The previous major paper on the outbreak (in Science, a week and a bit ago) had around 50 authors, five of whom died of Ebola before the report got published.
Obviously they're faking their deaths in order to get more grant money. They probably want a green card too. Disgusting filthy foreigners!
It may surprise you to learn that there are skilled people who live in these countries, and are unable to travel to their work because of the quarantine. My vessel had lost the use of 3 members of staff before the outbreak spread to Nigeria, when we lost access to another 5 or 6.
Quarantine is an appropriate response - which is why we've imposed it on the vessel - but the people of the area also have the right to carry out their normal businesses and lives when possible. Even if the disease does kill the pessimistic case scenario of 1.4million, that will still leave around 18.4 million people in the affected countries. And they'll have the right to pursue their trade and business, including international travel.
At least tap water --- if properly supplied --- has gone through the chlorination process
And according to WHO, chlorination kills the ebola virus
And there is your answer to the question of why they don't burn the bodies. They bury the bodies triple-bagged and soaked in strong chlorine bleach, with more bleach between the layers of bags. Let's be generous and say 10 litres (approx 10 kilos) of industrial grade bleach (18% by weight available chlorine, this stuff will peel the skin off your hands) per body. Allow another 10 kilos for triple layers of body bags.
How much wood does it take to cremate a body thoroughly?
There's nothing to stop you from drinking chlorine-sterilised water.
Bottled water, in the west, is purely a product of marketing. The only reasons for buying it are convenience (e.g. I put a couple of litre bottles into my pack to go hill-walking with) and if you've swallowed the bullshit fed to you by advertisers. If you think that you can taste the difference between standard tap water and bottled water then you're doing better than double-blinded trial participants. Many water-bottling plants in the west simply take their water straight from the municipal feed.
Outside the West, it's a different matter. I work in Africa ; bottled water is a necessity there.
When the Ebola outbreak spread to Nigeria, we enacted our ship's policy (decided some years previously) of not accepting any staff on board originating from that country or travelling through it. We're leaving our own colleagues and friends (two of the people I've been supervising for the last year included) in that country and will not be hiring them again until the outbreak is over. Totally cold-hearted and callous.
With 180 people on board the ship, we are not going to take the risk of letting that disease on board. We have no illusions about how fast disease can spread aboard, despite the best efforts of our medical staff. If that means that we've got to be callous, callous we will be.
We've already lost several days of operations because of delays in sourcing replacement staff. That's cost us (western operating companies) several million dollars - I don't have the exact figures because I'm not on the vessel at the moment.
Just because something is hateful doesn't mean that it's not insightful. For example, if I say "There are a large number of neo-Nazi fuckwits in America, and I think they're a good reason for collective retroactive application of thermonuclear birth control." I am being both hateful AND accurate, which is a major component of insightfulness.
Or are you going to claim that there are not large numbers of neo-Nazi fuckwits in America? Are you going to claim that on Slashdot? In a thread sparked by an (American, judging from his comments) neo-Nazi fuckwit?
I think its saying all of that mass doesn't go to a point of infinite density,
The abstract is explicit that their calculations (the details of which are way over my head) have a collapsing star "bouncing" before it's surface goes below the radius for it's event horizon. That's a finite radius, long before the singularity happens.
What I don't get is why they think that this prevents a black hole from ever forming, since there argument is based on the rate of emission of Hawking radiation blasting the infalling mass back into space - similarly to the Eddington limit to accretion rates on quasars. That would limit the rate at which matter could fall into the forming black hole, but I don't see how it would prevent a black hole forming.
Hmmm, my S5 certainly mentions this in TFM, including the IP67 rating. No mention of it on the case though. But I can see the 'O'-ring that provides the seal and the separate modules that provide the electrical and mechanical interfaces.
But then again, who reads manuals these days.
I write manuals often enough. I read other manual-writers work. Normally while the device in question is taking it's first charge.
You had IDE hard drives? My first efforts with Linux were with IIRC Slackware and a thing called Yggdrasil (a pre-pre-SuSE?). On a 42MB MFM hard drive which I'd hung on an RLL controller, giving me 60MB of space to work in. 4MB RAM, 386dx on a 25MHz clock.
Those were the days. Did I have a modem then? I certainly didn't have a network card.
I wanted to get your opinion on who should pay the costs associated with attending conferences.
Your employer.
In the past, I've covered costs associated with attending some local (in town) conferences, but despite claims to be willing to cover some costs associated with conferences, training, and certifications, my requests have been denied.
If your employer agreed that your attending the conference was worthwhile for your work, then they pay, and you get your supervisor's written agreement to that before making your booking (and sending the bill to Accounts for payment, attached to the relevant Purchase Order countersigned by your boss. Or whatever your local procedures are.
If you want the course or conference, but your boss disagrees with you about it's value, than you go, you pay the tickets and your bills, and you retain the value. And you probably leave shortly after, for a better employer.
If your Boss is only partly convinced, then you get written agreement about what they'll cover, what you'll cover, and crucially, who owns any resultant certifications or training. In particular, cover how much they will attempt to claw back if you leave "shortly" after the conference/ training/ certification. Settle this, in writing, before you leave. If necessary, take it to the point of getting a contract amendment written up with Human Remains (define things like "shortly", above).
If it's worth that hassle, then the event is probably worth the candle ; if it's not worth that hassle, then is it really worth atending?
often don't have any legal options to purchase movies, or the money to purchase them even if they did.
Examples of such countries?
From what I was seeing in Gabon last week (last time I'll be there for several years, 3rd or 4th visit in the last year, IIRC), they have no shortage of legal options for buying movies, and many more for buying discs which are commercially stamped from probably illegal copies of discs. I fail to think of any other reason for a Francophone country with an Anglophone minority to be selling DVDs in Chinese (originals imported by migrant workers, probably) and Russian language (source unknown).
Bandwidth on the other hand? Downloading a standard-resolution DVD would take several days if you could steal all the bandwidth of a major (200+ bed) hotel. That would cost... well, several days of wages, plus several months of income for the downloading machine.
Remember when you had dial-up. Remember web-surfing on 33.6bps? Actually, no, I suspect that you don't. You're taking for granted bandwidth which for much of the world simply does not exist. You should try being on my work vessel for a time : a 4Mbps satellite link with 2Mbps allocated to one particular service, 1Mbps for phone lines in and out (about 1 in 5 phone calls fails due to no line available - retry in 30 seconds), and the remaining 1Mbps allocated for all business and personal use between 180 people on board. (And we're a hundred kilometres from any mobile phone coverage, so forget that. Not that mobile phones are allowed outside the Faraday cage when we go into radio silence for explosives/ flammables operations.)
I'm sure someone will trot out the "but countries that have banned guns..." yes indeed, they have pretty much eliminated gun violence. Of course criminals moved onto knives, bats, and other things.
For your information, people had knives and cludgels a few hundred millennia before they had guns. Removing guns from society did not remove the pre-existing blade weapons and blunt-force weapons.
Removing guns from society is something that we've been working on since the mid-17th century, when they became cheap enough to be owned in significant numbers by non-military people or groups. The difficulty with correspondingly removing edge weapons and blunt-force weapons from society is that they are also fundamental tools. So, when I travel a quarter of the way around the world, I carry some of my working tools in my cabin baggage (computer, rock colour reference charts, cameras, microscope) and some has to go into hold baggage (large microscope, as it's a club ; screwdriver for adjusting microscope tensioners, as it's a point weapon ; engineer's scribes for picking rocks apart under microscopes, as they're pointed weapons too ; knife for scraping slivers off rocks, as it's an edge weapon). They're all perfectly valid tools (the cabin-baggage microscope has attracted attention in the past - of the "I've never seen one of those" variety.), which can also be viewed as weapons.
There's a high likelihood that you travel from home to your work in a piece of weaponry with the energetic potentials of a significant piece of artillery. and I'd suspect that you had to have training in it's use and obey regulations concerning that artillery. Probably you have more regulations concerning that artillery piece than a hand gun or rifle.
I tried that, but no matter how hard I hit the thing, only a couple of the keys on the underside would press, and I couldn't make any intelligible words.
I think you need to revise your understanding of Doppler shifts. They're not dependent on the speed of light, but are properties of any periodic phenomenon occurring in systems with parts in relative motion.
The apparent superluminal redshift of distant galaxies does not mean that they're travelling at any significant speed in their local context (in the same way that the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are not in rapid relative motion), but that the space between the observed distant galaxy and ourselves has been expanding for a long time and an accelerating rate.
I see your points, but I'm also seeing a wet chemistry (if not exactly "bucket" chemistry) process that is producing what looks like pretty flat (nanometre level of flatness)surfaces in quite substantial areas. And the electrical properties of that substrate can be controlled to a significant degree. There's potential there for micro-mechanical systems, or chip substrates. Quite a lot of interesting potential there.
Hypothesizing that you could use this to produce low-power electronics for, say a wireless environmental sensor of some sort, how does the idea of environmental sensors that are inherently biodegradable on a months-to-years time scale grab you?
Spacesuits (well, "pressure suits") were originally developed for high-flying planes, not for space travel. There are significant enough hazards in high-altitide flight to require some pretty significant protective gear, even if it's not a fully-certified space suit.
Fuck, I know people who wear space-suit levels of protection and work within a couple of thousand feet of sea level. (what level of protection would you use to repair pumps and valve gear in a working sewage plant? Pretty comprehensively air-tight and puncture-proof, covering whole body.)
Do teachers have forums? Considering all the constraints that they face about the commercial confidentiality of their schools and their customers/ product/ victims (however they classify the kids), what would they be allowed to talk about?
It's been a few years since talked to (knowingly) a teacher, so I genuinely don't know. But you do see frequent enough news reports of teachers getting sacked for talking about the kids online that I'd expect them to treat the whole topic with a ten-foot bargepole.
and whether we could reasonably expect reciprocity from other nations on such an approach.
You cna expect reciprocity from nations that don't have nuclear weapons. That would be Russia (hmmm, being very reciprocal at the moment, with their traditional single-finger wave), China (same wave, I see ; odd that), UK, France (waving a greasy dildo and a stale crusty baguette respectively, both begging you to come back again soon, but for different reasons). Oh, and don't forget Israel, India, Pakstan, DPRK, and imminently Iran.
America is really on a steep learning curve with this international relations thing. Enjoy!
Local music can easily not blow through that limit.
Shocking as it may seem to you, people's usage varies.
Mine [i.e. my music collection, not your music collection] does not (make any impression on that limit).
Shocking as it may seem to you, it consists a few hundred kilobytes of sound files for various bings and bongs which come as part of an OS. Actually, I don't really know how much it contains, since I've never looked, and don't have more than a vague idea on which partition it's stored. Streaming... I've heard of it. Is there any reason whatsoever to find out anything further about it?
On the other hand, I clock up 10-20GB of photos each year, though I wouldn't use a camera phone for that. Unless I got a microscope attachment for it. Good point - I'll need to look at that, unless the client gets down and actually puts together a microphotography suite.
Slashdot Mirror
People would stop attending well before that came to be an issue.
Sorry, I'm thinking of people as being rational actors. Which is a silly thing to do.
Obviously they're faking their deaths in order to get more grant money. They probably want a green card too. Disgusting filthy foreigners!
Quarantine is an appropriate response - which is why we've imposed it on the vessel - but the people of the area also have the right to carry out their normal businesses and lives when possible. Even if the disease does kill the pessimistic case scenario of 1.4million, that will still leave around 18.4 million people in the affected countries. And they'll have the right to pursue their trade and business, including international travel.
And there is your answer to the question of why they don't burn the bodies. They bury the bodies triple-bagged and soaked in strong chlorine bleach, with more bleach between the layers of bags. Let's be generous and say 10 litres (approx 10 kilos) of industrial grade bleach (18% by weight available chlorine, this stuff will peel the skin off your hands) per body. Allow another 10 kilos for triple layers of body bags.
How much wood does it take to cremate a body thoroughly?
Several hundred kilos.
Good enough reasons?
Bottled water, in the west, is purely a product of marketing. The only reasons for buying it are convenience (e.g. I put a couple of litre bottles into my pack to go hill-walking with) and if you've swallowed the bullshit fed to you by advertisers. If you think that you can taste the difference between standard tap water and bottled water then you're doing better than double-blinded trial participants. Many water-bottling plants in the west simply take their water straight from the municipal feed.
Outside the West, it's a different matter. I work in Africa ; bottled water is a necessity there.
When the Ebola outbreak spread to Nigeria, we enacted our ship's policy (decided some years previously) of not accepting any staff on board originating from that country or travelling through it. We're leaving our own colleagues and friends (two of the people I've been supervising for the last year included) in that country and will not be hiring them again until the outbreak is over. Totally cold-hearted and callous.
With 180 people on board the ship, we are not going to take the risk of letting that disease on board. We have no illusions about how fast disease can spread aboard, despite the best efforts of our medical staff. If that means that we've got to be callous, callous we will be.
We've already lost several days of operations because of delays in sourcing replacement staff. That's cost us (western operating companies) several million dollars - I don't have the exact figures because I'm not on the vessel at the moment.
Closer to 70% than 50%, in this West African outbreak (the Congolese outbreak seems a less virulent strain).
Can we build the hospitals first? The literally do not exist.
Or are you going to claim that there are not large numbers of neo-Nazi fuckwits in America? Are you going to claim that on Slashdot? In a thread sparked by an (American, judging from his comments) neo-Nazi fuckwit?
The abstract is explicit that their calculations (the details of which are way over my head) have a collapsing star "bouncing" before it's surface goes below the radius for it's event horizon. That's a finite radius, long before the singularity happens.
What I don't get is why they think that this prevents a black hole from ever forming, since there argument is based on the rate of emission of Hawking radiation blasting the infalling mass back into space - similarly to the Eddington limit to accretion rates on quasars. That would limit the rate at which matter could fall into the forming black hole, but I don't see how it would prevent a black hole forming.
Who punched Buzz Aldrin? Hoooo, that guy is going to get a battering when the nerds catch up with him.
Oh, I suppose I'd better go and find out.
Well, that sounds really completely uninteresting. Next question?
I write manuals often enough. I read other manual-writers work. Normally while the device in question is taking it's first charge.
Those were the days. Did I have a modem then? I certainly didn't have a network card.
Your employer.
If your employer agreed that your attending the conference was worthwhile for your work, then they pay, and you get your supervisor's written agreement to that before making your booking (and sending the bill to Accounts for payment, attached to the relevant Purchase Order countersigned by your boss. Or whatever your local procedures are.
If you want the course or conference, but your boss disagrees with you about it's value, than you go, you pay the tickets and your bills, and you retain the value. And you probably leave shortly after, for a better employer.
If your Boss is only partly convinced, then you get written agreement about what they'll cover, what you'll cover, and crucially, who owns any resultant certifications or training. In particular, cover how much they will attempt to claw back if you leave "shortly" after the conference/ training/ certification. Settle this, in writing, before you leave. If necessary, take it to the point of getting a contract amendment written up with Human Remains (define things like "shortly", above).
If it's worth that hassle, then the event is probably worth the candle ; if it's not worth that hassle, then is it really worth atending?
Examples of such countries?
From what I was seeing in Gabon last week (last time I'll be there for several years, 3rd or 4th visit in the last year, IIRC), they have no shortage of legal options for buying movies, and many more for buying discs which are commercially stamped from probably illegal copies of discs. I fail to think of any other reason for a Francophone country with an Anglophone minority to be selling DVDs in Chinese (originals imported by migrant workers, probably) and Russian language (source unknown).
Bandwidth on the other hand? Downloading a standard-resolution DVD would take several days if you could steal all the bandwidth of a major (200+ bed) hotel. That would cost ... well, several days of wages, plus several months of income for the downloading machine.
Remember when you had dial-up. Remember web-surfing on 33.6bps? Actually, no, I suspect that you don't. You're taking for granted bandwidth which for much of the world simply does not exist. You should try being on my work vessel for a time : a 4Mbps satellite link with 2Mbps allocated to one particular service, 1Mbps for phone lines in and out (about 1 in 5 phone calls fails due to no line available - retry in 30 seconds), and the remaining 1Mbps allocated for all business and personal use between 180 people on board. (And we're a hundred kilometres from any mobile phone coverage, so forget that. Not that mobile phones are allowed outside the Faraday cage when we go into radio silence for explosives/ flammables operations.)
For your information, people had knives and cludgels a few hundred millennia before they had guns. Removing guns from society did not remove the pre-existing blade weapons and blunt-force weapons.
Removing guns from society is something that we've been working on since the mid-17th century, when they became cheap enough to be owned in significant numbers by non-military people or groups. The difficulty with correspondingly removing edge weapons and blunt-force weapons from society is that they are also fundamental tools. So, when I travel a quarter of the way around the world, I carry some of my working tools in my cabin baggage (computer, rock colour reference charts, cameras, microscope) and some has to go into hold baggage (large microscope, as it's a club ; screwdriver for adjusting microscope tensioners, as it's a point weapon ; engineer's scribes for picking rocks apart under microscopes, as they're pointed weapons too ; knife for scraping slivers off rocks, as it's an edge weapon). They're all perfectly valid tools (the cabin-baggage microscope has attracted attention in the past - of the "I've never seen one of those" variety.), which can also be viewed as weapons.
There's a high likelihood that you travel from home to your work in a piece of weaponry with the energetic potentials of a significant piece of artillery. and I'd suspect that you had to have training in it's use and obey regulations concerning that artillery. Probably you have more regulations concerning that artillery piece than a hand gun or rifle.
I tried that, but no matter how hard I hit the thing, only a couple of the keys on the underside would press, and I couldn't make any intelligible words.
The apparent superluminal redshift of distant galaxies does not mean that they're travelling at any significant speed in their local context (in the same way that the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are not in rapid relative motion), but that the space between the observed distant galaxy and ourselves has been expanding for a long time and an accelerating rate.
False.
Whether anyone will read it and not dismiss it as word salad is a separate question.
Hypothesizing that you could use this to produce low-power electronics for, say a wireless environmental sensor of some sort, how does the idea of environmental sensors that are inherently biodegradable on a months-to-years time scale grab you?
Fuck, I know people who wear space-suit levels of protection and work within a couple of thousand feet of sea level. (what level of protection would you use to repair pumps and valve gear in a working sewage plant? Pretty comprehensively air-tight and puncture-proof, covering whole body.)
But isn't that what about half the US population actually want? and isn't America a democracy?
Do teachers have forums? Considering all the constraints that they face about the commercial confidentiality of their schools and their customers/ product/ victims (however they classify the kids), what would they be allowed to talk about?
It's been a few years since talked to (knowingly) a teacher, so I genuinely don't know. But you do see frequent enough news reports of teachers getting sacked for talking about the kids online that I'd expect them to treat the whole topic with a ten-foot bargepole.
You cna expect reciprocity from nations that don't have nuclear weapons. That would be Russia (hmmm, being very reciprocal at the moment, with their traditional single-finger wave), China (same wave, I see ; odd that), UK, France (waving a greasy dildo and a stale crusty baguette respectively, both begging you to come back again soon, but for different reasons). Oh, and don't forget Israel, India, Pakstan, DPRK, and imminently Iran.
America is really on a steep learning curve with this international relations thing. Enjoy!
Shocking as it may seem to you, people's usage varies.
Shocking as it may seem to you, it consists a few hundred kilobytes of sound files for various bings and bongs which come as part of an OS. Actually, I don't really know how much it contains, since I've never looked, and don't have more than a vague idea on which partition it's stored. Streaming ... I've heard of it. Is there any reason whatsoever to find out anything further about it?
On the other hand, I clock up 10-20GB of photos each year, though I wouldn't use a camera phone for that. Unless I got a microscope attachment for it. Good point - I'll need to look at that, unless the client gets down and actually puts together a microphotography suite.