Even vegetables put into an MRI machine for a functional scan can show some 'brain activity', simply because the fMRI doesn't actually show 'brain activity', it (in its typical configuration) shows blood oxygenation concentration levels in various places in the brain. The real problem is translating increasing or decreasing levels of oxygenation into brain activity. That's precisely what this study is showing: even a dead fish has changing brain-blood oxygenation levels. You need to remember to do the science and the math part of the problem, and make sure that the statistics are really showing meaningful relations.

The question remains as to what functionality is required to call a person "alive" or "brain dead". If you want to be as absolutely conservative as possible, anyone with a beating heart and working brain stem (corneal reflexes, heart-beat signal, breathing stimuli, etc) and can be considered alive, even if their entire frontal lobe has been entirely caved in removing any wisp of humanity and they aren't even capable of controlling their bowels or bladder or many other autonomic or homeostatic functions. Whether you think it's cruel to pull the plug on someone in this state is entirely up to personal beliefs and/or religious convictions. Medicine tries not to tread too deeply into this water, simply because it's not worth it to rehash the ethical dilemmas with no new science to change anyone's opinion. We leave it up to the individuals (through advanced directives, living wills, etc) and their families to choose.

Just don't be fooled into thinking that scattered activity in a bundle of nerves we happen to call a brain necessarily means she's "alive".

"Dynamic Load-based Overclocking" just doesn't sound as good as "Ultra Speedburner" or "Turbo Boosters" on the tin.

Yeah, nobody would ever notice that. Nobody ever audits or reloads BIOS code. BIOS chips are just packed with extra room for code and even more, they have vast swaths of writable RAM for storing tons of keylogging data, a tiny insignificant fraction's worth that actually would be useful to a foreign intelligence agency (which has to be filtered through to find anything on your ridiculously huge Echelon-scale supercomputing network).

It's a great plot for a novel, Dan Brown, but to get that to work on the scale proposed (getting literally every machine out of China with the software), it's just not feasible.

It's pretty hard to bug something at manufacturing time, since you usually don't have a clue as to who it's being shipped to. It can be done, but odds are you'll end up bugging a lot of 19 year old teenage girls going off to college instead of corporate execs.

The "T" vs "P" originally came from the name of the socket the processor fit in, but quickly became corrupted by Intel marketeering. The modern guideline is that the "T" chips tend to be Mobile Core 2 Duo ("Merom") which are 65-nm chips and run hotter, and that the "P" chips are all Mobile Core 2 ("Penryn") which are 45nm and run 10W+ cooler. The latter, obviously, get significantly better battery life and come with all of the bells-and-whistles enabled by default (VT-x, EIST, faster FSB at 1066 MT/s, etc).

If you're going for the most battery life you can squeeze out of the machine, it's worth the $50 upgrade. Otherwise you likely won't notice a difference in overall performance unless you're a heavy movie editor or exceptionally heavy gamer.

You're both right, which is why the argument is stupid. There's the Nehalem microarchitecture which refers to the chip's construction, and there's the actual Nehalem chip, which was the first chip built with the Nehalem architecture.

It's like arguing whether or not you can call the USS Greenville a "Los Angeles boat".

They're not really two parts of the same architecture; they're two parts of the same project, namely Constellation.

[car-metaphor]
Imagine you're taking a trip across the country. You want to take everything you can with you, because you don't know anyone and you don't really want to pay for lodging. You need: a car to get you across the country and a trailer to pull your stuff in (tents, food, etc). The only requirement of the car is to be man rated. The only requirement of the trailer truck is to carry cargo (let's just say it's automated). The car does not architecturally lean on the trailer in any way: it's just a people carrier. It doesn't matter if the car is an Ares I or a repurposed Delta or a Soyuz. It doesn't matter if the trailer is an Ares V or a Delta-Heavy.
[/car-metaphor]

Killing Ares-I probably kills the Constellation project (seeing as Ares-I is the only lifter for Orion), but I'm certain a lot of the technology could be re-appropriated to a new project.

But then again there are even better options, so perhaps the whole project should just be flushed and the appropriate administrators canned.

A rabid unshaven hippie environmentalist might bring notice to the fact that this is just spending more money propping up coal, rather than investing the money directly into pure green energy (such as a pure solar thermal power plant replacing the coal burning one). But the fact is, there's no way this money would have went to pure green energy in the first place, so they should really be pleased that they are even bothering to try to green their coal plants at all.

It'll be a few months before 1x2TB drive is more cost efficient than 2x1TB drives though. But when it does, it's a simple matter of buying the newer higher capacity drives when adding more storage. Ah, the wonders of redundant arrays of inexpensive data servers.

Since most modern commercial-grade HDs come with a 3-5 year or better warranty these days [1], it's easier just to cash those in when the drives go bad and build a new box around the newer-model drives they ship you in return.

This is truly RAID, as Google, etc. have realized and developed. When the drives die, you don't cry over having the exact same drive stocked. You don't cry at all. At $8k a machine, you could actually afford to flat-out replace the entire box every 4 years and not affect your bottom line (since, you know, you're saving better than three times that by not going with one of the 'cloud vendors').

Most laptops today have much more power efficient chips (AMD's line tops out at 35W, Intel's 25W, most do quite a bit less, especially with all of the fancy power-saving junk thrown in like QuickStart and SpeedStep w/ deeper-sleep DC4). And both of those numbers are just embarrassing with chips like the newer dual-core Atom chips which run at 4W or less at full-tilt and do most everything anyone demands of a laptop anyways.

Now if only someone would wise up and build a 15" laptop with an Atom chip, and LED display and a 9-cell battery... mmm, 8+ hours of battery life.

Obviously, that's why so many Russians have walked on the moon...

People buying these machines know they ship with Ubuntu. It says so right on the website, and the button you click, and repeats it when you checkout. People aren't returning these machines more because they have Ubuntu, they're buying them more because they have Ubuntu.

Now, if only this would rub off on the rest of the business sectors. I'd love to buy a new Studio 15 laptop with the option for Ubuntu. It'd save me 45 minutes formatting, reinstalling Ubuntu and reconfiguring the system the way I like. But unfortunately their selection for machines with Ubuntu only includes the crap Inspiron line (the Ford Fiesta of laptops).

Or we could fess up to the real reason this happens: We can't believe we dropped 50 bones on a game we beat in 2 and a half hours and now need something better to do with our time, so we prance around the game until we find something to entertain ourselves with.

Game developers have come a long way, but nowadays it's 99.999% about graphics and how much eye candy and shit you can pile into a game, and almost everyone's forgotten about the actual game part of the game, and the reason we'd want to play it in the first place.

You mean companies like TuneCore and CD Baby which do nothing but act as publishers of music? Tune Core will publish your music to half a dozen online music stores, and CD Baby will print and ship CDs with your music on you, no copyright B.S., no record labels, no bullshit period. They do charge money for it (hey, it is a service they're providing for you), but it's cheap enough that absolutely anyone with a few bucks can get in on the ground floor.