Not before I put an arrow between his eyes. I can not only shoot a primitive bow pretty well, I could make one, including the bowstring, with nothing but a knife. If I didn't, then I'd have to fall back on my boxing and (admittedly rusty) judo skills.

It's a common misconception that people capable of unusual intellectual feats must necessarily be physically helpless, hopelessly specialized, and oblivious to everything around them.

Naturally, my model would not starve the farmers. The real challenge is figuring out how to stop the bandits who are starving the farmers. Fortunately, you only need about seven samurai for that.

So when you break your leg, you're going to have your witch doctor set it for you?

Vaccines and antibiotics are not high tech -- by which I mean something that requires an extensive and intact industrial infrastructure to produce. Crude replacements could be created by someone with 21st C scientific knowledge and the kind of technology that would have been available to 18th C gentleman scientists.

As for other drugs, a doctor could work with herbalists. Willow bark replaces aspirin; foxglove replaces digitalis; Ephedra sinica replaces pseudoephedrine; absinthe replaces anti-worm medications. A herbalist working under medical supervision is a lot better than nothing.

Which, it turns out, has very little to do with actual computers.

The intellectual skills involved in CS could, with not much difficulty, be turned to other kinds of problem solving such as operations research. Seriously, you're going to leave questions like how to most efficiently distribute scarce resources such as food to someone with a *business* degree? As a computer scientist, I'd create a model of the underlying problem, develop alternative algorithms, then show how those algorithms and model apply the real world problem. I use computer science every time I come home from grocery shopping. As I remove items from the bags I stage them by where they are eventually going to go. Why? Because efficient sorting algorithms eliminate lots of entropy early on. Consequently I only open my refrigerator *once*.

Computer science is essentially about figuring out the resources needed to accomplish things. If you want to figure out how much fodder it would take to move your draft animal powered army over a certain distance, you *could* consult a historian who specialized in the logistics of pre-mechanized warfare who'd tell you how Viscount Howe did it in the New Jersey Campaign of 1776-1777. Or you could find some CS graduate who pulled at least a "B" in algorithms to figure it out for you.

As for experts in gymel -- a technique for singing polyphony with one voice -- it's worth considering that the technique was developed in a period of human history that would be considered apocalyptically awful by modern standards. Even when times are violent, disordered, and desperately poor people still need art and music, and if we're stipulating that apocalyptic == "no computers", that means no iPods either. So it seems quite plausible to me that experts in gymel might find their services *more* in demand in a post-apocalyptic world.

We think of fish is heart healthy, but fin fish don't produce omega-3 fatty acids; they bioaccumulate Omega 3s produced by the algae at the bottom of the food chain. Farm-raised fin fish may or may not have a healthy fat profile based on their diet. Grass fed beef has a healthier fat profile than grain fed beef, as well as containing useful phyotchemical (chemicals from plants) like carotenoids. Same goes for pork; lard from pasture raised pigs is relatively high in mono- and poly-unsaturated fats.

The pattern seems to be that the best thing to feed an animal is something that approximates that species' natural food in the wild. So I'm skeptical of a secret, proprietary, industrially produced feed. It's not necessarily a bad thing, particularly if it's just a matter of skipping a few trophic levels (i.e., feeding the animal something prepared from stuff that's lower on its natural prey's food chain). Aquaculture needs something like that. The world's population demands more seafood than can be wild caught. But I'm not enthusiastic about buying meat from animals raised on mystery food.

This is a self-serving move by GM.

Perhaps the engineers named are responsible for the deaths caused by the faulty switch. Perhaps they are not. We don't know. But we can be certain that GM is naming these engineers in the hope that the public will blame and vilify them instead of the company.

This is an attempt to evade corporate responsibility disguised as an act of transparency. Even if the engineers bear some responsibility for the faulty design reaching production vehicles, it should be impossible for two engineers alone to put an obviously unsafe assembly into a production car, even if they conspire to do that *deliberately*. Obvious flaws should have been caught in design reviews, non-obvious flaws in prototyping and testing.

Well, it shouldn't be a question of some random person pulled of the Internet vs. the scientists *working on the project*. It should be a matter of what an educated person would think if all the pros and cons were laid out impartially then intelligently explained to him.

The problem with GP isn't that he thinks that ITER is a "massive and pointless waste of money" that will "never lead to a practical source of energy." The problem is that he hasn't explained the reasoning he used to arrive at that conclusion, and shown that he has thoughtfully weighed the contrary argument. He may well have done so and formed a very sound opinion of the project. We just don't know.

While I am sure there are occasional situations where it might be advantageous to be thought foolish and incompetent, in general this is likely a bad thing.

It's like being thought *weak* in military terms. There in tactical situations you'd like the enemy to underestimate your strength, strategically it's better to be thought stronger than you actually are. If a hostile country is considering violating some treaty they have with us, we'd want them to think our intelligence agencies will catch them red-handed. Once they actually go down that road, we'd want them to think our agencies are completely incompetent.

I think we need to take a serious look at the "many eyes" theory because of this. Apparently, there were no eyes on the part of parties that did not wish to exploit the bug for close to two years. And wasn't there just a professional audit by Red Hat that caught another bug, but not this one?

Right.

I have to say I'm even less confident in the plan to couple it to DNSSEC.

Sure. We're better. But we need to be even better than that.

I'd say more than just the "community". We have a great many companies that incorporate this software and generate billions from the sales of applications or services incorporating it, without returning anything to its maintenance.I think it's a sensible thing to ask Intuit, for example: "What did you pay to help maintain OpenSSL?". And then go down the list of companies.

OK guys. We've promoted Open Source for decades. We have to own up to our own problems.

This was a failure in the Open Source process. It is just as likely to happen to closed source software, and more likely to go unrevealed if it does, which is why we aren't already having our heads handed to us.

But we need to look at whether Open Source projects should be providing the world's security without any significant funding to do so.

If physicists don't have a proper answer to "Why is there something rather than nothing" then they should stop pretending they do by the deceit of changing the definition of "nothing".

The issue of whether anyone has a "proper" answer -- indeed, if there is a "proper" answer -- turns on the ambiguity of the word "why". We use that word in three very different senses.

When we ask, "why is the sky blue?", we are asking "by what lower-level phenomena is the sky seen as blue?" We want a causal sequence of explanations that is static (or very short duration) in time and varies over the reductionist depth of phenomena: photons are scattered by air molecules, some of them enter your eye, trigger certain receptors in the retina, this is processed by the nervous system causing a sensation that your brain has been culturally trained to associate with the symbol "blue".

When we ask, "why did the Challenger explode?", we are asking "by what causal chain of events, one after the other, did the Challenger explode?" We want a causal sequence of explanations that extends over time and is fairly static in reductionist depth: politics prompted a launch in cold weather, cold weather caused the O-ring to warp, the warped O-ring caused hot gas to leak, boom. We want a time sequence that (in this instance) stays at the level of everyday experience, doesn't go in to the quantum mechanics of the O-ring or the grand historical narrative of humanity's existence.

When we ask, "why did Alice go the dance with Bob?", we are asking "what motives and values prompted Alice's decision?" We want an explanation of the desires and actions of intelligent agents, not a story about the atoms that make up her body.

When we ask "why is there something rather than nothing?", some people are looking for "God did it" -- the third type of answer. But there can't be an intelligent agent before there is something, so the question in that sense is contradictory and meaningless.

Some people are looking for the second type of answer: they want some cosmological causal chain of events as to how space and energy came to be. But any causal chain of events would be a thing, not nothing, so again the question in that sense is contradictory and meaningless.

What we have here is a proposed answer in the first sense, lower-level phenomena.

If you're looking for cause-over-time or motive as an answer to "why is there something rather than nothing", you've fallen into a linguistic trap around the ambiguity of the word "why".