Wow Tim, that was quite a little rant. Have you ever been to India? (If not, I have some travel photos at...enjoy:-)
Those are great snapshots, Mark. They really change the substance of my argument. After all, a few vacation photos tell the whole story of India better than the many, many, many, resources that tell us that India is a third-world country.
India has one of the worst infant mortality rates on the planet, they have a sickening gap between rich and poor, they have high rates of diseases that are all but eradicated in the first world, and they have...suburbs in Bangalore.
The reality of the situation is very simple: labor in India is cheap because it is a very poor country. They have abysmal standards for public health, medicine and sanitation, and tens of thousands of people die every year from diseases that are completely preventable. International aid organizations funnel billions of dollars a year into the country to fight things like polio and malaria, and meanwhile, the Indian goverment spends massive amounts of money on technical education that benefits only a relative few members of the highest castes.
It would be easy for the USA to compete on cost of labor, if we allowed our infrastructure to degrade to match that of a third-world country. If we stopped filtering our water, treating our sewage, and housing our homeless (just in the poor regions, of course), we could save billions on taxes. Then, we could deny higher education to 2/3rds of our students, label them as "laborers" or "merchants" and tell them that they could never aspire to a higher standard of living, due to birthright. Think of the savings!
Yessir, we could make those changes, and we would almost certainly become internationally "competitive"...I wonder why we don't?
Grow the hell up....when you're starting your own company, you may find you can provide services at a lower cost if you base yourself out of India (or China, or...), and that's what you need to get into the market. And an Indian can write just as good LAMP or.NET code as anyone else.
And when you do realize this, I hope you remember to get some equity and a piece of the *rich cronies'* pie! And yeah, life's pretty good even in our part of the world.
If "your part of the world" is India, then yeah, I guess that life is pretty good for the few percent of you who happen to be in the highest social castes. And as long as we ignore your atrocious public health system, your incredibly high infant mortality rate, and your massive problems with pollution and poverty, then yeah, life in India is just peachy.
Skilled labor in is expensive in the US because we have a high standard of living. If we allowed our infant mortality to skyrocket, if we allowed hundreds of thousands of our citizens to suffer and die from malaria, tuberculosis, dysentery and other wasting diseases due to poor sanitation, and we allowed thousands more to suffer and die from diseases that we have been all but eradicated in the first world (such as polio), then yeah, we might be able to compete with Bangalore on price. But then, we also might have to give up on our university system, shit in our water supply, and otherwise pollute the hell out of our land, water and air. Sounds like a good deal to me!
If India spent half as much money caring for their poor and suffering as they do trying to suck white-collar jobs from the US, I might believe you when you tell me that people in your part of the world need "web services." But from my perspective, you need doctors and mosquito nets a hell of a lot more than you need.NET programmers.
PI (pronounced "pi," like the number) has 50 employees and is headquartered in Bangalore, India. Its 15 founding executives--whose ranks include nine Microsoft veterans--are strung around the globe, in Dubai; Florence, Italy; Dublin, Ireland; Paris; London; and Montreal.
Cute. Why bother outsourcing, when you can just build the company in India, and make your rich cronies richer, while they live the good live in first-world countries?
For once, I find myself hoping that Microsoft kicks a startup's ass in the marketplace....
Proxy studies and urban heat island effects cloud the results of all such studies.
Except for, you know...studies done on polar ice. Real problems with urban heat islands there.
Look, folks. We're clearly being astroturfed by someone. But no matter what your local Republican party shill tells you, there is no scientific dissent: global warming is caused by human-produced increases in CO2 in the earth's atmosphere.
"Also, there are so many different kinds of intelligence that an IQ test is pretty much meaningless. I've worked with plenty of people who had a very high IQ but were completely ineffective either because of psychological weirdnesses or because they couldn't focus enough to get anything done."
While I wouldn't go so far to say that the IQ test is meaningless, I agree that there are many different kinds of intelligence. That said, there are also a lot of people out there who aren't very bright (or at least, aren't geniuses), who latch onto every pseudo-scientific notion they can to convince themselves of their own "misunderstood" intelligence, regardless of the (often overwhelming) evidence to the contrary.
In my experience, these people are oddly prevalent at comic conferences, libertarian conventions and/.
I find it ironic that the article was summarized completely incorrectly, but only in a way that reinforces the thinking of the people most likely to interpret the article incorrectly.
"Read the article? Bah...I'm smart enough to skip that step...after all, that's why the teachers never liked me!"
Yeah. You're right. I guess I wouldn't be familiar with the "reality," considering that I'm nearly done with my PhD, I know dozens of employed and "employable" grad students, and I work on NIH-funded projects.
"All these increases are just going to employ a new crop of N faculty, who are going to spin off another unemployable 10*N grad students and postdocs. That is the problem that needs to be fixed, and the increases just push the problem out a little further."
Uhm...who told you that people who get NIH funding are unemployable? The NIH funds biomedical research. Biomedical technology is one of the hottest areas of growth in the US economy, aside from "Wal-Mart associate," and "McDonald's Fry Technician."
I mean, really. Use your brain. Basic economics tells you that people won't pursue degrees that take 8+ years to complete, if those degrees don't get them jobs. To say otherwise is to ignore the fundamental realities of free market capitalism that neo-conservatives use to justify everything in their twisted, dogmatic worldview.
"Other than Walmart, no one one else has the volume and pull to get the kind of deals Apple is getting. The DRM license fee, and branding, will help protect Apple from Wal*Mart."
You'd think so, but you'd be wrong.
The music industry hates the deal that Apple is getting. If Apple licensed their DRM to one store, they'd have to license it to all stores (in the US, anyway), and they would lose an enormous amount of leverage with the music industry. Suddenly the music industry could play stores against one another ("Sorry, Apple, but if you don't allow tracks to sell for more than 99 cents, we'll just sell through IndustryShill.com. Too bad!"), and we would probably see price increases.
In other words, the barriers here aren't solely technological, or even competitive. Apple has a very tenuous advantage over the music industry at the moment, and the record execs don't like it at all.
Anyone who works in a job that requires any kind of concentration (software development being the most obvious example) will, given the opportunity, enter a state of "flow" where they are wholly committed to the work they're doing.
Yeah, that's nice in theory. In practice, the people most dedicated to The Flow (tm), are the antisocial, uncooperative nitwits who hole themselves up in their offices for 8+ hours each day, only to turn out piles of un-reviewed, un-documented, poorly-specified crap (whether code or otherwise).
With no exceptions, the best tech workers I know are balanced, social people who prefer not to hole up in their offices. The best coding environment I ever worked in was a room of 6 developers, separated by bookshelves, with small break-out rooms available for truly private conversations. Of course, you do actually have to like your coworkers for a setup like that to work, but I digress....
"the kids who do these projects usually have CONNECTIONS. They didn't just waltz up to a university researcher with a proposal, and get to work in a "real lab". They probably knew someone who knew someone."
Damn straight. IAAS, and I can tell you with 99.5% confidence, that this is how it works. The kids you see at the Intel Talent Search with posters on quantum mechanics or stem cell propogation are probably smart, but almost certainly have parents in the physics and/or biology departments at a major research institution. If they don't, I can guarantee that they're either in a program designed to "expose" certain populations (read: minorities and women) to the sciences, or they're related someone who knows a university professor. It really bugs me, but I think that the Intel "Talent" Search tends to select for this, as much as any real difference in technical or intellectual skill.
If I had my druthers, science fair programs would prohibit projects which made use of any sort of funded scientific research program or materials. It just isn't fair to allow smart kids with inside access to dominate smart kids whose parents don't live in the Iveory Tower.
"The NSF's budget has increased every year during the Bush administration."
That's a totally meaningless statement. The NSF budget has increased almost every year since its inception, regardless of presidential administration.
"Oh yeah, and the NIH budget doubled[pdf] from 1999 to 2003. For several of those years, a man named George W. Bush was president."
Yeah, that's nice. Bush also added an entirely new research arm to the NIH (bioterrorism), capped NIH budget growth to 2.5% in 2004 and 2005, and is proposing a nearly 30% cut in NIH funding in 2006. He's a real friend to the sciences. But, hey...at least he dramatically increased funding for weapons development! Yay!
Seriously...you have to be either stupid or willfully ignorant to think that George Bush has done anything to help the sciences. And IAAS, so I know what I'm talking about.
...or instead, you could skip the gimmicks, and just buy a camera with a decent lens.
Something that opens up to f2.8, for starters. There are actually plenty non-SLR digitals out there that have decent lenses -- they just don't tend to be the pocket-sized pieces of wunderplastik that look like credit cards.
The irony of image stabilization, is that on most consumer-grade equipment (even in the SLR world) it makes a shitty lens into an average lens at a cost that would have bought you a good lens. But camera companies learned long ago that features are more important than function....
But I could swear that I've seen this guage on photo.net....I'm pretty sure that the "artist" only added the gimp logo and text to a pre-existing image (And they did a bad job of it, too!)
Fremont is a district of Seattle here. It is more so known for its eclectic people than marketplace
Actually, Fremont was known for its eclectic people. Now Fremont is known for its rich yuppies (many of whom probably work at Micro$oft), oh-so-trendy restaurants (someone needs to tell the Fremont folks that conveyor-belt sushi is the cheap stuff in Japan...) and its collection of frat-boy bars. The eclectic people have long since moved on to Ballard (rapidly gentrifying), and parts of south Seattle (ditto).
That said, I thought the code name was perfect -- what better name for a slightly-evil, glossily-commercial "marketplace," designed by suburban Micro$oft employees, than "fremont"?
I guess it makes sense. The more time you spend talking the less time you spend thinking.
Yow. That's a terrible generalization. I say this as an introvert.
There is no necessary correlation between quality of thought, and degree of introversion. And anecdotally, I know plenty of dense introverts, just as I know plenty of smart extroverts.
I realize that it's fashionable to for most of the slashdot crowd to label themselves as "introvert, with pride," but in practice, that kind of thought tends to be inflexible, and unhelpful. It's one thing to identify as an introvert, but it's quite another to assume that it's a superior way to think.
Personally, I've always wanted to be able to control my personality. And while I accept that I may never be able to change, it doesn't stop me from trying. Life is so...boring, otherwise.....
It's a dirty not-so-secret of the scientific establishment that lots of crap gets published in high-quality journals. Lots of great, insightful, interesting papers get rejected, too. Frequently, the success of a publication is about its sales value, more than its scientific value (not to mention who you know, who you are, and how much money you have).
I could go on and on about this, but it isn't worth the time. People are people everywhere, including scientists. If you do things that make people say "wow, cool hack," then it almost doesn't matter how difficult it was to do. Almost.
My personal favorite was the show where they built the toasting-and-buttering robot to test the myth that toast always falls butter-side down. They went through an enormous amount of work to generate lots of toasty data, and then didn't even bother with basic statistical analyses to see if their results were significant.
The same thing goes for their test of plants' response to music (debunked by nearly every 4th-grade science fair project since the dawn of 4th-grade science fairs), and a few other programs. Even a simple t-test or confidence interval analysis would help with these types of things....
"I would encourage you all not to focus on general themes of internet governance but instead go to the heart of the matter"
Okay.
Fascist states are pissed that they don't get to regulate the content on the internet, because it hinders their ability to feed their population piles of political bullshit.
What do I get? Is the problem solved yet?
Seriously. The only correct theme here is the "general" one -- freedom is linked to prosperity.
Human Death Fetish
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"The reason H5N1 is being followed so closely is because it's already spread to people and because it's incredibly lethal (a roughly 50% fatality rate at th moment)." ...maybe.
So far, fewer than 150 people worldwide have been infected with HN51. Many of those people were old and poor, and didn't have regular access to modern medical treatment. Estimating a human mortality rate from these cases is virtually impossible.
It's one thing to say that a flu pandemic is inevitable. But then, so are earthquakes, volcano eruptions, giant asteroids, and the heat death of the universe....
Given that those pillows resemble bags of cement (without the softness or warmth), I doubt that anything could live in them.
I just returned from a trip to Japan. The Japanese do many things well (public transport, food, bathing), but unfortunately, sleeping is not one of them. I'm pretty sure that "futon" means "aching back" in Japanese....
Unless you have specially treated paper, your prints are likely to fade and lose color to the oxidation process within 5 to 20 years. Whereas photo prints are typically guaranteed to retain their color for 100 years in moderate to indirect sunlight.
Wrong.
Older (dye-based) inkjet printers had fading problems, but more recent models use pigment-based inksets, and the resulting prints actually tend to exceed the longevity of traditional color prints.
The Epson Ultrachromes, for example, are Wilhelm rated for over 100 years in good display conditions, and over 200 years in dark storage.
So what do you want? A job or a career? How much do you want it?
I think that there is a deeper subtext to your post than you are emphasizing.
Look at your career: you earned a CS degree. You worked as an engineer. Then, you went to law school.
Granted, you don't tell us why you made that decision, and I'm not going to speculate. But I am going to generalize, and say that your story is becoming the norm, and not the exception. I know a huge number of people who have switched careers mid-track. And the funny thing is, I see a correlation with intelligence -- the smarter the person, the less satisfied they are with their first career.
Why is this the case? Who knows? But I think it's significant, and I think it speaks to the way that a student should treat his/her college education: Try things. Experiment. Learn ideas, not facts. Learn how to read. Learn how to write. Learn how to live.
I speak from some experience here -- I spent a huge amount of time as an undergraduate studying the technical, and very little time learning about books, music and culture. Today, I'm a technology burnout. I would much rather read, write, paint, draw, photograph or perform -- basically, anything but spend the rest of my life sitting in front of a computer. I wish I had done things differently.
Perhaps, had I balanced my education a bit better in college, I wouldn't be facing this problem today. Perhaps not. But either way, I would be much better prepared for the difficulties of life, had I spent a little less time treating college like a trade school for science and technology....
Slashdot Mirror
Wow Tim, that was quite a little rant. Have you ever been to India? (If not, I have some travel photos at...enjoy :-)
Those are great snapshots, Mark. They really change the substance of my argument. After all, a few vacation photos tell the whole story of India better than the many, many, many, resources that tell us that India is a third-world country.
India has one of the worst infant mortality rates on the planet, they have a sickening gap between rich and poor, they have high rates of diseases that are all but eradicated in the first world, and they have...suburbs in Bangalore.
The reality of the situation is very simple: labor in India is cheap because it is a very poor country. They have abysmal standards for public health, medicine and sanitation, and tens of thousands of people die every year from diseases that are completely preventable. International aid organizations funnel billions of dollars a year into the country to fight things like polio and malaria, and meanwhile, the Indian goverment spends massive amounts of money on technical education that benefits only a relative few members of the highest castes.
It would be easy for the USA to compete on cost of labor, if we allowed our infrastructure to degrade to match that of a third-world country. If we stopped filtering our water, treating our sewage, and housing our homeless (just in the poor regions, of course), we could save billions on taxes. Then, we could deny higher education to 2/3rds of our students, label them as "laborers" or "merchants" and tell them that they could never aspire to a higher standard of living, due to birthright. Think of the savings!
Yessir, we could make those changes, and we would almost certainly become internationally "competitive"...I wonder why we don't?
Grow the hell up....when you're starting your own company, you may find you can provide services at a lower cost if you base yourself out of India (or China, or ...), and that's what you need to get into the market. And an Indian can write just as good LAMP or .NET code as anyone else.
.NET programmers.
And when you do realize this, I hope you remember to get some equity and a piece of the *rich cronies'* pie! And yeah, life's pretty good even in our part of the world.
If "your part of the world" is India, then yeah, I guess that life is pretty good for the few percent of you who happen to be in the highest social castes. And as long as we ignore your atrocious public health system, your incredibly high infant mortality rate, and your massive problems with pollution and poverty, then yeah, life in India is just peachy.
Skilled labor in is expensive in the US because we have a high standard of living. If we allowed our infant mortality to skyrocket, if we allowed hundreds of thousands of our citizens to suffer and die from malaria, tuberculosis, dysentery and other wasting diseases due to poor sanitation, and we allowed thousands more to suffer and die from diseases that we have been all but eradicated in the first world (such as polio), then yeah, we might be able to compete with Bangalore on price. But then, we also might have to give up on our university system, shit in our water supply, and otherwise pollute the hell out of our land, water and air. Sounds like a good deal to me!
If India spent half as much money caring for their poor and suffering as they do trying to suck white-collar jobs from the US, I might believe you when you tell me that people in your part of the world need "web services." But from my perspective, you need doctors and mosquito nets a hell of a lot more than you need
From the article:
PI (pronounced "pi," like the number) has 50 employees and is headquartered in Bangalore, India. Its 15 founding executives--whose ranks include nine Microsoft veterans--are strung around the globe, in Dubai; Florence, Italy; Dublin, Ireland; Paris; London; and Montreal.
Cute. Why bother outsourcing, when you can just build the company in India, and make your rich cronies richer, while they live the good live in first-world countries?
For once, I find myself hoping that Microsoft kicks a startup's ass in the marketplace....
Proxy studies and urban heat island effects cloud the results of all such studies.
Except for, you know...studies done on polar ice. Real problems with urban heat islands there.
Look, folks. We're clearly being astroturfed by someone. But no matter what your local Republican party shill tells you, there is no scientific dissent: global warming is caused by human-produced increases in CO2 in the earth's atmosphere.
"Also, there are so many different kinds of intelligence that an IQ test is pretty much meaningless. I've worked with plenty of people who had a very high IQ but were completely ineffective either because of psychological weirdnesses or because they couldn't focus enough to get anything done."
/.
While I wouldn't go so far to say that the IQ test is meaningless, I agree that there are many different kinds of intelligence. That said, there are also a lot of people out there who aren't very bright (or at least, aren't geniuses), who latch onto every pseudo-scientific notion they can to convince themselves of their own "misunderstood" intelligence, regardless of the (often overwhelming) evidence to the contrary.
In my experience, these people are oddly prevalent at comic conferences, libertarian conventions and
I find it ironic that the article was summarized completely incorrectly, but only in a way that reinforces the thinking of the people most likely to interpret the article incorrectly.
"Read the article? Bah...I'm smart enough to skip that step...after all, that's why the teachers never liked me!"
Yeah. You're right. I guess I wouldn't be familiar with the "reality," considering that I'm nearly done with my PhD, I know dozens of employed and "employable" grad students, and I work on NIH-funded projects.
How silly of me!
"All these increases are just going to employ a new crop of N faculty, who are going to spin off another unemployable 10*N grad students and postdocs. That is the problem that needs to be fixed, and the increases just push the problem out a little further."
Uhm...who told you that people who get NIH funding are unemployable? The NIH funds biomedical research. Biomedical technology is one of the hottest areas of growth in the US economy, aside from "Wal-Mart associate," and "McDonald's Fry Technician."
I mean, really. Use your brain. Basic economics tells you that people won't pursue degrees that take 8+ years to complete, if those degrees don't get them jobs. To say otherwise is to ignore the fundamental realities of free market capitalism that neo-conservatives use to justify everything in their twisted, dogmatic worldview.
"Other than Walmart, no one one else has the volume and pull to get the kind of deals Apple is getting. The DRM license fee, and branding, will help protect Apple from Wal*Mart."
You'd think so, but you'd be wrong.
The music industry hates the deal that Apple is getting. If Apple licensed their DRM to one store, they'd have to license it to all stores (in the US, anyway), and they would lose an enormous amount of leverage with the music industry. Suddenly the music industry could play stores against one another ("Sorry, Apple, but if you don't allow tracks to sell for more than 99 cents, we'll just sell through IndustryShill.com. Too bad!"), and we would probably see price increases.
In other words, the barriers here aren't solely technological, or even competitive. Apple has a very tenuous advantage over the music industry at the moment, and the record execs don't like it at all.
Anyone who works in a job that requires any kind of concentration (software development being the most obvious example) will, given the opportunity, enter a state of "flow" where they are wholly committed to the work they're doing.
Yeah, that's nice in theory. In practice, the people most dedicated to The Flow (tm), are the antisocial, uncooperative nitwits who hole themselves up in their offices for 8+ hours each day, only to turn out piles of un-reviewed, un-documented, poorly-specified crap (whether code or otherwise).
With no exceptions, the best tech workers I know are balanced, social people who prefer not to hole up in their offices. The best coding environment I ever worked in was a room of 6 developers, separated by bookshelves, with small break-out rooms available for truly private conversations. Of course, you do actually have to like your coworkers for a setup like that to work, but I digress....
"the kids who do these projects usually have CONNECTIONS. They didn't just waltz up to a university researcher with a proposal, and get to work in a "real lab". They probably knew someone who knew someone."
Damn straight. IAAS, and I can tell you with 99.5% confidence, that this is how it works. The kids you see at the Intel Talent Search with posters on quantum mechanics or stem cell propogation are probably smart, but almost certainly have parents in the physics and/or biology departments at a major research institution. If they don't, I can guarantee that they're either in a program designed to "expose" certain populations (read: minorities and women) to the sciences, or they're related someone who knows a university professor. It really bugs me, but I think that the Intel "Talent" Search tends to select for this, as much as any real difference in technical or intellectual skill.
If I had my druthers, science fair programs would prohibit projects which made use of any sort of funded scientific research program or materials. It just isn't fair to allow smart kids with inside access to dominate smart kids whose parents don't live in the Iveory Tower.
"The NSF's budget has increased every year during the Bush administration."
That's a totally meaningless statement. The NSF budget has increased almost every year since its inception, regardless of presidential administration.
"Oh yeah, and the NIH budget doubled[pdf] from 1999 to 2003. For several of those years, a man named George W. Bush was president."
Yeah, that's nice. Bush also added an entirely new research arm to the NIH (bioterrorism), capped NIH budget growth to 2.5% in 2004 and 2005, and is proposing a nearly 30% cut in NIH funding in 2006. He's a real friend to the sciences. But, hey...at least he dramatically increased funding for weapons development! Yay!
Seriously...you have to be either stupid or willfully ignorant to think that George Bush has done anything to help the sciences. And IAAS, so I know what I'm talking about.
...or instead, you could skip the gimmicks, and just buy a camera with a decent lens.
Something that opens up to f2.8, for starters. There are actually plenty non-SLR digitals out there that have decent lenses -- they just don't tend to be the pocket-sized pieces of wunderplastik that look like credit cards.
The irony of image stabilization, is that on most consumer-grade equipment (even in the SLR world) it makes a shitty lens into an average lens at a cost that would have bought you a good lens. But camera companies learned long ago that features are more important than function....
But I could swear that I've seen this guage on photo.net....I'm pretty sure that the "artist" only added the gimp logo and text to a pre-existing image (And they did a bad job of it, too!)
Fremont is a district of Seattle here. It is more so known for its eclectic people than marketplace
Actually, Fremont was known for its eclectic people. Now Fremont is known for its rich yuppies (many of whom probably work at Micro$oft), oh-so-trendy restaurants (someone needs to tell the Fremont folks that conveyor-belt sushi is the cheap stuff in Japan...) and its collection of frat-boy bars. The eclectic people have long since moved on to Ballard (rapidly gentrifying), and parts of south Seattle (ditto).
That said, I thought the code name was perfect -- what better name for a slightly-evil, glossily-commercial "marketplace," designed by suburban Micro$oft employees, than "fremont"?
I guess it makes sense. The more time you spend talking the less time you spend thinking.
Yow. That's a terrible generalization. I say this as an introvert.
There is no necessary correlation between quality of thought, and degree of introversion. And anecdotally, I know plenty of dense introverts, just as I know plenty of smart extroverts.
I realize that it's fashionable to for most of the slashdot crowd to label themselves as "introvert, with pride," but in practice, that kind of thought tends to be inflexible, and unhelpful. It's one thing to identify as an introvert, but it's quite another to assume that it's a superior way to think.
Personally, I've always wanted to be able to control my personality. And while I accept that I may never be able to change, it doesn't stop me from trying. Life is so...boring, otherwise.....
It's a dirty not-so-secret of the scientific establishment that lots of crap gets published in high-quality journals. Lots of great, insightful, interesting papers get rejected, too. Frequently, the success of a publication is about its sales value, more than its scientific value (not to mention who you know, who you are, and how much money you have).
I could go on and on about this, but it isn't worth the time. People are people everywhere, including scientists. If you do things that make people say "wow, cool hack," then it almost doesn't matter how difficult it was to do. Almost.
My personal favorite was the show where they built the toasting-and-buttering robot to test the myth that toast always falls butter-side down. They went through an enormous amount of work to generate lots of toasty data, and then didn't even bother with basic statistical analyses to see if their results were significant.
The same thing goes for their test of plants' response to music (debunked by nearly every 4th-grade science fair project since the dawn of 4th-grade science fairs), and a few other programs. Even a simple t-test or confidence interval analysis would help with these types of things....
"I would encourage you all not to focus on general themes of internet governance but instead go to the heart of the matter"
Okay.
Fascist states are pissed that they don't get to regulate the content on the internet, because it hinders their ability to feed their population piles of political bullshit.
What do I get? Is the problem solved yet?
Seriously. The only correct theme here is the "general" one -- freedom is linked to prosperity.
"The reason H5N1 is being followed so closely is because it's already spread to people and because it's incredibly lethal (a roughly 50% fatality rate at th moment)." ...maybe.
So far, fewer than 150 people worldwide have been infected with HN51. Many of those people were old and poor, and didn't have regular access to modern medical treatment. Estimating a human mortality rate from these cases is virtually impossible.
It's one thing to say that a flu pandemic is inevitable. But then, so are earthquakes, volcano eruptions, giant asteroids, and the heat death of the universe....
Given that those pillows resemble bags of cement (without the softness or warmth), I doubt that anything could live in them.
I just returned from a trip to Japan. The Japanese do many things well (public transport, food, bathing), but unfortunately, sleeping is not one of them. I'm pretty sure that "futon" means "aching back" in Japanese....
Overstatement? Not really.
Walk into your nearest office store. Find the Epson C86. It is the lowest model Epson available, it uses Ultrachrome inks, and costs less than $100.
Unless you have specially treated paper, your prints are likely to fade and lose color to the oxidation process within 5 to 20 years. Whereas photo prints are typically guaranteed to retain their color for 100 years in moderate to indirect sunlight.
Wrong.
Older (dye-based) inkjet printers had fading problems, but more recent models use pigment-based inksets, and the resulting prints actually tend to exceed the longevity of traditional color prints.
The Epson Ultrachromes, for example, are Wilhelm rated for over 100 years in good display conditions, and over 200 years in dark storage.
So what do you want? A job or a career? How much do you want it?
I think that there is a deeper subtext to your post than you are emphasizing.
Look at your career: you earned a CS degree. You worked as an engineer. Then, you went to law school.
Granted, you don't tell us why you made that decision, and I'm not going to speculate. But I am going to generalize, and say that your story is becoming the norm, and not the exception. I know a huge number of people who have switched careers mid-track. And the funny thing is, I see a correlation with intelligence -- the smarter the person, the less satisfied they are with their first career.
Why is this the case? Who knows? But I think it's significant, and I think it speaks to the way that a student should treat his/her college education: Try things. Experiment. Learn ideas, not facts. Learn how to read. Learn how to write. Learn how to live.
I speak from some experience here -- I spent a huge amount of time as an undergraduate studying the technical, and very little time learning about books, music and culture. Today, I'm a technology burnout. I would much rather read, write, paint, draw, photograph or perform -- basically, anything but spend the rest of my life sitting in front of a computer. I wish I had done things differently.
Perhaps, had I balanced my education a bit better in college, I wouldn't be facing this problem today. Perhaps not. But either way, I would be much better prepared for the difficulties of life, had I spent a little less time treating college like a trade school for science and technology....
And how do they explain George Bush, Beanie Babies and the Crazy Frog?
Evolution optimizes for survival, nothing else. And unfortunately, in this country, there is a strong selective pressure against intelligence.
Sarcasm and "bling" on the other hand....