Linus Torvalds tells kernel list poster to 'SHUT THE HELL UP' for saying COVID-19 vaccines create 'new humanoid race' Linus Torvalds has used some of his strongest language in years to smack down a Linux Kernel Mailing List poster who made some odd remarks about COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. The incident started in a Linux Kernel Mailing List thread titled “Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off” that commenced in April 2021. Event …
I don’t get how the whole Bill Gates covid thing got traction.
I mean, if you wanted to develop a small, reliable, repeatable, bug-free and useful piece of hardware, that worked first time and just did its job to spec, whatever its purpose, surely Gates and Microsoft are the last people you’d ask or trust to deliver.
I've known some wonderful coders that were batshit crazy about certain completely illogical things (pyramid power, crystals, the existence of god(s)/aliens/ghosts/whatever, left or right wingnuts, etc., you know the drill.
Didn't affect their coding skills whatsoever, although a few of the more vocal examples managed to alienate the rest of the staff pretty quickly.
On days like this we need Old Linus back - after he's explained messenger RNA in a calm, scientific manner and questioned exactly what "the illuminati" want us producing a spike protein for, of course. Perhaps he could delegate taking down clowns to mjg59? He's another one with a pretty good record of not suffering fools at all.
Had my first AZ jab last month. If I grew another head or changed any of my opinions (sorry to disappoint) it was for a very short time. AdBlock is still there in the top right, I still won't let anything I haven't compiled myself on a router and I still enjoy cancelled 1970s BBC sitcoms.
Maybe it was a bad batch...
something that would have made the castle bravo test look like a sparkler in comparison?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo
More people need to stop mollycoddling these halfwits, the charlatans that push this crap online need a meeting with a judge and a labour camp and parents who go down this rabbit hole should lose their kids until they smarten up (if they are capable.....)
Long overdue we stop tolerating these idiots as they are dragging down our collective intelligence and progress....
Just lost a long term friend to this claptrap so I'm more than a might *touchy* about this right now (initially was going to take the vaccine, then her anti vaxxer friend went to work, she was then unsure and 2 days ago was the convo that killed the friendship where she sent a link to a "personal wellness guru" pushing various anti vaxxer tropes (a rebuttal from a virologist was sent to no avail) with her then going on a rant about it being "poison", "you won't be saying that when people are dropping in droves from this experiment", "I know doctors and nurses who've told me to avoid this" "I've been suspicious of this vaccine for years" (funny its only been out for months), so I ended the friendship and cut off contact....particularly as she's well aware my wife is immunosuppressed and covid can and might kill her if she contracts it....instead she chooses to listen to kooks online and kooky "natural living" fanatic friends....
"More people need to stop mollycoddling these halfwits, the charlatans that push this crap online need a meeting with a judge and a labour camp and parents who go down this rabbit hole should lose their kids until they smarten up (if they are capable.....)"
They'd see that as martyrdom and be encouraged. Better to admonish them gently as Linus did, and then ignore them.
... his previous method of speaking to fucking idiots on the LKML was restrained.
Frankly I'm surprised that Linus was as tolerant as he was all those years ... If it was my name attached to the project, I'd have really lit into a few of the fucking idiotic prima donna drama queens.
@Jake
Ah......Jake.....I see that you make a distinction between the truth (as told by Jake)......and the truth as told by "nameless, faceless cowardly blobs of grey goo".
*
A pity really, because there are people out there who think that "truth is truth"....quite independent of the speaker. Oh well.....maybe you can try another comment or ten!
*
Signed: AC (aka NFCBOGG)
Both of these statements are meaningless without a definition of "truth".
There are strong, sophisticated arguments that "truth" in a technical sense can only accurately refer to formal truths – that is, tautologies under a formal system (a logic) that express sentences reducible to the axioms of the system under its production rules. Even there, of course, it's extremely easy to accidentally introduce a contradiction, rendering the entire set of statements inconsistent and therefore useless. (See Gödel, Chaitin, Kolmogorov, Löb, etc.)
Theories of "truth" which attempt to extend it out of the formal realm, even the ones that may people think are obvious such as naïve realism, quickly run into problems.
Charlie's proposition is supportable under various arguments, such as solipsism and Descarte's Evil Genius. In short, any human perception of truth has to begin with an assumption of trust in the individual's cognitive processes – that what you think is logically consistent in fact is, and you're not being deceived by mental defect or manipulation. Any realism has to begin with an assumption of trust in the evidence of the senses; even with technological instruments at some point the human reasoner has to perceive and interpret some report of the evidentiary data. Those are both subjective assumptions.
Realists posit that natural "truth" exists in the universe independent of human perception and cognition. That's a position you can hold and defend, but ultimately it's an act of faith, as is the belief that the universe is anything other than a construct of your own mind.
I stated nothing about TRVTH.
What I stated was (after being asked to compare downvotes for a particular AC) that I can't tell you nameless, faceless cowardly blobs of grey goo apart. Do try to read for content before replying next time, there's a good blob of grey goo.
the problem with saying "the truth" is that both sides of an issue often make claim to exclusive ownership of it, often with no proof other than "feelz" and "wantz" and "afraidz". On BOTH sides.
science demands peer review and repeatability and modified theories when the results do not come up as expected (and there were no lab mistakes that might have caused it). Over time, something close to "the truth" becomes possible. I would expect this to be true with a LOT of things. Over time, the truth will eventually be known. June 15th comes to mind on this one... (see icon)
But of course mRNA had nothing to do with kernels and so Linus was 100% right.
you don't have to vaccinate your kids -
only those you would like to keep.
And a virologist bluntly said that the notion of herd immunity comes from closed herds of cattle, which humans surely are not - they trave too much and have too much exchange between localities. Thus it is not applicable and if you are not vaccinated or already had CoViD you are more or less sure to get it in the future. Good luck.
Make no mistake, COVID is here. It's not going away. Countries are celebrating their vaccination schemes, and hell, I'm raring to get back to going to restaurants and being in public without that godawful mask, but you can be sure that, from now on, every year we'll have an updated COVID vaccine, just there's a flu vaccine.
COVID is here to stay.
"We have a huge garden, and also have no need of Microsoft products."
I also have a huge garden, and I give away my excess to people who need it. I approve of Mr. Gates doing the same ... why would anyone think otherwise? Do you have something against poor people eating? Or do you have something against people eating without supporting Safeway/Tesco?
Interestingly I recently read that according to the latest data there is a chance that we may have lost a couple of strains of the flu as there have been no reported cases anywhere in the past year.
It may just be that the people getting those strains weren't tested, but regardless flu infections have plummeted due to all the Covid measures. And I expect them not to rebound to normal levels right away as people are likely to stick with the extra hygiene measures for a while yet.
@Blank Reg
What that probably means is that sooner or later, without exposure to those strains of flu and without relevant vaccination, if people relax their hygiene and become exposed there could be an epidemic of a flu that was formerly less of a threat. Possibly it could also pose a much greater threat than before because of reduced immunity.
Masks will be around in 2121 - just like Chinese people were still wearing them over 100 years after the Manchurian Flue of 1910!
In some places, perhaps including Manchuria, wearing a mask is seen as good manners to protect other people, not the wearer. As an NHS worker who had had Covid at least twice, that seems right.
Sure if we all wear masks, socially distance, and limit gatherings we can make the flu nearly nonexistent. But as the flu is THREE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE less deadly than covid (which killed 600K in the US vs the flu killing fewer than 600 over the past year) it doesn't make a lot of sense to go to such extremes.
The good news is that mRNA vaccines can be developed for the flu, and due to the much shorter manufacturing lead time they won't have to "guess" which strains are circulating so it should be more effective as well.
Pre-covid there were at least a couple of universal flu vaccines in clinical trials. If they pan out then we'll always be ready regardless of which strains becomes most prevalent each year. But covid probably slowed down the clinical trials, it must be hard to test when there are so few people getting the flu.
I hope the universal flu vaccines pan out. I've read that "universal" vaccines that target all nine strains versus the common three (trivalent) and four (quadrivalent) of current vaccines have not been feasible in the past because they'd leave people feeling too shitty. i.e. they provoke such an extreme immune reaction from targeting so many strains at once you are left feeling like you have a bad case of the flu for a few days. You won't get too many takers for something where the cure is almost as bad as the disease and most people won't get the disease.
If they could develop a vaccine that targeted some part of the influenza virus that is common to all strains it wouldn't have this problem, which is what I assume the universal flu vaccine(s) under development are doing.
There is talk of doing the same with a universal vaccine that targets all coronaviruses. Since we've had one pandemic and two near misses with coronavirus in just the past couple decades, this would be a pretty big win.
I heard an interesting comment on this very question here by some doctors in the field of influenza on the radio.
They said that the reduction in influenza was largely down to the restrictions on travel. Apparently, a lot of the new strains are incubated in some of the more tropical climes and we bring them back with us when we holiday.
Here in Canada we have only had a handful of cases of the 'flu this last year, presumably because of it.
I suspect that it's more because kids were pulled out of schools. Kids are, in general, filthy little germ bags who share everything they come into contact with with all and sundry.
If you are fortunate enough to hang out with kids, chances are you are generally in good health because you have a nicely functioning, well exercised immune system.
They said that the reduction in influenza was largely down to the restrictions on travel
That explains the absence of the flu season in the northern hemisphere, but not so much the absence of the flu season in the southern hemisphere last summer. Travel was pretty normal up until late March in the US, and in central/south America didn't start getting severely restricted until a month or two later since it didn't hit them as quickly as it did the US.
Despite that countries like Brazil went from a normal start of the flu season to a quick 99% reduction (compared to other years) in flu cases after they locked down and started wearing masks.
The travel to other countries helps bring in different flu strains, but it doesn't do anything to stop the strains that already in the country from continuing to circulate. Staying home and wearing masks does.
Pascal is not wrong, although the good news is that the vaccines (both classic and mRNA) all show pretty good efficacy on the new variants that are starting to show themselves. It's when the virus eventually starts significantly changing the spike protein, which has so far been largely untouched in all the variants, which then makes vaccines ineffective, that we will then possibly see a repeat of lockdown waves or at the very least increased restrictions until the changes are rolled out in boosters.
This is one reason why I strongly believe that CEPI and COVAX (and the Gates Foundation) are wrong in insisting that TRIPS waivers are not given. The EU (and particularly Germany) are also on the wrong side of history on this. Yes, BioNTech and Curevac are on the bleeding edge with COVID vaccine patents, but the human population in developing countries deserve having the vaccines too, at a price they can afford, or even free, under licence by local vaccine manufacturers (primarily in West, North and South Africa).
South East Asia primarily has India (and even India is stuggling with churning out enough stuff to give its own population and their contracted customers in other regions), Japan and possibly China. More needs to be done, and it's the posh folks who've now got their jabs and couldn't care less about the other 6 or so billion who let their governments get away with token gestures like 1 million jabs here or 20 million jabs there. I see the G7 have pledged (but pledges mean nothing unless actually executed) to donate 1.6 billion vaccine shots, of which 600 million come (primarily) from the US and the UK.
This is *far* from over.
Something I'm trying to figure how to boil down to a T-shirt message ...
If COVID were a cattle disease, it would have been stopped cold in the first half year. Just like for other livestock, there's money at stake if the disease isn't stopped.
But with people involved, and *FREEDOM!* the excuse, we just let 'em keep dying.
Guess we're not worth enough even for Soylent uses...
My previous comment was deleted by a moderator. I can only assume this was because I had suggested that the UK government had planned something that lead to deaths. I profoundly apologise if anyone was offended by my suggestion that Johnson government actually had a plan. I now realise how foolish this was.
Just as a follow up to this, this is the first comment I have ever had removed. I didn't personally think it was that bad, but somebody obviously reported it and it was taken down. If anybody was offended by it then I do sincerely apologise, as it wasn't my intent. Oddly, the first reply quoting the entire comment in full is still there.
Again, sorry if I upset anyone.
I find it interesting that it was the people short-sightedly trying to save money that caused the virus to become endemic and will have cost most of them far more in the long run. Its actually still possible to eradicate the disease - indeed it would be the cheapest option in the long run - but it would take worldwide co-operation. NZ, Taiwan, Vietnam and Thailand showed they could reduce the infection rate by a factor of over 1000 in a couple of months by a proper lockdown with financial support for everyone. That would bring levels down to less than 1000 a day worldwide which should be controllable tending to 0 in the 21st C. As it is we'll need to control new variant breakouts every few months as the thing mutates and or crossbreeds until we get a vaccine that can protect against anything resembling a coronavirus.
> I find it interesting that it was the people short-sightedly trying to save money that caused the virus to become endemic and will have cost most of them far more in the long run
Turn that around and look at the UK govmt, for example - they seem to have been actively trying to make money (on the side)
Viruses do not cross breed although they are sometimes able to exchange genetic information.
Aside from that, seeing the end of anything looking like a coronavirus is unlikely to occur in the near future. Virologists have shown they are at least 10,000 years old and possibly share a common ancestor some millions of years back.
Birds and bats seem to be the main repository and the viruse seem to have evolved along with them.
We also have our own coronaviruses which have evolved along with us. In prehistory with small human populations with little contact between groups a newly species-hopped virus that was lethal would be unlikely to propagate far unless it evolved. In other words there would have been effective selection pressure in the past.
What's new about this one is that it's hit us when we've got large, densely packed population centres with large-scale fast travel between them. We need to find a new way of exerting selection pressure and vaccination is one way of doing that.
The difference now is that a coronavirus has pissed us off and we are calling them out.
We might not go after them in birds and bats and other critters. But we already are vaccinating badgers against tuberculosis and mosquitos against malaria, so if I was a coronavirus, I'd be scared.
They're probably using the non-epidemiological meaning, I.E. prevalent, not requiring external influence to exist. In strictly epidemiological terms, it is much worse as it is not in a steady state, but it meets all other requirements for endemism. Which area? That would be North America, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Some areas do continue to require external influence, E.G. Taiwan. Australia is unclear but may be able to reach such a state. It is hoped that vaccination programs will force it out of epidemic territory into endemic territory and eventually into nonexistent territory, but that's going to require a lot of people getting the jab. To anyone reading this who can get it and hasn't, it's safe. Lots of people have verified this, myself included. Join us.
It's not endemic yet, it's pandemic, but what was meant is "epidemic", disease running amuck in your country.
I think it goes:
Outbreak: uh oh.
Epidemic: It's spreading everywhere in one country.
Pandemic: It's spreading everywhere in the world basically,
Endemic: it's spread. At that point, it may be geographically limited. Or it may still be everywhere.
At any point it ought to be stopped, but someone in authority has to get off their backside and bother people.
To answer your question, each state is declared by the World Health Organisation, and only when it has been the case obviously for some time.
https://www.physio-pedia.com/Endemics,_Epidemics_and_Pandemics
covers the levels. I think I also saw a chart at WHO, or it may have been Wikipedia. This page also has a claimed WHO chart of steps towards a pandemic, but this may be specifically for a new influenza, going from birds / pigs / mink / kangaroos to person-to-person.
just worth pointing out... vaccination _is_ a way of establishing herd immunity...
(either that or do what parents did in the 60's for mumps, measles, chicken pox, etc. - expose your kids when they're young and get over it faster, whenever there's a breakout)
I prefer vaccines, myself. Only reason I haven't gotten one (yet) is I probably had the virus in early Jan of 2020 when a co-worker came back from china and then had to leave work due to fever etc. and then a couple of weeks later I had the symptoms, which went away in a day or so, and came back just once a week later (but milder). And a relative that lives with me got similar symptoms in that time frame. And things with sugar in them taste funny, now (instead of sweet). And early on, I thought "I'll let others get it first" since I'd most likely had the virus, when it was in ultra-high demand. But eventually, when it's convenient, I'll probably get the jab(s) just to make sure I'm immune.
So yeah I'm not even remotely close to being an anti-vaxxer, but i still don't like seeing people turn into extremists on the either side of this, especially when the arguments deviate from actual science.
@ Joe W
Yes that is true and we did not get rid of smallpox either by herd immunity although there was a lot of time.
It's also possible that we will have to take the vaccine more than once.
On smallpox.
"The origin of smallpox is unknown, however, the earliest evidence of the disease dates to the 3rd century BCE in Egyptian mummies"."
"Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by one of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor. The agent of variola virus (VARV) belongs to the genus Orthopoxvirus. The last naturally occurring case was diagnosed in October 1977, and the World Health Organization certified the global eradication of the disease in 1980."
And on the smallpox vaccine.
"From 1958 to 1977, the World Health Organization conducted a global vaccination campaign that eradicated smallpox, making it the only human disease to be eradicated. Although routine smallpox vaccination is no longer performed on the general public, the vaccine is still being produced to guard against bioterrorism and biological warfare."
"You forgot about the auto-updates from Bill Gates."
One tried to install, but it ended up in a bootloop so I replaced it. Open source to the rescue. Now has anyone found a driver which lets me connect my vaccine bot to this USB port I had installed a while ago (XKCD)?
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Can't say I agree.
I fully admit that there's a whole lot of garbage and hokum on YouTube, but at the same time I've learned an awful lot about general science, astrophysics, history, DIY, carpentry, electrics, car mechanics etc from YouTube. There are some content creators out there who really do put a lot of effort into making sure what they publish is accurate.
I'm in the middle of a van conversion which, frankly, I likely wouldn't have been able to perform without YouTube pointing me in the right direction (backed up by further research, of course).
> put a lot of effort into making sure what they publish is accurate
But how can a person who doesn't know anything about a subject decide if the information is accurate or not? Really flagrant nonsense put aside, "sounds plausible to me" is the only way to chose, and leads to everybody cherry-picking the echo chamber of his own personal truths. That's how you get those crazy notions we all love to laugh about, but which are poison for an already quite uncultivated population.
(You can argue Wikipedia is in the same situation, except Wikipedia is in the limelight and major misinformation is bound to be noticed much faster than on some isolated YouTube video. Also Wikipedia articles you can edit and fix, YouTube videos you can only try to persuade Google to ban.)
But how can a person who doesn't know anything about a subject decide if the information is accurate or not?
If the person in question is any good at research, they will try to draw information from more than one source, and also attempt to take the reputability of each source into consideration.
Unfortunately, research is a skill that not many people seem to possess. Or even realise exists as a skill.
There are bits of youtube that are useful. Some very useful. Other bits, the majority of it from what I have seen, are utter crap. If you have anything resembling a logical mind, it's pretty easy to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Sadly, they don't teach Critical Thinking in school anymore.
I'm curious.
It wasn't on the curriculum when I was at school, I only heard about it when my daughter had a course during her A level years.
So when did it start and when did they stop?
From the little I heard about it while she was on the course it sounded like it should be compulsory from an early age.
More that kids used to be taught to question things, instead of blindly following whatever drivel is spouted.
But that leads to older kids and adults daring to question what teachers and "authority" tell them, and teachers and "authority" figures don't like that.
Oh, the temerity. The very idea that someone might dare question their betters!
People are far easy to manage, manipulate and control when they are taught from an early age not to look behind the curtain.
Questioning the betters is fine. It requires recognising the betters, recognising why they are the betters and why the answers they give are more likely to be right than the opinions of some eejit they found on the net who can't tell the difference between biology and telecommunications technologies.
> Questioning the betters is fine.
There is a flip side to it, which is becoming progressively more prevalent in our society: Automatically "questioning" those we don't like the message of.
As in "I don't agree with you, so you must be wrong".
IMHO "questioning" is not a good choice of word, "think about" would be much better, putting the stress on the evaluation process more than on the final judgment. Making rash judgments is easy and often quite enjoyable, but it doesn't really help any.
I've seen it done in a variety of ways. Usually, the less organized and more sincere the effort is, the better it turns out. Some critical thinking exercises took the form of example documents making claims where some were obvious rubbish, which acknowledges the problem but that's pretty much it. The better ones are just pointing out logical fallacies and letting students find them in claims. I also recommend class debates where students can find those fallacies in each other, and hopefully also their own arguments to improve them. Unfortunately, as much as that approach is tried, it works best when the students are interested enough to pay attention to that lesson and keep tracking things down.
Having previously been (briefly) a secondary school teacher of ICT in the early 2000s, I rather liked the national curriculum for ICT - it had a lot of focus on information, not just computing, like the skills of distilling important points from prose and spotting trustworthy information. Sadly, once the kids reached GCSE and A level, they were mostly taking business computing courses that taught you how to use Microsoft Office, rather than the really useful parts of information and communication technology that allowed you to function in the modern world.
Critical thinking itself should really be taught in all subjects, and evaluation of sources is a key part of the history curriculum, but I think a lot of kids drop that boring subject about dead people as soon as they can.
Reading the comments for videos from 'that' side of Youtube is entertaining.
What amazes me is that people who are so colossally stupid are able to type ywo words in more or less correct succession.
I love the scientific(?) assertions made in many of the videos, especially anything to do with magnets and or free energy.
I have plenty of things to read for entertainment. Not included in that list is the output of polluted minds vying for "subscribers" and "likes" by feeding the GreatUnwashed massive quantities of doom and gloom titillation attached to precisely zero scientific facts wrapped in glitter.
Gene Spafford once said "Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea - massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it."
Youtube is all of that, in spades.
Note that I still, after all these years, read parts of Usenet. Wetware filters help immensely.
RE: "Reading the comments for videos "
Reading the comments for videos is actually a pretty good measure of the video. A rule of thumb - If the idiots don't like something then it's more likely to be true; If the idiots like something then it's bollocks.
The tricky part, though, is spotting the idiots. If one is an idiot too then other idiots can seem to be blazingly brilliant. It's a minefield. I'm sure the "Algorithms" can walk it safely though and we'll all be good in the end.
... and does Torvalds simply tell him the list is an inappropriate venue for the discussion and to take it elsewhere, and be done with it? No. He seizes upon the opportunity to indulge in his new hobby of virtue signalling and writes a competing 633-word rant of his own (in contrast to the meagre 66 words of the offending original), creating an effect somewhat reminiscent of a chimpanzee in a zoo furiously masturbating in front of a group of unhappy schoolchildren.
Wonderful. Just wonderful. It's a race to the bottom, ladies and gentlemen, and we're all invited.
Since when does a chimpanzee masturbating make children unhappy? It was a source of high amusement when it happened one visit when I was a youngster. The only people unhappy were the teachers who had to try and come up with a suitable PC explanation when one mate feined ignorance and asked what the monkey was doing..
@Terry Morgan: thank-you, at least 2 people with brains (you and the other upvoter). And funny at that, I like the chimpanzee image.
As for the 102 downvoters, I invite you to look up the story of the Diamond Princess cruise ship: of 3711 people on board, 712 got infected, 14 died all older than 70 years. THIS is scientific data, not the PCR cases that some governments throw around.
So don't feel all warm and fuzzy about the fact that covid cases have dropped a lot around you.
And it's because this hard scientific data from last year, confirmed by the many healthy people I know who did get the virus and recovered from it, that I very much feel warm and fuzzy about that Covid-19 panic, and not because of some lunatic videos that Linus is watching. My risks of dying from Covid-19 are lower than that of dying from a car accident ... which doesn't prevent me from driving.
"That’s 2%. Do you understand how bad that is? "
did-you, may-be, miss the "all older than 70 years " part of my post ? I've read that for elder people the mortality is ~15%, so pretty bad, there is no denying it. But for healthy younger people it's negligible, and for the <20 it's inexistant. Vaccinating the young has absolutely no medical or scientific justification. Now, of course, you'll come with "but it's to protect the elderly " .... but if the elderly are vaccinated AND the vaccine is efficient, they are already protected. So: WHY vaccinate the healthy young people ?
I don't care if you want to shoot yourself some experimental drug into the veins, BUT do it with YOUR money, and don't try to force ME to do it also because YOU are defecating into your pants. I trust that Darwin will take care of your lot.
> Vaccinating the young has absolutely no medical or scientific justification.
Just in case you are really just uninformed: vaccinating also people to whom the disease is not life threatening (say, kids) does stop transmission to those to whom the disease is life threatening (say, old folks). Some people *cannot* be vaccinated, among them some old folks.
Still with me? The justification you demand is: saving lives.
Is that so fucking hard to understand? Hint: no, it is fucking not.
The justification you demand is: saving lives.
So... We now ban driving cars ? Justification: saving lives. Thousands every year.
Also: no more beers, whisky, cigarettes... you know, saving lives. It's for your good. Mum knows what's best for you, she will check every girl for you, she won't let you fly but she might let you sing....
Zolko,
Consider the behavio(u)r of your average child at the grocery store. After wiping their nose & mouth with their unwashed hands, and then smearing the results on their trousers, they proceed to fondle every piece of fruit and veg that they can get their grubby mitts on. They also touch everything displayed at or about their eye-level on or around the rest of the shelves in the store. Including you, should you get in the way.
Now consider the adults browsing the same store, picking and choosing their fruit/veg and etc., picking up and putting down items from the display the kid just contaminated, and then smearing said contamination on items in upper shelves the kids can't reach, the meat display, etc. Followed by other adults further transferring the contaminate(s). Ad nausium.
Are you SURE you don't want the kids to get vaccinated, ESPECIALLY seeing as you yourself refuse to get the jab?
Yes, I'm sure Darwin will sort it all out.
For anyone still stupid enough to poo-poo vaccinating kids, may I refer you to this classic from Mythbusters?
Same link in plaintext for the suitably cautious among us:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wPKBpk7wUY
Consider the behavio(u)r of your average child at the grocery store
This is actually à good point: they closed EVERY place - bars, restaurants, theatres, churches, sports évents, concerts, schools...- EXCEPT supermarkets, where every body meets every body touching everything, and we have NEVER heard about hotspots there. Also, no mortallity amongs the employees of supermarkets: how do you explain that ?
Very easy to explain. Such outbreaks aren't announced as such because it would scare too many people from using the essential resource. That would lead to more depression, malnutrition, and suicides etc etc.
Oh, and supermarket workers have definitely died through this. Not necessarily at a higher rate than anyone else (they take an awful lot of precautions!)
Remember that the mainstream media is passed through a filter, but is generally somewhere in the vicinity of what's actually going on.
Could you tell us precisely how Linus comment could possibly be conceived as "virtue signalling"? I understand of course that there is a rabble that uses this term simply to refer to things they don't like, but I give you the benefit of doubt here.
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@Doctor Syntax
Linus is Finnish after all and some management by perkele is as times needed.
"Management by perkele is originally a Swedish expression for a Finnish leadership approach that, according to its proponents, takes required actions in a quick and swift way, instead of a prolonged pondering of all possible alternative approaches and points of view before actually getting anything done. This is specifically contrasted to the Swedish consensus decision-making, where the manager makes sure that everyone involved has been heard before decisions are taken. The name is derived from the well-known Finnish swear word perkele, and it is a reference to the repeated times this word is yelled by the top managers. ".
is that this is someone involved in kernel development, and therefore presumably knows how microprocessors work. As in, not just opcodes and clocks and transistors, but also how a semiconductor enables this, due to physics. Therefore there should be some appreciation of science in his skull. And a disinclination to believe anti-science conspiracy theories.
After all, if I went on there and posted that Linux works by magic fairies running around inside my laptop, he would probably say that was ridiculous.
<sorry, got to go, swarms of little winged beings emerging from my ethernet port looking angry....>
"After all, if I went on there and posted that Linux works by magic fairies running around inside my laptop, he would probably say that was ridiculous."
That's obviously ridiculous, any fule kno that Linux (and especially also FreeBSD) works by magic daemons running around inside one's laptop… ;-)
Ach, just because someone is rational and intellgient in some parctiular field of knowledge doesn't prevent them from being irrational in others.
Two cases I've encountered personally were an extremely able mathematician who somehow gave credence to some nonsensical von-Daniken-eqque drivel; how her logic didnt spot the crap for what it was/is is beyond me. Another was a prgrammer I knew that didnt believe the Apollo landings had actually taken place. His main counter argument was "if we can't do that now, how could they have done it back then?". Which f course completely ignores the how and why it was ventured in the first place.
I ctually had to point out to him that radio triangulation is a thing, and that if the Soviets hadnt seen signals going all the way to the Moon, and then come all the way back, they would have been shouting about it very loudly at the time. And that a laser reflector was left by the astronauts which has long bee used to check the precise distance to the Moon. he still wast convinced. Good programer, but not so good at applying logc outside of that narrow field.
Sigh....
Hit 'im again. Harder. [gets popcorn].
Silly twit doesn't know how lucky he is that Linus lit him up, not me. One of my nieces died, at only 25, of covid crap. I get VERY ANNOYED with anti-vaxxer idiots.
At the office, we provided transport, in company vehicles, on company time, to sites doing mass vaccinations. And then we set up our own mass vaccination. Those who aren't vaccinated have been advised that they may not be allowed on premises; a lot of work is from home, but not all of it. If you need to be on prem, you need to be vaccinated. You need to work on prem but don't want to be vaccinated? Start looking for another job, mate, you're not gonna be here for long. This is a Right To Work state, and we can fire anyone, at any time, for any reason or no reason at all, so long as the person isn't one of the Protected Categories. Anti-vaxxers ain't on the list. We checked.
We had some refuse to go when we sent the company vehicles to pick them up and take them to be vaccinated; so long as they're working from home, we don't care. They're not getting into the building, though.
Then you have people like this apologising for anti vaxxer idiots and blaming everyone else for their fuckwittery...
https://www.vox.com/2015/9/4/9252489/anti-vaxx-wife
My BP rose about 40 points reading this drivel, guy sounds like he has stockholm syndrome, that or no self esteem.....his wife sounds like an immature narcissist ready to throw a temper tantrum
...and the reason I think El Reg should purge itself from Facebook is the (only) three comments below this story on that platform. Sadly they originate from a countryman of mine.
For those who don't know: Lange Frans is a washed-up has-been from the dutch rap scene. He's trying to make a name from himself (or return to the spotlight) as an 'influencer' by peddling consipiracy theories and other social mechanisms that seem to exist only to prove Darwin right.
No two ways about it, the man is Marmite. The numbers say it all. Late Feb, hundreds were dying ever day. Now we have the same case rate and average deaths < 10. Have been we been experimented on? Well yes, and I made my peace with that before consenting to the first jab. Now less people gasping for their last as a result. What are these bloody idiots going to do if something worse than COVID-19 comes along?
COVID-19 also comes and goes, somewhat, as the weather changes. This persuaded Donald Trump to say in early 2020 that it would go away "like a miracle", and maybe persuaded televangelist Kenneth Copeland to "pray it away", you're welcome, now give me money, at around the same time. It persuaded the British government to re-open business with a colossally misplaced sigh of relief, last year. Then it turns cooler and back it comes.
Per comments here....
So a genius self-publicist with zero background in the hard science let alone bio-science is now an expert on mRNA vaccines.. I dont think so.
May he should read a standard text book on the subject like this..
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-1-4939-6481-9
..and discover that they know diddly squat about mRNA vaccine interactions with cells and long term effects on non targeted cell.
Thats the science folk.
The OP was an idiot to bring up the subject on a kernel mailing list. But as usual Linus the blowhard has to do what he does best. BS.
The actual published science is attenuated virus vaccines very very safe. Adenovirus vaccines probably safe. mRNA vaccines, remember Thalidomide...
So the OP was technically correct but a fool to talk about it in any online echo chamber full of Guardianistas
Remember boys and girls. R0 < 1.2, IFR < 0.2% and CFR < 2%. And for those under 70 a PSI/PORT risk score less that H1N1/H3N2..
And yes I probably had a mild / marginal SARs CoV 2 infection in early March 2020. It was weird just like H1N1-09 in 2009 but unlike H1N1-09 did not leave me prostrate for three days almost putting me in hospital and leaving me weak for months afterwards. Pretty standard with these sort of infections. So been there, done that, got the anti-bodies.
Those of us with serious non treatable chronic medical conditions pay very close attention to this sort of stuff. For many decades by this stage in my case. Because our lives depended on it.
So as someone who has done the literature research I'll be waiting around for an old fashioned vaccine like VLA2001. If I have to take a de-facto clinical placebo I at least want it to be a provably safe placebo. Just like all the other ones I would gladly take. Because I trust doctors about as much as I trust lawyers. Based on many decades of direct experience with both.
Your pseudo-scientific arguments hold no weight here, because this is one audience that actually does do their own reading outside of internet forums. As does Linus Torvalds I am sure.
"The actual published science is attenuated virus vaccines very very safe. Adenovirus vaccines probably safe. mRNA vaccines, remember Thalidomide..."
Thalidomide wasn't a vaccine.
Thalidomide wasn't a vaccine.
Pretty sure the OP is aware that thalidomide is not a vaccine and is instead giving an example of another product pushed by big pharma that was widely accepted as being completely safe, until everyone realised it wasn't.
The COVID Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are the first mRNA vaccines to be granted (emergency) approval for human use in history. Up till now they have performed really rather poorly in animal models. As such, no one can be certain whether or not their will be long term side effects with this technology. Vaccine hesitancy should not be seen as irrational in this particular case, especially as we're starting to see higher than expected levels of myocarditis in younger males given the Pfizer jab.
The scary thing is if you read the textbook I referenced on mRNA vaccines, the standard textbook, and plow through the various chapters about what is known about the actual mechanism of interaction with cells the current knowledge is mostly hand-waving. This is very early stage science. In 10 or 15 years it might prove to be a very power tool but now, actually quite terrifying that it is been clinically trialed on tens of millions of people.
The equivalent textbooks on adenovirus are on firmer scientific ground but given the problems that turned up in various candidate trials (the blood clot one with SARs 2 vaccine being pretty typical) its still not quite a mature technology yet. But very encouraging.
You just cannot beat good old attenuated virus vaccines. By this stage very well understood. No problem with those. In fact once things quieten down I need to get a Tdap booster and the new shingles vaccine looks like something worth getting. Not worth getting the flu shot most years as I have high H1N1 immunity, thanks to 2009 bout, and very good H3N2 immunity, thanks to when I was born as first pandemic exposure.
The immune system is a weird and wonderful beast.
The point about Thalidomide did not go over my head. My counterpoint was simply that you are scare-mongering about medical science, without reference to facts that matter for vaccines. All of history is full of mistakes of one sort or another. Boo!
"Not worth getting the flu shot most years as I have high H1N1 immunity, thanks to 2009 bout, and very good H3N2 immunity, thanks to when I was born as first pandemic exposure."
You claim to know so much and then write this. If anybody challenges you, you resort to name-calling. Bye.
You just cannot beat good old attenuated virus vaccines. By this stage very well understood. No problem with those. In fact once things quieten down I need to get a Tdap booster and the new shingles vaccine looks like something worth getting. Not worth getting the flu shot most years as I have high H1N1 immunity, thanks to 2009 bout, and very good H3N2 immunity, thanks to when I was born as first pandemic exposure.
What's your opinion on the Novavax vaccine? Just the spike protein, enveloped with a lipid. Perhaps safer than the mRNA and adenovirus options. Seems to be taking a while to get approved though unfortunately.
The Adenovirus blood clotting problem was known in 2006.
https://ashpublications.org/blood/article/109/7/2832/125650/Adenovirus-induced-thrombocytopenia-the-role-of
Obviously, Oxford doesn't read.
Or maybe they do: "The Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine is a replication-deficient simian adenovirus vector, containing the full‐length codon‐optimised coding sequence of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein along with a tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) leader sequence"
"Tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) is classified as a serine protease (enzymes that cleave peptide bonds in proteins). It is thus one of the essential components of the dissolution of blood clots. Its primary function includes catalyzing the conversion of plasminogen to plasmin, the primary enzyme involved in dissolving blood clots"
Decide yourselves...
Thalidomide _is_ perfectly safe... if you're not pregnant. Specifically, if you're not at a specific stage of pregnancy. So it's perfectly safe for 50% of the adult population 100% of the time, and for the other 50% 90+% of the time. It's hideously unsafe for the last few, though. Or rather for the fetuses the last few are carrying.
Seriously, look up aspirin and penicillin. If either of them had been first proposed in a modern testing environment, neither would have been approved. They'd never get past the animal testing, one kills guinea pigs and one blinds rabbits. (I don't remember which, and reading about it was too depressing so I'm not digging up the article again.) Penicillin is fatal to a small percentage of humans, and will make another small percentage very sick indeed.A lot of people have problems with aspirin (I'm one of them...) And yet both of them are still in use... (I can handle low-dosages of aspirin. Some others can't even do that.)
There's a long list of drugs which will cause problems in a small percentage of people. A very long list. (Any diabetics out there? Let me just mention metformin. And that one is by no means the most egregious example...)
'Vaccine hesitancy' _is_ irrational.
Thalidomide _is_ perfectly safe... if you're not pregnant. Specifically, if you're not at a specific stage of pregnancy. So it's perfectly safe for 50% of the adult population 100% of the time, and for the other 50% 90+% of the time. It's hideously unsafe for the last few, though. Or rather for the fetuses the last few are carrying.
Make no mistake about it, what happened with thalidomide was a tragic scandal. The fact you're passing it off as a nothingburger is deeply troubling and calls into question your motives with these type of posts.
The fact is, big pharma companies have been caught countless times behaving criminally, sometimes even contravening safety regulations. This isn't a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, it's an established fact.
You may peruse a selection of the biggest lawsuits here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical_settlements
Bearing all this in mind, some of us have come to the conclusion that we would prefer to wait for a bit more data before submitting to vaccines granted emergency approval, released in record time and that use brand new technology. If that's difficult for you to accept, so be it, but the vitriolic response meted out to those with a differing viewpoint is both depressing and hard to understand.
“ but the vitriolic response meted out to those with a differing viewpoint is both depressing and hard to understand.”
Not really. So much utter BS is spouted that make large, moronic sections of the population not get vaccinated. Which leads to thousands of extra deaths and prolonged lockdowns.
And THOSE SAME PEOPLE often refuse masks, and congregate like idiots.
Not really. So much utter BS is spouted that make large, moronic sections of the population not get vaccinated. Which leads to thousands of extra deaths and prolonged lockdowns.
And THOSE SAME PEOPLE often refuse masks, and congregate like idiots.
Almost 80% of the population in the UK have received their first vaccination and presumably the overwhelming majority of those people will take their second. Couple that with people that already have antibodies and T-cells from previous COVID infections and we cannot be far from attaining herd immunity. So why the hysterical overreaction about the very small minority that choose not to get vaccinated?
There you go, proving you are one of the echo chamber chatter moneys.. Pure gibberish.
Everything I quoted is straight from the current epidemiological and clinical data for SARs CoV 2. Some of us have been reading the published data very carefully since first week of January 2020.
And as the Thalidomide reference went straight above you head let me explain in simple terms you might understand.
I know Thalidomide was not a vaccine. Duh. It was the biggest single UK medical regulatory failing of the modern era. To date. It was the big story for most of my childhood and teenage years. Some of those kids with missing limbs were locals. You saw them in the streets and one was is in my primary school for a while. The current UK regulatory framework is directly due to the Thalidomide scandal. One FDA regulator would not take the pharma companies word that the side-effects were minor so it never got approval in the US at the time.
So just like Linus maybe do your research before making a fool of yourself in public.
"So a genius self-publicist with zero background in the hard science let alone bio-science is now an expert on mRNA vaccines.. I dont think so."
Nice strawman. Of course he's not. He corrected a person who knew nothing and whose statements were complete rubbish.
Imagine what you would say to me if I wrote a comment explaining that you are a mutant cucumber plant. I'm guessing it would be along the lines that there is no such thing and that you are A) moving around, which plants tend not to do, B) have a genome typical of humans, and C) do not have cucumbers growing out of you. I think you could manage to write this rebuttal without being an expert on cucumber horticulture. When the bar's on the ground, you don't have to jump very high to clear it.
Amongst my little group, anti-vax has been replaced with the term pro-plague.
As risk assessments go, vax versus no vax; versus probability of everyone getting COVID when restrictions are widely removed. I'll take a vaccine, thanks.
For the rest of you that can take a vaccine, but are declining it, there is a rather famous book by Charles Darwin that explains much.
The only other way is a repeat of the consequences that came with the Black Plague. Some might say that has advantages with respect to overpopulation; however morally bankrupt it might be. From a personal standpoint, I'd rather still be about all things considered.
For those unable to take a vaccine, but suffer the consequences of those that wilfully choose not to; those are the people I feel most sorry for. They have no more power over your choice to decline than I do.
We don't live in a benevolent dictatorship, but if it were me in charge I'd be mandating it for absolutely everyone that can have one to do so, because it's the right thing to do; for both yourself and everyone else.
Gentle reminder also, that hostile intelligence agencies are known to be placing misinformation to sow distrust of vaccines (reported by many reputable news agencies, if not government branches).
If one person changes their mind because of this then it was worth taking the 5 mins to write.
Currently if you're think is anti-vaxx, anti-Covid and so on the place to play woujld be off-guardian.org . This site started some years ago back when the Guardian's "Comment is Free" facility became somewhat less free (post the Snowdon basement disk smashing incident) as an outlet for material that got censored off the Guardian site as it "didn't conform to community standards". In the last year its been taken over by the Covid Conspiracy Theory crew, there's plenty of material out there for all tastes and some of it is really well written (if scientifically dubious).
Linus is right. The occasional tongue in cheek comment is just playfulness but overall source code is not the place to spread any kind of theories especially if they're completely off topic.
Isn't hypocritical and disgusting how Linus' arrogance and emotional immaturity shine through when confronted an opposing view to his own. It is important to note than like the man he is opposing, Linus doesn't understand mRNA and is not educated in the matter. If Linus wasn't such a fool, he would find that there is actually tremendous support for the view this man is expressing. The views come from extremely well educated people in the matter. And no Linus, you can't find the videos on YouTube and their views are not shared on Twitter. Those platforms block opposing views by qualified scientists. One shouldn't go to Kim Jong Un's media if you want information that would make him look bad. Linus is full of disappointments. He is a great code reviewer and falls short in many other areas. He's human. Or was before he got vaccinated if one is to believe what his opposer is claiming.. lol
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