And within an archaeologically insignificant moment of time, each flash drive will contain nothing but noise, the trapped charges within each cell having leaked and degraded into noise. Typically, thumb drive manufacturers target an expected retention time of no more than about a decade.

At this point, you pretty much have to be a power user to have a good Android experience, given how badly crapped-up most low - end carrier's phones are.

Most non power users have no idea how to deal with crapware, and no idea that all that junk isn't intended to be part of the Android experience.

This is just an anecdote (and thus worthless as data), but I have a family friend -- a female -- who earned a B.S. in chemical engineering. Dad was an engineer, and I think mom was a scientist, so she was highly encouraged (well, pressured) to go in a STEM direction. And she did it, she managed to pass all the math courses and crunch all the equations, earned her degree. And as a newly-minted female Chemical Engineer, I"m guessing a lot of companies were interested in hiring her, as they have been making intense efforts to fix the gender imbalance in their workforces.

Guess what happened next? She then proceeded to go back to Nursing School, and has since graduated and now does clinical nursing work. Basically, she paid four years of hard study and tuition to make other people feel good about make the "right" decisions for someone else's life, and only after satisfying them did she get to live her own life doing what she wanted to do.

Microsoft has already switched tactics, recognizing the Scroogle campaign was going nowhere. Currently the main thrust to boost search is through free "Windows with Bing" devices (pairing up with Intel's anti-ARM contra-revenue strategy), and the Android-with-Microsoft ecosystem they are trying to build up through Samsung and Cyanogen.

This is so insanely dangerous (to both parent and fetus), that any physician who assisted in setting such a thing up would be in danger of having their license yanked. A number of healthy live births have been reported, but most often this special case of ectopic pregnancy ends up being surgically aborted -- because when allowed to proceed the likely scenario is massive hemorrhage followed by demise of the fetus (and maybe the parent too).

That being said, it makes for an interesting thought experiment. You'd probably want to select for a male embryo to implant, as the man's hormones will cause abnormal genitalia in a female infant. You might be able to alleviate this problem with testosterone suppression therapy (after all, females normally have a small amount of circulating testosterone naturally -- but it really doesn't take much excess to virilize a female fetus). What to do about other hormones is also an interesting question -- for instance, how necessary would it be to supplement progesterone, for instance?

Another important issue is the immunological tolerance that occurs in the female, we don't know if males will respond appropriately to with induction of the special partially-suppressed state that occurs during pregnancy. We also don't really know what all the hormones and other substances pumped out by the placenta and fetus would do to the male host.

Indeed. Right now, a spy or disgruntled insider might be able to smuggle out schematics of the factory. Now they can smuggle out the factory itself.

This story from 201 doesn't explicitly state there was any theft of a bio-engineered organism (involved in biotech mass-production of a chemical substrate), but I wonder if something like that might have been involved: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12...

Prisoners usually receive some token payment for their work, though. 4chan janitors do it for free.

The style of the article reminds me of an Old Man Murray new article, featuring a glowing description of the rendering power of the (then not yet released) PS2 (article at bottom of page): Playstation 2 To Usher In New Era Of Underage Girlfriend Simulation

Here's an alternative interpretation of what the "social contract" is -- civilized society is an example of Emergent Behavior.

It's not a legal rule, where paradoxes of consent or capacity are questions that must be answered. It is simply the rule-set from which the emergent behavior of human society arises, like some cellular automata system. What behavior comes out of the system -- be it a civil society or Lord of the Flies -- is a judgement-free result that depends on the proportion of adherents, versus dysfunctional units and cheaters.

Hatsune Miku sings 1000 digits of Pi! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

There's also a drug that can turn blue eyes brown:
http://io9.com/why-does-this-e...

If ignition actually happened, my bet is on a triboelectric spark. All that soil and ice getting tossed up will generate a charge, just like you see in thunderstorms and volcanic eruptions.

I think I understand what you're trying to say, but let me make it a bit more clear using a car analogy. Yes, you get less ATP out at the end, but that's not really the point of the drug.

DNP is an oxidative phosphorylation decoupler. What this means, it that it does the equivalent of popping your clutch into neutral, and then stomping on the gas. Your mitochondria will rev-up furiously, but no ATP is produced as you have just decoupled the connection between the engine and the wheels. In the meantime, you burn a lot of gas.

Yeah, these scammers tried hitting my grandmother before, fortunately she's still pretty sharp and recognized it immediately.

That being said, with social media, these kinds of scams have the capability to become a lot worse. The scammer that called my grandmother did a generic "grandmom it's me", which didn't work because my Chinese is pretty accented as an American-born speaker -- instant giveaway from the first word out of his mouth.

But with a little research they could have loaded it up with a lot more detail.