The article makes me a bit suspicious:
"Intel's own high-endurance MLC NAND can be found in the drive, which is rated for 10 full disk writes per day for five years."
sounds pretty bad actually, if I understand it right.
Per cell this means: 365*10*5 = roughly 20.000 write cycles per cell? Sure wear leveling algorithms are there, but 20.000 cycles is not exceptional, or am I wrong?

Don't misunderstand this post. I think Intel's SSDs are good.

Maybe, but only maybe the article is right and it would be possible to design a protein, which binds specifically to a DNA sequence motif of a single human being killing the host. Currently this is a lot of work even for a few (as in 18) bases and not solvable by standard means. The design of a protein binding specifically to any random DNA sequence ( think huuuuuugee Zinc-Finger Nucleases : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc_finger_nuclease ) is in my opinion still nobel prize material.

If that was actually possible, people would use it to do good (Gene therapy etc). To knock out cancerous genes, while retaining the good ones. To bind specifically to Virus RNA or to just identifiy gene segments, which are connected somehow to genetical disorders (minus the killing of course in this case).

My point is: I don't think there is enough motivation in the scientific community to develop this just to kill a political target. There are definitely less costly ways, which leave less traces.

Yeah, because the 3DS did so much worse than the Virtual Boy. ^^

I agree. You are quoting a retail CPU. It's even worse in the server market, especially if you want many cores. We recently required a 32 CPU machine (single thread performance was not vitally important).
Suitable CPUs were:
1x16 Core AMD Interlagos: about 500 Euro
1x8 Core Intel Sandy-Bridge EP about 1000 Euro.

I know that people are going to say: but hey, single thread performance and Hyper Threading are going to make up for it. But that's not true: There is NO Intel CPU below 1000 Euro we could put into the system. There simply is no equivalent. It's a similar situation as with Apple: They make high-end products and people justify the price with it. That doesn't help the people who search for a low cost option.

No institution would allow a product like cigarettes to enter the market nowadays.
They exist and they are tolerated, but were they invented nowadays, they'd never be legalized.

Disclaimer: I'm no expert in spectroscopy.

Would it be possible to estimate the blood's sugar content with this kit?

It is possible non-invasively with Raman spectroscopy in the infrared:
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-08/mit-glucose-meter-checks-blood-sugar-levels-painless-ir-light

The usual blood glucose meters have errors of up to 50% in the reading. And they still require those expensive analysis strips.
If a home blood glucose measurement would be possible with one of those kits (even if you still need to draw blood), that would rock.

I know that technician! His name was Candlejack, right?
When he came to

Half of them won't sign up, i'd be surprised if 1% would sign up. Facebook needs critical mass. It they take a dollar to let you post stuff on your wall, there will be a huge outcry among all the users, even or especially the fans. Facebook will lose a lot of its fans and the mass will go to the next free social media platform: Google+

First: I agree completely with your comment.

I just want to say: Maybe once we are at the point, where less manual drivers equates less fatal accidents, the time has come to actually sacrifice some of our freedom and just allow self-driving cars on the road. It's an ethical question and it would be a hard sell politically and definitely not win votes, though.

Can't wait to jailbreak my Google WheelDroid car to tinker with its firmware and make it go faster by compiling -O9.

My crystal ball tells me:
At some point Btrfs will be standard in most linux distributions. Some time later deduplication will be developed to be used for the layman. (Planned features, wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs#Features )

1.) Wait it out until we are there.
2.) Get a NAS box using Btrfs
3.) transfer everything ...
5.) PROFIT (for the people building the NAS).

Surprisingly your mom still gets sick from time to time.

Maybe just outliers....

Let me read the article for you, if you don't believe me. Btw. there are no overall scores, there's just a biased conclusion.

Page 11 and 12 were simple examples, where there was a factor of two.
Page 1: no benchmarks
Page 2: Ubuntu is faster in three benchmarks, two ties
Page 3: Graphics, OSX wins
Page 4: Graphics, OSX wins
Page 5: Ubuntu loses in all SciMark benchmarks, wins in two others (once by a factor of 4)
Page 6: Ubuntu wins in Imagemagick (against 10.8) loses in Php compilation (but not by much)
Page 7: Ubuntu wins by a large margin twice, loses by a small margin twice
Page 8: Ubuntu wins by a large margin twice
Page 9: Ubuntu, tie, win, big win
Page 10: Graphics, OSX wins
Page 11: Tie, big win, big win, tie
Page 12: 4*Tie, big win
Page 13: Tie, win, win, lose/tie(12.04/12.10)
Page 14: Tie, big win, big win
Page 15: conclusions.

So let me tell you: All the "big wins" are DEVASTATING for OSX. They mean that you need to wait DOUBLE the time for your results.
I did not contest that OSX won graphics wise, but it is very clear that linux won the number crunching.

If you read the whole article you will see that there are many computing intensive benchmarks, where Linux outperforms OSX by nearly a factor of two. Saying that there is no noticeable difference is simply wrong (see Page 11, Page 12).

So many negative posts here. So let me be the first to say: Good job!

It's very good they open source it, even if only for legacy apps (Motif). The open-source code base for CDE is also nice to have in Patent lawsuits for prior art mining. It's nice they went out of their way to clear the legal issues, now that no money can be made anymore with either.

So thanks to the Open Group!