Phase change memory has some advantages, but for now and the foreseeable future it can't beat NAND in terms of cell size and price. NAND flash isn't going anywhere anytime soon. NOR, on the other hand, might get phased out in favor of this tech.

Sorry for the excessive italicization; I broke my close tag and then didn't look at the preview.

Everyone keeps saying that they violated the terms of the agreement, but from TFA, I'm not so sure that's the case. The agreement said that the blood would be used to “study the causes of behavioral/medical disorders”. Most of the research described seems to fall under that category. It was originally presented as work to help understand the high diabetes incidence in the tribe, because that was why the blood was collected in the first place, but when that work was done, they still had the DNA. Why not do research to the full extent covered under the agreement? It would have been more polite, perhaps, to for the various researchers working with the samples to keep the tribe updated on their work and findings, but nothing in the agreement required that.

Regarding your insistence that this was a violation of "do no harm" - I'm not buying it. I understand it's place in medical lore, but if you think it's really a useful guide, you're wrong. If "do no harm" was truly a useful rule for guiding doctors' actions, then they could never perform surgery, they could never prescribe drugs with harmful side effects, and the entire structure of medicine as we know it would cease to exist. They have to do some harm; the question is whether the harm is outweighed by the benefits. "Do no harm" sounds nice, and as a sort of generalized medical philosophy it's salutary, but it's so vague as to be useless for actually making decisions. That why, when doctors are actually looking at the ethics of their decisions, they don't ask "Did I do harm?". They look to the rules of medical ethics which have been developed through a lot of hard work by people actually dealing with real-world problems. Much as with science generally, relying on the writings of people who have been dead for thousands of years rather than your own judgement and the evidence is a terrible idea.

Just had to respond to your sig - that's not a real Jefferson quote. If the style of it weren't enough (the use of the idiom "the beauty of" and the completely uncharacteristic "they"), a quick Google search confirms it's bogus.

Sorry, but as a disinterested third party, I have to say that the position you just advocated kinda does make you an authoritarian pig:

In general, speaking positively of rules which ban the introduction of relevant, defendant-exonerating evidence in court, as opposed to mentioning it only as a last resort, means bad things about your commitment to having a free society.

Then again, looking for the intention behind the words is kind of silly if you just go and state your authoritarian prejudices explicitly.

Now, I don't necessarily disagree that, as a matter of necessity, some provision may need to be made for the criminalization of photorealistic 3D renderings. However, that isn't something to be happy about - it's a very bad thing. The only legitimate reason for banning child porn is protecting children from being exploited in its production. Take that away, and all you have is totalitarian moralism.

I'm sorry, you misunderstand me - the Oxford comma is one of the few points of English grammar that I absolutely believe are not merely aesthetically preferable, but practically superior. I seriously question the intellectual qualifications, nay, the very value as a human being of anyone who fails to use the Oxford comma.

Are you criticizing my views here, or someone else's? I've plainly said that I don't think that my preferred form of English is a more efficient form of communication than, to use your example, AAVE, and I agree that it's ridiculous to claim otherwise without some pretty compelling evidence, of which there appears to be none. I dislike the implication, however, that I'm wrong to have negative feelings towards another form of English because its users are currently disadvantaged. Regardless of relative power relationships, I absolutely reserve the right to disapprove of cultural traditions or elements thereof I consider harmful. To continue with AAVE, I think that the cultural tradition with which I identify is superior in a number of ways to that usually associated with urban African-Americans. This does not mean I am myself necessarily better than any individual who does identify with that culture, or that African-Americans are somehow inherently inferior - all it means is that I think my culture is better. As such, I would prefer it if those currently identifying with urban African-American culture changed their behavioral and linguistic choices to something more compatible with my own. I don't think that constitutes bullying - I don't plan to use physical force or intimidation to make others conform to my preferences. However, there's a difference between tolerance and respect. I believe in the former, where it doesn't involve risk of physical or serious mental harm. I'll give the latter where I think it's deserved.

That may be so, but it's all we've got once mutual intelligibility is satisfied. And I wouldn't say I "demand" it - I might prefer it, and I might tell them so, but it's not as though I'm going to beat people up who fail to conform to my grammatical preferences. I just won't like them as much. Which isn't even to say I won't like them - it's just to say it will be an irritation.

Um...so? I think I may be using "linguistic prescriptivism" in a slightly different, more general sense than you have in mind. People always try to distinguish themselves as social superiors, it's what we (including linguistically-educated people quick to jump in with cries of "there's no so thing as "correct" English usage! Language is fluid!") do. People also try to get others to share their views about art, music, and morality, and tend to like more those who do so. I fail to see what the problem with that is. The only difference is that the issue of morality has tended to get wrapped up with the power of the state, so views on that one have more consequences (not to say that issues of language and culture don't have significant sociological implications). In any case, if I find one form of the English language more aesthetically pleasing than another, why shouldn't I prefer that it become dominant?

For the most part, no, because I am not a linguist by trade, and am only superficially familiar with the details of the science behind it. However, the gap between is and ought remains as wide as it ever was, and my reasons for preferring certain forms of English are mainly based on aesthetics and tribalism, not some imagined sense of the practical superiority of one form over another (with the vehement exception of the Oxford comma).

I admit that the GGP's post isn't the most defensible (or comprehensible) thing in the world, but my issue with the reply was that "simply false" and "mistake" are the wrong words to use. On what basis is the OED being denied as authoritative? If he doesn't consider it to be such, that's fine, but by his own standards, to say that the claim is "simply false" is like saying my taste for the music of Britney Spears is "simply false" and a "mistake", i.e., something we might say in common conversation as shorthand for a negative value judgement about me as a human being, but not a useful reply in the context of an intellectual debate.

Why exactly do you think that, if you've studied language, you must necessarily give up on linguistic prescriptivism? This is the same problem I have with the more glib moral relativists - I accept that there is no "objective" standard, but that doesn't mean that I can't make prescriptive statements, it just means they're backed up by me, as opposed to nature or God. While the GP's views on the primacy of certain dictionaries may or may not be reflecting a less-thought-out view of language, it's far from "simply false". And nobody who has actually studied philosophy could make this mistake. :-)

You're right, it does help to read the article. Sparkfun doesn't sell anything that could remotely be considered a competitor to SPARC. They're a hobbyist electronics kit store. Unless you consider something like this to be a competing product to a SPARC server?

Well, the major benefit I can think of is that, if no competitor independently comes up with the idea within a year of that publication, then no one can patent your idea out from underneath you. If you publish in a more broadcast way, then a crafty and moral-free competitor might be able to patent it, and if they're large enough, might be able to out-lawyer a small inventor's attempt to prove that they didn't invent it themselves.

That's a pretty limited kind of protection, though, and it's not likely to result in much money for inventor, so I'm not sure it's exactly what the submitter's looking for.

And if all the people who have been lumped in under the term "New Atheist" thought like you claim to have soon after becoming an atheist I'd agree with you. However, that's completely false. If you read the books, it's pretty clear that while Dawkins and the like do blame religion for a variety of things, including wars, they aren't going off into fantasies of lynching the ignorant.

It's been like that for atheists for a long, long time - it's not as though the world pre-Dawkins was exactly trusting and friendly toward atheists. And maybe you hate the religious that much, but I don't. I can understand how people come to believe in God, and while I think they're mistaken, I don't really blame most of them for it. I do hate those who try to limit my and others' freedom on the basis of their unsubstantiated beliefs, but frankly, I think that one's justified.

Other than by emotionally beating them into submission, not often. But that's my point - other than Sam Harris (who really does come off as a bit nuts sometimes) and occasionally Hitchens (who isn't a scientist), the atheist books that came out recently were fairly reasonable and calm. The fact that everyone interpreted them as these abusive tracts is exactly my point - most people in this country have such a skewed notion of what politeness to the religious entails that any explicit criticism is seen as angry ranting.

Actually, no, it is relevant. If your notion of God is a very abstract, deist sort of almighty, then sure, but in case you haven't noticed, a lot of people who believe in God believe all sorts of other things, many of which are either directly contradicted or made highly improbable by modern science. When those people choose to believe in their faith rather than science, that's a problem for this country, and for the people who want to do science in it.

In true Slashdot fashion, I haven't read the book we're talking about, but I've read a lot about it, and while some of what they're saying is sensible (if not terribly new), the part about how "New Atheists" are being unhelpful with their stridency irritates me. So, people who don't believe in God are supposed to confront those who reject science on the basis of faith by being...nice to them? We've basically been doing that for decades, and it doesn't seem to have helped much. While some of the writers identified have been more angry than is perhaps helpful, most of them have simply not been willing to give faith a free pass. The problems America has with scientific literacy have a lot more to do with the fact that more people are unwilling to come out and say "that's absurd, here's the science", because it's seen as impolite, than because everyone's so scared of those "New Atheists".