I was assuming we're getting rid of all CO2 as OP suggested, including the stuff generated in the lungs as TFA refers to. Yes, you do make your own which is why we tend to see Cheyne Stokes rather than people just dying - at altitude the mechanism is due to reduced partial pressure of atmospheric CO2, so scrubbing all CO2 from the atmosphere could still cause problems in people who are already in O2 debt for whatever reason.

Even the most qualified engineers on the planet sometimes resort to "getting a bigger hammer", or trial and error. You know the Saturn V rocket? One of the biggest and most complex things ever made by humans? They had problems with the combustion plate, basically a big disc of metal that the fuel is sprayed through before igniting. The combustion kept becoming unstable to the point where it was an explosion rather than a burn, and they knew it was something to do with the pattern of holes. No amount of mathematics and computing "power" back then was enough to find a solution, so they took a bunch of plates and drilled holes in them at random until they found one that worked for long enough to launch the vehicle "safely".

The point is that the CO2 you breath out has come from atmospheric and/or food carbon, you're not adding any extra CO2 to the atmosphere, just moving it around a bit. The "dangerous" CO2 is the stuff that's generated from sources which are outside the normal biological cycles, eg fossil fuels. For example, burning wood is carbon neutral on the scale of a few decades - a tree grows extracting CO2 from the atmosphere, which we then release by burning it. The net change in atmospheric CO2 from the planting of the seed to the burning of the wood is zero - on the other hand, the CO2 released by burning coal was extracted from the atmosphere over the course of a few hundred thousand years, we'd need to wait for the equivalent mass of coal to form again before we balanced the sheets.

Car analogy: burning wood is like regularly spending $100 on maintenance, burning coal is like spending nothing on the car to save money, and waiting for the timing belt to break, destroying the engine.

That's the last of our problems- we'd all be dead within 72 hours or so. CO2 is required to make the human respiration system work, the breathing reflex is triggered by too much CO2, not by a lack of oxygen, this is why hyperventilating before holding your breath can make you pass out, you scrub lots of CO2 out of your system and then run out of O2 before your brain forces you to inhale. This is also the mechanism behind Cheyne Stokes respiration, where high altitude climbers don't breath enough while they sleep.

Erradicate all CO2 and you have to consciously breath, on purpose - if you forget, or fall asleep, you're dead.

The sad thing is that a lot of the cost is down to pharma companies (quite fairly) needing to recoup the substantial R&D involved. I'd like to see the world's governments get together, work out how much the companies are due, buying the licence from them and then distributing free or low cost treatments.

The baby was infected, but this is a "functional cure", it works like this: Whilst in-utero the baby receives a certain amount of protection from the mother's immune system and the filtering of the placenta. When it's born it does have the virus, and then the baby's own immune system begins to kick in. At this point, immediately after birth, they begin an aggressive but fairly standard treatment with antiviral medication. This suppresses the virus enough that the immune system then has a fighting chance, and whilst the virus is unlikely to be completely eradicated it is in theory manageable by the immune system for the rest of the baby's life. The virus is still there, but kept to very low levels so developing AIDS or passing the virus on becomes very unlikely.

This approach may work with adults, but you have to get in there very quickly with the antivirals, so it's more likely to work with, for example, a nurse who gets a needlestick injury than a person who contracted it days before. The developing immune system in infants may also play a part, so this may never be a "functional cure" in adults, but it's certainly a step forward.

Remember, we don't necessarily need to cure things like HIV and cancer, we just need to keep them at bay until something else kills the patient, that still counts as a functional cure.

I leave deciphering my intention as an exercise for the reader ;)

I've long held this view (and have a little archaeological training, so it's not 100% uninformed) - human group behaviour often seems, to me at least, to be closer to that of a dog pack than any of the other apes, so it's not entirely impossible that dogs have been "training" humans just as much as the other way around over the millennia. That said, this is just my gut feeling and I have very little to back it up with - I'm also doubtful that we'll ever find conclusive evidence either way.

Bah, yes, problem between brain and finger. Flip it about a bit, you get my meaning.

It's the oblivious mistake, there's one in every summary, just /. editors doing some subtle trolling to get the comments going.

I find ten inches perfect for one handed use in bed, but going back to tablets you may have a point - VHS won over Betamax (in part) because Sony licensed the technology for porn and Betamax refused to - a parallel with Flash today perhaps?

These days it's about using as many different languages as possible, ideally in the wrong place. Big desktop application? JavaScript hosted on a remote server sounds ideal! Website to display a list of your mobile phone apps? Show off your 1337 Java skillz by making the whole thing a plugin! A quick script to verify the format of an email address? To the Assembler!

The two software products address the same audience and the same tasks.

People who have $3k to spend on a 3D package != people who don't have $3k to spend on a 3D package.

Depends on what you mean by "professional" - if you're a 3D modelling/animation specialist then yes, agreed, you're better off with one of the proprietary packages, but that's not the only people who use 3D packages these days. 99% of my work is PHP/HTML/CSS work, but I also use Blender to produce 2D and 3D graphics and animations to include in websites. For the amount I use it Blender has everything I need and saves me an absolute fortune in software costs. Horses for courses, to mix your metaphor.

Sort of - I'm fine with being tracked where the return is good enough. Signing up for extra tracking simply to contact them however, is a step too far for me. Plus they don't have my real name, which I would have to supply if I was using G+.