No, it is only hypocritical if you think you can have a blog (or whatever) with moderated comments, while wanting to prevent someone else from having such a blog. And this actually applies to government censorship too. If government expects to publish information in web or in a dead tree format, then government can't prevent others from doing the same without exercising censorship.

Well then, perhaps you should work on that part of your "free" country, mmm? Having the cameras on every officer should make that easier, giving clear numbers of the extent of the hypothetical "camera malfunction" problem, and making it politically easier to get the rules changed, or existing rules enforced better.

First step is having cameras. If there is a high rate of tampered cameras, next step will be more tamper proof cameras. Also, same officer always having camera malfunctions sounds like something many officers would want to avoid, for fear of internal investigation. If there's any chance of catching hell for being a bad cop, it will have a chilling effect.

Second thing does not follow from the first. Light does not travel at infinite speed in any observer's reference frame. So we can actually easily estimate where the light from some event (which then needs to have already happened, or there would not be any light) is now travelling towards us (or not, if predicted event didn't actually happen, which we can't know until the light reaches us).

There may be other reference frames where the event has not happened yet, where the light has not been emitted yet, but in our reference frame, in this case light is already on the way.

Argh, well, at least that miscalculation does not detract from the point.

From wikipedia, "Sony released the first camcorder for the general consumer in 1983", so 30 years ago the usual way of making home videos was still the good old 8" home movie camera...

Uh... 1993? No. The computers of that era couldn't yet even play any decent video, and idea of having enough bandwidth to pass around videos was utopia. Hard disks were too small to even store much video.

Now get off my lawn!

Indeed, why does anybody run Ubuntu, when they can run Xubuntu...

But if you ask, why anything from Ubuntu family, then a good reason is, most of the non-distro-specific stuff comes with installer/installation instructions for Ubuntu. So, if you want that stuff to just work without hassle, an Ubuntu-family distro is safest choice.

Only exception I know of is mono .NET stuff, for that OpenSUSE is a better choice, IIRC, unless things have changed recently.

Building a city is engineering, so when will they solve the problem? At what point do they say "finished"?

Well, never, obviously. The city will keep taxing and charging you so they can keep building. Private companies will keep billing you for renovating and maintaining existing buildings. They'll also try to sucker new people into it. It's all a big scam! First they invent this "entropy" thing, and on top of it they keep om gradually introducing new stuff, such as running water, electricity, "broadband" Internet access... Do you ever wonder why they don't just build houses that last forever without repairs and maintenance, with best infrastructure allowed by physical reality? Well, let me tell you, it's because they want to keep robbing you of your money, day by day, millenia by millenia!

The time==distance for those photons to travel from there to here is almost same in both reference frames, ours and the reference frame of a similar planet in that other galaxy.

How are those genes any more "foreign", than genes of, say, a new fruit you try for the first time? Also, we're invaded by constantly mutating viruses all the time, and they actively seek to activate their "foreign genes" in our bodies. Etc. I simply don't see this as any kind of risk, compared to the "risk" of just existing in a normal environment. At least engineered genes and associated proteins will have had some screening and scrutiny before being unleashed on a new population, unlike most "natural" sources of "foreign" genetic material. There's nothing special about engineered genes in the sense, that observing health effect of some genes for 10-20 years would tell us anything about health effects of some other genes.

"GMO" marking would be much like "contains animal products" marking, and I'm certainly all for having that marking and giving consumer the chance to make a choice. But I don't see it as a health concern, I see it more a way to encourage GMO companies to act more responsibly for the fear of consumers starting to avoid GMO labeled food because of whatever bad headlines. Also, just because some consumers might be irrational about their choices and make emotinally motivated choices, it does not give some multinational corporation a right to make the choices for them.

Thanks for the links!

The problem with gene technology debate IME is, many people are just worried if it's "safe to eat the genes", not realizing how all organisms have these "digestive system" and "immune system" thingies, which have rather a long history of dealing with any foreign DNA entering the organism with extreme prejudice, even when that DNA does it's best to hide itself (like in the case of viruses).

I think the potential risk is introducing basically a new evolutionary mechanism, entirely new genes appearing "out of nowhere". Or at least it seems new to me, as far as I know how evolution works. What are the results of that, when it's done in global scale.

No, common sense is, until (scientifically, or whatever) shown to not be. Furthermore, when common sense says, common sense isn't, then it's common sense to assume the worst case scenario, until shown otherwise by a more reliable method.

You realize what you say makes no sense? What I said was tautology. Perhaps you meant "under pressure, natural selection can work surprisingly fast"? Yes, but there's generally a cost of a high extinction rate, and then diversification of those species which did not die. This is not a very desirable, especially when there's a big mass extinction underway, species disappearing very very rapidly (in geologic/evolutionary time scale).

Either you don't care about humans, or you're intentionally trying to muddle up human and evolutionary time scales. Recovery takes millions of years. We've either spread to the space or gone the way of the dodo long before any natural recovery has happened. Also, for recovery to happen fast, there needs to be lack of competition. This implies that there are no humans competing with the new species. Doesn't sound very good to me.

In other words, we've used our ability to adapt to increase our population, steadily approaching the carrying capacity of earth. We'll probably be in trouble long before we have the technology to supply everybody with food grown by nuclear energy (instead of solar energy and fossil fuels for fertilizers and machines, as now happens) or whatever. There's only so much net output available from solar energy.

We've increased human population to current billions (and counting) with the cost of ongoing mass extinction, decrease of biodiversity, and overusing natural resources (overfishing, burning forestes to get a few seasons worth of crops before burning the next piece, etc). Furher cost, which I hope we will not have to pay, but which seems inevitable, is that these billion will die, when we are at the practical limit of carrying capacity, and then there is a reduction in our food production (it could be for political reasons, or because fossil fuel based fertilizers become too expensive, or because climate shifts and large areas of arable land become too dry, or many other things).

I think you've got this backwards. Let's say you came up with a new mass-use for some known but not commonly used chemical. Would you really have no qualms about spreading it to the environment in large quantities, and keep doing it until you have scientific proof that it does something harmful?

No, when you do something new, and common sense says this has potential to be bad, then you do scientific study to rule out as many bad things as you can, until you can plausibly say it's ok.

Can you link to a scientific study, which for example estimates first of all how fast herbicide resistance created by gene technology may spread from crops to weeds, and further what kind of effects this may have if resistant weeds become the norm? If this study is at least a few years old, then also follow-up study which actually measures the actual rate would be useful.

I bet Monsanto has done a few studies like this. I also bet they are in a safe somewhere, closely guarded and known to as few people as possible.

Common sense says, that if you forcibly introduce and maintain a large number of new genes to the ecosystem, it has potential to unbalance things. Natural evolution can only keep up at the rate of natural evolution, adaptations driven by natural mutations, in very small steps and under constant pressure of natural selection. Humans are not limited in the same way, with gene technolgoies we can introduce very large "mutations" to ecosystem as fast as we want, and we can manipulate natural selection (for example with protected environments, introducing genes which protect against human-applied poisons) to keep otherwise detrimental genes around.

Gene technologies are not just more of what has been happening for the past about 4 billion years without humans too. This is a new, never before seen phenomenon. We have only one Earth to see what happens. Common sense says, better be cautions.

I think the problem is, what Python community considers good documentation does not match what I consider good documentation.

Many parts of Python docs are quite ok even to me, and I guess it's mostly issue with presentation, cross-linking, and how the whole thing is split into chapters. Also, I think the bad parts are more concentrated on areas used by less experienced Python programmers, seldom really used by those who might get around to fixing them. It could possibly be fixed just by modifying documentation tool output.

Oh, and yes, documentation comments/embedded documentation are used in most mainstream languages these days...