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The Continental Army was disbanded after the Revolution, and when the next major threat came up (Shay's Rebellion), Washington raised the militia. The standing Army was not small. It did not exist. It was not supposed to exist, which is why there's a two-year limit for military appropriations.

http://teachinghistory.org/his...
http://www.shsu.edu/~his_ncp/S...
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18t...

Madison, Jefferson, Adams, Webster, and Hamilton all argued that standing armies were a threat to liberty. Even Franklin got in on the act. Whatever the Founders disagreed about, they were all pretty much behind this idea.

âoeThat a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural and safe defense of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that, in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.â â" Virginia Declaration of Rights, June 12, 1776

You can have your own principles, but not your own facts, and the facts are against you: the Founders were entirely against having a standing army.

http://df.shsu.edu/

They're a medium sized University in east Texas with a young program.

It's OK, they use linux. It does infinite loops in 5 seconds.

Pah...she's a cutie...and fun, too!

Using a retrovirus to alter DNA in humans and change our genome for the better isn't exactly breaking news. It has been tried in gene therapy experiments in France (SCID) for a few years now with limited sucess. We already have the ability to take a piece of DNA and plop it down in the genome; however, there is no way to determine where the DNA will be inserted and there is no way to direct its insertion. Basically, a reverse transcriptase takes the RNA from the virus and inserts it into the genome wherever the nucleosomes are currently unwound. The problem with this is when the new "good gene" gets put in the middle of an old "important gene" and causes the old gene to lose its function. This may seem almost impossible considering the size of the genome (3 Gigabases) and the small number of genes (~40 kilobases). However, if you think about it, the most available spots on the genome are those who are activly doing something (and currently unwound.)

At SHSU, we've disabled port 135 and ICMP Echo Request (not all ICMP) at the port level on the switches. Inbound requests to our resnet lower than port 1024 are blocked at our firewall. The 135 block prevented new infections from occuring, and the ICMP echo request block prevented the ICMP flood that took out so many universities.

Professor Rappacinni examines and manipulates plants for his studies of poison's and thier use in medicines. He is immersed in his study and is blinded to the moral ramifications of his creations. He creates a garden, filled with genetically altered plants that while beautiful are filled with the deadliest poison. He raises his beautiful daughter, Beatrice, in the garden and as a result poison flows throughout her whole being. Rappacinni planned this result because he wanted to give his daugther a weapon with which to better fight the dangers of the world. One day she meets a young man, Giovanni, and they fall in love. But he is tormented by the fact that all she touches dies. A rival professor, Bagglioni, convinces the young man to give her an antidote to her poison so that they might live happily in the outside world. This professor knows that the antidote could work, or might kill her, but he provides it nonetheless out of a quest for political power and partly out of a maliciousness. When she drinks the antidote she is killed.

What does this have to do with Katz's article on Planet Gattaca?

Rappacinni's not the vilain in the story, and his creations aren't evil. He gives Beatrice her poison nature out of good intentions, he wants to protect her. Had she stayed in the garden, she would never had died. We are led not to blame Rappacinni for creating her the way he did. The individuals responsible for her death were Baglioni and Giovanni. They knew the rammifications of their actions and proceeded regardless out of their own selfish reasons.

Currently most genetecists are working on trying to understand the building blocks of life to make our lives better. They aren't the ones who will be making the decisions to use/missuse their discoveries. We need to be more concerned with those that will try to use their discoveries for socio-political gain, namely governments and corporations. If we try to apply moral control at the scientific level, we will just cease to hear about such discoveries. I'd rather that they do the research first and then ask about it than make the decision to proceed, or not, privately.