According to the article, the robot was developed to assist caregivers in hospitals and health-care facilities. So, yes, it is a completely useless and overpriced machine but it will be paid for by the taxpayers so it should end up being a big money maker for Panasonic.

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"I eat a lot - 15grams a day".
No, you don't.
You're advocating this as a significant part of the diet.

The first link I found gives for 15g of dried spirulena around 40 calories.
This is 2% of the energy you likely need.
If it's not dried, and that 15g is wet, it's _way_ under 1% of your daily calorific requirement.

15g a day is not a food. It's a spice, a flavoring, or a supplement.

I think it's safe to assume China is not pulling the plug on these enterprises because of environmental concerns. In a command economy,the only way to modernize industrial enterprises is by government fiat. The fact that improving efficiency has environmental benefits just makes for good pr.

The Chinese capitalist experiment only covers part of the country. as a result, much of China is filled with value destroying enterprises that would have gone bankrupt in a purely capitalist society. (It costs $1 of inputs to produce $1 of output.) On the upside, they employ people - but given that populations are declining due to the government mandated reverse baby boom, that is no longer as much of a concern.

This smells of Cold fusion. I was 12 when that scandal erupted and I'm *still* recovering from the disappointment that we hadn't just entered the age of flying cars. This time I think we're better off saving our excitement until the experiment has been repeated.

Add to this the recent discovery that there are over one hundred species of bacteria populating the average healthy lung (over 2,000 microbes per square centimeter), and that people with asthma have different collection of microbes in their lungs than healthy people.

Sounds like this has the potential to revitalize the desktop market.

While the wireless docking application for laptops sounds like it has great potential, the promise of using this technology to supercharge low-cost tablets, netbooks and mobile devices when in range of a desktop seems too good to pass up. This would provide a strong incentive for me to buy everything in that ecosystem.

The polling company also could have fallen afoul of Benford's Law.

From Wikipedia: "Benford's law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sources of data, the leading digit is distributed in a specific, non-uniform way. According to this law, the first digit is 1 almost one third of the time, and larger digits occur as the leading digit with lower and lower frequency, to the point where 9 as a first digit occurs less than one time in twenty. This distribution of first digits arises whenever a set of values has logarithms that are distributed uniformly, as is approximately the case with many measurements of real-world values.
This counter-intuitive result has been found to apply to a wide variety of data sets, including electricity bills, street addresses, stock prices, population numbers, death rates, lengths of rivers, physical and mathematical constants, and processes described by power laws (which are very common in nature). The result holds regardless of the base in which the numbers are expressed (except for trivial bases), although the exact proportions change."

I would add political naivete to that list. In an era where Obama's opposition is trying to paint him as an intrusive big government trampler of individual rights, coming out with a program to provide identity cards to people so they can be more easily identified and tracked on the Internet - no matter how well intentioned - is just begging to be used against him.

Right... so, let them eat cake, basically.

It's difficult to move even to a different city in Ukraine (you need a residence permit). As far as going to work in a different country, the entire international system is basically designed to prevent that. And it's not as if the world is your oyster... Your choices for visa-free travel as a Ukrainian are the former Soviet Union (except the parts that are now EU members) and that's it. You can pick up temporary visa's in-country in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Thailand and Vietnam.

And nobody gives work visas for freelancers, so you'd be working illegally anyway.

The problem is that the majority of Ukrainian freelancers already work illegally.

Corporate entities have a far higher tax payment rate than individuals, especially in the internet sphere where freelancers don't have physical office space or physical deliverables that can be tracked by authorities. Furthermore, individual entrepreneurs providing internet-based services in Ukraine make it hard for the tax-paying corporate entities to compete.

This has become important because Ukraine is set to receive from $19-20 billion from the IMF in the next two and a half years if they can show that they are making progress in reducing their budget deficits, so there's a lot of incentive to try to push tax payments up.

Exactly. My first reaction was, Porn Sites More Infected Than WHO Thought? Everybody knows porn sites are infected. That's why you use "porn mode" with AdBlock, no?