AAPL was elevated to stratospheric heights because of a bubble in their stock. Every hedge fund on the planet was buying it because the price was going up and the price was going up because every hedge fund on the planet was buying it. Its not really useful to compare to a time its stock was at stratospheric heights due to speculators.

On the other hand since Jobs died they do seem to be completely sucking. Hiring Kevin Lynch from Adobe was the most vivid illustration of that I can think of. I wager Jobs would have instantly fired anyone dumb enough to hire that guy.

Its probably an interesting question if those same hedge funds are pushing GOOG to heights greater than it deserves. Android is doing well but its a has a weird business model.

Japan has been using unmanned helicopters to spray crops for decades. Yamaha makes them, though they are a little expensive. They are extremely good at it, the down wash from the rotor helps spread the spray all through the plants.

UC Davis, if memory serves, has started trials on them in the U.S. recently but the restrictive drone regulatory climate needs to relax a little

This argument was addressed in this paper - from 1928.

http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/jcanres/12/1/9.full.pdf

"but the primary causes of cancer aren't your damn food."

No, just the phytoalexins required to reverse tumors. You are wrong and should read more.

Cancer is caused by a number of things. Cosmic rays can do it. It's quite natural and nearly all the time the body takes care of it' cancerous cells can be fond at all times in all living things, they're just cells that didn't divide properly for whatever reason. You cam never stop that not do you need to. What needs to be addressed is the inability of some people under some conditions to have their immune system destroy these defective copies. This turns out to be because of a nutritional deficiency caused by industrial tampering in our food supply. See my comments near the top to see the actual molecular biodynamics involved.

The poor grow their own food. That's why. I don't have much sympathy for whites complaining in areas notorious for systematic oppression of blacks. Move if you can't take the karmic payback.

Bingo. There's a huge lag in the discovery and acceptance of new ideas.

In the 1600s Jaques Cartier sailed from France to Canada and a planned return to France in the fall was delayed and they were forced to stay on the ship in a Montreal winter (notorious for being extra cold; you always want to buy a winter coat made in Montreal, not Toronto). They of course began getting ill from scurvy and when close to death the natives were finally asked for help. One them went to look at the men, shook his head, scraped some bark off a pine tree, boiled it in tea an the next day they were all better.

They get back to France and tell of this wonderful cure for the scourge of the seas (thought to come from "foul vapors" from the bottom of the ship) and what was the reaction of the "medical establishement" in Europe? "We have nothing to learn from savages" and the discovery of vitamin C was put back a while.

Modern medicine is utterly brilliant at surgery - we can fix nearly anything now. But chronic disease? Check for yourself, there's been no appreciable progress in what... 50? 100 years?

What it always comes down to in the end is a fundamental choice of therapeutic modalities, do you:
1) create synthetic drugs to manage the symptom
or
2) identify the biochemical fault and correct it.

that is, it's always better to work with the body and fix the broken bits (it's been said all non-infectious chronic disease is a nutrient deficiency of some sort) then to introduce synthetics to manage a particular symptom the additional complication being when the body sees a molecule it recognizes it knows what to do with it, but synthetics - since they're foreign to human biochemistry there are without exception side effects. In the US alone there are > 100,000 deaths every year from prescription "medicine", currently the third leading cause of death after heart and cancer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iatrogenesis

"In the United States, figures suggest estimated deaths per year of: [1][18] [19][20]
12,000 due to unnecessary surgery
7,000 due to medication errors in hospitals
20,000 due to other errors in hospitals
80,000 due to nosocomial infections in hospitals
106,000 due to non-error, negative effects of drugs
Based on these figures, iatrogenesis may cause 225,000 deaths per year in the United States (excluding recognizable error). An earlier Institute of Medicine report estimated 230,000 to 284,000 iatrogenic deaths annually.[1]
The large gap separating these estimates from annual deaths from cerebrovascular disease suggests that iatrogenic illness constitutes the third-leading cause of death in the United States; after heart disease and cancer.[1]"

ASA controls inflammation which is often the source of mutagenesis.

Like all NASIDS they impede the formation of E2 series prostaglandins which control inflammation, so there's a short-term/long-term component to think about.

ASA hasn't been shown to do much here afaik, cite 'em if ya got 'em.

I'd point out it works, and your team has no clue. At this point the number of cancer cures from intravenous C exceeds those cured by radiation and chemo combined[1] - which often cause more cancer than they cure.

Enjoy your high salary while you can.

[1] Brian Sparkes, pers. comms. 2009
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Sparkes

If you're trying to suggest it doesn't work (without actually knowing what it does) you have the problem of explaining what it is than that reversed the cancer in the 11 people in those three clinical trials.

And you also need to explain this:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2012%2F06%2F02%2FMNI11ORI84.DTL

"I don't have time to debunk your misunderstanding about science"
Translation: "I haven't read anything you're talking about but I know it's wrong" - the logical fallacy of the argument from ignorance. It's a shame you didn't even notice the refernces and pointers given, let alone actually read them.

There's a chance P53 doesn't work the way you think it does.

Here's an easier to digest synopsis for those short of time:

The Cytochrome P450 enzyme CYP1B1 [1] only occurs in cancer cells [2]. When certain phytoallexins such as reservetol and salvestrol are ingested these phytoallexins are converted by the P450 enzyme into picetannol [3], which is fatal to cancer cells but not human cells [4].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYP1B1
[2] http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/57/14/3026.short
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piceatannol
[4] http://www.nature.com/bjc/journal/v86/n5/abs/6600197a.html

This is old and there are newer references now but this should at least explain how the idea works and gives you some explicit papes to go chase down.

At this point chemo and radiation are total dead ends and should be stopped immediately.

Also curious is Potter had convinced the British government to give this stuff to everyone, big pharma talked them out of it.

You need to read medical history. Cancer was virtually unseen prior to 1900. But it has been known for 7000 years at least.

The first notice of work/toxin related cancers were chimney sweeps in the late 1800s. Enough of them got testicular cancer that a causative link was established. This was the first of the industrial cancers. Come 1900 and radical modernization of industry and the rate just starts shooting up culminating with the post-WWII idea that without antifungals (which turn out to be the thing that's doing the bees in) chemical fertilizers and pesticides we can't grow enough food to feed the boomers.

No go back 50 years prior to and read a gardening book from that era, say "Garden magic". The number of times they advise to spray "lead arsenate" in that book is phenomenal. Try doing that today. Point is that seemed quite reasonable in the day.

It's not our ability to detect it that's changed, it's how soon we can detect it that's changed. That's why people are living longer with cancer. They're not really, we can just identify it sooner. The cure rate has not changed since 1900; thats why Potter's stuff is so exciting, we've actually figured out what part of the body failed and why.

If Morocco was the only poor country where people died early that would be a good point.

I wonder if it's real or some really horrid chemical they can't quite get safe enough to use without dissolving your veins. That's the problem with that "discovery" in Sask. that cured cancer in rats. That's because rats can't scream as their veins dissolve.

Put on your thinking caps, why has cance shot up since 1900? What changed?

In 2007 or so, a Cytochrome B enzyme was found - CYP1B1 that only occurs in cancer cells. Fresh off the end of a successful prostate cancer drug, the first one with a new paradigm - something other than "kill ALL of the cells and pray" (See: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2012%2F06%2F02%2FMNI11ORI84.DTL) that exploited CYP17, Potter then set out to make a more generalized one based on the nearly universal CYP1B1. He designed the molecule then set about to make it and while looking for precursors noticed the exact same molecule occurs in fruit, made in response to mold.

So they tried it, and it worked. Every time. It gets converted in cells with CYP1B1 to picotaneol which is fatal to cancer cells but not regular cells. If you google "Salvestrol case studies" you'll find three clinical trials where cancer was reversed in every case. It's not patentable...

So, the current hypothesis is, since we began spraying anti-fungals, there's no mold so the plant doesn't make this chemical in response to mold, so non-organic fruit contains only 10% of what unsprayed fruit has. And it's a very bitter chemical and we breed bitterness out...

Cancerous cells can be found in any animal at any time, the body takes care of them. The problem arises when it can't, and we find Gene P53 is deactivated in those people. This reactivates it; once the body has the correct raw materials it gets down to work.

It's always better to help the body do what it does naturally and has for millions of years compared to some synthetic noxious substance. If nothing else understand that with a chemical that's already in the body all the time, the body knows what to do with it. With man-made drugs there are always side effects in every case as the body has no idea what to do with the molecules it doesn't recognize and they latch on to places they shouldn't and hellooo side effects.

There are 30,000 deaths a year from these side effects.

This chemical is found in tangerines and prune plums, strawberries, asparagus and so on. Tangerines have the most. Which raises an interesting question. Do areas that grow a lot of tangerines have a lower cancer rate. That would be Morocco.

It's not on the list of per capita cancer rates WHO keeps, that's quoted in Wiki. That list ranges from South Africa as the lowest (about 250) to Denmark with the highest at 387 or something. Note also that poor countries have less, developed countries have more... poor people grow their own food and can't afford chemicals.

But, if you poke around on the Moroccan government website long enough, you find their per-capita cancer rate: 100. Less than half the lowest stat WHO has for any country. And besides having all the tangerines, they pretty much invented chain smoking there. But still: 100.

So, if these guys are using this mechanism and trying to make a patent end run, bad. If it's something else, some noxious chemical, it's equally worthless. If however they have a new agent that also uses the pro-drug paradigm Potter found, then that would be good.

But there's a reason they don't give any details on this compound and I'd really like to know what it is.

Politicians would generally be clueless enough to not grasp that rapidly evolving technology has eliminated the need for human involvment in the analysis part most of the time. A crafty bureaucrat would let them restrict his human staff and point to this as proof for how our civil liberties are being protected.

Meanwhile in the server room the AI's are raping us.

Unless AC's are using Tor or a public computer, the NSA knows who you are.

Someday soon there will be no anonymity on the Internet.

I've been wondering, maybe the NSA's analysts are constrained from spying on American's but are there loopholes allowing AI's to spy on them instead?

Actually one of the Bush's started that, Obama is just continuing and expanding it. All of the other people I listed would have kept it too. Its probably the only tool that can attack Al Qaeda affiliates around the globe without the quagmires involved in invading countries to root them out.

I don't think drone wars are the worst thing happening right now, they are the least bad alternative to fighting Al Qaeda affiliates. The two down sides are A) killing innocent bystanders which radicalizes all their friends and family B) it can be over used to kill people who probably shouldn't be killed. Since its such an easy way to fight a war chances are everyone will be doing it soon and it things are going to get really messy. Read Suarez, Kill Decision