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I"m old enough to remember when X Rays were completely safe.

115 years is very old.

By 1897 the rays' dangerous side began to be reported: examples included loss of hair and skin burns of varying severity.

Yes, and the user had specifically signed up for that functionality. Ridiculous sensationalism.

Wrong on two counts. 1) They were opted-in by default. They did not "specifically" sign up for this. 2) Even if you didn't "sign up" for this by not having an account, you still got tracked "unintentionally" and were displayed ads enhanced by the tracking:

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2012/02/setting-record-straight-google%E2%80%99s-safari-tracking

No, that is a different technique. This one does use cookies, but it gets around the restrictions in Safari by doing a POST in the iframe. Details here, the Wired article is useless.

If the annoying "gifted computer scientist" and "scooping the FTC" rhetoric is too much for you, the tone come from the Wired article.

The original post by the 'gifted' man is much more reasonable. Safari by default blocks third-party cookies (you can turn it off in the settings). This post explains how Google, and others, get around it. Quote, "if a cookie is sent with an HTTP request, Safari’s blocking policy will allow the response to write cookies." So when they load their iframe in the background, the first thing it does is a POST. If that doesn't make sense to you, the summary is Google used technical means to get around Safari's limitations. Here is Google's response.

Most hilarious, irrelevant, line from the article, "Earlier this year, it was revealed that Target realized a teenage customer was pregnant before her father knew; the firm identifies first-term pregnancies through, among other things, purchases of scent-free products."

If the annoying "gifted computer scientist" and "scooping the FTC" rhetoric is too much for you, the tone come from the Wired article.

The original post by the 'gifted' man is much more reasonable. Safari by default blocks third-party cookies (you can turn it off in the settings). This post explains how Google, and others, get around it. Quote, "if a cookie is sent with an HTTP request, Safari’s blocking policy will allow the response to write cookies." So when they load their iframe in the background, the first thing it does is a POST. If that doesn't make sense to you, the summary is Google used technical means to get around Safari's limitations. Here is Google's response.

Most hilarious, irrelevant, line from the article, "Earlier this year, it was revealed that Target realized a teenage customer was pregnant before her father knew; the firm identifies first-term pregnancies through, among other things, purchases of scent-free products."

I think Cyc might be useful for certain limited domains. I would make it one agent in a multi-agent system, and use feedback to reinforce it when it provides the best response, according to user feedback.

I think if a formal language can represent how the brain stores information, it will have to tolerate inconsistency. Since natural language does this already, why not use it?

http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~jim/BBSNEURO/anastasio.html:

The cross-modal response of OR neurons could be larger than either of the modality-specific responses, and even larger than their sum. The modality-specific responses of AND neurons could be non-zero. Other neurons could not be fit into a Boolean scheme at all. For example, the responses of ENHANCED tectal neurons to a stimulus of one modality could be increased by a stimulus of another modality that was ineffective by itself. The responses of all types were significantly magnitude dependent. It would not be possible, on the basis of the data on multisensory neurons in the rattlesnake tectum, to develop a satisfying description of their response properties in terms of Boolean logic.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/november/neutrons-brain-movement-110810.html:

"If you said that the neuron was effectively voting for its preferred movement, you'd say it is voting for moving left at this time and a tenth of a second later it is voting for moving right and a tenth of a second after that it is voting for something else," Churchland said. "It would not make any sense at all."

---
Note: both the above papers present their own hypotheses about what's really going on, or how to resolve the apparent contradictions and inconsistencies observed.

In the first case, instead of P(X=Apple|S), I would use modalities in natural language ("That is an apple", "It may be an apple", "It looks like an apple" etc.). In the second case, I think I would try to use an agent model; one agent is saying "move", another is saying "don't move", and some controller makes a selection among them.

More-- ITAR regulations apply to domestic transactions as well. The product did not have to be sent to Iran for the sale to fall under ITAR, but only to be transferred to a controlled entity.

From Stanford (emphasis added):

Certain organizations and individuals are subject to trade sanctions, embargoes and other restrictions under U.S. law. These restrictions apply to both domestic and foreign transactions.

And, Stanford (emphasis added):

[E]xport controls apply whenever tangible items (equipment, components, materials etc.) are being sent or handcarried outside US borders, OR when controlled information or software code is being shared with "foreign persons or entities" in the US or transferred physically, visually or orally to foreign persons abroad.

More-- ITAR regulations apply to domestic transactions as well. The product did not have to be sent to Iran for the sale to fall under ITAR, but only to be transferred to a controlled entity.

From Stanford (emphasis added):

Certain organizations and individuals are subject to trade sanctions, embargoes and other restrictions under U.S. law. These restrictions apply to both domestic and foreign transactions.

And, Stanford (emphasis added):

[E]xport controls apply whenever tangible items (equipment, components, materials etc.) are being sent or handcarried outside US borders, OR when controlled information or software code is being shared with "foreign persons or entities" in the US or transferred physically, visually or orally to foreign persons abroad.

Notice how he's fulfilled his own prophecy, by proving that he can't represent his knowledge in words...but I think this line of argument has much more to do with social, rather than artificial, intelligence. At any rate, I'll continue trying to falsify his hypothesis by trying to represent natural language in language.

Natural language has the flexibility to represent the inconsistencies and paradoxes that abound all around us. Formal systems have problems because they try to ban inconsistency; but we have to reason in the presence of inconsistency. Natural language gives us a natural tool to represent inconsistent knowledge, and to reason with it. Formal languages are a subset of natural language; natural language is more expressive than formal languages; natural language can be as explicit as we want it to be, while also retaining its flexibility in other contexts. In allowing multiple meanings for words, for example, natural language can adapt to changing conditions (so that "web", "site", "hit", "mouse", etc. all took on new meanings in the last few decades).

Natural language is AI-complete (http://see.stanford.edu/materials/ainlpcs224n/transcripts/NaturalLanguageProcessing-Lecture01.html). When we deal with it from the ground up, representing our knowledge in it instead of creating impedance mismatches by trying to convert it to a formal language representation, we'll have to figure out the algorithms that can be applied to solve (all?) the other problems of AI.

Do you not know who Sebastian Thrun is? Don't confuse him as some huckster of side-of-the road scam diploma mills. His involvement with this lends the organization some serious credibility.

Von Neumann was much more influential than Turing. Not only did von Neumann do brilliant work in multiple areas of mathematics, he invented modern computer architecture. Babbage's design was more like a Jacquard loom card reader coupled to a calculator. Turing's theoretical machine had to roll a long tape back and forth, and the cryptographic machines were essentially hard-wired or plugboard-programmed. Those machines are closer in concept to Hollerith/IBM tabulators of the 1920s to 1950s.

Von Neumann got computer architecture right. He saw that the right answer was RAM, with programs and data in the same memory: The device requires a considerable memory. While it appeared that various parts of this memory have to perform functions which differ somewhat in their nature and considerably in their purpose, it is nevertheless tempting to treat the entire memory as one organ, and to have its parts even as interchangeable as possible for the various functions enumerated above."

He also figured out that 1) everything inside the machine should be binary, not decimal, 2) memory sizes should be a power of two, 3) about 2^18 bits of RAM were needed to get any useful work done, 4) delay-line memory would work in the short term, but "iconoscope" memory (see Williams tube), which is random access, would be better, and 5) what a reasonable instruction set should look like.

I think you'll find this enlightening. It sums up what all of us are saying, but better

http://engineering.stanford.edu/research/ate/aiken

If CSIRO is a patent troll then so is every major university. Stanford University's Office of Technology Licensing, for example, exists to generate income through the licencing of Stanford developed technologies which they then invest back into research and education. CSIRO similarly invests its income back into research and the Science and Industry Endowment Fund. The idea that research organisations are patent trolls and shouldn't be allowed to licence their inventions to others in order to maintain their focus on research is both farcical and intellectually bankrupt. Joe Mullin's jingoistic and, frankly, pathetically insular article isn't worth a second reading.

"Some think that the Sun's output in visible light peaks in the yellow. However, the Sun's visible output peaks in the green": http://solar-center.stanford.edu/SID/activities/GreenSun.html

"Well this year sales are down 17.1% for the top 400 publishing houses over last year"

Um, that's just plain wrong. The Association of American Publishers even says so right here. In fact, even just print books alone have been doing quite well, and ebooks have significantly added to that.

The newspaper market has NOT gotten smaller. It's actually stayed very steady (please see here). Yes, the ad avenues have dropped as advertising mostly goes to the online and television mediums - is that a surprise? Newspapers make their revenue in other ways, including through online subscriptions.

There are those much more famous than I who would disagree with you. (Scroll down to "A Flame...") Of course, appeal-to-authority is not a great way to argue a point that should be settled by data.

Some workloads are amazingly pointer heavy. Compilers and interpreters are very pointer heavy, for example. At least one SPEC benchmark sped up by over 30% in early testing. Then again, a couple others slowed down, which seems odd. I imagine we'll just have to see what happens as the compilers get tuned and so forth.

If you don't like x32, don't enable it on your system. I don't think it should be written off so easily, though.

Impartial, disinterested, university funded R and D - which is what everything from music synths to Google started out as:

http://facts.stanford.edu/research.html

-is a natural force for good in developed countries and it's never going to be "over" unless that developed country is "over" .

The leveraging for "Yearbook On The Web !!! " -type opportunities to make money off people naive enough to surrender their most intimate details to a group of total strangers whose sole aim is to monetize same, well, that may be over.

If you compare FB with Google, the differences tell the real story. FB could be replaced in functionality by any number of me-too--products because its peculiar success is not borne of any kind of technological breakthrough but only the fact that it, and not some other equally ordinary-technology product, was the victor in a product space with network effects strong enough to create a natural "winner take all" market.

Meanwhile, Bing is still trying to be 1/10th as good as Google is at doing what it does, despite billions of dollars at the M$'s disposal and some of the best minds in the world working for them.

When the story of the internet is told, it will go like this- DARPA, FTP, email, the web, HTML, Mosaic then Google. Those are the big events. Those are the technological breakthroughs that that literally changed the world. FB will be a footnote.

So to the extent that FB's value is an exercise in bubble economics and phantom value, maybe this is the end of SV's love affair with this kind of thing. That proposition is dubitable since people with too much money generally earned it by doing wholly useless things like co-locating their servers closer to NYSE's servers to give them a multi-billion dollar edge when doing flash trading -

http://theweek.com/article/index/204396/wall-streets-secret-advantage-high-speed-trading

and having custom FPGA made for them in order to grind out nanosecond advantages over their competitors in high frequency trading -

http://www.impulseaccelerated.com/app_financial.htm

so it's unlikely these same people are going to have the fine antenna necessary to distinguish innovations which create revenue opportunities by delivering real, ongoing value from those that have "Hindenberg " painted in man-sized letters on the side: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F54rqDh2mWA

Long live the free market and real innovation delivering real value to the lives of real people . Here's to you.

This is incorrect. Interpolating an audio signal using using lerp or Bezier or whatever will introduce auditory artifacts in the upper frequencies of the sound. The only mathematically correct way to upsample a signal is to perform the transformation into frequency space and then resynthesize the signal at the desired frequency with a lowpass filter.

See https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/resample/ for more information on why curve fitting is incorrect.

Yes, they do lie, but on the other hand it's also common knowledge that satellite has unusable latency. The speed of light is a fundamental physical limit, and it takes that long for light to reach a GEO satellite and back. See this rant from 1996.

The idiot who came up with the idea of requiring both mouse and keyboard input for one UI metaphor was a complete and utter freakin' MORON with absolutely NO UI design experience worth noting.

So then I guess Douglas Englebart, the inventor of the mouse, (or his team) is an "utter freakin' MORON" according to you.

If you watch the famous video ("mother of all demos"(*)), you will see that he uses the keyboard and mouse simultaneously.

Also, in more modern days, using shift or command to change selection of things you click on, or do different metaphors in the Finder (e.g. copy, move, make alias) while dragging, are also instances of useful uses of the keyboard and mouse simultaneously.

(*) Most relevant link I saw mentioned in the Wikipedia article: http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html

BSD advocacy folks are _just as political_ as the GPL crowd.

Yes, but the difference is that they wish they weren't.

In electromagnetic field theory, I suspect the boundary conditions between one field and another are discontinuity free. And I think it's an ecological principle that boundary conditions between ecological players tend to settle into a continuous rather than a discontinuous equilibrium boundary. I was thinking about this the other day concerning a piece I read a while back by Sapolsky on diabetic primates near an African garbage dump. They liked the easy calories, but it was hell on their health. Could they refuse? While some other troop fattens there and kicks their asses before the diabetic liability catches up? When your mortal enemy sells his soul to the devil for daemon spawn in your dominion, it's hard to sit around on the sidelines and play not-involved.

So then I was thinking about The Emerald Forest where the Fierce tribe obtain guns from western interlopers leaving the nearby pacifistic tribe not a hell of a great choice, as the gun-toting Fiercers became increasingly proficient at selling women and girls captured from the pacifist tribe into sexual slavery to help the hard driving westerners relax after a long day Caterpilling the Amazon into oblivion. Yeah, great choices were pretty thin on the ground.

I see the same dynamics on the highway. If you have more than 30% of the drivers thinking they are entitled to drive at the 70'th percentile (I'm not the guy really speeding), well, I'm sure you can work out the differential equations of competitive entitlement as well as I can.

If everyone drove according to my personal decision procedure, speeds would stabilize well above the posted speed limit under ideal conditions: good road surface, good visibility, low congestion, familiar route, the majority of drivers passing for attentive and competent, vehicle in good running condition, no in-vehicle distractions, clear and positive frame of mind.

As the auspicious factors decline, I adjust my driving profile more than most of the other drivers. Under poor conditions, I'm driving at or below the posted speed limit, while others persist in driving within the customary envelop (on one trip home in fresh snow where 30m expanded to well more than an hour, I counting sixteen "What, me worry?" optimists standing beside their off-road vehicles with cell-phones flipped open to summon a tow truck).

So even if you can't tell me apart from reckless speeders in the average mix, if you separate out different contingents you would see clear differences. My decision procedure is not inflationary.

When Stallman enters the conversation, others are forced to either politicize or find themselves pressed against the walls.

Victim Fights Back In NSW Sydney School
Bully Richard Gale Interview

Sapolsky has documented among other primates that shit flows down hill. When a low status baboon finally gains enough status to pass it along, he just can't wait for a more pathetic specimen to wander into the troop.

From Robert Sapolsky discusses physiological effects of stress

"Primates are super smart and organized just enough to devote their free time to being miserable to each other and stressing each other out," he said. "But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, you're going to compromise your health. So, essentially, we've evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick."

What Richard Gale fails to comprehend in his thin self-justification is that Eve once said to Adam "You said I started it long before I ever said you started it." In my theology, a pint of Guinness is God's apology to man, so I place the garden of Eden somewhere in Ireland.

I think both boys were suspended for being out of line. The principal of that school agrees with you that BSD is just as political as the GPL.

Those saying storms will likely get more frequent and/or severe have theory on their side, but little/no data

They have a hypothesis, with no support in data. There are hypotheses that say that equalized temperature over the globe will lessen the intensity of storms as well (less severe fronts). Until we have more data, it's scientifically wrong to make claims either way.

one of the four models examined (a respected model) predicts fewer strong hurricanes in a warmer world instead. - http://www.earthzine.org/2011/04/16/will-a-warmer-world-be-stormier/

The results suggest that storm-track intensity is not related in a simple way to global-mean surface temperature - http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/10/18/1011547107

Here's another way of extracting storm intensity values from a few decades back, by looking at damages: http://www.springerlink.com/content/v1851121221p0244/

(2) As a division within the Department of Commerce, NOAA is undoubtedly subject to various political pressures to toe the party line. That doesn't necessarily mean that their study is compromised, but I would want to see a confirming study from an independent group before I ascribe much weight to it.

Who's independent? JPL (below)? I'm not sure what you're getting at.

A likely source of the decrease is the change in measurement of MSLP with the cessation of
routine aircraft reconnaissance in 1987. There is no significant trend in intense storms either
before or after 1987 when the two periods are analyzed separately. - http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/3/1/124/pdf

A possible clue to the apparent discrepancy is that the increase in overall tornado reports roughly matches that of the U.S. population over this time, suggesting that the trend may be an artifact of greater tornado detection due to increases in population density, awareness of severe weather threats, and modern technological advances such as Doppler radar. At the current time, it is therefore not possible to anticipate even the sign of any climate change in tornado occurrence or strength. - NASA, same earthzine link as above.

Also, more discussion on reporting here: http://www.stanford.edu/~omramom/Diffenbaugh_Eos_08.pdf

My point is that we shouldn't make statements that do not accurately reflect the current state of science.

That being said, we (California) still have crappy public schools and this is still a huge problem. However, it isn't just a problem of bad science education, it is also a language barrier problem.

It's possible that the free distribution of existing child porn over the internet is probably the best thing that could happen (short of a cure) re: the problem of pedophilia. With its ease of accessibility, supply becomes high, resulting in, one would guess, a reduced chance for someone afflicted with pedophilia to use actual children to satisfy his desires, much in the same way that "normal" internet porn may reduce the occurrence of rape.

What pedophiles need is help, especially when evidence proves that some pedophilic urges are caused by physical problems and can be cured by surgery . (I'm not saying all pedophilia has physical causes; it seems obvious that much of it is caused by psychological problems during adolescent development)

For the benefit of those who missed the pun, we might mention that Donald Knuth does play organ, and has at least one in his home.

(I hope I waited long enough to post this that most readers who know anything about his personal life have already got a laugh out of the parent's post. ;-)

With some commercial STL machines (not the amateur ones) you can lay down multiple materials with different properties. Mark Cutkosky at Stanford has done this for some flexible robot parts. He's trying for biological-like structures, where everything is flexible but still highly structured.

This could well render California's wine industry economically unsustainable with only a few degrees change see http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/june/wines-global-warming-063011.html.

No, it will push the wine growers slightly higher up into the mountains, and will allow the central valley to grow oranges and other crops that can't freeze. A few degrees increase in California will mean that large tracts of farmland will no longer have to endure freezing winters, and will become a Zone 10 hardiness zone instead of Zone 9. It will be brilliant for one of the world's most fertile agriculture areas.

Imagine [a university] assignment to implement an API, only to find out its violating someone's copyright.

Such assignments have been around for over a decade, at least under The Tetris Company's interpretation of copyright.

Instead you decided to get back to the old ad hominem,

Ad hominem is not an insult. It's a (invalid) form of argumentation. The form of ad hominem looks like this:

"Because the speaker's character is flawed, the speaker's argument is invalid."

The second form looks like this:

"Because the speaker's character is impeccable, the speaker's argument must be valid."

Calling someone names, or disrespecting someone is not ad hominem.

I suggest you visit duckduckgo.com and search for "physicalism." Here's the entry from Standford:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/

Get a clue. As for "eternal" you are simply hopeless. That's a word even a child should understand. You shouldn't be confused about it and you shouldn't require a trip to the search engine for this. How did you get it so wrong? I know how. You don't care about anything I say. You just want to push your scientific claptrap at any cost.

There are hundreds of thousands of dead victims of world war two that would care to disagree with you.

http://nutrition.stanford.edu/projects/az.html

Stanford ran a comparison of various diets, including Atkins, and Atkins beat the other diets by 2:1 or better in terms of weight loss, and one of the diets was a traditional high carb, low fat "starvation" diet.

That's one of the better trials, but much of the rest isn't "scientific" studies per say but clinical experience with patients who actually use the diets.

http://www.dukehealth.org/health_library/news/low_carb_diet_effective_at_lowering_blood_pressure

This one refer specifically to blood pressure, although there's a guy at Duke (whose name escapes me) running a weight loss clinic using a low carb diet.

For even better reading and the science involved, you could read:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-been-a-big-fat-lie.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

Another article on a related topic by the same author, Gary Taubes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Check out his two books, "Good Calories, Bad Calories" and "Why We Get Fat" for detailed, well-annotated scientific explanations of low carb, high fat diets specifically.

It runs on ZeroBin, which uses client side javascript to generate a random 256bit AES key, then compress and encrypt the text before sending it to the server. Comments are also compressed and encrypted. The key is never seen by the server, so the server can't decrypt your data.

It uses the Stanford Javascript Crypto Library for its AES code, and its codebase is available on github.

The system is vulnerable to an MITM attack, also a server admin may be able to reveal the poster's identity, but not the post's content

Revealing the posters identity is worse than revealing the posters content! That is a huge security hole.

Also where is the key stored? Expect the government to investigate and interrogate whoever has the keys.

No, in fact, it has been actually validated.

http://nutrition.stanford.edu/projects/az.html

how is this validation exactly? sure, atkins provided the greatest weight loss, but there are lots of unhealthy ways to lose weight.

It runs on ZeroBin, which uses client side javascript to generate a random 256bit AES key, then compress and encrypt the text before sending it to the server. Comments are also compressed and encrypted. The key is never seen by the server, so the server can't decrypt your data.

It uses the Stanford Javascript Crypto Library for its AES code, and its codebase is available on github.

The system is vulnerable to an MITM attack, also a server admin may be able to reveal the poster's identity, but not the post's content

No, in fact, it has been actually validated.

http://nutrition.stanford.edu/projects/az.html

If you look at the map (actually, a globe is easier for this), the minimum energy trajectory from Brownsville takes you through the Straits of Florida, and directly over the Bahamas, which would be a natural location to recover the first stage. (Anyone with the slightest knowledge of spacecraft dynamics knows that their video, which shows the first stage returning to Cape Canaveral, is disinformation. The first stage will be recovered downrange.)

That trajectory would avoid any inhabited land before the Bahamas, passing South of Miami and North of Havana, and could probably get FAA approval.

The Bahamas are not on the list of ITAR restricted countries and there are ~ 58 airstrips there, including 3 closed ones, so SpaceX could presumably find somewhere suitable to land the first stage.

Another poster suggested Puerto Rico, which is unlikely as it would require both more energy and (worse) an overflight of Cuba. Soon after the revolution, an errant Atlas missile (launched from Cape Canaveral) landed in Cuba and killed a few cows. The Cuban government was, shall we say, unappreciative, and since then no missile trajectories have been permitted over Cuba. I don't see the FAA / Department of State making an exception for Space X, and I don't think ITAR regulations make it necessary.

Yes, they did... http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html But showing all the detail of their algo will not help to prevent spam.

Remember this really cool slashdot story about a sysadmin on the receiving end of a DDOS?

http://slashdot.org/story/01/05/31/1330202/post-mortem-of-a-dos-attack

The original writeup link is dead but I found it here (warning: PDF). This was a really cool story.

http://www.stanford.edu/class/msande91si/www-spr04/readings/week1/grcdos.pdf

Economists at Stanford demonstrated that other variables were responsible for 80% of the music sales downturn at the height of Napster.
http://siepr.stanford.edu/publicationsprofile/379

And it was found that Napster users bought more music, because they were exposed to more music.
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-243463.html

Nobody ever blames Clear Channel's tight control over US airwaves, and their limited playlists, as being a major factor in restricting new music to the buying public, but it is. And what about concert tickets rising from $10 in the 1980's to $100-$200 in the 2010's? We have LESS disposable income now than ever before. Music is mostly listened to incidentally.

There are two main imaging techniques that work in moderate-energy gamma-rays: Coded Aperture which use a shadow mask; and Compton Imaging.

According to this article the camera uses Compton Imaging. In this technique you look at gamma rays that scatter off of one detector and into another. Each detector tells you where the interaction occurred and how much energy was deposited. From this information, you can derive for each gamma ray that it came from somewhere on a hollow cone (with its tip at the first interaction point.) If you detect many gamma rays you can look at where the cones intersect, and that's where the gammas are coming from.

That's what I was thinking too. A recent study estimates that there may be 100,000 times (!) as many nomad planets in our galaxy as there are stars (est. 100 billion). Considering this huge number and given a time span not far short of the age of the universe, I would think that the likelihood of a long-lived star, such as HIP 11952 (est. 0.83 solar masses), to eventually capture a few of these highly numerous interstellar orphans to be not insignificant.

While I can't comment on Sweden specifically, the sort of paranoid, blinkered thinking in the parent is at least part of the reason why state-funded schools in little countries like Finland are kicking the crap out of their USA counterparts. One alternative is to, y'know, make the schools actually *good*:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands-Schools-Successful.html

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/january/finnish-schools-reform-012012.html

etc.

*Yawn* Cameras that can see around corners aren't even new (provided you can control the light source):

http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/dual_photography/

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8237361566146405294#

You know, Michael Snyder doesn't look like the extreme cheeseburger eating type. A Google search for him shows some full body shots. From the article, it sounds like they have evidence of a viral + genetic cause for type 2 diabetes.

You know, Michael Snyder doesn't look like the extreme cheeseburger eating type. A Google search for him shows some full body shots. From the article, it sounds like they have evidence of a viral + genetic cause for type 2 diabetes.

photon-photon collisions do happen, just at a very low cross section for low energy photons. See: Photon-Photon Collisions – Past and Future http://www.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/getdoc/slac-pub-11581.pdf

ethics by itself means nothing,
you have to qualify it with a school of thoughts
you have Kantian ethics, Cartesian ethics, Schopenhauerian ethic, Catholic ethic, nihilistic ethic, Episcopalian ethic, Islamic ethic and so on ... and that is why there is no unqualified article on ethics there : http://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=Ethic
Your definition appears to be Virtue ethics, but I could be wrong..

Nice try, but no. There have been plenty of theories which have been postulated well in advance of any technical ability to test them being even on the horizon. In fact, we're STILL trying to prove some of Einstein's theories. Perhaps you've heard of Gravity Probe-B?

GP-B was designed to measure two key predictions of Einstein's general theory of relativity by monitoring the orientations of ultra-sensitive gyroscopes relative to a distant guide star.

Here are Ren's papers (he's the guy who founded Lytro).
Fourier Slice Photography, the fundamental theory behind his work.
Plenoptic Camera, the results with his first prototype camera.

Here are Ren's papers (he's the guy who founded Lytro).
Fourier Slice Photography, the fundamental theory behind his work.
Plenoptic Camera, the results with his first prototype camera.