if the benchmark for what is legal is your own preference, you are a parasite on society to that same degree.

I'm curious - does that apply to marijuana users? If so, how was illegal marijuana use fundamentally different than this?

He can't help it, Oxytocin is regulating his socio-sexual behavior. Or mice are. Either way, welcome to Slashdot, newguy, hang around for a bit and you'll see posts a lot more ignorant than that one.

*shrugs*

Feel free to panic, then. I suggest a cabin in a remote corner of Alaska.

Go there, avoid all human contact for at least ten years.

You should be safe by then, so you can rejoin the world no later than early 2025....

Uh, Ebola spreads through contact, so by your logic it still wouldn't be time to be concerned if every last person on earth contracted the disease...

By my logic, if you people start getting ebola with no KNOWN ebola contact, it's time to think about maybe panicking.

Because that would mean an unidentified reservoir of ebola in the country. Which is potentially disastrous.

So long as we have a clear eye on patient zero and everyone in contact with him, we don't need to be terribly worried....

For those who said "No need to panic" ... are we there yet?

No.

We MIGHT (and I stress "might") be getting to time to panic the first time we get an ebola victim who hasn't been to Africa, and hasn't been in contact with any known Ebola victim.

Note that this case is one of the 48 people who are currently being monitored due to contact with that ebola victim who brought it here from Africa.

The Placebo Effect is known to have at least one huge flaw in its theory. There have been several experiments involving Placebo Opiates and Placebo Opiate Antagonists in double blind studies with real drugs of both kinds, and the researchers doing them have pretty much disproved that the Placebo Effect works in any of the ways theories say it might.
            In fact, one prominent researcher said of these studies, he was now of the opiniion that it was not possible to phrase whatever was really happening in a natural language, and he could not offer a theory that fit all the facts without it sounding like "Four-sided, colorless, green triangles meditate furiously. Other researchers have simply pointed out that, in their tests, the explanations of what should be expected in using placebo opiates simply don't have any pedictive ability when the tests also mix in treating those addicted patients with possible placebo antagonists, and left it at that.

The point is, you can define "liberal" to the stage where Reagan, Nixon, and even Goldwater were 'liberals", just as Fox news insists that ALL the other media outlets are liberal.
Remember the tax rebates of 2008 and 2009? It's estimated that individual consumer spending drives about 68-70% of all economic investment in the USA - in fact, the 2014 estimate for that is exactly 70.0%. Just about everyone in economic circles accepts this number, maybe with a few minor quibbles. That means a neutral (not conservative, not liberal, not supply side, not demand driven tax rebate would have been about 70% to individual consumers). Both the Bush and Obama year tax rebates were about 32-33% individual consumer and 68-67% business breaks, ergo, the "liberal" Obama tax rebate was weighted about 2 to 1 towards the ultra conservative end of supply side economics. Here's one of very few areas where there is a clear, unbiased, objective definition of where the line between left and right is, and by that test, the Obama administration is extremely conservative, as is damned near everybody elected these days.
        As much as I like treating the whole left v. right model as terribly over-simplified and using at least a dual axis model, and as much as I can respect your arguement about autoritarianism, the position that Eisenhower looks like a (modern) Democrat is simply factual. The Republicans may have shifted more towards an interventionist model in foreign affairs, or supported big government spending more than they once did, but that's not the biggest change - the Republicans haven't failed by drifting towards the Democrats on a few key issues, and only need to reform themselves merely by getting back to their "small government" roots. The real difference is between a party that is now 99% for whatever the MIC stakeholders want and a party that is only about 55% for the same thing. Until there are Republicans who want to cut MIC related spending and not just "social" spending to reign in big government, there is no meaningful distinction between a fiscal conservative and a neocon or a tea-partyist. Hell, until the Republicans get a single candidate that even admits the objective fact that cutting ALL of what they themselves define as social spending includes cutting the VA budget too, the idea of a populist Republican remains an oxymoron on the level of Nice, Sweet, Wholesome, Axe-wielding, Coked-up, Nazi, Mansonite Xenomorph. Not that I'm saying Republicans are monsters, just that their policies nowdays have contradictions that are ultimately at the very far ends of ANY normal or same spectrum, and leave them saying things that are literally impossibly self contradictory with every position they take.

What's an ideal IQ? 200? 500? The scale is open ended at the top, and even a perfect score on different tests equates to a different maximum.

  Plus, I'm pretty sure that your "less than ideal" would apply to some of the most brilliant people in history (James Clerk Maxwell, estimated IQ 115 (note that people who achieved something that applied to practical discipline, such as engineering or medicine, seldom did it nearly as early as precocious musicians and novelists, and so are always estimated lower unless the estimater includes a fudge factor. Mozart gets estimated much higher than Beethoven without that, because he started at 6, not 22. The way the fudge factor is calculated is to simply set both those great musicians to an (apparently arbitrary) 165, and adjust for age of first composition based on that ratio in calculating other historic musicians scores - this makes Wagner among the very elite, and Bach only 'fair to middlin').
          Or try Charles Darwin, and Copernicus, both estimated IQ 160, (The same score, as Dolph Lungren's actual test results). President Bush (41) scored a 98 - his son Bush (43) scored 125. Steven Hawking scored "only" 160, same as the estimated score for Einstein - both are eclipsed by actor James Woods and John Sunnunu (180 actual score each)
          President Carter scored at least 10 points above any other president or presidential candidate of the 20th or early 21st centuries, and of the current crop, Hillary Clinton is 5 points lower than Carter, but still beats everybody else that has shown any interest in running this time by at least anoher 10 points.

So I'm going to take this oportunity to deride the test - look maw, I'm a hipster!

Well, no.

From TFA, the absolute error closely approximates 0.000000000000000000004.

So you'll only see a relative error as large as you're showing (off in the fifth decimal place), if the correct answer is something like 0.000000000000000012345, which might show up as 0.000000000000000012344.

Pakistan and India have been hostile since they first were separated from each other, but they're not so different!!

The people of Pakistan and the people of India have been hostile toward each other much longer than that. Of course, they weren't "people of Pakistan and India" before the end of British rule of what is now India and Pakistan.

About the only period they weren't hostile was during the Raj, when the British tried to prevent that sort of thing.

Note that during the post-British period, when they were split into two countries, the Hindus living in what is now Pakistan were attacked by their Muslim neighbors and driven out of the country.

Likewise, during the same period, the Muslims living in what is now India were attacked by their Hindu neighbors. This reached the point that trainloads of Muslims fleeing to Pakistan were stopped by the Indian Army and machinegunned before being allowed to continue into Pakistan.

Surely this gesture will make them realize this and they'll have no choice but to bury the hatchet, that's just how human psychology works.

Bury the hatchet in each other's head, yes.

The way you mean it, no.

And do you really know so little of human psychology?

Umm, no.

4000 km^2 != 4 Mm^2.

4000 km^2 = 0.004 Mm^2.

I will do the math. .59* 80 = 47.2 which is 0.16% of 29,000.

Over seven years. The CO2 figure just covers one year, so it's actually a lot closer to 0.024%...

If they're made from someone else, the patient has to take immunosuppresive drugs.

Depends on the quality of the match. For my bone marrow transplant, they found a truly excellent match (no, it wasn't from a relative). I'm two years past the transplant, and haven't taken immunosuppressive drugs for seven or eight months now. No ill effects, not even any GVHD (Graft Vs. Host Disease), which used to manifest as rashes on the backs of my hands/wrists fairly regularly....

To argue that some silly law or court ruling overrides the First Amendment should be a criminal offense.

Replace "First" with "Second", and your statement is still perfectly valid.

Alas, evidence is that most people who get excited about the First tend to think that the Second is something that can (and should!) be overridden at a whim....