The Android line is not a paid consumer product. It's a piece of middleware offered to phone manufacturers.

Wonder how long "Google Play Music All Access" will last? Compared to PlaysForSure (Microsoft), Zune Music Pass (Microsoft), and WalMart Music Download Service. Just having a big company behind it is no guarantee of success. Google has never had a successful consumer product that people had to pay for.

List of discontinued Google products.

Despite all the noise, almost nobody is making money in "social". Even Facebook isn't very profitable, despite its size. The business strategy in "social" seems to be to give the service away for a few years, build a following, then crank up the density of ads until the users get fed up. Worked for Myspace, right?

Facebook traffic peaked about a year ago. Twitter is now exploring the user's threshold of pain with "sponsored tweets". This is robocalling in another form.

Basic truth: ads with search results are useful to users and effective for advertisers, because they're presented when the user is actively looking for something relevant. Ads on "social" are merely annoying because the user is looking at what their friends are doing.

OK, a fanboy from the Arduno cult has been heard from.

Back in 1979, Milton Bradley introduced the Big Trak. This was the first mass-market battery-motor-wheels-CPU toy 'bot. Since then, there have been more machines in that category and slightly above it, like Lego Mindstorms.

It's been three decades since the Big Trak. There hasn't been much progress above that level in mass-market devices. A Roomba is only slightly smarter than a BigTrak. Mobile phones, on the other hand, have advanced somewhat since the late 1970s. R/C toys have become much better, but most of that reflects improved batteries, and the good stuff is still at a rather high price point.

There's a new BigTrak from 2010. It has an optional camera and a WiFi connection, and will connect to an iPhone. It has the basic hardware to be an intelligent autonomous vehicle. But it's no smarter than the original BigTrak. If you want something as dumb as a BigTrak, you can buy one of these. No assembly required. Ages 6 and up.

Here's what's possible today at the hobbyist level: an autonomous paintball robot. Runs a maze and hits targets. Uses a Kinect as a sensor. Has 2D SLAM; builds a map of its environment. That's what new products should be doing.

No, the NSSF is the gun makers' lobby. The NRA is the gun buyers' lobby.

LK

a sudden outbreak of common sense.

There will soon be bipartisan proposals to counter it.

LK

There are already dumbots in that range. Any new robot should come with at least an Allwinner ARM CPU ($7) and a camera as standard. That's enough for some vision processing and at least 2D SLAM. The hardware to put some real smarts in a little bot is now cheap and there's enough open source software available to get started on making it smart.

The trouble with being a plumber is that most of the work is in building and remodeling. With housing construction way down, most of the people in the building trades are hurting. It's great during a building boom, though.

A related trade is HVAC - heating, ventilating, and air conditioning. There's more electronics and control involved than in plumbing.

That is an interesting article. But it bothers me that qPCR is the only assay they used. I'd really like to see those microarrays they talked about, it's been over 5 years and they already had the RNA from the qPCR. Either someone didn't think it was worth funding, or they didn't find anything worth publishing. Also, calmodulin is involved. There are techniques to measure and visualize calmodulin activity. Showing that calmodulin-Ca++ binding actually increases in those timeframes would be much stronger evidence for their claim.

So, no I'm not quite going to fuck myself yet. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and there's nothing extraordinary here.

It's amazing how much miscellaneous rock is floating around this solar system. Four sizable chunks of rock (tens of meters) have gone by the earth in the last week, one within lunar orbit. None were known objects.

There's a mile-sized one going by on March 31st, but closest approach is over 3 million miles.

Plutonium and uranium are alpha emitters. Alphas won't get through a sheet of cardboard. A gamma ray detector won't pick up anything. This won't detect an atomic bomb.

This is only useful for detecting radioactive waste, miscellaneous medical and industrial radiation sources out of their casings, and X-ray machines.

All excellent points. And there are still more.

#1. Unless your password is "password" or some variant AND the site does not limit password attempts then "password strength" isn't that important.

#2. You are more likely to have your passwords compromised by using a cracked computer or by falling for a phishing link.

#3. If not #2 then when one of the sites you use is cracked and their username/password file (unhashed, unsalted) is stolen.

Also, why can't a site tell you what the requirements are PRIOR to you having to come up with a username/password/secondary-password/pet-name/school-name/maiden-name-mother?

I'll happily go fuck myself when this result is repeated by experienced scientists with all proper controls. If this result is unreproducible, you can go fuck yourself instead.

Providing the funds is the most important part of the transaction.

No, doing the work is the most important part of the transaction. Only in the perverted mind of a capitalist is working less important than not working. The difficulty in finding funds to pay those who work is an artifact of captialism where resources are hoarded for the benefit of a few instead of distributed for the benefit of the many.

These investments are what raise someone's worth, not hard work by itself.

And that's exactly what's wrong with capitalism. It's not what you are able to do that matters, it's how much you own.