I think it's good to be prepaired for a worst case senerio, but in all reality, any two flu strains could merge and create a super flu at any given time, and any two flu strains could merge and die at any given time. So I really don't think its worth panicing, nor posting on SlashDot.
This reminds me of that old joke: "It's alright, I've never had any serious accidents while driving." "You're only going to have one."
How easy? Simply infect themselves with it AND a normal influenza virus which is contagious. What is needed is a virus that is able to spread easily. Since they have already shown that they have no issue with their own death, it is likely that it will be done.
First of all, the possibility that a combination between the H5N1 and the "regular" influenza virus might combine in a new strain with the capabilities of both is just that, a possibility.
Second, biological warfare has always had one major flaw: viruses can't tell friend from foe. To them we're all just dumb, slow, cows to feed off.
If terrorists wanted to start a biological war they'd have had already done it. A human mind with a laboratory can produce something much more deadly than H5N1, which appared randomly in the wild. Why haven't they?
Although we have advanced technologically since the last serious epidemic and are able to communicate effectively allowing people to take precautions, there exists one serious difference between modern Western society and previous. Our ultra clean lifestyles of the last 50 years or so mean our imune systems have not faced the daily bacteria count of previous generations. While we may appear healthier and wealthier, are we really as robust?
VIRUS IS NOT BACTERIA. Viruses are always, constantly, wildly mutating, always have, always will be. The viruses out there today are not the same that roamed the land 50 years ago. As a result, our immune systems are not adapted to what our grandpa's was.
It makes NO difference how "tough" you are. We're talking about an unexpected random mutation producing a particularly deadly virus. It can happen anytime. Sometimes, quite seldom, thank God, other factors appear which make it even more dangerous, such as ability to spread using wildlife.
The interesting thing, for me, is not this fact. This has been known for decades. No, the truly interesting fact is that despite all our knowledge, the solution is still hampered by our economic models and by good old greed.
I call bull on the bird flu hype. It's likely this disease has been around for a much longer time that it has been fashionable to run frantic news reports on it.
And your credentials as an authority on this are...
When I see goverments concerned with carrying pencils in airplanes is one thing. When I see them concerned with migratory birds passing a deadly virus, it's another.
Can you comprehend the difference or should we draw a picture? Hint: ulterior motive. What would be the motive for spreading panic all over the world? This case is quite different from the terrorist hype.
Also, with migratory ducks and swallows (of the laden variety), we're going to see this all over europe in the coming weeks.
Which raises the question: why is EU stopping poultry meat imports from affected countries? The poultry farms that do exports (as opposed to the local farmers who raise for their own use) usually raise the birds in enclosed facilities, so the contact with wildlife is null.
Is is a move to please nevrotic EU population? Is is a distrust message for the capability of the affected countries to deal with this outbreak? (Incidentally, the countries in that area -- Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey -- aren't EU members).
Maybe not so much. How about the prospected merger of AOL and Microsoft's Internet divisions? Once MSN and AOL Internet are one, won't that effectively bring ICQ in the same boat that MSN and Yahoo Messengers are getting into?
Next step would be a tight lock on the protocols, so those Linux bastards can't follow it anymore. Not that any of the major players (MSN, ICQ, Y!) has tried to keep Linux clients up to date recently, but at least they had stopped the "break it, fix it" chase with Gaim and Trillian.
You could say that this will throw people into the arms of Google Talk, just like lack of Internet Explorer on Linux lead to the rise of Mozilla & Firefox. But these aren't browsers, they're messengers. I reckon a much more realistic reaction would be "What, Linux doesn't have ANY of the cool messengers? Screw that."
The only thing I really miss from Opera is "paste and go".
While not exactly identical, here are a couple of suggestions for Firefox:
1) Control-L will select the address in the location bar. Just paste to replace it, then push Enter or Go.
2) Install the Diggler extension. It adds a button for the toolbar which you can use to quickly erase it. This way you can rely more on the mouse.
3) In Linux, if you activate middlemouse.contentLoadURL and middlemouse.paste in about:config, you can simply select an URL (a la mIRC) then middle click on a page and it goes to it. There's also middlemouse.openNewWindow if you want it.
Unfortunately, thats the way Slack best worked for me. Install everything but the Y "disk set" (games), and for all updates, upgrades, custom installs, etc. compile from source and target/opt/packagename-version. When new Slack releases came out, back up/etc real quick and follow the instructions on the disc. Went from 7.0 up to 9.1 that way.
Now I've gotten lazy and just use Debian.
"Lazy?" Dude, no offence, but don't you mean "sane"? What kind of horrific upgrade policy is that to wipe everything but/etc and recompile a distribution-load of packages?
And people say Gentoo is wasteful... at least Gentoo has an organized system in place that takes care of dependencies, maximizes chances of compilation success and is as ergonomical as it can be, given the circumstances.
*shakes head* If you want "upgrades" (as oposed to "reinstalls") then for goodness sake, at least have a system in place that calculates the minimum amount of packages that need to change.
Now if they produced shows that didn't SUCK I might give a shit.
Apparently all those people downloading episodes of Rome seem to think it's worth something. If the show was really crappy nobody would care that HBO is poisoning torrents that nobody cares about, and we wouldn't be discussing this.
And you know what I find even more worrisome? IIRC, software licensed as GPL v2 includes a notice saying "either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version". It was all very nice for as long as there wasn't any later version, or it was assumed that a later version would automatically be better and desirable. But how does this work out if the presumption fails? What happens if I've published my code under v2 and the users everywhere decide to apply v3 to it? What if I don't find v3 particularly appealing?
Actually, what REALLY bugs me is how they pronounce all the Japanese names as if they were English. It kills all the joy in your soul. It leaves the impresion they're little kids monkeying around trying to pronounce foreign stuff, or that they're being ironic.
The second all-time issue is the choice of voices, and I'm glad to see CPM letting the public decide for once. In most of the English dubs, girls sound either like horny skanks or high-pitched and annoying, while all the boys and men regardless of age or anything have deep, rough, powerful voices. It can completely change a character's personality and piss you off completely.
If she can use Word, she can use LyX.
Ouch. You're kidding, right? As someone else said above, WYSIWYG is important for non-technical users, hell, it's essential. vi, LaTeX, even Lyx, break that fundamental concept of seeing the real thing instantly, as you create it, instead of having to take a mental leap and imagine how it will come out later. As sorry as it seems, not all people are capable of this kind of mental gymnastics.
Will I be moderated as troll if I mention all the times that my "Linux" froze due to bad NVidia drivers, or some other cases of faulty software or drives? True, it didn't "crash", but as an end user, it didn't exactly made me extatic. I suppose some may reply that it's the hardware manufacturer's fault for not opening up their driver specs, and perhaps it is so, but look, what a novel idea, what if it's the same for Windows too? Saying just "Linux" or "Windows" when there are lots more things that affect how your machine runs seems a tad childish. I don't want to give more examples because it would just burst into flames, but think back and if you can honestly say you've never ever had trouble with "Linux" then you must have someone else taking care of your computer for you...
Why has the parent been modded Troll? It makes some damn valid points. Perhaps I don't agree with all of them, but DS9 damn sure was BORING. It had a static setting and didn't do anything to change it.
Stargate SG1 had a lot of fans screaming for Michael Shanks to be brought back on the show. I know, not quite the same, but the point is that there have been other shows about which fans have been very vocal.
All the toolbars are completely customizable. It is far more customizable than Firefox (at least, without developing your own skin).
Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Try moving the bookmarks to another toolbar, using only the GUI. With Firefox it's a simple drag & drop. Everything you see in Firefox, short of the menu and the tabs, the user can modify via right click/Customize/drag-and-drop. Both browsers have more powerful capabilities if you start messing with.ini and chrome.css files, but I'm talking about average Joe here.
Opera also has some kind of drag and drop customization, but it lacks in various aspects. You need to open a separate preferences window which can go over the very thing you try to see. It also can't remove buttons by drag and drop, only add them; that's a major design flaw IMHO -- the user added it via drag and drop, they'll expect it to work the other way too.
In Opera's defense, there are a lot more buttons, by default, available. It just bugs me that they still have usability problems in dealing with an otherwise powerful interface.
And yet they've managed to stay in business for the past ten years. Maybe people are willing to pay for quality software even if there's a cheaper alternative.
Even if it's the same thing, only beer-free?
It's unfortunate that Opera has to go free. They have a great product. They're just in the wrong market. Here's hoping that they don't suffer the same fate as Netscape.
They'd have to be taken seriously, as a dangerous competitor, for that to happen. Not yet there.
[...]Will they ever collect so much as one red cent from an 8 year old? Would they ever collect a red cent from a single mother on welfare?[...]
I think the answer is they don't care. As mentioned on p2pnet, it's a marketing campain. A godawful publicity stunt, designed to frighten individuals. The system allows them to beat most of their victims into submission and collect around $3,500 from each of them. And the rest of the public sees this and cowers in fear.
Isn't it great? They get renowned as bullies and make a quick buck in the process. These tactics, tested by street thugs before, still hold true and work flawlessly. Hooray.
The few victims that are too poor to pay up are insignificant for them. They get trampled all over, hold the headlines for a few days, and perhaps at some point the corporate lawyers will care enough to pull the suits. Or not. As I said, their take is that these small unfortunate roadkills are not relevant enough in the great scheme to give a second thought to.
Slashdot Mirror
Can we stop using AIDS and HIV interchangeably? (Yeah, I'm linking to Wikipedia, shoot me.)
I think it's good to be prepaired for a worst case senerio, but in all reality, any two flu strains could merge and create a super flu at any given time, and any two flu strains could merge and die at any given time. So I really don't think its worth panicing, nor posting on SlashDot.
This reminds me of that old joke:
"It's alright, I've never had any serious accidents while driving."
"You're only going to have one."
How easy? Simply infect themselves with it AND a normal influenza virus which is contagious. What is needed is a virus that is able to spread easily. Since they have already shown that they have no issue with their own death, it is likely that it will be done.
First of all, the possibility that a combination between the H5N1 and the "regular" influenza virus might combine in a new strain with the capabilities of both is just that, a possibility.
Second, biological warfare has always had one major flaw: viruses can't tell friend from foe. To them we're all just dumb, slow, cows to feed off.
If terrorists wanted to start a biological war they'd have had already done it. A human mind with a laboratory can produce something much more deadly than H5N1, which appared randomly in the wild. Why haven't they?
Although we have advanced technologically since the last serious epidemic and are able to communicate effectively allowing people to take precautions, there exists one serious difference between modern Western society and previous. Our ultra clean lifestyles of the last 50 years or so mean our imune systems have not faced the daily bacteria count of previous generations. While we may appear healthier and wealthier, are we really as robust?
VIRUS IS NOT BACTERIA. Viruses are always, constantly, wildly mutating, always have, always will be. The viruses out there today are not the same that roamed the land 50 years ago. As a result, our immune systems are not adapted to what our grandpa's was.
It makes NO difference how "tough" you are. We're talking about an unexpected random mutation producing a particularly deadly virus. It can happen anytime. Sometimes, quite seldom, thank God, other factors appear which make it even more dangerous, such as ability to spread using wildlife.
The interesting thing, for me, is not this fact. This has been known for decades. No, the truly interesting fact is that despite all our knowledge, the solution is still hampered by our economic models and by good old greed.
I call bull on the bird flu hype. It's likely this disease has been around for a much longer time that it has been fashionable to run frantic news reports on it.
And your credentials as an authority on this are...
When I see goverments concerned with carrying pencils in airplanes is one thing. When I see them concerned with migratory birds passing a deadly virus, it's another.
Can you comprehend the difference or should we draw a picture? Hint: ulterior motive. What would be the motive for spreading panic all over the world? This case is quite different from the terrorist hype.
Also, with migratory ducks and swallows (of the laden variety), we're going to see this all over europe in the coming weeks.
Which raises the question: why is EU stopping poultry meat imports from affected countries? The poultry farms that do exports (as opposed to the local farmers who raise for their own use) usually raise the birds in enclosed facilities, so the contact with wildlife is null.
Is is a move to please nevrotic EU population? Is is a distrust message for the capability of the affected countries to deal with this outbreak? (Incidentally, the countries in that area -- Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey -- aren't EU members).
Maybe not so much. How about the prospected merger of AOL and Microsoft's Internet divisions? Once MSN and AOL Internet are one, won't that effectively bring ICQ in the same boat that MSN and Yahoo Messengers are getting into?
Next step would be a tight lock on the protocols, so those Linux bastards can't follow it anymore. Not that any of the major players (MSN, ICQ, Y!) has tried to keep Linux clients up to date recently, but at least they had stopped the "break it, fix it" chase with Gaim and Trillian.
You could say that this will throw people into the arms of Google Talk, just like lack of Internet Explorer on Linux lead to the rise of Mozilla & Firefox. But these aren't browsers, they're messengers. I reckon a much more realistic reaction would be "What, Linux doesn't have ANY of the cool messengers? Screw that."
...our new user interface overlords.
Oh wait. It's not 1979 anymore. Let me see... 2005 minus 1979 is 26... it's obviously the 26th aniversary of Lisa that makes this news-worthy, right?
The only thing I really miss from Opera is "paste and go".
While not exactly identical, here are a couple of suggestions for Firefox:
1) Control-L will select the address in the location bar. Just paste to replace it, then push Enter or Go.
2) Install the Diggler extension. It adds a button for the toolbar which you can use to quickly erase it. This way you can rely more on the mouse.
3) In Linux, if you activate middlemouse.contentLoadURL and middlemouse.paste in about:config, you can simply select an URL (a la mIRC) then middle click on a page and it goes to it. There's also middlemouse.openNewWindow if you want it.
Unfortunately, thats the way Slack best worked for me. Install everything but the Y "disk set" (games), and for all updates, upgrades, custom installs, etc. compile from source and target /opt/packagename-version. When new Slack releases came out, back up /etc real quick and follow the instructions on the disc. Went from 7.0 up to 9.1 that way.
/etc and recompile a distribution-load of packages?
Now I've gotten lazy and just use Debian.
"Lazy?" Dude, no offence, but don't you mean "sane"? What kind of horrific upgrade policy is that to wipe everything but
And people say Gentoo is wasteful... at least Gentoo has an organized system in place that takes care of dependencies, maximizes chances of compilation success and is as ergonomical as it can be, given the circumstances.
*shakes head* If you want "upgrades" (as oposed to "reinstalls") then for goodness sake, at least have a system in place that calculates the minimum amount of packages that need to change.
We have forgotten what these rules, layed down by father of robotics over half a decade ago.
Why is Asimov dubbed "the father of robotics" anyway? He was a biochemist who wrote stories about robots. SciFi, granted, but still.
Now if they produced shows that didn't SUCK I might give a shit.
Apparently all those people downloading episodes of Rome seem to think it's worth something. If the show was really crappy nobody would care that HBO is poisoning torrents that nobody cares about, and we wouldn't be discussing this.
And you know what I find even more worrisome? IIRC, software licensed as GPL v2 includes a notice saying "either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version". It was all very nice for as long as there wasn't any later version, or it was assumed that a later version would automatically be better and desirable. But how does this work out if the presumption fails? What happens if I've published my code under v2 and the users everywhere decide to apply v3 to it? What if I don't find v3 particularly appealing?
Actually, what REALLY bugs me is how they pronounce all the Japanese names as if they were English. It kills all the joy in your soul. It leaves the impresion they're little kids monkeying around trying to pronounce foreign stuff, or that they're being ironic.
The second all-time issue is the choice of voices, and I'm glad to see CPM letting the public decide for once. In most of the English dubs, girls sound either like horny skanks or high-pitched and annoying, while all the boys and men regardless of age or anything have deep, rough, powerful voices. It can completely change a character's personality and piss you off completely.
If she can use Word, she can use LyX. Ouch. You're kidding, right? As someone else said above, WYSIWYG is important for non-technical users, hell, it's essential. vi, LaTeX, even Lyx, break that fundamental concept of seeing the real thing instantly, as you create it, instead of having to take a mental leap and imagine how it will come out later. As sorry as it seems, not all people are capable of this kind of mental gymnastics.
Will I be moderated as troll if I mention all the times that my "Linux" froze due to bad NVidia drivers, or some other cases of faulty software or drives? True, it didn't "crash", but as an end user, it didn't exactly made me extatic. I suppose some may reply that it's the hardware manufacturer's fault for not opening up their driver specs, and perhaps it is so, but look, what a novel idea, what if it's the same for Windows too? Saying just "Linux" or "Windows" when there are lots more things that affect how your machine runs seems a tad childish. I don't want to give more examples because it would just burst into flames, but think back and if you can honestly say you've never ever had trouble with "Linux" then you must have someone else taking care of your computer for you...
Why has the parent been modded Troll? It makes some damn valid points. Perhaps I don't agree with all of them, but DS9 damn sure was BORING. It had a static setting and didn't do anything to change it.
Stargate SG1 had a lot of fans screaming for Michael Shanks to be brought back on the show. I know, not quite the same, but the point is that there have been other shows about which fans have been very vocal.
They left out SeaQuest too. I can't quite believe that SeaQuest wouldn't make a top50 of SciFi series.
What do you have, a horoscope site? :)
It's a corporate site, actually, for a company selling ERP software. I repeat, 98% IE usage. Worried yet?
Only one website's logs makes for lousy overall statistics. I have logs which show IE at 98%. So what?
All the toolbars are completely customizable. It is far more customizable than Firefox (at least, without developing your own skin).
.ini and chrome.css files, but I'm talking about average Joe here.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Try moving the bookmarks to another toolbar, using only the GUI. With Firefox it's a simple drag & drop. Everything you see in Firefox, short of the menu and the tabs, the user can modify via right click/Customize/drag-and-drop. Both browsers have more powerful capabilities if you start messing with
Opera also has some kind of drag and drop customization, but it lacks in various aspects. You need to open a separate preferences window which can go over the very thing you try to see. It also can't remove buttons by drag and drop, only add them; that's a major design flaw IMHO -- the user added it via drag and drop, they'll expect it to work the other way too.
In Opera's defense, there are a lot more buttons, by default, available. It just bugs me that they still have usability problems in dealing with an otherwise powerful interface.
And yet they've managed to stay in business for the past ten years. Maybe people are willing to pay for quality software even if there's a cheaper alternative. Even if it's the same thing, only beer-free?
It's unfortunate that Opera has to go free. They have a great product. They're just in the wrong market. Here's hoping that they don't suffer the same fate as Netscape.
They'd have to be taken seriously, as a dangerous competitor, for that to happen. Not yet there.
[...]Will they ever collect so much as one red cent from an 8 year old? Would they ever collect a red cent from a single mother on welfare?[...]
I think the answer is they don't care. As mentioned on p2pnet, it's a marketing campain. A godawful publicity stunt, designed to frighten individuals. The system allows them to beat most of their victims into submission and collect around $3,500 from each of them. And the rest of the public sees this and cowers in fear.
Isn't it great? They get renowned as bullies and make a quick buck in the process. These tactics, tested by street thugs before, still hold true and work flawlessly. Hooray.
The few victims that are too poor to pay up are insignificant for them. They get trampled all over, hold the headlines for a few days, and perhaps at some point the corporate lawyers will care enough to pull the suits. Or not. As I said, their take is that these small unfortunate roadkills are not relevant enough in the great scheme to give a second thought to.