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Apple as a great understanding of the paradox of choice. This is exactly why Apple customers are so damned happy even though they have so very few choices of hardware options when compared to alternative vendors. If it really gets your goat that you don't have enough options, you probably aren't in Apple's target market. That's okay though, there's no need to bash them. I don't own any Apple products either.

You can actually try out these new technologies, and gain further insight into their pracical use without having to amoputate. You might not even have to amputate at all, how about assisted movement? I'd like to recommend a book on the topic of artificial human enhancement and much more called Natural born cyborgs (amazon.com) It will probably help you with insight into different user interfaces in bionics, how they work and what will probably be most fitting for you. I believe you'll find that there probably isn't much need to be as invasive a you suggest. The brain's body-image it seems, is incredibly plastic, and can easily be extended to encompass technological tools. The interface method actually seems to be more or less unimportant with some training. But there are many different approaches to interface circuitry both internally and externally that has made quite some progress in later years. So keep your arm and use it for what it's worth, but don't hesitate to augment it's function with technology. The fact the your cellphone isn't surgically attached doesn't diminish the extra capability it provides you. Also one thing most people here seems to have forgotten, yes electronic limbs need batteries to provide their "strength". But they also have the added advantage of simple mechanics; it takes power to apply a certain amount of pressure, or lift. but it takes no power to lock your limbs in contracted/lifted position and hold them there. That being one of the main reasons China is investing in exoskeletons (slashdot) for their farmworkers.

IAAP, although not in this field (and actually I don't know anything about "phantom matter"). The idea of imaginary physical quantities isn't actually as forbidden as you might think. The best example I can think of are tachyons. Non-physicists invariably hear about these particles in sci-fi (I seem to recall multiple references to them in star trek), but actually a number of current theories predict their existence. They are particles that travel faster than the speed of light, which means that their rest mass is imaginary. You need not worry, however, because they never travel slower than the speed of light. One example, supersymmetery, predicts a number of particles whose mass^2 is positive at high energies (read: very soon after the big bang), but goes negative at lower energies; hence their rest mass is imaginary and are tachyons.

Less esoterically, in the realm of electronics, the electrical impedance of capacitors and inductors is imaginary. However, one could argue that this is just a mathematical trick to aid computations.

I might also note (and probably other commenters have too) that Lawrence Krauss, who's mentioned in the summary, is the author of the famous The Physics of Star Trek, which is a great read.

the Ark of the Covenant? Give me a break. It's not a gadget. It's a box. A decorated box.

A company is expected to be profit-oriented, and 'by any means necessary' is the American Way.

Actually "by any means" isn't part of the American way. A good introduction to the American Way is Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America". Thomas Jefferson warned about a corporate aristocracy saying "I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and to bid defiance to the laws of their country."

Yahoo's in trouble. On the Mac they just don't cut it.

I'm typing this on a MacBook Pro and I have no problem with displaying Yahoo! in Firefox, I hadn't tried Safari though. I'm a member of some Yahoo! Groups and have my homepage set as the Groups homepage.

if you see an announcement that Google is splitting 2 or 3 for 1, call your broker with market orders to sell

That's a bad move. Sometimes when a stock splits the value actually goes up, if a stock is listed for $100 and there's a 2 for 1 split afterwards each stock may be worth $60. I'd be more worried if a corporation said it were going to do a reverse split, combining 2 or more stocks into one.

No it's not.

The Afghan Senate decided to go back on it's original decision But the first story / headline is much more likely to bring in people from the RSS readers / aggregators etc. Not that internet censorship isn't a topic worth discussing; but the latest information is more useful than this misleading summary. Sheesh.

might have had to tell you there's a hard disk inside the box, but once you know that, the rest is obvious

No, it's not - and that's why they got a patent. The patent isn't for "recording to a hard disk", it's a patent on a very specific method of writing data to the hard disk.

One of the founders of TiVo has a chapter in Founders At Work. He discusses the problems of getting TiVo functionality into low-end commodity hardware in the late '90s. If you read that, you'll get a better understanding of why they received a patent for it.

I'll also point out that Echostar/Dish believes that their new DVRs don't infringe on TiVo's patents - something which wouldn't be possible if the patent was just for "recording video to a hard disk."

Seymour Benzer's group at Caltech demonstrated that male homosexual fruitflys (must ignore obvious pun...) have genetically different brains from male heterosexual flys. Benzer's group isolated the key difference down to some six cells in the portion of the fly's brain that is responsible for sexual attraction. They found that in the case of the homosexual fly, the cells had inherited two x chromosomes in lieu of the ordinary x-y pair. They attributed the difference to an error in cell mitosis when the fly's brain was initially developing.

Benzer's group did some amazing work. For more details, read Love, Time Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior by Jonathan Weiner. The book should be required reading for any high school biology student - it's excellent.

It was widely reported from a variety of whistleblowers at the turn of the millennium that the U.S. was preparing the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter to be able to tap underwater fibre-optic cables. See Bamford's Body of Secrets for exmaple.

That this operation was carried out on the submarine named after the president who did the most to reduce spying on civilian targets shows just how petty and spiteful the professional privacy violators in the NSA are.

It was widely reported from a variety of whistleblowers at the turn of the millennium that the U.S. was preparing the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter to be able to tap underwater fibre-optic cables. See Bamford's Body of Secrets for exmaple.

That this operation was carried out on the submarine named after the president who did the most to reduce spying on civilian targets shows just how petty and spiteful the professional privacy violators in the NSA are.

In shades of 1984 , the report came from a new UK government agency called the Ministry of Privacy.

It's a bigger problem than most people like to think or admit. Two science journalists wrote about it back in the 1980's in a book that was widely and unjustly condemned by the scientific establishment. See Betrayers of the Truth by Broad and Wade http://www.amazon.com/Betrayers-Truth-William-Broad/dp/0671495496/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1201873131&sr=1-1

I doubt much has changed. Scientists are only human and the pressures they work under have only increased.

It's available new. You seem to have missed this seller at the bottom of the list.

Could well be out of print and selling old stocks though.

Says who? Who appointed you and vested you with the power to decide what the basis of a capitalist economy is?

Well, I own a dictionary, whereas you apparently do not. This makes me more qualified to speak about the meaning of words. I suggest you check out www.dictionary.com for details.

As the Father of Capitalism and the Free Market I believe Adam Smith is the most qualified to define what capitalism's responsibility is. If his "The Wealth of Nations" isn't informative enough his "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" should do the trick. Or for a debate on what capitalism's responsibility is read a debate in the Libertarian magazine "Reason" with Milton Friedman, Whole Foods' John Mackey, and Cypress Semiconductor's T.J. Rodgers called "Rethinking the Social Responsibility of Business".

Says who? Who appointed you and vested you with the power to decide what the basis of a capitalist economy is?

Well, I own a dictionary, whereas you apparently do not. This makes me more qualified to speak about the meaning of words. I suggest you check out www.dictionary.com for details.

As the Father of Capitalism and the Free Market I believe Adam Smith is the most qualified to define what capitalism's responsibility is. If his "The Wealth of Nations" isn't informative enough his "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" should do the trick. Or for a debate on what capitalism's responsibility is read a debate in the Libertarian magazine "Reason" with Milton Friedman, Whole Foods' John Mackey, and Cypress Semiconductor's T.J. Rodgers called "Rethinking the Social Responsibility of Business".

"Programmers at Work" available at amazon

No, it isn't, because a free market has no responsibility to provide for peoples needs in the first place.

Actually the Father of the Freemarket Adam Smith argued it is the freemarket's responsibility to provide for the people's needs, and that a freemarket was the most efficient way of meeting those needs. If you don't believe me and it hasn't come out for you with his "Wealth of Nations" then read his The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Back in October 2005 Libertarian magazine "Reason" had a debate on this with Milton Friedman, Whole Foods' John Mackey, and Cypress Semiconductor's T.J. Rodgers entitled "Rethinking the Social Responsibility of Business".

No, it isn't, because a free market has no responsibility to provide for peoples needs in the first place.

Actually the Father of the Freemarket Adam Smith argued it is the freemarket's responsibility to provide for the people's needs, and that a freemarket was the most efficient way of meeting those needs. If you don't believe me and it hasn't come out for you with his "Wealth of Nations" then read his The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Back in October 2005 Libertarian magazine "Reason" had a debate on this with Milton Friedman, Whole Foods' John Mackey, and Cypress Semiconductor's T.J. Rodgers entitled "Rethinking the Social Responsibility of Business".

One of the less well-known aspects of Explorer 1 was how it surprised controllers by changing its axis of spin. It was launched spinning about its theoretically stable long axis like a drill bit, but due to mechanical energy dissipation in its flexing antennas, it ended its first orbit in a flat spin--"like a juggling club" according to this book, which points out that the same would have happened to O'Neill colonies without constant dynamical control.

Basically, if you can write a program to find answers to problems that require combinations of numbers without having to go through all of the combinations, then, you create a breakthrough such that you would add insight to cracking real crypto codes such as DES, would most certainly take out the RSA and Diffie Helfman (sp?) that are used for SSL certificates (that https), and really just open the internet wide up. You wouldn't be able to have an encrypted packet going across the internet, because, anyone could read it, alter it, and spit it back out. No e-commerce, because you couldn't have secret messages, and, even worse, you couldn't even reliably tell if who you were talking to was in fact the computer that you thought. To wit, if such a theoretical breakthrough happened, someone could make a website called https://www.amazon.com/ and impersonate the credit card section of Amazon if they could put their network between your computer and the Amazon.com server. On the plus side, though, you would have a world where computers could really calculate the optimal way to build things, be able to figure out the chemical reaction needed to produce a particular molecule, and so forth. You wouldn't be able to surf securely, perhaps, but you'd most likely wind up with cures for AIDs, cancer and the cold, working nuclear fusion, batteries that last a lot longer, and yeah, some people would probably have flying cars.

Actually, the Dalai Lama has published a book that examines the role of philosophy and ethics in science: The Universe in a Single Atom.

http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Single-Atom-Convergence-Spirituality/dp/0767920813/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1201815023&sr=8-1

And actually, he does not *denounce* anything, because he has the utmost respect for science and empirical knowledge. What he does say, if I understand him correctly and can condense the point of the book into a single phrase, is that science does not exist in a vacuum separate from the human race, and that one subject that warrants study/deep thought is the relationship of human "ethics" or "values" to science.

One takeaway for me, and in the context of your post, is that "commodization " is a very subjective term. Of course we don't want to trivialize human life; we also do not want to limit our ability to constantly surpass the limits of human knowledge which will ultimately lead to the betterment of humanity as a whole.

So no, the Roman Catholic Church (of which I am NOT a member, and of which millions of people are NOT members) does NOT deserve any serious consideration in the context of science, as what it bases its judgments on is not empirical (and frankly, IMHO, is not based at all on any sort of improvement of humanity). In fact, my first thought when I see what the "Roman Catholic Church" thinks or says about anything is, "So fscking what?"

I meant a port you can use to get power from. I only see powered USB ports on computers. Not cars, nor airplanes, nor clock radios, etc.

http://www.amazon.com/Asus-2G-Processor-Preloaded-Green/dp/B001150JQ8/ref=pd_bbs_8?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1201799317&sr=8-8

By the way, its still available.

How do you see enforcing the law by stopping people from stealing copyrighted goods as controlling and censoring the internet. Obsolete publications models? If you want, there are plenty of high-tech ways to download your music per song and pay for it as well.

Sharing? You aren't sharing, you are leeching. If it was sharing you'd be creating movies or music to put up there and making $0 for it as a living. Piss off, sharing.

Well obviously I'm late to the shoutfest so rather than another "me too". How about some reading material for the next time?

Managing Intellectual Assets in the Digital Age

Information Ethics: Privacy and Intellectual Property

Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice

Intellectual Property Rights in a Networked World: Theory and Practice

Intellectual Capital for Communities: Nations, Regions, and Cities

Patent, Copyright & Trademark: An Intellectual Property Desk Reference

I doubt anyone will read any of the above let alone take to heart but at least no one can claim no one tried to educate them.

Well obviously I'm late to the shoutfest so rather than another "me too". How about some reading material for the next time?

Managing Intellectual Assets in the Digital Age

Information Ethics: Privacy and Intellectual Property

Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice

Intellectual Property Rights in a Networked World: Theory and Practice

Intellectual Capital for Communities: Nations, Regions, and Cities

Patent, Copyright & Trademark: An Intellectual Property Desk Reference

I doubt anyone will read any of the above let alone take to heart but at least no one can claim no one tried to educate them.

Well obviously I'm late to the shoutfest so rather than another "me too". How about some reading material for the next time?

Managing Intellectual Assets in the Digital Age

Information Ethics: Privacy and Intellectual Property

Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice

Intellectual Property Rights in a Networked World: Theory and Practice

Intellectual Capital for Communities: Nations, Regions, and Cities

Patent, Copyright & Trademark: An Intellectual Property Desk Reference

I doubt anyone will read any of the above let alone take to heart but at least no one can claim no one tried to educate them.

Well obviously I'm late to the shoutfest so rather than another "me too". How about some reading material for the next time?

Managing Intellectual Assets in the Digital Age

Information Ethics: Privacy and Intellectual Property

Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice

Intellectual Property Rights in a Networked World: Theory and Practice

Intellectual Capital for Communities: Nations, Regions, and Cities

Patent, Copyright & Trademark: An Intellectual Property Desk Reference

I doubt anyone will read any of the above let alone take to heart but at least no one can claim no one tried to educate them.

Well obviously I'm late to the shoutfest so rather than another "me too". How about some reading material for the next time?

Managing Intellectual Assets in the Digital Age

Information Ethics: Privacy and Intellectual Property

Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice

Intellectual Property Rights in a Networked World: Theory and Practice

Intellectual Capital for Communities: Nations, Regions, and Cities

Patent, Copyright & Trademark: An Intellectual Property Desk Reference

I doubt anyone will read any of the above let alone take to heart but at least no one can claim no one tried to educate them.

Well obviously I'm late to the shoutfest so rather than another "me too". How about some reading material for the next time?

Managing Intellectual Assets in the Digital Age

Information Ethics: Privacy and Intellectual Property

Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice

Intellectual Property Rights in a Networked World: Theory and Practice

Intellectual Capital for Communities: Nations, Regions, and Cities

Patent, Copyright & Trademark: An Intellectual Property Desk Reference

I doubt anyone will read any of the above let alone take to heart but at least no one can claim no one tried to educate them.

1. Let people copy CDs on Riptopia
2. Get detailed lists of exactly what CDs have been copied for whom from Riptopia
3. Send out the bills
4. Profit!!!

After all, you don't buy a Chevy battery to start a Chevrolet.

No, but wheels are almost unique to each model — replacing Geo Prizm with a Honda Fit, for example, forced us to replace our set of winter wheels/tires recently... While we have some decent standards already — the AC current, the bed-sizes, for example, too many things remain non-standardized. DC power is the most obvious example. Although Research-in-Motion and Nokia should be praised for trying to cut down on the number of different adapters, that is still not enough:

The Open Mobile Terminal Platform (omtp.org) is supported by a number of manufacturers that would like to see the micro USB become the standard connector. It's too early to know if they will succeed; let's hope they do.

Woo-hoo! If that reduces the number of "bricks" around, great. But I look forward to just having standard DC-outlets next to the AC ones...

Strangely enough, the MythBusters folks don't mention the maddening diversity of screws and bolts. Even inside a computer there are several different size. Oh, and they sometimes differ in the shape of the required driver too, not just length and diameter...

I doubt this is done on purpose, in order to secure future income for the company by producing the parts — computer-makers neither make nor sell the screws, for example. It is just a designer creating, what they think is ideal for the task, instead of picking up what's good enough and already available...

Computer-software vendors, BTW, suffer from the same problem — how many application-specific programming languages were created even after John Ousterhout's famous lamentation?... Even if there are some of them, which are better than Ousterhout's TCL (or Perl, or Python, or JavaScript, or whatever general purpose language you prefer), are they so much better as to justify forcing users to learn yet another language?

There's also a recent book on this topic (which I just happened to be reading today):

The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee http://www.amazon.com/Body-Has-Mind-Its-Own/dp/1400064694/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1201716211&sr=8-1

It's a readable account of how our senses and our immediate environment map to specific regions of the brain.

I guessed a URL on Amazon replying at a different story on slashdot, http://www.amazon.com/topsellers , it gives an ordinary 404 which is not clever of any kind.

On sites with actual smart 404 , it will grab the / part and do a site search showing relevant results or if it is plain obvious like my guess, even forward the person to right URL.

well, he did write Applied Cryptography http://www.amazon.com/Applied-Cryptography-Protocols-Algorithms-Source/dp/0471117099 didn't he? If you are unaware of the importance of that book for the general practice of cryptography, please take a look in the reviews at Amazon. They make much more justice to the book than what I would be able to do here.

And please don't start complaining that book is not "down to earth". Simplifying is a good thing, oversimplifying a complex subject is not.

From "Maverick! The success story behind the world's most unusual workplace" by Ricardo Semler ...

One of my first acts at Semco was to throw out the rules. All companies have procedural bibles. Some look like the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Who needs all those rules? They discourage flexibility and comfort the complacent. At Semco, we stay away from formulas and try to keep our minds open. I knew our rule book was useless when, as a test, I once distributed some additional pages for it. I asked some managers to read the new sections and give me their reaction. Almost everyone said they were just fine. Trouble was, I had stapled the pages together so they couldn't be read without first prying them apart. Funny how no one mentioned that. All that new employees at Semco get today is a 20-page booklet we call The Survival Manual. As you will see in Appendix D, it has lots of cartoons but few words. The basic message: Use your common sense.

BTW, is there anything known about diseases where people don't see tools as an extension of the body?

Oh, yes, you definitely should read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Dr. Sacks covers fascinating extreme dysfunctions of the brain (including a case where a woman couldn't recognize her entire body as her own, but considered it foreign and distasteful), yet all told compassionately and with an empathetic recognition of the humanitarian issues involved.

Philosopher Andy Clark has been seriously arguing the point for some time now that the human mind is not confined to just the brain, but can include the tools we use and the environment we manipulate. This view rejects the old Mind-Inside-The-Head concept, and says that the real genius of the human mind is its ability to export intelligence into the environment, so that we can then be "dumb in peace".

Some light reading:

• Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again
• Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence
• Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity And the New Science of Ideas

Philosopher Andy Clark has been seriously arguing the point for some time now that the human mind is not confined to just the brain, but can include the tools we use and the environment we manipulate. This view rejects the old Mind-Inside-The-Head concept, and says that the real genius of the human mind is its ability to export intelligence into the environment, so that we can then be "dumb in peace".

Some light reading:

• Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again
• Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence
• Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity And the New Science of Ideas

Philosopher Andy Clark has been seriously arguing the point for some time now that the human mind is not confined to just the brain, but can include the tools we use and the environment we manipulate. This view rejects the old Mind-Inside-The-Head concept, and says that the real genius of the human mind is its ability to export intelligence into the environment, so that we can then be "dumb in peace".

Some light reading:

• Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again
• Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence
• Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity And the New Science of Ideas

There's a very interesting book that lays out an argument about treating tools about part of the body in detail. It's called Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Check it out, it's an interesting read.

I've studied this for a while, and even taken courses about this exact subject. For a detailed explanation of this principle and its background in philosophy/psychology, check http://www.amazon.com/What-Things-Philosophical-Reflections-Technology/dp/0271025409/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1201672012&sr=8-1. I have that book on my shelf, and it sets off these theories against the background of "philosophy of technology" (as the general field is called), to explain why people (and other primates) can interact this way with tools.

But everybody's experienced this: from art to videogames we extend our bodies and our minds with tools.

For starters there is contract law to keep people from signing stupid deals

http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/business-forms-contracts/business-forms-contracts-overview/

But above and beyond that society keeps people from doing stupid things all the time for example meat inspections so we don't buy tainted meat. Do you want to go back to the days of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle?" I think not...

http://www.amazon.com/Jungle-Uncensored-Original-Upton-Sinclair/dp/1884365302

Or how about the days of child labor of the 19th century?

http://www.amazon.com/Times-Bantam-Classics-Charles-Dickens/dp/0553210165

Unchecked Libertarian capitalism is fine in theory, not so nice in practice.

For starters there is contract law to keep people from signing stupid deals

http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/business-forms-contracts/business-forms-contracts-overview/

But above and beyond that society keeps people from doing stupid things all the time for example meat inspections so we don't buy tainted meat. Do you want to go back to the days of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle?" I think not...

http://www.amazon.com/Jungle-Uncensored-Original-Upton-Sinclair/dp/1884365302

Or how about the days of child labor of the 19th century?

http://www.amazon.com/Times-Bantam-Classics-Charles-Dickens/dp/0553210165

Unchecked Libertarian capitalism is fine in theory, not so nice in practice.

My response is going to be WAY OT, but another potential solution is to remove the artificial borders between the countries and (re)create a thriving market. I'd recommend the book Mullahs Merchants and Militants. The book is more anecdotal than scholarly, but it raises some very important points.

It's good enough for Europe, it's good enough for the Muslim world.

You present only a single argument that NES is the greatest of all time because it followed the collapse.

The NES drug the console market out of a complete collapse into a thriving and expansive market. The quality was kept reasonably high through careful controls on the number of games that could be produced by each licensee. (To prevent the "game dumping" problem that occurred in the Atari generation.) It set the stage for the modern video game market, brought the arcade home in ways that even the Colecovision couldn't, introduced the idea of story-driven action games rather than arcade console games, reorganized the market around a control scheme that lives on even today (i.e. the venerable gamepad), and is fondly remembered by nearly every generation of gamer.

Objectively the PS2 sold the most with the DS coming close soon.

But the majority of gamers now were introduced to gaming via the PSX, and PS2.

You present only a single argument that NES is the greatest of all time because it followed the collapse.

The NES drug the console market out of a complete collapse into a thriving and expansive market. The quality was kept reasonably high through careful controls on the number of games that could be produced by each licensee. (To prevent the "game dumping" problem that occurred in the Atari generation.) It set the stage for the modern video game market, brought the arcade home in ways that even the Colecovision couldn't, introduced the idea of story-driven action games rather than arcade console games, reorganized the market around a control scheme that lives on even today (i.e. the venerable gamepad), and is fondly remembered by nearly every generation of gamer.

Objectively the PS2 sold the most with the DS coming close soon.

But the majority of gamers now were introduced to gaming via the PSX, and PS2.

Great for music, great for games, and game development. Even though my C64 is long gone, I got one of these as a gift: http://www.amazon.com/Commodore-64-Games-One-Joystick/dp/B000701CSM It's good for some of the old favorites. Paradroid anyone?!?