It's easy enough to simulate martian conditions here on earth, which is a more controlled and far cheaper means of experiment. It was found that certain lichen can do quite well, although note that this was on the assumption that water would be available.

It would probably be best not to introduce earth microbes before a full terraforming plan is developed. The population might explode, consume all the available micronutrients, and then die off. Or it might become a pest, inhibiting the release of other, more useful microorganisms later on. And it might obscure any extant martian microorganisms or micoorganism fossils when those could provide a far better template than earth-based extremophiles. We'll want something robust and sustainable, a planned ecosystem genetically engineered to produce all the right byproducts and which changes in concert with the alterations to atmosphere, global temperature, and soil composition without any unintended extinction events.

No, slaughter is indiscriminate killing. Reducing casualties is a definite move away from that. While attaching a cost to war is one way of prohibiting it -- hence the success of M.A.D. -- the problem is someday you do wind up having to pay that cost. Overall it's better to reduce the cost than trying to make it as frightful as you can.

But if soldiers can be made obsolete, perhaps killing people can be made obsolete as well. Just as women and children have sometimes enjoyed a certain immunity for not being part of the military forces, when the main threat and the main production force on both sides is robotic, why would the humans be attacked at all when their influence on the outcome is only marginal and doing so would open your own humans to retaliation?

We clearly need to capture this whale and study it.

I went the opposite route of never taking notes to taking meticulous notes. But I found in my upper level courses that my brain simply could not keep up with the material at hand. It was instead most important that I had the notes to refer back to for doing the homework, which was where I would actually figure out the material. Trusting only to my brain capabilities during that hour, I never would have parsed it into anything comprehensible. I would also go back and create a comprehensive table of contents for my notes which forced me to review them, figure what was important, figure out how it all related, and left me with a very handy tool for referring back to the material.

Of course, that only worked in classes with good lecturers in the first place.

In any case, we live in age where the professor only needs to deliver a solid lecture once and put it on youtube. I feel it would be better to do that and use the hour to answer questions and work problems -- things which actually do require the instructor's physical presence.

Actually, humans have done a good job of surviving famine and other food stresses by adopting long term storage strategies. It's fundamental to agriculture -- usually your crop is not producing 365 days of the year. Humans unable to ration and protion themselves would be less likely to survive because food availability is rather variable. We're not just eating machines. And there are plenty of places historical and contemporary places with high food aviailability and no significant obesity problem. Compare America to Japan. It really is the content of the diet which is at issue (as well as a more leisurely lifestyle) not simply the availability of the food.

Microsoft does not own the information; they as a third party own the server on which someone else's information resides, a server which is held and taxed as a foreign asset outside US regional jurisdiction. It's one thing to compel Microsoft as a transnational company to produce one of their corporate records regardless of where they have stored it: agreeing to subject themselves to the US judicial system is part of incorporating in the US. It's entirely another when they are being told their foreign offices are actually territory of the US government and anyone or anything which resides there must submit to the pleasures of the US judicial system.

If I had written a letter in Britain and put it in a British safety deposit box I don't think the court would have the guts to demand it, even if the bank were jointly owned in the US. But scan that letter and store on the server and suddenly it's free game. Why? Because now it's easy to sneak the data out of the country without bothering the local authorities? Good news for people torrenting.

I suppose if you live in other countries you should doublecheck that any web companies you do business with do not also have a US presence because if they do any of your data could be subject to requisition by the US government even if it's data which has never left your country.

Yes, although you wouldn't ignite it, you would simply apply a heat source to drive the alcohol out from the granules and into the vapor phase. You can do the same with regular alcohol.

I wouldn't recommend it however: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

Maybe it's not the best for inner city roads, but on long highway stretches it would be awfully nice to be able to see the road far ahead. Especially on road with hills and curves, headlights do a fairly bad job of lighting up that reflective paint (other than what's immediately ahead) because often your car is not oriented so as to illuminate it.

In my opinion this is a bit like sitting in your backyard with a telescope opining that there are no new planets left to discover in the solar system while people are out paving the way to actually visit them.

The work being done right now is monumental. Science is progressing faster than it ever has been. But great and fundamental insights are obviously going to be clustered around paradigm shifts. Newton gave us classical mechanics in the 17th century. It took another two hundred years before quantum mechanics displaced it. And then there was lots of room for different scientists to establish the ground rules and get their names in textbooks. But keep in mind that the discovery of quantum mechanics was not the result of people constantly hunting for a way to overthrow Newton. Scientists explored all Newton had to offer, eventually found places where he came up short, and trying to extend Newton is what eventually lead to the knowledge which justified quantum mechanics.

Nobel prizes are awarded for major effects on a field. When there's been a lot of branching off you try to look back to one of the initial branches and credit that with spawning the others. That's obviously going to favor older work as time goes on (keep in mind how nascent our recent understanding is). But that's a bit like crediting Adam and Eve. It's a pretty simplististic way of establishing a hierarchy of importance.

If they were making something that looks like blackberry for the purpose of selling to apple users, I don't think an injunction was necessary.

They aren't, really. The policy agenda of local representatives is much more flexible and much more tailored to the needs of those who voted for them. Do you honestly even care what your mayor's opinion on the Ukraine crisis is? Why would you want to be in the position of having to decide whether to vote to support your views on school vouchers or to vote to support your views on the war in Iraq? They are so disparately unrelated, even in the foundational knowledged needed to make good decisions in the respective areas, that it is just silly that you would have to choose between I-Support-Educating-Our-Underpriveleged-Youth-And-Want-To-Bomb-Brown-People or Keep-the-Troops-Home-and-Pay-Teachers-Minimum-Wage. Local reps pick up some of the party flavor, but they mostly inherit from their constituents. There are often local democrats who are more conservative than most republicans or local republicans who are more liberal than most democrats.

The further you remove the people who control your immediate laws/well-being, the harder it is to hold them accountable, and the more abstract their role becomes.

IMHO the issue is that academia is not really a hierarchy like in industry. At a big school the freshman labs will be plenty paranoid about safety because of legal liabilities, but once you're talking about professors' private research projects, it's more like a hobbyist working in their basement, and in that situation we're all inclined to become comfortable and take shortcuts. Part of it, also, is the assumption that anyone with a degree comes packaged with knowledge of proper lab technique. What you will find is that, especially when you are talking students and Ph.D.s from different countries, they were trained differently. We have a lot of Russians who seem particularly cavalier. (honestly, if Chernobyl had't already happened, I might be expecting it).

Clearly, Apple cannot afford to take the risk. Why, if they give in just this one time, they set the stage for this family to become kingpins of crime. All they would need is a steady flow of cadavers, forged legal documents, lawyers, and stolen iPads, any of which these sort of experience criminals could find fenced for a-dime-a-dozen.

This truly bothers me. This guy is like the members of MADD who are upset with ride programs because it means people won't get caught for DUI. Or those who are gleeful when civlians die in a way that proves their point.

When it comes to something like donating money to help poor kids, I don't care who is doing it or why. I care that the kids are being helped. It's obvious who views them as political pawns when one person feels it's "unfair" that they are receiving financial assistance because it doesn't play into his picture of the world. I'll bet Mr. Erin McElroy donates exactly $0 to help these kids out.

Sure, although it points a broader point about his willingness to engage in prolonged negotiations (for whatever reason) and willingness to drop the deal. It's kind of like trying to negotiate with North Korea -- the stated reasons they do anything are equally ridiculous, but you have to go along with it if you're actually looking to finalize those negotiations.