"The disease is sexually transmitted, endemic in the sexually active, can cause genital warts in both men and women, and is the primary cause of cervical cancer, which kills hundreds of thousands of women globally each year."

Let us look at the figures at wiki. 4800 women died in US of cervical cancer. 70% of these are caused by HPV and the vaccines are 90% effective. It means that if everyone is vaccinated, it will prevent about 3000 deaths. Remember CDC is recommending for US men and women and has no effect on global deaths which is around 250k/yr of which 70% are due to HPV, which is about 175k. That figure does not qualify as "hundreds of thousands".

Also, with the cost ranging in the region of $100-200 and effectiveness of 4-6 years, this is one of the most expensive preventive medicines ever.

Android only uses Linux based kernel. How does it make it open. You can't update anything on your Android phone without the permission from carrier/manufacturer/google. Google hasn't released latest Andrioid source code, not that it would help user in any way. You can't use gps on Android phone without giving google all your location information. The truth is, apart from the fact that you can download uncertified app on google android, you can't do anything more that what you can do on competing platform. I don't think this makes it any more open than other offerings.

Why do you need real time info for traffic safety?

Lots of people are blaming parents. I wonder how many of them are actually parent. I download different sets of programs for my two kids who share the same iPod touch. One of them is 3 years old. Once you give your ipod to the kids, there are no controls to restrict what they can or cannot do. Here are few things Apple can do, but it is not doing:

-- Separate password for downloading free stuff: Why do I have to give my password tied to my credit card to download free stuff? I can give that password when doing in game purchases if I want to.
-- Password restriction on apps: Apple provides restrictions on pre-insalled apps such as youtube. But not for downloaded apps.
-- Disable in-game purchases: No, you can't do that
-- 15 minute window to purchase all you want without password: Fixed only recently.

iPhone has few more issues:
-- 3G restrictions: Once due to a bug in iphone, my wifi stopped working. After rebooting, it started working. I didn't care at that time. However, next day I got an SMS from ATT that I had exceeded my data limit and they have already charged me extra for this.
-- No way to block specific SMS offender: I used to get too many junk SMS and there was no way to block. Once you get it, you have to pay even if you don't read.

I love my iPhone but I have to accept that it requires great care to avoid extra charges. I don't think alternatives are much better either.

The summary says, "This is beyond the theoretical limit of optical microscopy". Which theoretical limit? The only theoretical limit that I know is diffraction limit (angular resolution is about wavelength/lens_diameter or lambda/D). But that only applies for objects far off (distance much larger than D^2/lambda. so it is quite accurate for telescopes). There is no direct theoretical limit for microscopes. The semiconductor manufacturing uses near field photolithography for ages where they routinely create features smaller than the diffraction limit.

The Sutxnet should have been developed using open source model. That way more experts would have seen the code and that would have eliminated all these errors. Maybe I should create a project in SourceForge.

The article is indeed bullshit and some of the claims violate the very fundamental laws of physics the author cite. Take for example "...it typically takes about 50 milliseconds to send a message from New York to London. Placing a server in between the two could cut the speed of communication in half, they said, which may be enough time to take advantage of some momentary pricing discrepancy....". How do you accomplish this. By the time you get trading data to server halfway and create a trade and send the trade to NY for execution, the data from London has already reached NY. In fact theoretically you cannot take advantage of speed of light by itself. What you can take advantage would be if you setup a custom network between London and New York, which uses shorter and faster cable (coax RF is faster than optical) and networking equipments which are custom built to eliminate latency.

Microsoft has an excellent track record of supporting Windows on non-X86 processors. MIPS, PowerPC, DecAlpha, Itanium. With such an excellent track record, I am sure, the industry will take it very seriously and we will see tons of devices, computers in the market very quickly. Thank you Microsoft.

You have hit the heart of the problem in QM. The observer is YOU. Yes, that is what it is. I can assume everything in the world is made out of fundamental particles and describe a quantum state of it. At this point "nothing" exist (the qm wave is just mathematical probability equation) until I observe. In Schrodinger cat analogy: what if you keep a scientist inside a cage? Well in this case, the scientist mind is in two states too (dead cat and alive cat) until you open the cat and make the observation at which point it falls into one of the states consistent with your rest of the observations. The scientist, cat, and nuclear equipment in the cage form a quantum state and become classical state when you observe. From your perspective, I typed this when you observe this!

Firing Hurd was one thing, but hiring Apothekar was a total disastrous. In connection to this, Jack Welsh mentioned that he wouldn't admit knowing anyone in HP board even if knew anyone. These are rather strong words coming from a neutral person who was declared manager of the century in 1999. HP was fully aware of SAP-Oracle lawsuit going on and also of the fact that SAP had accepted the blame and Apothekar was the CEO at the time TomorrowNow was stealing. HP got what it deserved or wanted.

The problem is not in defining without using any artifact, but defining in a way it can be replicated. I can define 1 gram as a mass of my "SD card", but that want help replicate the unit without having access to my SD card. Length and time can be defined without any artifacts in a way it can be replicated. At this point we cannot define mass without an artifact which can be replicated and the reason for it is that we must come up with a definition which ties with the existing definition. So we can say that 100 billion trillion atom of C12 is 2 gram. This is a perfectly replicable definition. Problem is that it does not tie accurately to the current artifact based definition. The effort which is going on for decades is to conduct experiment to come out with a definition which ties with current 1 kg definition which can be replicated without using any artifacts. One proposal is to use a pure silicon crystal sphere of a known radius and declare (after comparing with the current kg) it as of some fixed mass. This can then be replicated anywhere without having access to original sphere or a copy of it.

The claim is extra-ordinary but unfortunately the proof is not. It is well known for a long time that the equations of quantum mechanics violates equivalence principle. Precisely for this reason, we don't have satisfactory theory of quantum gravity. So there is nothing new in terms of it. If I interpreted the contents of the paper right, the authors are suggesting a way to create an experiment which can show that m_i and m_g are indeed different, but these experiments have not been performed yet.

Most of the calculations about black hole are based on steady state. However, the time it takes to reach this state is of order of event horizon size divided by speed of light. Larger the black hole, larger the time. Thus if you have a black hole of the size of our visible physical universe, it can take billions of years to reach steady state. During this billions of years, life can go on normally! In fact the equation of universe with omega greater than one (which means that the whole universe would eventually contract and collapse to singularity) are almost same as a black hole with event horizon of the size of the universe.

However, most black holes are much smaller in size and hence are much more exotic. From what I understand, it is impossible to see any events which happened inside the event horizon. Thus you may be able to supply enough charge and angular momentum to remove its event horizon and reveal the interior of the black hole, but that would only let you observe the events that happened after you pass the charge and angular momentum (there is nothing new here, it is known for a long time). Any event that happened inside event horizon is forever lost (from classical point of view). From QM perspective, those events carry signature in Hawking radiation but that has nothing to with changing event horizon by supplying charge and angular momentum.

Change mpg to gpm.