If you have ever worked on software that stored data hourly, having one day of the year have twenty three hours and one day of the year have twenty five hours is enough to make you weep in frustration.

I don't think either Iran or North Korea has the launch capacity to put the 1000+kg that they would need to put a nuke into orbit.

Agreed that a nuke in LEO would play merry hell with GPS and lots of other satellites. But I can't really see North Korea or Iran being crazy or stupid enough to piss off their remaining allies (or sort-of-allies) like China or Russia. Of course, we are talking about North Korea and Iran...

The GPS satellites are in pretty high orbits (around 20000km if memory serves). I don't know if anybody has an anti-satellite weapon that can target a satellite that high. For that matter, the WAAS satellites are in geosynchronous orbit and even harder to shoot down.

You would also have to shoot down several GPS satellites in quick succession to produce a significant gap in coverage. Since the Chinese and Russian anti-satellite weapons are based on orbital launchers (for obvious reasons) the countries in question would have to do five or six satellite launches in a relatively short time window.

It would probably be far, far cheaper to jam GPS signals than to shoot down the satellites.

Yet standard procedure seems to be to dispose of protective garments after a single use. I suspect also that they discourage re-use of protective garments because of the risk of tearing and pinholes.

Y'know, six weeks ago I was in the "run for the hills, this is the end" school of thought.

Then I actually educated myself. And honestly, the whole scene in Texas, even given how incompetently handled it was, indicated to me that there was zero risk for a major ebola outbreak here.

Now I am more concerned about second-order effects. There aren't that many isolation units, air ambulances, and (apparently) doctors, nurses, and paramedics adequately trained in use of protective gear to treat more than a few dozen ebola patients in the whole United States. What will happen if (or when) we have those few dozen cases concurrently? There is also the concern that air ambulances used to transport ebola patients to treatment centers will not be available to transport other people who need life-saving treatments, like organ transplants. Also, doctors and nurses who test positive for ebola after treating an active case obviously can't treat people with heart attacks or deliver babies. There is the additional bonus that there are very limited stockpiles of the protective gear that you'll want to wear when treating an ebola patient.

One of the things that this whole series of events point out is that if you do think you have ebola, don't go to the emergency room. Emergency rooms are set up to deal with cardiac events, trauma victims, and generally people who are going to die in a very few hours if they don't get medical treatment right now. Not someone with an infectious disease. That guy in Texas who went to the emergency room with a high fever and told them he was from Liberia? Not gonna die in an hour so give him some pills and get him out of there. It wasn't a mistake, it was policy.

Given that the U.S. population is around 300 million, the only way we could get to 600 million deaths heart disease deaths per year is by importing 600 million people per year and force-feeding them bacon. Lots of bacon.

And who would enforce the ban? Last I checked the U.S. constitution doesn't give the government the power to ban foreign airlines from flying to a foreign country.

From a practical standpoint, I'd point out that there really aren't that many military transport aircraft in the world, that a great many of them are American, and that they are blocked out literally months in advance. Would your 21-day waiting period also apply to aircrew? That will really bollix things up.

I strongly suspect (but do not know for sure) that the 3000-odd US Military personnel on the way to that part of the world are depending on civilian air transport for much of their logistics. Certainly MSF and other NGOs do so. I also strongly suspect that going to a purely military transport system for Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea would greatly reduce the flow of emergency aid to these countries at precisely the time that their needs are so large.

We should also be careful what we wish for. I am sure that if we institute some kind of silly travel ban from ebola-infected countries, a large number of countries around the world are going to enact a similar ban -- I say "similar" because the major difference is that they will also ban travel with the United States, home of the most ebola cases outside of Africa.

I think a lot of what is going on is that healthcare workers in rich western countries have very little actual experience with an 80% fatal infectious disease.

While they may have training on protocols for dealing with such a disease, they undoubtedly are too busy to actually practice enough to keep current.

With the exception of SARS (and SARS didn't get most places it quite positively could have), we haven't had a real, o my god outbreak in living memory in the western world. So our health care professionals are going to be a little out of practice.

Yes, people die from the flu. Most doctors and nurses get flu shots. Most doctors and nurses are neither extremely young nor extremely old, so the worst case outcome if the get the flu is that they get the flu.

The United States government has no constitutional power to ban travel of its citizens, except in specific cases (for example, when the government reasonably believes an individual is trying to evade prosecution -- it isn't exactly clear they would even have legal authority to stop you from leaving if you were going to join ISIL though, although they would probably throw you in jail and sort it out much later). This has been beaten to death by the Supreme Court since the 1950's. The Trading With the Enemy Act prohibits U.S. citizens from spending money in Cuba, but the United States government has no authority to prohibit its free citizens from traveling there.

The State Department does issue travel advisories, and if you have any brains at all, you will at least check those out before traveling anywhere sketchy.

One of the real powerful things about C, especially for writing an operating system, is that a good C programmer can look at a piece of C code and have a pretty good idea of the machine code being generated. In the presence of C++ inline functions, implicit type converters, copy constructors, and assignment operator overloads that ability goes right out the window. If you were managing a project that involved lots of small contributions from a large and widely distributed group of developers that inability to see what a small patch does would be fatal.

On a more subtle level, C++ rewards a well-thought out design that doesn't change very much, and mercilessly punishes a design that is produced incrementally in an evolutionary fashion. Given how Linux has developed over the years, C++ would have been a brutally punishing language for Linux.

I like C++, I've used C++ in quite a few projects. I will probably use C++ again. But I can easily see why the Linux kernel is not a great place to use C++.

Sort of.

I've seen some really horribly disgusting free breakfasts at cheap hotels -- so I don't think it is fair to compare "free" and awful and "spendy" and palatable. And some higher-end hotels include breakfast in the tariff, as long as you aren't getting it delivered to your room.

Whether parking is free or not seems to depend on location. If your hotel is in San Francisco or Manhattan you will pay an arm and a leg for parking whether you are at a Super 8 or a Ritz-Carlton.

I do agree about cheaper hotels giving out free wi-fi and the higher-end hotels charging for it.

And resort fees are almost always a rip-off.

I agree completely.

Emergency rooms aren't really set up to deal with flu-like symptoms. Which can be from a lot of causes other than travel to Liberia. I can easily imagine a situation where between the bloody messy auto accident and a gunshot wound and two or three heart attacks the dude with flu-like symptoms just slips through the cracks.

When I took an EMT class so many years ago, one night a week I had to either ride around with a volunteer fire department or be at the emergency room of a small-town hospital. The amount of stuff that comes into the emergency room of a small-town hospital on Friday night would probably amaze you. I almost exhibit flu-like symptoms myself thinking about a big-city hospital.

Which gets to the other catch here. The initial presentation of Ebola is "flu-like" symptoms. Most people are highly suggestible and can practically think themselves into such symptoms if they are panicked and freaked out about possibly being exposed to an extremely fatal disease. So I suspect we will have a wave of people from Dallas or from Dulles Airport or from the flights this idiot was on who think they might have been exposed turning up at emergency rooms, urgent care clinics, and even their own doctors thinking they have Ebola. It is going to be quite a sorting job finding the tiny number of people who really are sick. I really hope someone has a fast, reliable, and relatively inexpensive test kit for Ebola that can be rapidly deployed. Because we are going to need it. Not because I expect a lot of people to get Ebola, but finding those needles in a haystack of hypochondriacs is going to take some work.

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.