Once these are bred in large numbers they can be released and will push the normal mosquitoes out by sheer numbers. If we are really lucky and this is a dominant gene, we can release them and they will gradually spread the trait through the wild population.

The limiting characteristic is dominance of the gene, without it the malaria strain can be reduced but not eliminated in the wild. The intent to place the gene in the wild is mentioned in the Arizona Republic article, and by the BBC.

How do you do a double blind when the "patient" is a plant? And why? To eliminate the placebo effect? I think this is muddy thinking, the evaluation could be blinded by taking photos and measurements of the various plants, not showing the cage or lack thereof, and letting whatever scientists are appropriate look at the data rather than the plants in situ.

In the late 1980's a program was developed to encode binary data in text format, called uuencode. It was followed by a shell script to take a filename, create an email message (or newsgroup posting) using uuencode, and package it as part of a shell script which could be fed back into a unix shell and would recreate the original binary file. I wrote a higher performance version in C called shar2 around 1990, which did some detection of file type, and optional preservation of modification. That program automated breaking the output into many parts of a given maximum size for transmission through limited message size channels. So using a bunch of SMS messages is hardly new.

Historical note

That appeared in comp.source.unix and was widely used. I maintained for several years, and stopped due to a lack of bugs and to avoid "creeping featurism" adding of bells and whistles. At a later date, someone else took my source, did some changes (perhaps 20% of the code changed), called it shar3, and released it, with my name pretty well removed and their name as author. Then they submitted it as "gnu shar" where it appears still, with only an obscure mention that I also had a shar program, the last time I looked.

Decades ago Intel changed from the separate integer and floating point processors (8086 and 8087, etc) to an integrated unit, because it was cheaper, faster, and more reliable. And because everyone wanted floating point, so there was no reason to separate them, and because Moore's Law said they could.

Now the GPU is being integrated, at least in the desktop chips. It's not so clear that everyone wants the fancy effects, 3D rendering, wobbly windows, and all the rest of the things vendors tout which are mostly aimed at game players. I think the percentage of users who need, want, or even tolerate those effects is smaller than the percentage who wanted floating point, but if it reduces the size, power, and cost of a computer with video, the average user will be happy, even if the bulk of the features are unused.

Note that Intel has added graphics in their i5-661 (and other) chips, although they seem to be more targeted to users who use only light duty graphics, and don't benefit from vast rendering capability. The market will decide the value of these changes, and the price will fall in line.

Actually what make ethernet work is not the error recovery but the error detection. The hard part of making a more robust CPU and memory model is not recovering from errors, but detecting them at all. This adds complexity to the whole stochastic design, and I think at some level the error detection needs to be error free, so that the success of the error recovery can be evaluated. Like a Hamming code which can correct all one bit errors and detect all two bit errors, as you add robustness to the detection, through more complex schemes like Fire codes, the resources in the error detection are greater than the error detection. And balancing by making the entire system more error prone is clearly not a solution.

There goes the patent, clearly prior art.

It's likely that the libraries are under the LGPL, and therefore source code linked to them is not necessarily GPL. There is a lot of information on the FSF site and other places, but I suspect that the program is not covered, although any modified source versions of the libraries would be required to be available if the executable is released. The laws on this are complex.

Because it doesn't happen with other brands of cars? Because Steve Wozniak says he can duplicate it at will with his Prius?

I would really like to see a distribution based on years of driving a manual shift car. These days that means older drivers and gear heads. And not many gear heads drive a Prius!

My thought on this is related to the cruise control. Many of these incidents have happened on highways where having the CC on would be typical, and if it decided that the target speed was very high full acceleration would occur. The non-effect of the brakes isn't clear, I would love to ask a survivor if the brakes vibrated as if the anti-lock was operating. That could make the brakes less effective as the ABS pumped the brakes to avoid phantom lock up. That sounds unlikely, but the recent car stopped by a police car in front of it offers two additional data item, (1) the police said they could smell the hot brakes as they chased, and (2) when the driver applied the (manual) emergency brake the car slowed down. Hard to argue that the brakes would stop the car if used, when clearly they were used, and that shows that the throttle didn't return to idle when the brakes were applied, another Toyota claim. Based on a trained observer outside the car.

The fact that the emergency brake was effective suggests that the regular brakes weren't working properly. May be an ABS problem or not, but clearly the normal brakes were being used and were not stopping the car.

And this happen only with Toyota? This would imply one of three things:
-People who buy Toyotas are worse drivers than other makes.
-Toyota has human engineering flaws which make them hard to control.
-There is really a flaw and behavior of expert drivers testing doesn't trigger it.

Hint:Steve Wozniack, co-founder of Apple, says it's software and he can demonstrate the flaw with his Prius on demand.

You can certainly dump 10MB through the serial port, should only take a few hours (as noted by others). But if you dump a raw image copy of the entire hard drive, there's a high probability that you can run the whole machine as a virtual machine under Linux (or whatever). I had probably the first UNIX based BBS in the country, back when the "UNIX-PC" (aka at&t 7300) came out with SysVR3. I ran both Citadel and my own MBS on it, with a modem on each serial port. Good fun!

Given the power of current hardware, you could probably put it back up in a VM and let people use it.

An antilock braking system is intended to preserve steering by "pumping" the brakes so the tires don't lock. However, this reduces the ability of the brakes to stop the wheel, and gives a longer but more controlled stop. If the antilock decided that it should pump the brakes it would reduce the driver's ability to slow the wheels. The fact that the car stopped by police only slowed when the emergency (mechanical) brake was applied suggests this. I'd love to interview the driver and see if he noticed the brakes throbbing.