Forcing the jackasses to go on the record as to whether or not they support the bill, rather than allowing them plausible deniability on whether or not they would have voted for it is actually a fantastic thing, particularly after the John Oliver interview of Edward Snowden, which basically makes it pretty obvious that the government gets to see you dick/boob picks if the bill is passed.

No fad is a long term winner. They are all short term winners. It's time for them to pick a new horse, if the old one is dead.

I notice she skipped addressing the questions dealing with the EV1.

Probably necessary, since there is not going to be much more she's likely to be able to add to the subject, but it would be worth hearing anything she did have to say.

Or just use a power of 2 chunk size?

What idiot configuration did someone have to have to trigger this bug?

It's not spreading all over because infected people from hot zones like the Philippines are not really doing a lot of traveling to the U.S., and, as I said, after onset of symptoms, people self-quarantine, and after an outbreak, people avoid other people they don't personally know, and avoid large gatherings of people where transmission is more likely.

Vaccination is not 100% effective, but strong border controls on people traveling from hot zones and strict quarantine rules are 100% effective.

Can't have an outbreak without a patient zero...

Yeah... it's a pretty genius tautology.

In related news, the major cost of creating new software is in the creation, and the major cost in deploying new software is in deployment.

I have always maintained that the missing mass of the Universe is AOL discs.

Only after you hit the HIT (Herd Immunity Threshold); below that, pretty much everyone who can get the disease, will, if it has a long contagious period prior to onset of symptoms, is contagious after symptoms remit and the person is not educated that they need to stay home longer, even if they "feel better", or the disease has asymptomatic carriers. Or some jerk decides to "work through it", and exposes their coworkers.

And as the math proves, measles and pertussis have an HIT too high to be able to pop over the top of the HIT to get to that saddle point. Their only saving grace is that people isolate themselves when they feel ill.

NB: measles is infectious 4 days before onset of symptoms, and up to 4 days after symptoms remit; pertussis, at least, is only infectious after onset of symptoms, and remains infectious for only 3 weeks (but symptoms last longer, if untreated with antibiotics); if treated with antibiotics, pertussis is no longer infectious after about a week. Measles is pretty insidious.

It's called a crock pot.

This slows the burn rate.

Read Richard Preston's "The Hot Zone". The reason Ebola is such a non-problem is that it has a very high burn rate: from acquisition of the disease to death is a short path, and therefore, without outside help, it has a hard time traveling very far before all the carriers are either immune (small percentage) or dead (most of them).

Counterintuitively, a slow burn rate is actually a *bad* thing, for an infectious disease, and the more infectious the disease, the *worse* things are, if the disease has a slow burn rate.

As an historical example: Typhoid Mary's burn rate was 0.

That was primarily due to defacto quarantine, not immunization. When someone is home sick, or in the hospital in isolation sick, they are not in contact with people who are susceptible, but have not yet contracted the disease.

This is an incredibly important effect for hyper-virulent diseases like measles.

Actually, that's not precisely what it means. What it means is that the herd has an immunity above the HIT, and therefore an infectious disease will burn itself out before it becomes endemic (*en*demic, NOT *epi*demic).

You are aware of what "herd immunity threshold" and "R(0) value" for a disease, mean, right? If not, let me refresh your memory:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

As you can see from the chart, the R(0) of measles is sufficient for some strains to require a 94% immunity in the population before the disease will burn itself out, rather than transmitting to a susceptible individual.

Since 6% of people can't be immunized (too young, Hep C, bad histamine complex on chromosome 6, immunocompromised by HIV or other infection, organ transplant, and so on), that requires *everyone else* be immunized.

In addition, if you read the text to the left of the R(0) chart, you'll see that the population has to be homogeneous for this to be meaningful. So what this means is that unimmunized people have to be uniformly distributed throughout the population. Which they are not.

Feel free to then drop down to the equations in the next section, and do the math for measles and pertussis.

Then come back, and we can talk more.

Ask me again after you've opened the box and agreed to the shrink wrap license on the D-Wave you just bought...

Of course, you are aware that due to medical inability for 6% of people to be vaccinated, and a non-zero vaccine failure rate, and the fact that we do not perform post-vaccination immunoassay to verify that the vaccination has been effective (and then revaccinate the shit out of the person until an immunoassay shows it to be effective), therefore herd immunity for measles and pertussis is mathematically impossible.

Right?

You *should* get vaccinated for these diseases, and you *should* get your kids vaccinated for these diseases. If the vaccine is effective, which for measles, it is 61% of the time according to a recent WHO study in Buenos Ares, Argentina, then you've saved your ass, or you've saved your kids ass.

But you are totally a moron if you believe that you are doing this out of altruism, rather than out of a selfish desire to save your own ass, because you will not, in fact, prevent either outbreaks or spread of these two diseases.

Particularly if we let people from hot zones with known active outbreaks fly into the U.S. with no border procedures to prove they don't have the diseases, and then let them go to Disneyland and infect the 39% of the 94% who are vaccinated (but for which the vaccine was ineffective), or the additional 6% who are immunocompromised to the point they can't tolerate being vaccinated.

P.S.: Now if you want to pick a different example, like Polio, chickenpox, or smallpox: yes, it's possible to achieve herd immunity. But most idiots who are bad at math tend to use measles or pertussis as their examples, because the outbreaks are always in the news (hint: because they are impossible to prevent via any method other than quarantine, and that's politically correct, even if we are talking about Ebola, for which there is no vaccine).

I thought that was Greenpeace.

And isn't their thing these days defacing world heritage sites in more or less irreversible and environmentally damaging ways?

Ironically?

Given the way things are going, probably the Opportunity Mars Rover...