as if it was designed to keep the UFO meme in the public consciousness. A strategy which works. Much of the public think conspiracy buffs are crackpots. with UFO tales priming the pump. I see all the time statements like "you are saying the ___ was a lie and the ___ was not real, LOL. What's next, UFOs?"

Overall UFO tales are a way for folks who grow up in authoritarian backgrounds, who sense something is amiss, to dissent in a safe way (in their minds).

they shut down a whole continent. and all you can cite is a plane that did not crash after directly flying through an ash plume

that means Branson is right

and their passengers, not the government.
whats next, prison sentences for those who don't rotate their tires?

I notice a lot of responses like this, the majority of slashdotters seem to be backing off from saying the planes would crash right away. which mean Branson wins the argument.

the maintenance of airplanes is the airline's business, not governments.

there were countries that had blue skies over head, and theire govt told plane owners they could not take off (even if they had no chance of -in your words- flying through an ash cloud more than once).

the ban was obviously a way over-reaction, IMO. I would give the politics of it, but this is tech forum

<quote>A dropping concentration of these cells in HIV+ patients' blood is a reasonable metric for the progression of AIDS.</quote>

translation: a lot of the time it isn't.

which means this machine will be responsible for more of the current tragedy taking place: healthy people are talked into taking poisonous AIDS drugs, the side effects of which will convince they were right to take the drugs. after years of debilitation finally their livers or hearts will fail, and AIDS hacks will call it "AIDS".

think this is crazy? did you know right now in the USA liver failure is the leading cause of AIDS death?

these are hacks. these mainstream scientists. hacks. people need to wake the fk up

First of all, you are trivializing the lives of millions that died in WWII by comparing what happened to them to this trivial thing.

Secondly, you are singling- out Venezuela/Chavez from what is a worldwide trend. here is an incomplete list of stuff you can't do by country, recent:

-- Venezuela - no violent video games
-- Italy - soccer players can't say "God damn it" on the field
-- USA - people can't photograph bridges or buildings
-- France - no burkas (?)

If you had just relaxed a little bit before you posted you would have realized loss of freedom is a worldwide problem

there aren't a lot of links. and I should say I am no expert. But from what I remember these were all failed predictions ==>

--background temperature -in pre-BB world this was correctly predicted (with slightly inaccurate math) to be 3K. BBers predicted values much higher. then when it was measured as 2.8k the BBers claimed they had said this all along

--distribution of galaxies - now observed, clustered not as predicted at all

--gravity waves : not found

--age of Universe: BBers keep waffling massively, see spinning on Hubble deep field, and what they would find

--neutrinos: I'm pretty sure they switched up on what they find, involving these particles, too

up next, the phantom Higgs Boson? I say yes.

A few years ago, during the construction, one of the LHC bigwigs gave a speech (which I later read). At the end he said (paraphrased)

  "if the Higgs boson does not exist, we will have to invent it".

He was half-joking I suppose, but that is what they are trying now, basically

I have thought for years, partly via observation of their psychology, that the underlying theory must have serious holes. I suspect the truth is:

1 the Higgs boson does not exist.
2 "dark matter" is BS
3 the Big Bang theory is wrong.

[btw, the Big Bang theory has an amazing number of failed predictions]

You would have been a better Slashdotter to have cut the first two paragraphs (where you announce your limited credentials and then launch into a pet peeve about the autism issue).

Your last paragraph -actually about bees- is dense and unsupported.

And the bit 'despite what you learned in high school' is patronizing and probably inaccurate. This isn't a HS forum, and they don't teach about bee hierarchies and transposons there anyway.