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won\'t listen to the regulators anyway.

\"The way to put more stones on the defense side of the scale is to put more resources into defensive technologies, not create a totalitarian regime of Draconian control.

\"I advocate a one hundred billion dollar program to accelerate the development of anti-biological virus technology. The way to combat this is to develop broad tools to destroy viruses. We have tools like RNA interference, just discovered in the past two years to block gene expression. We could develop means to sequence the genes of a new virus (SARS only took thirty-one days) and respond to it in a matter of days.

\"Think about it. There\'s no FDA for software, no certification for programmers. The government is thinking about it, though! The reason the FCC is contemplating Trusted Computing mandates,\" -- a system to restrict what a computer can do by means of hardware locks embedded on the motherboard -- \"is that computing technology is broadening to cover everything. So now you have communications bureaucrats, biology bureaucrats, all wanting to regulate computers.

\"Biology would be a lot more stable if we moved away from regulation -- which is extremely irrational and onerous and doesn\'t appropriately balance risks. Many medications are not available today even though they should be. The FDA always wants to know what happens if we approve this and will it turn into a thalidomide situation that embarrasses us on CNN?

\"Nobody asks about the harm that will certainly accrue from delaying a treatment for one or more years. There\'s no political weight at all, people have been dying from diseases like heart disease and cancer for as long as we\'ve been alive. Attributable risks get 100-1000 times more weight than unattributable risks.\"

Is this spirituality or science? Perhaps it is the melding of both -- more shades of Heinlein, this time the weird religions founded by people who took Stranger in a Strange Land way too seriously.

After all, this is a system of belief that dictates a means by which we can care for our bodies virtuously and live long enough to transcend them. It is a system of belief that concerns itself with the meddling of non-believers, who work to undermine its goals through irrational systems predicated on their disbelief. It is a system of belief that asks and answers the question of what it means to be human.

It\'s no wonder that the Singularity has come to occupy so much of the science fiction narrative in these years. Science or spirituality, you could hardly ask for a subject better tailored to technological speculation and drama.

$$$$

Wikipedia: a genuine Hitchhikers\' Guide to the Galaxy -- minus the editors

(Originally published in The Anthology at the End of the Universe, April 2005)

\"Mostly Harmless\" -- a phrase so funny that Adams actually titled a book after it. Not that there\'s a lot of comedy inherent in those two words: rather, they\'re the punchline to a joke that anyone who\'s ever written for publication can really get behind.

Ford Prefect, a researcher for the Hitchhiker\'s Guide to the Galaxy, has been stationed on Earth for years, painstakingly compiling an authoritative, insightful entry on Terran geography, science and culture, excerpts from which appear throughout the H2G2 books. His entry improved upon the old one, which noted that Earth was, simply, \"Harmless.\"

However, the Guide has limited space, and when Ford submits his entry to his editors, it is trimmed to fit:

	\"What? Harmless? Is that all it\'s got to say? Harmless! One
	word!\"
	
	Ford shrugged. \"Well, there are a hundred billion stars in the
	Galaxy, and only a limited amount of space in the book\'s
	microprocessors,\" he said, \"and no one knew much about the Earth
	of course.\"
	
	\"Well for God\'s sake I hope you managed to rectify that a bit.\"
	
	\"Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor.
	He had to
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