The government should stay out of *personal* morality *in matters that affect no-one else*, it's best for everyone.

There, fixed that for ya.

Idiot. Because they want to make ALL THE MONEY. If they can produce an energy-dense, carbon-negative, substitute for oil, for CHEAPER than oil, they will be selling to EVERYONE. In other words, they will have ALL THE MONEY.

They'd have to reroute the plasma flow and depolarise the graviton matrix first. Duh.

There is nothing wrong with price discrimination. All companies should be allowed to sell their products for whatever price they want, based on any criteria they want (except, arguably, race/sex/religion etc, because society doesn't like it).

However, using the legal system to enforce that price discrimination is a bad idea. Without the extensive legal barriers set up to "make prices fair", and with uniform labor/production/safety etc laws worldwide, the average incomes of people in the West and people in China (in this example) would equalise much more rapidly.

When corporations hijack governments to protect their own interests, it is bad for everyone.

Okay. So why can I buy a perfectly good calculator for 5 bucks, if there's all these external costs that you mentioned?

Giordano's in Apia, the capital of Samoa, makes the best pizza I have ever tasted anywhere. Their blue cheese pizza is just awesome.

What if, literally, the head of NASA, the pope, the president of the USA and 90% of all that scientist's fellow researchers assure you that this scientist's data is accurate and his conclusion is true, even though he isn't exactly a PR genius?

What's your position then?

James Hansen gets his money from an organisation that FLIES ROCKETS INTO SPACE. There is NOTHING about this man that fits your climate-change-proponent stereotype.

Al Gore's read a book?

I cook all the time, and I can think of several ways in which I could use an automated kitchen system like the one that the parent describes:

- Download recipes made for the system from the net, my phone/pda tells me what to put in when;

- Visual indicators of when everything's going to be ready, and more importantly, the status of the various dishes I have cooking;

- Teaching someone anywhere in the world how to cook, by monitoring what they're doing in real-time so I can give them instant feedback and advice.

These are just the "radio with pictures" ideas anyone can come up with; in actual use, these systems will spawn new and awesome ways of living that we cannot yet imagine.