"Geoengineering is a bad idea." "Why?"
"Because it hasn't been tested and could have unpredictable consequences."
"So let's do some testing and improve our models of how it works."
"No way, we can't be doing research on geoengineering!" "Why not?"
"Because geoengineering is such a bad idea!" "Why?"
"Because it hasn't been tested and could have unpredictable consequences."
...

I'm not so sure. You didn't need to be wearing stupid goggles to use Bob. But yeah, I made the same connection when I saw this demo: It's Bob, in threeee deeeeeeee! There's even a virtual yellow dog.

Nobody said that the nerves are going to work. Post transplant, the person will certainly be paralyzed from the neck down. That's why this kind of surgery is only appropriate for a paraplegic whose body is about to fail. He or she is not going to stop being a paraplegic, but might get many extra years of life by acquiring a robust new body.

It's pretty simple. If the excess power I generate has more value to me if I store it in a battery, rather than sell it to the grid, then I can just cut my connection to the grid. The fact that they're being such jerks would increase my incentive to cut them off.

If Norway does the right thing and opens up the FM spectrum for people and personal their short range transmitters, maybe we'll find something more useful to do with the FM bands. And since Norway are doing this first, they have a special opportunity to set a good precedent.

I hope it's not winter.

Everybody seems to be saying: "Oh noes, this is soooo bad! It's gonna make China get up off its ass and finally give Intel some actual competition!!!"

And here I am, thinking that we all stand to benefit if Intel got some actual competition.

I doubt that this is right. It's just a misconception to say that in a first-world society, fertility is pretty much the same thing as attractiveness. It's not. In fact, the people who are broadly judged to be most desirable - the people with Ph.D's, sixpack abs and fancy jobs - have fewer children that the average. A much stronger driver of first-world fertility in a place like NL is: Who's sloppy with their birth control, who's impulsive enough to think things like "Yeah, I should just have the baby!", who's someone that thinks that having a child is going to fix the problems in their relationship, etc.

For these fertility increasers to be correlated with height is just weird and hard to explain, but it's obviously real, so there much be some mechanism. But that mechanism is not as simple as "Taller men get more girls".

I'll make one prediction right now: No car of the future, clever or dumb, will be accelerated and decelerated with a single pedal oval, the right half of which does the former and the left half does the latter. We might all think that's completely obvious, but look at the interior photo of the prototype. Even Steve Jobs would think it's suicidal.

The ISS was a huge waste of NASA money, costing as much as all of NASA's "space exploration activities" combined (source:). This prevented, killed and neutered many missions that would have produced genuine science. It was simply a mistake. So hooray, let's make a bigger one!

Do you really think there are going to be humans in LEO turning bolts with hand-held wrenches, and that's how the Mars ship will be built? Did you not notice that even in the safety of Earth's factories, humans aren't really doing that kind of stuff anymore? By the time we get around to building a Mars ship, I doubt our automated manufacturing machines will be worse than now, and unlike humans, these machines can actually be designed to perform optimally in space.

Australian geeks and scientists: The weather is also nice in Silicon Valley, and they pay better. Do you really need another reason to leave?

Check out these facts about Finnish teachers, and weep (if you're American) (source):

I also remember reading that about 90% of Finnish teachers graduated in the top quintile of their class. In the US, that figure is more like 4%. American students of education typically get the worst SAT and GRE scores of all the majors. We cannot ignore these facts when we're comparing educational systems. In the US it's easier to get into med school than it is for a smart Finn to get into teacher school. The quality of the people who make it through means that pretty much every innovation they try is bound to produce satisfactory results, because highly their best and brightest are in charge.

Yeah, but why not? This sort of thing obviously undercuts national security by tying up our cops, making them complicit in some asshole's prank, and causing potentially deadly danger. And compared to the effort and expense of mobilizing and deploying a freaking SWAT team, it is a comparative trifle for the NSA to answer a call from the cops asking for the malicious report to be traced to its source.

This is one of those times when our government's all knowing, all access panopticon would actually be useful. Seriously, our cops can't trace the swatters?