> Some UN fixes I can think of are 1) t 1) the invasion of Normandy in 1942 and the subsequent war in Europe against Germany

Sorry, but huh?
- the invasion of Normandy took place in 1944. There was a raid on the city of Dieppe in 1942, performed by Canadian forces under British command, but it was a complete failure.
- the United Nations didn't really exist until 1945, at which time they mostly meant "the WW2 winners"

What does it have to do with the UN?

In case it wasn't sarcasm but genuine surprise, yes, there are such beasts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_science

Doen't string theory (supposed to be predicting the behavior of spacetime at very high energies as far as could understand from popular science books) claim that there are more dimensions than the 4 we observe, rather than less? I'm confused...

Smartphones are only one generation away from achieving console-like performance. Counting in IT generations that's what, 2 years? Sony should be worried.

Not to mention the peer referees who were supposed to review the manuscript before it was accepted for publication...

> Google Scholar is the most comprehensive index of scholarly articles in the world, period.

You can't possibly know that, as Google doesn't tell us exactly what's covered by GS.

> Not only are there no free alternatives, there are no alternatives at all.

Wrong. The Web of Knowledge and Scopus (commercial) and Scirus (free) are perfectly valid alternatives. Furthermore, a number of studies in various fields have shown that all of these tools, as well as GS, usually return a number of hits that were not found by the others (again, including GS). Therefore, they can always be seen as complementing each other.

What you cound argue, on another hand, is that GS offers the best quality/price ratio. I for one would accept that.