Lead was actually added to solder to lower the melting point. If you read the Wikipedia article you linked to you can see that lead whiskers also occur.

All I can think of while reading up on the Turing and related tests is how many humans would fail such a test.

With the many assumptions made about what constitutes 'true' intelligence, how sure are we of the assumption that a human being of at least average intelligence would pass it? What's the research telling us there so far?

Or are human and artificial intelligence somehow considered to be mutually exclusive?

'Uterus' sounds too scientific and medical, I guess :) I'm pretty sure most of the population has no clue what it is if you ask them.

Amazing progress, but it would be nice if the attitude within the medical scientific community to for example intersex-born individuals wasn't still stuck somewhere in the 19th century. Progress is relative.

How many people here actually know what intersex is? I didn't know it existed (among humans at least) or what it was called until I was 21 and I was born intersex (hermaphrodite).

Don't get me wrong, it's great that these women born without certain reproductive organs are getting them transplanted, but on the other side doctors are also chopping up the genitals of intersex infants and manipulating intersex adults like yours truly into 'normalization' surgeries.

Heck, after consulting dozens of 'experts' in about a dozen countries I honestly couldn't tell you which reproductive and related organs I do or don't have exactly. I also meet so many others who had to discover as a teenager or adult that their parents and medical file have withheld details about surgery being performed on them as an infant.

So yes, happy news for some, but just a bitter feeling for many others who had the misfortune of not being born a 'normal' male or female even one missing some bits...

Excuse the brief rant :)

That's indeed a bummer :(

Not true, each DisplayPort 1.2 output on a GTX 980 card can drive up to two monitors daisy-chained, so with a single GTX 980 you could have up to 6 displays with DisplayPort alone, more if the other outputs are independently driven (haven't checked into this yet).

Interesting. That would explain why China for example can build this type of reactor without major delays and the US can't. Nice of the US to sabotage itself like that :)

True, the US kinda switched to natural gas and are now shipping coal to Europe :) Here in Germany we got 26 new coal plants built or under construction in the past few years alone.

So the problem in the end is largely a logistics problem which should become less of an issue if more nuclear plants were being built due to the parts becoming less specialized. That's good to know, I guess :)

It always amazes me to hear about cost overruns and delays with new nuclear plants considering that in essence they're little more complex than coal plants, which keep popping up everywhere without any apparent issues.

So, is it just the red tape causing delays, or is it something else which make a nuclear plants so much more complex than a coal or gas plant?

If you wish to refute my sources, please provide your own references. It doesn't appear that you even read any of them.

30-100% load cycling, according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Also this link: http://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-ne...

Much depends on the exact reactor type, but for Gen II PWR/BWR reactors and up load-following is most definitely a realistic proposition. As the second link notes, German reactors were forced to switch to load-following mode due to the disruptions on the grid caused by the large-scale unbuffered PV solar and wind turbine fluctuations on the grid.

Any slightly modern nuclear reactor these days is load-following. Many of the reactors in France are load-following by necessity, for example.

They could have changed it for different countries, yes. Yet the thing people seem to kind of forget here is that it's more of a cutesy little game, not anywhere as fundamental as say one's gender designation on a social networking site. To me it seems like a massively overblown issue which might have warranted possibly an email to Nintendo asking them politely to maybe change this, or even humorously file it as a bug report. Shaming Nintendo into changing this isn't very mature or helpful in my eyes. Humour tends to be more effective in cases like this, leaving a more pleasant aftertaste, if you catch my drift :)

As for my electronics projects, I sadly don't have much/anything online about it as I only recently have begun to get some time to do anything with it again, especially after moving to Germany :) I got some FPGA dev kits and other assorted equipment trickling in over the coming weeks to do fun stuff with and hopefully not releasing any magical smoke. Stay tuned, basically.

Thanks for the interest at any rate :) I guess this kind of goes to show how my approach to making an important but unknown topic known works.

Well, the sticking point here is that I don't think it's entirely fair to blame a Japanese company for publishing a game in which homosexual marriage is not possible when the very country they're operating from has made this thing illegal.

To me this seems more like a case of shooting the messenger when it's the Japanese government which should be seen as discriminatory and outdated with this position on marriage. To be honest I'm not sure whether it would be legal for Nintendo to publish this game in Japan if they had made homosexual marriage possible.

As for the further point of making more people aware of intersex, I'm definitely trying. Through media appearances (see my site for examples) and possibly in the future through some games I wish to develop and publish via my own software company or in cooperation with other studios/publishers. The last thing I want to do, however, is to antagonize or be seen as a complainer. Issues like this should be approached in a level-headed, rational manner to have the proper impact.

Just my opinion on the matter, of course :)