Calculations and map

Not sure how valid this is, I haven't checked any of the sources outside of the surface area of the earth covered in water, etc. Also, of course there would be other serious changes to the climate, it's not just a matter of water level and amount of land available, etc.

Still it is interesting if this is true that the upper limit is around 60-75 meters. It definitely puts to rest any fears of a 'Waterworld' scenario and seems to suggest overall landmass would remain about the same.

I think this is where part of the disconnect is. I think younger users are comfortable with the fact that it's unlikely they're going to 'break' the device or get hurt if they just start randomly pushing buttons to see what they do. For many older users not used to computers doing random things was historically a good way to break things or hurt yourself so they're very hesitant to do so. When explaining things to older users I usually start with telling them there is really nothing they can do to break it and when in doubt just start trying random buttons to see what they do. Note I realize you can accidentally delete data and such but if they haven't been using a device before there really isn't anything on there to delete. If they truly manage to muck it up you can just reset it to defaults and they can start again with very little loss. These users aren't usually creating tons of content they just want to do simple things.

I seem to remember looking into this a while ago and the human genome isn't really as big as I thought it was. According to this nature page there are 3.4 billion base pairs and since each is only one of 4 values it takes 2-bits per base pair to encode so the entire genome is only 850,000,000 bytes which is 810.6MB (1,048,576 bytes/MB). I don't know about you but the cost to 'store' this in my mind is essentially nothing. There are a ton of places on the web that will easily offer 1GB of storage for free, 1GB USB sticks are frequently given away and if you buy a current HD (non-SSD) the cost of 1GB is less than $0.15.

I welcome the day when sequencing a genome costs less than $0.15...

This has been my experience as well. Every time I've known the story personally and read the version in the 'news' there have been numerous errors some of which are so blatant they change the conclusions. I don't read the NYTimes so maybe they have good journalists, I don't know, but there seems to be a lack of actual, good journalism out there. What happened to news reporters doing actual investigative journalism and research to try and bring the public a deep perspective on something? It seems now that most news is just surface scratching and repetition via the AP/Reuters, etc. They ask some 'expert' 10 questions about something and then horribly mangle those answers to try and make it as flashy as possible and fit in X words.

Fortunately there are still good sources of news for computer related news. Sites like Anandtech where actual testing occurs and research is done and presented as justification for claims made. I can only hope the rest of the news industry can somehow reclaim that which once made them an important part of a free nation.

It's been a while since I studied this so take this with a grain of salt. I believe RSA involves 2 random large primes, 'p' and 'q' which are multiplied together to form a bigger number, 'n'. There is a bunch of other math to generate two more values 'd' and 'e' from 'p' and 'q'. The public key is 'n' and 'e', the private key is 'n' and 'd'. The math works that you can't get 'd' from 'e'. Factorization means just that, finding the factors of a number. In this case you're given 'n' which you know has only 2 factors ('p' and 'q' are both prime) so if you can factor 'n' and get 'p' and 'q' you can recalculate 'd' yourself and you now have the private key.

I submit the problem is with step 2. You seem to think we should mitigate all the risks we can. I think step 3 should be part of step 2. Evaluate each risk and decide whether it needs to be mitigated and to what extent. If we just assume we're going to mitigate any and all risks that we have the capability of doing we end up where we are now with slow progress and insane costs. With regard to understanding the risks I admit I don't know specifically what they are for a given launch but I think you should be able to distill it down to a probability of loss of life on any given mission. I think you would still get a large number of qualified volunteers if the number was 10% or even 20% chance of death on the first experimental flight. Things don't have to be 99.999% safe for people to attempt them...

I guess I wasn't clear. What I meant was that by leaving a CD on a park bench (which is publicly accessible) I could, by your reasoning, be liable if someone comes along, copies the CD, and replaces the CD on the park bench. By your reasoning I have 'distributed' the CD by allowing (intentionally or not) someone to copy it.

So in this case too I could admit that a crime had taken place but that crime wasn't theft (the CD was returned) and I'd argue that leaving the CD there wasn't 'distribution' so the only crime was copyright infringement by the person who copied the CD on the bench.

Oh well, it doesn't really matter anyways I just think that you have to be careful with defining the word 'distribution' as if it includes unintentional public access you can get into all kinds of weird situations. Are you 'distributing' alcohol to minors if you forget to lock up a store with alcohol in it? etc, etc?