Anakin Skywalker spent a lot of time with the dark side and look how much body mass he was able to lose.

If you don't care about things like memories, about six billion bits: http://www.tmsoft.com/article-...

By all means, less likely views should be marginalized, but they should be marginalized as a side effect of their having only a marginal chance of being correct, not because you've built up some vicious characterization of their adherents. It's interesting that in the reasons you list for your opposition -- politics, religion, mental illness (?) -- you forgot to include anything about their explanations of the observed phenomena being less satisfactory.

My first problem with this attitude is, who decides when the best response is simply treating the adherents as unworthy neanderthals and making sure that no legitimate scientific criticisms get swept in? Will that be you? I don't trust that this is always going to work out. I do, however, always trust in a dispassioned comparison of evidence, or at least, there's nothing I trust more.

My second problem is that it much more difficult to reason with people when you start your arguments by giving them a bloody nose. At that point they're just in it to retaliate for the bloody nose, assuming they don't stop reading entirely. IMHO you are making it ten times more difficult to actually stamp out these bad thinkings just so you can have the satisfication of wielding a few insults. What does referring to anyone snidely actual accomplish in the scientific discourse?

IMHO the article written is not of publishable quality. (The journal it *did* get published in has a very low impact factor of 1.3.) It's badly written, poorly supported, and subject to substantial methodological errors.

Each subject comparison is based entirely on the subjective evaluation of a random med student. It doesn't seem like they even provided them with standard protocols. They just assumed that any discrepancies represented factual errors in the wikipedia article. They didn't make comparison to other sources or even internal to the literature.

It would be lovely if they would actually include some of the assertions they evaluated. But frankly I would put infinitely more faith in the Wikipedia articles cited than this particular report. Certainly they represent better and more substantial writing.

"Now the downside to this is more time on hold."
Do we really all want to converge on resources for the hearing-disabled and make their wait time even longer?

I would call sparsely populated a significant security advantage. Post proper signage and you don't have to supply much doubt than any unauthorized person in the vicinity is up to no good. None of the fake delivery guy nonsense that works in the movies. You stand a good chance of intercepting the hostiles before they even are close enough to see the facility.

As any bank robber can tell you, the most important part of the operation is the getaway. Walking in and taking what you want at gunpoint is comparatively easy. The next step is to get out of there and lose the authorities by getting to where you can hide and blend in. When the getaway involves hundreds of miles of empty single access road? You're screwed. No criminal or terrorist force is going to come close to matching what the government can dish out for firepower. Their only hope is to get away before the government can mobilize, which, in this case, they have plenty of time to do.

Also, I believe these contaminants are buried deep underground. That's foolproof security. A lock can be picked to bypass having to use the official key. When the security mechanism is a million tonnes of rock there is no shortcut, the terrorists are stuck using the exact same equipment and accessways as everyone else to extract the waste.

The final step is to get the radioactive waste to the target, which is a population area. Terrorists might not care what population area it is, which means by storing it near *any* population area you have saved them the trouble of doing any work to get it to its target. Having access to it for just a few minutes could be enough to do all the damage they want to do. Not so with a remote site.

It's easy enough to simulate martian conditions here on earth, which is a more controlled and far cheaper means of experiment. It was found that certain lichen can do quite well, although note that this was on the assumption that water would be available.

It would probably be best not to introduce earth microbes before a full terraforming plan is developed. The population might explode, consume all the available micronutrients, and then die off. Or it might become a pest, inhibiting the release of other, more useful microorganisms later on. And it might obscure any extant martian microorganisms or micoorganism fossils when those could provide a far better template than earth-based extremophiles. We'll want something robust and sustainable, a planned ecosystem genetically engineered to produce all the right byproducts and which changes in concert with the alterations to atmosphere, global temperature, and soil composition without any unintended extinction events.

No, slaughter is indiscriminate killing. Reducing casualties is a definite move away from that. While attaching a cost to war is one way of prohibiting it -- hence the success of M.A.D. -- the problem is someday you do wind up having to pay that cost. Overall it's better to reduce the cost than trying to make it as frightful as you can.

But if soldiers can be made obsolete, perhaps killing people can be made obsolete as well. Just as women and children have sometimes enjoyed a certain immunity for not being part of the military forces, when the main threat and the main production force on both sides is robotic, why would the humans be attacked at all when their influence on the outcome is only marginal and doing so would open your own humans to retaliation?

We clearly need to capture this whale and study it.

I went the opposite route of never taking notes to taking meticulous notes. But I found in my upper level courses that my brain simply could not keep up with the material at hand. It was instead most important that I had the notes to refer back to for doing the homework, which was where I would actually figure out the material. Trusting only to my brain capabilities during that hour, I never would have parsed it into anything comprehensible. I would also go back and create a comprehensive table of contents for my notes which forced me to review them, figure what was important, figure out how it all related, and left me with a very handy tool for referring back to the material.

Of course, that only worked in classes with good lecturers in the first place.

In any case, we live in age where the professor only needs to deliver a solid lecture once and put it on youtube. I feel it would be better to do that and use the hour to answer questions and work problems -- things which actually do require the instructor's physical presence.

Actually, humans have done a good job of surviving famine and other food stresses by adopting long term storage strategies. It's fundamental to agriculture -- usually your crop is not producing 365 days of the year. Humans unable to ration and protion themselves would be less likely to survive because food availability is rather variable. We're not just eating machines. And there are plenty of places historical and contemporary places with high food aviailability and no significant obesity problem. Compare America to Japan. It really is the content of the diet which is at issue (as well as a more leisurely lifestyle) not simply the availability of the food.

Microsoft does not own the information; they as a third party own the server on which someone else's information resides, a server which is held and taxed as a foreign asset outside US regional jurisdiction. It's one thing to compel Microsoft as a transnational company to produce one of their corporate records regardless of where they have stored it: agreeing to subject themselves to the US judicial system is part of incorporating in the US. It's entirely another when they are being told their foreign offices are actually territory of the US government and anyone or anything which resides there must submit to the pleasures of the US judicial system.

If I had written a letter in Britain and put it in a British safety deposit box I don't think the court would have the guts to demand it, even if the bank were jointly owned in the US. But scan that letter and store on the server and suddenly it's free game. Why? Because now it's easy to sneak the data out of the country without bothering the local authorities? Good news for people torrenting.

I suppose if you live in other countries you should doublecheck that any web companies you do business with do not also have a US presence because if they do any of your data could be subject to requisition by the US government even if it's data which has never left your country.

Yes, although you wouldn't ignite it, you would simply apply a heat source to drive the alcohol out from the granules and into the vapor phase. You can do the same with regular alcohol.

I wouldn't recommend it however: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

Maybe it's not the best for inner city roads, but on long highway stretches it would be awfully nice to be able to see the road far ahead. Especially on road with hills and curves, headlights do a fairly bad job of lighting up that reflective paint (other than what's immediately ahead) because often your car is not oriented so as to illuminate it.

In my opinion this is a bit like sitting in your backyard with a telescope opining that there are no new planets left to discover in the solar system while people are out paving the way to actually visit them.

The work being done right now is monumental. Science is progressing faster than it ever has been. But great and fundamental insights are obviously going to be clustered around paradigm shifts. Newton gave us classical mechanics in the 17th century. It took another two hundred years before quantum mechanics displaced it. And then there was lots of room for different scientists to establish the ground rules and get their names in textbooks. But keep in mind that the discovery of quantum mechanics was not the result of people constantly hunting for a way to overthrow Newton. Scientists explored all Newton had to offer, eventually found places where he came up short, and trying to extend Newton is what eventually lead to the knowledge which justified quantum mechanics.

Nobel prizes are awarded for major effects on a field. When there's been a lot of branching off you try to look back to one of the initial branches and credit that with spawning the others. That's obviously going to favor older work as time goes on (keep in mind how nascent our recent understanding is). But that's a bit like crediting Adam and Eve. It's a pretty simplististic way of establishing a hierarchy of importance.