What a strange point of view to find on Slashdot.

Applying this "argument" to software, no-one who bangs out code would care how it was used, and therefore how it was licensed. It would not be in their domain of interest.

Scientists are not one homogeneous group. There will be differing views on facets of the science and differing willingness to engage with the political debate, media, etc.

I'll sell my stock in hand-sanitizing gel manufacturers on Monday.

I share your anachronistic devotion to truth and accuracy and reality. But those things are out of fashion. They've been replaced with hate and greed and envy and the self absorbtion that is called "awareness".

To care about the truth is to fail to fit into modern society. Your "common ground" is very uncommon these days.

being able to fairly safely eat a sandwich with your hands?

      You have your own blend of bacteria, and shouldn't have trouble with a sandwich even if you haven't washed your hands. After all, those Peyer's patches should count for something in identifying and producing antibodies for your home blend of bacteria.

      The trouble is when a) someone prepares your sandwich without washing their hands, thus inoculating you with strange bacteria and b) when you touch other people, things other people have touched, or bodily fluids from other people. I say people but some rare (nowadays) diseases can be acquired from animals. Of course you can get sick by eating food that hasn't been prepared properly and has acquired pathogens from the environment, too - then no amount of hand washing on your or the cook's part will help you with say the Potato-Mayonnaise-S. aureus salad, good old undercooked-eggs-and Salmonella typhi salad, or the famous Not-Quite-Canned-Preserves-with-Botulinum toxin...

      Most courses that teach hygiene, in and outside of medical school, recommend washing your hands approximately the duration of the "Happy Birthday" (c) song - about 30 seconds with regular soap for "everyday hand washing". For minor surgery, about 3 minutes per hand including the wrists, scrubbing the hands and under the nails, and for major surgery 15 minutes per hand and forearm up to the elbow, with a scrubbing brush. Do remember to wash between your fingers. But remember, you will rarely make yourself sick (unless you have some auto-immune problem). It's other people/things that make you sick.

Depends on where in Asia. I've taught at 19 Japanese schools over a 7-year period, and two of those were high schools of differing levels. While the kids here excel at math and science, it's only in the areas where rote learning is emphasized. They really are at a disadvantage when it comes to original thinking. They think the teacher is responsible for telling them what's right. Also, they really hate trying to extrapolate an answer based on previous knowledge, because they might be wrong.

As for advancement through school, the boards of education are encouraging the "no child left behind" idea; even if you don't participate in class you receive a 55%, and 90% of your grade is based on the tests, not the classwork. This means that you only really have to cram for about eight weeks out of the year to do a decent job. For those who still manage to fail despite all of these measures, a single make-up test is offered every year for each subject failed, for which the student is rigorously coached (using the actual test questions) beforehand.

Japan and the US share a serious problem in common: a lot of bureaucratic interference from people who have no education credentials and are ham-stringing the teaching process to the point where everybody passes but nobody actually learns anything. Spending more time being taught badly isn't going to resolve the issue; we need to revamp the teaching system and eliminate the pandering cruft that is bogging down our schools.

When we die our remains will be nothing more than a snapshot of the atoms we occupied right before we died. Had we lived a year longer, a good proportion of those atoms would have been replaced with new material we drank, ate and breathed in through the year. It is as if living is a type of standing wave through which matter flows.

My point? I wouldn't care what happened to my remains. I was a wave, and all that remains of me are ripples left behind in a shared pool of memories.

Why not go infra-red? From the article..

Aye. A story deserving of being /.

Agreed. There are few cures for stupidity, and regulating the word "bank" in a domain name is not one of them.

Fat chance, me thinks. If this catches on, you can bet there will be 3rd party services that cache and index this location data indefinitely.

It would also been interesting to see if a few spoilers can break the flow. (As in the onset of turbulence in a fluid?)

First things first: this is fringe science, making its way into Scientific American. FTFA:

Bringsjord sounds a bit naive when considering the threat such programs could pose in virtual environments like Second Life.

Really? May be E will be controllable. But what about E'? You know, the one with the first 2 of the Three Laws edited in the source to be the boolean negation (!) of the original..

Fortunately for the researchers though, there's always someone out there willing to pay for this kind of stuff:

Maybe that explains E's dark hair and five o'clock shadow.

I have read and heard here and there that Rupert was naturalized by an act of Congress. If true, can anyone cite the act?

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Tangential discussions tend to go offtopic. So what.

Maybe not. Taking the claim at face value, then we'll never be quite dead: there will be always a copy of our brain somewhere ready to be loaded into a VM by some system admin.