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I strongly disagree..

They will track how long you play WoW, what you buy and put you in prison for that Virus that downloads pr0n.

Do you really think the gov't cares how long you play WoW, what you buy or how much you like to jerk off? They don't. And, if their "little black boxes" are monitoring your traffic, they should be able to tell the difference between a pent-up user and a malicious downloader, by the type and amount of traffic. They do even take legal action unless it is illegal content that you are surfing.

This is getting way out of control very fast.

How do you figure?

One thing for sure though, you won't run LINUX, you won't run anything except what that black box says you can run.

First off, no body is going to tell me what I can and can't run on my network (which happens to be 98% Linux). This wicked evil government has put laws in place to prevent monopolies, which is exactly what you are saying would happen.

Ironically there is a very real chance that only the collusion of fascism can take down Open Source because companies can't compete against it and governments absolutely hate systems built in the open because they can't lie about what they are doing to the masses.

The US government USES F/OSS systems in their own infrastructure and even publish whitepapers on hardening said systems to comply with DoD standards. For you to state that they hate open systems is to point out the fact that you have no idea what you are talking about, in that regard. Personally, I find the NSA/DOD whitepapers on open-source sercurity to be some of the best.

Seriously, people. Do some research into matters and gain a better understanding of the way things currently are before spouting that the government is bringing about a dystopian future by wanting to monitor and secure critical national infrastructures and the infrastructures of those third-parties that are put in charge of them. IMO, I think the government SHOULD step up security on the cyber front. God knows they have been pretty lacking

The Telegraph - 2nd March
New Scientist - 2nd March
Fox News - 2nd March
Popsci - 3rd March
Huffington Post - 2nd March
The Economist - 22nd April
The Daily Mail - 2nd March
Time - 10th March

Etc etc.

The greatest risk with GM food is possibly not the food itself, but the lack of biodiversity that using such crops exclusively will lead to.

As an example, the Cavendish banana is practically all the same clone:
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-06/can-fruit-be-saved

GM foods are not far off, since the genome needs to be tightly controlled in order to guarantee the presence of the artificially introduced genes.

There was an article about this in this months Popular Science

The Air Force has at least a couple of incidents of no comms from a Predator/Reaper back to home base. The a/c is supposed to circle and reestablish, or eventually fly back towards home base. One in Afghanistan apparently went off by itself and wouldn't respond. They had to send a manned F-16 to shoot it down.

Trauma care, radar, night vision, Jeeps, submarines, swiss army knives and roads. Oh Yeah - Flying Death Lasers http://www.popsci.com/node/19965

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-07/eestor-almost-ready-lead-technological-revolution

Do you mean like BOB the Big Ol' Battery in Presidio Texas?

As a far better article over at PopSci notes, the team includes a variety of physicists and engineers, only two of whom have done anything in the nuclear field.

While Richard Garwin did design the first proof-of-concept H-bomb way back in 1951, he spent most of his career at IBM, and held a symposium after the first Gulf War on how to close all those burning oil wells in Kuwait.

And although Tom Hunter has a couple degrees in nuclear engineering and is (until he retires in July) director of Sandia National Lab, his strengths appear to be more in the area of managing "big science" these days.

George Cooper, Alexander Slocum and Jonathan I Katz, though? Not nuke guys.

You're thinking of the "Rods from God" program.

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2004-06/rods-god and http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10section3a.t-9.html?_r=1

http://www.popsci.com/archives

Obligatory link to Edward Teller's article "Can We Harness Nuclear Fusion in the '70s?" in Popular Science magazine, May 1972 edition.

http://www.popsci.com/archive-viewer?id=VvyLShXydNgC&pg=88

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-04/why-cant-planes-fly-through-volcanic-ash-because-nasa-tried-once It basically starts to eat the plane's internals

What that story really implies is that there was an ash cloud from an icelandic volcano over europe in February 2000. No air space was shutdown. And noone crashed (including the Nasa plane). They found some "scary" engine damage by examining their engine with a microscope.

(By the way, your link is dead, here is the google cache)

Pilots usually just avoid ashclouds when they see them. If you can't see it, it's not high enough concentration to damage an airplane.

There's some evidence to the contrary. This is admittedly an anecdotal story but it appears to come from someone who knows what he's talking about.

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-04/why-cant-planes-fly-through-volcanic-ash-because-nasa-tried-once It basically starts to eat the plane's internals. So, while it may or may not experience problems immediately, it almost certainly will in the longer run, grounding those planes while they have parts replaced, and costing a fortune in new parts, because most of the shown damage in the pictures is not safely fixable.

"A feed box hooked to the front of the device keeps cows occupied and happy. One cow can produce about two kilowatts of electricity, enough energy to power four milking machines."

And from the original article @ http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2010-04/energizer-cow
"Some studies suggest that cows that exercise make more milk..."

Well, the cows will exist because people want hamburgers and cow milk. So, the cows can stand around doing nothing but eat, or they can get some exercise. Now, I agree that they should have a space behind the treadmill where they can back up to in order to get a break, but the idea of putting their food at the top of the treadmill is genius.

According to this article, Energizer Cow, Not only do cows that exercise make more milk, but they also generate less methane gas than those that stand around all day.

So, it sounds like a win-win situation.

The only question I have is, can one make more power from capturing and burning the methane output, or from the treadmill motion?

600 different meals cooked by robot.

It's what's for dinner

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-01/nasas-puffin-aircraft-stealthy-one-man-vtol-aircraft

How does an "advancement" turn into a "finished product"?

From the (5 day old) pop-sci article:

Outside experts have deemed the approach promising, if not yet ready to replace Kevlar or conventional bulletproof materials. But the boron-carbide nanowires already show some material improvement over more brittle boron-carbide composites.

Even if a super tough but flexible fabric were made, then they would still have to make it rigid upon impact.

I think "bulletproof t-shirts" is just a bit of verbal hyperbole from the reporter, albeit fitting in regards to the process that led to the creation of this material.

The main breakthrough of the process is that the third strongest material in the world, which was previously only accessible in a ceramic (read: brittle and crystalline) form can now be formed around templates of carbon fibers (the aforementioned, t-shirts baked to perfection).

In other articles, the main emphasis is definitely on this new stronger material being an improvement on current ballistic fibers such as Kevlar.

Popsci article:
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-04/armored-t-shirts-contain-boron-carbide-nanowires?cpage=1

Actually, I read about this the other day. Rumor has it, the language requirements actually do have a purpose, that is making sure the apps work with the new profiled multitasking setups. Supposedly cross compiled apps don't behave in the same way

That's plausible (a little tenuous, but plausible) if you're talking about restrictions against using another toolchain to build your binary.

But section 3.3.1 also bans upstream tools that generate code consumed by Apple's toolchain. You can't write code in another language to write C/C++/ObjC code for you. Which means you're telling developers that they can't write tools that make their lives easier. What's the justification for that?

Here's an already popular iPad app essentially written using Mathematica:

A complete rendering pass for the e-book requires running eight parallel Mathematica processes for a couple of days on the fastest available 8-core Macintosh. But it is a completely automated process, turning a terabyte of image archives into a finished, fully operational 1.9 gigabyte iPad app. This complete automation meant that we were able to experiment with dozens of different layouts and styles, concentrating on creativity, not the grunt work of manual file processing, yet still be able to see the finished book in action after each tweak.

Apparently it runs afoul if 3.3.1.

Frankly, it's not clear to me that every iPhone app doesn't run afoul of 3.3.1. Unless you actually think in C/C++/Objective C, every program is arguably first a set of cognitive abstractions in a human brain. Or, as this article puts it, with this restriction, "Apple may thus be the first company to bet the farm on Cartesian dualism."

There are other problems with Apple's approach.

Seriously, guys, are you that desperate for views?
The article linked to in the summary got the article from PopSci, who got it from NPR.

That aside... They should probably just stick a little reactor nearby to power their community and other nearby communities. Maybe even sell some power to Mexico.
I'm sure they've got enough wasteland that you could build one on without causing too much damage to human settlements in the region (which is all the NIMBYists care about).

Oh, I don't know. Maybe we'll find a way.

From that link:
On December 8, 2006, Markus Häring caused some 30 earthquakes -- the largest registering 3.4 on the Richter scale -- in Basel, Switzerland. Häring is not a supervillain. He's a geologist, and he had nothing but good intentions when he injected high-pressure water into rocks three miles below the surface, attempting to generate electricity through a process called enhanced geothermal. But he produced earthquakes instead, and when seismic analysis confirmed that the quakes were centered near the drilling site, city officials charged him with $9 million worth of damage to buildings.

So, how much do we have to shake things up to make toads and turtles start freaking out?

(Yeah, I know that's from Popular Science, which phrase is an oxymoron. More's the pity.)

There was a article in Popular Science recently about a man that was "allergic" to radio waves, here's the link: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-02/disconnected

So it's not so far-fetched that what he is claiming is indeed possible, however what idiot with this kind of problem would live near people? Like the guy in the PopSci article I'd be living waaaay out in the woods as far away from cities, towns or villages as possible. Just my 2 cents anyway...

PopSci just had a major article on it: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-02/disconnected

What you read says IV has no intention of going into full-scale production of the devices. They have, in fact, actually made them. Here's a video of an actual mosquito being actually zapped by an actual laser actually designed and actually built by Intellectual Ventures. It appears that they're willing to do the physical engineering to build proof-of-concept devices, then license the design to manufacturers. That is, in a nutshell, the same thing that Hewlett Packard is now doing with much of their equipment. In fact, fabless chip manufacturers, like ARM, don't actually make things, they just design them, if you want to get truly critical, so IV is less of a patent troll than the people responsible for the processors that power many cellphones. Unless you accept that some companies are good at design, and other companies are good at production, in which case building a functional proof-of-concept is clearly a case of a company actually making something.

I still think their business plan is akin to licking all the popsicles at the popsicle stand so nobody else will eat them, but at least they're building working models of some of their patents.

Well, they claim that they thought it was "lost to evolution"... I assume the fact that the gene is not active today is the result of evolution. So that implies the question Why is it inactive? I would think the ability to regenerate body parts on demand would be an evolutionary advantage, wouldn't it?.

Supposedly around 8% of human DNA was inserted by viruses into our genome. It could be that a virus in the past messed up our ancestor badly enough to lose regeneration and killed of all the rest. Also evolution doesn't have a "goal" our non-regenerative ancestor was just lucky that through some trait it was the best adapted to the environment at the time and it survived. It doesn't mean regeneration had a negative side to it.

40 years ago GM debuted a working plug-in hybrid... according to the magazine, the engineers were "not waiting for a breakthrough" and it "could be built today."
WTF happened???
http://www.popsci.com/archive-viewer?id=FyoDAAAAMBAJ&pg=86&query=hybrid

seems tasteful enough Perhaps the archive was retouched.

The author attacks Einstein for

abandon[ing] the hypothesis of an ether without furnishing a satisfactory substitute for this hypothesis. As has been previously stated, the very experiment which the relativity theory seeks to explain depends on interference phenomena which are only satisfactorily accounted for on the the hypothesis of an ether

source

For a different perspective, try Ether and the Theory of Relativity

If you have the urge to make like a Martian, you may get your wish. This is the goal of Paul S. Moller, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, who wants to develop low-cost ($4,000 and up) flying saucers for personal transportation. After installing new engines in his first machine [PS, July '66], Moller recently made a series of successful test flights a few feet off the ground. With a second, eight-foot-diameter, single-engine craft, demonstrated a few weeks ago, he hopes to acheive real flying-saucer altitudes.

March 1987 (advertisement)

For the past three decades, Moller International has been studying VTOL aircraft from every angle, in an effort to engineer the first VTOL aircraft that is safe to operate, inexpensive to manufacture, and economical to maintain. This advanced technology has finally been developed and will soon be available, in the form of the two-passenger Merlin 200.

January 2005

Last August one of the longest-anticipated feats of flight since the moon landing took place in a grassy field in Davis, California. As a small crowd looked on, a red Batmobile-like vehicle shuddered, lurched, and rose a few feet into the air, its eight 50hp rotary engines screaming like hornets. After a few minutes, the craft settled into the ground.

The event might not have seemed like much—it could hardly even be called a flight—but it represented a milestone that inventor Paul Moller, a 67-year-old Canadian, had been promising journalists and investors for more than a decade.

Yeah, a little bit more than a decade, all right. What a crackpot.

Atomic bomb: October 1945, page 80

"On August 5th 1945, an atomic explosion occurred within an annihilation bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Popular Science Monthly has looked forward to such a scientific triumph for many years..."

Anyone else appalled by the lack of humanity in this article?

That is a sign of the times. We had just ended the war with Germany and Italy. The atomic bombings were meant to end the war with Japan--the nation that launched the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and brought the United States into the war. An estimated 60 million people died because of World War II. Two-thirds of those 60 million were civilians. Japan was responsible for the Nanking Massacre which did not endear them any sympathy.

Entire cities were firebombed during the war. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were less destructive than many firebombings that had occurred in the preceding years. The effects of radiation were not yet well-known to the general public. More powerful nuclear weapons had not yet been developed and the ramifications of nuclear war had not yet set in.

I also doubt it was the weapon they looked forward to, so much as the ability to use nuclear energy.

Forget flying cars, where's my fusion reactor?: Can We Harness Nuclear Fusion in the '70s?

Atomic bomb: October 1945, page 80

"On August 5th 1945, an atomic explosion occurred within an annihilation bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Popular Science Monthly has looked forward to such a scientific triumph for many years..."

Anyone else appalled by the lack of humanity in this article?

Relativity: June, 1914, page 434
Quantum mechanics: February 1927, page 22
Atomic bomb: October 1945, page 80
Integrated circuits: September 1966, page 96

Relativity: June, 1914, page 434
Quantum mechanics: February 1927, page 22
Atomic bomb: October 1945, page 80
Integrated circuits: September 1966, page 96

Relativity: June, 1914, page 434
Quantum mechanics: February 1927, page 22
Atomic bomb: October 1945, page 80
Integrated circuits: September 1966, page 96

Relativity: June, 1914, page 434
Quantum mechanics: February 1927, page 22
Atomic bomb: October 1945, page 80
Integrated circuits: September 1966, page 96

Speaking of low level radiation, and specifically non-ionizing radiation like cell phones, popsci has an article about a guy that is hypersensitive to it. The online article is four pages (I think the print article was 10-12) and it does cover a lot of ground, including arguments from both sides. I kinda skimmed over it, myself, but if you care about this sort of thing it may be worth a read.

Polls like this one are somewhat misleading, since having a population of women whose desires can be represented in unison is not what we see in nature. Rather, a population of women will want a significant amount of genetic variance (manifested in personality and physicality).

There are probably much better ways to gather information about what a population of women want(s), though I can't think of any good ideas atm.

[Disclaimer: poster is transgendered]
For genes that are linked to a psychologically unsettling and difficult condition like male-to-female transsexualism to propagate throughout and remain as a small but characteristic subspace of a population, genetic variance is clearly at least one of the more important "traits" sought. (Note, that has to be interpreted carefully, with regard to the distribution of identifiable variances under consideration.)

[I do have to note that SRS is a modern invention for my above assertion to have any substance. There are cruder ways for a transsexual to adapt that were found in the past (and, just to contrast, more holistic and arguably healthier approaches [not that I rule out two-spirit as a separate possibility from male or female, mind you]), but I would imagine a good portion of men born with such a gene would not be wont to self-evirate, thus leaving the potential for procreation and proliferation.]

-os

Here's a video with a side-by-side comparison with a Kindle's e-ink display-- in sunlight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oawX3wenxNc

As far as how the display works, Popular Science has a graphic in this story: http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2010-01/pixel-qi-lcd-screen-could-finally-kill-paper-forever

(Direct link to the graphic is here: http://www.popsci.com/files/imagecache/article_image_large/articles/pixelqi-howitworks.jpg)

Here's a video with a side-by-side comparison with a Kindle's e-ink display-- in sunlight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oawX3wenxNc

As far as how the display works, Popular Science has a graphic in this story: http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2010-01/pixel-qi-lcd-screen-could-finally-kill-paper-forever

(Direct link to the graphic is here: http://www.popsci.com/files/imagecache/article_image_large/articles/pixelqi-howitworks.jpg)

How sensitive can that technology be when we're retiring the space shuttle soon and have no replacements past the drawing board stage?

Vehicles like the Space Shuttle have one capability that no other orbital vehicle past or current possesses... a large cargo capacity with down-mass (the mass of cargo it can land with) approximately equal to up-mass (the mass of cargo it can launch with). I don't think the Chinese want an exact copy of the the Space Shuttle, but I could see reasons why they'd want technology that enables this capability. Remember, once in LEO a craft is potentially 90 minutes from anywhere on the globe*... No I'm not worried about the Chinese trying to invade the US, Canada, or Europe from orbit, but there are other places outside of South Eastern Asia they may want to project power to in the future. Furthermore, even if they decide the US went down the wrong path with our shuttle you can often learn more from detailed analysis of failures than successes.

*Oh and if you think I'm being too speculative about this, the US military is seriously interested in orbital or sub-orbital spacecraft to deliver both troops and equipment anywhere on the globe quickly.

Volkswagen is helping, so maybe they had a spare car around?
http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2009-11/autonomous-audi-tts-will-ascend-pikes-peak-course-race-speeds

Absolutely. You could even just shift the military focus to space control instead of ground control.
You don't even need nukes to do some serious damage from space. See The Rods from God
Who needs bunker busters when you can just drop a cave collapser that even if it doesn't hit Bin Laden will at least do some serious damage to his underground network.

This line stood out: "They've even launched a program to create stress-mitigating pharmaceuticals." Reminded me of the JoCo song "I Feel Fantastic", written as an accompaniment to Popular Science's article Will Drugs Make Us Smarter and Happier?.

Some native American tribes (in Mexico, I think) still are a testament to that. They walk hundrets of miles in one trip. In crappy shoes or barefoot. (After all, we’re built for it.) No problem.
And they never get sick. They have some of the best healths on the planet.

Non-European population... check.

Very far away and hard to get to vaguely specified location... check.

Remarkable physical feets (as it were)... check.

Amazing health claims... check.

Ok! You win a "Jean-Jacques Rousseau Noble Savage Bullshit Prize"!

The people you're talking about are Taramuhara Mayans in Mexico. They've been moderately studied by one enthusiast. They run barefoot or very nearly and are very good at it, strongly suggesting a case can be made for minimalist running, much to the chagrin of the Running Shoe-Industrial Complex.

The claims that they "never get injuries" and keep running into their 80's and 90's are not exactly based on a formal review of treatment records at the local hospital. The claims that they "never get sick" are just the usual hyperbolic amplification that people pursuing the "Noble Savage Bullshit Prize" engage in, heedless of the terrible damage it does to their own brains and the brains of everyone around them.

You need to be more careful: we know that if a sufficient amount of Noble Savage Bullshit builds up in the world it can actually bring about the end of civilization.

what about a bacon plasma torch?

a 15yo builds a nuclear reactor in his basement and nobody stops him. But you bring a harmless bottle with some wires in it to school and they lock down the school for a day and force the kid to go to counselling?!

The terrorists have US citizens cowering in fear. They have already won.