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.
In case you want some more complete info:
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.
- 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.
How come everyone's going so slow if it's called rush hour?