I find that it most situations I can talk to my watch without annoying anyone. I just hold it right next to my mouth and speak softly enough that only someone standing very close could hear, and then not well. This works well even in very noisy environments.

There are some circumstances in which this would be nice because neither talking to the watch nor pulling out my phone are workable. But it's a pretty small set.

I haven't seen that pair of positions at all. I wish I had, because those are consistent. Ebola is so dangerous in Africa because sanitary conditions and medical facilities are so poor there. All of those deaths are a tragedy, and the deaths of healthcare workers sacrificing themselves are a tragedy that tugs the heartstrings.

On the other hand, Ebola is truly not dangerous here, because we do have good public health infrastructure.

There's nothing at all inconsistent about those two perspectives, unless you assume that people worried about death in Africa should only care if they fear that it's going to threaten them personally.

It's not so much that they "choose" something. It's the fundamental difference between "news" and "not news" colliding with the way humans have evolved to give cognitive weight to things they hear about frequently and which can be associated with strong narratives.

C. dificile killing 16K people annually isn't news, because it's been happening for years. It's part of the background, not something which jumps up and begs to be called out. If a few thousand people in Africa had been dying at a steady pace from Ebola, for decades, it would also likely be part of the background... just like malaria is. Outbreaks are news, even if the death rates are small, while a steady year in and year out death toll is not, even if it's killing a lot more people. Unless, of course, there is news about initiatives to eradicate the "normal" disease, or interesting new research or something that makes a change worth talking about.

Ebola is also particularly powerful from a narrative perspective. The graphic imagery it produces, plus the horrific nature of bleeding to death from the inside out, makes for a strong story. Then when you add in self-sacrificing health care practitioners risking their lives and working in horrific conditions to try to help the sufferers, and then themselves suffering the same horrible death, it becomes a really compelling narrative. Throw in government corruption resulting in basic protective measures being unavailable to said self-sacrificing practitioners and it's a blockbuster.

C. difficile, not so much. People don't usually die of diarrhea, and it's an experience all of us are familiar with, and don't really want to talk or think about. Lousy narrative, no great changes to make it news, so it gets ignored, until someone decides to try swallowing human feces as a treatment. That's news, and it has a narrative we can all relate to and be disgusted by. Which is why we're talking about it now.

If you notice the stories that the media "chooses" to scare the public, they're all "news with a powerful narrative". These things resonate with people and get their interest -- including members of the media -- so the media provides them. The nice story plus the repetition of seeing the story daily causes people to dramatically overestimate the danger.

We all need to learn more about how our brains work so we can compensate for our inherent biases.

Nonsense.

Most real inventions go the other direction... first the theory, then the gradual working-out of the engineering processes required to make it work, a a little, then more hard work to refine it into something really useful and usable.

Most claimed inventions without theoretical justification also go a different way... they're thought a hoax and then are proven to be a hoax. The reason they're thought to be a hoax is exactly because nearly all of them are.

It is looking more possible that the E-Cat may not be a hoax. Further study may gradually exclude all other explanations, and eventually we may start to see conjectured mechanisms, one of which may emerge as the best explanation. Perhaps along the way we'll learn some new physics.

Or, we may find that the E-Cat is a hoax. That will be the less surprising (but sadder) outcome. Time, and further study, will tell. But if it does turn out to be real, your snark will still be completely wrong. Most everything that is real is known to be real before it works, and most everything that is a hoax actually is a hoax.

These are independent researchers, not Kickstarter itself, and as the summary says, they'd be spamming you via Twitter. The simple fix is to remove your Twitter handle from your Kickstarter profile, that way they don't have a way to engage in an activity with you that they'd verbalize by using marketing speak buzzwords.

If you're suggesting that they would have picked up on some physiological false positive response on my part, I seriously doubt it, given that there were plenty of other questions that they were able to rephrase to the point where I was able to answer them without a shadow of doubt, and they repeat the questions over and over again in order to try and deal with any random outliers.

If you're suggesting that they would produce a "false positive" in response to anyone my age answering that question, that seems like a baseless assumption predicated on a preconceived notion. Moreover, wouldn't they have done that with drugs too? Yet I told them—truthfully—that I have never had any illicit drugs (well, technically, I got them to add a caveat on that one too, since I've had prescription drugs without a prescription, but it was only ever for valid medicinal use, such as the time some med student friends tossed me a few prescription-strength antihistamines when I discovered, upon breaking out in hives while at their house, that I was apparently allergic to their cats).

It's not a question of experimentation with uncertain approaches. The alternatives are all well-understood... actually the mathematics is straightforward enough that the characteristics of virtually any approach you can invent can easily be calculated.

The question is whether they should use the approach that provides the fastest route to a given level of certainty at the expense of deliberately leaving a significant percentage of sufferers untreated, or whether to use other methods that provide the treatment to everyone possible but will take longer to achieve the required level of certainty. There's a legitimate question here, particularly if the researchers strongly believe that the vaccine does work. In that case, using randomized treatment will needlessly allow many people -- and, in particular, healthcare workers -- to die. If, on the other hand, the vaccine really isn't very effective, then delaying the discovery of that fact, and therefore delaying evaluation of alternative vaccines (assuming they exist) will cost more lives.

In any case, this isn't a question of experimenting with uncertain approaches. The pros and cons of all of the options are fully understood. It's just a question of deciding which set of tradeoffs is the best for this situation.

Ebola is by no means the only viral hemorrhagic fevers (VHFs), and while the US may not have much experience in dealing with Ebola specifically, we do have a handful of other VHFs that are endemic in domestic rodent populations that act as carriers. Those VHFs (e.g. Hantavirus) lead to several human infections each year, yet you never really hear about them in the news, nor has there ever been a big scare regarding them, despite the fact that they've been around for decades or longer.

It's an anecdote, to be sure, and there are other differences between something like Hantavirus and Ebola that make Ebola more threatening, but there's ample evidence of the fact that America deals with VHFs already (although we clearly came up short in this latest instance). And as far as viruses go, Ebola is remarkably easy to contain, given that it isn't airborne and that infected individuals aren't contagious until they're presenting symptoms, so even if protocol isn't followed, it's relatively straightforward to get things back under control.

You'll note that I never broached the topic of legality. Whether it's illegal or not is an entirely separate issue. The simple fact is, based on every test I've found that provides an ethical basis for whistleblowing, what Manning did was not morally permissible, nor was it morally obligatory. I'm fine with what Snowden did—illegal or not—because he went through it in a manner that appears to have been of the highest ethical caliber. Not so with Manning. No so with how Wikileaks handled Manning and his leaks. Good may still come out of them, but the way those leaks were handled was not ethical.

So, 8 million blocks, and 100,000 creations means 80 blocks per creation. If Minecraft is anything to go by, that'd be the equivalent of about a 5x5 house that was 4 blocks tall...and had no roof. I suppose that's a "creation", but if that's all they're averaging, they're not doing so hot. Pretty much everyone I've ever seen play Minecraft manages to do better than that in the first few minutes, and by the end of their first sitting, they've usually expanded on it substantially.

Oh, and it should go without saying that I do not work there, otherwise I obviously wouldn't be discussing any of this. The job I found as a hold-me-over position until I was done with the CIA application process actually ended up blowing me completely out of the water, so when the CIA asked me to move forward with the application process, I let them know I had found something else and was no longer interested.

And keep in mind that all of this was well before Snowden's revelations.

In fact, for the writing sample I submitted with my application, I was in the middle of a crunch time with my graduate research, so I took 20 minutes and knocked out a quick ethical analysis on the topic of Wikileaks and Bradley Manning, because the two of them were in the news around that time and I figured I may as well publicize my controversial stances early in the process so that we didn't waste each other's time. My stance in the essay was more or less that I didn't believe Manning or Wikileaks had conducted themselves in an ethical manner in their activities related to one another, but that I absolutely supported properly conducted whistleblowing (including some of the earlier stuff Wikileaks had done) and the need for people to step forward when the government inevitably gets out of line, as well as the need for organizations like Wikileaks to enable those people to do so.

Imagine my surprise when a few months later I sat down for an interview with my would-be boss during the three-day session up in D.C., only to discover that not only had they read through my entire essay...not only had they highlighted it and kept it at their desk because they were excited to discuss it with me...not only did they agree with it and think it was incredibly well-reasoned...but I had actually been tagged for the position they were offering me (a position that was quite a bit better than what I had applied for) largely on the basis of that throwaway essay I had penned while pressed for time.

Strange, but true.

I applied to the CIA when I was looking at finishing grad school about 4 years back. As with the FBI, one of the things they mentioned was illegal downloading, of which I had done quite a bit while in college. I mean, we're talking hundreds of films, thousands of TV episodes, thousands of audio tracks, both foreign and domestic for all of those, from any number of decades, genres, and budget sizes.

I was upfront with them about it during a pre-screening interview held at my school's campus. I actually brought it up with them and asked if it'd be a problem. They indicated it wouldn't be, and formally invited me to fill out a proper application with them so that they could advance me through the process.

I answered truthfully regarding it on the application and any subsequent questionnaires that I had to fill out. I never got any word back regarding that specifically, but their response was to ask me to fly up to Washington D.C. for a three-day session with them, which I did.

I provided exacting details regarding my illegal downloading to the polygraph examiner at my polygraph session, as well as to anyone else who asked about it. I let them know the quantity, nature of the content, and how recently I had engaged in it. I passed the polygraph with flying colors and was told I didn't even need to come in for the second session they had scheduled since they were confident I told the truth about everything (and I had...in excruciating detail, in fact, just because I knew, being the pedant that I am, that if I left out any little detail, I really would be considering myself to be lying; as an aside, one of the other applicants I was hanging out with lied to them about the recency of his drug use and got caught in his lie).

And how did they respond to all of this? They asked me when it would be convenient to move on to the final stage of the application process (a thorough background check...which I'm confident I would have easily passed), since the folks I'd be working with were excited about bringing me onboard and wanted to keep things moving. Which is to say, the fact that I had downloaded loads of files illegally in the past clearly wasn't a problem. They let me know that it'd need to stop and that it would come up again in the every-five-years polygraph everyone working there submits to, but otherwise, they made it clear to me, both explicitly through their words and implicitly through their deeds that they really didn't have a problem with me having engaged in it at a relatively large scale in the past.

P.S. Just to state what I hope is obvious: an actual polygraph session is NOTHING like what is shown on TV (the room was well-lit, there wasn't an angry detective yelling at me, beads of sweat were not pouring from my brow, and no one was pounding on any desks). I don't want to get into a load of details, but suffice it to say, the environment was heavily controlled to eliminate external stimuli, the questions and their meanings along with the terms and their definitions were all explained in detail to me in advance, I was able to voice any misgivings I had about them to the examiner (in fact, we spent 2.5 hours of the 4 hours doing just that, since my inherent pedantry meant that I had all sorts of ideas like "well, technically I've compromised government systems when I lent a friend my password at our state university" or "I can't rule out the possibility that I unknowingly supported terrorists through a front that they're maintaining", which led to a lot of the questions getting rephrased to be prefixed by "insofar as you know" or "besides what you have disclosed here"), and the questions were all read to me over and over and over again in even, metered tones that were about as un-aggressive as you can imagine.

Simple. Because one of those represents the voting interests of the people who fund it, the other does not.
One funnels my money willingly for purposes I have a choice in, one does not.
The not-for-profit, assuming it's a registered lobby that's faithfully representing its funders, is doing just that- representing its funders.
The for-profit isn't. It's representing a board of directors, greatly amplifying their actual voice. Making their vote bigger than it really should be. They're more than welcome to use their personal funds to lobby though.

In short, the not-for-profit can be seen simply as a pooled resource of a bunch of individual people lobbying their government, while the for-profit is the pooled resources of a possibly massive segment of a market, not representing those people at all. No matter how you try to spin it, there is a difference. It's not crass or political. I have no desire to disenfranchise the wealthy corporate lords, but they can use their own money.

That is patently false. I'm a little stunned that someone going through such lengths to display intelligence, such as yourself, would even try to peddle something like that.
Allow me to paraphrase,
If you disagree with my assertion that a business is no different than a voter representation body, you're a dirty leninist out to subvert democracy for your own power.

Shame on you.

Or if we killed NAT. This is one of many ways in which NAT breaks the Internet.