This wasn't a thought crime. This was an actual crime, knowingly committed with full buy-in from the administration. Actual virus was produces, and had the intended effect.

There is potential benefit. The problem is that the costs appear to outweigh the benefit by many orders of magnitude.

Mod parent "Funny!" Only maybe s/he was serious. Sigh.

Why does it make a difference how they made the virus more transmissible?

Um. Yes, it would be nice to know if we were at risk. But if the way to find out if we are at risk is by massively increasing the risk, maybe ignorance really is bliss in this case. That's the point the authors of the article are making, and I think it's an important point.

The thing that boggles my mind about this is that apparently nobody in the chain of command at the university thinks there's anything wrong with what this brilliant idiot has done. If I were the prosecutor here, I would charge everybody who know about the experiment with a billion counts of attempted murder (just a back-of-the-envelope estimate), and throw the fuckers in the can for life. Unbelievable.

This person probably lives downwind of the great lakes, which froze last winter because the polar vortex moved off the poles (which were above freezing at times) and landed on Minnesota. We had a great winter in Vermont. OTOH, they are experiencing unseasonable high temperatures in California this summer, and Europe has had some really hot summers recently. Unfortunately people confuse their local climate with the global climate.

Warming hasn't flatlined. Atmospheric warming hasn't even flatlined. But sea warming has been consistent and substantial. Google clathrates if you're curious why you should care about that.

If that's your best argument, it sounds like you've come to the debate unarmed. Congress is notoriously hostile to climate science.

Yes, and really, really huge (many orders of magnitude bigger) amounts of profit would be lost by oil companies' shareholders if we decided to believe the absolutely overwhelming evidence that carbon dioxide causes global warming. Being a global warming scientist is a lot less lucrative than using those same skills to do just about anything else, so it's really hard to believe that job security is the motivational basis for roughly 99% of scientists who study climate change saying that we have a problem. Chances are that they just want to try to prevent their children seeing the last days of civilization and then dying painfully.

The double irony is that a lot of climate change deniers are the same people who stockpile weapons in case of the collapse of civilization. It's almost as if you bloody well want to spend your last days futilely defending the dwindling supplies in your bunker.

And yet... OP has a point! Dunno why someone modded that flamebait.

That's great, except that it's still the case that the interpretation of the biometrics happens at the source, not at the validation point, so it winds up just being bits, which can be trivially faked and are probably very predictable.

Exactly right. Biometric passwords are much easier to fake, because you can't change them. They also provide a nice means of identifying surveillance targets. It's almost as if these guys are getting direction from the NSA or something.

I get widely differing performance at different hotels in the same chain, for some chains, and consistent performance for others. And of course, different performance in the early evening than in the early morning. So these numbers are basically garbage.

I didn't claim to offer a solution. I was just commenting on the parent, who claimed that it was wrong to mod its parent flamebait. I agree with the moderators. Unfortunately new moderators have come along and modded the article up. We don't need more hope-killing hysteria. Telling people not to hope, that we're already doomed and defeated, is the surest way to keep them down. It's a fairly safe assumption that when someone does that, they are doing it precisely for that reason: they don't want you to get involved.