I think you give human kind too much credit - you think that we're so smart.

I see a lot of this kind of language "that the cells are so sophisticated that we still don't know much ...."

Why do you think we're so smart? What if we're actually the dumbnuts of the Earth? Heck, we still don't know much about quantum mechanics and the physical nature of the world - why should we be able to know everything there is to know about the chemical and biological underpinnings of life?

In my opinion, it'll take at least another couple billions of years before any sentient being on Earth will come to understand how the cellular machinery came to be. When it took a few billion years to evolve, don't you think it would take at least that long to understand? When you get to 2 or 3 billion years old, then you deserve to ask that question - Why don't we get it yet?. Until then, please understand that we don't know jack about the real nature of how biological organisms are put together, and all we can do is continue to experiment, continue to learn.

The article states that Intel is one of the investors of Intellectual Ventures. The article also says that one of the lawsuits was filed against McAfee, which Intel recently bought. So in this case, Intel is hiring someone else to sue itself - it would be much easier to hold an employee venting day if that's all they wanted to do.

I was wondering if it is acceptable to the TSA for me to request a private room, and strip naked to let them do a visual only examination to prove that I'm not carrying anything dangerous. They can look as closely as they want, as long as they don't touch me.

I have no concerns about privacy, but I do have a problem with xrays and a person feeling me up.

But I have no problems about getting naked. Is that an acceptable for the TSA? I will try it next time I go through an airport.

Yes, the reasons behind the score differences need to be evaluate. What if one teacher turned a blind eye to cheating, while the other teacher strictly enforced the no cheating rules? On standardized testing, the cheaters win. Anyone who says cheating is not a problem in primary / secondary school has no idea how kids actually are these days. Whatever the background, whatever family situation and conditions, cheating is something that happens. It's up to the teachers to bring it to the students' and their parents' attentions, and escalate it when necessary when students are caught cheating, and for some teachers, that's a really hard thing to do.

Choi + Shine is not an Icelandic company! I wonder where the heck the submitter got that. Their website puts their address at

Choi+Shine Architects office
358 Tappan St
Brookline, MA
02445

In any human, mitochondria ONLY comes from the mother. The mitochondria in the sperm are clustered at the base of the flagella and are used to provide energy for swimming. After insemination, the father's mitochondria are "discarded", left outside of the egg. There is also no worry that the father's mitochondria is "too different". So in current human biology, the mother's mitochondria is extremely important, as any defects/dna damage will be inherited by the offspring.

The father's mitochondria decides how energetic the sperm are when competing to fertilize the egg. The mother's mitochondria are carried on in the offspring.

Perhaps the genetic engineers will one day find out how to implant the father's mitochondria back into the developing egg.

If you read the article, the Apache folks were compromised before the Atlassian breach - and in the article, it appears Apache contacted Atlassian regarding the xss compromise which was used 2 days later directly on atlassian itself.

This is wrong. the Ports system is based on CVS, so in essence, you can go back version by version, back to the beginning, and select version numbers of the software to install at will, without having to depend on precompile binaries. You use the supfile to select the port version you need http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cvs-tags.html Gives you all the branch tags that you can check out via historical cvs. But Alter Relationship obviously didn't read the handbook, and started complaining without even reading the man pages.

It's NOT testing freebsd. the article tests the Debian world running with FreeBSD

I believe the real idea is that if you spent $1 billion in helping the OSCAR project along, you would have something useable by now. Even though OSCAR is only, as you say, a part of a larger solution, it still doesn't excuse the massive useless waste of space and money that eHealth Ontario represents.

If you take $1 billion dollars, and contribute it to Linux development, what would do you think would come out of it? Ask the same question for OSCAR, and you can start to see the real questions at hand.

I was in the non-profit space about a year ago, and we were thinking of trying out "Metrix" http://metrix.fcny.org/index.html . Developed by/for the Fund for the City of New York, it's a contact management / funding/donor tracking system built on top of MS Access, with integration into excel and word (mail merges). Since it builds on top of MS Office suite (ie word, outlook, excel, access, along with the free ms sql product), which most non-profits need to get licenses for anyways, it's a good fit if you're already on the Microsoft path.

I'd like to see something like Metrix built on top of Openoffice if there is such a thing.

This is absolutely true. Ask a native speaker, always.