Well, when you learn to read yourself you can go back to the start of this thread and see that I was replying to someone who said that Google was being evil. You seem to be supporting that person's comment. I don't see how they can be evil (in regards to this report) unless they somehow owe the world all that information so I am aksing why they owe it.

It seems to me that they should hire the best applicants that apply (as best as they can determine that) and it's really nobody else's business.

He only said that the guy deserves it. I think we all agree with that. He didn't say that it was a good law.

Most will die quickly without a host to reproduce in. I do know that.

But... a small number will not. I certainly don't believe that every place a smallpox victim has been or every gravesite where one was buried still contains viri. But there were a lot of hosts before it was 'exterminated'. I do think it's probably out there somewhere.

Except that now you are talking about a very expensive and difficult report to create. You would end up creating a team of people whose sole job is to collect, organize and report this information while providing no benefit back to Google. Why do you feel Google owes this to you? Sorry, not doing that does not make them evil.

That's pretty dumb. Comparing a virus to macroscopic animals.

I'm skeptical it can even be done at all. So it's said that smallpox is gone. But.. it's just too big of a big world.

Besides the know laboratories there has to be somewhere that some viri have somehow managed to be preserved. Maybe a vial that has long since lost it's label, now stuck in an attic or basement waiting to be sold with a pile of antiques. Maybe it's in a body that has managed to be burried in just the perfect environment to preserve it. Maybe it's in a stain on some old antique, totally not obvious by site after decades of just sitting there that it's source was a bodily fluid.

Wherever it is it's only a matter of time before someone wakes it up.

"Google is being evil here"

Uh, Yah... they are being real evil.

They should fire a bunch of white people and hire a bunch of non-white people based solely on the color of their skin.

That would make them not evil.

They aren't testing the true capabilities of the airport screeners. If they sent there fake weapons through taped to the crotches of young children and elderly grandmothers they would see the agents really shine.

I wouldn't bother. Just use QEMU. It's slower but it works.

I don't think proprietary software is worthwile on Linux. No, I'm not an RMS type that would completely boycott proprietary anything on philosphical grounds. It's just that my experience is that if I can't compile it from source on Linux it sucks.

First... you have to be running the same distro as the author or.. no support and maybe a 40% chance it will even work.

Ok, for the Pi everything is probably Raspbian so that might not be a problem.

But.. a year later... it doesn't work if you download any updates because it is dependant on some old library version or the distro has moved some file or something like that.

If you get source code... just recompile and it works. You get about 5 years before Linux has changed too much to use that same source code without modification.

Get a community to maintain the source code... it's more like 25 years.

Now.. proprietary software on Windows.. 10 to 20 years before you can't use it anymore.

ln -s /dev/null beacon.csv

"Because it's both insanely expensive as well as utterly pointless."

So the greatest aspiration of humanity should be to get fat sitting in a chair observing the universe from afar? Why not just go extinct imediately? What's the point?

If we aren't moving towards a future then what's the point of the present?

I like the way that kid thinks!

Really? Rovers can dig under the surface better? Citation needed!

Rovers have brought us some great information but now we are hitting the limits of what they can do and all we are getting in re-runs of the same great discoveries.

Robot scratched the surface of a rock.. found evidence of ancient water. Robot sampled surface soil... found products of broken down organics. It was news years ago. And yet it's still all we hear today.

Robot digs some feet down and finds things that haven't been sterilized by UV... Nope... not happening.

Sure, Tang is cool I guess. I am a bit more excited about microwave ovens, better integrated circuits which enabled personal computers and important things like that which came out of the Apollo program but hey.. if Tang is what floats your boat then whatever.

"Yeah! Because we just left the ISS floating around up there doing nothing sciencey for YEARS before somebody said "let's try to grow some plants!" "

No but it hasn't been doing the "sciency stuff" it was supposed to. It was sold to the public as a development platform to develop the technologies needed to live for long periods in space. That's what NASA said they were going to do anyway.

Growing plants in zero G being a great example of this as they provide food and oxygen. What it has been used for however is to give private companies a taxpayer funded zero G labratory to study how various crystals form and other chemical reactions without the influence of gravity.

Don't get me wrong.. there are some great material science and drug applications there but the goal of developing tech for living beyond the Earth seems to have been mostly forgotten since the thing was launched.

" ...only the really old live, then we run out of viable sperm and eggs in a few generations"

I would think that a man who's aging has been reversed would continue to produce viable sperm. Eggs... well.. that could be a problem.