I seem to have missed the part where everyone on the Internet is a US citizen.

But as a proud resident of Lower Banwidthistan, I am happy to contribute as requested.

github.com is great and all, but it doesn't contain all free or open source software that's out there, by a long stretch.

Where is the alternative meta-level listing?

A statement like GMOs cause cancer has little more information content than "life causes cancer" which is undoubtedly true but vacuous.

Which GMOs? All of them? Which genetic modification in particular? All of them? One of them? Some class of them, defined somehow?

At the level of generality you state it, you are contributing to the perception that GMO opponents are unscientific.

There are very serious concerns about GMOs and ecosystems. But overstating the case with a pseudo-science statement like "GMOs are toxic" just weakens the legitimate arguments against GMOs. Every genetic manipulation of every different organism species is a different case, and will have different effects.

It's very akin to changing a computer program. What you say is akin to saying "every change to MacOSX is toxic and will cause a worldwide computer virus epidemic". Well that is clearly an uninformed, and frankly, dumb statement, and it undermines the legitimate argument that there are some (relatively few) possible specific types of changes to MacOSX that would in fact cause a worldwide computer virus epidemic.

They just may not prioritize the risk above their salary or their company shares value.

A lot of people are content to be engineers and scientists in pretty morally bankrupt enterprises. How could any smart, educated person with a functioning moral compass work as an engineer or scientist in say, the fossil fuel industry these days, with the possible exception of those working on coal carbon-capture and storage.

And yet plenty do. Being book smart in a specialty doesn't mean you are wise or particularly moral.

Who built Dr. Evil's high-tech lair and outfitted his sharks with frickin' lasers, I ask you? I rest my case.

Probably most if not all current GMO food crops do not damage human health.

However, in the abstract, you are engineering (almost arbitrarily modifying) organisms capable of spontaneous reproduction and proliferation, so the level of precautionary principle needed is commensurate with "would it be ok if this escaped into the wild and took over ecosystem niches from more naturally evolved or incrementally bred crops / organisms? Do we have an accurate model of what would happen in that case? Have we tested enough to verify that model? And every case of a different manipulation or in a different organism is different so requires repetition of extensive testing."

The types of risks there run the gamut from destruction of wild varieties and species by competition from the GMO. Substantial alteration of ecosystem by shifting the balance of successful and unsuccessful organisms. Proliferation of and reliance on a GMO monoculture which is then subject to rapid destruction from a single pathogen. etc. etc. Ecological system effects in other words. Very hard to test for.

Again, it will probably be all be fine, until one day when it won't. When something unanticipated will happen and, well, the genie is out of the bottle and doesn't fit back in.

At a minimum, GMO food should be labelled as such, and let people decide for themselves and vote with their pocketbook.

after only a few years of operation, there is a noticeable dimness to the screen, so that it is unusable in daylight.

I've read that AMOLED displays degrade quickly in their brightness.

Great for you if you are a company wanting to sell me a new phone every two years. Sucks for the consumer who might want to keep their phone 5 or even 8 years like I kept my last pre-smartphone.

Selection can be confusing sometimes.

It turns out that low cost and recording time long enough to record a movie were more important adaptive advantages than better picture quality, when it came to attracting human buyers (economic mates, if you will) of the first video recording technology.

Similarly, low cost and the fact that everyone would have the same word processor were more important adaptive advantages for early PCs and their operating systems than, say, decent operating system software and command architecture, decent chip and memory architecture, software elegance and simplicity, or good-quality word processor design (e.g. Framemaker, lightyears superior to MSWord when they both began, but alas, too expensive and too "different" than what everyone else was using).
The first buyers just needed a computer that was cheap and compatible. Assymetrical information an network effects. Sigh.

Many biological systems use small but non-zero amounts of iron, magnesium, lithium, zinc, copper, chromium, nickel, cobalt, vanadium, arsenic, molybdenum, manganese, selenium etc. Not sure but I believe these are made use of mainly in energy conversion or energy storage roles. Example: Hemoglobin.

Also as you say there is a lot of speculation about whether metals were needed to catalyze early reactions at the formation of life.

Something else: The metals also add stable solid structure and a lot of gravitational material-gathering effect to the planet as a whole. Material gathering is definitely a prerequisite for life formation.

Beyond our solar system.

If it did take until around about now (in terms of numbers of stars in universe with heavy atom planets) for complex life to form, it's not really surprising others haven' visited us. It's paradoxical why Fermi expected them to have visited us when we haven't visited them.

Space is big. Really really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

Language (and before that no doubt complex gesturing) was one of the hallmarks of the flourishing of significantly greater intelligence in humans. As soon as you have those, every generation need not learn from scratch again, but can be taught by the previous generation (and by each other.)

That's one of the key advantages of intelligence: a means of communicating leading to mutually beneficial cooperation of individual organisms. Cultural learning is much faster than genetic-selection learning.

One detail you miss is that when each step happens once, it reduces the probability of the same kind of step happening again locally, because the first occurrence is a competitor for the would-be second, and has a time advantage to have evolved to be a better competitor, or an assimilator. Remember, life is about pattern competition, and pattern amalgamation (if more effective than competition at prolonging the sub-patterns.)

Life is about information patterns competing with each other to pattern the matter and energy which both surrounds and hosts the information.

Probably quite likely to happen, so long as there is enough structural and functional vocabulary (molecular variety and molecular combination variety) for embodied information to have probable mechanisms for enacting their 3D printing. Oh and just enough thermodynamic free energy and gravity so that stuff comes together about as often as it blows apart. Oh and another probable requirement is a region (such as but not exclusively) Earth's surface region, where common elements exist in all three of gaseous, liquid, and solid form and can sometimes transition in phase. This latter condition is again part of ensuring there can be enough structural and functional vocabulary to make the mechanisms (containment in solid or semi-solid structure, flow of energy-transferring and material-transferring contained gases and fluids.)

You are right. We don't know for sure.
But a large variety of elements with fundamentally different properties (different masses, different chemical bonding properties) yields a large vocabulary of different molecules with widely differing properties. This large vocabulary of structure allows for a large vocabulary of function, increasing the number of ways in which self-sustaining reaction groups (and eventually life) could occur.

This kind of technology is obviously going to evolve, and have better battery life, not to mention, increased miniaturization.

It's going to get interesting once people (other than CIA operatives) start wearing camera+audio recorder technology that masquerades as stylish jewelry, or a baseball cap http://www.amazon.com/Baseball....

I suspect that we're going to have to give up on being able to reliably ban such stuff.

That doesn't mean that certain uses of it won't still legitimately be considered douchebaggery.

Arguably, artificial intelligence is better than natural stupidity.

Of course the Commander Data character could think. Behaviourally, he demonstrated it all the time, comprehending his surroundings, forming goals, predicting outcomes, acting, assessing etc to meet those goals.

The really fake part was how Cmdr Data was unable to act as if he were emotionally affected by the situations he found himself in.
Put it this way: If you can make artificial intelligence of the level of a Cmdr Data, you can make artificial affect as well.

Affective processing (attachment of emotional tone and import to conceptualized aspects of context, in perception, memory, and thought) is almost certainly a necessary reasoning-prioritization mechanism, for an agent-housed artificial intelligence tasked with both its own survival, the welfare of team members, and general situation comprehension and handling.

There is never enough time to perceive all aspects of a context, to associate it with all possible related memories, and to pursue all possible hypotheses and plans related to it and to what to do next. You need selection of topic and aspect to focus perception on and to think about, dredge up, and plan about. Emotion-tagging and emotion-tagged associative organization of memory storage, provide such prioritization. Absolutely necessary to high-functioning and focussed functioning in complex evolving contexts. You can't even turn a context into a "situation model" until you've emotion/relevance prioritized the aspects to the perceivable context.