Makes you wonder if you'll start to see bubbles of high crime around airports with a high level of general aviation (which tends to use fuels with a very high concentration of lead compared to what was used in cars - ironically called "low lead" aviation gas).

Of course, there could be other factors. Such areas may have lower land values, and that could be a factor that impacts crime rates more strongly.

Of course, but the fact is that with software this is often not the case, and it costs a great deal of money and risk to litigate things.

With pharmaceuticals for whatever reason the vague patents tend to get worked out, but companies have still managed to use them to delay competition, which costs consumers a LOT of money.

Well, there are obviously a couple of solutions.

If you're still all-in for the free market, then just mandate that all hospitals conduct training/drills/etc for particular epidemics (including ones like Ebola that end to result in fluids all over the place, and other epidemics that are perhaps a bit more tidy but airborne), Mandate that hospitals also stock a certain list of materials in some ratio to the number of beds they have. Then audit for compliance, and fine anybody who doesn't comply sufficiently that they aren't saving money via non-compliance. Since every hospital is affected, they all have to raise their prices, and nobody who complies gets priced out of the market.

However, I think that problems like Ebola point to the need for true universal coverage. For an epidemic like Ebola the chain is as strong as the weakest link. It doesn't help if half the population has the world's most comprehensive insurance policies if the other half of the population tries to hide their illness because they're uninsured. I can have the world's greatest insurance plan, but if some minimum wage worker who doesn't get sick days and has no insurance has a drop of swat land on my hamburger because they went to work instead of the hospital despite feeling lousy and being friends with a guy who just got back from West Africa, then I'm probably going to die and my insurer can't do anything about it.

Sure, eventually we'll probably have treatments, but right now we don't, and plasma donations from Ebola survivors only work when you have only a few sick people in the entire country to deal with.

The cheapest way to deal with Ebola is to have people who are sick go to the hospital, and they aren't going to do that if they're stuck with a $20k bill even if it turns out they don't have the disease, and they lose a day of work besides. For the want of $25k, we get an extra $1M worth of epidemic spreading.

Nothing is preventing you from forking the last Debian and doing just that. The problem is that while those opposed to systemd are fairly vocal, they're not nearly as numerous as they think and most aren't active contributors.

For the number of people crying "just use OpenRC" or whatever, how many of them have written a patch for OpenRC in the last year? Certainly not nearly as many as there are writing patches for systemd.

All those functions already are in separate binaries (sort of - spawning a container is a separate binary, but chrooting a daemon is part of the same daemon that launches them). However, they aren't really designed to operate in isolation (at least not the log and the init), and nobody is interested in building bash-based replacements for journald or nspawn, etc.

Binutils and gcc consists of a whole stack of separate binaries, but you don't see people really mixing and matching individual ones much. They certainly weren't doing it back when it was first created.

Well, it does some things differently, and I can get why some don't like the "new way."

Also, on distros that are just adopting it like Debian it is immature. When you replace an init system that has been in use for 15 years with all those tiny little bugs worked out with a dependency-based init system that is brand new, there are going to be bugs. Dependency errors are easy to miss when you have unusual configurations. I had all kinds of issues with services not waiting for DNS to be available before starting, since the assumption was that if the network was available, DNS must be available. That is usually true, but it tends to fail when you're talking about a DNS server. Etc...

I believe the concern is that it isn't as event-driven. It also tends to go against the prevailing winds. I'm sure OpenRC will be supported for a long time, but a lot of Gentoo devs are moving away from it (though many are also sticking with it). Actually, my biggest concern is that neither is going to end up being well-supported on Gentoo as a result, but that is going to impact the OpenRC users harder since they can't just steal their scripts/units from other distros like SystemD users can.

Something the average software engineer might not appreciate is that patents for pharmaceuticals are a bit like copyright. They cover a specific molecule, which is basically an implementation. Anybody can tweak the molecule and if it works they can sell a competing product. Of course, doing so still costs hundreds of millions of dollars in testing/development costs, so that is why we tend to only have so many molecules in each class.

The patent office sometimes does issue very broad patents in pharmaceuticals, such as patents on a gene or molecular target, but for the most part they tend to get struck down by the courts, for all the same reasons that software patents cause so much trouble.

When applied to a single molecule patents work well in pharmaceuticals because they allow a company to be rewarded for its huge initial outlay in development costs despite their very low marginal cost of production. Now, companies do try to abuse patent law to extend their monopolies and this is something that I fully support punishing harshly. Society makes a deal - we'll pay $7/pill for about 10 years so that we have new pills, but after that anybody can get them for pennies - companies do not have some kind of right to profits - it is the offer society makes because it serves all of our collective interests.

I'm also for having the NIH actually fund more end-to-end drug development where the government bears all the risk of failure, but also owns the patents (which can then be freely licensed to US-based manufacturers, or those in countries who make similar investments and reciprocate). That would in theory lead to drugs that cost pennies from day one, while leaving the private pharma industry intact until such a time as the government-funded model is proven and ramps up and generally takes over (likely slowly hiring all the private pharma employees who actually do R&D/etc).

You're assuming they even offer that as a cost-effective option, etc.

But, if I can sub for a season for something like $15 and catch all the episodes of the show in HD with 5.1 audio, I might consider it.

I was saying that the conditions in the hospital were better than could be expected if Ebola got out of control (ie hundreds of people sick in every town). I don't dispute that they weren't ideal enough. My point is that you can't expect hospitals to be "ideal enough."

Yes, it is apparent that under truly ideal conditions you can contain the spread of Ebola. My point is just that so far we aren't doing a great job at it, and if we fail to contain it things will get even worse as hospitals aren't even able to afford the level of rigor they used in Dallas (which again was obviously already insufficient).

The design of linux essentially ensures that every process has a stdin/stdout. It does not ensure that every process contains a webserver. So, having a way to manage the stdin/stdout for things like containers makes more sense than implementing a webserver for every process.

Of course, it would be nice if the design for the console make it really easy to attach to it using a browser-based application. :)

But, that is just the nature of the capitalist system. The people making the decisions are the ones investing the money, and the ones who personally benefit from the effects of that decision on the bottom line.

The Mona Lisa didn't make much money, so the capitalist would say it was a worthless effort.

The question is, who cares if somebody can run a huge company full of lawyers, engineers, and scientists? Your answer would be "the investors" - and to that I'd say that this is just proof that the investors are unfit to be investors in the first place, and shouldn't be entrusted with so much money. :)

Viral hemorrhagic fevers have an infectious dose of 1 - 10 organisms by aerosol in non-human primates. In blood at least the loads can be billions of viruses per milliliter - I'm sure it is lower in saliva/etc, but the bottom line is that it takes very little to cause an infection. Touch a doorknob, then touch your eye, and boom, you're done.

Cites:
http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/lab...
and
Franz, D. R., Jahrling, P. B., Friedlander, A. M., McClain, D. J., Hoover, D. L., Bryne, W. R., Pavlin, J. A., Christopher, G. W., & Eitzen, E. M. (1997). Clinical recognition and management of patients exposed to biological warfare agents. Jama, 278(5), 399-411.

Hospitals have every incentive not to prepare for Ebola, and little incentive to do so.

If they spend a bunch of money on a closet full of hazmat suits and training for the staff, they can't increase their rates to cover it, so they just lose money. Insurers will only pay them for having that equipment if an actual Ebola patient WITH INSURANCE actually shows up. Most hospitals will probably never see such a patient, so they are just sinking these costs with no return.

That is the nature of free market anything - there is no incentive to buy stuff that you probably will never use. That is why "black swan" events tend to be so devastating. Public models also can tend to downplay preparedness, but at least the public can elect to prepare if they're willing to pay the bills - a market-based solution usually doesn't even give individual participants the option of preparing if they don't want to go bankrupt.

Materials and preparation cost money. Hospitals that don't have them make more money than hospitals that don't, unless they actually have an Ebola outbreak. Hospitals figure they never will, so they don't prepare.

That is what happens when you don't mandate preparation by regulation and audit compliance, and combine that with a competitive market-based healthcare system. Nobody has incentive to prepare for anything unlikely to occur. If anything does go wrong they just throw their hands in the air and say that nobody could have seen this coming and beg for help from the (CDC/Federal Reserve/FEMA/whatever).