Let's hope that somebody who can actually achieve something in the marketplace actually listens to what Michael Geist has got to say.

Or does the 'Not Evil' company sound like they are starting to become just that little but more evil?

What is the difference between drinking 'normal' cow milk and 'human-modified' that makes it seem so disturbing? I don't see how this is any different to eating goats cheese, as an example. Now - if they were talking about modifying dog milk then I might just find it slightly worrying.

and I don't particularly like them when they make the 'geek' community look bad - because it's only the bad stuff that tends to make the news - but if a result of this hack is that people (the big companies, the governments, the FOSS people with the good ideas) finally get together and work on a safe, secure and sensible way of carrying out net authentication that DOESN'T rely on me handing over my security credentials to someone else to manage, then it is a good thing in my eyes.

if they can get it approved and produced in large-enough quantities. It has been known for a long time that breast milk is far better than any of the 'formula' milks alternatives out there. There are, sadly, many women who cannot breast-feed for one reason or another (it may not be a high percentage, but it is still a lot of women). For them, they want to see the best done for their child and if this is a way of keeping their child healthier than the alternative then I'm sure an awful lot of them would take it as an option. I know that my wife and I would have done when she couldn't breast-feed our 2nd born due to her suffering from post-natal depression.

Not only does this not look to me like a particularly professional reporting site, if you follow the link on the page 'Which authors of this paper are endorsers?' you get the following;-

"No authors of 1103.6219 can endorse.
The weak password problem: chaos, criticality, and encrypted p-CAPTCHAs
Tetyana Laptyeva V.: Is registered as an author of this paper.
Not currently an endorser.
S. Flach and K. Kladko are not registered as owners of this paper"

If nobody is willing to endorse the paper then surely it's not been peer-reviewed and is, consequently at this time, worthless. It's no different to if I put a paper out there stating that I was going to produce safe passwords by generating random characters from snail-trails.

"Organizers of a six-day conference that has brought together more than 60 Catholic clergy as well as doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, teachers and youth workers..."

As well as a constantly changing harem of young boys (and a couple of young girls for those who really want to go against the Catholic creed)

The problem with having the FBI convert the original note to an ASCII text-only file is that a lot of the potential information would be lost. The positioning of the characters could be just as important (or even more so) than the characters themselves. Also, the characters vary - he had two distinct ways of writing the letter 'E' for example - one looked like the upper-case text that I've just typed, one looked more like the Euro currency symbol.
They'd have been much better served providing a decent high-resolution scan of the notes, rather than the crappy images that actually got linked everywhere - 1200x1200 dpi minimum.

If that's supposed to be a euphemism for something else then I'm quite sure it's illegal no matter where in the world you are.

I would all depend on what level of the thought process they have it operating. Would the user have to actively think "I'll move it up, down, away, towards etc", in which case it would be less intuitive and easy than the nerve- or muscle-controlled ones. If the arm was set to just work on 'impulse' type thoughts, then how long before peoples arms start grabbing women by the arse just coz the user had a dirty thought - would they be able to be held responsible in law for the action of their arm?
As for the Canadians doing this, well done. DARPA have been working on this for a long time now;-
http://www.neurotechreports.com/pages/darpaprosthetics.html
http://singularityhub.com/2010/08/03/mind-controlled-artificial-arm-begins-the-first-human-testing/

You're quite correct of course. I was looking at my world time zone chart, and failed to notice that the time-line I was looking at was actually just gone midnight on Saturday morning - so I was an entire 24 hours off. My cock-up. I meant, of course, somewhere like Honolulu.

Oops...

April Fool - what part of the world is /. base in, where it's only just turned April 1st? Somewhere in Russia maybe? Or possibly Fiji? I've been waiting 13 hours for this to happen.