[Nate the Great]

I saw the article about induced dwarfism, and I have to agree. You want a dwarf kid, adopt one. You want a blind kid, adopt one. It's not like the orphanages are running a shortage or anything.

Uh, yeah, I'll probably get flamed for that one, but I felt that this thread, which started a few dozen half-ideas ago has gotten a little too serious and needed levity.

No, my "heat death" refers to the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and the rich getting fatter and the poor starving to death faster. At the same time, the West is supporting a large portion of the rest of the world at a rate that only allows a certain number to be helped. Specifically I refer to the Hundred Dollar Computer project. Uh, dudes, get the entire world eating two real meals a day and access to clean water before you start giving away cheap hand-crank computers, okay? For a hundred dollars you could feed a person for a couple months on a minimal rice-and-clean-water diet, right? And still have money left over for innoculations, penecillin, etc.

As for global warming, we should've been halfway through a global program to totally remove all dependency on oil (as a power source) by now. I'm not joking. With making non-oil plastic as a second goal.

To return to Asimov's Laws (amazingly a lighter topic than the current one ), I don't think anyone posulated a reason for having robots operate on any sort of "intelligent" level.