Himalayan blackberries were intentionally introduced to Oregon as a food. They are quite tasty, but they are virtually impossible to wipe out, and you may think that they are free, but you pay for them in blood -- they have the worst thorns I've ever seen. The canes are tough enough to destroy the string used by weed-wackers, and I'm pretty sure they scratch the paint on cars as you drive buy. In other words, just because they taste good doesn't make them really obnoxious. Blueberries, on the other hand, quickly get eaten by dear and birds as soon as they become ripe. Birds are actually useful for spreading seeds, but that doesn't help the blueberries I was trying to grow in my garden. Strangely, however, where the birds ate all my blueberries, the next year there were "wild" strawberry plants growing! Apparently my blueberry bushes were the birds dessert stop after the strawberry fields.

We've also been trying to wipe out lions, tigers, bears, and most other predators (oh, my!) for thousands of years, so that must make it ok to drive those animals into extinction by killing every last one of them now, right? Just because we've been doing something misguided for a long time, doesn't make it ok, especially now that we're much more efficient at it. That being said, many GMO modifications aren't substantially different than those achieved by hybridization and selective breed, which has itself resulted in pretty massive changes in plant and animal species over the years. Ok, so at what point does modifying a species become a bad thing? That's the problem; it's almost impossible to know in advance. We've survived for millions of years as a species precisely because we don't agree on everything, it is useful for the survival of the species to have a certain percentage of people that disagree and refuse to do the "obvious" thing, because in a small percentage of cases, the obvious thing is actually fatal. For example, Christian Scientists refuse to get blood transfusions? They don't get HIV or many other blood-borne diseases. The lunatic fringe is actually ensuring our survival as a species.

I agree, most GMO foods are harmless, and there is no scientific evidence that they are any worse than the original. However, I also believe people have a right to their own paranoid delusions, therefore they have a right to know whether or not the food they buy contains GMO ingredients, and the federal government has a duty to endure that foods and other products are properly labeled, which in this case, would be a large, conspicuous "GMO" on the front label.

Dihydrogen Monoxide kills hundreds of times more people every year than Sodium Chloride does... If you die from Sodium Chloride, to the police categorize it as assault?

"Gallium Nitrade" is proof that the slashdot editors STILL don't check their spelling... (The linked article calls it "gallium nitride".)

Wouldn't this increase battery life in mobile devices? Data centers could all be run off of solar/wind/wave power, if we really cared about energy use.

... what's it taste like?

... all the way down!

Print Screen is actually useful; in Windows it copies the current screen or window to the clipboard, which is useful for people writing manuals. In 32 years of writing software, I don't recall ever using the Scroll Lock or Break key for anything... and I'm not really sure what they are supposed to do. I think Break was supposed to used with modems; not much call for that anymore.

I have a different (possibly more stupid) question: why are computer numeric keypads and phone keypads reversed from each other? This gets even worse when entering your pin for a bank; I've seen both layouts used by banks. I think the answer is, "That's the way we've always done it!" Somebody made an arbitrary and capricious decision many years ago, and nobody has had the wherewithall to change it. Another "standard" that bothers me: In the transition to digital video, they had the chance to do away with the PAL/NTSC dual-standard nonsense... but they still chose to support both 50 and 60 FPS video?!? As I understand, even 4K video comes in both 50 and 60 frames per second variety, because obviously we still need to synchronize our video to our AC line current...

The flaws in height-based segmentation of airspace are obvious: you've got to cross through the lower, unregulated height zones to get to the other zones! What zones to they recommend reserving for pistol-equipped drones?

They are already talking about running massive data servers entirely in flash: https://newsoffice.mit.edu/201... I'm thinking using this instead would be an obvious improvement. Of course, that assumes they actually deliver decent price-per-byte of memory. You'll probably see this first in massive NSA data farms... or rather, it will probably be used in them, and nobody will tell you about it, so you won't see it at all.

Hey! I've still got a half-dozen boxes with IDE-only disks! (Would you like one? I'm willing to part with them for cheap!)

Magnetic memory (the re-invention of core memory with much higher density) has already been done. I believe the advantage was non-volatility, just like magnetic core memory. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/...

Since it is trivial to convert Fahrenheit to Celcius or Kelvin (just type in into Google, duh!) I don't think it really matters what units are used, as long as they are clearly labeled.