Please if you're going to create stuff like this provide some context and answer questions like "What does this actually mean?". Without those things, this is just another scary looking title and graph that will make people more panicky than they already are. Given the ramp up in testing seen in my state, the large jump up to the cases in the graph isn't surprising. We know that the US has a far higher population than Italy and that testing rates in the US have been very low. Large spikes in confirmed cases are obviously going to happen as the testing ramps up. That's when we can start drawing conclusions and make better decisions. When we have a more clear picture of how widespread this is and what that actually means. What's the R0 and what's the mortality rate? On the other hand, if we accept that there are far more infected people right now than we know, the logical conclusion is that the mortality rate is low, otherwise there'd be dead people everywhere.
The huge issue with the numbers is that they always lag behind the actual situation right now. There is a delay of around 5 days until symptoms show, and something on top of that until you get tested and until the test is processed. And the deaths lag even further behind, it takes very roughly something like 3-4 week to die as far as I've read.
The deaths of today are the people that were infected 4 weeks ago, 4 week is an eternity on an exponential curve like this.
Yeah, those are the only two peering points in the area. There are tons of other data centers in the area, but these are also exchanges. Fun fact, Markley Group actually owns that whole building and Macy's is a tenant of theirs. I've had a few super weird and interesting conversations with drunk/high people when badging into the building late at night when I had gear in there.
But the 1/8" TRS/TRRS jack (headphone / headphone-with-mic jack) is analog when it's used for analog output (headphones/line-out) or input (microphone/line-in). The DAC is on the device side, not the accessory side.
Perhaps you're referring to the SP/DIF "hiding" inside the 1/8 jack of many Macs?
Yes, Rio sees many visitors regularly. What Rio does not see is an influx of visitors from nearly every country on earth. It's that spread that is the problem. The financial impact on hosting the games is already negative for host cities. That's no longer debatable without ignoring fact. Your argument that all the experts studying the Zika epidemic and drawing the ever more cemented conclusion that this is a very serious problem are wrong is what is hogwash.
But will you at least concede that THIS is what should have been the focus of the article? While perfectly valid, all of the scientific discussion around Zika is mostly irrelevant to the point the author was trying to make -- the true variable of interest is how the games shape the quantity of visitors and the distribution of those visitors around the world. But there's hardly a line in the article about that -- just the 500,000 number is thrown around with absolutely no citation.
Instead,the article does some of the worst things we'd expect from scientists with sentences like "All it takes is one infected traveler" -- this is fear-mongering and irresponsible and the author should be ashamed of that comment.
I maintain that it is not a careful, reasoned argument about the issue.
Instead,the article does some of the worst things we'd expect from scientists with sentences like "All it takes is one infected traveler" -- this is fear-mongering and irresponsible and the author should be ashamed of that comment.
I'm sorry, but there seems to be a bit of a logical disconnect here. This looks like a knee-jerk pattern match on the "all it takes" phrase. My understanding is that this is factual in this case. That is how it works with a lot of diseases -- with many kinds of self-replicators -- all it takes is one. That is how it works with various insect and fungal blights that have ravaged California forests. A public awareness of the relative risks is a public good.
Single patients flown to the US from the Ebola stricken regions did not spread infection, because of the particulars of infection mechanisms. Zika can be spread by mosquito. If the Olympics increase the traffic to resource-thin countries with populations of the right kind of mosquito, this should be considered carefully.
As an Indian I can tell you even a few infected people can come into the country and cause an outbreak here.
Its not like in US, the sewage infrastructure in India is very bad. There are open air sewage drains, mosquito infestation is every day life and in cities people live in very densely crowded homes. All of this contributes to a rapid spread in case of a outbreak.
In fact dengue outbreaks are common in India every summer, or a few months.
There's a good point. The number of visitors from those countries actually remained typical or declined in London for 2012. It is conceivable that the increased hotel and airfare costs actually deter travel from poorer countries.
That’s a pretty reasonable argument. Building better train networks between economically linked cities, getting people to choose other forms of transportation for their commutes, giving buses/light rail their own lanes, designing infrastructure to better segregate drivers from pedestrians/cyclists, encouraging car-pooling and use of smaller lighter cars wherever practical, and in general trying to slow down the speed of automobile traffic (ideally all urban driving would be <30 mph if not slower) would save a lot of lives.
Automobiles, while often convenient, are one of the leading causes of death, and we should try to organize public policy around reducing their use and the deaths they cause to the extent possible without overly compromising their convenience.
Reducing the number of automobiles would also have a big positive environmental impact, and reducing the number and widths of roads and parking lots would free up a lot of space which could be used for other purposes. Other forms of transportation also scale a lot better with population density, and denser cities use a lot less other infrastructure per capita.
Once self-driving cars become effective, I have high hopes that they will replace a large proportion of current human drivers, something else which should save many lives.
On the surface that's not a bad argument. It becomes a bad argument at certain scales though -- the difference between a 1% and a 100% increase matters. The point at which it matters depends in part on the transmissibility of the disease, which is low for zika.
Devil's advocate: I think the argument is that the damage of the disease is disproportional to the people exposed, because the increased pairs of interactions are what can make it spread fast.
So doubling the number of people congregated in Rio won't just double the danger, but quadruple it. If car accidents obeyed a similar dynamic -- where they increase (much) more than proportionally to the number of vehicle-miles driven, we should be similarly more cautious about additional drivers.
Well, it's a matter of cost vs benefit - while it may be valuable to take some costly, unpopular measures if that would have a meaningful change in spread of Zika, I'm not convinced if it's worth doing such things only to achieve, say, a 8% reduction (some of estimates here on impact of Olympics to tourist traffic) in risk of spreading the disease.
The negative financial impact of the games comes mostly from building and maintaining the Olympic infrastructure. Cancelling the games doesn't solve this problem, on the contrary as it denies the country the income and touristic reputation boost. Public health concerns go first of course, but it's not gonna be a financial win.
It's pretty well known and well documented at this point that the host cities for olympic games see no financial benefit at all, and in fact they lose money. Most recently, look at the Sochi games, which cost $50+bn. There is a 0% chance that the games brought in that much money. The entities making money are the IOC and the broadcast companies, NBC being the primary. It would be sad if the games were cancelled, but at the risk of a global pandemic it's hard to see how people can argue in favor anymore.
Agreed that the Olympic games do not have financially benefit the host city. But, Rio has probably already spent a lot of money on the games. Not hosting them would probably hurt, financially, even more.
Please note I am not arguing that the Olympics should continue in Rio. We should do what is best for world health, even if that negatively impacts Rio financially.
But that is nonsense for Rio, which has already spent its capital outlays for the games. Overall Rio may and probably will lose money, but if the games were cancelled, it could be financially catastrophic.
You're right that it isn't a question that should be determined by finances, but that's a different issue.
>It would be sad if the games were cancelled, but at the risk of a global pandemic it's hard to see how people can argue in favor anymore.
The corruption, bribery, and kick backs that go into selecting host cities means that short of a host city being wiped off the map by a nuclear bomb, the games will go on.
It's important to point out that all the Whisper Systems code is open source (https://github.com/whispersystems/). So if you have concerns, go read their code. Some of the best minds in security have, and they've come away with good things to say. There's a desktop version of Signal coming, which I'd personally be inclined to use over WhatsApp, but this is still a fantastic move.
Even the digital part. There is a thing called the Sails Library Network (http://www.sailsinc.org) that offers full digital catalogs for libraries. They have mobile apps and it works with Kindles or Kindle apps. It's also not back catalog stuff only as is the case with Oyster. Libraries have been the "Netflix for Books" for centuries before there was a "Netflix". Maybe people should use them more, they are wonderful things and you're already paying for them to exist and serve you.
When a PaaS/Cloud provider says private networking, they mean RFC1918 address space. It's not publicly routed IP space which is private. So saying they offer private networking is accurate against that long standard definition. The technology and effort involved in providing the equivalent of AWS' VPC is huge and most smaller providers don't have the scale, man power, or resources to do it. It's a non-trivial solution to deploy.
Not understanding the platforms you choose to use is not an excuse to write something like this article. It's also not an excuse to not understand how to manage the platform(s) you run your services on.
