"Oh how awful. Did he at least die peacefully?...To shreds, you say? Tsk, tsk, tsk. Well, how's his wife holding up?...To shreds, you say? Very well, then."

The most useful thing I learned in high school chemistry was that units behave like variables. I wouldn't have made it far as a physics major if I didn't recognize when the result of a formula has the wrong units or that you can't add meters to seconds.

My understanding of an "entropic force" is that it can be described in terms of fundamental forces. The pressure in an ideal gas, for instance, can be derived by looking at the impulse created by a single molecule, and then extending that to a collection of N molecules. This guy seems to be saying that gravity is an entropic force and therefore NOT a fundamental force, but it seems to me that entropic forces are just an abstraction that allows us to ignore the underlying fundamental forces. Of course, I didn't read the whole article, but what I read was poorly written and that doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. Maybe I'll take another look if it gets published.

If they aren't encrypted, I assume that means that these devices don't actually meet the NIST standard. Couldn't there be a lawsuit for advertising the drives as such?

The nsf conducted a survey that found that 51% of people in the U.S. thought antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind02/c7/c7s1.htm

My handheld GPS also has a built-in compass.

Why would you want to kill someone in public?

According to Wikipedia, as of 2008-04-30, ethanol production is no longer subsidized. Care to provide a source countering that?

And to the people who say that more energy is consumed in producing corn I'd also ask for a source. According to the DOE, has a positive energy balance. (Granted, the source is the government, so I guess they're only saying that because of corn lobbyists)

I'm honestly willing to hear claims to the contrary, but all I see here on slashdot is a bunch of people saying that ethanol is bad without citing any research (even TFA didn't cite any original research)