And how many medical professionals in the US are actually trained to do so? How many hazmat suits are actually available? How many beds? How many isolation wings? More generally: how big does an outbreak have to be in the US before it's not containable?

It's a valid question that no one seems to want to talk about. Even with relatively unlimited resources, first world countries are still vulnerable if the outbreak grows above a certain size. Keep in mind you don't need one hazmat suit per doctor, you need 1 per doctor per 2 hours of on shift time. The same is true for a lot of equipment.

For the vast majority of consumers, changing the PID to 0 is absolutely damaging the product. Product works one day, plug it into the computer with the new driver and it stops working. It's broken. Yes it can be fixed, but it's well beyond the comfort zone of the average consumer, which means they need to either pay someone to fix it, go begging for help, or buy a new one.

How would this work exactly? Should I be arrested for drug charges if I smoke pot while visiting Amsterdam? Should I be arrested upon entering Iran for drawing a picture of Mohamed while in the UK?

Extradition has rules and requirements, one of which is that the charges being extradited for have to be valid in both countries.

Nudity is not automatically pornography, not in any sane jurisdiction anyway. I can think of at least 2 album covers that feature pictures of very nude, very underage persons for instance.

Fixed.

Yep, the judge understands that the internet is global but he has totally forgotten how international law works. You cannot prevent a company from doing something outside of your borders just because it is illegal inside your borders. What if China decided that if Google wanted a Chinese presence they had to filter all results for all users globally? How is that any different other than the subject matter being blocked?

To be fair, he does say a progressive tax on consumption, presumably meaning every additional dollar spent would be taxed at a slightly higher rate. You could lay that out to mean everything from hitting the poorest the hardest all the way to no one paying taxes on the first $100,000 they spend every year, it's all in how you lay out the numbers.

Ah yes, lets blame the victims, the very people who were trying to help a very sick, very dangerous man while he lay in a hospital bed dying.

What the fuck is wrong with you!?

If AIDs or hepatitis were anywhere near as communicable you would see a mass exodus from the medical profession: working with sick people would be a death sentence waiting to happen. You can work with, live with, eat with, share a bathroom with, even fuck (with appropriate protection) people who have HIV or hepatitis without contracting it and you can do so for years if you're careful. We've now had 2 out of a team of perhaps 60 who cared for Duncan get sick. Does that sound equivalent to you?

The problem is that in the real outbreak areas (parts of west Africa, especially Liberia) there simply isn't enough protective gear to go around, let alone facilities or trained personnel to use them. In many places they are doing triage, sending patients home who they know to have Ebola because there simply isn't room. Now, if two trained nurses wearing most of the necessary protective gear got sick treating a patient in a modern hospital setting, how do you think average people are going to do treating their sick family members? At that point, things spiral rapidly out of control, which is exactly what we've seen in those regions and is why the WHO says if they don't get more beds, supplies, and doctors in place soon we'll see more than a million infections before the end of January.

Historic
Adj.
1) famous or important in history, or potentially so.

If you're going to be pedantic, you need to at least be accurate.

Shouldn't you at least entertain the possibility that those two things are related? We know nuclear can be safe, we also know it can be unsafe. Without the regulation, I wouldn't trust free market principles to ensure safety, not when a single accident can write off hundreds of square miles of real estate and dislocate hundreds of thousands of people.

I think the issue is that if your line of understand is correct, quantum information would be destroyed; either when matter crosses the event horizon or when the anti-particle does. We believe this to be impossible, quantum information should never be created or destroyed. If that's true, there must be some interaction between the contents of a black hole and the virtual pairs produced at the horizon.

That's disingenuous at best and outright dishonest at worst. Yes, someone with hep C will, on average infect just as many people as someone with Ebola, but people with Hep C live for decades, Ebola victims recover or die within a couple months. Total new infections per patient might be the same, but the rate of new infections per patient is different by orders of magnitude.

Yes, I'm sure 1.4 million west African's (CDC's current estimate of infections by end of January) are running around licking the bodily fluids of critically ill people.

This has got to stop. There are reasons the CDC requires bio-hazard level 4 containment to research Ebola. There are reasons this disease continues to spread even though many of the risky cultural behaviors have been changed.

At some point, statements like this ignore the reality on the ground: More people have died from this outbreak than died from SARS. Unless something changes drastically more will die than died from H1N1. If things continue on as they are you will see infection rates hit double digit percentages in several African countries by spring time.

If you work in an ER and someone comes in sweating and vomiting with a history of travel to Liberia... yes? Is that too much to ask? We just had medical professionals send someone home with classic Ebola symptoms and a history of travel in highly infected regions because of a total lack of vigilance.

We do know how to put a stop to it, it's quite easy, all it takes is bio-containment level 4 procedures, that should be easy to slap together in every international airport, seaport, and border crossing to the US. Look, I'm not going to fear monger here, but the fact is that if significant numbers of infected individuals start traveling around the globe we will not be able to maintain containment for long, even with all the resources that ultra-rich 1st world countries have at their disposal. How many beds do you think there are in the entire US that can safely treat Ebola ? I'd be shocked if it's over 1,000 and if the situation in western Africa doesn't change we will very soon see Ebola victims numbering in the millions (by the CDC's own estimates, 1.4 million by the end of January).

We need to stop pretending that Ebola is no easier to catch than HIV or other pathogens that are carried by the same bodily fluids, those diseases don't typically cause you to leak and eject the infected material all over yourself and the room you are in. A nurse in Spain got sick after possibly touching her face while removing her hazmat suit, when was the last time you heard about someone catching HIV the same way? This whole idea that Ebola is so hard to spread you'd have to be stupid to catch it needs to stop; it's wrong and it's dangerous and it leads to wonderful things like people not bothering to put on gloves and mask to go into a confirmed Ebola patient's apartment (thankfully that deputies tests have come back negative).