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Comment Re:Good news bad news time (Score 1) 74

The symptoms of pneumonic plague are coughing, sneezing, a fever, and sometimes chest pain, followed by often quite rapid death. Since it's pretty communicable and the pre-death symptoms are pretty typical for lots of things that do not bring people to the hospital, particularly when they don't have health insurance, containment (proper contaiment anyway) involves more than just treating walk-in cases.

Comment Re:Another way to bankrupt Social Security (Score 1) 68

Why? Retirement ages might have to go up, but that's only a bad thing if you've somehow spent your life doing something you hate and are counting the days until you can sit on a couch for ten or fifteen years waiting to die.

The most sensible solution to both problems would seem to be ditching the gamification of maximizing career progression from ages 18 to 65. Do something you enjoy. Take a break after the first ten years if you want to have some kids. Go back and do something you enjoy afterward. Maybe switch it up again in your forties or fifties. Lots of time left.

Seems the opposite of brutal.

Comment Re:Do not do it (Score 1) 44

Plumbing doesn't have universal standards either. You said it: "Adapters between copper and PEX piping exist."

My grandparents' place had aluminum wiring. You have to be a bit careful combining that with regular copper. Adapters exist.

There's some wifi smart home stuff, and there's some old 310/433 MHz X10 stuff, but the vast majority, including zigbee and thread, are based on IEEE 802.15.4, which, if you're familiar with computer stuff, you might strongly suspect is a standard. It's not a new one either, it was written in 2003; it's older than the wifi standard you're probably using right now. That's why Ikea can just move from zigbee to thread and keep backwards compatibility: it's a software change on the network and higher layers. Anyway, there are adapters between pretty much all the systems, even the oddballs.

I'm not really sure what offends some segment of Slashdot so much about lighbulbs you can turn on and off without getting up. You guys had TV remotes didn't you? Conveniently located thermostats? Hot and cold water on tap?

Comment Re:How LARGE is England? (Score 1) 28

The population weighted density of Nevada is one of the highest in the US.

You're insisting on using population density, or for some reason, aboslute size. The denominator for population density is land area. But nobody is running fibre to every square metre. As I said (and you ignored) the important metric is population weighted density. That's the average population density each person lives in. If most people are clustered in towns and cities, this is high. So Nevada, for example, has one of the highest population weighted densities in the US despite having one of the lowest population densities. Running fibre to houses in those kind of places is fairly easy because most people live close to each other. The long city-to-city links aren't really much of a problem.

Comment Re:How LARGE is England? (Score 3, Insightful) 28

Not really. The population weighted density of the US and Europe are fairly similar, although England is on the high side, similar to California and Nevada.

Population weighted density is the correct metric, not population density. Nobody is proposing running fibre to every square metre.

Comment Re:Fleas (Score 3, Interesting) 49

The Nature article is okay, although the title could be better. The Slashdot summary is crap. The Nature subtitle is "When hunter-gatherers began living close to animals, the pathogens that cause the plague and leprosy got closer too."

Zoonotic infection didn't start with animal herding. Herpes simplex type 2 likely jumped to our ancestors from chimps more than a million years ago. Zoonotic infection became much more common, i.e. "the pathogens got closer" with herding.

Plague might or might not be due to herding. It could be: humans tend to put their food scraps in dumps away from their living space but throw things like chicken or horse feed on the ground where mice can get it. Agriculture in general also lets us live in higher concentrations, which makes successful crossover, i.e. it infects enough people to notice, more likely.

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