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Comment Re:That's just Western prejudice (Score 1) 403

Yup, right up there with leeching

Actually, leaching *does* have medicinal benefits. Doctors have learned that leaches can be used effectively in the reattaching of severed body parts. They've also found benefits in the use of maggots (they eat infected flesh, but don't bother the healthy flesh surrounding it)

Got a headache? We'll drill a gaping, untreated hole in your head to release the "bad spirits"!

Hate to break it to you, but this is used by modern medicine too in order to relieve cranial pressure caused by fluid buildup.

So, despite your cries of "it's all bunk", "new" discoveries involving old techniques are not uncommon. That's not to say that *all* old cures and treatments work, but just because someone scoffs at something as unenlightened doesn't mean it really is.

Comment Re:Green, no turkey day for us (Score 1) 272

We /are/ resigned to not getting to eat out at a nice restaurant for a long time without finding a sitter first. :)

I would just like to say thank you. I like kids as a general rule, but parents who insist on taking the kid everywhere with them and who make no effort to quiet the child or make him/her behave (provided the child is old enough to understand) drive me up the wall.

Privacy

Kaspersky CEO Wants End To Online Anonymity 537

Andorin writes "Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of well-known computer security company Kaspersky Labs, is calling for an end to the anonymity of the Internet, and for the creation of mandatory 'Internet passports' for anyone who wishes to browse the Web. Says Kaspersky, 'Everyone should and must have an identification, or internet passport ... the internet was designed not for public use, but for American scientists and the US military. Then it was introduced to the public, and it was wrong ... to introduce it in the same way.' He calls anonymity 'the Internet's biggest security vulnerability' and thinks any country that doesn't follow this regime should be 'cut off.' The EFF objects, and it's likely that they won't be the only ones."
Space

Exoplanet Has Showers of Pebbles 341

mmmscience writes "The newly-discovered exoplanet COROT-7b has an unusual form of precipitation: rocks. Because it orbits so close to its sun, the temperature on its sun-facing side is around 4220 degrees Fahrenheit. That's hot enough for rocks to vaporize — not unlike water evaporating on Earth. And, like Earth, when the vapor cools in the upper atmosphere, it forms clouds and begins to rain. But instead of water, COROT-7b gets a shower of pebbles."

Comment Re:But it goes both ways (Score 1) 652

His IQ is indeed rated at 160 or 180 depending on where you look. However, I'd say that his intellect is much higher than that score would indicate. Among other things, distraction caused by pain would throw the test score off pretty dramatically judging by the difference in scores I got when I did it in a normal manner and while working on other projects at the same time.

Xue and I both test in the 140-145 range. However, we both have areas where our aptitudes would, in all honesty, put us rather above that.

Comment Re:But it goes both ways (Score 1) 652

And yes, of the two of us, my IQ's higher. ;)

Yeah. Yeah. We're in the same 5 point range so it's debatable whether or not there's any real difference in scores :P

Though to get a woman *twice* as smart he'd probably have to drink a hell of a lot of alcohol and kill a fair few brain cells since we're both rather high up on the scale.

Not to be immodest, but to get a partner twice as smart as either of us, we'd basically have to find someone on a level with Hawking and even that might be debatable...

(This would be bladesjester's girlfriend of... shit, how many years has it been now? are we up to four?).

Probably, yeah. Possibly a little more.

Software

Best Free Open Source Software For Windows 324

snydeq writes "InfoWorld surveys the FOSS-on-Windows landscape, detailing the 10 free open source solutions most likely to unseat proprietary offerings. 'Some, like TrueCrypt and VirtualBox, are real diamonds in the rough: enterprise-grade solutions that deliver many of the same bells and whistles of their commercial brethren, but for free. Others, like Firefox and OpenOffice.org, are already legendary, and their strong followings ensure their continued development and support at levels that rival the best proprietary solutions.'" Rather than click through 10 different pages, the slideshow presentation at least lets you hover over each page's link to preview the author's top picks.

Comment Re:Contracat ? (Score 1) 362

As I said, some ways are faster. However, the problem with guns tends to be the noise. It's one thing to not care who finds the body, but most people, I would think, would generally want to be somewhere else when the body is found.

Sure, you can make a single use silencer, but that adds other difficulties (prep time, actually knowing/learning how to do it, etc etc etc)

Comment Re:Contracat ? (Score 1) 362

Making stops to kill people takes much longer than stopping for potty breaks or tossing Gatorade bottles out of the car.

Not really. People are rather fragile. It doesn't take a lot to kill someone in all honesty.

What takes time is hiding the evidence. If you just want someone dead and don't care who finds the body, you can do it in a couple of minutes (and that's for opening an artery or two and letting them bleed out. Certain other ways can be even faster).

Science

Repulsive Force Discovered In Light 176

Aurispector writes in with news that the Yale team that recently discovered an attractive force between two light beams in waveguides has now found a corresponding repulsive force. "'This completes the picture,' [team lead Hong] Tang said. 'We've shown that this is indeed a bipolar light force with both an attractive and repulsive component.' The attractive and repulsive light forces Tang's team discovered are separate from the force created by light's radiation pressure, which pushes against an object as light shines on it. Instead, they push out or pull in sideways from the direction the light travels. Previously, the engineers used the attractive force they discovered to move components on the silicon chip in one direction, such as pulling on a nanoscale switch to open it, but were unable to push it in the opposite direction. Using both forces means they can now have complete control and can manipulate components in both directions. 'We've demonstrated that these are tunable forces we can engineer,' Tang said."
Science

Monkeys Show Language Recognition 67

mmmscience writes "The cotton-top tamarin monkeys can apparently tell the difference between suffixes and prefixes. They will turn to face the direction of recorded words when they hear the nonsense syllables "bi-shoy" change to "shoy-bi." The lead author, Ansgar Endress, suggests that this is just like how human infants learn language, by tracking the beginning and ends of words."

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