I don't know if this qualifies as life but it is could possibly have interesting applications for nano tech. If the structures can be made to self assemble then they can perhaps be made to assemble other things. or create something as a by product of its process.

Maybe they are hyping the story a bit but it is very interesting research.

Ok just to be about this. The Florida Div of Elections does not have a way of connecting for whom a voter cast his vote. The only thing the Division can track is whether or not a particular voter voted in a particular election. There is an intentional disconnect between the official voting system and the statistical system that the "hacker" broke into so to say that this is evidence of a vulnerability is a little disingenuous.

I am not saying that the system is perfect. I am just saying that THIS is not the evidence that we should look for. You can't use weak evidence to fight important battles.

If you are shooting from a 20' skif with nothing stable to shoot from then I agree. You will have a hard time even hitting them.

But if you start dropping .50 BMG rounds with 800 grain Mk 211 Mod 0 High-Explosive-Incendiary-Armor-Piercing (HEIAP) projectiles from an $32,000 Barrett Sniper Rig, I think that you might have someone's attention. Especially when you can do it from 1000 yds beyond their weapons range.

You don't have to hit a person. One of these rounds hits the boat and sets it on fire, they will be so busy bailing and trying to save their own sorry butts they won't really be worried about piracy.

Twenty four months is barely enough time to check out the latest Apple innovations, clumsily integrate them into the OS and try to take credit. Where does all the time go?

Finally a voice of reason. The article does NOT blame the victim. What it does do is try to provide victims with an ability to mitigate the problem. Criticizing this article is like criticizing someone for promoting a self defense class.

As you said, some people are jerks, but their need of therapy is not a justification for not giving a child a means of making himself less of a target. You can be into all of the nerdy disciplines and still socially acceptable.

I was in band, the science club, the chess club and the math club and yet I was reasonably popular. I had friends on the football team and even a girl friend. But none of that happened until the eighth grade when I decided to work on developing social skills.

At the end of the day, I wound up near the middle of the social order and not nearly as picked on as some, but none of it would have been possible had I not learned social skills.

By your logic, then you can't trust any of them.

I stood next to a CNN reporter at the Florida election certification as he said that there were as many Gore supporters in the crowd as there were Bush supporters. The problem was that there were maybe fifty Gore supporters at the Capitol building but there were easily two hundred Bush supporters. He was just careful to shoot his video at a narrow spot in the entrance so that the crowds looked even. When I watched the footage aired about a half hour later, it was full of file footage that was shot no where near the area being referenced in the story.

You can disparage Fox if you like but you just have to recognize that all of the media outlets air stories according to what their agenda considers "news." That is why media outlets with a liberal point of view ignored the Acorn scandal while Fox was running it as their lead story.

The fact that you don't like the messenger, doesn't mean that their message is always wrong. If Hitler or Stalin told me that the building was on fire, I would at least consider the possibility that it was true.

My favorite "nonstory" now is the way that CNN is sugar coating the budget impact of the Health Care legislation. They continue to push the projected long term savings of the legislation even though the bulk of the "savings" happens in the distant future and the short term numbers have already been brought into question by the CBO. You know the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) the people who came up with the initial projections for the bill.

At any rate, you hear a little blurb about things that oppose their point of view and week long tirades about things that support their point of view.

"The space agency says the WISE spacecraft will circle Earth over the poles, scanning the entire sky one-and-a-half times in nine months."

Maybe I am missing something but isn't 1.5 times in nine months the same thing as once every six months?

Why would you express something like that? It's like saying that gas costs 3.75 per 1.5 gallons.

The problem is that it is not Michael Mann et al's exclusive job to determine the quality of the papers being submitted. I imagine that there were some pretty respected "scientists" back in Galileo's day that were "sure" he was wrong and they were right. That is still not a justification to suppress his work.

At the end of the day, the publication of garbage papers helps bring the truth to light. If they want to truly discredit charlatans and prevent the publication of "garbage papers" they should require that the papers include the entire methodology or at least the entire data set used to support the conclusion being submitted.

The bottom line is that if your theory won't stand up to scrutiny, the problem is not with the critics.

The Chinese culture through the centuries has had explicit disincentives to innovation and independent thought. In America, we say "the squeaky wheel gets the grease." In China they say "the nail that stands up, gets beaten down."

On the other hand they have had remarkable cultural stability along with an ability to recognize the value of technology . Even during regime changes, the new boss was very much like the old boss, culturally. So, their innovations tend come at a slower pace. But, the Chinese have tended to hold on to their technology from regime to regime and have done a very good job of protecting their culture.

The fact that the Chinese have little respect for other peoples IP is not surprising at all. I have done a fair amount of manufacturing in China and another key difference that I have noticed is in the contract process.

When westerners sign a contract, we view that as the end of negotiations. The Chinese that I have contracted with have always viewed that as the beginning of final negotiations. At one point it got so bad, that we bought a small factory in China so that we could fix our cost basis.

He got off light. Hanging is to goo for him.