All the rain forests are being razed anyway. When the Population Bomb came out around 1970, the central thesis was correct. There are _way_ too many people on earth. Ways of exploiting the planet blunted the impact for several decades, but it's clear that GM foods, _if_ they are a good thing, are a short-term fix. Like steroids or meth, they are not without their own problems. People as a herd are stupid and love to breed, so should we let them starve instead of employing this short-term Band-Aid? Rock/hard place.

I would question the term "nutritionally equivalent." Do they mean "chock full of the same vitamins and minerals discounting the innate low-level pesticide."

He,he. What I find funny about the venom from some people is that Gnome 3 without a touch screen _forces_ me to use 2 or 3 times more hot key combinations and quick loads than I'm used to. Stuff people have been _telling_ us would be great for ages if we would just _use_ it. And they were right. Sometimes, it is almost like the speed and freedom of being back at a terminal.

I suspect part of the venom is that it's a bit like making a commitment to the Dvorak keyboard and if you work in an environment that requires you to switch back and forth between a Windows scheme and a Gnome 3 scheme, that can be disconcerting.

That explains a lot about 21st century America.

Frankly, I'm atrocious at maintaining numbers in visualization even if I do realize that (47*75) is half of 7500 minus three 75s. But, good god man, with a calculator? Maybe every kid should be required to use a slide rule to get a feel for the idea that this "weightiness" of a number times that "weightiness" of a number gives this approximate result because with those multiple choice options you really can just guess at the nearest answer.

Reminds me of Microsoft using their money to offer Office 97 at a near liquidation special to kill the then dominant WordPerfect -- in my opinion far superior at the time to Word.

And is "tools" why I have to update Nook for PC every couple weeks? I'm OK with the back light of the Aspire One I'm using, with the weight, even with the battery life. But I'm really getting annoyed with the "Do you want to update your Nook" window that comes around like a bad friend (and takes focus). So far, the program works great with WINE but with the mandatory fortnightly updates, I'm just waiting for the moment when a spokesman says, "Linux? People are using Nook for PC on linux? We never intended that so if our latest, improved version broke compatibility, it isn't our problem." What are the odds I'll see that in the future?

I guess that's why I'm neither encouraged nor discouraged by OWS at this point. This is their "Summer of Love." Last time the young people got uppity, they started shooting them. We'll see where this is a few years from now. Will that guy watching TV in rural Kansas care if they're shooting people in the streets, because, you know, it isn't just FOX. The mainstream media can always pull up a clip of a protester looking ugly, so people need to get over their Jesus complex of creating images of glorious suffering for the cause. People remember that photo of the woman in shock kneeling over the body at Kent State? She got inundated with death threats and it crushed her. And mostly what the 60's got us was the Neocon counter-revolution that has so successfully destroyed this country. Will OWS help crank that up to a new level? Just saying, if this uprising doesn't coalesce into a movement that succeeds in changing the country, the price of failure could be a murderously crazy backlash. As if this country weren't crazy enough already. So we'll see whether this becomes a grass-roots movement or fails miserably as media performance.

Totally agree on the price. 23andme.com periodically runs specials at $99, they've even done FREE+S&H, (with $9/month for a year commitment) and provides a ton of results on disease susceptibility, carrier status, traits, and continuing results as research comes in plus their ancestry and "cousins" angle, message boards, and informative blogs.

I don't know. They say I'm "CC" with two working copies of ACTN3 and I've never played "football, rugby, wrestling, or hockey" but I did finish three marathons in my early thirties. Seems like total reflex response time often has more practical value in sports than just "fast twitch muscle response" so it wouldn't surprise me if assessing the value of ACGN3 gets fuzzy.

War, pestilence, famine. The classics never get old.

The people who say we should "consume less" seem to discount people's pesky habit of eating and how we're gleaning the land and oceans bare.

Intelligent population control? He, he. That's a good one.

That stargate has to be around here somewhere.

Really? Assuming we actually can't go that close to the speed of light, much less faster, shouldn't we be looking at uploading our consciousnesses to quantum dots first so the payload is manageable?

Could be. The initial iteration of KDE4 sent me back to my Gnome past. There's much I like about Gnome 3 so I have to wonder whether this isn't just another v.1.0 scuffle. Surely, Gnome _will_ return desktop icons, or panel icons, or SOMETHING for removeable media, won't they? As for keyboard commands, I'm rather glad to be forced to _finally_ learn them and find it rather bumusing that "power users" hate the idea.

One of those with a "click" if you really want to know directive. They claim the genetic link is quite strong and APOE gene variants can be a predictor.

I worked for CTY for a few years in the late '80s. I never fully digested the history of the politics but CTY and TIP apparently agreed that CTY would get the coasts for talent search and TIP would get the interior. Didn't seem to me like that was a great deal for TIP. That was a long time ago. Wasn't TIP based on the ACT? CTY had kids from TIP's territory too. Fine if you heard about it. They just didn't promote in each other's territory.

Glad it worked out for you. Back then the internet wasn't common, dial-up like CompuServe was just getting into the home and I know the opportunity for kids to mingle with kids like themselves was a really intense experience. The RA's used to joke that the final dance was hell. They practically had to say, "Untangle yourself from that boy and go to the dorm. You're never going to see each other again for the rest of your lives. Until you die!"

I worked _for_ CTY in Baltimore and spent two summers on site at F&M in the '80s. It seemed like an extraordinary program. There was some institutional regimentation however, and I hear you about "Mandatory Fun." You understand that since you were hardly off campus, in class all day and study hall in the evening before being herded to your dorm "Mandatory Fun" was taken very seriously and intentionally planned to burn off youthful energy so you wouldn't go stir crazy?

True. True. True. But as someone who vaguely remembers the concern over Sputnik, I can't stop thinking that this is the first time America can't put a person into space since I was barely 10 and John F. Kennedy was starting his fourth full month in office. I too hope private industry doesn't kill off too many astronauts coming in under a profitable budget but I also wonder whether it's just another symptom of the advancing neo-Dark Ages where some guy in the 25th century will write poetry about the "giants" who jumped to the moon.