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.

This is already more or less the situation in China.

The "official" employment figures are already inflated, as is any other statistical figure in China. The colleges simply have no incentive to tell the truth, for those figures are used as criteria in the promotion of college deans or granting next year's funding (and yes, college deans are bureaucrats, this is now the Chinese education system goes). Some colleges maintain an unwritten policy of 'no job contract, no diploma'. There's already some (albeit more or less underground) job agencies that nominally "employ" newly students so that the employment figures get beefed up. The students are "hired" simply for the sake of being hired, and they are free to find a real job on their own, if they can. Now guess how these agencies generate profit? Oh yes, the students themselves and back-kick from the colleges.

And now I can only expect worse.

The statement that "China pays outright for the student to go to college" is a myth. Admittedly the state colleges are subsidized by the state (duh) but students are not fully financed by the government. That is to say students in China still have to find ways to support their own education. This may not be quite a burden for the urban class family who are more than willing to shell out some cash to support their kids. But be reminded this is China, and there is a huge population of very low income families, particularly those from underdeveloped rural areas. Those students usually, well you bet, apply for educational loans.

The problem is that China is not part of that "World" you were referring to.

In China, it is touch as hell for the private sector to do anything productive because the socialist political order and the state's suffocating tight grip on finance. The few private colleges have little incentive to outperform the state ones because the know they cannot succeed. As a result, they survive by collecting highly overpriced tuition from the those who can pay but fail to enter a good college, for whatever the reason. That's where their niche lies.

Oh thanks for the laugh.

Nah, the "occupy" thing is just organized trolling, be it Wall Str of HTML5.

Are you making a perl-based, hallucinogen-distorted variant of NetHack? I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.

The ones who made programming cool are my schoolteacher when I was 9-10 yrs old, my father who was a coding enthusiastic, and the old wizards from whom I learned the Right Way. It has always been cool.