I believe

I think I'd rather rely on published journal papers, thanks.

that's the airborne strain that doesn't affect humans.

Yet.

Except for that one very specific symptom of traveling to Western Africa!

Don't worry, that won't be a helpful symptom for much longer.

I hope the vaccine makers and distributers are successful and that my expectations are not met.

GSK-Beecham were putting out an item to the UK's morning TV news (I'm watching at the moment) that they don't think they could be shipping an effective vaccine before 2016, at the earliest.

Well, I'd think with today's computer systems, it would be pretty easy to keep track where someone is flying from.

"Com-puter sys-tems" .... sorry, but haven't you flown on hand-written tickets this year? I have. In (well, from) West Africa.

I'm not 100% sure if all of the countries in question have a US embassy. For certain, many of them simply don't have direct flights to the US, nor do they have US-airlines flying in or out. So why would they have US-compatible systems? (I don't recall seeing a single US operator on any of the boards over the last year, but I wasn't looking for anything other than my flight)

I don't think there are any direct flights from that area into the US. Thomas Duncan came through Brussels. It's probably impossible to totally quarantine such a large area.

Most of the flights I saw when travelling through the area in the last year were to and from other African countries, or to and from France (they don't call it "Francophone West Africa" without reason). But I was in Abidjan one day (I think - they blur one into the other after a time) and ISTR there was a flight to Rio de Janeiro.

But, so what about the lack of direct flights? I can get anywhere in the world with the possible exception of Antarctica within 24 hours and probably 3 flights. The door is open.

with our flight systems, can we not pretty readily track anyone flying OUT of that area

Because your (USA's) flight systems extend as far as the origin points of flights that terminate in your country. What happens outside that, you're dependent on other countries (or the traveller themselves) reporting information to you. (Of course, the NSA are probably perfectly well aware of the full flight history of anyone leaving the area, but they can't admit to that without being jailed.)

Better than have it reach pandemic proportions

It may have reached that point already. The WHO are expecting that, by Christmas/ New Year (when there will be a global surge of travel, intranationally and internationally) essentially every country in the world will have had several cases arrive from West Africa (albeit via third countries). The likelihood of secondary cases from those primary cases is high ; whether there are then tertiary cases is going to depend on local responses.

Which doesn't mean that we're fucked - just that global vigilance is going to have to increase and efforts at containment will have to increase rapidly too. So ... maybe every international airport in the world is going to need the nearest hospital dedicating to isolation cases. And if that means that no operations which are not urgent get carried out in the remaining hospital beds, then that may be the price.

For what it's worth, it's plausible that the number of deaths from the economic disruption caused to the three core countries is already exceeding the number of deaths due to the virus.

While there is a certain amount of logic there, privately owned city streets

I don't know about America, but over here in Britain we used to have private fire brigades, run by insurance companies.

seem like a disaster to me.

It was.

What someone should probably come up with is something between https and http..

Sorry, but I don't see what http or https has got to do with this. The session in question is using telnet on port 25, not ports 80, 8080 or ... 443 for https? That should be unencrypted text at either end and whatever (transparent) compression or gets done on the way. The contents of the packets have been changed, and that shouldn't happen.

If you haven't been fucked by your insurance company yet,[...]; you can't win or even hope to break even.

Well, while you probably didn't have any say in being born in America, you (probably, criminal record and skills permitting) have the option of leaving to live in the civilized world somewhere. Maybe the Canadians would accept you?

"Cash" as in bills or "cash" as in a check? Everyone can handle checks, no problem.

Cheques are either completely dead, or about to die. The banks are about to shut down the cheque-handling infrastructure and have been actively discouraging them for years. I honestly don't know if they've been shut down yet because I haven't seen one being used for ... ages.

Regardless, I got rid of my last chequebook in ... about 1989. Which was about 4 years before I got my first credit card.

The only reason for the ban was RF interference. That is no longer a problem with modern devices, so the ban should end.

So, you want the flight attendants to inspect every device before it gets used, to check that it's on the list of "modern devices" which are not a problem?

Right, I can just see that working.

Would deleting/destroying your keys be considered destroying evidence?

That varies by jurisdiction. And, of course, if you've gone down the "hidden container route", then they've no way of knowing if you've given them the key to all the data.

You do have key management issues with lots of keys ratting around though.

"The rest of you can go on ahead," they said, as if we mighty fly on despite the loss of a teenager.

Why would that be a problem? You're talking about someone who is close to the 18 end of teenagerhood, but even so, so what? I was hitch-hiking form one end of the country to the other when I was 14 (which was about 11 years before I first flew in a fixed-wing aircraft). Make sure the kid has a charged mobile phone, get on the plane, sort him out with a hotel room by phone, and then get on with sorting out how to move him on to catch up with the rest of the family.

Beside, whose fault is it that the person hadn't got appropriate ID? Yours, or the young adult? They're often whinging about not being treated like adults, so ... here's your power, take the consequences if you get it wrong.

It really sucks that we're stuck with Latin-1 here.

I wonder if my recently-sorted set of cat icons will work. Slight chance.

U+1F638 ; GRINNING CAT FACE WITH SMILING EYES ; U+1F639 ; CAT FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY ; U+1F63A ; SMILING CAT FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH ; U+1F63B ; SMILING CAT FACE WITH HEART-SHAPED EYES ; U+1F63c ; CAT FACE WITH WRY SMILE ; U+1F63d ; KISSING CAT FACE WITH CLOSED EYES ; U+1F63e ; POUTING CAT FACE ; U+1F63f ; CRYING CAT FACE ; U+1F640 ; WEARY CAT FACE ;

Bollocks, no.

I imagine the pills are fine, but any subsequent burps are rather unpleasant.

I'd imagine that the technicians designing the pill choose appropriate packaging materials that (1) wouldn't rupture under chewing (because NOBODY reads the instructions on the package, EVER. Well known fact.) and (2) don't release their contents until after acid immersion followed by a return to more normal pH (indicating that the pill has passed the stomach and is now in the small intestine, where the bugs are desired.

You know, people do think these things through. Unlike people looking for a quick laugh on Slashdot.