Oil goes into a lot more than just your gas tank. It represents energy to do stuff--purify water, create medicines, run semiconductor foundries and produce plastics. Even simple stuff like chewing gum depends on oil--it's all processed petroleum.

Perhaps most importantly, though, oil/natural gas are crucial inputs for fertilizers. The green revolution that makes it possible to feed the planet works only because we can convert petroleum into fertilizers. Natural organic fertilizers (i.e., bull&*%#) just aren't enough for six billion people. When we run out of cheap oil, we're going to be in for a food crisis as well as a transportation crisis.

Give the Chinese credit where it's due. Setting aside any arguments about how Americans don't value science and technology any more, to expect China not to produce good research is foolish. It is a large country that is putting resources into science and technology. Combined with the fact that stricter immigration laws make the United States a less desirable place for overseas students to study it's not a surprise. Based strictly on relative populations of China and America, we should be asking why the Chinese aren't producing even more groundbreaking work.

Americans forget that one of the main reasons they were the top dog in science and technology was because most of the world's population was doing subsistence farming. The kids of those farmers are now becoming scientists and engineers, and there is real competition now.

It's interesting to note that most of the top-tier research facilities of the past were backed by monopoly or near-monopoly corporations. Bell Telephone speaks for itself, IBM Labs was supported by revenue of a dominating computer manufacturer, Sarnoff is the old lab facility of RCA, which for a time had sufficient clout to pretty much set the price of vacuum tubes. Xerox was the dominant photocopier supplier in an era of large growth. In today's world, Microsoft is one of the biggest spenders on research, and they have their own cash cow from a software monopoly.

One wonders if the ability to fund basic research depends on having a nearly monopolistic revenue stream. And if that's the case, are we prepared to suffer monopolies to get the research that comes with them?

In this particular litigation, the plaintiffs and defendants made various stipulations. Notably the plaintiffs agreed to sue over primary copyright infringement but not on contributory (secondary) infringement. Defendants, on the other hand, agreed not to raise the various fair-use defenses that were available to them. In at least part of their brief the DOJ asserted that because of these waivers, this was not a useful test case for the Supreme Court because it wouldn't examine all of the arguments that could be made for each side. The DOJ didn't particularly come out in favour of IT rights; they just felt this wasn't the best case to settle them.

If the crops are reflecting all the light, what are they going to use to power photosynthesis?

That, of course, assumes that economics deserves to be treated as science.

Give him a break...he's suffering oxygen deprivation.

Lack of lab-to-lab reproducibility doesn't necessarily mean it's a hoax, although it can be a warning. I'd be a little more concerned about reproducibility on the original apparatus, but even that isn't a deal-breaker.

I recall sitting in a seminar on ultrafast laser pulses during my undergrad days and hearing about how some of the top labs in the world couldn't reproduce a particular piece of work. Eventually they discovered that some of the optical elements in the original test setup had a particular property that made it work (negative dispersion I think, but I don't remember for sure). No one, including the original researchers, realised it was important until everyone else's attempts failed and they started really looking at what the differences were between their test setups.