You got it exactly right. Cities *concentrate* polution. Spreading the same populatioh over a wider area *disperses* the pollution.

Civil engineers used to say "dilution is the solution to pollution", but no longer -- except ironically. That's because there can be offsetting mechanmisms that concentrate a pollutant -- e.g. collecting in streams.

Cities actually make processing pollution and waste more financially efficient, although the price tag in absolute (rather than per capita) terms can be eye-popping. Here in Boston we went through a major shock about 25 years ago. We had had the lowest water and sewer rates in the country, living off massive infrastructure investments made generations prior; but we were dumping minimally treated sewage and sludge into the harbor. A lawsuit forced us to disband the agency which was running the sewage and water system, but also recreation like parks and skating rinks, and form a new quasi-independent authority . After 6.8 billion dollars spent on new treatment plants, we had more expensive than average water. 6.8 billion spread over 2.5 million ratepayers is a LOT of money $2750 / person over a decade or so. But it's cheaper than if those 2.5 million people were spread out evenly along the coast for a few hundred miles.

The level of power output he's claiming *should* be able to make the device self-sustaining. 1.5 Megawatt-hours over 32 days (768 hours) works out to 1953 watts. On a 120V circuit that'd be the equivalent of drawing 16 amps; 9 amps on a 220v circuilt.

If the *bulk* of the power is coming from fusion, then despite the inefficiencies it should be possible to get this machine to run itself without external power inputs after an initial "bootstrapping".

OR ... scale the machine up to generate more power than a wall outlet can provide, but still "starts" off a wall outlet.

OR .... plug a fast electric tea kettle into the same circuit and see if the breaker trips. The fact that the machine "generates" power in the middle (ish) of the range supplied by a standard electric circuit is suspicious.

Did the ASPCA go out of business?

To answer your question, if you mean *absolutely* prevent, the answer is nothing. But that's not the right question. The question is whether this will be transmitted at such a rate that it can result in sustained "endemic" transmission. "Endemic" is defined as a situation where each person infected in a location on average infects at least one other person. There may be a handful of transmissions from this index case, but it will fizzle out.

People worried about Ebola becoming endemic based on what's happening in West Africa have no idea how primitive conditions are in West Africa, where hospital workers often lack basic supplies like gloves, and are even reduced to re-using hypodermic needles. And people there who get to one of those horrible hospitals are the lucky ones. The health care and sanitation standards in the effected regions has been described as "medieval".

"Pulling out all the stops" sounds like a good idea, except if you think about it, it gives you absolutely no guidance about what you should do. Some of those "stops" would actually make things worse, and others would be a ridiculous overreaction. For example, should we quarrantine the state of Texas? After all there's been a case of transmission there. That's an overreaction.

Beware the Dunning Kruger effect. Not knowing anything about public health or tropical disease makes it really easy to design a containment program that sounds to you like it ought to work. But there aren't infinite dollars, even to fight Ebola. Every half-baked thing you do comes at the expense of something that would have been more effective. I've worked with the CDC, specifically the Fort Collins DVBID, which does vector borne stuff. The agency is full of PhDs and MDs who've spent their career studying tropical disease outbreaks and what to do about them.

People who think they know better remind me of this quote from Terry Pratchett:

Because, to paraphrase the late computer science pioneer Alan Perlis, Alice in Wonderland is the best book ever written about anything.

Nope. And we never will be. Panicked people make stupid decisions that make the situation worse.

There is no "outbreak" in the US or Europe. And not knowing enough about Ebola is not the same as saying we know nothing about Ebola, and what we know says there is not going to be an outbreak here -- just a few isolated cases of transmission. Thus far there have been one confirmed case of endemic transmission in the US and one in Europe, both nurses. The other "cases" were people with other viral diseases. One transmission does not an "outbreak" make, except to people who are panicky. It's normal in a situation like this for "suspected cases" to pop up all over the place. What do you expect, with the media spreading panic.

The CDC is now saying that the transmission in TX was caused by a "breach of protocol", which is not surprising given that the barrior protocols are exacting and onerous.

The barrier protocols are quite onerous. It doesn't need to be idiocy, fatigue is enough to induce human error. Experts have pointed to this as a factor in the spread of Ebola in West Africa; aside from the fact that most people have access to medieval levels of health care, or facilities that lack things like latex gloves, supplying hospitals with equipment is not enough. The workload of health care workers has to be kept light enough that they can take the extreme precautions needed without making errors.

It is also possible that the barrior protocols have a bug somewhere in them.

SIGINT is the NSA's bailiwick and nothing in the mission statement of the NSA precludes using physical intrusion to obtain it.

What's more NSA is part of the DoD, and the DoD has been conducting physical intrusion to obtain SIGINT for years. In the Cold War American subs tapped undersea cables believed by the Soviets to be impervious. That was a joint NSA, Navy, CIA program, which makes sense.

It also makes sense that physical intrusion to obtain SIGINT would be a joint NSA/CIA operation, which means that someone with access to the NSA family jewels can also compromise CIA "assets" overseas.

Well, yes. Then if you see one call the public health authorities.

Common sense? Sure, but you'd be surprised at the degree to which what you'd think was common sense flies out the window when people encounter the unexpected.

In my experience what people do when confornted with the unexpected is take their cue from what other people around them are doing, and if that's nothing, they'll try to ignore whatever it is. I've even seen that happen with FIRE ALARMS. Instead of getting up and leaving, they look to see what other people are doing. And since those other people are doing the same thing, nobody is leaving. They're looking at each other, wondering whether that really IS a fire alarm. I once had to stick my head in the room on my way out and tell the people there that yes, it really is a fire alarm and they have to leave right away.

If people have been recently primed then perhaps they're more likely to do something reasonable. Of course that sometimes means lots more false positives, but that's a tradeoff.

Except this is engineering, not science.

Engineering is by inclination more conservative than science. That's because the failure of an engineering project is more catastrophic than the failure of a hypothesis, which after all is a result. But ultimately, after the engineer has done all he could to resolve competing priorities of cost, schedule, safety etc., it's whoever is bankrolling a project that decides to pull the trigger. The Apollo program was incredibly dangerous; more money and time might have mitigated that, but they were on a hard deadline to get to the moon by the end of the decade and were already spending an almost unthinkable fraction of the nation's GDP (0.8%) to do it. So they went ahead anyway. They lost three men on the ground and of the 33 they sent into space came within a whisker of killing five of them: all three on Apollo 13, and the LEM crew on Apollo 11 who almost ran out of fuel looking for a safe landing spot. And while you might point out that the Apollo 11 LEM crew still had 25 seconds of fuel left when they touched down, compare that to the margin of safety we set for aircraft, which can still glide if they lose engines.

While I agree broadly with the conclusion of the MIT critique, what I'm suggesting is that the engineering enterprise might have a degree of freedom they may not have considered, which is a willingness to take high levels of human casualties. The degree to which we value human life is a recent innovation. In the 1830s, trading ships began traveling between New England and California. That meant crossing Cape Horn in the winter, one way or another, and the casualty rates were appalling by modern standards. Sailors were routinely swept off the deck or fell from ice caked rigging to near instant death in freezing waters. But this was viewed as an acceptable price to pay in order to supply the New England shoe factories with cheaper leather.

While I don't think the proposed schedule is at all feasible, just from the time it will take to decide to *do* this thing, we might not necessarily have to wait until all the safety concerns are addressed to contemporary standards for things like ships and aircraft. Of course I wouldn't dream of boarding a ship to Mars unless I was 99% certain of surviving to death by old age, but some people might be happy to do it with 50%, or even less. Of course populating the mission with the wing suit contingent might have other unexpected effects...

Well, dismissing the suit because iof this kind of technicality is certainly feasible, but the reasoning behind it is circular.

If someone's legal status of "person" isn't recognized by the courts, then it is likely NOBODY can have the standing to bring suit on their behalf. There is, in a purely technical sense, there is nobody TO bring a suit on behalf of.

It turns out there are *other* grounds for establishing standing. It's not necessary to show that you are directly affected by some action to bring a First Amendment suit against a government entity for example. Such a suit brought on 14th Amendment "due process" grounds would put the court in a bind: it could not dismiss the suit because of standing without, in effect, making a ruling, or at least a determination.

We may well be forced to clarify the basis of indvidual "personhood" in the law by advancing technology; possibly AI, possibly even biotechnology. What if research into intelligence enhancement produced a chimp that could score above 100 on an IQ test that had been devised to handle humans with speech loss? Would it be reasonable to deny that chimp legal personhood while allowing someone who'd had a stroke to retain his? Why?

Well do children get to vote? Hold office?

The state takes a protective stance toward children that it does not toward adults, because children while human are neither competent to exercise adult freedoms nor fully capable of defending themselves against adult humans. The state recognizes the human rights of children less in protecting their exercise of free rights or participation in the public sphere than by protecting them from arm and ensuring they are nurtured to some minimal standard.

Presumably the status sought for chips is similar. To turn your questions around, is it OK to capture children from their native environment as bush meat or for purposes of experimentation?

When you're apply reductio ad absurdum to a proposal, you ought to ensure the nature of that proposal is unchanged, otherwise you're just scoring emotional points.

Cherry browns are quieter than Cherry Blues. However this is far from silent. Browns are quite noisy in comparison to dome switch keyboards which are standard today. I bought a mechanical keyboard with Kailh brown switches because I thought I might use it in the library, but it's far too loud. From what I've seen the Cherry Browns are just as loud, but they have a slightly nicer sound.

The Cherry patents have run out and Kailh is making a less expensive knock-off that's appearing on some sub-$100 keyboards. I'm typing on a cheap Kailh brown keyboard now -- the nixeus moda. It's not bad. It takes me back to some of the early Macintosh keyboards -- chunky and simple. Because of the mechanical switches the keyboard is two inches thick. A wrist wrest is probably a good idea (remember those?).

After many years of typing on Thinkpad keyboards I've actually come to prefer the quietness and lesser key travel of a scissors switch to the old mechanical keyboards. I've gone back to mechanical however because those scissors switches just don't last long enough. Between six months and a year the switches start to fall apart.

To tell you the truth I find the noisiness of mechanical switches irritating. I have a very old Hewlett Packard AT clone keyboard in the attic, complete with giant DIN connector. I might give that a whirl; as I recall it felt almost as good as a model M but was much quieter. I think that might be close to my ideal keyboard, except that takes up a ton of space. I prefer a tenkeyless design.

Oh, for Pete's sake this is not the 1918 Flu; it's not going spread like wildfire in first world sanitary conditions. We're not a third world country, yet. Ebola only spreads from symptomatic patients, and possibly through corpses through West African funeral practices. In the US most people go to the hospital when they're sick and are prepared for burial by a professional undertaker.

It's highly unlikely that the deputy contracted the infection just by walking into a house full of asymptomatic people.

Anyhow, get used to it. Emergent infectious agents emerge because of two things: local ecological disruption, and international commerce. We're going to be seeing a lot more emergent pathogens in this century.

My bet, however, is on the re-emergence of an old, familiar killer. Yellow fever has on multiple occasions depopulated US cities prior to the 20th C. Dengue is making a comeback in the US, and it's transmitted by the same mosquito species: Aedes aegypti.

No, the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy is that it doesn't work for long.