"Expensive when compared to the American dollar, but reasonably good value to an average Brit."
Ah, but the pisser is that we're Europeans now. Just the most heavily taxed and hard working Europeans. Okay, we log the most hours, then.
"I'm sure the 99 pence songs are seen the same way in the UK."
Not really. The state of the singles chart mean you can pick up a 3/4 track CD for 99p as it slides down the chart, and specifically speaking that comes to a tenner for ten tracks, which brings it in line with an over-the-counter CD purchase.
Albums tend to go for between 8.49 - 17.99, depending on the pusher and how badly you want the product. Asda (walmart) punts out it's overbuy at around 5, but those are the CDs that nobody wanted to buy.
There has been a significant price decrease in recent years, but this has led to the death of instore back catalogues, and a careful streaming of several hundred CDs to a selection based on the chart, whoseever chart that might be. That's what tends to fuel the 'music is shit' arguments you'll see mentioned.
Just to give some perspective, a new PS2 title starts at 39.99, and will fairly rapidly slide to 32.99 after they've raped the early adopters. Online sellers tend to start around 32.99 and can go as low as 24.99 before it hits 'platinum'. It's excessive, so I tend to read a lot of reviews before buying, and I'm early thirties, no kids or spouse.
'All numbers in this post should have GBP symbols in front of them'
"Whoopses. Sky over here in the UK is heavily plugging Jake 2.0 which is due to start in February.
Nothing like starting to watch a series which has already been canned!"
You mean like John Doe and Firefly?
We really have to find out who these executives are and point out that if you want something to get big, and I mean really big, you have to give the fanbase the opportunity to get interested, which means at least 1.5 seasons because they make such a hash of character development over the season long story arc.
I can see why they cancelled Farscape; it had lost it's way and was trying to provide bigger bangs on a consistent basis, but Firefly had some of the finest writing and characters that were believable...cancelling that was like stamping on a newly-emerged butterfly.
I can understand that networks need to make money, but given the current criterion for a 'successful' series, the original series of Star Trek would have been cancelled halfway through the first season.
Oh, and Enterprise showed promise for some elements of the third series, but the wholesale re-write of history for a new series has irked the fu** out of me. Not to mention the episode where someone suggested that they 'create some sort of prime directive'. Argh.
On the whole I'm not that worried about Enterprise; capitalising on Jolene Blalock's jugs as a method of securing ratings is even more course that introducing Seven of nine, who actually became a really good character without so many soft-focussed shots under the arm.
"There's no statute in the UK or US on what is cybersquatting, but judges have pretty much decided, and come up with good judgements."
You're muddling national legal statutes and the WIPO/NAF resolution organisations under UDRP, and they've been _getting better_. They've not been consistently 'good'.
Take for instance, Aimster. The ruling was that 'aim' stood for 'AOL Instant Messenger'. Curiously, there is precedence for it being a word, all on it's own as well, but that didn't stop the ruling in AOLs favour.
Professor Geist produced a report on the findings of the UDRP way back in 2001 PDF Here and although I know that it's gotten better, the situation back then was ludicrous...of course those were the days when a lot of people were overinflating the value of 'internet property', and 'cybersquatting' was the next great evil.
"However, in the case of Anand Mani, who is also known as A R Mani, he argued that his business had been running since 1981 and so had as much right to the name Armani."
Mani's case hinged on two aspects; that he was born A. R. Mani (Something he took great lengths to prove), and he had already asked for restitution to be made and permission to use another less contentious domain name. The found in favour of Mr Mani for as much those as to whether he was 'there first'.
The fundamental point of this all is that even stretching the bounds of confusing a domain with one that 'sounds like' and claiming brand dilution is a reach, even for Microsoft. As has been pointed out amusingly within this thread, Microsoft hasn't even attempted to register other similar sounding domains...so what's the gig?
"Everyone has their price, and it shouldn't be an act of "bad faith" to name it."
This comes down to the earliest examples of cybersquatting, and the daft tail-chasing of the law to try and appease celebrities and companies by handing over the domains if it can be proven that the registration in the first place was done for 'extortion' purposes. That lawyers have found a way to manipulate the law to their advantage is a testament to their sleaziness.
"It has basically nothing to do with the validity of the actual claim."
I'm consistently amazed by the occasional poster on slashdot that thinks this is the right course for them to take. There is an arbitration service (which has notoriously come down on the side of money, but this is a different matter) which nobody appears to have approached.
I feel that the more worrying aspect is that MS doesn't consider this to be a PR goof.
As was my reply, or you would've gotten hit with references.:oP
"Right now the UN is quite weak."
And it'll remain that way forever until they manage to decouple threats of trade tariffs and license revocations with votes.
"I'm of course playing off of people's fears that the UN will eventually become the "One World Govenment"."
I'm one of those that thinks that a single world government would be cool, given that we could get away from the systems that we currently have in place. Presently the UN is built from hundreds of weak nations and a couple of strong ones, the strong ones bullying the weaker ones into a consensus from both trade and military threats. And I'm not talking about the US. There's Russia, France, Germany, United Kingdom...
"I got modded up as insightful!"
Luck of the draw. Relax...bask in the warm, fuzzy glow.
"but don't microsoft *have* to enforce this to keep there trademark?"
No.
"While it might not be very nice of them"
They sent out a 25 page letter rather than put it through arbitration. Explain how it could've been nastier.
"I think politely asking him to hand over the domain was a reasonable request."
His refusal was also reasonable, he just made the mistake of falling into the trap of 'planning to make money from the domain sale'...but it's a domain that sounds a bit like the trademark. Tell me, should all domains that sound a bit like 'Bass' be handed over?
"With some companies *cough*RIAA*cough* the first thing you know about it is a $500,000 lawsuit."
Yup, and that's also wrong. You can't try and suggest that one is more reasonable than the other. Microsoft is using it's considerable muscle to lean on extremely small guys for nothing other than what appears to be bravado. How much money have they spent so far trying to get that domain? How much is it actually worth?
"It seems that the big catch here is that Mike made a $10,000 offer to Microsoft ('s lawyers?), and that single act essentially made their case that it was a bad-faith registration."
The point is that it's not really down to the lawyers to decide, and it's going to have a hell of an uphill struggle trying to explain that 'Mike Rowe' was trying to use his chance grouping of syllables in his own name in 'bad faith', although he might've shot himself in the foot by admitting that he'd already thought about it.
However, now I'm thinking about names to register because a $10 cheque from Microsoft would be worth framing.
"Of course, since we don't know who someone is, "Half-Life 2" could also be searching our hard drives for credit card numbers and PayPal logins while we amuse ourselves."
Damn those fiendish ex-communists. I hear the Reds in China are creating a version of Linux, too
Roll on the days when we can be sure our computers are safe, secure in the knowledge that root access is only ever used by Microsoft and some nice gentlemen at the DoD...
"For that matter if it was very contagious I would expect more cows to have it."
I'd repeat the crack I made above, but it wouldn't add anything. The main problem is testing for it. You have to look for;
a) The cow having problems standing.
b) A brain with a consistency of a sponge.
Both of those are a tad too late to stamp down on the milk/blood vectors without twatting the bloodline, which is essentially what happens.
"OTOH, considering how rare it is I wouldn't be surprized if many people are somewhat imune to it."
vCJD? I'd be very surprised. It's not a disease in the classic sense of the word; as you point out, Prions are somewhat outside the normal remit for virii and bacteria.
"Also very few animals have been infected in total."
Nah, can't let you have that one. The cull here was overbroad, but generally because of the lack of tests that can be made. We went for the slash'n'burn approach to be sure.
"There is some evidence that Wolfs cannot get it, though I don't know if it is proven or just appears that way."
I'd have to call a lack of data on that one; wild carnivores would be hard to track to the point of death...carcasses in the wild tend to be reduced very quickly by the food chain, so you'd be wise to start checking carrion eaters for prion-based disease rather than assume that there is a cross species barrier.
Seriously, SARS and respiratory diseases of that ilk are connected to avian flu and the close proximity of lots of humans that make the _slim_ chance of a disease getting a foothold in a human host that much larger.
In my opinion, SARS and vCJD are the warning shots from nature. These things have 'generations' that can be measured in days, and that's a hell of an evolutionary pace. To use the vernacular, we can't f*ck about with these things, or hope they go away because they won't.
However, I agree with you on the note of not panicking about it. The fallout from the 'flesh-eating' bug we had over here was horrendous, despite it being a media-driven expose of fairly normal Strep infections during surgery.
"Although there is no documentation of the transmission of prions to humans..."
I'd have to go check to see if there's any body of research that deals with other animals, because prions aren't species specific, which is why we have BSE ('Mad Cow'), Scrapie (in sheep) and Cruetzfeld-Jakob disease in humans. It's notoriously suspicious to start using 'in humans' as a caveat.
"This is why we don't take blood donations from people who spent time in England."
Stronger wording than the actuality;
"Because of the theoretical risk of vCJD transmission, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advises blood services not to receive blood from people who might have been exposed to the disease. This includes, among other groups, those who lived in the UK for 3 months or more between 1980 and 1996, people who received a blood transfusion in the UK anytime since 1980, and people who lived in Europe for 5 years or longer starting anytime since 1980." http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/hot/bse/n ews/dec1903blood.html
"I also heard on NPR yesterday that Mad Cow is often mistaken for Alzheimer's so Mad Cow deaths may be higher then we suspected."
That wouldn't surprise me, although pathology would immediately show the difference. One of the reasons why suspected cases in the UK are always sent through the pathologist.
The thing is that BSE crept up on us in the UK. We had cattle infected with BSE for the best part of fifteen years, which let to the pyres of curiously nice-smelling carcasses all over the place. 143 confirmed cases in that time, and bear in mind that the UK is actively looking is not a huge amount. However, the 'incubation' period can be a few years.
"can you truely die in most circumstances from eating meat on an infected cow?"
Depends whether you kill it first. Cows are terrible when pissed off.
The number of deaths from Cruetzfeld-Jacob disease in the UK remains low, even after some fancy footwork in terms of changing the goalposts with regard to the vector of the disease. BSE doesn't even begin to address the things that are coming across the tragically mythical 'species barrier'.
"I would definately say you will stand a high chance of infection if you eat the brain matter - but what about well-cooked portions of the regular meat?"
Prions are usually confined to the nervous system and brain, meaning that you should steer clear of those bits. There have been some notes of concern sounded by contamination of meat with spinal cord and brain matter, but the regs in the UK have been seriously 'beefed up'* since the great cull. Having said that, cross contamination is _going to happen_ in an abbatoir.
"but what about well-cooked portions of the regular meat?"
I _believe_ that prions survive the cooking process at roughly 200C, but you should check that with a more credible source than a poster on Slashdot. Cooking stuff well just tends to reduce the parasites that 'can' be in meat, although generally this is fairly rare.
"Is mad-cow a scare?"
Yes and no. It finally put the nail in the coffin of the really daft practice of feeding entrails to animals in the same and different species, and so far the risk factor _appears_ to be lower than bowel cancer, but it pays to be vigilant, especially if you have epidemeology (which isn't true in this case) or a multi-billion dollar industry connected with it.
Of course, US Beef doesn't enter the UK because of the vast amounts of 'safe' growth hormone pumped into it; that represents a bigger risk, IMO, that nobody has really gotten into.
Can someone confirm that the 400 cows slaughtered last week weren't actually buried according to news reports?
'cos if they had, you have a time bomb on your hands before the prions eventually reach the water-table, not to mention the long way up the food chain.
"But I'm incredibly uninterested in Manhunt, because it's...well, not a fun, entertaining game."
I've passed it by because it's a sneaker, and I don't find sneakers that much fun. A noticeable deviation from this taste question was Deus Ex, though.
Trying to sell a game on controversy, as this one was, is always a bit of a hit and miss affair, especially when we get jaded to the whole thing. Rotting corpses? Big deal. Chainsaws? Had those in Doom.
I suspect this is why 'The Sims' completely exploded without a machinegun in sight.
"It's absolutely impossible to create such a well-designed production at the length of your standard Adventure / RPG titles."
Two words: Half & Life.
Excuse my profanity, but f**k the game engine.
How good were some of the bits of humour? The surprises? The constant running into the suit guy? The tentacled thing at the bottom of the silo?
Seriously, although the ending was weak, the story had elements that could keep you chuckling and the occasional moments of suspense that were immersive. I have no idea how long it takes to run through, but I'll remember that game as a high point.
"If length of entertainment is what you prefer in games, you should probably be playing an MMORPG."
BT, DT, got conned into the expansions. I now refuse to play them because of the complete subsumption of the 'R' in 'RPG' into a scramble for levels/money/titles. I'm less interested in becoming uber as I am in development of the story. Deus Ex, Max Payne, Half Life all managed to break my dislike of the FPS genre enough to delight me with excellent (if derivative in places) story-telling.
"If not just for supporting the development of this type of quality title "
Perhaps we need an awards ceremony that means a damn?;o)
"At the very least rent it, because it may not be worth your money to you, but it's definitely worth your time."
Gah. I wish I had the money to lavish on every title that I thought was worth it; especially in terms of supporting the games industry beyond 'EA', but I'll take your recommendation as
read.
"No matter what technology you choose for the displays, I would suggest having a box of cleaning wipes near the screen - preferably the kind that have Clorox or some other strong antiseptic in them."
While a very good point, it's not that good an idea, as this is exactly the over-use of antiseptics that has led to the evolution of resistent bacterial and viral strains. The downside is I don't have a suggestion apart from reviving the old saw of 'washing your hands' when you come into contact with public areas.
I probably would, apart from the fact that I don't like platformers (yes, this is probably a horrible assumption) and apparently the total gameplay time is 10 hours. That's 3.90/hour at top retail prices, although they're bringing it down quite a lot because it's not been that well marketed.
True, although FreeBSD has had a lot more development time thrown at it recently with the upgrade to the 5.x kernel.
"It has very little commerical support for commodity hardware."
I suspect you mean that there aren't a lot of closed source drivers for hardware. The question then comes, do you really want a whole load of closed source drivers hanging around? To date, I think the most that Linux has got is Nvidia drivers and possibly some ADSL stuff. I *believe* that the Nvidia drivers run under Linux compat, but I've not checked, mainly because I don't really want my freebsd box to do that kind of thing.
"BSD has always been a geek os and will never reach the same popularity as Linux. Linux is everywhere."
Replace 'BSD' with Linux and 'Linux' with windows to see how fallacious this argument actually is. For shame.
"It is harder to install. You have to compile everything manually from a huge CVS respitory. It dosen't havge advanced Linux Packageing Systems such as APT, RPM, Portage, friendly GUI based autodectecting installers such as YaST, DrakX, Anaconda, etc."
The ports collection is not a CVS repository, and it's actually extremely easy to install FreeBSD. Open and NetBSD are completely different, however, and not for beginners.
Having said that, I've gotten on extremely well with the ports collection and CVS updates, although I don't class myself as anything approaching a hardcore geek.
"BSD is easy to make propreitery. You can take the code and make it propreitery. I can make Microsoft WinBSD XP and you can't do anything about it hahaha!"
Except ignore it. I fail to see your point here. Are you against freely available source code or the BSD license?
"It is not secure. People do not trust bsd to run it. Even OpenBSD, which claims to be "the securest OS ever made" runs on Solaris. They can make up excuses, but if you don't eat your own dog food, why should my Dog eat it?"
Nice, you picked out a good point there. Did you check the Freebsd or NetBSD servers? Did you not thing that not checking those out would drop you to the level of a troll? FWIW, Linux and FreeBSD tend to share the same security advisories.
"It has no support."
Au contraire. You can buy support, or avail yourself of the many newsgroups (ick), books or mailing lists without those dumbass kids trying to make you feel stupid. It's one reason why I'm really happy that FreeBSD stays under the radar compared with the religious wars over which 'distro is best'. I just can't abide this constant comparison with other OS's based on the 'whizzy' features that made Windows such a bloaty piece of crap.
FreeBSD does it's job, and it does it's job well according to my five odd years of using it.
"BSD are ex-linux geeks who coudn't take the fact that KDE and GNome made linux useable for the masses, so he ran and cried to his command line mistress!"
Ah, you're suggesting that the graphical user interface is the way forward? Have you considered windows 2003 server for your needs?
Slashdot Mirror
"Expensive when compared to the American dollar, but reasonably good value to an average Brit."
Ah, but the pisser is that we're Europeans now. Just the most heavily taxed and hard working Europeans. Okay, we log the most hours, then.
"I'm sure the 99 pence songs are seen the same way in the UK."
Not really. The state of the singles chart mean you can pick up a 3/4 track CD for 99p as it slides down the chart, and specifically speaking that comes to a tenner for ten tracks, which brings it in line with an over-the-counter CD purchase.
Albums tend to go for between 8.49 - 17.99, depending on the pusher and how badly you want the product. Asda (walmart) punts out it's overbuy at around 5, but those are the CDs that nobody wanted to buy.
There has been a significant price decrease in recent years, but this has led to the death of instore back catalogues, and a careful streaming of several hundred CDs to a selection based on the chart, whoseever chart that might be. That's what tends to fuel the 'music is shit' arguments you'll see mentioned.
Just to give some perspective, a new PS2 title starts at 39.99, and will fairly rapidly slide to 32.99 after they've raped the early adopters. Online sellers tend to start around 32.99 and can go as low as 24.99 before it hits 'platinum'. It's excessive, so I tend to read a lot of reviews before buying, and I'm early thirties, no kids or spouse.
'All numbers in this post should have GBP symbols in front of them'
"Whoopses. Sky over here in the UK is heavily plugging Jake 2.0 which is due to start in February.
Nothing like starting to watch a series which has already been canned!"
You mean like John Doe and Firefly?
We really have to find out who these executives are and point out that if you want something to get big, and I mean really big, you have to give the fanbase the opportunity to get interested, which means at least 1.5 seasons because they make such a hash of character development over the season long story arc.
I can see why they cancelled Farscape; it had lost it's way and was trying to provide bigger bangs on a consistent basis, but Firefly had some of the finest writing and characters that were believable...cancelling that was like stamping on a newly-emerged butterfly.
I can understand that networks need to make money, but given the current criterion for a 'successful' series, the original series of Star Trek would have been cancelled halfway through the first season.
Oh, and Enterprise showed promise for some elements of the third series, but the wholesale re-write of history for a new series has irked the fu** out of me. Not to mention the episode where someone suggested that they 'create some sort of prime directive'. Argh.
On the whole I'm not that worried about Enterprise; capitalising on Jolene Blalock's jugs as a method of securing ratings is even more course that introducing Seven of nine, who actually became a really good character without so many soft-focussed shots under the arm.
"There's no statute in the UK or US on what is cybersquatting, but judges have pretty much decided, and come up with good judgements."
You're muddling national legal statutes and the WIPO/NAF resolution organisations under UDRP, and they've been _getting better_. They've not been consistently 'good'.
Take for instance, Aimster. The ruling was that 'aim' stood for 'AOL Instant Messenger'. Curiously, there is precedence for it being a word, all on it's own as well, but that didn't stop the ruling in AOLs favour.
Professor Geist produced a report on the findings of the UDRP way back in 2001 PDF Here and although I know that it's gotten better, the situation back then was ludicrous...of course those were the days when a lot of people were overinflating the value of 'internet property', and 'cybersquatting' was the next great evil.
"However, in the case of Anand Mani, who is also known as A R Mani, he argued that his business had been running since 1981 and so had as much right to the name Armani."
Mani's case hinged on two aspects; that he was born A. R. Mani (Something he took great lengths to prove), and he had already asked for restitution to be made and permission to use another less contentious domain name. The found in favour of Mr Mani for as much those as to whether he was 'there first'.
The fundamental point of this all is that even stretching the bounds of confusing a domain with one that 'sounds like' and claiming brand dilution is a reach, even for Microsoft. As has been pointed out amusingly within this thread, Microsoft hasn't even attempted to register other similar sounding domains...so what's the gig?
"Oh? You mean like a trophy? And if Bill spat on you, what would you do with that?"
It's much better to not say something for fear of appearing an idiot rather than say something and remove all doubt.
Get back to me if you didn't understand that.
"Everyone has their price, and it shouldn't be an act of "bad faith" to name it."
This comes down to the earliest examples of cybersquatting, and the daft tail-chasing of the law to try and appease celebrities and companies by handing over the domains if it can be proven that the registration in the first place was done for 'extortion' purposes. That lawyers have found a way to manipulate the law to their advantage is a testament to their sleaziness.
"It has basically nothing to do with the validity of the actual claim."
I'm consistently amazed by the occasional poster on slashdot that thinks this is the right course for them to take. There is an arbitration service (which has notoriously come down on the side of money, but this is a different matter) which nobody appears to have approached.
I feel that the more worrying aspect is that MS doesn't consider this to be a PR goof.
"little mom-and-pop ice cream shop in Italy because the propriators (Mr. and Mrs. DiCaprio)..."
Actually a German Suntan shop and ice cream parlour run by Gerhard Bentrup
"It was a joke, lighten up!"
:oP
As was my reply, or you would've gotten hit with references.
"Right now the UN is quite weak."
And it'll remain that way forever until they manage to decouple threats of trade tariffs and license revocations with votes.
"I'm of course playing off of people's fears that the UN will eventually become the "One World Govenment"."
I'm one of those that thinks that a single world government would be cool, given that we could get away from the systems that we currently have in place. Presently the UN is built from hundreds of weak nations and a couple of strong ones, the strong ones bullying the weaker ones into a consensus from both trade and military threats. And I'm not talking about the US. There's Russia, France, Germany, United Kingdom...
"I got modded up as insightful!"
Luck of the draw. Relax...bask in the warm, fuzzy glow.
"but don't microsoft *have* to enforce this to keep there trademark?"
No.
"While it might not be very nice of them"
They sent out a 25 page letter rather than put it through arbitration. Explain how it could've been nastier.
"I think politely asking him to hand over the domain was a reasonable request."
His refusal was also reasonable, he just made the mistake of falling into the trap of 'planning to make money from the domain sale'...but it's a domain that sounds a bit like the trademark. Tell me, should all domains that sound a bit like 'Bass' be handed over?
"With some companies *cough*RIAA*cough* the first thing you know about it is a $500,000 lawsuit."
Yup, and that's also wrong. You can't try and suggest that one is more reasonable than the other. Microsoft is using it's considerable muscle to lean on extremely small guys for nothing other than what appears to be bravado. How much money have they spent so far trying to get that domain? How much is it actually worth?
"It seems that the big catch here is that Mike made a $10,000 offer to Microsoft ('s lawyers?), and that single act essentially made their case that it was a bad-faith registration."
The point is that it's not really down to the lawyers to decide, and it's going to have a hell of an uphill struggle trying to explain that 'Mike Rowe' was trying to use his chance grouping of syllables in his own name in 'bad faith', although he might've shot himself in the foot by admitting that he'd already thought about it.
However, now I'm thinking about names to register because a $10 cheque from Microsoft would be worth framing.
"Of course, since we don't know who someone is, "Half-Life 2" could also be searching our hard drives for credit card numbers and PayPal logins while we amuse ourselves."
Damn those fiendish ex-communists. I hear the Reds in China are creating a version of Linux, too
Roll on the days when we can be sure our computers are safe, secure in the knowledge that root access is only ever used by Microsoft and some nice gentlemen at the DoD...
"The UN"
...isn't building the largest fingerprint database on the planet as a condition of entering it's nations.
...hasn't been holding hundreds of people without charge because it can't decide whether it declared war on Afghanistan.
The UN may be many things, but the single world government it isn't. Imagine more a commitee of people that really loath each other...
" We were horrified at the implications and applications."
Now reread 'Ubik' by Phillip K Dick
"don't eat infected meat all togather"
Good thing they label it, huh?
"For that matter if it was very contagious I would expect more cows to have it."
I'd repeat the crack I made above, but it wouldn't add anything. The main problem is testing for it. You have to look for;
a) The cow having problems standing.
b) A brain with a consistency of a sponge.
Both of those are a tad too late to stamp down on the milk/blood vectors without twatting the bloodline, which is essentially what happens.
"OTOH, considering how rare it is I wouldn't be surprized if many people are somewhat imune to it."
vCJD? I'd be very surprised. It's not a disease in the classic sense of the word; as you point out, Prions are somewhat outside the normal remit for virii and bacteria.
"Also very few animals have been infected in total."
Nah, can't let you have that one. The cull here was overbroad, but generally because of the lack of tests that can be made. We went for the slash'n'burn approach to be sure.
"There is some evidence that Wolfs cannot get it, though I don't know if it is proven or just appears that way."
I'd have to call a lack of data on that one; wild carnivores would be hard to track to the point of death...carcasses in the wild tend to be reduced very quickly by the food chain, so you'd be wise to start checking carrion eaters for prion-based disease rather than assume that there is a cross species barrier.
Seriously, SARS and respiratory diseases of that ilk are connected to avian flu and the close proximity of lots of humans that make the _slim_ chance of a disease getting a foothold in a human host that much larger.
In my opinion, SARS and vCJD are the warning shots from nature. These things have 'generations' that can be measured in days, and that's a hell of an evolutionary pace. To use the vernacular, we can't f*ck about with these things, or hope they go away because they won't.
However, I agree with you on the note of not panicking about it. The fallout from the 'flesh-eating' bug we had over here was horrendous, despite it being a media-driven expose of fairly normal Strep infections during surgery.
"Although there is no documentation of the transmission of prions to humans..."
n ews/dec1903blood.html
I'd have to go check to see if there's any body of research that deals with other animals, because prions aren't species specific, which is why we have BSE ('Mad Cow'), Scrapie (in sheep) and Cruetzfeld-Jakob disease in humans. It's notoriously suspicious to start using 'in humans' as a caveat.
"This is why we don't take blood donations from people who spent time in England."
Stronger wording than the actuality;
"Because of the theoretical risk of vCJD transmission, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advises blood services not to receive blood from people who might have been exposed to the disease. This includes, among other groups, those who lived in the UK for 3 months or more between 1980 and 1996, people who received a blood transfusion in the UK anytime since 1980, and people who lived in Europe for 5 years or longer starting anytime since 1980."
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/hot/bse/
As an addendum, here's something from the UK Government - http://www.doh.gov.uk/cmo/vcjdstatement.pdf
"I also heard on NPR yesterday that Mad Cow is often mistaken for Alzheimer's so Mad Cow deaths may be higher then we suspected."
That wouldn't surprise me, although pathology would immediately show the difference. One of the reasons why suspected cases in the UK are always sent through the pathologist.
The thing is that BSE crept up on us in the UK. We had cattle infected with BSE for the best part of fifteen years, which let to the pyres of curiously nice-smelling carcasses all over the place. 143 confirmed cases in that time, and bear in mind that the UK is actively looking is not a huge amount. However, the 'incubation' period can be a few years.
"can you truely die in most circumstances from eating meat on an infected cow?"
Depends whether you kill it first. Cows are terrible when pissed off.
The number of deaths from Cruetzfeld-Jacob disease in the UK remains low, even after some fancy footwork in terms of changing the goalposts with regard to the vector of the disease. BSE doesn't even begin to address the things that are coming across the tragically mythical 'species barrier'.
"I would definately say you will stand a high chance of infection if you eat the brain matter - but what about well-cooked portions of the regular meat?"
Prions are usually confined to the nervous system and brain, meaning that you should steer clear of those bits. There have been some notes of concern sounded by contamination of meat with spinal cord and brain matter, but the regs in the UK have been seriously 'beefed up'* since the great cull. Having said that, cross contamination is _going to happen_ in an abbatoir.
"but what about well-cooked portions of the regular meat?"
I _believe_ that prions survive the cooking process at roughly 200C, but you should check that with a more credible source than a poster on Slashdot. Cooking stuff well just tends to reduce the parasites that 'can' be in meat, although generally this is fairly rare.
"Is mad-cow a scare?"
Yes and no. It finally put the nail in the coffin of the really daft practice of feeding entrails to animals in the same and different species, and so far the risk factor _appears_ to be lower than bowel cancer, but it pays to be vigilant, especially if you have epidemeology (which isn't true in this case) or a multi-billion dollar industry connected with it.
Of course, US Beef doesn't enter the UK because of the vast amounts of 'safe' growth hormone pumped into it; that represents a bigger risk, IMO, that nobody has really gotten into.
* Yeah, I'm really, really sorry.
Can someone confirm that the 400 cows slaughtered last week weren't actually buried according to news reports?
'cos if they had, you have a time bomb on your hands before the prions eventually reach the water-table, not to mention the long way up the food chain.
You have to incinerate the carcasses.
Do you need a hug or something?
"But I'm incredibly uninterested in Manhunt, because it's...well, not a fun, entertaining game."
I've passed it by because it's a sneaker, and I don't find sneakers that much fun. A noticeable deviation from this taste question was Deus Ex, though.
Trying to sell a game on controversy, as this one was, is always a bit of a hit and miss affair, especially when we get jaded to the whole thing. Rotting corpses? Big deal. Chainsaws? Had those in Doom.
I suspect this is why 'The Sims' completely exploded without a machinegun in sight.
"the joe averge buying for his kid are the real money earners."
Don't be daft. The game buying demographic hovers at low to mid 20s, and has done for a number of years.
I have a PS2 and I'll be getting an Xbox.
What did that do to your prediction?
"It's absolutely impossible to create such a well-designed production at the length of your standard Adventure / RPG titles."
Two words: Half & Life.
Excuse my profanity, but f**k the game engine.
How good were some of the bits of humour? The surprises? The constant running into the suit guy? The tentacled thing at the bottom of the silo?
Seriously, although the ending was weak, the story had elements that could keep you chuckling and the occasional moments of suspense that were immersive. I have no idea how long it takes to run through, but I'll remember that game as a high point.
"If length of entertainment is what you prefer in games, you should probably be playing an MMORPG."
;o)
BT, DT, got conned into the expansions. I now refuse to play them because of the complete subsumption of the 'R' in 'RPG' into a scramble for levels/money/titles. I'm less interested in becoming uber as I am in development of the story. Deus Ex, Max Payne, Half Life all managed to break my dislike of the FPS genre enough to delight me with excellent (if derivative in places) story-telling.
"If not just for supporting the development of this type of quality title "
Perhaps we need an awards ceremony that means a damn?
"At the very least rent it, because it may not be worth your money to you, but it's definitely worth your time."
Gah. I wish I had the money to lavish on every title that I thought was worth it; especially in terms of supporting the games industry beyond 'EA', but I'll take your recommendation as read.
"No matter what technology you choose for the displays, I would suggest having a box of cleaning wipes near the screen - preferably the kind that have Clorox or some other strong antiseptic in them."
While a very good point, it's not that good an idea, as this is exactly the over-use of antiseptics that has led to the evolution of resistent bacterial and viral strains. The downside is I don't have a suggestion apart from reviving the old saw of 'washing your hands' when you come into contact with public areas.
"Prince of Persia: Sands of Time"
I probably would, apart from the fact that I don't like platformers (yes, this is probably a horrible assumption) and apparently the total gameplay time is 10 hours. That's 3.90/hour at top retail prices, although they're bringing it down quite a lot because it's not been that well marketed.
"Try using the FreeBSD kernel with OpenBSD"
True, although FreeBSD has had a lot more development time thrown at it recently with the upgrade to the 5.x kernel.
"It has very little commerical support for commodity hardware."
I suspect you mean that there aren't a lot of closed source drivers for hardware. The question then comes, do you really want a whole load of closed source drivers hanging around? To date, I think the most that Linux has got is Nvidia drivers and possibly some ADSL stuff. I *believe* that the Nvidia drivers run under Linux compat, but I've not checked, mainly because I don't really want my freebsd box to do that kind of thing.
"BSD has always been a geek os and will never reach the same popularity as Linux. Linux is everywhere."
Replace 'BSD' with Linux and 'Linux' with windows to see how fallacious this argument actually is. For shame.
"It is harder to install. You have to compile everything manually from a huge CVS respitory. It dosen't havge advanced Linux Packageing Systems such as APT, RPM, Portage, friendly GUI based autodectecting installers such as YaST, DrakX, Anaconda, etc."
The ports collection is not a CVS repository, and it's actually extremely easy to install FreeBSD. Open and NetBSD are completely different, however, and not for beginners.
Having said that, I've gotten on extremely well with the ports collection and CVS updates, although I don't class myself as anything approaching a hardcore geek.
"BSD is easy to make propreitery. You can take the code and make it propreitery. I can make Microsoft WinBSD XP and you can't do anything about it hahaha!"
Except ignore it. I fail to see your point here. Are you against freely available source code or the BSD license?
"It is not secure. People do not trust bsd to run it. Even OpenBSD, which claims to be "the securest OS ever made" runs on Solaris. They can make up excuses, but if you don't eat your own dog food, why should my Dog eat it?"
Nice, you picked out a good point there. Did you check the Freebsd or NetBSD servers? Did you not thing that not checking those out would drop you to the level of a troll? FWIW, Linux and FreeBSD tend to share the same security advisories.
"It has no support."
Au contraire. You can buy support, or avail yourself of the many newsgroups (ick), books or mailing lists without those dumbass kids trying to make you feel stupid. It's one reason why I'm really happy that FreeBSD stays under the radar compared with the religious wars over which 'distro is best'. I just can't abide this constant comparison with other OS's based on the 'whizzy' features that made Windows such a bloaty piece of crap.
FreeBSD does it's job, and it does it's job well according to my five odd years of using it.
"BSD are ex-linux geeks who coudn't take the fact that KDE and GNome made linux useable for the masses, so he ran and cried to his command line mistress!"
Ah, you're suggesting that the graphical user interface is the way forward? Have you considered windows 2003 server for your needs?