Brady Haran is neither, but he puts actual scientists on his YouTube channels, and they talk about honest science (and occasional amusing trivia), with no CGI or celebrity required. No politics, no manufactured quotes, many Nobel prizes.

I enjoyed the first few, but the latest book was rubbish and I've entirely lost interest in the story thanks to the pace of his writing. He doesn't seem to have much in the way of original plot ideas, so it's mostly about character moments, and you have to keep that sort of writing coming for me to stay interested in those characters.

The series, however, I rather enjoy. While it's probably the first series to ever make me say "there is such a thing as too much gratuitous nudity", the pacing is vastly better than the books, the important character moments are all there, and the gaps between seasons aren't so long that I forget who everyone is.

It's the only thing that can scale, unless fusion ever stops being "just 20 years away". Think of the energy needs of 11 billion people at American consumption levels (~40 TW), which isn't at all a far-fetched projection and of course it won't stop there. Even ground-based Solar hits scaling issues there - it's one thing to shade everything that's already paved, and maybe all the salt flats, but at some point you get significant ecological effects.

Oh, sure, for now, but Solar for now can't be baseload anyhow. Orbital can. It will be a while before panels get cheap enough and enough not reliant on scarce materials to scale. It seems inevitable now, but it's still a ways off. Meanwhile, private space efforts keep making progress. In 50 years, when solar has wide adoption and we're struggling with baseload at night, and in bad climates, I think orbital will be a viable choice vs nuclear or gas.

The only argument for space-based is "it's a way around NIMBY". PG&E did some serious research into it, as there's just no where in Northern California they're allowed to build a new power plant, and demand keeps rising. The main reason the plan failed is still NIMBY: They'd need a 1-block receiving station for the incoming power, and could never get that approved. Fuck California.

It's also useful in Northern latitudes. In Texas, ground-based makes perfect sense: lots of land, far enough south. In Seattle, not so much - even on the 12 clear days each year, you're too far north for much efficiency.

My point was all about what happens when the mosquitos are not as infertile as planned.

If some offspring survive that means that they didn't get the gene to kill them for some reason. Aka, they're just like wild populations. So.....?

If chemical companies are going to dump something into my backyard, I will scream and shout just as loud

Your back yard is full of the intentional products of chemical companies. Here we're talking about the intentional products of genetic engineering. You're trying to change the situation by comparing waste products with intentional products.

You seem to claim that people should just trust experts. I claim that experts should attempt to inform the public better, thereby earning their trust...

Sorry, but Joe Blow GED is never going to become an expert on genetic engineering. Ever. Period. And the same goes for the vast majority of the public.

So, rabbits that got released in Australia are the top predator? The Pampas grass in California is the top predator? I can make a long list of invasive species that are not the top predator and still influenced their ecosystem a lot

.

Got any examples that aren't introduced species? We're talking about reducing or eliminating species within an ecosystem, not adding new ones from totally different ecosystem. And part of the reason rabbits were so uncontrolled in Australia anyway was because settlers had killed off almost all of the top predators. One could easily imagine that, for example, tasmanian tigers would have quite enjoyed a rabbit feast. Dingo numbers were also shaply culled in the areas with the highest rabbit populations.

What happens if a small percentage don't?

Then they didn't get the gene to kill them. Your point?

That's because most physics and chemistry experiments don't breed and multiply.

Neither do infertile mosquitoes; your point?

They are talking about something that happens literally in their own backyard.

Really, you think there's no products of modern chemistry in your backyard?

They are right to do a risk assessment.

And there have been risk assessments done, by regulators, taking into account the scientific data. Risk assessments are not something for Joe Bloe and his GED who reads NaturalNews and thinks that "GMO mosquitoes" means that they're going to bite his children and spread a zombie plague.

Changing the balance in an ecosystem can have huge consequences.

Contrary to popular belief, changing the bottom of a food chain rarely has major consequences; it's the changing of the top of a food chain that tends to have the biggest consequences. The higher up the food chain you go, not only do you have more of a profound impact on the landscape (look at how radically, say, deer overpopulation transforms a whole ecosystem), but also the more species tend to be generalists rather than specialists. Generalists means the ability to switch more readily between food sources, meaning changes further down have little impact on them. But if you eliminate a top predator from an area, the consequences further down can be profound.

Google had problems with getting updates out to devices

And with just a little bit of developer money, so many devices out there could be running a safe, secure version of Android instead of being merely abandoned and left vulnerable ("you luddites running six-month-old phones...").

I've been waiting to see a nonprofit that would sponsor such work and then sell decent smartphones to people who could use them to benefit themselves economically. People throw away ("recycle") perfectly good hardware because the software is too dated.

Oh, I know, "that dual core phone from last year with only half a gig of RAM just can't do anything useful...."

All the 'Libre' crowd rants about the source code of the software, but somehow gives a pass about the hardware not being open ...

You haven't been watching very closely.

*I* have been ranting on slashdot about AMT for years. Look it up.

Google is quite happy to see CM and similar third party ROMs flourish

Flourish or tolerate? Honest question. I've seen entire ROMs stymied by small things Google could/should have done as just a decent vendor, regardless of the ROM in question. For instance, a couple years ago the Droid3 port fizzed because the then-Google-owned Motorola wouldn't talk to anybody about releasing specs to turn on the camera.

Next you know the young whipper-snappers will take "variables" and call them "dynamic constants"

In Bluetooth (especially Bluetoothe Low Energy (BLE)) they already reanamed them. They call one a "characteristic" (when you include the metadata describing it) or a "characteristic value" (when you mean just the the current value of the variable itself).

Not for $700+ for an obsolete laptop, there aren't.

It would be a decent one for a CA, to keep in the safe.

To the military I say: buy the best on the market, with a proven track record, with a slight bias for buying local.

Not here - the DoD is spending $2B to design a new rifle, rather than just adopt the AK74M, which has all the features it wants and many allies already use.

"'Cause commies, son."

Turns out: not so much. As was predicted by the security community, there are flaws, and after a couple years the flaws were exploited, and the PIN is retrievable. This cycle has repeated (is chip-and-PIN in its 3rd generation now? it's at least the second).

Chip-and-PIN means only that the bank makes you liable for your stolen money, claiming "the card couldn't possibly have been stolen because magic". It solves a problem for the banks, and makes it worse for the consumer - shocking, I know.