every group he was in with his "make me" attitude.
Some people are born bad. Some people, via some combination of nature, environment, and truly random factors, are rotten to the core.
Your attempt to place yourself morally over these people (and if you read your post, it's pretty fucking elitist) is kind of pathetic.
This is precisely Citizendium's problem. It's a project "for academics, by academics," not "for the people, by the people." As someone else pointed out, the Biology article looks like a lecture to a bunch of bored freshmen. There is this feeling that academics are somehow better than everyone else. Hell, academics aren't so wonderful - "academics" are denying global warming and boosting intelligent design. The key is to look at the argument and evaluate the argument, and all Citizendium does is give some asshole the practical ability to override your argument and say "I'm more important than you are, fuck off." Somehow, Sanger expects the "Constables" to step up in favor of the "average joe." Lovely, when the Constables come from the same pool of elitists - many of whom were banned from Wikipedia for being assholes - that founded the project.
It's a bad attitude. It privileges credentials over knowledge, and that's simply anti-egalitarian and anti-knowledge.
You don't have to be an employee to be a shill. He treats your elitist, bureaucratic, censorious, top-down "collaborative" effort like it's the best damned thing since sliced bread.
Any wiki whose core, founding membership was comprised mostly of people who were banned from Wikipedia for being absolute jerks (with yourself excluded), mixed with an unhealthy amount of elitism, is not going to turn out to be puppied and rainbows.
It isn't so clear in that point. First, check a more accurate version. Second, notice that these are people who abandoned their natural inclination - within the context of idolatry, as explained in the previous verses. Paul is making an oblique attack on temple prostitution, not on homosexuality itself.
This is as silly a statement as "I do not take as many showers as most people, so my water is not as wet." The immune system works differently than how your muscles do, it does not function in a "use it or lose it" manner. When you are exposed to an antigen, you develop an acquired immune response to it allowing you to fight it faster in future exposures. This is not an issue with the avian flu because it is different from the other flu viruses that are, or have recently been, circulating through human populations (nobody has acquired immunity except for the people who have been infected and have lived). Whether or not people have been exposed to other germs will not change the immune response to a new flu virus. Additionally, during the 1918 flu those with the healthiest immune systems (people in their 20's and 30's) were more likely to die from flu infection (google "cytokine storm" to find out more). So your trite generalization does not apply to this situation.
From what I knew when I wrote the post (and my intellecual situation stands roughly the same), the situation is more complex than that. The immune system functions according to both specific and nonspecific principles, and while in order to trigger the specific response you need to have antibodies already in place, the nonspecific response is independent of prior exposure to that particular pathogen. Cytokine storms (which I am aware of, thank you) are characteristic of the initial, nonspecific (innate, if you will) response. An optimally functioning immune system will have considerable amounts of interleukin-1 receptor antagonist stockpiles and production capacity so as to prevent cytokine storms; however, the only way to build up that sort of resistance is to have had multiple cytokine-inducing infections previously that were appropriately mediated. With that reprieve, the adaptive immune system (the one they tell you about in high school, mediated by T-cells and B-cells and the like) has a chance to kick in, which is usually quickly followed by the abatement of interleukin and the other cytokines.
Furthermore, one has to take into account the complex interaction of phagocytes with viral infections. An immune system that has been subjected to multiple infections will have more phagocytes active. If there are enough phagocytes, viral infections like bird flu will not have a chance to multiply quickly due to being consumed by the phagocytes, lessening the cytokine response (as there is no longer as much of a need to trigger it). When there aren't enough phagocytes, but there is adequate phagocyte production capability, you run into the devastating septic shock that bird flu and the 1918 influenza are likely to produce- because then not only do you have the cytokine storms, but you also get tissue death from phagocytes consuming healthy as well as infected cells. It's harder to shut off phagocyte production than to start it, and the phagocytes become overaggressive.
To sum up: certain portions of the immune system are not directly affected by frequency of exposure to non-related pathogens, that is true. However, other portions are affected, particularly in the innate response period. So, perhaps you and the grandparent poster are right, in that a healthy immune system will be detrimental to surviving the next pandemic-level flu, and that prior infections won't be of help in fighting it off. However, there are immunological factors working against us related to our behavior regarding infectious diseases.
You said it right there: "Scurvy is no longer common." Guess what, rickets isn't either. Vitamin deficiency diseases in the "civilized world" are not common. Making generalization about the quality of processed foods does not change that fact. Also, the terms "vitamin" and "nutrient" cannot be used interchangeably as they do not mean the same thing.
Except that, at least for vitamin C (one of the easiest vitamins to get!) vitamin deficiency and depletion is actually fairly common
If the disease is highly infectious, and if they're on the Shinkansen (not the normal Tokyo subway line, for this demonstration), a standing sick person could aerosolize virus-infused particles into a car packed with up to 100 standing people (scroll down to the bottom). The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport posts guidelines to congestion in Tokyo subway cars; according to local sources many trains run at over 200% capacity. Tokyo subway cars are roughly the same size as the average-sized New York subway car (save for the large R143 mega-cars, which while Japanese-designed are not suitable for use in Japan). A narrow-width New York City subway car can fit a hundred people in rush hour; the comparatively smaller Japanese (who also cram more tightly into the cars) can reach 150% that capacity.
Factors working against us:
* As a whole, people do not get as sick as in previous generations. The constant fuss over cleanliness reduces the general health of the immune system because of its lack of exposure to many diseases.
* Vitamin deficiencies are not as rare as one might think; while scurvy is no longer common, most people in the civilized world consume processed foods, which generally lack vital nutrients. As such, their body mass is maintained or expanded, but the gains made in nutritional science have not, as a whole, trickled down very far into the general population.
* Palliative diseases are of little use against a virus that causes tissue death in the lungs, encephalitis, and destruction of tissue membranes due to necrosis and apoptosis. H5N1 appears to cause a broad-spectrum attack on the human body in ways that aren't helped by rehydration or salt balance.
* The vast majority of people may live in their own bedrooms, but are more likely to congregate in large, relatively cramped areas for work, school (especially school!), and purchasing. The rise of mass transit means that especially in urban areas, people are crammed together for long periods of time sharing the same air. For instance, in Tokyo, one person could infect sixty to a hundred people on the ride to the Akihabara district with one sneeze. Same in New York on the A, 4/5/6, 1/2, or 7 lines.
Furthermore, many more people live in apartments with central ventilation. One infectious person can thus infect dozens, even hundreds, of people with whom he has no direct contact.
* International and cross-continental travel is much more common, leading to the possibility of faster spread. If the virus has a long presymptomatic infectious period, one overnight flight from China could lead to an infection that spreads through half of San Francisco and hopscotches to New York within a matter of days, catching public health authorities off guard.
* A virus that spreads via aerosolized particles isn't as susceptible to sanitary conditions as many other diseases. It helps, but isn't as useful in preventative care as you suggest.
Do you have a specific factual criticism of the article? I found it particularly helpful in understanding a difficult topic, and while I don't believe that I, personally, am at a lot of risk (mostly because I'm very willing to stay indoors as much as necessary), based on what looks to me like a fairly level-headed article, I can make the necessary health decisions to keep myself and those I love safe with a minimum amount of stress.
They explain a) why bird flu is dangerous, b) how social, economic, and biological factors make a flu pandemic particularly dangerous, and c) how long we could expect to have to deal with a pandemic, and the patterns of time in which the most infections and fatalities are most likely to occur.
Science doesn't exist in a vacuum. Now, if the article is false or misleading in some way, please let the rest of us now. But if you're upset at them for bringing up the fact that this is a very dangerous virus, based on all indicators so far, that doesn't strike me as very helpful or very insightful.
Several things are important to point out:
First, right now it isn't "California" as a whole suing Sony. An attorney has filed a class action lawsuit, and California citizens (and the world as a whole) will benefit. It would be nice if the California Attorney General would lend the government's support in an amicus curiae brief, but in media-rich California that isn't likely to happen. The representatives of the people of California haven't really weighed in on the matter yet, sadly.
Second, a New York law firm will be next to join the bandwagon. Things are heating up faster than the article summary indicates
Third, all of these lawsuits are going to hit Sony *hard*, right in the wallet. Any financial benefit they might have gained from their DRM will be lost unless the lawyers involved immediately drop their cases.
Finally, Sony really doesn't have any solid defense against the charge that they violated the Consumer Protection Against Consumer Spyware Act, *unless* the act specifies that spyware can only be classified as such if it submits personally identifiable information back to the authors or a third party. I'm not too clear on that regard- anyone have information they can add on that count?
Actually, it was the Jedi Academy series by Kevin J. Anderson. The Thrawn Trilogy (including Heir to the Empire) was written by Timothy Zahn. Also, in the Corellian Sector trilogy (written by Barbara Hambly?), Centerpoint Station in Han Solo's birth system blew up a bunch of stars.
Although, given the people they had working on the Death Star project, it's not inconceivable to me that a future generation of Death Star could have blown up stars. I figure it'll happen in some post-New Jedi Order crap book.
I'm not a big fan of software or method patents in the slightest. However, if you have to make a method patent... barring prior art *within the realm of computer and video games*, this patent looks like a fairly reasonable one.
Call of Cthulhu and even Unearthed Arcana from d20 have implemeneted sanity points with varying effects. However, to my knowledge it had not been implemented in an interactive computer gaming environment prior to Nintendo's work, and it was an innovative solution. Although a method patent is unreasonable by its very nature, Nintendo and its programmers did some innovative work and that deserves legal respect.
You know, I kind of regret writing that. I'll feel really filthy in the morning.
And when you want to install something that isn't on that list, or which isn't scheduled to reach "Click-'N'-Run" or Debian's apt list for another couple weeks or months, you have problems. Problems including having to fuddle around with make, or with half-arsed installers putting things in odd subdirectories that have little to do with where you pointed them to. I mean, it may be proprietary, but InstallShield Wizard at least puts everything in one place.
For the record, never touched Slackware; I have, however, attempted to use various versions of Mandrake, Knoppix, SuSE (I evangelized their product with *very* embarrassing results), and various other "user-friendly" distros of the month.
I've edited my registry twice to enable hidden options. That's it. I have crashes, but it's clearly a hardware problem. Plus, when I made the changes, it actually worked as promised.
.conf files appearing everywhere, files scattered around my system, changes that were "guaranteed to work" but didn't... You get what you pay for. Crashed more often than Windows XP, too, and of course Linux is absolutely worthless for any kind of serious gaming- unless you want to shell out money for WineX, or play the handful of commercial games that have Linux clients, or pray that the latest flavor of Wine will work.
When I experimented with Linux, though... ugh.
I was incredibly excited that I was getting all this cool stuff for free. Except... the stuff really wasn't all that cool. Every program that didn't come with the operating system was a pain to install, and almost all of them required compiling. Icons had to be created manually.
I'm sure one day Linux will be a good desktop platform. However, every time I've dipped my foot in the water since, I've had good cause to be disappointed. In the meantime, there's Windows XP, which blows but does what I want it to and rarely gives me trouble.
I like the idea in general, but there are some things that need addressing:
1) How will the system handle cases where an idea is stolen from an employee by a corporation or by another party?
2) Because of the implementation of method patents, how will the USPTO handle prior art for business or coding methods?
3) Will the bill also put the USPTO fees in a lockbox to stop patent examiner losses?
4) What little abuses and other nastiness is hidden within the bill?
I have similar qualms about it- however, if Google makes it clear that "Flag as objectionable" is only to be used for spam or flooding, and that they will *not*, under any circumstance, censor anything but spam, then it isn't a big deal.
Blogger has certain terms of service, which include not being a spamming retard. They don't want to pay to host spam. Do *you* want to pay to host spam? Fine, then; do it on your own servers. Spammers don't have to use Blogger to screw over the internet; they can buy their own boxes and set them up. They still have the right to free (as in freedom) commercial speech; they just don't have the right to use other people's resources to spread their free (as in beer) speech.
Didn't bother reading the forum, did you?
I don't play World of Warcraft, and given many issues with the game I probably never will, but please... at least check your own links.
What are you smoking? I updated 1.0.3 to 1.0.4 through the "Check Now" button and didn't have any problems.
Doublecheck your internet connection settings.
It's the same in Orange County, and Polk, from what I understand.
:-)
School Boards appear to have figured out that successful sports teams get them in the papers, and get nice fat donations from the parents of the kids on the sports teams. Not enough to cover the amounts they're siphoning out of academics, but certain enough to look good on fundraisers' resumes.
NASA appears to be taking the opposite approach. The Hubble is beloved by astronomers and laymen alike, but NASA's killing it for cheaper projects. For once, I rather wish that NASA and Florida school boards would switch their budgeting priorities.
After all, the NASA Astros would make a kick-ass football team
Maybe they are suggesting decommisioning the Hubble for the same reason that schools often cut extracurricular sports first when budgets get tight
Pardon me... but what schools are you speaking of? At least in Florida, the first things they cut are sciences and arts; extracurricular sports are the last to go. Even when they can't afford classrooms for all of the students, they still build new stadiums.
Hubble is our most powerful telescope... and while telescopic observations aren't exactly going to bring about a revolution in telecommunications, if we're going to study the heavens, planet-watching strikes me as a damned good goal.
It *is* a problem with Linux, because it's functionality that the operating system lacks. Whether you'd like to admit it or not, gamers want to play games, and games are still overwhelmingly developed for Windows. Linux could have the best gaming libraries in the gaming world- which it doesn't, but that's beside the point- and it would still be useless to gamers, so long as it doesn't have full DirectX support. They can't run the games they want to play. Changing that status quo is probably impossible.
It isn't sufficient to run Halo, Diablo II, Alpha Centauri (which works off something else entirely on Linux), Baldur's Gate II, or anything else not developed specifically for it. As such, it doesn't help.