Relax, everyone. This is a non-story; it isn't going to happen, and no-one seriously expects it to.

We're having a referendum in September on whether to separate from the UK and become an independent nation. The UK government has woken up - very late - to the realisation that it's quite likely to lose, and consequently will also lose its only nuclear submarine base, 90% of its oil revenue, and probably its permanent seat on the UN security council. Consequently they're panicking and offering us all sorts of unlikely bribes. The spaceport won't happen because

1. If we vote 'yes', it's not going to be an urgent priority of the Scottish government;
2. if we vote 'no', this and all the other promised bribes will be quietly forgotten.

So relax. The fact that there's no money and no commercial use for it, and that we're too far from the equator, doesn't matter; no-one seriously intends to build it. It's a media stunt, pure and simple. It isn't going to happen.

Some economists at Harvard got busted publishing fake crap that support hokey rightwing anti-tax ideology and nothing happened, they just said "oops, gosh, we just made a mistake using Excel" and it blew over. The lamest part is it was published in a supposedly peer reviewed journal yet their fraud was only exposed by an undergrad a public university.

Most likely "peer reviewers" only checked that the paper is consistent with "economics" (or whatever the specific "science" in question is). How often do they look for errors with mathematics or logic? No doubt such reviewers also tend to assume things like measuring instruments, software packages, etc being used correctly and that things which depend on another science havn't been misinterpreted/misunderstood.
Also this case appears to be a "genuine mistake". Whereas with actual fraud you'd expect at least some attempt at obsucation.

I have a lot of respect for physical sciences but these "human sciences" like economics and psychology are full of shit.

Those possibly arn't even the best examples. This sort of thing even has a specific term in the field of medical research :)

Some of the papers in the field are highly cited, yes, because well, and here's the problem, everyone keeps citing each other in circles regardless of the actual impact.

Which can create a sort of positive feedback when it comes to citation. There will also be people who will take the amount of citations as being a measure of "quaility". Even when what they actually have is a "circular argument".
Then there's the issue of what happens if someone, especially an "outsider", discovers a problem with the original paper. With "lynch the kid (and deny the problem)" being the alternative ending to "The Emperor's New Clothes". (Possibly especially where there is no evidence of malicious action.)

The trick to being a lead researcher is finding a rich problem space for the students to work on that will attract grants.

This is likely to also result in all sorts of politics being attached to getting funding. At best only a subset of possible research areas, which happen to be PC, will get funding. At worst getting the "wrong" results means it then becomes even more difficult to attract grants.
Such a situation can easily lead to "research" which is either poor, even pseudo, science. Since there can be a lot more money in attempts at confirmation than attempts at falsification.

Seriously - why? There are less than 100,000 K-12 schools in the US, we're talking about $10,000 PER SCHOOL in the US, each year.

Probably considerably less than that once you account for all the costs associated with awarding contracts. Including "bidding" and multi layer sub contracting. Even if the whole thing is free from any kind of bribary.

I just upgraded my office (12 Ubiquiti access points, covering 45,000 square feet - probably about the average size of a school campus)

Area is rather less meaningful than number/density of clients. Also schools typically have what is effectivly a whole site shift change every hour or so. Schools tend to "punch above their weight" in comparison to businesses when it comes to things like network bandwidth requirements.
Even though Unify is cost effective both in terms of the prices of access points and not requiring a separate management system if it's not on some "approved list" a school may not be able to buy it with this money anyway. Also in a school environment you'd most likely be looking at at least one access point per room for decent coverage.

Are you sure that your area doesn't have access to this: http://www.wa-k20.net/
Most schools, libraries, and public institutions in Washington state use the Washington K-20 educational network. Districts and towns can opt out of the program if they want. If your area is not using it for the library or the schools you should start asking them why.

A quick look at the website showed quite a bit of "corporate speak". Maybe a poll of school network admins would paint a different picture.

I work as an admin for a very LARGE business and do this professionally and I've never seen the cluster-fsck that 2 dozen high school kids can make of a network in 10 minutes without even really trying. Hardware and software companies need to get these kids to be beta testers.

It would be a mistake to assume that the most destructive users in a school environment are the students though.

Goliath is stomping ten Davids every time one David throws a rock, and a hundred if it's a credible throw (e.g. a rocket).

It seem more that they will blame "David" every time a rock gets thrown. Some of these rockets are being fired from Lebanon yet Hamas, rather than Hezbollah, being blamed. Co-operation between Shia and Sunni not being likely either. Those launcing the rockets are also being refered to as "Hamas supporters". Rather implying "With friends like these who needs enemies".

After reading the article, his reasoning is that the Iron Dome is mostly chasing the rockets from behind, and therefore cannot be effective, because a rocket cannot effectively be caught from behind, or from the side.

Without knowing the actual flight characteristics of both the rockets and the missiles you can't really say if "tail chasing" is a viable interception approach or not.

Furthermore, previous anti-missile systems (the patriot) have had their success rate exaggerated.

It's likely to be harder hit an unstable missile than one which stable. IIRC this was one of the issues with Scuds. Ironically "proper" rockets might be easier to intercept than something scratch built from whatever materials might be to hand.

Applying the "sewage' attribute to pure water molecules would be superstitio

Or "homeopathy".

unless you assumed the sewage was somehow radioactive.

Unless it's been kept isolated for a few hundred years it probably will be slightly radioactive :)

Actually, I've been calling for someone to graft the THC-production complex into kudzu. That way, either we get government help to wipe it out, or the government finally gives up; either way, kudzu becomes useful for something.

Anyway you could call it "superweed".

My point is that someone specific in that crowd probably was targeted, but to us the public, it remains a random crowd of people.

That is more a "possibility" rather than a "probability".

At least that's what I've been told by someone who was in some special forces somewhere.

You ca't really generalise this to all terrorists. Even those supported by nation states.

It's mainly targets and not a single target. Bombing on a bus, mall, disco, market, etc all involve densely packed people to inflict maximum casualties.

Note that an intended target may be someone from a specific group rather than a specific individual.

if you're considering a large death toll as a terrorist goal, then you're wrong. Terror is the goal, and having people killed are only the means.

People tend need to be alive to be terrified.
Another similar idea is military weapons intended to wound, Since they can potentially remove three times the number of wounded soldiers from the battlefield.

So, as others pointed out acetaminophen is actually fairly dangerous as drugs go. However, let's pick on something like ibuprofen instead which is definitely safer.

In intersting irony is that many illegal drugs are less dangerous than many available "over the counter".

Pain-killers in general have the deck stacked against them. For something like a heart medication to get on the market you basically have to show that it saves more lives than it takes. So, if it prevents 10k more heart attacks per year than any other drug on the market, and it kills 10 people per year due to liver toxicity, then it isn't hard to get it approved.

That process appears to have failed with HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors though. Drugs which havn't been shown to be of any benefit to other than a small minority of people. Which actually work by disrupting an important metabolic function.