Really? Well, perhaps that is an aspect of it, but I can think of several other factors:

- Most voters are deeply reactionary (in the sense that they are very reluctant to accept any change from status quo, whether good or bad), and the current view of most ordinary people is that 'drugs are bad'. Insight and understanding don't enter into the picture, because most people's opinions are based on hearsay rather than knowledge - they have been taught not to trust their own ability to understand things, so they don't want to even try.

- Drug barons are rich and well connected to the establishment, just like others in the top of international crime. Legalising drugs in any form would hurt their business, which depends on drugs being illegal and therefore very expensive. I mean, fairly priced a kg of top notch hash should cost something like 1 USD (citation: thin air, I'm just guessing), so even with the usual, over the top taxation, a gram would be astonnishingly cheap, and the drugs cartels wouldn't have any business.

Your lack of cynicism is verging on being a ringing endorsement for the current drugs laws.

Thanks for shooting down my dreams :-) Now, time for me to shoot back.

Well, once it was not really possible at all; things will change, and more things will be practical to do from remote. Even things like surgery via tele-link no longer seems like sci-fi.

Well, here in the UK we have several companies that rent out office space on an hourly basis - Regus is one such. You basically move in and have access to all the things you would need in an office: network, printer, rooms, receprtionist etc. In fact, the idea probably came over here from the US, so you know about it already. It is only a small step from that model to one where companies have many local offices, with a few, or even just one employee; the employee would benefit in two ways: their commute would be short, and they would still have some sort of daily routine that takes them away from home and into a group of professional peers. There will be some problems, like how do you ensure that your employees don't leaks sensitive information to the other companies in the hybrid office, but I'm sure it can be addressed.

We are talking about the future - a future in which transport infra-structure is radically different. Right now it may seem much better to have millions of people physically commute, but that is one of the things that won't be practical in such a situation.

As somebody attending /. you are probably aware that technology becomes cheaper and more powerul very quickly. How long ago was it that 3D printing was just this wild, new idea that we'd just heard of? Or computers? When I was a teenager, I had this completely mind-blowing vision of packing maybe even a million of transistors in to one IC to form a computer; well, you have probably heard a story likethat many times from us old ones, but the point is that technology has moved faster than even the boldest dared dream about. In all areas, too - it feels like only a decade ago that the idea of actually reading genetic code or watching brain processes in real-time, for example. I am very confident that micromanufacturing will replace traditional production in almost any area.

I think it is more correct to say that many raw materials are most easily accessed in a only few spots; but in the future, as these deposits run out, it will be necessary to develop technologies that make it possible to extract what we need from less easy sources. Another factor that will come into play is, that the raw materials we need will change as we find new ways of producing things. Some of the things we are likely to need, are abundant everywhere, like carbon, silicon and aluminium, only not economical to extract - for now.

I think airships are amazingly cool; whether they are actually a good solution, I don't know. They may require a lot of infrastructure, as you say, but it is probably less than the road- and rail network we have now, and it seems to me like it would mostly be local infrastructure anyway. As for the speed of travel - why is it necessary to travel fast? In a world where everybody can work from any place in the world, the need to have clearly delimited time off so you can travel abroad, becomes less prominent; you could travel slowly around the world for months and work at the same time. As for the need to transport goods and food quickly - micromanufacturing makes that less important, and we could probably live with seasonal variations in the availability of certain foodstuffs, like we used to. Plus, nobody says that we will end up in a situation where fast, long distance transport is unavailable; but to my mind, it could well be that the need for it will become much less in the future.

Road- and railway transport may become less important in the future, I think, at least in two areas, I imagine:

1. Commuting - what the Americans call tele-commuting could become much more widespread; perhaps in a hybrid form, where people go to work in an office facility shared with several other companies, and within walking or cycling distance from their homes.

2. Micromanufacturing, like eg. 3D printing, may replace manufacturing in large factories. If this trend continues, it is possible that all or most raw materials could be sourced locally as well, so that the only things that would need to be transported are the specifications for production.

This only leaves travel (as in going on holidays), and we may find better and easier ways of doing that, which don't need roads or the burning of large amounts of fuel. Airships, anyone? Not the fastest mode of transport, but it could be a lot faster than it is, if we worked on it. I'm only speculating, of course, but I don't think it needs to be all bad.

This is probably one of the most exciting, new insights we have achieved in recent decades; but aren't there two equally possible routes for this ingestion? One being that a predatorial cell feeding on these cells at some point stopped completely digesting them, the other being that the mitochondria and chloroplasts were once parasites. I'm not sure which one I think is more likely - perhaps I'd go for the parasite scenario, but it could well be that both routes could have been employed, or that the distinction between predation and parasitism isn't all that clear.

Exactly - it is no different from the horse meat scandal. Horse meat isn't dangerous or even poorer quality than beef, but a lie is a lie, simple as that. Business can only exist in the long term, if there is trust between vendors and buyers; start allowing lies, and the whole thing might unravel in the end.

Being intelligent and educated is not in itself proof of moral superiority; indeed, many of the most atrocious individuals throughout history have been highly educated and very intelligent. Just like having a 'faith' or believing in a cause does not make you a better person; in fact, recent reearch has shown that terrorism and similar crimes are most often morally motivated - ie. these are people who have thought about things and made a moral choice about what they are doing.

I am not anti-intellectual, but I think it is important to understand this. On one hand, academic education is not enough - we must include moral education as well; but on the other hand, we must also break the religious monopoly on morality. Good morality makes excellent sense from a logical point of view, in that it pro-social; religion at best makes no difference, but is more likely to make people less moral because it can legitimise an 'us vs them' view on the world.

Scott Adams, the cartoonist, has a go at science? And is taken marginally serious? Is this a bit of celebrity fawning that's gone too far, or what? Much as I appreciate his humour, on occasion, the guy just isn't a scientist, and not surprisingly, it shows.

Science has never made a secret of the fact that they don't understand how our bodies regulate calory intake; things like the food pyramid should not be taken as 'Scientific Fact' - it has only ever been a good, educated guess, and it can only be as good as our understanding permits. Plus, it doesn't really tell you how to keep a healthy weight, it only tells you what a balanced diet most likely should contain.

Accusing science of "steering an entire generation toward obesity, diabetes, and coronary problems" is at best uniformed nonsense, and at worst obscene drivel that is likely to harm, not just science, but also the health of the very people he claims to speak out for. Scientific research is the only way to unravel the incredibly complex mechanisms that control our metabolism; if he wants to blame somebody, blame the media for uncritically running with any fad or sensational bit of news, without sparing even the slightest glimmer of thought for understanding the content of what they are saying - or caring about the consequences. Or blame the unprincipled sharks that puke out one fad diet after the other, simply because they know there is a lot of poor fools out there that are desperate for anything that can help them with what is becoming an ever more serious health problem. Or blame the manufacturers of processed foods laden with HFCS, hydrogenated fats and low-quality raw-ingredients hidden behind food-additives.

The only two parties that one can't blame, are the scientists, who are in fact working hard and achieving real results, and the victims of obesity, who, try as they may, are not able to cope with the combination of poor advice from health providers, shameless lies and advertising pressure from the industries, and peer pressure from idiots around them, who regard you as some sort nut-job if you don't want to fill you gut to bursting with sugar and fat ('Are you some sort of health-freak?')

Indeed. Looking back to when I was that age, what I'd really have loved to learn, was something that was not just theoretical and sedentary, but had an immediate, tangible effect; it could have been anything, like growing things, making things from natural sources or whatever. It could have been flint-knapping and basic survival skills, like how to make fire, how to extract useful fibres and build a shelter or a boat - there is no end to the fun and useful things one could do; or now-a-days it could be guerrilla gardening or playing with robots or whatever. None of these are, of course, marketable as such, but they teach you a very valuable confidence in your own abilities, which is infinitely better than learning to program.

Well, up to a point - it depends on exactly how this sterility is achieved; it may not be 100% waterproof, very few things really are, when you get right down to it. It could be that only 99.9% sterility was achieved, for example, so have the consequences of the small number of successful offspring been firmly established?

The 'craze' consists mainly of these few articles that try to whip up a mad frenzy of mild interest. I'm sure, in five years' time it will be forgotten, and then maybe in ten years we'll occasionally be surprised by discovering that there are actually a few areas in which it is used and proving useful. It is in fact not a bad idea as such, being able to just connect certain things to the wider internet without having to bother with configuring NATs or similar things; they probably won't be things that are security sensitive in any way, but I can think of several things where it might be convenient. One thing that springs to mind could be all kinds of remote sensors with built in GPS; each would have a unique address and would know its position, so you could scatter them in the environment and they could communicate their data and position from time to time. And while that may sound a lot like spy cameras, it would actually be much more interesting as a cheap and easy way to collect date about, say, temperature, pressure, pollution etc. That is where we are going to see the real 'IoT', not in idiocies like a connected fridge or oven.

I think you know the flaw in this viewpoint: no democracy is guaranteed to offer up candidates that ought to be allowed into public office, and you only get to vote for those that actually run for election. I think a lot of it has to do with education, especially what one could call 'moral' education - by which I mean secular, moral education; as soon as religious interests get into education, it tends to go the wrong way. Democracy and freedom work best if everybody understands and accepts concepts like fairness and human rights in the same way.

I agree. What do you call a creature that passively feeds on what others produce? In biology the answer is simple: a parasite. Another lesson from biology is that parasites can bocome valuable to the host - if they are somehow subverted and made to work for the host. If one were to carry that line of thought over to society, then it is quite possible that all credit should be nationalised, so that it would work for the whole of society. BTW - you do realise that what you are saying implies the end of capitalism as we know it? I think that would be a very good idea.

So, you are an unsympathetic person? I, by contrast, feel a lot of sympathy with the Greeks; I have been in a similar situation many years ago on a personal scale. When you are in debt, it can be almost impossible to find a way out, even if you are clever, honest and industrious.

Quick, check your horoscope. That's what I do every morning, otherwise I don't know how I feel.

Personally, I'm not one of the critics of Pascal; it was my first, real programming language, and I enjoyed it a lot.

But over the years, although languages have been through a sort of Cambrian explosion, aren't beginning to see that they are converging towards the same end goal? Nearly all major language families now have things like object orientation, functional programming features etc, and I wonder if we are not going to end up one day with 'just one' (ie: a few) language again? One of the effects you can already see is that it is quite easy to move from one language to another - certainly within the C family (C, C++, Java, Javascript, ...) and even from one family to another.

Woooh, not good, not good at all. I mean just for starters, statements should end with ';', not '!', and the final 'end' needs a '.' - and of course, no indentation - how on earth are you going to read this mess when you return to your code in a year's time?