If people can't afford cars because of the crisis, they necessarily can't afford cars with those "useless concepts".

The radio telescope and the communication satellite has wildly different design goals and specs. You can't get much by just comparing the size.

Well girls do speak a different language XD High-school girls in Beijing are known to develop their own variant of Mandarin, featuring variations of consonants. It isn't usually preserved through adulthood though.

As a fellow /.er has posted above, this statement works if the error is purely statistical, that is to say no significant contribution of systematic bias.

That idea could make great games, not necessarily the "war game" type, but the more "psychological" genre. I can imagine the player being the hero who at some point must choose either to slaughter POWs on his superior's order, or to defend their rights out of his own ethical principles, etc.

On your other point.. I don't think games can do much, nor are they supposed to do that. Those violations indicate systematic problems within the military, and the Red Cross should concentrate their work to get that fixed before trying to make an influence through games.

There's a difference: EMACS actually works.

Then you don't have to ban it. Since the community is aware and responsible, as you and others have indicated, the peer reviewers will stop the manuscript from being accepted. Responsible 3rd party researchers can also make themselves heard and persuade the editors from publishing the result. But there's no need of banning or dictating what kind of research can or cannot be done. Perceived threat of bioterror attack should not compromise the liberty of free speech and academic freedom.

You're kidding yourself if you think the "1%" need the "99%" only as serfs.

And only the ones without a life think the top members of the society go to the top just to live a care free life.

I'm not particularly moved by your call of returning to the reality that ended by reminding me of movies ;) but I agree it's just talk anyway here on /.. The reality is in the labs and the hands of the many people doing the real tough job. I sympathize with them a lot, and I think censoring the knowledge works against them (and us).

The risk of damage caused by ourselves succumbing to a potential bioterror attack is, I think, lower than that of losing important scientific knowledge and at the same time encouraging more censorship against science/scientific publishing in the future. This does sound suicidal, I admit. But I guess the society need some portion of its members to think this way so that our liberty does not rot away when we're *not* facing imminent crisis of survival. And I'm just making my point.

If a good countermeasure is factually impossible (i.e. there's a law of nature denying it), keeping things secret only delay the inevitable. I'd rather struggle against inevitable death fully knowing this very fact (and fail), than live blissfully ignorant.

Absurdism aside, we currently don't know whether a countermeasure exist. So give ourselves a chance. The genie of biotechnology has been out of the bottle at least a decade go, so why let more people informed about it? I think the late physician Lewis Thomas summed it up in an essay on the ethics of biomed research, which I cannot bring up exactly now. But I remember his point: censoring scientific research due to the fear of uncomfortable truths only limit our own choices in the face of change which is likely to the detriment of our survival as a race.

To answer your second point: the individual researcher is not likely to go rampage but governments are. That's why citizens must know the possible ways the government could perform evil so that we can better constrain the beast. That's why we need the information. As for the black swan bad guy argument, I just point out that the good guys are just as many as the bad guys, and as competent, if not better (and I assume much better). The bad guys can walk the earth unhindered only if their arsenal are not understood by the good guys.

Look, we slashdotters are having great arguments in this thread and we began thinking about securing our better future even if we're arguing. We don't usually spend time thinking this way. And this is precisely because there *is* a story getting published rather than kept secret. I think it works this way for us. Publish and enable wisdom.

So basically you're saying "we know so little therefore let's keep knowledge secret". Makes sense.

And now it's not public. And who watches the watchers? By informing *us* about the potential danger all of us can do something. Scientists can use the information to understand better how our body works and how we can counter the threat. Investors can sense the interest in developing a countermeasure and put money in it. And everyone will keep an eye on the government which is by nature quite likely to be tempted by the evil it could done using said virus. We are the watchers and we gain our deserved power by knowing better.

Even if the worst-case situation should come, I'd die a little bit more comforted knowing my killer. I don't want to die like an ignorant animal.

Who is to judge what can or cannot "destroy human civilization"?

But sharing the information with peers in med research tends to help developing a better vaccine, faster.

And in the same ten years, scientists will have already made this stuff harmless. Precisely because this kind of research and knowledge is not banned.

Banning publication doesn't even remotely make sense. If he's got super killer virus, publication informs the public and other guys can use the information to develop a countermeasure. By keeping the knowledge secret you're just granting even more leverage to potential abusers of the knowledge.