So in theory if you can get an electrical signal to the graphene, you can use it to modulate laser light up to 500ghz. Awesome!

That just leaves two fatal flaws:
1. You need to modulate the electric signal with useful information at 500ghz. I'm not an expert, but it seems like we're a long way off from being able to do that. Can anyone comment?
2. How do you demodulate such a signal?

Totally agreed. A helicopter that relies on the ground effect isn't practical. But neither is a human-powered helicopter. Practicality is obviously not the point here.

Not even close. Trusting people is *not* the same as faith in the religious sense. Not even close. When you trust an expert, you hold them accountable. If someone claims to be an expert and gives you advice that turns out to be wrong, you stop trusting them as an expert. In essence you use empiricism for evaluation which experts to trust.

It is ridiculous to conflate this with a blind belief in a supernatural entity with *no evidence*. There is *no* empiricism in religious faith.

It's a blurry line between ideas and implementations. For example, Edison wouldn't have been able to patent the "idea" of a bulb that produces light, but he was able to patent the "implementation" of using a metal filament in an evacuated bulb, etc. But that's just an idea too, and you could say that the specific implementation would involve the exact size of the filament and metal composition, etc -- but that's more specific than his patent.

My point being: The term implementation in software tends to mean something much more specific than a patent is intended to protect. In software an implementation typically refers to the specific code. The lightbulb analogy would be the specific shape of the glass, the specific composition of the filament, the size, the way it's mounted, etc. Patents are *broader* than that, but not so broad that you can just cover some arbitrary idea like "an electronic device that produces light".

Wage depressing strategies?

I'm sorry, but this is BS. I'm an employer in California desperately searching for skilled programmers. I've been searching for about 3 months now and I haven't found any qualified programmers (java web developers) with a salary requirement less than $100k. Of about 50 serious applicants I've reviewed less than 5 have been citizens. A few of those were qualified but were looking for salaries at minimum of $100k.

The unqualified americans were looking for salaries roughly around the $60k mark. Compare that to the 45 H-1B applicants who were also not qualified, but given the job description I legally would be required to pay them $72k/yr.

From my perspective there's nothing wage depressing about H-1B visas. You're legally required to provide them the prevailing wage, and in my case I can find americans with similar skills for less than the legally required wage.

There is a serious lack of talented skilled american programmers. You can't find them until you get in the $100-$150k/yr range.

If you're a talented programmer 4 years out of college you can easily be making $100k/yr. I just can't see that being a deterring factor when people are deciding which career they want to go into.

Why would you pay for news? Perhaps because you value journalism? Because high quality journalism is essential for a well functioning democracy? Because you don't want to read news where 50% of the headlines are about Lindsay Lohan or "human interest stories"?

I'm very conflicted by this move from the times. In my opinion nytimes.com is one of the best sources of journalism on the web, and I've always been concerned that in the long run their business model wouldn't be sustainable. I think that paying money to support good journalism makes a lot of sense -- it's too important not to.

But $15/mo for the entry level? That's really disappointing. There are many readers that will not be able to afford this. I was hoping the entry level would be closer to the $5/mo mark.

Close, but not quite:
V=1.4e18 m^3
m = 1.4e18 kg
E = (1.4e18 kg) * (4187 J/kg*K) = 5.8e21 (21 -- not 24)
E/c^2 = 65 metric tons

Still, your general point is absolutely valid.

Less than 3000 people died on September 11th, which triggered two wars, the patriot act, erosion of privacy in many ways ,etc. This, for a change, is a *pragmatic* way to improve our society with not a lot of money and energy (again, compared to the cost of the war on terror for 3000 lives). 9000 lives per year and a measured response vs 3000 lives one time and mass hysteria and fundamentally changing society.... This does not even come close to being placed on the scale of "hysteria".

Just like a meter isn't a scientific term. No theories depend on the definition of a meter.

This move by mozilla is genius. Have you seen the kinds of things lawmakers are talking about, e.g. making it illegal for website to track customers? By proposing a much better mechanism Mozilla will hopefully prevent any sort of crazy no-tracking legislation from becoming law.

Of course these headers wont be universally honored -- that's not the point. If lawmakers find this solution to be inadequate the most likely scenario is they will mandate that website honor this header, which would be WAY better than the alternative of lawmakers unilaterally deciding how this should work.