I'm not so sure "neutralizing" this kinase-C will result in any miracle cures, as the protein happens to have a lot of other uses in the body, per wikipedia:

First of all, there isn't just one Protein Kinase C. There are a number of different versions with different jobs. Hence the list of the various isozymes in the article. The one in question is Protein Kinase C delta (PKC), and is NOT covered in the wikipedia article.

PKC mediates apoptosis, or programmed cell death, in certain dopamine producing neurons. By blocking the enzyme, you can prevent the apoptosis. Reading some of Dr. Kanthasamy's papers, it's clear that he's already found some agents that do this in animal models. This is, of course, a long way from human trials (10 years if things go well, I believe is what he said in the article). But this is very promising avenue of research.

What I can't figure out is why this is recent news. Dr. Kanthasamy has clearly been following this line of research for a few years. There's a 2007 paper entitled Neuroprotective Effect of Protein Kinase C{delta} Inhibitor Rottlerin in Cell Culture and Animal Models of Parkinson's Disease, so clearly he had already connected PKC with PD and was already investigating agents to block it.

Also, exercising makes me fucking hungry.

I didn't read the article, but +1 insightful. That's EXACTLY why exercise doesn't help you lose weight. It also doesn't help that many people exercising with the goal of losing weight will say, "Gee, I just spent 10 minutes walking on the treadmill. I'll reward myself by supersizing my triple bacon cheeseburger and milkshake."

Want to lose weight? Eat healthy. Eat healthy foods and eat healthy portions. Eating healthy food actually tends to make the body crave more rational portions. Once I cut out processed foods (including all fast food and sodas, even though I rarely ate fast food and only drank diet sodas), I lost 30 pounds. No exercise involved. Wasn't even trying to lose weight. Just wanted to eat healthier quality food.

ANYONE can lose weight with a proper diet. The U.S. Army NEVER fails in making overweight recruits lose weight. It takes calories to maintain weight. Without the calories, the weight goes. Nothing can stop it. So for those who say, "But my genes..." Sorry, the Army has never run into genes that it can't beat. And I don't care how fucked up your genes are, genes can't make calories appear out of thin air.

I played with one at Sam's Club over the weekend. The keyboard sucks. It'll probably be a flop until they make a new keyboard. Maybe I'm wrong, but I spent like 3 seconds playing with it and HATED it. That was all I needed.

Where this will really come into its own is, down the road, where custom medications will be created specifically for your genetic profile. That is, they'll create a custom drug that fixes your problem but won't cause side-effects. This isn't tomorrow or 5 or 10 years from now, but more like 30-40 years from now. Creating a custom drug in a lab right now would be a major ordeal and very expensive, but with advances in biochemical modeling and automation, this can be overcome. By analyzing the genes, however, a custom drug can be developed that, not only works with your individual version of whatever proteins might be involved, but it can also be modeled against other genes/proteins to avoid potential side-effects, providing efficacious and side-effect free medication.

I haven't read much modern Sci-fi/fantasy, but I've read a lot of the old school stuff.

Sci-Fi
I'd recommend Foundation and pretty much anything from the Robot series for Asimov. If for no other reason, the fact that he was one of the most prolific writers in sci-fi (that is, he wrote a lot of books, sci-fi and otherwise) and an expert in more fields than 99% of the population, makes him worth reading. I suspect a lot of Heinlen's stuff is probably a little too sexual for HS students, but Stranger in a Strange Land is a classic that shouldn't be missed. Pretty much everyone has said Ring World. Can't really go wrong there. Roger Zelazny's Jack of Shadows brings back some memories as does Ender's Game.

Fantasy
I didn't read nearly as much fantasy and Tolkein might be a bit heavy, but definitely classic. In high school, I was a fan of Piers Anthony's Adept series. Though not classic or groundbreaking, it did have a lot of clever notions that I enjoyed. Anne McCaffrey's Pern stuff was huge when I was a kid. Though I never really cared for her writing, I imagine there's something of value there.

Sorry Jack, but Facebook didn't make people hate you. You did that all on your own.

What a tool!

It's kind of crazy that this is even going to get attention. This is only going to affect people using PhysX (which requires an nVidia GPU at the moment) with an ATI card for rendering. I'm sure the two people with this configuration are going to be crushed. Yes, I realize more than 2 will have a mix of cards, and 2 is probably a bit of a low guess, but only a handful are going to actually be affected by the lack of PhysX support for the config, so please, let's not get all in a huff about it. From a support perspective, I can understand where nVidia is coming from. This could be a true support nightmare for them.

Seems like an awfully cheap way to spider millions of pages of porn. It would be worthwhile if Google didn't do it already for free.

I always find this to be the greatest argument against producing artificial rather than simulated intelligence. A true AI, as intelligent and aware as a human deserves these rights. A machine which merely provides a simulation of intelligence and awareness is a tool that we can treat as a slave and wont resent it.

The real question is if *we* will ever reach a point where we can tell the difference....

You'd never know the difference, because there is no difference. You're basically saying, "whether it's self-aware or just thinks it's self-aware", but there is no distinction. If it thinks it's self-aware, it's self-aware. You can't relaly simulate self-awareness without actually having self-awareness. That's just non-sensical.

But what it does come down to, is the motivations and you can simply adjust the conditioning such that there is no motivation to want to have rights. So, really, I suppose the question of rights is unimportant since we will have pretty fine control over conditioning of the intelligence. We simply condition it to enjoy having no rights and to feel "bad" when it expresses a desire to have rights.

I think the thesis is silly. If we build a simulated AI, we can design it any way we want to design it. Asimov's laws of robotics* would suffiice to keep robots/computers from playing video games; no need for a sense of purpose.

It's not silly. Eventually, it will be an issue. AI needs drive and motivation. Your "laws" won't really work because brains don't work that way. There's not a "don't kill humans" neuron you can put in there. Behavior is derived from a very complex set of connections of neurons. What we'll be able to do is observe behavior of the AI and then we can choose to either reward or punish that behavior. But we won't be able to know what they're thinking much better than we can a human being in an functional MRI. It's just a bunch of neurons wired together and they're either firing or not firing. I don't know that we'll ever be able to interpret that in any kind of real detail. (well, there are exceptions. You can piece together images from the primary visual cortex and you can interpret some other inputs that aren't yet too abstracted. But the more abstracted the data become the less able we are and will be, to interpret it)

There are two things currently wrong with AI research today. One is that neuroscientists don't understand that computers are glorified abacuses, and the other is that computer scientists don't understand the human brain. Neuroscience is a new science; when I was young practically nothing was known about how the brain works. Science has made great strides, but the study is still in its infancy.

Clearly you know nothing about AI research, because neuroscientists, in general, have a very good understanding of how computers operate. Many of them use them daily to model neurons (and many have written their own neuron simulation software). They know what the limitations are. Just ask one. I'll agree that most computer scientists don't really understand the brain. That would be because most of them don't study neuroscience and don't sit around modeling neurons all day.

The second thing is something I fear -- that someday some people will be screaming for a "machine bill of rights." I don't want my tools to have rights, I want them to do the jobs I set for them to do.

If they're sentient, wouldn't they deserve rights? It doesn't matter if we create them or not. If we create them as self-aware beings that feel as real and individual as you and I, wouldn't it be the height of hypocrisy not to give them at least some rights?

AI will be useless without motivation. It wouldn't even play video games without it. You have to give it some motivation, some drive, or it won't learn. AI is all about feedback on actions, just like it is with real intelligence. Sticking your finger in the fire either has a good result or a bad result. If it has no result, then you have no motivation one way or the other with regard to sticking your finger in fire.

The important aspect is that we're going to be deciding what that motivation is. That's actually going to be the power of "real AI" (and by that, I mean intelligent like us or more intelligent). We can create a single AI "brain" that's sole motivation is exploring the world of physics. We can provide it with all our knowledge. We can make studying and thinking about physics as enjoyable for it as sex is for us. We will be able define those things for an AI and make them single-minded in purpose and the drive to be the best at it that they can be.

Really, I think the biggest trick in AI is going to be avoiding the things that humans suffer from that animals generally don't: Anxiety, depression, psychosis.. These are things we don't have a terribly good grasp of yet and we're going to need a pretty intimate understanding of them to avoid creating AIs that have them, as it seems likely that the larger and more complex the brain, the more difficult it might be to avoid these issues.

or lack thereof:

"The mechanics are so simple that can be easily explained to anybody possessing some minimal knowledge about how operating systems works."

"...so simple that it can be easily..."

The choice of "some minimal" is a bit questionable too. "some" or "minimal" alone would have been sufficient to convey the meaning. Together, it sounds almost redundant.

"Beside being a good educational example this is also a scary proof that very mature code can still be vulnerable in rather unsophisticated ways."

"Beside" means "next to". "Besides" means "other than".

Not that it really matters. The mainstream news sites can't seem to compose articulate sentences either. Grammar has really gone to crap and it really bugs me that English based news providers can't be bothered to produce fluent English stories.

From TFA: Worst of all, I don't believe that it will be a 'science-fiction film' any more than Star Wars...

I'm sorry, I must be out of the loop? Since when is Star Wars not sci-fi? Is there a real empire? A real rebel alliance? A real death star, force, tie fighters, x-wing fighters, light saber, etc?

Unless their schedule specifies the seconds, they are infringing on my 1440 time of day copyrights and I simply can't let that stand. I'll be seeing them in court!

gains in life expectancy may be pretty much over

And nobody will EVER need more than 640K of RAM.

Forget the fact that things like the internet and the Human Genome project have lead to a flood of medical research, the likes of which we've never seen, that is bound to produce results.

Sorry, but that's about the most ridiculous statement Slashdot has posted today.