Yes, the point has came up again and again that ebola has mutated to an airborne form before. In 2012 Canadian researchers showed that Ebola Zaire could be transmitted in an airborne fashion from pigs to monkeys. Being transmitted between humans that way doesn't seem like a very large leap.

My thoughts are that it wouldn't exactly have to "go airborne" to become a catastrophe. MRSA isn't exactly airborne, but its nasty, sometimes fatal, and endemic to hospitals and health clubs all over the pretty sanitary (compared to Liberia) United States. Replacing MRSA with something that is essentially untreatable except for supportive care and is 80 percent fatal would be pretty damned heinous.

Past ebola outbreaks tended to burn themselves out pretty quickly. This one hasn't. Maybe that is because ebola finally got into an urban area. Maybe it is because all three of these countries (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea) have dysfunctional health care systems and are recovering from horrific civil wars -- on the other hand, that sounds a lot like The Congo and Zaire before it. Something sure seems to be different this time. That should keep people up at night. I'd feel better if some smart people from the CDC or WHO or USAMRIID were trying to figure out what us different this time.

Another thing that comes to mind is that quality, up-to-date information about this outbreak is hard to find. About the most reliable source is the wikipedia page on the outbreak. I am kind of worried about the bland reassurances that we have nothing to worry about, and then reading opinion pieces like this one:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09... ... which to me, translated from epidemiologist-speak, seems to be saying, "run for the hills."

I'd heartily agree with the above remarks.

To be honest, using bash for running scripts, especially on something public-facing like a web server, is just driven by laziness and stupidity. Most scripts would run perfectly fine on a lightweight shell without all of bash's features.

If you are talking an embedded system or even a dedicated server, I really don't understand why you'd want (or need) bash on your system at all. For that matter, for a lot of embedded systems I know there is no good reason to have a shell on your system, except possibly for testing or debuggery.

The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components of any systems are the ones that aren't there. Oh, and the most secure as well.

I really don't get why an embedded system needs to have *any* shell in the first place. From both a security and reliability standpoint you don't need to stress about components that aren't there.

Or you could take a hint from busybox and have one statically linked executable that does everything you need, AND NOTHING MORE, on your system.

It isn't that hard to write your own version of init to parse a config file and do whatever your system needs to do. And it is a hell of a lot more secure.

I've only been building shell-less (and root-less and passwd-less systems) for twenty years.

I would agree with you except that in the past Ebola has became airborne amongst monkeys and amongst pigs, of all things. That makes me suspect that it could happen in people, too.

Having ebola become airborne is probably a lot less likely than any one person being struck by lightning tomorrow. Probably those odds (ballpark) are around one in a billion for any one person to be struck by lightning. But each time ebola is transmitted to another host there are literally trillions of reproductive events that represent a chance for ebola to mutate in a bad way. So the odds that we will get the wrong kind of mutation, over time, actually go way up as more people become infected.

Best article I've found on this topic (they are estimating between 77000 and 278000 cases by the end of the year):

http://www.eurosurveillance.or...

And the wikipedia page on the outbreak is also quite good:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

This is an extremely scary situation. We have a 77% fatal virus with the caseload doubling roughly every three weeks. We might get lucky and this might burn itself out before it goes airborne or global some other way. Then again we might not.

My concern is what we are sending to Africa is probably not going to be nearly enough. And by the time it all gets there we might be looking at 10000 or 30000 cases, not the few thousand we have today. I also agree that it is very likely that the official figures substantially understate the number of infected.

I am getting very skeptical about the home-made bioweapon that ends the world.

It isn't unreasonable to think that some lone idiot could make a new version of smallpox or bubonic plague or bird flu that goes the distance. My question is how in heck would they test it? DNA is like the worst imaginable spaghetti code, so it isn't like you just flip this one sequence here and your ordinary flu bug is 99 percent fatal. And if you combine in other stuff you have no real idea what unintended side effects might make your world-killer fizzle out. And given the very large number of angry people with guns who would be looking for me, I would want to be DAMN sure that my world-killer would really kill the world.

If I wasn't suicidal, I'd also want a vaccine. How are you going to make that vaccine without testing? I mean like really infect people, vaccinate some uninfected people, put them together, and see who dies. And for your potential world-killer to go the distance, it would have to be easily transmittable -- so that implies that you would need wicked good biocontainment and someplace very private to do your evil deeds.

Now, there are still some awful things you could do without needing to worry about testing so much. Making a hypothetical virus that would be asymptomatic (or just very mild) for nearly everyone except some small group with specific DNA markers, or just one person, would be possible. It would sure suck to be president or even a university professor who gave the wrong little snowflake a shitty grade.

The problem is that you kill just as large a percentage on the downstream trip, largely due to dissolved gas bubbles in their flesh due to dramatic pressure changes. So even if you can get the adult salmon upstream to spawn, the baby salmon can't survive the downstream trip because they get the bends.

Even if they get past all of the dams, they have to go past the mildly radioactive section around Hanford and then the rather polluted Columbia River Estuary below Bonneville Dam.

I sympathize, but then again I do not see large numbers of people moving to Antarctica or Greenland. Both of which are likely to be much, much nicer places to live in the short to medium term than anyplace on Mars is going to be on the same timeframe.

Anecdotal evidence.

I have never owned an American-made car. I have owned various Toyota or Lexus products for the last fifteen years.

My rigs always come with rubber floor mats. After Toyota redesigned the floor mat I had the very exciting experience of the accelerator sticking under the floor mat while boarding a ferry. Lots of luck and quick thinking prevented an accident. I pulled the floor mat right then and called the dealer and Toyota of America and told them they were murderous dumbfuck morons.

I found out later that the dealer started pulling rubber floor mats out of all of their customer's cars. This was about a year before all of the hype about sai's. The fact that my dealer took it that seriously did a lot to win back my confidence.

I do know that rubber floor mats could easily produce a sticking accelerator in some Toyota models. I never had any other experiences with sudden acceleration so have no opinion about whether or not firmware bugs could also cause such incidents.

A lot of spreadsheets have formulas that are dependent on calculated values from the preceding row or column. In fact, the replication functions most spreadsheets have encourage you to do this.

The problem, as any well-trained computer scientist knows, is that floating-point errors can rapidly accumulate using these kinds of calculations. Very. Rapidly. That means that your answers fifty or eighty rows along might well be gibberish.

I've been to three separate meetings at three separate companies whee different people's spreadsheets gave hilariously differing answers. Faces got red, voices got raised. The reality was that no one had numbers that were even close to right.

I wouldn't worry about some list of technologies. I wouldn't worry about n years of experience in some field.

Technologies come and go rapidly.

It would be better to focus on what problems you have solved, and how you used technologies you knew and came up to speed rapidly on technologies you did not know to solve those problems. Come into an interview with working software you can demo and code you have written -- and expect to talk about what you are showing.

Also, bypass recruiters as much as possible. Work connections through friends, family, and school to get an interview. Expect to get turned down more than you get accepted, but eventually something will turn up.

Yep, and when people left Africa about 50,000 years ago there probably were less than 150 colonists as well. I don't know as much about Polynesia but I suspect similar numbers were at play.

I've been suspecting nearly the same thing.

Hypoxia can set in within minutes, and people can become extremely confused under its influence. If the pilots were so confused they thought the plane was malfunctioning for some other reason they might have started resetting things by shutting off circuit breakers and inadvertently shut off the transponder. Hypoxia could also explain the very extreme altitude changes that were reported.

I'm also thinking a fire in the cockpit could have caused nearly the same thing, and if the fire did enough damage that they could no longer control the plane but the autopilot still worked that also would explain most of what we know about the flight. But that seems a little bit or a lot unlikely.

If it is some terrorist or special operations chicanery then it is really an oddball scheme -- more like a Clive Cussler or Tom Clancy novel than something that would happen in the real world, I think.

Oh I don't know...

It is like square footage limitations on retail spaces in Germany that made bigger grocery stores uncompetitive.

It is like rules on work hours that mean you can't buy anything at a grocery store on Sunday in France.

My first observation is that even relatively simple programs can't be represented graphically and comprehensibly in two or even three dimensions. Since programs really aren't required to have a physical representation at all, there isn't any reason to expect that would be the case. Anyone who has played around with old-school flowcharts quickly discovers that flowcharts become unwieldy and incomprehensible for all but pretty basic algorithms.

My other observation is more of a question: what do you wish to visually represent? Execution flow? Data flow? Something else? Everything?