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Yet people still come from around the world and pop across the border from your beloved Canada to seek treatment in the US, because it's the best in the world.

That's a myth, actually. But quite ironically, a lot of people in the USA seek health care treatment in Mexico.

...maybe we can smash the 90s idea that eating dietary fat makes you fat. I'm tired of arguing with people that fat is not inherently bad for you any more than carbs are inherently bad for you...

Well, I have a fun anecdote for you.

A month ago I thought exactly the same thing that you do: just because you're eating fat doesn't mean it sticks to you. ...and, actually, that's still true. It's more complicated than that.

Months ago I came across this news item:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-01/cp-adr122908.php

I read the article that the scientists wrote in Cell Metabolism (it was actually free at the time, but not anymore), which was nice and scientific and all. They took some mice, fed them a high fat diet, waited for them to become obese, then did some tests to determine if the cellular stress they suspected of causing obesity had occured. Then they gave the mice some drugs to reduce this cellular stress and, like magic, they began eating less and exercising more and lost a lot of weight, all of their own free will. (Naturally they used a lot of control groups, but I'm just summarizing.) It was nice to see that real scientists were working on the weight loss problem, given that the weight loss industry is all about pointless bullshit.

Anyway, after tiring of eating mostly oatmeal cream pies, I switched to a diet of ice cream for about a week, at which point I randomly weighed myself and found that I weighed 260 pounds, which was up from the rather steady 250-255 I had seen for the past year. I was sick of ice cream by that point anyway, so I went to the store and picked up some Stouffers heat-it-in-a-pan meals, for no reason other than that they looked good.

While cooking the stuff, I noticed the fat content was really low. Eating an entire bag was only 25% of the recommended fat intake. This made me start thinking about that study those scientists did, and how, while they seemed to carefully consider all sorts of variables, something they seemingly assumed to be an absolute truth was that the path to obesity was a high-fat diet. In fact it seemed to be their theory that the high fat diet causes some sort of stress in the leptin-sensing cells in the brain, causing the brain to believe the body has less fat than it actually does.

Thinking about it, if it were true that high fat diets cause obesity, it would be the simplest experiment to confirm it. Get some mice, feed one group a high-fat diet, the other a low-fat diet, let both groups eat as much as they like, and see what happens. Surely if it weren't true, scientists researching obesity would know.

This all got me thinking: Assuming I'm overweight because I've eaten high fat foods and reduced the leptin sensitivity in my brain, would eating a low fat diet allow that leptin sensitivity to restore itself? Since I had a week's worth of Stouffers meals anyway, I decided to find out.

I'd tried low-calorie diets before, but they never went anywhere. As I tell people all the time: Hunger is regulated by the brain. If you're not eating what it wants you to, you'll spend all day thinking about food. Despite popular belief, overweight people don't eat for the joy of it. I was eating only oatmeal pies because I simply couldn't convince myself to eat anything else, and I really didn't like the oatmeal pies all that much either. It was just that whenever hunger became uningnorable, it was easy to eat one and get back to whatever I was doing.

Even though the Stouffers meals were fewer calories than I was used to, I initially started out with just two bags a day, which is only 1500 calories or so, and yet I didn't really feel any need to eat more than that. I expected that after a day or two my brain would wise up to the fact that the same volume of food was now fewer calories, and cause me to want to eat more, but it didn't happen. I was sort of hungry, but it was the kind of hu

nyone have anecdotes for green technology IP that originates in the U.S.?

Efficient polymer solar cells UCLA

Angle-independent anti-reflective coating for solar cells RPI

Printed solar cells Semiprius

Concentrating photovoltaic technology Greenvolts

Shallow drilling geothermal GroundSource Geothermal

nyone have anecdotes for green technology IP that originates in the U.S.?

Efficient polymer solar cells UCLA

Angle-independent anti-reflective coating for solar cells RPI

Printed solar cells Semiprius

Concentrating photovoltaic technology Greenvolts

Shallow drilling geothermal GroundSource Geothermal

It's clear and undeniable that different families have different physical attributes. It's clear and undeniable that different families have differing level of susceptibility to different diseases, conditions, etc. Is one really to believe that everything is heritable EXCEPT for anything to do with the brain...really? What makes the brain exempt from evolution and heritability?

Nice straw man. I never claimed the brain is exempt from these. My claims are that intelligence is a culturally biased concept, that intelligence tests consequently have an inherent cultural bias, and that "race" is irrelevant in determining intelligence, its correlation with culture being mere coincidence. Not a word you said has done anything to refute these claims, for which the scientific evidence is overwhelming and widely accepted.

But the death blow to your argument is that there are no races. Individual/familial genetic variation is so much greater than genetic variation between races that the latter is insignificant, making any "racial" distinction on the basis of superficial appearances such as skin colour meaningless. That makes race a purely cultural concept.

How about this--if you had said the SAT was culturally biased, you MIGHT have a point. Brainpower is brainpower.

I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean, but I think you might be implying that brainpower is purely genetically or "racially" determined. If so, that's wrong; environmental factors including culture have everything to do with it (ref.: Nature, Nurture and Early Brain Development). It starts right in babyhood where interaction with the baby is an important factor in determining brain development. How this interaction is done is culturally determined to a high degree.

It continues through adulthood where our mode of interacting with the environment is culturally determined and determines which brain parts are stimulated and strengthened and which are not. For example, London taxi drives have enlarged hippocampuses because they have memorized the entire London street map. More generally, our visual processing capacity has been massively increased for the recent few generations due to television and the image culture; simultaneously, most of us now have the attention span of a gnat and have become impaired in our ability to read a book or otherwise stay on the same task for hours on end. Conversely, our ancestors would have considered MTV a form of visual torture; their brains couldn't possibly handle it. These are all very real aspects of biological brain development that are culturally determined. (Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains is a good social commentary on that phenomenon.)

More proof? The Flynn effect: average IQ scores worldwide tends to increase about 3 points per decade, reflecting improvement in education standards worldwide. They have to periodically recalibrate IQ tests because of that. In a more extreme example, Dutch conscripts gained 21 points in only 30 years, or 7 points per decade, between 1952 and 1982 (see the wiki article for the reference). There is no way for any of this to be caused by genetics. Genes don't change that fast.

In short, denying cultural influence on brain development is just as silly as denying genetic influence on the same. And "race" is a genetically insignificant factor compared to individual and familial genetic variation, which puts any and all nonsense about Africans being stupid due to genetic inferiority in the rubbish bin where it belongs.

These results don't say that global warming is occurring. In fact, they neither support nor oppose the idea at all. The Woods Hole press release is fairly neutral:

And since this cold southward-flowing water is thought to influence and perhaps moderate human-caused climate change, this finding may impact the work of global warming forecasters.

"May impact the work of global warming forecasters" is true; it might also influence the thinking of UFO chasers but that won't help determine whether they're piloted by little green men. This research will complicate models designed to model the specific effects of global warming. Given how much is unknown yet, and how much has yet to be determined by human activities (to the extent that we choose to mitigate or fail to mitigate our impact on the biosphere) those models are already only potentially correct by marvelous coincidence anyway.

Stuff like this is going to look real dumb once a cure for obesity is found. It's only popular to hate on fat people now because the weight loss industry has convinced the public that a person's weight is entirely under their control, and that obese people are only obese because they choose to eat even when they aren't hungry and they choose not to exercise just because it isn't as fun as video games and television.

You know what? I weigh 250 pounds. I fucking hate television. I don't care for video games either. I don't have a lot of energy, and so it annoys the fuck out of me to have to cook something to eat. Nothing really tastes very good anyway, so it isn't as if eating is fun. It's just another chore, like pissing and shitting, that I have to do simply because I am alive. As for exercise, I like to go outside, and I like to ride my bike, but I just don't have the energy to do things like that.

The true cause of obesity is that the brain incorrectly understands the energy reserves of the body. A person may be fat, but their brain believes that they have very little fat, and so it does what is completely logical when a person is very skinny: It tells them to eat a lot, and it tells them to avoid unnecessary exercise. The result is that people eat high-calorie foods because their bodies aren't satisfied until they do, and they avoid exercise because doing anything at all makes them feel tired, and they don't feel as if they have the energy to move around just for the fun of it.

Thankfully, real scientists continue to search for real solutions to obesity. Here's a link about a possible solution that was found earlier this year: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-01/cp-adr122908.php

The really interesting thing about what I linked to is that they didn't put the obese mice on a reduced diet nor did they force them to exercise. They simply corrected the problem that was making their bodies believe that they didn't have enough energy, and the mice subsequently ate less and exercised more, entirely of their own free will.

Thin people don't realize how easy it is for them. They might think that when they exercise, it is hard, but if it was as hard as it is for an obese person, they probably wouldn't do it. They also seem to think that when they gain a few extra pounds and "diet" to lose them, that they've experienced what an obese person must experience to lose weight, when the truth is that they probably would have lost that weight had they done nothing at all since a person's weight doesn't remain perfectly constant.

The simple fact is that no one likes being obese, no one likes eating when they aren't hungry, and running around is always fun when you have the energy. Fat people are fat because there is something wrong with them, and it isn't fair to tax them for being ill.

A lot of technologies are being developed to reduce the CO2 emissions at source, which is useful. However, are there any industrial process that will reduce the already-emitted CO2 in the atmosphere?

Before somebody says "a tree", we might need an alternative.

That's not entirely true. Most LCD TVs have speakers and most have paper cones. (Ok, most have metal or plastic support structures).

Thin speakers are not particularly new.

http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2009/04/paperthin_speakers_for_advertising.html (also covered by Slash dot here: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/03/147246

And see also:
http://www.eurekalert.org/features/kids/2008-12/acs-tps121508.php

You don't have to believe me.

But wait! There's more. Here's a link to a summary of another study. Sorry I don't subscribe to the Journal of Geophysical Research, or I'd link that actual study.

You do realise journals are ranked in acedemia don't you, Nature is ranked #1, I threw in the lowly Science rag as backup.

Academia? You're serious? Academia is a liberal bastion of socialist thought by people who couldn't get a job doing what they teach. Of course, they do good work on occasion, but never rely on a single source for information.

Refer to the NASA link and the previous list of 50 Nature and science articles. Also the site you link to does not mention that climate models predicted higher rates of warming in the Artic and The antartic pennisula, exactly what we have been observing, see IPCC wrt polar amplification.

First, I have provided my own data that shows Antarcica is NOT losing ice, or more precisely, the Souther Hemisphere is not losing ice. The difference is that my data had numbers. It showed that the ice had increased and by how much. Your data had some guy saying that Antarctica is losing ice. Sorry, but I need numbers and the raw data, not a conclusion from some guy who is looking to insure funding.

Of course, I respect NASA and NASA does good work. However, as you have said yourself, they screw up from time to time. Why just read this slashdot article that tells how NASA went with an older, less accurate method of measuring ice because more accurate data would negate the older, less accurate data. Seriously! Now are these measurements you bring up from NASA using the older "sensor drifting" tech? Yes they are because it's what NASA uses! Here's a quote from the article:

Today, however, they say that they have been the victims of 'sensor drift' that led to an underestimation of Arctic ice extent by as much as 500,000 square kilometers. The problem was discovered after they received emails from puzzled readers, asking why obviously sea-ice-covered regions were showing up as ice-free, open ocean. It turns out that the NSIDC relies on an older, less-reliable method of tracking sea ice extent called SSM/I that does not agree with a newer method called AMSR-E. So why doesn't NSIDC use the newer AMSR-E data? 'We do not use AMSR-E data in our analysis because it is not consistent with our historical data.

GRACE is not as accurate as you would believe either. I noticed that your searches were limited to two sources and GRACE data only.

So, who do you believe? Do you believe your sources that say Greenland and Antarctica are melting? Do you believe the sources that are counter to that?

The result is a mixed picture, with a net increase of 6.4 centimetres per year in the interior area above 1500 metres elevation. Below that altitude, the elevation-change rate is minus 2.0 cm per year, broadly matching reported thinning in the ice-sheet margins. The trend below 1500 metres however does not include the steeply-sloping marginal areas where current altimeter data are unusable.

The spatially averaged increase is 5.4 cm per year over the study area, when corrected for post-Ice Age uplift of the bedrock beneath the ice sheet. These results are remarkable because they are in contrast to previous scientific findings of balance in Greenland's high-elevation ice.

Truth is that you don't know. The scientists don't know. No one knows for sure. When you find a source that says they don't know, that's the one you believe. You rely on data, not opinion. Make your own analysis, don't rely on someone else's.

As for the climate prediction models you mentioned.... which ones? The ones that say we'll increase our temperature by 1.6 degrees over the next 100 years? How about the ones that say that the Northwest passage will be open in 40 years? Maybe the one that says that the north pole wil

Hopefully its not a problem. This was one of the first things I wondered about after reading the article. I then found: this link which explains the process much better.

"With this technique, the researchers were able to achieve defect-free arrays of nanoscopic elements with feature sizes as small as 3 nanometers, translating into densities of 10 terabits per square inch. One terabit is equal to 1 trillion bits, or 125 gigabytes." (from the site) - so about 125 gigabytes per square inch. That is quiet a bit of space, however I still think its a far cry from what they make it out to seem like.

I mean 125 gigabytes per square inch? How many of those would fit on something the size of your pocket..that is maybe, say 5 square inches? It would only fit maybe 1.2 terabytes... (please by all means create a grid using square inches to see how many would fit on an object roughly the size of a "normal" pocket..don't forget to round it as it'll be a platter not a complete rectangle) At this point its not worth the press release they put out unless they can get disk compression or shrink the amount they can fit per square inch even more. Otherwise the normal disk platters we have at >1 terabytes are going to trounce this and are already probably cheaper. Don't get me wrong I could see this as another step to downsize platter size, but unless they're putting multiple platters of these things in a disk then the idea of fitting the library of congress is still a far reach. And even if they do it won't fit in your pocket well...

Yes I do realize that the library of congress thing was a stretch and concocted here, but that should be their endeavor imo. Not only would it make a good marketing move, but imagine what else you could fit besides the library of congress on a single disk...although it does bring up a relative question of how reliable over time the drive would be.

Actually, those two journals are print journals I normally pick up in a bookstore. As for online sources, I'm not aware of any academic journals that are freely available online (unfortunately). For free online stuff, reading a nice variety of newspaper-like sites is probably as good as one can get. A few worth reading:

Science:

Eurekalert, Scientific Blogging, National Academies

Politics/Current events:

Moscow Times, Al Jazeera, PressTV, YNet, UN News Service, People's Daily

All this plus heavy use of Google News with custom sections, of course.

None of this is as good as the journals, but it's more current.

People if you want real breaking science and engineering news try Eureka Alerts, no forum but at least they don't pull shit like this every other week. For the sake of god there isn't even a printable version on 95% of the ad farming websites anymore because they know we would link to it. Who has time to click a page 14 times like a trained seal for a piece of tinned herring? Speaking of herring there is a technically inclined one that does not link to ad farms. Seriously, Slashdot editors if you read this, you know we are all using Adblock Plus, well at least I have ever since your animated banners showed up, do you really think we of all people would tolerate linking to a page like this? I honestly used to look forward to being able to click on your ads after reading the article because they were mostly unobtrusive, often fun and half the time relevant but I am physically incapable of reading something on a page that has animations without frustration and discomfort. I mean who can honestly absorb a significant amount of information that way? It is the Power Point presentation level of discourse, the executive summary level of detail and the blasé attitude from site administrators that their visitors would tolerate something they would not because it sells 1% more ad dollars for 10x the ads that sickens me to the point of loathing and disgust. Grrrr!

It's also been found effective against gout.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-11/ncfh-nef111308.php

Yet another moron who doesn't understand when to use PNG and when to use JPEG:
http://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/web/11285_web.jpg

I wonder if any of these shows have used this:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-10/uol-dcr100608.php

as a plot device yet?

'These results have a potential use in forensic science, since it suggests that, given large databases of names and Y chromosome profiles, surname prediction from DNA alone may be feasible.'

Instead of wasting money on growing eyes they should be figuring out how to make a
pesticide-resistant frog that can survive the f&^#ing chemical soup we humans subject them to.
Read up, kids:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-11/uop-prf111108.php

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-02/uom-htn022206.php

http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/be+as+scarce+as+hen's+teeth

Maybe, say, "Humans' Beaks"... that might buy you some time, hehehe...

Yes, I know the difference between weather and climate. I also know that science can't accuratly predicte either with enough accruacy to commit trillions of dollars on flawed solutions because some people think the sky is falling. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-02/osu-atd021207.php/

Let's use the excess heat in some parts of the chip and use that as a secondary power source.

It would seem to me that any sort of heat engine driven by heat from the cpu is going to impede the cooling of said CPU.

Maybe not by dissipation, but turning the heat into kinetic energy, effectively cools the CPU. Otherwise we would be breaking the 2nd law by producing energy out of nothing.

Perhaps what you're trying to say is that if the efficiency of the device is pretty low, the heat won't be converted to electrical energy as fast as it accumulates. But think about this: What if the device used to collect the heat goes BETWEEN the CPU and the heat sink? By definition, the sink is ALWAYS cooler than the CPU, therefore making heat transfer possible. Actually that's the opposite of what peltiers do: They use electricity to accelerate the heat transfer from the CPU to the heat sink.

Here's an article about devices using excess heat. Perhaps it's the same device discussed in this article since it's 3 months old, but I'd need to double-check.

Hmmm nope. Here's the original research page about THIS article. What's interesting is that the link doesn't mention anything about brownian rachets. In fact, there are NO articles there!

http://www.eurekalert.org/features/doe/2001-11/dl-mrs062802.php

I think this part of the computing timeline is going to be
one that is well remembered. I know I find it fascinating.

This is a classic moment when tech takes the branch that
was unexpected. GPGPU computing will soon
reach ubiquity but for right now it's the fledgling that is being
grown in the wild.

Of course I'm not earmarking this one particular project
as the start point but this year has gotten 'GPU this' and
'GPGPU that' start up events all over it. Some even said
in 2007, that it would be a buzzword in 08.

And of course there's nothing like new tech to bring out
a naysayer.

Folding@home released their second generation
GPU client in April 08. While retiring the GPU1 core in
June of this year.

I know I enjoy throwing spare GPU cycles to a distributed
cause and whenever I catch sight of the icon for the GPU
client it brings the back the nostalgia of distributed clients
of the past. [Near the bottom].

I think I was with United Devices the longest.
And the Grid.

Now we are getting a chance to see GPU supercomputing
installations from IBM and this one from MIT.
Soon those will be littering the Top 500 list.

I also look forward most to the peaceful endeavors the new
processing power will be used for... weather analysis,
drug creation, and disease studies.

Oh yes, I realize places like the infamous Sandia will be using
the GPU to rev up atom splitting. But maybe if they keep their
bombs IN the GPU it'll lessen the chances of seeing rampant
proliferation again.

Ok, well enough of my musings over a GPU.

-AI

Where?

Outside your cave. Sorry you made the mistake of trying to look informed while being ignorant of something that was all over the news. And that you think "payed" sounds different from "paid" and that verb irregularities make the language easier to learn.

Everyone's ignorant. Not everyone flaunts it.

They really need to get an adaptive UI.

Before all these changes this site was much easier to scan. Now it bunches comments up on the right side if they are nested to deep, the lines while clever are not ready for production and I just liked it better before all these CSS changes. If you guys need something to do, start reading more science and engineering sites and less game and sysadmin sites. I mean if you are having a slow newsday you aren't looking hard enough.

Like this, for example? Nano structures have interesting and useful properties; some of those are likely to interact in various ways with biological "nano" structures.

I usually get up in the morning and read news.google.com first to see if the world has blown up and than peruse the RSS feeds from Eureka Alerts before downloading my custom top 50 stories unto my Sony Ebook Reader which I recently upgraded to from my old Palm M500. On the light rail I read the news like people used to read newspapers, completely on most days unless a slew of unwanted stories is downloaded. I find reading things that may not interest me at first can become a pretty enlightening experience and I am now as of a few months ago becoming more familiar with new economic movements such as crowdsourcing and Wikinomics.

If you were smart enough to read, instead of just repeating the left's propaganda, you'd know that no cures for ANYTHING have been found using embryonic stem cells. Adult stem cells are now responsible for curing over 100 conditions.

Be careful about using absolutes like "anything" or "nothing", "always", or "never". They frequently come back to bite you. Remember, all of this research is extremely nascent, most results are just getting to the human testing phases. Further, embryonic stem cell research receives far less funding (especially in the United States) and what research does occur here is very limited. Even with one hand tied behind its back though:

• Diabetes
• Cell differentiation (think growing new organs)
• Spinal cord injury
• Brain lesion repair
• Diffuse motor injury

• Ok, I'm tired to cutting and pasting. The list is way too long. And as far as Bush not opposing embryonic stem cell research, your daft if you actually believe otherwise. He's stated as much on many occasions. 8 years ago, embryonic stem cell research was a glint in sciences eye. It's no wonder that funding didn't exist before then.

  That we have received funding despite Bush's efforts is not a sign of his support. Simply compare the funding being provided within the U.S. to that being provided in other countries. It's no wonder the U.S. is lagging far behind the rest of the world. You know what happens when a societies backwards, ignorant beliefs prevent funding into cutting edge technology? The cutting edge sciencists leave.

If you were smart enough to read, instead of just repeating the left's propaganda, you'd know that no cures for ANYTHING have been found using embryonic stem cells. Adult stem cells are now responsible for curing over 100 conditions.

Be careful about using absolutes like "anything" or "nothing", "always", or "never". They frequently come back to bite you. Remember, all of this research is extremely nascent, most results are just getting to the human testing phases. Further, embryonic stem cell research receives far less funding (especially in the United States) and what research does occur here is very limited. Even with one hand tied behind its back though:

• Diabetes
• Cell differentiation (think growing new organs)
• Spinal cord injury
• Brain lesion repair
• Diffuse motor injury

• Ok, I'm tired to cutting and pasting. The list is way too long. And as far as Bush not opposing embryonic stem cell research, your daft if you actually believe otherwise. He's stated as much on many occasions. 8 years ago, embryonic stem cell research was a glint in sciences eye. It's no wonder that funding didn't exist before then.

  That we have received funding despite Bush's efforts is not a sign of his support. Simply compare the funding being provided within the U.S. to that being provided in other countries. It's no wonder the U.S. is lagging far behind the rest of the world. You know what happens when a societies backwards, ignorant beliefs prevent funding into cutting edge technology? The cutting edge sciencists leave.

First disallow software patents, software is already protected by copyright.

I'd take it further. Disallow patents (ie. interference by the government in the citizen's business) for all areas where it cannot be scientifically justified that patents are a clear net win for society. In other words the onus is on the patent office to justify their costly existence, not on us to justify that they shouldn't.

I don't know whether patents are needed or not but that's why I came up with my proposal. Adam Smith called them a necessary evil.

Have patent times varying by field, again scientifically justified. e.g. if we have pharmacy patents at all it might be justified having the time length extended by the length of testing.

"Drug industry spends nearly twice as much on marketing than on research and development". "An alternative to pharmaceutical patents". Also pharmaceutical companies don't do all the research, for instance the NCI, National Cancer Institute spent $183 million to develop Taxol, a drug for cancer chemotherapy, then sold all the "rights" to use the testing data to Bristol-Myers Sqibb for $43 million. This was in the late 1980s, by 2000 it was estimated BMS made $1 billion a year by 2000 on Taxol sales.

After that if the patent holder wants to keep the patent then require them to pay a royalty, the first five year extension would cost say 5% of the average of revenue the product had generated the first five years.

Too easily gamed. Form two companies. One sells the product with the patented technology at minimal cost to the second company. Use structural impediments to make sure nobody else will buy it. Second company makes all the profits.

That's Hollywood accounting. Simply require anyone who can afford it to be able to buy whatever it is to be able to buy it from the manufacturer.

Another way to reform the patent system is to require patent holders to release a product utilizing the patents within a couple of years of the issue of them.

Too easily gamed. Sell a hand made, useless product at a ruinous cost that nobody in their right mind would buy. Keep patents on the shelf indefinitely doing that.

If a corporation does that it's liable to be sued by stockholders, aren't some Yahoo! shareholders suing or threaten to sue Yahoo! for it's refusal to accept MS's offer? Maybe what you're meant was that one company sets up another one to manufacture a product who then sells it exclusively the the first one. Simply make that illegal. What I said about Hollywood accounting above addresses it as well.

Reading the rest it appears you oppose patents "entire patent edifice". To a degree I am too, for instance I don't like the thought one person can be prevented from selling something they came up with independently but someone else received a patent on it first, however companies and people have to have a reason to spend the tyme and money to invent something. As Adam Smith said patents are a necessary evil.

Falcon

"Giving up" on doing a study showing a particular result means hiding results that don't agree with your hypothesis. You can't give up on something unless you've tried.

Here's one from 2003.

A report from 1998.

Some more from the 1990's.

And a Stanford professor on industry FUD in the 50s to 70s. (unfortunately light on details, it's a press release).

It's hard to find the papers from that long ago. I will amend my post though: the tobacco industry is STILL doing their best to pervert science to show results favourable to themselves.

Who says the Singularity is reliant on ARTIFICIAL Intelligence?

AUGMENTED Intelligence is actually within our grasp: for example, look at the number of people who know how to Google / Wiki any information they don't know to get caught up with whatever subject is at hand? "Well, Damn, don't know much about RAID, better Wiki it... oh, I get it!"

How long until we figure out how to make pills to make people think faster, or remember better?

How long until we get PDAs in the form of sunglasses that will allow you to automatically get the definition of words as you hear / read them?

Or Contact Lense-displays that connect to a PDA that you control using your brain?

The Singularity is not going to be an all at once WHAMMO thing, we're not going to wake up with benevolent robotic overlords announcing that the Rapture of the Geeks is at hand. It will be gradual, and those of us on the techy side will likely not even notice it.

Computers will get faster, and as we learn how to augment ourselves, we will to. Eventually we'll be able to communicate with a PC/PDA directly. Meanwhile, things like RepRap will change our world in ways we're not quite ready for. (For example, I have no dobut that a functional RepRap would be a beautiful, amazing thing in the hands of Slashdot or the OSS Community. At the same time, the idea of 4Chan getting ahold of one fills me with Dread.)

black holes emit nothing.

Oh, I'm sorry, the correct answer was "Black holes emit X-rays of varying intensity in a repeating pattern over regular intervals." Thanks for playing, though.

Ideally, you wouldn't want to store hydrogen. You would want to find a way to make it on the fly. We have problems with long term Hydrogen storage because it is so thin of a molecule, it tends to evaporate or seep through the storage containers as well as the evaporation causes the pressure to builf to a point it needs to be vented if it isn't kept cool. With long term storage, you will reach a point where energy use in keeping it cool will outplay any benefits or savings in using it.

Here are a couple of links talking about the issues.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-06/dlnl-lph060408.php
http://www.fuelfromthewater.com/storage.htm

Yea, I didn't mess with a proper link so you might have to copy and paste them. I don't know why I didn't link them properly, it seems that this little explanation uses more key strokes then I could possibly save by not including a href= and a couple of anchors. But that's where I'm at tonight.

Sounds to me like he still doesn't really understand the difference between free "as in speech" and free "as in price". That he still doesn't understand non-fiscal incentives after all these years means that he will likely never understand them, and thus will never be able to manipulate them to his advantage. Let's hope this mind set is pervasive at Microsoft.

n the drugs industry, a poster child for pro-patent arguments, a fixed-term monopoly could be granted by the licensing authority as a quid-pro-quo for getting a new drug proven and certified

Except patents aren't needed for drugs. "An alternative to pharmaceutical patents". As for funding research, pharmaceutical companies spend much more money on marketing than research and development. Then not all research on drugs is done by pharmaceutical companies either. An excellent example is Taxol, a drug for the treatment of some cancers such as breast cancer. The National Cancer Institute, NCI, spent $183,000,000 developing and testing Taxol. After the NCI spent all that taxpayer money it sold all the rights, including the test data needed to get FDA drug approval to Bristol-Myers Squibb for $43,000,000, $140,000,000 less than taxpayers paid. By 2000, years after BMS bought the rights, it was estimated BMS was making $1,000,000,000 a year on sales of Taxol.

I wish people would stop posting crappy science articles from ScienceDaily and related sites.

This is not the "journal article". This is just the Stanford press release about it. The article is released tomorrow. But there are 200 comments here from people who have already decided what they think about it. I'd like to see the author's data. I didn't think such detailed canoe info was available. "canoes of oceania" lacks hull lines drawings for instance. Here's the stanford press release, which is the same as that slashdot post. http://news-service.stanford.edu/pr/2008/pr-ehrlich-021308.html and here's the article: http://www.eurekalert.org/jrnls/pnas/07-11802.htm the article gets released tomorrow. Today I get this error: "You currently do not have access to this embargoed journal page." I assume only "peer reviewers" get access until then, so they don't get confused by multiple comments from people who haven't actually read it. If you have actually read the article or can give me access, please let me know, I've photographed, measured and drawn many pacific outrigger canoes.

The main thing to do when purchasing CFLs is to avoid the junk that's sold at Wal-Mart, Meijer, Home Depot, etc.

So, basically, any retail store where people actually shop. Thanks, Mr Lightbulb elitist! If only everyone were as tuned into the world of online lightbulb fetishism as you are.

So, you disproved your own point. The bulbs for sale to the general public are inferior, and overpriced.

And since when is "just a tiny bit of mercury" ok? It's 1/100th of what was in an old thermometer, however, an old thermometer had enough mercury to poison the average residential well a dozen times over.

There is no "safe" mercury level.

There are much better options. CCFLs suck, please stop astroturfing (knowingly or not) for the likes of Philips, GE and Siemens.

Unless the government is going to come along and subsidize my energy bill, they should have no right telling me how to use it. I'm dumping enough cash by proxy into dopey "green" research to have the right to call myself "carbon neutral" using the same logic as Mr Gore.

Sledgehammers. They provide gross oxygen levels provided by the blood in particular brain regions. A good control has to be given to subtract the actual data recordings from - because the brain is constantly activated all over, and constantly provided blood. If the controls are wrong, the study is usually not proving anything, though sometimes the reader has to figure it out. That said, fMRIs also assume that in different people, the brain is organized EXACTLY the same, which just isn't true - if it were, then among other things, we'd all have the same memories.

So, let's find another source before we believe anything an fMRI study suggests.
And don't even get me started on which brain region "does" what. Because even that isn't exactly well established. For example, how is this possible: http://www.eurekalert.org/images/release_graphics/pdf/brain.pdf (PDF warning).

Reminds me of this article: Computer model behaves like humans on visual categorization task.

4) Are there genetic conditions that promote obesity?
5) Are there viruses that promote obesity?
6) Are there different types of intestinal flora that promote obesity in humans?
7) Are there other causes that I can't think of that cause the human body to think it's in starvation mode and preferentially store every calorie it can as fat? Yes, I bet there are.

For now, the team is focusing on the building blocks of words. In a series of experiments over the last few years, Ramsey has imagined saying three vowel sounds: "oh", "ee" and "oo". By watching his brain activity, the researchers have been able to identify distinct patterns associated with the different sounds. Although the data is still being analysed, they believe that they can correctly identify the sound Ramsey is imagining around 80 per cent of the time

What about the other 99.9% of the waste products?

http://www.eurekalert.org/features/doe/2003-12/danl-nr031804.php
To date, U.S. nuclear power plants have produced 40,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel. The spent fuel consists of 95.6 percent uranium, 3.0 percent stable or short-lived fission products, 0.9 percent plutonium, 0.3 percent cesium and strontium, 0.1 percent minor actinides (neptunium, americium, and curium), and 0.1 percent long-lived fission products in the form of isotopes of iodine and technetium.

Go look in a mirror. Explain to me why you have traits of both of your parents.

Is this not descent with modification? What exactly do you think evolution is?

A change in allele frequency over time. If that isn't what you thought evolution is then you can now stand corrected.

Evolution is the fact that offspring get traits from both parents. Natural selection explains why this offspring will be successful in reproducing or not.

It's really very simple.

Here are some links:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.html

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_fact-and-theory.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4161281,00.html

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-06/uor-nsf061203.php

Ever wonder why your physician demands that you finish off all the antibiotics he is prescribing? That's right, evolution. You see, the drugs will first kill the weakest of the bacteria infecting you. If you stop, the strongest, least effected will survive and reproduce passing on this ability to withstand the drugs. Next thing you know we have antibiotic resistant bacteria. Evolution via natural selection. It's really very simple, isn't it?

another link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_resistance

To point out an error in your post. Evolution says nothing about life originating, that is abiogenisis. Evolution is what has been happening since life appeared.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-05/vt-bev051304.php