[extropy-chat] How are we going to do this?

Adrian Tymes wingcat at pacbell.net
Fri Jun 11 05:54:24 UTC 2004


--- Michael Howell <vanmojo at msn.com> wrote:
>       What you say is true, but the problem still
> remains. Suppose in the near future, we wake up one
> day to find the first assembler nanites have been
> created. One week later, Congress bans
> nanotechnology( not to mention dozens of other
> governments probably, as you said think of what they
> would lose). What would we do?  

Make very very certain the procedures and techniques
for creating assembler nanites fall into hands that
are not banned, and/or use other techniques to obviate
the ban in practice.  (Reenacting a lesson from the
Prohibition slice of history.)

Although, I'm not sure Congress would ban nano
outright.  American politics are deliberately rigged
so that there are a wide variety of interests in
Congress - probably including some who would
personally stand to benefit from assembler nano, and
know it.  The benefit might be enough that they could
bribe away a ban.  (Work within the system?  Hey,
sometimes the system isn't totally messed up... ;) )

BTW, have you seen others' (like Damien's) comments
about not using HTML?  They are specifically directed
to you.  Your email software is sending HTML messages
instead of the standard for email: plain text ASCII.
While HTML email has its uses, many online communities
(including this one) frown on it because many email
clients can not read it correctly.  My mail client,
fortunately, can read HTML, but many other list
participants can only read my replies to you.
Whatever setting you have in your mail client
(apparently MSN Explorer) to send in "HTML" or "with
formatting" or whatever, please turn it off.  If you
do not know how to turn it off, please find the
control; there should be a Help menu available.  (My
apologies for having to put it like this, but you
weren't acting on others' messages to this effect.)



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