Made me think of this Megatokyo strip.
http://www.megatokyo.com/strip/1178

Hmm, that sounds exactly like the type of anti-US song that other nations would want their citizens to hear about the US. Any song that makes the US in general sound like a worse place to live than a third world country or about the same as that won't be on any other nations' banned list.

No. Millions of people losing their jobs is a nationwide problem. Teenagers taking naked pictures of themselves is a non-issue. These aren't exploited kids being molested or stripped against their will. And I guarantee you at least one of these prosecutors streaked, went skinny-dipping, etc. in their youth. This is just ridiculous. Don't we as a nation have better things to be worried about than a teenager getting naked for another teenager?!

Nah, we are stupid when it comes to money. We've got no hope of solving that crisis. Now a teenager taking naked pics, we can handle! We can throw the book at her and make a global example of how we treat people now in the US.

A while back, I came across some articles on open source hardware and how exciting/fast growing those projects are. The thing isn't that you have a patentable idea. It's can you stay ahead once anyone else sees your idea and makes their slightly different copy of it?

Apparently, the thing with the OSH is that they released their base design and have basically something like a forum to suggest/give improvements. Of all the various Chinese fabs that they ordered a few thousand from, each of the chinese folks once learning that they could reuse the base hardware ran with it and used it for other stuff as well. The original folks are still abit ahead with better features/support than the rest, but its all the competition and low prices that make it possible.

Where they've learned how to make money is on the support and custom R&D end. Its amazing some of the things and prices on some of their products. But the profit margins are much, much lower than what you'd want. There was something about a device attached to art work to track it and it being sold for a $150-200 per device to museums. Their open source hardware could do the same thing for like $5-10 for a couple. They had a few other examples that were similar.

Now obviously you want your business to be long term profitable and not to just hand our your ideas and such. I'd suggest that you do a quick search in the OPH and just double check if anyone else is already doing what you are planning and if so how much it's going to cost them. It's liable to cost you about the same to produce something similar. Plus you might consider how wide spread some of those various projects are. If it looks like your idea can bring in money for the next 5 years, by all means patent it and make as much as you can off it. If it looks like there are a couple of others about ready to do the same thing and are giving away the specs at cost, then you should seriously think about joining up, or using their hardware for portions of your project or releasing your specs. It depends on how great your competitive advantage actually is about what you decide to do though.

One thing to remember though even if there is a project doing something similar or you just decide to use their hardware in your stuff, it's that you are selling your stuff to your clients. Is this something that you can make a living off of "support" or assisting others in setting it up? If not seriously think about how you tend to bring in money in the future. One day some one will be competing against you. Now a days that could be far sooner than you realize.

I think this could be a good idea. I think the wikipedia part should be more along the lines of properly adding, verifying, and/or updating existing articles on wikipedia. Anything below about junior high age, and wikipedia is usually fine as being the only source. At that age, it's condensing the pages and pages of stuff on wikipedia down to oh two paragraphs of stuff that you think is useful for some random project.

I use wikipedia and google all the time as my only research tools. I think that I'm fairly good at it, but it would be nice to actually be taught a few things rather than just using the search box and typing in 2-3 keywords.

I'm very mixed on the twitter thing. I don't know how useful that one could be.

On IM, E-mail, and blogging, I think that it is a grand idea. Especially for e-mail. I wish some one would have taught my boss how to properly address people in e-mail and how to properly compose sentences. He will address an e-mail to 3-4 people, the people that he should be CCing he puts in the To block, the folks in the CC he usually talks to, though sometimes he'll put you in BCC and talk to you. In the body of the message, he will randomly talk to all individuals at his own whim. After experiencing that, I really, really want our kids to be taught the basics of on-line manners, how to properly compose a sentence, and how to properly address individuals. Also they need to teach at an early age that anything that you write is liable to be found and read by those that you don't want to read it.

Blogging would be a great way of tricking students into just keeping a daily journal and reporting on random topics that they found interesting that day. Teachers can just grade by spelling/grammar and the occasional you sound odd part here and there. Assigning for them to read each others blogs and comment about poor spelling/grammar or where a spell checker changed a word into something that you didn't quite mean would be useful traits to give to the next generation. How long should that really take though?

I don't care if this falls a few steps short of mimicking organic brains. I'm more happy with it appears to be a system that we can build and might find out how to get to do useful work without it having the ability to wake up on us. Later versions might be different, but the first couple of generations we shouldn't have anything to worry about. If anything, I'd be happy if this just lets us build slightly smarter microwaves, stoves, dishwashers, or washing machines. I think that those devices are already getting too wired as it is.

How could this thing be used to make our cell phone, net book, or next gen console better?

We don't want to build smart robots, we just want a maid bot that's smart enough.

Add a few chips and you'll soon get "I think, therefore I am."
Keep going and you'll end up with "Bite my shiny metal ass you meatbag!"
I wonder if the researchers will know when to STOP adding the together?

Oh, a week after they've hooked up a self replicating plant producing this by the million powered by a combination of geothermal, solar, and nuclear power.

Thank you, Mr. Uninformed Ranter. It has been said, again and again that if Steam's servers are taken offline, access controls will be removed.

You truly believe that? Creationism makes far more sense than that.

I personally hate physical media. I think physical media is a scam on an epic scale. So I'm willing to log in to avoid that hassle. Sure, Steam could go down and kill my game. But my kid could frisbee the disks across the room and kill the game.

I'm willing to believe (at this point) that Steam is a robust enough distribution channel that it's at least slightly more disaster resistant than my house.

Are you just playing a troll? I mean come on I've avoided Steam, WOW, and many games that I've got to be connected to the internet at any time to play. I play PS2 games mostly because I completely avoid most of those issues. I'm dreading moving into "the next generation" platforms as it seems they all really really want to connect to the internet regardless of what I want. I like having a physical discs. I like not having to connect to the internet for little things like watching DVDs, playing mp3 CDs, cooking, doing laundry, having a refrigerator, going to the bathroom, and playing video games.

Sure the internet is nifty, but it isn't a cure all for everything! Slashdot is around to inject sanity into people like you.

Furthermore, there is a philosophical reason that pollution doesn't apply in the standard libertarian framework. The central philosophical idea behind most forms of libertarianism is that if I'm not harming anyone then I should have a right to do whatever I please. This is a strong argument. Unfortunately, pollution does harm other people. It isn't as direct or as obvious as murder or theft but it is harming people. It is again, just more diffuse and harder to pin down exactly who is harmed by which bit of pollution. For both economic and philosophical reasons even a hard-core libertarian should be ok with regulation of pollution.

Nah, you've not got any actual libertarian systems. You'd have private military groups and those that you believe are harming your interests you'd hire a military group do go after them. Libertarians have nothing against buying/sending/using deadly force against those that they don't like.

If you had pollution in a true libertarian system, no one would care until it was proved that the pollution was causing harm. That's when those in the inflicted areas who thought that they were being harmed would buy military contracts against the various polluters. Heck, even those that just disliked "pollution" in general would fund these groups whenever any form of pollution showed up on their radar.

Also kids from other countries have lots of experience under their belt: in the UK university is only 3 years, and very often kids take a gap year, that is all great and good, but people their same age elsewhere will have 4 or 5 years university under their belts and they don't take gap years but instead start working, so when you get both of them in front of you it is frankly a no contest.

Think of it as cultural evolution. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but if you think that the students of an educational environment from else where are more competitive than your locally educated, than obviously they have some sort of international evolutionary advantage.

I think immigrates of any type are a poor indicator of other countries educational systems or national environments. Basically immigrates come in two flavors, those that dislike their native home and have fled for whatever reason, and then those that just choose to work else where and then return home after their work career has ended. Don't you think that those that you actually saw of the second group would by default be the best that their given system produced or tried their hardest so that they had skills/abilities needed to leave their native system?

Look at the US immigrates to other countries. They should generally be "highly educated" by the usual standards of the US educational system.

You could say that being a hard working immigrate is some sort of advantage.

I actually don't hunt myself, but I am of the opinion that animals need to die for humans to live and I would have no problem killing something that I needed to eat. If someone actually wants to go through with all the BS it takes to hunt nowdays (hunting permit/draw, gun permit, learning to shoot reliably under pressure, finding the animal, skinning the animal and packing it out), more power to them. It's a little piece of history that most of us don't appreciate about when we are in a hurry to buy our chicken and cow meat in the supermarket, on the way home to watch Survivor or get on the internet.

People were meant to kill animals and plants to eat them and use them as resources to live. Much in the same way that animals kill each other for life to continue. The key is to do it responsibly, like the other animals do.

I have a unique POV here in Arkansas. I don't get into all the outdoors stuff. The bulk of the male population here does some form of fishing or hunting. Hunters use bows or guns of various types. I will tell you something that most environmentalists don't quite realize. If it weren't for the hunters and fishers, we wouldn't have any fish, deer, duck, or other game that they hunt. We'd have harvested them to extinction ages ago, or they'd be limited to farm animals.

I dislike PETA and most other general animal lovers with a passion. Some would like to free all the farm animals so we'd never eat meat again. You know what would happen to most domesticated species if we actually chose to stop eating them? Instead of having stable populations in millions for chicken, cows, pigs, and other critters, the bulk of them would be sold off in one last bid to profitably get rid of them, or just let loose. Those that were let loose would mainly die. We'd be lucky if the various species survived for several generations if we ever decided to change our minds and start eating meat again.

Humanity has always preserved/breed/domesticated animals that we've deemed useful.

Can we please just execute those boozes for treason or being criminally stupid? Please? Heck, at this point, I'm in favor of rounding up every one of their board and share holders that voted for this had beheading them and mounting them on sharp stakes right in front of wall street.

Can you tell that I'm just mildly upset?

More precisely, if the experimenter can freely choose the directions in which to orient his apparatus in a certain measurement, then the particle's response (to be pedantic--the universe's response near the particle) is not determined by the entire previous history of the universe.

I've not read the whole thing yet but it sounds like they've managed to prove that if free will exists then there is no non-local hidden variable theorem compatible with the results of QM.

It's stuff like this that makes it actually easy to believe in god creating the universe and actually running it.

This entire thread sounds like some scientists that want to disprove human freewill by tying to QM. I have no problems with an electron having free will. So what no big deal. So what if it gets to choose where it goes? It still roughly follows all the previous rules that we've discovered. The same can be applied to us as well. So what if we do or don't have free will. We will still be running by our same cultural and genetic rules and doing the same things.

I'm afraid of those that seem to try to disprove free will though. Why? Because if they manage to convince enough people that their pet theory is true, well then its a short hop, skip, and jump to hey let's adjust the free will of various "law breakers" or "yet to be law breakers" so that no one will ever break what ever the laws of society at the time are. It's sort of like let's invent or use mind control on you because it's for your own good. See we've disproved that you have any free will over the matter so you have to do what your genes, chemicals, hormones, or electrons are telling you to do. So if we make "adjustments" to you, then you'll be good.

It's little things like this that would actually make me think that their actually is a grand creator or some such. We might not like free will and want to take it away, but if we are actually looking at the universe properly then you can't take free will away from everything from the ground up. If that ain't good paranoid design, then I don't know what is.

I took baby quantum mechanics a year ago (an optional 3rd semester of intro physics), and the whole predestination thing was thrown out the window to me as soon as soon as there was a probability distribution of where the particle was at any given time. My thought philosophically is that the sum of tiny deviations from the mean made it so that I could not just take an inventory of all the particles in the universe, write a program to describe their governing laws, and then the output would be every moment of of the future. I much prefer a universe of surprises.

You'd think that if their was a quantum observer watching the entire universe and had some say in the universe's construction that it would want the universe to constantly surprise it. Electrons having "free will" could be an easy way of setting that up.