The next superbug that comes out will kill many million people, will destabilize the world so much all those drug companies would go bankrupt. So it is self correcting, in that sense.

I felt a great disturbance, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible had happened 5.5 billion light years away.

No, it is not enlarging live brains. It enlarges the cells in tissue samples.

It is quite common in engineering software development to come across features that depend on one person. If your team has a few bachelors degree guys all proficient in the software development platform you might see the skill set perfectly interchangeable. But if your team has a mixture of Masters and PhDs working on engineering analysis there will be tons of tasks that only one team member can do. Companies can not hire multiple PhDs in the same super sub specialty. Typically companies will hire a dozen PhDs in a broadly related area, (they usually suck in software development and following coding standards.) Typically there will be given a broad area of code base to "own" and manage. So if the feature touches "absorbing boundary condition" it has to go through Dr Yin May. Or Dr Sundararajan would be the only one who understands how the k-epsilon model of turbulence is baked in to the product. Any feature or development that needs turbulence modeling would need Dr S to check if it is feasible and to implement it if it has to be done.

It all sounds sciency enough but I have grown very disenchanted with these experiments that use "simple tasks" to judge "$parameter". As my company switched to Agile I was forced to undergo "Agile for managers" or whatever. They made senior manager stuff envelopes and place stamps and had a few gotchas. It made me realize the root of the con game is to pick the tasks that are so simple any team member could do it. The variability in skill set, the varieties of skills needed to complete the project is not fully addressed.

Instead of some simple tasks which anyone can do, if we throw in some tasks that could only be done by one or two persons in the team, then it would be more realistic. Something like some step needs derivative of a function and only one team member remembers calculus 101, or requires translating a passage from French to English.. The moment you introduce variation in skill sets among the team members, agile for software breaks down. This experiment too might have different results.

The code was not malicious, It was incompetent. It is the difference between venomous and poisonous. Snake fangs are venomous, designed to kill. Arsenic is poisonous, it kills but not designed to.

This volume is not meant for regular use, It would be mounted as a back up volume, written by backup software at scheduled intervals and it should be configured to save only important files. But a single \rm -rf /* would not destroy home disk and the mounted backup disk too.

We can think of a file system where a file once written will not be modified. I am thinking of pure back up applications and audit trail applications. We had it with WORM disks, write-once-read-many times optical disks that supported multi session writing.

We could think of a backup disk where the command \rm -rf / will simply write a fresh empty table of linked inodes on /.

When the "oops" moment comes, we will have tools that will go and find the previous versions of the inodes table for / and restore the files. We have developed very sophisticated back up tools, time-machine in MacOS comes to my mind, and version control suites. So it should not be difficult to come up with a "safe back up volume that never deletes anything". It will be very good to comply with audit trails etc.

Is there a way to mount a disk in a "Add only no delete" mode? If not, why not?

I wish Apple would also pitch in and find and publish bugs in both Windows and Android. And Microsoft to retaliate by finding and reporting bugs in Android and Apple. In the end we as consumers will benefit. This should be come the norm. No longer minor players report possible bugs and the clock does not run till the company "accepts" that there is a bug.

Free markets! Competition!! That is what made America, what it is.

I wish such fierce competition exists in all spheres of the economy.

The one third due to inheritance is true in the fortune 400, probably extends to the top 1000. But in the top 0.5% more than 80% are due to inheritance. Top 0.5% by net worth starts at 15 million dollars. No doctor, lawyer, engineer, accountant, salesman accumulates that much without extraordinary luck. If a person starts without inheritance, and gets into the top 1% by income of his peer age group, stays there through the entire earning career, will barely make enough to be in the top 1% by wealth. (5 million dollars). (Wealth not including non-rented home(s), cars, jewelry etc)

Without inheritance only very very few lucky people make it to the top 0.5%, by luck. Many who worked as hard and were as smart would not make it to top 0.5%.

Add the cost of acquiring the phone to the fine and send the phone to uber after each fine. Change the law to allow this to happen.

If it can detect phones used in stings, it should make a special tag on them. Have a list of super clean vetted operators and send the sting police squad only these rides. Police will think Uber has cleaned up.

Assigning motives, thinking abilities to inanimate objects, even when it is patently obvious that it can't think, is useful. Daniel Dennett calls is "design stance". In coding parlance, it is hiding all the intricate details of a complex functions and explaining it what it is designed to do. "The stream buffer expects the input strings to be null terminated", "This excel macro wants the data to be in comma separated fields format". I hear people shouting, "Do not anthropomorphize programs. They hate it" ;-)

Saying pitcher plant allows a few ants to escape communicates the idea, even when everyone knows there is no brain, no thinking, and it actually means, "over the last few thousand generations the plants that did not produce the sticky protein for parts of the day had better survival rates".

But you need to draw an even more important lesson from this, very very applicable today. Without any thinking, purely by chance, some people will find enormous success. So we need to discard the current political thinking based on, "ALL the rich people got rich by being smart and working hard. ALL the poor people are poor because they are dumb and lazy".

The market is flooded with cheap chinese knock-offs that sell far cheaper than 6000 Rs. Many of them have dual or triple SIM cards. It is not unusual for them to use one SIM for making within-metro calls, another to for National or statewide calls and yet another one to make international calls. The quality is terrible and reliability is atrocious on these cheap chinese phones. But competition is brutal. Not much of margin there.

Instead of looking at raw sales based on number of units or gross receipts, if one starts breaking down the market by amount of profit generated, iPhone is well ensconced. Top end Samsung comes in next.

Samsung should be careful to distinguish the models and handsets very obviously and visibly. If the brand acquires an association as the "phone for the unwashed masses", the high profit segment will just disappear. My nephew visiting me derisively called the old flip phone "a servant [maid] 's phone". Other nephews and nieces make sure their clothes and accessories will not be mistaken for a cheap imitation. It is a very class conscious society. And the training starts early. Almost all their buying decision seems to be driven by "what my peers will think if they catch me using this product?".