Great link! Indeed, if his beliefs weren't enough to discredit him in the first place, having what is basically a PhD in bullsh*t should. Also, what kind of institution provides a PhD in kinesiology? Not a very reputable one I suspect....

Yes, but the airflow is required for it to work. Evaporative fridges have been used for a very very long time, but require energy input in the form of wind. The bottle is inverted in comparison to the evaporative fridge, thus it requires a fan or it would only accumulate a very very small amount of water...

The bottle requires an energy input, they are using solar. The submitted article is based on a slightly fuller one: http://www.pri.org/stories/science/technology/scientist-takes-inspiration-from-natural-world-to-create-self-filling-water-bottle-12154.html

Why isn't this modded up? It's the single most useful post to this story. I've just read the actual Nature article as the submitted link was indeed horrible (with flash video auto-starting to boot), and it makes none of the claims that that the submitted article or the summary make. It is still rather interesting though.

Offline maps. When I got rid of my Nokia N8 and bought a Samsung SIII, there were two things I missed, one is the camera (the N8's was far better in several ways), the other is the maps. With the Nokia you got offline maps for the entire world and the app itself was excellent (though it had teething problems to start with). Turn by turn directions that don't sound like a robot (I'm looking at you Google), were as good as or better than most commercial Sat Nav devices, accurate (looking at you Apple), regularly updated and, I'll say it again, offline maps! In Australia at least you can be quite often out of range of a decent data connection.

The commercial Navigon app that I got bundled with my SIII is definitely inferior and you only get maps for Oceania, I have to buy the European/US ones if I need them.

Oh my goodness, because I live in Australia I have to wait a week before seeing a TV show? How do I manage?

Sometimes I can't quite believe the world we live in.

Indeed, and I have to say, I can't really see that the economic effect would be that great either (impact on any dot.com 2.0 bubble aside). If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, just how would that have any large effect on the economy? Even Zynga isn't totally relying on Facebook and nobody has shops that only operate through Facebook either to the best of my knowledge.

There's a lot of comment here about whether it was piracy, but note that it isn't just about the 6500 seats, they actually gave copies of the software to other organisations so that they could access the police systems. In fact, that was how Micro Focus came to hear about what was going on.

Some are. PLoS One for instance has a pretty high impact factor. It's not up there with Nature, but it's higher than the vast majority of journals.

Whilst I would like to see the day where our work (I am a scientist) is all in open access journals, there is still a cost. The author pays the journal instead of the library. The difficulty for authors is that we typically don't have funding for that. Maybe what we need is for our institution libraries to be paying that cost, but then the library doesn't save any money...

I second this. I fairly regularly go to live orchestral performances and frankly a CD on a decent system gives you only a tiny fraction of the live sound (note I'm not talking about amplified concerts here, before the get off my lawn comments start). I hoped that as disks were able to store more and more data we'd get closer and closer to that live sound, but now too few people are interested to make it economically worthwhile.

I'm not defending the actions of the GG or the GG's ability to dissolve parliament, but Gough Whitlam was dismissed because the opposition had control of the senate and refused to pass any budget he put forward. The country was about about to be paralysed due to the government no longer being able to pay anyone (much like nearly happened in the US recently, but didn't for different reasons). He wasn't dismissed for not doing what the US wanted. Also the GG's powers aren't archaic, they are there because the Queen is still our head of state.

It doesn't do anything of the sort and there is nothing new in the Schneier article. Why would your average non-IT journo understand about PGP? If the journo was told it was a temporary password then they are very unlikely to say, "oh no you are wrong you IT people, I know about stuff and this can't be temporary". I've been reading Slashdot for well over a decade and if someone I thought knew what they were talking about told me they had stuff encrypted with a temporary key, I would believe them (although I'd be wondering just how it was done).

The other angle is that why would the Guardian publish the key if they new it would unlock everything for everyone? It isn't in their interest (selling newspapers), plus there are plenty of reports of other media outlets being offered the data more than a year ago, so it has hardly just got out there.

I think the real story is it is all a screw up, journo knows nothing about IT, is bullsh*tted by Assange and believes what they are told. Assange isn't doing the security by the Wikileaks protocol, everything goes to crap.