Suppose we just go for the thigh meat. We cut off the joints, then push the meat out with a blunt metal probe. (should work on grasshoppers at least) Although this is more wasteful than a fancy fillet, the equipment would be way faster and cheaper.

The result is also a chunk size suitable for burger. It doesn't need to be treated like pink slime. It need not be breaded and fried.

If you get them mixed up, then your treatment of animals is related to your treatment of humans. This applies to both good people and evil people. For example, it you make you join PETA if you don't like killing. You'd see nothing wrong with PETA's idea that killing a rat is like killing a child.

If you can keep humans separate in your mind, as you ought to, then killing animals is no big deal. It can neither horrify nor satisfy an evil urge. It's kind of boring actually.

I think you CAN separate the meat. Look, slashdot just ran a story on a robot that would draw blood. There was also one with a robot folding towels and many with robots driving cars. Machine vision has reached a point where I'm pretty sure you could use it to pick out the meat.

If there isn't a market for meat, then those animals will never even get a chance to live. They simply won't be needed. It's like you're killing them before conception. Meat eaters at least give the animals life, allowing them to be born and usually even grow up. The animals get the best years of their lives, humanely euthanized before facing the suffering of old age.

This is my sole reason for rejecting insects. I think we could build a robot to solve the problem of picking out the meat.

I'd love to eat insects if you stop implying that I have to eat the horrible parts. I also don't want processed "meat" like hot dogs. Find a way to butcher insects properly, and I'll gladly wolf them down.

For example, I can imagine a machine (sort of a robot) that gets the meat out of grasshoppers. First it yanks off the back legs; the rest goes to compost. Second it snips off the leg joints, keeping only the big thigh section. Third it uses a blunt metal probe to push the meat out of the exoskeleton. The result is tasty little bits of meat that can be sold like burger. Probably I'd make tacos with it.

Proposed mechanism:

The underlying causes are inate intellectual ability and drive. People with these traits are more likely to learn many things, languages included. People with these traits are also more effective at multi-tasking, prioritizing, resisting Alzheimer's disease, using a large vocabulary, and learning math.

Those hours are a chunk of time stolen from the life of a child. He can never get them back.

If a decade or two is devoted to the problem, then there will be a small benefit. It's extremely unlikely to make up for the investment. He could get a tiny bit of extra pay in the military or he could get a job with the CIA. This is nothing to get excited about.

This idea persists because women collectively don't get all that offended by non-virgin men. Considering all the diseases, plus the risks of the man supporting some other woman (willingly or not), this is kind of a problem. We could use a derogatory word for men who run around.

That said, I don't see this changing much. There is an evolutionary reason for women to prefer men who get around; they may be more likely to produce sons who can do so. There is likewise an evolutionary reason for men to prefer women who are hesitant, at least if the man could end up providing resources.

Black people don't randomly get born to white people.

Better comparisons can be had with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, with Down Syndrome, and with people who are born deaf. We should avoid treating them as less human... does this mean we should not seek to prevent or cure these issues? People with all these issues are treated as less than human, yet they can live their lives. Are they OK? Maybe you think the rest of the world is the problem, and these people are in no need of cures?

There is an optimum level of physical activity. If you get seriously far from this, then yes you do have a mental problem. (land luge, skiing Mount Everest, diving with gases more exotic than helium...) We might not bother forcing you to get treatment; this would deprive us of seeing you earn your Darwin Award on youtube.

Yes, except for the fact that the beliefs which lead to priesthood are actually the norm. The norm is exempt from being an illness, even if it is wacko.

I never said "moral". This is more of a "you fail" issue.

I suppose I do think that the healthy and intelligent people have some obligation to reproduce, but somebody who lacks the proper urges (one way or another) might not really be healthy anyway.

Is ADHD a "problem" that needs to be "cured"? How about Aspberger's or the inability to spell words like that? What risks and side effects would be tolerate? Suppose it requires brain surgery or virus-mediated genetic engineering with a 7% risk of death and a 29% risk of survival with disability.

Here we have people who are obviously abnormal (maybe 1% or 3%, whatever), who obviously have brain structure differences, and who are obviously having problems. They are far more likely to commit suicide. In the USA, they are far more likely to get HIV. By any objective measure, we ought to be searching for a cure.

Most of them don't want a cure, or at least won't admit to wanting one. We can save money by not bothering! This reminds me of the sad situation of deaf people who seek to make deaf children (no joke) and who view people who get cochlear implants as being sort of like traitors or sellouts. If most deaf people were this way, we'd never have developed any treatments.

The concept of a mental illness is fundamentally normative. Even if you think homosexuality is perfectly OK, you need to admit that it was removed for purely political reasons. Objectively it is clearly abnormal: perhaps 1%, perhaps 3%, whatever... but TINY.

If you insist on adding the requirement that there be harm, and you want to dismiss the suicide issue as a trauma result, the situation is still pretty clear from numerous viewpoints. In the USA, AIDS is still primarily a homosexual disease. I can even argue this from an atheist viewpoint: if something prevents offspring in the Nth generation, impacting one's evolutionary fitness, then it causes harm. (and we all know what the typical Christian/Muslim/Jew would argue)

Given that we've already found brain differences, this new system seems like it can not avoid bringing back homosexuality as a medically accepted illness. This is not to say it can be treated or that any future treatment would be worthwhile, because the cure can be worse than the disease. Nearly nobody is going to risk surgical and/or genetic brain modification to become heterosexual. Almost certainly it would be considered unethical to even attempt such a risky modification.

BTW, there tend to be differences between the brains of republicans and democrats. Care to declare one of them in need of treatment? (sure, the other team!)

Nope. There are two ways an OS can work, neither of which will do you any good. The simple way is that the OS just assumes your display hardware uses the sRGB gamma curve. Since the OS also assumes that all apps follow this curve, the OS does nothing. The complicated way is that you measure your hardware so that the OS can convert from sRGB to not-perfectly-sRGB that you have measured. In the complicated case, an app might supply a value of 127,127,127 and the OS turns it into 127,128,126 before handing it over to the display hardware.

You're responding as if the OS would do something much more severe, turning that 127,127,127 into something roughly near 192,192,192. Nope, there is no normal OS that is designed for apps that assume gamma of 1.0, which is linear RGB.

50% grey is a pixel value near 192, not one near 128. A pixel walue near 128 is much darker.

As far as I know, the engine doesn't handle this. It may even have some sort of hack to crudely compensate for the error, such as rendering things a bit more or less bold. Any such hack is unlikely to work with both white-on-black and black-on-white.

I think the problem is even implicit in the API. You can't just render to bitmap, cache the bitmaps, then generate pixels with any color.

Green on magenta tends to show the problem well. The edges shouldn't be dark. Giving equal brightness to each color, converting to greyscale should make the text fully dissapear. (identical pixel values)