> But in practice we have half the population who are capable of programming but who are severely underrepresented

That's a totally unsupported assumption.

It also ignores the question of DESIRE. It completely degrades half of the population by stripping them of any sort of free will at all.

That's the whole problem with these do-gooder crusades that fixate this kind of "imbalance" while ignoring the the imbalances in the skilled trades or nursing.

"Working out" really burns very little in terms of energy unless you are overdoing it like Arnold Schwarzenneger. You aren't going to get a sufficient calorie deficit just from exercise.

The main value of exercise is sabotaging your body's starvation response.

Otherwise, your body will just adapt to the famine. That's what it is designed to do.

Yup. That's why you need to EXERCISE. Excercise will increase your metabolic rate for about 18 hours afterwards. This will help counteract your body's tendency to go into panic shutdown mode due to lack of food.

Diet and exercise.

They go together like a horse and carriage.

ANY effective weight loss is going to be counter to your instincts. You will have to fight your inner animal. It won't be easy. It WILL be unpleasant.

STARVING is never fun.

Your inner animal is basically holding it's breath for the duration.

If it were easy, anyone could do it and it wouldn't be such a problem.

"Don't anythng that wasn't alive" is a poor way of putting it.

It's more like, don't buy anything ready made. Buy only agricultural commodities. Buy only components.

You avoid most of the junk that way.

You need very little fat. You can cut most of it out and not have any problems (besides hunger). You can cut most of the carbs too. The real problem is protein rather than fat or carbs.

Carbs and fat are for energy. They're pretty much what you need less of.

> I remember the days of sending mass emails

So Facebook solves the "problem" of spamming your friends. NICE.

In other words, it doesn't solve any real problem at all and if anything just enables those that abuse the shared infastructure.

That little nugget again... OF COURSE your time is worthless. Wages are stagnant. Good jobs are harder to come by. If you have a decent job, it's a salary job where you don't get ANY money for working extra. If your job is crap, you have to go through hoops just to get enough hours to feed yourself.

Free time is either easier to come by or devalued by current labor standards.

Also, there's no opportunity cost in letting a machine work for you.

This is stupid. Nobody needs to dox anyone. These kinds of people that ISIS wants to target are self identifying. There are any number of obvious symbols that "terrorists" could latch onto if they wanted to lash out at servicemen and their families.

There's simply no need for cloak and dagger or "hacking".

The key thing here is that noone really wants to run Windows. They perhaps want to run Windows applications. It's all about the ecosystem. Everyone that puts up with Windows does so because of the positive feedback loop that's existed from the days of DOS. Everyone thinks it's the only option so it becomes the only option.

The troll is also ignoring the possibility that somoene might by Apple hardware for it's own sake and merely want to do whatever the HELL they want with their own personal property.

At one time I ran Linux on Macs. It made sense at the time. Apple's hardware was just another PC to me.

> So your politics invalidates someone else's genuine want? Some people will want the factory lockdown to enhance security.

No. NO ONE wants this. NO CUSTOMER wants this. This is just something that the Ayn Rand brigade like because it allows corporations greater freedom to abuse the rest of us. That includes the paying customer that indifferent at best.

Microsoft likes this. No one else does.

I think that's a very personal sort of judgement and one that should be reserved strictly for the mother. This part of motherhood is not delegable. It's a big responsibility. How it's handled will impact the resulting person for the rest of their life. The resources available to the mother (and no one else) will have a great impact.

If the mother doesn't cooperate and take her responsibility seriously, there is nothing that an busybody can do to change the situation. So the mother has to agree of her own free will or it doesn't really work.

This is why the government should not get in the middle of the decision.

It's also good public policy to support the mother in any way we can once she decides to treat "the blob" as a person. It benefits us all if she gets the best result possible.

Vitamins. Food. Medical care. Schools. Perhaps even training.

Moral Majority busybodies usually want to take all of those things away.

> Should we really eradicate all heritable disease, or post-edit the afflicted to mitigate effects?

We aren't even to the point of that yet. We're still barely scratching the surface of the obviously harmful stuff that will KILL YOU pretty quickly once it manifests.

Sickle-Cell is an entirely different iceberg here.

There's plenty of time for these people to cure cancer and other more exotic things that you've never heard of while the rest of us argue what other things this tech should be used for.

Current regulations will already likely keep Pandoras box closed for the time being.

Nobody is talking about "blindly hacking the genome" at this point. There are some very well understood negative mutations. We know what these genes should look like and we know what these genes do look like when they are broken.

Remember the Human Genome project? That wasn't all for naught. What we're doing now builds on that.

Nobody is even talking about the Frankenstein stuff yet.

GMOs are much more Frankenstein than this stuff.

Once you do something, you have to be prepared for the fact that YOU WILL SCREW UP because you probably will. How can a population of people so heavily biased towards IT not be aware of this? It's like any other system or set of processes. You have to prepare for the worst because you know that sooner or later the worst is going to happen.

It's not IF we will screw this up but WHEN and what do we do about that.

With tech we far too often ignore that discussion because it's not easy and it's not pleasant.