Points!

Nonsense. Highly unlikely events? Multitude of convincing arguments? ...and if we are alone, the fact that failing to colonize other galaxies before the sun exhausts all its nuclear fuel would finish us does not make us the ones to seed life in other galaxies and colonize distant solar systems. That's simply a non-sequitur.

With neither real facts nor justification of any assumptions of the frequency of life, multicellular life, intelligent life, technological life, stupid-enough-to-give-itself-away life, this article starts off on the wrong foot and gets worse. It doesn't matter how many exoplanets you can find, one, ten, hundreds, millions, billions, trillions - finding life on those planets is a completely different step. Finding life on a planet that has is not trying to be found is not likely to be possible, and this opens a problem that is beyond simple epistemology.

As others and famously, Stephen Hawking, has pointed out, an intelligent life form on an exoplanet should be aware of the risk contacting ET should entail. It's a simple matter of weighing risk and reward - and so far, Homo Sapiens has failed to figure that out. We're still stupid enough to be sending physical artifacts far away from our planet with a map that effectively says "We're curious and stupid - please invite us to dinner" without distinguishing the difference in role of dinner guest and entree.

Fortunately, sending physical artifacts is one the least effectual ways to contact ET. Sending electromagnetic signals is far more effective, and humans have tried that too, but only for a short time and only in a few directions. Beyond our early transmissions of "I Love Lucy," the increasing complexity of our signals make it less likely that modern communication, if were somehow intercepted with adequate S/N ratio, would be decoded into anything useful to ET. In fact, those DirecTV signals mean almost nothing without a access card, by design. Unless we actually intend to send a signal, nothing from Earth is likely to give our presence away, short of a few hundred short bursts of nuclear radiation from our atomic and fusion weapons, which we can only hope have ceased to be transmitted.

The simple fact is: "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." Plausably, Homo Sapiens has got to figure out how to deal with the "terrible ghastly silence" of space with much greater probability than having to deal with ET. Even so, contact with ET is much more likely to be via long-distance (and therefore long-latency) communication than by physical contact. And if a religious person doesn't like what ET is saying, they'll just change the channel, or stop responding.

Historically, religion has adapted to scientific advances without just giving up and saying - OK, we were wrong. Religions have been very facile in their interpretation of sacred documents in order for their memes to continue to flourish despite scientific and logical contradiction. Indeed, with Socrates as the example, the risk is borne by the truth-tellers, not the religious followers....unless one can surmise how religious orthodoxy would drink the hemlock this time.

Nice diagram of a left-facing swastika in the article - or is that a southern-hemisphere hurricane?

Uhh. No. The number of people previously infected is very low, and concentrated in areas not part of the current outbreak.

I would also add that the 52% fatality rate is much better than the 90% rate that other outbreaks have sufferred, and it suggests that the heroic medical intervention that is underway is having a beneficial effect.

Perhaps you are unaware of exponential growth - http://www.geert.io/exponentia...

It's going to be difficult enough to get the 1700 beds constructed quickly enough to make a dent in this problem, and the magnitude of the problem is approximately doubling every month.

From the comments I've been reading to most of the Ebola news articles these days, American's have been demonstrating their stupidity at a truly alarming rate.

Pease take off your tinfoil hat - it's acting as an antenna and overconcentrating the paranoid thoughts the CIA is putting into your tiny brain.

This solar process replaces up to order 80% of the fossil fuel that must already be employed to generate steam 'round-the-clock. There is also a gas-fired steam generator present to make steam at night and/or days with insufficient insolation, though they discuss on their website the notion that steam injection rates may vary - more during the day and less at night in order to increase the use of the solar-generated steam (to get up to the 80% level). Otherwise, the typical peak-rate to average-rate problem of solar power would make the amount more like 50% utilization absent additional hardware for steam storage.

Nope - it's the high temperatures that make the heavy oil flow more easily. But "Global Warming" of only a few degrees doesn't really do the trick.

Fortunately, this technology isn't so useful in Canada because of its lower solar insolation.

I'm not convinced that this is a problem that needs a solution, but to me, a simple solution to the problem is this:

Start the car with the cell phone. In that way, which cell phone is associated with the driver is simple.

A more detailed disclosure follows:

Instead of starting the car with a key or a button, start the car by sending a text message. The car then blocks sending text messages by that phone for as long as the car is moving, (or in an alternative embodiment, as long as the car is operating). This prevents that particular phone from being used in whatever prohibited manner is desired, such as no texting when the car is moving (or when the car is operating).

In an alternative embodiment, an application running on the cell phone is started to start the car operating, and beginning making the cell phone operate in a restricted manner. In an alternative embodiment, well-known cryptographic techniques are employed by the software application to start the car in a secure manner. Thus, the car replaces a physical or electronic key. As a side effect, the phone in control by the driver is identified for restricted operation.

Similarly, in an alternative embodiment, the phone can be prevented from other prohibited uses, such as (but limited to) web browsing, non-hands free calling, and so forth. When the car is turned off (with button, or ignition key), normal operation of the phone can resume.

Technologically, this is most easily enforced by the phone itself, under command from the car. In an alternative embodiment, the car can block attempted communication by that particular phone advertising itself as a micro-cell-tower that only that particular phone connects to.

In an alternative embodiment, the car can signal that the phone should enter a lower-power operating condition, and take over monitoring communications on behalf of the phone, such as by advertising signals matching what the phone would normally employ to maintain cell-tower communications and wake up the phone to a higher-power state when an incoming call or incoming message arrives. In an alternative embodiment, this operating mode would use car hardware to maintain hands-free communications mode in replacement to the normal communications modes of the cell phone.

All patent rights reserved. Contact me for licensing.

Solution C: Deputize driverless cars to enforce traffic rules of surrounding cars and report it to the authorities. Make it enourmously expensive to drive cars manually, causing the free market to make driverless cars mandatory. When you include all the little potential violations, the frequency at which drivers violate traffic rules is probably several times per mile.

I've outfitted quite a few WRT-54GL over the years, but I've moved on to the ASUS RT-AC66U with Shibby variation of Tomato.

The features that grab me most are (0) GHz Ethernet LAN connections (1) QOS rules and graphical pie charts of relative usage both incoming and outgoing (2) multiple SSID's and both 2.4 and 5 GHz bands, triple antennae (3) graphical displays of bandwidth usage that can drill down to show individual machines (4) display of bandwith of individual TCP/IP connections (5) VPN support with enough processor bandwidth to perform the encryption (6) WDS to extend coverage without a wired backbone (7) DDNS for remote access by domain name.

I've found the Shibby releases to be very stable and rarely have to reboot. The price is a few times that of the WRT54GLs, but the improved coverage helps to reduce the number of boxes I need to use. I wish they were prettier to have around the house, though. I've placed some Engenius EAP600's in ceilings where esthetics were important, using them as access points to extend coverage - they also support multiple SSID's and POE so you don't have to run AC power.

Does anyone have favorite devices for extending links between buildings that are a few hundred feet apart? I put a high-gain antenna onto a WRT-54GL with tomato and used WDS, but without a matching antenna on the other side, it was as solid as I would have liked. Ideally, I'd put something on an exterior wall and use POE to power it.

Drones had better learn to deal with traffic, too.