About a few hundred reasons, the most important of which are
1. the much larger likelihood of an immune reaction to the collagen-elastin matrix. Human collagen =! Cattle collagen , mainly in terms of glycosylation etc.

2. Large blood vessels of the body have some degree of specialization, they aren't just pipes. Finding an anatomically compatible cattle vein can be a problem, what with cattle liver being a completely different shape and all that.

3. As a matter of principle, you really don't want to expose cattle pathogens deep into the human peritoneum, it only encourages them to jump species. and before you say Sterilization, remember that is only a probabilistic process which you can't do too much of non-destructively.

If you can't beat 'em, find a way to make money while you join 'em.

Well played, Microsoft, well played.

All in all, that is really peanuts in terms of electicity bills. If you are spending roughly 2 hours a day gaming, a normal person with a full-time job and a family would have very little time to do much else that can sink money.

Considering that yearly electricty bills routinely reach about a $1000+ for a standard household, this added 10% due to gaming is pretty insignificant when compared to other hobbies...like racing cars for example.

Sure, there may be cheaper hobbies, but I honestly don't think anyone well-settled enough to be practising a daily hobby and deriving enjoyment from it finds it a problem to spend 8 bucks 50 cents a month for their recreation.

Try explaining to your boss or spouse, that the time spent playing a mindless game on the computer is actually an intense mind-wandering session that is going to boost your productivity. Or that you need this time to be your creative best.

In my experience, few people 'get it'.

Except, new designs of cars have a bunch of things that do make a difference- like aerodynamics and crumple zones. It's not _all_ about fashion. Much harder to say that about computer interface 'design'.

Torrents...huh. I am guessing you use the word 'legal' loosely.

Curiously, the actual paper alludes to the fact that it was a case of "loss-of-function" for a gene product, ie., the inhibition of a certain genomic activity, rather than "gain-of-function" as is generally expected from a anthropocentric point of view that leads to "human-like features in mouse neurons" and perhaps human-like intelligence.

I happen to know one of the authors of the paper, and she was herself rather frustrated about exaggerations and misinterpretations she is seeing of her work in 'journalistic' literature.

She pointed to what she feels is a much more relevant summary of the paper here : http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/05/04/a-duplicated-gene-shaped-human-brain-evolution%E2%80%A6-and-why-the-genome-project-missed-it/

I did not RTFA. I second your point. But even if we were to take a more generous view of commenting sections, the problem of noise filtering remains. Comment sections are a perfect example of what Asimov said best :

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”

The amount of effort required to parse through comments to find gems of significant value is enormous. I know that this is that age of the crowd and so on, but there are certain issues on which the opinion of the crowd has on average very little value because of the complexity of the topic and the years of experience required to make informed conclusions. The trade-off between expert opinion and open crowdsourcing varies widely depending on what is the topic under discussion, and the userbase of the particular site. Vaccines and autism on a Californian site, for example.

On the contrary, there is much less money it now per researcher in relation to the problems expected to be solved. Competition for research positions remains high and results are still expected to be delivered. The way public funding is set up, failure is a disaster.

This creates the incentive for scientists to deliver the result, or the appearance of a successful project - by any means necessary.

This is why research laboratories in private enterprise have a higher incidence of pladiarism, but not fraud.

In academic science, there is little philosophical motivation to publish false results as the truth, unless the presence of those results and apparent success of the project is tied to the career and survival of the scientist.

A lot of things look ridiculous in hindsight. It's all a work in progress, always will be.

This is a philosophical decision. Any setting that compromises security should be OPT-IN by design, not the default.

IT Professionals of minimal competency will read complete release notes before rolling out a new version of any software. So if you have a "Fuck it Broke" situation, blame it on your IT guys.

And you would deserve it. If you maintain an insecure system, you are a threat not just to yourself, but to the entire internet.

You foster malicious code that can be used to pit your system against others. Everyone is connected on the Internet, and if you chose to be a weak link, you are everyone's problem.

I am usually sympathetic to upgrade issues, but if you are going to be in the wild of the internet, fix your software. You are on an internal closed network, no one is forcing you to upgrade Firefox. Maintain your legacy setup.

Cool story.

Why I use Windows 7?

I do taxes. I play 3D games. I do coding. I do a lot of scientific analysis and modeling for work. I do a lot of instrumentation control and driver manipulations during work for which I use specialized software like LabView and MATLAB and OriginPro.

Which is the operating system that allows me to do all of those things, without compromise ? You guessed it Windows 7.

How much does this cost me? Maybe a couple of thousand dollars including all the Windows and specialized software licenses, and zero time. How much will it cost me in time and money to replicate OriginPro on Linux or develop a peice of software that performs all those things on Linux?

The oh-so dangerous viruses that supposedly arrive through emails are taken care of by three things.
1. Get MS Security Essentials. Leave it on autoupdate.
2. Don't ever overrride its warning unless you confirm the file is non-executable/safe manually.

That's the thing with Linux...if I need it, I could get it an no cost. It makes infinitely more sense to run Linux on a Virtual Box on a Windows PC than the other way around , if you want to ensure that you never run into a situation that you are prevented from doing 'task x' in the intended way due to OS limitations.

The day a child runs out in a way the human behind a steering wheel is not able to react to due to their incompetence, blood alcohol levels, sleepiness, or distraction, there is always a tragedy.

This tragedy has nothing to do with whether a machine or a human is controlling the car. It's a tragedy of an unfortunate circumstance.

It is possible however that on an average the machine does better than or equal to a human. To determine if it is so, it requires testing. Which is being done. So what exactly is the problem? Why do you assume that the human level of intelligence is the end-all and be-all of doing everything? Time and again it has been demonstrated that human intelligence is biased towards certain kinds of tasks. And it is debatable if driving is one of those, considering it is something humans have started doing only in the last 150 years or so at most.