The assumption that people will eat more because they walked around this mall is false. They may simply walk around at home a little less and sit down or go to bed earlier. There's plenty of energy being wasted on frivolous actions when you're talking about action of the human body and we usually respond to small amounts of extra exercise by resting rather than minute changes in the amount of food we cook for our meals. The amount we cook is usually binned in set amounts rather then being a continuous variable we carefully adjust and extra is thrown away or consumed needlessly more often then not. OTOH your point about production costs sounds reasonable but do you have any numbers to back up the idea that the energy used for mass production will be more then is reclaimed over the entire life of the tile?

False Dichotomy. I don't go to India to hire an incompetent electrician just because I don't need an electrical engineer PE to wire my new house.

This is part of the current problem. Software Engineers are writing lots of things that can kill you and we don't have any licensing body or laws requiring a PE to make specific applications. It generally means we can't be held responsible, but that cuts both ways. If we're working on a serious application we have nothing to hold back from management if we know the design doesn't pass muster. A PE must attach his signature to his work to approve it so a PE has leverage in the ability to refuse to do so unless the work meets his professional standards. As software engineers they can just take our work any day of the week and throw it into a production system and if we don't like it we can GTFO. So to sum up, we have the same pressures, the same dangers and moral responsibilities, with none of the leverage over management or our peers to enforce professional standards.

No. As a Software Engineer myself I see this 'blame the management not the engineer' mindset as an unacceptable abdication of responsibility. Management isn't the technical expertise, the engineer is. If your a Civil Engineer PE and your MBA boss asks you to sign off on a design, that's great and all, but you don't sign off unless you're sure that the designs are sound and acceptable according to your trained, professional opinion. The company is paying you to make that call honestly, they did not and can not simply buy your signature unless you have no sense of honor or integrity to your profession, in which case you shouldn't call yourself an engineer in the first place and can rightly look forward to being 'thrown under the bus' for signing off on a design that causes harm to others.

In your bridge example you state the designs are cross-checked and reviewed by a slew of other engineers. Guess whose job that is to make sure that's all been done properly before they sign their name on it? The CE with the PE license that's in charge of the bridge. If management doesn't give him the resources to have the designs cross-checked and reviewed he doesn't sign and the bridge doesn't open. He most certainly does not piss and whine about management privately, pocket the money, sign the design and say it's the fault of the MBA's who don't know anything about bridges when 20 people die on it.

Are management dicks? sometimes. Is it easy to stand up to them? No. Might there be negative consequences for doing the right thing and acting like a professional? Yes. Welcome to real life and having responsibility of a profession rather than a job.

That doesn't make sense on any level. How does one extend science with vendor lock in and get everyone to switch to it before they kill it off? Are you telling me the Big Bang theory (first put forward by a catholic priest) is a clever extension of science to lead us down the wrong path before they somehow destroy all scientific knowledge completely? You can't throw that phrase around just because you hate the person/group embracing whatever idea you also like and are thus faced with having to live in a world where your enemy isn't quite as ubiquitously evil as you'd prefer them to be. Can't let that happen or next thing you'll be self reflecting on whether the stereotypes you hold true are correct and you should be hating them at all!

Because they have a less firm grasp of the slippery slope fallacy?

Wow, you're giddy about fellow human beings dying because they have different culture and beliefs than you. Is this really the "enlightened" and "evolved" alternative to religion you wish to present?

You can get most college football from ESPN on an Xbox. I only use cable for the NFL. no idea about motorcycle racing but if it's on ESPN 3 you can get that via the xbox app.

This is a line of thinking that would declare bullets to be useless in modern combat because they could be defeated by a scrap of metal.

There's no contradiction in saying the Constitution which is the supreme law of the land has a lot of power while at the same time correctly pointing out that the pre-amble of the Constitution has little to no bearing on established law and neither grants nor limits federal power or individual rights. From Wikipedia:

You might as well be mad that they consider the Articles of the Constitution important but for some reason refuse to recognize moral obligations cited in Sesame Street Episodes

I think the idea of this is "higher then currently employed". For example, an analyst tracking a target that walks under a bridge and out the other side might be confident enough to give the go-ahead but assisted by a software bio-metrics package the analyst can be warned that based on height calculations the guy that just came out on the other side of the bridge isn't the target being tracked unless he just grew 3 inches.

I love how the summary says they store your religious and political views like they aren't boxes literally labeled religious and political view that your purposely decided to fill out and display publicly on your profile info page. My God, they're probably even storing your facebook NAME and profile PICTURE somewhere on their SCARE SERVERS!!!!

Agreed, hence proper and trained supervision being necessary to deter it.

The part where you have to break the seals on the machine, take it completely apart, hook up circuitry to it, close it back up, and re-seal the now broken tamper-proof tape, let the election run, break back in, break the seals on the machine again, pull your electronics back out of the machine to eliminate evidence and then reseal the machine and fix the tamper-proof seals again.

Are you saying ordinary Americans are trying to break encryption on NSA smart phones in order to intercept their communiques? Neither my post nor GP's mention ordinary Americans btw.