It's completely unclear the BD-R optical discs consumers can get their hands on are superior, let alone more durable. CMC seems to currently be the least worst manufacturer, all the higher quality manufacturers have stopped making them, and they're obviously not highly trusted because of their history with previous generations of optical media.
For DVDs, I'd go with MAM-A, silver or gold, ditto CD-Rs, which I trust a lot more than DVD recordable media, since pressed DVDs pushed red laser CD technology as far as possible. (Taiyo Yuden exited the optical disc market in 2015, selling their stuff to CMC.) Therefore not going to calculate their costs, especially since their small capacity will start to really affect your off-site storage costs, unless you can stash them with friends or family, and trust them to keep the environment in which they're stored within the requirements (both tape and optical discs are picky here, that's the one advantage hard disks have over them.
Now we get to capacities, if you're going for low costs, single layer is where it's at, 25GB for BD-R, 4.7GB for DVD-R. Compare to 800GB native for LTO-4 tape, back when they were not ancient you could get new high quality Fujifilm ones for ~$22 in lots of 20, I now see a price of $14.70. I see today that Newegg is selling LTO-5 1.5TB native quantity 1 at $23, LTO-6 2.5TB native at $32, and LTO-7 6TB native at $82 (that's less than $1/TB more expensive than LTO-6), and a quick check at Amazon shows their LTO-6 and -7 prices are not competitive, even before we get into quantity discounts, which are the standard way to buy tape.
Comparing my first purchase of 25 Verbatim 25GB BD-Rs just this month from Amazon, to a quantity 20 price from a 3rd party I trust, Malelo and Company, for LTO-6 tape, we're talking $0.0352/GB vs. $0.0105/GB. LTO-5 weights in at $0.013/GB and LTO-4 at $0.0184. And I trust tape from Fujifilm infinitely more than I trust BD-Rs from CMC. Ah, Verbatim at quantity 50 BD-Rs only gets you down to $0.0306/GB.
If you're a prosumer like myself, who's been personally using magnetic tape since the late 1970s, you don't buy the very latest generation of LTO, you go back one or more generations. If you're good at scrounging, you should be able to get a tape drive with a lot of life for $1,000 or less, as I did in 2011 for a new HP LTO-4 drive which I'm still using, when LTO-5 was the new hotness. Today, without going to any real effort, I could buy a new LTO-5 drive from Newegg for $1,700.
A SAS controller is pretty cheap, ones based on the LSI200x chip particularly so right now. If you're patient, you only need a buffer device to avoid shoe-shining your tapes, rather than a fast RAID array. That is, you have your backup software write a 10GiB or so file at a time (probably ought to be larger for the newer LTO generations), and then stream it to the tape drive in one go. I use a Cheetah 15K drive right now, a DRAM tmp file would suffice, you can also scrounge higher end used but not used up Intel DC for enterprise datacenter 2.5 inch drives that were presumably taken out of service because their "small" capacity could no longer be justified.
All in all its quite practical, you have to do the math, including safe deposit box rental or whatever you choose for your offsite storage, and see if it makes sense compared to cloud vendors. Or you might not trust them to exclusively do your offsite backups, tape gives you a level of control you don't get from them.
When MIT was trialing 6.01, the first half of their replacement for 6.001-4, the first being the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs "Wizzard Book" course, this one using Python to drive robots, the official course material included a link to Wikipedia on differential equations, since it was quite possible people taking the course hadn't studied them in sufficient detail by the time this was needed in the course.
Guess you don't think IBM's CPUs are good, since both their z Systems (mainframes) and POWER architectures are also vulnerable to Meltdown (well, they're very expensive...). As well as ARM's latest out-of-order design.
Of all the surviving high performance CPU design families, only AMD escaped this mistake. But not a lot of Spectre ones.
My problem is that the center left folks are not criticizing the far left angry "I hate white cis males who are all nazis who deserve to be taxed/punished".
"No friends to the Right, no enemies to the Left" has been a guiding principle of the Left for over a century. One reason they've swept the tables during that period.
The issue, as I understand it, with your thesis is that economists haven't been able to find productivity gains from the widespread adoption of software like Excel. You ought to see more economic activity per person, but... who knows, maybe Parkinson's law is in play, ""work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion", maybe we programmers are to blame for the vast expansion of government intrusion in the economy because our tools like Excel have allowed companies to cope without bankrupting (more of) them, maybe the economists' metrics are somehow wrong.
I have yet to regret a B&H purchase, have been using them for video and camera stuff since the 1990s. Just got a used Tamron lens from them, exactly as described (their 8+). Am even thinking of buying some SD cards from them because I just don't trust Amazon for that sort of thing any more. Only oddity is that it's run by Hasidic Jews, so they shut down except for web browsing during the Sabbath, no problem if you're patient.
Walmart.com has great control over their supply chain, they're really strict about that, although I'm sure they get taken every once in a while. Newegg still seems to be OK for me, as long as in a search I click them as the only retailer, as far as I know they aren't sharing their logistics system with their 3rd parties like Amazon does, and their multifactor search for computer components is still very good.
Now that the CreateSpace/Kindle part of Amazon is banning books wholesale, they've solidly lowered themselves to the bottom of my list of general Internet vendors given their massive and very hard to avoid counterfeit/commingling issues.
While the length isn't good compared to prior iPhone branding, it's the last three syllables being a real tongue twister that's a problem, 'x' is close in pronunciation to 's', and to close, Max of course then ends in 'x'. I take it as a very bad sign of how the company is veering from its long, long history of good branding. Really from the very beginning with the Apple I and Apple ][, names which generally stood out from its competitors back then.
It's a lesson we've seen many times before, if you're doing something fundamentally evil, if you're evil yourself, it's hard to hire good, competent help.
Someone else wondered if they used a database notorious for coming with wide open defaults. Doesn't matter, a competent person will investigate and implement the security that's appropriate. Competent managers and company owners will budget some time and money for Red Team penetration testing.
Of course, there are technical people out there who are both evil and at least somewhat competent, but they're probably somewhat hard to find and hire, and they're by definition dangerous to employ.
Every company but AMD, which has by definition the very tightest technology sharing arrangement with Intel made the Meltdown screwup. Every company including AMD has multiple Spectre screwups. Why is it so hard for you to believe this is a general industry problem? Or to put it another way, I'll repeat a question I asked to another participant in this discussion, "Show us on the doll where Intel touched you." Because I find this monomania about Intel inexplicable.
I haven't seen the slightest bit of evidence that Intel "licenced" this sort of technology to anyone by AMD by definition, and the basic technology goes back to the 1960s and IBM, when it FRAND licensed all its patents due to a 1940s or very early 50s lawsuit settlement, that's one of the reasons their mag tape and mechanism designs became ubiquitous, as you can see in old movies. Of course by 1993-5 with others started doing out-of-order and at least in Intel's case speculative execution based on that IBM's patents had lapsed.
Thus we see of the few still successful high performance CPU makers all but AMD created Meltdown vulnerable designs, and all including Spectre vulnerable ones.
Seriously, this obsession has me asking "Show us on the doll when Intel touched you."
IBM says they've vulnerable to Meltdown. And, hmmm, adding this item from them it's much worse than the one new microarchitecture ARM discovered was vulnerable to a Meltdown variant, looks like POWER 7+, 8, and 9 processors, can't confirm if 7 is affected, but this is clearly pretty much all of their currently supported CPUs. The first item also implies problems, without mentioning Meltdown specifically, with POWER 4 through 6 CPUs. Ah, and following a link in that first one, per RedHat z/Architecture CPUs are also vulnerable to one or both.
I'm not sure the problem occurred in the IBM 1960's design, for I don't know if it included speculative execution as well as out-of-order execution, in those days IBM built its computers with discrete silicon transistors, 1 or a very few of them along with resistors and maybe capacitors on a single module. Played well to their manufacturing strengths when true single die silicon integrated circuits were just too new, and no one could make them in the volumes IBM needed. So gates were very expensive, and they might have satisfied themselves with just out-of-order execution. Especially since this was just for the FPU.
By the time of the Pentium Pro in 1995, gates were a lot cheaper, so adding speculative execution when you already had all those anonymous registers, and doing it for your integer instructions wouldn't have been hardly as expensive. Or as complicated or gate intensive, since you could afford to use microcode, the top 2 IBM System/360 CPUs didn't, and fared less well in the marketplace because they couldn't emulate earlier IBM CPUs using some additional microcoded instructions.
And being labeled a Troll for telling the truth is certainly going to encourage him to contribute in the future.
Is there any out-of-order with speculative execution architecture family out there that doesn't have these problems? IBM's z/Architecture?? No idea, and it's been a long since anyone bought an IBM mainframe for CPU power, but the modern out-of-order design was first developed for the System/360's supercomputer FPUs. Per my reading Wikipedia just now, of the non-dead ones, there were out-of-order MIPS and SPARC microarchitectures in the past. The big and successful ones today all suffer, Intel/AMD, ARM and IBM POWER.
Yes, but as another comment indicated, only the chips based on Intel designs had the Meltdown problem
Could you point out the comment that indicated both ARM and IBM's RISC designs were "based" on Intel designs, I couldn't remember it, and I just reviewed the 0 or higher scored them and couldn't find one.
The fundamental design that's gotten everyone into trouble including AMD, which copied the Pentium Pro (just not the Meltdown part), goes back to IBM in 1967 when they were creating the highest end System/360 supercomputers.
Intel's out-of-order security problems go back to their very first out-of-order CPU, the 1995 Pentium Pro on which all their current fast chips are based on. Given that every other company of any size with out-of-order CPUs also have Spectre problems, and ARM and IBM also have Meltdown ones, this represents an industry wide blind spot, not anything at all unique to Intel.
ARM may license some technology from Intel, AMD licenses a lot by definition, but ARM has always had their own unique designs, governed from the very beginning by low power usage. Back then, it was so that they could use inexpensive plastic instead of ceramic packaging for their desktop computer target, they beat their target by a factor of two. That's one of the main reasons ARM chips now own the mobile market.
If your claim was true, it wouldn't explain why every other one of their earlier out-of-order designs only suffer from Spectre flaws. Instead, that, along with IBM's POWER Meltdown and Spectre issues, including this very latest set of Foreshadow/L1TF ones, and AMD's Spectre problems starting with the first reporting of this class of bugs, show that this has been a massive blind spot of the entire industry.
Isn't the seasonal flu vaccine based on the prevalent strains from the previous 6 months.
Plus wild guesswork, which is often wrong, i.e it was mostly so for the prevalent circulating A strain or strains in the last season's Northern hemisphere vaccine. The 6 months is to create new seed strains if needed, and to produce millions of doses in the old fashioned way with eggs, max 3 doses per egg... and for the elderly, they're now preferring to use 4 times the normal dosage to better insure a sufficient immune system reaction. Plus you need to do this 3 to 4 times, one each for the A H1N1 and H3N2 strains, then for 1 or 2 less lethal but still bad B strains.
As for my knowledge, I've got a strong for a non-specialist biology and medical background (major was chemistry), and studied this intensively when the 2009 swine flu pandemic happened.
There's almost certainly an ideal weight range, I can't imagine morbid obesity being consistent with higher survival rates, but I wonder if we "know". Ah, surely this has been researched with generic flu infections, you'd want to look that up. No idea on the "low weight" the guy I was quoting was talking about, most people aren't super skinny, e.g. there's a threshold below which women can't conceive. But there should be research on this as well, but that will have problems with very small populations of victims.
So Americans could simply open hospitals/clinics in selected Chinese cities, and collect virus samples themselves.
So you don't know that Americans can't actually do that "simply"? It's theoretically possible in "encouraged" sectors, requires a local "partner" for "restricted" sectors, and then there are the "forbidden" ones. With such a transparent motive, I can't imagine it being simple, but a quick check tells us that there are some.
But you're ignoring the whole point of the article, if you wait until it's a generally circulating super-flu epidemic in the PRC, it's too late, it's probably also circulating outside of the mainland, and only weeks from becoming a pandemic.
Even with modern technology it takes time to brew the antigens, purify the mess, bottle and test it, distribute it, a week or more for a vaccine recipient to get protected, etc. etc. etc. And we aren't geared up to do this for 100s of millions to billions of people. To do it with old egg technology... forget about it, by the time you've developed seed strains, grown it in zillions of eggs (at most, 3 doses per egg), then go through the purification etc. process, most of the world will have been exposed to it, absent catastrophically stringent quarantine measures.
Not hardly. But to the extent our body weights are more than they should be, that might help a lot of our people survive, according to this comment:
Deaths are linked to low weight (not enough fat to survive periods where it's a struggle to keep food down, and low energy to power the immune system)...
That being true 100 years ago for most people (1918 pandemic), and today for many Asian populations where high death rates have been observed from bird flu. So we might be the best prepared in the world!
How are you going to spread it? Air drop a bunch of chickens?
It's influenza, it's very hard to keep it from spreading, in 1918-9 even to the most remote Pacific islands. However we'd get warning if the PRC instituted a mass inoculation effort, that's the obvious heads up if any county is about to try a genocide the rest of the world with an infectious bioweapon. Their economy also take a bit of a hit, plus they'd lose a lot of their people from starvation when they couldn't import crude oil and food.
Oh, and if they succeeded in this? Depend on Russia, and likely the US joining them in turning most of urban mainland China into radioactive glass, and using dirty bombs upwind of as much of the rural population possible. Which is why countries don't try to pull this shit, we're worried about the PRC doing this accidentally to save face, no sir, no SARS to see here!.
If you had even read the article, you would know at least 4 research institutions have samples.
Not of this particular H7N9 strain! See e.g. this comment of mine on how strains of the same subtype change and can become drastically more lethal, as seen in 1918 and in the recent pandemic, all H1N1 strains.
And while you're commended for "doing the math", you need to use pandemic infection rates to get the high end of possible deaths, not just normal flu season ones which represent the low end. Then apply a range of lethalities, a more transmissible H7N9 is likely to be more adapted to humans, and might be less lethal.
And your probably right that it's not in epidemic state in the PRC, the concern is that it's moving that way with rumored human to human transmission. As for getting samples from travelers, if it's that far along, it's probably too late. Also hard to pull off logistically, unless they're promptly dying after arrival, at which point it is too late.
Slashdot Mirror
It's completely unclear the BD-R optical discs consumers can get their hands on are superior, let alone more durable. CMC seems to currently be the least worst manufacturer, all the higher quality manufacturers have stopped making them, and they're obviously not highly trusted because of their history with previous generations of optical media.
For DVDs, I'd go with MAM-A, silver or gold, ditto CD-Rs, which I trust a lot more than DVD recordable media, since pressed DVDs pushed red laser CD technology as far as possible. (Taiyo Yuden exited the optical disc market in 2015, selling their stuff to CMC.) Therefore not going to calculate their costs, especially since their small capacity will start to really affect your off-site storage costs, unless you can stash them with friends or family, and trust them to keep the environment in which they're stored within the requirements (both tape and optical discs are picky here, that's the one advantage hard disks have over them.
Now we get to capacities, if you're going for low costs, single layer is where it's at, 25GB for BD-R, 4.7GB for DVD-R. Compare to 800GB native for LTO-4 tape, back when they were not ancient you could get new high quality Fujifilm ones for ~$22 in lots of 20, I now see a price of $14.70. I see today that Newegg is selling LTO-5 1.5TB native quantity 1 at $23, LTO-6 2.5TB native at $32, and LTO-7 6TB native at $82 (that's less than $1/TB more expensive than LTO-6), and a quick check at Amazon shows their LTO-6 and -7 prices are not competitive, even before we get into quantity discounts, which are the standard way to buy tape.
Comparing my first purchase of 25 Verbatim 25GB BD-Rs just this month from Amazon, to a quantity 20 price from a 3rd party I trust, Malelo and Company, for LTO-6 tape, we're talking $0.0352/GB vs. $0.0105/GB. LTO-5 weights in at $0.013/GB and LTO-4 at $0.0184. And I trust tape from Fujifilm infinitely more than I trust BD-Rs from CMC. Ah, Verbatim at quantity 50 BD-Rs only gets you down to $0.0306/GB.
If you're a prosumer like myself, who's been personally using magnetic tape since the late 1970s, you don't buy the very latest generation of LTO, you go back one or more generations. If you're good at scrounging, you should be able to get a tape drive with a lot of life for $1,000 or less, as I did in 2011 for a new HP LTO-4 drive which I'm still using, when LTO-5 was the new hotness. Today, without going to any real effort, I could buy a new LTO-5 drive from Newegg for $1,700.
A SAS controller is pretty cheap, ones based on the LSI200x chip particularly so right now. If you're patient, you only need a buffer device to avoid shoe-shining your tapes, rather than a fast RAID array. That is, you have your backup software write a 10GiB or so file at a time (probably ought to be larger for the newer LTO generations), and then stream it to the tape drive in one go. I use a Cheetah 15K drive right now, a DRAM tmp file would suffice, you can also scrounge higher end used but not used up Intel DC for enterprise datacenter 2.5 inch drives that were presumably taken out of service because their "small" capacity could no longer be justified.
All in all its quite practical, you have to do the math, including safe deposit box rental or whatever you choose for your offsite storage, and see if it makes sense compared to cloud vendors. Or you might not trust them to exclusively do your offsite backups, tape gives you a level of control you don't get from them.
When MIT was trialing 6.01, the first half of their replacement for 6.001-4, the first being the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs "Wizzard Book" course, this one using Python to drive robots, the official course material included a link to Wikipedia on differential equations, since it was quite possible people taking the course hadn't studied them in sufficient detail by the time this was needed in the course.
Guess you don't think IBM's CPUs are good, since both their z Systems (mainframes) and POWER architectures are also vulnerable to Meltdown (well, they're very expensive...). As well as ARM's latest out-of-order design.
Of all the surviving high performance CPU design families, only AMD escaped this mistake. But not a lot of Spectre ones.
"No friends to the Right, no enemies to the Left" has been a guiding principle of the Left for over a century. One reason they've swept the tables during that period.
I'd bet another factor is that ubiquitous 1000BT Ethernet links over cheap enough Cat 5e cables are fast enough to make this setup work well enough.
The issue, as I understand it, with your thesis is that economists haven't been able to find productivity gains from the widespread adoption of software like Excel. You ought to see more economic activity per person, but ... who knows, maybe Parkinson's law is in play, ""work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion", maybe we programmers are to blame for the vast expansion of government intrusion in the economy because our tools like Excel have allowed companies to cope without bankrupting (more of) them, maybe the economists' metrics are somehow wrong.
I have yet to regret a B&H purchase, have been using them for video and camera stuff since the 1990s. Just got a used Tamron lens from them, exactly as described (their 8+). Am even thinking of buying some SD cards from them because I just don't trust Amazon for that sort of thing any more. Only oddity is that it's run by Hasidic Jews, so they shut down except for web browsing during the Sabbath, no problem if you're patient.
Walmart.com has great control over their supply chain, they're really strict about that, although I'm sure they get taken every once in a while. Newegg still seems to be OK for me, as long as in a search I click them as the only retailer, as far as I know they aren't sharing their logistics system with their 3rd parties like Amazon does, and their multifactor search for computer components is still very good.
Now that the CreateSpace/Kindle part of Amazon is banning books wholesale, they've solidly lowered themselves to the bottom of my list of general Internet vendors given their massive and very hard to avoid counterfeit/commingling issues.
While the length isn't good compared to prior iPhone branding, it's the last three syllables being a real tongue twister that's a problem, 'x' is close in pronunciation to 's', and to close, Max of course then ends in 'x'. I take it as a very bad sign of how the company is veering from its long, long history of good branding. Really from the very beginning with the Apple I and Apple ][, names which generally stood out from its competitors back then.
It's a lesson we've seen many times before, if you're doing something fundamentally evil, if you're evil yourself, it's hard to hire good, competent help.
Someone else wondered if they used a database notorious for coming with wide open defaults. Doesn't matter, a competent person will investigate and implement the security that's appropriate. Competent managers and company owners will budget some time and money for Red Team penetration testing.
Of course, there are technical people out there who are both evil and at least somewhat competent, but they're probably somewhat hard to find and hire, and they're by definition dangerous to employ.
Only in a very technical sense, Commodore for example did it a decade earlier in red for the Amiga. Here's a Wikipedia page on things like it.
Every company but AMD, which has by definition the very tightest technology sharing arrangement with Intel made the Meltdown screwup. Every company including AMD has multiple Spectre screwups. Why is it so hard for you to believe this is a general industry problem? Or to put it another way, I'll repeat a question I asked to another participant in this discussion, "Show us on the doll where Intel touched you." Because I find this monomania about Intel inexplicable.
I haven't seen the slightest bit of evidence that Intel "licenced" this sort of technology to anyone by AMD by definition, and the basic technology goes back to the 1960s and IBM, when it FRAND licensed all its patents due to a 1940s or very early 50s lawsuit settlement, that's one of the reasons their mag tape and mechanism designs became ubiquitous, as you can see in old movies. Of course by 1993-5 with others started doing out-of-order and at least in Intel's case speculative execution based on that IBM's patents had lapsed.
Thus we see of the few still successful high performance CPU makers all but AMD created Meltdown vulnerable designs, and all including Spectre vulnerable ones.
Seriously, this obsession has me asking "Show us on the doll when Intel touched you."
IBM says they've vulnerable to Meltdown. And, hmmm, adding this item from them it's much worse than the one new microarchitecture ARM discovered was vulnerable to a Meltdown variant, looks like POWER 7+, 8, and 9 processors, can't confirm if 7 is affected, but this is clearly pretty much all of their currently supported CPUs. The first item also implies problems, without mentioning Meltdown specifically, with POWER 4 through 6 CPUs. Ah, and following a link in that first one, per RedHat z/Architecture CPUs are also vulnerable to one or both.
I'm not sure the problem occurred in the IBM 1960's design, for I don't know if it included speculative execution as well as out-of-order execution, in those days IBM built its computers with discrete silicon transistors, 1 or a very few of them along with resistors and maybe capacitors on a single module. Played well to their manufacturing strengths when true single die silicon integrated circuits were just too new, and no one could make them in the volumes IBM needed. So gates were very expensive, and they might have satisfied themselves with just out-of-order execution. Especially since this was just for the FPU.
By the time of the Pentium Pro in 1995, gates were a lot cheaper, so adding speculative execution when you already had all those anonymous registers, and doing it for your integer instructions wouldn't have been hardly as expensive. Or as complicated or gate intensive, since you could afford to use microcode, the top 2 IBM System/360 CPUs didn't, and fared less well in the marketplace because they couldn't emulate earlier IBM CPUs using some additional microcoded instructions.
And being labeled a Troll for telling the truth is certainly going to encourage him to contribute in the future.
Is there any out-of-order with speculative execution architecture family out there that doesn't have these problems? IBM's z/Architecture?? No idea, and it's been a long since anyone bought an IBM mainframe for CPU power, but the modern out-of-order design was first developed for the System/360's supercomputer FPUs. Per my reading Wikipedia just now, of the non-dead ones, there were out-of-order MIPS and SPARC microarchitectures in the past. The big and successful ones today all suffer, Intel/AMD, ARM and IBM POWER.
Could you point out the comment that indicated both ARM and IBM's RISC designs were "based" on Intel designs, I couldn't remember it, and I just reviewed the 0 or higher scored them and couldn't find one.
The fundamental design that's gotten everyone into trouble including AMD, which copied the Pentium Pro (just not the Meltdown part), goes back to IBM in 1967 when they were creating the highest end System/360 supercomputers.
Intel's out-of-order security problems go back to their very first out-of-order CPU, the 1995 Pentium Pro on which all their current fast chips are based on. Given that every other company of any size with out-of-order CPUs also have Spectre problems, and ARM and IBM also have Meltdown ones, this represents an industry wide blind spot, not anything at all unique to Intel.
ARM may license some technology from Intel, AMD licenses a lot by definition, but ARM has always had their own unique designs, governed from the very beginning by low power usage. Back then, it was so that they could use inexpensive plastic instead of ceramic packaging for their desktop computer target, they beat their target by a factor of two. That's one of the main reasons ARM chips now own the mobile market.
If your claim was true, it wouldn't explain why every other one of their earlier out-of-order designs only suffer from Spectre flaws. Instead, that, along with IBM's POWER Meltdown and Spectre issues, including this very latest set of Foreshadow/L1TF ones, and AMD's Spectre problems starting with the first reporting of this class of bugs, show that this has been a massive blind spot of the entire industry.
Is ARM the company a trustworthy enough reference about the Meldown variant they discovered in their Cortex-A75 core?
Plus wild guesswork, which is often wrong, i.e it was mostly so for the prevalent circulating A strain or strains in the last season's Northern hemisphere vaccine. The 6 months is to create new seed strains if needed, and to produce millions of doses in the old fashioned way with eggs, max 3 doses per egg ... and for the elderly, they're now preferring to use 4 times the normal dosage to better insure a sufficient immune system reaction. Plus you need to do this 3 to 4 times, one each for the A H1N1 and H3N2 strains, then for 1 or 2 less lethal but still bad B strains.
As for my knowledge, I've got a strong for a non-specialist biology and medical background (major was chemistry), and studied this intensively when the 2009 swine flu pandemic happened.
There's almost certainly an ideal weight range, I can't imagine morbid obesity being consistent with higher survival rates, but I wonder if we "know". Ah, surely this has been researched with generic flu infections, you'd want to look that up. No idea on the "low weight" the guy I was quoting was talking about, most people aren't super skinny, e.g. there's a threshold below which women can't conceive. But there should be research on this as well, but that will have problems with very small populations of victims.
So you don't know that Americans can't actually do that "simply"? It's theoretically possible in "encouraged" sectors, requires a local "partner" for "restricted" sectors, and then there are the "forbidden" ones. With such a transparent motive, I can't imagine it being simple, but a quick check tells us that there are some.
But you're ignoring the whole point of the article, if you wait until it's a generally circulating super-flu epidemic in the PRC, it's too late, it's probably also circulating outside of the mainland, and only weeks from becoming a pandemic.
Even with modern technology it takes time to brew the antigens, purify the mess, bottle and test it, distribute it, a week or more for a vaccine recipient to get protected, etc. etc. etc. And we aren't geared up to do this for 100s of millions to billions of people. To do it with old egg technology ... forget about it, by the time you've developed seed strains, grown it in zillions of eggs (at most, 3 doses per egg), then go through the purification etc. process, most of the world will have been exposed to it, absent catastrophically stringent quarantine measures.
Not hardly. But to the extent our body weights are more than they should be, that might help a lot of our people survive, according to this comment:
That being true 100 years ago for most people (1918 pandemic), and today for many Asian populations where high death rates have been observed from bird flu. So we might be the best prepared in the world!
It's influenza, it's very hard to keep it from spreading, in 1918-9 even to the most remote Pacific islands. However we'd get warning if the PRC instituted a mass inoculation effort, that's the obvious heads up if any county is about to try a genocide the rest of the world with an infectious bioweapon. Their economy also take a bit of a hit, plus they'd lose a lot of their people from starvation when they couldn't import crude oil and food.
Oh, and if they succeeded in this? Depend on Russia, and likely the US joining them in turning most of urban mainland China into radioactive glass, and using dirty bombs upwind of as much of the rural population possible. Which is why countries don't try to pull this shit, we're worried about the PRC doing this accidentally to save face, no sir, no SARS to see here!.
Not of this particular H7N9 strain! See e.g. this comment of mine on how strains of the same subtype change and can become drastically more lethal, as seen in 1918 and in the recent pandemic, all H1N1 strains.
And while you're commended for "doing the math", you need to use pandemic infection rates to get the high end of possible deaths, not just normal flu season ones which represent the low end. Then apply a range of lethalities, a more transmissible H7N9 is likely to be more adapted to humans, and might be less lethal.
And your probably right that it's not in epidemic state in the PRC, the concern is that it's moving that way with rumored human to human transmission. As for getting samples from travelers, if it's that far along, it's probably too late. Also hard to pull off logistically, unless they're promptly dying after arrival, at which point it is too late.