Horn presents the history as Jobs coming to Xerox, seeing a bunch of Smalltalk windows, and then becoming inspired to write the Mac GUI. Much of the design of modern GUIs didn't even come from Xerox, it came from people like Doug Engelbart at SRI and Alan Kay in his pre-Xerox days. Furthermore, Jobs didn't just see Smalltalk, he saw Xerox's prototype office workstations, which did offer WYSIWYG editing, icons, direct manipulation, and Finder-like functionality.
I guess Horn has two axes to grind, coming from both Xerox and Apple, but his version of history is self-serving bullshit.
In reality, Apple's first commercial GUI-based product, the Lisa, was based on a combination of published work, ideas copied from Xerox, and some significant but incremental improvements. Apple's second commercial GUI-based product, the Macintosh, wasn't ground-breaking anymore, it was simply a stylish mass market version of those products that cut a lot of corners in the engineering department.
At least that part, Horn realizes to some degree: "In my opinion, the software architectures developed at Xerox for Smalltalk and the Xerox Star were significantly more advanced than either the Mac or Windows." Well, that's an understatement. The point of Smalltalk was to open up the machine, to make it easy to add new functionality. Even with Xcode, Cocoa, and Applescript, Apple is still as far away from that as they were when they came out with the Lisa.
Given Apple's litigious history, I don't think there's any reason to consider these claims absurd. Apple went as far as trying to claim rights to pretty much all graphical user interfaces without even having invented them.
Whenever a patent claim gets settled, then well, that same claim can't be made again by another company -- unless they take it up with the company that won the first claim.
Huh? Whatever gave you that idea? Unless the question is decided in a court of law (not just settled), these kinds of claims can be brought against Apple again and again.
But, then again, who cares? It's not like Apple is so well behaved themselves.
Corporations are legal entities, not people, and they lack most of the characteristics that people have, like a sense of responsibility, morals, or mortality.
Some "associate / analyst / economist" up the line, looking at a spreadsheet, maxing the bottom line for profit decided to fire your sorry ass.Just People. It's all the stock market and the mantra that the investors come first.
It's their responsibility to maximize profit; they don't have a choice in the matter. If they decide to keep people on without justification, they are guilty of fraud.
And who do you think are those "investors"? It's you and it's me: it's our 401k's, our retirement funds, and our bank deposits.
Now, you can say that the system we set up is stupid, and I'd be willing to agree to some degree. But you can't blame "them" for it because there is no "them": this is your system and my system, and we decide to keep it up every time we go to the ballot box. If you want to get rid of corporations as we know it, get politically active and start beating the drums for other political candidates. You're the guilty party, not "them".
The US has copyright laws, and lots of people rely on it, including open source projects.
The robots.txt file is a clear indication of the conditions under which a copyright holder gives you access to their copyrighted materials. As such, it is not "voluntary".
In addition to probably being in violation of copyright law, it is simply rude for companies to ignore robots.txt files; if the Internet Archive does this, they are badly behaved.
If courts should decide that robots.txt files can be ignored at will, then more sites will require registration, click-through licenses, and those annoying "try to read this" safeguards, making life more miserable for all of us.
The best thing for everybody, including the Internet Archive, would be for the robots.txt standard to be enforced strongly by courts.
If you wanted to catch people doing unethical things, the best thing to do would be to create software or services that promise to hide information and then collect information about the users. To get around that, the source needs to be audited by someone, and for this kind of product, that means that the application needs to be open source.
The news in this is that we've reached that particular point in our society where a corporation doesn't even have to have the common decency to fire people in person.
What kind of phantasy world do you live in? Labor rights and relations have come a long way since the 19th centuries; companies didn't use to fire employees by E-mail, they used to work them to death and kill them.
You're confusing a company with a thinking, feeling person. Companies are like big, impersonal machines, and they have always been. Complaining about being fired by E-mail makes just about as much sense as taking the BSOD or a washing machine malfunction as a personal insult. The company doesn't want you anymore, so just move on. If people get fired too often in your opinion, then the solution is to fix the system (by working for more labor rights), not to whine about the form in which you get fired.
This is anything BUT kneejerk legislation based on media headlines, its coming up from grassroots victims of crime.
No, it isn't. There has been one victim of crime and no evidence at all showing that his perusal of violent porn caused him (or anybody else) to become a murderer. Yet, the proposed law will criminalize probably millions of people and it will give yet more ill-defined powers to a police that is already highly intrusive.
It's a bad law, and it's passed without significant. And your knee is jerking just as much as that of the 50000 people who signed.
Oops, the first curve wasn't right; both Apple and Linux have been going down, but because "apple" and "mac" are generic terms, "mac" has been holding steady.
You need to play around with Google Trends a bit to get a picture; it's tricky to find reasonably comparable terms, but here are some more suggestions:
The point is: suggestions that the Mac is on some enormously steep rising curve while Linux is somehow threatened are just not supported. If there is some other data, maybe you can share it.
I think Apple has a niche market, as a premium consumer brand, and they are good at it.
When it comes to the real world, Linux will make a lot of inroads in the business world, and from there, it will slowly but steadily move home.
I think Yager is also wrong on several other counts:
-- His view is totally US (and California) centric; in most other nations, Linux has long surpassed Macintosh so far that most people haven't even heard of Apple. Even iPod is much more of a US phenomenon than anything else. And while California used to be the trend-setter for the youth in the rest of the world, it isn't anymore.
-- Counting revenue from pre-installed operating systems makes little sense; Linux drives a lot of PC hardware sales, both with Windows pre-installed and without.
-- Calling Linux "just a kernel", while literally true, is missing the point; when people talk about Linux, they mean the kernel and the user environment. And, in fact, at this point, the Linux kernel is arguably the most limited and most troublesome part of distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, or SuSE.
I have a bunch of LED lights at home. For more than 10 times the price of a CFL, you get something that gives you a tiny fraction of the light and has an unnatural color. Even at that limited performance, they are larger than a standard lightbulb.
LED lights will happen in another 10-20 years. Right now, they are not a feasible lighting choice. CFL's, on the other hand, work like a charm; I use them everywhere, except where I need something dimmable.
A PS3 isn't like a car or a house or a stock portfolio, something where you need to plan carefully.
The PS3 will come out when it will come out, at whatever price, with whatever performance. I don't particularly like Sony, but their engineers and marketing department aren't exactly stupid either. And the PS2 also turned out to perform far less well than promised, yet was a big success.
'conveys the appropriate sense of openness, transparency and collaboration.'
"Appropriate" is one of the top weasel words. For example, in this context, it could easily mean "it is appropriate for the patent process to be closed, non-transparent, and uncollaborative, so hell will freeze over before we'll do anything to change that".
There are different kinds of "I don't understand it".
If the reviewer doesn't understand the importance of the claims or conclusion of the paper, then that's the author's problem. It's the responsibility of the author to make those clear and accessible to everybody.
If the reviewer doesn't understand the methods of the paper, that's the reviewer's problem. Methods sections need to be detailed, accurate, and take as little room as possible, which makes them intrinsically hard to understand. But that's not a problem because they are meant for reproducing the work, not for understanding it.
Given all the (meaningless) talk about reforming the academic review process, I often wonder: how much of the problem described by this professor would be solved if more reviewers had the balls to admit that some of the most novel ideas were over their heads?
They may well have admitted that, but it doesn't matter: the problem is that if the reviewers don't understand it, the audience doesn't either. While "this isn't hot" is an invalid reason to reject a paper, "the reviewer didn't understand it after 20 minutes" is a valid reason for rejection.
I have seen many novel and ingenious papers rejected from conferences precisely because they are not from the current 'fad' field.
It's particularly frustrating when the subject of your rejected papers become the fad 10 years later, and then you have to listen to people about this "hot new idea". It's happened to me a couple of times. But that's the way science works: just like any other field of endeavor, most of its practitioners are just not very smart.
In any case, you can think of paper reviewing a bit like Slashdot moderation: the reviewers are, for practical purposes, anonymous, and many of them are fanboys or zealots for their own pet approach and will "moderate down" anything that challenges their preconceived notions.
Yet, Slashdot is probably a better model for academic review than the current system, because Slashdot permits many more people to contribute and it permits a true discussion between authors and among reviewers. An even better model might be Digg because it also permits the stories to be peer selected.
First, the GP was not talking about "better" in terms of correctness; he was talking about "better" in terms of intellectual honesty.
Yes, he made a bunch of unfounded assertions in that regard. In fact, the evidence for global warming is compelling, there is widespread scientific agreement on the matter, and his charges of intellectual dishonesty are baseless. My point is that even if his charges were true, it still wouldn't matter.
Let's say that the cost of reducing carbon emissions is $1e12, and that the cost of global warming would be $1e14. Now, let's suppose that the % contribution of human activity to global warming is %30. So far, reducing carbon emissions saves us $2.9e13. [...] In short, "plausible possibility" is not enough. You need numbers, and they have to be right.
Your basic assumption is wrong in that reducing carbon emissions actually has economic benefits to society at large: it means more investments, more jobs, more economic activity, higher productivity, lower defense expenditures. Therefore, we know that reducing carbon emissions is the right course of action.
Where we can agree, I think, is that getting off of oil would be a Good Thing regardless of which side is correct. Go fusion!
We don't need fusion, and we'll likely not get it any time soon. Existing technologies are more than sufficient. The world would already get off the US's case if the US reduced its per capita carbon emissions to European levels.
Lets just replace global warming with eternal torment in Hell. Guess what. Using your logic, everyone should instantly become Christian, "Just in case".
Your analogy doesn't work. First of all, "eternal torment in hell" isn't a plausible scientific possibility, it is exclusively an article of faith. In contrast, there is significant scientific evidence for the occurrence of global warming and its human causation. Secondly, whether you condemn yourself to hell is your own business, but carbon emissions put everybody at risk.
There are plenty of people making a lot of money off of scaring other people.
Yeah, people like you, who try to scare the world into continuing the status quo by painting apocalyptic scenarios of economic collapse if we just reduce our carbon emissions to European levels.
Given that, saying that we should all do without because maybe some fearmongers are right seems kind of silly.
You're quite right: fearmongers like you need to be recognized for who they are.
Why not just let them blow up a plane once in a while, I say, and perhaps we can get rid of some of these increasingly absurd security procedures.
Because then various politicians couldn't justify wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on ridiculous and overpriced security services provided by their buddies in industry.
Terrorism is a symbiotic relationship between the people blowing up planes and the politicians claiming to stop them: the former get more attention than they otherwise would, and the latter basically get a political carte blanche.
Imagine where GWB would be today if 9/11 hadn't happened: his administration was already failing, his programs were going nowhere, and the nation was starting to realize what a dope they had elected.
People cry about the dishonesty and corporate backing that comes from anti-GW studies, but it really doesn't seem to be any better on the pro GW side.
It doesn't have to be "better". Because the potential downsides are so huge, it's sufficient for people who are concerned about global warming to demonstrate that it is a plausible possibility and that it has significant costs. That has clearly been done. Furthermore, we know that the costs of carbon emission reductions are small in comparison to the costs resulting from global warming if global warming is occurring.
In the face of such a huge downside, to continue carbon emissions at current levels is reckless. The burden of proof is simply not symmetrical; we must reduce carbon emissions until opponents of reductions can demonstrate unequivocally that continued emissions are safe.
Your kind of insistence on "balance" is a debating strategy. Don't pretend that it has anything to do with science--it's nothing more than a carefully crafted PR message.
Yes, it does "skew" the results and that's being taken into account. Particulate pollution did reduce temperatures, and as a result, global warming has been masked to some degree.
However, unlike CO2, particulates have a short half life in the atmosphere, so now that we have been reducing particulate emissions, we're seeing more of the impact of global warming.
(Note that deliberate particulate emissions would not be a feasible countermeasure to global warming: they are too unhealthy.)
Why should people have to prove that those activities are unsafe? Given the potentially devastating consequences for all of humanity, the people who want to engage in those activities should have to prove that they are safe before we permit them.
Of course, in real life, no such proof exists. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that carbon emissions at current levels are not safe, and that GM foods are negative consequences for the environment and for third world economies.
In those years of genetic engineering, they made a Chihuahua and Shih-Tzu from wolves.
Actually, it now looks like man did not deliberately domesticate wolves; instead, wolves simply evolved to be more docile and compatible with humans because it was advantageous for their survival.
Does the fact that DNA can now be manipulated directly really make a difference as to what we're doing? In both cases, we are artificially selecting genes.
Yes, it makes a big difference: genetic engineering can create organisms that have a negligible probability of arising naturally.
Also, keep in mind that genetic engineering of humans will eventually become necessary. Medical technology is allowing people with severe genetic defects to live and reproduce that would have died without it. Eventually this will result in a polluted gene pool.
An interesting proposition, but there's little evidence for that happening. In any case, the solution is what we already practice: genetic testing and counseling in at-risk parents; no actual genetic engineering is needed.
Slashdot Mirror
Horn presents the history as Jobs coming to Xerox, seeing a bunch of Smalltalk windows, and then becoming inspired to write the Mac GUI. Much of the design of modern GUIs didn't even come from Xerox, it came from people like Doug Engelbart at SRI and Alan Kay in his pre-Xerox days. Furthermore, Jobs didn't just see Smalltalk, he saw Xerox's prototype office workstations, which did offer WYSIWYG editing, icons, direct manipulation, and Finder-like functionality.
I guess Horn has two axes to grind, coming from both Xerox and Apple, but his version of history is self-serving bullshit.
In reality, Apple's first commercial GUI-based product, the Lisa, was based on a combination of published work, ideas copied from Xerox, and some significant but incremental improvements. Apple's second commercial GUI-based product, the Macintosh, wasn't ground-breaking anymore, it was simply a stylish mass market version of those products that cut a lot of corners in the engineering department.
At least that part, Horn realizes to some degree: "In my opinion, the software architectures developed at Xerox for Smalltalk and the Xerox Star were significantly more advanced than either the Mac or Windows." Well, that's an understatement. The point of Smalltalk was to open up the machine, to make it easy to add new functionality. Even with Xcode, Cocoa, and Applescript, Apple is still as far away from that as they were when they came out with the Lisa.
Given Apple's litigious history, I don't think there's any reason to consider these claims absurd. Apple went as far as trying to claim rights to pretty much all graphical user interfaces without even having invented them.
Whenever a patent claim gets settled, then well, that same claim can't be made again by another company -- unless they take it up with the company that won the first claim.
Huh? Whatever gave you that idea? Unless the question is decided in a court of law (not just settled), these kinds of claims can be brought against Apple again and again.
But, then again, who cares? It's not like Apple is so well behaved themselves.
"pen and paper"
Since OS X Macs don't need to be rebooted a whole lot compared to Windows, that's not such a big deal.
(Old MacOS systems, however, used to crash constantly.)
Corporations are PEOPLE, just like soylent green.
Corporations are legal entities, not people, and they lack most of the characteristics that people have, like a sense of responsibility, morals, or mortality.
Some "associate / analyst / economist" up the line, looking at a spreadsheet, maxing the bottom line for profit decided to fire your sorry ass.Just People. It's all the stock market and the mantra that the investors come first.
It's their responsibility to maximize profit; they don't have a choice in the matter. If they decide to keep people on without justification, they are guilty of fraud.
And who do you think are those "investors"? It's you and it's me: it's our 401k's, our retirement funds, and our bank deposits.
Now, you can say that the system we set up is stupid, and I'd be willing to agree to some degree. But you can't blame "them" for it because there is no "them": this is your system and my system, and we decide to keep it up every time we go to the ballot box. If you want to get rid of corporations as we know it, get politically active and start beating the drums for other political candidates. You're the guilty party, not "them".
The US has copyright laws, and lots of people rely on it, including open source projects.
The robots.txt file is a clear indication of the conditions under which a copyright holder gives you access to their copyrighted materials. As such, it is not "voluntary".
In addition to probably being in violation of copyright law, it is simply rude for companies to ignore robots.txt files; if the Internet Archive does this, they are badly behaved.
If courts should decide that robots.txt files can be ignored at will, then more sites will require registration, click-through licenses, and those annoying "try to read this" safeguards, making life more miserable for all of us.
The best thing for everybody, including the Internet Archive, would be for the robots.txt standard to be enforced strongly by courts.
If you wanted to catch people doing unethical things, the best thing to do would be to create software or services that promise to hide information and then collect information about the users. To get around that, the source needs to be audited by someone, and for this kind of product, that means that the application needs to be open source.
The news in this is that we've reached that particular point in our society where a corporation doesn't even have to have the common decency to fire people in person.
What kind of phantasy world do you live in? Labor rights and relations have come a long way since the 19th centuries; companies didn't use to fire employees by E-mail, they used to work them to death and kill them.
You're confusing a company with a thinking, feeling person. Companies are like big, impersonal machines, and they have always been. Complaining about being fired by E-mail makes just about as much sense as taking the BSOD or a washing machine malfunction as a personal insult. The company doesn't want you anymore, so just move on. If people get fired too often in your opinion, then the solution is to fix the system (by working for more labor rights), not to whine about the form in which you get fired.
This is anything BUT kneejerk legislation based on media headlines, its coming up from grassroots victims of crime.
No, it isn't. There has been one victim of crime and no evidence at all showing that his perusal of violent porn caused him (or anybody else) to become a murderer. Yet, the proposed law will criminalize probably millions of people and it will give yet more ill-defined powers to a police that is already highly intrusive.
It's a bad law, and it's passed without significant. And your knee is jerking just as much as that of the 50000 people who signed.
It may be free, but they are going to make up for that in volume.
Oops, the first curve wasn't right; both Apple and Linux have been going down, but because "apple" and "mac" are generic terms, "mac" has been holding steady.
t u+linux
You need to play around with Google Trends a bit to get a picture; it's tricky to find reasonably comparable terms, but here are some more suggestions:
http://google.com/trends?q=macintosh%2Clinux
http://google.com/trends?q=apple+macintosh%2Cubun
The point is: suggestions that the Mac is on some enormously steep rising curve while Linux is somehow threatened are just not supported. If there is some other data, maybe you can share it.
http://google.com/trends?q=mac%2Clinux
http://google.com/trends?q=osx%2Cubuntu
I think Apple has a niche market, as a premium consumer brand, and they are good at it.
When it comes to the real world, Linux will make a lot of inroads in the business world, and from there, it will slowly but steadily move home.
I think Yager is also wrong on several other counts:
-- His view is totally US (and California) centric; in most other nations, Linux has long surpassed Macintosh so far that most people haven't even heard of Apple. Even iPod is much more of a US phenomenon than anything else. And while California used to be the trend-setter for the youth in the rest of the world, it isn't anymore.
-- Counting revenue from pre-installed operating systems makes little sense; Linux drives a lot of PC hardware sales, both with Windows pre-installed and without.
-- Calling Linux "just a kernel", while literally true, is missing the point; when people talk about Linux, they mean the kernel and the user environment. And, in fact, at this point, the Linux kernel is arguably the most limited and most troublesome part of distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, or SuSE.
I have a bunch of LED lights at home. For more than 10 times the price of a CFL, you get something that gives you a tiny fraction of the light and has an unnatural color. Even at that limited performance, they are larger than a standard lightbulb.
LED lights will happen in another 10-20 years. Right now, they are not a feasible lighting choice. CFL's, on the other hand, work like a charm; I use them everywhere, except where I need something dimmable.
A PS3 isn't like a car or a house or a stock portfolio, something where you need to plan carefully.
The PS3 will come out when it will come out, at whatever price, with whatever performance. I don't particularly like Sony, but their engineers and marketing department aren't exactly stupid either. And the PS2 also turned out to perform far less well than promised, yet was a big success.
'conveys the appropriate sense of openness, transparency and collaboration.'
"Appropriate" is one of the top weasel words. For example, in this context, it could easily mean "it is appropriate for the patent process to be closed, non-transparent, and uncollaborative, so hell will freeze over before we'll do anything to change that".
There are different kinds of "I don't understand it".
If the reviewer doesn't understand the importance of the claims or conclusion of the paper, then that's the author's problem. It's the responsibility of the author to make those clear and accessible to everybody.
If the reviewer doesn't understand the methods of the paper, that's the reviewer's problem. Methods sections need to be detailed, accurate, and take as little room as possible, which makes them intrinsically hard to understand. But that's not a problem because they are meant for reproducing the work, not for understanding it.
Given all the (meaningless) talk about reforming the academic review process, I often wonder: how much of the problem described by this professor would be solved if more reviewers had the balls to admit that some of the most novel ideas were over their heads?
They may well have admitted that, but it doesn't matter: the problem is that if the reviewers don't understand it, the audience doesn't either. While "this isn't hot" is an invalid reason to reject a paper, "the reviewer didn't understand it after 20 minutes" is a valid reason for rejection.
I have seen many novel and ingenious papers rejected from conferences precisely because they are not from the current 'fad' field.
It's particularly frustrating when the subject of your rejected papers become the fad 10 years later, and then you have to listen to people about this "hot new idea". It's happened to me a couple of times. But that's the way science works: just like any other field of endeavor, most of its practitioners are just not very smart.
In any case, you can think of paper reviewing a bit like Slashdot moderation: the reviewers are, for practical purposes, anonymous, and many of them are fanboys or zealots for their own pet approach and will "moderate down" anything that challenges their preconceived notions.
Yet, Slashdot is probably a better model for academic review than the current system, because Slashdot permits many more people to contribute and it permits a true discussion between authors and among reviewers. An even better model might be Digg because it also permits the stories to be peer selected.
First, the GP was not talking about "better" in terms of correctness; he was talking about "better" in terms of intellectual honesty.
Yes, he made a bunch of unfounded assertions in that regard. In fact, the evidence for global warming is compelling, there is widespread scientific agreement on the matter, and his charges of intellectual dishonesty are baseless. My point is that even if his charges were true, it still wouldn't matter.
Let's say that the cost of reducing carbon emissions is $1e12, and that the cost of global warming would be $1e14. Now, let's suppose that the % contribution of human activity to global warming is %30. So far, reducing carbon emissions saves us $2.9e13. [...] In short, "plausible possibility" is not enough. You need numbers, and they have to be right.
Your basic assumption is wrong in that reducing carbon emissions actually has economic benefits to society at large: it means more investments, more jobs, more economic activity, higher productivity, lower defense expenditures. Therefore, we know that reducing carbon emissions is the right course of action.
Where we can agree, I think, is that getting off of oil would be a Good Thing regardless of which side is correct. Go fusion!
We don't need fusion, and we'll likely not get it any time soon. Existing technologies are more than sufficient. The world would already get off the US's case if the US reduced its per capita carbon emissions to European levels.
Lets just replace global warming with eternal torment in Hell. Guess what. Using your logic, everyone should instantly become Christian, "Just in case".
Your analogy doesn't work. First of all, "eternal torment in hell" isn't a plausible scientific possibility, it is exclusively an article of faith. In contrast, there is significant scientific evidence for the occurrence of global warming and its human causation. Secondly, whether you condemn yourself to hell is your own business, but carbon emissions put everybody at risk.
There are plenty of people making a lot of money off of scaring other people.
Yeah, people like you, who try to scare the world into continuing the status quo by painting apocalyptic scenarios of economic collapse if we just reduce our carbon emissions to European levels.
Given that, saying that we should all do without because maybe some fearmongers are right seems kind of silly.
You're quite right: fearmongers like you need to be recognized for who they are.
Why not just let them blow up a plane once in a while, I say, and perhaps we can get rid of some of these increasingly absurd security procedures.
Because then various politicians couldn't justify wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on ridiculous and overpriced security services provided by their buddies in industry.
Terrorism is a symbiotic relationship between the people blowing up planes and the politicians claiming to stop them: the former get more attention than they otherwise would, and the latter basically get a political carte blanche.
Imagine where GWB would be today if 9/11 hadn't happened: his administration was already failing, his programs were going nowhere, and the nation was starting to realize what a dope they had elected.
People cry about the dishonesty and corporate backing that comes from anti-GW studies, but it really doesn't seem to be any better on the pro GW side.
It doesn't have to be "better". Because the potential downsides are so huge, it's sufficient for people who are concerned about global warming to demonstrate that it is a plausible possibility and that it has significant costs. That has clearly been done. Furthermore, we know that the costs of carbon emission reductions are small in comparison to the costs resulting from global warming if global warming is occurring.
In the face of such a huge downside, to continue carbon emissions at current levels is reckless. The burden of proof is simply not symmetrical; we must reduce carbon emissions until opponents of reductions can demonstrate unequivocally that continued emissions are safe.
Your kind of insistence on "balance" is a debating strategy. Don't pretend that it has anything to do with science--it's nothing more than a carefully crafted PR message.
Yes, it does "skew" the results and that's being taken into account. Particulate pollution did reduce temperatures, and as a result, global warming has been masked to some degree.
However, unlike CO2, particulates have a short half life in the atmosphere, so now that we have been reducing particulate emissions, we're seeing more of the impact of global warming.
(Note that deliberate particulate emissions would not be a feasible countermeasure to global warming: they are too unhealthy.)
Why should people have to prove that those activities are unsafe? Given the potentially devastating consequences for all of humanity, the people who want to engage in those activities should have to prove that they are safe before we permit them.
Of course, in real life, no such proof exists. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that carbon emissions at current levels are not safe, and that GM foods are negative consequences for the environment and for third world economies.
Actually, it now looks like man did not deliberately domesticate wolves; instead, wolves simply evolved to be more docile and compatible with humans because it was advantageous for their survival.
Yes, it makes a big difference: genetic engineering can create organisms that have a negligible probability of arising naturally.
An interesting proposition, but there's little evidence for that happening. In any case, the solution is what we already practice: genetic testing and counseling in at-risk parents; no actual genetic engineering is needed.