Many if not most GM plants are rendered sterile so that you are forced to purchase new seeds

And now I went on to believe that it was to avoid contamination and halt unforseen outcomes. I don't know how to find back this story of modified crops which contaminated the surrounding fields by pollination and they had a situation going on.

Guess I'm still from the generation where "chaos theory" was theoretical and implications of genetic engineering were investigated in SciFi making people cautious about uncertain outcomes compared to the current one where everything is conspiracy or for economical gains.

Reading that as from a Samantha, I imagine that's "clod-ette".

I hope she's hot, that would make her smart, funny and hot. I'm at your feet Samantha!

I'm developing on both Android and IPhone; started out on Android and now have extended my repetoire to IPhone.

The advantage but also disadvantage with Android is that it's very open-ended. Often you want to get a specific thing done and you end up alot of time bending the API to your will. (Oh tabview, why art though so...) Or bump into the limitations of your architecture and need to rework some things to get it running.(why does it crash on device x when I have two nested frameviews to have this design? Why doesn't it scale well on device y?)

The IPhone API takes more knowledge (how does that delegate call again and what object is stored where and how do I get a refernce to this?) but it's consistent. And the look is consistent. (which shaves up alot of time thinking about the GUI when trying to implement it.)

I'm an avid Android lover but I can appreciate the IPhone API as well.

Or surface tension, pressure, Earth movement, ...

Although, at that depth you can get creative with rainwater seeping down and you can store your heat of the summer/cold of the winter in the ground to inverse while the season changes. (see Geothermal heat pump)

Which kills the weaklings and singles out the resistants to bread and progressively switch over the population (instead of allowing resistent genes to delude)

Application design (have someone think about everything in broad lines, set out a main architecture-model in ADVANCE.)

Iterative design.

A good project manager prioritizing and communicating current development shielding programmer from clients (who during the "waiting time", are fantasizing changes).

In contrast, in debugging and QA, free way between the client and the developer (more efficient and gives more motivation to the dev as to slave for )

Realistic expectations: don't get your devs running around doing "quick" jobs left and right while they're trying to keep a tight schedule.

Keep everybody current: short standup meeting in the morning

Motivate communication; devs tend to get absorbed in their coding-problem (nd prioritize being "productive") but forget to be a team

The right personality on the right segment of a project: developers have their strengths and their weaknesses.

...

It would be surprising to see what Google does with its own XXX site.

Programmer porn

While you battled with your 7-figures about a single world, I registered every other word in the dictionary and created new niches of porn.

You should check out our wildest newly added categories: categories

(while joking, that list does sound like it could be made into a porno.)

They were just as smart if not smarter then us today. The key difference was they didn't discover a lot of technology we take advantage of.

That "discovery" is part of our historic background and social evolution. We have have rediscovered the knowledge stored in the East (they transcribed the Greek wisdom and had mathematics and astronomy) with the crusades giving us "Enlightenment" and later making knowledge accessible. The desire to make knowledge easily accessible produced the bookpress. Without the ability to write, all that had no purpose or maybe some people going around singing about.

Also, don't judge a fish's intelligence by its ability to mount a mountain; Cavemen knew how to operate in a world that we cannot even phantom, not by choice but by necessity. But we operate in a world a cavemen wouldn't be able to comprehend either, and we use our tools by necessity to come to a simular result (we live, eat and play).

and the engineers will walk away if they're not paid

A government, or any "large coorporation" renting "talent" acts as a milk-cow. Often alot of money is burned in "processes" which are in place and have become too rigid to operate ^properly without outside influence: you have your internal taskforce doing jobprotection and learning progressively how to avoid to work too hard

Whenever you contract a firm you can put in conditions as penalties. I've seen large firms burn cash in their "penalty period", with teams working day and night for months in order to get prestige (resumé of the company) and often to be selected for follow-up projects. so they weigh the cost against the benefit.

Some projects will go easy and they will be overbilled. Others will burn alot of resources but get carried with the buffer of overbilled projects and secure the future.

For clients this means, they have some "sort of guarantee". If the contractor overestimates his own capacity (buffer cash, their internal talent, projections, ...) or made a proposition to cut short in order to eliminate competing contractors.. They go broke and default.

So the conclussion is; both parties take risk and try to negotiate to limit the risk and to present themselves capable to reduce risk to a minimum. To ensure this, you will have lenghty contracts. In time of excess and big budgets, people will be less cautious and take more space as there is no need to tighten things up as it allows.