See also too: "I, Robot"...

China made a cheap knock-off of a whole island?!

I'm still hoping for a similar process for producing butanol - apparently butanol can be burned in a normal gasoline-burning engine with no modifications, and with very nearly the same efficiency (so, no "flex-fuel" modifications needed, nor even switching to Diesel engines, and you supposedly get about the same mileage as regular gasoline).

Last time I looked (admittedly, this was about half a decade ago) butanol was wholesaling for about $8/gallon, so not yet competitive with gasoline, but I'm guessing that's more of a production problem (low supply=higher price) than anything else.

While there may be some real problems with poor-quality science coming out of Chinese publications, I don't think that's an issue here. (The fact that the PI's name is "Hong Liu" probably has more to do with the ongoing money-grab that US universities go for, preferring to bring in foreign students because foreign students pay substantially higher tuition and therefore bring in higher profits. If they can be enticed to work cheap even by graduate-student standards while they're doing their graduate studies, so much the better. I don't know if those among the foreign Ph.D. students who graduate and become professors at US institutions are prone to work more cheaply than US-born professors or not, though, but I imagine it does tend to increase the proportion of potential professors for US colleges who are of recent Chinese descent.)

The issue from my perspective is that the important information - actual peer-reviewed scientific publications with actual data and actual results describing what this researcher's lab actually did to get these vaguely-defined huge improvements instead of (insert vigorous, forehead-vein-throbbing, ear-bleeding, eye-popping profanity here) "public relations" marketing crap the (insert even more vigorous, forehead-vein-throbbing, ear-bleeding, eye-popping profanity here just to make sure there's enough) overpaid administrators no doubt think is more important - is apparently not available, at least not to mere plebes outside of the lab like me.

Microbial fuel cells are a personal interest of mine, so I really wanted to know what they had actually done. A simple link to a scientific paper (or multiple scientific paper if the lab is sleazily "parsing" their results into the "smallest publishable units" so they can put out separate papers on every single little element of their experiment and brag about how many papers they've published this year...) is all I ask for. As usual, the "report" available to the public makes no mention of it.

(Please choose a small set of additional intense profanity to insert here in conclusion).

Why do these things never have a link to a peer-reviewed paper that I can read to see what they're actually doing?

I'm likely going to be switching from T-Mobile to US Cellular (due to coverage issues where I live now), and am seriously disappointed to see that their phones are all apparently unsupported (except for one discontinued older model, the "Samsung Mesmerize"). The CDMA versions of the Galaxy S II and S III seem to be excluded.

Anybody know if any of US Cellular's phones are likely to see support any time soon? After years of happy Cyanogenmod at T-Mobile I'd really hate to be stuck with a manufacturer "skin" version again...

The problem here is really more about "autoplay" than "sound" (and I agree completely - autoplay is an abomination unto the Browser. Now if we could get Google to quit forcing the HTML5 "beta" videos to autoplay we might be getting somewhere...)

Converting it to butanol allows it to be dumped as-is into ordinary gasoline-burning engines, which would be a bonus.

I was just thinking they should buy RIM outright (analogous to Google buying Motorola Mobility), since they already effectively "own" Nokia without actually having to deal with the regulatory or financial hassles of literally "owning" them.

Exactly right - temporary monopoly is essentially the payment that the public makes to buy public access to "trade secrets", and the payment to authors to release useful works (historically, works that are of purely artistic merit seem to also be considered "useful" in this context) to the public, to be improved upon by the public, after the duration of the monopoly with which the access was paid for. ("To promote the progress of science and the useful arts" - the purpose of patents and copyrights is spelled out pretty plainly in the US Constitution. I'm making the assumption that the purpose is similar in other nations.)

The problem is that we're now paying for complete junk ("OOooo! Rounded corners! That will be an awesome basis for further improvements in 20 years!") in terms of patents, and paying a horrifically, obscenely inflated price (almost a CENTURY in most cases [95 years for "works for hire", which most seem to be these days, or as I recall "70 years after the author/artist dies"]).

One fix I haven't seen discussed is doing away with "flat fee" payment (i.e. a set term for all patents/copyrights) and instead having a panel offer an appropriate monopoly duration based on an estimate of the patent or artistic work's reasonable value - a genuinely plausible and novel cure for multiple cancers that would be useful for developing other cancer cures might be worth more than the standard 20 years worth of patent monopoly, while a typical low-quality "software patent" might be only worth a year or two. Copyright gets a little more difficult because in many cases the "worth" is a matter of subjective artistic merit rather than obvious "usefulness", but one might grant some truly groundbreaking piece of epic art/movie-making/music or an exceptionally useful scientific publication a full century, while a naked-midget-jello-wrestling porn video series' 12th sequel might be "paid" only a year, for example.

When the world wises up and elects me Emperor of the United States, this is but one of the much-needed reforms I'll implement, so make sure you write me in for the position during the next election.

Hey now, there are TWO parties in the US. There's the "Not-Republican Party" and the "Anti-Not-Republican Party". Obviously, they are completely different from each other.