Even if you count all the labor involved, you're still talking about what amounts to a pot luck event. It is way cheaper than a professionally catered event, etc. Also, he fed them breakfast, not dinner. Pancakes are WAY cheaper than filets.

Agree. I think my wife and I spent about $1k on our wedding total, and we probably had 50-100 people on the invite list.

We held the ceremony in the evening and just had snacks for the reception. I think we had a pot luck rehearsal dinner. Decorations were just whatever was easily borrowed, etc. Flowers were artificial. Dresses were inexpensive, and many were handmade. A friend took photos.

As far as I can tell everybody still enjoyed it, and I wouldn't change much if I did it over again.

You don't need to treat a wedding as a state affair. There are a lot better things for a new couple to spend money on.

The problem is that between being asymptomatic and being on death's door you have moderate flu symptoms and are contagious. That is something we want to keep an eye on.

As far as Al Qaeda goes, I was just pointing out the irony of the situation. In any case, if they wanted to spread it around I agree that they probably would want to avoid catching it. If you had a sample of tainted blood/vomit/whatever you could easily soak a rag in that and wipe every doorknob in town. Even if you wore no protection it would take a week before you showed any symptoms, so if you were into suicide you could just keep a bag of vomit in your coat pocket and periodically dip your hand in it as you go about your day.

I don't think we should be more serious about quarantines to keep Ebola out of the hands of terrorists. I think we should stay on top of quarantines because it simply makes sense.

I think the statistic you're looking for is this. Nobody believes the official US unemployment rate - it only makes sense as a short-term trend. The US doesn't count anybody who has been unemployed long-term.

Whether by choice or not, the participation rate does reflect the potential manpower available in an emergency without impacting the normal labor force.

That must be the non-GSM Galaxy Nexus. I'll agree that they damaged their reputation on this one, but this is why they haven't done a non-GSM Nexus since.

The GSM Galaxy Nexus received updated for 1.5 years from initial release, which is what they all basically get. I still would like to see longer support, and there is a chance that the Nexus 4 will get the L release.

You must be of the school of thought that says if a project calls a release "stable" it is. Cyanogenmod actually seems to have gotten better with their M releases which actually target stability instead of proclaiming it, but it is still a fairly minimal use of the word "stable."

In more mature projects stable means that the software was tested BEFORE it was released, in basically the same form that was actually released, and that if a bug comes up it will be fixed quickly, without the addition of new features that might cause undesired changes. When Linux 3.17.1 comes along, it will only contain backported bugfixes/etc with a very low risk of regressions, and 3.17.0 went through 6 release candidates before it was released. That certainly was not the way Cyanogenmod worked a year or two ago, though they're moving closer to something like this now (they still don't have long-term stable releases, though).

When did I ever suggest throwing Africa to the lions? We absolutely should be helping to deal with the problems there. Isolation is at best a stalling move - you can't just let millions of people harbor an infection and hope that it won't spread beyond your ability to contain it.

Right now we're basically just sitting back and watching what happens, which is about the worst thing we can do. We're not taking serious measures to either contain or solve the problem. If we treated these kinds of problems more seriously in the first place, we wouldn't be where we are now, so now we need to spend a fortune and deal with it.

Is there any bioequivalence or clinical data that suggests that it actually works? Or did some compounding pharmacy just throw it into a pill and start selling it?

Compounding pharmacies are both useful and necessary. However, of late some have earned a reputation for just being end-runs around regulations designed to ensure that the drugs we buy are both safe and effective. The fact that they can throw some stuff in a pill doesn't mean that it works.

Normally if you want to reformulate something into a new form you need to do a bio-equivalence study. That means giving somebody either the accepted or new versions of the drug and measuring the concentration of the drug over time in their blood, to demonstrate that it is absorbed, distributed, metabolized, and excreted in a manner similar to the original. If that is the case, then it is very likely that the new form is just as safe and effective as the original. It isn't THAT expensive to do these kinds of studies (compared to full-blown clinical trials), but you know how cost-cutting goes. That compounding pharmacy in New England couldn't be bothered to clean the mold off the ceiling.

Well, if you want another data point viagra was originally being developed for blood pressure I believe, and they found a side-effect. I believe propecia is in the same boat as well.

Happens all the time, not that this is necessarily the norm.

We're not talking about shootings. We're talking about an infectious disease.

A better analogy would be shutting down an entire company email system because 2% of the users of that system have been infected with a virus that spreads by email and is on the lookout for industrial control systems so that it can cause extremely expensive sabotage. Most corporate administrators would do just that in such a situation until they could deploy patches/signatures/etc to contain the spread of the virus, since so much is at stake.

Of course, the sensible thing would have been to set up a quarantine around a few villages when the problem first came up - that would have been pretty easy to do. However, as with most such incidents nobody wants to interfere with somebody else's problem until things are completely out of control.

The alternative seems to be to sit back and see what happens. Maybe that will work out, maybe it won't. I don't debate that there is a decent chance that everything will go fine if we don't do much of anything. However, this has the potential to be an incredible disaster, so I think that is about as wise as just hoping that another Cat 3 hurricane doesn't hit New Orleans, or that everything will work fine in 2038 without any code audits.

But, if everything works out fine the pundits will be out in full force saying, "see, I told you it would be fine" - just as many point to Y2K and call it a waste of effort. I bet they still own fire insurance.

Nope, I sleep quite well. Like I said, I run a tor relay, so the NSA probably has all my boxes rooted (even if just to monitor the tor network). They aren't going to send in ninjas, since I doubt I'm particularly difficult for them to hack. I have standard software like apache, postfix, and openssh (and obviously tor) facing the internet, and that assumes that they don't have an exploit available for openwrt. Sure, I always keep everything patched, but that doesn't help against zero-days. How many of those were in Stuxnet, again?

I'm not going to lose sleep over it. Not much I can do about it one way or another.

Funny. When you go to borrow money at the bank they don't just assume that you're a fine upstanding citizen who will pay back the loan. People act negligently all the time - just look at how they drive. If you put 100 people in self-imposed quarantine, chances are a few are going to step out (only for important stuff, of course).

Also, imagine if the news broke that Al Qaeda or whatever was working hard to try to break into the CDC to steal Ebola samples for a biological weapon - you'd probably see an army stationed outside the research labs. Think about it - if they want to get their hands on it now all they have to do is go visit somebody who is waiting at home for the results of their tests.

Well, you could quarantine the folks who actually came in contact with the one case. And by quarantine I mean actually putting them in a segregated area of some kind, with controlled access, not telling them to stay home and to call if they get a fever.

Sure, there aren't "infinite" dollars, but you're not saving money if you save a few million and then end up with an actual outbreak.

Also, there is no reason that we can start mass-producing treatments like wmapp. Sure, it could turn out to not work out as well as it seems, but it isn't like there are a lot of other options. Whatever options there are should also be explored.

Situations like this almost always cost a lot less if you spend a lot of money up-front vs waiting for things to really get bad and then REALLY spend a lot of money. What else are we going to spend the money on? Certainly it isn't going to the welfare state...

Sneaking from Africa to the US isn't exactly easy to pull off. You have to base your quarantine on geographic borders as a starting point - if you wanted to do a travel ban it would make the most sense to just ban the entire continent. Then by all means narrow it down as you get things under control on the ground. However, the current outbreak is way to big to just put a fence around it.

Just shut down all air and sea travel to the entire continent, and if other countries don't go along with it include them in the ban. Worst case you just shut down all international travel. Yes, this will cost billions of dollars, but so will an outbreak.

I think we need to get serious about this...

But, they just redid the paint last year! Nobody would choose us as the best place to give birth and have colonoscopies if we had bleach splotches on the wall!