It's interesting to note that most of the top-tier research facilities of the past were backed by monopoly or near-monopoly corporations. Bell Telephone speaks for itself, IBM Labs was supported by revenue of a dominating computer manufacturer, Sarnoff is the old lab facility of RCA, which for a time had sufficient clout to pretty much set the price of vacuum tubes. Xerox was the dominant photocopier supplier in an era of large growth. In today's world, Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders on research, and they have their own cash cow from a software monopoly.

One wonders if the ability to fund basic research depends on having a nearly monopolistic revenue stream. And if that's the case, are we prepared to suffer monopolies to get the research that comes with them?

In this particular litigation, the plaintiffs and defendants made various stipulations. Notably the plaintiffs agreed to sue over primary copyright infringement but not on contributory (secondary) infringement. Defendants, on the other hand, agreed not to raise the various fair-use defenses that were available to them. In at least part of their brief the DOJ asserted that because of these waivers, this was not a useful test case for the Supreme Court because it wouldn't examine all of the arguments that could be made for each side. The DOJ didn't particularly come out in favour of IT rights; they just felt this wasn't the best case to settle them.

If the crops are reflecting all the light, what are they going to use to power photosynthesis?

That, of course, assumes that economics deserves to be treated as science.

Give him a break...he's suffering oxygen deprivation.

Lack of lab-to-lab reproducibility doesn't necessarily mean it's a hoax, although it can be a warning. I'd be a little more concerned about reproducibility on the original apparatus, but even that isn't a deal-breaker.

I recall sitting in a seminar on ultrafast laser pulses during my undergrad days and hearing about how some of the top labs in the world couldn't reproduce a particular piece of work. Eventually they discovered that some of the optical elements in the original test setup had a particular property that made it work (negative dispersion I think, but I don't remember for sure). No one, including the original researchers, realised it was important until everyone else's attempts failed and they started really looking at what the differences were between their test setups.

If you were dealing with 15-20 songs an hour, 24 hours a day I would expect the record companies would happily do business with you.

But truthfully if you're paying a nickel per play like the radio stations then you'd be renting, not buying, large quantities of music. For any music that you expect to play more than nineteen times you'd be better off going to iTunes.

I thought the same when I first read the article, but this is not the case. The transmission system is 735 kV AC. It was the eddy currents themselves that were DC. The Wikipedia article uses some funny comma placement, but you'll see further up that the system is definitely AC, except for a single high-voltage DC link that was completed much later.

Quebec is situated on the Canadian shield, which is primarily composed of insulating igneous rock. Eddy currents generated by the fluctuating magnetic fields that would normally dissipate in the ground in other parts of the world were instead directed into the power system, where they caused overloads.

The Wikipedia article on the Quebec electricity system for a slightly more detailed discussion.