Chemical lasers are far from obsolete, and the place they're still useful is this exact type of continuous high-power application. Jefferson may have pushed a FEL to 14 kW, but the laser bolted to the plane delivers megawatts of continuous power.

I have no doubt that FELs will eventually surpass chemical lasers for this sort of application, but right now they're nowhere near ready for this sort of application. And if you think back the 15 years or so to when this project was conceived, they were even less ready. I'm sure the upgrade to FELs will come along sooner or later, but choosing them for the first-generation design would probably have delayed this project quite a considerable amount.

The problem may be fixing itself, however - journal costs are getting so out of hand that many universities are cutting back on journal subscriptions, which means that open access journals are getting higher citation counts because they're all some researchers can access. While it'll be a while before they're going to displace heavies like Nature or Science, many free-to-read journals like PLoS Biology or the New Journal of Physics have higher Impact Factors than their closed brethren, meaning that at a glance they're at least as pleasing to the bean-counters as a comparable pay-to-view journal.

The only issue remaining is the slight distastefulness of pay-to-publish models - The coupling of acceptance of a paper to income is slightly troubling, although a more robust solution is not immediately apparent.

You're so right about the mercury in vaccines! But that's only just the beginning! I've done some rigorous research on these vaccines, and found that they also contain molecules which contain carbon and nitrogen! Now, I know what you're thinking, the vaccine people say this is safe. But these are the constituents of cyanide, a deadly poison! How can they put this in our children?

Seriously though, these vaccines are not floating in pools of liquid mercury - they contain a preservative which contains atoms of mercury as part of its chemical structure. Something which is hazardous in one chemical form is not necessarily hazardous in another. The mass removal of thiomersal from vaccines was mostly a measure to allay public fears because of the scary associations that could be drummed up by saying "mercury!" There is no rigorous epidemiological evidence for a correlation between thiomersal and most of the conditions it is claimed to cause.

And with regards to the "safer" comment - a sense of scale is sometimes lost here. People warn about the "one in a million" chances of something going wrong with your vaccine, while overlooking that not taking the vaccine exposes you to a much greater chance of dying from wholly preventable diseases - hundreds of un-vaccinated children have died from diseases which should have been prevented since this "controversy" started. There is no conceivable risk-benefit analysis where the risks of giving your child some of the panel of common vaccines are greater than the risks of not doing so.

The reason nobody cares about the particular unlock method Valve may plan to use when they go belly up is that Steam is already conclusively broken. Typing "Steam" and "Crack" into Google yields roughly 4 million hits, for a wide variety of games, right up to brand new titles. Most of the online authentication tricks they use are no more complex to remove than the DVD checks in physical media, and so unsurprisingly the same types of cracks exist.

If that's your only reason for not using steam, do a bit of googling and enjoy the wonders of digital distribution.

From the article, I think the issue with the fee is that it is not an early termination fee on your contract, any more. According to the article, on a 2 year contract it starts at $350 and goes down $10 every month. A quick bit of subtraction shows that at the end of your contract you still owe $110. You've held up your end of the contract, and still Verizon want to take more money from you. That doesn't seem right.

(Also, the numbers Americans throw around for their cell phone contracts scare me - $100 a month or more? Do they deliver your data to you in gold-plated USB sticks or something?)

That is not how interference works - interference modifies the intensity of the beam, that is the number of photons which would be observed at any given point. It does nothing to the energy of the photons - interfering light only gives light, interfering microwaves only gives microwaves, and so forth.

Actually, I don't see the HCl/mucus acid argument for irreducible complexity at all - digestion is possible with either of these things, and both could potentially be used independently: lower concentrations of HCl or other acids will still facilitate digestion without massive risk to the rest of the body, while mucus offers many other properties unrelated to the protection from acid - the fact it's ubiquitous in the respiratory system points to that.

The combination merely allows for a more efficient use of both components - in that sense, it looks more like a poster-child for gradual, staged evolution than a highly complex system that doesn't fit together without all its parts.

Continuous examples of this type don't really seem to add that much - just like the beetle, the eye, and various other examples which are trotted out, the argument is that it's not obvious how it could have come about in by evolution, not that it's impossible.

It's memorable, but it's also wrong - the chemicals the Bombardier beetle uses are not explosive in and of themselves, and must be catalysed by the beetle. Only an evolution that led to a massive over-production of the catalysing agent and the reagents would have caused the effect you suggest. This means that the individual components could have been developed incrementally, without explosive consequences.

Indeed, many of these components have developed naturally in other beetles, as mentioned in the Wikipedia article which sadly devotes much of its time to debunking this idea.

Much of the rest of the "irreducible complexity" arguments probably break down similarly - it's not saying it's impossible that it could be brought about by incremental change, it's saying you don't know how it could be brought about. Very different statements, really.

There's a bit of a confusion of terms here - nuclear reactors do have some degree of a size restriction, but neither the Pioneer or Voyager programs used nuclear reactors as their power source. They both used radiothermal generators (RTGs) - that is, they derived their power from the heat generated by the decay of a nuclear isotope, rather than a fission reaction.

This latter kind of generator is pretty much infinitely scalable, as you say, but aren't so efficient for big power demands - most of the RTGs in the probes you mention provide a few hundred watts, even when new.

For these thrusters, you're talking about burns of 10 MJ or more, which would require a vastly bigger RTG (or, more likely, a true reactor as the scaling would make it the more efficient choice) to get a reasonable pulse rate out of it.

These bacteria were probably exposed to little or no selection pressure - this means that "beneficial" or "not beneficial" mutations are not selected for, as all bacteria are allowed to multiply. As a result, only catastrophically poor mutations will be selected out.

Evolution is a two-step process - the first part is the production of mutations, which is a random process (and, given how finely balanced organisms are, the majority of these random events will probably be negative, on balance). The second part is selection - if there is genuine competition between these strains, then the beneficial mutations will be selected, so the fact that they are relatively rare will have little effect on their eventual domination of the population.

The people taking it, I can understand. It's the people prescribing it I have an issue with. By promoting their method as anything other than wishful thinking (which sounds harsh, but isn't a bad description of the placebo effect, really), they increase the chance that someone will take the sugar pill instead of real medicine. This is especially true in the cases when many of the people promoting their cures actively attack conventional medicine as being the harmful work of evil corporations and so forth.

When this happens, as I said above, people will die, with a much higher frequency than the real provable successes of the placebo effect from these pills. Just look at the case of Rath noted in the introduction - by promoting his magic water for the treatment of AIDs at the expense of retrovirals, hundreds of thousands of Africans have died before their time.

Is this an acceptable cost so these people can peddle their "alternatives"? I don't think so.

What you posted describes the Pareto distribution, yes. However, the Pareto distribution is exactly the opposite of what the "Long Tail" model suggested by Andersen describes.

The crux of Andersen's argument is that, while Amazon et al have the same demand for big-name titles, their tail is longer and higher than a traditional bookstore, and by defining a cut at a certain point (say, those with less than 5% of the peak sales, those outside the top 10% or whatever is appropriate) it can be seen that the low-volume sales represent a larger fraction of the total sales due to the extreme length of the tail.

Quoting from the Wikipedia article on the topic:

Andersen was suggesting that, in the limit of infinite items to sell and negligable stocking costs, much more profit is to be derived from the large number of items that sell a few copies than the few items that sell many copies.

Indeed, it went further than that, suggesting that as people got used to having more choice, they would begin to shun the "popular" items in favour of more obscure titles, further fattening the tail. But that's even more speculative and somewhat independent of the other economic predictions.

Your father did not prove the official story wrong, it's mentioned in your post and numerous of the sibling posts - the placebo effect. That's all there is to the vast majority of these cases - sometimes, stuff which demonstrably should not work does, because human bodies are funny things like that. Sometimes, a sugar pill really could save your life.

However, the other 99 times out of 100, the real medical treatment is what gives you the best chance of a cure. And when people are advocating their magic sugar pills rather than proven medical treatments, people will (and did) die. That is why "live and let live" style outlooks are not a suitable approach to these issues, and no number of anecdotes changes that.

With regards to the "1 of 9" thing - you said in a reply below that you got the first part of the first book free. Would this by any chance have been "From the two rivers"? If so, that was part of a re-release of the books, where the first was split up into two to try and entice new readers.

I ask, because at the time there were indeed 9 books in the series, which would explain the discrepancy between your recollection and those of other submitters.

I think we must be using the term "balance" in different ways, as I'm struggling to make sense of your post, based on my interpretation.

In my interpretation, 'balance' would mean that no (class/skillset) has a clear competitive advantage over all others*, such that all options were equally valid.

There is nothing about skills-based games that would stop a particular skill/skillset dominating over the alternatives (swords do 1 million damage per hit, maces do 1 damage per hit with no other differences: clearly swords and maces aren't 'balanced', in this admittedly ludicrous situation).

Is your argument that this interpretation of balance doesn't matter, because, in the above example, anyone who used to use maces can just switch to swords and redress the balance? If so, I suppose I have to agree in principle, but it doesn't feel like a system which I would describe as "balanced" - while the players may in principle be balanced, skills and classes are not, and this leads to uninteresting gameplay.

* - Obviously class differentiation may lead to some classes being better at some things than others and so forth, but taken as a whole classes should have roughly as many good points as bad points. Exact counting of good and bad points may vary, but this should be the general goal.