You do understand that many Christians believe that God is good,and if he commands them to do good things for other people it's because He has that sort of goodwill, and wants them to learn to feel goodwill too if they don't instinctively feel it, or express it if they already do. You make it sound like non-Christians doing this sort of charity actually feel goodwill, and the Christians don't, but do it for fear of punishment or displeasing an arbitrary source of commands. I know some Christians who are mostly driven by fear of an angry God, but I'd bet that most of the doctors, nurses, and other volunteers in a program like this are driven by a genuine desire to do good, and when they have moments of fear it's more about the risk of death than anything else. That goes regardless of belief systems, Christian, Islamic, or Secular Humanist.

Here's a good, reliable page on Ebola, Reston variant: (this assumes you don't think Stanford is a cheesy school, or in on the vast conspiracy to supress all conspiracy theories, or whatever).
http://virus.stanford.edu/filo...

from this page
"twelve of the 186 people tested had serological evidence of infection with EBO-R. 22% of the workers at Ferlite Farms had positive IFAT (indirect fluorescent antibody test) titers, which was significantly higher than at the other three export facilities."
              Those infection mumbers are low for a virus that normally attacks humans, like Ebola Marburg, in a setting with no precautions at all and lots of hosts, but the fact that humans have no significant symptoms from it says that the Reston variant virus does not colonize humans at all well, and so are at least marginal support for it being exceptionally likely to survive in the environment, compared to the more human lethal types. This just might indicate that Reston is airborne, but probably just indicates it survives a bit longer on surfaces or takes a little more exposure to some disinfectants to destroy than the commoner Ebola virus types. So you're halfway right about that - Reston is not presumed to have become air vectorable, it's just been raised as a possibility in discussion, and is still rated as less likely than some alternatives.

this particular shipment of nonhuman primates had a far larger number of deaths in Room F than would normally have been expected.
              And there goes your record - Reston is deadly to simians, at least to cynomolgus macaques. Unless you want to stand on your obvious spelling error (yeah, it doesn't kill "semians" - I hear not even Kryptonite kills them), the poster you are "correcting" was correct.

      Given a 25% accuracy rating and four spelling errors and two grammer errors in four sentences you would have a hard time persuading people to reject the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump's hairpiece is an Venusion Brainslug invader.

If this was found because the exact image is already on file with law enforcement, and his copy was detected by some hash function (MD5 maybe?), then it seems very, very likely there are other people passing that photo around. Whether guilty or not, this guy deserves to get a jury that will be able to understand that point, so his lawyer can raise relevant questions such as "If you weren't targeting my client before you had any evidence, how come you didn't find any of these others?". What are the chances that the jury will understand if there are any odd holes in the prosecution's case, even if the accused gets a lawyer who will try.
        People have all sorts of theories about the O J Simpson case, but one thing most of them have not heard is that the prosecution went back several times asking for larger and larger hair samples, but couldn't explain why to the jury. The prosecutor's expert witness told the jury that six hairs was enough to get 1 billion to 1 odds that it wasn't anyone else, or a billion to one against it matching the accused if he was actually innocent, and that more hairs would not be any more accurate. Then, the witness couldn't explain why they got those six hairs and then asked for a 36 hair and eventually a 200+ hair sample. In a high profile case with powerful lawyers, this sort of thing comes out, but would it in a case like this?

I see a bigger problem with Google acting as unpaid law enforcement. It puts their own employees at risk. Criminals, particularly the sort we are now calling terrorists, will not see any sharp line between a company that acts to aid law enforcement, especially without even needing a subpoena, and the government itself, and the one big distinction they will see is that the company does not have heavily trained, firearms wielding personnel in large numbers.
          It's only a matter of time before somebody attacks one of these companies and issues a statement that it was a blow against the hated government. A smart company realizes that a court order gives them plausible deniability when they are accused of starting a criminal investigation or being over zealous in making accusations. They can say they were only doing what the law required, and the investigation was already ongoing, neither of which makes any sense as an excuse if they become extremely and seriously proactive. A smart company realizes that making their typical employees into soft targets is not fair to the employees.
          More simply, if you are an employee, and your company is asking you to do things that may leave a criminal wanting revenge against you, or a whole group of political nutcases targeting you, do you get the pay, equipment and training of an FBI agent or US Marshall? Does your workplace have the security of a federal office building? Does your health insurance have the same clauses a cops or soldiers does? Do you get paid to stay in shape on employer time in case your environment becomes a combat zone? Would the company use its legal department to protect you if the criminal sues you? Even if your management and you both really want to help catch the criminal, do they mean it enough they will back you up for your part, if that criminal is now carrying a grudge against you? Could you even expect your company to keep track of when a guy like this gets out of prison and warn you, or send a lawyer to his parole hearing?
      It's easy to cooperate with anything law enforcement asks, and harder to think rationally about the whole concept of blowback. It's easy to feel good about helping catch a particularly scummy criminal such as a pedophile, and harder to allocate the resources to properly protect your people from that potential blowback. And what happens at your company if you helped catch some guy everyone agrees deserves it, and now the government wants you to help catch all sorts of other criminals, who may be doing something you don't think should be a crime at all?

Does sexual selection actually work at all? Less controversially, does it accomplish anything regular natural selection can't, or is is an explanation that is simply redundant to natural selection as a whole?
          For example, there are some species, such as Walruses, where there are extreme differences between males and females, and we use Sexual Selection to explain how those evolved. The problem with that is revealed by Bighorn Sheep, among various other species. There, we have both a lot of dimorphism, and males acting very competitively in displaying themselves for the female, but it turns out that the famales aren't 'selecting right'. Female Bighorns seem to go off with the loser as often as the winner, or sometimes take up with a mate who isn't engaging in the head butting displays at all. Unlike Walruses, the males don't seem to have any way to keep females in a harem unless they can be convinced voluntarily, and since all a sheep has to do to signal unwillingness to mate is stop standing perfectly still, opting out seems to be the female's choice. Most recent studies either show no real pressure at all or a rather mild form of selectivity that doesn't seem like it's enough to explain major size and feature difference unless they could also be explained by non-sexual selection pressures. In other words, winning at head butting doesn't really seem to increase a male's chance of mating, so it's now unclear both why males butt heads, AND whether there as been any sex-based selection, at least in sheep, to cause the behavior.
            Something like this also shows up in African lions, where the male's size and mane can probably be explained by them being the part of the tribe that fights off Hyenas and Baboons just as well as sex based selection.

There's also the argument that wings evolved from smaller structures which were held angled down to in turn hold the running bipod proto-bird (or advanced dinosaur) down when making sharp turns at high speeds (like automotive spoilers) . Strange as that idea sounds, if this actually worked, then it helps explain what's otherwise a pretty large gap - evolving flight. Arms races, as this one where the predators would be trying to outcorner their fleeing prey, and the prey would be trying to evade ever more agile predators, are often considered as explanations for complex evolutionary paths, and may well be true in this case, but it also means we would have an even harder time matching feathers to any specific climate data - as we don't know whether insualtion was the major advantage of the structures just because the animal didn't have the wing surface for actual flight..

I don't count as an expert, but I stayed at a Holiday Inn when I took my first Nuke-Bio-Chem defense course as an NCO, and I did manage a few updates and more advanced courses in subsequent years. All my professional training is from before 2001 however, and I'm sure some of it is obsolete. There are some people posting to this thread who really do know a thing or two, even if there are some others who are either channeling the spirit of Tom Clancy or just winging it.

The best analysis based on how much various samples have mutated differently from others indicates HIV entered its first human host about 1908, most probably in what is now Cameroon, but with a fair probability of it being in what is now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Your estimate of the 1920s is barely possible, but that's about as late as it could possibly be, There's also some chance of it being as early as the late 1890s, but again, thats the other extreme of the margin of error range, and the probability for this is a bell curve-like distribution. Source for transmission was overwhelmingly likely a chimp, and the mechanism was most probably someone cut themself or had an existing wound and got chimp blood into it, while cutting up a chimp slaughterd for bush meat.

I'm not sure what you're saying about a chemo patient's equivalent of interferon and the subject hating it. My Ex was on Interferon for a year for a stage 4 Melanoma. The effects were milder than typical chemos, I'd say much milder - After getting through the first two weeks when the IVs were daily, she went to once a week, and had only ntermittent nausea on the day she actually took the IV drip, usually controlled with just oral Dramamine, and she was usually able to eat within a few hours of leaving the clinic, The first two weeks took simultaniously administering IV painkillers, anti-nausea and anti-fever drugs, and she still felt like a bad case of the flu, but after that 2 weeks the dose came down form literally billions of internal units to just millions, and it got pretty tolerable. Sometimes she still felt lousy the next morning, but usually she was feeling fine by 2 or 3 hours later. Pain management became Tylenol. This whole treatment may have made her Arthritus start up earlier, but it probably had no effect there and she likely would have developed RA just the same. Bad effects like joint pain, high fevers, and just possibly even memory loss are known with these tremendous doses, but they all have very low chances, i.e. less than 1% of patients, and without getting at least one of those, most patients wouldn't say they hated it. It's not like the endless weeks of nausea, extreme fategue and pain that's pretty damned common for regular chemo.She made friends with a dozen people on conventional chemo at the same oncologist's and she and the other interferon patients frequently discussed what troopers those people were and how much easier the Interferon group had it.
          Conventional chemo is not usually as effective in advanced Melanomas, as these really, really massive doses of Interferon, and it certainly worked in her case, or one of the odder experimental things we also tried did, because she beat literally billion to one odds with an initial tumor over twice the diameter that typically gets classified as stage 4. Her oncologist said the first 6 months on Interferon had probably done everything Interferon would do, but If it wasn't too bad, she might improve her odds a little more by sticking with it a full year, and she had no hesitation staying on it. Upwards of 65% of people who are treated this way manage to stay on Interferon IVs for the whole year, and the biggest reason to stop earlier seems to be if the person has bad veins and the clinic is worried about damaging the circularory system further when they may need to try other treatments.

You run Linux on dead badgers, not wolves.

I finally had to tackle an xorg config problem on a machine where I moved an existing hard drive preinstaled with Kubuntu 12.10 and tried to get it to work. Resolution dropped to about 640 x 480 until I worked it out. I've never had to deal with it when installing Linux from CD/DVD since about the StormLinux 2000 era. Linux installs always seemed to find the max resolution the monitor was rated for just fine. Yeah, xorg was a pain, but I only bothered as a learning experience, Reinstalling from disk was always an obvious alternative, and even the lousy resolution was good enough if I had needed to recover other data from that drive first. To be fair, I haven't had any worse experiences with Windows video config since about Win Me. I've been assuming that it takes some pretty odd hardware to get a real video problem anymore in any modern OS, but evidently, someone's milage varied.

Where did it say he was a scientologist? They didn't even exist back them. You made that up to pump up your argument.

Jack Parsons was friends with L. Ron Hubbard for a time, and this friendship allegedly failed because Hubbard took off with a great deal of Parsons' money. Again allegedly, Scientology was founded with that money. Malina and Parsons are two major figures in rocketry who did various occult rituals with both Alastair Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard and basically the historical links between those last two are mostly links through the rocket researchers more than direct contacts.

I see where you are coming from, and even admire it in a way, but I feel compelled to point out another side of the issue (one other side, there are probably 20 more). Online bullys don't usually just make speech involving insults and putdowns. There's a high degree of these being accompanied by false accusations that can easily count as libel, and by misinformation which is often damaging in other ways. (In fact, for cases where bullying goes on for over 3 months, the chance of one or more of these other actions approaches unity). We've seen cases where, for example, the bully has progressed to claiming that a victim is HIV+, and then giving out a lot of misinformation about HIV in general, falsely claiming to be a doctor or to have gotten the information from one, an/or claiming to having hacked their victim's medical information. These things are generally criminal in and of themselves, and/or have other negative impacts (such as triggering security audits of medical records keeping to make sure the bully's claim isn't genuine), Protecting teens against insults and put downs is a mixed bag, but when you add in protecting them from bad medical and legal advice, and false claims that they can't protect their records if they see a doctor, and so many other things, any sane society is going to opt for some limitations, at least with regard to minors.
          This form of bullying has many interrelated bad effects: Laws get passed, because existing laws don't seem to be stopping the problem behavior. Free speech becomes hard to protect when the test cases are such unsympathetic types - even the ACLU sometimes declines to take a case where the jury is likely to be looking for any chance to convict on anything remotely applicable. Even if a politician actually cares about free speech (I know, I know, but some of them actually do.). The ones that actually try to live up to the Constitution, the UN declaration of rights, or other such inspirational ideas are also the ones who really want to stop these other related abuses, so even they will look to compromise (and for the ones who are just pandering to whatever group will get them elected, that sort of compromise is a no-brainer). Let a creep get away with enough, and everybody wants to see some sort of blowback, and if it looks like that creep is just hiding behind a first amendment claim, then the first amendment starts to be called a "technicality".It takes more character than most have to defend Vlad Adolph McKnife-wielding-Psycho. That's why there are phrases such as "Online Stalker" - behavior analogous to real world stalking, not just insults.
        My feeling is, even if we should let kids naturally develop tougher skins and reognize that free speech includes just the sorts of speech we find ourselves half wishing there was a law against, there's too many real creeps on the net for it to happen. The best way to stop it would be for the laws against slander, libel, and impersonation to be enforced so the things that are not just speech are what we are regulating, but we don't seem to do that, so bad laws WILL get passed instead.

Now I'm wondering if we've entered the era when crackheads are more technically competent than the average Slashdotter...

Some of the Hobbit film bits are supposedly from letters JRRT wrote Christopher about 20 years after LOTR came out, describing how he would like to rewrite the book to make it tie in better with LotR and the limited Silmarillion notes he had at the time. Tolkien was supposedly torn between finishing up the Silmarillion or going back and working on a 'better' hobbit first. I suspect there's some truth to this claim - LotR draws from a great many sources that are fundamental in studying early English literature, from Spencer's Faerie Queen to the "Jack the Giant Killer" stories, to the Song of Roland to Beowulf itself, and the Hobbit's literary roots are mostly in one story - the same one Wagner drew on for Das Rheingold. Some of the dwarf naming and such in the Hobbit seems to connect to Finnish mythological tales and maybe some other Scandinavian sources, but the references are mostly truncated there or limited to a few very short phrases to fit in a children's book.
          I can certainly see JRRT deciding to work in some other bits from classics he couldn't really use in LotR. LotR took so long because Tolkien wanted it to have a certain gravitas as fantasy and so aimed for being really encyclopedic in referring to the roots of Fantasy literature, and at least touching broadly on English literature of the mundane and modern kinds. Tolkien even read some Lovecraft (and liked it), probably before writing the scene of the Watcher at the gate to Moria, possibly afterwards to see how it compared, and read or re-read some of the more esoteric works of T. S. Elliot, R L Stevenson and such, maybe just to have a better idea of where he wanted to steer modern English lit. or maybe to see if he needed to actually address these modern works in what he aimed to make his Magnum Opus. What he did afterwards, planning a next stage after becoming such a success, was doubtless quite technically ambitious.
        I respect people saying they don't like this or that, but some of those people might want to do a little research before they label everything they don't like as not true to Tolkien. In particular, the scenes where the dwarves try to use all the gold to kill the dragon seems to have some real connection to Tolkien's plans for the story, and possibly the way there is more about human 'politics' in Laketown is too. Once people get some idea of what might have been the Hobbit, rewritten for an audience the same age as LotR's, they can rag on the Hobbit equivalents of Elven Shield Surfing twice as hard. (Please! I could have done without half the falls in the Goblin caverns and had the height of the other half quartered, and the extended commercial for the Elven Rafting Riveride at Universal Orlando). Still, not everything here needs to be line for line either.