i gotta wunda yzit dey tinkin wedadumwuns wen ryting disway canb far moar efishunt an expresiv. peepol who thro a fit abowt sumdin liek da cowrecked form uv der (they're, their, there) mussb dadumwuns cuz da meenins clear frum contxt... uddawyz der, der, an der woodall sownd diffrnt to. point izat if i sed der sittin ova der on der lawn, yad no wat i meen, so ynot makit da same for rytin. There are occasions that call for communicative and thus linguistic precision, which demand the correct use of words, syntax, grammar and so forth. However the notion that any non quantitative language can be used with maximum communicative efficacy is foolish. For instance, a studied linguistic prodigy could write a whole story with what was intended to be communicated hidden (but nonetheless objectively discernible) in the etymology of choice words while maintaining a coherent facade--in other words steganography by etymology. Similarly a word might be used such that several of its meanings yield sensible interpretations. The mere fact that many words have multiple distinct meanings is enough to indicate that absolute precision in communication by this language is unlikely. Despite this lack of objective precision, communication is surprisingly robust; people often use words thinking they mean something other than what they actually mean, yet the intended meaning comes across (more often than not, in my experience). The modern paragon of this situation is the phrase "beg the question," commonly used as though it means "causes the question to arise." This usage is unequivocally false: the phrase comes from formal logic as the fallacy of assuming what is to be proven, first defined by Aristotle ~350 BCE. It's not just the uneducated masses who abuse conventions, a good number of celebrated authors have as well: Emily Dickinson's work is superficially characterized by a distinct misuse thereof, Jose Saramago won the Nobel Prize for literature for a book that abandoned all rules regarding punctuation of speech, and for his best known work "A Clockwork Orange" Anthony Burgess successfully discarded much tradition in favor of a largely fabricated and evocative lexicon. Even authors for whom the principle intent is not to explicitly subvert tradition will occasionally see fit a bit of unrestrained expression. Intentional subversion of convention is not necessarily better than the accidental, as the important consideration is efficacy of communication; if technically incorrect writing communicates more effectively than the cowrecked alternative it must be qualitatively superior. Objectively the rules of writing should only matter as much as they aid in communication since it is the primary objective. This is a good thing, as the rules of writing are so complicated that even professional authors require editors to point out all the errors. If technical proficiency is more important than communication then language kinda loses its point, amirite? Clearly there are cases in which abandoning standards is more effective or desirable than abiding by canonical stricture, thus rendering the concern at hand nebulous. Are we simply to assume that people who replace 'because' with 'cuz' are idiots, or is it possible that certain other people are inflexible pedants unable to realize that 'cuz' is an efficient, effective and unambiguous replacement of 'because'? The truth is that language is evolving, as it has from inception, the only difference being that presently it is happening fast enough for crotchety pedagogues to notice and complain. If it weren't for such odd sociological pressures I think this evolution might happen much faster, at the very least cuz it does (with intriguing results) when distinct languages intersect. Some portion of people who started reading this won't make it to this point cuz of my possibly disconcerting choice of ostentatious diction (further rent til but a tortuous enigma did remain :P), which is too bad because they don't get to see this part where I expose my erudite articulation to be a Planck thick veneer over an idiocy so profound it is capable of using cuz and emoticons, and in, liek, a run on sentence. Another portion will get here having not fully understood what I've intended to communicate. Notice that for both of these cases it isn't my failure to comply that causes a communication breakdown but my technically acceptable overzealous use of multisyllabic words that might appear on the GRE. To me the emergence of glyphic phenomena such as lol, \o/, lmao, :/, :|, :), :D and :P indicate a previously irrelevant deficiency in the ability of our communication medium and language to express ourselves sufficiently; in other words it's really hard to convey any emotion in the terse typed (not even handwritten!) form which has recently rapidly grown to unprecedented ubiquity. To not recognize the validity of these modern phenomena even in traditional print just seems stodgily conservative. Similarly if my use of unconventional symbolic representation lowered a persons judgment of my already limited intellect, I would cease association with them over concerns oftheir mental stability. I cannahelp but tink dat deybdadumwuns, tinkin as dey do dat da comma is anemor dan vizul garbish.

Emphasis on directly, we've been able to coax human adult somatic cells to become pluripotent stem cells since 2007. The "ethical issues" are pretty much old news, bringing it up almost feels like troll bait. TFA suggests that these cells are much less prone to cancer than iPSCs, which seems like a rather important bit the summary omitted.

Electric bicycles are a great idea for advancing fitness and reducing energy consumption and pollution, but Sanyo did a terrible job at realizing this. Like the eneloop, most e-bikes have the electric motor mounted as the hub of the front wheel, and this is idiotic for a number of reasons. For one, this placement fails to utilize the ~21 gears that happen to be on the bike already, failing in turn to utilize the variability in power and speed. Second, having the motor in the front hub puts all sorts of stress on the forks, limiting the maximum power and accelerating wear on one component you really wouldn't want to fail during run time. Proper chain oriented pedal assist systems are fully possible, I guess Sanyo just figured it was safer to copy the same design that many others have been peddling with limited success. Sigh.

I totally agree with you, we Americans are all slaves! But then... doesn't that make us free? Huzzah, Americans are free at last! But wait, that means we're all slaves....

Ok, ok. The real point imo is that there is no such thing as freedom in terms of government, it's just an empty word thrown around to stimulate nationalistic emotions or whatever else. True governmental freedom would be anarchy. Then again I don't think brainwash or mind control is real either; every bit of communication that reaches you is an attempt at mind control, some are just more damaging than others. Suffice it to say, if an argument is convincing and changes ones mind, well then it seems some form of mind control has taken place.

Exactly what I thought... 'sure, they'll steal a whole product without a moment's hesitation, but I'm sure my data will be perfectly private and safe with them."

Not that I'm going to change your mind about any of this, but... "The wear has occurred assymmetrically, with that part of the stylus which bears against the right-hand wall of the groove (as seen looking towards the cartridge,with the centre of the record to the left) showing more wear than the side bearing against the left-hand wall." "Neglecting factors such as the elastic deformation of vinyl, the distribution of forces in a V-shaped groove and the accelerations at the stylus tip during tracking, simple calculation based on these figures gives a stylus pressure of 240 grams per square mm, or 340 pounds per square inch. [...] The pressure exerted by a new (spherical or standard elliptical) stylus is even greater than the figure calculated above, as the area of contact of the new stylus tip with the walls of the groove will be less." from: http://www.micrographia.com/projec/projapps/viny/viny0300.htm "Since most vinyl records contain up to thirty per cent recycled vinyl, impurities can be accumulated in the record, causing a brand new album to have audio artifacts like clicks and pops. Virgin vinyl means that the album is not from recycled plastic, and will theoretically be devoid of these impurities. In practice, this depends on the manufacturer's quality control." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramophone_record#Vinyl_quality etc. I don't have any references for my final point, but who even bothers with cd's anymore? That's like so 90s :P. I've got a few hundred, sure, but I never have to change or handle them, they're all on my hard drive. IMHO, compared to (non-DRM) digital audio files, neither records nor cd's are even a contest.

96khz is major overkill. Find out for yourself, get a tone generator and I can almost guarantee you won't be able to hear 32khz, much less 96. The only reason I know this is because I've done it myself, curious about the whole 32/96 audio thing. Even with a brand new high quality record and a fully capable recording chain I've never seen frequencies much higher than 32khz (even though practically nobody could hear it anyway), in fact they often have considerably worse frequency response than digital audio. By extension, dvd-audio and SACD are a scam (as with most audiophile garbage).

A few years ago I worked in a record store where we actually sold more records more than cds. I own a relatively large number of records, contemporary and otherwise. Despite all this, It's my opinion that this is just a fad, one strangely ambling along at a lazy pace. I think the only reason it has been able to gain traction is because people don't realize all the pitfalls of records. To start, yes, records can theoretically sound better, but there are Many things that can get in the way of that: virgin vs. recycled vinyl, cold pressings, warping, dirty or worn stylus, imbalanced tonearm, etc. Even under optimum conditions the quality advantage of a record is gone after 5-8 plays, as friction heat from the stylus literally melts the signal irreparably; from then on, the sound quality will continue to deteriorate with each play. Most people start out saying that they like records because analog sounds better. Then, after I tell them this, their reasoning changes--they like records because the hiss and pops are warm and soothing. The question of quality aside, records are a pain to deal with! You have to handle them carefully, clean them often with specific supplies. After a couple of songs have played, you have to stop what you're doing and flip the record over (don't try putting on a Barry White record, it may set the mood, but only for a few minutes... and hopefully that's regarded as a problem). Some people say they enjoy the whole process involved with records, that by having to do all that work they are able to appreciate the music more. Fine, but personally, having to constantly fidget with the record player interrupts the pleasure I get from listening. Also, consider the weight and space records take up: I estimate about 50 records occupy a cubic foot and weigh at least 25 lbs. On the other hand, you can fit thousands of digital albums in your pocket. Records do have a certain sense of novelty to them, but it wears off fast; digital music is and will remain an incredible thing.

Not that I want to be associated with the anti gay marriage crowd in the slightest.... but humans are animals, conscious/sentient (in the way I presume you intend) are extremely poorly defined, and all mammals I know of have a period of adulthood, many plants do too.

I see it a bit differently. Consider the colonization and establishment of the US--it wasn't exactly done for profit. Likewise, although the initial push westward in the US was driven by the gold rush, the later and more substantial movement of people was enabled by the transcontinental railroad. Of course, the transcontinental railroad probably wasn't the best bet regarding short term ROI, but in the end I'd wager it was a momentous event for the economy such that everyone was made a winner, and to an extent that was probably difficult to anticipate in any ROI calculation. My point is that there's at least two ways we'll see exponential growth in human activity in space: space is profitable (the gold rush) as you say, and/or space is cheap (the railroad). The first numbers I've found from google suggest that it costs $22,000 per kilogram of payload to get something into space using rockets. IMO it's unlikely more than a handful of space-based ventures could see a profit with that kind of cost. The same site from whence numbers were pulled suggests that using a space elevator, a kilogram of payload would cost "as little as $1.48." Personally I think the precision of that figure casts its calculation into doubt, but even if their calculations were off by a factor of a hundred it would be still be decidedly more attractive. Wikipedia suggests that the Apollo program cost around $145 billion 2008 dollars, and I've seen figures suggesting that a space elevator would cost about $1 trillion. Personally I'd figure that the cost could vary high or low from there, but just as the Apollo program brought down the price of semiconductors (alone a boon to humanity as well as one of those unpredictable ROI elements), I imagine that the various products required would decrease in cost with time and scale just as has happened with genomic sequencing, etc. If anything, I think the only feasibility buzzkill for a US funded space elevator is the requirements concerning location, but on the whole it is my humble opinion that a space elevator is the obvious next step in the advancement of the human species. I don't think space colonization is possible without it, and until that happens the persistence of the human species will remain in doubt. I also think, as hinted, that the establishment of a space elevator will have an inestimable but desirable impact on the state and growth of science and technology.

I have an idea... don't buy the DLC. We can call this exercise of freedom of choice in spending, hm... capital punishment, wait, no... capitalism maybe? Or we could call it a boycott, it doesn't roll off the tongue the same but the upside is that we can call not buying the game at all a mancott. Mancotts are powerful because you can use all that time saved from not gaming to build that DLCBS resistance movement. Mancotts are not to be confused with ascots, apricots, mascots, Madoffs, or men in cots, which are all powerful in various other respects for various other non-revolutionary reasons.

I used to be super-excited too, until I realized that there's probably nowhere near enough easily accessible copper to affordably produce hundreds of millions of electric motors big enough to push all these really heavy 5 passenger/1 occupant cars around. Also, the Prius IS a fad; a 3,000 lb multi-engine 5-door hatchback is not a sustainable platform (even if you throw a dead-weight, useless solar panel on the roof). If we want a huge jump in energy efficiency, the first and technically easiest step is moving to ultralight single passenger vehicles, regardless of what fuel is used to power them. Less than 1% of the energy received from burning gasoline is used to propel the driver.

Not so much. I have a really loud stereo because *I* like it, not because I want attention; quite the opposite actually, I get really uncomfortable and stressed out when people focus on me (obviously, given that i'm posting here). A slashdot user with a loud stereo shouldn't be surprising... I like music, math, physics and electronics, and a serious car stereo is an obvious intersection of these sets. As a geek it's pretty exciting to blow a 65 amp fuse, to play with bridged amps, a big capacitor and 1-gauge wire.