Sorry... I was going for the joke and didn't pitch it very well. My actual views are more like yours.

As for the reality of the subject matter, I would borrow the concept of "probably approximately correct" from machine learning, and give it a 90-95% chance of being ~80% correct. (The 80% is lower to allow room for some more big discoveries like inflation.)

Unfortunately, people will be (hopefully) studying this for thousands of years on top of the <100 we have so far, and none of us will live to see how it turns out in the long term.

And I'm guessing that the publishers who use region codes cry like babies whenever governments impose artificial barriers to free trade.

I always heard it as: "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."

And of course, the word of choice usually wasn't "fool".

(Is this really a regional saying?)

Like all esoteric fields of study, we outsiders can't understand it because we don't have The Right Stuff.

(Presumably that's something they smoke.)

"Hydric acid"? Now that's weak! 8)

Nobody uses these names, but technically the IUPAC systematic name for ammonia is "azane", and water is "ozane". (Google says they're a Star Refrigeration subsidiary in the US and an exterminator business in New Jersey.)

I'm imagining Slashdot stories like "Fracking Fluid Contains Significant Amounts of Ozane", "Ozane Responsible For Rising Sea Levels", "Guantanamo Prisoners Tortured Using Ozane", "Oncoming Ozane Crisis Threatens Civilization", "Weak Beer Found To Contain Excess Amounts of Ozane", "Linus Torvalds: Ozane Has No Role In Linux", "Ozane Layer Disappearing Along East Coast", "Tesla Motors Introducing Ozane-Based Fuel Cells", etc.

My first cynical thought was "shoot them down if they blow up". But one bomber claimed to be on board, so they could have reasonably been concerned that the planes would be hijacked and used as missiles.

Yeah. If you make threats on Slashdot you get picked up by men in white coats instead of black helicopters.

That's got to be a large part of it; they're a waste of space. Imagine a stack of hundreds of those things, turned on their sides. They would occupy a whole seat. With Skymall gone they can compress your knees further into the back of the guy in front of you and cram in an extra row of pig crates.

It means no one had died yet, as far as they know.

*HIGH FIVE* Yeah!

The denialists will still come up with an alternate interpretation of cherry-picked data from some crackpot blog, to prove you wrong.

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The same data has been used to claim men landed on the moon, and that the moon landing was a hoax. Therefore all data related to the moon landing should then be ignored. As it's proven flawed on both counts.

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Echoing this thread.
Assessing G+ activity by counting public posts is like assessing a community's sexual activity by looking at marriage licenses.