Ultimately, the government is accountable to the people since the people grant the government the power to do what it does. The government thus has an incentive to please the people since those exercising that power usually wish to get re-elected. And if a government does something horrible enough, the people rise up and topple it and replace it.

I'd argue that most of recorded history indicates that citizens are willing to put up with a huge amount of government misbehavior as long as it's not directed towards them personally, and are also far too willing to let bygones be bygones in cases where draconian punishment is called for. The CIA's torture is only the most recent example. Again, we're talking about matters of life and death, which is far beyond the powers of mere corporations.

A corporation on the other hand is only accountable to the shareholders and its ultimate obligation is just to maximize shareholder wealth.

True, but a corporation is also obliged to follow the laws of the countries in which it operates, which includes the pretty much universal understanding that the government has a monopoly on force. The government can also invade my privacy at will, including interfering with my personal contracts with telecoms and Internet companies, but Google cannot simply decide to listen in on my cell phone conversations.

(And I'm not a libertarian, so I have no idea what your screed about libertarians has to do with anything.)

And you'd get no privacy with either, as well. So competition does not make a real difference to you

I hate to parrot the free-market fundamentalists, but seriously: if the privacy you speak of was really that valuable, there would be a market for it, and I could find a competitor who wasn't mining my emails for information. (And there probably is, I'm just too busy to look right now, and frankly I'd rather have the free service.) Or, hell, I could just buy a domain and set up my own email server, or do other fancy shit to hide from the eyes of Google, which is still perfectly legal, unlike (for instance) hiding from the IRS or setting up my own government.

Because in the end, Google gets your information anyways because I'm certain a significant number of people you email use Gmail. And on analysis, that can easily be 50% or more emails now archived by Google about you.

Which still doesn't negate points (2) and (3). What could they possibly do with partial email conversations? I don't put anything important and/or sensitive in email anyway - I mean, that's like the very first thing I learned about email ("don't send anything over email you aren't willing to have your worst enemies read", from my father who barely knows how to use anything beyond a word processor and web browser) and it is good practice regardless of who's running the servers.

And, frankly, while I'm reliant on email (i.e. GMail) for my professional activities, I have zero expectation of privacy there anyway. It would not kill me to do away with personal email altogether - I'd rather not do it, but again it's vastly easier to do than escaping the reach of the US government (or any other). But I find email convenient, and I am happy to trade away some privacy in exchange for the free email account and other nifty services. So Google knows I spend a lot of money on musical equipment, my mom doesn't like the GOP, and I'm incapable of making financial decisions without consulting my dad. So fucking what?

I've thought for a long time that 'big brother' will not come from governments, but from corporations.

A few of the many important differences:

1) Consent. No one is forcing me to use Google products. (Well, except my employer, which contracts with Google for email and various other services, but anything that they have access to is my employer's property anyway and I have no expectation of privacy to begin with.) I could completely banish Google from my personal life without severely impacting anything I do. It's a little more difficult to escape the reach of governments.

2) Competition. Microsoft and Yahoo would be happy to handle my email instead. I can't switch governments without physically moving to another country. (Voting doesn't count, and I don't vote anyway.) Conversely, it would not be a huge burden for me to jettison all Apple or Microsoft products, although it would be problematic for my music collection.

3) Force. Google does not have the ability to dispatch a SWAT team to break down my door, shoot my dog, and haul me out in handcuffs. And why would they, anyway? They don't care what activities I'm engaging in offline except for the purpose of targeting advertisements.

There are certainly all sorts of things that corporations can do to make our lives unpleasant, but it seems rather perverse to worry about creeping corporate dictatorship because of Google's ad targeting, especially given the track record of governments.

Why is this necessarily any worse than in the past? In the 20th century, countries run by insane fundamentalist cults managed to make some very impressive technological advances that could easily have been used to enslave the world if they'd happened a few years earlier. The fact that these cults weren't technically "religious" is irrelevant - they were driven by absolute conviction, blind faith, and messianic pretensions, and willing to use any amount of violence to propagate their worldview. Remarkably, the planet survived.

(The encouraging aspect of this is that both cults had some wholly unscientific blind spots that helped cripple them in the long term - for instance, the denigration of certain areas of physics as "Jewish Physics", and the mass exodus of Jewish scientists from 1930s Germany, which were among the many reasons that the US had nukes before Germany did.)

My favorite part about working with a Russian scientist: In the original Star Trek series, Chekhov often makes comments claiming specific discoveries or cultural artifacts as Russian - "discovered by famous Russian astronomer" or "old Russian fairy tale: if shoe fits, wear it". It's sort of a running joke, I assume related to the fact that 20th century Russian science tended to be totally cut off from the rest of the world. The really funny thing: THEY ACTUALLY DO THIS. And not just about historical discoveries either. I left a perfectly good job in large part because of this kind of crap.

I think you'll find many anti-vaxers & anti GMO people these days are Conservative homeschool sorts.

Sadly, no. I live an a notoriously lefty enclave and the level of anti-GMO (or anti-nuclear, or anti-cell phone radiation, etc.) sentiment is much higher here than in most of the US. I find it marginally more tolerable than creationism (which is almost entirely a right-wing phenomenon), but only because I especially despise the overtly anti-intellectual goal of indoctrinating children with creation myths.

This article only takes into account direct emissions. It neglects the CO2 emissions due to the energy used in the manufacture of said airplanes, which is proportional to their cost.

neither Branson nor Musk have ever said that their space ventures are anything other than a method of making them a bunch of profit

Musk has repeatedly stated that he wants to retire on Mars, and making orbital launches affordable is a first step towards that. It sounds a little nutty, but I wish him the best of luck anyway. If he succeeds, we should all benefit in the long term; if he only makes a fool of himself, at least he's not doing it with my money.

Anyone know what the efficiencies are on these sorts of "tabletop" laser particle accelerators versus say a linac? I'm curious as to whether it'd make an effective "tabletop" spallation neutron source

I don't know about efficiency, but the problem with the tabletop synchrotrons (which accelerate electrons, but X-rays are the primary product) is that their X-ray flux is much lower than the football-field-sized rings, which means they're not as useful for molecular imaging applications. My guess would be that the same problem would apply to a tabletop neutron source.

The headline could be confusing. The garage was significant. My point is that people extend the concept in their heads and imagine a lot more than it really was. That is the myth part.

I'd even say there has been very little fundamentally new stuff for the last 100 years.

Depends on what area of technology, and what you consider "new" as opposed to a "technical refinement" or "manufacturing advance". Does the transistor count, or is that just an incremental improvement on vacuum tubes? The physics required to build, say, an iPhone were mostly understood by the 1920s, and I don't think there was any theoretical work suggesting that it was impossible. On the other hand, the concept of ubiquitous handheld multi-functional computing and communication devices connected by a global network containing nearly all human knowledge required levels of technology that couldn't even be guessed at.

If you consider the life sciences instead, our background knowledge is as far beyond 1920s biology as the iPhone is beyond the telegraph, and revolutionary discoveries and technical advances are still being made.

Free market indeed, it's funny when the market is far freer in a politically communist nation

China has a huge number of trade barriers, including price caps on pharmaceuticals. The other half of the "free(er) market" you're describing is a failure to enforce IP rights (or, possibly, failure by companies to file the relevant patent applications in China, but that seems unlikely), so that pharma companies are having to compete with generic products that would be illegal in the US. You can applaud this if you like, but it's not generally considered a good environment for inventing new drugs.

Of course an experimental ebola vaccine wasn't worth that much in 2010 since the Africans needing it then didn't have lots of cash to pay for it.

Also: it's experimental, which by definition means that someone has to invest a lot of time and money figuring out if it actually works. Drug companies license experimental therapies like this all the time. Nine times out of ten (probably more), they're buying something that turns out to be worthless. When they actually get hold of something that really works, of course it looks like a steal in retrospect, but there's no way to predict that in advance. (Although I do sometimes wonder why academic IP holders don't push for profit-sharing agreements more often.)