Exactly. Given enough money and enough mares, you could make hundreds of attempts, but the amount you could make back in winnings and stud fees has to be tiny compared to how much it would cost to run a breeding program like this. Now you could collect eggs and sperm from 2 horses, and then use in vitro fertilization and surrogate mares. You'd at least just have 2 sets of genetic material, but genetics is such a crap shoot, you'd go broke trying to get even 10 "perfect" horses.

Cloning would be much more efficient and cheaper, with much more certainty of results.

Hey, there's a lot of Texas hate here. A great deal of cutting edge science goes on in Texas. Don't confuse the do-ers with the voting masses or the easily manipulated and oblivious legislature. Most of the science opposition is at the elementary/high school level anyway and fueled by ignorant parents who wave the reelection hammer over weak politicians.

Not sure where you are, but just to check I just tried signing up on TXU and Reliant (2 major providers in north TX) websites and both of them require either an SSN OR DL# to do the required credit check. Now, you could possibly refuse the credit check, but then they will charge you an exorbitant deposit to start service. I know they've been doing credit checks around here for at least 10 years, maybe more.

"it's blind and shows a lack of imagination."

No, what it shows is a lack of paranoia. My point about identifying information was that we already trust these companies with information that can do a great deal more harm if lost, stolen or sold. What i see in the links you provided is a lot of scare tactics using words like "potentially" and "could be". Obviously this is a reason to ban smart meters immediately rather than add usage data to the other private information they can't disclose without our approval.

What is this terrifying information anyway? Using my smart meter, they now know that at 6:00pm, i turn on several appliances that draw more power. they reason it could possibly be a microwave oven and a tv. or maybe i'm washing dishes and watching tv. or maybe i'm welding. wow. that's scary. Then maybe they notice that on the weekend, i use a lot of power. egads! those advertisers must be foaming at the mouth for this kind of information. Imagine their amazement when they learn that middle class Americans watch TV and cook in the evenings and spend more time at home on the weekend than they do during the week. It's a veritable gold mine I tell ya. It takes a large tinfoil hat to believe these meters will identify anything that could not be guessed at by anyone.

Smart assery aside, there are much more real and damaging threats to people's privacy than some magic box that could possibly be reading your electrical lines for information that's much easier to get at. advertisers can already determine what you buy, where you go and what you do with far more accuracy by using existing sources of information.

i repeat the question. Why does it matter? Come on here's a list of all the information my current electricity provider ALREADY HAS ON FILE FOR ME: Name, Address, Social Security number, Drivers License number, credit score and probably history at time of account opening. I could go on. How is a detailed analysis of my power usage more of a privacy issue than all that deeply personal information I was required to provide to start service? Just what private information is this smart meter supposed to be gathering? So I use more or less power during certain hours of the day. Does that come as a surprise to anyone. Do you think they can identify when the Mrs. plugs in her favorite sex toy, or what tv shows you watch?

Wait a sec. How is it a privacy issue for the utility provider, that already knows how much power you consume, to use a smart meter? Help me out here.

Anecdotaly... As a multiple time sufferer from mis-read meters and the pain in the ass that results from convincing the power company to believe that you really didn't use 10000 KW/h last month when you've been average 1500 KW/h for years I love that my usage is precisely monitored and measured. I also get some cool features like email alerts if my usage spikes, the ability to see my projected bill ahead of time and make adjustments to my usage in advance, and I can compare my usage to other houses in the neighborhood. That last however DOES NOT IDENTIFY THE HOUSES. All I see is "your usage is x% more/less than similar size houses this week".

Yeah, this above ground stuff is for the birds. I moved from an older neighborhood with above ground utilities to a newer area in the suburbs with buried. It's quite a relief to not have to worry about branches/kites/vehicles hitting power lines and shorting the entire neighborhood. We pretty much assumed any major storm or high winds would lead to an outage. The cable service also ran above ground and for some reason squirrels love to eat the casing. I had internet and tv outages 2 or 3 times due to that one. Aesthetically, it's nice not to have all this crap overhead too.

I would have thought with the age of most European cities that above ground would be more common, that seems to be the excuse around these parts "well, that's just the way they did it back then. live with it." So if buried power in Europe is so much more common, what's the reason for that? Have power lines always been buried there? Was it done after WW2 since everything had to rebuilt anyway? Or did most countries just say "screw these ugly poles and wires" and eat the expense of burying the lines?

What do you want to bet the long awaited release date for WoW: Mists Of Pandaria is announced in the next week? Wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being pretty close to the GW2 date.

Why did MS have some obligation to make files compatible with the competition? Becoming the de facto standard is usually something any company would like to do, I fail to see how it's wrong when MS does it. If I remember correctly, MS Word was one of the first word processors to support RTF which is an open standard, and I recall being able to save files in other formats as early as Word 2.0. MS frequently provided converters to output to the native format of other products.

Would it have been nice to have an open standard? Probably so, but most consumers didn't care enough to demand it. Jeez back in the late 80's/early 90's every application seemed to have it's own file format.

yeah MS was the first software company with a popular product to have a proprietary file format. what were they THINKING? Open source was not even on the radar, hell maybe not in the vocabulary of 95% of the software buying world back then. How long did it take OpenOffice or other products to get even close to the functionality of Word? Hey look! You can use this OPEN SOURCE (say it in an impressive voice) word processor that has 1/2 the features of the leading brand AND is incompatible. File format was only the icing on the cake that turned people away.

"I'd be willing to bet that they're using small variations on garden variety filtering algorithms"

I'm inclined to agree. Face it, if they had some super incredible sound processing algorithms, they'd be raking in the money licensing them to other companies for other uses and we'd hear about it somewhere. Sadly, that somewhere would probably be a patent lawsuit.

"The saddest thing in all of this is, though, that there will be a sizable number of middle- and lower-class people..."

this crap drives me crazy. Obama proposes a tax on people that make over $250k. Cut to endless footage of people that making $50k a year protesting that this is going to break them.

that's why i also use it on my luggage.

When PS3 first came out, I bought one because I wanted Blu-Ray and I could get a stand alone player for $500 or get a PS3 and have a game console for the same price. The difference though is that back then you only HAD a choice of $400+ Blu-Ray players. I can go down to Wal-Mart and get a Blu-Ray player w/ Netflix etc for $60 on sale. So unless I just realllly wanted a console, I could put a player in every room for that much. The point is that Sony might have lost that business several years ago, but there are alternatives now.

"RIM also carries no debt and has $2.1bil in the bank."

And $1 billion in unsold, unwanted product sitting around that they will write off. No doubt some accounting hand-waving will take place to make this look like a great thing. $2.1 billion in the bank is more cash to waste as they cast about for a home run and a nice lining for the executive parachutes when it's all over. Obviously RIM is a shining example of a well managed company that is ahead of the curve and really sticking it to the competition...

I've had BB, I've had iPhone, and I'm finally fairly happy with my Android phone. RIM better hope their next products are the most perfect corporate phones ever in the history of ever, because they'll never be a factor on the consumer side without divine intervention.