Every time a new discovery is made, legions of naysayers appear to tell us how it will not make a difference or is impossible to implement or too expensive or, well, you fill in the blank. Never underestimate the ingenuity of people wanting fame, wealth, professional success, better mate selection or whatever. Graphene will be whatever it will be. It was only a relatively few years ago that these same people, or their ilk, thought they knew everything there was to know about the well-explored element, carbon. The future will reveal itself in due course and those who predict utopia or disaster are both likely to be wrong.

What has motivated almost all exploration on Earth is pursuit of profit, wealth or colonization. There have been a few explorers that pursued it for knowledge, adventure or glory, but they are by far the minority. Although the "oil" option was facetious, it is actually dead on the mark. As soon as someone determines that there is money or power in space, then there will be a real race.

This is apostasy and can only be punished by academic death. They will never get a grant in this town, again!

No, science should not be ignored but that does not mean that conspiracies do not exist. They do.

Al Gore is not just a celebrity. Sadly, many people are influenced by his gibberish. I agree with your basic premise but most AGW advocates ignore and will not address contrary evidence, preferring instead to ridicule and cast aspersions, as you do. What is there to fear from an open discussion and equal treatment of all available evidence, unless a predetermined outcome is the goal?

My last company was a well-known, major defense contractor. HR sent CS grads, with credible paper GPA's from well regarded universities, who claimed to know C, and could not explain the source code for "cat". I'm no C programmer and it took me about thirty seconds to puzzle through it. It does no good to produce legions of CS grads whose diplomas are valueless. Coding, even with modern tools, is not easy and never will be. The way to attract more ***QUALIFIED*** people to CS is to allow the market to price their services accordingly.

Friends with H1B hungry commercial companies report similar experiences. A few imports are very good, most range from barely Ok to competent and the rest are dead weight.

The subject under discussion is broadband. Try to pay attention. And, yes, municipalities do prohibit competition through sleazy deals with all-too-eager providers. In those areas where there are no contractual monopolies, lower rates, better service and higher consumer satisfaction are the norm. The reason why there is only one choice in so many locations, like mine, is because local government has sold the monopoly rights.
http://www.wired.com/2013/07/w...

The answer is pretty easy. Eliminate the ability of cities, counties or states to create monopolies. In jurisdictions where there is no monopoly and multiple offerings exist; prices are lower, service is better and customers are more satisfied.
http://www.pcworld.com/article...
http://cbpp.georgetown.edu/wp-...
http://www.uspirg.org/reports/...

I'm with the other two posters who also thought this was considered fact.

General Atomic's San Diego Tokamak is till running and performing very useful research, particularly in magnetic controls. http://www.ga.com/magnetic-fus... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

But, if you must complain, file a grievance with the Internal Security Ministry, Sedition Division.

What caused the dust bowl in the thirties? Global warming? What caused the Saharan climate shift six thousand years ago? SUV-driving Republicans? Attempts to link individual weather events or even climate shifts to the eidolon of "climate change" are pointless and scientifically vacuous.