Well I asked for that. I should have said it differently. Another try: there is a lot of experimental evidence to show that the fine structure constant is constant. If it hadn't been constant we would have known. With the claim that the fine structure constant is a real constant one is on solid ground.

Then the possibility that outside of the solid experimental proof the constant could still vary "maybe the constant was not always the same" - should be handled very sparingly. It's an idea to be kept on a short leash because it's speculation. And often its untestable speculation , and it's best to stay out of that territory. And when you do experiments and they don't come out right, the hypothesis that 'maybe current scientific understanding is wrong' should be considered a very expensive claim that should be postponed until all other options have been exhausted. Instead, and partly because of popular media, it's become a very cheap claim that is easily made.
In the OPERA experiment they came up with the explanation that maybe neutrinos go faster than light. If you want to claim that maybe all of our scientific understanding is wrong then you need an awful lot of evidence to back it up, or you shouldn't make the claim. The guy should just have shut up and kept searching rather than hoping for a scoop.

People should not start trotting out a 'variable constant' hypothesis because some ratio of elements is wrong in ore.

Mazda is still selling sport vehicles with Wankel engines ... a friend of mine drives one, an awesome car.

The RX8 has been sold for a long time but they discontinued it a few years back. They're working on a successor but as long as they fail to satisfy the emission requirements it's not going to enter the market.

I'm not saying researching the possibility that universal constants are not constant is bollocks, though I'd consider it too speculative for science. But once one starts taking an open environment 'dirty' testcase where the ratio 235/238 is different from the sample nextdoor as a clue for variable universal constants, then one is really in the middle of bollocks territory.

also to discover whether the laws of physics that govern nuclear reactions may have changed in the 1.5 billion years since the reactor switched off.

What bollocks. I think the actual question to ask is how it's possible to create the conditions for an very large (the size of the mine)and extremely low density (the concentration of natural ore) nuclear reactor.

In the days the preference for civilian reactors was to develop further along the design of the compact high density submarine reactors. The nuclear industry never got over that. There are prototypes of large reactors with much lower power density. It's a natural question to ask how low enrichment and low density one can go.

XP comes with a perfectly good command line ftp client, ported from BSD.

Knowing how to work within the system to change the system seems brilliant to me.

[quote] Will the Nissan Leaf Take On the Tesla Model S At Half the Price?[/quote]
Falf the price, and at the batteries they're considering, half the range.

[quote] So it looks like the Leaf might get up to 150 miles of range, possibly by the 2016 model year. The range increase will come from a larger battery pack, possibly 36 or 42 kWh, and more energy-dense cells.[/quote]
The Tesla comes with a 60 or 85 kWh pack, looks great, and is a luxury sports sedan. The upgraded leaf will still have half the range of the Tesla, and none of it's style.

There's only one reason people choose the leaf over the Tesla, and that's because they can't afford the Tesla. I understand, it's not cheap, but you can't claim that the two are in the same category any more than you can compare the Nissan Sentra to the Mercedes S class.

I wish, but the Canadian government doesn't have a track record of using anything but strong words against the US in these sorts of disputes.

What's weird is that Intel was in the ARM business for a while, before selling XScale to Marvell in 2006, just as it was taking off. Maybe the prices were getting too competitive.

CarPlay is likely to assume integration with an iphone. fewer consumers have iphones than have non-iphones. Why do you think most people would demand a system that is unlikely to work well with their phones?

That's a good idea, because the least accountable branch of government is surely on your side! /s

The judicial branch and the supreme court serve much the same purpose as the Tsar in old Russia. No matter how bad it gets, it's not the Tsar's fault. It's the noblemen's fault. The Tsar just has bad advisers. If only we could get past them and talk to him and make him understand, it'd all be OK.

I never once said it's something that just happens and then that's it. I said it's a horrible, horrible crime. You even agree with my point in that quote, you say that "some women recover okay". Please show me even one murder victim that has "recovered okay". I'm well aware that people (not just women!) can be highly traumatized and have massive psychological problems following a rape, and for years, or decades later, sometimes for their whole life, in fact I have met several of these people, and even provided medical care for some of them. That said, they get to do that because they are still alive. If you ask many rape victims what they were thinking during the rape it is frequently along the lines of "please don't kill me!"

I think rape is one of the worst crimes possible. But it is not murder, and considering it as such does nobody any favours.

It wasn't me who compared the USA to China, Mexico, and Russia, countries with massive social problems, including poverty like you have never seen or experienced.

I wanted to give the USA the benefit of the doubt and compare them to countries with very similar demographics, diversity, and physical characteristics. You decided that was too much to aspire to, and that the USA should be content because it's better then China, Mexico, and Russia. Use whatever terms you want to describe it, but I think you could aim higher.

You talk about diversity, Canada and many parts of Europe are just as diverse as the US, the difference lies in less of an "us vs them" mentality (there are no "african-canadians" "italian-canadians" etc, they're all just Canadian)

You talk about large geography. Canada and Australia both have that covered.
You talk about urban density. Europe has you beat.
You talk about rural areas. Canada and Australia have you beat.
You talk about illegal immigrants from poor nations adjacent. Australia has a huge problem here with boatloads of people trying to sneak in from nearby Asian countries, Much of europe shares borders with countries rife with poverty.

You're making excuses because you don't want to fix your mess.

I think so too. I like to compare physics breakthroughs with earthquakes. A century ago we were in a very active area: decent chance for big earthquakes. Now things have calmed down. Plenty of small earthquakes.Large earthquakes have not become impossible but are very much rarer. Since the 'fundamental laws' have something special it does feel like the end of an era.

  But meanwhile there are other scientific areas that are active and we gradually we'll be moving more and more into areas where we're making and inventing things more than discovering them.

But god forbid (sometimes literally) that you do anything to solve these issues by helping make education and healthcare more accessible to the poor, or work on the huge income inequality problems, or limit access to firearms...