This same problem is happening with legacy software all over the place be it from Google, Microsoft, Apple or other vendors. There are billions (YES! 1,000,000,000's) of devices out there that work just fine but can't use the latest operating system from the vendors so they aren't getting patched. This creates BILLIONS of opportunities for hackers, worms, trojans, scammers, etc all because the vendors are greedy and don't want to keep supporting hardware and software that is only a few years old.

They should be offering legacy support out at least a decade. It is very doable with conditional compilations to build the latest operating systems for the older hardware of even 15 years ago. It simply won't have some features like transparent windows and other eye candy. The software should gracefully fall back to fit the hardware. This is doable at the compile time which avoids having overly large software packages.

Mountains are in the way.

(Thank you for your thoughtless and ill considered reply.)

Radio? What's that? We can't get radio here.

Because bicycles are so much more efficient than SUVs we'll never see people riding fast from city to city in large vehicles so there will never be suburbs or a need for interstate highways... Right... Great logic.

A big problem with MacOSX and iOS is legacy support. Apple is abandoning compatibility with older software and even older hardware which is perfectly capable of handling the computational demands of the newer software. This in turn is destroying access to older files due to the lack of software to read them.

Apparently they're not fully employed so the lawyers are having to make up absurd cases. Or maybe the lawyers are just starving.

"make writing and publishing a zero-sum game. ... the potential pool of money is so large as to be effectively unlimited"

Scalzi is out of touch with reality.

It hasn't become a zero-sum game anymore than it was before and there is not an effectively unlimited pot of money. People never had an infinite amount of time to read and they don't had an infinite amount of money to spend on books.

The About Forestry link is a questionable graph.

Forests soak up a _lot_ less carbon than pasture lands.

Forests also have low biodiversity of both plants and animals, especially temperate and northern forests.

If you want to sequester carbon then the best thing to do is create savannah style pasture lands which maximize carbon and nitrogen sequestering as well as producing meat from livestock and a far greater biodiversity of wildlife than forests.

The solution is to buy meat from local pasture based farms which supports their maintaining pasture. That maximizes carbon sequestering while also feeding the world. Small farms can feed the world.

These "Girls Only" programs are bogus and sexist. If they did it "Boys Only" there would be cries of discrimination and lawsuits. It is illegal to do sexual discrimination yet our government does it over and over "Girls Only." Time to cut the crap.

"The strongest body-builder is not close to our ancestors, or to chimps, in strength."

While you have some good points the above is false. The strongest humans are stronger than the strongest chimps and stronger than our strongest ancestors on record. With a population of over 7 billion individuals to pick from and extreme training we have now produced some extraordinary physical specimens.

What chimps have is greater muscle density. If they were as large as our largest lifters and got the same training then they would probably be stronger. But they're not.

Oh, I understand but I disagree having experience with both.

Clearly this study was written by someone who doesn't actually do agriculture in traditional ways as it has been done for the past tens of thousands of years. Farming, be it planting or herding, is not a cushy job. It's hard, vigorous work. I farm. I have dense bones as shown by X-rays I've had. I've also broken a lot of bones. Farming is hard, vigorous work and sometimes we break bones, just like we did doing hunting and gathering too. And what may be really surprising to those sitting in the ivory towers is we don't need to go see a doctor for a mere broken bone. It heals. Old skeletons show this, not just human or even primate but even T-Rex.

"installs malicious code in a MacBook's boot ROM (read-only memory)"

Nope. It may write to EPROM or something like that but by definition it can not write to ROM. ROM means Read Only Memory and as such there is no writing to it. EPROM or some other flavor of Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory is what it would have to be working with. Too bad writers can't read. Not even their own sentences. Or perhaps they can't comprehend. IM (Incomprehensible Memory) in the case of the OP.

The problem I see you having is not with living for ever but with becoming decrepit. Increasing age and decreasing health and ability are not intimately linked. Some people deteriorate at relatively young ages, like yourself, but others are healthy and vibrant into their 80's, 90's and even 100's. If you weren't feeling like you were slowing down you might feel like living longer.

Personally, I have a lot of things that I still want to accomplish so I'm willing to give immortality a try. At the end, perhaps we can compare notes if you believe in the afterlife...

Spoken like a true coward.