Slashdot Mirror

I thought Ennis's experiment was double blinded, and was also carried out in four different labs (kind of like a simultaneous replication, although I'm sure that doesn't count as scientific evidence of replication). Also, I've read that the Horizon experiment was very different from Ennis's and therefore does not invalidate her research. See http://www.homeopathic.com/articles/media/2020_enn is.php which purports to be an email from Ennis to the Horizon researchers listing discrepencies. If this is authentic (and I have no way of knowing if it is or isn't) it would also seem that the Horizon experiment could never demonstrate an effect as the basophils would have been "killed off". A more balanced report of the Horizon results is included in the New Scientist here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18624940.300 .html Overall... I think we still need to await better science for more definitive answers one way or the other.

You would not need just the images, but also very accurate positioning data on where the photos were taken.

Quite right!

In theory, perhaps you could extrapolate the positioning information by looking at static objects in the frame, shadows, etc., but I don't think that's anywhere near practical.

No; It actually exists, now. It's not just a theory. I have a video on my hard drive here, demonstrating it ("kitchen.mp4.avi",) but I can't find it online. No matter; do a google search on "real-time camera tracking in unknown scenes" (which is the title I see when I start up the video,

It's just as you say-- those little points are called "landmarks," and it uses them to track by.

However if you had a cellphone with augmented GPS (WAAS or something like it) that had submeter accuracy or better, and you were taking pictures of a large object, and maybe included a compass chip or something like it to give you an azimuth reading, then I think you could do what you're talking about. At the very least you'd be able to easily construct a photographic panorama / flyaround (a la Quicktime VR). The work necessary to produce a 3-D model might be, as a physicist I knew used to say, "really nontrivial." At least working just from the images and telemetry data without any other subjective stuff (like selecting out the areas by hand as those 2-d photogrammetry systems have you doing, it seems).

A blue bird in industry has told me that in the next 3-5 years, cell phones will have not only GPS, but $3 accelerometers capable of sub-meter resolution sustained for 1 hour without update. (Important for underground locations.)

The work to produce 3-D models may be non-trivial, but: Did you follow the links I gave you? It's all been done- and this isn't recent: This is a few years back.

Here's a very simple example, here's a more complicated one, and here's yet another, this time dated 2000. Be sure to check out the generated 3D models.

So the techniques are out there, and they're in practice, and many people are starting to wake up that these are useful things to do. There's a lot of money to be made here. So, this is why I don't think it'll be long before this is integrated into cameras.

We have 2D camera phone scanners. Why not 3-D? Some even do OCR.

But in general I think that's a very cool idea. It would be neat to see digital camera manufacturers start to embed GPS chips into cameras; at the very least it would be cool to open something in iPhoto and see a minimap of exactly where you took the photo. I know that there are some vacation photos of mine that I wish I knew exactly where I'd been standing when I took it, and there's no easy way to figure out now. It's not like the chips to do that would be bulky anymore, now that they've been miniaturized for cellphones. In fact I think I remember a fairly old Kodak DSLR (one of their really serious ones that were built on Nikon F1 frames) that had a serial port and might have been able to connect to a GPS, for that purpose. I think it's a feature that's ready for prime time.

The cell phones have cameras, and many phones already have GPS. It won't be long before they all do..!

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6092&p rint=true has a little info on it. It's a bit tricky to find the information I read before, but the article may help slightly.

I do know that over the years, I think the past few centuries, when the speed of light was measured, it's bit slightly different each time they measured it.

Here's a link to the genetic consequences of the technology of 'civilization', through the most-recent 500 centuries, in New Scientist

I was going to post a reply pointing out there is a lot of skepticism about the effectiveness of Lorenzo's Oil, but it appears my information is old. A quick Google found this New Scientist article about a study showing its effectiveness. You can still find links expressing skepticism, but I'd say a study trumps those.

um...there are several different techniques used to harvest stem cells. Do a Google search on stem cell harvesting...

They can even be harvested from embryos without destroying it. In fact, the embryos in question that had a stem cell removed where later put into the womb of a female mouse, and 23 of the 47 came to term in spite of having cells removed. The 47/23 ratio is the same rate as the control test of coming to term as embryos that had not been tampered with...

They can also be harvested from your own bone marrow and blood, although these cells are already partially specialized. There is research into de-differentiate of the cells. This article is all the way back from 1999. Here is more information on de-differentiation, in which cells from a fruitfly have been successfully changed back to stem cells. Human trials are a bit off yet, but it's not a far leap to being able to do the same in our cells.

The anti-stem cell crowd has ingraved in so many people's minds that "stem cells=dead babies". That might have been true in the late 1990s...but not true anymore. The information is widely avalible on the net to current research. Many people, especially religious people in the US, feel the whole idea of cloning is so creepy as to do anything to stop it, even if they have to lie about it.

Since it is Christmas, I shall be kind to such a response. Mars is experiencing Global Warming.

So is NASA lying? Or don't you believe in their facts?

Since it is Christmas, I shall be kind to such a response. Mars is experiencing Global Warming.

So is NASA lying? Or don't you believe in their facts?

I read the self-same story in New Scientist some time ago...

And it seems to be getting from bad to worse...

"But the questions don't end there: two papers from MizMedi on which Hwang is not an author are also being retracted."

Actually, it seems that at least some stem cells do penetrate the blood-brain barrier quite regularly. I first saw this in last month's Scientific American (Charles Q. Choi. Baby to Brain. Scientific American 11/2005, p. 22-24.), but, since I can't hastily find a link to it, here's a New Scientist article talking about the same thing.

Apparently, fetal stem cells normally migrate throughout the mother's body -- including to her brain -- during pregnancy. They've found this in mice, and, I suspect, will find it ini humans as well.

There's nothing to say that *only* fetal stem cells have this ability, but they were the first to be noticed, since they occur naturally.

Given that the Mars Polar lander crash site has been misidentified using better imagery, the chances that this is Beagle II are low. The image shown in the article is not compelling. There is the stench of politics surrounding the result. Very nearly worked? Uh Huh.

Nice thought, but wrong. While the US is fairly genetically diverse, most of the world is not. And there are already race-specific medicines hitting the market.

Fair enough on the rebuttal, I missed that. If it's a non-language based non-culture standardised IQ test, that would be more valid as a view of IQ across nations and cultures. Writing the questions would be a bitch though :)

I don't know if you're studying the area or not, but I thought I remembered a study showing that gaming addicts exhibited many of the same symptoms as physical drug addicts, and that it seemed likely that the gaming addiction eventually became the only coping strategy they had that would raise dopamine levels and bring relief - in common with all other forms of addiction. The evidence is not as strong yet as for other addictions, but it would certainly appear that in the most addicted, gaming is little different in it's phsyiological effects than other forms of addiction.

(original link)

Actually, the effects of the depletion of the ozone layer and global warming on each other is pretty circular- UVB destroys small phytoplankton in the Antarctic. This contributes to global warming [see HERE], as well as a collapse in the polar and sub-polar oceanic food supply. I also hope you appreciate that global warming helps to slow the repair of the ozone layer by raising the temperature of the stratosphere. Just because you haven't been taught something, it doesn't mean it's wrong. And yes, the UVB is absorbed no matter *where* it's absorbed, but to be honest I'd rather it were absorbed higher up, and not by the micro-organisms that help to keep our climate stable. In any case, the ozone disappearing and reappearing *is* cyclical, but most recent science takes it for granted that CFCs and our activities on earth are seriously affecting that pattern.

FYI: this story was first reported in New Scientist here http://www.newscientist.com/channel/info-tech/mg18 825305.200

still can in a way can't you? If you have a service running with a presence on the user's desktop that has system level permissions (e.g., Virusscan) can't a user level application get a handle to it?

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2646

The BBC article cited in the main post has no mention of the redshift associated with this whitedrawf. It just says "The mass calculations are based on how the star's light is distorted by its neighbour's intense gravitational field." This New Scientist article reporting on the same news does mention redshift - I like redshift: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8460&f eedId=space_rss20 Other info on redshit can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift

Wow. I've read this story before - back when it was J. Hendrik Schon faking experiments at Bell Labs, with his collaborators eventually stuck with retracting 17 Science and Nature papers.

The similarities are incredibly striking, including (according to the New Scientist) duplicated figures within papers and between papers claiming to be different samples.

What motivates someone to (apparently) fake results like this, when they're almost sure to be caught?

Last month, Hwang admitted that some of the human eggs used in his experiments had come from junior researchers in his lab - an ethical lapse he had previously denied

And while I believe that rival cloning firms/research teams are out for blood, if their stuff is so real, why would the good doctor's own team give silly excuses for questions raise on the research topic?

as someone else has posted, this link is better

Here is a better article (with more explanations at least) than the one posted on /.

And the sad thing this is the link posted on fark.com a full day before /. did. And they did it With a much better headline.

"Slashdot.org : News for non-inquisitive Nerds"

But questions over his data only surfaced last week, when Hwang told Science that the 2005 paper contains four instances in which the same photographs were mistakenly used to represent cells cloned from different patients.

In one case, one of two duplicated photographs is enlarged relative to the other.

In a second, one of two duplicated pictures is distorted by being enlarged to different extents along its horizontal and vertical axes, Science has confirmed. "This is a level of error beyond sending the wrong file," says Robert Lanza, who leads a rival cloning group at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Now questions are also being asked about DNA fingerprint plots in the paper. The plots were presented to demonstrate a match between nuclear DNA from the donors and the cells cloned from them. So they should look similar, with peaks at the same points. But a South Korean blog pointed out last week that in at least five of the matched plots, the peaks are also strikingly similar in shape and size - more so than would usually be expected if they came from different cells.

the researchers were very lax about what they accepted as a sign, etc.
they of course had their own agenda to push

While research bias (either for or against chimps communicating) is a problem that is difficult to overcome in such a strong issue (for many), I have read quite a bit on the successes. I was referring to an instance where chimpanzee's (or another primate) did create words. The example I remember is "bad+dream" for nightmare.

they imitated some key words, but didn't originate their own

Humans have the "inventing words gene," while I believe other primates don't. But that isn't a bad thing (IMO), as it allows us to continue to understand them. If they did invent new words, they would have to teach us, and their ability to teach humans (they are, after all, not equal to our intelligence) could be limited.

Having said that this article says that it's quite possible bonobo's (a type of chimpanzee) do create verbal sounds for specific things, which I presume they've invented. I don't know if it is true that they are verbal "words," but it does bear more research.

However I don't see their inability to create words as them being unable to learn language. This page (it was only a quick search, info may be a bit suspect, but it seems fairly valid and jibes with what I've read in the past) has info on both success and failures. Why I like it is because it outlines those against the results proving language's opinions, as well as those opinions who are for it. One man called Herb Terrace doesn't believe the results so far are indicative of language aquisition, but merely "aping." Some of his complaints are:
* That the apes were were performing rote memorization tasks similar to pigeons who are taught to peck at colors in specific orders.

This I take issue with, because the page earlier shows an ape taking a word in one context "more" and using it in others. It isn't a simple case of "sign X always follows action Y" but instead, reasoning what sign X actually means, and applying it in other situations.

* Primates only signed in order to please their trainers, not for the personal gratification of using the signs.

I take issue with this, as many sources I've read say apes do spontaneously speak with each other. Having said that, it appears Terrace's complaints were actually made a few decades ago, and that research since then has proven him wrong. More info here

* A primate might learn to connect a sign with food and reproduce the sign through simple conditioning, just as Pavlov's dogs were conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell.

To be honest, is it possible to prove that human children don't speak for the same reasons? I don't think so. Think about it, when a baby is learning to speak, we heap attention and treats on them. The Pavlovian method of teaching requires this to begin with, which is then removed and the taught actions continue regardless. A problem with detractors of ape speech is that they often ask questions we can't answer when it comes to humans.

but if anyone did do some proper communicating with chimps, i don't know about it.

Unfortunately I to, do not know if anyone has. The article I linked to before, does suggest that researchers are doing their best to communicate properly with apes, but it's a hot issue for those involved. I believe current research is very indicative, but it can't silence critics yet. But I do believe it's enough (or at least enough to warrant a much more structured research program with a definitive goal of giving apes more rights) to say "y'know. Maybe we should reconsider how we treat them. Perhaps there is a better place in our society for them."

I keep hearing all of this noise about Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD but it appears that Holographic discs are coming out next year with a capacity that far outsteps either of the competing formats. If you're going to wait...Might as well wait for the best.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6065

Seeing that the source for the main article is currently ./'d, you should have time to have a gander :-)

Ok but the poles flip fairly often, geologicaly, to quote new scientist

"Records of the field direction, frozen into sediments laid down on the seabed, show that the magnetic field has reversed hundreds of times in the past 400 million years."

as for killing us due to a reduction in the magnetic field. Nope
"Their simulations show that the solar wind - the million-kilometre-an-hour stream of hydrogen and helium nuclei from the sun - wraps itself around the Earth in a way that induces a magnetic field in the ionosphere as strong as the original field."

makes sense really as the earth isn a dried up husk.

stroy here
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4985

All together now: "Intellectual Property"* is a privilege, not a right.
 
Your patent does not make you a unique and beautiful snowflake. The gov't does not usually invalidate patents outright. More often than not, they force you into a compulsory licensing scheme.
 
OMG ITS COMPULSORY!!!111
 
Calm down. Some governments won't even bother to license it.
  Asian bird-flu example. [bbc.co.uk]
 
If the government feels that its national security is more important than your patent, it can and will take your "IP". In a small fraction of cases, [newscientist.com] the government says "You can't patent that idea. It is to sensitive." And guess what... you can't file a patent.
 
  Ultimately, patents are a gift from the government to you.
 
*In this case I'm not including copyright...
even though it's a privilege granted by Congress,
it has the word 'right' in it.

From New Scientist:

A COMPUTER worm called Sober hit the headlines last week, reigniting people's fears about viruses. But while many may fret about infected emails, hackers are increasingly turning to stealthier ways to spread malicious software. Their latest target is instant messaging (IM), a wildly popular alternative to email that allows groups of friends or colleagues to chat online in real time.

"Hackers look at IM and they see fertile new ground," says Jonathan Christensen of FaceTime Communications, an IM security firm based in Foster City, California. "Although email continues to be a target, malicious code writers have become more creative." Even Microsoft, which supplies a proprietary instant messaging service, agrees. "Instant messaging has become a popular target for malicious hackers," says a spokesperson.

IM viruses and worms are not new. In 2001 two IM viruses called Choke and Hello struck, albeit with limited impact. But back then just 141 million people were using IM to talk online. Today 863 million people chat this way, and in March 2004 the volume of IM spam, known as spim, began to skyrocket (New Scientist, 3 April 2004, p 22). But because instant messages from your account can only be sent to your approved contact lists of friends, security experts hoped that IM worms would never take off like email-based malware.

Now, despite these protections, IM worms are beginning to cause similar damage to their email counterparts. "The sweet spot for IM worms is right now," says Jon Sakoda of IM security company IMlogic in Waltham, Massachusetts.

On April 14, the UK-based news agency Reuters had to remove 60,000 clients from its Microsoft messaging service for 20 hours after it detected an attempted invasion by a worm called Kelvir. IMlogic reports a threefold increase in the number of new IM worms released in the first three months of this year compared with 2004. And during this month and last a new IM worm variant has appeared almost every day, according to FaceTime.

Kelvir and another widespread worm called Bropia were detected on 6 March and 19 January respectively. They both use a piece of publicly available code called an application programming interface (API) to infect Microsoft IM networks, and spread via messages that appear to come from a trusted friend, but actually contain malicious web links. Click on one and it automatically downloads a virus that gives a hacker remote control of your PC.

The links are embedded within casual, friendly or salacious comments depending on the worm variant. Hackers have even programmed some Kelvir worms to chat with the victim before sending the link, to persuade the recipient they are talking to a friend. The worm's stock responses are sent blindly, regardless of how the victim replies, so these "conversations" can seem fragmented and illogical. But this is not uncommon even in genuine IM chat, due to the short time delay between sending and receiving messages. "It always shocks me how well these social engineering attacks end up working," says Nicholas Weaver, a security expert at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California.

Other worms such as Gabby, which surfaced on 26 April, target AOL's Instant Messenger, gaining access to contact list addresses through a flaw in the software rather than using API. And in March, a spat broke out between IM virus writers (similar to turf wars between email virus writers) when the IM worm Fatso (otherwise known as Sumom or Serflog) contained expletives aimed at the writer of the worm Assiral, which in turn was designed to disable Bropia.

Graham Cluley, a security consultant at UK-based anti-virus firm Sophos, says that email still poses a bigger threat. "While IM viruses may be on the rise, I think there will always be more people with access to email," he says. He points out that the Sober worm that struck last week, which also gives hackers remote control acce

In all fairness, Google claims that these blocked links would be inaccessible anyway. However, I think this contributes to the deception in that someone in China won't even know what news is being blocked. Insidious.

Similar stories have been reported in places like New Scientist (best example I could find at the moment) for several years. Often they just come to a conclusion that dogs, once trained, are far easier to handle than wasps and live a lot longer.

Actually, the point with Oklahoma Oil isn't because the field is exhausted. Those wells are capable of pumping just as much oil in just as short a time as the ones in UAE. The difference is the $50 per week wages for oil field workers there and the $30-$50 an hour wages here for comparable jobs. The Hubbert and peak oil projections are all about that the world will be incapable no matter the technological advancement or at any price, to produce as much oil as we consume. Hubbert published his report in 1949. Think about what was being predicted about computer technology in 1949. ENIAC was 3 years old. Even as late as 1977 the head of DEC was quoted as saying that no one would even need a computer in the home. Could Ford in the 1930's have envisioned what is possible with the new GT40? And the current cababilities that we use every day to recover oil today, let alone the possibilities of tomorrow, weren't even dreamed of in Hubbert's day. The peak oil Hubberdites are a lot like the fanatical believers in Atlantis. One author writes something that sounds good when applied to a limited scope and kept within the context of the writings, but it then gets taken over and expanded upon, by people with not as much understanding, and/or a specific agenda to push, and it takes on a life of its own.

As for the global warming/cooling, this article summarizes some of the thoughts along the lines of what I presented above. A quick google search will lead you to much more in depth analysis. There is a study, not mentioned in that article and I can't find it right now, that showed this effect occuring in eastern China by all of the smoke being produced inland and blown over the coast, also a smaller study about similar effects from the burning in the Amazon.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6458

Carbon molecules called "buckyballs" - which hold great promise for nanotechnology - but have been shown to harm fish have been made safer by scientists.

The soccer-ball-shaped carbon nanoparticles were shown to cause brain damage in fish and kill water fleas in a study in March 2004. But now a team at Rice University in Houston, Texas, US, has come close to understanding how buckyballs - more formally known as fullerenes - kill cells and how their toxicity can be lowered in human cells.

Although the toxic nature of the carbon-60 nanoparticles may be useful in medicine, for example in fighting cancer, there are concerns that their potentially widespread use in fuel cells, drug delivery and cosmetics could mean they find their way into the environment, and so into animals and humans.

"There are a couple of different manufacturers that will, and are, mass producing fullerenes," says Christie Sayes, one of the team. "They could make it into consumer based products: fuel cells and batteries or make-up," she says.

New Scientist has a better picture of the foot detail.

New Scientist has a better picture of the foot detail.

ID supporters say that there is a gap between *species A* and *species B*. But once a species between A and B is found, ID supporters say now there are 2 gaps

from the NewScientist article:
Mayr told New Scientist that there are no unique traits shared by archaeopteryx and other early bird-like fossils that are not present in dinosaurs. This would either mean that archaeopteryx cannot be classed within the same evolutionary group as birds or that this group needs to be redefined.

And that's a scientist speaking. Not too surprising, though -- the idea of class is quite artificial and was not designed in such a way that you could classify something as being between two classes.

The closing statement reads as follows:

The last shutdown, which prompted a temperature drop of 5C to 10C in western Europe, was probably at the end of the last ice age, 12,000 years ago. There may also have been a slowing of Atlantic circulation during the Little Ice Age, which lasted sporadically from 1300 to about 1850 and created temperatures low enough to freeze the River Thames in London.

But consider:

a) The authors' believe their data is robust. Their sampling rate however is extraordinarily low i.e. 1957, 1981, 1992, and 2004. So there is no idea of whether this fluctuation is unique or cyclical and, if the latter, the frequency of its occurence;
b) FTA " Some climate models predict that global warming could lead to such a shutdown later this century."

So, the effect is categorically not understood, but with laughably meagre data a link is pronounced to events 12,000 years ago, bolstered with a guess to a period of recorded history experiencing a "sporadic" Ice Age. This is what passes for science in climatology?! Bunk! Pure bunk!

And don't get me started about climate modelling ... oops, too late. There are a lot of models. When the latest ones are introduced, we learn how poor the previous ones were. And models are a really funny beast. That last link reveals that the new model "uses weather data from 1961 to 1985 and models of future weather from 2071 to 2095, which assume a doubling of the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide". Models using models must somehow compound errors, no? Less well known is that since potential variables are so numerous in climate studies, subsets are grouped and modelled linearly (via principal component analysis). This has the effect of reducing the dimension of the problem at the cost of accuracy. The latter is sometimes significant e.g. how many climate processes are linear? Frankly, climate models seem merely to be a way of currying favour with potential sources of funding using pseudo science and fear.

What if a person commits a crime and uses this surgery to escape identification and/or conviction.

Never heard of it happening for faces, but bone marrow transplants can, and do, mess up forensic DNA analysis.

Yikes!

...laura

It's nothing (on a global scale) if the reported morbidity rates are anywhere near what they are now. Of course, that is the problem ... if the disease becomes highly contagious, then we have problems.

While we should be concerned about pandemics, don't panic (yet ;-).

Related to the quoted article, I can't find an original source of the report of Lance Jennings saying that there will be 75% mortality. This may be from the current reported cases, but to extrapolate this to the entire population seems a bit extreme. (Especially when your other article indicates that we have no idea of the incidence of infection.) Later in the Medical News article, a Chinese doctor predicts 300,000 fatalities in Hong Kong alone - which is a bit over 4% of the population. It is a significant number, but not the "end of civilisation" numbers predicted.

would make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other. Provoking widespread homosexual behaviour among troops would cause a "distasteful but completely non-lethal" blow to morale

Mr. Bush has already made his intentions clear .

He has publicly stated if a pandemic strikes there will be martial law, and
the national guard, state police, local police, and "other" authorities will
block "all" travel .

My quetion to this is , who is gonna stop the birds from flying around ???

Want to take that to a WHOLE new level ???

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/8788

Remember the civet cat and Sars ???? Oh my, guess what .

This virus is changing, and it is not done changing .

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8372

If this thing becomes transmitible to the common house cat, killing and eating birds in
every city that has alley cats . We got ourselves a recipe for a bad situation .

Another point of this strain that is being missed is the mortality rate so far .

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?ne wsid=5596

If this thing kicks off at anywhere near this supposed 75%, it will be worse than the plague .

Some current numbers put it under 50% and lets hope it becomes less deadly as it mutates .

Keep in mind the 1918 pandemic was 2 - 5%, and not with modern medicine .

This has the potential for a major catastrophe .

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

20 - 50 million world wide died in a time before widespread food shipment and travel .

A pandemic has reoccured with regularity every few decades, but this is shaping up to be
the deadliest in modern times if the mortality rates are anywhere near what they are now .

I hope all countries around the world take this VERY seriously .

Ex-MislTech

... they just displace the problem. Bio derived energy will not come from First-world waste, it will come from the Third world who will deplete their forests with yet another profit making crop.

Better put here at Forests paying the price for biofuels.

Also, alcohol has been shown to accelerate cancer growth in animals. The parent article states : "Most beer has low levels of this compound, and its absorption in the body is also limited". This "drink beer and live longer" result doesn't really sound like a cancer breakthrough - the active compound was discovered 10 years ago - but more like a brewery funded marketing experiment.

Green fuel plan 'will destroy rainforests'

Forests paying the price for biofuels

Careful what you wish for.

All together now: "Intellectual Property"* is a privilege, not a right.

Your patent does not make you a unique and beautiful snowflake. The gov't does not usually invalidate patents outright. More often than not, they force you into a compulsory licensing scheme.

OMG ITS COMPULSORY!!!111

Calm down. Some governments won't even bother to license it.
Asian bird-flu example.

If the government feels that its national security is more important than your patent, it can and will take your "IP". In a small fraction of cases, the government says "You can't patent that idea. It is to sensitive." And guess what... you can't file a patent.

Ultimately, patents are a gift from the government to you.

*In this case I'm not including copyright...
even though its a privilege granted by Congress,
it has the word 'right' in it.

Complete with a photo of His Noodly Holiness.

Anyways....why did they send the probe up anyways

For the same reason we send robots into hazardous environments - it is too dangerous to justify sending humans.

We need to know how to land on asteroids. That skill might become valuable someday.

Problem solved (portable nuclear reactor).

(1) First, this is NOT the first evidence for Cretaceous grass- there's been some evidence from pollen grains in India, South America, and Africa. See New Scientist for a better writeup. http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8336.

(2) This grass (assuming it is grass and not one of its close relatives, which can also deposit silica in their tissues) is from India, not North America. The flora of North America is very well known(from both pollen and leaf fossils), and there's zero evidence for grass in North America until substantially later. So it's unlikely, to say the least, that the American duckbills and horned dinosaurs ate grass.

(3) A blade does not a grassland make. It may have existed, but it was hardly common in the way it is today. Grasslands didn't become widespread until millions of years after the dinosaurs became extinct, so it's extremely unlikely that any dinosaur was a specialized grazer, or even that grass made up a significant portion of the diet of dinosaurs.

...and where BMG were the ones who brought DRM into the picture."

Is that so?

Sony pulled the same crap with Celine Dion's album A New Day Has Come in 2002 using their key2audio DRM--the scheme that could be defeated with a felt-tip marker.

As far as I'm concerned, there should have been the same degree of outrage then as there is now.

Also - what do you suppose Blobmouse thinks of all this? Some mice get all the good mutations..