I have a chair that my wife refers to as the Wall-E chair. I use it with a reading table to hold my laptop, a bluetooth keyboard, and a trackball that sits on the arm of the chair. Works a treat. The chair is something like this: http://www.la-z-boy.com/Produc...

It's ugly, the construction is pathetically bad, I've had to screw it back together with drywall screws, but it is quite comfortable, and doesn't look _completely_ awful. I'm sure you could come up with something nicer, though.

He gave us both the word "crap" and "ballcock"? What a guy.

See there, you're talking about *actually* unwanted programs. If a program is potentially unwanted, then it's not currently unwanted. It just might become unwanted in the future.

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.

I think you mean something like "unwittingly installed program" then. You could knowingly install an application and still retain the potential for not-wanting it.

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.

I know it's started becoming a common terminology, but I don't really like the terms "Potentially Unwanted Program" and "Potentially Unwanted Application". Any program/application is *potentially* unwanted. Whenever someone starts talking about PUP/PUA, I can never figure out where they're drawing the line.

I'm not aware of Odoo, so I'm only speaking generally, but generally speaking, having a simple/intuitive product does *reduce* the need to documentation. For example, I don't need documentation to tell me that I can open a Word document by going to "File", selecting "Open", and then going to "Computer", "Browse"....

Now, come to think of it, the process for even something as simple as that has gotten needlessly complicated. WTF is Microsoft doing these days?

Back on subject, yeah, if you open files by going to an obvious menu button that says, "Open File...", then I don't think you really need to document that. You only need to document the features that aren't completely blindingly obvious.

The need for documentation can also be reduced by having a good help/support system. If you have a procedure for doing something unusual and complicated that's undocumented, you had better have someone standing by that I can call/chat/email who can help me out. And even still, that stuff should be documented at least well enough that you can train your support staff.

If you don't have good support and something is not completely obvious, then yes, it should be documented.

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.