Yeah, this problem really sank in with us when we realize it was faster to download the data onto 2TB external drives and ship it to collaborators rather than transmit it over the internet (even with Aspera). Seemed so bizarre to be surrounded by all this high tech equipment and yet we're putting stamps on our data so we can give it to the mailman.

Sure we do. Write the manual in C instead of English.

Pathogenity requires extensive adaptive mechanisms from a microbe, otherwise it isn't able to live in an organism with an immune system. Microbes that cause human illnesses have through countless generations developed traits that enable them to grip molecules on human cells, thrive in tissues, and resist the immune cells' attempts to destroy them.

I don't know if I really agree with that. Some of the more dangerous pathogens are those that have recently jumped from other species and have had little time to evolve into coexistence with their new host. SIV infections are symptomless in their natural host, but deadly in related primate species (including HIV in humans). Same thing with herpesviruses, relatively minor symptoms in their natural host, but often deadly when they make a zoonotic jump (herpes B amd AlHV are good examples). Plus 120,000 years ago is not very long at all on an evolutionary time scale and it could have easily been exposed to other primates/mammals (even humans) at that time. In fact the age of it really only guarantees that a human host would have zero protective immunity against it, so it would be like smallpox blowing through native American populations.

Does Vista do everything openBSD does? I don't seem to remember anything in the release notes about Vista shipping with a SSH or Web server. Hell does windows even ship with an SSH client yet?

Christ, you think that private corporations are any better? There have been so many data breach/loss incidents lately that they don't even make the news anymore.

rm -rf juryduty

It's both right and wrong.

Yes, yes, but what is it if I look inside the box?

I question whether that is really true. I've seen a few articles that would lead me to believe that the US isn't alone. In fact, I saw a recent survey in the UK where about about half of people interviewed felt that alternatives to evolution should be taught in the classroom (including 30% of teachers):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/nov/07/creationism-intelligent-design-religion

We had our proximity card access system completely shit the bed on the 31st. Don't know if it was a leap year issue or if it was just coincidence, but it caused widespread outages and was a major PITA.

Yes. Actually if you read the report, towards the end they conclude that the main cause of death was a failure to place their seat backs and tray tables in the upright position.

Depends on the pathogen. Things like smallpox, sars, or ebola are not going to be easy to come by, while something like influenza and the information to recreate Spanish flu would be. But that was kind of what I was getting at in my last point. Someone could easily start cloning things into common pathogens, which is not a good idea unless you are doing it in controlled conditions (like a BSL3 lab), but in practice there is no way you can effectively regulate that.

Virtually all academic researchers are required to have approval of a recombinant DNA research advisory committee before they do any kind of work like this. There certainly is a real possibility of someone creating something dangerous, such as a recombinant pathogen which is the very reason why we have those oversight committees in the first place. For example, the article mentions creating tattoos using florescent squid genes, which is vague but I'm assuming the only way that would work would be to make a recombinant virus expressing a GFP-like gene. So you really don't that it might be a bad idea to have people injecting infectious agents into themselves that they brewed up in their garage?

I'm all for regulating this, but realistically there is no way to prevent people from making recombinant human pathogens in their garage while still allowing legitimate educational activities like making GFP-expressing e.coli. So frankly, regulation is pointless beyond what already is in place, such as limiting access to pathogens.

The US is still by far the largest manufacturing economy in the world. In fact, it's almost as large as the next 2 countries (China and Japan) combined:

2007 stats in USD:
US: 1.8 trillion
China: 1.1 trillion
Japan: 0.9 trillion

http://unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/dnllist.asp

Flagship demo projects like this often get exceedingly big discounts from the vendors.

Yeah, remember Virginia Tech's crazy Mac cluster that had a a slew of Power G5s that they ran for what seemed like less than a year and replaced with XServes? IIRC, Apple gave them an even swap for the brand new XServes.