That's right but I wonder to what extent the argument of self defense is still being dragged in. I recall that in the beginning tasers were being presented as an alternative to guns. That was not a credible argument and I would like to see statistics about whether guns have been used less since introduction of tasers. I think that tasers have just become a new way to force people to are no credible danger but who are just not obeying orders . Or not fast enough.

Actually a lot of audiophiles have always stuck to vinyl . It was the CD they scoffed at. Then later on they got a new reason to despise CD when record companies started to use more compression on CD while the dynamics on vinyl was left intact.

A new article fleshes out Dijkstra's statement, providing a good example of where an anthropomorphized analogy for Object Oriented Programming breaks down when you push it too far.

Yeah well, don't push it too far then. Are there a lot of people who are pushing it too far?

If you can provide external propulsion (some kind of laser thing or whatever) it would make a large difference. Then you just need to brake. So
- step one: mission with unmanned replicating robots that starts with external propulsion, takes an awful long time to get there
- it brakes by itself.
- it builds a braking system
- a manned mission is sent with external launching and braking.
- profit

I've seen video though that shows that the planes flew in from the outside.

As for instance this source.
I think it's very plausible.

That's ironic. Vint Cerf confirms that Al Gore has been quite instrumental in creating the internet. Which is what Al Gore also said. He never said he invented it.

Colin Powell assured me that it was North Korea, and that we must act NOW. And that's good enough for me!

Colin Powell is the kind of good soldier who says 'the highest official sources tell me it's North Korea, who am I to object to that?'. Very deferential to authority. Good guy if you know what you can and cannot expect from him.

No, the United States government made a claim about a hostile action by an unpopular country, and that's automatically factually incorrect.

That's probably intended to make it sound ridiculous but it's pretty accurate. The unpopular countries tend to be cautious and defensive(sabre rattling is a defensive move, we just like to present it otherwise), while on our side there's no restraint in using them as scapegoats for anything. One has to keep in mind scapegoats make perfect sense. It's politically safe to blame them and a consensus is easily found for it.

I didn't know that one. It's not what I had in mind - I was thinking of an abnormal state of an otherwise normal system - but it's interesting.

Look for 'homeobox' and cancer. Of course homeobox expression can itself be influenced by mutations, but I never can tell whether the mutation hypothesis is some default assumption or whether they've got confirmation.

I am not sure mutations should be tightly linked to cancer. Here's an alternative model: the same set of genes give rise with humans to about 250 different useful 'regimes', which we know as cell types, and which are just different rhythms of the network of genes switching each other on and off.
If (some) cancers are just bad regimes of the same genes, then not a single mutation is needed. Then it's just another celltype that replicates too much.

That's a nice correction. But you know the meaning of 'lie' I hope.

That's all pretty muddy thinking. Suppose that all cancers are decided by a roll of a set of dice, and carcinogens and genetics merely control how many black and green faces there are on the dice. Then a cancer is never just a matter of luck or carcinogens but always both. But it's still possible to conclude that there would be 35% less cancers if we kept the carcinogens down. Or put differently, we shouldn't hope to be able to cut in half the number of cancers by just removing carcinogens, because it just doesn't have enough impact. So you have a potentially very valuable research result, but it gets interpreted in a nonsensical manner.

Rule one: once the US has declared a country their enemy that country becomes very cautious. Some defensive sabre rattling but no adventures.