I got the MIR information second hand from a cryptococcus researcher who had a pet theory about radiotrophic fungi (back in 2007). A quick perusing of the internet reveals no credible source for those claims, so it's possible they were exaggerated. OTOH, radiotrophic fungi are known to exist, as well as microbes surviving the vacuum of space, so it's not implausible, and we only found these organisms three years ago so it's an emerging field. Unfortunately, MIR is no more, so whether that fungus was radiotrophic may never be known (the trait is quickly lost because it's metabolically expensive).
I don't disagree that life probably doesn't exist in the Earth's core, merely due to Occam's razor. OTOH, I cannot say that with any certainty. The gravity and radiotrophic adaptations were made within a few generations. Life has had well over a billion years to adapt to the conditions in the Earth's core. We've also noticed life using essentially every source of energy on the surface, so it'd be strange if geothermal organisms didn't exist. Lack of evidence and theoretic underpinnings isn't convincing with a global paucity of data.
American carriers definitely overcharge, my point is that their costs would still be higher even if they didn't. You can't look at service and hardware as separate costs. The phones are locked to a single carrier based on which radio is installed, so when you buy the phone the carrier knows you're stuck with their service. So they price phones arbitrarily. It's essentially a down payment for the two year service contract. Right now, you could find many comparable smartphones for $0.01 on Amazon (holiday special I presume).
VPNs are either free, $36/year if you want 100 Mbit speeds and no data cap, or the cost of your time if you run a server yourself. Some providers also allow multiple connections for the same price. Tethering, IIRC, is ~$30 per phone for 5 GB. That said, the phone company won't really care what you're doing if you are using dozens of gigabytes of bandwidth per month, they'll find some reason to disconnect/throttle/charge you.
It's not pure profit. England has the third highest population density for major counties in the world. The US has lower density overall, and a lot more rural areas. People expect coverage in those areas because Americans travel more than people in most other countries (vehicle miles traveled per capita is nearly twice that of the UK). We also have four major cell phone networks with different technologies and frequencies. So it is a lot more expensive to run a cell phone company in America than in England, although none of the extra expense actually helps consumers.
DNA melts at 60 - 100 degrees Celsius, depending on the ratio of GC/AT base pairs (GC has 3 hydrogen bonds, AT has 2). That's why the scientific community was surprised to find M. kandleri growing at 122 degrees, and apparently theories that it has an unusually high GC content were also disproven. The current thought is that 150 degrees (0.4 kK) is the biologic limit, but I'm skeptical.
Life has been found in every place on Earth we thought it couldn't exist (albeit it was not always immediately discovered). E. coli can grow at 400,000 times normal gravity. The MIR space station had a problem with fungi growing on the outside of the windows... When they tried to kill it with radiation, it grew (much like the fungi inside the Chernobyl sarcophagus, something unexpected as DNA ionizes under those conditions). The core of the Earth is probably inhospitable to life, but since we haven't looked I can't say it's impossible for life to grow there.
There are several types of color blindness. One type is as you describe, lacking a third type of photoceptor (RGB VS GB). In this case, the cone type responding to the next nearest frequency takes over (e.g. green for red), whereas in normal individuals the retina filters this low intensity signal out. Another type is an altered absorption spectrum. So the "red" cones might best respond to a slightly higher frequency signal than normal (the most common variation, present on 5% of X chromosomes).
As for color blindness being a disability in all circumstances, it isn't. Do you know how we test for it? We camouflage numbers in an array of multicolored dots. People with normal vision can spot some of them, people with various types of color deficiencies spot others (or different numbers). This is analogous to defeating camouflage in nature.
Tetrachromacy offers an additional green photoreceptor (e.g. red-green color blind father crossed with a normal mother). The benefit is increased differentiation of green hues. This doesn't grant bee-like perception of UV or IR or anything, but I'd be hesitant to call it worthless. After all, our visual color range is defined by our red and blue photoceptors. The greens are in the middle, and if absent (deuteranopia) then visual range is unaffected, but green things look more red or blue. As for how tetrachromacy might work in nature, guess what color most plants are...
Evolution is an emergent property arising out of mathematics and population dynamics, but we can identify many selection pressures. With vision, there's pressure to have mutations so no prey animal can evolve a perfect camouflage. That's probably why the color photoreceptor genes stay on the X chromosome. It guarantees that a handful of the population has altered color perceptions (mostly members of the male sex). An autosomal gene would enter an equilibrium at either a much higher or much lower incidence (don't get me started on altruism with a slightly disadvantageous gene that benefits the population... huge discussion there). Also, a gene can't become dominant. Dominant and recessive is an over-simplification. You have functional and non-functional proteins assembled from polypeptides encoded by genes, and if that produces symptoms it's "dominant" (again, very simplistic, DNA methylation & such alter it still, and there are proteins with variant function and incomplete penetrance).
Color blind people don't have a "different vision system". They see a subset of the same spectrum that everyone else sees. They just tend to focus more on brightness variations, because they can't see as much variation in color, in much the same way that blind people pay more attention to what they hear. But that doesn't' mean they actually have different ears, or are able to hear things that sighted people cannot.
That's addressed easily enough by the physiologic mechanism behind Ishihara plates. People with normal vision see one number (or just random dots) while people with various color deficiencies see another (or random dots). The reason is linked with the mutations for color blindness.
If you're missing a cone type (most frequently red) then the retina will transmit more information from the nearest functional cone type (e.g. green). Your rods will pick-up everything, so they're used for brightness, so you essentially see a bright version of dark green. People with normal vision don't see this because the optic nerve doesn't have sufficient bandwidth to send uncompressed data, so the retina will filter-out the weaker signal from the green cones.
Likewise, another mutation is to have an altered absorption frequency for a specific cone type. So it responds to light of a slightly different wavelength. This is the basis behind tetrachromic vision, as females have multiple X chromosomes which may have different photoceptor genes.
In modern times, color blindness is a disadvantage I suppose. But at its current incidence it must have been a selective advantage for it to be preserved in the gene pool. Also, canines are dichromats. It's pretty common among mammals to pick-up or lose a cone type based on diet. Just look at humans if you think the color vision system is evolutionarily stable. There are tons of mutations! Which makes sense because otherwise an animal could develop camouflage that could fool nearly any type of visual predator.
The people firing the device will be prepared with sunglasses because it would be absolutely stupid not to. It's the same reason people who use gas grenades wear gas masks. "Light reflects off shiny things" is such a well known effect that I'm sure the weapon designers thought of it.
Umm... a lot of predators are color blind for the same reason it's (historically) advantageous for humans (and it's much less important than kinetic vision and depth perception). As for different types, yes, there are many types of color blindness and many types of camouflage, which is why there's variation in the population. If Andy, Bob, Carl are hunting and any one of them spots an animal, then it works just as well (and it's difficult to camouflage against several different vision systems). Being able to spot animals who are trying to hide would have been critically important for our ancestors attempting to endurance hunt, since the prey tries to gain a lead then hide and rest.
Very true. One theory that I like is that, in early human groups, men were the hunters while women were the gatherers. Biologically, this makes sense, because men are a bit more expendable and gathering is amenable to child rearing. One good piece of evidence for this is that ~10% of men have a color deficiency (e.g., instead of RGB vision, it's GB), while ~2-% of women have tetrachromacy (RGGB). The former is advantageous for seeing through typical camouflage, while the latter is useful for distinguishing plants and fruit (and a lime green VS spring green shirt).
Aside from the whole surface area to volume ratio, I love how they only think it's possible for life to live near the surface. Our deepest holes only measure a few miles deep. Earth's core could be teaming with life for all we know. I personally doubt it, given the expected conditions, but some bacteria (more likely archaea) living down there wouldn't surprise me in the least. The thing is, we can't really know without looking.
I certainly overuse "IMHO", but I try to limit myself to using it once per post, as I generally explain what I know first, then opine, and like to clearly demarcate the two. I could drop the "H", but "IMO" is a less commonly used acronym and I try to be laconic.
Now, as for why I'm motivated to reply, pray tell how I misused the word "ilk"? I'm not trying to use it in the archaic Scottish sense (of the place with the same name). Arguably, it's used primarily for people and implies a common origin, but neither of those are strong implications. I used it primarily because the modern implications are of a slightly negative sort, as are my ([not so] humble?) opinions on DHTML.
It disturbs me that Amazon would include a javascript command to execute arbitrary native code as root, and doesn't sanitize input. An ID3 tag should not be rendered, especially not with javascript, and especially not in the privileged mode the GUI is given. Making any one of those mistakes is amateurish and indicates that whoever designed this system knows absolutely nothing about security. Beyond that, obviously that person/team was given the autonomy to do this without any kind of oversight, so the device is surely riddled with such defects!
IMHO, most likely some web developer came up with that idea and is unused to even considering security issues. While you can write a GUI in DHTML and its ilk, it's not necessarily a good idea. When they ran into the easily predicted performance issues, this was their solution. Suddenly, they're no longer playing in the sandbox, but apparently they weren't quite cognizant of the implications.
IMHO, there needs to be a standard minimum so that we can all understand what others do. For example, I'm no artist and essentially never need to draw anything beyond stick figures, but when I meet an artist I like to be able to converse at a higher level than "what do you make pictures of?". I'd also love to be able to describe my day or hobbies without eliciting blank stares.
While you don't need to be a master of everything, one should at least be familiar with the major concepts of the core areas of human knowledge. If you're strikingly ignorant in one of them, you're overspecialized and prone to errors (i.e. when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail).
The amusing thing is that much of the technology from the space race is now available for cheap to consumers, much like other technologies from that era. I expect to see a lot more private efforts to reach space in the future, and with more attempts the economy of scale should further bring down the costs, eventually leading to the private sector surpassing the national space program. If I had to bet, I'd say the first person on Mars will be a civilian, and perhaps even the next person to walk on the Moon if there isn't a shift in priorities.
OTOH, humorless names also become problems because they're not memorable. Most patients give an admirable effort in pronouncing or remembering the name of their prior illnesses, but there are limits. "Mysthenia Gravis" or "Lambert-Eaton syndrome" are simply beyond what many people can tell their future doctors, and they have even a rougher time trying to spell them for Google. Latin is a bit better than an eponym, but neither is useful when forgotten. OTOH, if a mother mentions a "hedgehog" then any doctor will know what she's talking about. Contrast this with an apyrase deficiency. Every doctor learns that pathway, it's taught just as much or more than the hedgehog system, but you'd be hard-pressed to find many that remember what that enzyme does.
Now, this is a non-issue for most doctors. Unless they just learned English they'll be able to describe a disease in at least three or four ways and pick the most appropriate for the individual patient. Not too many patients care to learn the molecular biology specifics of their genetic defect, e.g. the term "Cystic Fibrosis" is vastly preferred to "a F508 deletion".
Ostrich eggs would be a good start for the Moa. The Thylacine is a marsupial, so let it's closest relative, the numbat, carry the fertilized egg until it can be delivered and incubated (i.e. much easier than placental mammals). Mammoths probably delivered larger offspring (given size difference) and carried them for significantly longer (given climate) than elephants, so I'm not sure it's as simple as you think.
The tradeoff between development cost and hardware requirements
This is exactly why I like free software. If you're writing code as a hobby then you take pride in your work and release the best version you can conceive of, and only when it's ready. If you're selling it, then everything is a tradeoff designed to maximize profit. Or at least that's my theory. In reality, a lot of free software developers are commercial software developers by day and their "bad" habits carry over, especially with less interesting parts of the codebase. And there are commercial software developers who legitimately take pride in their work and aren't so focused on maximizing profit, but they're a rarity in this day and age.
The trend in Ask Slashdot also seems to be focused on a more generalized and less technically adept audience. I recall at least two recent ones that stipulated they wanted to buy something off the shelf for their one-off project rather than build and tweak it themselves. While there's merit in convenience, building and tweaking is a core principle of being a geek. If you don't want to do that, the obvious solution is to hire a geek to do it for you.
IMHO, starting with a mammoth is a bit foolish. Mammoths have been extinct for 4500 years, which generates problems in reconstructing the genome, disease resistance, and probably a half dozen other factors. They're also rather large, and slow to mature, which makes them a terrible experimental animal, and with the reduction in clone lifespan it may not survive to reach sexual maturity. I'm not saying we shouldn't eventually clone the mammoth, but I think we should start with something a bit easier.
A better choice that's equally impressive would likely be the Moa. It's a 12 ft tall, 500 lbs bird that was hunted to extinction 600 years ago. Given how tasty the natives apparently thought it was, there's some potential for farming them as well. OTOH, the best candidate would perhaps be the Thylacine, a marsupial wolf-like predator which has been extinct for only 75 years. We also know how to keep them in captivity and they're fast to mature (lifespan of 5-7 years, 9 in captivity).
Here's a quick summary regarding keystroke logging made by the two recent articles:
Original video that demonstrated CarrierIQ logging keystrokes. I.e. not a theoretic capability, nor a risk, but actual entries into the system log. This was performed on an stock HTC Evo 3D.
This article is asserting that CarrierIQ does not contain the necessary hooks for keystroke logging on the Samsung Epic 4G Touch.
IOW, the two articles are not making the same claim. It is already known that different phones have different versions of CarrierIQ. This article isn't claiming that no phone has the capability to log keystrokes, merely that the Epic does not. The original article wasn't claiming that all phones are logging keystrokes, merely that the Evo is. Methinks someone is trying to manipulate public opinion, as the original video is surprisingly difficult to find, and this article's claims were immediately exaggerated and that version of the story was popularized.
It varies by mail carrier I'm sure. Personally, I receive more mail meant for other people than for myself. Of course, the problem is beyond the carrier because I occasionally get mail for people in other zip codes.
For registered mail it's even more annoying. My mail carrier would knock, then be gone by the time it took me to walk to the backdoor of my one bedroom apartment. After several days of this (I thought it was some neighborhood kids playing pranks), he left a note to go pick it up at X post office... which referred me to Y, which referred me to Z. I felt like I was playing Super Mario Brothers!
Good old fashoined paper letters are PRIVATE.
e-mail is not private, and good luck getting your contacts to use pgp or s-mime.
43% of identity theft occurs from physical paperwork. 11% from online. Personally, I don't trust any security mechanism that can be defeated by someone walking by, opening your unlocked mailbox, and holding the envelope to the sun. E-mail can be quite private, but you're correct that most people don't require that level of privacy and subsequently don't bother. Let's see you convince your contacts to use PGP on snail mail...
e-mail is best effort, paper mail on the other hand is guaranteed delivery (and for registered mail it leaves a paper trail).
USPS loses about 3-5% of mail, per an unofficial source. They collect but do not publish these statistics themselves. E-mail seems more reliable that that, albeit there are tons of factors that go into it. At least you're much more likely to get a "message undeliverable" reply with e-mail.
e-mail is so impersonal, hand written letters on the other hand are much more personal.
Congresspeople don't give a fuck about e-mail petitions, they hear on the other hand the power of hand written letters.
It's a social convention, there's no real difference between the two, beyond the cost of the stamp and slower transit. As for congressmen, I find your assertion that they take either seriously to be quite amusing.
Slashdot Mirror
I got the MIR information second hand from a cryptococcus researcher who had a pet theory about radiotrophic fungi (back in 2007). A quick perusing of the internet reveals no credible source for those claims, so it's possible they were exaggerated. OTOH, radiotrophic fungi are known to exist, as well as microbes surviving the vacuum of space, so it's not implausible, and we only found these organisms three years ago so it's an emerging field. Unfortunately, MIR is no more, so whether that fungus was radiotrophic may never be known (the trait is quickly lost because it's metabolically expensive).
I don't disagree that life probably doesn't exist in the Earth's core, merely due to Occam's razor. OTOH, I cannot say that with any certainty. The gravity and radiotrophic adaptations were made within a few generations. Life has had well over a billion years to adapt to the conditions in the Earth's core. We've also noticed life using essentially every source of energy on the surface, so it'd be strange if geothermal organisms didn't exist. Lack of evidence and theoretic underpinnings isn't convincing with a global paucity of data.
American carriers definitely overcharge, my point is that their costs would still be higher even if they didn't. You can't look at service and hardware as separate costs. The phones are locked to a single carrier based on which radio is installed, so when you buy the phone the carrier knows you're stuck with their service. So they price phones arbitrarily. It's essentially a down payment for the two year service contract. Right now, you could find many comparable smartphones for $0.01 on Amazon (holiday special I presume).
VPNs are either free, $36/year if you want 100 Mbit speeds and no data cap, or the cost of your time if you run a server yourself. Some providers also allow multiple connections for the same price. Tethering, IIRC, is ~$30 per phone for 5 GB. That said, the phone company won't really care what you're doing if you are using dozens of gigabytes of bandwidth per month, they'll find some reason to disconnect/throttle/charge you.
It's not pure profit. England has the third highest population density for major counties in the world. The US has lower density overall, and a lot more rural areas. People expect coverage in those areas because Americans travel more than people in most other countries (vehicle miles traveled per capita is nearly twice that of the UK). We also have four major cell phone networks with different technologies and frequencies. So it is a lot more expensive to run a cell phone company in America than in England, although none of the extra expense actually helps consumers.
DNA melts at 60 - 100 degrees Celsius, depending on the ratio of GC/AT base pairs (GC has 3 hydrogen bonds, AT has 2). That's why the scientific community was surprised to find M. kandleri growing at 122 degrees, and apparently theories that it has an unusually high GC content were also disproven. The current thought is that 150 degrees (0.4 kK) is the biologic limit, but I'm skeptical.
Life has been found in every place on Earth we thought it couldn't exist (albeit it was not always immediately discovered). E. coli can grow at 400,000 times normal gravity. The MIR space station had a problem with fungi growing on the outside of the windows... When they tried to kill it with radiation, it grew (much like the fungi inside the Chernobyl sarcophagus, something unexpected as DNA ionizes under those conditions). The core of the Earth is probably inhospitable to life, but since we haven't looked I can't say it's impossible for life to grow there.
There are several types of color blindness. One type is as you describe, lacking a third type of photoceptor (RGB VS GB). In this case, the cone type responding to the next nearest frequency takes over (e.g. green for red), whereas in normal individuals the retina filters this low intensity signal out. Another type is an altered absorption spectrum. So the "red" cones might best respond to a slightly higher frequency signal than normal (the most common variation, present on 5% of X chromosomes).
As for color blindness being a disability in all circumstances, it isn't. Do you know how we test for it? We camouflage numbers in an array of multicolored dots. People with normal vision can spot some of them, people with various types of color deficiencies spot others (or different numbers). This is analogous to defeating camouflage in nature.
Tetrachromacy offers an additional green photoreceptor (e.g. red-green color blind father crossed with a normal mother). The benefit is increased differentiation of green hues. This doesn't grant bee-like perception of UV or IR or anything, but I'd be hesitant to call it worthless. After all, our visual color range is defined by our red and blue photoceptors. The greens are in the middle, and if absent (deuteranopia) then visual range is unaffected, but green things look more red or blue. As for how tetrachromacy might work in nature, guess what color most plants are...
Evolution is an emergent property arising out of mathematics and population dynamics, but we can identify many selection pressures. With vision, there's pressure to have mutations so no prey animal can evolve a perfect camouflage. That's probably why the color photoreceptor genes stay on the X chromosome. It guarantees that a handful of the population has altered color perceptions (mostly members of the male sex). An autosomal gene would enter an equilibrium at either a much higher or much lower incidence (don't get me started on altruism with a slightly disadvantageous gene that benefits the population... huge discussion there). Also, a gene can't become dominant. Dominant and recessive is an over-simplification. You have functional and non-functional proteins assembled from polypeptides encoded by genes, and if that produces symptoms it's "dominant" (again, very simplistic, DNA methylation & such alter it still, and there are proteins with variant function and incomplete penetrance).
Color blind people don't have a "different vision system". They see a subset of the same spectrum that everyone else sees. They just tend to focus more on brightness variations, because they can't see as much variation in color, in much the same way that blind people pay more attention to what they hear. But that doesn't' mean they actually have different ears, or are able to hear things that sighted people cannot.
That's addressed easily enough by the physiologic mechanism behind Ishihara plates. People with normal vision see one number (or just random dots) while people with various color deficiencies see another (or random dots). The reason is linked with the mutations for color blindness.
If you're missing a cone type (most frequently red) then the retina will transmit more information from the nearest functional cone type (e.g. green). Your rods will pick-up everything, so they're used for brightness, so you essentially see a bright version of dark green. People with normal vision don't see this because the optic nerve doesn't have sufficient bandwidth to send uncompressed data, so the retina will filter-out the weaker signal from the green cones.
Likewise, another mutation is to have an altered absorption frequency for a specific cone type. So it responds to light of a slightly different wavelength. This is the basis behind tetrachromic vision, as females have multiple X chromosomes which may have different photoceptor genes.
In modern times, color blindness is a disadvantage I suppose. But at its current incidence it must have been a selective advantage for it to be preserved in the gene pool. Also, canines are dichromats. It's pretty common among mammals to pick-up or lose a cone type based on diet. Just look at humans if you think the color vision system is evolutionarily stable. There are tons of mutations! Which makes sense because otherwise an animal could develop camouflage that could fool nearly any type of visual predator.
The people firing the device will be prepared with sunglasses because it would be absolutely stupid not to. It's the same reason people who use gas grenades wear gas masks. "Light reflects off shiny things" is such a well known effect that I'm sure the weapon designers thought of it.
Umm... a lot of predators are color blind for the same reason it's (historically) advantageous for humans (and it's much less important than kinetic vision and depth perception). As for different types, yes, there are many types of color blindness and many types of camouflage, which is why there's variation in the population. If Andy, Bob, Carl are hunting and any one of them spots an animal, then it works just as well (and it's difficult to camouflage against several different vision systems). Being able to spot animals who are trying to hide would have been critically important for our ancestors attempting to endurance hunt, since the prey tries to gain a lead then hide and rest.
Very true. One theory that I like is that, in early human groups, men were the hunters while women were the gatherers. Biologically, this makes sense, because men are a bit more expendable and gathering is amenable to child rearing. One good piece of evidence for this is that ~10% of men have a color deficiency (e.g., instead of RGB vision, it's GB), while ~2-% of women have tetrachromacy (RGGB). The former is advantageous for seeing through typical camouflage, while the latter is useful for distinguishing plants and fruit (and a lime green VS spring green shirt).
So, the freedom to consume substances well known for removing one's ability to not consume them? Isn't that like selling yourself into slavery?
Aside from the whole surface area to volume ratio, I love how they only think it's possible for life to live near the surface. Our deepest holes only measure a few miles deep. Earth's core could be teaming with life for all we know. I personally doubt it, given the expected conditions, but some bacteria (more likely archaea) living down there wouldn't surprise me in the least. The thing is, we can't really know without looking.
I certainly overuse "IMHO", but I try to limit myself to using it once per post, as I generally explain what I know first, then opine, and like to clearly demarcate the two. I could drop the "H", but "IMO" is a less commonly used acronym and I try to be laconic.
Now, as for why I'm motivated to reply, pray tell how I misused the word "ilk"? I'm not trying to use it in the archaic Scottish sense (of the place with the same name). Arguably, it's used primarily for people and implies a common origin, but neither of those are strong implications. I used it primarily because the modern implications are of a slightly negative sort, as are my ([not so] humble?) opinions on DHTML.
It disturbs me that Amazon would include a javascript command to execute arbitrary native code as root, and doesn't sanitize input. An ID3 tag should not be rendered, especially not with javascript, and especially not in the privileged mode the GUI is given. Making any one of those mistakes is amateurish and indicates that whoever designed this system knows absolutely nothing about security. Beyond that, obviously that person/team was given the autonomy to do this without any kind of oversight, so the device is surely riddled with such defects!
IMHO, most likely some web developer came up with that idea and is unused to even considering security issues. While you can write a GUI in DHTML and its ilk, it's not necessarily a good idea. When they ran into the easily predicted performance issues, this was their solution. Suddenly, they're no longer playing in the sandbox, but apparently they weren't quite cognizant of the implications.
IMHO, there needs to be a standard minimum so that we can all understand what others do. For example, I'm no artist and essentially never need to draw anything beyond stick figures, but when I meet an artist I like to be able to converse at a higher level than "what do you make pictures of?". I'd also love to be able to describe my day or hobbies without eliciting blank stares.
While you don't need to be a master of everything, one should at least be familiar with the major concepts of the core areas of human knowledge. If you're strikingly ignorant in one of them, you're overspecialized and prone to errors (i.e. when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail).
The amusing thing is that much of the technology from the space race is now available for cheap to consumers, much like other technologies from that era. I expect to see a lot more private efforts to reach space in the future, and with more attempts the economy of scale should further bring down the costs, eventually leading to the private sector surpassing the national space program. If I had to bet, I'd say the first person on Mars will be a civilian, and perhaps even the next person to walk on the Moon if there isn't a shift in priorities.
OTOH, humorless names also become problems because they're not memorable. Most patients give an admirable effort in pronouncing or remembering the name of their prior illnesses, but there are limits. "Mysthenia Gravis" or "Lambert-Eaton syndrome" are simply beyond what many people can tell their future doctors, and they have even a rougher time trying to spell them for Google. Latin is a bit better than an eponym, but neither is useful when forgotten. OTOH, if a mother mentions a "hedgehog" then any doctor will know what she's talking about. Contrast this with an apyrase deficiency. Every doctor learns that pathway, it's taught just as much or more than the hedgehog system, but you'd be hard-pressed to find many that remember what that enzyme does.
Now, this is a non-issue for most doctors. Unless they just learned English they'll be able to describe a disease in at least three or four ways and pick the most appropriate for the individual patient. Not too many patients care to learn the molecular biology specifics of their genetic defect, e.g. the term "Cystic Fibrosis" is vastly preferred to "a F508 deletion".
Ostrich eggs would be a good start for the Moa. The Thylacine is a marsupial, so let it's closest relative, the numbat, carry the fertilized egg until it can be delivered and incubated (i.e. much easier than placental mammals). Mammoths probably delivered larger offspring (given size difference) and carried them for significantly longer (given climate) than elephants, so I'm not sure it's as simple as you think.
The tradeoff between development cost and hardware requirements
This is exactly why I like free software. If you're writing code as a hobby then you take pride in your work and release the best version you can conceive of, and only when it's ready. If you're selling it, then everything is a tradeoff designed to maximize profit. Or at least that's my theory. In reality, a lot of free software developers are commercial software developers by day and their "bad" habits carry over, especially with less interesting parts of the codebase. And there are commercial software developers who legitimately take pride in their work and aren't so focused on maximizing profit, but they're a rarity in this day and age.
The trend in Ask Slashdot also seems to be focused on a more generalized and less technically adept audience. I recall at least two recent ones that stipulated they wanted to buy something off the shelf for their one-off project rather than build and tweak it themselves. While there's merit in convenience, building and tweaking is a core principle of being a geek. If you don't want to do that, the obvious solution is to hire a geek to do it for you.
IMHO, starting with a mammoth is a bit foolish. Mammoths have been extinct for 4500 years, which generates problems in reconstructing the genome, disease resistance, and probably a half dozen other factors. They're also rather large, and slow to mature, which makes them a terrible experimental animal, and with the reduction in clone lifespan it may not survive to reach sexual maturity. I'm not saying we shouldn't eventually clone the mammoth, but I think we should start with something a bit easier.
A better choice that's equally impressive would likely be the Moa. It's a 12 ft tall, 500 lbs bird that was hunted to extinction 600 years ago. Given how tasty the natives apparently thought it was, there's some potential for farming them as well. OTOH, the best candidate would perhaps be the Thylacine, a marsupial wolf-like predator which has been extinct for only 75 years. We also know how to keep them in captivity and they're fast to mature (lifespan of 5-7 years, 9 in captivity).
If you upload something to Facebook, assume anyone can see it.
Personally, I assume that Mark Zuckerberg can see it, if he so chooses, and I trust him less than my least trustworthy friend.
Here's a quick summary regarding keystroke logging made by the two recent articles:
Original video that demonstrated CarrierIQ logging keystrokes. I.e. not a theoretic capability, nor a risk, but actual entries into the system log. This was performed on an stock HTC Evo 3D.
This article is asserting that CarrierIQ does not contain the necessary hooks for keystroke logging on the Samsung Epic 4G Touch.
IOW, the two articles are not making the same claim. It is already known that different phones have different versions of CarrierIQ. This article isn't claiming that no phone has the capability to log keystrokes, merely that the Epic does not. The original article wasn't claiming that all phones are logging keystrokes, merely that the Evo is. Methinks someone is trying to manipulate public opinion, as the original video is surprisingly difficult to find, and this article's claims were immediately exaggerated and that version of the story was popularized.
It varies by mail carrier I'm sure. Personally, I receive more mail meant for other people than for myself. Of course, the problem is beyond the carrier because I occasionally get mail for people in other zip codes.
For registered mail it's even more annoying. My mail carrier would knock, then be gone by the time it took me to walk to the backdoor of my one bedroom apartment. After several days of this (I thought it was some neighborhood kids playing pranks), he left a note to go pick it up at X post office... which referred me to Y, which referred me to Z. I felt like I was playing Super Mario Brothers!
Good old fashoined paper letters are PRIVATE. e-mail is not private, and good luck getting your contacts to use pgp or s-mime.
43% of identity theft occurs from physical paperwork. 11% from online. Personally, I don't trust any security mechanism that can be defeated by someone walking by, opening your unlocked mailbox, and holding the envelope to the sun. E-mail can be quite private, but you're correct that most people don't require that level of privacy and subsequently don't bother. Let's see you convince your contacts to use PGP on snail mail...
e-mail is best effort, paper mail on the other hand is guaranteed delivery (and for registered mail it leaves a paper trail).
USPS loses about 3-5% of mail, per an unofficial source. They collect but do not publish these statistics themselves. E-mail seems more reliable that that, albeit there are tons of factors that go into it. At least you're much more likely to get a "message undeliverable" reply with e-mail.
e-mail is so impersonal, hand written letters on the other hand are much more personal. Congresspeople don't give a fuck about e-mail petitions, they hear on the other hand the power of hand written letters.
It's a social convention, there's no real difference between the two, beyond the cost of the stamp and slower transit. As for congressmen, I find your assertion that they take either seriously to be quite amusing.