I'm not sure you can say there's only one organism on earth except in the most metaphorical sense, and I'm too hard of a thinker to take metaphors like that very seriously.
Not in a metaphorical sense at all... in a very literal sense. It's just defining life a bit differently. Think about it... it's entirely possible I have a carbon atom in my body from the very very first chemical reaction that led to life. We are all part of that chemical reaction that began two or three billion years, and has been continuing since. Note that it is a *single* chemical reaction that just hasn't stopped reacting yet.
Because the cells in the reproductive parts of an organism are the first to be formed during cell division and are kept in 'suspended animation' until actually needed. Thus, "accumulated damage" isn't so bad for those cells as it is for other cells.
You're missing the point... my "reproductive parts" are *directly* related to the very first generation of the organism. If damage was accumulating, everything would've died out long ago.
There is so much wrong in your post that it actually makes me weep that you're really serious.
Those people will be amongst the first to benefit from any such medical process; And if history has been any judge, that medical process will be expensive and there'll be little incentive to make it cheaper.
If history is any judge, medical processes get consistently cheaper and more widely available.
The end result will be people who are born and work their entire lives, then die, never having had the opportunity to aquire wealth, because those who still have it aren't dying anymore.
Do you seriously believe the only way to acquire wealth is to sit and wait for someone to die and have it given to you? Sheesh.
Let me tell you the easiest way to become wealthy: SAVE. That simple. Don't be a typical consumer idiot. Save 25% of your income. By the time you retire, you will be one of those rich people you think hoard all the wealth.
If and when the day comes, then we'll have to answer the question of what happens when numbers increase but resources decrease?
What makes you think immortality leads to population increases? Actually, I think it's far more likely that it will lead to a decreasing population. I doubt that immortal people will continue to crank out kids decade after decade. It's more likely that an older population of people who have "been there, done that" will be done making kids, and we'll actually have an human extinction crisis in 1,000 years.
What that means is that immorality leads to a decreasing population leading to more resources for fewer people.
There are two problems I see with the usual theory that aging is related to "accumulation of damage", as the article seems to imply:
1) Humans live, barring accidents and disease, about 80-90 years, 120 at the outside. My dog lives 15-16 years, 22 on the outside. My dog gets all the normal signs of aging -- arthritis, gray hair, join and muscle pain, etc. But at an age that humans are not even entering their physical prime.
2) From a certain point of view, there is only one organism on earth, and it's billions of years old. Pieces of the organism fall off now and then, but it constantly renews itself. Slightly different each, but going through a consistent cycle of "physical prime". How can it renew itself when, presumably, all cells are "accumulating damage"?
What the hell are you talking about? First, spousal privilege only applies to married couples. Second, there is nothing to stop someone from voluntarily testifying out of moral duty (though, in some states I believe that a spouse cannot testify even if he/she wants to under certain circumstances).
That's *exactly* why a 120TB archive is *not* and *never will be* a $12.000 question.
My point wasn't that the actual cost of archival was $12K, my point was that the actual quantity of data was irrelevant. Whether it's 1TB or 120TB, you still have all the issues you mention. The OP's point that we should care how big our emails are in the interest of conserving bytes is ridiculous.
Sheesh. I call this phenomenon "technological puritanism". All tech must be ugly! 80 columns should be enough for anyone! Fixed-width fonts were good enough for my granddaddy, they were good enough for me, and they should be good enough for everyone! Words are worth a thousand pictures! Get off my damn lawn!
Nothing personal, but if people like you were in charge of the world, we'd all be living in gray, cast concrete cubes. Think of the efficiency! No more wasted paint. You can just make a bigger house by stacking the blocks and adding a ladder.
Most of us *like* color, pictures, paragraphs, and most of all, convenience. Use FTP when I can just add an attachment that goes directly to the source? Give me a frickin' break. No one gives you respect points when you prove how miserably you can live.
Let's put this in perspective... that 120 terabytes costs 12,000 dollars in hard drives. Retail at Fry's. The entire output of the Bush Administration costs less than what they probably spend on coffee in a month.
P.S. And, yes, this is from someone who used a teletype in high school, and was ecstatic when we got a 300 baud modem (whoa! It's almost 3 times faster than the ol' 110!) and a Televideo terminal. Those days were not better.
But I have learned, rightly or wrongly, that being stealthy and going for the customers that are being ignored by more powerful players is a better strategy.
I agree with you there. I don't remember the exact quote, but I still remember shaking my head when Andreessen started shooting off his mouth taunting Microsoft back in the Netscape browser days. I think I posted at the time something to effect of, "A browser is not the most difficult piece of technology in the world. All he's doing is causing The Navy Destroyer Microsoft to swing its howitzers around to take a shot at his little tug boat." And that's what happened.
Also, please back up your claim that a compiler generates worse code than a human. Provide example C code where your assembly is better than what gcc produces at O2.
Well, I was willing to maybe believe that you might know what you were talking about, until this... 'gcc' is a notoriously bad optimizer compared to commercial compilers (especially Intel's compiler). The advantage of 'gcc' is that it's common and portable, not that it's a good optimizer.
Compilers are actually extremely good. I'm pretty sure it's been a while since a compiler can beat most of the hand-written assembly out there, unless it's written by a true guru (and there's very very few of them out there - not because assembly is not as common, but because it's hard to write optimized code).
Let me guess... you've never programmed in assembly language in your life. Funny that it's only people who have little experience with writing in assembly language that believe this. It's also only people who have never written in assembly who believe that it's hard.
But if you want proof, look at Photoshop, where filters are commonly written in assembly language for performance reasons.
That a small start up could take on Intel in a serious way?
Well, that wasn't what killed them. There are many stories of garage companies taking on the fat, lazy big boys and winning (Microsoft/Apple against IBM, for one).
What killed them was the Fundamentally Wrong Approach. They wanted to, in essence, make a "magic optimizer" that would take Intel instructions and convert them to run on a very simple, low-power device. The "magic optimizer" was left as an "exercise to the geniuses". The business plan for that consisted solely of hand waving. "Hey, we'll just hire smart people and let them figure it out."
Unfortunately, optimization is a notoriously difficult problem, and is really a subset of Strong A.I. No one programs in assembly language these days, so one really understands how bad compilers really are at producing code, compared to human optimized code. Computers are so fast and programmers are so expensive, so we don't really care anymore.
Taking assembly and trying to translate/recompile it into another very-low-level assembly and do this on-the-fly without any time or performance penalty is a fool's game. It was never going to work. I could probably even dig up my posts on this subject way back when.:)
See also: VLIW processors, where the hardware guys fool themselves by saying, "the software guys will figure out how to compile to it."
I think you're backing up the A/C's point about people saying something is automatically artificial once they know Photoshop is involved. If there's anything in that pic that's real, it's the flag. Look at the fabric creases. There's no doubt about it.
Actually, I was thinking exactly the opposite. If that original really was that blurry and grainy, and the Photoshop artist made it that sharp and natural looking, it was an incredible job. I'm staring at it, and I don't even know why you would think it was bad. The head is too sharp against the flag?
You've got a right to be wrong, and prejudge someone - you might even guess right - even though courts don't have that right to be wrong. But if you judge people guilty without their going through an evidence and argument process, you're probably going to be wrong.
"Prejudging" has nothing to do with it. Courts of law are heavily weighted toward finding not guilt verdicts, because we've decided that "better a guilty man go free than an innocent man go to jail." The tragedy of a wrong guilty verdict is such that we don't want to risk it.
Courts are NOT about finding the truth! The "truth" may be that Suspect A is absolutely guilty of murder and we have video to prove it -- but if the video was ruled inadmissible, then the murderer may go free, even though everyone involved with the case knows that the truth is that he's guilty. The United States has determined that we'd rather let a guilty man go free than use contaminated evidence.
I, however, am free to use whatever evidence I want to determine guilt -- because all I'm interested in is the truth. That's not the same metric as a court of law. So it's perfectly reasonable to hold a personal standard that's not the same as a court of law.
BTW, in America people are presumed innocent until proven guilty, especially when Bush has a political crusade at stake.
I like Mark Cuban, and I can totally believe the Bush administration is trumping up charges against him. That said, your quote is one of my pet peeves, and is DEAD WRONG.
In America, people are presumed innocent until proven guilty IN A COURT OF LAW. The public at large is perfectly within its rights to judge anyone anyway it wants to. For example, O.J. Simpson was found not guilty in his first trial, yet I have no doubt he performed the crime.
All too often people in power and/or defense attorneys try and manipulate the public with the "innocent until proven guilty" junk. "Don't rush to judgment on my client just because he was seen with a smoking gun in his hand, remember, we're all innocent until proven guilty!" No, I'm under no obligation to judge people based on courtroom rules used to "prove" guilt. I can judge people based on whatever criteria seems reasonable to me.
Wrong still. The original platform was formed by committee, with compromises over features, scope and departmental subsystems roles (i.e. state's rights). It was based on compromises and feature creep.
You think Unix wasn't? Unix had plenty of compromises and plenty of modifications over the years to fix various things that weren't done right at the beginning. But at it's core, it had the right *philosophy*, which was what was guiding and influencing the features that were added.
You've got the right general idea, but the wrong analogy.
The proper analogy is that the original government was like Unix -- small, elegant, efficient, and decentralized. As society has gotten more complex, we've grafted on more and more onto the basic framework, making it far more complex. But at the core, it's still the right way to do things.
Windows Vista is Socialism -- an attempt to "cast off the past legacy of Unix" (analogous to Capitalism) and rewrite things to be all things to all users. And what you get is a gigantic resource hog that barely functions, but convinces people through pretty, shiny colors and pretty, shiny marketing that you have total freedom (e.g., "life without walls" or whatever their propaganda slogan is this month). And through ever increasing processing CPU power (/ever increasing debt spending), people believe that it works.
OS/X is the freedom of Unix, but with an attempt to add a user friendliness to the process -- kind of like Obama (though the jury is out on how much he actually believes in freedom, but let's go with it). Linux is more like a Libertarian government -- total freedom, but total responsibility as well, and only a geek's view of taste and beauty (in other words, little taste at all).
But in Gates82's post, when he "hires" a university, it is not the university creating the IP (a game in this topic, but could be most anything else), but him instead.
Well, it's true it's not strictly analogous, but my overall point is that assignment of IP does not automatically go where you assume it might. In the case of the University, they're obviously providing something of value, since the students are doing it within that structure, and not outside of the school. The school is providing the hardware and guidance for the project.
Let's say I wanted to break into the gaming industry, and I tell Valve that I'll pay them to allow me to work on the next Half Life, just so I can get the experience on my resume (probably a lot of people would do that, if they could). Am I "hiring" Valve, in that case? No -- it's more negative salary. It doesn't give me any IP rights.
I think that's more analogous to the University example. The University is "letting" you pay them to attend classes and do projects, so you can get the experience and move on to bigger things.
Schools play by their own rules regardless of how the world works. I view universities as a service I pay for. Therefore anything I create at a university (unless employed to work on) should inherently become my property.
You have a distorted understanding of how the world works. When you pay for someone to do work you, you do *not* necessarily get the IP rights to that work. A notorious example is wedding photography -- you're paying for the photographer's time and a set of prints, but you do not have duplication rights. Those belong to the photographer, because it's considered an artistic work, just as if you hired a famous artist to paint a scene. The artist still holds the reproduction and marketing rights. If you want to duplicate your prints, you have to pay the photographer for them or negotiate for the duplication rights.
If you hire somebody to do *any* creative work (*including* programming), and you care about the IP rights, then make sure that's in the contract -- whichever side of the paying equation you're on. If you make assumptions about this, then you are in for a rude awakening.
I don't expect committees to be efficient. It's too easy to be corrupt in Congress -- there are so many members that it's easy to fly under the radar and spend money. But the President should stand up for the big picture of what's right. And Congress didn't promise to make government smaller -- Reagan did.
Zero? I actually don't like to think about this, but I'm afraid the probability might be 100%. Shy?
We don't have this technology yet. But suppose bioengineering continues to the point that we reduce creating new organisms down to a programming language -- in other words, the barrier to entry to engineer an organism comes down to the point that any reasonably intelligent engineering type could create an organism with computer-like control.
What this means is that it only takes one insane person to create a disease that would wipe out the entire human race, 100%, no exceptions. Here's how you would design it: Of course, it would be spread through the air. It would have a built-in clock that wouldn't trigger the kill release for 5-10 years. Maybe 20 years. It would be dormant in animals, so to spread among survivors. After it triggers, it would nearly instantly wipe out most of humanity. There wouldn't be time to find a cure -- it would happen too fast. And cures are a hell of a lot harder to create than the disease in the first place (it's always easier to destroy than to defend. Nuclear bombs are easier to make than to defend against).
Don't think someone would do that? Think Unibomber -- he was a full-blown genius, who also happened to be a full-blown lunatic who thought humanity should die. There are plenty of environmental nuts who think humans are the worst thing that ever happened to the species.
Once we understand life to the level of reducing it to mere programming, the game is over. It only takes one nut and there's nothing we can do.
Of course, I pretend this isn't inevitable and live my life anyway.:)
The bankruptcy of the country aside, I'll start supporting NASA putting humans in space when NASA provides a path for normal citizens to go to space, such as myself. Right now, space travel in the United States is only for the annointed elite, and that's not the way it should be.
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I'm not sure you can say there's only one organism on earth except in the most metaphorical sense, and I'm too hard of a thinker to take metaphors like that very seriously.
Not in a metaphorical sense at all... in a very literal sense. It's just defining life a bit differently. Think about it... it's entirely possible I have a carbon atom in my body from the very very first chemical reaction that led to life. We are all part of that chemical reaction that began two or three billion years, and has been continuing since. Note that it is a *single* chemical reaction that just hasn't stopped reacting yet.
Because the cells in the reproductive parts of an organism are the first to be formed during cell division and are kept in 'suspended animation' until actually needed. Thus, "accumulated damage" isn't so bad for those cells as it is for other cells.
You're missing the point... my "reproductive parts" are *directly* related to the very first generation of the organism. If damage was accumulating, everything would've died out long ago.
There is so much wrong in your post that it actually makes me weep that you're really serious.
Those people will be amongst the first to benefit from any such medical process; And if history has been any judge, that medical process will be expensive and there'll be little incentive to make it cheaper.
If history is any judge, medical processes get consistently cheaper and more widely available.
The end result will be people who are born and work their entire lives, then die, never having had the opportunity to aquire wealth, because those who still have it aren't dying anymore.
Do you seriously believe the only way to acquire wealth is to sit and wait for someone to die and have it given to you? Sheesh.
Let me tell you the easiest way to become wealthy: SAVE. That simple. Don't be a typical consumer idiot. Save 25% of your income. By the time you retire, you will be one of those rich people you think hoard all the wealth.
If and when the day comes, then we'll have to answer the question of what happens when numbers increase but resources decrease?
What makes you think immortality leads to population increases? Actually, I think it's far more likely that it will lead to a decreasing population. I doubt that immortal people will continue to crank out kids decade after decade. It's more likely that an older population of people who have "been there, done that" will be done making kids, and we'll actually have an human extinction crisis in 1,000 years.
What that means is that immorality leads to a decreasing population leading to more resources for fewer people.
There are two problems I see with the usual theory that aging is related to "accumulation of damage", as the article seems to imply:
1) Humans live, barring accidents and disease, about 80-90 years, 120 at the outside. My dog lives 15-16 years, 22 on the outside. My dog gets all the normal signs of aging -- arthritis, gray hair, join and muscle pain, etc. But at an age that humans are not even entering their physical prime.
2) From a certain point of view, there is only one organism on earth, and it's billions of years old. Pieces of the organism fall off now and then, but it constantly renews itself. Slightly different each, but going through a consistent cycle of "physical prime". How can it renew itself when, presumably, all cells are "accumulating damage"?
I don't know what he'd draw, but I know it'd be covered in chrome. :)
What the hell are you talking about? First, spousal privilege only applies to married couples. Second, there is nothing to stop someone from voluntarily testifying out of moral duty (though, in some states I believe that a spouse cannot testify even if he/she wants to under certain circumstances).
That's *exactly* why a 120TB archive is *not* and *never will be* a $12.000 question.
My point wasn't that the actual cost of archival was $12K, my point was that the actual quantity of data was irrelevant. Whether it's 1TB or 120TB, you still have all the issues you mention. The OP's point that we should care how big our emails are in the interest of conserving bytes is ridiculous.
Where the hell do you live that you can buy a terabye of storage at a retail store?
What? Did you just step out of a time machine from 1990? Where can't you buy a terabyte of storage?
Here's a terabyte for $119, with an external enclosure.
Sheesh. I call this phenomenon "technological puritanism". All tech must be ugly! 80 columns should be enough for anyone! Fixed-width fonts were good enough for my granddaddy, they were good enough for me, and they should be good enough for everyone! Words are worth a thousand pictures! Get off my damn lawn!
Nothing personal, but if people like you were in charge of the world, we'd all be living in gray, cast concrete cubes. Think of the efficiency! No more wasted paint. You can just make a bigger house by stacking the blocks and adding a ladder.
Most of us *like* color, pictures, paragraphs, and most of all, convenience. Use FTP when I can just add an attachment that goes directly to the source? Give me a frickin' break. No one gives you respect points when you prove how miserably you can live.
Let's put this in perspective... that 120 terabytes costs 12,000 dollars in hard drives. Retail at Fry's. The entire output of the Bush Administration costs less than what they probably spend on coffee in a month.
P.S. And, yes, this is from someone who used a teletype in high school, and was ecstatic when we got a 300 baud modem (whoa! It's almost 3 times faster than the ol' 110!) and a Televideo terminal. Those days were not better.
But I have learned, rightly or wrongly, that being stealthy and going for the customers that are being ignored by more powerful players is a better strategy.
I agree with you there. I don't remember the exact quote, but I still remember shaking my head when Andreessen started shooting off his mouth taunting Microsoft back in the Netscape browser days. I think I posted at the time something to effect of, "A browser is not the most difficult piece of technology in the world. All he's doing is causing The Navy Destroyer Microsoft to swing its howitzers around to take a shot at his little tug boat." And that's what happened.
It will continue until the attorneys run out of ways to milk more money out of it. They're the real winners in this whole thing.
Also, please back up your claim that a compiler generates worse code than a human. Provide example C code where your assembly is better than what gcc produces at O2.
Well, I was willing to maybe believe that you might know what you were talking about, until this... 'gcc' is a notoriously bad optimizer compared to commercial compilers (especially Intel's compiler). The advantage of 'gcc' is that it's common and portable, not that it's a good optimizer.
Compilers are actually extremely good. I'm pretty sure it's been a while since a compiler can beat most of the hand-written assembly out there, unless it's written by a true guru (and there's very very few of them out there - not because assembly is not as common, but because it's hard to write optimized code).
Let me guess... you've never programmed in assembly language in your life. Funny that it's only people who have little experience with writing in assembly language that believe this. It's also only people who have never written in assembly who believe that it's hard.
But if you want proof, look at Photoshop, where filters are commonly written in assembly language for performance reasons.
That a small start up could take on Intel in a serious way?
Well, that wasn't what killed them. There are many stories of garage companies taking on the fat, lazy big boys and winning (Microsoft/Apple against IBM, for one).
What killed them was the Fundamentally Wrong Approach. They wanted to, in essence, make a "magic optimizer" that would take Intel instructions and convert them to run on a very simple, low-power device. The "magic optimizer" was left as an "exercise to the geniuses". The business plan for that consisted solely of hand waving. "Hey, we'll just hire smart people and let them figure it out."
Unfortunately, optimization is a notoriously difficult problem, and is really a subset of Strong A.I. No one programs in assembly language these days, so one really understands how bad compilers really are at producing code, compared to human optimized code. Computers are so fast and programmers are so expensive, so we don't really care anymore.
Taking assembly and trying to translate/recompile it into another very-low-level assembly and do this on-the-fly without any time or performance penalty is a fool's game. It was never going to work. I could probably even dig up my posts on this subject way back when. :)
See also: VLIW processors, where the hardware guys fool themselves by saying, "the software guys will figure out how to compile to it."
I think you're backing up the A/C's point about people saying something is automatically artificial once they know Photoshop is involved. If there's anything in that pic that's real, it's the flag. Look at the fabric creases. There's no doubt about it.
Actually, I was thinking exactly the opposite. If that original really was that blurry and grainy, and the Photoshop artist made it that sharp and natural looking, it was an incredible job. I'm staring at it, and I don't even know why you would think it was bad. The head is too sharp against the flag?
You've got a right to be wrong, and prejudge someone - you might even guess right - even though courts don't have that right to be wrong. But if you judge people guilty without their going through an evidence and argument process, you're probably going to be wrong.
"Prejudging" has nothing to do with it. Courts of law are heavily weighted toward finding not guilt verdicts, because we've decided that "better a guilty man go free than an innocent man go to jail." The tragedy of a wrong guilty verdict is such that we don't want to risk it.
Courts are NOT about finding the truth! The "truth" may be that Suspect A is absolutely guilty of murder and we have video to prove it -- but if the video was ruled inadmissible, then the murderer may go free, even though everyone involved with the case knows that the truth is that he's guilty. The United States has determined that we'd rather let a guilty man go free than use contaminated evidence.
I, however, am free to use whatever evidence I want to determine guilt -- because all I'm interested in is the truth. That's not the same metric as a court of law. So it's perfectly reasonable to hold a personal standard that's not the same as a court of law.
BTW, in America people are presumed innocent until proven guilty, especially when Bush has a political crusade at stake.
I like Mark Cuban, and I can totally believe the Bush administration is trumping up charges against him. That said, your quote is one of my pet peeves, and is DEAD WRONG.
In America, people are presumed innocent until proven guilty IN A COURT OF LAW. The public at large is perfectly within its rights to judge anyone anyway it wants to. For example, O.J. Simpson was found not guilty in his first trial, yet I have no doubt he performed the crime.
All too often people in power and/or defense attorneys try and manipulate the public with the "innocent until proven guilty" junk. "Don't rush to judgment on my client just because he was seen with a smoking gun in his hand, remember, we're all innocent until proven guilty!" No, I'm under no obligation to judge people based on courtroom rules used to "prove" guilt. I can judge people based on whatever criteria seems reasonable to me.
Wrong still. The original platform was formed by committee, with compromises over features, scope and departmental subsystems roles (i.e. state's rights). It was based on compromises and feature creep.
You think Unix wasn't? Unix had plenty of compromises and plenty of modifications over the years to fix various things that weren't done right at the beginning. But at it's core, it had the right *philosophy*, which was what was guiding and influencing the features that were added.
You've got the right general idea, but the wrong analogy.
The proper analogy is that the original government was like Unix -- small, elegant, efficient, and decentralized. As society has gotten more complex, we've grafted on more and more onto the basic framework, making it far more complex. But at the core, it's still the right way to do things.
Windows Vista is Socialism -- an attempt to "cast off the past legacy of Unix" (analogous to Capitalism) and rewrite things to be all things to all users. And what you get is a gigantic resource hog that barely functions, but convinces people through pretty, shiny colors and pretty, shiny marketing that you have total freedom (e.g., "life without walls" or whatever their propaganda slogan is this month). And through ever increasing processing CPU power (/ever increasing debt spending), people believe that it works.
OS/X is the freedom of Unix, but with an attempt to add a user friendliness to the process -- kind of like Obama (though the jury is out on how much he actually believes in freedom, but let's go with it). Linux is more like a Libertarian government -- total freedom, but total responsibility as well, and only a geek's view of taste and beauty (in other words, little taste at all).
But in Gates82's post, when he "hires" a university, it is not the university creating the IP (a game in this topic, but could be most anything else), but him instead.
Well, it's true it's not strictly analogous, but my overall point is that assignment of IP does not automatically go where you assume it might. In the case of the University, they're obviously providing something of value, since the students are doing it within that structure, and not outside of the school. The school is providing the hardware and guidance for the project.
Let's say I wanted to break into the gaming industry, and I tell Valve that I'll pay them to allow me to work on the next Half Life, just so I can get the experience on my resume (probably a lot of people would do that, if they could). Am I "hiring" Valve, in that case? No -- it's more negative salary. It doesn't give me any IP rights.
I think that's more analogous to the University example. The University is "letting" you pay them to attend classes and do projects, so you can get the experience and move on to bigger things.
Schools play by their own rules regardless of how the world works. I view universities as a service I pay for. Therefore anything I create at a university (unless employed to work on) should inherently become my property.
You have a distorted understanding of how the world works. When you pay for someone to do work you, you do *not* necessarily get the IP rights to that work. A notorious example is wedding photography -- you're paying for the photographer's time and a set of prints, but you do not have duplication rights. Those belong to the photographer, because it's considered an artistic work, just as if you hired a famous artist to paint a scene. The artist still holds the reproduction and marketing rights. If you want to duplicate your prints, you have to pay the photographer for them or negotiate for the duplication rights.
If you hire somebody to do *any* creative work (*including* programming), and you care about the IP rights, then make sure that's in the contract -- whichever side of the paying equation you're on. If you make assumptions about this, then you are in for a rude awakening.
Yeah, but even if you managed to do all of that, Madagascar would still close its ports and leave a remnant of humanity.
That's why you have the 10-20 year fuse. To give the disease time to infuse every corner of the world.
Wouldn't it make more sense to blame both?
I don't expect committees to be efficient. It's too easy to be corrupt in Congress -- there are so many members that it's easy to fly under the radar and spend money. But the President should stand up for the big picture of what's right. And Congress didn't promise to make government smaller -- Reagan did.
Zero? I actually don't like to think about this, but I'm afraid the probability might be 100%. Shy?
We don't have this technology yet. But suppose bioengineering continues to the point that we reduce creating new organisms down to a programming language -- in other words, the barrier to entry to engineer an organism comes down to the point that any reasonably intelligent engineering type could create an organism with computer-like control.
What this means is that it only takes one insane person to create a disease that would wipe out the entire human race, 100%, no exceptions. Here's how you would design it: Of course, it would be spread through the air. It would have a built-in clock that wouldn't trigger the kill release for 5-10 years. Maybe 20 years. It would be dormant in animals, so to spread among survivors. After it triggers, it would nearly instantly wipe out most of humanity. There wouldn't be time to find a cure -- it would happen too fast. And cures are a hell of a lot harder to create than the disease in the first place (it's always easier to destroy than to defend. Nuclear bombs are easier to make than to defend against).
Don't think someone would do that? Think Unibomber -- he was a full-blown genius, who also happened to be a full-blown lunatic who thought humanity should die. There are plenty of environmental nuts who think humans are the worst thing that ever happened to the species.
Once we understand life to the level of reducing it to mere programming, the game is over. It only takes one nut and there's nothing we can do.
Of course, I pretend this isn't inevitable and live my life anyway. :)
The bankruptcy of the country aside, I'll start supporting NASA putting humans in space when NASA provides a path for normal citizens to go to space, such as myself. Right now, space travel in the United States is only for the annointed elite, and that's not the way it should be.