Comment missing options (Score 1) 920
What about all of us that don't live on Earth? You insensitive clod!
Comment Re:Editorializing (Score 1) 430
Of *course* healthy people don't get a significant personal benefit from being vaccinated. Nobody ever said they did.
Are you crazy? Maybe you and a few other people get vaccinated for altruistic reasons, but the vast vast vast majority of people get vaccinated because they honestly believe that it will protect them from getting infected. Moreover, this is exactly what the doctors and researchers say it will do.
Comment home made (Score 1) 711
If you want a plug done right, design it yourself.
Comment Re:I get it but... (Score 1) 83
Science is done for science's sake. You would be hard pressed to find any discovery in the field of astronomy which has led to a practical discovery (I won't say there is none, because I'm sure someone can come up with an example.) Who cares about the atmosphere of Venus, or the structure of the Sun?
The point is, we do science for its own sake, and when it leads to a discovery, that's nice, but hardly the goal.
Comment Re:The Crab Nebula wasn't born in 1054 AD (Score 3, Insightful) 145
The whole point of relativity is that there is no such thing as absolute time. Your statement assumes that there is meaning to simultaneity, which is incorrect.
Comment Re:Look on the bright side, (Score 2, Interesting) 185
Sure they did:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/11/0139225
Submission + - Open source software for experimental physics 1
jmizrahi writes: "I've recently started working in experimental physics. There are quite a few programs used in the lab, for assorted purposes--Labview, Igor, Inventor, Eagle, just to name a few. I've noticed that they're all proprietary. This seems to be standard practice, which surprised me. Does anybody know of any open source software intended for scientific research? Does anybody work in a lab that makes an effort to use open source software?"
