Phil Osborn

Reply to Stopping pandemics at the source in Health & Medicine JoeUser Forums

It's simply the fact that the Chinese raise enormous numbers of pigs and poultry together, providing the ideal pathway for a virus to mutate its way to us. Birds everywhere are constantly hit with proto-flu type viruses, but we don't see many outbreaks into mammals or humans, because the viruses are very specific, and are in a constant battle to outwit the birds' immune systems, so they simply don't have any extra capacity to innovate twenty other cha

Stopping pandemics at the source in Health & Medicine JoeUser Forums

The various strains of flu that emerge mainly from Asia come via one major route - birds and pigs raised together. Note that this combination is not necessary, but speeds the process of getting to humans. The birds catch the original version of the new mutated virus, then the pigs pick it up by eating the birds' droppings, but not immediately, as the virus has to go

NOW who do you trust? in Internet JoeUser Forums

Oh joy, yahoo access is back at the libraries! And we only lost a couple of weeks... Does this worry anyone except me? Of late, if anyone has tried to contact me at my Yahoo address, you may be wondering why I'm not answering - at least immediately. The answer is simple: Yahoo is blocking my email. Yahoo is blocking a lot of other people's emai

Reply to Yahoo locking out email users in Yahoo JoeUser Forums

And if I invite you into my house, which just happens to have all kinds of advertisements festooning the rafters, and little recordings playing continuously (BUY Supperware, BUY Supperware,...) and then I serve you little portions of food, all labeled and with coupons attached, and you discover that among your fellow guests are the heads of half the major corporations on the planet, all nervously eyeing your checkbook, you should protrate myself, I sup

Reply to Yahoo locking out email users in Yahoo JoeUser Forums

According to the library personnel here, there has been a specific problem with Yahoo - from Yahoo's end. It seems that Yahoo treats the entire library system as a single user and is denying them service on account of overuse! Can you believe that anyone could be that stupid? Especially a communications giant like Yahoo. Where is Dilbert when we need him? I note that the one time recently that I was able to get to my email was

Reply to Yahoo locking out email users in Yahoo JoeUser Forums

As I sit at a different branch of the library today, with a different sysop and configuration, I am getting nowhere at all attempting to get to my mail, either at Yahoo or at my alternative service. The patron to my left says that he can hardly get to any site he tries, and the lady to my right cannot get to her Yahoo email either - for the past three days, she says. Clearly there is something nasty afoot here.

Yahoo locking out email users in Yahoo JoeUser Forums

For three periods of time now, for at least several hours each, and, I suspect, several days, including the present time and most of the past two weeks, I have not been able to get to my Yahoo email account. I've heard rumors that this is happening to other people. And, try to complain. There is no route. The "help" system has no option to reach a human being, so

Human Genome Project in Health & Medicine JoeUser Forums

VERY interesting public lecture tonight at UCI (University of California, Irvine) by Eric Lander, one of the heads of the Human Genome Project. Lander outlined the future goals of the project, the basic methodologies, how long it will take, and how much it may cost - A LOT, but probably well worth it. A case study he covered: turns out that there are two very

A Dream Unfolds in Misc JoeUser Forums

So, last night I had this amazing full-featured SF dream, in which I was caught up in some battle for a city area, with heavy weaponry and massed fighters, and just down the street there was this apartment building or hotel in which I was staying with my lover. I was captured during the battle, while manning a heavy machinegun, and escaped somehow, making my way back

Corporate Meanness in Current Events JoeUser Forums

Update: 01/31/05 Having seen nothing yet of my refund from the L.A. Times, I called the number from the Sunday Times ad, and then the 2nd number that they referred me to, and finally spoke with a rep who assured me that my non-subscription as detailed below would finally be refunded to my credit card. We'll see... Every year for some time, I anticipate t

The Gestapo is Here, Now in Politics JoeUser Forums

In Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" (which came in right after the Bible as the book that most influenced American's lives, when the Book of the Month Club did a survey in 1991 - not bad for a 1958 novel, which still sells quite briskly in 2005), there is a classic scene in which two of the good guys are facing a crew of state sleezebags who are utterly certain that they

Reply to A New Theory of Aging in Pure Technology JoeUser Forums

Reply By: scatter629 I missed this thread, but anyway, regarding your theory of aging, it seems to have been arrived at deductively ,from macro to micro. It also poses a problematic analogy between biological cellular systems and political-structural systems. This you must agree , is a quantum leap which as they say , like comparing apples and coconuts so that we really will have difficulty linking them together. What about focusing on the cellular

Reply to The Ethics of Importance - Reflections on Tsunamis in Philosophy JoeUser Forums

Reply By: raghu.K(Anonymous User) Posted: Friday, December 31, 2004 the writing is thought prvoking.My thinking that the LIVES on this planet EARTH have to rededicate themselves for future of THE PLANET ,Homo Sapiens being more advanced in thought should take the lead, has been reaffirmed.The time has come for the people living on this earth to think together ,make decsions in respect to life on this earth as a whole,not in respect to particular rac

Reply to The Ethics of Importance - Reflections on Tsunamis in Philosophy JoeUser Forums

Reply By: [email protected](Anonymous User) Posted: Thursday, December 30, 2004 If each individual chose their set of values it would lead to anarchy. AND???? You might want to look at the Stirner book on line that I linked to in my article. Anarchy - the absense of the "Archon," i.e., the monopoly state - has a long and interesting history. It does not necessarily mean the same thing as "chaotic" or "disorderly" or "destructive." A

Reply to The Ethics of Importance - Reflections on Tsunamis in Philosophy JoeUser Forums

Reply By: Pam Johnson Posted: Thursday, December 30, 2004 ... Even though the Alexandria library wasn't built until sometime during the third century BC a good deal of other libraries built before the third century for some unknown reason were always destroyerd by invaders and raiders who took over a country. Because of that first dark age of humans we lost a large part of history that might have helped guide us into the future.

Reply to The Ethics of Importance - Reflections on Tsunamis in Philosophy JoeUser Forums

Reply By: scatter629 Posted: Thursday, December 30, 2004 How true. I think the important thing is getting the message in plainspeak to ordinary people and motivate them to be extraordinary for their survival. It's more of an art - something that's quite divorced from assigning the class to read three books about why we should pay attention to books ,continually question and value life. I don't think that it is so hard to get the messag

The Ethics of Importance - Reflections on Tsunamis in Philosophy JoeUser Forums

Ok, my beef is with the idiots who torched the library. THE Library. You know, the world library at Alexandria, where the collected wisdom of virtually all mankind West of India and East of the Americas resided. All that lore and history and science and myth and poetry - gone. And who is t

Reply to A New Theory of Aging in Pure Technology JoeUser Forums

I think that there is a kind of zero-sum-game going on on some level regarding the evolution of complexity. As the information in the DNA or mDNA increases, the rate of errors due to cosmic rays, quantum effects, mutagens, viruses, etc., also tends to increase, meaning that more effort must now be dedicated to information correction simply in order to hold place. More sophisticated systems for error-checking also evolve as they provide a competitive

A New Theory of Aging in Pure Technology JoeUser Forums

Some time in that past few years, I got to hear Dr. Douglas C. Wallace, the Donald Bren Professor of Biological Sciences and Molecular Medicine at UCI discuss his research on mitochondria, the energy organelles that power all our cells. Wallace is the generally acknowledged top-gun worldwide in mitochondrial research. I posed him a hypothesis, during Q & A, which I

Reply to Anthony L. Hargis & Co. - A Case Study in the Present Danger in Philosophy JoeUser Forums

Well, I talked with Craig Cowns (sp?) at the receiver's office yesterday, as I recalled that there was supposed to have been a hearing on the 6th. Craig informed me that the IRS is now attempting to claim everything, partially on the basis of assessing an $1100 fine on all 800 of the account holders identified so far. The fine, according to Craig, was based on the premise that all these people were participating in an "illegal" "warehouse bank." It

Reply to Partisan Tactics Out of Control in Politics JoeUser Forums

Actually reading the article makes it clear that no one actually knows who, if anyone, is actually making these calls. Let's get real, here. You're an advocate for (choose one or more or none) Kerry, Bush, Nader, the Giant Pumpkin, ok. You want people to vote for your candidate, one would suspect. So, you do something utterly tasteless, cruel and disgusting to supposedly intimidate someone to vote for your candidate???? Does that make sense

Condi's Face in Current Events JoeUser Forums

Nalini of KPFKChat.org submitted a pointer to this little site bashing Bush. Not bad. Want to see something REALLY bizarre? Take virtually any interview with Condi - say the ones from "Uncovered" - and s l o w

Reply to Anthony L. Hargis & Co. - A Case Study in the Present Danger in Philosophy JoeUser Forums

Here's the receiver's number: 714-432-0800 - Good Luck. You might ask for Craig Cowns. That's who I've talked to repeatedly and I call him every week or so to see if any more of my mail has come through. I do notice that most of the mail, such as the birthday card from my mother in Georgia, has been opened, and for a couple of weeks apparently someone was holding it, as Craig couldn't get it from the Post Office for that period. I imagine there are

Trying to Add Translation to My Blog in Personal Computing JoeUser Forums

Trying to figure out how to put the altavista Babel Fish translator button on my site... Let me know if you know a way to do this...

In Security in Current Events JoeUser Forums

As I've discussed in recent articles here, the criminals have not been slow to take advantage of new technologies. The ubiquitous use of cell phones by the little gang who were trashing my life for the past year is just one example. The highway street-racer kids and their use of cellphone lookouts is another. I think that any competent bank robbery team could use t