I could not summarize my feelings about the upcoming Rutan/Allen launch any better than this.

The New York Times Magazine has an interview with Bill Joy. I didn't like him the first time I read his thesis in Wired and I can see additional years have changed little.

I'm sure he quite wishes to place the entire world in the closed system of a machine which is at the heart of his comfortable world view but, as plagues and evolution show, this is not the case.

Joy has made a point of not pursuing the moral, religious or political dimensions of his argument. ''I'm focused on truly catastrophic danger, where we must act,'' he wrote to me in a late-night e-mail message.

The problem of course with that line of logic is that those are the systems that provide the checks and feedback that keep the risks he so fears in control. SARs is arguably the type of incident he is so worried about yet it was caused by a poor political and moral structure in China; not by technology. Beating SARs was about strong political, moral, and religious themes in the countries that have created the tools and protocols to respond to the problem.

It's really too bad Gutenberg didn't put the brakes on the printing press. He should have foreseen the risks of this drivel... Can somebody get "Joy" a good therapist?

I wish this didn't hit home.

Cartoon by Mike Ramirez of the LA Times.