The population of the planet isn't going to decrease just by breaking up large countries. You'd be replacing the problems with democracy amongst large groups of people with the problems of diplomacy.between large groups of peoples.

The only moment where my suspension of disbelief ran into problems was a brief technobabble tossaway about the super soldier serum and his "genetic code". So when I got home and googled around a little to learn a little more of the history of what the state of knowledge was between Mendal and Watson&Crick. Now I find myself reading Schrödinger's 1944 book "What is Life?".

Agreed. The analogy with real viruses breaks down when there is any sort of command and control involved in the malware. Also, a real virus will never pass up an opportunity to spread the moment it mutates, while a malware author might save their best new trick for a really special target. On the other hand, this might be a good opportunity to model a few aspects of how a hypothetical bioengineering arms race might play out.

For better or worse, research will simply take place in whatever jurisdiction doesn't pass those laws.

The dotted line we draw around humanity is, ultimately, an arbitrary choice. There was a time not long ago where the definition of "person" excluded whole races and whole genders. And even though we have a person good grasp of how far to extend the shield of our empathy and citizenship, there are still people pushing the boundary further (animal welfare, the great ape project, etc).

Chimeras and genetically altered organisms, by their existance, reopen the entire debate over personhood. That means not only a discussion about whether these new creations have human rights, but possibly revisiting past decisions over whether all rights really need to apply to all people.

Please remember when designing these rules that as soon as people have been trained to react to notifications of a privacy breach, scammers will begin sending fake notifications as a phishing hook.

Is slashdot a social game?

I think you underestimate the simulation power of cellular automata. Also, by having the client render local surfaces with splines, you can remove the "blockiness" on the client without any additional overhead on the server.

Destructable terrain is not what minecraft is about. Cellular automata creating a dynamic world is what makes minecraft tick. Destructable/craftable terrain is just a side effect that you get almost for free..

I've noticed that microtransactions fundementally change the developer-player relationship. In a subscription-based game, a developer and a player are on the same side: the player wants to buy an entertaining game to stick with, the developer wants to make an entertaining game people stick with. In a microtransaction-based game, it's an adversarial relationship: the player wants to minimize their spending to find entertainment while the developer wants to maximize the emotional impulse to spend. This creates a qualitative difference in the entire atmophere of a game. So although I used to be ok with microtransactions, their presence is now an automatic "no sale" for me.

One would think that the upheavals of the extinction event would have created some mass graveyards that could be found at the layer itself. I realize that in the grand scheme of things, the one wiped out generation is a statistical blip relative to the millions of generations that came and went through the normal lives and deaths, but given the scale of the disruption to normal ecology, it would be nice to find boneyards right on the KT boundary event itself.

There seems to be an intense eagerness on slashdot to predict RIM's demise. It smells like deliberate FUD, whether from a competitor or just self-flagellating Canadian doomsayers who no longer get their regular fix from staring into the abyss of Nortel.

What are the legal implications of Watson lying? of providing false or misleading information?

I declined share options and stock purchases and asked that if they were going to give me a bonus, that it be in cash even if it was only a fraction of the paper value. I thought through all the risks and decided that investing in what was already my sole source of income didn't make sense at any price.

You're assuming I wasn't a cleaner. Everyone used to envy the guy with the tennis ball on a stick who spent his days cleaning scuffmarks off the polished main hall. His life looked so simple, so fulfilling. He knew his job, he did his job, he went home and slept well.

I'm not the cardboard box yet, but if I can't pull it together and stop having panic attacks every time I see a cubical, a suit or a shell prompt, that's where I'm headed.

Wait ... that's quite a bit ... does that mean I might be getting some severence pay after all?