So what does the good senator do ? Introduces a bill that creates the position which is then conveniently filled by the guy waiting in the wings. Every controversy seems to be much more easily solved by creating new positions.

Actually, there is a very important application of a by-product of a circular particle accelerator: very high-quality X-rays. They are a pain for the particle physicists, but a blessing for the condensed-matter and biophysics people. At Cornell they use these X-rays to study a lot of crystalized proteins. Another reason to keep the funding going.

Honestly, I don't know much about what happened at CERN before LHC, I only remember that they had LEP, which was an electron-positron collider, while the Tevatron is proton-anti-proton. The "scooping" of experiments happens all the time, for example Cornell's collider was the main place to study B mesons for about 20 years, before SLAC built the BaBar machine that accumulated in one year as much data as the Cornell machine has accumulated in 20 years. Luckily, the people at Cornell were able to move to K mesons (which contain strange quarks rather than bottom quarks) in a different energy range and do precision measurements. This way they kept the funding going. As for the next collider, the US Congress has canceled SSC back in 1993 and there is little chance such a project (40TeV, as opposed to LHC's 14TeV) will ever get built in US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider

The Tevatron is so thoroughly outclassed by the LHC that they have to take advantage of every opportunity to make a press release and show that they are still relevant. Once the LHC starts producing science data there will be impossible to justify funding for the Tevatron. The whole of Fermi Lab. (which uses about half the science money given by the D.O.E.) will be in danger of being closed, so they are fighting for survival. During the Bush administration they had to get private funding to avoid lay-offs. http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/good-news-or-less-bad-news-for-american-science/

This looks to me like an attempt to win an ignoble prize. Just like this one, which was an actual winner: http://improbable.com/ig/2002/scrotal-asymmetry.pdf "Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and in Ancient Scupture"

I saw that things are picking up in the SCO v.s. Novell lawsuit, and according to Groklaw SCO is in a pretty bad position with Novell owning the UNIX copyrights. Asset stripping sounds suspiciously convenient, especially if somebody wants those pesky copyrights out of the way.

I worked in the energy market, specifically in electricity (not as a trader). First, Enron pretty much invented the market for electricity ("power trading"), it was the (mis)management that sunk the company. The problem with renewables, and wind in particular, is the unpredictability. You can end up with a lot of power delivered to you and you may end up paying somebody to get rid of it, as you cannot consume it all. So if Google wants to buy wind power for its own consumption, it makes all the sense in the world to enter the market and trade as well.

The European Commission has set an example by fining Intel 1.45B. No US court was likely to award much more than that. AMD can make much better use of the cash now, rather than a few years down the line. And Intel can do without being continuously accused of cheating. Rest assured that the agreement has included quite a few provisions regarding dirty play in the future, but don't expect those to be made public.

Just to remember one thing, when Microsoft pushed their Windows clusters (yes, there is such a thing) Cornell was the only university which bought such clusters and forced their students to use them. This time I am sure they did not sign up to the "project" ...

Back in '92 the school received a bunch of 386 machines. The school principal (or "director"), computer illiterate and scared of such dubious machines, decided that allowing the students to use them will have only one outcome: the students will damage the machines. Therefore, to prevent such damage, he locked them away in a warehouse, and I am sure that they are still there, in the same warehouse, in the same state as in '92. Not a trace of damage, of course.

Is anyone surprised ? Check out this year's Physics Nobel prize. Disgusting publicity stunt for LHC, so that it will continue to get funding despite the setbacks and the fact that it will most probably find nothing at all. When the most powerful machine was able to reach only about 40GeV, all the theoretical models were showing irefutable evidence that the top quark had a mass of about 45GeV. The 2004 Nobel Prize (Physics again) ? The idea belonged to Sidney Coleman who was honest enough not to put his name on a paper where all the work was done by his student (Politzer), but David Gross had no problem stealing the idea and adding his name to the paper written by his student (Wilczek). Not to say that Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered the pulsars, but it was her advisor Antony Hewish who got the Nobel Prize even though he was incapable to recognize the value of her work and just discarded her data as just plain wrong. There are other examples, bu these are the most obvious ones I know about. Is anyone surprised about the bribery probe ? I certainly am surprised that this was not kept under the wraps and was made public.

The entire debacle would not have happened if the rating agencies had done their jobs an not put an "AAA" rating on securities backed by the crappy mortgages, securities that should have been graded a lot lower. So much revolves around this "credit rating" that financial institutions just take the ratings without thinking and move on from there. Somehow, nobody points the finger at the rating agencies, now it's the quants who are to blame.