The GPS device was attached to his vehicle, which is driven on public, state and federally owned road infrastructure. There is no legally defensible expectation of privacy in public places. His car is registered to him, with a license plate that ties him to the vehicle. Tracking him visually by having agents follow him, or tracking him by GPS signal, is nominally different both effectively and physically. There was no breach of privacy, there was no attempt to prosecute this man for anything. The FBI has the constitutional right to track him in public places. The individual also has the constitutional right to avoid being tracked, as this individual did by removing the GPS tracker.

Now, if they wiretapped his telephones and recorded all of his conversations without a warrant, that might be a little different ... but that's what the Patriot Act specifically allows.

I missed 40 days of school in 8th grade (a personal high point), and I didn't get much better about it during highschool. Now I'm working on a Ph.D. in Neurobiology at a translation research and teaching hospital. I credit my not-being-at-my-public-school for the level of success I've achieved.

As a parent, it's my business where my kid is. I'll smash that damn device and hand it back to the truant officer on my kid's behalf. Schools have become the Juvenile Executive branch of the government, and it's not their responsibility. "We'll educate you with the information we want you to know, whether you like it or not!"

If you can see/hear it, you can copy it. Heck, isn't that what the education system is all about?

How many people held up a recorder to an old mono-boombox back in the day? It wasn't too long ago that everyone recorded TV shows on their VCRs and watched them whenever simply by hooking up an inline video feed with a recording timer. As signals become higher and higher quality, the same recording equipment become available to the consumer at lower and lower cost ... why even bother recording? Hook a vinyl recorder up to the speaker leads and have a 99.9999% perfect copy made for you.

I don't understand what the fascination is. It's just because everyone and their nephew has a computer at home ... but only one person has to make a recording and post it on the internet to produce the same amount of 'damage' as there being no copy-protection on media at all.

I hope the terrorists use AT&T, because my txts get delayed all the time!

There's only a handful of reasons why you'd hear about this first from a newspaper called "The Inquirer" as opposed to Nature Neuroscience ... I'll leave it to you to figure out what those reasons are.

I am a scientist and philosopher (degrees in both Religion and Neurobiology), and this is a valid question. Where did the law of gravity come from? Yes, the Big Bang and pockets of density that turn into galaxies would spontaneously form based on the laws of gravity and entropy, but why do those laws exist to begin with?

That is a question to which an answer will never be found. Never. I'm not being pessimistic, it's simply that to discover the answer, one has to be able to manipulate the system from outside of it. The known universe is 8.79829142 x10^26 meters in diameter. We're about 1.5 x10^0 meters.

You brought up "intention" by suggesting brains are different than bark in some fundamental way (interestingly, "cortex" is latin for "bark"), but that's simply not true. And now you're backing down by saying it's semantics, when it's not, it's a fundamental Aristotle v Plato world view difference.
The same biochemical processes underlie the functions of both neurons and plant cells. But just because the brain is a very complex system does not mean we have to invent some "emergent" property ... that's just calling it a 'black box' and ignoring the complexity when truly it's just a matter of buckling down and looking at it. Sure the components don't describe the whole, that's what synergism is for; but synergism is sufficient to describe the behavioural effects of neural networks.
It's not a matter of not having the tools, it's a matter of not having the patience.

How does anything evolve? What's your point?

It's not a division error, and linking to an explanation of a division error doesn't make it one any more. There's no reductionism about it. That's like saying that describing how an engine causes a car move is reductionist.
Neurons operate via complex set of modalities involving physical, chemical, and temporal actuators. "Intention" is a human invention foisted upon objects which results in superstition and type I error. Great evolutionarily to protect us from predators, but bad at making us effective logicians. Synergism of neurons can create inordinately complex results, but that does not create a qualitative upheaval in which "intention" is born. Free will cannot exist without cause-and-effect. If we truly had free will, our actions would have no correlation to our environment at all ... but they do. What we sense in our environment causes us to produce a certain effect, like sensing a sabertooth tiger "causes" our sympathetic noradrenergic systems to overpower our parasympathetic system and produce a preference to RUN! It's all very elegant ... but complexity and synergism is quantitatively exponential, it does not produce something where there was nothing.

Humans don't have "intentions" either, we're just a mix of chemicals that obey physical laws. Evolutionarily, plants could just as easily sense human 'pheromones' in the environment through receptors on their bark or leaves, which initiaties a cascade of chemical events leading to the release of toxic pollen. That's basically what a glutamate receptor in your brain does: senses a neurochemical causing neuronal depolarization of the target cell.

A seedling is capable of germinating without sunlight, because the fruit (the pea) has within it all the necessary nutrients to sprout.

Photosynthesis serves the function of producing sugar from sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide by transfering an electron through several enzymatic structures. It is conceivable that (in order of likelihood), a) the half-inch long seedling was still being fully fed from the fruit, b) simple diffusion of sugar from the blood stream was able to supply the plant with enough sugar to sustain itself, c) free radicals were able to diffuse into the seedling's tissue, donating an electron to the photosynthetic chain.

"Scientists Grow Plants without Sunlight or Water": http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=scientists-grow-plants-wi

Actually, the pine tree in a lung ... that was (obviously) a fake: http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2009/04/russian-man-did-not-aspirate-fir-tree.html But if this pea actually did grow insidiously inside a man's lung, this is actually remarkable in any number of ways. The immune system surely could not handle a pea, it's simply too large. Plants of been around for a lot longer than mammals, and this just goes to show their evolutionary dominance. If you're an imaginative person, it brings to mind that M. Night Shyamalan movie about the plants intentionally releasing pollen that was toxic to humans. Twilight zone stuff.

A plant growing inside a human, able to cause pain and possibly death, much like a virus, brings to mind lots of philosophical questions.

What happened to the tilde (~), I thought that was pretty universal as sarcasm.
But if you can't figure out when it's sarcasm, then the problems with you, not the comment.

I think it's QC, not R&D. An Apple store recently opened near me so I got to play with some iPhone4's for a while in the store, and I might go back because I found some interesting things. Two iPhone4's right next to each other, one dropped to 0 bars in the store within 30 seconds of merely touching the antenna gap, the other one dropped 2 bars after a couple minutes of death gripping it. There was NO discernable exterior difference in the phones. I even scratched at the metal to try to see any noticeable polyvinyl coating on one v the other. At that point, the third "Genius" in a matter of 90 seconds asked if I needed any help, so I began to feel awkward poking at the phone (it was very busy in the store).

I would not be surprised if one manufacturing plant in China has a poor Quality Control or Quality Assurance division that just is not doing their job. I've seen pictures of iPhones with reversed volume controls on the side, and this lends to that explanation, and to Apple's personal assurances that they've thoroughly tested these phones. A coating of some sort should be sufficient to abrogate any conductivity, and it does not make sense that Apple did not think of that. I might return and take a look at the batch numbers on the back of the iPhones I played with in the store. I'm still not buying one, because I have no idea if I'm going to get one that works or one that does not, and I'm not playing games with the return people. By the time they get it sorted out, if ever, the Next Big Thing will probably be out. I still own the original iPhone, because nothing has seemed worth the upgrade yet.

mod parent Informative

Yeah, but you don't go around telling the creator of the jigsaw puzzle that you put it together in a way they haven't described and that this might result in damages, but not if they just listen to what you have to say.