The problem is, you assume humans work well 100% of the time, when in fact it is considerably lower than that. That's the key issue, not the pursuit of perfection, but the pursuit of something better than a human. Computers can have potentially have better response times, more awareness, and more correct handling of common danger scenarios than humans. We still have a ways to go till we reach the point when we swap a human driver with a computer, but computer assisted driving is getting more a more common.

Bah, that should be "For all odd numbers". That will treat me to reed my messages before posting.

Ah, yes, I knew something was missing or I disproved it inside of a couple seconds :P. Yeah, it would have to be even as all primes are odd save 2, and the sum of any 2 primes is even, so you'd be forced to use 2 as one of those primes all the time for all even number and that very quickly breaks.

What is more unlikely, that Earth is the special seed in the hundreds of billions of galaxies out there, all composed of a few billions stars each, or that we're just one of many such planets carrying life. Now, as the previous poster said, that doesn't mean we're ever going to encounter said life, but it is a HELL of an assumption that the qualities for production of life are so remote that only Earth managed to fit the criteria, especially when the biological evidence so far speaks to life being surprisingly easy to start out.

I skimmed it. It apparently got slashdotted since then.

Indeed. Personally, I find all 12 of those points meaningless. I'd rather have some simple things, like a working web view, or having the ability to search and replace across paragraphs, or how about just letting me access all the F'ing auto format options (although as I recall Word had that issue too, just with slightly less annoying hidden untouchable options).

It goes beyond just that silliness too. Let's just give for a second that a programming language is copyrightable. Well, derivative works are also automatically copyrighted too, and Java is derivative of C++ and C before it, and probably something before that, and none of those have expired. Plus, forward facing, all use of Java of would be copyrighted too. So, suddenly, you'd have every business using Java pissed at Oracle for claiming copyright on their work, but not only that, Oracle has thrown the door wide open for being sued themselves for copyright infringement on a vast scale. Yeah, this is an argument you want to go down in flames, and really even Oracle, they may not realize it, but they too want it to go down in flames as well.

Even if you did such, all that does it push back the wall some, there is still a wall there. We only have so much farmland, never mind the limits on other resources. If you really want to reduce consumption in a way that won't hit a wall you'll have to stop our population growth, and even reverse as it is pretty much too high as is. I don't think genetics are the solution there though. That's more a social issue.

It's a good question. I personally don't know. My limited understanding of copyright protection is it protect not function, but expression. So copying the function of something isn't derivative. To protect function you have to get patent on it. However, it depends how close the new programmers are to the original code. For instance, if you hand a detective novel to a writer and say make me a story very similar to this one, even if he changed the names, places and such, if the general plot is the same, that could be considered a derivative work. But in that case, the plot itself is really an expression, not a function, so although that is very close, I think they are different situations.

You too huh... it went from, ooo, this could be... oh psychics... well, nothing to see here folks.