BTW an American plug can handle 15 amps easily; it's how I run my spare heater.

Yeah. But 15 amps on a 110V socket isn't as much power as 15 amps on a 220V socket.

Of course, you can change the breaker that's in use to increase the current that the socket can handle. Check that it's rated for the increased power draw, but you can get 30A, 45A, 60A and 100A breakers in North America to replace the standard 15A breaker that most sockets run on.

Because that *still wouldn't solve the main problem for Afghanistan*- which is the cross-border civil war. Making that border something more than just a line on a map would end troop movements across the border for a *very* long time (well, at least if you wanted healthy, ready to fight troops on the other side, instead of troops with cancer and less than 24 hours to live).

...In the way that meeting the guy who sings for the band playing at the mall on Labor Day is like meeting Bono.

If you consider a virus to only be the infectious particles outside of a cell, that's true. However, that's not even the interesting portion of a virus's existence. It's just a kind of dormant spore.

When a cell gets infected with a virus, one could argue that the original identity of the cell is lost, and the newly reprogrammed cell now *is* the virus, and it is in its active phase. The cell is born again. It is no longer concerned with replicating its original self (or the organism it belongs to), but instead it becomes mainly dedicated to replicating the virus.

There is no doubt that the virus is alive at that point, as it consumes energy and cranks out more spore particles. When the cell bursts and releases the particles, it goes back into the dormant phase until it comes alive again in new cells.

So I'd argue that a virus is alive, but only intermediately. It has the ability to suspend itself into pure information between active states, then reconstitute itself.

It's life, but not as we know it.