I don't see how this is different for any country. If China's government wants something that your company has, and issues a subpoena or court order for it, and your company has a physical presence in China, they can hold those company officers in jail until you produce the information/item. Same goes for any country.

What you need to look at is the track record of the government(s) which your vendor operates under. I never hear about the government of Iceland causing problems with companies and their customers, yet I do hear about the US legal system causing a lot of problems. So if you have a choice between an Iceland-based vendor and a US-based one, maybe you should select the former.

If you don't like the law, you're free to go to another country. Isn't that the way you nutball Randians think?

This is the case for any normal country, as well it should be. I can't believe I'm defending Obama on something, but they're right on this one: if a country's legal system has a valid case for something, and issues a court order ordering you to turn something over, you can't just avoid a court order by saying "it's in my summer home in another country!". If you refuse, they can hold you in contempt of court until you decide to produce it. Maybe the other country can't be compelled to give it up, but you're in this country, and they can keep you in jail as long as they want.

I'm plenty curious, but won't be signing up for that first manned mission to the surface of the Sun -- we haven't been there either, the movie Sunshine not withstanding (and it didn't go too well for them anyway) :-)

Since you're on /. it's likely that no one's been to your penis either, but I'm not going to recommend NASA mount an expedition there... :-)

While "Because it's there and we haven't been" is a valid answer, it isn't really a good answer.

And, of course, once we start naming Dwarf planets, will want Elf planets, Hobbit planets, Orc planets, etc...

Though there's no absolute rules against a planet having those characteristics. Perhaps a planet caught by, not formed within, the system might match some/all of those, etc...

I can see the desire for have more specific names for different types of things, but I can also see the appeal in keeping things simple.

Many people don't seem to realise that by editing Wikipedia anonymously, you're giving away your IP address for everyone to see. I'd expected a comment to that effect here but didn't, so I'll be the first to post it.

In that sense, editing with a registered account is much more anonymous. Only some Wikipedia staff members can look up your IP address, so edits from Capitol Hill using an account won't be picked up by this twitter bot. Also, those staff members (should) have to follow procedures before they can look up your IP.

Some economists at Harvard got busted publishing fake crap that support hokey rightwing anti-tax ideology and nothing happened, they just said "oops, gosh, we just made a mistake using Excel" and it blew over. The lamest part is it was published in a supposedly peer reviewed journal yet their fraud was only exposed by an undergrad a public university.

Most likely "peer reviewers" only checked that the paper is consistent with "economics" (or whatever the specific "science" in question is). How often do they look for errors with mathematics or logic? No doubt such reviewers also tend to assume things like measuring instruments, software packages, etc being used correctly and that things which depend on another science havn't been misinterpreted/misunderstood.
Also this case appears to be a "genuine mistake". Whereas with actual fraud you'd expect at least some attempt at obsucation.

I have a lot of respect for physical sciences but these "human sciences" like economics and psychology are full of shit.

Those possibly arn't even the best examples. This sort of thing even has a specific term in the field of medical research :)

What kind of non-story is that? One link points to some guy writing about how some other guys went to study waves at different locations. It doesn't say anything about how they did it, or has any technical information. The other link is a PDF scanned from a paper from 1982. Slow day when you have 32 year old news?

Some of the papers in the field are highly cited, yes, because well, and here's the problem, everyone keeps citing each other in circles regardless of the actual impact.

Which can create a sort of positive feedback when it comes to citation. There will also be people who will take the amount of citations as being a measure of "quaility". Even when what they actually have is a "circular argument".
Then there's the issue of what happens if someone, especially an "outsider", discovers a problem with the original paper. With "lynch the kid (and deny the problem)" being the alternative ending to "The Emperor's New Clothes". (Possibly especially where there is no evidence of malicious action.)

The trick to being a lead researcher is finding a rich problem space for the students to work on that will attract grants.

This is likely to also result in all sorts of politics being attached to getting funding. At best only a subset of possible research areas, which happen to be PC, will get funding. At worst getting the "wrong" results means it then becomes even more difficult to attract grants.
Such a situation can easily lead to "research" which is either poor, even pseudo, science. Since there can be a lot more money in attempts at confirmation than attempts at falsification.

More of that high-quality Slashdot/Dice.com editing.

What's wrong with those Trojan authors nowadays? There are whole programming language implementations that run in less than 20KB!

Don't they code in assembler any more?