I like my touchscreen phone, but I hate the fingerprints on it. As for my computer, I clean my laptop screen and external monitor once a week to get rid of all that dust and cr*p that gets on it. The idea of going with my sweaty fingers all over it gives me goosebumps. How would I dare to show anything to my boss or co-workers in my computer if the screen is full of s**t?

In this case it is better to be safe than sorry. Monitoring online news comments is totally acceptable to prevent next Breivik cases, I would not classify it as terror or excessive surveillance. If we would consider things like ACTA, PIPA, SOPA etc, then its a different story.

I totally agree with your summary on human nature. It is just true.

I have not used any Excel recently, because they all tend to die when coping with larger datasets. R (www.r-project.org) has always worked better for me. And, o yeah, plotting .. no excel can stand against R plotting capabilities, it is just superior.

While reading your post, it suddenly came to me: "Why the heck am I reading all this!? I won't get much smarter reading slashdot posts and I have a lot of urgent things to do!" Thanks man, I'll continue finishing my schoolwork now! :) +1 Useful, If there was such an option.

It is very easy to inject malware in open source code, especially if you control the distribution of it and it may take weeks after somebody would notice it. For example, take Firefox extensions. It takes about 10 lines of javascript to insert a fully functional keylogger into any existing extension like Adblock for example. What I want to say is that malware can be very easily hidden in source code and even if you're an excellent programmer, you do not have time to analyze source code of all the software you use. Even if there were 10000 excellent programmers, the chance that a cleverly placed piece of code will be missed, is significant, especially code from an untrusted distributor.

Such gene studies actually may help some people in deeply religious communities, especially when it comes to homosexuality and such related stuff. If you are gei, then you may not certainly be *evil*, *tainted* or *dangerous to society*. Of course, nobody cares, if the society is keen for example even blaming Harry Potter fans for witchcraft etc. On the other hand, for example, if someone proved that pedofilia or murdering is caused by some genes, then nobody would be happy to accept this as force majeure. Still, I doubt anybody can blame a set of genes to excuse cheating his wife. :)

Ahh, invest some time and learn for example following tools: Tex/Lyx for documents, presentations, papers etc R/ggplot2 for data manipulation, tables and plotting Python for other things you want to compute you get quality stuff and you never want to use any office suit again

Fortunately my 5 year old laptop has not had any fatal malfunctions yet, but it is full of cracks and the lid barely holds together. I've used it almost daily at work and school and if it holds together 5 more years (which it probably does not), i would not bother to upgrade. One thing I'd like to rant about are the people who say that a bit older, but working hardware obsolete and useless. Every now and then they buy better CPUs, better graphics cards, more RAM etc and then think the world starts to turn. Bloody hell, if they use poorly-written software made by stacking together slow algorithms, every day download movies, games and stuff illegally, clutter their system with all kinds of crap, then no wonder they cannot get enough of upgrades. Do not misunderstand me, I have nothing against people upgrading their hardware, but I just hate people who cannot use their computers properly.

I wonder who has time to type that many text on a conventional mobile phone. 31% of teens sending more than 100 message per day is in my opinion manic. I thought that people needing to communicate that much already used Skype or similar software. Maybe I'm just a wierdo as I don't anyone who sends more than 10 messages a day on average. Or are the statistics biased? A biased sample of teens in the study? I don't know.

I'm not sure you need brains to cause minds. Although the processes in our minds are complex, they can be described algorithmically or be simulated by artificial neural networks, although in a limited way at the present time.

Sorry to reply to my own post, but here is a more interesting demo

See this military demo about Active Denial System. Maybe this with conjunction of a GPS system could somehow provide alternative prisons without *actual* walls? But it sure would cost a lot more.

How come? But the real programmers do it? citing ...