Um, insulin pumps have been around for about 30 years, and very common for the past 15. They're already a huge improvement over injections. This level of "artificial pancreas", though, not so much. The glucose sensing technology, though dramatically improved from its debut a decade ago, is still primitive: it uses interstitial glucose, and lags behind actual blood glucose, requiring regular calibration with fingersticks. Combine that lag with the fact that a non-diabetic pancreas starts producing insulin even before food hits the bloodstream, and it's impossible for the system to react to food in a timely way. Worse than that, though, is the fact that insulin effectiveness isn't constant. It's less effective when you're eating a lot of fat, and it's more effective when you're exercising (and for some time after). Just measuring glucose levels isn't enough to tell the system how to react. Maybe eventually they'll manage to combine this with enough other sensors to actually be a real artificial pancreas, but I think that's a lot farther off, and we'll probably have effective islet cell transplants without immune rejection by then.

You think you're joking, but given that you can already play Tetris in Emacs, it's only a matter of time...

Where are we going?
Planet 10!
When?
Real soon!

So don't take a bath, get a 1.5 gpm showerhead, don't leave the water running while brushing your teeth, washing the dishes, etc. It will also rapidly become worthwhile to get a high efficiency clothes washer and dishwasher. Seriously, I live in a water-rich area, and even I do a lot of these things, so I don't think it will be too difficult for people to manage when they have a serious incentive to do so.

Hell, I wonder that now. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of drivers only barely escape disaster every time they get behind the wheel, mostly because their frequent lapses are adjusted for by other drivers who happen to be paying attention at that time. If two lapses occur simultaneously, *crash*.

Mostly the problem with nutritional studies is the impossibility of doing large scale, long term, controlled trials. See http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02...

I became a regular employee of the company I work for just this week, making me the newest in one sense.

I've been contracting for them since 2009, which would put me in the middle of the pack.

I started working for the company that merged into this one way back in 2003, and I'm the only one who used to work for that company still left, as well as having been at one or the other longer than most employees of the current company.

I'm not sure where the author gets the idea that Apple has stopped releasing security updates for older systems. The page linked from the summary lists updates for software for OS X 10.7 and up as recently as 16 December, a Java update for versions 10.6 and up on 15 October, and the most recent actual security update, also for versions 10.6 and up, on 12 September. Apple releases security updates when necessary, not every Tuesday like Microsoft. The fact that they've released an OS update, which includes security patches, for the most recent version of the OS without releasing one for older versions most likely means that the vulnerabilities addressed were not present in older versions; this has been the Apple release strategy for at least a decade.

Around here, if I'm in a hurry a car would most likely be slower. I frequently beat friends who are driving to places while I am cycling, mostly because the bike lanes don't get clogged with traffic nearly as much as the car lanes, and there are a few very useful shortcuts on bike paths.

If I'm going someplace unfamiliar, though, having a navigation aid is pretty useful. I find that the voice directions from my phone mostly work.

I just spent two weeks in Italy, plus a couple of days in Ireland, and did not encounter a single place where my magstripe cards were not accepted. This included several ATMs, a couple of train ticket vending machines, and a few retail point-of-sale terminals. I did use cash for a lot of transactions, but unless I was just lucky every single time, I am not very convinced of the supposed universality of chip and pin.

Separating the O2 from the C is easy, but it takes energy -- that's why plants need sunlight to do it. If we had a source of clean energy with which to perform the separation, we'd be better off just using that source directly and never generating the CO2 in the first place.

Is there something wrong with the word "soldier"?

Game of Thrones won the Dramatic Presentation, Long Form award last year (for the entire season), so I don't think it's that surprising.

Yeah, but BSD isn't Linux. :-P

(I was just going to say, "I use BSD, you insensitive clod.")

My apartment is 640 square feet, and around here that's pretty spacious for one person. 850 square feet would be quite big. Why do you need so much space? Do you have a multi-person family, lots of pets, or is it just that you've become accustomed to spreading everything out?

I'm not the only one who feels this way, either -- there wouldn't be such high demand for apartments in places like Manhattan (where many apartments are much smaller) if people weren't happy living in such spaces. There are a lot of benefits to density -- things like arts and culture and the ability to walk places without jumping in a car -- as well as advantages to smaller living spaces (lower heating/cooling bills, not having lots of space to fill up with junk that you'll have to deal with when you get old, etc.).