Must be /. night over at 4-chan tonight.

Probably because it has a 90% mortality rate, and not only will you die, but it will hurt the entire time it's happening. I mean, consider HIV -> Terrible, but you can control it with meds. Smallpox? We have a vaccine for it, and we know you can beat it. It has a mortality rate of 30-35%.

Let's see here...magic eightball says invest in companies which produce interferon and antiviral products...buy stock now. Hmm.

Can't be. The Antichrist has to 'call down fire from Heaven for everyone to see' or something like that, and the US military, try as they might, do not really have anything that matches that. I mean, napalm? Maybe. White phosphorous? Maybe. But are they really being called down by a single person? Kind of yes, kind of no. It's not a single person, speaking to the Heavens, calling it down; it's a person, speaking to several hundred people, who make it happen. So yes, with a Deus Ex Machina, no without one. You want fire from Heaven, you need something more extravagant than even SDI with its X-Ray lasers. Like a spacegoing battlecruiser, like several of them, and maybe some plasma weaponry...that's about as close as you are going to cut it without pyrotechnics. It looks like fire, or so I imagine. On the other hand, one of the horsemen is Pestilence...and Ebola covers both him and Death. Matter of fact, Ebola is so frightening / fast, that there probably isn't time for war / looting to erupt...I imagine any place it's been is treated like Ravenholm.

Well, the doctor who went to Africa did so with the conditions that you would expect in Africa. The conditions in the US, I imagine, are different -> they probably are planning to stick him in a bunny suit, as well as his pilots, and keep the air circulation separate, as well as the cabin itself. When he lands in the US, I imagine they will keep him heavily quarantined, possibly with a shoot to kill order to the guards if they've learned anything from Africa. Only two ways he's getting out of that hospital: a clean bill of health, or in a coffin. And yes, this is less of a "we're doing this because you have done so much good for the world" and more of a "We're quaking in our boots and want to try for every advantage possible before this thing comes over the Atlantic" because you KNOW that's what the CDC and the military are thinking that right now. If you're President Obama, you're probably been briefed several weeks ago about the possibility of the US military shooting down civiliarn aircraft if they happen to be plague bearers...I mean, I'm sure that the military will try to quietly divert the afflicted plane to a military base where they can quaratine people, but from a realistic standpoint, a person with an airborne (or even non airborne) strain of Ebola Zaire flowing through their system is a moving WMD, and a biological one at that.

They could forget to autoclave the interior...

Hmm. I wonder what kind of defence there will be for "Hey, someone is coughing up blood on this overcrowded 767 that's due to land in Atlanta in an hour..."

Enough painkillers to stop their breathing, me thinks. And their purpose now is either to recover, and give medical science some info on how to do that, or not recover, and give medical science some info on what experimental drugs / treatments are not going to work. IANAD, but were I in a similar position, I'd be flooding them with retrovirals. Ebola seems to knock out certain interferons (alpha, beta, something, look it up), which allows it to screw up the human body something severe. Since interferon is how the human body stops virii from ravaging a body, I'd make that a priority. I'd basically give them a chemo patient's equivalent of it...and that person would hate it...but they might survive. Here's a link for some light reading on Ebola and Interferon: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... There's more if you google those terms. And yes, we can create interferon.

Their stated reason for doing it -> "So the patient receives better healthcare."

Their real reason for doing it -> "We received a phone call at 4 AM on Tuesday telling us that Ebola Zaire (the magical strain of D00M) has been hopping between countries in Africa, and that the natives are hiding the infected because their witch doctors told them that Western Medicine is the source of the disease. The people at the CDC (that's us) actually have a plan written down for this particular scenario, and we're following it to the letter.

Long ago, we figured that it was only a matter of time, in a scenario like this, before Ebola Zaire would become airborne; our goal is then to extract several of the infected early on, and learn what we can from them, living and dead. Officially, we will be keeping airports open, and so on, right up until the first infected lands stateside; this is to keep the people from panicking. Once that panic sets in, God help you.

Seeing how it's Ebola Zaire, we are not totally defenseless. Antiviral drugs, such as interferon analogs, may increase the chances of survival; the question of the supply of said drugs be a source of contention.

As always, your fearless leaders will be directing the relief effort from the nearest bunker, with a sign over the entrance "No Admittance.""

Hmm. Still waiting for AMD to toss out a higher end product that fixes the issues with Steamroller. Their roadmap seems to indicate that they have no intentions of fixing it (at this point in time), nor are they intending to put much focus on the higher end (they are focusing on APUs more than CPUs...which is weird, given that their higher end stuff from the CPU / GPU end has got to be bringing them in loads of dosh). What I want from AMD is a fixed Bulldozer / Steamroller, even if that means soldering on an extra FP unit per module and what have you. If they want to make me really happy, they should make their Opteron holdings overclockable, with motherboards to match. Which brings to mind Asus & friends...they have got to be bored waiting for a new chip to ship from AMD so they can refresh their motherboard line up. Crosshair Formula-Z is getting pretty gnarly at this point...

Or they didn't, and they're going for a power grab. I wonder which one it is...

Which confirms what I thought about this market all along, that it was foolish developers chasing nickels in place of dollars.

Quiet you. A few more revolutions around this sun, and we'll own this planet. We've all but convinced them that they need to move everything onto the cloud, and soon thereafter that they need to upgrade to this year's CPU: ARM (preferably v6). Those of us who are quietly stashing those gigantic x86 16-core / 4 CPU beasts that companies are throwing away because 'IT & programming are last year's business' are sitting pretty for the upset that is to come...I mean, we are looking at a "Napolean won Waterloo" level of misreporting style event, and it feels good.

Precisely that...it's a compiler bug. People get real tired of "is it my code, or something else" when things go boom after they hit late 20s...To put things in perspective, if Microsoft shipped a VS update that banjaxxed the C++ compiler under certain conditions (well, more often than it probably already does), developers! developers! developers! everywhere would be looking to BBQ someone alive for that mistake. Yes, mistakes happen. Yes, it's a part of technology. But with unit tests and all this other overhead that programmers are forced to write, these problems are supposed to be disappearing. You're not supposed to suddenly be encountering the equivalent of fairies in your garden. So I have sympathy for the man, and those who have to put of with this stuff. This is a problem that should have been caught long before it made its way to him, and the time he spent trying to figure out whether or not it was his code, his compiler settings, some missed update or flag, possibly a vanilla install, etc. before bringing in even more people to do the same and cover all his bases before screaming at the top of his lungs must have been at least several hours of his time, possibly a few days or a week.

Because there's no way for browsers running on OUR machines to sidestep that...it's foolproof. Yep, better give up, and start watching those ads...