Re: 1teraflops cell processor possible?

> 3. It is clear that infectious diseases can be used as weapons of mass
> destruction and that people have made preparations for using them in
> that way.

Yes they have tried. Whether it would "work" in any useful way is highly
doubtful. The basic principles of infection have a strong tendency to get
in your way. Unless you manage to build an organism with both high letality
_and_ high latency-to-disease, you won't succeed - and that's were those
basic principles get in you way.

Even Yersinia pestis, at its height, only managed to kill about a quarter
of the population in urban European areas.

> 4. There are now bacterial infections that are incurable because there
> are strains of bacteria that are resistant to all known drug
> therapies.  It is not impossible to imagine reaching the point that we
> will simply not be able to operate hospitals because they are such
> effective repositories for such bacterial strains.

Almost all of that problem is of medicine's own making - undisciplined
use of its tools. The US of course is a leader here as well.

> While I don't want to turn this into a tussle with Mr. Hinds or anyone
> else about what is and is not possible, the fact is that we know the
> ab initio equations that apply, and we know how to solve them.  The
> kind of grimy guesswork that Mr. Hinds is familiar with is
> necessitated not by any lack of fundamental understanding, but by a
> lack of raw computing power.

That's were I disagree most. There's a lack of interest and will in 
attacking these kinds of problems. We do _not_ know enough, we have very
little fundamental understanding of what is going on in human bodies.
Hell, IMNSHO it's more complicated by orders of magnitude than gaining
an understanding of society and in particular economics - and look where
the state of the art in that subject is! Adiabitic deviations from thermo-
dynamic quilibrium under the assumption of global, almost perfect knowledge
will get you a Nobel prize...ugh.

        Jan