God, I hate it when people bring this up. A bacteriophage does NOT infect eukaryotic cells, and more importantly their route of infection is tailored to exploiting bacteria. One of the most common model bacteriophages, T4, is in fact reliant on gram-negative anatomy by searching for lipopolysaccharides and porins to bind to.
So how to regulate it? Well, how to even regulate humans creating tailored cats to catch rodents on their trading vessels, that would then evolve is tricky...
Then again, considering cats are the new overlords of the internet, that's a bad example.
Do you really not get the irony of mentioning the civil rights movement while speaking about "patience, compromise, and steady change?" Do you know why there was this relatively sudden burst of demonstrations, protests, marches, and so on and so forth? Because for the past fifty years since the Atlanta compromise, gradualism was mainly used by the government as an excuse to do nothing about existing issues with no real plans on the agenda for integration. From 1895 until the 1950s, "patience, compromise, and steady change" did jack shit and only served to retard progress. That's why there even was a civil rights movement. People didn't feel like spending generations as second class citizens, waiting patiently for their great-grandkids to have a future they won't be around for and can't say for certain will even come around. There is no way to have slow, steady change on an order less than many generations, because thoughts and cultural memes get entrenched and passed from parent to child, and the only thing that'll force them out is conflict.
What you're talking about are all symptoms of a dysfunctional society and a refusal of the new social strata, and your examples are riddled with holes and victim blaming, especially because Bradley Manning couldn't've released his information piecemeal because between the volume of data and the constant threat of feds busting down your door, and regardless of what the law says there's nothing right about fifty years in jail for a few minutes in a closet unless you're taking someone's life, and then constant legal issues to the point where you kill yourself just to escape. While you're saying to stop vilifying opponents who well earned their reputations and stop glorifying leaks, what's really being said, be it your intent or not, is to just shut up, bend over, and hope it'll be over quicker this time. Change doesn't come from people lining up and merely wishing things were different, and attitudes like those don't make it happen at all. Stop blaming the victims and look who's really making people into martyrs.
Looks like someone never tried an iOS upgrade on an older iDevice...
You'd've been S.O.L. if I was your kid - even when I was real little, I'd find myself staying up late into the night and consistently waking up past 10AM.
Except that a nuclear bomb and a nuclear reactor are only the same in that they have the same Joe Sixpack/media stigma attached to both of them. Here, let me use an analogy.
Not building a nuclear reactor in Japan because of the previous use of the atomic bomb due to concerns of insensitivity is roughly the same as the United States of America not building the Saturn V because the use of rocket propelled grenades against troops in Vietnam. Completely different devices for completely different ends.
But, I thought in this modern era of human resources, employees were the assets seized!
Congratulations!
You seemed to forget the entire point of XKCD's what-if series is, in fact, taking childish daydreams and running with it. It's a bit odd, anyways, that a person who (begin rant) thinks a COTS laptop, in a shielded cabin in a magnetosphere-shielded environment using a tiny node size is every bit as radiation-hardened as a RAD750 with a 150nm node size to reduce susceptibility to smaller particles, with latchup-proof logic, parity-checked memory, etc etc. (end rant) is behaving as a physics expert to begin with.
Actually, a power tool is precisely the model to go after, really.
I insert the safety key and press the on button. The motor turns on and it just works. Dangerous? Mildly to extremely depending on the tool. But it Just Works and that's what matters whether it's some skilled artisan who has turned more bowls on his 25,000 dollar lathe and hand-sharpened every tool he's forged himself or something absurd like that or an underpaid illegal immigrant sticking screws into a wall frame with a handheld drill/screw gun. It just works - pull trigger switch, motor turns, screw goes in. Obtuse things like spitting out errors that are purely a number just doesn't make sense in this era of 64-bit monster rigs that can churn out well-encoded, efficiently compressed video at or above the native framerate - can't we spare a couple bytes to stick a descriptive error string after looking up the error in a stored table? It isn't like we're dealing with featherweight embedded computers with barely enough space to stick a primitive FORTH in. Maybe I just need to turn in my geek card in, or something. I don't know.
I agree, if the kid ends up with a record from this, finding a job might be difficult. He may feel that society has turned on him and there is no where to go and decide the acquire a weapon and take it out on everyone.
If he gets a record for a silly drawing, having some resistors and TO-223s in a breadboard hooked to a couple AA batteries, and being smart, finding a job will be difficult and will feel that society has turned on him because it has turned on him for absolute nonsense, and hell - everyone already thinks I'm some crazy terrorist, and I don't have a future that doesn't ask if they'd like fries with it too, why not hit up the local Ryder and rent a nice big truck and run off to a farming supply shop? Heard there's a sale on the fertilizer.
A bone to pick, if you would:
Do you know how a city water system works? that's a marvelous creation. Do you understand the metallurgy used to create a nail? do you know the variety of chemical choices the can be made when making gas?
The vast majority of marvelous thing that you use you don't really care how they work in any real detail.
I don't know everything - anyone with an ounce of sense would say they don't, but frankly, I simply detest that sort of thought, that blase and complacent ignorance of the world that seems pervasive nowadays. I don't know the metallurgy in a nail, nor do I completely grok of the workings of the municipal water network in my city nor even its power grid, and only dimly aware of anything about the specifics of petrochemical refining. But you know what?
The world's only as boring as you let it be. Reading about those sorts of subjects over a lunch or while bored in the evening is the kind of thing I do. Even in the USA, a person can get a surprisingly good survey of the sciences and some trades with its broken educational system, but the problem isn't simply lack of availability, it's, again, this willful ignorance of many things. There is this growing urge to literally refuse to learn about the basics of things that deeply influence their life. I'm not an expert in a lot of fields, but at least I'm not enough of an ignorant mule to act like none of this matters.
[...W]hat kind of dumbass thinks that zero-g would enable a fish to "swim" thru air?
The same kind of dumbass that considers that impulse is impulse, regardless of it's under 0G, 1G, or 42G of gravitational pull.
What microgravity doesn't do is make air thicker, but what microgravity
Which means a fish could indeed, swim in air. In the absence of gravity to hold things down, one could simply flap their arms in the air to propel themselves forward, if slowly.
Likewise, so could a fish flap its fins and propel itself slowly through air, in the absence of gravity to cancel out the tiny force imparted on flapping fins against air.
We can't get people to the moon economically or technologically, even. Anyone you send will just die from a number of factors including exposure to the Van Allen belts, micrometeorites and low orbital debris, lack of gravity and plus, if anything else were to happen, they'd be also be dead then, because nobody could reach them in time to help them. It is a fool's journey.
Not if the 400k van has a 50k engine and a recently overhauled transmission. Repair isn't always a bandaid so that it just barely works again. It's called proper maintenance.
Uh, did you ever take a biology class, or did the man infiltrate those? Because I don't know if you've read/seen much NatGeo or Discovery, but this world is awesome as it is ready to kill you, and dying of awful disease born of unprocessed and unsterilized and improperly handled food was quite the common thing before the advent of sanitary processes. Dysentery isn't just something that makes your characters on Oregon Trail disappear.
Unless, of course, you are indirectly suggesting that the solution to this problem is a human die-back. That would indeed reduce the need.
Suggest you just sit there and wait till life gets easier.
