and 1% of us at the very top end know that there isn't a bell curve for intelligence - it has a smaller hump at the lower end which corresponds to those with mental disability of whatever kind - but that the 6 000 000 000 sample size irons things out enough that to all intents and purposes median and mean are close enough to the same thing.

what's black and white and dead all over?

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Slashdot fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a MacPro (3GHz / Quad-core, 8GB of RAM), directly connected to one of the internet's root servers, for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to load the front page with all the new scripting. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4 on a 300 baud modem with IP over Avian Carriers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers), which by all standards should be a lot slower than this MacPro, loading the old site would take about 10 seconds. If that.

In addition, during this page load, Chrome will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Twitter is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while surfing the new site, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is being unable to get the preferences to actually change anything, despite the open source 'Bazaar' architecture seemingly allowing the community to quickly suggest a fix without waiting for a proprietary solution to release a solution. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram printing on a daisy-wheel printer and posting that surface mail to OSDN directly to request a printout of the front page by return post delivers content faster than this cutting edge computational monster on government-grade bandwidth. From a productivity standpoint, browsing Slashdot no longer just occupies my employer's paid time but interrupts my personal life and sleep pattern too now.

Slashdot addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Slashdot over Digg.

pics or it didn't happen

Seriously.

You will note from the wiki that there was *limited* evidence of bird flu human-human contact. The public health guys seemed less concerned about this - they were worried that it might mutate and make the jump to a more significant rate of human-human spread.

You are correct. But I was not talking about SARS. I was talking about avian flu. SARS is a coronavirus, Bird flu is a strain of influenza A.

In case you want some more complete info: SARS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome
Avian flu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H5N1

Avian flu and Swine flu are both influenza A, but they are different subtypes. SARS was a completely different kind of virus.

Not sure. That's how the public health specialist described it, but the content of the presentation was on our response, not the genetics - that was just a brief mention as it was a curiosity.

It's not just the very young and very old dying. That's part of the worry. It's early days, and what we know changes by the day at the moment. What we do know is:

- there is evidence of person to person spread (unlike bird flu, which seemed to be just animal-person)
- the people dying are over-represented in the 20-40 age group (unlike most flu)
- mortality so far has been around 7-8% (probably lower as a lot of cases probably never present for medical care and so are not included in the survival statistics
- the viral genetics are a mix of 4: human flu, swine flu, avian flu, and human/swine flu (apparently a separate one)

This might be bad news
Information source for anyone interested: I am an emergency doctor, we had a presentation this morning from a public health specialist and an infectious diseases specialist detailing the regional response plan for swine flu, so it's about as up to date as is available.

You do realise women don't piss out their vagina? There is more than one hole. Think bowling ball.

It would be more like leaving a sign saying that it was OK to come in and write cool stuff on your wall, then getting pissy because some douchebag came along and wrote a bunch of encoded hex instead.

$1.6M doesn't sound too cheap to me

Dude, you've come up with the solution! All we need to do is build loads of ships, then sink them. It will spur economic recovery (shipbuilding) and reverse the rising seas (global warming). You're a genius! It's foolproof!

Vegetarians have a lower risk of coronary artery disease, diabetes, some cancers, and obesity. For most people, it probably doesn't make a huge difference. But this dude has already identified himself as someone who is at a higher risk, and is trying to minimise his risks as much as possible. So in answer to your rude and incorrect post - 1. The medical degree I have probably holds some weight, and 2. there is a lot of scientific evidence that avoiding meat is helpful in terms of heart disease

Some general advice (you might know this already): - low dose aspirin daily (50-100mg), balanced against the risk of some sort of bleed (most likely stomach ulcer) - low dose beta blocker (atenolol 25mg prob enough) daily - low dose ACE-I (ramipril seems best candidate, more likely best drug company-sponsored research spin and all drugs in this class have similar effect) - regular exercise - don't overdo it and injure yourself another way. - be aware of all the possible manifestations of a heart attack (about 1/3 of them are diangosed retrospectively - people who thought they had heartburn / 'colic' / ate something bad) and go the the ER if they happen (assuming you are in the US - have health insurance) - keep your weight down and your central body fat low (waist measurement) - get your GP to check your blood sugar yearly - make sure your cholesterol and blood pressure are known and treated if necessary (some of the above will help the BP) - become a vegetarian - look both ways before crossing the road....