One cruicial difference between OS and commercial projects is the existence of tight deadlines and unstable customer defined specifications, which often have implications for reliability, featureset, security, and documentation.

Mod parent up!

A potentially truly game-changing technology is Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor). This was a technology developed during the Cold War that uses thorium to breed uranium for nuclear fission in order to generate electricity. It has most of the advantages and almost none of the disadvantages of traditional nuclear power generation. The technology has been tested and a reactor was build and run at Oakridge National Labs for a number of years. Unfortunately it wasn't developed initially due to the emphasis on building weapons - the thorium fuel cycle isn't ideal for nuclear weapons - and the technology faded into obscurity. Recently, however, a group of engineers, scientists, and concerned individuals has taken a serious interest in this technology and is advocating restarting research on LFTR with the goal of developing a commercially viable reactor. You can find more information at http://energyfromthorium.com/.

Then you would expect to see a different sort of fossil record. The one we have says we emerged here.

Or we could remember the laws of inertia instead.

That's because you shouldn't be "watching" a lecture (its not television), you should be "interacting" with the lecture. Unfortunately, many lecturers have adopted a style which is not conducive to proper learning, but that is beside the point.

This is really at the heart of it isn't it? Do you go, or do you stay? Perhaps the answer lies in letting the answer to the following question guide your decision, "If we knew what we know now, would we have invaded Afghanistan in the first place?"

Or weapons inspectors from the UN who went to Iraq, looked around, found nothing, and told us all about it.

That doesn't make it right.

Thank you for saying what needed to be said.

We should be honest about this. Legalized alcohol will result in more people using, more people abusing, and all the problems that implies. We all remember smart kids from high school that wasted their lives on alcohol. But, this is still far better than incarcerating people for only harming themselves and the huge amount of money and abuse of freedom that we currently have. In addition, we will be taking away a guaranteed source of income from alcohol gangs, some of the nastiest people on earth. It is not a panacea, but it is a large net gain.

I hate to break it to you, but String theory is "The Establishment" in theoretical physics and to my knowledge it is not a panacea.

Do you have any idea just how impossible such a task would be? It makes for good science fiction, but the laws as we know the say no.

What exactly was the nature of these tricks? I happen to think that singular value decomposition is a great trick when used for solving certain optimization problems, but that doesn't mean the technique isn't justified. The word "trick" is sometimes used as a synonym for "clever" in a perfectly innocuous sense.

According to the Wikipedia article on Steve McIntyre, he is not a statistical analyst; he has been in business administration and policy for the last 30 years. Having a degree in mathematics obtained 30 years ago is not equivalent to being a trained and experienced statistician proficient in techniques of climate modelling.