>social pressure

"Firing someone" is not simply "social pressure"

To begin with, the article is speculation:

>although no one knows for sure whether the bacteria survived the inter-planetary ride.

> The key part here is that when you are looking for life

You should be able to tell if the life is extra-terrestrial without arbitrarily excluding possibility of contamination.

For example, I do not need a whole history of specimen to determine if genome sequence was contaminated. There are computer programs that will do that fairly easily.

"and releasing more energy than a large atomic bomb" in the first reports it was "a small atomic bomb".

Imagine

"Your 60-hour police work is not a badge of honor" and then in the text: "it's a sign that favelas are screwed up organizationally".

>The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

In this particular case, it's more of an opposite, since American law enforcement is known for baiting people into committing crimes.

There are international grants?

I object my tax dollars going to support this kind of crap studies.

How do I check if my card number is compromised?

Does this affect only cards used in brick-and-mortar store cashier machines?

I am disappointed that there are no insightful comments about the area, actual danger, chemical composition.

Does reading a PERL script that implements company phone book and taking plain text user and password to implement a better phone book for personal use constitute hacking?

>Thinking about the eventual fate of the universe and our current home is something that we should all do at some point.

Valid point. Question: why does one need to make unverifiable extrapolations to do that?

Can somebody explain why this stuff matters? I mean speculation without a chance of experimental verification?

I listened to a dramatic program on NPR about licing in India and they mentioned that "green revolution" had significant harmful effect of using chemicals in agriculture of the Third world. They are getting out of it now, in the process.

>Maybe I'm an idealist

"Something wrong on the internet" :-) I am familiar with that feeling.

Take it easy, bro

That is not true. Just yesterday I saw a highly upvoted (32 votes as far as I remember) Reddit comment linked to Slashdot article.