...we are unprepared for a major pandemic. But consider:

1. Human genetic diversity means even a bad pandemic will not eliminate all of humanity. It may eliminate enough of humanity to cause the collapse and reconfiguration of current nation-states, but that is a different issue that needs a different form of preventative action.

2. We already have technology to level the playing field on pandemics but we have not deployed it. In particular we need two approaches:

a) Rapid response. When a pandemic starts you quickly identify the hyper immune individuals and quickly transfer their immunity to others (one fast way is through IgG, but you would stage approaches as you were able to isolate the key immunity factors — this topic is a bit long for a post). But both the surveillance for such persons and the logistics to harvest, distribute and administer have not been put into place globally and the policy implications are difficult (for example, what policy would allow an institution like WHO to send people or drones to pull blood from hyper immune individuals automagically identified in the middle of some developing world country without immense time-wasting and exponentially-human-killing red tape?) Even for flu, where the geographic location is well-known, we do not have the infrastructure in place.

b) Prophylactic approaches. One of the key issues we face with modern disease is that it evolves more rapidly than our immune systems or our vaccination infrastructure. It is, however, possible to genetically analyze the different evolutionary pathways, e.g., a protein coat might take, computationally chop all those branching variations into epitopes and then statistically cull the most common, broad, and unique epitopes from that set. You end up with a multi-valent vaccine against a future set of diseases, which under the current regulatory environment you would not be able to legally manufacture for distribution. But it would be wise to stockpile and update these every year.

3. There are other approaches as well that are within current technology. But they are not the approaches that articles like the one cited appear to promote (versus increasing funding for existing old-school institutions). And I fear that the will to do something different will not appear until AFTER a pandemic. So I am in the awkward position of hoping we have a pandemic, but a small one.

This goal of quantum supremacy was just a milestone, measurable but mostly of marketing value. It is newsworthy for sure.

But testing a quantum computer against a conventional computer on a problem that is essentially simulating a quantum computer, well, that is a bit of an impractical milestone. Yes, it can be helpful for bootstrapping progress, but it qualifies as mostly marketing because it sounds like far more progress than it is.

I am a long time fan of unconventional computing architectures (I first brought Michael Freedman to Microsoft after knowing him at UCSD in the eighties when I was working there on the first multi-layer backprop neural network computing architectures) but this is a long game. Hooray for human patience and the few corporations who are still able to fund long term research and development.

Thatâ(TM)s an average of $1200 per victim... for a 3.5 year scam...

The unsealed indictment notes they sold one time, one year and lifetime subscriptions, and sometimes would offer âoerefundsâ for the lifetime subscriptions and thereby access the customerâ(TM)s bank account for more fraudulent transfers. It also notes they transitioned from credit cards toward gift cards and money orders.

The gullibility of computer users is unlimited â" education has failed to keep a (mostly) older generation comfortable with technological complexity. Think of what the opportunities will be for mobile phones, which are more ubiquitous, increasingly complex and intermingled with financial services, and therefore less secure and more of a target. Caveat confector.

I put in a policy of "Unlimited PTO" and flexible work at my company. So you can work from home or come in depending upon what makes sense. This is not a question of which is more productive. It is a question of which is more productive in which situations.