Are you contending that using quarantine to isolate people who have been exposed to a specific disease is ineffective?
I ask because I'm curious as to whether I'm debating this with a reasonable person. Are you the type that gets the whole office sick because of your lack of understanding of disease (or your complete lack of consideration of other people)? Do you send your children to school when they're sick, despite the fact that they will be spreading their sickness to the whole school?
I think your comment about the birds demonstrates that you don't really understand the nature of the disease. It's not the passing of the disease from birds to humans that will get us, even though that is how this thing is likely to get started. It's the human to human vector that is going to kill us. It's AFTER the pathogen has made the shift and is easily communicable between humans that we're at dire risk.
You bring out some important facts to support your argument, but you leave out some other important facts that inconveniently do not support it. Let's stroll over to Wikipediain another tab as we examine your claims, shall we?
You write: The main reasons the spanish flu got so bad are 1) There was a big war on and millions of soldiers were lying around in cold, wet, unhygienic trenches just begging for a disease to come kill them and
2) There was a big war on and media censorship effectively kept the disease from being reported and therefore no effective countermeasures could be put into effect.
And, pray tell, which effective countermeasures could have been taken? Given the state of technology at the time?
The facts are that 1)The airlines are already collecting this information about you, and if the "security" services want it, they'll be able to get it. 2) Modern travel will allow a pathogen to reach many many more people in a much much shorter amount of time.
Fortunately, we have a better understanding of such diseases (at the time of the Spanish Flu, they didn't understand that it was a virus; they believed it was a bacterium), and we have better information technology to track who may be exposed to such a virus. For the sake of precious privacy (yes, it is precious) you'd sacrifice precious life. Your privacy isn't going to do you a lot of good if you're dead.
In 1918, before the advent of commercial jet flight (i.e., you took a boat if you wanted to cross the Atlantic or Pacific), there was an outbreak of Avian Flu know at the time as the Spanish Flu. Between 25 million and 50 million died (with some estimates going as high as 100 million) from this flu. It killed my great-grandmother, leaving my grandmother and her sister orphans.
The solution is simple for all you privacy extremists (I'm not saying you're one, teaserX, but bear with me):
If you don't want to give out this information, then don't fly across international borders. Even better, go hide in a cabin in the mountains. Then you'll be safe from both the government and the flu.
If pandemics were common, there probably wouldn't be any of us around to post on slashdot. But the chances are very good that a virus will mutate to something that could pose a very real threat of a pandemic.
If this thing becomes transmitible to the common house cat, killing and eating birds in every city that has alley cats . We got ourselves a recipe for a bad situation.
We'll be safe. When (if ever) do you think was the last time a slashdotter got any pussy?
I'm doing my best not to remember the whole situation with extensions pre-OS X, but it keeps coming up in different places.
Being an old fart who so desperately wants to be hip, I'm always checking out "what the young people are up to". Well, the latest craze among some of my young friends is this thing called Firefox. I think it's a browser, whatever that means.
And one of the coolest things about this Firefox thing is that you can install all these really great extensions, that, get this, EXTEND the capabilities of the browser. For instance, I can install a mozilla calendar extension. Now my browser is a CALENDAR!! And there's a google toolbar extension for, uh, using google tools.
Now, remembering my previous experience with system extensions, I took the cautious approach and only installed about nine or ten of these great extensions. It's like. . . drugs? . . . candy? . . . potato chips? You can't install just one! Of course I want to control iTunes from my browser. It's become such a pain to switch applications that honestly, I'd given up listening to music. OK, so I need to install Foxytunes. Oh, and now there are so many toolbars, that I need to install a toolbar manager extension. And so on.
I pray that Cassidy and Greene will come back from the dead with a Conflict Catcher for Firefox.
Unfortunately, the idiocy goes beyond merely failing to secure one's computer. Social engineering is a major component of many gambits to get sensitive personal information. In other words, people are not only too stupid to secure their computers against malware, they willingly install it on their machines (spyware) and voluntarily give out their credit information (phishing sites).
How's that Windows XP beta been going? The OS X beta I've been involved with has been pretty good. We're up to 10.4.3b, and I'm confident we'll see an RC before the 10.5 beta comes out. =)
True, there is the question of where to draw the line, but some things are clearly porn. If you're not sure what I mean then visit this site, one of my favorites. That is clearly porn.
I think that your suggestion and the "porn port" ideas are not mutually exclusive. Together they could make a better solution than one by itself.
Also, I don't think that pornographers and their customers (I'm looking at you, Ohreally!) should mind having porn segregated into a "pron ghetto". It is a preventative defense against those who would seek to eliminate them entirely from the internet ("We're good netizens, we're doing our part").
But most of all, it would make it easier for me to find porn if it was all in one place. We just need to make such a move to a porn ghetto economically attractive to the pornographers as well as ethically attractive.
And I was wrong and you're right. You had to install drivers, i.e., drag an extension into the extension folder and perhaps a control panel to the control panel. Which reminds me of one of the things that truly sucked about Macs before OS X. Extension conflicts. Remember having to reboot with a different extension set if you had been editing video and now wanted to play a game?
I had a tricked out mac with lots of extensions, and getting all the extensions to behave, even with a utility like conflict catcher, was a laborious and frustrating process.
In hindsight, System 7, OS 8 and OS 9 really sucked (at least in this area), although I didn't realize it at the time, and I'd rather forget about it now. Maybe this is why I currently really love the idea of Linux, but I honestly don't have the patience. And i don't really go for the many OS X tweaks and customizations available from third parties. Yeah, they're cool, some are quite clever, but I really just want to do some work in a (mostly) pleasant computing environment. I deleted Konfabulator after maybe a week, and Dashboard Widgets seem a bit superflous to me. But like I said, I know a lot of people that do like to trick out their macs, and there is cool stuff out there.
it is as if PickleWorld(TM) created a huge, terrifying banner equating pickle-theft with murder to be placed in their stores, but instead of putting it over the side-exit or whichever mode of exit is usually employed by the serial pickle-thief, they put it over the checkout where it can only be seen by paying customers!
Or as if, when ever you were about to bite into a juicy hamburger, you had to remove it from it's anti-pickle theft shrinkwrap barrier. Hold the pickles, already!
OK, crappy analogy compared to yours. But light years better than the tried and true computers:cars analogy.
And to the poster just above who asked for a torrent of the anti-piracy commercial: Dude, that cracked me up. You're a comic genius. We should replay that joke in irc and then submit it to bash.org. You'd be famous! =)
It's an old saw by now, but since Sony isn't there already (and they could've been, nearly), Jobs is willing to play that role. This will probably be a good thing for operating systems, as an aside.
Could have been, nearly, my eye! They could have been absolutely. Jobs offered Sony a partnership, but Sony turned it down. The Sony CEO later apologized to Sony investors (for missing the boat in general, I don't think the refusal of the Apple deal was mentioned specifically) and stepped down.
I think HP blew it, too, when they had a chance to particpate in their grasp. Remember the rebadged HP iPods? I think the rank and file of HP , because the iPod was Not Invented Here and was a factor in Carly Fiorina being forced out. At least it was a symptom of her never managing to fit into the HP corporate culture. What could HP have done with the iPod? I don't think Apple would have let them mess with the iPod itself, but HP could have put put time and resources into developing all manner of cool accessories. There are some really bright people at HP, and there is no telling where they could have taken this. And look how lucrative the iPod accessory market is now! What a missed opportunity, all because of a perverted sense of corporate pride and a CEO who couldn't steer the ship. The people working under Fiorina did the HP shareholders a grave disservice because they refused to ride anyone's coattails.
What did HP end up with? Higher margins on a tiny fraction of sales in the market for mp3 players. Hmmmmm. Sounds like Apple in the computer market, especially during the late 80s to mid 90s. And unfortunately for HP, I don't think Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard are going to come back and save the company. (OK, I exaggerate. HP is no where near as "beleaguered" as Apple was. Yet. )
It must have been another article in which I read this tidbit (I didn't R this particular FA), but they calculated it as 12 iTMS songs = 1 physical CD. Of course they could also be be calculating by dollar amount of sales.
That was in the past before their surprising discovery that iTMS could be highly profitable as it scaled up.
Also, you might have noticed that Steve Jobs, known primarily as a hype master, also downplays at times to suit whatever his diabolical strategy is. Exhibit #1 being the video iPod (or is it the iPod that incidentally also plays video?); Apple is still de-emphasizing that feature, insisting that it is first and foremost it is a music player. Not too long ago, Steve said that Apple wasn't interested in making a video iPod because he didn't think that it was what people wanted.
Around that time he mentioned making a computer with a built in toaster, because he was of the belief that most people eat toast. I immediately registered the domains ibread.com and itbs.com, but so far, no luck. Oh, well.
Another thing about Apple is that while they have a reputation for being on the cutting edge, introducing or incorporating new technologies (Firewire and USB being good examples), they often enter a market after others have pioneered the space (iPod). Also, while they have a reputation for being revolutionary, their improvements are often incremental. I think the reason for this is twofold. Obviously, the incremental model helps pump up sales for those who purchase the latest and greatest. It's perhaps the oldest trick in the tech marketing book, and Apple does it well. The other reason is that Apple engineers seem to take their time to polish a product and get the details right. It's the last 10% that's the most difficult and the most work, but Apple more often then not gets that 10% on any given feature. I'm thinking of two different products lines here: the laptops, which have continually added small touches (DVI out, backlit keyboards) even when the CPU upgrades were paltry, and the slow (and ongoing) evolution of the iMac into a media center.
Back a moment to the downplay strategy: I think the motivation at the time was to discourage others from starting up their own music stores. You'll remember that MS was going to stay out of that business, instead developing and selling the software/infrastructure to companies that wanted to open such stores. Which they did and still do, although probably not in the great numbers they'd hoped. Because Steve talked down the profit potential of selling music downloads.
Now, no doubt that the iPod is earning the lion's share of Apple's profit. But the iTMS is delivering a nice chunk of pocket change. Those pennies add up!
There were probably other considerations. I'm sure Steve didn't want to look foolish if iTMS flopped, so it was positioned as a way to sell iPods.
OK, this has turned out to be much more long winded than I had planned, so I'll stop, even though I'm feeling untypically insightful at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
**I agree with parent when it comes to bad/copycat companies. They're doing it because it's hip/they're lazy.
That's a FEATURE! Not a BUG!
Sincerely,
Web 2.0
Our one saving grace is that it's more the way it is now than it's ever been.
Are you contending that using quarantine to isolate people who have been exposed to a specific disease is ineffective?
I ask because I'm curious as to whether I'm debating this with a reasonable person. Are you the type that gets the whole office sick because of your lack of understanding of disease (or your complete lack of consideration of other people)? Do you send your children to school when they're sick, despite the fact that they will be spreading their sickness to the whole school?
I think your comment about the birds demonstrates that you don't really understand the nature of the disease. It's not the passing of the disease from birds to humans that will get us, even though that is how this thing is likely to get started. It's the human to human vector that is going to kill us. It's AFTER the pathogen has made the shift and is easily communicable between humans that we're at dire risk.
You bring out some important facts to support your argument, but you leave out some other important facts that inconveniently do not support it. Let's stroll over to Wikipediain another tab as we examine your claims, shall we?
You write: The main reasons the spanish flu got so bad are
1) There was a big war on and millions of soldiers were lying around in cold, wet, unhygienic trenches just begging for a disease to come kill them and
The flu did not limit itself to the soldiers fighting in WWI. The total death toll (military and civilian) of World War I was at least 16 million, of which about 9 million were military and about 7 million civilian. This is over the course of 4 years. Contrast this with the Spanish Flu killing at least 25 million (quite possibly 50 or 100 million) in 18 months.
While it usually only infected less than one-third of the population in most places and killed only a fraction of those infected, there were a number of towns in several countries where the entire population was wiped out. The only sizeable inhabited place with no documented outbreak of the flu in 1918-1919 was the island of Marajó at the mouth of the Amazon River in Brazil.
2) There was a big war on and media censorship effectively kept the disease from being reported and therefore no effective countermeasures could be put into effect.
And, pray tell, which effective countermeasures could have been taken? Given the state of technology at the time?
The facts are that 1)The airlines are already collecting this information about you, and if the "security" services want it, they'll be able to get it. 2) Modern travel will allow a pathogen to reach many many more people in a much much shorter amount of time.
Fortunately, we have a better understanding of such diseases (at the time of the Spanish Flu, they didn't understand that it was a virus; they believed it was a bacterium), and we have better information technology to track who may be exposed to such a virus. For the sake of precious privacy (yes, it is precious) you'd sacrifice precious life. Your privacy isn't going to do you a lot of good if you're dead.
but pandemics are rare
In 1918, before the advent of commercial jet flight (i.e., you took a boat if you wanted to cross the Atlantic or Pacific), there was an outbreak of Avian Flu know at the time as the Spanish Flu. Between 25 million and 50 million died (with some estimates going as high as 100 million) from this flu. It killed my great-grandmother, leaving my grandmother and her sister orphans.
The solution is simple for all you privacy extremists (I'm not saying you're one, teaserX, but bear with me):
If you don't want to give out this information, then don't fly across international borders. Even better, go hide in a cabin in the mountains. Then you'll be safe from both the government and the flu.
If pandemics were common, there probably wouldn't be any of us around to post on slashdot. But the chances are very good that a virus will mutate to something that could pose a very real threat of a pandemic.
If this thing becomes transmitible to the common house cat, killing and eating birds in .
every city that has alley cats . We got ourselves a recipe for a bad situation
We'll be safe. When (if ever) do you think was the last time a slashdotter got any pussy?
I'm doing my best not to remember the whole situation with extensions pre-OS X, but it keeps coming up in different places.
Being an old fart who so desperately wants to be hip, I'm always checking out "what the young people are up to". Well, the latest craze among some of my young friends is this thing called Firefox. I think it's a browser, whatever that means.
And one of the coolest things about this Firefox thing is that you can install all these really great extensions, that, get this, EXTEND the capabilities of the browser. For instance, I can install a mozilla calendar extension. Now my browser is a CALENDAR!! And there's a google toolbar extension for, uh, using google tools.
Now, remembering my previous experience with system extensions, I took the cautious approach and only installed about nine or ten of these great extensions. It's like. . . drugs? . . . candy? . . . potato chips? You can't install just one! Of course I want to control iTunes from my browser. It's become such a pain to switch applications that honestly, I'd given up listening to music. OK, so I need to install Foxytunes. Oh, and now there are so many toolbars, that I need to install a toolbar manager extension. And so on.
I pray that Cassidy and Greene will come back from the dead with a Conflict Catcher for Firefox.
Uh, yeah. And you're able to install aqua on top of that and have OS X. Riiiiiiight.
Unfortunately, the idiocy goes beyond merely failing to secure one's computer. Social engineering is a major component of many gambits to get sensitive personal information. In other words, people are not only too stupid to secure their computers against malware, they willingly install it on their machines (spyware) and voluntarily give out their credit information (phishing sites).
Yes, we all know that the internet was invented on August 6, 1991. That's when we celebrate Intarweb Day across the word (wide web).
Gee, what's that sound? WHOOOSH!
Talk about overkill! Why couldn't you just have limited .gov sites just to allow oral sex?
=P
Keep your greppin' fingers to yourself!
How's that Windows XP beta been going? The OS X beta I've been involved with has been pretty good. We're up to 10.4.3b, and I'm confident we'll see an RC before the 10.5 beta comes out. =)
ooooooooh! I just pinged myself!
True, there is the question of where to draw the line, but some things are clearly porn. If you're not sure what I mean then visit this site, one of my favorites. That is clearly porn.
I think that your suggestion and the "porn port" ideas are not mutually exclusive. Together they could make a better solution than one by itself.
Also, I don't think that pornographers and their customers (I'm looking at you, Ohreally!) should mind having porn segregated into a "pron ghetto". It is a preventative defense against those who would seek to eliminate them entirely from the internet ("We're good netizens, we're doing our part").
But most of all, it would make it easier for me to find porn if it was all in one place. We just need to make such a move to a porn ghetto economically attractive to the pornographers as well as ethically attractive.
Isn't hyperbole like the national championship for kids with ADD? (Shamelessly stolen from bash.org)
Brain fart. Kensington.
And I was wrong and you're right. You had to install drivers, i.e., drag an extension into the extension folder and perhaps a control panel to the control panel. Which reminds me of one of the things that truly sucked about Macs before OS X. Extension conflicts. Remember having to reboot with a different extension set if you had been editing video and now wanted to play a game?
I had a tricked out mac with lots of extensions, and getting all the extensions to behave, even with a utility like conflict catcher, was a laborious and frustrating process.
In hindsight, System 7, OS 8 and OS 9 really sucked (at least in this area), although I didn't realize it at the time, and I'd rather forget about it now. Maybe this is why I currently really love the idea of Linux, but I honestly don't have the patience. And i don't really go for the many OS X tweaks and customizations available from third parties. Yeah, they're cool, some are quite clever, but I really just want to do some work in a (mostly) pleasant computing environment. I deleted Konfabulator after maybe a week, and Dashboard Widgets seem a bit superflous to me. But like I said, I know a lot of people that do like to trick out their macs, and there is cool stuff out there.
it is as if PickleWorld(TM) created a huge, terrifying banner equating pickle-theft with murder to be placed in their stores, but instead of putting it over the side-exit or whichever mode of exit is usually employed by the serial pickle-thief, they put it over the checkout where it can only be seen by paying customers!
Or as if, when ever you were about to bite into a juicy hamburger, you had to remove it from it's anti-pickle theft shrinkwrap barrier. Hold the pickles, already!
OK, crappy analogy compared to yours. But light years better than the tried and true computers:cars analogy.
And to the poster just above who asked for a torrent of the anti-piracy commercial: Dude, that cracked me up. You're a comic genius. We should replay that joke in irc and then submit it to bash.org. You'd be famous! =)
How about being able to quit your day job?
It's an old saw by now, but since Sony isn't there already (and they could've been, nearly), Jobs is willing to play that role. This will probably be a good thing for operating systems, as an aside.
Could have been, nearly, my eye! They could have been absolutely. Jobs offered Sony a partnership, but Sony turned it down. The Sony CEO later apologized to Sony investors (for missing the boat in general, I don't think the refusal of the Apple deal was mentioned specifically) and stepped down.
I think HP blew it, too, when they had a chance to particpate in their grasp. Remember the rebadged HP iPods? I think the rank and file of HP , because the iPod was Not Invented Here and was a factor in Carly Fiorina being forced out. At least it was a symptom of her never managing to fit into the HP corporate culture. What could HP have done with the iPod? I don't think Apple would have let them mess with the iPod itself, but HP could have put put time and resources into developing all manner of cool accessories. There are some really bright people at HP, and there is no telling where they could have taken this. And look how lucrative the iPod accessory market is now! What a missed opportunity, all because of a perverted sense of corporate pride and a CEO who couldn't steer the ship. The people working under Fiorina did the HP shareholders a grave disservice because they refused to ride anyone's coattails.
What did HP end up with? Higher margins on a tiny fraction of sales in the market for mp3 players. Hmmmmm. Sounds like Apple in the computer market, especially during the late 80s to mid 90s. And unfortunately for HP, I don't think Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard are going to come back and save the company. (OK, I exaggerate. HP is no where near as "beleaguered" as Apple was. Yet. )
It must have been another article in which I read this tidbit (I didn't R this particular FA), but they calculated it as 12 iTMS songs = 1 physical CD. Of course they could also be be calculating by dollar amount of sales.
That was in the past before their surprising discovery that iTMS could be highly profitable as it scaled up.
Also, you might have noticed that Steve Jobs, known primarily as a hype master, also downplays at times to suit whatever his diabolical strategy is. Exhibit #1 being the video iPod (or is it the iPod that incidentally also plays video?); Apple is still de-emphasizing that feature, insisting that it is first and foremost it is a music player. Not too long ago, Steve said that Apple wasn't interested in making a video iPod because he didn't think that it was what people wanted.
Around that time he mentioned making a computer with a built in toaster, because he was of the belief that most people eat toast. I immediately registered the domains ibread.com and itbs.com, but so far, no luck. Oh, well.
Another thing about Apple is that while they have a reputation for being on the cutting edge, introducing or incorporating new technologies (Firewire and USB being good examples), they often enter a market after others have pioneered the space (iPod). Also, while they have a reputation for being revolutionary, their improvements are often incremental. I think the reason for this is twofold. Obviously, the incremental model helps pump up sales for those who purchase the latest and greatest. It's perhaps the oldest trick in the tech marketing book, and Apple does it well. The other reason is that Apple engineers seem to take their time to polish a product and get the details right. It's the last 10% that's the most difficult and the most work, but Apple more often then not gets that 10% on any given feature. I'm thinking of two different products lines here: the laptops, which have continually added small touches (DVI out, backlit keyboards) even when the CPU upgrades were paltry, and the slow (and ongoing) evolution of the iMac into a media center.
Back a moment to the downplay strategy: I think the motivation at the time was to discourage others from starting up their own music stores. You'll remember that MS was going to stay out of that business, instead developing and selling the software/infrastructure to companies that wanted to open such stores. Which they did and still do, although probably not in the great numbers they'd hoped. Because Steve talked down the profit potential of selling music downloads.
Now, no doubt that the iPod is earning the lion's share of Apple's profit. But the iTMS is delivering a nice chunk of pocket change. Those pennies add up!
There were probably other considerations. I'm sure Steve didn't want to look foolish if iTMS flopped, so it was positioned as a way to sell iPods.
OK, this has turned out to be much more long winded than I had planned, so I'll stop, even though I'm feeling untypically insightful at the moment.
Yeah, that's only in Australia or if you get paid in pre WWII Marks.
Oh, and the Kottke Troll is famous, at least here on slashdot. Watch for it's many variations!
It's easy to spot. It starts out with the words "I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you [*] fanatics?"
The reason I made the mod_troll joke is that . . . well, surely you're aware that this is one of the major flamewar topics in the Mac/Windows war?
OK, I'm trying to overcome years and years of drug abuse and the consequent impaired memory, so bear with me.
I remember using a kingston 2 button trackball with my centris 650, circa 1993. That would be with some version of System 7 on it.
If I'm way off base here, please don't say, "you must be on drugs". Instead, say "you must have been on drugs". =)
OTOH, I am absolutely certain that I was using multibutton trackballs under OS 8 and 9 with a beige desktop G3 during the later 90s.