Other than being a place to wave your flag, and maybe--and I mean maybe--a handy place to build a telescope and a base for scientific research, is it really economically viable to haul back minerals and other materials by the ton?

Exactly my thought. If an F-22 went down over Lake Ontario on a training mission, we would have a dead pilot, and lost $150 million aircraft, which can't be replaced. The F-22 loss might have been noted on CNN, but certainly wouldn't have been /. worthy. So, here we lost a $12.5 million aircraft, which can be replaced, and nobody dies. Somehow, I doubt that the submitter and the /. editors are pro-drone, but I see this story and think that, to the extent that I actually give a shit, it makes an excellent argument for drones.

OK. I like Kevin Bacon. He's starred in some good flicks. I think that Tremors is an under appreciated film, and did you know that he was the one with the "Thank you sir! May I have another?" line in Animal House. He even has that whole Bacon Number thing going for him. But come on, there's a point where being a fan turns into a sick obsession, and I think you're treading dangerously close to that line.

Quite a few years ago I was hanging out in Egypt at a Red Sea resort with my girlfriend. Now I can hang on a lounge chair on a beach for a few hours, but that's about all can take before I want to get up and do something. So, I decided to take a tour boat out to the coral and go snorkeling. When the boat got to the coral reefs, they dropped their anchor right on the reef, which pissed me off. The captain explained that the government had installed permanent mooring buoys in order to preserve the coral, but these had been stolen by thieves.

Now, fiber cable doesn't have the same resale value as copper, but then try to explain that to a third world dumbass thief.

The disappointment in the high energy physics community is over what comes next. For many decades, high energy physicists have been building bigger and bigger colliders. Each collider has left some unanswered questions justifying the next giant collider. If the standard model seems to fit all the data and there's no clear question to be answered by the next collider, then what's next for high energy physics? All the "new physics," dark matter and dark energy, is coming from astrophysics these days, and they need telescopes, not colliders.

If you replace "corporate white paper" with "patent," you can have the same poll options and get similar results. Well, OK, the patent version might get higher results for crying since the BS that gets through the patent office has a direct result on people's livelihoods.

It's got to be a reasonably good, well-liked site, but not a mega-site like Google or Facebook.

How about Salon.com or theonion.com?

I would say /., but by its nature, /. has too many connections to be used for a Kevin Bacon number equivalent. Conversely, The Onion probably doesn't link to enough stuff.

I vote for Salon.com

Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics, and the field of statistical mechanics in general, work quite well with quantized systems. As an example, if you look at Boltzmann's definition of entropy: S = k ln W, where W is the possible number of microstates that can contribute to the system, you can see how statistical mechanics does a good job of handling quantized energy levels. Likewise, the Maxwell-Boltzman distribution does a fine job of describing the population distribution of an equilibrium ensemble of molecules / atoms / whatever with discrete quantized energy levels. The critical term here is equilibrium. If the system is not in equilibrium, such as a laser, then one can argue that it's temperature (at least for the degrees of freedom where there's a population inversion) is not well defined.

The thing that makes the Science paper really interesting is that the negative temperature is observed in the motional degrees of freedom where you normally think about a continuum of energies, and where you seldom have the necessary isolation from other degrees of freedom to prepare such exotic states. The key here is that Bose-Einstein condensate have coherent, quantized motional degrees of freedom that are highly decoupled from the rest of the universe.

layman
n.
A man who gets laid. Also known as a non-Slashdotter.

I thought it said, 'Successful prostitutes probably will be directly integrated with the user’s body," but then maybe that was just wishful thinking...

Sounds like the USPO.

I work for an engineering / science firm that does a lot of small contracts with billable hours. Most of the technical employees manage a contract or two. We need to know hourly salaries at proposal time to bid hours and determine budgets, and if anyone charges to the contract (peers, management, etc.) the person managing the contract can determine the salary.

after first thinking the article was about Romulan fortune tellers.

There's no point in building a heavy lift vehicle to build a lunar base that's going to use the water if we can't access the water. NASA is doing it right...It's a lot cheaper to send a robot to check out the water, see how easy it is to extract the water, and even return a sample to Earth than it is to send people there. And NASA would look really stupid if they get congress to fund a multi-billion dollar lunar base program only to discover that they don't have access to the water that they had counted on.

...but I'm sure it costs a bit more
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5YftEAbmMQ

By the way, we saw it first in Aliens:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQDy-5IQvuU