My odds on winning the lottery for hundreds of millions of dollars, and buying a ticket on a Soyuz to the Space Station are *vastly* better than your odds of catching ebola.

For that matter, my odds of getting killed when someone "looses control" of their car and jumps the sidewalk are zillions of times higher than catching ebola.

Oh... and I work not a few hundred yearas from where one of the nurses that was suspected of having it was sent.

                    mark, in the home of the of the terrified and stupid

Cheer up, my friends said, things could be worse. So I cheered up, and, sure enough, they got worse.

                mark "if I am depressed, it is for good and sufficent reasons, and if I wasn't depressed, I wouldn't be facing reality"*

* copyright, me, 1983

Legal:? Last week, I heard a speech by Vint Cerf, and he says the next iteration of google car will NOT HAVE A GAS OR BREAK PEDDLE, OR A STEERING WHEEL AT ALL.

              mark

As others of that culture were. Um, guys, is it unreasonable of me to not assume that they burnt them due to plague, but rather that they were burnt down by invaders, and there was no one left to live there?

                mark

Google car ain't going anywhere.

Last week, we had an IPv6 transition seminar where I work, and the keynote speaker was none other than Vint Cerf.

His title of "Internet evangelist" is right - sorta like, I dunno, Pat Robertson.

He told us that the next iteration of google car will *NOT* have a steering wheel, brake, or gas peddle. I quote, "you might be in the back, drinking, or doing crosswords, and so you won't have the context if an alarm goes off, and you'll do the wrong thing".

Now, when I drive home, one road goes from two narrow lanes, with the center line going away to no center line, cars are parked on one side (there's a park on the other), and busses use this route. Go ahead, tell me that anyone's software can handle that road... and we're in a old, big suburb of Washington, DC.

                mark "and I don't want *you* to have a flying car, either, since you'd crash into my second-floor bedroom"

And George W. Bush and the Republicans, pandering to their funnymentalist base, close to stopped all stem cell research...

And killed Superman.

Hmmm, Dick cheney *does* seem to channel Lex Luthor....

              mark

I'll give you one: preservatives.

Many years ago, at one job, I was drinking several cans of soda a day. One day, while eating lunch, I started thinking about the label: 1/10 of 1% preservative. So, 1% from drinking 10 cans... and a hundred cans, which might be one month, is a pound of preservative.....

No need for embalming when you go, you're already well-preserved.

                    mark

Easy: first build several *real* space stations, not "outposts in space", that serve the same way airports do, and use orbit-to-orbit ships - true spacegoing vessels. Once those are up, interplanetary travel is *much* cheaper.

Then we build the magelev launchers on the Moon....

                mark

Yeah, under Bush the W, the US prison population surpassed that of the Soviet Union's prisons at their worst under Stalin.

But now that populations are falling, I'd say the first things to go are the UNCONSTITUTIONAL PRIVATIZED PRISONS (aka slave labor shops).

          mark

Child,

        Your odds of getting ebola are significantly less than mine of winning the lottery and buying a flight on a Soyuz to the ISS. The odds that someone who should have stopped driving years ago, or a drunk, or someone texting, will run you down with their car is hundreds of thousands of time higher.

      Lessee: ~300M Americans, > 40K killed in auto accidents; 2 dead from ebola.

                    mark

A techie mailing list I'm on has multiple people ranting about the absolutely bs that happens - not the way aircraft comm works, not the way this, that and the other work, and the plot...um, what plot?

                mark

First, let's skip over the whole idiotic concept of twitter as a serious medium of communication (quick, here's 140 chars, tell me everything you know), and go to places that you can actually write coherent sentences - that'd be anywhere from email, to usenet, to websites that allow long comments (or your own website).

Back in the day, we used to get trolls on a usenet group I was a regular in. Some where drive-by shooting, never seen again; frequently, we made sarcastic comments about their post. Then there were the longer posts, from someone who might even come back.

Y'know, I understand that about 1,000 years ago and more, if a bard, or someone, made a satire of you, you might as well kill yourself, because no one would ever forget it (admitedly, they didn't travel a lot back then, and the supply of humor was a lot smaller).

Our answer was to MST3k that person. Doing so, of course, requires intellegence, a good familiarity with language, and frequently, some basic logic. I don't think *anyone* everr came back after being misted....

It's a much more elegant solution, and more enjoyable to everyone else, than to simply JUMP DOWN THE ASSHOLE'S THROUGHT WITH COMBAT BOOTS ON.

                        mark "come on, meet me at x, and show me that you meant that crap"*

* Now, my sword, my walking stick, or just 911?

Lessee, my chances of catching ebola are significantly below those of my winning the lottery and buying a trip the the Station... but the media, esp. Faux, is screaming about ebola. (And I happen to work no more than a few hundred yards from a facility that had one of those possibly exposed.)

We won't mention allegedly science programming channels with supernatural crap.

And then there's the textbooks in Texas and other southern states, where they'd trying to take out evolution. And the budget cuts for scentific research.

And we also won't mention the climate change deniers.

They mostly managed to avoid science in school, it's all magic to most users, and they think that the LATEST IPHONE IS THE MOST IMPRTANT ADVANCE IN TECHNOLOGY THIS CENTURY!!!!!

                  mark "beam me up, Scotty, there's no intelligent life here"

Um, more likely price. Or didn't you see the lawsuit, months ago, from the former Oracle exec, who was alleging that Oracle management underpaid him, becuase $10k or $20k less per year was "good enough for an Indian".

              mark

From Last Starfighter

              mark