If you can irradiate it with a laser then you can see it. So why not just cut the bastard out? Or hit it with an ion beam which does much more damage than a laser and is just as selective as the gold nanocage method?

Here's an idea. Lets pretend that a rigorous bayesian method like maximum entropy doesn't exist. :P

Seriously, this is a great idea. Only teenagers would agree to such a ridiculous implant, and you could rootkit the bastards and zap them when they piss on your car on a Friday night.

Agreed. I have a desktop and a laptop. Company "helpdesk" blocks everything except ssh and http. Work desktop has firewire800 disk attached to it, running time machine for hourly work backups. I have two bash scripts that I use once per day: "arriveAtWork" and "goHome", containing various rsync commands over ssh. Works great.

"what practical research do you think the US government should embark upon to get the most return for it's citizens and the world"

That's the problem right there. The government should be funding fundamental scientific research without worrying about technological spin-off and profitability. The reason the US is in this mess, just as in the UK, is that science has become the playground from which wealthy business steals its sweets, except for the last few decades they are also the same people who lobby politicians distributing the sweets. In effect, the taxpayer ends up funding R&D for business with patents and IP slapped all over it, and business is creaming off the brightest talent whilst calling it a "partnership".

Well, all that you say is true, but that isn't what I meant.

The money comes from people phoning you. Voicemail is active as default and most people don't disable it.

When you ring someone else and they don't answer, the voicemail picks up and you pay for one minute of a phone call. That is a lot of money when your customers have thousands of missed calls per day. If the other network reciprocates, then the networks have a tidy income and the customers pay to listen to a robot beep at them.

Orange, TMobile and O2 milk far too much cash by diverting to voicemail after as few rings as reasonable.

The Germans conveniently define an internet connection as "a new kind of radio device". Since TV and Radio devices are chargable by the GEZ then the definition means you have to grab your ankles and think of England... um... I mean Germany.

As a physicist, I tried to point out that an ADSL connection isn't a radio device, but they were more interested in tracking down all the addresses that I'd ever had and trying to charge me for as much shit as possible. They are still sending me letters now that I live in France, the bastards.

No changes on amazon.co.uk, I can see all these "unranked" books just fine in their ranking system. Not so for the amazon.com site. Maybe you've hit on the old "SEX=BAD" problem. Another example of this is Grand Theft Auto (steal cars and kill people, totally illegal) being fine for older kids; but when it's found that the main character can engage in a sex game with his lady friend (not illegal for older kids and necessary for the existence of life) the game is banned and then later released x-rated. Go figure.

I blame obese conservative wankers in suits who think that sex only exists on Sunday evenings through a hole in a sheet, when absolutely necessary, and between a married man and woman in their late 30s who don't actually know each other anymore. These are the people who's lawns are identical and for whom "different" is a virtue of the satanic and godless heathen who deserves to burn in hell for eternity. Lets just boycott these obese wankers.

In the mean time, good luck with your amazon.com campaign. My tip: order from the UK site. You'll have to wait a while longer for your books, but with the british pound worth less than a teaspoon full of gooseshit and falling you'll probably get a good deal :P

That's a crap article. And anyway, the only realistic solution is to burn them to make electricity.

Does the chimp GPS provide automatic traffic avoidance? It must be the same implanted GPS as featured in London Taxi Driver 1.0?

What a load of bollocks.

Google docs is fine until you start dealing with anything different to a Mail on Sunday article. Forget equations and figures. And if google goes down like it has the last few weeks...

Apple's new web based system is alright for footnotes and things, and for comments, but for serious collaboration with merging different versions and edits, then you can forget it. (If someone from apple reads this, please add gawdamn ODF support to pages for the love of all things sacred).

I still end up using latex to render equations and slap them into the document as a tiff file. And last time I used pages to collaborate with M$ office users it messed up the footnote marks for institute addresses and I ended up installing the mac version of office anyway :S So lets rule out apple for the time being.

Lyx didn't support the styles and bibliography for the physics journals I was writing for last summer (phys rev, elsevier). Lyx is not a bad idea, is it ready?

Microsoft word + equations = hell on earth. And having just lost 2 weeks of my life dealing with micro$oft's APIs, circular help systems and automatic updates every 3 minutes, I threw the thing straight back at IT and vowed never to go there again. Someone else might be able to tell you how good the M$ online collaboration tools are, but it won't be me! ;-)

If your collaborators are like mine, they want to see a return to fortran and VMS. My current line of thinking is to try to coerce them into using latex instead of m$ word, and volunteer to be version control. Then use something like git on your own machine to merge all the different branches as they e-mail their changes back to you. For me it's the lesser of all evils.

When you actually come to submit you'll still have to jump through hoops to please the journal editors with figure file formats and stuff ("we want 4 gigs of EPS files please author") but the process of collaborating on the authorship will be a damn sight easier.

Good article subject though. You've hit on a topic that has been in my mind for the last few months too (sorry about the long reply!)

Police Entrance Exam

Question 1 Please demonstrate the correct police procedure for gathering evidence from the rogue website "www.nastyTerrorPaedophiles.org".

Your answer

freedom4all:~$ nmap -A -T4 www.nastyTerrorPaedophiles.org
Interesting ports on www.nastyTerrorPaedophiles.org:
Not shown: 1688 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION
22/tcp open ssh (protocol 2.0)
.
.
.
freedom4all:~$ ssh root@www.nastyTerrorPaedophiles.org
root@www.nastyTerrorPaedophiles.org's password:[britneyspears]
Permission denied, please try again.
root@www's password: [poshspice]
Permission denied, please try again.
root@www's password: [thepiratebay]
Last login: Mon Mar 2 22:58:01 2009 from disarray.nastyTerrorPaedophiles.org
root@www:~$ ls -l
total 13
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2009-02-27 09:01 My_Terror_Plans
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2009-02-27 09:05 My_Child_Porn_Movies
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 2009-02-27 09:09 My_BitTorrent_Files
.
.

Don't spend any time worrying about it. It won't change a thing, and if a potential employer accuses you of being a paedophile based on a google search, you do NOT wanna be working for them :P