I disagree, English is my native language and I have a Linguistics degree. The phrase means exactly what it was intended to mean and makes perfect sense. This is typical /., full of people who believe their mathematical logic professors when they claim such things as "the newspaper headline 'Bus passengers should be belted' has a humorous, unintended meaning". There is nothing unintended about it, and it is ludicrous to suggest otherwise. While learning to think in a certain, "mathematical" way is a very useful skill indeed, it is most unfortunate that it often highlights a very misplaced arrogance on the behalf of supposed "experts".

There would seem to be a relatively easy solution to this problem - make the raw data available from the article itself, or at least as an attachment. If that requires petabytes of storage, then presumably PLOS will provide the necessary infrastructure. That way they can ensure that as long as the article is being offered, all data used is also available. Does that sound unreasonable considering their requirement?

Damn, why do my points always expire just before I see a comment that really needs modding up?

Deaths aren't expensive, long hospital/old folks home care is.

I'm gonna have to call bollocks on that one. Smokers consume far more healthcare dollars on average than non-smokers. Government pension money, however, is a different story...

I'm pretty sure the studies show that mental acuity is prolonged, not life expectancy. Someone with Alzheimer's or senile dementia just sits there being dependent, and from my reading, regular study (mental exercises, etc.) delays/prevents both those to some degree in many.

Sorry, I wasn't very clear. I was talking about immigrants who already have degrees that were paid for by their home countries. Australia (and other net receivers of immigrants with degrees) benefits directly from this without baring any (much) of the cost.

It may be a stretch to say it would all be money not spent on health/elderly care but I suggest you do some further reading on the matter. The studies I have read say the positive cognitive and health benefits of continued education and activity are marked. Anyway, my point is that simply taking figures or non-representative edge cases simplifies a highly complex situation. Don't get me wrong though - I personally think the HECS scheme is excellent and the government SHOULD work harder to get the money back from graduates. If national governments can come to agreement on this then such schemes can become much more widespread, which I think would be a welcome development.

Oh, you poor Australian you. How about Australia pays the governments who financed young graduate immigrants who won't see any of the benefits they paid for? No? And how many years did said 92 year old pay taxes? Have you heard about the massive benefits of keeping active and intellectually alert in one's old age? The truth be told, him studying is probably going to save as much as what would have been spent by the health system anyway. As always, the situation is far more complicated than simple figures and anecdotes can convey...

Eh... you misunderstand. You say that Linguistics doesn't say "you can't say 'she' for the neutral pronoun". I know this, I have a first-class honours degree in Linguistics. Linguistics is (supposed to be) about describing "language" and "languages", though in reality it actually does a lamentable job of it (let's not go there...). However, I'm not talking about Linguistics at all. The sort of claim "you can't say/write 'she' for the neutral pronoun" has nothing to do with description - if it did it would be terrible because obviously many, many respected publishing houses allow it. Though with that I am assuming you are allowing "written language" in the study of language... There are, however, (probably) still lots of prescriptive grammar books out there that make this sort of claim, and many English teachers no doubt too. That makes any descriptive claim false and any prescriptive claim outdated (because "languages" change and this change is happening).

And you need some serious updating on your demographics knowledge if you think only white people speak Indo-European languages...

Really? To what rules are you referring? To my knowledge very few English-speaking countries have absolute authorities like the Academie Française in France. So we have grammar books, but grammar books are just "motivated opinion pieces" written by people, and most of them are conservative white men. The "motivated" refers mostly to "accepted usage in academic, journalistic and fictional literature". There are many areas (sociology, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, political science,...) where it is very common to see edited, peer-reviewed material from highly respected publishing houses using "she" as gender neutral. Obviously they accept it, so the grammar books should too.

Personally, it annoys me, particularly when both are used. Back at varsity I was discussing it with a flatmate (a lesbian feminist English Master's student no less!) one evening and she agreed it was annoying and that one solution would be to simply use one's own gender. This is still the most elegant solution I've ever heard.

The skills that are required for coding are the same skills that are required for numeracy (and real science). Abstraction and creating precise formal models is what coding is really about - the rest is just practice and a bit of wrote learning. In a technological society abstraction and model creation are paramount - everyone should know how to do it, and do it well. Is everyone good at maths today? No. Could they be? I think so, and so do many educators but society has decided that "some people are maths people, most aren't" instead of searching for alternative ways to structure education for people who don't succeed in the traditional formats.

Good statehood means formatting the populace to a defined set of memes and ways of thinking. Can you imagine if everyone actually took responsibility for their own thinking? It would be anarchy! People would actually give a shit because they would understand how things work instead of just delegating power to others and doing what they were told. People would demand transparency. People would demand democracy.

It sounds like that would be a good thing... but I challenge anyone to show me a truly educated society of any more than a few thousand - any more and it just gets unworkable. Society is global today and that makes it completely impossible.

Nice! Trolling by calling someone a troll. You almost had me.

How is it trolling? No one told me slashdot is a US-only site... The point is that different currencies have value in different contexts. Very few of the criticisms levelled at bitcoin can't be levelled at normal fiat currencies. They are all now based on trust. Just like government. We create social constructs that we agree to agree on. These can disappear, just like governments, when most people agree that the constructs are no longer necessary/desirable. Or maybe that's just trolling...

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss this. The brains behind Rethink Robotics is Rodney Brooks, a long-time professor and head of MIT's CSAIL. While not as much of a show pony as Kurzweil, he is still quite well known outside academic circles. He was also behind the robotic Roomba vacuum cleaners that are in many people's homes.

While he is definitely a controversial theorist in AI/Robotics circles, no one denies his ability to get things done. His (and his student's) research has been used in a lot of the advanced robotics we see today (military, space, other). I can't help thinking that the basic tenets of his theories are a little difficult to grasp for most people, including AI/Robotics researchers. There are some branches of philosophy, neuroscience and the human behavioural sciences that have long been arguing the sorts of things he does as the basis of human intelligence, though they have not been particularly popular since the 60s. Competing theories are not really getting us very far though, and the key concepts he pushes are starting to get more traction again.

Brooks is still searching for "the juice", as he puts it, the last piece he believes is necessary before we can create truly generative intelligence. He may not live to see it (though he's not even 60 yet I think) but I believe his ideas will form the basis of AGI in the not-too-distant future. Probably around the time I turn 70 ;).

That is a pretty naive view of things. After all, I can't pay my taxes in USD. I can't pay my rent, utilities, or buy food in USD. Hell, I'm not even sure a beggar would be very interested in USD coins - they're pretty much completely useless where I live. I can use it on certain websites but when I do I always get hit with large surcharges, larger than those (probably about the same number) where I could spend bitcoin. It varies in value and is subject to fluctuations due to speculators and the latest decision by law makers. Can you remind me how that is different to bitcoin again?

Interesting point about the MJ suppliers.

However, nothing you say even implies your last statement has validity. I first properly realised "what money really is" less than 10 years ago when I started reading about gold and monetary systems and the parent is completely correct (and already +5!). It is simply an enabler of trade. Anything can be used, as long as the buyer and seller have trust in the tokens used. Clay pellets also work. In today's society we have governments that want their piece of the action but to date there don't seem to have been too many anti-crypto-currency government campaigns, so unless that changes then the future is bright. If a currency can be traded for a particular good or service then the currency is logically and functionally equivalent to any other for the purpose of trade.

Money doesn't even need to be backed by anything real/physical - almost all of today's currencies are proof of that. Governments/banks can simply create ex-nihilo 10s of billions in $ equivalent every month - as long as trust is maintained then the system continues to work. Rulers long ago realised that controlling the currency was a very, very effective means of controlling the population but it hasn't always been that way and certainly doesn't need to be.

Think for a moment what it means for someone outside of the US (and a few puppet states) to have a US dollar account. They can't withdraw that money and buy a loaf of bread - they can't even buy goods/services from US-owned companies like McDonalds! Does that make it "as worthless as bitcoin"? According to many, yes, but we all know that USD is not (currently) "worthless" and that is because people still have trust in it. You don't get taught this in high school economics though...