Since we invitably have legislatures heavily influence (and sometimes fully captured) by moneyed interests, often the best we can hope for is competition between the different factions of moneyed interests to shape policy such that the outcome is triangulated to be somewhat more beneficial to the public than if one faction had unchecked influence. Until the last 20 years or so, the media and telecoms industry were separate factions that had some competing interests and sometimes served as a checked on one another. Now they're merged/merging into media telecoms conglomerates, but the tech industry has recently risen as a competitor with even more directly competing interests.

It'll be interesting to see how the lobbyist wrangling behind the scenes works out. The tech industry is the new kid on the block, especially in terms of their presence in Washington DC, and it takes time to build up relationships and influence in politics. It's not quite as quickly scalable as the tech industry is used to, but they also have vastly more resources.

I think this was a plot to a Michael Crichton novel, except instead of Zina it was a terrorist group's bioweapon.

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six had a created virus released at the Olympics as a plot point.

Is it even possible to compress it down tha much?

So in a vacuum, yes people probably perform on a bell curve. But that bell curve is self-aware and will start sabotaging itself if you incentivize it to.

That kind of bacteria sounds like something that would spread very quickly in unleashed in the wild. I wonder what the outcome would be.

It's impossible to really predict what that would look like but we'd have decades of research to work with before this became commercially available. Ideally you would engineer the organism to require a synthetic marker to reproduce that was tightly regulated and available only in the fertilizer so that it is incapable of spreading beyond runoff.

However, we're talking about a hyperthermophilic bacteria that wouldn't be able to out compete it's neighbors at temperatures anywhere near ambient. Realistically, the direct evolution experiment will likely require several genetic transfers of the chemical pathway to organisms better adapted to the environment so we won't be effecting survivability as much. Directing the evolution of a single feature is much more practical than the whole organism so I don't think we will be tipping the scales too much.

CEOs get the credit when the company does well and they get paid extraordinarily well. Either they don't deserve that credit and shouldn't get paid nearly as well as they do, or they should get just as much credit when the company fails. None of this heads I win, tails you lose bullshit.

How are you disagreeing with what I said?

I think perhaps a more subtle warning would be to have the container sense an rfid tag in peanut allergic peoples' hands and set off a warning alarm and flashing lights.

I'd call "__proto__" a magic string, but it's kind of an accident of history and a one off that everyone wants to get rid of, but can't.

This pain is one of the most potent things that keeps people from trying to pull off fraud more often.

Can't let that precious link juice spill out to other websites! Don't you remember link juice? Bullshit SEO tactics are killing the web.

Agreed, the juice stinginess is lame.

They could've at least added a useful outbound link with rel="nofollow" to be helpful while avoiding leaking any of their precious juice.