Modern infantry tactics are all about suppressive fire. Which you can't do with a bolt action rifle. There's a reason everyone uses assault rifles. I would be shocked if the reason this is just happening now isn't just a combination of neglect and lack of funds.

Beyond that, soldiers do carry more stuff. Depending on the situation, a US soldier may have 120-150 pounds ("Emergency Approach March") to carry plus body armor and rifle. There's simply more useful gear than there used to be. Everyone complains about it, but nobody wants to get rid of anything. Soldiers would like to ditch the armor, but they're not allowed to because their commanders don't want to explain to grieving widows (and the press) why Joe wasn't wearing his armor when he got shot.

It's probably even worse in Northern Canada, since you'd have all sorts of extra stuff to deal with the cold.

So yeah, you shave off pounds where you can. Not only is a modern assault rifle lighter than an Enfield (I own one - holding that sucker level from a standing position gets old really fast), more importantly the ammo is much lighter.

We've had many epidemics in the US. We've had scarlet fever, tuberculosis, cholera, typhus, polio, dengue, malaria, leprosy, influenza named after various places and creatures... the list is endless.

The problem is the CDC lost focus. With a relative lack of communicable diseases for going on five decades, like all bureaucracies with not enough to do they started expanding their portfolio to include lots of things you wouldn't think belong under "disease control" and took their eye off the ball. Now that we have a bona fide health threat all they know how to do is hold press conferences telling us not to worry.

The one thing the CDC doesn't need is more power and money. They already have broad emergency powers, and if they have enough money to do gun control studies and lesbian weight gain studies they already have too much money.

As a side note, the director would be a lot easier to support if he wasn't obviously lying when he says there's nothing to worry about. We're not children, buddy, so don't treat us like children. Obviously this strain of Ebola is quite a bit more contagious than earlier strains, and it falls in about the middle of the lethality range normal for that disease (20%-80%). We should be restricting travel from affected countries, and anyone coming in from those countries should be quarantined for 21 days.

True "patent trolls", the way I've always understood them, were always small companies. Once large companies start suing each other it becomes MAD. I win in Korea with patent A, you win in the US, you sue me in the EU with patent B, I sue you in China with patent C... Look at the way the Samsung-Apple war played out (is that over?).

But if the company is just a patent portfolio, there's no way for the victim to retaliate. The cheapest way out is to settle, which gives them enough money to go after the next guy (hopefully one of your competitors).

This is a situation faced by millions. You want to do something for a living but there aren't any jobs. They should really accept that fact and move on like everyone else. It's particularly hard to have sympathy in that this isn't something that just happened yesterday - it's been a long time since getting an academic position was likely. Longer than it takes to get a PhD.

If we combined a rather large vehicle meant to return with a shuttle-type profile (ceramic heat shield and glide control)...

I'm not convinced the shuttle has much to teach us beyond "don't do it this way". Powered landing has all sorts of advantages over wings, and I think that's where we should be concentrating our efforts.