Summary is a bit inaccurate, leading to uninformed comments and questions on this thread. From the article,

The researchers found that the rats chew the bark of the poisonous tree and lick themselves to store their poisonous spit in specially adapted hairs.

They do not eat the plants. They chew it. This is the same way people chew certain herbs and then apply it to wounds to numb the pain. They don't eat those plants - if they did they'd be in poor health indeed.

I believe that looks like a jail cell.

It might be illegal, but nobody knows it; everybody who wants one will probably just get one (I used to live in China). Not that I agree one iota with it, but I can definitely understand the government's need to control thoughts: it's lead to great stable economic development so far; they operate in what has always been the prevailing mode of government throughout history; they have a different idea of morality (one that's not necessarily wrong) - that the individual rights are weighed much more lightly compared with the greater societal good. In addition, though not overtly, our media is also structured in such a way that they passively try to control our thoughts.

That aphorism sounds nice, until you consider how well Wikipedia, Firefox, and LibreOffice are doing.

I'm not sure your argument is complete. Is it fair that Walmart can keep using the money you paid for Halo long after you stopped playing Halo? Your information is the payment. Though I agree with you: services and companies should be a lot more upfront about what you're paying for their "free" service. I bet not a lot would change (maybe 1% of facebook .5% of google users would stop using the service) but at least people would feel better. And this provides a path to progress: if every service listed the price clearly, it's easier for competitors to lower the price ("oh they track everything but we only track your click habits, and that information expires 30 days after you stop using our service").

To be honest with the bandwidth/data plans as abysmal as they are right now in the US, those extra bits seem too steep a price to pay for the effect they provide.

No kidding. The iPhone app the article mentions is rated 2 stars on the app store. Tons of complaints that it doesn't do what it is described to do.

And eventually we wouldn't need to spend a quarter of our life times in school.

Funny, but not really accurate. The concept of an absolute sense of time doesn't make sense when we're talking about objects so far away.

Maintaining standards of aesthetics in your code is the cheapest and easiest way to ensure it does what it's supposed to do. Simple logic: if I have a hard time reading your code, I might misunderstand its intention and modify it the wrong way.

The university has LAN based connectivity as well as 802.11 connectivity. 802.11 connectivity is free - as long as you can get on at the network level you're free to use it. LAN based connectivity is obviously only available in classrooms and in dorm rooms.

Now at the beginning of school year, each LAN port is "reset", in the sense that it becomes unregistered. When a user connects next (this means the new student to move into that dorm room), it will be served a special page upon any HTTP request. That special page will check the UserAgent of the browser and, if Windows is indicated, will be prompted to run a security scan of the PC (windows-only software). If any other OS (or a router) is indicated, then the user is let through un-scanned, for the rest of the year.

Seems to me, that while technically more support is provided to Windows users, anyone would prefer to connect as a non-Windows user.

Actually the IT you see at Joe Papercompany is different from the IT you need to successfully run a large company whose business is tied to the IT (such as Google or certain types of finance companies). So "most IT" that most people here think they know about is dramatically different from the top 10% of IT.

I believe the point is to model how people are using the trains rather than the status of the trains. How many people/who/when are the questions they want to answer.

Such as in any subway system in China. Where reception doesn't end at the subway entrance. People are making calls and surfing the web while riding the train.

I wonder what happens when people start selling portable "camera controllers". The intended purpose can be overridden and the nefarious purpose can propagate easily.