I wish you could look a bit farther than your nose... If you depend on exponential population growth in order to keep the economy healthy, a point will come where further growth becomes impossible, a much harder shock will have to be endured and you'll have much less time and resources to deal with it.

I'd prefer to hurt the real estate economy in the short-term, than devastate everything in the mid-term.

It's much bigger. If they manage to grow big enough insects so I won't have to eat their eyes, mandibles, wings and so on, I might consider giving it a shot.

It also needs, because of purely associative reasons, to look sufficiently different enough from the nastiness we spray in our bathrooms, and the flies that go for each piece of s**t they see. That's if you want this kind of meal to have any chance with the general population.

If insect production becomes an industry, then, I suspect, just like with cattle, we'll see the emergence of new selected species of insects sufficiently different from their wild counterparts.

While it's a fact nothing is pure, and especially food, the requirements for body insect parts per unit sum up to significantly less than 100% insects, compared to what you'd eat under this new green proposal.

As you put a meal on the table and leave it there for 5 mins, just by interacting with air it comes in contact with various environment waste and pollutants, like flakes of human skin and what not. Doesn't mean I'd enjoy to be served human waste for dinner either.

In short: it's not the idea I might have tasted an insect that's the problem. It's when that's primarily for dinner.

Maybe we do not NEED to be 7 billion people on this planet. Yea, there I said it.

I'm not advocating genocide, but we would start with (1) two children per family. One child per family causes too big tragedy if that child is lost, and causes cultural strangeness in some countries where the families try to make that one child be a boy. Two is better.

Considering not every family wants two children, and not everyone creates a family, this will stop growth and begin a new process of population reduction.

Next, (2) encouraging traits that cause women to have their children later in life. Education of women, equal employment of women: while it's in the name of women, it also causes them to have their child later in life (late 20-s, early 30-s) rather than early (mid-teens-s to early 20-s). This means about 10, up to 20 years less "overlap" between generations, so slower reproduction means a lesser number of people.

Cap and trade is too easily corrupted, especially with "offsets", even if well intended, so let's face it: (3) we need to reduce some other taxes, and tax greenhouse production at some point, with no possibility for the business filling in papers for offsets. The money from these taxes can then be used by the government to produce additional offsets themselves.

So, just three things in no particular order, I'd gladly see in this world, before we're forced to eat cockroaches. Just saying, mmk?

You really don't see the problem? How can you be so naive. Maybe you're new to this. All signs show to the fact there is a problem.

Of course the problem is not obvious. The article itself says it'll completely surprise us. They know we won't believe it at first. But that's why we must believe it, or else it's Armageddon.

Would you risk an Armageddon, because of your inability to understand and see?

And that's, in short, why we must attack Iraq.

Wait, what were we talking about :P?

Compared to the "omg he said profit, all bets are off" interpretation of most Slashdot users, your post is giving me hope that not all tech nerds are a uniformly infantile bunch.

That said, apparently a big share of them are.

Don't be so simple. Do you really think he's running WikiLeaks to be rich?

Little hint 1) He has personally supported WikiLeaks from his money for the most of the project duration.
Little hint 2) He recently signed for his biography rights and said a lot of the money will go towards supporting WikiLeaks.

My my, does seem it's all about profit.

Now here's the reality: things cost money. Some of the people who work for him, want money (some don't, but not all). The machines WikiLeaks is hosted and maintained on, cost money. Processing these documents, costs money.

If you're so easily disillusioned that he mentioned the word "profit" as a part of his legal strategy, you'll basically hate absolutely everything "good" that you ever aspired to in the history of human civilizations.

Aren't you a perfect picture. What would YOU do in his position? The function of WikiLeaks is to leak, but it has to be in a controlled responsible manner. Isn't that what everyone wants?

What he said, was because he needed a legal motive to threaten to sue. What the real motive behind his threat was you'd probably never know. The documents might have had sensitive information that isn't in public interest, he'd prefer blacked out, like he has done with most documents WikiLeaks has released.

Wow, aren't you intimidating waving that big finger at him.

However, he said that he knows more people who died in a car crash than measles. You cite "3 in 1000 kids infected die". Well, 1 in 100 die in a car crash.

So, turns out of we abolish vaccines, which I wouldn't recommend completely, there will be still more people dying in stupid car accidents which no one talks about, than measles. Stats is a funny thing.

Wow, I wish I had your "clear" view of that matter. The parents love their children, and are mislead by poorly constructed evidence aired in media. Solution: make those children orphans and put their parents in jail.

Although that's a false dilemma, I'd still personally prefer to keep my parents and the 0.3% chance of dying than 100% of chance growing up on the street with my parents in jail, thank you very much.

O_O

You know what, in the big picture, I think you and the people who'd "like it" count on the fingers my hand.

Good story, bro. And yet, officials are exempt, as described above.

The concept behind how the government is supposed to balance itself for the benefit of all is a good thing. I'm sure FBI and the the government is full of good people, much like me and you, who honestly believe and try to follow the letter and the spirit of the Republic.

That said, when plain facts continuously mismatch the theory, the scientific method says your mental model of reality needs an adjustment.

As always the issue is more complicated than it seems. On one hand we have people who reject these tests as an unwanted externality, failing to understand it decreases the risk of a drunk driver ramming into your vehicle.

When an article speaks of "DUI tests on drivers", you never think of the other drivers, you think about yourself.

On the other hand, breathalyzers give false positives. At which point your only course of correction is a blood test. Whoops, they got your DNA (which you noticed).

Let's say they do nothing scary and sci-fi with the DNA, except to put markers in a database to look up DNA evidence against.

Unfortunately DNA markers work like a (weak) hash algorithm: they give false positives (collisions), although they don't give false negatives. This is largely unaccounted for in courts, where a match may be considered direct evidence, especially if you have some past criminal offense that seems convenient, and you have a bad lawyer (most of the cheap ones are).

So let's see the chain of honest and good intentions here:

1) Breathalyzers reduce risk of driving drunk.
2) Mandatory breathalyzers reduce risk further.
3) Blood tests correct for breathalyzer false positives.
4) Reasonable chance your blood test will be sent off in other departments, and end up in a DNA marker database.
5) Chance you may end up inflicted in a crime based on a DNA marker false positive during evidence look-up
6) Hell.

Of course, I'm barely scratching the surface, we've yet to see all side effects once this enters into mass application.

You may be confusing "they have every little detail about their life" with the more generic and less useful "they have a lot of arbitrary data about their life".

If there is something a government is good at, it's making you fill in endless forms of data that is neither conclusive, neither guaranteed verified, and in the end rarely useful.

If the government could easily know every little detail of the life of government officials, it'd be quite hard to explain the constant stream of corruption schemes discovered around the country, often randomly, accidentally, and years after the fact.

Until recently, pilots of airplanes themselves had to be scanned every time before flight. You'd think if you trust someone to operate what's basically a giant winged bomb full of people, you might as well trust him not wear a bomb in his pants.

What you see is rather a simple after-effect of basic human psychology and lack of public control. Left to their own devices, lawmakers see the world as any human would: me, us, and them. Me is me, I trust myself. Us are my colleagues and the people who fund my campaigns. Them is everyone else.

As it goes, inconveniencing "us" is a big problem as we have serious work to do, which we know in detail and we discuss in corridors every day. That's ok, because we know each other and you can trust "us".

While "them", a quick scan and grope shouldn't really harm "them" much, especially considering you can't trust "them".

I don't mind sharing. Also keep in mind TSA don't publish their full list of "rules". So this is just what people caught in public.