"socialism" doesn't mean what the bulk of americans (ie "you") think it means. Most of Europe, Canada and South America are "socialist". We say "socialism" and you hear "communist dictatorship" which is something completely, completely different.

Sort of like how "liberal" is slanderous to you guys... so weird.

Stop thinking in black & white, flush the cold-war era propaganda from your mind, and you'll find there are some excellent lessons to be learned from a system not driven wholy by greed.

A computer guy who doesn't like change, huh? We have a name for you people around the office... Unemployed.

The answer is that two mirror image mollecules won't necessarily fit into the same chemical receptor (think Tetris), and therefore have different biochemical effects.

Codene is actually the stereoisomer of heroin, but it doesn't fit most of our receptors so appears mostly inert.

explain please how an entity can design itself. Just because what you typed reads like valid english, doesn't make it a profound truth. In your case, you're just blabbering nonsense.

A huge problem though is in deeming what is "defective". The fact that a gene exists in any significant part of the population beyond what you'd expect given random mutation, implies that it must have (or had) a reproductive benefit. For example, some jewish people have a gene that makes them slightly more succeptable to Tay-Sachs disease, which is an almost certainly deadly recessive trait. However, being a carrier for it grants immunity to Cholera, which would have been advantageous for a population that has been living in disease-ridden ghettos for millennia. Another deadly recessive trait is sickle-cell anemia. Being heterozygous for this trait still has non- life-threatening symptoms, but also the benefit of malaria immunity. Not surprisingly, sickle-cell anemia is prevalent in tropical african populations.

My point is, by weeding these genes out we create a monoculture of humans that will be less able to adapt evolutionarily to new diseases and environmental stress. Genetic diversity is a natural safety mechanism for species, as any agriculture expert will tell you.

I mean tightly control their licensees, so the market isn't flooded with crummy apple clones. Not talking about the technology, here!

Back then a computer was $4000, which included significant margin. Nowadays, computers (yes, even Macs) are much cheaper, and the margins are lower. Apple sells a new copy of OSX every year to most of its customers, with or without a new computer. This could make them money, if tightly controlled.

I'll be really surprised if Apple doesn't agree to simply make a deal with Psystar to manufacture clones for a licensing fee. It isn't that radical - Apple licensed Mac clones back in the late 80s - early 90s (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone#The_first_Macintosh_clones ). My uneducated guess is that Psystar has been negotiating for a licensing agreement for a long time, and then calculated that an outright court battle would land them a better deal than paying the fees initially suggested by Apple.

That or they're a fly-by-night outfit.

Worked under 6.0.5 as well, as long as you have the VT extensions enabled in the BIOS.

What does this have to do with the Mesa and X.org teams? They're graphics guys, and this isn't for graphics. I'd like to see inclusion in GCC (auto-vectorization maybe?) though.

You probably missed the part where NMap is open source.

Can I humbly recommend LOTRO? Its very WOW-like, but prettier and somewhat slicker. My coworkers and I have all switched over, and are quite happy with a new world to explore.

The LOTRO UI pretty much just works. I haven't felt a burning need to customize any of it. This is a Good Thing, because casual gamers are not going to customize - if the default UI sucks, then the game appears to suck.

Not being able to find the network panel is a "show stopping bug"? I agree its in a weird place, but come on...

Call me an idealist (though most would call me the opposite) but... wouldn't it be better if we could use our capacity as a "rational species" to handle our own population issues? I'm hoping we can. If not, we'll hit the point where deaths = births fairly quickly anyhow. No need for your plague - this'll be equally unpleasant.