Get their relatives to pay for a discontinous 700 mile steel wall with cameras, floodlights and motion detectors blocking a total of one third of the 2000 miles in question to keep them out.
The Great Wall of China was a similar concept – also discontinous over a length of 2400 km (1500 miles). It didn’t work.
If you work in software development, you can’t help hearing that it’s cheaper to test properly rather than skimp on testing and fix the bugs after the software goes into production. Sony’s learning the hard way. They have released over 400 000 LCD rear projection TVs and LCD flat screen TVs into the wild that after 1200 hours of use (an LCD TV typically has a life of 50 000 hrs) either won’t switch on or won’t switch off. Owners have to order an update kit which they can install themselves or, for some models, request a Sony authorized technician to come to their home to perform a software update. Sony isn’t saying how much the issue is going to cost them.
US Senator Charles Schumer seems to have become completely paranoid and wants the P&O Ferries deal with Dubai Ports World blocked:
He said the Committee on Foreign Investment, which approved the $6.8 billion agreement allowing Dubai Ports World to oversee operations at six U.S. ports including New York and New Jersey, had “proven itself unreliable” on issues of national security.(P&O is, by the way, a British company, and not as you might have thought reading the above, an American company. The six US ports have actually been in foreign hands for a number of years.)
... if Shripad Tuljapurkar of Stanford University is right. He thinks that by 2050 the retirement age may have to be raised to 85 and that 50 or 75 year mortgages will be being offered. He expects life-expectancy to rise by one year each year between 2010 and 2030. (This view clashes that held by other experts, who warn that life expectancy may drop by several years due to the health problems that people in the industrialised nations have developed – too many calories and too few vegetables and fruit causing obesity, diabetes and other “civilization diseases”). Frankly, the prospect of working for around 40-45 years doesn’t thrill me with joy today – the thought of working for 65 years makes me think maybe the present isn’t such a bad time to be alive.
Dr Leon Bennun, Director of Science, Policy and Information for BirdLife International, raises an interesting possibility in the BBC’s Green Room series – he points out that the outbreaks lie mainly on major trade routes, rather than on the routes taken by migrating birds. And countries which have implemented strict controls on importing and movement of poultry, such as Japan and South Korea, have had no outbreaks after the controls were imposed:
In fact, countries which have not yet developed a large-scale intensive poultry industry have also been largely spared. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that in Laos, 42 out of 45 outbreaks affected intensive poultry units.So – it could be that avian flu is largely caused by the overcrowded, insanitary conditions in many large intensive poultry-farms. As Bennun says of the dying swans being reported across Europe:
They may have caught the disease from other wild birds; but this is unlikely given the tens of thousands of waterfowl that have tested negative for H5N1 over the last decade. Much more likely is that before starting out, they picked up the virus from farms, either from infected poultry or their faeces. Mute swans often graze agricultural fields, and are likely to have come into contact with poultry manure spread as a fertiliser.
If wild birds had been spreading the disease across continents there would have been trails of outbreaks following migration routes; but this hasn’t happened…
At magnatune (whose motto is: We are not evil) you can choose from over 400 albums covering everything from classical to punk music. There’s some good stuff, but mostly from lesser known artists – you won’t find the Rolling Stones or Norah Jones there, although you will find Trevor Pinnock.
Listen to all the tracks on an album before you buy it. You pay what you feel the music is worth (price includes VAT) and download it as WAV, MP3 or several other formats and then it’s yours. The artist gets half of what you pay. No copy protection to prevent it playing in your car CD player or elsewhere. License it for commercial use, if you want. Give your download to 3 friends fee – it’s legal. Sounds fair to all concerned, doesn’t it?
