Just because they acted as a whistle blower in leaking a sensitive document, that does not mean that they would stoop to circumventing the DRM measures of this copyrighted material. Seriously, that would violate the DMCA. That's getting into serious business. They might get sued!
Yes, really! This reminds me of the scene in Dr. Strangelove where somebody shoots up a Coke machine to get a dime to make a phone call to save the world. (Yes, that's what phone calls cost back then.) Another officer says something to the effect of "My God, what have you done, man? Don't you realize you will have to answer to the Coca Cola Company for this?
Secret is things that the powers that be would rather aren't publicly available. Top Secret is things that would significantly impact the armed forces abilities to do their job.
Not quite, ANY classified document is so classified because of its potential to cause harm to national security.
That's funny. I always thought that the reason governments classified information as any flavor of "secret" was to keep it from their own people. How could I have been so wrong?
It's worse than that. They don't even have to rationalize that it is the name of a person. They can just make up a short story right there on the spot, and name it with whatever random sting of characters they have, and they have now created a perfectly valid proper noun that is completely within the spirit of the new rules...
Yep—too bad I don't have any mod points, or I'd mod you up. What is and what is not a "name" is a philosophical dispute with a very long history. Mattel has stepped into a morass that is far deeper than they know.
Yeah, but you might need more than just one word, even if it's very useful. I'm going to memorize every pharmaceutical brand name that has ever been trademarked. Then I'll write a filter that eliminates common names that everyone already knows (like Dzerzhinsky) and run the telephone directories of every major city in the world through it, and memorize what's left.
Umm...actually that's what I would do if I had something remotely resembling a memory for names.
In summary let me just say this one thing:
WHOOSH !
Are you serious about the joking? I can see no real evidence in the quoted report that it's meant to be less than serious. Also, the fact that this is being done for the sake of greenitude pretty definitively points in a contrary direction. People who are really into the green thing usually lack a sense of humor, and are incapable of making jokes—especially about their ideology. They are also quite likely to believe that measures like this work.
No, I want the one who can listen to non-technical people and understand the problem, write documentation that is comprehensible to end users (or at least comprehensible enough to serve as a starting point for the tech writer), and that I can take to a customer site with a reasonable degree of assurance that he will not commit an egregious offense that violates basic primate sensibilities.
Or do you suppose we could have refined this question a bit more?
Can anyone give any insight behind how they perform upgrades like this?
FPGAs, of course. It's a test of SCORPION STARE...or maybe the rover ran into something that had to be handled with extreme dispatch. You can read the details here. WARNING: I am not responsible for any consequences that may ensue from your accessing this information without sufficient clearance.
Here's an abstract:
This document describes progress to date in establishing a defensive network capable of repelling wide-scale incursions by reconfiguring the national closed-circuit television surveillance network as a software-controlled look-to-kill multiheaded basilisk. To prevent accidental premature deployment or deliberate exploitation, the SCORPION STARE software is not actually loaded into the camera firmware. Instead, reprogrammable FPGA chips are integrated into all cameras and can be loaded with SCORPION STARE by authorised MAGINOT BLUE STARS users whenever necessary.
I used to work for a company whose anonymity I'll protect by giving only its initials—HP. It was a few years back, but a couple of viruses (I think it was Code Red and Nimda) took down the entire freaking corporate network for a total of at least two weeks. They'd get it fixed, then it would go down again; it was a big game of whack-a-mole. The principal cause was eventually determined to be laptops. IT had no policy to prevent users from taking their laptops home or traveling and connecting to insecure networks, doing stupid things, and then simply bringing them to work and plugging them into the corporate network. That couldn't possibly be the case in your organization, could it?
When I take my laptop traveling, I image it before I leave home, then when I return I take any files I need off via a thumb drive, and plunk the old image over the disk. That's for my personal laptop.
It's their responsibility because the items were sold on their site.
Now, making good on their fuckup isn't the entitlement mindset, it's excellent, self-serving business sense...
It's good sense, but I think "excellent" is going a bit far. After all, not making good on the fake product would have kind of gotten them on the wrong side of the law, wouldn't it? Newegg may not have known the CPUs were fake when they shipped the product, but once they were made aware of the fact, failing to remediate the situation would have put them in some pretty deep legal juju. Replacing the fakes was the minimum action they were required to take. I don't think they deserve to be congratulated for doing what is both morally and legally mandatory.
Had I been a recipient of one of these fakes, I would have been pretty disgruntled. I would have calmed down once I got the real thing from Newegg, but if they wanted me to feel really gruntled again, they'd ship me a little something extra, or maybe give me a $15 gift certificate toward a future purchase. Now that would be "excellent".
For the record, I've ordered lots of stuff from Newegg for years, and have never had an untoward incident in my dealings with them. I'll certainly be considering them as a possible source for future purchases.
And wallpaper your apartment with the grids, and the windows too. Just be sure to ground them onto the plumbing, or opening doors might be fun.
That's what the old U.S. embassy in Moscow had to do, though they just used metal foil. Apparently, the KGB bugs planted throughout the embassy required microwaves to power them, so the Soviets did the obvious thing. Of course, localized microwave beams would just help locate the bugs, so the Soviets blanketed the whole building.
I wonder if the foil wallpaper helped, either to reduce the health hazards or to cut off power to the bugs.
Obviously, you have not considered the advantages of living in an apartment subject to heavy microwave radiation. Microwaves heat stuff. To prove this, just put your cat in the microwave and turn it on. Clearly, this means that you will be saving tons of money on your heating bills—the cell phone company will be heating the apartment for free! (Well, maybe they will just be heating conductive objects, like for instance you, but that's all you need during those chilly Manhattan winters.
What is this "Google account" of which you speak? I thought they were a search engine, and a pretty good one, I have to admit. But why would I want an "account" with them? Have they gone into the banking business? (Hint: there are other ways to handle email than Gmail, Hotmail, and whatever Yahoo has (hoomail?)
So no, I didn't "ignore" their options—I opted to ignore the whole deal that involves me creating an account so that I can give them my personal data to mine. I was talking about an anonymous publicly visible cookie; Google can have my data when they pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
What are these "popup ads" of which the article speaks? Is it something you toast for breakfast?
Maybe "intrusive ads" create more revenue...for the site that serves them up, but that's not the same thing as being effective—that is, actually selling stuff. All I know is that I don't usually see "intrusive" ads on the web. I've made arrangements that pretty much eliminate "intrusive" content from my web reality. Basically, my policy is to kill anything that moves. Uh, well I mean anything that's animated, flashes at me, does any popping up or under or sideways, and does not basically sit meekly in a corner and behave itself. I get a kick out of the/. notice that offers to turn off advertisements for me because I have such good karma (yes this is your chance, oh my enemies!). I mean, doesn't having good karma mean I've been around? Like, what ads, man?
Here's free advice to advertisers: if you want me to notice your advertisement and even maybe click on it, make it a nice discreet image that doesn't get in my way, but shows something I am likely to be interested in buying. You know, stuff that will draw my eye instantly: guns, ammo, camera lenses, computer parts, neat tools, or new science fiction books. I'd even be willing to sign up for a service that plants a cookie that cues advertisers about my special interests, as long as that meant I wouldn't be bothered by obnoxious ads for all the other stuff I will never want. In fact, why hasn't anybody already implemented a system like this? Ooops, time to fill out the patent application.
I'm sure the Universe is expanding because when I drive to my son's house it seems further away every year.
Actually, time goes faster because we accelerate when we go downhill!
Or, to put in the more formal terms of Vomact's Law: Those of us who are over the hill have more momentum.
"I want to be older, I'm tired of this long school day bullshit."
Better to want to do the very best you can where you are in life. I wouldn't trade my 65 years of experiences and my white hair for anything in this world.
Yeah, me too. Except youth, good looks, and a red Maserati.
i'm turning 30 this year and already i can see why they say youth is wasted on the young.
If you're 30, then you are young. You should have another 10 years or so before the effects of entropy really start making themselves noticed. Mind you, although my knees and ankles creak and my eyes don't work that well, I really wouldn't want the chore of having to live the last 5 decades all over again....
There are some observations that I have made concerning the subjective experience of time. In the interests of science (or, at least, humor), I will share them:
You are now the oldest you've ever been. For you, your present age is the definition of "age" or "maturity", or whatever. You have no direct experience of being any older than you are. (I humbly suggest we call this "Vomact's Tautology".) That's why we get 30 year olds whining about getting old. That's why 75 year olds laugh at me when, at 62, I complain about the same thing.
The subjective experience of duration is proportional to the time you have already experienced. To a 4 year old, an afternoon can last a very long time. (I remember some of those...) That's because a four year old has lived only about 1,460 days; an afternoon represents a meaningful fraction of his entire lifetime up to this point. (You should be grateful you can't remember being born—your extrusion into the world would have seemed like forever...) On the other hand, time flies for the 60 year old; he's lived about 22,000 days, so a mere day is piffle. It's gone before you notice. I suppose this could be "Vomact's Conjecture".
E-brakes are usually referred to as Parking brakes now. In some cars, they only engage 1/2 of the rear brake shoes. In others they only engage a small auxiliary brake shoe which is not part of the normal braking system, and is not designed to stop the car at highway speeds.
If they're actually making the parking/emergency brake less effective, I think that's a very bad thing. I've been saved from a serious accident at least once by quick use of the emergency brake. It was the end of a long day at work. I was about to pull out into traffic from the parking lot, but stepped on the brake because there were cars coming. The pedal went to the floor with absolutely no resistance—and no slowing of the car. I grabbed what was, in that moment, most definitely an emergency brake, and yanked on it with all my power. I came to a stop with the front of my car just barely nosing into traffic—enough to get me honked at, but not hit. Since then, I've always looked on the horizontal lever to the right of my seat as a potential life-saver. Yes, it's not going to stop me quickly if I'm traveling at highway speeds...but it's sure better than no brake at all.
I should mention that this incident took place about 25 years ago, and that the car was a total piece of crap. (Datsun 710, one of the worst cars ever made.) Back then, they didn't have redundant brake system hydraulics, and it was possible to lose braking totally if you had a single leak in the hydraulic lines. So, it's much less likely that this will happen with a modern car—but it isn't impossible, and as far as I'm concerned, building redundancy into critical systems is the smart thing to do. If you're going to have a parking brake in any case, why in the world would you want to cripple it?
...I don't think a plastic cover is the way to go. Cars are not in the air. They require instant off in an emergency where there is surrounding traffic...
Yeah, besides, a plastic cover over the engine kill switch might cause confusion with the similar cover over the arming switch for the Ma Deuce.
... What I find questionable is that they don't want their children to attend a school because the children might be confronted with values the parents don't agree with. Yes, that's their official reason.
"Confronted" with "values" is pretty vague phrasing. There's a difference between being taught a course about world religions and being taught that all religious are the same in that they are equally mythological. The first is educational; it's about what various people believe. The second is indoctrination. Do you think that the average public school teacher has the subtlety of intellect to do one and not the other? If you do, then the schools you attended were far better than mine.
If you worry about the quality of the education received by home-schooled kids, comfort yourself with this: it's hard to do worse than the public schools.
Big fan of home schooling myself, however the biggest problem with home schooling isn't the quality of education. It is the lack of socialization. Home school kids are massively underdeveloped socially, they miss out on a lot of cues that the rest of the population learned the hard way in social environment.
I suppose maybe there's something to that. We homeschooled our daughter, and her idea of socializing is to text her friends, chat via computer, play MMOs or (gasp) computer games with her father over the home LAN. Yep, I'm afraid she's definitely abnormal.
She's going to graduate from the local state university after the current semester (she's 19). I figure when she starts working, maybe her "socialization" will improve. She's going to look for work as a science teacher in the public schools (she's doing her student teaching stint now). And yes, I do savor the irony...
No, I'm saying that the kind of scaremongering put forth was the only thing sufficient to make people take common-sense actions like washing their hands regularly.
...There's no need for data: the spread of H1N1 was considerably slowed by the precautions taken....
I respect your surprising honesty and openness about your beliefs and tactics. You think that the masses are too stupid to make rational decisions based on facts, and must, therefore, be frightened into action by propaganda—lies spread by the elite (you) that will promote correct conduct. I have long suspected that this is how the self-nominated elite thinks, and am pleased to find someone who openly admits it. You must be new.
This type of thinking is emblematic of the whole series of fright campaigns—especially "climate change". Usually, the perpetrators are too wily to explain their tactics openly; revelations come only when they think no outsiders are listening—as was shown by the recent leak of internal emails from the University of East Anglia. The thinking in those internal memoranda was pretty explicit: if the evidence won't produce the panic we need to provoke action, why by gosh we'll fudge it so it comes out "right".
But don't you go a little far when you say there's "no need for data"? It almost sounds as though you feel no need to justify your panic-mongering with facts, even to yourself; as though the panic was an end in itself. I can't help but think...it does make the dumb sheep easier to govern, doesn't it? I guess I'm just naive.
To you. Are you a doctor? Are you a virologist? What the fuck do you know? Nothing. Do you think anybody in his right mind is going to risk the lives of hundreds of thousands of people by paying attention to you?
...
The 1918 flu caused 650,000 deaths. Nobody really knows why. We could have another epidemic like that any year. When the new flu comes up, nobody knows until it's all over whether it's going to be the big one until it's all over.
Ordinarily, I am courteous and tend to cut people some slack. I will, however, make an exception in your case: You don't know jackshit. Fool.
The 1918-1920 influenza pandemic killed tens of millions. That's MILLIONS. Big difference. This reference says 20 to 40 million. This says 50 to 100 million. Going by the conservative estimate, that is several times the number of people that were killed in the First World War itself. Maybe you should acquire some courtesy until you succeed in your quest for omniscience.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because they acted as a whistle blower in leaking a sensitive document, that does not mean that they would stoop to circumventing the DRM measures of this copyrighted material. Seriously, that would violate the DMCA. That's getting into serious business. They might get sued!
Yes, really! This reminds me of the scene in Dr. Strangelove where somebody shoots up a Coke machine to get a dime to make a phone call to save the world. (Yes, that's what phone calls cost back then.) Another officer says something to the effect of "My God, what have you done, man? Don't you realize you will have to answer to the Coca Cola Company for this?
Secret is things that the powers that be would rather aren't publicly available. Top Secret is things that would significantly impact the armed forces abilities to do their job.
Not quite, ANY classified document is so classified because of its potential to cause harm to national security.
That's funny. I always thought that the reason governments classified information as any flavor of "secret" was to keep it from their own people. How could I have been so wrong?
It's worse than that. They don't even have to rationalize that it is the name of a person. They can just make up a short story right there on the spot, and name it with whatever random sting of characters they have, and they have now created a perfectly valid proper noun that is completely within the spirit of the new rules...
Yep—too bad I don't have any mod points, or I'd mod you up. What is and what is not a "name" is a philosophical dispute with a very long history. Mattel has stepped into a morass that is far deeper than they know.
Yeah, but you might need more than just one word, even if it's very useful. I'm going to memorize every pharmaceutical brand name that has ever been trademarked. Then I'll write a filter that eliminates common names that everyone already knows (like Dzerzhinsky) and run the telephone directories of every major city in the world through it, and memorize what's left.
Umm...actually that's what I would do if I had something remotely resembling a memory for names.
In summary let me just say this one thing: WHOOSH !
Are you serious about the joking? I can see no real evidence in the quoted report that it's meant to be less than serious. Also, the fact that this is being done for the sake of greenitude pretty definitively points in a contrary direction. People who are really into the green thing usually lack a sense of humor, and are incapable of making jokes—especially about their ideology. They are also quite likely to believe that measures like this work.
So what's the inverse of a whoosh? suuuuck?
The one with more math is the one you want.
No, I want the one who can listen to non-technical people and understand the problem, write documentation that is comprehensible to end users (or at least comprehensible enough to serve as a starting point for the tech writer), and that I can take to a customer site with a reasonable degree of assurance that he will not commit an egregious offense that violates basic primate sensibilities.
Or do you suppose we could have refined this question a bit more?
Can anyone give any insight behind how they perform upgrades like this?
FPGAs, of course. It's a test of SCORPION STARE...or maybe the rover ran into something that had to be handled with extreme dispatch. You can read the details here. WARNING: I am not responsible for any consequences that may ensue from your accessing this information without sufficient clearance.
Here's an abstract:
This document describes progress to date in establishing a defensive network capable of repelling wide-scale incursions by reconfiguring the national closed-circuit television surveillance network as a software-controlled look-to-kill multiheaded basilisk. To prevent accidental premature deployment or deliberate exploitation, the SCORPION STARE software is not actually loaded into the camera firmware. Instead, reprogrammable FPGA chips are integrated into all cameras and can be loaded with SCORPION STARE by authorised MAGINOT BLUE STARS users whenever necessary.
I used to work for a company whose anonymity I'll protect by giving only its initials—HP. It was a few years back, but a couple of viruses (I think it was Code Red and Nimda) took down the entire freaking corporate network for a total of at least two weeks. They'd get it fixed, then it would go down again; it was a big game of whack-a-mole. The principal cause was eventually determined to be laptops. IT had no policy to prevent users from taking their laptops home or traveling and connecting to insecure networks, doing stupid things, and then simply bringing them to work and plugging them into the corporate network. That couldn't possibly be the case in your organization, could it?
When I take my laptop traveling, I image it before I leave home, then when I return I take any files I need off via a thumb drive, and plunk the old image over the disk. That's for my personal laptop.
Facebook is slowly turning into the WalMart equivalent for the internet.
I believe we already had something like that—it was called "AOL".
The Normals need a playground. A market like that just can't be ignored; after all, there are so many of them.
They vetted the supplier.
It turns out they did a bad job of it.
It's their responsibility because the items were sold on their site.
Now, making good on their fuckup isn't the entitlement mindset, it's excellent, self-serving business sense...
It's good sense, but I think "excellent" is going a bit far. After all, not making good on the fake product would have kind of gotten them on the wrong side of the law, wouldn't it? Newegg may not have known the CPUs were fake when they shipped the product, but once they were made aware of the fact, failing to remediate the situation would have put them in some pretty deep legal juju. Replacing the fakes was the minimum action they were required to take. I don't think they deserve to be congratulated for doing what is both morally and legally mandatory.
Had I been a recipient of one of these fakes, I would have been pretty disgruntled. I would have calmed down once I got the real thing from Newegg, but if they wanted me to feel really gruntled again, they'd ship me a little something extra, or maybe give me a $15 gift certificate toward a future purchase. Now that would be "excellent".
For the record, I've ordered lots of stuff from Newegg for years, and have never had an untoward incident in my dealings with them. I'll certainly be considering them as a possible source for future purchases.
And here people have prejudice against mobile home dwellers. Imagine all that aluminum protecting them day and night!
Yeah, but those benefits are offset by the tornado-attracting qualities of that same aluminum.
And wallpaper your apartment with the grids, and the windows too. Just be sure to ground them onto the plumbing, or opening doors might be fun.
That's what the old U.S. embassy in Moscow had to do, though they just used metal foil. Apparently, the KGB bugs planted throughout the embassy required microwaves to power them, so the Soviets did the obvious thing. Of course, localized microwave beams would just help locate the bugs, so the Soviets blanketed the whole building.
I wonder if the foil wallpaper helped, either to reduce the health hazards or to cut off power to the bugs.
Obviously, you have not considered the advantages of living in an apartment subject to heavy microwave radiation. Microwaves heat stuff. To prove this, just put your cat in the microwave and turn it on. Clearly, this means that you will be saving tons of money on your heating bills—the cell phone company will be heating the apartment for free! (Well, maybe they will just be heating conductive objects, like for instance you, but that's all you need during those chilly Manhattan winters.
What is this "Google account" of which you speak? I thought they were a search engine, and a pretty good one, I have to admit. But why would I want an "account" with them? Have they gone into the banking business? (Hint: there are other ways to handle email than Gmail, Hotmail, and whatever Yahoo has (hoomail?)
So no, I didn't "ignore" their options—I opted to ignore the whole deal that involves me creating an account so that I can give them my personal data to mine. I was talking about an anonymous publicly visible cookie; Google can have my data when they pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
What are these "popup ads" of which the article speaks? Is it something you toast for breakfast?
Maybe "intrusive ads" create more revenue...for the site that serves them up, but that's not the same thing as being effective—that is, actually selling stuff. All I know is that I don't usually see "intrusive" ads on the web. I've made arrangements that pretty much eliminate "intrusive" content from my web reality. Basically, my policy is to kill anything that moves. Uh, well I mean anything that's animated, flashes at me, does any popping up or under or sideways, and does not basically sit meekly in a corner and behave itself. I get a kick out of the /. notice that offers to turn off advertisements for me because I have such good karma (yes this is your chance, oh my enemies!). I mean, doesn't having good karma mean I've been around? Like, what ads, man?
Here's free advice to advertisers: if you want me to notice your advertisement and even maybe click on it, make it a nice discreet image that doesn't get in my way, but shows something I am likely to be interested in buying. You know, stuff that will draw my eye instantly: guns, ammo, camera lenses, computer parts, neat tools, or new science fiction books. I'd even be willing to sign up for a service that plants a cookie that cues advertisers about my special interests, as long as that meant I wouldn't be bothered by obnoxious ads for all the other stuff I will never want. In fact, why hasn't anybody already implemented a system like this? Ooops, time to fill out the patent application.
I'm sure the Universe is expanding because when I drive to my son's house it seems further away every year. Actually, time goes faster because we accelerate when we go downhill!
Or, to put in the more formal terms of Vomact's Law: Those of us who are over the hill have more momentum.
"I want to be older, I'm tired of this long school day bullshit."
Better to want to do the very best you can where you are in life. I wouldn't trade my 65 years of experiences and my white hair for anything in this world.
Yeah, me too. Except youth, good looks, and a red Maserati.
i'm turning 30 this year and already i can see why they say youth is wasted on the young.
If you're 30, then you are young. You should have another 10 years or so before the effects of entropy really start making themselves noticed. Mind you, although my knees and ankles creak and my eyes don't work that well, I really wouldn't want the chore of having to live the last 5 decades all over again....
There are some observations that I have made concerning the subjective experience of time. In the interests of science (or, at least, humor), I will share them:
E-brakes are usually referred to as Parking brakes now. In some cars, they only engage 1/2 of the rear brake shoes. In others they only engage a small auxiliary brake shoe which is not part of the normal braking system, and is not designed to stop the car at highway speeds.
If they're actually making the parking/emergency brake less effective, I think that's a very bad thing. I've been saved from a serious accident at least once by quick use of the emergency brake. It was the end of a long day at work. I was about to pull out into traffic from the parking lot, but stepped on the brake because there were cars coming. The pedal went to the floor with absolutely no resistance—and no slowing of the car. I grabbed what was, in that moment, most definitely an emergency brake, and yanked on it with all my power. I came to a stop with the front of my car just barely nosing into traffic—enough to get me honked at, but not hit. Since then, I've always looked on the horizontal lever to the right of my seat as a potential life-saver. Yes, it's not going to stop me quickly if I'm traveling at highway speeds...but it's sure better than no brake at all.
I should mention that this incident took place about 25 years ago, and that the car was a total piece of crap. (Datsun 710, one of the worst cars ever made.) Back then, they didn't have redundant brake system hydraulics, and it was possible to lose braking totally if you had a single leak in the hydraulic lines. So, it's much less likely that this will happen with a modern car—but it isn't impossible, and as far as I'm concerned, building redundancy into critical systems is the smart thing to do. If you're going to have a parking brake in any case, why in the world would you want to cripple it?
...I don't think a plastic cover is the way to go. Cars are not in the air. They require instant off in an emergency where there is surrounding traffic...
Yeah, besides, a plastic cover over the engine kill switch might cause confusion with the similar cover over the arming switch for the Ma Deuce.
... I mean the black and white of it is to send them Back to Germany - or to roll in with the tanks and reform the country (a popular choice lately).
Please tell me this is humor, and not the result of a public school education. You know—the history courses never quite get to the Second World War...
... What I find questionable is that they don't want their children to attend a school because the children might be confronted with values the parents don't agree with. Yes, that's their official reason.
"Confronted" with "values" is pretty vague phrasing. There's a difference between being taught a course about world religions and being taught that all religious are the same in that they are equally mythological. The first is educational; it's about what various people believe. The second is indoctrination. Do you think that the average public school teacher has the subtlety of intellect to do one and not the other? If you do, then the schools you attended were far better than mine.
If you worry about the quality of the education received by home-schooled kids, comfort yourself with this: it's hard to do worse than the public schools.
Big fan of home schooling myself, however the biggest problem with home schooling isn't the quality of education. It is the lack of socialization. Home school kids are massively underdeveloped socially, they miss out on a lot of cues that the rest of the population learned the hard way in social environment.
I suppose maybe there's something to that. We homeschooled our daughter, and her idea of socializing is to text her friends, chat via computer, play MMOs or (gasp) computer games with her father over the home LAN. Yep, I'm afraid she's definitely abnormal.
She's going to graduate from the local state university after the current semester (she's 19). I figure when she starts working, maybe her "socialization" will improve. She's going to look for work as a science teacher in the public schools (she's doing her student teaching stint now). And yes, I do savor the irony...
No, I'm saying that the kind of scaremongering put forth was the only thing sufficient to make people take common-sense actions like washing their hands regularly.
...There's no need for data: the spread of H1N1 was considerably slowed by the precautions taken. ...
I respect your surprising honesty and openness about your beliefs and tactics. You think that the masses are too stupid to make rational decisions based on facts, and must, therefore, be frightened into action by propaganda—lies spread by the elite (you) that will promote correct conduct. I have long suspected that this is how the self-nominated elite thinks, and am pleased to find someone who openly admits it. You must be new.
This type of thinking is emblematic of the whole series of fright campaigns—especially "climate change". Usually, the perpetrators are too wily to explain their tactics openly; revelations come only when they think no outsiders are listening—as was shown by the recent leak of internal emails from the University of East Anglia. The thinking in those internal memoranda was pretty explicit: if the evidence won't produce the panic we need to provoke action, why by gosh we'll fudge it so it comes out "right".
But don't you go a little far when you say there's "no need for data"? It almost sounds as though you feel no need to justify your panic-mongering with facts, even to yourself; as though the panic was an end in itself. I can't help but think...it does make the dumb sheep easier to govern, doesn't it? I guess I'm just naive.
To you. Are you a doctor? Are you a virologist? What the fuck do you know? Nothing. Do you think anybody in his right mind is going to risk the lives of hundreds of thousands of people by paying attention to you?
...
The 1918 flu caused 650,000 deaths. Nobody really knows why. We could have another epidemic like that any year. When the new flu comes up, nobody knows until it's all over whether it's going to be the big one until it's all over.
Ordinarily, I am courteous and tend to cut people some slack. I will, however, make an exception in your case: You don't know jackshit. Fool.
The 1918-1920 influenza pandemic killed tens of millions. That's MILLIONS. Big difference. This reference says 20 to 40 million. This says 50 to 100 million. Going by the conservative estimate, that is several times the number of people that were killed in the First World War itself. Maybe you should acquire some courtesy until you succeed in your quest for omniscience.