Disclaimer - I'm talking about Scottish law ; I am not sure of the state of English law. I'm sure that Asda's Scottish advocates do know and can inform their English barrister associates which bits of Asda HQ's English laws are not going to work in Scotland.
If you can handle the civil disorder charges afterwards, you know since it is in a public place...
No, it's not in a public place. It's on private property (a supermarket) to which the public are *granted* access but do not have a *right* to access. Which is why they have to employ security guards who do not have the powers of the police (they can't touch you, except in self defence, nor detain you except under the normal conditions of a citizen's arrest). You do not have the right to go there - the store can refuse you access and demand that you leave (and you're then committing a public order offence if you don't then leave the private property).
If the store management object to you stripping your clothes off, then they can request that you leave. But they've invited you onto their property and if they don't like you stripping off and dancing naked down the aisles, it's for them to deal with, not the Police.
In a world where the Baby Jesus Butt Plug is a real artefact, and given the frequent public redneck masturbation on Slashdot over the buttocks of Obama, I can guess that slightly modified 9in Obama-dildoes are going to sell well.
The same tests on DNA from another man from the same era and locale but from a different Y-haplogroup
Where's the sample?
In archaeology (and palaeontology in general), you play the hand you're dealt. (Though you can try to stack the deck a little by choosing where to dig.)
maybe I have played/watched too much resident evil
Maybe you have. (What's "resident evil"?)
Unfortunately, this is not a game, and people are at risk. I've a colleague working in the area at the moment, and I'm due to be going back there in about April ; my neighbour's husband is worried about relatives who live in Ghana and his colleagues in Senegal.
I really think your concern about your conspiracy theories are a bit over-blown.
Note that the NewLink vaccine donated by Canada has demonstrated Ebola-like symptoms in many of the people who've been inoculated in Phase I trials, so it's entirely possible Canada Health has been giving those people
Hmmm, I wonder if, after vaccination with this (or one of the other in-development vaccines and treatments), the patient will then always return positive on the piss-in-a-pot type tests for Ebola which are also under development?
Of course, if they do return positive because of the vaccination, then they'll not be prevented from travelling on that basis - they show positive because of the vaccination, and the vaccination is reported in their vaccination passport (do you carry your vaccination passport along with your identification passport? I do, in the same wallet.). So they'll just get waved through any security check for perfectly good reasons.
Will this vaccine against this strain of Ebola protect against the 6 or 7 other strains of Ebola? Oh, now that's a question whose answer would be really quite important to know.
But Slashdot demands immediate action now, regardless of unimportant questions like that. Oh Noes!
I'll translate that into statistician speak : more patients die than absolutely necessary.
I'm not trying to make you feel bad - it's just a nasty situation.
Try one of the standard psychological tests : there is a run-away train on a line running towards a car with a family of five children in a car stuck on the tracks ; there is a set of points (errr, EN_US : switch??) which you can use to divert the runaway train into a siding where it will impact a wheelchair-bound man stuck in the crossing there. This is your situation. What do you do?
Nature doesn't care about how uncomfortable it makes you feel.
As I understood it - vacine - post infection is a moderately effective treatment
We don't know that for this disease. It is the case for some diseases, but... I'll spell it out: W_E D_O N_O_T K_N_O_W T_H_A_T...
And that is one of the things that we need to find out.
I still emotionally struggle with the clinical trial approach of giving half the participants a placebo to see how many of them die vs. the ones who were given the drug under study
You don't, generally, give the patients a placebo ; you give them the standard treatment. Generally, you're not interested in comparing whether your new treatment is better than nothing ; you're interested in finding out if your new treatment is better than the standard treatment.
And as your results (deaths, or whatever other end state you've defined, for example a 20% reduction in tumour size) come in, you assess the likelihood of the test treatment being better than the standard. If you reach a pre-defined level of confidence one way or the other then you switch people to the better treatment, but not until you reach that level of confidence.
Unfortunately, for Ebola, the best treatment at the moment is supportive care (fluids, essentially), with about a 30-40% survival rate.
Struggle with it emotionally. It's hard. That's why I gave that career path a body swerve when offered it (plus I hate working in offices).
Let me shed some light on this - a lot of people died of heart disease whilst heart medication was tested simply because the studies needed to be "double-blind" to ensure statistics' accuracy - thus medication that otherwise would've saved their lives was withheld
Properly designed and conducted double-blinded trials result in fewer deaths overall than badly conducted trials, if the drugs are any good. If the drugs are not any good (which is something you do not know until after you're at least part way into the trials), then people still die. But since you don't have an effective treatment, people are still going to die.
I did a reasonable chunk of medical statistics in my first year of university, and the department thought I was good enough that they wanted me to change to doing stats full time ; I didn't go into statistics because I couldn't stand the idea of my day job being to decided (in a cold-hearted, randomised, impersonal way) on people's life and death. Even when I knew - through having worked through the mathematics and having done the experimental design myself - that this was the way to minimise the number of deaths.
Simple. Use a portion of the 24,000 doses (a few thousand?) to spot vaccinate anyone who's had close contact with someone with Ebola, say all immediate family members.
OK, that's the first 100,000 doses of your 24,000 used. What are you going to do with the next -76,000 doses?
Most (not all) people in this area live in fairly extended families - mum, dad, several kids, one or several grandparents, maybe a cousin from the country. 6 to 8 per household might be a reasonable average.
Infections are running at about 1,000 cases per week, accelerating by about 40% per week. So this week, you'll need about 7,000 doses. Next week, you'll need another 9,800 (16,800 used so far), the week after another 13,720 (you're 6000 doses short already), the week after another 19,000 doses which you don't have. And now you're getting into the infections that may or may not result from your initial round of vaccinations, so maybe you'll stop having quite so many cases. But 3 weeks further down the line you're seeing cases from the 6,000 people you couldn't vaccinate.
All of which assumes that the vaccine is 100% effective. If it's 90% effective (which is pretty good, for a first generation vaccine), then you've still got a long way to go.
So many people are executed every year in various countries (even the US). Why not allocate them for research purposes?
I'll put my statistician's hat on to answer your fucking stupid scenario.
Are the immune systems of overweight drug-addicted white guys living on a high fat diet directly comparable to the immune systems of subsistence farmers who work a 12-14 hour day and are significantly malnourished, and also have several types of intestinal worms and other chronic infections? (And malaria too, active or passive.)
This is why you test your vaccine (or any other treatment) on a population as closely comparable as possible to your target population.
That leads to another problem with such a testing regime : a significant number of your target population are going to be pregnant or menstruating women, so how are you going to recruit pregnant death-row inmates to your trial? (This is actually a general problem with drug design and testing - there is an understandable reluctance to test drugs for safety and efficacy on pregnant women and unborn foetuses. Breast-feeding women and babies too ; same problem.)
Do people on Slashdot actually try to think through problems before spouting politically-motivated bullshit? Oh, sorry, I just noticed that you're an anonymous coward (with the emphasis on the "coward" part of that).
There's about a half-dozen such piss-in-a-pot tests in development - which is good! - but that means that each of the drug testing agencies in their distinct countries of origin need to confirm their effectiveness (false positive rates versus false negative rates), and that is going to take cases and time.
The design purpose of these is not to test people arriving in western countries, but to test people suspected of infection in the outbreak countries, which is a far more effective way of keeping the disease from getting out of those countries. Secondarily, the test kits might be used to screen people going into airport departure lounges (typically, they take 10-15 minutes, which is not disastrous in a security/ departure setting ; in an arrivals hall, there would be riots. And you've already had the exposure on board.)
I heard Ron Paul's name mentioned. Who is he, and what relevance does he have to the issue (IANA-American)?
much like visitors to some countries get vaccines for yellow fever
Every West African country I've been to, they won't let you in unless you've got an in-date vaccination certificate for Yellow Fever. That's every such country.
(They actually changed the required vaccine booklet for new issues to have a yellow cover, as a flag of the main disease they look for in it. My older one is grandfathered in though.)
And how is that going to get additional BSL-2 sterile bottling capacity built in under a year just how?
Oh, sorry, I disturbed your political posturing with a relevant question. I'll let you get back to grandstanding without reading the fucking article. Meanwhile, I've got friends in the area, trying to do their jobs. But don't let the real world disturb your political ranting.
That may be the case in your country, because you let the religious idiots be in charge of the politicians. That's not the case in the rest of the world.
(Also this wasn't stem cells at all).
Ah, following the traditions of Slashdot by not RTFA, or WTFP (Watching TF Programme), or knowing WTFYWOA (WTF You're Wittering On About). Yes, the study did use stem cells. Specifically, the stem cells that continually regenerate nerve cells in the nose, to re-connect olefactory nerves to the central nervous system, after the CNS nerves get broken by environmental damage. Didn't you understand the point that the olefactory nerve is the only bit of the CNS that is actually directly exposed to the environment?
the problem is that American beer is crap unless distilled to vapour (when it is effective for clearing out blocked sinuses and removing wallpaper) or frozen solid (when it is good against sprains, bee stings and such like minor injuries).
Quite why Americans drink the stuff when it has so many better uses... simply incomprehensible.
I find lasers very problematic. It's not the laser per se that's the problem, it's the bloody great tank of seawater that splashes around all over the place from the shark that the laser is mounted on. Seawater and stuff I want to post isn't a good mixture.
It's been 25 years, so it's possible details have changed, but I doubt the basic rules have changed that much.
The rules haven't changed much. People work to get around them as much as possible, but it gets increasingly difficult. And, to be honest, when I'm witnessing wireline jobs onshore, one of the things that I'm required to do by the (oil company) operations geologist is to audit the driving behaviour of the wireline crew, if they're not staying on site. (If you're the only wireline crew in the country, and 300 miles / 2 days drive from the rigsite, and there's no accommodation within 3 hours drive of the rigsite, you might ass well have them stay in the camp.)
So just imaging a large ship except it has it's cargo in pods. Two or three ships meet up at locations their AI deem to be most optimal and switch only some of their cargo depending on what is going where and then they continue on.
I take it from this that you've never done ship-to-ship cargo transfer. You talk blithely of transferring loads from one vessel to another, both of them moving with respect to each other, and both of them moving with respect to the sea surface (errr, momentum? remember inertia? Newton's first law?), and the sea surface being both movable and flexible.
Yes, it can be done. We move thousands of tonnes of equipment and supplies onto and off our drilling rig every tear. And we take strenuous efforts to minimise the number of transfers because they're (1) dangerous to personnel ; (2) dangerous to the equipment of the rig ; (3) dangerous to the equipment in the container ; and (4) slow. Ten transfers an hour is pretty damned fast, and that is only if you have all the loads in the right places to lift off, and the returning loads ready to go on the boat, and having space on the rig (and boat) to drop each load into. Once you have to start to play "deck chess", then your transfer rate goes through the floor.
But such crippling objections aside, what do you think you mean by "cargo pods"? They'd need to be cuboid units (which will tesselate perfectly, with no wasted space between units), each with standardised fittings for lifting them with standardised equipment which will operate the same the world over, and which are all the same size (or small range of sizes). you've just described the "shipping container". Changing the name to a "pod" isn't going to change anything.
There is a huge inertia in these systems. You'd have to launch a globally effective system, with at least three ports and three vessels all equipped to handle and transfer the "pods". And you'd probably still find that you'd have a system that worked in multiples of a "shipping container".
I remember someone here shared the notion that x white people had to get the disease to get a vaccination underway.
Leaving aside the "x white body count" shit (remember, most of the work so far has been on the basis of fears of weaponised EBV), you do realise that before you can have a vaccination programme, you firstly need to have a vaccine that works, with a reasonable degree of safety and efficacy (so trials are unavoidable) ; then you need to produce large quantities of the vaccine (GSK estimate that this step is going to take a year ; this is their business, so I accept their estimate of the timing) ; and then you're going to need to ship it and distribute it, which is also going to take weeks to months.
However many white bodies we are from an effective vaccine, we're also on the order of a year from a vaccine.
Is there actually a law of nature that requires there to be a vaccine for a particular virus. I don't see that there is, of necessity.
Catholicism is Christianity in entirety - it has essentially two main branches, Roman Catholic, and Protestant (or Church of England based Christianity, and also includes most other non-Roman Catholic Christian branches such as Baptists, Methodist etc, which are all offshoots of the CoE branch). But both sit under the label of Catholicism.
So, there's no Coptic church? No Orthodox church? And they're just the ones that there is no doubt about them being Christian. You could have a slightly longer discussion about whether Mormons are Christian or not - only a thin condom rubber between the two from where I sit.
You need to retake religious studies
Someone needs to re-take their RS exam, but I think you're in that remedial class too.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer - I'm talking about Scottish law ; I am not sure of the state of English law. I'm sure that Asda's Scottish advocates do know and can inform their English barrister associates which bits of Asda HQ's English laws are not going to work in Scotland.
No, it's not in a public place. It's on private property (a supermarket) to which the public are *granted* access but do not have a *right* to access. Which is why they have to employ security guards who do not have the powers of the police (they can't touch you, except in self defence, nor detain you except under the normal conditions of a citizen's arrest). You do not have the right to go there - the store can refuse you access and demand that you leave (and you're then committing a public order offence if you don't then leave the private property).
If the store management object to you stripping your clothes off, then they can request that you leave. But they've invited you onto their property and if they don't like you stripping off and dancing naked down the aisles, it's for them to deal with, not the Police.
The boundaries are subtle, but they are there.
What, if anything, is to stop you from taking your clothes off outside the booth? It doesn't have to be on the street, you know.
In a world where the Baby Jesus Butt Plug is a real artefact, and given the frequent public redneck masturbation on Slashdot over the buttocks of Obama, I can guess that slightly modified 9in Obama-dildoes are going to sell well.
Where's the sample?
In archaeology (and palaeontology in general), you play the hand you're dealt. (Though you can try to stack the deck a little by choosing where to dig.)
Maybe you have. (What's "resident evil"?) Unfortunately, this is not a game, and people are at risk. I've a colleague working in the area at the moment, and I'm due to be going back there in about April ; my neighbour's husband is worried about relatives who live in Ghana and his colleagues in Senegal.
I really think your concern about your conspiracy theories are a bit over-blown.
Hmmm, I wonder if, after vaccination with this (or one of the other in-development vaccines and treatments), the patient will then always return positive on the piss-in-a-pot type tests for Ebola which are also under development?
Of course, if they do return positive because of the vaccination, then they'll not be prevented from travelling on that basis - they show positive because of the vaccination, and the vaccination is reported in their vaccination passport (do you carry your vaccination passport along with your identification passport? I do, in the same wallet.). So they'll just get waved through any security check for perfectly good reasons.
Will this vaccine against this strain of Ebola protect against the 6 or 7 other strains of Ebola? Oh, now that's a question whose answer would be really quite important to know.
But Slashdot demands immediate action now, regardless of unimportant questions like that. Oh Noes!
I'll translate that into statistician speak : more patients die than absolutely necessary.
I'm not trying to make you feel bad - it's just a nasty situation.
Try one of the standard psychological tests : there is a run-away train on a line running towards a car with a family of five children in a car stuck on the tracks ; there is a set of points (errr, EN_US : switch??) which you can use to divert the runaway train into a siding where it will impact a wheelchair-bound man stuck in the crossing there. This is your situation. What do you do?
Nature doesn't care about how uncomfortable it makes you feel.
We don't know that for this disease. It is the case for some diseases, but ... I'll spell it out : ...
W_E
D_O
N_O_T
K_N_O_W
T_H_A_T
And that is one of the things that we need to find out.
You don't, generally, give the patients a placebo ; you give them the standard treatment. Generally, you're not interested in comparing whether your new treatment is better than nothing ; you're interested in finding out if your new treatment is better than the standard treatment.
And as your results (deaths, or whatever other end state you've defined, for example a 20% reduction in tumour size) come in, you assess the likelihood of the test treatment being better than the standard. If you reach a pre-defined level of confidence one way or the other then you switch people to the better treatment, but not until you reach that level of confidence.
Unfortunately, for Ebola, the best treatment at the moment is supportive care (fluids, essentially), with about a 30-40% survival rate.
Struggle with it emotionally. It's hard. That's why I gave that career path a body swerve when offered it (plus I hate working in offices).
Properly designed and conducted double-blinded trials result in fewer deaths overall than badly conducted trials, if the drugs are any good. If the drugs are not any good (which is something you do not know until after you're at least part way into the trials), then people still die. But since you don't have an effective treatment, people are still going to die.
I did a reasonable chunk of medical statistics in my first year of university, and the department thought I was good enough that they wanted me to change to doing stats full time ; I didn't go into statistics because I couldn't stand the idea of my day job being to decided (in a cold-hearted, randomised, impersonal way) on people's life and death. Even when I knew - through having worked through the mathematics and having done the experimental design myself - that this was the way to minimise the number of deaths.
OK, that's the first 100,000 doses of your 24,000 used. What are you going to do with the next -76,000 doses?
Most (not all) people in this area live in fairly extended families - mum, dad, several kids, one or several grandparents, maybe a cousin from the country. 6 to 8 per household might be a reasonable average.
Infections are running at about 1,000 cases per week, accelerating by about 40% per week. So this week, you'll need about 7,000 doses. Next week, you'll need another 9,800 (16,800 used so far), the week after another 13,720 (you're 6000 doses short already), the week after another 19,000 doses which you don't have. And now you're getting into the infections that may or may not result from your initial round of vaccinations, so maybe you'll stop having quite so many cases. But 3 weeks further down the line you're seeing cases from the 6,000 people you couldn't vaccinate.
All of which assumes that the vaccine is 100% effective. If it's 90% effective (which is pretty good, for a first generation vaccine), then you've still got a long way to go.
Simple?
I'll put my statistician's hat on to answer your fucking stupid scenario.
Are the immune systems of overweight drug-addicted white guys living on a high fat diet directly comparable to the immune systems of subsistence farmers who work a 12-14 hour day and are significantly malnourished, and also have several types of intestinal worms and other chronic infections? (And malaria too, active or passive.)
This is why you test your vaccine (or any other treatment) on a population as closely comparable as possible to your target population.
That leads to another problem with such a testing regime : a significant number of your target population are going to be pregnant or menstruating women, so how are you going to recruit pregnant death-row inmates to your trial? (This is actually a general problem with drug design and testing - there is an understandable reluctance to test drugs for safety and efficacy on pregnant women and unborn foetuses. Breast-feeding women and babies too ; same problem.)
Do people on Slashdot actually try to think through problems before spouting politically-motivated bullshit? Oh, sorry, I just noticed that you're an anonymous coward (with the emphasis on the "coward" part of that).
The design purpose of these is not to test people arriving in western countries, but to test people suspected of infection in the outbreak countries, which is a far more effective way of keeping the disease from getting out of those countries. Secondarily, the test kits might be used to screen people going into airport departure lounges (typically, they take 10-15 minutes, which is not disastrous in a security/ departure setting ; in an arrivals hall, there would be riots. And you've already had the exposure on board.)
I heard Ron Paul's name mentioned. Who is he, and what relevance does he have to the issue (IANA-American)?
Every West African country I've been to, they won't let you in unless you've got an in-date vaccination certificate for Yellow Fever. That's every such country.
(They actually changed the required vaccine booklet for new issues to have a yellow cover, as a flag of the main disease they look for in it. My older one is grandfathered in though.)
Oh, sorry, I disturbed your political posturing with a relevant question. I'll let you get back to grandstanding without reading the fucking article. Meanwhile, I've got friends in the area, trying to do their jobs. But don't let the real world disturb your political ranting.
are small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
Still doesn't.
That may be the case in your country, because you let the religious idiots be in charge of the politicians. That's not the case in the rest of the world.
Ah, following the traditions of Slashdot by not RTFA, or WTFP (Watching TF Programme), or knowing WTFYWOA (WTF You're Wittering On About). Yes, the study did use stem cells. Specifically, the stem cells that continually regenerate nerve cells in the nose, to re-connect olefactory nerves to the central nervous system, after the CNS nerves get broken by environmental damage. Didn't you understand the point that the olefactory nerve is the only bit of the CNS that is actually directly exposed to the environment?
the problem is that American beer is crap unless distilled to vapour (when it is effective for clearing out blocked sinuses and removing wallpaper) or frozen solid (when it is good against sprains, bee stings and such like minor injuries).
Quite why Americans drink the stuff when it has so many better uses ... simply incomprehensible.
I find lasers very problematic. It's not the laser per se that's the problem, it's the bloody great tank of seawater that splashes around all over the place from the shark that the laser is mounted on. Seawater and stuff I want to post isn't a good mixture.
The rules haven't changed much. People work to get around them as much as possible, but it gets increasingly difficult. And, to be honest, when I'm witnessing wireline jobs onshore, one of the things that I'm required to do by the (oil company) operations geologist is to audit the driving behaviour of the wireline crew, if they're not staying on site. (If you're the only wireline crew in the country, and 300 miles / 2 days drive from the rigsite, and there's no accommodation within 3 hours drive of the rigsite, you might ass well have them stay in the camp.)
I take it from this that you've never done ship-to-ship cargo transfer. You talk blithely of transferring loads from one vessel to another, both of them moving with respect to each other, and both of them moving with respect to the sea surface (errr, momentum? remember inertia? Newton's first law?), and the sea surface being both movable and flexible.
Yes, it can be done. We move thousands of tonnes of equipment and supplies onto and off our drilling rig every tear. And we take strenuous efforts to minimise the number of transfers because they're (1) dangerous to personnel ; (2) dangerous to the equipment of the rig ; (3) dangerous to the equipment in the container ; and (4) slow. Ten transfers an hour is pretty damned fast, and that is only if you have all the loads in the right places to lift off, and the returning loads ready to go on the boat, and having space on the rig (and boat) to drop each load into. Once you have to start to play "deck chess", then your transfer rate goes through the floor.
But such crippling objections aside, what do you think you mean by "cargo pods"? They'd need to be cuboid units (which will tesselate perfectly, with no wasted space between units), each with standardised fittings for lifting them with standardised equipment which will operate the same the world over, and which are all the same size (or small range of sizes). you've just described the "shipping container". Changing the name to a "pod" isn't going to change anything.
There is a huge inertia in these systems. You'd have to launch a globally effective system, with at least three ports and three vessels all equipped to handle and transfer the "pods". And you'd probably still find that you'd have a system that worked in multiples of a "shipping container".
I wonder what proportion of Slashdot users today were conceived while we were posting? I bet it's not 0%, and I bet the number is increasing.
Leaving aside the "x white body count" shit (remember, most of the work so far has been on the basis of fears of weaponised EBV), you do realise that before you can have a vaccination programme, you firstly need to have a vaccine that works, with a reasonable degree of safety and efficacy (so trials are unavoidable) ; then you need to produce large quantities of the vaccine (GSK estimate that this step is going to take a year ; this is their business, so I accept their estimate of the timing) ; and then you're going to need to ship it and distribute it, which is also going to take weeks to months.
However many white bodies we are from an effective vaccine, we're also on the order of a year from a vaccine.
Is there actually a law of nature that requires there to be a vaccine for a particular virus. I don't see that there is, of necessity.
So, there's no Coptic church? No Orthodox church? And they're just the ones that there is no doubt about them being Christian. You could have a slightly longer discussion about whether Mormons are Christian or not - only a thin condom rubber between the two from where I sit.
Someone needs to re-take their RS exam, but I think you're in that remedial class too.