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There in no basis for assuming that these conditions would ever occur.
You mean, except for the fact that we observe each of them occurring separately, and are not aware of any reason why having one occur would exclude the other? From those premises alone it follows that it is a statistic certainty that they will all occur at the same time eventually.
To remind, alcohol was actually illegal for a while. Then it was legalized again, because the society understood that banning it leads to a worse result overall.
Why does the state even need to be in the business of telling sane adults what they can and cannot put into their own body?
Corporations are a creation of the state. You cannot separate the two.
And now, you begin to understand the problem with corporations and campaign laws.
Why does it matter? Alcohol and nicotin are both still way more harmful than weed, but we don't ban them outright.
irradiated with high-energy ultraviolet photons
That's a part of "space-like conditions".
surrounded continuously by doting scientists and elaborate test apparatus
That part is to guarantee success and have a thorough measurement of the process. For the natural process, it is reasonable to assume that it took many hundreds of millions of years before some place (and maybe more than one, over those years) happened to have all those conditions in it at the same time. The point here is that all the things that they've done and all the input materials are the kind that occur naturally. From there it's all statistics.
What are the power differences between, say, a brother and a sister?
If you think that time travel was off-topic in "Cat", I have to ask, what did you think the book was really all about?
I'm wondering whether you're confusing Heinlein's treatment of women with his characters' treatment of women. There's plenty of sexism in "Mistress", but I don't recall it being glorified or presented as desirable by the author. It is presented as normal by the character, yes, because it's part of his cultural background.
Heinlein certainly did have some strange notions about women, as evidenced by "Stranger", but they are of a different kind.
What's wrong with incest?
The condescending My Docs, My Music, et al should also go.
Already gone in Win8. "My Documents" is just "Documents" now etc. The only exception is "My Computer", which became "This PC".
The only OS I can think of that actually did it that way was BeOS.
Not saying that it's a bad idea, but it clearly doesn't stick around. The momentum of having to provide compatibility with everyone else is just too big to overcome.
Alternatively, you can say that file exension is metadata distinct from the name; it just so happens that the conventional name to record this metadata is as a dot-suffix to the name.
And yes, it is a crappy way to do it, but it's the one that became the de facto standard. Changing it now is very costly, and cannot be done unilaterally.
A lot of ships were sunk during the battle, but it was a very far-flung battle. I believe Musashi was the only Japanese warship sunk in the Sibuyan Sea during that battle (a Japanese heavy cruiser was crippled during the action). In fact, the sinking was not due to magazine explosions but rather to flooding, finally capsizing. I'd expect the turrets to be quite some distance away, but there's no reason to expect the hull to have broken up badly.
Assumption of guilt. Good one!
There's lots of things I can either buy or find/create/grow myself. Potatoes I buy in a store are neither more nor less potatoey than potatoes I grow.
Documentation is the castor oil of programming. Managers know it must be good because the programmers hate it so much.
