I don't think all GM crops are automatically bad. That's like saying that all plastics are bad, for all applications, which is silly.

However, there are a number of reasonable scientific, specific concerns about specific GM products and practices. Here's one:

Dr. Huber Explains Science Behind New Organism and Threat from Monsanto's Roundup, GMOs to Disease and Infertility

There are others, but I think the potential issues with roundup-ready corn, soya and now alfalfa and similar products are serious enough to warrant at least *really* investigating the consequences of their use, rather than just rubber stamping "Yes, sir, Monsanto, Oh, sure you can do whatever you want, we trust you *wink* *wink*".

Totally new world economy not based on consuming breakable crap, please! I'd like one.

Well designed, well-engineered products, that last, would be more "expensive", but in the long run, humanity and the planet will be better off when we finally switch over to a less wasteful system.

Fortunately we do have examples (like the Voyager probes) of good engineering, not that our washing machines and TVs need to be *quite* that well-engineered, but still, there's a lot of room for improvement.

There are many multiple-source inverter systems available that work in conjunction with (or function as) an automated transfer switch for when utility power is unavailable, though such an inverter does add to the total cost to the system. A battery system is not necessary, although a small battery system for limited power at night isn't really all that expensive, compared with total system cost.

I would *love* to be able to produce 5kWh per day! That's just a little less than half our energy usage, and would be sufficient to hum along during an extended power outage almost indefinitely, especially with a genset running occasionally to fill a water pressure tank and heat water.

What if you're a secular humanist and also a mystic?

While that is certainly true, there's something to be said for decentralized energy generation. In areas with a lot of sun, if you can get a majority of buildings to install solar heating/cooling/lighting and photovoltaic, and some local storage, you can make a big dent in the energy requirements (from coal) in a particular region.

In areas with less sun, solar systems can still be viable, though less economical, and augmented with wind, micro-nuclear (maybe someday), ground source heat pumps, and even wood burning furnaces.

If we then keep going with high-efficiency systems (thermal barriers, pumps, major appliances) with individual and community installations approaching energy self-sufficiency, there is a benefit even beyond the reduction in coal burned, in that the grid can be more resilient in the event of power plant or distribution issues.

Having had *three* long term (more than a week) power outages here in the northeast US in the past few years, I know if I could afford it, I would be installing a grid-connected system that could keep us going on emergency power (enough for a little heat, water and communication systems) for extended periods, even if we can't generate 100% of our needs, the peace of mind that would bring is priceless.

It may be a negative in some respects, but there *are* a lot of people losing their homes, mostly due to the activities of a few very rich men. So symbolically it is appropriate... It probably can't be sustained long term, at least in it's current form. In the 60s, many "communes" formed. Most of them were not successful, though a few survive to this day. I think that idea could do better now than it did then. Not in the "flower power" sense, but in the practical living and survival sense, in an increasingly monetized existence.

If the President were to roll tanks on the "occupy" protests, as was done to the Vets, that would probably create a bit of a stir. There are probably almost as many OWS protesters are there were people in the Bonus Army, if not more, although they're not all in one place, yet.

Yes, the comparison to the 60s is certainly appropriate, since as others have said, the 60s was a dress rehearsal for what's happening now. Though keep in mind that in the 60s there were still (lots) of poor people living in Manhattan. Nowadays, there really isn't a "crappy little apartment" to rent, anywhere in Manhattan. Even Harlem has been largely "gentrified".

My thought when OWS first started in Zucotti Park was that they would eventually be forced out, and would need to look for other places to stay and/or protest in shifts. However, I think the "camping" is actually a good strategy, for many reasons, foremost probably being the 24/7 presence accelerated coverage of the protest. The protesters are going to be vilified no matter what they do. They will need to find more places to stay, particularly for the harshest parts of the winter. There are MANY precedents for american citizens "camping out" for their rights. Of the top of my head, the biggest one I can think of was the WW1 vets in Washington DC in the 30s. Tent city for miles... not that there's a direct comparison with OWS there, but there are interesting historical parallels.

That's fascinating. It would be cooler if the protocols were rigorously followed, but things being as they are, that's still kind of neat. All kinds of fancy algorithms and 30+ years of moore's law, and fundamental aspects of modern computing technology still depend on simple lookup tables.

Totally. This. This is the biggest reason I'm tempted to abandon firefox. Firefox (even on windows) *used* to allow me to keep browser sessions (dozens or even hundreds of windows/tabs) open for months at a time, without having to restart firefox or reboot. Granted, that was a while ago, now with current versions of FF, I'm lucky if I can survive more than a week without having to restart firefox from it getting infuriatingly slow and clunky, which is *REALLY ANNOYING* when you have lots of tabs open that have stuff in them you need to work with. Sometimes it takes me 20-30 minutes to reliably save state in order to restart firefox, and then I've still got to reconstruct where I was with everything after that. Firefox does have session saving, which does work, even for hundreds of tabs, unless you have a ton of pages open that were the results of form submits or behind authentication barriers, then it's a nightmare, so I basically can't use it.

I've taken to using multiple instances of firefox portable to isolate projects. This works, but is less than ideal. I end up sometimes having several different instances of firefox running as well as chrome and sometimes IE.

The world shouldn't need to be this way!

Yeah, once you see what you can do with regular expressions, particularly in Perl, I think you're pretty much ruined forever :)

I so much prefer using them in Perl though, rather than PHP, but I write PHP to pay the bills.

Yes, Perl OO (in Perl5) is hard (for anything non-trivial), ugly, fragile and slow, though it does work, and it's possible to do neat stuff with it. Perl6 will fix all that (except the working and being neat part).

This!

Perl is a "beautiful" language -- in the same way some people talk about certain human languages (e.g. romance languages, Russian, or Sanskrit) being beautiful, as opposed to merely functional. Other people will disparage those same languages as being too this, or not enough that... the same kind of debate we see with programming languages, particularly with Perl, which is kind of interesting.

And for some of those human languages, you'll also hear people lament how horribly some non-native speakers butcher them, perhaps because those non-native speakers are using them merely as a "functional" language, rather than grasping the full depth of expression that is possible.

This analogy has at least some merit I think, since Perl is a language that was designed "linguistically" at least in some sense, in that it has the same kinds of patterns that natural languages have and is chock full of idioms and expressions, that some programmers (myself included) find not only useful from a functional perspective, but actually enhance the creative process that happens when one writes code. I think part of that is due to Larry Wall's now venerable "Programming Perl" -- which is one of the few truly valuable programming books that's also actually fun to read -- especially if you're one of those people that thinks at least a little like Larry, and enjoys a dry wit.

Anyway, so yes, I totally agree, programmers that need "restrictions" in a scripting language to have their code be readable are definitely a certain "kind" of programmer. Not that they are better or worse programmers, they just don't embrace the TMTOWTDI philosophy, which is something that the society at-large doesn't generally embrace, so it's no surprise that there seem to be a lot of people that shit all over Perl.

I've seen (in my own code and in others) truly beautiful and elegant Perl code that reads like a story, and also the "line noise" code people complain about. Which is really all about regular expressions. Some people really love 'em, perhaps a little too much. Though as has been pointed out probably a billion times, there's nothing wrong with one-off throwaway code that looks like line noise, but if you're building a giant system, then your code should be all pretty and commented and generally sociable.

It's both unfortunate (and I still hope... a mixed-blessing) that Perl 6 has taken so long to come about. In that PHP went and pretty much took over it's niche as a web-development and "glue" language. Though the Perl community is still strong, if small, and I have no doubt that it will remain a living language for a long time to come, if for no other reason than the fact that CPAN is awesome, and there are zillions of lines of code written in Perl that a lot of people depend on every day, and that when Perl6 matures, I think it will enjoy a resurgence, within the Perl community, and perhaps much further, simply because of the simple and powerful philosophies that it encodes.

Easy things should be easy and hard things possible.

As a programmer, I can say that programming itself, that is, *how* to write code, in terms of methodology -- is a skill that will never leave you once you have acquired it (so long as you keep using it).

Almost any programmer worth their salt can learn a new language in a few weeks, if not days. Granted it may take more time to develop understanding of any idioms or warts the language may have, but you can learn that stuff on the fly, unless you're writing HA/mission critical code, in which case, there'd better be a review process, and it's reasonable to expect that someone on the team will be an expert in the technology being used.

So I'd say unless you've given up programming entirely and have moved on to a different career, your skills are still valuable, and will stay reasonably "fresh" even if you're writing code in a 30-year-old language (as the article says), as long as you actually think while you write code, and aren't just a copy/paste/munge wizard, not that there's anything wrong with that, for certain kinds of things.

This of course doesn't even consider the (imho) much more valuable part of being a software developer: being able to converse with non-technical people, in whatever human language you use, and then translate that into some sort of actionable programming work. That's often more than half the battle. Then of course there is testing, testing and testing.

The article isn't completely wrong, but (like much of the "IT industry") I think it missed the point of what skills are actually important to doing software development. Knowing how to use a specific bit of kit is pretty far down on the list, I think, for any reasonably competent programmer/technologist.

I treat anything with the word "marketability" in it with suspicion.

24 hour holds is nice for starters, but how about eliminating (pure) speculation entirely by making the requirement that anyone wanting purchase commodity futures must actually be able to take delivery of the tangible product associated with those futures... That way, hedge fund managers, et. al., get booted from the game, and the people that actually really care about/want the oil, or grain, or whatever, actually compete in a more natural way for the resources without market speculators taking a cut off the top of everything, and providing very little (if any) value into the system.

Though maybe the whole system is too far gone for anything like that to actually happen, or even if it did, have an effect, since the speculators would just find another way to make money from their huge piles of money, without ever actually making or doing anything.

Are We Not Men? We Are Devo!