I'm also not sure why you'd want to run gcc3 on a 15 year old piece of hardware,

That was the question of the original post. Except don't do it on 15 year old hardware, do it on something circa 1990. So something base don a 80386SX, Z80, 65C02, or 68000.

He doesn't realize that in 2017, the FUture Widget FUx5000 will be released, and in the following 3 years will become the dominant platform.

It's not like a major processor manufacturer hasn't tried this recently.

if you have any sense whatsoever, you'll have a suite of regression tests to run on your software already. You can use that to validate the new environment when you compile a baseline. I've been involved with several projects that migrated from one platform to another.

Such tests might convince YOU (the developer). But would they convince REGULATORS? If not, you have to go through a whole, horribly-expensive, regulatory approval every time you migrate tool versions.

Regulators don't get dinged for insisting on more costly work by the regulated and withholding their approval. They DO get dinged if they approve something that then does harm.

That's why the FDA caused something like 400,000 extra deaths by delaying the approval of beta blockers for prevention of secondary heart attacks until the European research had been repeated in the US under US rules, rather than accepting the data and allowing the use. After the Thalidomide mess they're not going to approve ANYTHING quickly or easily. The same principle applies to other fields.

[Spys] won't blackmail you to the intelligence companies, they will blackmail you by threatening to tell your wife, or creditors, etc.

Your reading comprehension leaves a bit to be desired. That's exactly what I was talking about.

1) To get the clearance you need to tell the US government everything the foreign spooks could use to blackmail you - by threatening to tell wife, creditors, media, etc. Then you need to convince the US spooks you don't care - even if you do.
2) If you left anything out, the US is likely to revoke your clearance. So your confession form has all the juicy stuff about you.
3) Now ALL the confession forms were stolen by the foreign spies. Oops!
4) Next step: The foreign spies get to test ANY of the people with clearances they want to test, to see if they REALLY don't care whether these things are revealed to their wife, creditors, ...

Make sure it's it's not compatible with any current technology or formats.
Maybe you can write it all in Java. We all love Java running on our servers. Maybe with a non-intuitive touch screen console with no real functionality. You'll make a fortune. :)

The clearance process includes finding out if you're blackmailable into turning over secrets. So of course they question you about everything enemy spies may use as blackmail material. They're often willing to approve you if you confess all your sins to them - because the spies can no longer use the threat of revealing them to the intelligence agencies to pressure you.

It behoves you to confess ALL of it, because if you leave anything out they'll pull your clearance when they discover it. On the other hand, if YOU don't care if its revealed, THEY don't care either. So to get the clearance you tell them everything and claim you don't care.

Of course that means the intelligence agency files includes pretty much all the juicy blackmail material there IS on you. So if there's something you really DO care about, and you were bluffing the agencies, you ARE subject to blackmail threats.

Of course you also expose your life history, to prove you're not a mole. And THAT is everything an identity thief needs to completely replace you. SS number and mother's maiden name are a drop in the bathtub compared to this info.

The agencies should have guarded this MORE TIGHTLY than they do nuclear secrets. It's the key to ALL the people who know ALL the secrets.

...it could keep our activities in public relatively anonymous for a bit longer.

A bit longer, the best you can hope for. Acknowledging the fact that we will eventually lose this one.

Highly evolved animals such as humans have a pretty impressive track record when it comes to seeing into the future. The problem does exist that some if not all of us have evolved enough to plan adequately into the long term.

Highly evolved animals such as humans ALSO have a pretty impressive track record when it comes to constructing money- and power-grabbing scams, and detecting such scams when they're being perpetrated upon them.

Unfortunately, the Global Warming Solution Advocates, regardless of the merits of their concerns, used something that has the form of a gigantic scam when promoting their proposals, and promoted proposals that involve massive transfers of wealth, increases in government intervention in private lives and businesses, and reductions in standards of living. This has created substantial skepticism (which moneyed interests that would be harmed by the proposed actions have, of course, gleefully promoted). The failure of the climate to follow their predictions and discoveries of their fudging of the data doesn't help their cause, either.

There are a number of steps between "I think the weather is getting warmer, and people are causing it." to "We must drive the developed world's population down to third world standards RIGHT NOW, to prevent a couple degrees increase in world average temperature, or we're ALL going to DIE!"

Because it looks like a scam, about all they've gotten any substantial traction on is that the temperature is changing a bit (as it has for all of geological time - we ARE coming out of an ice age, after all - and whether the change is actually human-caused is immaterial beyond indicating that we could change it the other way if we tried). But they haven't convinced the population that they have a correct model.

And they haven't even STARTED on the NEXT of several steps: Is global warming, bad, indifferent, or even good? (The geological and historical record seems to indicate that substantially warmer than what we have now - by more than the amount they're concerned about - is actually better for both civilization and life in general.)

With the population unconvinced that there IS a "Grave Threat To Humanity", it's premature to assume that "Our Brains Can't Process" it.

But speaking as if the thing to be proven is already proven IS another technique of scammers. And making such a claim is an obvious prelude to a move by governmental people, who believe "their brains ARE capable of processing it", to go ahead and impose wealth-transferring, power-grabbing, population-impoverishing solutions, "for their own good", whether the populations want to be reduced to serfdom (rather than be killed by what they perceive as the allegedly falling sky) or not.

They can isolate and concentrate it, maybe stimulate production, but full synthesis? I don't see that happening yet.

Huh?

Human monoclonal antibodies have been grown by culturing gene-engineered mouse cells since at least 1988. They're already in use treating a number of diseases and more are in the approval pipeline.

From Wikipedia:

Building on the work of many others, in 1975, Georges KÃhler and César Milstein succeeded in making fusions of myeloma cell lines with B cells to produce hybridomas that made antibodies to known antigens and that were immortalized.[2] They shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1984 for the discovery.[2]

In 1988, Greg Winter and his team pioneered the techniques to humanize monoclonal antibodies,[3] removing the reactions that many monoclonal antibodies caused in some patients.

Monoclonal antibodies have been generated and approved to treat cancer, cardiovascular disease, inflammatory diseases, macular degeneration, transplant rejection, multiple sclerosis, and viral infection (see monoclonal antibody therapy).

In August 2006 the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America reported that U.S. companies had 160 different monoclonal antibodies in clinical trials or awaiting approval by the Food and Drug Administration.

This disease process looks like suitable candidate for this approach, as well.

A few antibody PRODUCING cells, harvested from the same donor(s) as the antibodies, would be an ideal starting point: The antibodies have already been proven to cure the disease, so only a production mechanism is needed. Once a suitable cell line has been constructed, tested, and its product approved, the donor can retire, secure in the knowledge that his genetic material will continue to save mothers' and babies' lives, even long after his death.

Is this the un"adjusted" raw data, or does it have the various "adjustments" that have been applied to the historical data before in past releases?

In my opinion, to conduct proper science on climatological measurements, the raw measurements should be available to all, to let everyone apply any "adjustments" and "corrections" they believe are necessary - and justified - taking them into account. Then each can properly check the works of their predecessors, and reach their own conclusions, without incorporating unknown distortions from previous work.

If the maintainers of the archive believe adjustments are needed to deal with some measurement pathology, they are welcome to also release an open correction dataset or tool in parallel.

With the low price and high speed of modern digital storage and processing devices, data set size and complexity is no excuse for withholding the raw data.

But the modelers argue that this really wasn't a failure, because their predictions served as worst-case scenarios that mobilized international efforts.

Sure, this worked this time in everyone's favor. But what about the next epidemic? Let's say the modeling is better next time (which it should be) and it predicts another disaster. What then? People will look to the modeling on Ebola and say "it's not going to be that bad" and regard the next warning more lightly. This does nobody any good.

A good example of this is Hurricane Katrina. The Weather Channel makes every weather event look like the apocalypse because it's the Weather channel and they really only have one story they can run. They have to keep eyes on their channel to sell advertising time. So they exaggerate everything. And people become numb to the warnings - and look what that got us with Katrina.

No, it's always better to call things for what they are. I think they would be better off to say the modeling was off, call a failure a failure, and keep people's trust intact.

Actually, the WTC would be a strategic military target. It could easily been included in infrastructure. There was a lot that happened through that building, therefore it was a valid target. It wasn't the best target, but it was a target.

The thing is, the group who attacked the WTC weren't a military. They weren't even paramiltiary. All things indicate a handful of people with boxcutters. There are better organized paramilitary organizations operating within the US daily that carry out widespread crime. They just go under reported because they aren't as important in the eyes of the casual news viewer as a couple big buildings and a bunch of people in suits in a one-time event.

how could such an advanced culture (as Rome) have staged such bloody spectacles?

How could such an advanced culture (as ours) have prominent media people who confuse "advanced" with "non-bloody" (or "squeamish")?

Answer: Freedom of speech and of the press. Even the clueless can be read and heard by millions.

Meanwhile, our culture seems to be decaying in much the pattern of Rome's. Let's hope that, if we can't fix it, it takes as many centuries to fall, rather than going down "in internet time" or "as we approach the singularity".

Worse: Collateral damage of all other occupants of the building.

Even worse: They hit the building the target was in 22 hours earlier. That doesn't mean the target was still there.

Mental note: only take selfies outside of businesses and residences of people I don't like.

... not letting me delete my account.

Slashdot is like the Mafia, CIA, and the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society: Once a member, ALWAYS a member.

As LASFS says: "Death Will Not Release You."