Regarding #2: livestock is expensive to raise, but the costs aren't necessarily borne by the producers. Livestock may be raised on public lands, fed subsidized feed from companies profiting by corporate welfare, or not held liable for various consequences of consuming their product: all of these are externalities to the producer and may not be reflected in the retail price of the product. I'm not making an argument for any of these items specifically but I could see an artificial meat process that cost less overall than livestock raising, slaughter and processing; yet resulted in a higher market price.

With respect to labeling, an interesting question will be what kinds of marketing will be viable for artificial meat producers. For example, livestock producers would probably object to advertising claims that their animals suffer or that there's anything wrong with meat production. If artificial meat producers are unable to make this claim and don't have very low prices on their side, then this cedes an important competitive advantage, and it will be interesting to see the result.

I'm reminded of the "Better Cheese comes from Happy Cows" and "Happy Cows come from California" marketing campaigns (the cartoonish idea in the ads was that warm California was a more happening place than cold Wisconsin, another cheese-producing state), which were challenged by some group (PETA, possibly) on the grounds that the cheese producers were not actually making cheese from milk produced by happy cows. Talk radio pundits and the like laughed about the excessive silliness of PETA (or whoever) in bringing the challenge to the campaign. But the problem I have with it is this: if we establish that any claim of relative happiness among livestock must be comic, and can be made by anyone without regard to the treatment of their livestock, then that removes from the marketplace a potential competitive advantage that a theoretical milk producer who did try to use a higher ethical standard might try to take advantage of. In short, while I hardly agree with a lot of PETA says or does, and I don't necessarily think the decision in this case should have gone their way, I don't think the idea that some livestock could be happier than others is laughable, nor the idea that claiming that your cows are happier than the competitions' is a marketing claim that needs to be supported with evidence.

Not just the fat, but the connective tissue and to a lesser extent dermal layers and blood vessels and the way that muscle near the bone is different--in short, all the various anatomy to a cut of meat that would be lacking in the most naïvely-produced artificial meat.

However, eating a roast, chop or steak is an acid test that artificial meat doesn't really need to pass for many uses. People eat a huge amount of processed meat in nugget, sausage and additive form. Artificial meat can start there while coming up with generations of improved matrixes and structures that allow it to come closer to fine animal-sourced meat.

That's an interesting link, but it doesn't point to more information about Leipold's paper. I don't disagree with the conclusion, necessarily, but it's hard to see how comparing jury and judge trials could result in useful information, because there's no reason to think that those populations of cases are of equal merit (superficially, to rule out, for example, the possibility that guilty defendants demand jury trials and innocent ones don't). There's no way to "objectively" establish guilt or innocence, so... it's hard to see how you could even conduct a useful study with that premise.

When I look at the satisfaction people seem to take in making life miserable for others, the conclusion doesn't surprise me at all, though.

A lot of what I see virtualization used for has to do with failures of software engineering, in the sense of being able to keep instances separate. Due to the overhead issues you mention, it would be better to support different software environments and applications on one host OS. For example, you have four physical web servers and want to replace it with one physical server. Why not just run one OS instance and four instances of your webserver? Almost every OS has features that allow you to pin process groups to processors or limit memory or do whatever other resource management you're using virtualization for, while avoiding having to lose capacity to OS instances and preallocations.

The reason, often, is that the application is engineered poorly to work this way. Innumerable little details like fixed port numbers, hardcoded configuration file locations, a robust way of logicalizing ("logicalizing"--I like that as an alternative to "virtualizing") the way a piece of software sees its environment--these all make it "hard" to have a bunch of software instances running together.

Another thing that virtualization "helps" with is deployment--the idea that instead of deploying an application package, you deploy a (probably partly) preconfigured full OS image that matches what you built, QAed and demonstrated. But again, this is a kind of workaround that sidesteps the issue that you're not packaging your software well--repeatedly, reliably, stably.

Virtualization has its place, but these are the uses to which I'm actually seeing it put (I work at a large IT outsourcing company). And it makes me a bit sad because it's failures of software engineering that make it needed.

Well in fact they do end up hiring programmers, but they might call them something else and they might not be employees: they might call their job "customization" or "configuration" or whatever.

This is the whole thing that bugs me about ERPs and other "enterprise" packaged software, encapsulated in the "buy vs. build" debate. It's never "buy" vs. "build": it's always "buy and build" (in the form of integration, customization and configuration--you always need to supply the logic yourself), or "build".

I think your expectations are unrealistic.

First of all, you need to distinguish between people who are professionals, and who have a professionals' responsibility and duty of care; and those who don't. You can't lump dentists, doctors, lawyers and other professionals in with service people like cabbies and sales people. In the latter case, there's no reasonable expectation of "trust".

It's realistic to expect that most people (professionals aside) who get money based on what you spend will try to get you to spend that money, and as much of it as possible; and dealing with them in ignorance is very much asking for a fleece job. This is true whether it's a mechanic or a repairman or a computer or mobile phone salesman.

What I find strange is that dear old grandpa probably understands this very well when dealing with mechanics and plumbers and car salesman. I don't understand why people expect the rules to magically change when they're buying a computer.

Thanks for pointing this out. I also don't know City of Heroes very well, but it seems like there's a need for an OOC zone and a PVP zone that are separate, as exists in almost all of the multiplayer games I've played (admittedly, all MUDs and MUSHes, no graphical MMORPGs). Similarly, if there were a single opponent-beating tactic like Twixt's, that points to a mechanical problem with game balance.

These career path selections are never made in a vacuum, either. If you're interested in two or three career paths, and one is full of sexist bullshit and one is not, more women may go into a second choice.

I don't know why you would bet that. It seems as likely to me that it would be called "entangled replication" or "time drive" or "teleportation"; or perhaps be named after the yet-to-be-discovered phenomena or law that allows us to do such a thing; or originate in a non-English language. Fact is, we don't know and I actually think conventional notions of driving something through space propulsively are likely as not not to apply to such a thing.

Science fiction can further science by inviting us to imagine the not-yet-possible, but I think we need to be wary of the ways in which the demands of human narrative can limit our imagination as well.

Why would they need a way out? NASA had the chance to honor a scientist or engineer, but decided not to--Serenity doesn't honor anything but entertainment, and neither does Colbert, or Tek Jansen for that matter.

This is a really interesting perspective, thank you. I don't know a lot about schizophrenia but now that you point it out, of course this would be a problem, because as a schizophrenic it would be hard for you to know what is reasonable for someone to be saying and what is not.

A poster below asks, "how can you detect sarcasm in writing?" It's the test of reasonability. It's harder with strangers but it is part of reading comprehension to determine from tone and context what it would be reasonable for someone to put forward.

I'm not sure I can agree with that. Remember that WoW was very late to a market that had already been developed my many MMORPGs--EverQuest, notably, and AC and others. I think that sometimes being first to market isn't an advantage at all, and Google of all companies is in a position to appreciate this, as Google succeeded largely by being very late to the search engine market.

WoW and Google succeeded so dominantly because they were better, and a big part of why they were better than the established players was because they learned from the existing market, and because they had no established customers they were worried about losing.

Many of the ones with "experience" are not so hot, for that matter.