Medical screening is a tricky subject - see the wikipedia article for a better overview of it all. However tests aren't 100% foolproof, and if you look up terms such as sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, false positive etc. on wikipedia it will give you a general indication of how these tests really work. I do not believe that you can have a test that screens for all cancer that is useful. Or if I put it this way when will it pick up cancer? Can it pick up ALL cancers early enough that you can do something about it? Will there then be false positives (worrying patients, giving them unnecessary treatment with the associated side effects), or false negatives (i.e. people not picked up)? Or are they making a test that picks up all cancers when they have metastasised (i.e. spread to the other parts of the body) when people cannot be treated? The last example is not the useful one. It is useful to see the principles of screening on the first section of the wikipedia article. It will give people a general background on tests and why they may or may not pick up things. Medicine (and the human body) is somewhat of an inexact science so some cancers may not be picked up until they are untreatable, and patients may not understand why they personally have fallen through the net. The article seems to acknowledge that this is still a research idea - the important bits are that they screened 'advanced' cancers, some of the statistics, and the cost. I do support researchers as I know that advances can take a long time to prove and filter through from research into something that is useful.

This is just another misleading story - Apple actually has complied by providing an adaptor for charging. They specification that they are adhering to is the Common External Power Supply and allows the use of adaptors. They already have on for older type of dock connector. I suspect Apple has valid reasons as they want data transfer to be as fast as possible with their proprietary adaptors, but still allow micro-usb charging if people want it.

IANAL but here was the story from earlier today Easy Fix For Software Patents Found In US Patent Act. I think will go and email the x-plane guy about it as it could be that "Stanford law professor Mark Lemley" may be willing to do some pro-bono work. Or easily ask the EFF and google to chip in. Can't quite see how this company is getting away with this.

I'm not sure but you maybe want to make this a challenge for yourself? I would personally go for the easiest route which you just set up and takes care of itself without complex problems. Dropbox (if you have enough storage) is the ideal answer as it will sync away in the background so freeing you to do things for yourself. Certainly the last dropbox update seemed to ask me if I want dropbox when I plug in a camera rather than using iphoto.

However I suggest getting a good NAS and my suggestion is a Synology Diskstation of some type (no financial interest, just very satisfied customer). You have your own server without the power overheads. Plus you can set it up for remote access and they have even released their "cloudstation" solution which is like having your own personal dropbox syncing, so would satisfy having pictures on your own server. Would go to http://www.synology.com/ and check it out. I'm sure you could set it up to backup things if you accidentally deleted locally. By the by if you're travelling abroad please do not data roam, it will beexpensive and very regrettable. Either switch off data roaming or get a local sim.

Well done! I haven't laughed this hard at a comment in a long time - I miss the Slashdot mega-trolls of old times...

The question really is how much do you value your data? A little? A lot? My solution is a dual solution (albeit still waiting for the 2nd part to arrive). Online I have a subscription to CrashPlan (although there are other various services available which will do a similar job). You can get the software which will backup your computer (or selected folders) to another computer with the software installed over the internet (e.g. your parents if there is enough free space). If you pay a subscription you can back up your files encrypted to CrashPlans servers (and I think you can even put in your own encryption key), albeit it can take a few days to do this. You can even get family packs for multiple computers.

The 2nd part for which I am waiting is a networked attached storage - I am getting a Synology product, although again there are other companies making these. The model I am getting will have 2 spare bays for hard disks of your choosing, and then you can run a backup on your computer to these which will keep the discs up to date. You can also use this as a file server, as well as a media server, bittorrent client etc. (see the synology website if you are really interested). You can stuff a couple of 2TB drives in there and even implement some sort of RAID.

So you can then have an onsite and an offsite backup with a NAS and crashplan. The 3rd part of the solution probably is to trim down what you store as I can vouch I have a lot of crap that really doesn't need to be saved. Then do regular backups of the really important bits (for me this is not my itunes folder) to DVD-R.

Overall it comes down to how much is your data worth and how much are you willing to spend?

The ZX81 was one of the main reasons the UK had a great generation of programmers (and especially games programmers). The computers were cheap, easy to tinker with and allowed endless modifications. I know that a lot of people are very sniffy about Basic, but the BBC Basic taught in schools at the time was the gateway to self taught computer programming. This is why I think the Raspberry Pi will herald a revolution in computer programming - $25 (?£) compared to the £50 in some of the advertisements for the ZX81. With a keyboard and mouse the raspberry pi will be equivalently priced.

As an aside I never had the ZX81, only the later Spectrum +3. But those were the glory days of British computing...

Certainly the devolved parliaments have a different election system than Westminister allowing smaller parties to get in, plus there is a tendency to more local politics there. However it is not helped by the fact that if you are ambitious or want to make a serious change it seems you go to Westminister, whereas there seems to be a lot of ineffectiveness in the devolved governments. The UK wide political parties inability to do well in the Scottish elections seems to be the fact that the candidates really aren't the cream of the crop and have quite poor policy platforms to stand on.

Are you sure? If the world politics/UN is anything to go by there would be some countries siding with Iran, some abstaining, some being in the retaliation camp, and then a veto or two against the whole plan by a country that's playing realpolitik. It would be a mess. But the power of having a nuke is that people start taking you more seriously on the world stage

The WSJ is a bit misleading - there is no definite information that the whole cell chip itself was used to create the Wii and 360 CPUs. However all three chips are derivatives of IBM's pre-existing PowerPC architecture (itself a subset of their POWER processors), with the Wii having by all reports a faster version of the PowerPC that was in the GameCube. The way that machines are created there's no way that research that went into one chip didn't go to improving all of IBM's other chips (and as the article suggests), but not to the extent that they would use the whole Cell architecture and give it to SCEA's direct gaming competitors (and I would have thought there would be an explicit exemption to that in the Sony-IBM contract). The wikipedia article (see below for links) is quite informative. It will tell you that the XBox used the PPE part of the Cell chip - from what I can tell the PPE is a PowerPC derivative - I previously heard that it was a custom built version of the PowerPC 970 that was the last Mac PowerPC chip. The special thing about cell is the parallel architecture, with the PPE and SPE tags causing some confusion. You can claim that some help might have been indirectly provided by Sony, but IBM has the expertise (and pre-existing relationship with Nintendo) to make the chips without Sony's funding. In summary it seems all chips have a basis in IBM's longstanding PowerPC series, with the Cell being a bit more specialised. As the specs of the chips are secret is difficult to say what exact differences there are without examining the chips in detail. Have a look at these links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)#Power_Processor_Element_.28PPE.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC

I heartily recommend a setup based on a ScanSnap and some sort of organisational filing software. The ScanSnap is a home-office grade document scanner - the main difference to your cheapo scanners is it's focus on documents and it's ability to scan both sides of A4 paper in one pass, achieving at least 20ppm scanning. The software that comes with it should be able to do OCR. I combine this with DevonThink on the Mac which allows me to organise the documents efficiently and search through them - it will allow you to 'tag' documents so that actually finding things is very easy. I have years of documents with me this way, and the documents come with me on the road.

The paper documents I file in a filing cabinet at home. Get a 4 drawer filing cabinet. Get a label maker. File everything in alphabetical order. Use one drawer for 'months' - this will hold documents that you can shred at the appropriate time of year.

GTD is a great method of planning and organisation however people never keep to the strict philosophy and work variations. I would read it. That should get you sorted.

Seriously this is too much. If they positioned themselves as not allowing you to have PSN services if you modded your console, then fine. Going against people who pirate games, fine. But targetting legitimate modding (including what can be 'dual use' which is another philosophical question in itself) when people have purchased the console themselves is a new low - it's now infringing on the rights of consumers to do what they want to with machines they purchase. If they are allowed to get away with this as others have mentioned it will set a whole new (lower) standard in how companies can restrict our inalienable rights. The whole concept of them promising the 'other os' option and then taking it away is poor.

I have to say Microsoft has behaved (from a console/gamer point of view) in a much more respectful manner in the past few years. I don't even think Sony has a natural advantage why you would want to buy their equipment, especially as others make better phones/tvs etc.

I'm calling for people to boycott Sony, not just games, but in TVs, cameras, and phones. Maybe they'll get a message that their anticonsumer tactics are not in anybody's interests. As a public service aside I noted the linked article has broken download links for the 'hypervisor bible'. So I provide the following link for the Slashdot audience: http://www.ps3iso.com/showthread.php?t=51100

No actually Hitler was elected by democratic elections. What he did was get initially elected to the German parliament and used the electoral system at the time to grant himself more and more powers. This was helped by infighting and political manoeuvring by his opponents which allowed him to set himself up for a "power grab", allowing himself to become Chancellor (essentially what would be the prime minister) and then eventually merge his job with the office of president. The conditions of post World War 1 German politics essentially set up the conditions for his rise. Hindenberg was a check to him initially but he was limited by constitutional role that he needed to perform to enable the proper formation of a government from the people who had been elected to parliament. See the Wikipedia article on Hitler; it's quite interesting.

But does logic really matter in international politics? Serbia invaded Kosovo, which was part of Serbia, and got a kick in the teeth for their efforts. Kosovo is the precedent and a very dangerous one now. As they say rights are only guaranteed by power, and in this case might is right.

From the rough discussions I've seen is that Georgia has been historically very territorially aggressive, only limited by the fact that the Russians directly sit next to them. The region of Ossetia at least is from a different ethnic group (not sure about Abkhazia) and by the standard of Kosovo have the right to self determination. The most cynical view that I've seen is that Georgia wanted to make sure that any referendum on the future of Ossetia goes their way by essentially wiping out anyone who would vote to join Russia.

The current invasion of Georgia is due to their initial act of aggression, gambling wrongly, and losing it all. They're in for many years of re-building at the moment.