Just curious but why do you say that? We have no clue how likely intelligent life is to evolve. All we know is that it has happened once, and it took 3.5 billion years from the formation of the first like on Earth. Suppose that this was very much faster than average and the the mean time for intelligent life to evolve (once life itself has started) is 30 billion years? Such a long time would hugely reduce the number of intelligent species since you need a very stable environment for a long period of time and even then you have to get lucky.

Trying to quantify what you don't know is a mug's game...in order to be able to do it you really need to know what you don't know. If anything I would argue that there is, perhaps, some weak evidence for intelligent life being rare: travel might be hard but radio is easy. We have not heard ET's broadcasts which would suggest perhaps that there is no intelligent life nearby (or they use some technology beyond EM waves).

That you know of. Besides, I'm sure you've had many that you've caught during the standard code -> compile -> run -> segfault -> debug cycle, but the more subtle ones are harder to trigger.

Depending on what the code is doing and what kind of legacy cruft you're dealing with it's not always trivial.

More likely the other devs feel like it's bad form to drag the names of past contributors through the mud in public. Particularly when the reviewers missed the bug as well.

I'm pretty sure it was implied that P(snowstorm) is high enough to make the cost/benefit rational.

Unless of course you think his comment would be better off at 4 times the length, detailing all of the obvious common sense assumptions he made.

He's referencing GWB's mangled attempt at the quote.

I guess we'll be well prepared for nuclear war then. Lets get right on that. Or maybe not.

Won't the option be to either let the GPU use the extra 1/7 speed memory, or force the data back out to system memory over the PCIe bus at a much lower speed? Outside of benchmarks, I don't think many applications are going to be demanding that extra memory anyway.

At least the old Unix names were at least somewhat relevant to their purpose, even if severely shortened to save keystrokes:

grep: Global Regular Expression Print -- Ok, still pretty bizarre sounding if you're not a bearded unixguy
man: Short for MANual. Straightforward.
awk: Beats me. I think it's named after the author's initials or something
sed: Stream EDitor: does what it says, edits streams of characters

Just because open source projects can choose terrible names doesn't mean they have a monopoly on it.

Who am I kidding? The '90s was a bleak period for British sci fi.

Your entire elaborate argument is based on a false premise.

As I said, the road damage is exponential with the weight. It is proportional to the axle weight to the fourth power.

Fuel economy is roughly linear with weight, or even less than linear (big rigs get much better MPG per ton than smaller vehicles). Therefore, fuel taxes don't begin to recover the extra costs of heavier vehicles.

Who has made the stupidest argument you've ever heard now? You might look in the mirror.

I was aware but as the old saying goes:
To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer.

The same applies to traditional breeding vs GMOs. Genetic modification is a much more powerful tool than the various sources of random mutation. As such we're going to create new classes of risks that we don't understand yet. We don't exactly have the healthiest environment right now and farms aren't sealed labs, before we inject massive numbers of plants with several novel and powerful traits into an ecosystem we need to understand what the effects of those actions are.

The tone sounds like you're disagreeing him but it sounds like you're actually agreeing with him and debating my point.

Whatever the source of "natural" evolution (selective breeding, random mutation, horizontal gene transfer) we've been dealing with it for thousands of years and understand the risks. To use your example it's pretty easy to evaluate the safety of a fallen tree bridge. But with manmade bridges it took a while before we learned to avoid things like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

They're allowed to have an opinion, too, and they are scientists, after all, which means we might actually want at least to consider what they have to say. We're free to disagree with them, but we really should have some good reasons for that.

Those who aspire to become nuclear physics do not study a "nuclear scientific method"; they learn how to apply the scientific method to the field of nuclear physics. Folks who want to become climate scientists do not study a "climate-scientific method"; they learn how to apply the scientific method to the field of climate science.

Do you see where I'm going with this? Would I pay attention to a similar group of medical doctors, or chemists? Sure, why not?

I think the labelling thing is nonsense since I don't think health risks are a big concern but I am a bit more cautious about the long term environmental effects as I suspect we're underestimating the probability of black swan events.

I think of selective breeding vs GMOs is a bit like traditional medicine vs modern medicine. Traditional medicine generally ranges from slightly beneficial to mildly harmful, you're not going to do yourself much harm, but you're not going to help much either. By contrast modern medicine is devastatingly effective in good ways and bad.

Right now you'd be a fool to choose traditional medicine over modern medicine, especially if you have a serious health issue, the benefits are too strong and we know how to manage the nasty side effects.

But at the dawn of modern medicine? You're probably better off dealing with the traditional stuff, a lot of people died because modern medicine was an incredibly powerful tool and people didn't know enough about that tool to use it safely.

I worry we're at that stage with GMOs and the environment. We don't really understand what it does to the ecosystem when we introduce new traits at that speed and effectiveness. We really can't know until we've done it a while. I'm sure GMO crops are the answer for the future, but I'm worried our capabilities are outstripping our knowledge.

The bit about Skype is also not quite true. MS have done horrid/idiotic things with the UI, especially in the mobile versions, but I use the Linux desktop version almost daily and it works just fine for its intended purpose.