No, I mean that by any rational standard, deliberately creating a pathogen that can kill millions, whether you release it deliberately or not, is a crime. It may not be on the books, but it should be.

You are correct—this isn't attempted murder. But IMHO it's in the same moral category. I think you are basically right that it's a failure to think outside of the immediate problem space, but what a failure. Imagine if 40-60% of the people you have ever met or heard of, as well as those you don't, died within a month. The 1918 flu left emotional scars that persisted for generations. And that had a 2% mortality rate. The amount of suffering this person could have caused through his narrow thinking is more than has ever been experienced in all of history.

So if I fill a big, weak tank with a poisonous substance and deliberately park it upstream from a public reservoir, but don't actually open a valve to dump the toxin into the reservoir, and there's really only about a 20% chance of the thing bursting and dumping the whole load of toxin into the reservoir, you are saying that I have done nothing wrong, and should not be subject to prosecution, because although I set up a situation with a real probability of poisoning the water supply, I didn't actually poison the water supply.

ISTM that you are really saying that it's only attempted murder if the toxin actually winds up in the water supply; if so, you don't understand what attempted murder is. It's when you try to kill someone, but fail. I suspect that there's no mens rea here, so the charge wouldn't stick, but knowingly manufacturing a pandemic virus ought to be a crime, and the knowingly part would then constitute mens rea.

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.