Life timeline on earth (in millions of years ago): Earth formation - 4,600; First life (simple cells) - 3,600; Dinosaurs ~ 300; Humans ~ 2.5; If we use that for comparison, and best case scenario of Vega having something very similar to earth, it is highly unlikely that it can host even the most basic of life forms..

hahaha i was being sarcastic

All three antivirus checkers lose 3 points in just three months? also, "Yes, Windows Defender is enabled automatically when no other antivirus is present, but its technology comes from the Microsoft products that failed the recent tests. Don't rely on it. Install a better antivirus right away." sounds like an ad by one of its competitors

agreed, although my reason for using MSE is that it never finds anything and never bugs me with stupid popups telling me how it found a super deadly trojan , about once every few days, reminding me of its absolute importance.

Sounds like a really bad idea to try to control a 5000lb car with your mind that can barely stay focused on one thing for more than 5 seconds It would be a lot easier to just input the destination and have your car take you there autonomously! But thats just waay too far fetched =)

Among other things, China is developing a pretty good sense of humor

I have been working on optical gyroscopes for the last three years, they are nothing new, and they are already being widely used in satellites , missiles, drones and etc, the idea has been around for a long time, what this horrible article is referring to is newly funded research to enhance their sensitivity and accuracy. Currently, they have to use up to 8 (depending on accuracy needed) gyroscopes per missile/satellite to get enough resolution. Hopefully this research will yield cheaper and more accurate systems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibre_optic_gyroscope

Because this planet is still mainly inhabited by humans, not robots ;-)

thanks, that makes sense. I didn't realize error correction was so ridiculously inefficient. According to your description, you would get a speed up from just sending copies of each packet just in case one of them gets lost.. at a certain amount of redundancy you will get 0% of packets lost and even though you are sending perhaps 4 times as much data, it is still way faster than having to go back and figure out which packets got lost and request them again..

I've only read the abstract of the article and this is probably a stupid question but as i understand it, this algorithm is designed to efficiently recover lost packets in the transmission, so when the article claims that "MIT found that campus WiFi (2% packet loss) jumped from 1Mbps to 16Mbps" shouldn't the increase in speed be only 2% and not 16x?

is it ..... MERCURY?

no i understand what the intended use of watermarking is.. but if you really think about how mp3s spread you'll see that by the time they catch a stolen/leaked mp3 it will already have gone through like 50 computers that can't be identified since it was shared through torrent or some p2p program. So yeah, you trace it back to the person who actually paid money for it / leaked it , but just because its the same file doesnt mean that this person is the one who leaked it. Plus people getting advance releases before their official release is not what causing label companies to lose money, its just someone buying a cd thats already out and then sharing it with the rest of the world..