Limiting access to any virus or bacteria that's in the environment is rather hard.
Depends on the pathogen. Things like smallpox, sars, or ebola are not going to be easy to come by, while something like influenza and the information to recreate Spanish flu would be. But that was kind of what I was getting at in my last point. Someone could easily start cloning things into common pathogens, which is not a good idea unless you are doing it in controlled conditions (like a BSL3 lab), but in practice there is no way you can effectively regulate that.
We make paper. Or Zeros and Ones. Those will not be worth as much as they once were.
The US is still by far the largest manufacturing economy in the world. In fact, it's almost as large as the next 2 countries (China and Japan) combined:
2007 stats in USD:
US: 1.8 trillion
China: 1.1 trillion
Japan: 0.9 trillion
http://unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/dnllist.asp
Flagship demo projects like this often get exceedingly big discounts from the vendors.
Yeah, remember Virginia Tech's crazy Mac cluster that had a a slew of Power G5s that they ran for what seemed like less than a year and replaced with XServes? IIRC, Apple gave them an even swap for the brand new XServes.
Credit ... is the only enduring testimonial to man's confidence in man. -- James Blish