People have been talking for decades about the sort of application that a cure for cancer could have...

Will that prevent patenting one, once you would come up with a way to _actually_ make one _work_?

The patent never revolves around the idea of putting a fuel cell into a laptop - it's about the HOW you do it...
You may not like that Apple files for a patent for this, but the problem is that Apple, like all companies needs to also look after the interests of its shareholders - if you create a solution and NOT attempt to monetize it, how will your shareholders react? May you even run the dangers of running into a liability for not pursuing profits (after all - that's what _for profit_ companies are for).

For what it's worth - seeing how Apple, Motorola, and other companies are cross-suing each other for patent violations, we should end up with far more attention on how to solve the patent crisis (and, no, I don't think just ditching patents is the way to go - just like there are bad reasons for patents (trolling readily springs to mind), there are also good ones (like preventing a large company from wiping out a small start-up who came up and patented a brilliant solution to a problem).

The wayback machine is a wonderful thing, yes... But a positive example doesn't negate a negative one.

Guns are a good thing - they really helped that one time in the forest when a bear attacked you. They just sucked badly, when a good friend got shot.

Cigarettes are a good thing, because they make you look 'cool' - until lung cancer sets in, at which case, cigarettes probably weren't quite as cool.

The wayback machine is nice to look at some of your old work - but the wayback machine also allows you to remove your site from it - not an individual page or version, yes, but at least it does give you _some_ way to keep a lid on your data.

But picture the bad side - you post something bad about a friend (after a fight you've had). Later you feel sorry for it - and you want to remove it; and you find, you can't.

Another bad side may also be when you change opinions on something over time, and people find pages of you arguing 'the other side' - maybe you were against abortion at some point, now your pro abortion - and some of your pro-abortion friends might find pages of you advocating against (or vice versa).

There are certainly things I argued 20 years back (_on the net_) that are still visible, but that I now see fallacies of. And I have no chance of removing the old comments. If you discuss something just among friends, you can, at least, hope that they'll forget it over time - or that they will also see how your change of heart comes about and therefore ignore what you said before.
On the net, you don't have that choice.

You may now argue, that people should think better before they post - but how often do you read the "How to avoid beginner's mistakes on XYZ", _before_ making some of them?
In my case, 20 years ago, I wouldn't have thought that that data would still be around now; at least, not publicly - at the time, I just didn't think it was feasible storage-wise to keep it all. Now I know different.

Today you might be thinking - well, whatever I post, I don't think anyone will be able to find it 10 years from now - but you're basing that thinking on technology that you see today; and you might think google will not have an easy time finding what you said 10 years ago, so it will not manage to do that 10 years from now, either. On the other hand, in those 10 years, technology will grow leaps and bounds - maybe in 10 years, you can just click on a photo of someone on the internet, and just right-click and select 'personal history' and the future google dredges up _all_ it can find on that person: from the 'more informed' comments that person might be making then, to childish comments uttered in the early 2000s.

Exactly!

60% of the energy is being used by the 90% living in the third world countries...
40% of energy consumption is by us 10% of the people in the 'developed' world.

Interesting how this looks when you start adding numbers of people...

Indeed obvious, where we need to start, isn't it?

And that is before trying to calculate energy consumption in third world countries to have them produce stuff for 'us'...

As long as people will agree that the earth is warming up - will a long discussion about whether man caused it really serve any useful purpose?

Here's how I see it:

Picture yourself as a passenger of the Quantas A380 plane whose engine exploded mid-flight. The moment the engine exploded, what would you look at first:

a) trying to figure out what CAN be done?

b) trying to figure out whether it was caused by humans or not (terrorists or material faults vs. meteor or lightning strikes)?

Think that you will have to decide what to focus on, while the plane is having trouble staying in the air.

My guess is, that getting to land safely ANYWHERE was the top priority... But - it's just my guess...
Maybe you want to fund a study into the event asking everyone on board to see what they did first...

_OR_ we might try and focus on how to get the situation under control as safely as possible - by reducing the number of maneuvers that could contribute or increase the problem, and thinking about counter-maneuvers.

I bet you, even if the wing of that A380 would have gone, and even if chances of the pilot making ANY difference AT ALL - I bet you, they would have tried EVERYTHING to even minimally increase the chances of ANYONE surviving.

From the article:

Hmmm, so it would need 'cleverness' like a closed shell window:

$ sleep 3600 ; cp /path/to/secret.file /mnt/thumbdrive

Then wait half an hour, insert your thumbdrive to be mounted to the proper location; open a completely harmless (but non-work document) from it, say - an invitation to a garden party, and print it -- all the while leaving the thumbdrive mounted, so that the sleep-job can write the document in the background after in the next hour...

Then ensure the thumbdrive is only ejected once more than an hour has passed and the file has been written.

Nothing untoward will ever have been on your screen in the half hour before the thumb-drive access. The worst they'll see on screen is you opening a private garden party invitation to print it at the office...

Stupid system...

Dear anonymous coward: Am I really an idiot for asking whether something is being researched?

If there are pathogens that can jump species - like bird flu - why should it be impossible to make the opposite work, a vaccine that can jump species?

Look at the various plans that are being discussed in different places:

  - vaccination of humans - doesn't solve the problem in the long term, as it would require constant re-vaccination of new generations of children.
  - there's Myrvold's mosquito-zapping laser - is it a permanent solution? No - only permanent in that it will take permanent sales of new units over time, once the old ones die. (Perfect moneyspinner, though - for the "long" term).
- exterminating the mosquitoes - possible, but unlikely that that will succeed, and incalculable in terms of further damage to the ecosystems (what about animals that might live off mosquitoes, and animals living of those? Or is the mosquito really the top-of-the-line predator)?

The best solution, it seems would most likely be to eradicate the disease itself - which will also require that the pathogen be purged from mosquitoes as well. This is not a quick fix, but it will take a very long time - still somehow I think developing a vaccine that might work on mosquitoes will be very, very difficult, but it might just open a good possibility of getting rid of the disease.

Vaccinating mosquitoes themselves is going to be very difficult - I doubt you'll find a way of getting them to line up for the vaccine; so is there a possibility of making a vaccine that might jump from one of the mosquitoes prey (humans or animals) to the mosquitoes as carriers? If we find a single species with a 'manageable' number of creatures to be vaccinated that would in turn over time help to vaccinate all the mosquitoes as well?

This may be sci-fi right now, but given that we have both
  - vaccinations that can be delivered orally (like polio vaccines), and
  - pathogens that CAN jump species

IS there a way that both could be combined, to make a vaccine that will make it up the food chain, to get mosquitoes to suck up the vaccine WITH the blood of its prey?

However unlikely it may be - has such a way been investigated as a possibility?
 

Unlikely, but, would it be possible to design it in a way that it works in mosquitoes as well? (So, that the mosquito might possibly get the antibodies as well?)

If oral vaccination works for polio in humans - would it be possible to design an oral vaccination that might help eradicate the Malaria pathogens in mosquitoes? (i.e. can we 'cure' the mosquitoes before they bite us again?)

The difference in voice control almost seems to resemble the text adventure games of the 80s -
most games, like the Windows 7 feature today, basically used 2-word parsers, all instructions were just plain ' ' (open door, n, kill goblin).

Infocom adventures at the time understood almost plain text sentences; and stood far above the others...

[...]

You've heard of the Einstein quote “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” - have you ever thought that your statement may also make stuff 'simpler' than it is?

For long in human history, it was posed that the earth was flat - until someone 'made up some shit' called gravity that allows us living on a ball shaped earth, without us sliding off the side or making people in Oz simply fall off the planet...

How about hydrogen? For long in history, hydrogen wasn't known to us - until someone 'made up some shit' called atoms and molecules -- in the process picking the name 'atom' (something indivisible), until some other shit was made up (protons, neutrons, electrons), which is the smallest that exists -- well, apart from some other shit stuff that was subsequently made up (quarks).

Obviously, some of this stuff was 'discovered' first, and not made up - but all of it would simply have been some 'invented some shit' had someone just posited its existence before.

Many of Einstein's ideas (frame dragging, time dilation) might still fall (partially) into the same category - it's something that must exist for some formula to work.

Note - this is not saying all of the above would be fictitious, but saying that sometimes you need to posit things that you can't observe, so you have something you can go and look for and finally discover and prove, or simply disprove.

Superstring theory is not yet proven, yet it's a useful concept to talk about among people trying to prove its existence, and it allows making the whole 'matter' thing even simpler -- yet, it may still fall apart. Or - maybe there already is a new theory for it or something else.

Just discrediting any hypothesis as 'making shit up' is stupid, and not helpful to any science. Discrediting making up a theory (and for it to work some as of yet unobservable force/matter), sounds more like religious dogma to me. Sure, many theories turn out to be wrong, but positing a theory (and all it requires) allows people to talk about and test an idea, and may give other people ideas on how some of it could be tested in order to prove or disprove it.

And another point - if dark matter / dark energy existed, it would make some models and some understanding simpler, than by introducing something else different.

In the end, we will see whether "dark energy", or "gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum", or even both go the way of the "Phlogiston"...

Question for the pricing breakdown - can the e-paper be printed on on both sides?

If not, the usable pages go up to 10.000...

Also, trying to print a 50 page document, and your either US$50 (double-sided print) or US$100 (single-sided print) out of pocket - and you need to buy enough paper for the longest document you might want to print.

Besides, reprinted 260 times only really works, if you treat the epaper fairly carefully... Once it has been folded a few times / crumpled / ... I'm not sure you can still go that often. Besides - when you add the ink to the cost of the individual pages, have you added the extra cost of re-arranging the paper, carefully aligning it, (possibly having to worry about which side is up), and then putting it back into the printer, as opposed to just putting another stack of paper into the printer?

What about marking, noting, drawing on the printout? Will that damage the epaper, or will it handle that cleanly?

Finally, what's the environmental impact of 260 pages of (recycled) paper + ink vs. the environmental impact of disposing the epaper (and its chemicals)?

I'm all for the idea of epaper, but I think there is still a fair number of issues left with it...

Well - they're already the largest power importer in Europe - because they went out of nuclear power after Chernobyl...

Remember this one? A storm felled a tree that cut one of the power lines transporting power to Italy - this tripped of a cascading effect cutting off all of mainland Italy:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Italy_blackout

But - even when you say 'This differs from Germany in that the Italian decision was made by a public vote, rather than a government mandated shutdown.' - this is only part of it. Germany had already decided on a nuclear exit before - it was the current government that extended the runtimes of nuclear reactors, causing public outrage. They mostly reverted back to the original targets now, since they increasingly find themselves becoming more and more unelectable, keeping to nuclear power. The governments stance pro nuclear power might have carried for a while longer, if it wasn't for Fukushima. Basically, the pro nuclear lobby said something like Chernobyl couldn't happen in Germany as our plants are safer than the Russian ones -- they couldn't convincingly say that they're safer than Japans...

Am I really the ONLY person who thought of House M.D. Epic Fail (season six) when the initial story made it to slashdot?

It's the episode with the guy who posts all new symptoms on the internet, resulting in the hospital phones, faxes, emails getting overwhelmed by people sending 'their suggestions'...

All you cynics!

Don't you realize what Microsoft is doing?

So many people complain about Apple's 'walled garden', and the 'necessity' to jailbreak your iPhone if you want to be able to do more - at the risk that an update might brick your jail-broken phone.

Now - Microsoft is giving you the (more or less) open phone - no walled garden - and all that without having to give up the thrill of bricking your phone on an upgrade...

A nobel peace prize for Wikileaks?

So far - we are not quite certain, whether wikileaks will aid peace, or actually _cause_ wars.

Think about it - some of the diplomatic papers released were embarrassing (like US diplomats takes on the German foreign minister, or the comments about Putin) - do these aid peace? No.

Some more diplomatic papers seem to reveal some arab states actually urged the US to attack Iran - hmm - is that helping peace along in ANY way? I think it makes conflict between those states MORE likely, not LESS.

Don't get me wrong - wikileaks has done good things - like releasing the helicopter attack videos. These are clear whistleblowing activities, highlighting criminal behaviour. But it seems to me that some of the papers that were released were chosen by the potential size of the print run (i.e. tabloid style), rather than serious and responsible journalism.

So? How is that relevant to me?

I'm happy with the iPhone as it is - completely independently of whether Steve Jobs has a psychological condition or not.

I'd still prefer the iPhone over Android, no matter whether Steve would be healthy or sick, black or white, saint or sinner, started selling crack or even Android phones, ...

Does the company CEOs health or personality have ANY impact on what the device itself does or how well it works? Maybe it has - maybe it's become a lot better BECAUSE of his personality 'defects'.
But then again, without the iPhone, do you really think you'd get an Android phone?

It doesn't matter - the phone does what I want from a phone, it has the apps I'd want on the phone, it looks good, I luckily don't have to turn every cent over twice before buying a phone, so the higher price tag doesn't touch me (enough), ... ...maybe I would draw a line if he endorsed Palin, but that's a whole different issue... ;-)