We have killed birds, beavers, ... over 500 different species that we know of and we constantly fight to get rid of some bacteria and viruses. Why the sudden interest to save this one?

> Like, for instance, humans. Nature would get along much better without us, probably.

Not quite, there are mosquitoes that need humans as a food source.

You could improve the existing fish, instead of inventing new fish... why are we talking about fish?

I suggest Cppcheck: http://cppcheck.sourceforge.net/
- It is quite small
- It is a command line application (there is a small GUI also in case you would prefer working with that, but I would recommend the CLI first)
- It has very good unit test coverage (about 90% line coverage), so if you break something with your modifications, you will most likely notice it.
- The general idea is rather simple, source code is input, then it is preprocessed, then simplified, then passed to a number of different classes that try to find errors from the source. So following the execution path should not be very difficult.
- As it is a tool for static C and C++ code analysis, you will learn a lot about C and C++ language while working with it
- It is a tool, which you as a C++ developer most likely want to use yourself, so helping it improve will give help also you.

"The aeroplane will never fly."

— Lord Haldane, Minister of War, Britain, 1907 (yes, 1907).

"No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris ... [because] no known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping."

— Orville Wright, c. 1908.

"The whole procedure [of shooting rockets into space] . . . presents difficulties of so fundamental a nature, that we are forced to dismiss the notion as essentially impracticable"

— Sir Richard van der Riet Wooley, British astronomer, reviewing P.E. Cleator's 'Rockets Through Space,' in Nature, 14 March 1936

Because of science like this, we had knowledge about quantum physics and we knew what electrons are and how they work. Because of that we have transistors and computers. Because of computers we have modern medical equipment and Folding@Home.

Also "holy grail of sustainable power-producing nuclear fusion" could help getting rid of air pollution and save 2 million people every year[1].

1) http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2006/2006-10-06-01.html

> Seems like there will always be a need for humans in the chain, no matter how technologically advanced things get.

Perhaps, but that need is decreasing all the time.

Few hundred years ago pretty much everyone was working in farming and forest industry. Now one man with a harvester can cut down a whole forest. And a couple of people with fully automatic milking robots can take care of hundreds of cows.

And when I was a kid I used to buy train tickets from a person. Now I buy those from a machine.

When programming was just born profession, programmers had assistant to write the code to a punch card. Nowadays those assistants are not needed as code is typed directly into computers.

> but freshwater is growing expensive

Consider that wealth of average person is constantly growing (normal western workers live like kings used to live a few hundred years ago). So it might not matter in the future that water is expensive if everyone can afford it. We got plenty of seawater and like metals, water is reusable. A household could recycle their own water using plants.

> farmable land is finite

Perhaps, but humans have a history if increasing both the land size and amount of food that we can get from it.

Good example of this is South America where there was huge areas of land where you couldn't grow anything because the land was toxic and poor. Then scientist investigated the land to see why it was toxic and figured out a cheap way to make it non-toxic. Then they put seeds into ground with fertilizers and now they are planning on becoming number one food producers in the world (if they are not already).

We can also farm on the sea or under the sea, city rooftops, mushrooms in dark places under the ground and in the future bacteria could be used to grow our food faster than ever before.

Also e.g. in Africa food production has been quite stable even it has increased elsewhere in the world. Once they start using more advanced farming techniques, they can get at least 6 times more food just by getting rid of the pests (and this can be done with natural methods).

In 2005 EnviroMission said that the first solar tower would be up and running before year 2008 in Australia. That never happened.

Now in 2011 they say that it will be ready at the start of 2015 in Arizona. I hope they succeed this time.

I have not seen very many predictions come true.

E.g. "Spam Will Be 'Solved' In 2 Years--Gates" from 2004:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/17500979

Many other predictions have been removed, so I can't give links, but e.g. ethernal life, Solar tower, Iter (fusion reactor), space elevator predictions have been updated to another date. E.g. Iter was supposed to be ready in 2015 (predicted 2005) and now it is supposed to be up and running by 2019. So 6 years passed and the date was changed by 4 years.

From my own personal list of predictions (made by others) 0 / 7 have come true. Many of them are quite far in the future (e.g. year 2050 seems to be popular, by then we should have a robot team beating human champions in soccer). I actually think personally that it will happen sooner, but I'm no better than others predicting the future.

You can automate a click on a web page. E.g. simply wget the url

Considering that in the field of programming, the performance difference between the worst and the average (not the best) is infinite(1). Wouldn't $100k vs. $40k be a small price for getting even the average instead of the worst?

1) Some people simply can't write software at all, even they are paid for doing it. Zero result causes the difference to be so big.

Some alternatives:
- South-America's ancient cultures used charcoal (which they made by burning trees without oxygen) as a fertilizer.
- In ancient Egypt they used floods of the Nile to fertilize their fields.
- In several places volcanic ashes have been used.
- Also animal dung has been used as a fertilizer.
- It is also effective to use different plants in different years as they have slightly different needs.
- One should also remember that currently a lot of fertilizer is going with the rain down to the sea, where it causes problems. So fixing this problem would also help.

> The numbers have been dropping since the mid-90's (as I said, about 12-15 years after the "get tough on crime" stuff began in the early 80's),

It could be caused by video games also. E.g. Pac-Man was released 1980 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacman). Or any other event that occurred during that time. You should at least compare the crime rates of different countries to see whether crime rates have been dropping everywhere or only in those countries where "get touch on crime" has been used.

> Potato selection from year to year is like updating your apps at user level

No, it is about taking half of a source code from two different kernels and mixing them randomly together. We can partially predict the outcome. E.g. 1/4 of the results will be something what we like, with unknown side-effects. If sex would be invented today, it would never be allowed by anyone because it is so random and dangerous. Think about genetic diseases.

> GM, is like poking and mixing the bytes and the bits of the KERNEL itself

No, it is about changing one, well known place is the source code to something well known, where the end results can be predicted. Think about fixing genetic diseases.