http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RepRap_Project

Cool. I want a self replicating replicator!

Someone is writing a book about Britney Spears?

Good idea, until you want to play any new Blu-Ray movies you get.

Yep, it is know as the Tragedy of the commons

You are assuming this is to solve a technical issue, that they are trying to efficiently use resources.

However, if you consider that they are trying to solve an issue with how phone carriers charge for data usage, you will see where this might provide value.

You are correct about text messages on modern networks being just data; however, providers do not charge the same for this data usage.

In some places, they charge much more for text messages than data usage (here in the U.S. is an example of one of those places); in those places, you try to find ways to use your data plan to send text messages. This might be in the form of instant messengers or the like.

In places where text messages are cheap but the data plan is expensive, the opposite desire comes into play; you start trying to get data sent through text messages.

When you think about this as a way to get around the arbitrary price differences between the same data, you can see how this would be valuable.

This study asked people to 'rate their levels of alertness' after being given either caffeine or a placebo. The people who normally consumed caffeine rated their alertness levels the same after receiving caffeine as the non-caffeine users rated their alertness levels after receiving a placebo.

Now this could mean a couple of things. One meaning could be what the study authors said; that caffeine addicts need their caffeine to be at the same level of alertness that non-caffeine users need. OR it could mean that the non-caffeine users aren't used to the higher levels of alertness that caffeine gives you, and therefore don't use the same scale to rate their alertness that caffeine users do. A caffeine user may think that the 'normal' (non-caffeinated) level of alertness is actually low (because they are used to being more alert from caffeine) even though they have the same 'actual' level of alertness. In other words, non-caffeinated people might not realize how un-alert they are.

A much better test would be to actually TEST their alertness, instead of relying on a subjective self-assessment. Make them do tasks that require alertness, and measure the differences. You might get different results.

May I ask what I have been diluted by? I tried to stay away from the water........

Umm well their name IS a portmanteau of 'screw' and 'google'..... so are you really surprised they are trying to leech off google?

The problem is that pork IS flesh... distinguishing wood and flesh is easy, distinguishing pig flesh and human flesh fast enough to stop a blade... a little harder.

This sort of thinking (that if the accuracy rate is improved enough it will become a valid way of determining someones guilt) shows a fundamental misunderstanding of statistics. It is the same reason blanket drug testing doesn't work and medical screening can sometimes be a bad thing.

Let's imagine for a moment that this lie detector technology has been perfected to a 99.99% accuracy rate. Since the test is so accurate, we decide that whenever a crime is committed, we will just have everyone in the area take the lie-detector test, asking them the question "Did you commit the crime?". Clearly, when someone fails the test, they are 99.99% likely to be the criminal. Right?

Except no. In cases like this (where the average person is much much much more likely to NOT be the criminal, the error rate will overwhelm the actual guilty-rate. If we are testing everybody in an area, then we can suppose that each person we check has an average chance of being the criminal of about 1 in however many we are checking. If this number we are checking is very large, then we are CERTAINLY going to have quite a few people who are found to be guilty on the test but are actually innocent. It will pick out more innocent people than guilty people.

While this sort of statistical phenomena will not take place if we don't giving blanket tests to everyone and limit the test to people who we already believe are very likely to have committed the crime, we as a society have a very bad tendency to not understand the statistics and think we should just give everyone the test and let the results tell us who is guilty. If you doubt this, just look at how many people think we should have a DNA database that everyone needs to join (so we can just run any DNA found at a crime scene against it). This combines the birthday paradox with the statistics I described above to create a situation where we have a very real fear of false convictions, exacerbated by the fact that people who are relying on this evidence (juries) do not realize that even a test with 99.999% accuracy can have a very high false positive rate in these sorts of circumstances.

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes'_theorem#Example_1:_Drug_testing for more info on the math behind this.

I agree, and would never argue that vendors should hide bugs they find or bugs they fix.

HOWEVER, require all bug fixes be fully publicly disclosed could create some perverse incentives to not patch a bug. If they feel that not many people know about it, it may seem advantageous to a short sighted vendor to just hide the bug and pretend it doesn't exist, since fixing it requires disclosing its existence.

This is a horrible thing of course, but I don't think a vendor being this short sighted would be shocking.

But if he doesn't use those abbreviations, how will everyone know how super smart and in the know he is?

The upload bandwidth he was talking about is for the VPN tunnel.... since the person hosting the VPN on the US side would have to stream the feed from Hulu to the guy outside the US.

I agree with everything you say EXCEPT that a GUI interface would make it harder to use your smartphone with 1 bar. Nothing inherent in a GUI requires more information to be sent down the wire than a CLI would, unless you were trying to construct the GUI dynamically from data returned by the server.

That is interesting. In the United States, we often have the opposite situation: debit cards often cost $1.50 per use while credit cards are free. I have seen a couple of gas stations who charge less for cash, but that is extremely rare.