It would be fascinating to troll through the /. archives and find out what fraction of things that were predicted to come to market in timescale X actually did so. XKCD aside, I don't think this question has ever been properly addressed.

Both the GP and you are wrong about this. Hardware support for exponentiation is completely irrelevant to it being a built-in operator rather than a function call.

FORTRAN, famously, has some extremely efficient tricks for implementing exponentiation by small integer exponents (up to 7, if memory serves) that are independent of MPU support. They are handled by the compiler. Why C/C++ doesn't have this is beyond me, and writing these things efficiently for a given architecture is non-trivial and better handled by the people porting the compiler than application developers.

Nice use of the Standard Template for Pro-Government Action:

1) Lead with wildly exaggerated scenario that you make out to be super-scary

2) Middle paragraph that's patriotic and tough-sounding without actually saying anything that anyone doesn't already know, but presented as if its some kind of special revelation that only a super-tough uber-patriot could possibly have come up with.

3) Close with a polite disavowal of the lead paragraph's wildly exaggerated super-scary scenario, so no one can call you out for promoting fear and arguing from completely unrealistic threats.

The only place where you lose points is that your original scenario is too transparently lame. Losing all our cat pics is going to cost the economy a million dollars per person? I don't think so.

The saying is military propaganda. If you want peace, prepare for peace.

If anyone doesn't know what "prepare for peace" means--or thinks it means "surrender"--they are part of the problem, too ignorant to partake in this discussion, unable to see that there are options that are better than war (and since war is both on theoretical and empirical grounds the least efficient, least effective solution to any problem there are always options better than war.)

I appreciate your mention of "reefs", as they are completely irrelevant to the depths in question, and make it easy to completely dismiss your cavil as what it is: the persistent whine of the naysayer, who is opposed to everything.

It's really useful for people with the courage to take risks with the future, and therefore make things better, to be able to spot the naysayers, and concern for "reefs" at thousands of feet below the ocean surface is a good way to do so in this case, like concern for "birds killed by windmills" allows us to spot anti-wind trolls and concern for "polar bears on melting ice" allows us to spot climate change trolls.

There are valid concerns on all these topics, but people like you, who contribute only noise to the conversation, need to be screened out if we are to have the conversations that matter. Thanks for making that easy!

If it ever does (break even). Scaling up is an incredibly high-risk business, because some things just don't scale.

In Canada we recently opened a national chemical engineering facility (http://www.greencentrecanada.com/) that is specifically aimed at helping researchers scale chemical processes that work at lab-scale (grams) to industrial scale (kilograms to tonnes). There are plenty of things that just don't work outside of the lab, and new processes in particular are often invented by experts who are the only people in the world who can make them work successfully.

The skills required for scaling up are very different from those required for discovery, and having something like this were there is a specific group of experts in scaling up is a godsend to university spin-off businesses, and adds a level of reassurance to investors that simply couldn't exist otherwise.

You've been modded funny but this is actually insightful.

The fantasy of "brains working together" is based on a transparently stupid idea: that adding more manpower to a late project will not make it later. Communication and thinking are hard, and brains are decidedly non-standard components, with different internal representations of pretty much everything.

As a friend who works in GIS is fond of saying, "If I take a group of geologists out in the field and have them map an area, at the end of the day I can tell who mapped where, but not what they mapped." Our internal representations of the world even for such apparently unambiguous concepts as "granite" are sufficiently different that we have genuine trouble agreeing on boundaries between types of rock. And yet for some reason everyone believe that their own person concept of any given thing is "true" and "real" and everyone else is mistaken.

Even if we could connect two human brains together with high enough bandwidth to do meaningful "co-thinking" the result would look a hell of a lot more like a three-legged race than anything else.

Our knowledge of pedagogy has improved considerably in the past century, which makes it worth revisiting the question. Masters who are ignorant of pedagogy, as the typical master of an apprentice was, are not good, efficient or effective teachers, as demonstrated by the lengthy terms of apprenticeship and the rather high failure rate.

That said, modern "teacher education" is almost completely free of pedagogy. We know how to teach, and we know a number of methods that have been proven again and again under a wide range of circumstances to work. They all look vaguely like the Montessori method, although there are lots of variants that, again, are known to work.

What they don't look very much like is either an apprenticeship program or a modern classroom, neither of which are primarily intended to teach. Apprenticeships are fundamentally about creating barriers to entry for the protection of existing tradespeople. Modern classrooms are about warehousing children for whom society has no place.

As such it is no surprise that we do a bad job of education, because no one is very much interested in educating using empirically valid pedagogical methods. They are rather interested in promoting their political and ideological interests, as you have done here.

Who is talking about "sterile seed"? Do you understand how the terminator gene works? Terminator plants still produce pollen that can fertilize other plants, but those seeds will not germinate due to the terminator.

The cleverness in the process is that Monsanto has produced a fertile strain that will generate seeds that will grow into infertile plants.

So the detrimental effects of the terminator are not limited to heirloom varieties, they will universally decrease yields for any farmer who is depending on putting aside pollinated seeds from this years crop to plant next years (this is a bigger deal in the developing world, still.)

This is not an "if" but a "when". It is as near to a certainty as anything can be.

If anyone other than a large, politically generous American corporation were proposing to do this it would be considered at act of bioterrorism to release terminator seeds into the wild, because cross-pollination with wild-type seeds is a certainty and therefore everyone not buying new seed every year will suffer from yield reductions due to Monsanto's seeds.

The idea here is that the background state of our universe is a so-called "false vacuum" that will at some future point decay into the true ground state, destroying our universe in the process. That's boring.

By far more interesting is the possibility that the Higgs mass has been driven to just above the line of instability by some new physics. This is the first genuinely "that's odd..." moment to come along in high energy physics for quite some time.

Except Iran does not have nuclear weapons nor has it ever seriously pursued them, despite Israeli accusations to the contrary for the past twenty years.

How do we know this?

Because after 20 years, if Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons it can only be because they are not seriously pursuing them. They are simply not that hard to build. Even the North Koreans can do it, and they are nothing like as technologically adept as the Iranians.

It took less than five years to go from "nuclear weapons might really be possible" to Trinity, and that was inventing the basic tech along the way, computing with human computers and timing with mercury switches and tubes. Today, with a budget of a billion dollars and a team of competent high school students you could build a nuclear bomb within five years.

So Iran doesn't have the bomb because Iran is not trying to build one. If they were, they would have had one long ago.

I was going to mod you "Funny" because this is so hilariously stupid, but thought I'd reply instead, and point out that fully 1/3 of the population of Canada was born elsewhere, and the US isn't that far behind in this regard.

Want to tell me again how 30% of the population here isn't "really free" by some stupid definition of 'free' you just pulled out of your butt? Or that the greater part of the rest of us couldn't change nations just as easily? "Minor practical barriers" are in a different category from "illegal under the laws of the nation I am currently living in."

"Free" does not mean "effortless", which seems to be the construction you are putting on the term.

While I'm in agreement with this view, I'm also aware of how much messier the AGW situation is than the CFC situation was. Anything beyond "anthropogenic gases are probably adding about 0.2% (1.6 W/m**2) to the Earth's heat budget at the surface" is extremely model dependent, and models are just not that good at predicting the detailed response of such a complex system.

I am a computational physicist, and it is very clear after digging in to climate models a bit that climate models are not written by computational physicists, who typically have dealt with much simpler systems in much better controlled (and experimentally accessible) situations, which gives us a very healthy awareness of how inadequate our simulations are at capturing anything but the gross features of reality.

If a computational model of a radiation detector comes within 10% of reality you're generally doing pretty well, and radiation detectors of various kinds are about as simple as you can get in terms of physics.

So anyone who claims that climate models are adequate or even particularly useful as guides to policy response is likely not tightly coupled to reality. We don't really know what areas are likely to be affected by what kind of events. Even apparently simple things like an increase in hurricane force winds, or possibly an increase in the number of hurricanes, are hotly debated. No one, to the best of my knowledge, predicted ocean acidification as a likely outcome of increasing levels of atmospheric CO2, but this is likely going to be one of the more significant impacts. And so on.

As such, it behooves us to pursue a number of policies that won't address any specific threat, but which will a) reduce human greenhouse gas emissions and b) increase our ability to respond the climate-driven humanitarian disasters. In the former category would be nuclear power development and other green power sources, and in the latter things like increased funds put aside for international relief via existing organizations.

These positive actions have zero political support, however: people who are beating the drums regarding AGW policy are almost uniformly putting it in terms of controls and limits and restrictions on other people, which we know from far too much history never ends well, and certainly never solves the problem it was supposedly intended to address.

And the Lack of Reading Comprehension Award goes to the guy who wrote the above, putting words in the GP's mouth and then maligning them on the basis of that fantasy.

It's so much easier to win arguments with imaginary opponents who can be vilified for saying outrageous things.

With regard to economics: while it does not explain all of human behaviour, it is difficult to defend the hypothesis, beloved by Lefties in particular, that "economics doesn't matter".

Economics matters, and it is not "putting economics first" to say this, but rather recognizing that economics imposes constraints on any solution to the problem of anthropogenic climate change. The anti-AGW community are firmly convinced that the pro-AGW community consists solely of people like you, who think that the reality of AGW is somehow justification to impose your own anti-economic agenda on the rest of the world.

By responding as you are, you are playing exactly the role the anti-AGW community wants you to play, bolstering their support amongst the public, who will see you for what you are: a left-wing nutjob who has grabbed on to the AGW mantra as an excuse to further your political agenda, not because you care about the future of the planet (because as the GP correctly points out, any viable solution to AGW will have to take economic constraints into account, as as such people like you who deny economic constraints are important are actually an impediment to dealing with AGW.)