On the contrary, it's a very real problem for me because I live in Europe where (1) almost no food is labeled as "non-GMO food" because there is almost no GMO food right now, (2) US corporations and international corporations like Monsanto have been trying for decades to lower EU protection and food labeling standards, last time it was part of secret TTIP negociations to allow GMO food to be imported without labeling, and they will try again, (3) even with higher standards in the EU not buying any US food would not necessarily ensure that I have a free consumer choice because ingredients of products do not need to be labeled in the EU either and they can come from the US - and in the case corn, soy beans and peanuts they often come from the US - , and (4) international corporations that have a vested interest in lowering environmental protection and health standards usually start in the US and then use the lax requirements they've achieved there in order to argue economically against high standards elsewhere.

I want the consumer to be guaranteed to be able to make a free choice, not just to maybe make a free choice at the whim of companies. The only way to guarantee free consumer choice is to fully inform the consumer. As I've said, it's a no-brainer. Another no-brainer: When large corporations are lobbying incessantly not be required to inform the public about something, then something about that stinks.It's not as if there haven't been plenty of scandals in the pharmaceutical and agricultural industry in the past....

If you have a good product, you can surely tell the costumers what it is.

I wasn't arguing for or against nanny states, I was arguing for free consumer choice. Your suggestion does not give customers the choice to buy non-GMO foods, because there is no guarantee that there will be "voluntary labeling of non-GMO food". For a free choice between X and Y, you need to be able to distinguish X from Y. It's a no-brainer.

That's not a cogent argument at all, you are merely patronizing people. A free market requires informed consumers. The analogies you draw are also fundamentally flawed:

- Whether you build a nuclear power plant or not is a political decision, not one made by an individual person, because many people benefit from the power plant and many people would be affected if there is a major incident. Labeling GMO food as such keeps no one from buying it who wants to buy it.

- If you decide for your children that you don't want them to get vaccinated, then you are literally endangering the life of your children and the life of other children who cannot get vaccinated for rare medical reason. By not buying GMO food, you do not endanger anyone's life.

Not buying GMO food is a customer choice just like not buying some food because you don't like the look of its packaging or the logo of the company. If a company doesn't want that to happen, then they are free to offer non-GMO food. Not labeling food is and always has been nefarious, there is simply no cogent argument for not labeling the nature of food ingredients. You can also easily invent compressed codes or put a link to online information on the packaging.

It's a great place to get what you need but cannot afford and you can easily circumvent most blocks by using alternate DNS servers. If that doesn't work, use a VPN! Happy birthday piratebay!

History has nothing to say about it. Technical, scientific, and cultural development have made massive quantum leaps, our current technical culture with global communication & global trade is not even remotely comparable to anything that has existed before, and there is no sane reason to think that "countries", "nations", or similar arbitrary human artefacts have to repeat the mistakes of the past. On the contrary, the history of cultural development suggests strongly that mankind can shape their own future as they like, just as we shape cities, countries, and all of the rest of our environment to our liking. If you think that skyscrapers are possible, then certainly lasting peace on earth is possible. It's not even very hard to achieve, all you need is a decent amount of economic entanglement, lots of contracts to the mutual benefit of everyone, and a few global players to push it forward.

Note that pretty much all of the past reasons for conquest have long gone in modern, industrialized societies. Resources can be acquired by international trade, war for territory is no longer worth it, and religious superstitions are luckily declining wherever there is technical and economic development.

Small local conflicts will be fought but there is no credible major war scenario that can be won by anyone.

I'm very conservative, if not precautionary about the intentional genetic alteration of humans precisely for the reason you apparently find it so appealing. (Unless you're trolling or joking, not sure about that.) Serious medical reasons make sense to me but political and moral opinions and world views are the pretty much the worst reasons I could imagine for fundamentally altering human DNA.

That's one of the worse examples and wouldn't convince many people, but the problem is going to be massive once the techniques have been improved. The real problem is that people get their "information" from the most shady sources and tend to switch their brain of. Captain Disillusion's Youtube Channel is a great and entertaining way of becoming more skeptical.

You could set up correct file access permissions.

It's also very common to hire people with higher degrees than needed. Back when I was young, one guy at our school was so good he got the highest possible final degree in every discipline. He then went on to study mathematics, where there was a more level playing field for him. Then he became an SAP consultant. Another friend of mine studied physics. He is now working for Siemens in middle management (I presume). I also knew a mathematician who did his Ph.D. in something very complicated I couldn't possibly understand. Then he was hired as a mathematician by an economics professor and told us that he was laughing his hat off at how ridiculously easy the tasks were that the professor wanted him to solve. But the payment was good and it was definitely easier than to try the postdoc grind in mathematics.

In a nutshell, this phenomenon is not limited to CS at all. Many companies prefer to higher people with degrees that give them strong math skills, even if they don't use them in their job.

100% this. It's a blatant misunderstanding of the discipline to think the main goal of computer science is to enable someone to program. Maybe you could say that being able to program is a prerequisite to start learning CS, though. In Germany the discipline is called "Informatik" which is perhaps a better term than CS. However, in the end CS is a branch of applied mathematics, but one that is important enough to warrant its own discipline. In that respect it's similar to statistics.

Most day-to-day programming tasks are fairly simple, if not a bit monotonous. Moreover (and independently of the first point), almost any team of programmers can be trained and/or forced to write highly secure, highly reliable software, e.g. using Ada/Spark or Rust or C++ with extensive code analysis tools and testing, extensive code reviewing, rule books, and so on. That software will cost many times more than normal software, though, and the development will take way longer.

The bad state of some consumer software is because of lack of liability and many other political, legal, and economic issues, not because of a lack of skilled programmers. If a company is not liable for bugs and their customers prefer fast release cycles with new features over stability, then the company has no incentive to spend more money on software quality. It all depends on how many resources you spend on company practices, code reviews, auditing, etc., up to formal verification of program correctness. You can even build a high integrity system by combining three redundant independent systems that are developed by several completely independent programming teams, maybe even using different compilers. But who is going to pay for that?

Yes, it's full of psychopaths. I can't explain why either, it's bizarre.

You're right about the term "fake news" but I'd like to add that talking about "US mainstream media" is way too vague to be of any use in any discussion. In the US you absolutely have to distinguish between newspapers, radio, and TV:

- Radio plays no substantial role. Some US radio hosts may be informative whole others would land in prison or pay hefty fines for libel, slander, and hate speech in almost every other civilized country.

- TV "news" is mostly hysterical crap and also very biased in the US. It has always been like that, the quality is really low almost everywhere. If you primarily get your "news" from Fox or CNN, you will remain uninformed, though certainly less than if you get your news from other internet sources like news aggregation sites.

- Most US newspapers are outstanding, no matter which political bias they have. The people who criticize newspapers do not read them. The printed versions are extremely informative, and a good way to get good background information in the US (besides other sources like foreign online news,directly tapping into press agencies, documentaries).

Every other alleged news source in the US is not only crap, it doesn't even generate any news. Left and right wing "info sites", bloggers, social media, etc. do nothing else but copying news from shady sources who copied the news in the place. Most of them employ no journalists or way too few, and even worse, most of them don't even have subscriptions for news agencies.

So in a nutshell, US TV channels and the social media are and have always been horrible 'news' sources, but printed newspapers are fairly good and will inform you.

In my experience the people who criticize mainstream media are almost universally uneducated and misinformed because they get their "news" from way less reliable sources and do not understand that somewhere there needs to be real journalist recording, taking pictures, and jotting down notes in order for there to be any news at all.

That's something that people who get their news from bloggers, radical radio hosts, social media, and shady news aggregator sites will learn the hard way.