> the way to make a name in academia is to overturn the status quo.

I don't think it's as simple as that. An unknown researcher can't fight the conventional wisdom merely by being right. A recognized rising star might fight the accepted view. Or the CW might be tottering and rotten and the critics ready to rally around the right attack from a newcomer who has nothing to lose by bucking the establishment.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-21/japan-sets-safe-limits-for-consuming-radiation-contaminated-food-table-.html Prescribed safe limit from Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare for radioactive cesium in drinking water is 200 Becquerel per kilogram.

The rest of the article refers to contamination levels in Bq/kg, which seems to be the standard unit for this. The level 1000 Bq/kg is not tremendously high, as it is only a few times larger than safe limits for human consumption of cesium-contaminated water (which hopefully are conservative). (And writers who don't know the difference between "rem" and "rem per hour" are even worse.)

Dead on with your question "do they really get more done?"

What I have seen in graduate students is lots of inability to concentrate and make good decisions on top of exhaustion and insomnia. I have seen months spent going down the wrong track because of an inability to think clearly. I have seen late nights spent fixing things that were messed up due to tiredness. I have seen students who can't get anything done in the lab because they hate grad school and can't enjoy doing anything else because they feel that they should be in the lab.

Want proof? Look at how many graduate theses start with a 100-page literature review, covering material which is well known and not particularly important to the real research. The appropriate material would be 15 pages and lots of references. That review represents many months of wasted energy and probably lots of 80 hour weeks accomplishing nothing of value.

All the people who travel and never look up except through the viewfinder of the camera can now stay home. All the people who clog museums taking photos of the art can now stay home. By all means let us devalue the trip of someone whose interest doesn't go much beyond, "Now I can say I went there." Make more room for those of us who are ready to open all our senses to new experiences and let our attention linger over details.

It often works fine as long as you only use your computer the way that Lennart wants you to (single user at a desktop running Gnome). If you have different ideas, the setup can be difficult and poorly documented. It's very good at stopping flash from locking up the audio, which is the main reason I keep using it on some computers.

Often silent movies look "jerky" because of how they are shown ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_film#Projection_speed ). In particular, video for TV has a fixed frame rate, and transferring the movies to a different frame rate while maintaining smooth action is not trivial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine).

I believe the documentary you mention is Objectified.

Re: guitars. In my experience, fretting is easier as a left-handed person using a standard guitar, but finger-picking is a lot harder.

"Some review spam is remarkably inept." Also note that paid reviewers don't review the same things that normal people review. A real person will review 15 restaurants all over a city in the course of a year or two. A paid reviewer will review 4 pet grooming shops and 5 auto bodywork places in one week. Check the histories...

Hard to avoid? Um, you're not trying very hard. Ever heard of distrowatch or xwinman?

What is the best estimate of the operating size of tokomak power plant? How many do we need to convert the US away from coal & gas power plants while switching to electric cars? What is the answer if we look at 100-year projections for population, energy usage patterns, and density? Will a tokamak-based power grid be more or less useful in parts of the world with different needs, like Europe, Japan, India, or China?

What is a reasonable cost to assign to the carbon and pollutants put into the atmosphere during operation of a coil, oil, or gas power plant? Can you compare the price of fusion-generated electricity to other known technologies, including *all* costs to society.?

"costs much less than paper to distribute."

This is almost certainly not true in any practical sense.

We are concerned about the cost to consumers, so the cost to produce the copy is not important. What matters is that cost minus the advertising revenue. Advertisements on the web don't make anywhere near as much money for the NYT as ads in the paper. A digital-only subscription does not necessarily bring in more money for them; there is however a shift in the fraction of the cost paid by the reader vs. the amount paid for by ad revenue.

First, please note that I do not think the application of these laws is justified in this case (that's my personal opinion, based on what I have read).

But I would ask you to rethink the justification for hate crimes laws. Consider the kind of actions that were committed in the southern US earlier in the last century, such as burning a cross in the yard of an African American family. Is trespassing in the yard the only crime committed? The action was a message to the entire African American community, telling them not to step out of line or irritate the white community or they risk the lives of their families. This is one kind of intimidation that hate crime laws are meant to address. For one group of people to attempt to control another group using threats of violence is indeed a crime by itself.

None of this argues that the actual laws we have were well written or are appropriately enforced. On those matters, I don't know enough to have an opinion.