I'll even predict when the big war will occur. As soon as they develop good enough tech (in part from all their science and engineering student and businessmen spies over here) to geolocate and take out the boomers. They have to be able to do that, ground based can be taken care of already, and developing carrier killers is already well established in their arsenal. Then they will hit the US with a devastating first strike, which will be both preceded and followed by intense asymmetrical warfare on the ground with sabotage and perhaps even biological weapons that have been tailored to be race specific, and it will be effective enough that the US will be forced to capitulate, to sue for peace, and then they will come as occupiers.
Everything great except for this part. I still have faith in mutual destruction keeping us both safe... They're not going to unload their Tbonds either, they could never get any money out.
China has enough of its own problems, first and foremost their own government. Totalitarian governments lead to corruption on all levels and the masses are fed up with it. It's estimated they must maintain 8-10% growth each year for the populace fast growing restless over corruption (gov't officials using their powers to seize private land for pennies on the dollar, and then turning around and selling it to multi-national corps for millions more and pocketing a hefty profit)...which is unlikely to happen. They have an ever growing pollution problem...there are several protests per day across China over government seizing land...no...China still has a lot of problems, too. They are not gods.
Poor Retro Studios. Making the same game over and over. They got MP1 right, but the mistake was to bring little new to the table. Further, If Nintendo had marketed MP1 right, I'm pretty certain it would have actually sold (more than the abysmal 200,000 units).
Even better, if you have a 5 button mouse you can use X-mouse Button Control (works for Windows XP, Vista) to map Ctrl+W to the easiest to reach thumb-button, and Ctrl+Shift+T to the other thumb button. I love this.
It's not that I'm reading them all at the same time, it's that I can queue up things to read. For example, me on Slashdot back in 2004 when I still used IE:
1. Open Slashdot 2. See interesting headline 3. Click article (*gasp*) 4. Read article 5. Click back 6. If content was interesting and there might be a good discussion, click Comments link 7. Read, reply, repeat. 8. GOTO 1 unless I've gone back far enough to come across stuff I read/commented on yesterday.
Now with tabs I just run through the front pages of all my normal news sites until I hit old articles middle-clicking on everything that looks interesting, then I swing back to the beginning and read through every tab. I know it's technically the same experience as opening multiple windows, but tabs feel cleaner to me as a matter of personal opinion.
I would say you're new here, but I'm at a loss seeing as you've been here since 2004.
Most users (me included) skip steps 3-6. I really haven't missed much. Most of the stuff worth reading is in the Insightful comments anyways.
Data compression is an inherantly serial operation. Parts of it can be done in parrallel but in general the way you compress the next bit is based on the patterns observed earlier.
Say you wanted one core to start encoding at 0% and the other at 50% of the way into the movie. The core starting at 50% has to start compression without any of the learned patterns in the 0-50% range. In the example you gave one core encodes half the screen and the other core encodes the other half. If they are running in parrallel the second core can't use the learnt patterns of the first unless it wants to wait for the first core to finish its current frame (thereby making it non-parrallel).
So you have a tradeoff. You can run everything serially, or you can accept that you'll miss a few observed patterns here and there and run more parrallel.
For usability (seeking through a video) no codecs worked based on a learned pattern. The memory requirements to make use of this would be astronomical (you'd have to store the entire file in RAM, good luck doing that with a BluRay).
IIRC, the furthest back any codec looks is something like 24 frames.
I completely agree. This is a trivial piece of hardware, of which there are millions of examples on the Internet, the majority of which are more interesting than this.
Is this of interest just because someone at MIT was involved? What's next? MIT engineers demonstrate how to drink beer?
The Slashdot Achievement "Days read in a row" is killing me. If I'm out of town for a weekend I find myself worrying if I'll have access to, and time to hop onto the internet and log in to Slashdot to keep my winning streak rolling.
Weighing the consequences, I've decided to just play it safe and live with mom in the basement. Don't have to have a job to pay rent that way.
I've hit 2^6 so far, anybody have better? (Be honest please, no scrips that check for you every day. Yes that's a good idea, wish I had done it myself before giving the idea away like this, heh heh;)
Why move to Europe? I mean, its not like they'll not be restricting the system so that it only works over Europe. Why not just buy a Galileo receiver (when they become available)?
Also, isn't Galileo supposed to be backwards compatible with GPS?
The whole move to Europe thing is usually someone ranting about fat US people or something. Fact is, proven by the strengthening of the US dollar against the Euro since the recession, the world considers the US and US currency a safer place to store their money than in Europe. Europe has banking, and few other serious industries. That's why they were hit so hard with this housing collapse. Double whammy because people stopped traveling so much. Venice would die first, what would they produce? I mean do they even have internet there? The entire city is nothing but one giant romantically-overrated tourist attraction.
solar event will cause transient events that will recover in a few seconds
A normal event, sure. But a repeat of the 1859 solar flare would likely damage many satellites not in the Earth's shadow at the height of the impact. Is the whole GPS constellation set up to handle that type of event? Or would more than half the satellites go down in a hour?
Of more concern is the electrical grid. There was a hot topic on the internet for some reason recently, probably someone pulling some strings hoping to get the populace worked up about our power infrastructure so that Obama could come in and save us. The money wouldn't have even gone to fixing that problem, it would have gone to rebuilding transmission line infrastructure that is terribly close to falling apart. Nevermind that the whole problem was caused in the first place by a congress thinking that running electricity across the nation is like piping gas, you send it down on pipe and it comes out the other end. (Shameless hands-off plug-- if congress would fix the legislation then the carriers would be able to profit [right now it's impossible to collect anything more than revenue, so there is no incentive to upgrade or improve the structure, only to spend for the mandatory fixes. Of course congress isn't bothered by this, because it means they'll be able to come in and save us and look all good and stuff).
If nothing else the spending provides a market for engineering new, more efficient uses of current technology, and it employs the brighter minds in work that can be immediately rewarding (for example defense contractors involved in rapid prototyping-- design, build, and test in about 6 months, work the kinks out, and mass produce 3 months later. These contractors have had a very real impact on the lives of soldiers in Iraq-- they can report and say "hey if we had something that could do XYZ, we'd crap our pants 40% less in situations similar to X Y and Z, which were a majority of our encounters on the field; then the contractor can design and build and produce something that fills that need very rapidly).
They're giving laptops to "low-performing school districts with limited resources", but surely to actually use those laptops in lessons, the schools will have to spend even more of their limited resources setting up an infrastructure and new teaching plans?
What's interesting about this is this part from the article:
The child must sign a document promising simply to try to "do something great" for their state, families -- and themselves -- with the laptop.
It doesn't sound like they're putting these laptops in the hands of the children for the purpose of teachers utilizing them as teaching tools. And of course, with such a bold new technology, I would expect the teachers not to use them at all at first. Then learn to use them as an augmenting learning tool. And maybe the final stage five years from now is to have the textbook on the laptop and all that jazz.
I know a school teacher in the Bronx and from what she tells me it sounds like all other attempts to improve the learning process have failed or actually deterred from it. She sounds like she'd be willing to try anything.
Keep in mind that these laptops are probably going to cost the same as a couple of new textbooks. Who cares if it fails? It'd be great if a few kids did do something great for their state and family with these laptops.
Parents who care and teachers who can actually discipline the students will do far more for the kids' education than laptops. If we went to a voucher system the schools could set their own policies-- "Yes most of our students achieve very high test scores, and we will take your child, but you must sign this consent form that we will be providing consequences for your child if he is acting up and disrupting the class". If the parents didn't like it they can just send their kids to another school.
I admit I haven't thought about it much, but I have yet to see a good argument against the voucher system. It would help weed out the bureaucracy and spending on school stadiums and football fields, too.
Take a look into NoScript and Adblock for Firefox. Those two kill all processor-sucking advertisements. You can still enable the sites that need javascript.
It's $30 here if you're a student, $50 if anyone else for an unlimited monthly.
Except the revenue wasn't paying for the train so they decided to levy a tax on people inside the county and leave the prices the same. Why would you tax people for something they don't even want to use? $50/month is a great deal, clearly there is no desire for the train otherwise people would use it.
=====
As much as it's a statistical inefficiency (like about 75% of government), I couldn't get to my coop without it; couldn't afford a car to drive there. At first I was frustrated that it takes me 1h15m each way, but then I realized I get to do productive, entertaining things while I ride the mass transit. If it would take me 45m each way to drive, then I spent an extra hour per day commuting when I'm riding the train, but I gain 1h30m in time that I would have spent driving, to do things like read books, watch TV shows on a laptop, read all the interesting news articles I want to (open up 30 tabs in the morning of all the articles that catch my interest and then suspend the laptop till I get to the train)...
It's been a huge gain in time, simply a loss in controlling how I get to use it. Not that this matters, I would have spent it playing games or something.
At the end of the day I see mass transit as potentially useful for empowering the lower to lower middle class to get to work. There's no way I could afford car, or would buy and run one if I could; it would eat up too much of the paycheck which needs to go to schooling.
So couple mass transit with a graduated welfare system (IE decreases gradually as your paycheck increases-- but not so much that it's not worth moving up in your organization [attaining management at a fast food joint for example]) and it could be a net good.
However, simply spending willy nilly on trains is stupid foolish. Our road system is already so well designed that trains would be far too little return on investment (unlike it was in Europe, not to mention the population density differences). It would be much more efficient for us to simply spend on ramping up mass transit.
Traffic--our city handles traffic in an ingenious way-- make the emergency shoulders wide enough for the buses. Then, the buses (and buses only) can use those emergency lanes during rush hour if traffic is stopped up. Result is the mass transit is reliably on time-- even if I-75 is backed up, you can still get home in 1h15m if you take mass transit.
After two weeks you get used to the longer commute, and enjoy having lots of time to crank through all those books you've been wanting to read, things you've been wanting to learn, etc.
If our overlords are shitting out dung, no matter how useful, I'd prefer then to be underlords, or over-to-one-side-lords, or not-over-my-head-at-least-lords.
Some aborigines consider dung a delicacy, you insensitive clod!!! Consider it a "desert" if you will...
What gets me about this sort of leak is that we all treat it as some sort of big news when in reality we are leaked information in this way all the time. Notice that it is always someone high up in the foodchain talking to someone in the media.
A real accidental leak would be something overheard at a bar where the speaker didn't know a reporter was listening. But when the guy says it straight out to a reporter, that isn't leaking, that's just an unofficial announcement.
Remember when Adam Osborne announced that the next version of his PC would be better than his current one and everyone stopped buying in anticipation? Leaks are always carefully planned but don't always have the effect you're looking for.
It's no surprise they're doing this on purpose.
What gets me is how great this viral marketing is working. Even I've got 7 fever-- I just want to get rid of XP (supposedly 7 is faster than Vista at games; I'm CPU limited in Vista but not as much in XP).
It's a bit like delays on trains. If your train is just about due to arrive and they schedule a 15 minute delay, there is a reasonable chance that it will actually be delayed by 15 minutes. If your train is not due to leave for an hour and they put up a 15 minute delay, it will clearly be delayed by a lot more than 15 minutes. The delay will gradually increase during the next hour according to some complex non-linear formula I've never been quite able to derive.
Sometimes, the delay time is listed as "unknown". This is the Duke Nukem Forever of train delays. At this point, it's usually quicker just to walk, even if your journey is several hundred miles.
(for context, I live in the UK)
I had to take your trains last summer when I studied abroad.
My heart goes out to all you poor blokes.
(ok ok, actually, it wasn't that bad, but it was just as expensive as flying (in the states).)
Given that the pigs farmers are almost all part of the Coptic Christian minority, which has a history of being oppressed, this doesn't surprise me at all. As parent says, it's not about the swine flu.
Coptic Christians have it very rough in Egypt; if they are the majority of pig farmers then this is a very plausible explanation for Egypt acting so silly over this.
I actually had this conversation with a friend a year ago or so. Of course, they didn't express a desire to relish in raw pork. And it was related to the Bird Flu. But pretty much dead on the same.
Their reasoning was that Bird Flu wasn't going to be an issue because it couldn't "evolve" the ability of human-to-human transmission because... evolution was a bunch of nonsense. And the media had lost interest by that time so my friend thought it had all just been overblown.
But H5N1 (Bird Flu) hasn't gone away at all. This H1N1 (Swine Flu) may be bad; it may not. But even if it has low mortality rate, if it spreads quickly far and wide, it may increase the chance H5N1 picks up human-to-human. That would be very bad indeed.
Micro vs. Macroevolution; there is a difference, and as you saw there are plenty of people who don't know the difference... Many (most) (all educated) Christians don't have a problem microevolution....
*Not talking about size by the way. Just because it is small does not make it "micro" evolution...
It it is most dangerous to those with strong immune systems because of the potential for cytokine storms
Which is pure speculation at this point. The truth is nobody knows why it's mostly killed young people so far. Pointing to a cytokine storm as the cause is possible, but very misleading.
No it's not; read up on the Spanish flu of 1918-1920, this strain is very similar and is functioning in exactly the same way.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll even predict when the big war will occur. As soon as they develop good enough tech (in part from all their science and engineering student and businessmen spies over here) to geolocate and take out the boomers. They have to be able to do that, ground based can be taken care of already, and developing carrier killers is already well established in their arsenal. Then they will hit the US with a devastating first strike, which will be both preceded and followed by intense asymmetrical warfare on the ground with sabotage and perhaps even biological weapons that have been tailored to be race specific, and it will be effective enough that the US will be forced to capitulate, to sue for peace, and then they will come as occupiers.
Everything great except for this part. I still have faith in mutual destruction keeping us both safe...
They're not going to unload their Tbonds either, they could never get any money out.
China has enough of its own problems, first and foremost their own government. Totalitarian governments lead to corruption on all levels and the masses are fed up with it. It's estimated they must maintain 8-10% growth each year for the populace fast growing restless over corruption (gov't officials using their powers to seize private land for pennies on the dollar, and then turning around and selling it to multi-national corps for millions more and pocketing a hefty profit)...which is unlikely to happen. They have an ever growing pollution problem...there are several protests per day across China over government seizing land...no...China still has a lot of problems, too. They are not gods.
You should go outside of the dumpster, that metal around you is a faraday cage intercepting all your internets!
You do realize the bandwidth of DDR5 is twice DDR3's? The 512bit DDR3 bus bandwidth is equal to a 256bit DDR5 bus' bandwidth.
Beg to differ...
Poor Retro Studios. Making the same game over and over. They got MP1 right, but the mistake was to bring little new to the table. Further, If Nintendo had marketed MP1 right, I'm pretty certain it would have actually sold (more than the abysmal 200,000 units).
Same story here. You're just growing up, that's all. Other things have more value to you.
Even better, if you have a 5 button mouse you can use X-mouse Button Control (works for Windows XP, Vista) to map Ctrl+W to the easiest to reach thumb-button, and Ctrl+Shift+T to the other thumb button. I love this.
It's not that I'm reading them all at the same time, it's that I can queue up things to read. For example, me on Slashdot back in 2004 when I still used IE:
1. Open Slashdot
2. See interesting headline
3. Click article (*gasp*)
4. Read article
5. Click back
6. If content was interesting and there might be a good discussion, click Comments link
7. Read, reply, repeat.
8. GOTO 1 unless I've gone back far enough to come across stuff I read/commented on yesterday.
Now with tabs I just run through the front pages of all my normal news sites until I hit old articles middle-clicking on everything that looks interesting, then I swing back to the beginning and read through every tab. I know it's technically the same experience as opening multiple windows, but tabs feel cleaner to me as a matter of personal opinion.
I would say you're new here, but I'm at a loss seeing as you've been here since 2004.
Most users (me included) skip steps 3-6.
I really haven't missed much. Most of the stuff worth reading is in the Insightful comments anyways.
I have prior art, I was born with a magic wand!
Yes?
And do you put on your robe and wizard hat before you use it?
In Harry Potter, if you replace "Wand" with "Wang", the results are hilarious.
Bash.
Data compression is an inherantly serial operation. Parts of it can be done in parrallel but in general the way you compress the next bit is based on the patterns observed earlier.
Say you wanted one core to start encoding at 0% and the other at 50% of the way into the movie. The core starting at 50% has to start compression without any of the learned patterns in the 0-50% range. In the example you gave one core encodes half the screen and the other core encodes the other half. If they are running in parrallel the second core can't use the learnt patterns of the first unless it wants to wait for the first core to finish its current frame (thereby making it non-parrallel).
So you have a tradeoff. You can run everything serially, or you can accept that you'll miss a few observed patterns here and there and run more parrallel.
For usability (seeking through a video) no codecs worked based on a learned pattern. The memory requirements to make use of this would be astronomical (you'd have to store the entire file in RAM, good luck doing that with a BluRay).
IIRC, the furthest back any codec looks is something like 24 frames.
I completely agree. This is a trivial piece of hardware, of which there are millions of examples on the Internet, the majority of which are more interesting than this.
Is this of interest just because someone at MIT was involved? What's next? MIT engineers demonstrate how to drink beer?
Dancing up next
The Slashdot Achievement "Days read in a row" is killing me. If I'm out of town for a weekend I find myself worrying if I'll have access to, and time to hop onto the internet and log in to Slashdot to keep my winning streak rolling.
Weighing the consequences, I've decided to just play it safe and live with mom in the basement. Don't have to have a job to pay rent that way.
I've hit 2^6 so far, anybody have better? (Be honest please, no scrips that check for you every day. Yes that's a good idea, wish I had done it myself before giving the idea away like this, heh heh ;)
Why move to Europe? I mean, its not like they'll not be restricting the system so that it only works over Europe. Why not just buy a Galileo receiver (when they become available)?
Also, isn't Galileo supposed to be backwards compatible with GPS?
The whole move to Europe thing is usually someone ranting about fat US people or something. Fact is, proven by the strengthening of the US dollar against the Euro since the recession, the world considers the US and US currency a safer place to store their money than in Europe. Europe has banking, and few other serious industries. That's why they were hit so hard with this housing collapse. Double whammy because people stopped traveling so much. Venice would die first, what would they produce? I mean do they even have internet there? The entire city is nothing but one giant romantically-overrated tourist attraction.
A normal event, sure. But a repeat of the 1859 solar flare would likely damage many satellites not in the Earth's shadow at the height of the impact. Is the whole GPS constellation set up to handle that type of event? Or would more than half the satellites go down in a hour?
Of more concern is the electrical grid. There was a hot topic on the internet for some reason recently, probably someone pulling some strings hoping to get the populace worked up about our power infrastructure so that Obama could come in and save us. The money wouldn't have even gone to fixing that problem, it would have gone to rebuilding transmission line infrastructure that is terribly close to falling apart. Nevermind that the whole problem was caused in the first place by a congress thinking that running electricity across the nation is like piping gas, you send it down on pipe and it comes out the other end. (Shameless hands-off plug-- if congress would fix the legislation then the carriers would be able to profit [right now it's impossible to collect anything more than revenue, so there is no incentive to upgrade or improve the structure, only to spend for the mandatory fixes. Of course congress isn't bothered by this, because it means they'll be able to come in and save us and look all good and stuff).
If you keep going though it turns into the northern hemisphere.
I'd rather spend the money.
If nothing else the spending provides a market for engineering new, more efficient uses of current technology, and it employs the brighter minds in work that can be immediately rewarding (for example defense contractors involved in rapid prototyping-- design, build, and test in about 6 months, work the kinks out, and mass produce 3 months later. These contractors have had a very real impact on the lives of soldiers in Iraq-- they can report and say "hey if we had something that could do XYZ, we'd crap our pants 40% less in situations similar to X Y and Z, which were a majority of our encounters on the field; then the contractor can design and build and produce something that fills that need very rapidly).
They're giving laptops to "low-performing school districts with limited resources", but surely to actually use those laptops in lessons, the schools will have to spend even more of their limited resources setting up an infrastructure and new teaching plans?
What's interesting about this is this part from the article:
The child must sign a document promising simply to try to "do something great" for their state, families -- and themselves -- with the laptop.
It doesn't sound like they're putting these laptops in the hands of the children for the purpose of teachers utilizing them as teaching tools. And of course, with such a bold new technology, I would expect the teachers not to use them at all at first. Then learn to use them as an augmenting learning tool. And maybe the final stage five years from now is to have the textbook on the laptop and all that jazz.
I know a school teacher in the Bronx and from what she tells me it sounds like all other attempts to improve the learning process have failed or actually deterred from it. She sounds like she'd be willing to try anything.
Keep in mind that these laptops are probably going to cost the same as a couple of new textbooks. Who cares if it fails? It'd be great if a few kids did do something great for their state and family with these laptops.
Parents who care and teachers who can actually discipline the students will do far more for the kids' education than laptops.
If we went to a voucher system the schools could set their own policies-- "Yes most of our students achieve very high test scores, and we will take your child, but you must sign this consent form that we will be providing consequences for your child if he is acting up and disrupting the class". If the parents didn't like it they can just send their kids to another school.
I admit I haven't thought about it much, but I have yet to see a good argument against the voucher system. It would help weed out the bureaucracy and spending on school stadiums and football fields, too.
Take a look into NoScript and Adblock for Firefox. Those two kill all processor-sucking advertisements. You can still enable the sites that need javascript.
Muni cost $40 dollars per month pre-tax money.
It's $30 here if you're a student, $50 if anyone else for an unlimited monthly.
Except the revenue wasn't paying for the train so they decided to levy a tax on people inside the county and leave the prices the same. Why would you tax people for something they don't even want to use? $50/month is a great deal, clearly there is no desire for the train otherwise people would use it.
=====
As much as it's a statistical inefficiency (like about 75% of government), I couldn't get to my coop without it; couldn't afford a car to drive there. At first I was frustrated that it takes me 1h15m each way, but then I realized I get to do productive, entertaining things while I ride the mass transit. If it would take me 45m each way to drive, then I spent an extra hour per day commuting when I'm riding the train, but I gain 1h30m in time that I would have spent driving, to do things like read books, watch TV shows on a laptop, read all the interesting news articles I want to (open up 30 tabs in the morning of all the articles that catch my interest and then suspend the laptop till I get to the train)...
It's been a huge gain in time, simply a loss in controlling how I get to use it. Not that this matters, I would have spent it playing games or something.
At the end of the day I see mass transit as potentially useful for empowering the lower to lower middle class to get to work. There's no way I could afford car, or would buy and run one if I could; it would eat up too much of the paycheck which needs to go to schooling.
So couple mass transit with a graduated welfare system (IE decreases gradually as your paycheck increases-- but not so much that it's not worth moving up in your organization [attaining management at a fast food joint for example]) and it could be a net good.
However, simply spending willy nilly on trains is stupid foolish. Our road system is already so well designed that trains would be far too little return on investment (unlike it was in Europe, not to mention the population density differences). It would be much more efficient for us to simply spend on ramping up mass transit.
Traffic--our city handles traffic in an ingenious way-- make the emergency shoulders wide enough for the buses. Then, the buses (and buses only) can use those emergency lanes during rush hour if traffic is stopped up. Result is the mass transit is reliably on time-- even if I-75 is backed up, you can still get home in 1h15m if you take mass transit.
After two weeks you get used to the longer commute, and enjoy having lots of time to crank through all those books you've been wanting to read, things you've been wanting to learn, etc.
If our overlords are shitting out dung, no matter how useful, I'd prefer then to be underlords, or over-to-one-side-lords, or not-over-my-head-at-least-lords.
Some aborigines consider dung a delicacy, you insensitive clod!!! Consider it a "desert" if you will...
What gets me about this sort of leak is that we all treat it as some sort of big news when in reality we are leaked information in this way all the time. Notice that it is always someone high up in the foodchain talking to someone in the media.
A real accidental leak would be something overheard at a bar where the speaker didn't know a reporter was listening. But when the guy says it straight out to a reporter, that isn't leaking, that's just an unofficial announcement.
Remember when Adam Osborne announced that the next version of his PC would be better than his current one and everyone stopped buying in anticipation? Leaks are always carefully planned but don't always have the effect you're looking for.
It's no surprise they're doing this on purpose.
What gets me is how great this viral marketing is working. Even I've got 7 fever-- I just want to get rid of XP (supposedly 7 is faster than Vista at games; I'm CPU limited in Vista but not as much in XP).
It's a bit like delays on trains. If your train is just about due to arrive and they schedule a 15 minute delay, there is a reasonable chance that it will actually be delayed by 15 minutes. If your train is not due to leave for an hour and they put up a 15 minute delay, it will clearly be delayed by a lot more than 15 minutes. The delay will gradually increase during the next hour according to some complex non-linear formula I've never been quite able to derive.
Sometimes, the delay time is listed as "unknown". This is the Duke Nukem Forever of train delays. At this point, it's usually quicker just to walk, even if your journey is several hundred miles.
(for context, I live in the UK)
I had to take your trains last summer when I studied abroad.
My heart goes out to all you poor blokes.
(ok ok, actually, it wasn't that bad, but it was just as expensive as flying (in the states).)
Given that the pigs farmers are almost all part of the Coptic Christian minority, which has a history of being oppressed, this doesn't surprise me at all. As parent says, it's not about the swine flu.
Coptic Christians have it very rough in Egypt; if they are the majority of pig farmers then this is a very plausible explanation for Egypt acting so silly over this.
Sigh...
If only this were just funny.
I actually had this conversation with a friend a year ago or so. Of course, they didn't express a desire to relish in raw pork. And it was related to the Bird Flu. But pretty much dead on the same.
Their reasoning was that Bird Flu wasn't going to be an issue because it couldn't "evolve" the ability of human-to-human transmission because... evolution was a bunch of nonsense. And the media had lost interest by that time so my friend thought it had all just been overblown.
But H5N1 (Bird Flu) hasn't gone away at all. This H1N1 (Swine Flu) may be bad; it may not. But even if it has low mortality rate, if it spreads quickly far and wide, it may increase the chance H5N1 picks up human-to-human. That would be very bad indeed.
Micro vs. Macroevolution; there is a difference, and as you saw there are plenty of people who don't know the difference...
Many (most) (all educated) Christians don't have a problem microevolution....
*Not talking about size by the way. Just because it is small does not make it "micro" evolution...
It it is most dangerous to those with strong immune systems because of the potential for cytokine storms
Which is pure speculation at this point. The truth is nobody knows why it's mostly killed young people so far. Pointing to a cytokine storm as the cause is possible, but very misleading.
No it's not; read up on the Spanish flu of 1918-1920, this strain is very similar and is functioning in exactly the same way.