I'd love to buy North American goods but there are hardly any out there compared to "Made in China" goods. Finding stuff that is not made in China is actually pretty hard.
Someone should make a UPC scanner app that offers you "Made in XX" products as alternatives.

Another thing is, once you have all this infrastructure in place to upkeep roads, military, etc... it is extremely disruptive to the economy to make sweeping changes. Imagine cutting road budgets in 1/2, military budgets in 1/2, and watch the economy fall and unemployment rise. Look at how "too big to fail" industry gets propped up with bailouts, and even protection against fair competition.

There are potential dangers in making organisms virus-proof, though. Most obviously, they might have an advantage over competing species if they escaped into the wild, allowing them to dominate environments with potentially destructive effects. In the case of E. coli, those environments could include our guts.

"We want to be very careful. The goal is to isolate these organisms from part of the natural sphere with which they normally interact," says Carr. "We shouldn't pretend that we understand all possible ramifications, and we need to study these modified organisms carefully." But he points out that we deal with similar issues already, such as invasive species running riot in countries where they have no natural predators. Additional safeguards could be built in, such as making modified organisms dependent on nutrients they can get only in a lab or factory. And if the worst came to the worst, biologists could create viruses capable of killing their errant organisms. Such viruses would not be able to infect normal cells.

I wonder how someone who deals directly with evolutionary processes can be so sure of something like this never happening, or how fixing one genetic "woops" should be solved by creating yet another organism. Where did the inspiration from that come from, Jurassic Park? Still, the possibilities are interesting.

I was simply responding to the OP who said:

No chat, no auction houses, no guilds (basically no social interaction of any kind, which kind of defeats the whole point of an MMO).

I think my interpretation was fair and hardly a flame. Glad to know they were incorrect.

They should at least allow friends to interact. There's a good chance a person was introduced to WoW by a friend, and I'm sure they'd love to be able to chat with one another during the trial. Thats pretty much a showstopper for me.

You're implying that people don't care what browser they're using. If that were true, how did Firefox convince 400M people to use Firefox? Why not use the pre-installed Internet Explorer or Safari?

Part of the problem with this is that you might be teaching it to people who don't have the emotional maturity to truly gauge the difference between right and wrong

In my mind, that's the main problem. Sure, some of them will use their skills for good. Others will be tempted into using their new-found powers for bad.

Perhaps it's best to start them off small and let them work their way up into the more advanced topics with proper supervision. Like martial arts, you don't teach them how to break someone's neck in the first week.

People who use a browser at work also use a browser at home: they're the same people. Is the thinking that these people will use IE/Opera/Chrome at work then switch to Firefox at home? Granted, I'm sure a lot of people do do that, but adding "when you're at home" seems like an odd caveat to add to the Mozilla manifesto of openness, innovation, etc.

Well, besides the things you might consider "enterprise", you can take your pick from here: http://www.mymacosx.com/terminal/handy-collection-terminal-commands-tweaking.html

I think (hope!) dumbing down of interfaces is a fad. For all the simplicity of interfaces these days (let's take OS X as an example), I hate to think about all the times I had to search the net about how to do something from the command-line because the UI didn't allow it, or to look up some magic keypress that isn't discoverable. Or that simple functionality like Refresh isn't available in Finder. A lot of Apple products are like that. Browsers are starting to go that way, too. Seems the ultimate state might be to leave the computer turned off - doesn't accomplish what I want but is very simple.

I voted elementary because I'd like to go back with a new perspective. I never got the "big picture" when I was a kid. Never had any idea why people might act the way they did. That makes me sad. I can't go back but I can help my kids have a better experience than I did.

I hope they spend some time improving their gaming console interface.
Specifically:

- I don't even want to see genres I'm not interested in.
- I want a "not interested" option, like on the web interface
- I should be able to see a full list of things I've watched, so I can go back and continue to watch a series I started watching awhile ago.
- Should be able to apply a "not interested" rating to an entire series, across all seasons.

Also, why bother showing search results for titles I am not able to watch? Hoping a click on an unwatchable title at least triggers a hit so they can see demand for it.

Keep in mind "Green peppers allow access." follows standard sentence structure. I'd wager that your passphrase would be much more difficult to crack if the capital letter was in some random place and the period was moved somewhere else, like "greeN pepp.ers allow access"

Try checking for updates using the account that installed the software, if you haven't already. I've found that Firefox doesn't want to update itself in a different (but also admin) account on OS X than the one that installed it.

From what little I've seen and heard, his biggest problem is his temper. I can imagine the crappy ideas he's railroaded through by yelling at people, instead of getting them through on merit.