I believe all humans are equally valuable and respectable regardless of race and sex. I do not, however, believe that humans are all created equal in terms of predisposition of physical skills and intelligence.

Differences in physical skills between race and gender is not much of a taboo. It is generally accepted that men are stronger than women, and in sports we don't let men compete with women because that would be unfair and pointless. The 100m sprint is dominated by blacks. Should we think of women as less than men because of this? Or whites to be inferior to blacks? Obviously not.

Differences in "intelligence" between race and gender is a huge taboo. It is not accepted that men are generally predisposed to be more able to abstract and plan ahead than women, and that whites and asians are predisposed to have better abilities to abstract and plan ahead than blacks. Perhaps the difference may be caused by poverty, less opportunity, cultural differences or racism. Or perhaps its the other way around: less ability to plan and abstract causes poverty and cultural differences.

This would be a racist and highly controversial, politically incorrect position to take. In my view, this is exactly where the problem starts. Apparently, intelligence is the one measure by which we must judge a human being. It seems that against all evidence we want to continue to pretend we are predisposed to be all equally smart, implying that people that would be predisposed to be less smart are somehow inferior. This is infuriating and obviously not the case. Intelligence is an arbitrary measure just as physical skills or beauty is. There are many traits to a human being, and it would be better if we'd accept that there are differences in terms of predisposition between gender and race. It would mean conceding that some races are predisposed to be physically superior and others to be predisposed in terms of ability to plan ahead and abstract. Then we can accept that, yes, no surprise, we see a lot of white men in doing things that demand math-like skills such as finance, programming and research. A great many of these jobs that require abstraction and planning are the higher paying ones.

The human species is evoluting degeneratively, let's say devoluting. The brain and our health are the first victims of this.

We're devoluting because the widespread use of contraception prevents successful males from spreading there genes in the amounts required to sustain the quality of the human race. Not too long ago, alpha males would spread their genes 50 to 100 times, or even 1000 times if very succesful. Today, perhaps average 3 or four kids for them. That's not sustainable, humans were not designed that way.

And nature doesn't give a fuck about your political correct counter-opinion.

Boy did they reach their goal. There's now 2.5 million OLPCs for each child that actually wants one.

Not only that, but the car is on a road and the nav system knows where the roads are. If the nav system has an approximation of the location of the car, and the car makes a right turn, then it can know and sync the position of he car to be on that road.

Let's face it: people don't want to think about every bit they do.

You're right. People are plain stupid! Why do we even give them the right to vote? Surely, if people are too dumb to switch of the lights or TV or heating when they don't need it, how can they be given the responsibility of choosing their own government?

Hope you start to see a problem when dismissing people from their responsibility to judge for themselves because they are 'too stupid'.

the price of leds is made up by the extreme long life they have.

That's what they said with the first generation power-saving lamps as well. Supposed to last 25 years, but that turned out to be about a year. Yes, I had to replace these lamps yearly. A lightbulb costed 90 eurocents, these power-saving lamps were at least 5 euro a piece. As for the environment - worse than lightbulbs because the power saving lamps have electronics in them which take much more water and energy to manufacture and generate more and much nastier waste than an ordinary light bulb.

Now we're supposed to believe that leds are the answer. Sure, leds last long but what about the circuits that drive it? People have dimmers in their houses which may not play nice with the electronics on the lamp, breaking it in no-time.

And as for efficiency - the heat a bulb generates is not wasted at all in houses with the heating turned on.

And... I just can't believe banning the bulb is even possible without any protests in the USA, "land of the free". The only ones who benefits are the producers of lamps, Philips, Siemens, etc. You can bet that they did some lobbying here and there for these regulations to pass. The losers are you (less choice, higher cost), the environment (because I'm pretty sure these lamps will break plenty quick too) but worse, choice and even liberty in general.

Because this won't stop here, obviously. In the name of the environment, what's next?

Mars had an atmosphere
Yes, and it was totally gone within 500 million years after Mars was formed, and had likely become prohibitively thin for any life to form way before it was gone. Any life that existed must have evolved during the first couple of hundred million years. But on earth, it took 1 billion years. And earth is bigger, closer to the sun, has more water, a less toxic surface than Mars.

I'm sorry, but this is just common sense. Life does not spontaneously appear if you stir in a bowl of water. The chances of a self-copying molecule (because that's all the first "life" can have been) to spontaneously appear is so small, that it took a billion years on earth to happen. Mars, being an environment orders of magnitude less favorable, there's just zero chance.

On earth, it took 1 billion years before life started to appear. Just let that amount of time sink in for a second. A billion years. During this astoundingly long period, the conditions for life to appear have been orders of magnitudes better than on Mars. Lower radiation due to an atmosphere, warmer but not too warm, less toxic chemicals on the surface, and covered mostly with oceans.

Now although there might have existed water on Mars, and even oceans, the reality is that the chance that life had been able to start on Mars before it dried up and turned into a reddish rock is zero.

intercepting cell-network-information

No need. Have wifi turned on? Your phone will dutifully offer its mac-address when you come near the router.

No RFID required to track you all day. Cameras everywhere. Carrying a cellphone? Driving a car?

We already know where you are, and where you're going.

What a great comment. Perhaps it is too ambitious to shoot for "flying cars" as in cars like today that can also fly. Perhaps it is better to aim for "roadable airplanes" like the design in TFA.

That makes a lot of sense. A roadable airplane only needs short runways and can perhaps be designed to take off and land at a speed of less than 160 km/h (100 mph), making it much more flexible than a conventional airplane. Once in the air, it should behave like a proper plane, that is as easy and as safe to navigate as a car. In the age of self-driving cars, the technology is there to make that possible. I imagine virtual roads in the air that only exist as GPS coordinates in the board computers of roadable airplanes, to minimize any chances on collissions. Also, the planes should be in constant contact with each other in order to stay out of each others way and to be able to land and take off safely.

To do: extra infrastructure in the form of extra short runways, and technology that makes navigating them as easy as driving a car and which allows for many of these planes to be in the air at once without any dangers.

Former Apple fanboy here.

Off-topic rant first: It seems that user experience is no longer top priority at Apple. Why on earth did they screw the user experience for iPhone 4 and older models? The redesign of iOS 7, what a mess. It is inconsistent, mostly pointless, buggy, but worst of all it slows my phone down so much that scrolling has become jerky in any app. I remember playing with an Android Samsung phone a couple of years ago, and dismissed it mainly because of the sluggish user interface. Now my iPhone is like that. Good heavens.

On-topic: Apple is no longer trend-setting but trend-following. Will they also come with bigger screens? Bigger displays? Better cameras? Sensors that actually work for gaming? You know, the stuff that other phones already have? Who knows, follow the trend, Apple...

But personally I think a curved phone is a bit of a gimmick and Apple will not follow it.

I really hope they get their shit together and start making inspiring phones that have the best software, hardware, design and most importantly the best user-experience of any other phone. You know, like in the old days. But I'm not holding my breath. Sigh.

Not sure if this has been posted already, but you must see:
Phantom Menace deadly review

The Aharon-Bohm effect seems to share the property of gravity that it can seemingly exert a force without exchanging a force carrying particle. Since it does not exchange a force carrying particle, it is not collapsing the waveform of the particle it interacts with. When an electron leaves the emitter, the A-B effect is capable of influencing the location where it will hit the screen and gets detected, analoguous to gravity. From an observers point of view, it seems the path the electron took has changed. But, as the axioms demonstrate, it is impossible to prove that the electron was actually present anywhere in between the emitter and detector. The A-B effect seems to be in line with this; the electron does not have any presence or follow some path, but instead follows some set of unknown rules which establish the location of its next interaction.