Cows are remarkably resilient too. Sort of funny story - my dad grew up on a farm with cows roaming around freely, and they also used to mix red ochre with old engine oil for painting buildings.. Yeah, you can see where this is going. One day one of the cows drank a bucket of the paint. The cow survived, but for the next 3 days it was excreting red dung all over the yard.

So much for worrying about liver failure in old age.

Frankly, a man in his 50s is less likely to produce new offspring so the accident is unlikely to be of tangible benefit to the gene pool.

It seems to me that part of the dynamic here is that highly skilled programmers in the US have less of a need to prove themselves in a competition like this - they probably already have good salaries and good jobs. Programmers in poorer countries are probably not as fortunate, though, and taking part in an international programming competition could provide a ticket to a more lucrative future working for a Western company.

If a hacker gets caught causing damage to a company's infrastructure it's hard to imagine him not going to jail and/or having to pay for the damages he/she caused. Given that Stuxnet spread around the world, do the victims get to send their cleanup bills to Uncle Sam?

I've watched debates on this topic for almost two decades and they never seem to go anywhere. People who believe in supernatural entities tend to justify their beliefs through less logical arguments, and people who do not believe in them have logical reasons to support their view; ergo there's no satisfactory middle ground - there's no common language between believers and non-believers.

This is a case of a belief that'll die with their adherents, as new generations seem to hold less superstitious world-views than their parents. Hallelujah to that.

FTFA:

This area definitively warrants further research - if nothing else, it could mean that Iris scans will have to be re-done every 5-10 years (a bit like passport renewals). Depending on the specifics of the cumulative degradation (i.e. how exponential the effect is), you could be looking at a 2,000,000% failure rate increase in 11 years.

To be fair, in the days and weeks ahead of the IPO I can't remember anyone thinking USD 38.0 was a reasonable price for this stock - it was obviously overvalued in relation to the company's revenues and arguably overvalued in relation to its growth potential. Everyone I know knew this, so I can't imagine people purchasing the stock at the opening price except for greedy speculators who hoped they could make a quick buck on the FB bubble before it popped. Regardless of what Jim Cramer et al will say in the coming days it's very difficult to feel bad for anyone who lost money betting on this overvalued IPO.

All that's left of them now is what mattered the most to the rest of the world.

The only bit which rang a bell FTFA:

Q: What's the last thing to go through a person's mind when thinking about buying a Russian superjet? A: A mountain

Vulnerable people who live in less safe areas are the most obvious candidates for self-defence courses, no? I don't see the Queen of England signing up for one of these.

A virtual gerbil running inside this tube projector coming to a Hollywood celebrity near you.

The medical industry has been using 3D voxel based imaging for a long time now, and this looks like a neat extension of existing techniques. The output looks quite grainy but this is probably partly down to kinect resolution, and partly down to compression. Based on the video my guess is that the voxel resolution is somewhere between 128x128x128 and 256x256x256 so worst case you could be looking at 10x more data than HD video at full frame rate.

This looks like a great little R&D project, but one has to wonder what the best market for this kind of live 3D videoconferecing would be - perhaps getting feedback on your golf swing or dance steps by a remote coach? It likely won't come cheap, and a decent (say 10 Mbps) network link is almost certainly going to be a requirement at both ends for decent performance.