It will be interesting to see how this "diagnostic game" field develops with the aging of generations familiar with electronic game platforms. Calibration of the test to the subject could become far more critical when we have a greater prevalence of sexagenarian gamers. It'll be similar to the problems one might encounter giving a cognitive vocabulary test to equivalently aged persons - one of which is an English professor. Without some intelligent means of accounting for differing patient baselines in gaming ability, false positives may present a greater problem in the future than is experienced now with these source papers.

I see you've dealt with Verizon billing before too.

Wait -- back up. You know that one of those two things is actually on-the-books against the law and the other is not, right? I hope. Please?

Sounds like you probably aren't from the southern U.S.

Nature is a big fan of brute force solutions to complex equations - it just does shit and reports the result.

I disagree, at least in the extent to which survival at the end of the trip (be it one way or not) is not a reasonable probability. It's not as simple as "do you want to take that risk?" Risk implies probability, but planning for a one-way trip is a certainty.

An organization does not have the ethical right to ask for this certainty, especially when there is no chance that the asking could be done without some form of coercion (i.e. implicit do it for your country/honor/science/show you're not a coward/etc...). We don't even ask this of our armed forces. When people join, they know there's a risk (i.e. probability) that they may die - and in fact that they may later be ordered into a very bad situation - but those are situations (often in the heat) where plans went very wrong, or situations involving the kind of math where you spend infinity to gain infinity. And even in that example, the action was voluntary by situation, not by designed plan. We have no such pressing desperation in scientific exploration.

We can design exploration plans that allow for something other than suffocation or starvation as an end point. I would say that exploration with pioneering and settlement are ethically reasonable places to solicit volunteers. Even sustained exploration where limited resources are not an assurance of death (i.e. "an ongoing mission to seek out...") could be reasonable. But I think any mission which involves planting a flag, running a few experiments, and then opening one's helmet is ethically flawed - especially when patience will let us solve the intrinsic survival problems.

Let's stick with the laws I know, which are Illinois - so here is Illinois' mattress law - that's in addition to the regulations that come out of our executive branch: http://www.ilga.gov/legislatio... (but hey, I'm just a lawyer, wtf do I know, right?)

The use cases for google glass (overlaying information ontop of really - i.e. augmented reality) and Oculus Rift (a VR display that supplants and replaces your view with a different view - i.e. virtual reality) are entirely different. That would be like buying a car manufacturer to help catch up with SpaceX in building heavy launch vehicles - yeah, both are things you catch a ride in - but the technology that powers them doesn't cross pollinate.

This is why it is illegal for states to regulate anything originating from outside their borders, like flammable mattresses and poisoned baby food.

Can't tell if serious or successful troll.

Marijuana is still illegal, right? I mean, it's it a conspiracy theory if I can point to the status and rules at issue?

Good News! It's already implemented.

I have a better bright-line rule to suggest: no method patents - ever.

Patents should be restricted to the implementation of physical mechanisms - machines, circuits and widgets. Not pseudo code - like the one you linked. What you linked is an idea - an abstract concept of how to solve a problem. The specific implementation could be subject to copyright protection (for the code) and trademark protection (if the slide style became a hallmark of the product) but a patent? No way.

Meh - doubling capacity is so last century. Look at optical media - just by punching a hole in the middle you go from zero useful storage to a lot!

P.S. Ok, so I punched a hole in my Bards Tale character disk so my sister could have her own side (and not screw up my stuff).

You're not allowed to patent an obvious advancement.

But patent law is offensively fucked up. Basically, it's a war of money. Both sides line up patent lawyers (one of a very few formally recognized specializations for attorneys in the U.S.) and burn money until someone gives up. This case will almost certainly wind up before the Supreme Court eventually - unless Samsung folds and pays to make apple go away. Fortunately, Samsung is sufficiently profitable that it can saturate the process with more money than required and write it off as a margin cost for continuing to compete in the smartphone market.

Apple's patents are offensively bad. There *is* enough there to require a jury verdict to nullify them rather than a summary ruling by the Court (preferably one where the foreman doesn't lie about having a personal stake in proving that software patents are nearly always valid - like the last trial between these two) but in a sane system of patents there would be no question that "slide to unlock" is a variation of long established design concepts - i.e. a latch.