I was told by an Amercian, that you tend not to use knives; ie that many of you only use a fork at the dinner table? Is that true?

Would you please stop freaking using imperial units. The rest of the world has moved on, and /. Should of all places be setting an example.

This system uses the principal of echo cancellation to work.
Typical transmit levels are +20dbm and receive levels are -80dBm. That's 100dB of echo cancellation. That's damn hard to achieve. The issue they will have is real world echo cancellation where you reflections change from moving nearby objects. Eg a metal bladed ceiling fan in a room that causes a significant reflection of the transmitted signal to modulate at dozens of Hz meaning you will have to recharacterise your echo cancellation every few milliseconds.

Can't do that in Australia as we have Fringe Benefits Tax. Anything, including business lunches or business cars parked at your private home are considered personal income and if paid by the business are taxed at very high rates.

Gosh, try Australia, where we have : fixed speed cameras, mobile speed cameras, hand held radar, point to point average speed cameras. There's not much speeding going on in Oz, because ultimately the demerit point system is of more consequence than the monetary value of the fine.

Reminds me of the Myth-busters episode where Tory, Jamie, Kari wouldn't hurl on the spinning motion sickness chair; but Adam and Grant would. It seemed ginger & motion sickness tablets worked really well for those of us susceptible to motion sickness. Maybe some people will just need to resort to medication.

What. No treetab control.
This is the first thing I install on Firefox. I have 50+ tabs open at any one time, and don't get how anyone can do that with horizontal tabs.

calorific intake is too simplistic. Gut bacteria greatly effects HOW the food we eat is metabolised. Some of the energy is consumed by bacteria, and some shoots out the backside. There was a recent case of a normal weight woman getting a fecal transplant from an obese donor, and now this woman has become obese but not changed her diet and lifestyle.

My wife reads about this stuff all the time, and the evidence is starting to point to the food pyramid being upside down!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt40...
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst...

I've always wanted to be able to print super detailed gigapixel maps, but not found any up to date tools to do the stitching. It's a pity pro still limits the resolution so much.

So show me a study on how effective the vaccine is? There are lots of other reasons for disease rates plummeting which are more to do with isolation practices and good hygenie.

http://www.amazon.com/Dissolvi...

This is a lift from an AC post

Where is the evidence for a working measles vaccine? There is no blinded RCT. It sure sounds like the observational evidence is confounded.

        “A likely reason for this is that the case may have been misdiagnosed as a non-specific viral illness. Measles has become relatively uncommon in Singapore with two decades of widespread measles vaccination, and especially after the second dose policy was implemented in 1998. Many primary care doctors may not even see a single case of measles in a year. This makes diagnosis more difficult.”

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

        “This was not a blind study, since the investigators knew which children had received measles vaccine. It seems probable that the occurrence of so much ‘measles-like’ illness in the vaccinated children was a reflexion of the difficulty in making a firm diagnosis of measles in the African child at one visit.”

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

        “As only approximately 7% of the clinically-diagnosed cases of measles reported locally turned out to be measles by laboratory testing, there is a need for laboratory confirmation of measles to avoid misidentification of cases and improve disease surveillance.(2)”

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

        “Before the introduction of measles vaccines, measles virus infected 95%–98% of children by age 18 years [1–4], and measles was considered an inevitable rite of passage. Exposure was often actively sought for children in early school years because of the greater severity of measles in adults.”

http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/...

        "“It is evident from Table IV that many children in all three groups were unwell and that the proportion was greatest in the live-vaccine group (61 %), less in the killed/live-vaccine group (54%), and least in the unvaccinated group (38%)...
        Table VI shows the cases of measles reported by the parents and those seen and diagnosed by the doctor. Of the total cases reported the doctor saw about 60%, and, of these, confirmed the parents' diagnosis in 93 % in the control group, 64% in the killed/live-vaccine group, and 70% in the live vaccine group."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

        "Measles
        Evidence from cohort studies
        Effectiveness against measles was investigated in three cohort studies (Marin 2006; Marolla 1998; Ong 2007)...
        There was a lack of adequate description of exposure (vaccine content and schedules) in all cohort studies. Another recurring problem was the failure of any study to provide descriptions of all outcomes monitored. A lack of clarity in reporting and systematic bias made comparability across studies and quantitative synthesis of data impossible."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

        " Indeed, an average of only 100 cases of measles are confirmed annually [32], despite the fact that >20,000 tests are conducted [28], directly suggesting the low predictive value of clinical suspicion alone. "

http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/...

        "Our data demonstrate that regression analysis shows only limited correlation between NT results and the ELISA values. This is in agreement with other reports [4]. Similar limitations in the correlation were also reported for other viruses like Cytomegalovirus (CMV) [10]. In case of the gamma globulin samples, the low correlation might reflect the wider spectrum and heterogeneity of the involved or measured measles antibodies."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

I know plenty of kids who have been vaccinated against measles yet still caught it. Something fishy is going on.
One should always have a healthy skepticism when it involves complex biological systems.
Here is a book by an ex board certified nephrologist who saw issues with vaccines in her clinical practice and wrote a convincing book about the subject.

http://www.amazon.com/Dissolvi...

Kind of fits. Alibaba needs 40 thieves.

Those are interesting points.

I read 'Darwins Black Box' by Behe many years ago, and thought he made good rational arguments about irreducible complexity.

When a genetic mutation occurs, there will be a continuum of effect, from new feature to no effect to death.
Natural selection will only have a certain forcing effect that is weighted to the 'death' end of the scale.

The problem I have with evolution, is the vast majority of any random mutation will be non beneficial and that this process will happen faster than natural selection can remove these defects from the population.

Isn't this a problem for Evolution proponents.
Evolution requires that beneficial DNA mutations win out over non-beneficial.

Lets say DNA is like a self replicating VM. The VM has built in error correction but occasionally a copy error occurs. The premise of evolution, is this copy error is occasionally beneficial and the non beneficial errors eventually die out, but the spectrum of copy errors can cause vastly different outcomes. Sometimes a copy error may change an eye color, or cause a miscarriage.
The question is, does the rate of beneficial mutations outweigh the rate of non-beneficial so the NEW functionality is created and functional entropy is halted?
My pragmatic side says, If I changed random bytes in a VM, I wouldn't eventually get a facial recognition system, I'd get slowly decaying VM.