That's where we get it too!

Truffles, saffron, vanilla, good cheeses etc. all of which are very expensive comparatively.

In fact, very few people (globally) have the privilege of eating actual vanilla!

The aggregate global demand for real vanilla is estimated at 2,000 MTs per year, primarily for high-quality vanilla flavoring. Between 1965 and 1989, world consumption grew at an average annual rate of 2 percent. Between 1980 and 1989, demand expanded rapidly particularly in the United States, where it grew at 7 percent a year in volume. In Europe, the rate of consumption was more modest: 2-3 percent. Highest consumption per capita is found in Denmark (4.57 grams), the United States (3.85 grams), France (2.54 grams), and Canada (1.00 grams). Synthetic vanillin accounts for more than 90 percent of the U.S. vanilla flavoring market and about 50 percent of the French market (the lowest national share). One ounce of artificially produced vanillin has roughly the same flavoring power as a gallon of natural vanilla extract. Synthetic vanillin costs one-hundredth the price of the natural product and not only substitutes for vanilla but also supplements adulterated vanilla extracts.

I don't eat many store-bought baked goods because my wife and daughters like to cook and home-made tastes so much better! But you can't help but notice some of the ingredients cost real money. It costs a fortune to buy commercially-made equivalents with real vanilla and real butter and so on, and you never know when they will start cheating on you.

Taking your time in handing out a highly questionable tax break is pretty far from what blatant censorship actually looks like.

Ah, I was wondering, since MIRV ICBMs were developed in the late 1960's.

Also, bundles of cubesats launched in a P-POD.

If you haven't seen the documentary Last Train Home about the struggles of being a seasonal worker in China and getting home to visit your family once a year, I highly recommend it. For anybody who thought the overcrowded dystopian future feared in the 1970's failed to occur, China is one place where it already did.

Ha ha, welcome to America, land of the Free, where your actions and movements are never tracked. Laughable.

Just 20 years ago, I honestly believed that if we started to get security cameras everywhere like Great Britain was doing, they would just get shot out all the time. I actually thought that.

Not when it comes to CO2 - we've only just begun to even try. Our per-capita CO2 emissions are sky-high compared to Europe and China. We're still in the "smoke em if you've got em" club along with Canada, Australia, and a bunch of little oil-rich nations. (cite)

"Peer review is broken" is such a broad statement, it's like claiming "clothes today aren't well-made." Peer-review is as good or bad as the individual journal.

Granted, the average quality of "journals" has probably plummeted in recent decades as there are far more PhDs, papers, and journals than in the past. But by the same token, the quality of the top 100 journals (or any fixed number) has probably increased. I say that because the ease of communications now helps, and because of all the progress and recent focus on repeatability and avoiding statistical pitfalls. (A lot of reporting on this implies it is somehow a new problem, but there is no reason to think that).

Please do not advocate linking to some crappy ad-supported mainstream press summary, or somebody's blog, over Science.

If you want to see some of the most corrupt businesses alive today, look no further than utilities. This is nothing more than a front, primarily to stop the debate about Government intrusion but also to squeeze more money from the middle class.

What utilities are you referring to? My sewers, water, electricity, and gas all keep flowing, and at reasonable rates. I certainly would not want them transformed into Comcast-esque money-grubbers. Privatization in the absence of competition is the worst of both worlds, and that's what broadband to my home currently is.

With respect to government intrusion, assuming you buy the line that it's any different from, or even separate from, corporate intrusion (which I don't, since companies simply sell it to the govt) - the US Mail has the strongest legal guarantees of privacy, as far as I can tell, with phone being next. It seems to be in decreasing order of when invented, rather than public/private. At least with a utility there's a possibility of meaningful privacy regulations, if the public ever decides to start wanting them.

Nations don't fall because of (un) diplomatic gestures. They fall because they are conquered, or go bankrupt. The Soviet Union fell because of its bad economy. However, the USSR did not increase military spending in response to the US buildup. There was never any reason to think they did, other that it was a nice story.

The USSR's 9-year Afghanistan misadventure, on the other hand, was extremely costly (look at the above graph from '79 to '89). US support for the Mujahideen surely increased that pain. But the American president who started backing them was, in fact, Jimmy Carter.

Reagan vilifying the Soviet Union is totally irrelevant to Obama and the NSA. People everywhere love smack talk about faraway enemies, it always plays well. A better Reagan analogy would be the Iran-Contra scandal.

Now as to Obama, he did order Gitmo shut down. What happened? Congress rebelled, even Democrats, spinning up fear of Magneto-like supervillians too dastardly to contain in American prisons. Congress passed a law making it illegal to bring Gitmo prisoners to the US even for medical treatment, so now we spend millions flying medical equipment down there to rot.

I suppose a more forceful President might be able to prevail on the Congress more often, Teddy Roosevelt-style, and do something about the NSA, if they had some reason to do so, which they don't. It's hardly ever a voting issue. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was used by both Democratic and Republican administrations to trample the Constitution for decades and voters never cared, because they were so scared of Communism they supported the purge. Now the roles are filled by a new cast of characters, but little has changed.

But that's why I don't understand how it makes sense to argue about whether the observations are about "the Higgs boson," or something "else." If the Higgs boson was previously a prediction, as were these others, and new observations are consistent with several of them but don't rule out all but one, what is the basis for saying one was the real one and the others were impostors?

I have a 512 one and the slow CPU is a bigger issue for me. It is too slow to comfortably run a web browser. It is also too slow to use as an X server using ssh tunneling. Opening up the X display to accept unencrypted connections from remote hosts, it is kind of OK (no videos, obviously).

I am sure it's great for lots of things, but if I were buying something to plug a screen and keyboard into, I would go the route of a used Core 2 duo laptop next time. YMMV.

Oh, darn, you beat me to it.

But I just wanted to add that fMRI lacks the resolution to measure individual neurons, so I don't know how it could possibly be used to rule out neuron-level parallelism. It is like recording people's height in whole feet and concluding there are only 6 different heights of people.