They don't lose anything by becoming citizens

They will lose the ability to do meaningful banking in countries that have signed FATCA-treaties with the US.

They'll have to submit FBARs.

etc...

Thanks to the new FATCA regime imposed upon the world, banks in NZ are tying to detect her US citizenship so her details and financial info can shared with the NZ IRD who will then pass it on to the US IRS.

You're lucky! Where I live, banks have realized that they can avoid the whole FATCA rigmarole by not accepting US persons as customers. You want a securities account? Great. Oh, you're a US person? Sorry.

This US person "disease" also spreads via power of attorney. You're not a US person, but your spouse is and you gave him or her power of attorney over your accounts? Well, you better revoke that or have your accounts cancelled.

Being a US person (which isn't the same as a US citizens, but usually US citizens are also US persons) will make dealing with foreign banks very, very painful. Thanks to FATCA (google it), foreign banks will just refuse to deal with US persons (or at least refuse to give them more than a regular checking account. No stock market accounts, etc). This goes as far as threatening to cancel the accounts of non-US-person spouse if US-person other spouse has power of attorney over these acounts. Don't laugh, this happened to me.

Also, there's FBAR - foreign bank account report. A US person must report any and all of their foreign accounts, even if they don't owe any taxes. Should you happen to forget that, the fine can be as high as the maximum value of each account - for every year that you forgot to file.

A spinal cord is more complicated - obviously.

Spinal nerves are a completely different beast than peripheral nerves. The latter do regrow on their own, slowly. The former don't.

I got my hopes up. :( I have a syrinx.

Mine's right below the tumor that caused it. Neurological crap is some of the worst crap.

There is a huge difference between repairing trauma damage and repairing a clean planned surgical cut.

These guys aren't planning to repair a surgical cut, they're planning to graft the spinal cords of two different bodies together.

Maybe they should try to fix a regular decapitation first. Put the head back on the same body and prove that most of the nervous connections still work.. Even that would be worthy of a Nobel prize in medicine.

Spinal cords? We're just missing a *CONCEPT* somewhere, a molecule, a messenger, INFORMATION.

The same is true for curing cancer, every genetic disorder, and every viral disease.

Also, we don't even know if a solution exists.

Do heart transplants involve cutting the organ in halft and putting it back together?

This isn't like pursuing heart transplants before being able to fix each and every heart defect. It's like pursuing heart transplants before being able to do surgical sutures.

Right now, we can't even repair spinal cord injuries where head and body belong to the same person. Once that becomes a routine medical procedure, we might think about head transplants and how to solve the problems associated with them.

Seriously, are the people who cleam this serious? I don't think so.

Reminds me of a competition to program a computer player for the classic Asteroids a few years ago.

The best entries, however, didn't rely on AI, but on the fact that the RNG of the arcade game isn't random. Once the Asteroids-bot figured out the internal state of the RNG, it could basically use hyperspace to make targetted jumps (and never one that lead to the destruction of the ship), shoot at asteroids that haven't appeared yet and various other tricks. It was very impressive to watch one of these bots in action.

There's no real way to use chemical weapons accurately.

Delivered by spring-loaded injector disguised as an umbrella.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

If, at some point, we have the capability to travel 0.8 ly (which probably includes keeping a spacecraft operational for decades), it's probably not very difficult to scale it up to 8.0 ly.

Unfortunately, our current capability is probably closer to 0.000008 ly than to 0.8 ly.

'Fittest' must mean ' most fit in a certain environment', but how is that measured?

Producing more offspring that manages to procreate.

'Most fit' must can only be meaured as the ones 'that survive'.

No, survival is a necessary, but not a sufficient criterion. Reproduction rate is what actually counts. If there are two groups with different reproduction rates, the larger one will eventually become completely dominant, especially when the two groups start getting into conflicts about resources.

Yeah. Human civilization would be nice if it didn't involve all those people.

Instead of the company going through that hassle, why can't these 100 users find another game?!

Maybe they like this particular game? I'd love the chance to play City of Heroes or Earth&Beyond again. I wouldn't mind paying for that opportunity, either.

Few users means this game is not that much fun anymore.

Dictating what other people have to consider "fun" is ridiculous. This is just a super lame excuse to trick/force companies to share their code for nothing/free.

They could keep a server running. Or charge for the server module. Their choice.

That's bullshit. The code belongs to the copyright holder to do as he/she sees fit during the copyrighted phase, they should not lose it.

Sorry, copyright law was supposed to beneficial for both the public (which profits through the promotion of, er, the sciences and useful arts) and the creator of the work (who has an easier time monetizing it). Using copyright to force the public to stop using the old stuff and spend money on the new stuff is flat-out abuse of copyright law and should not fall under its protections.