It's about 23000 feet - most commercial airliners I've taken do their long-haul flying at 30000 or above, though non-pressurized small planes usually stay below 10000.
Verizon wasn't reading the text messages or filtering them - they were refusing to sell NARAL a mailing list server that would accept short-number messages and sign up the sender for the list.
If they're doing any filtering, it's likely to be spam filtering on email-to-text servers, if those still exist. On the other hand, the comment that text messages can be read is definitely still true.
Verizon's position was neutral - if Operation Rescue had been the first abortion lobby group to try to buy this kind of service, Verizon says their policy would have turned them down too, and you'd have seen the religious right flaming them for non-neutrality. In this case, NARAL's trying to lobby a somewhat younger and more technical crowd to lobby politicians, so they were the first ones to hit that wall.
I think the policy was probably driven by worry about teenagers subscribing to information that their parents disapprove of, which could lead to parents not buying cellphones for their kids, which would of course be _bad_ from VZ's perspective. IMHO this means there's somewhat of a bias against politically/socially liberal issues, because parents are more likely to get upset about their kids getting text messages from gay groups than from abstinance groups, but most of the hate groups are right-wing, and parents would also get upset about their kids getting messages from the skinhead types.
The lower-speed cellular protocols had really high, random latencies. Not as bad as satellite, but a lot more variable, so you're not going to use the data side for voice, but it's probably ok for emacs over telnet.
The newer protocols have somewhat better latencies - 3G in particular, which is what you probably want for speed if you can get it.
"Unlimited" cellular plans usually mean "Unlimited, but only on your handset, not using it to feed your laptop", or "Unlimited, as long as you use less than _N_ GB per month", where N is often 1 and usually under 10. You can do some things with it, but basically you're better off with the cantenna.
Mais ouis. I learned my French in elementary school, which means that I probably have a better accent but we didn't do much with spelling and less with grammar, and I've picked up enough more over the years that I can read a bit of it (mostly menus) but can't write anything useful at all:-)
At least back in the 1990s, when the US government was pretending that its rules against publishing crypto were to keep Commies from getting it, you weren't allowed to export the full Kerberos system, but you could export "Bones" subsets that had the crypto routines removed, which was enough to duplicate the protocols once you ftp's the DES code from Finland or whatever.
The US seems to be a lot more flexible now about not harassing code websites, and John Gilmore and the EFF beat them up by building a machine to crack DES, but I don't know if you can export full Kerberos now (or at least if you can get official permission.)
Ok, they weren't technically declared wars, but the War Powers Act means that the President can start a real war without having to get it declared first. George H.W. Bush ran a couple of wars during the Reagan Administration, defeating the Evil Forces of Communism in Grenada, which got enough public support for him to run a bigger war in Panama (though you could view that as an Employee Termination with Relatively Extreme Prejudice, since Noriega was a former CIA stooge.) That war was also popular enough that Bush could get away with invading Iraq.
The US under Reagan Himself and VP Bush also ran a naval blockade against Nicaragua, which is legally an act of war, including mining their harbors and funding illegal combatants that fought the government, both after the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship and also after Ortega's legal election in 1984. While Nicaragua didn't surrender to the US, it did contribute to the downfall of Ortega in the 1990 elections (though the Socialist incompetent meddling with the economy, the US spending roughly $9/voter supporting the opposition, and the US drug war funding the Contras also contributed significantly.)
First of all, it won't help you - The Bush Administration thinks that the Constitution doesn't apply to non-US-citizens anywhere, or to anybody outside the US, so you're a US Subject even if you're a non-citizen living outside the US. And if you don't give up your US citizenship, you owe US taxes on any income above some moderately high threshold, so you'd still be paying for Bush's war.
The more practical issue is whether Canada will let you in as an immigrant - the last time I looked they had a point system, where you get points based on age, education, employment, language skills, marital status, and maybe some other things. If you're young and educated, they want you; if you're old and unskilled they don't. If I'd moved there back when Bush got elected, all I'd have needed was to have a job lined up; now that I'm Officially Over The Hill, my wife would also need to have a job lined up and one of us would need to learn French or find another way to earn a couple of points. (I don't know if learning a First Nations language counts as bilingual:-)
If you're talking about two pennies, the metal in them is worth more than the monetary value. A few years ago the US switched from real copper to copper-coated zinc, but now even the zinc's worth more than 1 cent.
If you're talking Euro-cents, the monetary value might still be worth more than the metal.
Actually, it points to one of the early ISPs on Anguilla - you can look at www.ai if your browser insists on converting "ai" to "www.ai.com". The server for the.ai domain used to be in Berkeley California. There were (and probably still are) email addresses like "username@ai", mostly belonging to friends of the TLD administrator - the shortest valid email addresses had single-letter usernames like "x@ai". Anguilla's small enough that if Vince wanted to give everybody on the island an email address under the TLD, it would have worked fine (except for problems like multiple people with the same name.)
The reason for not having infinite numbers of TLDs is that the hierarchical structure of DNS makes things easier to manage by partitioning the namespace - if you don't do that, then it's no better than having everything under.com. Things could probably scale to a few thousand TLDs with no problem, but that isn't the direction IETF and IANA were going before ICANN took over, and now ICANN has the cheeseburger and wants to make money by charging $50,000 for applicants for TLDs.
Of course you can't compare bogomips from a very easily parallelizable application like Folding@Home with Linpak, but the latest Top500 list has the #1 machine, Blue Gene/L at Livermore Labs, at 280 TFlops, and the next two at 101.x TFlops. And Japan's Earth Simulator, which was the top machine a few years ago, has been left in the dust at #20.
If you want to talk about whether Real Science is being done, too many of the top machines are working on various aspects of Weapons of Mass Destruction and therefore aren't publishing a lot of results for the scientific community... For a number of years, the fastest machine was Seti@Home, but their statistics reporting has gotten a lot less useful so it's no longer easy to tell how much CPU is being used to search for signals from little green men, and I think by about 2005 it was no longer on top even ignoring the linpak-vs-bogomips disconnect.
HDTV is actually better-looking TV (doesn't help the plot, unfortunately, except for sports channels where it really _is_ better when you can see the puck.) But Standard-Definition Digital TV isn't better than analog - it degrades differently with noise, but its primary advantage is that it's easier to put more channels on the cable using digital. The channels you get don't look better than the ones you get on analog, but the channels you didn't get on analog might look better in digital.
Usually I'm against software patents - they're not only usually overbroad, but they mean that if you invent something yourself that somebody else also invented and patented, you can't use your own work.
In this case, I'll make an exception - if MS patents this, then nobody else is allowed to use this kind of annoying interference with user experience:-)
They're still collecting data from all the same data sources, they're just putting the data-mining tool on hold until they either clean up their act or rename the program to be less visible. So there's not much gain for your privacy except that they *might* not spread your data around as much when they restart.
It would be nice to say that "If we're lucky, it won't start up again until the Bush Administration is out of office", but that's not realistic - the folks who are doing this kind of thing won't stop unless there's a major restructuring of the National Security Apparatus, and I don't hear any of the major Democratic candidates saying they're going to fix it. Stuff like this was going on when Bill Clinton was in office (though not quite as rabidly), and Jonathan Edwards in particular was generally pro-surveillance during the 2004 elections debates.
Meanwhile, Moore's Law just keeps cranking away. The computer databases of the 1960s and 1970s that had everybody worried about privacy ran on machines with a lot less horsepower than my cellphone or iPod. This not only means that they can collect a lot more data, but queries that used to take a year's development work and a staff of a hundred people feeding the computers are now something an average employee can do on a whim at lunch hour (e.g. build an SQL query to find out how many Guatemalan immigrants lived near known activists.)
First of all, there are different places in a network that can be oversubscribed, and of course they're different for cable, DSL, and other architectures. The two most important points are the Internet Backbone feeds and the neighborhood distribution networks. P2P has much different financial and technical effects in the two environments.
For cable modems and DSL, the local distribution transmission technologies are asymmetric, but the upstream media from the head end or DSLAM on up normally has more slack, so the technology tends to limit the amount of resources P2P can consume. It's obviously better if you're uploading material that's being downloaded by somebody on your local distribution network, but for general applications that's unlikely - too few people want too many different files. (Large Universities are a special case, where the bulk of the traffic is probably for relatively popular material, students have more shared tastes than random neighborhoods, and upstream is usually faster and often symmetric.)
The "backbone" bandwidth, which is what costs broadband companies money based on traffic levels, is going to be more affected financially than technically - it's a small number of locations, and broadband companies can monitor it fairly easily so they can keep up with growth. The scalability issues are really critical here - if people usually upload material to other users of the same carrier and in the same geographical area, they're not touching the backbone for high-volume media, only for tracker support, and since _everybody_ on the consumer broadband networks is primarily an information consumer, not producer, the traffic's more likely to stay local, and the traffic ratios which affect what the broadband company pays for traffic are very skewed and P2P balances them a bit rather than exacerbating them. Overall backbone downstream traffic can still increase, but carriers that care about that should be encouraging their customers to use protocols that download locally when possible, and can put up their own P2P caching servers (i.e. fast user machines) if they want to reduce imports from outside.
Napster had centralized databases tracking who was downloading what songs, so if they wanted to they could easily enough have made sure that users stayed within their local networks whenever possible, especially for universities that had scaling problems. BitTorrent trackers can provide somewhat the same capability, if they want to. The fancy way to do it is to look at BGP autonomous system numbers to determine who's sharing with whom, but even just trying to keep systems in the same/19 or/16 together is a good start. Most of the P2P protocols support a cruder approach - checking ping times or other TCP or UDP packet transmission latencies - and even these are a good start, because local stuff tends to stay local. You can do a bit better for scalability if you weight IP addresses or BGP ASNs as well - usually there's enough correlation that overall performance doesn't change much, and it helps your ISP a lot. There's some variance in that, such as that a fast university user who's networkily near one of the exchange points that your ISP uses may be more attactive than a user who's geographically farther away but on your carrier's network, but in general being crude and greedy isn't as bad as you'd expect.
.... and the people who support actual old people will complain that you don't understand what old people need. Unfortunately, many old people need a bit more than the original poster suggested.
They do need Javascript and Flash, because too much of the Web uses it. Therefore you need an environment that can support that dangerous junk safely:-) You also need to be able to play a couple of different video and audio formats.
Old people print stuff. That's how they remember it between sessions, especially if they've got a kiosky environment where they can't save their own stuff easily. It's also how they make it easier to read some things that are hard to read on screen. So you need printing.
Shared machines might need logins or equivalent to take care of bookmarks and web-page stored passwords.
Old people need email, but you can punt it over to Yahoo/etc. if you want.
Some old people like Instant Messages; others don't.
Some old people need to be able to load pictures from their cameras, so they can mail them to their kids or grandkids.
My first thought was to do a Linux livecd of some sort (or MacOS or BartPE or OpenBSD if you're not a Linux fan.) You *should* be able to do a pretty safe read-only-/usr environment instead, which will perform better and be a bit more reliable, and you can build yourself a reinstall-everything CD/DVD to fix things in case it's acting up - just try to find some way to preserve any user account settings. VMWare or User-Mode Linux or Xen can make it easy to build a heavy-duty sandbox environment to make it easier to keep the basic system safe if you want.
The important part of the user's interface to the operating system is that if they turn the power switch off and then on again, everything will work as if it were loading from scratch. Maybe they need to type in their name and a password, or maybe not.
While the posting you're pointing to is funnier than this posting of mine (:-), what your comment reminded me of is the spam that I used to get lots of for some training company in Cairo that mostly does civil engineering. If I need to know the *current* regulations for casting liquified limestone in Egypt, they might be the people to go to, but they were so persistent for such a long time that I'd really have liked to cast their mail server in the stuff, and their ISP was the monopoly telco which had no interest in stopping spammers.
My firm does disaster-recovery consulting as well, though since I'm in California my customers are more likely to care about earthquakes than the hardware failures or router bugs or hurricanes that our East Coast product developers are more likely to focus on, and after Katrina hit there was a lot of exploration of which carriers had infrastructure in New Orleans. (And of course after 9/11 hit most large businesses, especially New York financials, got a much different perspective on their DR issues.)
But this Pandemic Flu stuff has a much different feel to it - there's a constant pump of propaganda that's going on that's different from the traditional disaster recovery consulting business normally deals with.
Actually in this case, it's the chicks who learned enough Sumerian to impress other people - they're a local women's choral group who perform in something like 17 languages, because it's just not enough to do several different Gaelic-family languages and Bulgarian and Seneca or have the main dead languages you perform in be Latin and classical Greek. (I forget whether the Hebrew they do is ancient or modern, or whether Ladino counts as a dead language yet, but it's a relatively recent language either way...)
There are two main groups driving the Pandemic Flu Preparedness business. One is the usual Homeland Security / Bush Administration scaremonger mob, who want to keep the rabble afraid so they'll support any increase in government power that the mob suggests. The other is computer consultants who can make money on preparedness consulting, which is something that they can charge much higher fees for than low-level consulting like fixing device drivers for video cards.
The computer consultants have a lot easier time selling to the financial industry, where there's a general recognition that business continuity is important, a strong auditing sector, and a willingness and ability to pay lots of money for services that can save them lots of money in case of relatively rare disasters. The trucking industry, on the other hand, will pay a bit of money for somebody to sell them reliable scheduling and inventory systems, but is much more concerned about threats like "Gas prices rise another $1/gallon" or "Mafia war in New York City changes protection rackets" or "Auditors investigate Teamsters Union Pension Fund".
And any time the scaremonger mob wants to yank the public's chain, they can put out an announcement about "Pandemic Flu Booga-Booga" and the consultant business acts as an amplifier by hitting up all their potential clients with well-publicized seminars, as opposed to saying "Unverified Terrorist Chatter Booga-Booga" which gets amplified by lots of local news stations interviewing local police and mayors about whether the local bridge or the propane tanks behind town hall might be on Al Qaeda's Top 10 Targets List". Also, it's a way to keep white-collar workers nervous and worried, which is sometimes harder, as opposed to the kind of scaremongering that works better for blue-collar Fox News audiences.
Of course it's possible that another pandemic-capable flu strain will evolve, even though the Bush Administration doesn't believe in Darwinian Evolution. (Some of their descriptions of pandemic flu evolution have been pretty close to Lysenkoism, worrying about how little the flu will have to change itself to be acquire the ability to pass from human to human, but that's a separate problem.)
I can't say that this has never been what the Pandemic Flu scares were about, because early on there were some serious medical concerns, especially before we had enough experience to know what this flu was doing, and it's certainly a much more serious risk if you're in the poultry business or flu-vaccine buiness than if you're not. And while H5N1 doesn't appear to be a major human epidemic version of the flu, it's possible that a more virulent flu strain might evolve, and this flu has helped medical researchers learn more about how influenza works, which is legitimately scary stuff. And there are people in the US government and the UN WHO who really do care about stopping disease.
But this scare-mongering has overwhelmingly been driven by the political scaremongers, with a bit of help from computer consultants who make money helping customers assess and mitigate various threats. You don't see the same constant consistent warnings about Hurricane Preparedness, even though the computer consultants have a lot more frequent hurricanes and earthquakes to deal with than pandemics. (That might change if an environmentalist Democrat gets elected, since "Global Warming Causes More Hurricanes" is a good scare story too, and "Republicans are Incompetent at Hurricane Preparedness and Democrats Aren't" is potentially useful as well.)
Also, you don't see the government putting the same level of effort into stopping medical problems that they _can_ easily do things about but are politically incorrect. It's not just having public-school sex education courses talk about using condoms to prevent pregnancy and disease transmission instead of the politically correct scientific technique of "hoping teenagers will always stop at third base". Sure, they're not 100% effective, but having women get cervical cancer because of the HPV epidemic isn't an appropriate response. It's things like getting rid of the laws against hypodermic needles, which were originally put there to improve public health by making injectable drug use more difficult but have had the effect of making needle-sharing prevalent, spreading AIDS and hepatitis and other diseases. Among other things, these laws interact especially badly with the US illegal-drug culture because prostitutes are often addicts, so the disease not only spreads among junkies but also prostitutes' customers and their other sex partners.
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It's about 23000 feet - most commercial airliners I've taken do their long-haul flying at 30000 or above, though non-pressurized small planes usually stay below 10000.
If they're doing any filtering, it's likely to be spam filtering on email-to-text servers, if those still exist. On the other hand, the comment that text messages can be read is definitely still true.
I think the policy was probably driven by worry about teenagers subscribing to information that their parents disapprove of, which could lead to parents not buying cellphones for their kids, which would of course be _bad_ from VZ's perspective. IMHO this means there's somewhat of a bias against politically/socially liberal issues, because parents are more likely to get upset about their kids getting text messages from gay groups than from abstinance groups, but most of the hate groups are right-wing, and parents would also get upset about their kids getting messages from the skinhead types.
The newer protocols have somewhat better latencies - 3G in particular, which is what you probably want for speed if you can get it.
Mais ouis. I learned my French in elementary school, which means that I probably have a better accent but we didn't do much with spelling and less with grammar, and I've picked up enough more over the years that I can read a bit of it (mostly menus) but can't write anything useful at all :-)
The US seems to be a lot more flexible now about not harassing code websites, and John Gilmore and the EFF beat them up by building a machine to crack DES, but I don't know if you can export full Kerberos now (or at least if you can get official permission.)
The US under Reagan Himself and VP Bush also ran a naval blockade against Nicaragua, which is legally an act of war, including mining their harbors and funding illegal combatants that fought the government, both after the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship and also after Ortega's legal election in 1984. While Nicaragua didn't surrender to the US, it did contribute to the downfall of Ortega in the 1990 elections (though the Socialist incompetent meddling with the economy, the US spending roughly $9/voter supporting the opposition, and the US drug war funding the Contras also contributed significantly.)
The more practical issue is whether Canada will let you in as an immigrant - the last time I looked they had a point system, where you get points based on age, education, employment, language skills, marital status, and maybe some other things. If you're young and educated, they want you; if you're old and unskilled they don't. If I'd moved there back when Bush got elected, all I'd have needed was to have a job lined up; now that I'm Officially Over The Hill, my wife would also need to have a job lined up and one of us would need to learn French or find another way to earn a couple of points. (I don't know if learning a First Nations language counts as bilingual
If you're talking Euro-cents, the monetary value might still be worth more than the metal.
The reason for not having infinite numbers of TLDs is that the hierarchical structure of DNS makes things easier to manage by partitioning the namespace - if you don't do that, then it's no better than having everything under
If you want to talk about whether Real Science is being done, too many of the top machines are working on various aspects of Weapons of Mass Destruction and therefore aren't publishing a lot of results for the scientific community... For a number of years, the fastest machine was Seti@Home, but their statistics reporting has gotten a lot less useful so it's no longer easy to tell how much CPU is being used to search for signals from little green men, and I think by about 2005 it was no longer on top even ignoring the linpak-vs-bogomips disconnect.
You can make up some more yourself....
HDTV is actually better-looking TV (doesn't help the plot, unfortunately, except for sports channels where it really _is_ better when you can see the puck.) But Standard-Definition Digital TV isn't better than analog - it degrades differently with noise, but its primary advantage is that it's easier to put more channels on the cable using digital. The channels you get don't look better than the ones you get on analog, but the channels you didn't get on analog might look better in digital.
In this case, I'll make an exception - if MS patents this, then nobody else is allowed to use this kind of annoying interference with user experience
It would be nice to say that "If we're lucky, it won't start up again until the Bush Administration is out of office", but that's not realistic - the folks who are doing this kind of thing won't stop unless there's a major restructuring of the National Security Apparatus, and I don't hear any of the major Democratic candidates saying they're going to fix it. Stuff like this was going on when Bill Clinton was in office (though not quite as rabidly), and Jonathan Edwards in particular was generally pro-surveillance during the 2004 elections debates.
Meanwhile, Moore's Law just keeps cranking away. The computer databases of the 1960s and 1970s that had everybody worried about privacy ran on machines with a lot less horsepower than my cellphone or iPod. This not only means that they can collect a lot more data, but queries that used to take a year's development work and a staff of a hundred people feeding the computers are now something an average employee can do on a whim at lunch hour (e.g. build an SQL query to find out how many Guatemalan immigrants lived near known activists.)
For cable modems and DSL, the local distribution transmission technologies are asymmetric, but the upstream media from the head end or DSLAM on up normally has more slack, so the technology tends to limit the amount of resources P2P can consume. It's obviously better if you're uploading material that's being downloaded by somebody on your local distribution network, but for general applications that's unlikely - too few people want too many different files. (Large Universities are a special case, where the bulk of the traffic is probably for relatively popular material, students have more shared tastes than random neighborhoods, and upstream is usually faster and often symmetric.)
The "backbone" bandwidth, which is what costs broadband companies money based on traffic levels, is going to be more affected financially than technically - it's a small number of locations, and broadband companies can monitor it fairly easily so they can keep up with growth. The scalability issues are really critical here - if people usually upload material to other users of the same carrier and in the same geographical area, they're not touching the backbone for high-volume media, only for tracker support, and since _everybody_ on the consumer broadband networks is primarily an information consumer, not producer, the traffic's more likely to stay local, and the traffic ratios which affect what the broadband company pays for traffic are very skewed and P2P balances them a bit rather than exacerbating them. Overall backbone downstream traffic can still increase, but carriers that care about that should be encouraging their customers to use protocols that download locally when possible, and can put up their own P2P caching servers (i.e. fast user machines) if they want to reduce imports from outside.
Napster had centralized databases tracking who was downloading what songs, so if they wanted to they could easily enough have made sure that users stayed within their local networks whenever possible, especially for universities that had scaling problems. BitTorrent trackers can provide somewhat the same capability, if they want to. The fancy way to do it is to look at BGP autonomous system numbers to determine who's sharing with whom, but even just trying to keep systems in the same
My first thought was to do a Linux livecd of some sort (or MacOS or BartPE or OpenBSD if you're not a Linux fan.) You *should* be able to do a pretty safe read-only-/usr environment instead, which will perform better and be a bit more reliable, and you can build yourself a reinstall-everything CD/DVD to fix things in case it's acting up - just try to find some way to preserve any user account settings. VMWare or User-Mode Linux or Xen can make it easy to build a heavy-duty sandbox environment to make it easier to keep the basic system safe if you want.
The important part of the user's interface to the operating system is that if they turn the power switch off and then on again, everything will work as if it were loading from scratch. Maybe they need to type in their name and a password, or maybe not.
While the posting you're pointing to is funnier than this posting of mine (:-), what your comment reminded me of is the spam that I used to get lots of for some training company in Cairo that mostly does civil engineering. If I need to know the *current* regulations for casting liquified limestone in Egypt, they might be the people to go to, but they were so persistent for such a long time that I'd really have liked to cast their mail server in the stuff, and their ISP was the monopoly telco which had no interest in stopping spammers.
But this Pandemic Flu stuff has a much different feel to it - there's a constant pump of propaganda that's going on that's different from the traditional disaster recovery consulting business normally deals with.
I just *knew* that feeding it the nam-shub of Enki was going to be a bad idea....
Actually in this case, it's the chicks who learned enough Sumerian to impress other people - they're a local women's choral group who perform in something like 17 languages, because it's just not enough to do several different Gaelic-family languages and Bulgarian and Seneca or have the main dead languages you perform in be Latin and classical Greek. (I forget whether the Hebrew they do is ancient or modern, or whether Ladino counts as a dead language yet, but it's a relatively recent language either way...)
The computer consultants have a lot easier time selling to the financial industry, where there's a general recognition that business continuity is important, a strong auditing sector, and a willingness and ability to pay lots of money for services that can save them lots of money in case of relatively rare disasters. The trucking industry, on the other hand, will pay a bit of money for somebody to sell them reliable scheduling and inventory systems, but is much more concerned about threats like "Gas prices rise another $1/gallon" or "Mafia war in New York City changes protection rackets" or "Auditors investigate Teamsters Union Pension Fund".
And any time the scaremonger mob wants to yank the public's chain, they can put out an announcement about "Pandemic Flu Booga-Booga" and the consultant business acts as an amplifier by hitting up all their potential clients with well-publicized seminars, as opposed to saying "Unverified Terrorist Chatter Booga-Booga" which gets amplified by lots of local news stations interviewing local police and mayors about whether the local bridge or the propane tanks behind town hall might be on Al Qaeda's Top 10 Targets List". Also, it's a way to keep white-collar workers nervous and worried, which is sometimes harder, as opposed to the kind of scaremongering that works better for blue-collar Fox News audiences.
Didn't they want to acknowledge RMS's efforts in promoting Unix-like operating systems? :-)
I can't say that this has never been what the Pandemic Flu scares were about, because early on there were some serious medical concerns, especially before we had enough experience to know what this flu was doing, and it's certainly a much more serious risk if you're in the poultry business or flu-vaccine buiness than if you're not. And while H5N1 doesn't appear to be a major human epidemic version of the flu, it's possible that a more virulent flu strain might evolve, and this flu has helped medical researchers learn more about how influenza works, which is legitimately scary stuff. And there are people in the US government and the UN WHO who really do care about stopping disease.
But this scare-mongering has overwhelmingly been driven by the political scaremongers, with a bit of help from computer consultants who make money helping customers assess and mitigate various threats. You don't see the same constant consistent warnings about Hurricane Preparedness, even though the computer consultants have a lot more frequent hurricanes and earthquakes to deal with than pandemics. (That might change if an environmentalist Democrat gets elected, since "Global Warming Causes More Hurricanes" is a good scare story too, and "Republicans are Incompetent at Hurricane Preparedness and Democrats Aren't" is potentially useful as well.)
Also, you don't see the government putting the same level of effort into stopping medical problems that they _can_ easily do things about but are politically incorrect. It's not just having public-school sex education courses talk about using condoms to prevent pregnancy and disease transmission instead of the politically correct scientific technique of "hoping teenagers will always stop at third base". Sure, they're not 100% effective, but having women get cervical cancer because of the HPV epidemic isn't an appropriate response. It's things like getting rid of the laws against hypodermic needles, which were originally put there to improve public health by making injectable drug use more difficult but have had the effect of making needle-sharing prevalent, spreading AIDS and hepatitis and other diseases. Among other things, these laws interact especially badly with the US illegal-drug culture because prostitutes are often addicts, so the disease not only spreads among junkies but also prostitutes' customers and their other sex partners.