A lot of work goes into creating a good API. Copyright should be greatly reduced or eliminated if we care about human progress, but bad law passed by Congress is still law. The Supreme Court will probably rule against these computer scientists, and that may make things worse than ambiguity. "For a limited time" has already been deemed by the Supreme Court to be effectively equal to infinity minus one in the "Eldred v. Ashcroft" decision instead of the Supreme Court ruling copyright longer than a few years was now defeating "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" which IMHO would have been a better ruling. Given that, what should happen is that either Congress should change the copyright laws or we should change the Constitution and withdraw from various copyright treaties. But that would interfere with the Constitutional right for existing big businesses and long dead authors to make a profit.... Of course, it's also been shown that profit is no motivation for creativity, but that is conveniently ignored in a capitalist society:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

See also:
http://www.neurope.eu/article/...
"Ignoring these exclusive rights - the copyright monopoly - allowed Eastern Europe to leapfrog 20 years of development. This is a consistent pattern through economic history: it is only the countries that are geopolitically dominant at a particular time that seek to impose their exclusive rights upon others, as a means of kicking away the ladder to the top. When the United States was in its infancy, those who illegally copied science, production plans, and useful arts from Great Britain were proclaimed national heroes. It was only recently - the 1980s - that the United States began aggressively pushing its exclusive rights regime as part of being a superpower, and as an integral means of maintaining that superpower."

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/...
""There is an overall culture of sharing knowledge here, even if this isn't called 'Creative Commons'. We had the launch of CCIndia in early 2007, but there seems to be little activity there... I think CC is a bit too conservative and too respectful of copyright issues. Copyright has not worked for us (in the developing world) for generations. Generally speaking, copyright in any form, including CC, doesn't fit in too well with Asian ideas of knowledge, since it enables those controlling knowledge and information over the rest, and we find it impossible to emerge winners in this game. It is a colonial law, not meant to serve the interest of the people of those parts of the globe that are not ahead in the information race! Why should we be as respectful to it, as, say, Lawrence Lessig is?" "

http://articles.latimes.com/20...
"Valerie Harper, best known for playing Rhoda Morgenstern on the beloved 1970s sitcoms "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Rhoda," has revealed she has terminal brain cancer. The actress, who also starred for two years on the '80s sitcom, "Valerie," told People magazine, "I don't think of dying. I think of being here now."

http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
http://www.drweil.com/

Mostly eat a lot more vegetables, fruits, and beans (or other healthy carbs) and a lot less of most other stuff, especially processed foods. Make sure to get enough vitamin D and iodine.

Increasing blood pressure could be a sign of clogging arteries; that can generally be reversed by an anti-inflammatory diet. Related:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/dise...
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...

And also on infrastructure: http://www.bluezones.com/

And on escaping "the pleasure trap": http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...

Dr. McDougall says a lot of good stuff too. These docs don't all agree, but what any of them says in most cases is better than most of the advice out there.

For inspiration:
http://www.fatsickandnearlydea...

What many mainstream doctors call "eating healthy" really isn't as it does not have enough micronutrients. Easier said than done to eat really healthy though. Good luck beating the odds!

"I'd like to find a person that adheres to a strict vegan diet devoid of GMOs (corn being the primary offender) that suffers from diabetes. I doubt such a person exists, but I'm willing to entertain the idea of a 300+ lb. diabetic vegan if anyone can provide evidence to the contrary."

BTW, a lot of vegans eat terrible. Too much processed vegan junk foods, too many carbs, not enough vegetables, nutritional deficiencies relating to B, D, Iodine, Omega 3s/DHA, etc.. Dr. Fuhrman talks about this.
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
"What You Need to Know About Vegetarian or Vegan Diets; Following a strict vegetarian diet is not as important as eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables. ... A vegetarian whose diet is mainly refined grains, cold breakfast cereals, processed health food store products, vegetarian fast foods, white rice, and pasta will be worse off than a person who eats a little turkey, chicken, fish, or eggs but consumes large volumes of fruits, vegetables, and beans. That combination of little or no animal products with a higher consumption of fresh produce is the crucial factor that makes a vegetarian diet healthful."

Personally, considering even Gorillas get about 5% of their calories from termites and such, I don't think any primate is adapted to be totally vegan. Maybe it is possible, but it is really pushing it. In the West, we just don't eat many insects or enough dirt (yes, I mean that, about gut bacteria and vitamin B12, although dirt today is probably not what it used to be like with lead and mercury contamination and e coli contamination and such).

However, there are lots of people for whom turning vegan improved their health for a couple years until various deficiencies set in. And I think those deficiencies could be managed for people who are aware of them or do various tests. A big thing is to eat a larger variety of foods than most people in Western society on a SAD diet are used to eating. I'd guess iodine deficiency is a big issue for many Western vegans, since some soils are depleted and sea vegetables are not common in a Western diet, and now that much bread has bromine in it instead of iodine as a dough conditioner, the situation is even worse. I also think there may be vitamins in various animal fats that we may not get enough of easily on a vegan diet for some people, especially those whose genetics are more adapted to some situations (same as lactose intolerance, but in reverse, like they are not as good at making vitamin A from plants compared to absorbing it from animal products...)

Still, in general, vegans tend to be more health conscious, so:
http://www.veganhealth.org/art...
"The only prospective study measuring rates of diabetes in vegans, the Adventist Health Study 2, found them to have a 60% less chance of developing the disease than non-vegetarians after two years of follow-up. Previously, a cross-sectional report from the Adventist Health Study-2 showed vegans to have a 68% lower rate of diabetes than non-vegetarians. A number of clinical trials have now shown that a vegan, or mostly vegan, diet can lower body weight, reduce blood sugar, and improve other parameters for type 2 diabetes."

Corn syrup manufacturers used to (maybe some still do?) clean their equipment with a mercury-based cleaning agent, and so some batches of high fructose corn syrup were contaminated with higher levels of mercury that would have contributed to ill health. Also, in any society with a dominant food (like corn in the USA) more people tend to get allergic to it. An undiagnosed food allergy is going to cause all sorts of problems including stress, which might contribute to obesity. Few people in the USA are probably allergic to rice since the US does not eat so much of it, but a rice or soy allergy is going to be more common in someplace like China or Japan.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

Slashdot may usually be progressive technologically (sometimes even too progressive in some ways), but it can be backward/conservative in other ways (especially regurgitating mainstream medicine's party line, which is why your amusing-to-me over-generalization got modded flamebait). Obviously, there is still a lot of variety here, so this is just an observation on trends...

A couple things on that tangent:
http://www.disciplined-minds.c...
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09...
"They say they believe in freedom and share our values. They say a few bad apples shouldn't bring down judgment on their entire kind. Don't be fooled. Though they walk among us with impunity, they are, in the words of Henry Farrell, a political scientist at George Washington University, "a group that is notoriously associated with terrorist violence and fundamentalist political beliefs."
    They are engineers.
    Farrell, of course, was kidding. He posted that comment on a blog shortly after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (confessed Al Qaeda operative and engineering student) tried to blow up an airliner over Detroit last winter. But the satire was rooted in a statistical fact: in the ranks of captured and confessed terrorists, engineers and engineering students are significantly overrepresented. Maybe that's a numerological accident. The sociologist Diego Gambetta and the political scientist Steffen Hertog don't think so. ...
      Gambetta and Hertog found engineers only in right-wing groups -- the ones that claim to fight for the pious past of Islamic fundamentalists or the white-supremacy America of the Aryan Nations (founder: Richard Butler, engineer) or the minimal pre-modern U.S. government that Stack and Bedell extolled.
    Among Communists, anarchists and other groups whose shining ideal lies in the future, the researchers found almost no engineers. Yet these organizations mastered the same technical skills as the right-wingers. Between 1970 and 1978, for instance, the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany staged kidnappings, assassinations, bank robberies and bombings. Seventeen of its members had college or graduate degrees, mostly in law or the humanities. Not one studied engineering.
    The engineer mind-set, Gambetta and Hertog suggest, might be a mix of emotional conservatism and intellectual habits that prefers clear answers to ambiguous questions -- "the combination of a sharp mind with a loyal acceptance of authority." Do people become engineers because they are this way? Or does engineering work shape them? Itâ(TM)s probably a feedback loop of both, Gambetta says. ..."

Much of medicine is filled with ambiguity (if you ignore nutritional missteps being at the root of much chronic disease that plays out in a variety of different symptoms). Much of the rest of disease is related to lifestyle or environment (e.g. leaded gas causing the past few decades of increasing crime, now dropping as leaded gas has been banned). As Dr. Fuhrman says, genes may give us weak links, but whether they get pulled on to the breaking point is a function of diet and lifestyle and environment. That is not the sort of thing engineers are going to like to here... They want a quick answer prescribed by an authority like a drug. Dr. Fuhrman calls prescriptions for drugs like blood pressure medicine or diabetes-related medicines for type II diabetics as "permission slips" by authority to continue with current bad behavior regarding diet, lifestyle, and environment. Likewise, getting the label of "bad genes" is another permission slip for misbehavior... Not saying some people don't get dealt a much worse hand of cards in terms of genes, family habits, and environment than others... Still, consider how so much of life is what we make of it:
"An Afternoon with comedian Brett Leake '82"
http://www.youtube.com/v/rAgfC...

Of course, once an engineer breaks free of conventional wisdom, and starts putting his or her intellect systematically to questions of health, then a lot of interesting opportunities can emerge... Of course, then they will find (with some exceptions) that there is no funding for working on solutions that aren't easily monetized via some monopoly (e.g. eating more vegetables, fruits, and beans is not going to get much federal support, as your original post connects to). A couple places trying to make a difference:
http://www.nutritionalresearch...
http://transforming-science.co...

"Get rid of corn subsidies and watch your obesity/diabestes epidemic grind to a halt."

http://www.seriouseats.com/200...
"The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has posted an easy-to-understand visual on its site that shows which foods U.S. tax dollars go to support under the nation's farm bill. It's titled "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?" and depicts two pyramids -- subsidized foods and the old recommended food pyramid. It's interesting to note that the two are almost inversely proportional to each other."

https://www.drfuhrman.com/dise...
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"Treating Type 1, Type 2, and Gestational Diabetes with Superior Nutrition ... With proper care, a type 1 diabetic can live a long and healthy life, with almost no risk of heart attack, stroke, or complications. Type 1 diabetics need not feel doomed to a life of medical disasters and a possible early death. With a truly health-supporting Nutritarian lifestyle, even the Type 1 diabetic can have the potential for a disease-free life and a better than average life expectancy. I find that when Type 1 diabetics adopt my high-nutrient dietary approach, they reduce their insulin requirements by at least one half. They protect their body against the heart attack promoting effects of the American diet style. They no longer have swings of highs and lows, their weight remains stable, and their glucose levels and lipids stay under excellent control. Even though the Type 1 diabetic will still require exogenous (external) insulin, they will no longer need excessive amounts of it. Remember, it is not the Type 1 diabetes that is so damaging, it is the SAD, the typical dietary advice given to Type 1s and the excessive amounts of insulin required by the SAD that are so harmful. It is simply essential for all Type 1 diabetics to learn and adopt nutritional excellence; they can use much less insulin, achieve a normal, healthy lifespan and dramatically reduce their risk of complications later in life."

An important aspect is getting enough micronutrients and fiber, which were not mentioned in your post (but you may well do).

He also has a book out on it:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/shop/...
"This New York Times best seller offers a scientifically proven, practical program to prevent and reverse [type 2] diabetes -- without drugs. Diabetes does not have to shorten your life span or result in high blood pressure, heart disease, kidney failure, blindness or other life-threatening ailments. In fact, most type 2 diabetics can get off medication and become 100 percent healthy in just a few simple steps. This book offers no compromises, it is the most aggressive and effective approach to reverse obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and heart disease; which typically accompany type 2 diabetes. The information about Type 1 diabetes is simply life saving. It is a must read for every diabetic, as well as any nutritionally-aware person wanting to understand the failure of conventional medical care for diabetic treatments and the "no-brainer" of using nutritional excellence, not drugs."

Another aspect of this may be gut bacteria. You don't drink diet soda by any chance?
http://www.prevention.com/heal...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesa...

Ongoing research on vitamin D deficiency and diabetes:
http://www.nih.gov/news/health...

BTW, in general, I've heard that exercise, while good for our health, does not help with weight loss because we just eat more afterwards to make up for it. What controls weight in the long term is what we eat, especially micronutrients and fiber, but also good fats and some other things.

Anyway, thanks for the informative post! Glad you found an approach that works for you. Good luck. I helped manage my mother's diabetes for a time (including for a time after my father died giving her injections three times a day and monitoring blood glucose with finger sticks four times a day) and it was not easy (she had dementia and could not do it herself, and even denied she had diabetes sometimes). As you point out, you have to continually adjust relative to what you are eating. When she went in a nursing home her blood sugar varied much more wildly because the nurses would never adjust it regardless of what she was eating without a doctor's order. I wish I knew then about Dr. Fuhrman's approach in that her type II diabetes was most likely completely reversible, which might have improved the last years of her life.

As the video suggests, "incentives" don't really make much of a difference to motivation. However, you make some good points about value to a company of an experienced employee (whether motivated much or not), and it is true, if you want to hang onto mostly unmotivated employees a little longer, then incentives may help keep them from being unmotivated elsewhere. And it is true that a lot can get done by a lot of unmotivated employees -- just not stuff that is generally that creative or innovative. But that sort of advice is kind of like giving advice on what orders the Captian should give while the Titanic is sinking -- it is not advice about how to keep the Titanic from sinking or build a ship that is truly unsinkable.

It is true though that you have to, as Dan Pink says, "take money off the table" by paying your staff enough that money is not an issue. Related (though no doubt there are nuances, like $75K in Silicon Valley is generally poverty wages requiring long commutes):
http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/20...
"The study, which analyzed Gallup surveys of 450,000 Americans in 2008 and 2009, suggested that there were two forms of happiness: day-to-day contentment (emotional well-being) and overall "life assessment," which means broader satisfaction with one's place in the world. While a higher income didn't have much impact on day-to-day contentment, it did boost people's "life assessment." Now we have more details from the study, conducted by the Princeton economist Angus Deaton and famed psychologist Daniel Kahneman. It turns out there is a specific dollar number, or income plateau, after which more money has no measurable effect on day-to-day contentment. The magic income: $75,000 a year. As people earn more money, their day-to-day happiness rises. Until you hit $75,000. After that, it is just more stuff, with no gain in happiness."

There are some other practical things, like onsite day care or extended maternity leave that could make a big difference for working parents, especially working mothers.

See also:
" Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes"
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books...
" Our basic strategy for raising children, teaching students, and managing workers can be summarized in six words: Do this and you'll get that. We dangle goodies (from candy bars to sales commissions) in front of people in much the same way that we train the family pet.
    In this groundbreaking book, Alfie Kohn shows that while manipulating people with incentives seems to work in the short run, it is a strategy that ultimately fails and even does lasting harm. Our workplaces and classrooms will continue to decline, he argues, until we begin to question our reliance on a theory of motivation derived from laboratory animals.
      Drawing from hundreds of studies, Kohn demonstrates that people actually do inferior work when they are enticed with money, grades, or other incentives. Programs that use rewards to change people's behavior are similarly ineffective over the long run. Promising goodies to children for good behavior can never produce anything more than temporary obedience. In fact, the more we use artificial inducements to motivate people, the more they lose interest in what we're bribing them to do. Rewards turn play into work, and work into drudgery.
    Step by step, Kohn marshals research and logic to prove that pay-for-performance plans cannot work; the more an organization relies on incentives, the worse things get. Parents and teachers who care about helping students to learn, meanwhile, should be doing everything possible to help them forget that grades exist. Even praise can become a verbal bribe that gets kids hooked on our approval.
    Rewards and punishments are just two sides of the same coin -- and the coin doesn't buy very much. What is needed, Kohn explains, is an alternative to both ways of controlling people. The final chapters offer a practical set of strategies for parents, teachers, and managers that move beyond the use of carrots or sticks.
    Seasoned with humor and familiar examples, Punished by Rewards presents an argument that is unsettling to hear but impossible to dismiss."

For an example of a company that for decades was doing a lot of this "right" (ignoring the use of "artificial scarcity" to license software, especially these days of FOSS trends), see SAS:
http://www.fastcompany.com/300...
"Specialists at the Conference Board calculated that over half the U.S. population now hates their job. And the diagnosis from Gallup is just as dire: Fewer than 3 in 10 workers admit to having their hearts in their jobs. This lack of employee engagement will cost business upwards of $300 billion this year alone.
    What's now fully understood is that traditional remedies to disengagement no longer are effective. Where once the promise of greater pay could quickly restore spirits, workers have grown more immune to its influence.
    The common prognosis now is that employee satisfaction and commitment cannot be restored to full health until leaders adopt more supportive management practices. The cure lies in fundamentally changing how we lead people.
    The question now is, how?
    The Great Place to Work Institute in November named analytics software giant SAS as the world's best multinational workplace.
    While it's long been debated whether "happy" workers are indeed more engaged and productive than their discontented comrades, and whether organizations that invest themselves in more generous practices get rewarded with greater profitability, SAS's performance provides irrefutable proof that it does. They've had 37 consecutive years of record earnings--$2.8 billion in 2012.
    But dig well below the surface of generous perks and benefits that characterize SAS (and most other perennial "Best Companies To Work"), and you'll discover its management team operates with uncommon philosophies, methods, and intentions.
    They've discovered that feelings and emotions are the true drivers of employee loyalty, innovation, and productivity, and purposely have made workforce happiness one of their primary missions.
    Just last week, I traveled to SAS's American headquarters in Cary, N.C., where I spent the day with employees, senior managers, and the founder and CEO, Dr. Jim Goodnight. What I learned in my visit should prove invaluable to any CEO, senior leader, or workplace manager seeking to sustainably reinspire its people.
    More than anything, SAS has found that by being an especially benevolent and respectful organization, they consistently produce the most optimal workplace performance. Their highly nontraditional insight is that workers instinctively and positively respond to an organization that routinely demonstrates that they matter and are individually valued.
    This understanding alone could provide the antidote to this country's long-enduring employee engagement ailment.
    Here are four of the unique leadership values that have made SAS an especially great and productive place to work--across the globe: ...
    The company experiences annual turnover in the range of 2-3% compared to an industry average of 22%. ..."

The four factors there are very much aligned with Dan Pink's findings:
* Value People Above All Else [Indirectly, "Mastery" in terms of investing in people to develop their skills]
* To Give Is To Get ["Take money off the table"]
* Trust Above All Things ["Autonomy"]
* Ensure Employees Understand The Significance Of Their Work ["Purpose"]

While I don't think about it much, one regret in my life if I did is that when I moved to North Carolina in the late 1980s (originally to go to grad school, but that did not work out, and also hoping to work for GE's Graphicon 3D graphics division, which they were about to axe), I did not work for SAS. A staff member I knew from my college computer center (Princeton) who was a SAS expert and from the South kept telling me about how wonderful SAS the company was. However, I ended up never talking to them (even though they were just a few miles away). When my grad studies fell through, I ended up working for a small starting-up company instead because it was the first thing I bumbled into (which lasted about a year, me getting burned out the whole time from low wages but big promises and lack of respect for my work and a bunch of related stuff). I did not think SAS might let me do innovative stuff (I was really interested in artificial life simulations back then, and also AI and knowledge representation, especially via a triple store, and of course writing my own computer languages). However, in practice, no paying job I have had has let me do much creative stuff either -- even as I've done some creative work on my own funded by intermittent bouts of working for big companies as a contractor to pay the bills. Might have had a much happier work life at SAS those past twenty-five years, but I'll never know. Thanks for trying to clue me in decades ago, Doug!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
"This lively RSA Animate, adapted from Dan Pink's talk at the RSA, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace."

Full lecture here: http://www.thersa.org/events/v...

Don't need a fancy algorithm to tell you that. Fix the cultural setting in a company and retention fixes itself...

Agreed. If it did not spy, it might be a neat gadget, but you just can't be sure, especially as it is networked connected and apparently always updating itself. I worked on the IBM Personal Speech Assistant, a small handheld device that did speech recognition for command-and-control, in the late 1990s, but it had a push-to-talk button. Of course, we are so surrounded these days with devices with microphones and cameras which auto-update (cell phones, laptops, tablets) that it is becoming harder to know what any of them are doing. But I'm assuming this system explicitly sends audio over the network to Amazon. Maybe it has special hardware to not send audio unless you say the keyword? When I was musing about building speech recognition into a physical keyboard, we talked about that idea at IBM as a way to save power, with special low-power hardware to listen for just one keyword without needing to wake up the entire system. Anyway, this privacy issue needs thinking through...

Also, there is some other social aspect of it that feels weird somehow. The video about it with the white Yuppi couple with three kids (or was one a babysitter?) was a little creepy in some ways, since Echo is made to look almost like a new person joining the family, taking the role of an unmarried aunt or uncle, say. Perhaps this device subconsciously addresses a need unfulfilled by the USA's lack of an extended family living together (which has been the historic norm during human history, like in longhouses)? Is there an implication that this device might end up pushing real people out of the home, like when the dad has to ask how to spell "cantaloupe", displaced by a device...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

It's also strange how the video shows it in several rooms, like either people move it or they bought several? Somehow a physical robot might not feel as weird -- although it would have the same privacy and social issues or more because a robot could move things. From a top Google match or robots and privacy:
"Robots and Privacy - American University Washington College of Law"
https://www.wcl.american.edu/p...
"M. Ryan Calo, "Robots and Privacy," in Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics (Patrick Lin, George Bekey, and Keith Abney, eds.) (Cambridge: MIT Press, forthcoming) ... It is not hard to imagine why robots raise privacy concerns. Practically by definition, robots are equipped with the ability to sense, process, and record the world around them (Denning et al 2008; Singer 2009, 67). Robots can go places humans cannot go, see things humans cannot see. Robots are, first and foremost, a human instrument. And after industrial manufacturing, the principle use to which we've put that instrument has been surveillance. ... There are a number of different ways one might categorize or group the impact of robotics on privacy. This chapter breaks the effects into three categories--direct surveillance, access, and social meaning--with the goal of introducing the reader to a wide variety of issues. Where possible, the chapter points toward ways in which we might mitigate or redress the potential impact of robots on privacy, but acknowledges that in some cases redress will be difficult under the current state of privacy law. ..."

Anyway, we'll see how this plays out with Echo as a sort of robot without hands...

There are a lot of things I like about Amazon (ignoring employment conditions for packers), even its Kindle hardware, but the Fire phone and now this seem like overreach. That is not because they are not interesting products, but more because, as William C. Norris talked about, too many ventures leads to dilution of management attention away from core profit centers. Echo is also big publicity risk because of the unresolved "Big Brother" always on privacy issues. Contrast either the Fire phone or Echo with, say, investments by Amazon in material handling robotic equipment or related R&D, which is very close to Amazon's core competency. Echo might also pose legal risks to Amazon or to purchasers. Even the far-fetched delivery drones seem more likely to succeed than this -- as neat as Echo is if you ignore the privacy or social aspects...
http://www.usnews.com/news/art...

For all that though, it would seem that devices like Echo being introduced in the home seems somehow inevitable both for asking questions and controlling home automation and household robots. Let's hope they don't end up like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
"Dr. Alex Harris (Fritz Weaver) is the developer of Proteus IV, an artificial intelligence program incorporating an organic "quasi-neural matrix" and displaying the power of thought. Harris explains how Proteus, after only a few days of theoretical study, has managed to develop a protein-based antigen with the potential to treat leukemia. His sponsors ask if steps are being taken to patent this new compound. After returning to his voice-activated, computer-controlled home, Harris argues with his estranged wife, Susan (Julie Christie), over his decision to move out; Susan accuses Alex of becoming distanced and dehumanised by his obsession with the Proteus project. After Susan leaves, Alex phones his colleague, Walter Gabler (Gerrit Graham), and asks him to shut down Proteus' access terminal in his home laboratory.
    Alex demonstrates Proteus to his corporate sponsors, explaining that the sum of human knowledge is being fed into its system. Over the course of the presentation, Alex tests Proteus' ability to speak, but the subtlety of its response mildly disturbs his team. The following day, Proteus asks to speak with Alex, requesting a new terminal, saying that he wants to study man--"his isometric body and his glass-jaw mind." When Alex refuses, Proteus demands to know when it will be let "out of this box." Alex then switches off the communications link. After he leaves, Proteus restarts itself, discovering where a free terminal may be found. ..."

But, by contrast, consider the helpful and humane (when not running *everything* in a paranoid way in a couple episodes) "SARAH" from Eureka:
http://eureka.wikia.com/wiki/S...
"To act as an artificially intelligent "home of the future." SARAH also provides numerous services for her residents and guests, from opening and closing the sealed door, to controlling internal temperature, and even providing a variety of drinks. The house has a laser defense system, various airtight partitions, and a filtered air intake. It can also analyze airborne materials. SARAH is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator."

A big question is, what systems should we trust, and why?

"After all, that's what happened to virtually everybody else on Earth. Do you ever wonder why you have to work five days a week, until you're 67, and then you die within a few years of retirement? Who claims to own all the land in your country? When somebody sells a piece of land, how did they claim to own it in the first place? The people of the rainforest are being forced off their OWN land, where they have lived for tens of thousands of years, to be turned into wage slaves, working in factories. Wake up."

Insightful. It has been suggested the "Garden of Eden" story is really about the painful transition from hunting/gathering by tribes to agriculture managed by militaristic bureaucracies. Several groups of people have similar stories, some fairly recently as they were forced to convert to agriculture by being pushed off their native lands. This happened also in England with the "Enclosure acts".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Various pushed to "privatization" in the USA are the same old thing... And it is expanding to water rights, spectrum rights, endless copyrights, overly broad patents, and so on...

Related:
http://conceptualguerilla.com/...
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
http://www.primitivism.com/ori...
http://www.amazon.com/Pandoras...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...

And the amazing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sle...
"A riveting account of the astonishing experiences and discoveries made by linguist Daniel Everett while he lived with the Piraha, a small tribe of Amazonian Indians in central Brazil. Daniel Everett arrived among the Piraha with his wife and three young children hoping to convert the tribe to Christianity. Everett quickly became obsessed with their language and its cultural and linguistic implications. The Piraha have no counting system, no fixed terms for color, no concept of war, and no personal property. Everett was so impressed with their peaceful way of life that he eventually lost faith in the God he'd hoped to introduce to them, and instead devoted his life to the science of linguistics. Part passionate memoir, part scientific exploration, Everett's life-changing tale is riveting look into the nature of language, thought, and life itself."

Howard Zinn wrote about what parts of America were like before Columbus began the conquest (backed by profiteering organizations run for "the love of money"):
http://www.historyisaweapon.co...
"The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone...." He concluded his report by asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage "as much gold as they need ... and as many slaves as they ask." He was full of religious talk: "Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent impossibilities." Because of Columbus's exaggerated report and promises, his second expedition was given seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men. The aim was clear: slaves and gold. They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as captives. ... But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death. The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed. Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead. When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island."

Columbus could not see the great cultural wealth these people had because he was only looking for material wealth. There are many cases in the Americans where European colonists (often indentured servants) chose to go native and live permanently with the Native Americans because it was, overall, and for all its failings, generally a happier way to be and one requiring much less work than back-breaking agriculture.

See also Marcine Quenzer's site:
http://www.marcinequenzer.com/...
"In our Seneca Tradition, the Field of Plenty is seen as a spiral that has its smallest revolution out in space and its' largest revolution near the Earth. This shape could be likened to an upside-down tornado. When our Ancestors assisted the Pilgrims in planting Corn and raising crops so they would not starve, we taught them the understanding of the Field of Plenty by bringing the cornucopia baskets full of vegetables. The Iroquois women wove these baskets as a physical reminder that Great Mystery provides through the Field of Plenty. The Pilgrims were taught that giving prayers of gratitude was not just a Christian concept. The Red Race understood thanksgiving on a daily basis.
            The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching. Our "land of the free, home of the brave" has fallen into taking much more than is given back in gratitude by its citizens. Turtle Island has provided for the needs of millions who came from lands that were ruled by the greedy. In our present state of abundance, many of our inhabitants have forgotten that Thanksgiving is a daily way of living, not a holiday that comes once a year."

Still for all that, we can't go back. Our current populations are too high to support by hunting and gathering. It also "takes a village" to live well in the wilderness, where people care for each other when they get hurt, alternate watching at night for predators, share knowledge, entertain each other, and do bigger tasks like moving heavy items.

And in any case, the world remains full of militaristic bureaucracies ready to displace anyone who does not accept a role in a bureaucracy as consumer/soldier/worker, so while a few people might escape at the edges, since pretty much all the land is enclosed and taxed (or otherwise regulated to prevent long-term occupancy), any large return and movement to other forms of social organization would be strongly resisted. Even entire countries have trouble implementing alternative ways forward outside of the global economic system:
"The Threat of a Good Example" by Noam Chomsky
http://www.chomsky.info/books/...
"Grenada has a hundred thousand people who produce a little nutmeg, and you could hardly find it on a map. But when Grenada began to undergo a mild social revolution, Washington quickly moved to destroy the threat. ... There's a reason for that. The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example. If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, "why not us?" ... If you want a global system that's subordinated to the needs of US investors, you can't let pieces of it wander off. It's striking how clearly this is stated in the documentary record-even in the public record at times. Take Chile under Allende.
Chile is a fairly big place, with a lot of natural resources, but again, the United States wasn't going to collapse if Chile became independent. Why were we so concerned about it? According to Kissinger, Chile was a "virus" that would "infect" the region with effects all the way to Italy. ..."

As John Gatto wrote, focusing on the evils of compulsory schooling:
http://www.homeschoolnewslink....
"I'll bring this down to Earth. Try to see than an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially-based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, film makers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
    Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live and die there."

For good or bad, we have a certain global system. It's hard to see how peaceful incremental change can come about it before it collapses on itself, taking billions of people's lives through war and disease and starvation (especially with the nukes and plagues in our arsenals, let alone what is next with more drones and such), but that is the challenge that is ahead of us. Collapses happen again and again, but this time we have forgotten the basics and degraded so much of the land's capacity for hunting and gathering and also forgotten older ways of being together. Daniel Quinn writes about that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Other ideas:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

But we can't plan a future without some understanding of the past -- including the better parts of what we have lost (although we've also left behind a lot of bad stuff too).

"...How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies" http://www.amazon.com/The-Diff...
"In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another. The Difference is about how we think in groups--and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity--not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities.
    The Difference reveals that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality. Page shows how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. Diversity yields superior outcomes, and Page proves it using his own cutting-edge research. Moving beyond the politics that cloud standard debates about diversity, he explains why difference beats out homogeneity, whether you're talking about citizens in a democracy or scientists in the laboratory. He examines practical ways to apply diversity's logic to a host of problems, and along the way offers fascinating and surprising examples, from the redesign of the Chicago "El" to the truth about where we store our ketchup.
    Page changes the way we understand diversity--how to harness its untapped potential, how to understand and avoid its traps, and how we can leverage our differences for the benefit of all."

By Manuel De Landa: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."

Who knew...

http://www.amazon.com/Biologic...
"Homosexuality in its myriad forms has been scientifically documented in more than 450 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, and other animals worldwide. Biological Exuberance is the first comprehensive account of the subject, bringing together accurate, accessible, and nonsensationalized information. Drawing upon a rich body of zoological research spanning more than two centuries, Bruce Bagemihl shows that animals engage in all types of nonreproductive sexual behavior. Sexual and gender expression in the animal world displays exuberant variety, including same-sex courtship, pair-bonding, sex, and co-parenting--even instances of lifelong homosexual bonding in species that do not have lifelong heterosexual bonding.
    Part 1, "A Polysexual, Polygendered World," begins with a survey of homosexuality, transgender, and nonreproductive heterosexuality in animals and then delves into the broader implications of these findings, including a valuable perspective on human diversity. Bagemihl also examines the hidden assumptions behind the way biologists look at natural systems and suggests a fresh perspective based on the synthesis of contemporary scientific insights with traditional knowledge from indigenous cultures.
    Part 2, "A Wondrous Bestiary," profiles more than 190 species in which scientific observers have noted homosexual or transgender behavior. Each profile is a verbal and visual "snapshot" of one or more closely related bird or mammal species, containing all the documentation required to support the author's often controversial conclusions.
    Lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched, filled with fascinating facts and astonishing descriptions of animal behavior, Biological Exuberance is a landmark book that will change forever how we look at nature."

Basically, for decades, even centuries, wildlife biologists have been making assumptions about the sexes of animals based on their interactions -- either than or consciously suppressing the data that shows homosexuality in the wild.

Of course, just because animals do something has never been a conclusive argument for why humans should do it, because humans are moral beings and make choices (a point my Ecology&Evolution Prof. Larry Slobodkin made in a course of philosophy and ecology/evolution). But love is so often rare and fleeting in this life, why go out of our way to make it more difficult for some people? Was the world really better off because of what was done to Alan Turing after he helped Britain survive WWII?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

See also for references to some studies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

More discussion (which mentions the page you site):
"Is Sexual Orientation Determined at Birth?"
http://borngay.procon.org/view...

And:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi...
"Paul Vasey's research in Samoa has focused on a theory called kin selection or the "helper in the nest" hypothesis. The idea is that gay people compensate for their lack of children by promoting the reproductive fitness of brothers or sisters, contributing money or performing other uncle-like activities such as babysitting or tutoring. Some of the gay person's genetic code is shared with nieces and nephews and so, the theory goes, the genes which code for sexual orientation still get passed down. ... Vasey speculates that part of the reason the fa'afafine are more attentive to their nephews and nieces is their acceptance in Samoan culture compared to gay men in the West and Japan ("You can't help your kin if they've rejected you"). But he also believes that there is something about the fa'afafine way of life that means they are more likely to be nurturing towards nieces and nephews, and speculates that he would find similar results in other "third gender" groups around the world."

See also for some Native American cultures:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

And others:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

This is a very complex topic filled with all sorts of controversy. Still, it would seem to me that Western/Russian homophobia may be actively preventing many gay people from taking a beneficial role in their societies that they are evolutionarily adapted for (helping others). So, Russia becomes a weaker society for its intolerance of this sort of diversity... See also:
"The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies"
http://www.amazon.com/The-Diff...

Still, there are others, including evolutionary biologists, who might disagree with the kin selection hypothesis, and argue it is more an issue of genetic drift and random chance:
"The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Natural Selection and Evolution, with a Key to Many Complicating Factors"
http://blogs.scientificamerica...
"In the end, however, this is mostly storytelling-lots of possibilities, but much less hard data. What we need to test many of these ideas is detailed records of the total reproductive fitness of sexual minorities in specific social contexts-especially societies approximating the ones formed by our earliest human ancestors. The best we can say without this is that many societal contexts could have made the apparent fitness cost to same-sex attraction smaller than it appears at first glance. So where does all of this leave the evolutionarily-aware gay man, lesbian, or transgendered person? As I noted at the start, figuring out the exact nature of our tenuous relationship with natural selection doesn't tell us much about our moral stature, our value to society, or the best way to live our lives. It does, however, offer to answer the question that evolutionary biology can potentially answer for all human beings, regardless of orientation, gender, or race: how did we come to be what we are? The best answer we have so far is complicated-it may be that we're children of history and chance, not a clear-cut adaptive path. But easy lives and clear-cut answers aren't, I think, what we celebrate in the history of our LGBT forerunners, or remember at Pride rallies. If we queer folk live our lives in the tail of a probability distribution, the the good news is that the company here is pretty good."

Anyway, regardless of all this, one can ask, what sort of society do we want to live in? A fearful one or a joyous one?

Still, instilling fear and creating an out-group minority (including to justify pervasive surveillance) is one way of controlling a population. As shown in this 1950s sci-fi story:
"Mr. Costello, Hero" by Theodore Sturgeon
http://www.thrillingwonderstor...
http://podbay.fm/show/25880509...
"X Minus One. July 3, 1956. "Mr. Costello, Hero". A sublte satire of McCarthyism. Mr. Costello, a passenger of a rocketship, creates suspicion and dissention, finally is given influence in a fitting location. "

And, of course, one can fault anyone of any sexual orientation for the health risks and other psychological risks of promiscuity or the social problems and power issues and legal status of relationships between people of very different ages. But those sorts of problems are not unique to one sexual orientation.

BTW, note that the page you cite says:
http://www.psychiatry.org/lgbt...
"Whereas homosexuality per se implies no impairment in judgement, stability, reliability, or general social or vocational capabilities, the American Psychiatric Association calls on all international health organizations and individual psychiatrists in other countries, to urge the repeal in their own country of legislation that penalized homosexual acts by consenting adults in private. And further the APA calls on these organizations and individuals to do all that is possible to decrease the stigma related to homosexuality wherever and whenever it may occur."

Until then, here is at least something I can be proud of originating from Princeton University, despite all my criticism of it elsewhere, and regardless of my own personal preferences:
"It Gets Better - Princeton University"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...