I've used my tools to open my own vehicle and had the police stop to check it out. A quick explanation, hand over my ID, and they go on their way. Not a hassle at all. Same thing for friends. If they lock their keys in the vehicle, I can open it, with them present, and prepared to give the ID to the cops to prove ownership.

The reality is that around here, you're not getting charged with possession of burglarious instruments unless you're misusing them. Being able to quickly open your own vehicle or that of a friend, instead of waiting for AAA, is really useful. You should also check out locksport--TOOOL is active in Mass. and there are other smaller locksport meetups.

Absolutely. I've worked both with pure biologists and physicians (and biologists in a medical context) and they have dramatically different outlooks and mindsets. Many, many biologists are deeply interested in understanding what is going on, while physicians and medical-focused biologists are much more interested in finding stuff that works to solve this problem.

The divide is very similar to that between pure and applied physicists, although for some reason we don't talk about "applied biologists" (perhaps we should.) Pure physicists are simply trying to find answers to questions; applied physicists are trying to find solutions to problems. The same is true in biology.

Brain size and IQ are not particularly correlated, and I've seen at least some research suggesting that people with high IQs or more education are actually more efficient at using their brains, to the extent that there is some thinning of the grey matter in such individuals in their late teens or early 20's.

Thinking does take more energy than not, but this isn't a big effect compared to brain size: http://www.scientificamerican....

And evolutionary biologists will ask, "What is the evolutionary advantage of intelligence?"

What we think of as "intelligence"--the specifically human abilities to build complex machines and to use anything to represent anything else and to create unbounded chains of logical inference--is almost certainly an epiphenomenon of having a brain big enough to engage in the kind of complex social and cultural behaviour that developed due to sexual selection in our evolutionary history.

The human brain is like the peacock's tail: men with big brains were more likely to get laid, probably because we could be more entertaining and interesting to women with big brains. Once the process started it ran away with itself, until both men and women ended up with these enormous brains that happen to be able to think deep thoughts.

Evolution does this kind of thing, like flight-feathers evolving from modified scales that were selected for thermal rather than aerodynamic properties.

Many genetic diseases are the result of optimizations for other things (anemia is related to malaria resistance, there is some problematic gene in a Jewish sub-population that is related to plague resistance, etc.)

Evolution is continuously running an extremely complex multi-dimensional optimization problem with a time-varying objective function. Local minima abound, and it's easy for organisms to get trapped in them.

Furthermore, kin selection and possibly group selection play a role in human evolution, which makes the whole thing even more complex and non-linear. So looking at specific genes and saying, "That doesn't make sense!" as if there was some obligation for the universe to "make sense" to our naive pre-scientific intuition is fairly silly.

The human genome is a Rube Goldberg apparatus that manages to make hundreds of thousands of products out of 40,000 strongly interacting templates plus a bunch of ridiculously inefficient secondary control mechanisms like micro-RNAs (which in some typically degrade already-transcribed mRNA). Pointing to one step as if it can be considered in isolation from everything else is not a good move.

Loss of vitamin C manufacture could well have to do with the development of some other pathway that was more important at the time, and may well continue to be more important today. The only way to really find out is to either a) understand the genetic trade-offs in detail or b) ask some volunteer to have their vitamin C production turned back on by a technique like this. Personally, I'd recommend the former.

Given how weird humans are developmentally, some things like this may be important when we're young and not so much when we're older, so in the fullness of time we may find we can turn on vitamin C production only after people mature, for example. The possible range of futures, given how little we know now, is large.

In the meantime, we have plenty of people with genetic diseases that we know the cure will not significantly disrupt their cellular machinery, because we have lots of examples of people without those diseases who are just fine.

Bullshit. Locksmithing tools are state by state. In MA, I can, and do, freely carry lockpicks, no license required. Now fuck off and die, you idiot. Or at least, don't spread false BS.

Yeah I used to think that when I was 20 too. But I've been around the block a few times and I've heard about the sky falling more than once now. After a while you learn to ignore the hysteria.

Well then I have good news for you! You're wrong. Absolutely.

Wikipedia is usually a good reference. These two articles talk about it. It's the oldest evidence for "dark matter". Either that or it's evidence that gravity doesn't behave entirely the way described by Einstein. The latter view has fallen out of favor due to the lack of good theories adopting that viewpoint. The former has fallen into favor due to the copious selection of theories containing a particle with little or no interactions (it's easy to do). Neither of these theory-spaces has been proven to be correct (yet).

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_rotation_curve

Hey look, it's $something_we_dont_understand, and ooh, I can claim it's evidence for $todays_fad!

Astrophysics is big, messy, complicated, and difficult to measure. We just can't send probes to other galaxies to see what's really going on. Most of the time these things have more mundane explanations. But, until we figure out why galactic rotation curves are wonky, everyone will claim everything is due to dark matter.

Obviously you can construct any complex scenario closer and closer to the imaginary line separating legal from illegal, for pretty much any law. As you get closer to that line, each such concocted scenario gets harder and harder to argue about because the issues become more and more subtle. All you're doing is trying to define that line exactly, when typically laws cannot be defined so exactly. Getting closer to the line just means you are "more likely" to be found guilty. There is never a perfect line that can be drawn, on one side being 100% guilty and the other side being 100% innocent.

The best answer to your question is that scenarios that close to the line are typically going to be decided on a case by case basis. Who knows what the decision would be until a court actually decides it, and we're not going to be able to go through all of the arguments and predict what the outcome would be here.

However, if you enjoy speculation, the I'd say the scenario you described is probably legal because you own the device in question, and are not profiting from using it in the way you describe. Profiting from your actions tends to bring your actions into much closer scrutiny because of the implication that your profit may represent illegal gains at the expense of whoever is losing profit because of your actions.

Read the other comments before posting, it will save us all some time. All that Germany proved is that in ideal conditions on one afternoon solar contributed significantly to their energy supply. Solar only contributed 5% of their total power over the year. That is hardly proof that such a methodology can scale as you suggest.