What is evil? I like the AD&D definition - a scale of more and more willing to allow harm to others for your own benefit. Of course, what is seen as harm that matters is the rub.

Would an open organ market save lives - oh, yes, and prohibiting it does cost lives - so one could certainly argue like here that the prohibition is evil.

But allowing such a market will create a society that allows much more willful harm for profit. Right now, organ illegal organ harvesting exists, but is somewhat rare and difficult to make a safe profit from. The legal 'market' is based on donations - so there is no prohibition on the act of getting organs, there's just more people with failing organs than people dying with healthy organs.

The results of allowing an organ market would be an opening bubble resulting in increased harvesting amongst the ethically 'invisible' (poor/isolated), and a greatly increased demand for 'donors' either desperate or false (in order to launder organs). Some of this will be caught, but much of it would become institutionalized.

The endpoint would be a lot of poor people across the world dead and permanently disabled, a lot of wealthy and older people living a few months longer, a relatively few children of the wealthy saved, and a HUGE number of people financially invested in the organ market through their banks and mutual funds.

This last part is the big evil thing - markets always, ALWAYS demand more - more organs, more secrecy, more profitability. They thrive on multiplying evil in terms of harm ('externalities') in order to create better profit ratios.

The whole pattern is just far to evil for me.

I'd suggest putting more money into single-organ cloning (there's been some amazing developments lately), but if there's one thing the market process is HORRIBLE at, it's doing scientific research - it always seems to abandon anything long term, treats it only as marketing, and destroys far too much (to prevent helping 'competitors'.) Taxes, though a limited kind of evil, tend to be much more productive over time for the same result.

Ryan Fenton

There's many, many more PCs in the world than there were last year, and there will continue to be many, many more PCs next year.

Just because it's rate of growth is slower than it used to be, does not mean there will be fewer PCs used - PCs are not actually getting less popular, they're just not getting more popular at as fast a rate as before.

The 'desktop' is as necessary, and as used as ever - there's just fewer folks needing a new copy right now. The role of PCs in doing most of the creation of content, serving of data, and as a customizable platform will not be reduced - there's just other specialized devices getting into their own growth phases in popularity, consuming the content created by an industry of PCs and PC servers.

It's like saying that micro organisms are in danger, because they've filled most of the world, they aren't doubling in number periodically anymore, and other creatures that eat them are increasing in number. But none of those 'competitors' actually fill the same niche, and they all depend on the lowly class of micro organisms to function in the end.

Ryan Fenton

Why do so many of these stories have things like "dumbfounded" or "baffled" in the title? Are these scientists just standing there, exclaiming to everyone who will listen - "I'm just so gosh-darn BAFFLED!" Not from any scientist I've met - but it's always reported as such, as if unknowns weren't a crucial element of the whole, you know, SCIENTIFIC PROCESS.

Yeesh.

Ryan Fenton

I've worked on programming games of chance for various states and governments, and learned that's there's a lot of problems communicating odds/ratios/differences in the ways this test is laying things out, especially for wide audiences that will validly complain about the terms used.

While they're not always fully ambiguous, you're just going to get a large percentage of test-takers answering incorrectly for things they legitimately know, just because they were thinking 'wrong' about how the information was present at that moment. Now, while this does a good job of showing where real-life problems can mislead people - it does a poor job of testing the actual skills being taught, as it's testing too many distinct things in each question to be meaningful in measuring math alone.

In order to have these kinds of questions be meaningful, you'd have to ask several variants over 100's of questions to filter understanding of each aspect of the questions - and you couldn't do that in one sitting either - which is why these are bad questions for a test of math.

If you wanted to test understanding of language context, use a question just for that - a 'what is the best sentence to describe..', then you don't have to have it as part of every question, and can even use previous questions to establish a context.

What this seems designed to do, is provide poor test results for people who haven't been given special training about 'math sentences' (which don't correspond to much), so that they can inflate their "improvement" when people improve in their tests, which are mostly just about 'math sentences'.

That doesn't sound like a math class - that sounds like a product training class.

Richard Feynman would rant much about this.

Ryan Fenton

So... you're saying that the whole "we've got to alter the polarity on the deflector array" technobabble on Star Trek, may be retconned... as reality? With lasers, onto metals?

Daaaayyym.

Seriously though - neat new twist on material science, and great exploration of particle coupling/entanglement! Could result in some rather odd, but promising advances in chip design and layout.

Ryan Fenton

Sounds less like 'piracy', and more like early America, where our forebears had little stake in maintaining the seemingly unjust control of foreign interests, but much interest in creating a large body of works that the public could use to generate culture in this new world.

I'm sure there were a lot of folks an ocean away decrying the 'free ride' those Americans were taking then too - but those resources had some heavy work to do, and it would rightly seem absurd at the to pay several times the cost of production for a 'licensed' book at the end of the day. What parts of culture we were able to 'steal' helped make us diverse and strong - and I don't blame any developing nation for wanting to repeat that, either officially, or unofficially like most nations.

Ryan Fenton

Using radio waves to track position/movement is VERY far from new. Even imaging through walls is extremely old hat. A control interface with 10cm+/- resolution would be drastically worse than any current game controller.

This isn't for gaming - it's use would be primarily for surveillance and automated 'security' tools of various kinds. It's not Xbox - its NSA/military/creepy 'spy' tools.

Ryan Fenton

A very good video showing movement mapped to real gameplay.

The obvious: It's not QUITE as 1-1 as a mouse with 4 inches of control surface.

But I'd still rate it a bit higher than a trackball, which is high praise from me, since I really enjoy using trackball inputs when a mouse isn't convenient.

This is a real accomplishment in input innovation - even without considering the dynamic haptic feedback portion of the design.

I'd be amazed, if this works as advertised, if Sony and Microsoft don't push for a copycat controller very rapidly - especially given the PC-like nature of their new consoles.

The remaining challenge: How would it fare against a 360/Dualshock controller in specialized console games. From what I've heard from developers so far:

Super Meat Boy dev trys out the Steam controller

It sounds like it's a good compromise overall - but it's still got some hurdles to clear to being "the best" - but man, it sounds promising so far!

Ryan Fenton