I'm not an Australian, so I may be misunderstanding some of the terminology involved, but it's my understanding that they actually do owe him that information, based on National Privacy Principle 6 (NPP 6) from Australia's Privacy Act of 1988.

Here's a quick summary over the relevant NPP:

Which is to say, unlike in the US, the data actually may be owed to the customer in this case if the customer makes a request for it. The organization may not provide the information, but they have an obligation to have a very good reason for having done so, else they should have provided the data.

Again, I may be misunderstanding things or unaware of later changes to the law, but I'll share what little I know in the hope that someone more knowledgeable can correct me if I'm off-base.

Six, actually. More important than that: His Erdos Bacon Sabbath number is 10.

I haven't really seen anyone point this out in spite of you regularly making the conflation between for-profit corporations and not-for-profit corporations.
Am I wrong to see a distinction there?

One utilizes the willingly donated resources of the people for the purpose of lobbying for policy to lobby for policy, the other uses the resources of people, often given up because they have no real choice (we've got to live, right?) to lobby against the interests of those very same people.

Corporate personhood doesn't bother me so much as the abuse it allowed in campaign financing. Fix that, and I don't have any legitimate beef against corporations being more-or-less people.

That's partly due to the witch-craft and dark incantations inherent in the language.

I love Perl :)

The JVM is a pretty badass VM, really.
Even Java itself as a language isn't too vile, it's really some of the things people do with it (JVM abuse allowed by the language) that can really turn the code into a festering pile of ebola-ridden excrement.
Normally, I'm pretty adamant about not blaming the language for the authors (I'm a 9th Circle Perl Acolyte), but finding a piece of Java code greater than the length of a single class that isn't an obvious gateway to the Dark Side is fucking impossible.

Back on topic, I'm super open-minded about languages, and I regularly use many of them in my line of work... But Python.. No. Fuck that garbage. I learned it, I became proficient in it, it still churns my stomach. The sheer level of skill it took to take all the good ideas in Python and ruin them with a few unforgivable paradigms impresses me every time.

You just blew my mind, sir.

The CDC determined the simians were infected while en route while stored with other infected animals.
The only thing supporting the theory of aerosol transmission was default option. They couldn't find anything there that could have spread it, so it must have spread via the air. The logic is pretty flawed, really. Of the over-100 humans that handled the animals, only 6 showed antigens from exposure, making airborne transmission highly unlikely.

It's pretty damn unlikely for Ebola to ever become "airborne", as a virus- it's too damn big. You just can't fit enough of them in an aerosol-sized droplet to stand much of a chance at infection.
The "mutation" required to make it an effective aerosol pathogen would shave off 90% of its genome.

That isn't to say that it can't be transmitted by a good sneeze or a cough over the air, but even in those cases- it's not so easy, as again, the virus is rather large, and it takes a certain amount of viral load for an active infection to actually occur.

You're not infectious prior to becoming symptomatic, otherwise- ya. That would be bad

Most Republicans I know would gladly take a shot of Ebola instead of coming to Seattle

6/178 animal handlers who handled the infected animals tested positive for reston-ebola antigens (meaning they were infected). Airborne was never established as the vector. (and is considered unlikely to have been). I'm not sure where linked article gets its information about the only connection being via airborne vectors. The CDC determined the monkeys to have been cross-infected during the delivery flight.

You have that completely backwards. Cherry MX Reds have a linear actuation (i.e. no tactile bump, no click, just a smooth press) that requires very little force, which makes sense, since they're aimed at the gaming market where being able to double-tap keys is important. They're probably the quietest keys in the entire Cherry MX line. The only sound they may even possibly be making is a banging that would occur if you're bottoming out with each key press, and you shouldn't be doing that unless you've picked up bad habits from years of using spongy, rubber dome keyboards. If you are bottoming out while typing, look into getting "landing pads", which are little pieces of foam that go around the switches and help to muffle the sound a bit.

In contrast, Cherry MX Blues (which are aimed primarily at typists) have a higher actuation force, along with a tactile and audible click. They're one of the loudest in the entire line of Cherry MX switches (if not the loudest), on par with the ones you'd hear in the Model M. If you want something a bit quieter while keeping the tactile sensation, get Cherry MX Browns, which go for more of a tactile bump instead of a click, meaning it's quite a bit quieter but still has most of the tactility. Again, you shouldn't be bottoming out while typing with mechanical keyboards (the biggest advantage of having the tactile feedback is so that you know when you've pressed a key and can move on, hence why the more tactile ones are aimed at typists), but if you are, landing pads will help with the racket you'd be making, though the goal should be to get to the point where you're not bottoming out any longer.

There are some other ones as well, such as Greens, Clears, Whites, Blacks, and Grays. They vary in terms of actuation force necessary, what sort of tactile sensation they provide, and where the release point is located in relation to the actuation point. But the Reds are most certainly one of the quietest, while the Blues are most certainly one of the loudest.

...that's what treaties are for. I haven't checked yet, but who wants to bet that a few treaties were likely breached in this case?

Oh, I'm with you. I was merely responding to the OP by pointing out that even if he doesn't subscribe to the idea that we should treat people well, there are economic reasons for doing so.

Sure, but for a sufficiently large, randomly selected group, we can rule that out as a likelihood. You typically don't need too many people before you can be statistically certain that they're essentially homogenous.

Ethical in what regard? Yes, it respects the right to live of the medical workers currently in the field by giving them what we think offers them the best opportunity to live, but it comes at the cost of engaging in shoddy science that could potentially mislead us into pushing out a vaccine that isn't at all effective and will end up endangering massive numbers of people by tricking them into thinking they can safely go into riskier places when they really can't. We'd do what we thought was best for a few hundred at the cost of a few thousand.

The situation on the ground is changing rapidly. New funding is coming in, more volunteers are arriving, additional training is taking place, societal awareness of the disease is affecting behavior, and better facilities are being constructed. Any one of those has the capacity to significantly affect the rates at which the disease spreads. Without putting a control group in the same environment with the test group, we have no way to control for those factors so that we can isolate the efficacy of the vaccine, or, as the case may be, its lack of efficacy. If we see that the infection rates are at X right now and X/2 six months after the vaccine is introduced, how can we tell if it's because of the vaccine or because of better practices that were put into place?

We can't. That's why we need control groups.

You're suggesting that we remove the placebo effect as a factor, which would create an uncontrolled discrepancy between the two groups. We already know the placebo effect can have a fairly substantial impact in affecting a person's health, not all of which we entirely understand, and we don't know how far that impact may extend. We also know that higher levels of stress can negatively impact a body's immune system response, so an awareness of being in the control group has the potential to negatively impact the outcome for the control group in a way that the test group wouldn't experience.