Yeah, if you're in an exceptionally noisy environment with a long cable run, it might make sense to buy a more expensive cable that features things like additional shielding, thicker gauge wires, etc...(or just go fiber).

Otherwise the ECC does it's job and there's no practical difference between the cheapest wire possible and the most expensive.

Hell, audiophiles can't tell when the testers are using coat hangers as speaker wires, and that's an actual analogue signal!

But the cases where a decently constructed commodity cable won't do but the 'premium' will are generally limited.

In many cases with 'premium' cables, you end up with cable and connectors so heavy that that causes the very problems than the cable was supposed to solve!

I'll admit, I've spent double the money on 'better than the cheapest I can get' cables on occasion, but that's usually because I had broken the cable through use/abuse that was there originally, so getting a 'tougher' cable made sense.

Problem: They've been working on the Ebola vaccine for a lot longer than a year. What really happened is that they had a vaccine in the early testing stages, with something like an estimated 5 years of testing left before it could be commercially deployed. Then we have a relatively huge ebola outbreak, panic sets in and they grant a waiver for the testing. Basically, they had enough information that 'We think this will probably help you survive exposure to Ebola. We're pretty sure it won't hurt you'. So they administer the vaccine in a sort of accelerated study, because it might save lives. Turns out it probably did.

Outside of an Ebola outbreak, the risks weren't worth it. During one? Worth it.

It actually reminds me of the first vaccination methods - Variolation. Fascinating history. Various versions around, but had a top end of 1% chance of death. Yes, the vaccination itself killed 1% of those treated. But it was against smallpox - with a death rate of 30% during epidemics. As long as the chances of catching smallpox was above 4%, it was 'worth it' to variate. And in Europe, the chances were a lot higher than 4%. Even royalty variolated their children.

As for cancer - apples and oranges dude. The problem with cancer is that it's actually lots of different problems, all under the same name. Causes, effects, treatments, all different.

We've developed lots of cures for various cancers, just not all of them yet.

Okay, digital data is supposed to be easy 1 and 0 communication. But when you get down to the physical media, said binary digits are represented by physical phenomenon. So +3.3V = 1, 0V = 0 type stuff.

Voltage, resistance, EM waves, magnetics, etc... You're actually back in the world of Analogue, and here you have to worry about noise.

When you're moving data as fast as you can, or storing it as densely as you can, interference becomes more likely. For example, you'd think that +3V =1 and 0V = 0 would be easy, but when you're flipping the signal as fast as you can, you end up with the cable possibly acting like a transformer or capacitor. So the voltage might run a bit higher, a bit lower, a bit faster, a bit slower, etc...

Radio transmissions, Solar noise, close by electrical cables, other data cables with parallel runs, etc... The world is 'noisy' even if you're using wires.

That's why you have error correction in digital communications. So the 'occasional' bit can become flipped and the system transparently recovers it, and you get your transmitted data, identical from the other side.

Given the size of the trial, it's really unlikely that it prevents less than 90% of the cases of Ebola that would otherwise develop. So while I agree that 100% continuing is all that likely, especially if you start including immune suppressed people such as the HIV positive, those with cancer, transplants, young children, the elderly, etc... Still, if you vaccinate 100% of those eligible for it and it provides 95% immunity to Ebola, odds are the vulnerable won't be exposed at all, because you'll have something like 5% of the flare-ups from a wild source, and such flareups should mostly be individual, not thousands.

On the other hand, thinking about Ebola and vaccines reminded me that vaccines have made an even deadlier disease less problematic - Rabies. It wasn't until a relatively short time ago that we had any survivors from the symptomatic stage, and even then getting those requires putting them into a medical coma for a while.

But with the vaccine we realistically save thousands of human lives every year in the USA alone, and that's with mostly vaccinating animals, not people, and only vaccinating humans who we suspect have been exposed or work in a higher exposure risk area.

Not necessarily. I'd say it remains 'nice' even if it only lasts for 6 months, so long as it works on 'most' strains, but said strains are identifiable.

The critical part here is that it works when given close to exposure. That makes it like the rabies vaccine. Ebola outbreak? You hit everybody in the village up with it, and it remains at 1-2 cases, not hundreds.

If it's 100% effective for life with 1 shot, it goes way beyond 'nice'. As such it would beat most vaccines today, as most vaccines are: Only about 90% effective, require multiple shots to reach that effectiveness, only last a limited period of time, etc...

Flu - annual(though that's for a wide number of varieties), Tetanus - 10 years, Hep A - 2 does, Hep B - 3 doses, Chickenpox - 2 doses, etc...

So, you're saying they were guinea pigs?

Its like saying "Hey, Chevrolet, you know your customers like the radio station set to 101.9, why cant you engineer your cars to respect their choice instead of forcing your nefarious 101.5 agenda."

Yeah, but this is a Mozilla car analogy we're talking about here.

In the current 2015.7 model, release, the UX team has decided that a 5-button hamburger menu on an AM dial (and only from 1100Khz to 1150KHz in 10KHz increments) is all that's needed. Users who want to access a wider range of frequencies in the AM band are free to write an extension or purchase a third-party radio head unit.

To further improve the user experience, we remind prospective extension developers that in the Aurora channel for the 2016.1 model year, the about:config setting for frequency.megavskilohertz has been removed, along with the FM antenna. The UX team has made this recommendation based on telemetry that suggests that few drivers actually listen to FM radio, especially since the 2013.6 model, in which the AM/FM toggle switch was removed because the UX team for 2012.1 felt it was cluttering the dashboard.

It will also vary depending on the performance of the vehicles immediately ahead of, oncoming-and-passing, or crossing ahead of the street view vehicle. Especially the first: The sensor will be running in the exhaust plumes of the vehicles ahead of the street view car, so the map will be a very non-random sampling.

On the other hand, the partculate and "volatile organic compounds" sensors will produce some very interesting data. The latter is what the federal standards call "unburned hydrocarbons" when emitted from an engine, and the output of modern engines is vanishingly small. But many species of evergreen trees emit them in enormous quantity, as part of their ongoing chemical warfare against insects that eat trees. That's what the blue haze around pine-forested mountains (such as "the Smoky Mountains") is about. You can literally destroy (by extreme and long-term contamination) an automotive conformance test cell (the room where they test the car's emissions), requiring it to be torn out and rebuilt, by placing a Christmas tree in it overnight.

I expect some towns in remote, forested, mountain areas, where people move "for their health" and "for the clean, fresh, air", to get a rude awakening. B-)

But I doubt it will affect the extremely tight standards for automobile engines - except maybe to cause a flap that tightens them further. These days many engines are so clean that running then can IMPROVE the air quality in some places (such as portions of Los Angeles, with topography that created such a thermal inversion that a single settler's campfire could leave the whole valley filled with smoke for a day or more) by inhaling and burning far more hydrocarbon and particulate pollutants than they create.

Which just goes to show a lot of indie media is composed of fucking retards

It really doesn't fucking matter whether talking about a black or a white or a hispanic or an asian getting shot in the back by a cop, the "officer's pistol" didn't magically "discharge". The cop murdered a non-threat, plain and simple.

And never mind the recent rash of suicides for traffic violations - I have to give them credit, that takes their disdain for the general population to a new low. They couldn't get much more blunt about how the feel about us short of literally pissing on us at every traffic stop. "Don't worry, I've marked you, the next one will pass you by".

The lack of accidents and crime are more likely related to a general trend in crime going down from before they started turning off the lights. ... Give me at least one full year worth of data so I can compare it to the prior year, and have half of the country keep their lights on so It can be compared to the same time frame as well.

Hear, hear!

There's lots of room for methodology errors. Here's another:

Comparing murder rates between Great Britain and the US is complicated by differences in reporting. The US bumps the murder stat when there is a body and evidence of foul play. G.B. bumps it when they have a conviction.

Do they do that with other crime? If so, stable stats in the absence of street lighting might mean that any rise in crime is compensated for by a fall in identifying, apprehending, and convicting the criminals responsible. (Indeed, turning off the lights might easily result in LOWERED crime statistics at the same time it was causing a drastic increase in actual crime.)

I'm an anesthesiologist. I put people to sleep for cardiac surgery. My hospital does around 400-500 hearts a year... and we don't kill any dogs.

What hospital is that? I'll want to avoid it if I ever need heart surgery.

Seriously: How does your cardiac unit's mortality and morbidity rate stack up against those of hospitals where practice surgery on live animal, models, at least where the surgeon is new to the procedure, is more common?

So, he says it was over his yard, the kids say it was over their yard, the neighbor says it was over their yard. Does anyone, including the drone owners, dispute that? One would have a hard time arguing it wasn't over their yard.

That seems like something provable. He only fired one shot, correct? And we know where the drone crashed, and where he was, so we can probably determine if that's a false statement. It doesn't seem like it. He must have shot up in the air, because he hit the drone, and the drone was in the air. And it crashed in a field near his house, not in a neighbor's yard, so the statement that he did not fire over his neighbor's fence does not seem false on the face of it. I wonder if his neighbor actually saw the shot, too.

As for warning about a falling drone, don't know. And we don't know if it was necessary. We'd need a better look at his neighborhood, and the reasonable assumptions one could make (or not make out) about the trajectory of a crashing drone. It depends on how populated his neighborhood is. But nothing in the article indicated any possibility of it hitting someone while crashing. Possible, sure, but you'd think that issue would have been explored if it existed.

The article says he was charged under the Kentucky Revised Statutes with "wanton endangerment in the first degree" and "criminal mischief." Here's the wanton endangerment statute:

Do you think he exhibited "extreme indifference to the value of human life" and created "a substantial danger of death or serious physical injury?" Clearly not from the shotgun blast. As every hunter and student of simple physics in this thread has already said, there's no danger from falling pellets. And if the direction of the blast checks out (not at anyone, not over his neighbor's fence, etc) then the blast itself did not create any danger to human life.

So how about the falling drone? If he shot the drone down in a crowded area, where it would almost certainly hit someone, then yes. That does not appear to be the case, though. Nothing from the story indicates there was any significant risk of it crashing into someone. If that had been the case, you'd think they'd put it in the story. Obviously that needs to be confirmed, but I think it's likely. If no reasonable person could believe the drone had a reasonable chance of crashing into someone, then I don't see how you can convict him of wanton endangerment.

So how about criminal mischief?

I'm assuming it's in the first degree, as the value of the drone was over $1,000.

Well he did intentionally destroy property causing loss of more than $1,000. So the question is did he have a right to do so, or any reasonable ground to believe he has such a right? He clearly believes so. He believes he has the right to destroy a spy camera hovering in his backyard. Whether or not that's reasonable is up to a jury. But in Kentucky? Own backyard? Father? Kids who could either be injured if the drone crashes on its own, or by the drone pilot intentionally, or at the very least be spying on them taking pictures? I'd bet a Kentucky jury of his peers would agree that Meredith had reasonable grounds to destroy a spy camera on his property. You own your airspace up to 300ft per the FAA, and there are Supreme Court decisions that agree you have property rights over your airspace.

I hope he takes it to a jury. I'd like to see what they say. I bet he will, too. He believes he's right, and I bet a defense attorney would love this case, if not just for the news spotlight alone.

There has been public outcry. People are talking about it. Laws are getting passed. Opinions are changing. Snowden is in exile for now but I don't think he'll stay that way forever.

The US declared war on Germany on 12/11/41. It took two and a half years to land at Normandy. It's still 1943 and you're declaring Hitler victorious.

Do they have a good reason to be firing the weapon?

"Justification" is a thing. You can argue in front of the jury that yes, you broke the law against firing weapons in city limits, but you were justified in doing so because reasons, and they may or may not agree with you.

So, are the neighbors just randomly firing their guns in their air for shits and giggles? If so, he would not respond favorably. If they're firing their shotguns in the air to defend their property and privacy from flying surveillance devices, he'd probably tell his daughter to go inside for a bit while he goes and helps his neighbors deal with a nuisance.

Somebody else in the comments had a good idea...garden hose on full blast. Consider it a warning shot. Yes, I think Meredith was justified in what he did, but I like the hose idea, as you're less likely to wind up arrested.