By the same token, if I decide to make a guestbook for my website in PHP, all I need to do is let the server write the post data to a text file, I'm ready to go. I don't really know much about form validation or security, but that's okay, because I'm not trying to be a programmer, just set up a little web form for learning's sake.

The big red warning lights you see in your head right now are what graphic designers see when someone says they can make their own cover.

You CAN make a book cover using random artwork with a large font, but you'd be surprised how many people can screw that up, too. And if you screw it up, it'll make people think the contents of your book are amateurish, too, and nobody will read it. And if that's where you're headed, you'd just as well set up a regular blog and bypass publishing altogether.

The trick of publishing right now is that editing (and to a lesser extent, copy editing) is much less common than it used to be. Editors pick up titles, give them minimal once-overs and turn them over to production because the money isn't in fixing, it's in producing, and they want to keep their jobs. There may be a few editors who have the power to really involve themselves, but they're the exception and not the rule anymore.

Very true, but again, the reality is that except for a small percentage of books published today, the publisher does very little in terms of marketing. Before he was an e-publishing powerhouse, Joe Konrath used to boast that the only way he made it where he was was by traveling around the country doing his own marketing. He's been self-made the whole time, because publishers largely don't care to do that kind of legwork anymore.

I know several author friends who have been duped into spending all of their advance (or more) to hire THEIR OWN marketing experts to get the word out, because publishers will usually say "get a blog and good luck." It's absurd and short-sighted, but it's the way the game works now, except in very rare circumstances.

This is where we agree 100%. Free templates and buddies who are artists are poison to your work. If you don't know EXACTLY what you're doing, don't do it. A less-than-stellar cover will sink your book before it's opened, and less-than-stellar book block design will ruin your chances almost as fast. To date, there is no magic button to design a book without a lot of expertise.

This is true, and it's a danger you have to deal with. That said, the question is whether you WANT to work with a publisher. Put quite simply: sign a deal for anything less than a blockbuster title, and you will probably come out of the experience in debt, with so few copies sold you'll never get another book contract again. At least with self-e-publishing, you'll know how much of a raw deal you're getting in advance.

Well, admittedly the gap between a synthetic genome and widespread bioterror is pretty immense, but then the subject here is also open source biology, which I think assumes a lot of progress will need to be made in developing the science and tools as well. And once you start trying to develop those tools, it's pretty safe to say you'll discover what you SHOULDN'T do before you stumble upon any magic cures.

Never mind the Bond villain trying to take over the world, and never mind wiping out even a small fraction of the human population; all you need to do is make something that kills a few dozen people and has the APPEARANCE of being contagious, and you'll have a worldwide panic worse than H1N1. Make it easy for virus coders to share their work around the globe, and you've got the makings of something really terrible. It's not as sexy as a best-selling thriller, but it's just as scary.

... a similar story on Slashdot talking about open sourcing the battle against disease, with the concept that "with enough eyes, all bugs become shallow", and ultimately how there was the concern that it would create a new type of malware that could do a lot more damage than the rest of the world could offset. I mean, even when we're trying to do good, we can make things that are utter poison... imagine if some borderline nutbar in a university lab got dumped by his girlfriend and decided to take revenge on women in general by making an airborne pathogen that would leave men intact. Sure, you could make an antidote with enough people and effort, but how many people wold die in the meantime? We see the battle between dedicated coders already with DRM and DRM-cracking... if that were to happen in the bio-tech space, it would be an utter disaster.

The Economist is right, to a point, but they seem to have more faith in humanity than humanity deserves.

(disclosure: that Slashdot story years ago led me to research and write a novel about this type of scenario, so this is near and dear to my heart)

Ha! It's called RollBots. I had it in the title, removed it, and forgot to update the body. Heh.

I've actually never looked at how the batteries work, but my gut tells me it's probably a non-standard rechargeable type. I wonder how long a UPS would power something like that...

You have an hour of battery on the Shaw VOIP when the power goes out. It's not ideal, but it's far better than Telus. DSL in Canada is generally just a variation on a theme, and that theme is "poop".