Many problems with your scenario...first of all, commercially grown bell peppers (and other vegetables) are not all of the exact same variety. Sure, there's more popular varieties, but different climates and soils call for different varieties. They use different peppers in California than they do in Minnesota (and it's not just economy of scale - California climate and soil is favorable to bell peppers).

Also, even within the same variety of plant, there are genetic differences, even if they're very similar. A doomsday virus that kills one variety of bell pepper isn't likely.

Also, have you ever looked in a bell pepper? There's a lot of seeds. Should a miracle happen and (say) Anaheim Bell Peppers no longer can be grown, it would be easy for another variety to take its place very quickly. There are seeds banks around the world, private growers, etc. The extinction of most varieties of bell peppers just is not going to happen.

Farmers don't re-seed from their own crops, and (in the first world at least) haven't done so for 70-80 years. So the fact that most farms choose to raise the most popular variety of peppers in a non-factor into the genetic diversity of the crops.

Many of the longest-lived populations in the world, populations with low rates of obesity, have high-carbohydrate diets. Much higher than in the US.

Insulin is released more from protein than from carbohydrates. Eating them together releases more insulin still! Insulin is simply not a "get fat hormone" and you should ignore any source that tells you it is. Insulin suppresses appetite, this is very well established. It's junk science.

Why? I don't eat a strict diet like that, I eat nothing like that in fact, and I'm not a fattie, and my health checks come out about perfect. Japan has the world's longest lifespan, nobody there is eating brown rice or whole grains quinoa.

Governments shouldn't tell people how to eat, especially when the specifics of what's healthy aren't exactly understood. There's a lot of evidence that meats are an important part of a healthy diet.

I am not obese, I appreciate all the cheap calories from corn syrup. Before corn subsidies there were wild price fluctuations in food, not just those that use sugar but also in alternate grains and in meat. It's good domestic policy. Why should stupid people who can't limit themselves force the US to cancel a policy that works well? Anyway, if it wasn't subsidized corn syrup, fatties would find some other cheap food to stuff their faces with, or would just pay the extra money.

Why shouldn't the weak get WMDs, why does only the government (the strong) get to arm itself with nuclear weapons? So the idea is "people can protect themselves with weapons, but not the really powerful ones?"

And who makes the determination that a weapon is too powerful for an individual? The government? Why shouldn't each individual himself be allowed to decide how powerful of a weapon get gets? If I want to arm myself with a few grenades, a bazooka, and some C4, why should some Washington bureaucrat tell me I can't?

Send enough traffic over an IPSec tunnel in a short enough period of time, and expect it to be suddenly blocked one day, only to work again in just a few days.

This. It's totally arbitrary. Also it's a two-tier system, where many things are easily proxied around, while some sites (pornography, Falun Gong, Tian'anmen) can't be.

I think mostly the point is to inconvenience and be protectionist rather than block. Sure you can get on twitter if you really want, but your average Joe in China doesn't want to bother figuring out proxies just to get some stupid cat picture, so they turn to Weibo or some wannabe-twitter site like that instead.

I prefer Civ 3, I don't like how game companies release unfinished product, but to be fair the game is currently a whole lot better now than it was in the first month, you just need to have the expansion packs. Most people would call it the best Civ yet.

Yup, all my Commodore 64 games are stored with their cracks on handy 5.25" disks.

But of course people in the 1880s had valid concerns, and in the last 120 years a lot of laws and social pressures have developed regulating the use of cameras. Without which, people would still find the use of cameras objectionable. Many of the issues haven't been entirely worked out - a couple week ago there was a story about how Germans needed to get rid of naughty photos of their exes if asked, and many people didn't seem to like the idea.

The Apollo Program showed it was capable of getting people to the moon, but the point of NASA isn't just getting people to the moon over and over, the point is to eventually establish a permanent, expanding presence in space. Pointing a V-2 rocket up at the sky is effective but is also a dead end.

And of course the space program had problems under the Airforce.

Is this 2002? All the plans by all the companies include unlimited texts, including low-end $30/month plans. I only know one person who pays to text (after reaching a certain amount), this person has stuck with his same phone contract for more than 10 years.

But I could almost see Davis/Sacramento becoming a tech hub(unlike, say, Montana or Arizona), since it's a relatively easy interview/move for tech workers currently in the Bay Area. Certainly it would take a long time & a lot of luck to become anything somewhat comparable to Silicon Valley, but I could see it as a satellite of the Silicon Valley.

This would be an extraordinarily easy thing to data mine. The fact that no correlation has been found (even though people know other things about the children of older women, eg they are more likely to suffer from a number of conditions) leads me to believe there's no correlation.

Well it's easy to believe that "you're getting in trouble for calling the pope an idiot" wouldn't fly, so they gave him trumped-up charges. Like maybe you condemn the US President in the press, so you get prosecuted for some unrelated charge of smoking a joint. Just sayin'.

Are you saying there's no vulnerabilities in Linux? Or that nobody would ever intentionally put a vulnerability in Linux? Or just being mean?