Sometimes you need to root for both sides to fight and both to lose. I can't remember the original quote but it was about America selling weapons to both sides of a conflict because the US wanted both sides to lose.

I always thought that this was a pretty neat thing. http://science.slashdot.org/story/08/10/22/1757257/x-rays-emitted-from-ordinary-scotch-tape?sdsrc=rel Only works in a vacuum etc, but still pretty awesome.

I'm sure if they tried to export this drug they would be seized as counterfeit or unapproved.

Don't forget this. http://apps.who.int/medicinedocs/en/d/Js6160e/6.html Look at table 4.3. The only markets that matter are the US and western Europe. Everywhere else is peanuts in comparison. The US, Europe and Japan collectively pay for the vast majority of the world's drug R&D through both government grants, venture capital and big pharma research.

Let me introduce you to the Bayh Dole act. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act Before this act, all IP generated by federally funded research was assigned to the federal government which in essence put it into the public domain. The argument comes down to this. Before Bayh-Dole, most research likely to result in profitable products was conducted in companies and the results of the research were kept as trade secrets. After Bayh-Dole, we have much more research being conducted in universities and non-profit institutes. You need to publish your results in order to secure more funding, but the products of the research are assigned to the schools who license them. These licenses in turn fund the schools. Bottom-line, returning to public domain for federally funded research would "close source" research and probably stifle innovation.

The real HP was spun off by Carly into Agilent. As far as I know they are still doing just fine doing all those things that the original HP used to do.

My god could you imagine the heat dissipation of a 64 core alpha processor. I had a desktop with an EV7 in it. That thing was a space heater. I just looked it up. The spec was 125W for that thing.

The thing that kills me about this "WiFi allergy" business is that it is a recent phenomenon. For the last 100 or so years we have been surrounded by much stronger EM radiation. Your typical WiFi card/router outputs about 30mW. Average cell phone of today is less than 1W and typically much less. Typical radio communication gear can be from 5W to 1.5kW. Broadcasters can go up to 50kW. Radar transmitters, not including the gain of their antennas, can be in the low megawatt range. Even when you account for the drop in irradiation intensity due to distance on these powerful transmitters. Think of an airport. Think of how many people a day go through an airport. Now think of the radar intensity of a 1MW transmitter at 1 mile(inverse square law). You get a whopping 300mW/m2, but this is still much less than the exposure limit of 10mW/cm2 or 100W/m2. Now put think of the intensity of those cell phones and WiFi cards. If this allergy to radio existed and was present in even a small fraction of the population we'd expect to see people suddenly come down with symptoms every time the approached any of these large transmitters. Even if you absorbed all of the radiation it would still be less than what you would get from radar.

Oh yeah and there is one more source that we are surrounded by all day every day. It is nearly impossible to escape. The 60Hz radiation from the power grid.

This is what I don't understand about the "but they aren't embryonic so its ok" argument. Thats not how science works. We didn't go back and forget how to reprogram embryonic stem cells and then relearn how to program iPSC. We used all the data from the old embryo destroying techniques to figure out how to use them. In essence, you are benefiting from the destruction of embryos.

I remember all of this as well. My first experience seeing the web was at the JPL open house in 1993. The pages they had loaded up were JPL, NCSA and CERN. I remember my first thoughts were its like gopher but with inline pictures.

I'm sure everyone wants to forget the pain of the old days too. Installing trumpet stack on your Windows 3.1 box and then struggling for days trying to figure out what was going wrong. Oh and don't forget having to install the 32-bit extension on to old 16-bit Windows so that you could use NCSA Mosaic/Mozilla.

Came here to say this. Reusing names within the same field is fail. If you cannot be bothered to google a term to make sure it is relatively unused, you are lazy. When you work in electronics, computers or communication and don't even realize there is a protocol called Telex already....
It would be like someone say I have a great idea for a computer. We shall name it UNIVAC...

If you really depend upon your Gmail account for personal or business reasons, its probably worth shelling out the $5/mo for a paid business account. In addition to extra storage, it will also give you access to 24/7 customer support.

I wonder is the FBI could subpoena a critical control system say a Siemen's SCADA controller that had been hacked. If this control system were used to control a machine capable of causing grievous bodily harm or death, would the FBI not be negligent? If the FBI took a server legitimately housing an e-commerce site containing customer data, would that be considered a data breach under California law?(FTCA torts are determined under state law not under Federal)

The FTCA specifically allows claims based upon negligence to be brought against the Federal government. However, you are correct that this liability is limited by the exemption you have posted. I don't think that any reasonable person could suggest that if data were stored on a server at Google and distributed over an entire datacenter, that the entire datacenter could be seized. That exemption gives Federal employees the leeway to search a house they reasonably believe contains a fleeing suspect. It does not cover something like seizing all the cars on a block because one contained drugs. No reasonable person would suggest such a ludicrous argument in that case nor should anyone suggest that since these 100 or so servers are in close proximity in a data center they may all be seized.

It is not even a matter of reproducible results. This whole affair is a logic exercise, the experiments performed cannot rule out other trivial explanations for the results. Science does not only require an experiment showing the plausibility of one explanation, but also the implausibility of alternative reasonable explanations.

This whole affair is an example of peer review gone wrong. It is clear that Science in their haste to publish this article probably didn't do the best job of picking reviewers of this paper. Had they sent this article to even one critical reviewer, none of this would have happened. The paper would have been delayed for publication for a few months while the authors did some more rigorous experiments.