We're in the "blue LED phase" of 3D right now, where everyone is using it just because it's new. Once the novelty wears off it will start to be used more sensibly. Although I'd argue that we still haven't reached that point with blue LEDs either :)

The centralization of power would be an auxiliary benefit of a plug-in hybrid, but keep in mind that today's hybrids are never actually plugged into the grid - so there's no shuffling of energy costs from your car to your home and no power plant that enters into the discussion yet. The power source that grants an electric vehicle efficiency over a gas engine is the road itself. As the car rolls downhill the electric motor acts as a generator and starts charging the battery "for free".

That's where the efficiency comes in: you can charge a battery using inductive current from the motor, but you can't use that energy to put more gasoline in the tank. In a gasoline vehicle it's just waste energy.

Given the causality violations possible with FTL it even makes sense...

If life independently exists on Titan - in our virtual backyard - then life is probably far more common in the universe than we had previously thought.

Imagine the natural evolution of a virus that figures out a way to attack and destroy all eukaryote cells. Even if it's just a human specific disease. Especially with air travel these days, epidemics can spread very quickly and quarantining is difficult.

There's a very high probability that virus would cease to exist in short order. Evolution favors viruses that preserve their hosts at least until they've had ample opportunity to spread. Even artificially developed viruses, not subject to the pressures of natural selection at the time of their creation, must still replicate and spread to cause epidemics and will be influenced by selective pressure in the environment.

However, consider the range of natural viruses and the incredible diversity of symptoms that they can cause. What worries me is not that some nutjob will create a virus which merely kills people - that sort of thing is swift, obvious, susceptible to existing protocols for controlling infectious diseases, and probably self-limiting - but that some nutjob will create a virus that alters people in subtle ways, body or mind (Vernor Vinge explores the theme of a mind-control virus in one of his sci-fi novels, Rainbows End (sic)). When a virus infects your cells it can write whatever code its creator wants into them. However difficult doing any high-level coding with this may initially be, "libraries" will be developed and such things will eventually be as easy as programming a computer is today. In fact, this would be awesome if not for the threat it represents (and if not for the fact that people are going to do some really immature if not outright harmful things with that ability - think a real life version of the Spore creature library). It would increase biodiversity tremendously from the outset, though common "library" sequences would likely be more or less homogeneous.

In any case, I do not think a designer virus would spell the end of all humanity, although it could cause widespread devastation. For any single pathogen there is a segment of the population which is, for some reason or another, by cause of some mutation or another, simply not susceptible to it. It would be extremely challenging for a virus writer to take the level of diversity among all humanity into account. We evolve too. What's more, designer viruses would also enable us to begin building our own defenses against such things if the researchers can keep up with the bio kiddiez.

As for advanced AI presenting a threat, I'm not as concerned about that one: I don't think an advanced AI would want to kill us any more than we want to kill off the chimps. If anything it would want to study our behavior - if it's that advanced we're no threat to it, and if it's not we still have a chance of stopping it.

None of this is in disagreement with your argument that establishing distant colonies would be beneficial for the robustness of humanity and of life, BTW. That's still the best long term solution.

Every molecule necessary for life as we know it found on an asteroid is a leap forward for panspermia as a theory. No longer need the materials come from a planet; this provides some evidence that they can be indigenous to the asteroid itself.

Accuracy isn't all that telling a figure. I'd have expected sensitivity and specificity: i.e. what proportion of lies are actually detected vs. (1-)the proportion of true statements which are falsely identified as lies. Actually, I was kind of hoping for an ROC curve in the paper. It is kind of the standard classification metric in this field.

False positives in a system like this can be pretty dangerous. "Innocent until proven guilty" means they should be trying to reduce the false positive rate even if it compromises the ability to identify actual lies. But to do that they need to separate out the different types of mistakes the system can make.

at one point, even the arm of a human volunteer.

I don't know about Germany but in the USA such a study would never pass the IRB at most research universities and labs.

Yeah, the moral isn't that it's a bad idea to buy a game before a holiday, but that it's a bad idea to buy a game with DRM.

Right, the lack of standardization seems more a problem than a lack of any performance metric at all. "Show and tell" style assignments (or fewer larger projects) in which people describe all of the fun geeky things they did seem like they would work reasonably well in that sort of model, but this would be hard enough to compare against other students in the same class, much less across schools or districts.

But it may even be possible to keep the standardized tests and just alter the nature of the day to day assigned work. Most of the really bright people we're talking about here would probably do well on them regardless. But then havoc gets raised if the numbers start to slip at all, even if the result is truly a more educated student body, people demand that the system become more proactive in addressing the "problem", and the system is back at square one...