My feeling says that if the shortage of cocoa is as bad as TFS suggests, market forces will soon enough take care of that.

If there is no Internet available in the area, it's not likely you can find a working hotspot at Starbuck's or the local library or where-ever you would expect to find one in your home country.

There is more to GM seeds than short-term feeding of people.

There's the patents - putting too much power in the hands of a handful of people. In the end we may be stuck with eating Soylent Green.

Then there's the problem of plants grown from hybrid seeds, which do not produce viable seeds themselves, so you have to buy seeds every time. You can't use seeds you harvest from your own crops any more. Cross-breeding between hybrid and traditional strains (this will happen, if only accidentally) introduces these hybrids to traditionals, so the traditional strains may lose their ability to produce good seed. In time, we may only have these hybrid seeds available. The genetic variation in the crops goes down, local varieties disappear as they can not produce their own seeds any more.

All that then has to happen is some plant disease to appear, against which the hybrid strains (we don't have anything else any more) is not immune, and we have a world-wide famine, with little to no option to recover.

Remember that patents are location bound, so only if they're patented in that specific country AND that country accepts that accidental cross-breeding falls under the patents, big ag may be able to do something.

It's probably counted like that indeed.

But don't overstate air traffic - it's still quite low capacity compared to trains and buses, which are the transport method of choice for all those migrant workers. Even in the US, if 20% of your population is on the move, 90% of those will have to take other transport than planes.

I'm more used to hearing about numbers in the tune of 200-300 million people travelling over the New Year holidays - China's most important celebration. That's mostly migrant workers travelling back home, plus some tens of millions of tourists.

No matter what, this are huge numbers.

That are all second and third (illegal) children. Plus of course all the second wives (aka mistresses).

I'd call that good riddance.

Didn't those cars have license plates attached to them for easy identification?

I'm used to such numbers being inside the passenger compartment, under the rug - rather concealed places like that.

If the police would want to check on it (never heard they do), I'd have a hard time finding it. It'd require me to read the car manual to check on the location of it.

In case of the challenge/response, the car knows what response to expect on the challenge it sent out. So the car and the key basically do the same calculation.

The lost key situation is very simple: reprogram not only the key, but also the car. The car can be reprogrammed after gaining entry with a physical key - this may be a traditional key, or a smart key, or whatever. Just a second key, that the owner receives with his car and which can only be used for gaining access for reprogramming purposes.

Now what if you lose that reprogramming key as well? Then the car owner will have to pay for a new window in his car, as the dealer will have to use brute force to access the reprogramming hub.

Now theft becomes a bit of an issue (thief steals reprogramming equipment, gains access to the car, reprograms it to match the thief's key), however this again can be mitigated by having the car lock up for some time (a few hours should be enough to deter thieves) upon reprogramming without reprogramming key.

The only issue may be that all the existing keys to the car (many people will have more than one key) have to be replaced.

A web site on the Internet is quite arguably the cyberspace equivalent to a public place.

The display of a YouTube video on a screen in your shop, streaming from YouTube, is quite arguably the same as embedding it in your web site.

A lot will depend on the copyright license of the material in question. You're certainly allowed to play music in your store if you get explicit permission from the copyright owner of this music to use their material in your shop. Maybe they even come and play live in your shop. If you put a video out on the Internet, and explicitly add "only link, do not embed this video in any other site", and someone does embed it after all, you may still be able to claim copyright infringement as it's explicitly stated you don't want this.

Now such a comment shows you have a serious problem - one with not thinking through the problem, and showing a thorough lack of understanding of even the basics of the concept of copyright. Note that every video, every work out there is copyrighted. Also your home videos. The whole notion of those anti-copying groups that say "don't share copyrighted material" is stupid - whether you can share copyrighted material with third parties depends on whether the copyright owner has given permission or not. Simply uploading to YouTube may very well arguably include an implicit permission to share, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

There is a general agreement that linking to material is OK, however this is much more than just linking - this is embedding. Linking is easier: it basically tells "look, over there you can find this or that, you may go have a look". Nothing from the original content is visible in your web site, clearly no copyright infringement.

Embedding a video goes a lot further than that. It is getting quite close to renting a video and showing it to all your friends and all other people that ask. Whether that is legal, generally depends on the copyright license of the rights holder.

If no restrictions on this, you could take all the content of your local newspaper's site, embed it in your web site (using frames or so, so you're not actually copying the news articles to your own web site), and you got your own news web site. I'm pulling it a bit more to an extreme, but it's basically the same: it's embedding. However now you must see the issues this may have.

As I understand it, YouTube has an option to indicate whether you allow your video to be embedded in another web site. If you allow this, there's no issue of course.

A complicating factor in this case will certainly be the fact that the uploader of the video is not the copyright holder of the original material... and that when I see videos from YouTube broadcast as part of a TV show, it very often says (C) YouTube - also something that I have bad feelings about, whether it is true or not.

You're a few years behind the times.

While for sure they're not on par with the Americans, I wouldn't call BeiDou a "PR stunt". There are already mobile phones on the market that use it, in conjunction with the American GPS and the Russian GLONASS. They also have a growing number of more and more advanced military satellites circling around the earth already, and have managed to reach Mars.

There is for sure a lot of PR involved, and that should tip you off for the future. They will sooner or later leapfrog the US, just because of that, because it's the exact same motivation the US had to put a man on the moon.

When the Americans decided to put a man on the moon, they did it within ten years. In an era where manned space flight was in its infancy

We're now in an era where manned space flight is more or less routine, and where rocket technology and other space technologies have vastly improved.

I'm quite positive it's possible to put a man on Mars within ten years, if only we really want to. If the US would put only a quarter of the money that now goes towards destruction of other people (i.e. the military) towards this mission, it can be done - the amount that goes to their military is so huge, a space mission will look cheap in comparison. It'll need a multiple of spacecraft, one for the crew (with life support for the duration of the trip and a while on Mars), several robotic freighters to carry further supplies needed to set up a permanent base. Indeed it'd be a one-way mission, until the Mars colonists produce the fuel needed for the return trip.

What's missing is the political will. The Americans got to the moon as they thought they were being outcompeted by the Russians, and that this was the only non-selfdestructive way to show the Russians their might (invading Russia would've amounted to suicide of course). This political will, this competition is missing now.

So that indeed gets us back to China. Russia has lost most of it's capabilities, and won't be back on track soon. The Chinese however develop quickly, and start to seriously catch up with the Americans. The moment the Chinese take over and say "we're going to put a man on Mars, just to show the world how great we are", the Americans will say "we're going to be there first!". As soon as that happens, less than a decade later, there will be people on the moon.