Greg H.

So basically, what you're saying is that if the obtained experimental results don't match your theory, it's the experiment that's wrong. Check my signature. I have a feeling it applies. No serious scientist would ever make a claim like this - even within their own narrow subset of overall science. You know who does? Dogmatists and religious shills with an agenda to push.

So you are planning to explain all of this woo you've come up with, at some point in the future. Now would be a good time to start. Also, I was pretty sure you were planning to let the big pharma companies stumble across this thread by blind happenstance. You know, I'm not a biologist - never had the desire - nor am I an epidemiologist, or an Oncologist. But I do have a pretty well developed bullshitometer. And it's been pinging all the way through this thread.

I know they can obtain the records - that doesn't mean we should just give them carte blanche to use it whenever and for whatever they like.

0. You must play the game. 1. You can't win. 2. You can't break even. 3. You can't quit the game. -- Charles Percy Snow, CBE (1905 - 1980)

To paraphrase: You can have my phone's GPS data when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. On the subject of the OP, I'm not even willing to let them put a black box in my car. I'll be thrice damned if I'll allow them to microchip me like a farm animal. Religious implications aside, we are entitled to some privacy in our lives, and the US government has a very poor record when it comes to not exceeding the intended use of information that we give it.

Tell you what. Go take your idea to a major pharmaceuticals company. Since the cure for cancer would literally be worth billions of dollars, they should jump all over this. Forget the paltry sums associated with the Nobel Prize. Cash in my friend, buy a small island, and drink little fruity umbrella drinks for the rest of your life. Assuming your idea isn't basically snake oil, of course.

There's a local sky scraper here that my wife and I jokingly refer to as "the pointy dildo building". The sad part is, our friends are starting to call it that as well.

If you're looking at fiction, you could give a read to Larry Niven's Pierson's Puppeteers, and their Fleet of Worlds.

I would further add, why does it matter what "language" they think in?

I disagree. Animals can and do think - they may not think about abstract concepts like religion, the nature of the self, or politics, but they do think. Animals make choices all the time - "Do I nest here or there?" "Do I forage for food in this direction or that one?" "Do I attack that animal or run away from it?" "Do I knock all the stuff off this shelf before or after I take a nap?" (My cat made me add that last one). Like humans, they have to deal with the consequences of those choices. Robots on the other hand, do not have the free will to think for themselves outside of the bounds of their programming. If you present a robot with the exact same stimuli then it should, in theory, react in exactly the same way. An animal on the other hand (and I include the human animal) may or may not react the same depending on a variety of things including a vague sense of intuition that subtly change the context of the stimulus itself. Edit to add: Robots are becoming more and more complex all the time - there may come a time when they do develop the ability to exceed their programming. My statements above are directed more towards factory style assembly line robots rather than the more advanced experimental models.

Then let me define think, since I used it first. At it's most basic level, I would characterize thinking as the ability to accurately detect, process, and react to stimuli that impinge upon the organism.

I'll be honest, I've felt that for a long time what this country needs is to be a bunch of smaller countries - we have reached a point in population diversity where it is becoming nearly impossible to reach consensus on major issues. I don't trust the politicians in Washington in general, but to be honest, the last decade or so everything that the Republicans try and do just scares me. I keep hoping the party will officially split so I can actually vote for the moderate people that I tend to agree with more, instead of having to vote against their party in general because I'm too damned scared of what the extremists might be able to do if they win. To a lesser extent that goes for the democrats as well. What we really need is a third moderate party.

You're going to need to be more specific. What do you mean by "free will"? The ability for any thinking creature to arbitrarily determine it's own course through a non-deterministic universe? Or something else?

I'm a simple guy with simple rules. If a bug wanders into my home, I kill it by whatever means are handy. Outside, I generally leave them alone, but many a flying night critter has met their maker on my windshield.

Ahh. Well, that makes more sense that what I thought he was up to.

Question: Why would you need to convert the value to an integer?

I stopped reading right about there. If you were really unbiased, you wouldn't need to point out that your view is unbiased. That's a trick used by sophists to get people to subconsciously agree with them because no one wants to be thought of as biased and against the truth.

No. You're really not.

We do have the technical know how to create a gravitational tractor that can tug small asteroids. As far as a Star Trek kind of tractor beam, I'm going to concur with Ophiolite - we don't know enough about the physics of gravity to even begin building a tractor beam on the scale you're talking about. That said, see Tractor Beam on wikipedia. Scientists are working on the idea..

Never discount the ability of Internet cats to consume bandwidth. It's apparently their favorite food.

In summary, Keller, A.M. and Hendrix, M.S. (1997). Paleoclimatologic Analysis of a Late Jurassic Petrified Forest, Southeastern Mongolia. Retrieved on 09-25-2013 from http://origins.swau.edu/misc/paleocurrents/pdf/china-not%20so%20good-references%20etc/paleoclimatologic%20mongolia-keller.pdf

As Ophiolite said, yes, it is theoretically possible - if you subject it to a massive enough gravitational field, you can move a celestial object. Practically, it does happen when galaxies collide - as the stars of the two galaxies intermingle, they rearrange themselves according to the shifting gravity. To wit: Curious About Astronomy: Ask An Astronomer, Cornell University Astronomy Department. http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=354

The universe disagrees with you. Guess which one of two is wrong?

I'd like to add that unless you specify your measure of efficiency, the entire question is pointless anyway. Efficient at run time? Efficient at compiling? Efficient for the developer? That's a bit like asking if there are any faster routes to a destination without specifying the destination itself.

So the Russians let him keep and use his movie camera during a death march towards Siberia? That was my first clue this was crap.