In this case, I think it is that Microsoft is the key-signing authority which definitely can be seen as anti-competitive. If they would hand over that power to an independent entity, I think that much of the conserns would be resolved.

At first, I thought that it sounded a bit "whiny" to go to EU to complain (just like I thought about the browser ballot thing), but after reading some more I do think they have one important point: Microsoft has the master key and everyone that wants a signed trusted boot need to get it from them. This does rub me the wrong way. If Microsoft had started an independent entity responsible for Secure Boot signing, this thing would not smell as bad. Hispalinux has some good arguments also regarding the laws of public procurement where the Secure Boot lock-in to Windows actually turns out to be illegal.

I can quite confidently say that you never have had any real experience with science..... and probably never even taken any basic classes in statistics. I can agree with you that science journalism is a big joke, and unfortunately that is often the only contact normal laymen get with science. Luckily in this TFA there is a link to the paper showing a mechanistic link between sodium chloride and the up-regulation of a protein that promotes T-cells to differentiate into Th17 cells. There are several Th17-driven diseases that could be influenced by this. On the flip side, there are also diseases (mostly people with susceptibility to fungal infections) that have a too low Th17 response. It would be interesting to see if those people would be helped by a higher salt diet...

Indeed and since when did it matter what Microsoft does on ./ ? Stuff on ./ seems to get less and less "nerd" (figuring out how stuff works / hack together solutions) and more and more "geek" (the "tech hipster" buying the latest stuff, preferably before it is cool).

As being one that move between two countries in Europe frequently, I must say that this generally is a non-issue. You simply use a pay-as-you go topup SIM for each country. My primary SIM got a 2GB free data per 15€ topup + 1h free calls/day to others of the same carrier and normal fares to other networks or landlines. The thing is, all European carriers are using the same standardized protocols (GSM and whatever the 3- and 4G standards are called).

I did not have any mod points but +1 to the parent. The standard prayer "Our father" (or whatever it is called in English) was specifically designed to "trademark" christianity. Certain elements in that prayer were put there to define some beliefs as non christian, for example the "...tortured by Pontius Pilatus.." part. According to the Gnostics (who believed in a conflict between Spirit and Matter), Jesus could not have been in pain on the cross since he was a higher being (more Spirit, and pain and suffering is part of Matter). Pretty amazing actually that I as an atheist (or more specifically an Ignostic) often know more about the historical contexts of certain parts of christianity than many of those that call themselves christian...

As someone active in biomedical research (inflammation, not directly cancer) I can say that any claims that cancer researchers do not want to find a cure and that there would be some sort of "conspiracy" holding progress back is pure bullshit. The sad truth is that cancer is not a single disease and lately it has become evident that even within a single patient, the population of cancer cells can be highly divergent (including the still controversial idea about "cancer stem cells", which are non-dividing and thus resistant to most chemotherapy). There are lots of very interesting data still in basic research which will take years before they get out into clinic and sadly there are also very promising drug candidates that due to economic reasons will have a difficult time getting promoted by drug companies. One of those examples is salicylic acid - which has shown very promising results against colon cancer and a number of other types. The problem is that it is an old drug of natural origin which is basically impossible to patent. This means that no companies are interested in funding phase I to III trials (which is actually the most expensive part of drug development). Other highly interesting developments at the moment are the cancer-specific T-cell treatments (or vaccinations), which I do believe will become a future treatment strategy - unfortunately most of this research is publicly funded at the universities and the industry only steps in after they are nearly sure that they will be able to reap the benefits.

Just like anti-GMO environmentalists are complete whackos. It seems like to be a rational green is impossible in the political landscape of today - either you go with the crazy people that are against stuff that really reduces environmental impact (nuclear power, glyfosate resistance, Bt toxin) or you end up in the camp that don't give a shit about the environment and think it is OK to drill for oil in sensitive environments and such.

... or we could all sit around and hope for fission power to be a viable energy source before coal kills us all - hey Duke Nukem Forever is released and E17 is about to be. The end result may not be all what it was hyped up to be but nothing is impossible.

An artificial womb might not primarily be interesting for human reproduction, but for example in conservational biology to re-establish near extinct species, this could be a great tool! Coupled with the technologies of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS), where one can de-differentiate a mature somatic cell and then differentiate it into sperm and egg cells we could also generate a large progeny even from a limited number of individuals. Further, the same technology could theoretically be used to surpass many of the reproductive species barriers and make it possible to generate completely new hybrid species. Especially since one could do repeated cycles of embryonic stem cell to egg/sperm differentiations in vitro, one could in this way generate completely new species out of invitro hybrid breeding. I have no idea how far apart species can be with this method, but regulations probably would have to be put in place to avoid generation of new sub-species of humans generated by in vitro hybrid breeding with the other great apes. Who knows... perhaps it would even be possible to breed crocodiles and birds and get some sort of approximation of dinosaurs using this method...

If this was true, we would expect people genetically originating from poorly evolved cultures (there are still hunter-gatherer cultures out there) to be on average smarter than people with a genetic origin from people who have been living in agricultural/industrialized cultures for millenia. I do not think that anyone has observed something like that.

If I remember correctly, OpenBSD was looking at PCC as alternative compiler. It would in a way fit their philosophy better considering that it is simpler/cleaner and pure C, so C++ does not have to become a systems dependency. In fact, PCC has also made some rather nice advances lately, like building a FreeBSD kernel, and there is always the challenge of building a Linux kernel with pcc (http://bsdfund.org/bundle/).

You should definitely try compiling something with LLVM/Clang sometime. The error messages that you get are quite nice and stuff normally compiles much faster compared to similar optimization level with GCC. For a source-based distribution like FreeBSD or Gentoo that might be a nice boon. Some developers (the Chromium ones if I am not mistaken) have switched to LLVM/Clang for their development, but they still ship the final binaries built with GCC.

Anyone else noticed the similarities between tentacles and noodly appendages? The flying spaghetti monster - Chutulu's second coming?

Yeah sure, but you have to look at the symbolism of the scenes. There was a reason why they showed him wearing a black glove. The same is true for another really good scene in in that episode where Luke is hiding from Vader refusing to fight him, then there is a scene with half of Luke's face covered in shadow while Vader provokes him and finds out about Leia.