"Facebook. Where men are men, women are men, and 14-year-old girls are FBI agents."

are small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.

it doesn't have the same ring to it..

Still doesn't.

Considering it's essentially* illegal to study,

That may be the case in your country, because you let the religious idiots be in charge of the politicians. That's not the case in the rest of the world.

(Also this wasn't stem cells at all).

Ah, following the traditions of Slashdot by not RTFA, or WTFP (Watching TF Programme), or knowing WTFYWOA (WTF You're Wittering On About). Yes, the study did use stem cells. Specifically, the stem cells that continually regenerate nerve cells in the nose, to re-connect olefactory nerves to the central nervous system, after the CNS nerves get broken by environmental damage. Didn't you understand the point that the olefactory nerve is the only bit of the CNS that is actually directly exposed to the environment?

Warm is the correct temperature for proper beer.

the problem is that American beer is crap unless distilled to vapour (when it is effective for clearing out blocked sinuses and removing wallpaper) or frozen solid (when it is good against sprains, bee stings and such like minor injuries).

Quite why Americans drink the stuff when it has so many better uses ... simply incomprehensible.

Even better, you get to use a laser!

I find lasers very problematic. It's not the laser per se that's the problem, it's the bloody great tank of seawater that splashes around all over the place from the shark that the laser is mounted on. Seawater and stuff I want to post isn't a good mixture.

It's been 25 years, so it's possible details have changed, but I doubt the basic rules have changed that much.

The rules haven't changed much. People work to get around them as much as possible, but it gets increasingly difficult. And, to be honest, when I'm witnessing wireline jobs onshore, one of the things that I'm required to do by the (oil company) operations geologist is to audit the driving behaviour of the wireline crew, if they're not staying on site. (If you're the only wireline crew in the country, and 300 miles / 2 days drive from the rigsite, and there's no accommodation within 3 hours drive of the rigsite, you might ass well have them stay in the camp.)

So just imaging a large ship except it has it's cargo in pods. Two or three ships meet up at locations their AI deem to be most optimal and switch only some of their cargo depending on what is going where and then they continue on.

I take it from this that you've never done ship-to-ship cargo transfer. You talk blithely of transferring loads from one vessel to another, both of them moving with respect to each other, and both of them moving with respect to the sea surface (errr, momentum? remember inertia? Newton's first law?), and the sea surface being both movable and flexible.

Yes, it can be done. We move thousands of tonnes of equipment and supplies onto and off our drilling rig every tear. And we take strenuous efforts to minimise the number of transfers because they're (1) dangerous to personnel ; (2) dangerous to the equipment of the rig ; (3) dangerous to the equipment in the container ; and (4) slow. Ten transfers an hour is pretty damned fast, and that is only if you have all the loads in the right places to lift off, and the returning loads ready to go on the boat, and having space on the rig (and boat) to drop each load into. Once you have to start to play "deck chess", then your transfer rate goes through the floor.

But such crippling objections aside, what do you think you mean by "cargo pods"? They'd need to be cuboid units (which will tesselate perfectly, with no wasted space between units), each with standardised fittings for lifting them with standardised equipment which will operate the same the world over, and which are all the same size (or small range of sizes). you've just described the "shipping container". Changing the name to a "pod" isn't going to change anything.

There is a huge inertia in these systems. You'd have to launch a globally effective system, with at least three ports and three vessels all equipped to handle and transfer the "pods". And you'd probably still find that you'd have a system that worked in multiples of a "shipping container".

I don't get to post whenever I like ; I only get to post when I've got an internet connection.

I wonder what proportion of Slashdot users today were conceived while we were posting? I bet it's not 0%, and I bet the number is increasing.

I remember someone here shared the notion that x white people had to get the disease to get a vaccination underway.

Leaving aside the "x white body count" shit (remember, most of the work so far has been on the basis of fears of weaponised EBV), you do realise that before you can have a vaccination programme, you firstly need to have a vaccine that works, with a reasonable degree of safety and efficacy (so trials are unavoidable) ; then you need to produce large quantities of the vaccine (GSK estimate that this step is going to take a year ; this is their business, so I accept their estimate of the timing) ; and then you're going to need to ship it and distribute it, which is also going to take weeks to months.

However many white bodies we are from an effective vaccine, we're also on the order of a year from a vaccine.

Is there actually a law of nature that requires there to be a vaccine for a particular virus. I don't see that there is, of necessity.

Catholicism is Christianity in entirety - it has essentially two main branches, Roman Catholic, and Protestant (or Church of England based Christianity, and also includes most other non-Roman Catholic Christian branches such as Baptists, Methodist etc, which are all offshoots of the CoE branch). But both sit under the label of Catholicism.

So, there's no Coptic church? No Orthodox church? And they're just the ones that there is no doubt about them being Christian. You could have a slightly longer discussion about whether Mormons are Christian or not - only a thin condom rubber between the two from where I sit.

You need to retake religious studies

Someone needs to re-take their RS exam, but I think you're in that remedial class too.

Well,if you think that will make you impervious, enjoy.

EU to UK is the exception, being an island. The rest of (mainland) Europe sees no reason to monitor the movements of people. Hostile borders (eg EU to south) generate more information. But to assume that all movements generate the same amount of data as an air flight does is false. Dangerously false.

Consider some-American-one who goes to ... CAR for business (of whatever sort), and in the process crosses many borders, then returns to the US. (I ignore the question of who gets fuck ed on the way) Since CAR is a long way from the at - risk areas, he should not raise any alarms.

Beyond one degree of separation, border controls are not effective.

If you are an American and you want to move to Canada, you need to have a job offer first,

Yes. I went through that when I was last working in Canada. And the employer has to prove to the Canadian government that they've advertised the job adequately in Canada.

You've got good skills, I take it? So, this isn't a problem.

and then you still need to take the entrance exam to determine if you will be allowed to emigrate.

Skills, languages, income ... again, this isn't a problem. They waived the languages tests for me (and my colleagues) because we weren't looking for settlement, just employment, but that wouldn't have been a problem anyway. My French is adequate, my Spanish workable (not that I need either very often). My Russian isn't worth much, but I can navigate my way around the country without getting lost or shot, so it's not useless.

Might be worthwhile getting some of those useful rarer skills.

The information is stored in the computer system.

You're missing the point. In some countries (not, I take it, America ; assuming you're American, I think we've had this conversation before) your entry and exit of the country is not recorded. Not on computer, not in stamps in anyone's passport, not in face recognition at non-existant border posts. It's simply not recorded.

For starters, I did (counts ...) 10 border crossings in my recent vacation. Only the ones into and out of the UK generated a border crossing datum. The rest, at best, recorded the movements of a hired car. And at least two of those crossings were in someone else's car. And that is in high-tech modern Europe. Go to most of Africa and there is still negligible border security if you're a person. (there's a bit more security if you're a 30-tonne truck, due to being rather more conspicuous and needing a reasonable road surface).

The beautiful thing will be if a vaccine is produced.......watching the cognitive dissonance in all those anti-vaxers who also are posting hysterical things about ebola. Will they risk the autism?

Just hold onto that thought for .... at least 14 months.

GSK are not expecting to have a vaccine in production lines before 2016.

Ebola has been around since the 70s

Ebola virus has almost certainly been around for a lot longer than that. It was identified and characterised in the mid-1970s.

It's entirely possible that, for millennia, whole villages or towns have been wiped out by Ebola at 10 yearly intervals. But with no survivors, nobody knew what had killed them.