I think most people are (or would be) impressed at Watson's ability to retrieve data, crunch data and output it into human-understandable information almost instantaneously. I doubt many people would see it is a reliable "last word" in medicine though.

I believe Watson, in practical application, would help solve the human problem of "digging up" the information necessary to produce the best diagnosis and treatments possible. Several years of medical experience, training and keeping up to date with medical sciences is necessary to actually make the best possible decisions. As a result, there's a huge amount of information from many facets of medicine for doctors to parse, much of which can be outside their area of expertise... specialty areas, the latest on break outs, internal medicine, statistics, demographics, new illnesses and so on... This kind of crunching sounds like something Watson can help with. If it can, it could greatly assist doctors of all kinds.

However, Watson will not replace (competent) humans in the actual decision making process. Ultimately, we are far, far, far away from making a question and answer machine that will usurp human judgement (even with all of its flaws). It could offer a valuable second opinion, though... and at the very least could make a great "research assistant".

How exciting for our farming industry. Just think of the benefits!

This is probably less grandstanding and more of just ignorance. It's clear by the statement that Mr. Lombardi didn't understand the intention of the app. If the Vatican understood that the intention is not to confess to the device but to use it as a tool to aid "real" confessions, then maybe their opinion would be different.

On the other hand, it is probably difficult for anyone to come to that conclusion with news headlines reading, "Can the iPhone forgive your sins?" and "Make confessions through your iPhone" etc...

Brilliant. It fits so perfectly into this discussion. If only I had mod points...

Well, if you're aim is to INCREASE this synaptic EM phenomenon in your brain, then yes.

one of the kids had brought in a ham radio

Mmmm, a radio made entirely of ham. How I yearn for the old days.

Everyone knows zombies have poor reflexes

[blockquote]Sidenote: why is this article tagged "microshit"? Really?[/blockquote]

It's tagged !microshit, which means NOT microshit. ! is a reference to programmatical methods for representing "NOT" equal to.

I don't know what I'm talking about, BUT I believe this is less about mineral sources and more about the convection of ocean currents and the weight of salinated water.

The article says that the snake gave birth to a litter of all female snakes, only with a peculiar chromosomal makeup -- WW instead of ZW (female) or ZZ (male).

What I wonder is what the significance of WW is versus ZW, since YY in human terms isn't viable.

I also have to wonder what good this is in nature if all such snakes can produce are female offspring. On at least the surface -- unless asexual reproduction is common -- this be a seemingly not-so-useful adaptation in terms of survival.

3.0 is backwards compatible with 2.0 as long as you use a USB 2.0 cable. USB 3.0 cables have longer connectors.

Given that any games you download are *expected* to be loaded with DRM. If it weren't for that, I imagine the numbers would be quite different. I feel there's a very disturbing expectation that if you don't have a physical copy, you somehow own it 'less' because some companies try to shame you into feeling like a criminal by default.

Tell people no DRM would be involved and they really *owned* the games they downloaded and try the survey again -- the results would be different.

Unforutnately, it would appear your humor gland is broken.

Well, that explains it.

Easter is attributed with the sale of 50 million games. This year, Easter came in March (a surprisingly good month), not April like it usually does (a surprisingly dismal month).

Perhaps this isn't the sole reason, but I'm sure it's part of it. There's really nothing to see here.