Unless they enjoy being hypocrites

It certainly seems they do. At least they are rarely punished for it such that the penalty is not a dis-incentive.

The research seems to suggest that the cells intrinsic ability to mutate developed early on in the evolution of life, certainly long before sexual reproduction.

I used reproduction as a more extreme case to illustrate the effects and didn't mean to imply it was the primary issue. The trade-offs affect almost all of life, just in different weights.

Since society wouldn't allow it to happen to humans, they'd transplant human minds into pigs, goats, etc.

"I'm hungry. Since there's nothin' in the fridge, I'm goin' out back to graze."

Can we use it to shoot Congress into Space? We could call it an "Emergency preparedness for giant asteroid strike" or something! Of course once IN space, they might have to stay there for a while. Giant asteroid and all that. Earth might not be habitable again for decades!

Nuclear power CREATES birds? That would be AWESOME!

Bribing foreign officials is, especially if you do business with the US government. It means fewer bribes *cough* I mean... campaign contributions... for our guys!

I can see such in reproduction-related cells, but not regular body cells because those are not passed on.

More likely cancer is simply the result of the trade-offs between efficiency versus duration. In a competitive world efficiency guarantees genetic success more than life duration. After all, the alpha male is in almost a winner-take-all role. To be the alpha male you have to have a high metabolism and an efficient metabolism (get big without having to find extra food).

This means that entropy (errors in cell division) builds up faster. There are generally two solutions to entropy: slower metabolism or error correcting mechanisms. Being slower means you'll never be able to be the alpha male, and error-correcting means you are less efficient during your prime because such mechanisms consume resources. (Some bacteria have such.)

Note how female mammals typically have lower metabolism and live longer. This is because they are not in the winner-take-all position of males.

Only because of the "devil you know" argument. It's similar to QWERTY: we can't convert until everybody else does first.

One of my biggest advances as a programmer has been writing unit tests for everything and the associated decoupling of code required to make unit tests for everything actually work well. They reveal weaknesses in your design early on, before fixing them is too bad, encourage reusable code, encourage you to keep your design simple and increase the degree of certainty you have when you deploy something. I haven't quite jumped on the test-first bandwagon yet, but I'll write a class and then write its unit test. If the unit test reveals that more functionality is needed or that I need to change something, I do it then.

"The best way to compete with a 3rd-world country is to become one".

Like my 70's era assembly language book thought that 32 bit processors would "never' be widespread due to how expensive it would have to be to produce them?

You know, if anyone was actually bribed in the process of that, it would be VERY illegal back here in the USA. Just sayin'...

Nobody has a perfect crystal ball. Languages die off and you should expect them to. COBOL would be the last language I would've expected to last such a long time, but it somehow did; it's almost like Latin: people use it because it's already dead such that there are no surprises in it. There are stupid things about almost every common current language that could doom them. Plus, fads come and go.

No career is easy, especially when you are green. I tell them to do what they love, do it well, but look around and be flexible so that you have options.

Just start a company that charges $0.01 for each OSS title.

PS. Please Diecrosoft