I've been using iGoogle as my home page forever. Considering the broad range of services Google provides now - email, chat, voice services, etc. - you'd think they'd want to provide a central hub. I've got mine set up for some basic news headlines with sports, hollywood, and Fox filtered out. I also use it for local weather, Google Chat, and to manage account settings. I think I'll miss the news aggregator function the most.

Any suggestions for a good generalized news aggregator? Something that will draw from a variety of sources and can be customized for topic preferences.

I suspect most people will "change their behavior" after the warnings or speed throttling by switching ISP's.

Perhaps once telecoms begin to lose customers as a result of being MAFIAA enforcers, they'll decide to side with their customers and more modern copyright laws.

Always interesting to see the categories different parts of academia place each other in. The post's author is calling math, physics and comp-sci "natural sciences" and apparently considers statistics to be "social science". I'm a geology professor and, as far as I'm aware, my colleagues and I tend to consider Earth, environmental, and biological sciences to be the "natural sciences"; physics, chemistry, engineering, and any math to be "physical science"; and psychology, sociology, (cultural) anthropology, etc. to be "social sciences". Everything else is art and/or humanities.

I wonder how other groups categorize one another? Right off the bat I'd suspect that mathematicians don't always consider themselves scientists. Perhaps ditto for engineers. People tend to form and place each other in groups of varying degrees of subjectivity. How you place others probably says something about the standards and values of one's own group.

This sounds like it'd make a great piece of social-psych research! They love this kind of fluff, right? (j/k)

This is exactly the problem with American chips lately. They're too lazy to put any effort into their work. Sure, they're "saving energy" but that just means they're going to become even more obese. Chips from many Asian manufacturers are already much more accurate and efficient than American ones. We need to encourage American chips to be more interested in STEM fields if we're ever going to turn our economy around!

Normally:
CO2 + Light = Algae

Now:
CO2 + Algae = Light

Brilliant!

I've always gotten the impression that the dark and dystopian futures prevalent in cyberpunk and related genres are the result of corruption and abuse of the power and potential of technology. They are a warning against what technology can become if not applied responsibly. Most tech-heavy sci-fi ends up being a warning against potential results of some new science and technology.

Snow Crash . . . is basically reality now . . . Diamond Age is a better example. It portrayed two opposing views of nano tech implementation: centralized vs. decentralized production. Either way it demonstrated the potential of nanotechnology. And, hey, now we have people building 3D printers in garages and using them to make toys for their kids rather than enslave the underclass.

You're absolutely correct! We should immediately begin funneling money into a (heavily) manned mission to Venus so that we can bring the freedom-hating planet to justice. Once we're done there, we should deploy additional craft to Mars, as intelligence suggests that they may have facilitated logistical support for Venus and its allies. In fact, the time may come when we are forced to consider actions against Jupiter . . . for the greater good, of course . . .

How does one go about doing this, just out of curiosity? I believe I've seen something on my W-4 about withholding more money from my paycheck, but not less. Or, is this only a trick that you can pull of if you're self-employed, a private contractor, etc.?

I was thinking more in terms of population density combined with industrialization (cities, roads, power plants, etc.). Throw in your suggestion of brightest lights and you basically get Beijing or Shanghai.

I don't usually go in for conspiracy theories and crazy end-of-the-world stuff, but I was just thinking about the same thing. What if aliens were to finally visit the Earth? They'd be likely to head for the largest modern civilization, which is basically China. Would we ever hear about it, especially if something went wrong? Same deal with any other sort of globally important event or disaster. Weaponized nationalist pride, basically . . . scary.

No, no. That's old school. They want new, advanced techniques. Perhaps they can start using a fuel cell in place of a car battery . . .

When comparing panspermia to a terrestrial origin for life people seem not to fully comprehend one important factor: time.

It began raining on the Earth about 4-4.4 billion years ago, meaning surface temperatures and atmospheric conditions were stable enough for the oceans to accumulate. Some of the earliest evidence of biochemical alteration of the atmosphere (banded iron formations) first appear about 3.7 billion years ago. That's over 500 million years for naturally occurring amino acids to jump to self-replication and then to simple prokaryotes. Now, think about the rate at which microorganisms reproduce. 500Ma is about as much time as its taken for life to jump from single-celled forms to modern vertebrates, etc.

Panspermia includes too many unknown and slim chances. And, as mentioned elsewhere in these posts, where are these life-seeding bolides coming from?

With $6.4B in losses, its possible that actual pirates are attacking and pillaging their shipments, factories, etc. Or its a bit of creative bookkeeping - every downloaded Black Eyed Peas single represents a loss of $18,000 . . . so that's nearly $40,000 right there.

They go by a different name in the NYC area. We call them "public restrooms" or "Port-a-Johns" more popularly.

The major problem with this plan is that the kiosk touchscreens will probably be turned on 24/7, cycling through pictures, ads, etc. How are the homeless people who inevitably take up residence in these booths going to be able to sleep if the screen is constantly running?

I've seen this from both sides. One of the schools I work at used to have an older chemistry professor that basically refused to use modern computers. The department had to hire a part-time student worker to do email and submit attendance and grades for the guy. He wasn't a technophobe - he used an old Pentium PC to run research software - he just stopped keeping up with computer progress.

On the other hand, I can see why teachers might avoid technology in the classroom. In my experience, schools seem to hire IT professionals out of the business sector who tend to bring business-class technology solutions along with them. Like help desks and call centers that treat students and staff like they are low-priority clients. Smart board systems that require a remote control and a pointer/wand device to fully utilize . . . the remotes and wands disappeared within months of deployment, so now the boards are very expensive marker boards and projector screens. Access to and quality of classroom technology can be highly inconsistent and, thus, frustrating to use.