My first thought was "why the hell would I want a machine to lip read?" since lip reading is basically a crutch for humans' inability to hear sufficiently well to extract someone's voice from the surrounding environment.

We already have laser microphones, which can detect sound vibrations at a distance, and we have sophisticated sound processing methods to extract weak signals from noise, etc. We don't need lip reading, other than maybe as a fun science project for graduates.

That in fact is only one of the ways religious ideas fail the test of reality. You're still making the mistake of accepting that there is such a thing as a clear conception of something that represents what religious people mean when they invoke the nebulous word "god".

If you dig deeper, you'll find that in common parlance "god" refers to a set of contradictory statements, which cannot ipso facto exist as any object worthy of study anyway, and even just introducing the premise that an object can exist satisfying the requirements commonly understood by people who use the word "god" will introduce a contradiction into your argument, thereby rendering it a waste of time to pursue.

TLDR: never use the word "god" or any of its synonyms, it's a contradiction in terms.

Who cares about the meaning of life, the universe and everything? Science isn't the father figure you've been craving for to tell you who you are and what your place is.

Science is a compendium of human knowledge. It doesn't answer all possible questions, only those we happen to have figured out by now. Except it doesn't do so by a humongous Q+A list, that would be inefficient. It does so by stating a small number of facts and theories, and then you can try to see if your particular Q has an A that's derived from those facts and theories. So you actually have to do some work instead of being told everything. And you need some education to even be able to do the work.

There's no free lunch. If you want that, go check out the Hare Krishna in your neighbourhood.

It's *always* been September, you just left your coat and umbrella somewhere.

Free markets have never existed. There's a good reason for that, they don't work. So stop pining for the nonexistent ideal, it's as useful as pining for communism.

If would be paired with my phone in my pocket. If I was taking photos it would go out through the phone.

Like I said in my comment, I view this as the first steps in a suite of countermeasures, not all necessarily through the Wifi protocols.

I can reasonably imagine that stores or restaurants may create internet free zones, where some technology jams your phone in your pocket, as long as you are within the private premises. Kind of like now, where you can only connect to Wifi if you're reasonably close, the jammers would be localized. Moreover, since every measure invites a countermeasure, there would be other tools that prevent other technologies you might carry from working, once loopholes around the phone jammers become exploitable etc.

As a technology geek, this interests me, as well as knowing what sorts of things will be available when I truly need it. I don't care if this particular Wifi method is slightly niche.

Exactly. Libraries are the repositories of Humanity's Knowlege. Remember all the stuff we used to know that got lost when we burned the Library of Alexandria? No? Of course you don't, 'cause we lost it.

When it comes to books and knowledge, the economics of publishers has to take second place to the imperative of preserving all the copies we can. Not only should libraries be able to make all the copies they want, they should also be able to share their copies with other libraries. The future demands it.

There's no minimum time, just how long anybody is willing to protect the sanctity of the tomb. For example, if it's a king, then his subjects are probably willing to stop and prosecute anyone who's trying to open the tomb for a few generations after, probably until the kingdom gets destroyed even. If it's you, then you get dug up about 50 years after they bury you, so somebody else gets to putrefy in your cemetery spot.

Ok so the google glass or what ever doesn't connect to your local wifi.... Um and the google glass wearer with their paired LTE phone in their pocket cares why exactly????

I don't know why *they* care. *I* care about such news, because it's the first step towards building a technology stack that will boot those paired LTE phone / glasshole combos from my neighbourhood.

Every useful countermeasure technology has to start with baby steps somewhere. Hopefully more sophisticated jammers and anti glasshole viruses will be ready for when we truly need it - when those spyware tools become cheap and more plentiful.

It's not a monopoly. Switching search engines is free.

Netscape was free too, and it was easy to switch from IE for anyone who wanted to... And yet MS was rightly convicted.

Never overerestimate the inability of ordinary people from doing the most basic things. You may think it's trivial to switch search engines, but for most people it isn't. And antitrust is all about bringing about a good outcome for most people, not for people like you or me who can take care of ourselves.

So no, switching search engines isn't easy for most people, and therefore it's right to force monopolies to go out of their way to make it easier. The market is made up of ordinary people, and giving them more choices improves the market.

Oh, is it Opposite Day today? If by redundant you mean diametrically opposed, then yes the post is "redundant".

The problem is that peer review has these same flaws. It has no more scientific merit than online comments; it is just as error prone and arbitrary as rating systems; and it's gameable just like citation statistics.

While all systems have flaws, the flaws with peer review are not the same as (and I would argue, an order of magnitude smaller than) the flaws with online comments. In particular, to claim that peer review by scientists has no scientific merit is ridiculous. The mere fact that the reviews are conducted by qualified individuals in the field raises their merit substantially versus online comments, which we've seen extensively in the last few years with the "scientific" debates conducted in the blogosphere.

Peer reviews are frequently (probably usually) carried out by students without higher degrees. Even many people with higher degrees are not "qualified scientists".

Are you for real? I stopped reading after those two sentences. You clearly have never seen the inside of a scientific journal review system.

Can this be expressed as a simple bulleted list. Too much lawyer. Many nomenclature.

And for those of use who are more comfortable with steering wheels than bullets, maybe a car analogy too?

That's very wrong. Online comments have no scientific merit whatsoever, ratings systems are abitrary and error prone (who computes the ratings? is it an algorithm, or some full time secretarial type? Does he/she even have a degree?), and citation statistics are gameable, in similar ways that Google rankings are gameable in fact.

Proper scientific reviews by qualified scientists with higher degrees are non negotiable, if we want science to remain a high quality human endeavour.