I said that it's an awful one. It makes very little sense and only then in terms of energy cost, not environmental impact. Consider this:
Palm oil and canola oil both cost a similar amount, so they should have the same order-of-magnitude damage. Palm oil may have a large impact, but it's a cherry-picked example of a bad product.
How can a counter-example be cherry-picked when it's disproving a statement? If you say X is true, and I provide an example of X not being true (two examples, actually), then you can't dismiss it as being cherry-picking. I've shown that X need not be true. Furthermore, I'm challenging you to show why it should be true.
Energy cost of product (in dollars) * energy factor + labor cost of product * labor factor *..
That doesn't mean anything. I can say it too but it tells us nothing about any particular instance which is the point because you're saying that it tells us something about a general case. It doesn't. For product A, your energy cost might be very low and your labour cost very high. For product B, this might be reversed. In either case, your "cost" was listed in dollars which does not have a connect to environmental impact. The logic isn't even bad, it's missing.
If palm oil is "cherry-picking" then how many examples would you like of this principle being wrong. Trafigura dumped toxic waste off the African coast in order to save money. If they had disposed of it properly, both the energy cost that you give so much weighting to, and the financial cost, which you rely on for your hypothesis, would be much higher, yet the environmental impact would be far, far lower. What about mark-up. If two models of car are made with, similar in size and perhaps only 10% different in fuel economy, say a Porsche and a Ford, then your principle of "final cost is an approximation of impact" is going to say that the sports car, costing four times as much, has four times the impact. Patently false. I have a limited edition book at home, it cost twice as much as the ordinary run of the book (with nearly the same page count). But the content is somewhat different. You assign them different impacts?
But like I said, the first-order-approximation can just use total cost. It won't be very accurate, but it's an easy way to compare a dog to a SUV on the back of a napkin.
It's a terrible, terrible way to compare a dog with a SUV. You can't just say "owning a dog over its life costs the same as a SUV, therefore environmental impact is the same" or whatever ratio of dog to SUV you want to say. How does that make sense? Does the environmental impact of a SUV fluctuate with the economy, supply and demand? If one SUV factory is in France and is powered by a clean nuclear powerplant and one is in the US and powered by a filthy coal-plant next door, is the environmental impact of both SUVS the same because they're priced roughly similar? Dear gods, man.
Quite insightful. There is no such a thing as a "circle" of life. Life is not a circle. It is a process of decay.
...into carrion which is eaten by scavengers, into rotting biomass that is consumed by detrivores that may be eaten by other animals or into soil nutrients which feed plants which get eaten by animals, that eventually die and become carrion or decay into nutrients... hence circle. It's not hard to grasp the terminology. Cars don't get eaten when they die and their destruction does not release the energy that went into their production. Hence not a circle. What energy loss is not released by the decay-cycle of living creatures is replaced by energy from the Sun - the renewable energy that keeps the circle of life turning. The car industry (both manufacture and disposal) is fueled by fossil fuels, i.e. not renewed. Therefore it is not a circle... more of a deepening hole.
The environmental impact of all the workers who built the car (and their dogs) is included in the price.
No, no it isn't. Price does not necessarily reflect environmental impact at all. One of the reasons coal-power is competitive with nuclear power in the USA is because the coal industry doesn't have to pay for the environmental cost of spewing vast amounts of pollution into the atmosphere. The reason palm oil is cheap is because asian countries are engaged in massive deforestation to supply it. By your reasoning, a higher cost means high environmental damage. But how can that be when you can reduce costs by cutting environmental corners? You make no sense.
Talk of eating your pet makes little environmental sense. Why that instead of, say, not having a second car as many households do? Why that instead of, say, eating 5% less (which many Western households would actually benefit from).
There are many other things to look at first including the elephant in the room - population control. This is just some academic looking for cheap headlines.
What will it take for the US public to get their head around big budget != high quality. Red Dwarf had a tiny budget compared to most US sci-fi series. Was dozens of times better than most of them too. The Children of Earth five part series had a special effects department that consisted primarily of some rubber puppets, a few CGI flame effects and a person with a copy of Audacity to do the alien voices (probably). Result = Very Creepy Miniseries.
because all of the contestants were mocking him, rather than the news.
I remember that last episode and it was by far Paul Merton who really went all out sticking the knife in. He showed a genuinely vindictive side on that episode. He had a special t-shirt printed with newspaper headlines about the host which he wore. He basically didn't let the host get out a straight question for nearly the entirety of the show. The host, Angus Deayton, put up one of the most valiant efforts I've ever seen to take everything in good humour and turn everything into a joke - and he did really well. But you could basically see that Paul Merton was out for blood. I don't know why. Either Paul Merton disapproved of Angus's personal life and set himself up as judge, or he was using the scandal as a chance to take out professional differences on him. But if you watch that show, you can see he was basically out for the hosts blood. Angus Deayton was a really good host and I don't see why someone's personal life needs to be dragged out and interfere with their professional career by judgemental people. And sadly, Paul Merton was one of the worst culprits.
When you have boring shit-heads like Russel Brand and Jonathon Ross using their show to call up retired actors and leave messages about having sex with their grandkids on their answer machines and getting away with it, you wonder why someone very talented who tried to keep their personal life well away from their professional work should have their career wiped out.
Okay - rant over. Sucks to see a fairly long and entertaining television career torn to shreds on national TV right in front of you.
Add the other flaws a lack of explanation as to why the GPs decline it. As a critical worker in an NHS practice, I was entitled to a flu vaccination. I declined simply because I knew that we had limited stocks and I didn't want some elderly patient turning up after missing their session and being told the last one had just been used.
I understand that in the USA, vaccines are being offered to everyone? Or that they're purchased as standard? Here in the UK, they are provided free (you can still buy them elsewhere if you want) and we prioritise them to patients that really need them. Alot of the doctors I have worked with will, if they're reasonably healthy themselves, put their patients needs ahead of their own.
"Doctor" seems to be a license to be rich in the USA. You earn a very good wage as a doctor in the UK, but it's about patient care for most of the ones I've worked with.
The dataset he is interested in is the percentage of people playing it to a substantial degree (these people have been playing it for hours to get on the high score table) and the point of comparison is those that are doing so with paid copies vs. those that are doing so with pirated copies. The total number of downloads is irrelevant for his question. You are arguing against a strawman of someone saying each pirate download = 1 lost sale. He's not saying that. He's illustrating how many people who actually are interested in the game enough to play it for hours have refused to pay the $2 to purchase it and he has published sufficient data (and will post more) to determine that.
Okay. In that case, I withdraw some of my comments above where the USA is concerned. Your country has a serious attitude problem where flu vaccination is concerned. Good for you in doing your own thing.
I see three issues with this immediately, I'm afraid.
The first is the simple fact that there is big money involved in this, so a number of people will get have an incentive to not undermine a big vacicnation programme and many more will have a big discinentive to speak out because it wont sit well with senior people in the first that benefit.
The second is that there's a fair amount of uncertainty about all this and so the criticisms from people in the know aren't so much going to be "This is a lie!" as they are "There isn't a great deal of statistical evidence to demonstrate a benefit so while it's possible this is a good use of resource especially in the eventuality of the strain mutating into a more virulent form, we consider these risks to be small". Which is what they should say because they're honest and being accurate, but whilst you and I consider doubt and uncertainty to be a reasonable position, the public and wannabe-hero politicians don't weigh it correctly against medical career-climbers and administrative land-grabbers who make certain sounding statements focusing on risk.
The third is that the mainstream media will print whatever the fucking Hell it pleases. I don't know if you've ever been interviewed by TV or radio on a specialist area or just generally. I have. And I have friends who have been. And we've all been burned by them. I mean look here - you've got a Slashdot article filled with reasonable, thought out comments from people discussing the likely severity and appropriateness of resources allocated to swine flu. Many of us either working in the health care industry or having done at some point. The discussion is there. The challenges to the promoted view are there, but that's not what you see in the Daily Mail (hysterical (not in a good way) UK paper) or on FOX News.
Put those three factors together, and you can relatively easily pull off something that you don't think of as a "really big scam" until you look at the money involved and realise that big scams don't have to be a fragile conspiracy that any insider might blow up by picking up the phone to a newspaper, but can in fact be an ugly aggregation of selective reporting, boss-pressure and lack of position and authority to challenge orthodox views.
It doesn't work that way in a society with a free press. Educated people need to be able to use the correct terminology. And journalists and will (and should) quote the experts. The only way you'll avoid a quote saying "there is a global pandemic" is if nobody in the field uses the term. You're asking people to abandon correct terminolgy for the sake of political correctness. Which I hate. It's like the endless cycle of spastic, cretin, retarded, whatever where doctors have to keep swapping terminology each time something seeps into general public usage and is misused. I almost got my head bitten off a couple of years ago in the UK when I called a child retarded. Well I'm sorry - but when I was growing up, that was the correct term!
Science can't keep running away from precise terminology because words become politicised. That just leads to fuzzy reasoning and confusion. The fault, is that of the media that misuses terms or uses quotes out of context for the sake of shock and a generally poor education in the relevant area. And it's especially the fault of people who confuse the map with the territory and think if they change a word, a problem goes away like clnicians having to say "mentally challenged" instead of retarded, etc.
Alternatively.... some Christian groups can claim (to the horror of others) that the Bible is not the Truth
My impression is that it's a great deal more than "some" Christians these days. The majority diverge from regarding the Bible as absolute Truth I should say, though that might be less so in the USA than elsewhere.
And just to avoid making a pedantry post elsewhere, I'll roll in a comment to the GP that it's a six day creation, not seven. The seventh day was a well-earned rest and probably spent browsing Slashdot.;)
Possibly you misunderstand. If someone has an allergy to egg sufficient to be dangerous, then it will have been triggered by their eating it egg previously. So only someone who had never had an egg would be at risk. Additonally, it's a cautionary measure. People who are allergic to eggs have had flu vaccinations without adverse effects. I know this because I was in charge of my former surgery's flu vaccination program and when I excluded a patient that had an egg allergy, she called up to complain about not getting a vaccination on the grounds that "she'd had it last time" (before I took over, btw). I persuaded her not to have it.
I'm not working in Primary Care (UK terminology for non-hospital part of the health service) at the moment, so I don't know as much about the H1N1 program. But for the usual flu vaccination programmes which this discussion seems to have spread into, you wouldn't give a healthy five year old a flu vaccination. The only children who'd receive one would be those with qualifying medical conditions such as compromised immune systems (under the right conditions). Maybe it's different in the USA and everyone is getting vaccinated. But in the UK, the children that get vaccinated are the ones that you really want to avoid getting ill.
As regards the effectiveness of the flu vaccine, I couldn't really comment authoratively. I've never done research into it and it sounds from TFA, that not that many people have. But I can comment on the safety and qualifying criteria. As regards anaphylactic shock, the onset is pretty quick. I organised the patients to come in, have their vaccination and then be provided with somewhere to sit and relax on site for fifteen minutes afterwards. We did have someone go into anaphylactic shock at our surgery once. I can't remember what it was due to - it may or may not have been the flu vaccination. One of doctors was immediately there and the patient was fine. Anyway, as I say, the only patients we provide the regular vaccine for are vulnerable ones who would be very adversely affected by flu. It may be used more indiscriminately in the USA, I don't know. Also, I don't know what the program is going to be for "swine" flu. In the UK, I'm not aware of any special roll-out program for patients other than the usual lot. Plenty of hysteria in the papers, mind you, but everyone I know is just ignoring it with some people wanting to just get it so it's out of the way.:D I do know one person who had it. Said they felt rotten as Hell but they're fine now.
That people aren't comfortable with Linux isn't Linux's fault. The KDE and Gnome projects have bent over backwards to make things accessible with a minimum of effort and the Ubuntu distro has made enormous strides in making Linux something easy to find, install and keep up to date (building on Debian, naturally). Basically, Linux's part of the bargain is complete. Sure, we need to keep up with the latest hardware and such, but you can't really ask for anything more in terms of accessibility. If someone doesn't want to stay on XP and doesn't like Windows 7, then they're going to have to either buy a Mac or accept that they need to spend a few hours one evening clicking buttons and learning how to use Ubuntu or whatever.
If you want to approach life in a negative frame of mind, then everything is a "least of all evils kind of thing". If Microsoft have the "least of all evils" on their hands, then they're onto a winner. They don't for me because I'm happy enough with Linux and whilst I would buy Windows 7 just to play around with and develop for, the price is way above my price point.
The stupidity is that Windows 7 is actually looking quite good. And then they pull the sort of stupid marketing stunts that you'd only be driven to if it were crap, making them look desperate.
That said, good or not, Windows 7 is over-priced. Lots of people might want it, but they wont pay hundreds of dollars for it. About $60 - 70 and it would fly off the shelves. Most will not upgrade but just wait until they pick it up with a new PC (which could be a long time for us build-our-own types).
Posted before finishing. I meant to say that if you are arguing that this is a rare exception that doesn't impact sales, then you are really seeing only what will support your view, not what is there.
but I can't say I know anyone that downloads content instead of buying it
I find that very hard to believe. I can name at least five of my friends who do without even having to think about it. You surely aren't arguing that people don't download music, movies, books instead of buying them? If you are arguing that, then I think you are really only seeing what you want to see.
So I pay US$40 for something whilst for everyone of us that does another three people who would have bought it if they had to rip it off for free? In theory, that game should have cost each of us US$10.
either the business model will change or those games won't be produced any more. One way or another it won't last, don't lose any sleep over it (unless you are a games developer staying up late working on your new business model).
Or if, you know, you want games to be produced because you like them (or big budget movies, or mainstream music, or novels, or whatever).
Not meaning to be argumentative, but I think it's important to bear in mind two things that may affect how well your parallel with flying aircraft works for driving whilst talking on a hands free phone. The first is that pilots are, well, pilots. You go through a lot of training to become a pilot, especially a professional one. I'm sure there are better and worse pilots, but they're all pretty qualified people. I'm not sure you can translate that to the general mass of car drivers. Pilots have had the bottom quartile removed in a way that motorists haven't. Secondly, in a similar sort of way, flying a plane is, well, flying a plane. You know you're in a serious situation and you're concentrating on what you're doing. A car driver should be doing that but typically, let's face it, is not in the same headspace as a pilot landing a plane. And the conversation that a pilot is having is about what you're doing as well. You're not talking about work or sex or plans for the night (I hope), you're listening for information that will tell you whether it's time to pull up or lower the landing gear or whatever. Your attention, even if monitoring different sources of information, is on the task.
I mean, you're the pilot, so correct me if I'm wrong, but these are things that occur to me. And don't base it on whether you can "walk and chew gum" at the same time, base it on whether you know anyone who can't - I think most of us do!
Also don't forget that somebody had to pay for the open-source system to be developed. I somewhat doubt that anybody spends their spare time hacking away on electronic health record databases.
Hey now - I did!:)
This was in the UK and I no longer work in the NHS. But in Primary Care (i.e. your local doctor's, not a hospital), there are a handful of providers of medical systems with a couple of really big ones (EMIS and Synergy). I have a lot of experience with Synergy and quite frankly, it's a mess. I think it got a little better, but in the modern age we could do so very much better. And it wouldn't actually take much developer resource to come up with it. I noodled around with writing an alternative one, but I simply couldn't dedicate the time. But it would have taken a small team of decent programmers (maybe four of us) around a year to make a functionally equivalent system that did the job better, was open source and a good platform on which to build further. And I could have written conversion tools for the back end databases myself fairly easily. The issues are twofold. Firstly, the perceived hassle of migrating to a new system and secondly getting the license from the UK's Department of Health. The latter would have been the showstopper. It's a Boy's Club. There are a lot of very hard-working people at the low levels of the NHS and - under Labour - quite a lot of over-spend and corruption at the top. Particularly in the area of IT.
I'm no longer in the NHS. I got fed up with the problems I had to deal with being caused at a level above where I could fix them. I would love to manage the development of an open source alternative to the existing systems though and I could do it for a tiny fraction of the budget allocated to other NHS IT projects - a sort of skunk works project.
Unfortunately, the New Labour government has been determined to do everything it can to privatise the NHS without committing the political suicide of admitting they're doing so. The damage behind the scenes to British healthcare is enormous.
Actually it isn't illegal. But you're right that people have had their cameras or phones taken away from them and pictures taken away. Also the police have told people that it is illegal.
Which is great because it gives us an opportunity to express our displeasure to businesses that participate. It's hard to withhold your taxes from the government (they beat you up), but you avoid paying money to businesses that you don't like and tell them why. THIS is our avenue of attack if we don't like this system.
Actually I imagine the first Prime Minister that gets caught coming and going from his girlfriend's house on CCTV will be in favor of cancelling this program.
If there's a scandal, the Prime Minister is removed by his party and a new one brought in. The new one does not remove the system because that would just be a concession that he was going to behave similarly. What would happen (and it doesn't need to be anyone as dramatic as a Prime Minister) is that exceptions will be made for a vaguely defined class of people (which basically translates as people with power) that you are prevented from spying on by law and by technological measures.
The only reason parliament would ban this sort of thing would be if there is sufficient public disgust voiced to make it clear that it harms their electoral achievements and benefits their rivals.
Slashdot Mirror
I said that it's an awful one. It makes very little sense and only then in terms of energy cost, not environmental impact. Consider this:
How can a counter-example be cherry-picked when it's disproving a statement? If you say X is true, and I provide an example of X not being true (two examples, actually), then you can't dismiss it as being cherry-picking. I've shown that X need not be true. Furthermore, I'm challenging you to show why it should be true.
That doesn't mean anything. I can say it too but it tells us nothing about any particular instance which is the point because you're saying that it tells us something about a general case. It doesn't. For product A, your energy cost might be very low and your labour cost very high. For product B, this might be reversed. In either case, your "cost" was listed in dollars which does not have a connect to environmental impact. The logic isn't even bad, it's missing.
If palm oil is "cherry-picking" then how many examples would you like of this principle being wrong. Trafigura dumped toxic waste off the African coast in order to save money. If they had disposed of it properly, both the energy cost that you give so much weighting to, and the financial cost, which you rely on for your hypothesis, would be much higher, yet the environmental impact would be far, far lower. What about mark-up. If two models of car are made with, similar in size and perhaps only 10% different in fuel economy, say a Porsche and a Ford, then your principle of "final cost is an approximation of impact" is going to say that the sports car, costing four times as much, has four times the impact. Patently false. I have a limited edition book at home, it cost twice as much as the ordinary run of the book (with nearly the same page count). But the content is somewhat different. You assign them different impacts?
It's a terrible, terrible way to compare a dog with a SUV. You can't just say "owning a dog over its life costs the same as a SUV, therefore environmental impact is the same" or whatever ratio of dog to SUV you want to say. How does that make sense? Does the environmental impact of a SUV fluctuate with the economy, supply and demand? If one SUV factory is in France and is powered by a clean nuclear powerplant and one is in the US and powered by a filthy coal-plant next door, is the environmental impact of both SUVS the same because they're priced roughly similar? Dear gods, man.
No, no it isn't. Price does not necessarily reflect environmental impact at all. One of the reasons coal-power is competitive with nuclear power in the USA is because the coal industry doesn't have to pay for the environmental cost of spewing vast amounts of pollution into the atmosphere. The reason palm oil is cheap is because asian countries are engaged in massive deforestation to supply it. By your reasoning, a higher cost means high environmental damage. But how can that be when you can reduce costs by cutting environmental corners? You make no sense.
Talk of eating your pet makes little environmental sense. Why that instead of, say, not having a second car as many households do? Why that instead of, say, eating 5% less (which many Western households would actually benefit from).
There are many other things to look at first including the elephant in the room - population control. This is just some academic looking for cheap headlines.
What will it take for the US public to get their head around big budget != high quality. Red Dwarf had a tiny budget compared to most US sci-fi series. Was dozens of times better than most of them too. The Children of Earth five part series had a special effects department that consisted primarily of some rubber puppets, a few CGI flame effects and a person with a copy of Audacity to do the alien voices (probably). Result = Very Creepy Miniseries.
I remember that last episode and it was by far Paul Merton who really went all out sticking the knife in. He showed a genuinely vindictive side on that episode. He had a special t-shirt printed with newspaper headlines about the host which he wore. He basically didn't let the host get out a straight question for nearly the entirety of the show. The host, Angus Deayton, put up one of the most valiant efforts I've ever seen to take everything in good humour and turn everything into a joke - and he did really well. But you could basically see that Paul Merton was out for blood. I don't know why. Either Paul Merton disapproved of Angus's personal life and set himself up as judge, or he was using the scandal as a chance to take out professional differences on him. But if you watch that show, you can see he was basically out for the hosts blood. Angus Deayton was a really good host and I don't see why someone's personal life needs to be dragged out and interfere with their professional career by judgemental people. And sadly, Paul Merton was one of the worst culprits.
When you have boring shit-heads like Russel Brand and Jonathon Ross using their show to call up retired actors and leave messages about having sex with their grandkids on their answer machines and getting away with it, you wonder why someone very talented who tried to keep their personal life well away from their professional work should have their career wiped out.
Okay - rant over. Sucks to see a fairly long and entertaining television career torn to shreds on national TV right in front of you.
Add the other flaws a lack of explanation as to why the GPs decline it. As a critical worker in an NHS practice, I was entitled to a flu vaccination. I declined simply because I knew that we had limited stocks and I didn't want some elderly patient turning up after missing their session and being told the last one had just been used.
I understand that in the USA, vaccines are being offered to everyone? Or that they're purchased as standard? Here in the UK, they are provided free (you can still buy them elsewhere if you want) and we prioritise them to patients that really need them. Alot of the doctors I have worked with will, if they're reasonably healthy themselves, put their patients needs ahead of their own.
"Doctor" seems to be a license to be rich in the USA. You earn a very good wage as a doctor in the UK, but it's about patient care for most of the ones I've worked with.
The dataset he is interested in is the percentage of people playing it to a substantial degree (these people have been playing it for hours to get on the high score table) and the point of comparison is those that are doing so with paid copies vs. those that are doing so with pirated copies. The total number of downloads is irrelevant for his question. You are arguing against a strawman of someone saying each pirate download = 1 lost sale. He's not saying that. He's illustrating how many people who actually are interested in the game enough to play it for hours have refused to pay the $2 to purchase it and he has published sufficient data (and will post more) to determine that.
Okay. In that case, I withdraw some of my comments above where the USA is concerned. Your country has a serious attitude problem where flu vaccination is concerned. Good for you in doing your own thing.
Most people are.
I see three issues with this immediately, I'm afraid.
The first is the simple fact that there is big money involved in this, so a number of people will get have an incentive to not undermine a big vacicnation programme and many more will have a big discinentive to speak out because it wont sit well with senior people in the first that benefit.
The second is that there's a fair amount of uncertainty about all this and so the criticisms from people in the know aren't so much going to be "This is a lie!" as they are "There isn't a great deal of statistical evidence to demonstrate a benefit so while it's possible this is a good use of resource especially in the eventuality of the strain mutating into a more virulent form, we consider these risks to be small". Which is what they should say because they're honest and being accurate, but whilst you and I consider doubt and uncertainty to be a reasonable position, the public and wannabe-hero politicians don't weigh it correctly against medical career-climbers and administrative land-grabbers who make certain sounding statements focusing on risk.
The third is that the mainstream media will print whatever the fucking Hell it pleases. I don't know if you've ever been interviewed by TV or radio on a specialist area or just generally. I have. And I have friends who have been. And we've all been burned by them. I mean look here - you've got a Slashdot article filled with reasonable, thought out comments from people discussing the likely severity and appropriateness of resources allocated to swine flu. Many of us either working in the health care industry or having done at some point. The discussion is there. The challenges to the promoted view are there, but that's not what you see in the Daily Mail (hysterical (not in a good way) UK paper) or on FOX News.
Put those three factors together, and you can relatively easily pull off something that you don't think of as a "really big scam" until you look at the money involved and realise that big scams don't have to be a fragile conspiracy that any insider might blow up by picking up the phone to a newspaper, but can in fact be an ugly aggregation of selective reporting, boss-pressure and lack of position and authority to challenge orthodox views.
It doesn't work that way in a society with a free press. Educated people need to be able to use the correct terminology. And journalists and will (and should) quote the experts. The only way you'll avoid a quote saying "there is a global pandemic" is if nobody in the field uses the term. You're asking people to abandon correct terminolgy for the sake of political correctness. Which I hate. It's like the endless cycle of spastic, cretin, retarded, whatever where doctors have to keep swapping terminology each time something seeps into general public usage and is misused. I almost got my head bitten off a couple of years ago in the UK when I called a child retarded. Well I'm sorry - but when I was growing up, that was the correct term!
Science can't keep running away from precise terminology because words become politicised. That just leads to fuzzy reasoning and confusion. The fault, is that of the media that misuses terms or uses quotes out of context for the sake of shock and a generally poor education in the relevant area. And it's especially the fault of people who confuse the map with the territory and think if they change a word, a problem goes away like clnicians having to say "mentally challenged" instead of retarded, etc.
Sorry - touched a nerve.
My impression is that it's a great deal more than "some" Christians these days. The majority diverge from regarding the Bible as absolute Truth I should say, though that might be less so in the USA than elsewhere.
;)
And just to avoid making a pedantry post elsewhere, I'll roll in a comment to the GP that it's a six day creation, not seven. The seventh day was a well-earned rest and probably spent browsing Slashdot.
Possibly you misunderstand. If someone has an allergy to egg sufficient to be dangerous, then it will have been triggered by their eating it egg previously. So only someone who had never had an egg would be at risk. Additonally, it's a cautionary measure. People who are allergic to eggs have had flu vaccinations without adverse effects. I know this because I was in charge of my former surgery's flu vaccination program and when I excluded a patient that had an egg allergy, she called up to complain about not getting a vaccination on the grounds that "she'd had it last time" (before I took over, btw). I persuaded her not to have it.
I'm not working in Primary Care (UK terminology for non-hospital part of the health service) at the moment, so I don't know as much about the H1N1 program. But for the usual flu vaccination programmes which this discussion seems to have spread into, you wouldn't give a healthy five year old a flu vaccination. The only children who'd receive one would be those with qualifying medical conditions such as compromised immune systems (under the right conditions). Maybe it's different in the USA and everyone is getting vaccinated. But in the UK, the children that get vaccinated are the ones that you really want to avoid getting ill.
As regards the effectiveness of the flu vaccine, I couldn't really comment authoratively. I've never done research into it and it sounds from TFA, that not that many people have. But I can comment on the safety and qualifying criteria. As regards anaphylactic shock, the onset is pretty quick. I organised the patients to come in, have their vaccination and then be provided with somewhere to sit and relax on site for fifteen minutes afterwards. We did have someone go into anaphylactic shock at our surgery once. I can't remember what it was due to - it may or may not have been the flu vaccination. One of doctors was immediately there and the patient was fine. Anyway, as I say, the only patients we provide the regular vaccine for are vulnerable ones who would be very adversely affected by flu. It may be used more indiscriminately in the USA, I don't know. Also, I don't know what the program is going to be for "swine" flu. In the UK, I'm not aware of any special roll-out program for patients other than the usual lot. Plenty of hysteria in the papers, mind you, but everyone I know is just ignoring it with some people wanting to just get it so it's out of the way.
That people aren't comfortable with Linux isn't Linux's fault. The KDE and Gnome projects have bent over backwards to make things accessible with a minimum of effort and the Ubuntu distro has made enormous strides in making Linux something easy to find, install and keep up to date (building on Debian, naturally). Basically, Linux's part of the bargain is complete. Sure, we need to keep up with the latest hardware and such, but you can't really ask for anything more in terms of accessibility. If someone doesn't want to stay on XP and doesn't like Windows 7, then they're going to have to either buy a Mac or accept that they need to spend a few hours one evening clicking buttons and learning how to use Ubuntu or whatever.
If you want to approach life in a negative frame of mind, then everything is a "least of all evils kind of thing". If Microsoft have the "least of all evils" on their hands, then they're onto a winner. They don't for me because I'm happy enough with Linux and whilst I would buy Windows 7 just to play around with and develop for, the price is way above my price point.
The stupidity is that Windows 7 is actually looking quite good. And then they pull the sort of stupid marketing stunts that you'd only be driven to if it were crap, making them look desperate.
That said, good or not, Windows 7 is over-priced. Lots of people might want it, but they wont pay hundreds of dollars for it. About $60 - 70 and it would fly off the shelves. Most will not upgrade but just wait until they pick it up with a new PC (which could be a long time for us build-our-own types).
Security through obscurity is a warning, not a mantra.
Posted before finishing. I meant to say that if you are arguing that this is a rare exception that doesn't impact sales, then you are really seeing only what will support your view, not what is there.
I find that very hard to believe. I can name at least five of my friends who do without even having to think about it. You surely aren't arguing that people don't download music, movies, books instead of buying them? If you are arguing that, then I think you are really only seeing what you want to see.
So I pay US$40 for something whilst for everyone of us that does another three people who would have bought it if they had to rip it off for free? In theory, that game should have cost each of us US$10.
Or if, you know, you want games to be produced because you like them (or big budget movies, or mainstream music, or novels, or whatever).
Not meaning to be argumentative, but I think it's important to bear in mind two things that may affect how well your parallel with flying aircraft works for driving whilst talking on a hands free phone. The first is that pilots are, well, pilots. You go through a lot of training to become a pilot, especially a professional one. I'm sure there are better and worse pilots, but they're all pretty qualified people. I'm not sure you can translate that to the general mass of car drivers. Pilots have had the bottom quartile removed in a way that motorists haven't. Secondly, in a similar sort of way, flying a plane is, well, flying a plane. You know you're in a serious situation and you're concentrating on what you're doing. A car driver should be doing that but typically, let's face it, is not in the same headspace as a pilot landing a plane. And the conversation that a pilot is having is about what you're doing as well. You're not talking about work or sex or plans for the night (I hope), you're listening for information that will tell you whether it's time to pull up or lower the landing gear or whatever. Your attention, even if monitoring different sources of information, is on the task.
I mean, you're the pilot, so correct me if I'm wrong, but these are things that occur to me. And don't base it on whether you can "walk and chew gum" at the same time, base it on whether you know anyone who can't - I think most of us do!
Hey now - I did! :)
This was in the UK and I no longer work in the NHS. But in Primary Care (i.e. your local doctor's, not a hospital), there are a handful of providers of medical systems with a couple of really big ones (EMIS and Synergy). I have a lot of experience with Synergy and quite frankly, it's a mess. I think it got a little better, but in the modern age we could do so very much better. And it wouldn't actually take much developer resource to come up with it. I noodled around with writing an alternative one, but I simply couldn't dedicate the time. But it would have taken a small team of decent programmers (maybe four of us) around a year to make a functionally equivalent system that did the job better, was open source and a good platform on which to build further. And I could have written conversion tools for the back end databases myself fairly easily. The issues are twofold. Firstly, the perceived hassle of migrating to a new system and secondly getting the license from the UK's Department of Health. The latter would have been the showstopper. It's a Boy's Club. There are a lot of very hard-working people at the low levels of the NHS and - under Labour - quite a lot of over-spend and corruption at the top. Particularly in the area of IT.
I'm no longer in the NHS. I got fed up with the problems I had to deal with being caused at a level above where I could fix them. I would love to manage the development of an open source alternative to the existing systems though and I could do it for a tiny fraction of the budget allocated to other NHS IT projects - a sort of skunk works project.
Unfortunately, the New Labour government has been determined to do everything it can to privatise the NHS without committing the political suicide of admitting they're doing so. The damage behind the scenes to British healthcare is enormous.
Actually it isn't illegal. But you're right that people have had their cameras or phones taken away from them and pictures taken away. Also the police have told people that it is illegal.
Which is great because it gives us an opportunity to express our displeasure to businesses that participate. It's hard to withhold your taxes from the government (they beat you up), but you avoid paying money to businesses that you don't like and tell them why. THIS is our avenue of attack if we don't like this system.
If there's a scandal, the Prime Minister is removed by his party and a new one brought in. The new one does not remove the system because that would just be a concession that he was going to behave similarly. What would happen (and it doesn't need to be anyone as dramatic as a Prime Minister) is that exceptions will be made for a vaguely defined class of people (which basically translates as people with power) that you are prevented from spying on by law and by technological measures.
The only reason parliament would ban this sort of thing would be if there is sufficient public disgust voiced to make it clear that it harms their electoral achievements and benefits their rivals.