At least according to some philosophers and physicists, everything corresponds to algorithms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Any patented process and device can be described wholly in algorithmic terms. Does this mean nothing should be patentable? Of course not. There's no sharp dividing line in these things, and this is my point -- there are soft lines here, just like there are soft lines between things that are best described as mathematics, and things that are best described as software processes. Ultimately they all reduce to mathematics, but that in itself doesn't make them unpatentable. The disputes here are on where along a continuum to place a threshold, and everyone has their own favourite point. The summary suggests this is lost on Mr. Lee, who chooses to see this as purely black and white and cut off anything that reduces to mathematics. The problem with that is that, if you were to take this to its logical conclusion, then nothing whatsoever would be patentable. Then again, Mr. Lee may just be radical enough to believe that, even if he's not upfront about it for strategic reasons.

You failed to address the possibility, one that has been suggested more than a few times over the past few TC articles here, that TC was written by NSA devs, perhaps as a side/unofficial project, and now that's come home to roost.

> "if I was neurotypical I would not be as skilled a programmer" [citation needed]

Post peer-reviewed, reproducible research backing up your anecdote, or I call BS. Only a small portion of good developers fall on the spectrum, and even if the incidence of ASD is greater among software developers than the general population, it's not that much of a difference, and, more importantly, still fails to back up your claim.

Funny enough the supporters of "deaf culture" made the same noise as cochlear implants became more common. And the same thing will happen to the "autism rights" imbeciles that is now happening to the "deaf culture" ones--slow but sure annihilation. Good riddance, I say.

That still doesn't make it fair to us normals that you can get tax deductions in the US for carrying this diagnosis.

Science (and I mean biology and evolutionary psychology, not soft "science" like sociology) backs up GP, not you.

Note that I didn't write just bacteria, but those and other "unicellular lifeforms", which includes archaea, and also most eukaryotes such as protozoa. Claiming that the distinction between multicellular and having multiple organelles is moot is silly, and makes it appear as if the point of your post was to show off or make an argument. If you really believe that the difference is moot, then you should be at the forefront of a campaign in biology to redefine the terms unicellular and multicellular (of course, none such exists, and instead we're shooting the shit on /.)

Bacteria and other unicellular lifeforms are the most evolutionarily successful on Earth by any measure -- numbers, biomass, adaptability to changing environmental conditions. The expectation that complex multicellular life is an inevitable product of evolution is unwarranted, even when looking at our own example -- look how late complex life came on the scene in the history of this planet's biome. Even less justified is the expectation that, when complex life evolves by chance on some place where simple life is present, it is unlikely to become extinct before it begins spreading through the galaxy. That assumption is without basis and comes from the same bias that makes people presume humanity being extant at some indefinite time in the future, in one form or another. A further assumption is that spacefaring ability leads to, well, spacefaring. Given our own experience, there seems to be a lot more focus on inner space -- the virtual world of information technology -- than outer space, primarily because the former is very cheap to explore in comparison (cheap in terms of difficulty and expenditure of energy and other resources). As the virtual allows us to bypass ever better the biological mechanisms which drive us towards taking real life risk and putting real effort into exploration and expansion, the impetus to move into space will remain weak and likely even weaken. (I'll acknowledge here transhumanists' wet dream of a nanomachine-based grey goo substrate for our minds eventually expanding to feed itself with more matter, once it eats up the planet, but that is extremely unlikely, and I'll point out that Richard Smalley's basic science criticisms of the futurists' views of nanotech possibilities have yet to be properly addressed.) Let me end this by noting that it is a good thing there almost certainly is no other spacefaring civilization in the galaxy, for reasons another poster brought up last time slashdot discussed extraterrestrial life: http://science.slashdot.org/co...

Is this post a joke? This change is far, far deeper than the changes of instruction set and CPU architecture that comprises the difference between Itanium and x86. This is about making fundamentally more powerful hardware on the most basic level to break the physical limits approached by current applied technology.

And that's just one problem with your post. The other is the criticism of different CPU architectures and instruction sets, pointing out Itanium's failure and forgetting the enormous success of ARM which these days runs in about 50 billion devices--and ARM is no less different than x86 than Itanium is.

I use Firefox daily, with many tabs and many add-ons, and I haven't seen a crash in years. Nice FUD spreading.

Mod parent down for lack of reading comprehension. The study is on 6-11 year olds who were exposed to general anesthesia within their first year, not those who were exposed during their 6th to 11th year.

> Separating them requires vast amounts of electrioc energy.

Your post sets out to critique the claim of efficiency of this technology and falls flat on that count, because you fail to compare the "vast amounts" of energy it takes to convert the bauxite into aluminum with the vast amounts of energy the battery releases. The absolute amount of energy used to manufacture the battery is irrelevant; what matters is the amount relative to that recovered as electricity produced by the battery--and that your post fails to cover completely. (In practical terms, the source of energy for manufacture also matters, and Alcoa's plant being exclusively powered by hydroelectricity is a big part of this story, as another of your responders already noted.)

It's not a good idea to use words one doesn't understand just because they might sound cool. A husk is a left over outer shell or covering. A neutron star derives from the inner layers and core of the original star--the summary writers could hardly have chosen a more ill-fitting word. That the degenerate matter in a neutron star is a superfluid, juxtaposed with the more specific meaning of husk as the _dried_ outer portion of a fruit or nut, takes this misuse of the word into the realm of the ludicrous.

The biggest problem with MDMA is toxicity. It's highly excitotoxic, among other things: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... It's ability to cause depencency has not been as well studied, but stimulants in general are addictive (including legal prescription ones like Adderall and Ritalin). The fleeting nature of any benefit, as http://science.slashdot.org/co... notes, makes this not worth it given permanent nature of the neurotoxic effects. If you've got to do something, stick with psychedelics--generally non-addictive, low toxicity, and bad reactions are rare and generally limited in scope (unless, you know, you jump out of a window or something).

> Jury nullification almost never happen

That's quite sad, really. It shows that, for most, conformance supersedes conscience.