This will be a brilliant investing opportunity when the technology comes to age, whether "having your own grown to sell" or simply "investing in the company."

Less Discovery Channel for you, buster.

You are looking at the wrong end point. Yes, the planet will survive. Very few people are worried about that. You have to be a real doomer / gloomer to stay away worrying about Venus level runaway heating. But you can have a number of other scenarios that can be considered less than pleasant:

- Intensifying the sixth major extinction event. The other five really changed the planet around, much to Randall's comfort. The planet will survive this next one but since apex predators tend to be significantly effected and humans are the ultimate apex predator, this might be considered a Bad Idea.
- Increasing temperatures increase arable land (generally). The problem is that of time frames. It may take hundreds of thousands of years to convert warm swamps into farmland. Most Americans can't handle fasting between gas stations, much less millennia
- Increasing resource stresses - you may have noticed that humans are having a bit of a problem creating stable geopolitical structures during geologically and biologically stable periods. Add big swings in weather / climate, no matter which way, creates more stressors and more reasons for us not to get along with each other.
- Which segues into another bit of bad timing. Changing climate while simultaneously cranking human population to over seven billion. For a number of important resources it can be argued that we have exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet. The degree and speed of upcoming climate events may well overcome our ability to feed, water and house all of us.

So, it's not even a big issue which way the climate goes. The only way climate can mitigate the other problems is if it stays relatively constant. That doesn't appear to be happening.

People will be really bitter about that positive sci-fi when those research grants build a powerful AI which is immediately used to make a replica Manna system.

Technology is a neutral force multiplier, and in our society evil is more powerful than good. Unless the AI spontaneously turns evil in the story, as in the Terminator movies, it's not saying AI is scary and dangerous. It's saying our society is scary and dangerous and this is what we'll do with the power of AI.

So maybe it is better if we stay away from some technologies until we're collectively mature enough to do positive things with them instead of using them to make things worse.

Everybody does not know that. I have no experience with GHB, and don't know anyone first hand that does. A search didn't find anything that said that. Do you have a link? I don't ask that to be snarky. I knew that it was usually put into alcohol, but had never heard anything about it requiring large quantities to function.

No need to paint the male gender as a whole as being filled with sociopaths. It's just the law of large numbers at work. There's maybe 30 million American men in the age rage that are likely to pick up srange women; if just 1/10 % of them are sociopathic predators that's 30,000 predators; and since they *are* predators they'll be overrepresented in young women's encounters with men in pick-up scenarios. Small numbers can produce disproportionate problems. In this case it represents numbers the actions of such a small proportion of men that our ideas about how normal people act aren't a reliable guide.

Drink spiking is a very rare crime. Most studies that look for evidence of it find very little. The highest I found was a government study which found date rape drugs in 4.5% of the cases from four sexual assault clinics. Note this is 4.5% of the cases where the assault occurred, so we're not talking about 4.5% of encounters, we're talking 4.5% of rapes. 4.5% is certainly high enough to be a concern in certain situations, like residential parties at a college. In such a situation a date rape drug detector might actually have some utility, even though it addresses relatively rare actions by a tiny proportion of men.

A bigger concern than what we think of as a "date rape drug" is alcohol itself. The same study that found date rape drugs in 4.5% of sexual assault samples found alcohol in 55%. This result is consistently found across studies: alcohol is very frequently associated with sexual assault -- around half of the time. This is especially concerning because some people (men and women both) don't believe that surreptitiously incapacitating someone with alcohol in order to have sex is rape. They don't distinguish ethically between two people getting drunk and having sex and one of them slipping extra alcohol into a drink.

But the fact remains most men wouldn't do something like that. But that doesn't preclude the possibility that a woman might often encounter the few remaining men who would. A typical man has sex with a small number of women many times; a man who has sex with a large number of women only once is bound to be encountered by women disproportionately often.

Given the simplicity of putting on nail polish, the drawback of wearing it would be pretty small. Remember, while the rate of drugging rapes is small across the whole population, there are a lot of women going to situations that they know have an inordinately high likelihood of someone raping them, and Not to mention, they are going already going into it with the intent of drugging themselves with a drug that induces poor judgement.

As with any security measure, it is a question of balancing convenience, cost, and risk. Going to a 3 year old's birthday party? Don't need it. Going to a frat party where you already know a couple of the guys are rapists? Yeah, the nail polish is probably a good idea.

What this really points out is that we need to lay the groundwork for the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Robots.

No, that started with a spelling checker.

The only thing that would be more metal than that would be to have Skálmöld play a concert on the fissure while it erupts ;)

No, the Icelandic Met office was, based on a very reasonable - but ultimately wrong - interpretation of the earthquake and surface tremor data.

Hey, dike is the English word! The Icelandic is "berggangur", which is like "rock conduit".

You sound stressed. Why don't you go relax and have a krap?

Exactly. If you want to regard yourself as an engineer, you have to start by accepting you are working to serve the interests of the client, not your career. I've seen so many problems occur because programmers want to have a certain technology on their resume. And the sad thing is that it works to get them through the HR filter. If HR is told to look for experience with a particular technology, it doesn't seem to matter whether the candidate's experience with that technology is failure.