Private debt drives the economy. And yet economists have convinced themselves and us that we can safely ignore the role of banks debt and money. This situation is absolutely insane.

You appear to have convinced yourself you can completely ignore those "economists" and figure out what they think via telepathy.

Personal opinon: on economics, you're better off reading Krugman than slashdot.

If it costs $1B to get a drug through the FDA approval process, and your prize is $2B, you will only play the game if you think you'll get your first or possibly second try through the approval process. If you have to start half a dozen and have them fail at various points through the approval process, you've already spent the potential prize money without winning it.

We might need to look at how safe drugs have to be before they can be FDA-certified. I've harped on this before but I know people who thought Vioxx was a lifesaver in treating their arthritis, and experienced a very significant change in health and happiness when it was taken off the market because of the harm it did to other people. If we insist on drugs that have statistically significant positive effects, with infinitesimal negative effects, we may run out of options and end up dying the way people did in the middle ages, while the drugs we need sit on a shelf somewhere, waiting for a different regulatory environment.

First, the complexity of the engine shouldn't matter. You will never get the bulk of users out there to use, or care about, the real power of the engine. They don't want to mess with the engine. The engine should be under the hood, in a black box, whatever engineering metaphor you want. Users just want things that work.

I remember way back when I was at university. There were various absolute rules for good software engineering. The first was that the user should be presented with a must-read manual no longer than one paragraph. Tips and tricks could be more extensive, but that one paragraph was all you needed.

The second was that the user absolutely must not care about how something was implemented. In the case of encryption, I take that to mean, in the case of e-mail, that the engine should not be visible outside of configuration. A supplied key should trigger any behind-the-scenes compatibility mode or necessary configuration to talk to that user. If the keys the user has aren't suitable to correspond with that person, the system should ask if one is needed and tie it to that protocol.

There should be no extra controls in e-mail, except at an advanced user level. If a key exists to correspond with a user, it should be used. If a key exists for inbound e-mail, the key should be applied. The process should be transparent, beyond getting passwords.

Any indexes (particularly if full indexes) should be as secure as the message, good security practices on both will take care of any issues.

Ideally, you want to have the same grades of authentication as for the early certification system, adapted to embed the idea that different people in the web of trust will have done different levels of validation and will be trusted to different degrees. The user should see, but not have to deal with, the level of trust.

Last, GnuPG is probably not the system I'd use. Compatibility cruft needs to be as an optional layer and I'm not confident in implementation.

There should be eight main libraries - public key methods, secret key methods, encryption modes, hashes (which encryption modes will obviously pull from), high level protocols, key store, index store and lacing store. (Lacing is how these are threaded together.) The APIs and ABIs to those libraries should be standardized, so that patching is minimally intrusive and you can exploit the Bazaar approach to get the best mix-n-match.

There should also be a trusted source in the community who can evaluate the code against the various secure and robust programming standards, any utilized theorum provers and the accepted best practices in cryptography. Essentially replicate the sort of work NIST does, but keeping it open and keeping it free of conflict of NSA interest.

I'm not too sure. I lost my father when I was young. I think that if he had made a video for me, I would find it more than a little creepy, as well as being a forceful reminder of what I had lost. It would not make me happy; it would make me cry in pain, and perhaps even feel controlled.

Unless he can make it a Haron Seldon tape, to play only during special occurrences, I think the best answer might be not to.

If you want her to be able to let go, perhaps the best thing is for you to let go.

That's two disjointed statements. Wearing a band that slides the width of the watch up and down makes skin breathing no issue at all. Not wearing an appropriate band is going to cause problems whether you sleep with the watch on or not.

What purpose would it have? Unlike a watch, which does tell the time, also in bed.

That says a lot more about your sleeping habits than mine.

No, it doesn't work that way. See, when the alarm goes off you know you cannot go back to sleep. That's kind of what the alarm is for. So when you turn it off it's always time to get up and never time to sleep in.

It's when you wake up without the alarm going off you may want to know what time it is, preferably without any fumbling that makes you more alert, nor noises waking partners, dogs, cats or walruses. All I have to do is lift one hand and open one eyelid and blissfully slip back to sleep. Thank you, Omega.

In those instances, why bother with homoeopathy? Why not go straight to sugar pills/water?

And THAT is the problem with his claims.

It isn't important whether reading YOUR horoscope makes YOU "feel" better about YOURSELF.

It's whether reading someone else's AND BELIEVING IT IS YOURS makes you "feel" better about yourself.

So ..... do we foster an anti-science belief system because some people can self-invoke the placebo effect? Or do point out that it is nothing more than the placebo effect?

Why not?
The smart watches just need to be far more frugal and, dare I say it, smart? Passive NFC powered devices already exist, for example.

A pacemaker can run 5-10 years on a battery. A wristwatch that mechanically moves hands and dials runs for years on a single battery.
Saying it can't be done is copping out. It's like saying we could never have an electric car that could go for 300 miles on a charge.
We can, and we should.

1: I have a job.
2: I tend to wake up several times before the alarm time. If it's just 15 minutes before, I get up; if longer, I stay in bed and try for some additional sleep.
Also, sometimes I sleep other places than where I have an alarm clock.