Influenza is a virus. It's a thing which spread from one living being to another. It has nothing to do with your food. *You* could eat sicked chicken without any risk as long as it's dead and cooked (and you have to cook poultry thoroughly if you don't want to have a big food poisoning problems anyway).

Also, birdflu is a *BIRD* disease, humans normally don't catch it under normal circumstances. (The 'H5' receptor on the virus only binds to chicken cells. You need H1 or H3 to bind to human cells easily if my memory serves me right) So even if you have a sick chicken in your house, chance are almost nothing would probably happen to you.

The problem is not *you*. The problem with is with the high density of birds in those farms and their massive (over-)population.
If one single chicken catches the bird flu, it can spread very quickly to the whole farm, then neighbouring farm, then the whole region (same as human flu at a workplace in a densely populated area).
If you don't stop the disease today, by killing the 150'000 chicken who were in direct contact with a sick chicken (and could catch it) today, then in a few days, you'll have a dozen of million of sick birds on your hands and a massive epidemiological problem. (Same with humans: If you don't stay at home when you're sick, you're going to make all your colleagues sick and before you know, the whole building housing your workplace is full of cick people).

In addition to that, if there's such a massive amount of virus spreading around, there's a tiny bit of risk that "by error" a virus infects a human who is a lot in contact with the chickens and the bird epidemic (and by "a lot" i really mean "a lot". As in "the farmer who work in the chicken farm everyday". Not as in "some random guy who happen to eat chicken").
For the human him-/her-self this isn't necessarily bad news (in a big city, in theory... sadly we're usually speaking about very poor farmers in remote area, so their accessibility to proper treatment is very likely to be sub-optimal). Nor is it a direct danger for other humans around (it was already a big amount of luck that the *bird* virus managed to infect a human. Jumping from that point onward to another human *again* is like winning a lottery 2 times in a row: *very* unlikely).
But due to the peculiarities of influenza genetics, inside the human the bird flu virus could get mixed with a human flu it the human has it too. (The bird flu stealing the gene for the correct receptor to be able to efficiently bind and infect human cells). The same could also happen inside an animal which could catch both flu at the same time (pigs can occasionally catch bird flu, and pigs can also catch human flu - this a pig could also serve this role of mixer).
And *this* mutant hybrid would be problematic because this new humanized bird flu could cause an epidemic among the human population.

In short, the sick chickens aren't dangerous for humans. They are not killed because of that. The reason they are killed is to stop the bird flu spreading and causing an epidemics among the birds. And also to lower the risk that 1 virus manage to win the lottery and become a human-infecting hybrid and in turn cause a human epidemic.

But the flesh is perfectly edible. You can safely eat chicken, and you can safely take advantage of the lower prices.

(It's a different situation than the mad cow disease.
Mad cow disease is due to a protein, which survives cooking.
Bird flu is due to a virus, which requires a living bird, and doesn't infect humans anyway).

VLC is already modularized. Most of the functionality resides inside a library, and this library has already been ported to ARM CPUs too.

The only thing needed is "just" yet another UI. Next to the classic windows, Mac OS X Quartz, Linux GTK, Linux QT, textmode and a few other less known, they now need to add a metro interface.
It's basically just making new menu/button that work nicely on a metro tile, and connecting them to the already existing portable VLC engine.

That will actually require only a couple of week-ends worth of time.

The rest of the time budget will probably be spent getting everything working together nicely, and ironing out bugs (which *WILL* take a lot more time, specially given the complexity of VLC).

First you have to know which compound of the venom are the active ingredient (a venom is not a single molecule, it's a big mix of lots of substances).

Maybe the important part are just small peptide (works also for small nucleic acid strands). In this case, yes: just slap the gene inside a bacteria or yeast and just harvest the thing in a huge brewery tank. This will cost a tiny fraction of the current method. (as in "a few bucks for a dozen of kilograms"). Washing industry thrives on this kind of process and has already made it fucking incredibly cheap (do you really think that the digestive enzyme in your washing powder where harvested from actual animals ?)

But maybe not. Maybe it can be a complex protein that requires some post processing (chaperone helping to fold it into an unusual shape, enzyme modifying some parts) - (but very unlikely. If the venom can cross the skin without injection, it needs to be something small). Or maybe it can be a small chemical molecule that is produced by a long and complex chain of chemical reaction necessitating a big collection of enzymes (very likely, given that it can easily cross the skin).
In this case you need to identify the candidate, understand the process that produce it (not impossible but it takes time), and then either put the whole machinery inside yeast (bacteria post-process a lot less their proteins) and go for the brewery-tank method, or replicate the synthesis in another way (produce the protein in bacteria and then do the modification in a lab. Or find a way to synthetise the small chemical compound by using a sequence of chemical reactions in a lab) and scale it up to industrial scale.
This *WILL* end up being incredibly cheap in the long term, but requires much more research and development.

There's a whole branch of science to study that, called "Venomics".

Until then, you're stuck at putting bee on a micro electric chair until they are so pissed of that they start stinging the glass.

(And I'm betting that perhaps, all the benefit come from the few traces of adrenalin-like substance that the bee end-up secreting after going through such predicament and of which a small part might end up in the venom itself).

But the fact that they extract only a gram from a whole hive, means that they are probably concentrating/extracting the product already, so they know already a few tips in which direction to look to find the interresting part.

The problem with this is the time that 1 generation takes.
- For bacteria, you can observe a lot interesting stuff happening, because a single generation has a time span between couple of dozens of minute and a hour. On a single day you can get near to 100 generations. Spend just 1 week observing them (a little bit less than a thousand generations), and you can see the effect of lots of generation reproducing and adapting and evolving. (That why bacteria are so problematic regarding antibiotic resistance: they evolve rapidly simply because they live at another time scale).
- All the animals you mention have generations that take a couple of years. To observe the effect of evolution (still aiming for a thousand+ generations), you need quite a lot of generations, over a couple of millennia (which is, *indded* the span of recorded history).
- Humans are among the slowest animals to reach maturity, they only start reproducing after a decade and a half, 10 time longer than the other animals you mention. Thus still keeping the time frame you give, this would require a 10 time longer time span to observe the same amount of evolution. We're not speaking a couple of millennia here, but a couple of dozens of millennia, which is much longer than recorded history (and coincidentally is around the age of the homo sapiens specie - so indeed we can expect to have evolution happening at this time scale. The diversifications of ethnicities, for example).

In short:
1000 generations of a bacteria != 1000 generations of cats != 1000 generations of humans != 1000 generation of even slower maturing living being (some trees for example).

And that's neglecting the whole question of evolutionary pressure.

Because (according to several sources of information, including Phoronix whose Micheal has interviewed Gabe at Valve) Valve is interested in keeping "Steam-on-*any*-Linux" in addition to "Steam-on-the-specific-Ubuntu-fork-running-on-Steambox", because that will be a nice dev platform for indie and other small studios. Currently alternatives from the other big players is still expensive for indie and amateurs.

Also, Valve has expressed interests in not locking down too much this future console, but keeping it hacker/mod friendly for those still interested.

And from a practical point of view, once you have a Steam running nicely on a linux-powered machine, having Steam run on any random linux distro (or even other unix-like OSes) doesn't require much more efforts, and the Linux community has already highly motivated people to put a huge part of the efforts (packaging, testing, patching bugs in system libraries, collaborating with valve to fix steam or source, etc - for example as soon as the Ubuntu DEBs were released in closed beta, several other distros got their own steam package with all the necessary libraries) so it's not like "maintaining their Linux port" is going to cost any more resources.

A. ...you would maybe have stunned the one real wannabe mass killer who would have otherwise done something stupid this year (and thus maybe saved a couple of dozen of potential victims).

B. ...and you would have a country filled with countless problems of abusive tasering (badly behaving kids who got on the nerves of their teachers. Not that the brats were in their rights to begin with. But using a potentially lethal weapon to deal with verbal menace or bad behavious *is* inappropriate) and several extra cases of taser-related deaths on top of the usual ones.
Just look at how much cases of inappropriate tasering there has been since tasers became popular among various security branches.

(And I'm not counting in the potential of malevolent kids stealing their teacher's electrical weapon for nefarious purposes)

...yup but sadly 2 decades after Maastritch, there still isn't a common EU taxation law.

So currently, corporation get to game the system all they want - thanks to the increased mobility offered by the european union.
But there's no way for the state to get money to finance eduction, health, and so on. Because of lack of a European-level tax.
(more likely instead of an actual tax - i.e.: an extra tax to be paid by individuals and corporations - it would be better as flux of money between states. If all corporation run away to ireland, it would be fair for ireland to pay to the EU a share of the increased income coming from the companies moving in).

Curriously: although it's not even actual part of the EU but just having bilateral convention with it, and although its considered as a tax haeven, Switzerland DOES give money to the EU currently.

But, it *still* *completely* *LEGAL*. Unfair, unethical, but legal.

If you have a problem with that, don't sue them.

If you have a problem with companies gaming the system in order to take advantage of it, don't try to hit them (other will take turns and you're in for a huge whack-a-mole game). Try to change the system itself. Try to bring new laws, try to create new international tax scheme.
(And try to find a way to do it without alienating said company and having them run away from you).

So the long-terme solution would be a european law, asking ireland to reshare part of its income to other countries depending on how much money they store, so that healthcare, education, public transportation, etc. can be also produced there.

There's a practical difference (at least that's how it's defined in Switzerland - which is one of the possible tax avoidance place, although far less attractive than the ones in the summary).

- One is *lying*, giving false information and not paying the taxes you're required by law to pay. You pretend you don't have money and try to hide it (in order not to pay taxes. But according to the law you should be paying taxes). This is illegal. A person or a company doing so should be persecuted.

- The other is just shifting money around. You're absolutely honest and give any needed information out. You simply move the money to another place, where the tax happen to be lower than the first place. Once there, you openly collaborate with the local tax institution, declare all the money you have and pay all the taxes you're required to pay. It just happens that said taxes are lower than in the country of origin. But nothing is hidden, all money is openly accounted for. No one pretends anything false. This *IS LEGAL*. A person or a company doing so is just cleverly playing the system. WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE is collaborating with the local government so some tax money is funneled back to the original country.

Ireland, for example, has almost no taxes. There's nothing wrong in the law about storing your money there. There's nothing wrong about paying almost no taxes (as long as you declare everything and don't hide anything). If you're unhappy with this, you should bring to court the company putting their money there. you should instead write to your politician asking that the European Union finally comes up with a solution for EU-level taxes (so money is shared between Ireland and the other countries where the money was prior transfer but were the company isn't paying taxes).

You mean, like IEEE 802.11ac? :-D

More seriously:
A new feature will probably be supported the same way Bluetooth was supported before microsoft included it into the service pack: an ugly vendor specific hack included with the driver.
So the end user will be stuck between two hard choices:
- keep the older OS version and put up with the crappy stack
- pay and upgrade to the newer OS version with buil-in official support

The reverse would be comparing the number of stars in the sky with the number of hairs.
It's probably a gross under-estimation (I in turn am no astrophysicist), but the listener clearly gets the point:
There's an insane amount of other stars out there than our sun.

Don't worry. Some of us here realise it and take it with the necessary amused grain of salt.
We understand what you meant actually:
a gigantic number-crunching machine with bat-shit crazy computing capability.

Let's say that, you completely under estimated the computing power of a neuron.

First of all, a transistor just takes a few inputs, integrates them and give 1 signal out. To over simplify (medical doctor/researcher speaking here, so it will be an abusive over simplification) it will work like a basic boolean operator on 2 input bits.

A neuron is several order of magnitude more complex than that. It takes many more different inputs. The connection between two neuron is a synapse: neural impulse comes to one extremety of the source neuron. at the synapse this cause the release of a chemical (a neurotransmitter), across a gap there's a corresponding receptor on the target neuron. When the chemical is docked into the receptor, this opens a small gate which let a few ion flow through changing the electrical properties on the target neurons.

There can be several *thousands* of synapses on a single neuron, meaning that a single neuron can receive input from thousands of its peers.
Also the integration of all this inputs is complex (a docked neurotransmitter will only *change* the electrical properties on the target neurons, not necessarily fire the target neuron. Whether the neuron will fire or not depends on the net result of all the activities at all synapse. Some will raise the probability of firing, other will lower it). At that point we're already far from the "two bits in ; bolean operator ; 1 bit out" of a computer transistor. We're speaking of "thousands of signals in followed by complex and subtle integration".

Conversely a single neuron projects its output on a lot of target neurons too, so the overall network (synapses) can get very complicated for a given number of nodes (neurons).

The signal itself isn't binary. It's not "fire / no fire" duality unlike the bits in a byte. In fact neuron are (most of them) constantly firing. What varies is the rate at which they are firing. And this can vary across a wide range. So neuron aren't even digital, they are analogue with a lot of subtleties (and few signal loss, because they use the time domain instead of the signal amplitude).

And that's only the near inter-neuron communication. (At the synpase level). There are also a lot of general circulating molecules in the blood flow which can have an impact on the activities of neurons (hormones, etc.)

And all that is only the simulation of the activity going at a single point in time. But neurons are living objects and constantly changing.
Their metabolism changes, they might change their inner structure, etc. For example: The whole point of treatment of the depression is encouraging the neuron cells to produce more receptor for serotonin.

Even if neural cell don't reproduce, the network change over time: new synapses are created (e.g.: more synapses along often used paths) other are removed.
The total population of neuron change two, on one side, old neuron may die (or can get poisoned by drugs and toxins), on the other hand, stem cell (in the amygdalia region) produce new neuron which can then migrate and insert themselves into the network, compensating the loss (well, as long as the individual isn't suffering from dementia).

You will need actually much more than 16 transistors to simulate such complexity. You might as well need a small computer (or at least a whole separate thread) just to simulate 1 neuron. You definitely need a massive super cluster if you want to fully replicate the work of even the simplest animal brain.

Even if we *do* use neural net in computer research and data processing, such nets use virtual neuron which are much more simplified than the real biological counterpart. It's good enough to do research and data processing, it's not good enough to simulate a brain.

So definitely no, you can't count a 1:16 neuron-to-transistor relation in your cyber-brain.

The main problem between mr torvalds and nvidia, is that up to that point nvidia has never ever wanted to collaborate with them, nor even try to use whatever already exist in linux.
nvidia wanted the lazy way and share as much code as possible. their current way to do things is throw everything in the garbage and do things their own way. the problem is that this doesn't play nice with everyone else (including Intel hardware) and thus some functionality is completely broken (Optimus only works though third party hacks) although the necessary functionnality is alread in the kernel (but ignored by nvidia).

recently they've started to wisen up. they are open to collaborate better and try to use what exist. but now the situation has reversed and currently the linux developpers aren't playing nice (the necessary technology has been licensed as GPL only from the beginning)

and that would be stupid.
Instead valve went the hard route and started collaboration between their own developers, and GPU drivers developers (both official binary at AMD and Nvidia, and official opensource at Intel and AMD). All this leading to several improvement.
Thanks to them, binary driver are being improved, and even the opensource stack (the Intel driver is officially opensource, and AMD officially supports opensource efforts in addition to their own in-house binary drivers. All these based on the same standart Linux infrastructure) has seen an increased pace of development (among other Valve is responsible of adding several debugging related extension to Gallium 3D, paving the way for future OpenGL 4.x).

And these efforts do indeed pay back: Source engine with an opengl back-end is much faster than with direct3d... even on windows.