Which is why the war in Iraq was not just stupid and wasteful, but PROFOUNDLY, UNIMAGINABLY stupid and wasteful.

Q. How long does a Coin last? Do I recharge it? What happens when my Coin’s battery dies?
A. Coins are designed to last for 2 years under normal usage and do not need to be recharged. Once the battery dies you will need to replace your Coin.

For $100? I don't think so.

However, there is a clear difference between a fraudulent paper, and a shoddy paper in which the experimental results are clearly an error.

Catching fraud can be very tough for a reviewer, since they pretty much have to rely on the author's word that the primary evidence exists. They don't get to go look at the students' lab notebooks, or whatever. If someone wants to fabricate a graph, or photoshop a gel, that's going to be hard to figure out. It's only going to be caught when someone with the interest, knowledge and proper resources attempts to replicate the experiment.

In this case, the fake paper's conclusions are clearly a mistake. They state a dose dependency, and then show a graph with a flat line. Kindergarten mistakes. Even an undergraduate with a basic understanding of what a biological assay is should be able to spot the wrong conclusions right away. You'd literally have to not read the paper to not miss it. If that gets past a reviewer, that's a much bigger problem.

Close. The reviewers are actually the anonymous party, and they see the author list. So there's much more potential for abuse.

A quality editor can usually see through bias in a reviewer, and I've seen them override a reviewers decision if they think there's a problem. There have certainly been unfair, biased reviews from people with an agenda (arguably it's more common in grant reviews, in my experience), but this is not usually perceived as an endemic problem. In many journals, a submitter can recommend reviewers, and can recommend against reviewers whom they don't want to see the paper. With some exceptions, scientists are generally a pretty ethical lot since we all have to live with the peer review system, and thus everyone knows that rampant abuse would just hurt everybody.

Or, even more likely there is a law enforcement database of known child porn images, and you look for what you know is out there. In my soul, I have to believe that the generation rate of new kiddie porn images is low enough that law enforcement keeps up with it, and investigates when new images start showing up at the dark crevices of the internet that distribute them.

>Define "you". Some "you"'s government folks want to harm by definition.

Plus, over the course of a lifetime, the "you"s change.

I don't want to defend WoW too much, as I just quit, but I have to disagree when people who haven't raided since TBC say that the raids are too easy. Raid mechanics in Cata and MoP are very complex. Vanilla and TBC was almost entirely a matter of gearing to be able to burn the boss. You can still do that to some degree in MoP, especially if you're just doing the super-dumbed-down LFR raids (meant for beginners, or gearing). But many bosses in the current tier of normal and hard-mode raid content are at least as complex and unforgiving in terms of movement and raid awareness as the Lich King fight was back in Wrath. Every other bit of content outside of hard-mode raids are very dumb and simple, but don't dismiss the current raids.

With that tag, that is the single most hilarious list I think I've ever read.

Probably because Arabidopsis is one of the most well studied plants in terms of its genetics, and, thus, easier than other plants to genetically modify.

Luciferase genes are common throughout nature. Not just fireflies. It's just where they were studied from first. There's no heat produced - it's essentially the most efficient light source we know of. Far more efficient that anything we can manufacture. The actual reaction is not terribly different from one of those plastic glow sticks, just a biological form of it.

The only problem I see is that I just can't see how it's going to be very bright. I remember a classroom demo where the professor took purified luciferase and the reactants you need, and it lit up and glowed for a while, but petered out pretty quickly. The bio reaction is ATP-dependant, so having a plant with a bright light is going to have to consume tons of energy that the plant would rather be using to maintain normal processes.

What's really going on? There must be some other way we're being screwed here....

Not exactly. Most (all) states fund those jobs at least partially with federal funds that they receive. So, is it really state money? I guess.

This is the problematic viewpoint. Air traffic controllers, police, fire fighters, teachers, etc are not double cheeseburgers that would be nice to have but we don't need. There are many government-funded employees who ARE the baked potato and beans that we survive on. Funding for basic research is slashed as well, so that we're not investing for the future either. Defense spending is more than all of that - the cheeseburger we probably don't need now - and that got cut too. Sequestration was supposed to be so painful to both sides that we would avoid it. Didn't work thanks to the Tea Party maniacs who are unwilling/unable to compromise to cut and tax effectively (in other words, lead).

Careful. The Superman "S" shield was different on first publication than it is today. Also, underpants-over-tights is not the "real" Superman's costume anymore. Why do you think they changed Superman's costume last year? Why do you think the movie costume is quite a bit different from tradition?

IANAL, but it seems like soon you probably could make a Superman movie based on Action Comics #1. However, it better not mention Krypton or Kryptonite, and don't use any of the well-known supporting characters outside of Lois Lane and Ma and Pa Kent. Oh, and that Superman can't fly, no super-speed, no heat vision, etc.

> what does a doctorate in Organic Chemistry actually qualify you to do for a job, besides teach at a university in a self-perpetuating cycle? (I'm randomly guessing maybe something in pharma? I honestly don't know.)

Ten years ago a PhD in Organic Chemistry was one of the surest employment routes at many Pharmaceutical companies, big and small. Organic chemists synthesize molecules, which is critical in the long and expensive drug discovery process. However, since then pharma has moved to the creation of randomized synthetic methods using robots and extremely simple reactions to make libraries of millions of molecules (combinatorial chemistry), and discovered that India has an extremely well-trained chemistry work force, and so the US job market has imploded. Along with that, the biotech stock bubble popped and there are a lot fewer small companies and start-ups around now to hire these people.