Nature news itself covers this story a little better here.

You might be interested to know that the volunteers for this study were patients with severe epilepsy, and the neural recordings were from electrodes actually inserted into the patients' brains. Similar work has been done recording from the brains of e.g., monkeys in order to control a robotic arm (rather than control a video display). This involves invasive surgery that wouldn't be done unless there was also a medical necessity for it.

When I last checked (which was 2008), fit and fit sport have identical engines.

There are trivial differences in the body shape which I suppose could change aerodynamics. The wheels are different. I don't think the upgraded sound system is going to make a difference. I think both can be either manual or automatic, which will make a difference.

Of course, how you drive has a huge impact on mileage. Also, of course, different cars with similar names will get different gas mileage.

In my Honda Fit Sport, I am lucky to get 30 mpg driving around Los Angeles, but when I'm elsewhere I can usually surpass 35.

This 'Cyber-warrior gap' discussion echoes a similar discussion about the 'Science gap'. One perspective is that not enough smart people are going for a particular career. Another perspective is that actually the smart people consider that career, and decide pursuing that career is for chumps.

If you want to attract smart people, you need to make the career look good. In the science gap, the career is unappealing because the effort/reward ratio is unfavorable (get a Ph.D., do some post-docs, then hope a search committee picks you out of the hundreds or thousands of other applicants for one of the three jobs opening up this year in which you might eventually be offered a permanent job). It sounds like for "cyberwarriors" the situation is similar: spend your time doing stuff that might get you arrested or that nobody cares about and then hope the government suddenly decides to actually start hiring.

Wow! I was thinking if nobody'd posted a link to Lessig's recent stuff, that I'd get an easy +5 and feel good about myself doing it. Now I see the first mention of it is currently sitting at +2 and I just feel sad. The corrupting influence of money on the US government is a crucial problem we have to solve right away, and I hope a lot of slashdot readers get that and want to help.

Maybe I'm reading too much into moderation. In fact, I hope the parent isn't highly up-moderated because everyone already knows about fix congress first.

Thanks for the overview of the clinical trials procedure. You clearly know a lot about it. One thing I wanted to point out is that while placebo-controlled designs are probably the most reliable, in many contexts (including a cancer treatment) it would be unethical to give patients a placebo (i.e. a treatment expected to do nothing) rather than a treatment that might actually help them.

Basically, if there is a treatment that is known to be at least somewhat effective, that's your control rather than a placebo. It might be that the definition of placebo has shifted to include any standard non-experimental treatment, but that would be news to me.

I think the general thrust of your comment is correct. The video games lobby is nowhere near the Hollywood lobby. However, I live in Los Angeles and within a few miles of my house are offices of EA, THQ and Activision. According to the ESA, California companies employ the most people, accounting for 40% of the employment in the US video game industry. Texas is also in the top 5. I think this kind of brouhaha has more to do with relative age. Movies have been around for as long as our baby boomer overlords can remember. Video games (particularly in their current form) have not. They are newer, so they're a more convenient scapegoat.

I read a blog post about this case pointing out that East Bay Express also happens to run a restaurant rating service. Conflicts of interest don't always lead to problems, but the conflict should be kept in mind when evaluating the article's claims.

A link to the post.

While I can't disagree completely, it seems that some authority figures are using YouTube to get their message out. The California Department of Motor Vehicles has its own YouTube channel with over 17k subscribers. I don't know how many subscribers you need on YouTube to be popular, but 17k seems like a lot.

I guess the New York Times wrote an article about the whole thing. You can check it out: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/22/us/22dmv.html