Am I the only one who only knows this quote (and many others) from Sid Meier's Civ?

Just spent an afternoon listening to talks about developments in Brain Computer Interfacing; really cool stuff. By the way, that should have read Society for Neuroscience, of course. =)

Seriously, doesn't everyone on slashdot want this as well? I'm surprised it doesn't have the 'want' tag yet. =)

If you father children at age 8, you're not too bright either. =D (the same could be said for fathering 8 kids tho =/ )

It's not an issue of whether it's enjoyable. The people these spammers reach are by definition those people on whom spam works; hence they are also the people most likely to consider spam as a viable marketing strategy. Besides, since spam is your own product, you don't have to pay anyone to advertise with it.

I fail to understand why this article did not have the usual donotwant tag. =)

Since nuclei is a plural (think 'dollars' vs 'money'), shouldn't the article read 'number of nuclei' instead of 'amount of nuclei'?

"We cannot allow a technological error to spook the markets and cause panic. This is unacceptable. In this day and age and with the use of such complex technology, we should be able to make sure that our financial markets are effectively monitored and investors are protected." You know... the same thing could be said about banking practices. It's easy to whine about technological errors, but when we make the same point about economic errors spooking the market and causing panic, the bankers don't like it either..

Try being a scientist. That way, you're not just the guy working evenings and weekends, you're also the guy who keeps telling you that you need to. And it's a 38-hour salary of €28k... grr

"the particles measure less than 0.25 mm across"; so how the hell am I supposed to turn that into my epic sword?

Yes it's EEG. As the article says, the system detects where you focus (most likely by detecting effect of letters flickering at different points in time; point is: you can't do that with EMG). However, as long as you can move your eyes, this could easily be replaced (and done better) with an eyetracker.

The problem with this type of technology is that the group that will really benefit from it is very small. Sure, you can produce a few letters a minute, and that is a huge improvement for people with Locked- in syndromw (the final stage of ALS a.k.a. Lou Gehrig's disease). However, this technology often gets promoted to help quadriplegics and other people with severe but not total movement impairments. It does not really help them: the reliable information throughput of these systems is less than you could obtain with voluntary control of a few (facial) muscles. If you can have accurate control of a 2D (or 3D) cursor in real time, that might be an achievement, but it looks like that will require invasive procedures. It may look impressive when people play pong with EEG, but it only requires gross 1-dimensional input. see ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93computer_interface ) for more on invasive and noninvasive Brain Computer Interfacing.