No kidding. Those burning fuels will kill more animals in the long run than the .... zero animals likely hurt by Google.

See my reply to the other poster.

Licking was a comical exaggeration. But curtains are sufficient to separate adult patients and prevent cross contamination, no "separate rooms" necessary. Families with children are a bigger concern but ultimately the safest and most practical course is to keep those kids with their parents, and keep them all at home.

Humans instinctually fear rare events significantly more than common events, even if those common events are more likely to result in danger. It made sense as a hunter-gatherer to run from the rare and strange, but today the instinct is often just lower brain messing with our more-advanced rational thought processes. It's why the average person fears plane crashes far more than car crashes, despite car crashes being statistically a more likely way to die.

Things that might kill you have two parts - the chance of this affecting you, and the chance of the affect being death. People inflate the first for rare events, and downplay it for common events, despite science and statistics to the contrary.

>> Put them all in the same room? Maybe only one or two have ebola. Can't put them in one room, then they'll all get ebola if a few had it.

Not unless they lick each other's bodily fluids.

Limited liability is a privilege, not a right. Think of anything else corporations today demand - including their new so-called "free speech" - and realize that all of those things can be negotiated away to those voluntarily seeking this limited liability.

A corporation enjoys special tax and legal status not available to individuals. In exchange for that status, the government can and should demand that they give up their so-called "right" to free speech (the same way non-profit groups can be restricted so long as they wish to retain their non-profit status).

The law should also be changed to make it easier to pierce the corporate veil and prosecute executives, employees, and board members. The defense of "I didn't know what the other guys were doing so I couldn't see the whole picture" should be evidence of conspiracy, not a defense.

Punishment for corporations found guilty of crimes should be more than token fines. Yes, non-employee shareholders of publicly-traded companies enjoy limited liability for those companies' actions, but they do have liability up to the value of the stock. No, it doesn't make sense to give corporations the "death penalty" very often, so long as the company had some legal business, but the government should be better able to seize assets, primarily stock and options, especially from executives. The public will demand more accountability from the companies they own if they know that corporate crime will more often cost them their ownership directly, not just as a blip in profit.

Because government in this country is so limited and the benefits of monopoly (or, more likely duopoly) so immense, corporates naturally grow in size until they are "too big to fail". Again, as with free speech in exchange for special tax status, corporations do not have the right to grow so big or become so vital to the economy that their collapse would lead to destabilization of the country. The government should regularly be reviewing this and taking actions to break those companies up, or prevent the mergers that lead to this situation in the first place. Maximizing efficiency and profits through consolidation when times are good leads to increased instability when times are bad. It is the government's job to regulate the economy to ensure the general welfare, and that includes smoothing both the highs and lows.

While I am not a medical professional, someone out there could argue that a drug designed to prevent more of your healthy X cells from being infected is a vaccine, even if some of your existing X cells are already infected. Substitute white blood, red blood, brain, heart, bone, etc. for X depending on the disease.

Humans are not homogenous and not every cell of an infected person is infected. While such a drug should probably be called both a treatment and a vaccine, language evolves and if people start calling drugs that prevent any or further infection "vaccines", so be it.

Because if you want to get home, now you need to trek through the jungle to another country first, then lie about having been in an Ebola country.

It's not like it's that hard to use past sales to predict relevant purchases; most advertisers are just too oblivious/stupid to figure this out. You might want to order a case of oil or some wax or maybe new insurance, right?

Or, if I liked those boots or whatever - I already bought them. I don't need another pair!

Relevant contextual ads are those that appear before I've settled on or rejected the product in question. They are also for the same type of products. If I buy no-grain dog food or dandruff shampoo, for example, don't try to sell me the regular shit. Finally, give me a reason to click on the ad instead of buying from a usual source. I already pay Amazon for "free" shipping - you need to match that and beat their price for me to bother creating a new account somewhere else. Honestly even if I do want the thing you advertise, I'll probably go to Amazon or the local store and buy my regular brand there anyway (thanks for the reminder).

To be effective, advertisers need to be better able to anticipate needs. This works pretty well some places - at Target, for example, where they use your information to determine if you are having a baby and then send you ads and coupons for things the child will need just before you need them. This is more difficult to track for adults. For the boot example, you'd need to remember that I looked at boots, then advertise boots to me again in ~10 years just as the old pair wears out.

When someone mentions procreative the GP thinks they mean having babies. Since, you know, that's what that means. =p

No kidding about international travel. After being so afraid of overages that I left my phone at home from a trip to Europe in 2008, earlier this year I took a work trip to South Korea / Taiwan / Hong Kong / mainland China. As I got off each plane and turned my phone on, the immediate text with "welcome to [country] standard data rates apply" was pretty awesome. I didn't take my laptop - I used my phone exclusively for two weeks.

(Verizon iPhone with a T-Mobile SIM, so yes I could get data in S. Korea despite the country being CDMA iirc.)

Who are you to say which is more lethal? It seems to me that H1N1's better transmission methods make it the more effective, if less efficient, killer than Ebola. So far H1N1 has thus proven itself to be more lethal, though of course Ebola might catch up.

Lethal - "sufficient to cause death" or "capable of causing death" is a word with enough ambiguity in the definition to apply to either case. It does not exclusively mean "efficient at causing death once afflicted on someone" as you imply.

So that's just 16 half-liter donations, which spaced out every 8 weeks takes less than 2.5 years. There's plenty of time for Dad to donate that much between when he learns his wife is pregnant and when that kid needs to enter high school. (Plenty more if Mom donates, too.)

The big problem, as in everywhere else, is that paying for blood attracts donors with bad blood (literally), some of which will escape testing and get into the supply. "Thanks to the blood for grades program, China now has enough blood for your transfusion. Unfortunately, the blood you got had untraceable levels of HIV and now you'll get sick and die, but you can do so knowing that some unrelated kid got into a better high school for your suffering."

That's not to say the U.S. doesn't have some of the same problems. The incentive to give can be strong.