The big difference is that biology isn't concerned with finding the optimal solution to problems; any very good solution (optimal or not) will let you live to see another day. A lot of math and computer science is dedicated to finding ironclad proofs that under every circumstance, a particular algorithm will deliver he optimal solution. While that's great when it's feasible, sometimes it's OK to go with something that works well even if it isn't optimal.

The set of good heuristics is a strict superset of the set of provably good heuristics. Nature can discover the former, but academics (largely) get paid only for the latter.

If smart = fit and fit = more kids, any gene that makes you smart will propagate exponentially. Changes giving a 1% boost will become dominant in a population after a few hundred generations.

"Cognition-enhancing" drugs have rather simple effects on the brain. It's almost certain that there's some genetic diversity that twiddles with the concentration of or sensitivity to any specific neurochemical - essentially you can be pretty sure that evolution has the tools to be able to mimic anything that a simple neurochemical intervention could also do.

Thus performance-enhancing drugs probably won't increase the overall evolutionary fitness of typical humans, because if improvement were that easy then evolution would already have made the same change the drugs make.

These drugs probably can increase your ability to focus, and that might be a good thing to be able to do now that we're not preyed upon so often. However, the idea that a simple drug could make average humans smarter in every way doesn't stand up to our knowledge about how evolution propagates good genetics. We can modify our moods, and the best mood for a hunter-gatherer might be different than for a PHP programmer, but that's it - there's no across-the-board upgrade to be had from a simple drug.

Old SSDs never die. They just lose their bits.

I think it's a bad move that they chose X rays instead of THz for this generation. THz rays can't hurt you, while the TSA has been preventing independent safety analyses of the backscatter X ray machines.

The total dose of backscatter X rays is low, but it's so concentrated that it might still be a problem. Cancer risk grows superlinearly with exposure, so concentrating exposure to skin effectively amplifies the effects of the small dose. Independent medical researchers are not permitted to investigate these machines, so we don't actually know if they present a problem. We're not all going to die, but it could be that choosing X rays over microwaves will result in a few dozen extra cancer deaths per year, in which case it's a bad move.

In any case, microwave scanners are probably just as effective (read that how you will), so I'm surprised the TSA doubled down on the potentially risky bet that X ray backscatter technology is going to remain legal.

I am on Slashdot and I do not hate Unity as of 12.04.

I could not stand the Unity that came with 11.10 - I run a lot of MATLAB, and there was no functional way to switch between multiple figures. People would moan and complain about Unity taking a few more clicks or whatever; for me it was actually impossible for me to switch between windows as needed on 11.10, try as I might. I was fearing a forced switch to Unity, since Ubuntu wouldn't be an option for me anymore.

Unity on 12.04 is a completely different story. While I still don't love its window-switching behavior, the super-W feature of displaying all windows is wonderful.

Unity might not be as polished as KDE 3.5 yet, but 12.04 was so much better than 11.10 that I'm willing to see where Canonical's headed.

On the contrary. If they reanimated Steve for this presentation, I would be very impressed.

I cycle too when I can. However, I read a study that shows that a cyclist's life expectancy is so much longer than a car commuter that any fossil fuel reductions gained by cycling are almost cancelled out by the extra years of non-transportation-related consumption. I wish I had the reference handy...

So, does that mean the jury for Apple vs. Samsung should have consisted of 12 corporations? What about having corps sit on criminal case juries?

Do you use Bayesian inference to combine positional information from many sources, some of which might be sorrily mistaken? I'd be interested in hearing more about the algorithms used to stitch this data together, and if there are any heuristics or approximations that help.

On the other hand, the Pi might just hit a sweet spot in the market. Aside from serving files it can run a webserver easily, yet it can also talk to raw electronic peripherals. I plan to buy one to start automating the household: silly things like having garden watering controlled by soil moisture (GPIO comes in handy), thermostats made more sane (programmable thermostats are more opaque to me than cron), controlling the color of lights in my baby daughter's room so she knows when to try to go back to sleep in the early morning, etc. The low power consumption means I'll keep it on 24/7 (good thing too since it has no internal clock: NTP at boot plus a cron job to refresh it).

I've done a lot of work with circuit boards, and a bit of web design. In general, the fact that the Pi does a reasonable job in both worlds means it could be the glue for a lot of fun hobby projects.

You might be right that while the Pi is an excellent tool for a lot of makers, it won't find a place (at least branded as a Pi) in every household. As long as us geeks use it in interesting ways, I'm not sure that I care.

Nice troll there. Sorry to the community that I'm feeding you, but I can't just sit there seeing your comment at +2 without pointing a few things out.

I'm an atheist, but I think I wouldn't be if I were born in a Muslim country. There are places in the world where if you're not a Muslim (or a Catholic, etc.) you're a social pariah. Many people have to at least pay lip service to a creed, and even if they would rather become atheist given the freedom of choice, they're not going to alienate themselves from their family and social support structure by "outing" themselves in a declaration of a radically different/nonexistent faith.

Comments like yours therefore discriminate against people not only by choices, but by where they were born. That's pretty narrow.

Secondly, I'd like to point out that the way a faith is interpreted is way more important than what the letter of the sacred texts might say. The Bible praises people for killing a man found gathering firewood on a Sabbath. Obviously, most sane Christians don't choose to follow that part of the Bible. Sane Muslims don't want to kill us. People who are currently insane Muslims would probably be insane atheists if Islam were to disappear overnight.

Similarly, every Muslim I've met is sane, friendly and understanding. If I had to make generalizations, I'd even say that Persian culture (at least the fragment that's escaped from Iran's bizarre regime) encourages contemplative meekness, not the crazy Jihad-spewing vitriol that the US South's pundits would have us believe is mandatory for every follower of Allah.

As an individual, you want to be judged by your actions as an individual. Please extend the same courtesy to Muslims individually, which means refraining from labeling them collectively as aggressive nut cases bent on world destruction.

How about no ACs, no super-new accounts (newest 2%?) and no non-excellent-karma accounts in the first 5 replies to a story? Then newbies wouldn't be forced into top-posting, but trolls still couldn't get in the first word.

Kalman filters assume a linear relationship between predictor and response, while nonlinear least squares allow there to be a parametric known nonlinear relationship.

It's not so much the binding energy as the number of gluons in the proton that give it its mass. Binding energy would *decrease* the mass of the proton.

PS I can't believe "gluons" isn't in the Firefox spelling dictionary.

As has been said elsewhere, the advantage of keeping at least some technical identifier is that URLs are obvious. Compare:

Visit the mcdonalds website

vs.

Visit mcdonalds.com

Incidentally, with the way the Chrome address bar works, you *can already* just type mcdonalds into the bar and go to its website.