Of all people, experts of the disease take precautions to avoid catching it themselves, when they do, its not a good sign.

Maybe. Then again, where I work it's the new guys who follow safety guidelines religiously, while those who have been there for a while can't be bothered because, after all, nothing's happened this far so it must be safe.

Experts are humans, and humans are notoriously bad at keeping their guard up with familiar things.

Drugs like this are what meddle in the affairs of intelligent parasites trying to shape and control populations.

Virii are not the least bit intelligent by any reasonable definition. And Ebola doesn't seem to be causing any evolutionary pressure except for a resistance to itself.

However, it seems this epidemic has exposed the lingering traces of Social Darwinism exemplified by your post, as well as - once again - demonstrated how they could be a fatal weakness if allowed to remain operative.

The region mechanic was a completely game-able loophole. It needed quite a bit of work, TBH.

The region mechanic was always an attempt to limit the size of the simulation. The individual citizes in SC4 are too small, presumably because the machines of the day couldn't handle bigger ones. So a real improvement would be redoing the game as a 64-bit only version and discarding the region system.

That said however, the fact this one captured laptop revealed the dark intentions of just "one" radical speaks volume of how truely fucked humanity is. This ideology is hell bent on destroying modern civilization and leaving a culture of hell-on-Earth in its place.

If modern civilization falls, it won't fall to plague-infested terrorists, but to people like you who believe any bullshit story you're told. Or do you honestly think "enemies of ISIS gave me a document that totally says ISIS is up to no good" is even remotely credible evidence?

But no doubt, they want you, me, and every non-Muslim converted or dead.

I see. And how do you reconcile with this assertion with the alleged intent to use as weapons bacteria which are quite infamous for being unable to know or care about their victim's piety? Because state-building and doomsday plots are somewhat contradictory goals.

Is the "19-page document in Arabic on how to develop biological weapons" a viable plan, or wishfull thinking?

For that matter, is it real? Do we have any reason to trust a file presumably found on a laptop held by intelligence agencies?

I know, it would probably be better to set up a cron job.... but I actually know very little about cron...think I've used it once or twice.

No, because then you risk simultaneous uploads stalling each other and eating potentially unlimited amount of resources until the machine crashes.

And this is acceptable because...?

Because the idea of domination - of the strong enslaving the weak - still lies at the heart of even modern society. Harassment is simply a crude way of establishing these roles. It's tolerated because someone engaging in it is expressing their acceptance of and adherence to this idea. They simply lack the sophistication to bully others in ways society has sanctioned as right and natural - mainly wealth, in ours.

Come on. The Mac Pro requires you to spend big bucks. It's not too much to ask Apple follow Intel's roadmap with the Mac Pro.

Absolute truth. Women as a group tend to be more emotionally mature, and apt to avoid senseless conflict. Men are perfectly free to act like 14-year-old testosterone-mad Peter Pans, but women are just as free to reject their infantile behavior.

So does this mean that any woman engaging in sexual relations with a man should be looked down and possibly arrested because, after all, she is taking advantage of a 14-year old hormonally imbalanced orphan? Or did you mean "absolutely truth" as in "look how cool I am"?

Hardly. What he's said is: "!E(x) hasredblood (x) && handskeystochauffeur(x)", which is equivalent to "A(x) !(hasredblood(x) && handskeystochauffeur(x))". Since according to you you already fail the first part of the conjunction by not having red blood, the second part is not constrained by it.

In other words, you can hate driving as much as you want, since you don't have red blood ;).

It is expensive because of all the prior improper risk taking.

It is expensive because you're deliberately trying to artificially inflate the cost of nuclear power in order to make renewables look better in comparison, just like the enviromentalists have been doing for decades. Unfortunately, that tactic won't work, since renewables aren't capable of providing reliable baseload power, so all you'll end up doing is shifting to gas and, once it runs out, coal.

A bunch of apparently quite dumb, reactionary and fearful people somehow dictate policy for multi billion dollar industry with armies of lawyers and wads of cash to throw at lobbying.

That's the dark side of democracy. Everyone can see there's something very wrong with the world, and no one wants to look into their own soul to see what it is. So any demagogue who comes out and blames it on someone else never lacks followers. Fear sells, but beyond fear it's the good old "the world will become a paradise just as soon as we exterminate this one last evil opponent".

That said, democracy is still progress: a couple centuries ago Greenpeace and nuclear lobby would had been killing each other. Unfortunately, avoiding outright war is not enough, so I guess humanity's about to be tag-teamed by climate change and energy crisis. And it's all you hippie's fault.

You do realize this scenario happens beyond the Arctic and Antarctic circles on Earth every winter, right? Both of which have life.

We can continue looking for them, but studding the entire globe with uber-telescopes, as NotingHere insisted, seems pointless until we can (or, at least, come close to being able to) reach any of them in reasonable time.

Putting telescopes in orbit is a good way of pumping money to the emerging spaceflight industry.

Don't send a person, send a blueprint and some way to raise and teach a first generation. We don't have to get there ourselves as long as our "children" can.

And that "some way" would be?...

In all likelihood it would take a fully sapient AI with a humanlike body puppet to raise a human being. At that point, what would be the point? Just accept these sapient spaceships are as good as our "children" as meatbags would be. And of course, since we're talking about sci-fi tropes here, there's always brain uploading.

Also, you're not considering the moral implications of sending a bunch of babies to live or die in an alien planet, in what are likely to be extremely limiting and harsh conditions. Whether you personally care for such things or not, a society that can simply ignore them is unlikely to send anyone anywhere, for the simple reason that this entire project requires a lot of people putting other objectives before their personal interests for a long period of time.