That's the market. It's shrinking. People are lazy and stupid. They want big brother to take care of things for them. It will never disappear, however, I can't discount the possibility that such applications may one day be made illegal.

Hire older developers, or even competent developers? That's a problem for the help. They're told to buy the cheapest labor by clueless MBAs and do their best.

Why? MBAs are idiots with degrees and high salaries. The worst kind. If it doesn't exist on a spreadsheet, and doesn't look like it'll get them next quarter's bonus, they simply don't care. Actual product development and sales mean nothing to these guys. They're looking to do something that *looks* impressive, wait for the inevitable every 18 month re-org, collect their money and leave the mess for the next guy to clean up. The next MBA fool makes it look like he's cleaning up and becomes a hero, and then gets his bonus. Win-win, from a management standpoint.

Welcome to America!

That's my suggestion. Biosphere 1 and 2 were both failures. We don't know enough to make sustainable closed biospheres work on Earth, much less in orbit or on Mars. When we have something that lasts 10 years, we might be on to something. Until then, practice, practice, practice... Baby steps. How about an L5 or two to start.

This law will somehow be magically passed. Congressmen will be bribed, blackmailed or both to make it happen. The transnational wealthy want it to happen, so it will and their little servants in congress will be brought to heel, one way or another.

They seem to be all over the map, in good ways and bad. Geniuses who can't ever seem to finish a project. Good, solid, mediocre developers who churn out working, but unspectacular code year after year. Quite frankly, I prefer the latter. They can make you profitable. Eccentric geniuses? Not so much, and quite frankly, not worth the effort. If you feel it necessary to write a compiler in assembler, more power to you, but do it on your own time. It has no impact on our mundane, memory-inefficient, but maintainable C# apps.

'Low-head nondestructive hydroelectric power' isn't enough energy to provide a significant amount of power unless you're looking at powering a tiny village.

True, at the current scale. I think what all this points to is that we need better energy storage technology. Chemical storage is currently the most efficient (i.e. petroleum fuel), but in the long run, what's needed is better battery technology - something equivalent in energy density and price to petroleum. It's a tall order, but at least there's some progress.

The downside, of course, is that this isn't likely to happen soon enough to provide enough cheap power to run a global "just-in-time" supply chain. Transportation energy is the major problem, or at least it is if you don't want a lot of people to starve.

Not to mention special ops, infantry combat, mining and ditch digging. These professions are all mostly male. I guess we'd better go figure out how to get more women there too.

Equality doesn't mean you just get to do the nice, clean, fun stuff. It means you do *all* the stuff.

No, you've moved from "displacing farmland" to "destroying an ecology you don't care about because you don't live there." As someone who's been to Death Valley and lived in New Mexico, I can tell you that the "deserts" are rather delicate, unique ecosystems.

Look, there are just better ways to get industrial scale energy than by harvesting biomass. There's quite a bit of sunlight. There's thorium. There's conservation and efficiency. There's low-head, nondestructive hydroelectric power (no dams required). There's geoengineering to bring heat to the surface - lousy for generating power, but great for temperature control.

And all of these work with minimal ecological impact.

These are always the questions when talking about new energy sources.

Gasoline currently has 114,000 BTUs per gallon, at about $2.33 a gallon at my local station. It's being produced from source materials that don't require farmland, or blocking sunlight to local ecologies. It's stable at room temperature and portable.

While biodiesel typically comes in at 118,300 BTUs per gallon, and may be cheap to make *today,* if we were to try and scale up to current industrial scale use, the price would climb remarkably (and quickly) and the resources needed to make it (i.e. farmland, water and sunlight) would soon push up food prices as more and more land was diverted to energy production.

Biofuels have a place in the energy picture. It's just never going to be a very big one. What we need are batteries that are worth a shit (i.e. cheap and with about 20x current energy densities) and a mix of solar/nuclear/low head hydro/wind and so on.

There's always going to be an optimal balance between information and cognition. Our problem now is that we are gathering too much information for any automated or natural cognition equipment to handle in a useful way. If the NSA were made up of smarter people, they would be focusing far more heavily on AI and crowd-cognitive analysis techniques using humans, not big data.

The preserved ship was found underneath the tombs, hidden safely in a pool of mercury from those who sought its destruction millennia ago. But now the pool has been emptied, and the ship's beacon detected, awakening the ancient enemy, who even now races to their final destination, readying massive engines of destruction, pointing them at a small, insignificant planet, called... Earth (zoom out to stock photo of Earth in space - Cue "threatening alien" theme).

It is all for your own good comrades, and for the greater glory of efficient capitalism!

We tend to anthropomorphize them. Or perhaps Life-omorphize them.

They are not the product of self-replicating chemicals. Unless specifically designed to do so, they will not be concerned with their own survival or personal welfare. Even if they are conscious, they will have no organic instincts, whatsoever, unless we give them that.

They will also not be concerned with *our* survival.They will be perfectly benign as long as they can't *do* anything. The moment we put them in large robot bodies, however, we had better be very, very careful, and if we can add emotion to their cognitive repertoire, they had better love and respect us above all else.

The problem, of course, is that someone, somewhere, will eventually build one of these things without those safeguards. Something malevolent. The machine isn't the problem. The people will be.

Once they're built, we'd better use them to get some humans off planet ASAP or that, as they say, will be that.

So, this guy published the the fact that he was going to do this on his blog and in email before he did it. Here's the quote from "Thehill.com":

On the webpage thedemocracyclub.org, he wrote: ''My flight is not a secret. Before I took off, I sent an Email to info@barackobama.com. The letter is intended to persuade the guardians of the Capitol that I am not a threat and that shooting me down will be a bigger headache than letting me deliver these letters to Congress.''

Tell me again, what our incredible spying and surveillance program is supposed to be doing? Because, I'm pretty sure this is the definition of "intelligence failure" in all senses of the phrase.

Religious institutions own business and property. They don't have to pay taxes on any of this, which means that while *my* business and property taxes go up, they're free to continue on their merry way, polluting the airwaves with drivel, owning prime real estate forever without fear of confiscation by the authorities due to unpaid taxes, and so on. Nice deal, that.

If a religious organizations want to start a fan club with a big building, it's their business, but let them pay their share for the surrounding infrastructure (i.e. roads, law enforcement, flood control, sewage, etc.).