Add IPX8 to the high specs.

I did manage to find some metrics for disease transmission. There are a variety, but the primary one is R0, the "basic reproduction number". Measles is one of the most communicable diseases, with an R0 of between 12 and 18. Ebola is one of the least communicable diseases, with an R0 between 1 and 2.

Here's a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

It's Wikipdedia, but contains links to its sources, which are WHO and CDC for the measles number and an international research study published in September for Ebola. The latter suggests that if just half of the Ebola cases could be avoided, the R0 would drop below 1, causing the disease to die out. That means Ebola is so hard to transmit that it's just barely able to continue.

In contrast, Measles is so communicative that it's expected that 90% of the people who come into contact with an infected person will get it.

You're so wrong and so backwards here, it's not even funny.

Cite? I've never heard of, nor have I been able to find, any numeric rating scale for communicability, much less documentation of those two numbers for those two diseases.

Assuming the measure exists, and that those numbers are accurate, I strongly suspect that the scale measures difficulty of transmission, and that lower numbers indicate more communicable diseases. Measles is spread via aerosol transmission, Ebola is not.

If I was Job [...]

Sorry to get all theological for a moment, but most people don't realise that Yahweh's answer was actually pretty good. Job was written as a philosophical piece to address the question of whether or not bad things happen to good people because they or an ancestor did something wrong. Yahweh's answer was "no, I'm just arbitrary". If you replace "Yahweh" with "the universe", that answer is still more or less correct today.

I'm not American, and I certainly doubt that mall cops exist.

On the Internet, too many people think that "critical thinking" means memorising lots of Latin names for logical fallacies.

What is the case in which you would -not- call a biological change "evolution", and how is that different from the mere criteria for "reproduction"?

To start with, any time the change was brought about by deliberate, external intervention. For example, Bt-expressing corn, or glyphosphate-resistant crops, are obvious examples of "intelligent design" in the literal, non-pseudoscientific sense. We know this because "we" (i.e. humans) made these modifications ourselves, by a known and reproducible mechanism. I would argue that conventional breeding isn't really "evolution" either, although it relies on more natural phenomena rather than direct genome manipulation.

The fact that these biological changes are genuinely intelligent design does not prove the general case, however, because we've only had the technology for direct genetic manipulation for a few decades, and only know about selective breeding for a few millennia. For other biological changes, we assume evolution, because the directly observed mechanisms by which evolution operates rely on processes that we know have been possible for hundreds of millions of years (if not billions). If you want us to start considering intelligent design, you need to demonstrate a mechanism that predates human civilization.

we have not actually observed it happening

Um, wrong.

If the choices boil down to "wall them off and let them die" or "spread the epidemic far and wide" -- yeah, I know which one I'd choose.

So far it appears that the more treatment is attempted, the worse it gets, because the caregivers are at such risk, and some will need treatment in turn... rinse and repeat until there are no caregivers left.

Quarantine may not be kind to the victims, but spreading it around so everyone can share isn't kind to anyone.

I suggest sending Air Force One to Liberia, with Obama aboard. Wonder what tune he'd be whistling then...

Even if that worked, high doses of vitamin C can cause bleeding. Hmmm... maybe it was the gun after all.

File it under "stuff that matters".

A lot of arguments for open source are based on things which people outside the project could in principle accomplish, but in practice seldom do. So it's reassuring at least that an experienced developer can build the two most popular browsers from scratch. It means the arguments aren't hollow. I've seen closed source projects that were purchased by companies, only to find out that getting them to build on any computer but the one it was developed on is a serious engineering challenge.

That the process of building these browsers from scratch is somewhat arcane will come as no surprise to any experienced developer. But that it's not so arcane that it's impractical to figure out is good news.

And if an individual's immune response is slow or poor, there may not BE any antibodies until too late for the test to catch.

The obvious solution is a 4 week quarantine (to make sure every case is discovered -- a few may incubate beyond the usual) everyone who's been in West Africa.

This isn't "denying a citizen entry"; it's delaying it due to sheer common sense.

Better, tho, would be to quarantine the affected parts of West Africa as best we can; let people in, but don't let them back out. Because what we're doing now is pretty much guaranteeing ebola's spread.

You could also quickly and easily negate any sort of protest... including protests against using chemical restraint on the public.

Who are the "bad guys" is generally dependent on what laws you have and who enforces them. YOUR side won't always be in charge.

My first thought was -- what if it hits a kid or small adult? I'd guess their dosage assumes a roughly 150 pound adult, because that way it'll stop the "more dangerous" persons. I guess anyone under the presumed body mass had better not get hit, eh?