Whatever happened to posting stories that aren't filled with FUD and hate? Maybe HTML5 is more standards compliant and more widely available on other things... like say... Mobile devices... Which are probably one of the places many people would want to access the 'cloud' from. Or perhaps silverlight is too heavy for the task of being a portal UI... Whatever happened to using the right tool for the right job?

I believe your example of the Lyme disease is erroneous. Watson would be primed with that sort of information as it can be fed a list of common causes and common environmental issues quite easily. Watson could then say, "you're symptoms sound like Lyme disease, but that is not common here. Have you traveled to these areas recently?" Pretty much the same as a doctor or nurse at a clinic.

Watson will also be able to do things like search the entire patient history and perhaps identify lingering things that add up into a whole or flag symptoms for non-specialists. For instance, I had a history of shortness of breath in the morning and occasional acid reflux as well as sinus pressure/infection, I went to a couple of doctors/school nurses and they did the standard tests and found nothing wrong. I have very powerful lungs. Take some antibiotics, you'll be fine. However, 3 or 4 years later I'm on my ass with chronic fatigue due to allergies. I was even taking allergy meds.

Turns out the acid reflux and shortness of breath were a semi-obscure allergy symptom due to chronic drainage since my sinus were nearly swollen shut and the meds I were taking weren't in large enough doses to control the issue. My allergist spotted this almost instantly. You would have to think Watson would be able to learn that sort of behavior as well.

I do agree with you regarding the image processing capabilities. I have been doing research in medical imaging for the last 5 years, and it's a tough field. However, it's a field that's ripe for machine learning approaches(and I have colleagues who do this sort of research) since there's already large amounts of labeled data generated every day. You'd need technicians to take images, or measurements perhaps, but I think you're underestimating how powerful Watson could be in this area.

That said Watson isn't going to eliminate the need for doctors as it doesn't have hands and can't take readings or run MRI's, but it will probably greatly speed up diagnoses and like I said bring specialist knowledge to non-specialists.

To nitpick, I thought several metallurgical historians had pretty much established that Wootz steel ingots and a forging process with a high/medium heat cycle would result in Damascus steel due to the presence of vanadium or molybdenum. They've also found the presence of carbon nanotubes in the steel recently. I can't find the exact article, but there was an excellent article on the subject in the mid 2000's that seemed pretty definitive. The real speculation seems more to do with how the technique was lost and what the precise methods of forging the ancient smiths used, more than how to recreate it.

They're using the stems and leaves of the plants. As in the left over parts after food is processed. They can also use the plants that rot in the field or don't make the grade for edibility I'd imagine. There was word of Pepsi switching its bottling process over to use plastics made out of the leftover plant matter from their food processing plants a few weeks ago. I imagine this would be much the same and not like the corn based ethonal boondoggle.

You assume the cost of openness is free, but for a company like Apple it's probably much much greater than the pittance it will take them to make their own. Especially considering they might even get MS to actually help them with compliance.

Enslaved? Really? That's the analogy you want to work with?

Slavery implies that the person is forced to do something and stripped of their rights to do other things. Software is an object. An inanimate object. Saying someone has enslaved your software is like saying someone has enslaved the bricks they used to build their house, or since this is /. it's like saying your car has enslaved its tires.

If someone uses your code, they have not deprived you of the original code or indeed truly stolen anything of value. You can argue that you took all the time and effort to make the code and thus the code is valuable in the time it took to create. However, you chose to make it freely available. It's polite to contribute back to the code if you've made it better, certainly, as community tends to be an important element of the human social order, but really you haven't lost anything if someone else is using your code. Your code is still freely available, but the new product that someone else made with your code is not. But now something might exist that wouldn't have before your wrote your code. So your code is already increasing utility in the market.

GPL is saying if you want to use my code, then I have to be able to use your code. GPL then places a cost on using your code. So now your code is not free either in the sense of beer or liberty(for the developer, who lets be honest is really the person who's going to look at the code). So does it really surprise anyone that a group of developers would choose to avoid software which makes them less free?

I went through security wearing a kilt once. Never have I seen a TSA agent so loathe to touch someone. His boss had to force him to pat me down higher than my knees.

Kilt + come hither smile == security breach 9/10

They problem with math education is that it is taught in a sort of vacuum. Students don't see the necessity of math until much later in their lives when it's too late. People try all sorts of methods to teach math, but what we really need to teach, I feel, is the necessity of math. We need to wow students young to show them that math can be useful.

That said I think that we should introduce logic and geometry at younger ages and geometry needs to play a more natural role than doing those retarded column proofs that scar 10th graders so much. Math was invented to help explain the world around us, to help keep count of that which is important to us, but it has been divorced from that in education. Sure we have those asinine word problems, but again these problems rarely connect with their target audience.

If you look at higher math so much of it has very deep connections to geometric structure as well as critical logic skills. So it makes no sense to me that these ideas are taught in compartmentalized nature and that all the areas of math are so segregated. Plus Logic and critical thinking are skills that cross all areas of life.

In conclusion, we need to be showing children how and why math is important, not just trying to beat the rules of arithmetic and fractions into their aching and confused brains.

I have a record player with the built in capability to rip records to MP3... It cost 50 or 60$

I just bought a CD the other day while on vacation. As I was walking back to my hotel all I could think was "Now how the hell am I going to listen to this..." Of course I have a CD player in my laptop but that thought didn't occur to me as a way to actually listen to the CD, just as a way to rip it into a digital format so I could listen to it in a more convenient manner. Hell the only reason I even bought the CD was because it was a regional exclusive release... [/anecdote]

When(and where) I did my undergrad in CS, it was mandatory that we took both the basic and advanced Computer Architecture courses and the intro to Logic and Design course. These were the same courses that electrical and computer engineers took. We designed Clock radio circuits, studied K-maps, Boolean logic, gray codes, wrote our own basic RISC chips(instruction set and layout) using Xilinx(with the option to put them onto FPGA's and run them), studied floating point calculations, studied parallel pipelining, did manual loop unrolling, worked with MIPS emulators, studied multiple assembly languages, and not once did I touch out of date hardware.

I just don't see how using such old computers is anything but a gimmick. Unless you're trying to study some rather obscure architecture for which no emulator exists, I just don't see how it adds much to the educational experience over having a properly designed curriculum

It would seem that GPL3 has been out long enough that if its merits for switching the kernel to said license were so important it would've happened by now. Or is it possibly the case that not everyone has the exact same values as you and still enjoys the flexibility of using the kernel under GPL2. God forbid someone get rich off the collective works of society. Sure, they should contribute back, it's the nice thing to do, but really not everything has to be about forcing openness. I would rather a company build on a solid foundation rather than have to reinvent the wheel all the time. It tends to result in better products.

That's what phones are after all, consumer products. 99% of the world just wants a product and could give two shits about rooting or jailbreaking the device. The vast number of people who buy these phones will just be focused on comparing things like price, service, available apps and the usability of the product. There's a reason that the iPhone is/has been so successful. It came with a slick UI out of the box(and has gotten slicker). Sure it's not open, but most people don't care because it doesn't impact the way they want and expect to use said device. Sure, you're effectively renting the hardware since you can't run whatever you want on it. Sure, that's not ideal. But given the choice between a semi-locked down system that is easy to use, looks good and does what I want or an open system with a crufty UI and so-so ease of use, I'll take the first one most of the time. Especially if it's a device I don't want to have to mess with constantly.

Yes I've run Linux and Solaris and I like them for their purpose. I also run OSX on my macbook and windows7 cause they fit my purposes. I appreciate the openness of Linux and openSource, but I can also respect the decision not to be open source. And as I've spent more and more time using computers, the need for good UI design has become more and more a factor and I've come to care less and less about being able or needing to hack code to make it work.

Gizmodo also has an axe to grind after the stolen prototype fiasco. So it's not really a NEUTRAL third party.

Option D: The bumper starts coming standard with all iphone4's sold and if you want some other case you have to spend money on it? But it will take until September 30 to get production to the point where that is possible.

They are after all only providing free cases because they can't produce enough bumpers to provide free bumpers for all.

Option C: Seems highly unlikely to me as I just don't see Apple as a company or culture changing their manufacturing process this soon into a product and/or completely redesigning their product. Especially given that a full hardware redesign or modification as you propose would be tantamount to full admission that this problem is that severe and they've already been burned in the PR dept for things like discounting first(or was it second gen) iphones too quickly before. Plus the only quick fix they could probably roll out in 2.5 months would be some sort of clear coat on the metal which would just seem 'tacky' in the mind of the designers at Apple. Who knows, I'm not an antenna engineer, maybe there is something they could do in the manufacturing process to change things that quickly.