While I share your opinion that it's Apple's right to block Palm, I just want to mention that, contrary to traditional slashdot wisdom, antitrust law does not require a monopoly. It also prohibits so-called "unfair business practices". Another case where no real monopoly is needed is multi-company collusion, though I admit that such conduct has the effect of a de facto monopoly. It's a fair question to debate the morality of blocking interoperatability. I like Apple, and it seems wrong for Palm to get a free ride on Apple's work, but where would the PC world be without interoperatability and standards? Why not allow printer manufactures to block third-party ink and toner suppliers? It's not easy, and anyone with too firm an opinion on this has probably not thought it through.

The problem with stiff arteries is that they conduct the pulse wave a lot faster. As it is reflected at junctions and narrow passages in the arteries, it can then get back to the heart while the aortic valve is still open. The heart then has to work against the higher pressure, which increases the workload and eventually leads to heart diseases.

The pulse wave doesn't really get to the skin. Away from the large arteries, the pressure is more or less constant. I'm sure you've seen a few injuries with lots of blood (i. e. on the head), but even there there's no notable pulsing of the bloodflow.

That'd be pretty great. the number of tickbites is certain to decrease, and, if it's identified as a major thread, can certainly be avoided almost entirely. But it's only been published in a single paper called "Medical Hypotheses" and there are a number of other diseases mentioned as possible causes: "In both AD and/or the tSEs, transmissible agents and infectious proteins have been postulated to be aetiological factors [4], [8], [11], [12] and [13]. These include bacteria such as Chlamydia pneumoniae [14], Borrelia burgdorferi [15] and [16] and Spiroplasma sp., a helical mycoplasma in scrapie [17], typical and atypical (unconventional) viruses [18], e.g., Herpes simplex virus [19] or L-particles of the latter [19] and [20], tobacco mosaic virus [21], retro-viruses [22], viroids and plasmids [23] and [24], virinos [25], scrapie-associated fibrils [26] and [27] and others [28] U. De Boni and D.R. Crapper, Paitred helical filaments of the Alzheimer-type in cultured neurons, Nature 271 (1978), pp. 566-568. Full Text via CrossRef | View Record in Scopus | Cited By in Scopus (4)[28].: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WN2-4N6FVHJ-6&_user=1676895&_coverDate=12%2F31%2F2007&_rdoc=1&_fmt=full&_orig=search&_cdi=6950&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000054205&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1676895&md5=8536e295f899761700037b54b167c9c5#secx5

Should be easy enough to ask a sample of patients and a control what diseases they had and how much time they spent outdoors. So easy in fact that I'm sure it's been done and nothing came up.

It could just be that, evolutionary speaking, there wasn't much to do at night and thus we rest half the day to save energy.

This reminds me of the current idea to charge a 10$ entrance fee for foreign visitors. The money is supposed to go into a marketing fund. It's not only borderline schizophrenic to raise a new barrier in order to promote it, it might be even more sinister: that fee can apparently only be paid by credit card. Since 10$ doesn't seem to be enough money to be worth collecting, I'm wondering if getting all the credit card data isn't the real goal.

Or maybe the US wants to finally catch up with the third world in unfriendliness.

The US just approved this merger about a week ago. An additional week is certainly no proof of malice. Even if it takes longer, it might be due to more intensive oversight, as the EU seems to simply take the job more seriously.

You could argue that in-depth oversight hurts businesses, but it's a common fallacy here to attribute it to Anti-Americanism, even though there's ample evidence that European and Asian country are often hit just as harshly as American ones. See for example the then-highest cartel fine against countries from Belgium, the UK and Japan.

Better than ducted heating (I could never stand that when I visited the US), but worse than normal radiators, since the convection of warm air lifts all the dust from the floor.

Yes, it's a desaster the program worked better than hoped for. I'm sure the car industry hates it that they sold these cars so fast, they didn't even have to advertise.

Not going to RTFA article, but I can't see how you could screw this up. Let everyone self-report their mileage and then recover whatever you had to pay out if an accident occurs and mileage is off by more than 20% or so. That's the system used here (Europe) and I've never heard anyone complain about it. No privacy violations involved, either. If you don't trust the self-reporting, it'd be easy to verify mileage in regular intervals by tying it to i. e. existing mandatory emissions & safety checks.

I have to correct myself: Gerafix has no chance at today's stupidity prize. You win. "Over a 12-year-period" obviously means they're talking about people in or after puberty. It could never be that these scientists had thought about the best group to test, or to test for a long time, say a "12-year period", and then "correct for age".

I'm sure you're feeling really smart now, having repeated the endless slashdot correlation does not prove causation meme. It's so great that every 14 year old slashdotter seems to know more about statistics than scientists do.

You're even closer to your "best of slashdot" award by not even reading the summary, or not knowing what "corrected for physical activity" means. But beware: the hundreds of "BMI is stupid because I'm not fat/It's all muscle/my bones are heavy" commenters are on your heels. It's surprising that there's not a single really overweight person commenting here, considering that 90% of overweight (by BMI) are simply fat. But maybe, just maybe, all the geeks here are secret superheros.

I'm interested in the biosciences, and there's no internet resource that beats Albert's Molecular Biology of the Cell. It's a 2000 pages book that's not only more detailed than Wikipedia on most subjects it covers, it's simply vastly superior in the way it presents the information, illustrates it and basically builds up a narrative throughout the material. Wikipedia might have more width of knowledge, but nowhere the depth. Learning is also different from ADD-hopping Wikipedia links, where you can read all day without learning much because you don't have the structure or framework that lets you commit those facts to long-term memory. There's a certain class of books that's just epic. Tufte comes to mind, Feynman's lectures or "A Pattern language". I'm sure it's possible to do such work on a webpage, but we haven't found the best way to do it yet.

I should add that there's a problem with the general sentiment of "everything was built so much better in the past". Firstly, that might simply be cognitive bias. The old stuff that lasts is still around so you'll base your judgment on that, neglecting everything that broke down and is long forgotten. Secondly, it's not that we have forgot how to build solidly. We've just learned to build cheaply. Plastics just weren't available in the past so you had to use metal. There was less knowledge about materials so you had to use higher margins or error. All those factors drove up the prices. Your grandmother's washing machine might have lasted twice as long, but it was three or four times as expensive. With longevity comes stagnation - I don't even want to use a twenty year old fridge, as it'll be loud and wasteful (even if you include energy used to manufacture it).

Sometimes you might want something solid just because it's more fun to have it. It might be furniture, tools or even notebooks. But there are still brands around to cater to that need, it's just that most people prefer to buy the cheap stuff and then bitch about i. e. Apple's prices.

When the ISS is decommissioned, I doubt it'll be for technical reasons. It's obviously not a consumer product and NASA and their contractors have shown they can build stuff that lasts (like the Mars Rovers, Voyager, the Space Shuttle or any of the hundreds of satellites). At some point the ISS will simply stop being useful. Some say that day had come the day it was launched, but I'm sure there's a little bit of science and a lot of engineering research and PR that the ISS has and still is useful for.