Is this the same Lawrence Krauss who polluted the Scientific American for years with his leftist political diatribes? I have no problem with Comgress cutting the political dead wood from the Energy Department or any other department of government. There are enough activists in the bureaucracy.

Indeed, it carries MUCH more precision than just "Ebola", which can mean any of the following:

"Ebola River" is a tributary to the Congo River.

"Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever" was the name of a disease first discovered in people living in the remote Ebola River watershed.

"Ebola Virus" (abbrev. "EBOV") is the infectious agent that causes "Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever"

"Ebolavirus" is the taxonomic genus to which the "Ebola virus" belongs.

"Ebola Virus Disease (abbrev. "EVD") is now the more common name for Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever. We can call it that because we have definitively identified the infectious agent that causes the disease (EBOV). Changing the name pre-emptively differentiates EVD from other hemorrhagic diseases that might arise from the same area.

Laymen simply say "Ebola" and let their audience sort out what they mean -- if indeed they mean anything precisely. I once had this conversation with an elderly relative.

Relative: 90% of bats have rabies.

Me: That's hard to believe.

Relative: It's true! I read it in the paper.

So I went to the paper and found out that she had it hopelessly garbled. TEN percent of bats SUBMITTED FOR TESTING had positive SCREENING tests.

I worked in public health informatics for many years, and it's a longstanding tradition to use three letter codes. I think this is the legacy of old systems which provided three or four character fields for codes, but it certainly speeds things along when you're keying data into a spreadsheet.

The tradition isn't formalized, and so it's application is somewhat irregular, but it's important in this case to realize that public health surveillance makes a strong distinction between a *disease* (a disorder of structure or function in an organism like a human) and an *infectious agent* (the parasite, bacterium, virus or prion that transmits the disease). That's because you can find the infectious agent without finding any cases of the disease -- for example in an asymptomatic human, in a disease carrying vector like a mosquito etc. Non-specialist use the same terms to refer to either the disease or the agent (this naming by association is called "metonymy", a word every system designer should be familiar with). So of course the abbreviations experts use seem nonsensical to non-specialists.

The abbreviation "EVD" maskes perfect sense -- it is the *disease* caused by the Ebola Virus (EBOV). A non-specialist uses terms loosely and would say things like "They found Ebloa in Freetown." A specialist wouldn't use such loose language. He'd say "We found a human case of EVD in Freetown," or "We had a serum with a positive titer for EBOV from Freetown."

There's only one thing you need to know about the H-1B program to see that it's not about providing skilled labor *here*: after 6-10 years of working the visa holder is kicked out of the country to make room for a less experienced visa holder.

If H-1B led automatically to a green card, then we'd be keeping the *most* expert workers here, rather than replacing them with less experienced ones. Change that *one* aspect of the program, and it's be an asset to the US as a nation.

I went back and got a degree after 25 years. It's not the *degree*, it's the *education* that matters, and I got a lot more out of the education than my younger peers. This was a new perspective on things I was already familiar with, and I was able to connect a lot of dots I wouldn't have been able to when I was eighteen. I could immediately see what stuff was good for, and I discovered a number of things that would solve commonplace problems I'd seen occur over and over again, even with personnel wit advanced degrees.

Then I got out and discovered that the world didn't want to hire a fifty year old who'd been "out of work" (going to school) for three years....

My first Windows system had all 32 bit drivers, so, don't forget to close the gate when you leave so the unicorn doesn't get out.

Really, you only had trouble if you were using either very low-end, parallel-port attached stuff, or high-end proprietary cards. Everything else-- SCSI devices, PnP cards, and mainstream non-PnP cards-- were supported at launch or within a year. You might have to log onto a BBS to get the driver (since web support sites were still a little primitive), but most people shouldn't have been running anything in real mode. Sometimes the driver was even included in Windows, but if it loaded in autoexec.bat it would prevent the Windows one from loading. All you had to do was comment it out.

Good thing she's not a Democrat, or we'd all be calling you racist and sexist.

Well, IE was originally created using Spyglass' code...

Well, you are unlikely to be the *only* one who doesn't think this is all that impressive, because you're unlikely to be the only one who didn't read the article or looking up the device on the company's website.

The robot in question is designed to capture energy from surface waves for propulsion. So it is not a deep submersible, it waddles along a six meters below the surface, tethered to a streamlined surface buoy that it drags along and uses to capture wave energy. Making it through a major storm is a significant proof-of-concept for such a system.

That's already been done. I know that for some of the robots they were building in the 80s, they found it easier to balance on one pogo-stick leg.

How about we focus on those things that actually gets people hurt, like banksters taking chances with the economy and politicians using the army to play chicken-race.

Both a red herring AND a false dichotomy. Impressive!

In the case of smallpox what would happen is that the scientist screwing up might get infected and placed in quarantine.

What if he's immune, and, becoming a carrier, boards a plane?

No one who wasn't literally insane would try to use smallpox as a weapon

Islamic extremists.

No, they're swept under the run because it's simply impossible for a woman to be sexist.

What's a "cis"? Sounds like a codeword of the intolerant to me.

You're part of the problem.

"Nice ass" is more than enough to get one fired in today's misandrist society.