I would not have thought so, but kittens actually make that little sick feeling worse.

Any logical operation you like, actually.

A modern electronic equivalent of this might be Content Addressable Memory, a specialized type of memory sometimes used in network routers.

With Virtual Reality
we can create the Iraq we dreamed of
where the people
greet us as liberators

Distraction and Holy Fire are two of my favourite books. I wonder when he's going to do one for Asia :-)

Zenith Angle... maybe it's a straightforward technothriller, but I couldn't help thinking that most of the things the protagonist does *don't make any sense*, they're an incoherent reaction to an incomprehensible attack, and maybe that was Bruce's perfectly deadpan point.

Evolutionary game theory predicts that people should act like psycopaths.

The current crop of atheism enters evangelical territory when they try to argue that this is not the case. Their argument that atheism can form a viable basis for ethical behaviour is incomplete, and they are trying to pretend that it is not.

Madness? This is Sparta!

'Morally dubious'...

Wow, a recursive definition of sin!

'Bioethical' violations...

Bio-unethical violations are fine.

Let us not forget that plants are already terrifyingly weird eukaryote-prokaryote hybrids.

The great tree of life isn't actually strictly speaking a tree...
http://www.tolweb.org/tree/

Just encrypt the damn thing already. Really, it's shocking we still send packets in the clear. You wouldn't send a letter in a clear envelope.

For P2P it's even easier, because the server doesn't need to be unduly overloaded with crypto computation.

There really is technological fix here.

Perfectly good carbon in those menus. Convert it to terra preta by pyrolisis and sequester it.

Crash: There is more open-source bioinformatics software than you can poke a stick at. The genome itself has also been downloadable for some time now. Grab yourself a copy here:

ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/genomes/H_sapiens/

Have a browse through the GBK files, which have gene annotations describing what is known about gene function. These are the product of a large amount of experimental work by researchers all over the world, and are being added to all the time.

Anything involving actual biology, such as getting a microarray done or a genome sequenced, remains expensive, though this is changing scarily rapidly. See for example the new generation of short read sequencers, such as 454, Solexa, and SOLiD.

Meanwhile, 99% of scientific publication remains behind ridiculously expensive paywalls.

I always feel slightly dirty when I login through my university's site license.

I can see several problems with this rocket design, and I'm not even a rocket scientist:

- It seems to be nearly 100% cabin space. Where does the fuel go?

- If we're talking about reaching orbit here, you need multiple stages for that. Or are we just going to launch our children at the enemy?

- Made of cardboard.

:-P me wants a cardboard SpaceShipOne

William Gibson had heart from the start. Tumbledown punk surrounds have so many more spaces for heart than your classic retro-future. Y'all just catching up now?