The New York Times recently did an extensive article on this scam.

The entire basis of their operation is to fool people into paying for something advertised as free. They claim that their site discloses its fees, but the disclosure is still discrete enough to fool massive numbers of people.

Any site where you make a purchase should disclose the fact that you are making a purchase with at least the level of clarity that you encounter on a reputable site such as Amazon.com. Also a service that advertises itself as "free" should never be allowed to charge -- even if they gratuitously disclosed their fee (which they don't) it would still be a bait an switch scam.

Why do you blindly accept Verizon's word that the true cost of the DROID is $560? I don't know how much the DROID cost to manufacture, but the components of an iPhone 3GS cost $179. Assume the same for the DROID and toss in a generous amount for Motorola's assembly and R&D and I will guesstimate that Motorola can easily sell these things at $300 each and still make a reasonable profit.

Verizon wants to make it effectively impossible for people to leave so they slap on a ridiculous extra $260 to what they paid for each DROID and they announce that a no-contract phone costs $560. All of a sudden the price-gouging termination fees they charge for their plans are 'justified'.

Oh yeah, and if you pay the ridiculous termination fee you must trash your DROID as it is carrier locked. You don't even own the phone you paid for.

This is just another reminder of why we desperately need Net Neutrality to apply to wireless carriers -- Motorola would then be selling unlocked DROIDs directly to users regardless of cell phone provider. The retail price of the DROID would be determined by the open market in competition with every other model of cell phone.

If you look at the PDF of the report that the article references you will see that many of the products were completely successful at identifying and at least neutralizing the tested malware. The reason why none of them rated "very good" is because some of the programs required you to reboot your computer to remove some specific malware programs while for others the use of a boot CD was required. The report also criticizes when some anti-virus programs leave some non-malicious components behind instead of eliminating 100% of the program.

The article gives the impression that the programs are failing to combat the malware, but the criticism is more about the convenience of the malware removal process. And yeah, I think it is a nice thing to completely remove a piece of malware but the report doesn't explain why it is so tragic if some anti-virus programs sometimes fail to remove some of the non-malicious components of the malware.

Apple rejected Google Voice because it would "duplicate features that come with the iPhone". Google Latitude was rejected "in order to avoid confusion with Maps on the iPhone".

Don't you realize how dangerously confused iPhone users might become if they have access to this free navigation program?

AT&T urged its employees to post on the FCC's net neutrality website. You can do the same, you have until Thursday to post.

http://openinternet.gov/

Cancer can affect the levels of various proteins in the blood: prostate cancer can raise prostate specific antigen, carcinoembryonic antigen is associated with colon and other cancers, alpha-fetoprotein is associated with liver and other cancers... the list goes on and on.

The problem is that these proteins are produced by normal cells but cancer cells often produce them in excess. The ability to detect these proteins has never been a problem. The problem is that they often only reach a very high level when the cancer has spread. The only protein used in cancer screening is prostate specific antigen and the benefit of this test is very contentious as its use has resulted in many a false negative and false positive diagnosis.

A real discovery would be to identify a blood marker that is useful for screening. It must be sensitive enough to enable detection while the cancer is curable but still maintain a very low false positive rate - as of today this doesn't exist for any cancer.

I don't know where your non-cited figure of "6" deaths from the original swine flu outbreak in Mexico came from, but maybe it was from a misinterpretation of a report detailing the deaths of 7 patients at a single tertiary care hospital in Mexico city during a single month. The New England Journal of Medicine article that detailed the fate of the 98 patients acutely ill with the swine flu in that hospital at that time also references that 85 people in Mexico were known to have died as of May out of 4910 confirmed cases, a fatality rate of 1.7%.

Fortunately only Mexico during the initial outbreak reported such a high fatality rate. This is very fortunate as almost no young person in the world had any kind of immunity to this strain. In all likelihood when you come down with it you will be 'lucky' enough to only have to suffer a few days of bed-bound misery.

Skepticism is good, but you've jumped way beyond that into conspiracy theories and paranoia.

Doing nothing does not count as a preventative measure. It is true that usually with the seasonal flu vaccine scientists must guess months beforehand what strains to put in the vaccine and since they don't always guess right the vaccine is usually only about 70% effective, but as for pandemic H1N1 the vaccine is an excellent match and it should give almost everyone who gets it protection.

The concept of "unlimited" plans is obviously a fiction, but there are problems presented by selling customers a fixed monthly data allotment because people who download at off peak hours will unfairly pay as much as someone who downloads during peak hours, and regardless of the time of day someone who downloads from a cell site with a huge excess of capacity will be penalized just as much as someone who downloads from a cell site that is breaking under overwhelming demand.

The best solution is for the cell phone companies to sell customers 'shares' of bandwidth. It would work something like this:

With your cell phone plan you own one 'share' of bandwidth and you are allowed to download 10 Gb/month of peak demand data. You have an unlimited monthly allotment of non-peak data that you can download.

Say that the cell phone company defines 'peak' data usage as anytime an individual customer for an individual cell site is unable to download at a rate of at least one Mbps.

Now say a given cell site has a capacity of 10 Mbps. If two different customers are accessing this site simultaneously (each has one share) then each one will be able to download at a rate of 5 Mbps. This cell site obviously has a lot of excess capacity - neither of these two users will have eaten into their 10 Gb/month data allotment.

Now say that the same cell site has twenty users - each user's share will come out to 0.5 Mbps of bandwidth. The data that is being downloaded will be deducted from their 10 Gb/month allowance because the available bandwidth per share is now less than one Mbps.

What happens when a user exceeds their monthly allotment? They get throttled down to... well let's say 0.5 shares. Now when they download they will only get 0.25 Mbps at the same time that other users are getting 0.5 Mbps from the same site.

Users who want more capacity can purchase more shares from the wireless provider.

The cell sites should give real-time feedback to the smartphones when the cell site is operating at peak capacity and deducting from their 10 Gb/month limit.

The FCC will need to put out some rules to prevent the usual predictable abusive wireless provider behavior. We don't want AT&T to suddenly charge you one dollar per Mb that you use in excess of the 10 Gb/month limit. In my view it is criminal when companies generate revenue via 'gotchas' instead of honest practices.

Sorry, I meant curatively resect. I may have been too bold to even suggest that by removing half the brain it might be possible to cure GBM. GBM can never be cured, and it is not even clear if currently practiced 'palliative' resections extend life. Anyway therapies that use antibodies to target antigens expressed on target cells are promising, but the idea of requiring focused light to target glioblastoma cells that are sprinkle around the brain is pretty futile.

The article states that "cultured human GMB cells" were "killed up to 80 percent... after 5 minutes of exposure to focused white light".

How exactly are you going to expose a malignant tumor that has diffusely infiltrated the parenchyma of the brain to focused white light? You can't surgically resect a GBM unless you are willing to remove an entire cerebral hemisphere. If you scooped out part of it and exposed the remaining cavity to white light you would barely effect any of the remaining tumor.

Now if brain tumors only occurred in petri dishes then this treatment would result in a brief remission.

T-Mobile offers a service called Hotspot@home whereby a WiFi enabled cell phone will automatically receive and place calls over your home WiFi. This would enable everyone to make and receive limitless free phone calls while at home and subsequently shift a lot of the burden off of the cell phone network, and everyone would have perfect reception in their house.

This should also be a free service included with every cell phone plan - it is only because of the cell phone oligopoly that T-Mobile is able to charge you a monthly fee for the right to NOT use their network, and similar abuses explain why other carriers won't even allow this option. We need network neutrality.

AT&T is trying to mollify the FCC so that they can maintain multiple other abusive practices that would be eliminated if the same network neutrality standard that is applied to wired connections is applied to the cell phone networks. The wireless providers don't want to become mindless providers of bandwidth.

-They want to be able to charge $0.20 for each text message.

-They want to force you to purchase a phone from them. They will justify their high rates by explaining that they are subsidizing your phone but even after you've paid off your phone after 1-2 years they will still force you to pay the same inflated rate. If you leave the network you can't take your phone with you because the phone YOU paid for is locked to their network.

-They want to be able to force you to purchase a data plan with certain WiFi phones.

-They want to continue to cripple phones that offer highly desired features unless they can charge for them (e.g. gps chips are common in cell phones but users are not allowed access to the information unless you give the wireless provider cash).

The list goes on and on. I hope that the American public and the FCC isn't fooled by this bone that AT&T tossed our way.

The New York Times published an article in August about a technology that decoded a human genome for less than $50,000. The inventor speculates that the technology will be able to decode a genome for just $1,000 in 2-3 years.

That being said it will be amazing to see the IBM project succeed. Either way the cost of decoding a genome is dropping so quickly it puts Moore's Law to shame.

There is a misconception that being "healthy" will prevent you from getting a primary viral infection, but this is not true. For example if you have never been exposed to varicella-zoster virus (the virus that causes both chicken pox and shingles) and if you inhale viral particles then you WILL come down with chicken pox - I don't care how "healthy" you think you are. Being healthy will, however, usually limit the severe the primary infection.

Being healthy will also allow you to build up a strong specific immune response after exposure to an antigen, so secondary infections by the same or similar viruses can be prevented. As we age and our immunity wanes then the varicella-zoster virus that has been stored in our nervous system for decades will have a chance to erupt again - now you have a case of shingles.

Being "healthy" can prevent a primary bacterial infection, just not a viral one.

If you are young and healthy and think that you don't need the vaccine because you "never get the flu" then you need to realize that you are actually the most likely person in the world to get the flu. Older people are more likely to be resistant to swine flu because many have been exposed before and they carry specific neutralizing antibodies.

So one of the reasons that the conclusion of the article is unlikely to hold up under analysis is that if you've never been exposed to the pandemic H1N1 virus then you are completely vulnerable. Getting the seasonal flu vaccine can't make you any more vulnerable than you already are. Actually I think that the best reason not to draw conclusions from the article is the fact that multiple other countries failed to observe what the Canadians observed.

There is so much paranoia about vaccines that people will seize on any bizarre pseudo-scientific reason not to get one. Unless you are anaphylactic to egg proteins (and I know you aren't) the only non-paranoid reason you should be giving for not getting vaccinated is that you are too lazy and unmotivated, or maybe you have a crippling phobia of needles. Everyone else who gives a different reason is just wearing a tin-foil hat.

I strongly support government intervention to discourage any harmful product or behavior as long as such intervention is supported by appropriate evidence and as long as the risk/benefit ratio of what the government is trying to discourage is sufficiently high.

The increasing severity of the obesity epidemic over recent decades is alarming as demonstrated by the Center for Disease Control's map of obesity prevalence in the United States from 1985-2008. A government intervention to stop this epidemic is warranted, but that intervention must be backed by evidence.

The authors of the New England Journal of Medicine article cite the evidence demonstrating a correlation between the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and obesity. They then cite the results of the four long-term randomized controlled trials that studied the effect of discouraging these beverages on weight gain in school children. A one-year United Kingdom study did not show a significant change in body mass index although a decrease in the overweight rate was statistically significant. The authors failed to mention, however, that a follow-up of these subjects two years after completion of the study showed that this difference in the overweight rate was not sustained. It would seem that this dietary intervention had no more than a transient effect without impacting the long-term propensity of these children to become obese.

The other three long-term studies cited by the authors all failed to meet their primary endpoints. Instead the authors rely on the results of sub-group analysis of these studies to conclude that there is a benefit to discouraging these beverages. The conclusions of the sub-group analysis between these studies don't even match up as one study suggested that only the more overweight kids would benefit, another study suggested that only the more overweight girls would benefit, and the last study suggested only a benefit of increased lean body tissue. These mismatched results of subgroup analysis are only useful as a basis for designing future clinical studies.

So which dietary interventions work? Well, all of them... and none of them. Clinical studies have show a wide variety of diets to be effective (e.g. low fat diets, low carbohydrate diets, etc.) but the most a population of highly motivated obese people can expect to keep off in the long term with any diet is about 5% of their body weight (although there is a lot of individual variability). No diet has been shown to effect the long term propensity to be obese - i.e. you must keep on the diet forever. I think that discouraging sugar-sweetened beverages probably will have some effect, but it is unlikely to be superior to any other intervention. Even if restricting sugar-sweetened beverages does cause weight loss we cannot assume that combining it with another dietary intervention such as a low-fat diet will result in an additive benefit.

Body weight is exquisitely regulated and "will power" can only be used to vary ones weight within a very narrow range. We need to admit to ourselves that we do not understand the etiology of the current obesity epidemic and we should not be distracted by trying to fix it via unproven interventions like restricting beverages. Maybe then we can focus more on basic science to find the true etiology.