As an ancient person, I learnt COBOL from a book but I didn't have a computer. Then when I got near a mainframe, I taught myself filetab: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filetab and later stll I used RPG2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG, later still Basic on a mainframe via a TTY33 [of course] and also the ineffable APL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language) which prepared me for my career in Perl. If you think Perl is unreadable, try APL, but get off my lawn first.

That's cheap and plentiful...

Yes, my sig is a 'jeu de mots' based on 'honi soi qui mal y pense', translated it would mean 'off we go for those who think little of it' but it sounds like the original. French speakers spend a certain amount of their lives doing this, look as Asterisk in the original, all the characters names 'mean' something.

Thank you, as a relic from the 60s, I was about to mention zipguns, but you beat me to it, all kudos. If you're quite young, get off my lawn though!

Yes that's funny, but no-one much on here knows French...

That would explain a great deal about the modern world.

Yes I agree, we're heading for asymmetric demand pricing [something I just made up] like the airlines and railways, it's expensive at the moment you need it, but the base costs remain constant. It's called automated blackmail or increasing shareholder value [in Europe, most of the utilities are privatised]. Also there's cash to be made on speculative option and contract purchase using the big data leeched out of the grid.

Am I being cynical? No, just reflecting the values of late stage capitalism...

Yes, but unhappily the other fuckers are usually very similar to the previous fuckers and about as corrupted by non-transparent lobbying and the entitlement culture of professional politicians [in the UK, they've usually been to Oxford and haven't actually had a 'job' except as 'special advisers']. I think there are a couple of solutions:

1. Apprenticeships for politicians and senior civil servants. They need to live in bad housing and do shit jobs before any promotion
2. Sortition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition choosing representatives by lottery, to prevent all the cosy, sweetheart stuff. The quality won't be worse and will even out

There are probably plenty of other ideas, but what we have certainly doesn't work properly for the 'people'.

Not really, given that a lot of our lifestyles are unhealthy anyway. I have relatives in Korea where they eat tons of meat and then have regular colonoscopies, that seems to me to be faintly ridiculous. Why would we change the planet so that we can become obese and ill?

Incidentally there's a strawman argument there too. I'm not suggesting that we return to the state of hunter/gatherers.

I agree 100% with you that GMO holds promise and != Monsanto. But we live in a corporate-dominated world and it's a legitimate fear that GMO will become a tool for control and profit rather than improvement of the human condition. Second point, mono-culture and gene-spliced is a lot less sustainable/more risky than natural high-yield. We could concentrate on eating less protein too, that's what takes the majority of the space/water etc.

Just take liver out, go out drinking and put it back in when finished. What could wrong with that?

Oh absolutely, at 62, I've seen punched cards, disk drives the size of washing machines, computers the size of a decent sized appartment, compuserve and everything on up to the Raspberry Pi. That included hacking via acoustic couplers, slow modems etc. etc. Old certainly now doesn't mean pre-technology and old tech is tech, usually just slower and bigger.

As in any 1950's science fiction film: 'Sir they're getting bigger!' Yes, what go possibly go wrong with all of this?

Yes agree, we seem have US influenced laws in the UK too, either as part of our highly asymmetric 'special relationship', some the recent deportations and deportation attempts, for example, or via the WTO [wealthy terrorist organisation]. We need to wake up to this and see what we can do to push back via boycott etc.

I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy [with a laser]...