I was told by a guy who build computer models of pandemics that when the media is blah blahing about ebola and whatnot that the key test is that if we first hear of a disease and 10,000 are dead then it is time to run for the hills but no sooner. Everything else is pure hype. But he also said that he didn't think that the governments of the world fully understood the math behind a truly nasty disease and that they wouldn't do the right thing when it came to quarantines especially with "favoured" countries. He said shutting down all transport to the Ivory Coast was enough of a political hand-grenade so what would be like to shut down all travellers to and from Japan, or England? The key being not most travellers but all including the VIPs who will potentially make calls to the whitehouse or whitehall as the case may be.

So while he thought that we could easily deal with any pandemic along the lines of the worst in history that the mamby-pamby governments of today wouldn't so he had a cabin way in the woods to sit it out until the various governments realized that PR was now out the window and that measures for survival now needed and could be brutally implemented. A great example would be the aggressive measures taken against malaria in the Southern US would be very difficult to implement in today's political climate.

But at the same time he was working on a model that showed that our ability to deal with diseases is soon approaching the point where pretty much no disease could really wipe out huge majorities of populations.

By the way the second test of a really dangerous disease was that another 10,000 were dead in western countries in that many diseases are local by their very nature such as Malaria; so a disease that spread in a modern non tropical country would be a dire problem. Ebola basically not spreading in the West is a perfect example.

Expert? So she has some form of psychology degree?

What the GP was saying is that this person is not impartial, potentially has an agenda, and has pulling power that an actual psychologist probably wouldn't have. If instead DR Mann Von Mannerson had been consulted on the portrayal of sex slaves instead, what would the outcome have been? Given how we have actual and real accounts of what happens to women in this situation (It occurs in Somalia currently) why did they need the help of a feminist writer?

Dyson have a bladeless fan (http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2009/10/dyson-fan-pr-1.jpg). I've wondered why the reverse of this doesn't work for electricity generation.

I had already planned on getting a 970 or better early next year. So the timing couldn't be better. I expect that the 970 has the required HDMI port?

Around 2000 I was playing with a Digital (the computer company) technology where you could do microtransactions on web pages. I forget the exact size but it was as low as something like 1/1000th of a cent. This was pretty cool in that you could charge customers to visit your website page by page or however you would like to structure the transaction. The idea was that an end user would have put, say, $10 in their wallet and each time they would go to a website it would pop up and say, "This site will charge x amount per page" you could also put limits on a given site or have it pop up every so many cents and so on. This way some site couldn't screw you with frames or some such scummery.

I loved their implementation as it was beta but fundamentally clean. They also indicated that they had a handful of major banks onboard so it wasn't DOA. I think the death of Digital itself was what killed it.

But I would love this and would have no problem paying a tiny bit for slashdot, NYT, The Economist, stack-overflow, even reddit. But I would say FO to sites like huffpo who you know would spread their articles out so thin that it would be pretty much one word per page.

Plus it would be funny to watch great site after great site implode after the MBAs took over and just started to try to skin their customers by jacking up the prices over and over and over until the site collapsed. Which is sort of how many sites operate now as an ever higher percentage of their surface area is dedicated to ads and an ever growing percentage of their content becomes clickbait.

But one of the greatest parts in the Digital plan was that they only took a tiny taste, a very tiny taste vs the massive cut that google takes on adsense and most others take on their ad platforms. So when you gave a penny to slashdot they would basically get that penny.

What is even worse was that at this point paypal wasn't the domination machine that it was to become. Thus this platform could have become the defacto payment system for all transactions in that it didn't only do microtransactions but you could do ebay sized ones without any difficulty but at a much lower fee.

Agile development in the more pure form such as XP is doing just fine where I see it being used. But the management/certification/terminology/paid courses version of Agile should be taken out behind the woodshed and shot. Basically when I hear a company has SCRUM masters then I add it to the dead pool of tech companies that my friends and I bet chocolate bars on. I have a long list of these sort of silver bullets that can claim to turn shitty programming teams into productive machines. Six Sigma would be another pet peeve.

I am partial though to some parts of the PMI PMBOK type stuff but some care needs to be taken distinguishing between certification and ability. At least half of managing people is being a people person.

But to me agile seems to be mostly adopted by really really shitty programmers who aspire to management so as to cover up their complete inability to get anything done. Also many Agile people tend to use the guise of agile to ram their shitty programming style down everyone's throat as some kind best practice. People who like ++i or have insane commenting styles.

You know it's bad when Bitcoin looks like a better alternative! O_O

Fellow citizens! Do your part, and make waste. Life is easier when you lighten the load.

Muahahaha, how quaint!

I am going with coverup. Information is power and they would feel so special being in the know of something so momentous when everyone else is in the dark. Even if a few came out and leaked it unless they had a massive massive data dump they would just end up a crank on the History channel. Look at that former Minster of Defence we have in Canada. He is all "blah blah ALIENS blah blah ALIENS!!!" yet outside of crank TV he is ignored.

But for many they would suppress it for all kinds of paternalistic/religious/nationalistic reasons. Then after they suppressed it for a while they would just keep suppressing it so they didn't get the blame for being the one to suppress it.

One pet theory that I always loved (and finally found in a sci-fi book) is to wonder how far dinosaur civilization would have to have gotten before we would have already found incontrovertible evidence?

I suspect that Neanderthal level would simply have left little trace with any findings being self-supressed by the palaeontologist.

Even North American Indian culture of 500 years ago would still be largely invisible after 65 million years again with the aid of people dismissing the few oddities they found.

But the aliens that I have long thought we would encounter would be some sort of machines sent out to just explore. Not even terribly advanced machines. Think about the warp drive or emdrive that NASA is tinkering with. If we barely got those to work I could see us firing out zillions of little probes to explore and eventually report back. Not all would make it back.

For the love of all science fiction be aliens!!! How many Sci-fi stories have we all read where an asteroid/comet/artefact is floating around our Solar system and it turns out to be some uber cool alien thing that has warp drive or a stargate or whatever and off we go adventuring around the galaxy?

In fact I could even narrow the question down to how many sci-fi stories have we all read where the artefact involved Ceres?

So while if I had to bet I would go with ice, soil disturbance, tectonic, or maybe even something a little cool like magnetic. But I want aliens!

I am thinking various space probes floating about. Some of those things will keep going for centuries. There is also some solar powered crap on the moon. That could keep going for stupendous amounts of time. Maybe millennia depending on the degradation of the solar panels.

But maybe there is some geothermal system that will just keep going for eons as the power generation aspect of a thermocouple should last indefinitely and is buried so it won't be subject to any weathering.

What about them garden lamps that are solar powered? They charge during the day and give off light at night.

Which one is this? I don't see anything unusual in my addons or plugins list.