You do realize that the mentally handicapped (i.e., "retarded", as you call them), aren't the ones benefiting from this, right? "Speech and communications" problems don't mean the person is intellectually subpar. (Making asinine comments on/., however, is a fairly strong indication.)
This is much less certain territory (at least, for me) but isn't the risk proportionally higher with homemade pathogens? You can do things in the lab (e.g., the fluorescent yogurt talked about elsewhere in this topic) that simply wouldn't occur in nature, and you can produce more of it than would occur naturally (because you're specifically providing an environment favorable to its growth). To use dog breeding as an example, there are certainly breeds which exist today which would not be expected to arise naturally, if we didn't help them along.
My concern is that by giving people the ability to have makeshift labs, we're taking some of the protection that nature affords us in the wild out of the equation, which I think makes it riskier than what happens to the average person on a daily basis.
You probably wouldn't even need to do it in one swing. Getting hit with an ax can be fairly devastating, severely limiting your opponent's ability to defend him/herself.
Simply existing is a biological experiment, if you look at it that way. That doesn't mean it's justified to increase our risks, though. We're protected from most of the nastiness in the microbial environment by immunities that've built up over time, but those immunities can fail us if a pathogen changes slightly (e.g., the 1918 influenza outbreak). Don't we get attacked from nature enough without having to bring more of it down on ourselves through the inevitable carelessness that's going to happen if tens of thousands (which is a more reasonable estimate, if we're talking nationally or even globally) of people decide to start cooking up critters in their basements? It doesn't take thousands of people simultaneously making the same mistake at the same time to cause a problem.
It's certainly not a case of NIMBY. I'd actually feel a lot safer if no one in my country were producing biological agents, thank you very much.
Just so we're clear: I don't personally care if someone wants to produce LSD, meth, or ecstasy in their garage. If someone wants to kill themselves through experimentation, that's their business. More power to 'em. But you've got to draw the line somewhere, and it occurs to me that homebrew pathogens just might not be such a bad place to draw it. It's not the equipment that's the problem. It's the stuff you put in the equipment (the other column of that table) that's the problem.
Where did I say that a gun and a virus could do the same amount of damage? I didn't. What I compared was some people's attitudes toward them. The kinds of people who would keep a gun in an unlocked drawer are exactly the kinds of people who would be careless about the safety requirements of their experiments. In a professional setting, I'd be tempted to believe that such a person would be filtered out before they could do anything dangerous. But when it's Amateur Hour, I don't have that assurance.
7 Billion people around the world are actively engaged in (unintentional) home-brew microbiological experimentation. I really doubt that a few hundred "intentional" experimenters are going to bend the curve of viral and bacteriological evolution.
Well, I think 7 billion is an overestimate. You need to eliminate from that number those who are either a) not at sexual maturity, or b) not inclined to procreate because of sexual preference. (For the sake of argument, we'll assume that every heterosexual capable of procreating wants to procreate.) But whatever the number is, plenty of this experimentation leads to unintended consequences. You've got congenital birth defects, the potential for genetic mental illness, and people who just give their children particularly bad environments and produce sociopaths. So yeah, that experimentation goes wrong often enough to produce some pretty severe societal consequences.
To your credit, locking the gun up and controlling access to it is part of gun safety.
Yeah. That's kind of what I was thinking about when I wrote that. The kind of people who keep their gun in an unlocked desk drawer well in reach of little Johnny.
Evolution is like a trillion monkeys hammering away at potential genomes
That analogy doesn't go quite far enough. Evolution is more like a trillion monkeys hamering away at potential genomes, and keeping the ones that work out.
> It's fairly easy to accidentally do something destructive.
Which is why humans have immune systems, self-repair capabilities, etc. It's a jungle out there and we're still alive in it.
An immune system isn't an impenetrable shield. What happened in 1918 can still happen today.
To be clear, I'm not saying that some virus released from a homebrew lab will destroy all of civilization. I'm not even saying it would be the equivalent of the 1918 flu epidemic. But if it was even 1/4 of that size, it'd still be a pretty big deal.
For that matter, we've been abusing antibiotics for decades and while MR bacteria are a problem today, they haven't (and won't) wipe out the human species.
Again, I'm not saying it's going to be a real-life Resident Evil. But it can put a world of hurt on us without dooming humanity.
I don't know a lot of people who accidentally programmed a virulent virus, but I know of people who've accidentally done things like run rm -rf on the wrong directory, or coded (and distributed) macros that did unexpected things in Word documents. And operating systems routinely have bugs in their initial releases that have to be patched later.
If you doubt that people can accidentally muck with nature and produce disastrous consequences, just consider dogs. Humans have bred dogs for specific traits, but that breeding has introduced problems into breeds. With a complex genome (and viruses aren't even that complex, compared to higher organisms), you can't predict what's going to happen. Probably, the odds of having something bad happen with one guy in his basement are pretty small, but if you get 10,000 or 100,000 people doing it, eventually, Something Bad will happen.
In some guy's basement, they won't be in place. How could they have advisory panels and such, in such a low-scale environment? I could see a corporation having those kinds of safeguards, but not individuals.
I should've specified the U.S. in my comments about guns. Sorry about that.
I'm not against stretching the limits of what we can do. I'm not even against doing risky things. What I'm saying is that some level of care needs to be taken that we're at least trying to assess risks. And maybe the guy doing the experiment shouldn't be the one who makes that assessment. In academic settings, those safeguards are in place. In some guy's basement, they won't be.
It's not a question of efficiency, necessarily. It's a question of possible unintended consequences. It's fairly difficult to write a highly-efficient piece of malware. It's fairly easy to accidentally do something destructive. It's why people are not encouraged to run programs as root on their machines.
Do I think someone's going to accidentally create a superbug through their own tinkering? No. But can you tell me it's impossible someone gets a hold of a pathogen and it doesn't accidentally escape, or worse, mutate into a different strain, and then escape? That's where I see the potential for danger.
Just as a quick clarification: I don't mean to sound anti-gun. Everyone has a legal right to own a gun if they want to (subject to certain restrictions). I was just pointing out that there are people who don't take it quite as seriously as they should. Regardless of whether you think guns kill people or people kill people, it's undeniable that a person with a gun can kill people, so guns should be treated with due care.
History is replete with examples of people doing things because they could, without considering the question of whether or not they should. It's almost certain that someone will rush headlong into a project like this without adequately preparing for contingencies. It's no different than someone buying a gun and being lax about gun safety.
It's unlikely that even if he tried, he could make a disease more lethal than what nature has produced before.
It's not the idea of someone trying to make a disease that worries me. What worries me is the idea of someone moroning it up and accidentally producing something dangerous because they don't know what they're doing. The well-meaning idiot scenario is almost certainly more likely than the evil genius scenario.
Ah, you're back to complaining about having to jailbreak. I thought when you said iOS wasn't robust enough you actually had something interesting to say about the OS, not about Apple's policies.
How is the need to jailbreak not about the OS? If the OS was designed correctly, there wouldn't be a need to jailbreak to do these things. Apple took a system designed to do all these things, and took those capabilities out. To add insult to injury, they made it harder to add those capabilities back in, and use the threat of revoking your warranty as a stick to discourage you from doing so. Apple's policies made a bad situation worse, but the problem is the OS itself, not the policy against jailbreaking. The need to jailbreak in the first place is the problem. I would happily retract my comment about iOS not being robust if either a) the capabilities were exposed in the OS by default or b) the capabilities could be added via the App Store. (Hell, I'd even be satisfied if you could download an app through a third party website to do it, but God knows Apple is too anally retentive to allow anything like that to happen.)
This is really very simple: In order for me to consider the OS robust, it would have to have these capabilities, exposed to the user. It's not like Apple doesn't know how to make such an OS. They have one. They just chose not to use it for the iPod, iPhone or iPad.
Yes, we're back to you wanting a pretty GUI. That's fine, but it's not a comment on the "robustness" of the operating system. Linux is a good, robust operating system and doesn't have a pretty GUI, although you can add one if you want.
I'm well aware that Linux has a lot of pretty GUI options. In fact, I'm typing this in Ubuntu right now, using Gnome and Docky, typing in a particularly "pretty" Chrome browser window. All of that is entirely irrelevant to what I was saying.
The point is that iOS doesn't give you those things without having to jailbreak your phone, and Apple is on record (multiple times) that they don't want people jailbreaking. If you'll recall, they even issued a "You'll be on your own" statement after it was announced that jailbreaking your phone was perfectly legal. To whit:
Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris said Apple won’t change its policy that voids iPhone warranties if a phone has been jailbroken. “It can violate the warranty and cause the iPhone to become unstable and not work reliably,” she said.
This isn't about wanting a "pretty" graphic UI. It's about wanting a UI. Any UI. As it stands right now, Apple gives you nothing in terms of command line access, file management, or any of the other things I mentioned. That may be acceptable to offer consumers on a cell phone, but I can't understand why anyone would find it acceptable on a tablet. If you saw a PC or laptop with that kind of an OS, how hard would you laugh?
Again, this isn't about a pretty GUI. A GUI-less installation of Linux gives you about 1000 times the power of what iOS has.
I'm not down exclusively on iOS, either. I think the Chrome OS is silly to put on a browser, and while Android and WebOS don't suffer as much from the walled garden syndrome of iOS, they're a lot more limited than just putting a standard Linux distro on a tablet and being done with it. The only reason I think Apple deserves more scorn is because of how hostile they've been to people trying to use the hardware they paid for the way they want to use it. Android and WebOS (to take two examples in the mobile space) don't have that problem (although they have others).
1) iOS has a file manager. Complete with rm, cp, mv etc.
A built-in one? Do you have a citation for that? I'm not saying you're wrong, but I have never seen that anywhere, and have seen several posts like this bemoaning the lack of a file manager. I understand you can SSH into an iPhone, but I'm talking about a user-level file manager and command line. (Incidentally, command line access isn't the same thing as having a file manager. A file manager is a program which manages files (e.g., Windows Explorer, Nautilus, etc.).
Your problem is that Apple doesn't want you to (trivially) access any of these things. That doesn't mean that iOS doesn't have them. They're easily available if you jailbreak. And you're going to have to do more than jailbreak to run Chrome.
First, don't kid yourself: Apple doesn't want you to do any of those things at all. If it was up to Apple, jailbreaking would be illegal, and they'd be more than happy if any attempt to jailbreak bricked your phone.
Second, if it doesn't exist in the UI, for all intents and purposes, it doesn't exist. The UI controls what average users can do.
You're absolutely right about Chrome. That's one of the reasons I wouldn't use it on a tablet. A tablet should let you do all the things I mentioned without having to use Google to figure out have to get admin rights in your own system.
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You do realize that the mentally handicapped (i.e., "retarded", as you call them), aren't the ones benefiting from this, right? "Speech and communications" problems don't mean the person is intellectually subpar. (Making asinine comments on /., however, is a fairly strong indication.)
This is much less certain territory (at least, for me) but isn't the risk proportionally higher with homemade pathogens? You can do things in the lab (e.g., the fluorescent yogurt talked about elsewhere in this topic) that simply wouldn't occur in nature, and you can produce more of it than would occur naturally (because you're specifically providing an environment favorable to its growth). To use dog breeding as an example, there are certainly breeds which exist today which would not be expected to arise naturally, if we didn't help them along. My concern is that by giving people the ability to have makeshift labs, we're taking some of the protection that nature affords us in the wild out of the equation, which I think makes it riskier than what happens to the average person on a daily basis.
You probably wouldn't even need to do it in one swing. Getting hit with an ax can be fairly devastating, severely limiting your opponent's ability to defend him/herself.
Surprisingly enough, that's not comforting. ;)
Simply existing is a biological experiment, if you look at it that way. That doesn't mean it's justified to increase our risks, though. We're protected from most of the nastiness in the microbial environment by immunities that've built up over time, but those immunities can fail us if a pathogen changes slightly (e.g., the 1918 influenza outbreak). Don't we get attacked from nature enough without having to bring more of it down on ourselves through the inevitable carelessness that's going to happen if tens of thousands (which is a more reasonable estimate, if we're talking nationally or even globally) of people decide to start cooking up critters in their basements? It doesn't take thousands of people simultaneously making the same mistake at the same time to cause a problem.
Just so we're clear: I don't personally care if someone wants to produce LSD, meth, or ecstasy in their garage. If someone wants to kill themselves through experimentation, that's their business. More power to 'em. But you've got to draw the line somewhere, and it occurs to me that homebrew pathogens just might not be such a bad place to draw it. It's not the equipment that's the problem. It's the stuff you put in the equipment (the other column of that table) that's the problem.
Where did I say that a gun and a virus could do the same amount of damage? I didn't. What I compared was some people's attitudes toward them. The kinds of people who would keep a gun in an unlocked drawer are exactly the kinds of people who would be careless about the safety requirements of their experiments. In a professional setting, I'd be tempted to believe that such a person would be filtered out before they could do anything dangerous. But when it's Amateur Hour, I don't have that assurance.
7 Billion people around the world are actively engaged in (unintentional) home-brew microbiological experimentation. I really doubt that a few hundred "intentional" experimenters are going to bend the curve of viral and bacteriological evolution.
Well, I think 7 billion is an overestimate. You need to eliminate from that number those who are either a) not at sexual maturity, or b) not inclined to procreate because of sexual preference. (For the sake of argument, we'll assume that every heterosexual capable of procreating wants to procreate.) But whatever the number is, plenty of this experimentation leads to unintended consequences. You've got congenital birth defects, the potential for genetic mental illness, and people who just give their children particularly bad environments and produce sociopaths. So yeah, that experimentation goes wrong often enough to produce some pretty severe societal consequences.
To your credit, locking the gun up and controlling access to it is part of gun safety.
Yeah. That's kind of what I was thinking about when I wrote that. The kind of people who keep their gun in an unlocked desk drawer well in reach of little Johnny.
Actually, people are very afraid of that. Swine flu. Mad cow disease. Avian flu.
Evolution is like a trillion monkeys hammering away at potential genomes
That analogy doesn't go quite far enough. Evolution is more like a trillion monkeys hamering away at potential genomes, and keeping the ones that work out.
> It's fairly easy to accidentally do something destructive. Which is why humans have immune systems, self-repair capabilities, etc. It's a jungle out there and we're still alive in it.
An immune system isn't an impenetrable shield. What happened in 1918 can still happen today.
To be clear, I'm not saying that some virus released from a homebrew lab will destroy all of civilization. I'm not even saying it would be the equivalent of the 1918 flu epidemic. But if it was even 1/4 of that size, it'd still be a pretty big deal.
For that matter, we've been abusing antibiotics for decades and while MR bacteria are a problem today, they haven't (and won't) wipe out the human species.
Again, I'm not saying it's going to be a real-life Resident Evil. But it can put a world of hurt on us without dooming humanity.
I don't know a lot of people who accidentally programmed a virulent virus, but I know of people who've accidentally done things like run rm -rf on the wrong directory, or coded (and distributed) macros that did unexpected things in Word documents. And operating systems routinely have bugs in their initial releases that have to be patched later.
If you doubt that people can accidentally muck with nature and produce disastrous consequences, just consider dogs. Humans have bred dogs for specific traits, but that breeding has introduced problems into breeds. With a complex genome (and viruses aren't even that complex, compared to higher organisms), you can't predict what's going to happen. Probably, the odds of having something bad happen with one guy in his basement are pretty small, but if you get 10,000 or 100,000 people doing it, eventually, Something Bad will happen.
In some guy's basement, they won't be in place. How could they have advisory panels and such, in such a low-scale environment? I could see a corporation having those kinds of safeguards, but not individuals.
I should've specified the U.S. in my comments about guns. Sorry about that.
I'm not against stretching the limits of what we can do. I'm not even against doing risky things. What I'm saying is that some level of care needs to be taken that we're at least trying to assess risks. And maybe the guy doing the experiment shouldn't be the one who makes that assessment. In academic settings, those safeguards are in place. In some guy's basement, they won't be.
It's not a question of efficiency, necessarily. It's a question of possible unintended consequences. It's fairly difficult to write a highly-efficient piece of malware. It's fairly easy to accidentally do something destructive. It's why people are not encouraged to run programs as root on their machines. Do I think someone's going to accidentally create a superbug through their own tinkering? No. But can you tell me it's impossible someone gets a hold of a pathogen and it doesn't accidentally escape, or worse, mutate into a different strain, and then escape? That's where I see the potential for danger.
Just as a quick clarification: I don't mean to sound anti-gun. Everyone has a legal right to own a gun if they want to (subject to certain restrictions). I was just pointing out that there are people who don't take it quite as seriously as they should. Regardless of whether you think guns kill people or people kill people, it's undeniable that a person with a gun can kill people, so guns should be treated with due care.
History is replete with examples of people doing things because they could, without considering the question of whether or not they should. It's almost certain that someone will rush headlong into a project like this without adequately preparing for contingencies. It's no different than someone buying a gun and being lax about gun safety.
It's unlikely that even if he tried, he could make a disease more lethal than what nature has produced before.
It's not the idea of someone trying to make a disease that worries me. What worries me is the idea of someone moroning it up and accidentally producing something dangerous because they don't know what they're doing. The well-meaning idiot scenario is almost certainly more likely than the evil genius scenario.
First thing that came to my mind, too.
Luckily, a lot of it gets mopped up by Jupiter, from what I understand...
I'm certainly not saying that's a good thing. I'm just saying that if that's all Chrome OS brings to the table, it's unnecessary.
Ah, you're back to complaining about having to jailbreak. I thought when you said iOS wasn't robust enough you actually had something interesting to say about the OS, not about Apple's policies.
How is the need to jailbreak not about the OS? If the OS was designed correctly, there wouldn't be a need to jailbreak to do these things. Apple took a system designed to do all these things, and took those capabilities out. To add insult to injury, they made it harder to add those capabilities back in, and use the threat of revoking your warranty as a stick to discourage you from doing so. Apple's policies made a bad situation worse, but the problem is the OS itself, not the policy against jailbreaking. The need to jailbreak in the first place is the problem. I would happily retract my comment about iOS not being robust if either a) the capabilities were exposed in the OS by default or b) the capabilities could be added via the App Store. (Hell, I'd even be satisfied if you could download an app through a third party website to do it, but God knows Apple is too anally retentive to allow anything like that to happen.)
This is really very simple: In order for me to consider the OS robust, it would have to have these capabilities, exposed to the user. It's not like Apple doesn't know how to make such an OS. They have one. They just chose not to use it for the iPod, iPhone or iPad.
Yes, we're back to you wanting a pretty GUI. That's fine, but it's not a comment on the "robustness" of the operating system. Linux is a good, robust operating system and doesn't have a pretty GUI, although you can add one if you want.
I'm well aware that Linux has a lot of pretty GUI options. In fact, I'm typing this in Ubuntu right now, using Gnome and Docky, typing in a particularly "pretty" Chrome browser window. All of that is entirely irrelevant to what I was saying.
The point is that iOS doesn't give you those things without having to jailbreak your phone, and Apple is on record (multiple times) that they don't want people jailbreaking. If you'll recall, they even issued a "You'll be on your own" statement after it was announced that jailbreaking your phone was perfectly legal. To whit:
Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris said Apple won’t change its policy that voids iPhone warranties if a phone has been jailbroken. “It can violate the warranty and cause the iPhone to become unstable and not work reliably,” she said.
[Emphasis added.]
Source
This isn't about wanting a "pretty" graphic UI. It's about wanting a UI. Any UI. As it stands right now, Apple gives you nothing in terms of command line access, file management, or any of the other things I mentioned. That may be acceptable to offer consumers on a cell phone, but I can't understand why anyone would find it acceptable on a tablet. If you saw a PC or laptop with that kind of an OS, how hard would you laugh?
Again, this isn't about a pretty GUI. A GUI-less installation of Linux gives you about 1000 times the power of what iOS has.
I'm not down exclusively on iOS, either. I think the Chrome OS is silly to put on a browser, and while Android and WebOS don't suffer as much from the walled garden syndrome of iOS, they're a lot more limited than just putting a standard Linux distro on a tablet and being done with it. The only reason I think Apple deserves more scorn is because of how hostile they've been to people trying to use the hardware they paid for the way they want to use it. Android and WebOS (to take two examples in the mobile space) don't have that problem (although they have others).
1) iOS has a file manager. Complete with rm, cp, mv etc.
A built-in one? Do you have a citation for that? I'm not saying you're wrong, but I have never seen that anywhere, and have seen several posts like this bemoaning the lack of a file manager. I understand you can SSH into an iPhone, but I'm talking about a user-level file manager and command line. (Incidentally, command line access isn't the same thing as having a file manager. A file manager is a program which manages files (e.g., Windows Explorer, Nautilus, etc.).
Your problem is that Apple doesn't want you to (trivially) access any of these things. That doesn't mean that iOS doesn't have them. They're easily available if you jailbreak. And you're going to have to do more than jailbreak to run Chrome.
First, don't kid yourself: Apple doesn't want you to do any of those things at all. If it was up to Apple, jailbreaking would be illegal, and they'd be more than happy if any attempt to jailbreak bricked your phone.
Second, if it doesn't exist in the UI, for all intents and purposes, it doesn't exist. The UI controls what average users can do.
You're absolutely right about Chrome. That's one of the reasons I wouldn't use it on a tablet. A tablet should let you do all the things I mentioned without having to use Google to figure out have to get admin rights in your own system.