The banana hasn't actually been as successful as it could be, because of its vulnerability to disease. And that vulnerability has put the livelihood of banana growers at risk. Most of them are on lower incomes (globally speaking), so one bad harvest can be catastrophic. Random catastrophic shocks to economies leads to social instability.

As for dogs, I'm taking it from your comment that you don't assign any negative value to the suffering of non-humans. Fair enough. I do, which is why I refer to it as a cost, and as something to be avoided in future.

Um. Saying that one should go into genetic modification with ones eyes open, prepared for unexpected consequences, learning from the mistakes we've already made? That's silly?

The problem here is that people seem to think I'm against genetic modification, which is something I never said. In fact, you'll notice I claimed genetic engineering is "capable of wonders", so I'm a little perplexed how people are getting such negative vibes from my comment. I'm just saying, picking the banana and the dog shows stunning ignorance and hubris, as those are two cases where we've made huge and costly mistakes. Why not use something like Golden Rice as an example? That said, I think there are valid concerns about Golden Rice becoming a victim of its own success, leading to a loss of biodiversity. But's that's where should learn our lessons from the banana, and take steps to prevent it.

As long as, of course, we also knew what—if any— beneficial effects those genes had and had plans to compensate for their loss.

You mean the Cavendish banana, that repeatedly comes under fungal and viral attack, that it can't defend itself from due to its lack of genetic diversity? Or the relentlessly inbred pedigree breeds that have defects in their breathing, walking or vision? Genetic engineering is and will be capable of wonders, but we shouldn't blind ourselves to the dangers.

I hate to be crude, but to an outside observer, it appears you've both got your heads up your respective arses. It's like watching an acrimonious divorce. "Go on then, take your car, but you'll better get it out of my garage!" You know there's no happy ending there, both parties are going to bleed.

I'm not assuming Hansen is correct, but your analysis is flawed. You are comparing studies of local conditions with a study of global conditions. Just because a single heat wave is not anomalous locally, it does not mean that a series of distributed heat waves is not anomalous globally. In case that's not clear, consider an extreme example : A hurricane in Florida in a year is not anomalous. Each major coastal city in the world being hit by a hurricane in the same year would be.

The reason you don't see this discussion happening much is it's already happened, some time ago. Conservative voices weren't in it because they were still arguing with the evidence (note that I say with, not about). There are both pros and cons to being conservative.

For balance, please read consider the opposing view on the history of McIntyre, Briffa and the Yamal data. And no, the two terms are not synonymous (although group think is a type of positive bias).

Forget AGW for the moment. If you accept that we're going to run out of fossil fuels at some point in the relatively near future, then I would suggest you skim read Sustainable Energy - without the hot air. Taken purely from the energy-use perspective, it makes a rational, scientific argument that our "modern way of life" is clearly not sustainable, and something is going to have to give. It's a less attractive gamble than you might think.

This has nothing to do with GW. I presume you're referring to the hole in the ozone layer. The reason that particular "chicken little" scenario didn't come to pass is that the politicians actually responded to the science in a timely fashion and banned CFCs. Your argument here sounds similar to people who complain that the Millenium Bug was a lot of fuss over nothing, ignoring the possibility that nothing particularly bad happened in 2000 because people spent a lot of time and money making sure that it didn't. The rational response to potential disasters is not to do nothing to prevent them until they're actual certainties - because nothing is a certainty until it's actually happened.

People without scientific qualifications in the relevant discipline who make predictions that something bad is/is not definitely going to happen are probably loons, and their opinions should not be given equal weight. I honestly don't know where you heard this unless it was from James Lovelock, who is, unfortunately, a bit of a loon.

Wait, what? Are you honestly saying that you aren't willing to accept any scientific findings unless you've personally repeated the experiment yourself?

Well, that's an interesting topic. Pests thrive in a monoculture, and so you need pesticides for those acres of corn. Organic farming, because of the need to avoid pesticides, often involves deliberately avoiding a monoculture by mixing your species. This makes life harder for the pests and encourages predators. So, by definition, this type of organic farming will always need more unit area of land for the same unit volume of crops. So is the study effectively one giant tautology? Wouldn't we be better served by comparing yields on crop volumes? Bearing in mind, as others have said, that claiming that this study means that we won't feed the world's growing population on organic food is silly, as we won't feed them on conventional food either.

Of course, you're joking. The cost of Oracle licenses for their infrastructure would in all probability be dwarfed by the cost of the person-hours they've put into developing and supporting Cassandra and their Heath Robinson MySQL setup.

No naming convention is necessary, but some are useful. I find it useful to differentiate interfaces from classes at a glance, you do not. We disagree, and that's fine, but my reasoning for my preference makes sense to me in C#. I don't do the same thing in other languages, because they don't have the same distinction. I'm highly unlikely to change my opinion on this, because I can identify the benefits I gain from the practice on a day-to-day basis.

Manned space exploration != Mars. Obama wants industry to handle LEO, and NASA instead to focus on solving the hard problems of manned deep space exploration (with the implication that he expects industry to ride their coat tails to the Asteroid Belt). This is perfectly consistent with his stated goals.

To put it another way, if we needed to leave the planet in a hurry, Mars is utterly impractical. It will take centuries to terraform it, if it's even feasible. On the other hand, if industry can be persuaded to work out how to knock the kinks out of ground to LEO travel, and to learn how to build safe long-term habitats (for instance, hotels) with materials gathered from deep space, then we might just stand a chance.

As a huge fan of fluent code, but also as someone who prefers to see the distinction between a promise and a concrete implementation to be at a glance of the class definition, I have to disagree. Of course you should be using a language derived from your problem domain, but if your problem domain contained all you needed for the solution, then it itself would be the computer program. At some level, you have to use the language of the solution domain, you can't wish it away. I would also say that, these days, having to chance the name from ISomething to plain Something is no big deal, due to built-in refactoring support. Finally, what are the deprecated constructs and styles in C#? Can't think of any of the top of my head.

Nice troll, but I can't decide whether you really don't know that it's Studio Ghibli, and that Hayao Miyazaki and John Lasseter are close friends.