Well, considering at least one Slashdot poster commented about his 3-year-old wracking up charges, I would say at least some of of the children are toddlers and they probably are using $300 dollar devices.

Perhaps it shouldn't, but considering that you got it wrong, as Microsoft added DX11 support to Vista, obviously it's slightly more difficult to grasp than you seem to think it is.

We know it works at large scales. We don't know if it works at small scales. Since the entire goal is small-scale fusion (i.e. something that doesn't require an entire solar mass of hydrogen to maintain), we really don't yet know if it works as a viable contained power source.

I suspect the issue is more "why?" Why would they bother spending even a few thousand dollars on a satellite that was supposed to have been shut down 15 years ago and for which they (quite clearly) have no more use? And it would cost money, if only the time they spend using the amplifiers/antennas. Considering that the DSN communications system already has to support multiple missions, adding one extra that serves no useful function is a complete waste of resources.

Except that's not really true. Our current Big Bang cosmological theory rose into the forefront (despite being derisively named the "Big Bang" by the proponents of the earlier reigning cosmological theory of the steady-state universe) when the cosmic microwave background was discovered. Quantum mechanics is the reigning theory for explaining particle behavior at very small scales, despite Einstein's well-known dislike for the theory. The fact is: you don't have to convince your opponents, you have to convince everyone else. It doesn't matter if you have a bunch of scientists unwilling to give up their "sacred cows", because you have a bunch of other scientists who have no stake in one theory or the other but are perfectly capable of judging between the evidence. Thats really the key: scientific progress is made by the community testing and accepting theories. Of course, some people (like Hawking) have a significant influence, but it's not like Hawking is never willing to admit he's wrong either: he has famously made several bets with John Preskill/Kip Thorne about singularities and black holes, which he has lost (and admitted to losing).

Unfortunately, we can't. From TFA:

And just as fast as those physicists have come up with those equations, they have been ruled out. Currently, none of the equations explain the phenomenon better than dark matter (and they're often much much worse). It's not equally as possible that dark matter exists as that it doesn't: the current evidence points to dark matter being more likely to exist than not. Tweaking equations and throwing in correction terms to force the model to fit the observations is usually a bad approach in physics (or science in general).

BTW, looking for side-effects that would result if dark matter does exist is, far from being stupid, a decent method of indirectly confirming the existence of dark matter in the first place (since observing dark matter directly is really, really hard, perhaps even impossible).

Most of them will. However, my current desktop has gone through a motherboard swap, CPU upgrade, 2 graphics cards swaps, several HDD upgrades, added RAM, PSU swap, and a new case (technically, the only original component is 2 of the current 4 sticks of RAM, the Wifi card, and one of the HDDs).

Most people probably won't use the modularity much, if at all. But some people will, and those people who do can benefit from it tremendously.

His precision is orders of magnitude greater than that of the Drake equation itself, so by comparison he was incredibly specific.

Not that that actually helps at all: the Drake "equation" is only useful as a thought exercise and is completely and utterly useless for any* kind of quantitative usage whatsoever (since several terms in it are completely and wholly unknown).

*Well, you can use it to find weak upper-bounds, but that's about it, and not much help, and you don't need the full equation for that.

Encouraging people to commit a crime is also, generally, a crime. Speaking with the intent to cause a riot? Criminal. Speech that happens incidentally to cause a riot? Not criminal.

Where do they claim that, exactly? As far as I can tell reading Wolfram's licensing page, your claim is 100% completely and utterly false. What they do claim is copyright on their presentation and assemblage of the facts (such as plots, graphs, tables, et alia), but not at all on the facts themselves.

Atlantis was solved over 2000 years ago: Plato made the story up. He says as much. It was never intended to be taken as an actual real place, it was just a story told by a fictional character in one of his dialogs (the Timaeus, to be specific) to make a point.

DOIs can take a few hours/days or so to start working in some cases, if the results were recently announced. While Slashdot covering recent news would be surprising, it's not totally unheard of.

I'm puzzled where you're seeing the confusion. TFA uses the term "precise" precisely (heh) as it is meant to be used: it tells you the uncertainty (known uncertainty, obviously, though you can throw in a "fudge factor" to account for unknown factors) in the measurement. It's not really possible to tell if the measurement is *accurate* except by comparing it to other measurements made by other teams, but given the higher level of precision in this experiment, that comparison is mostly useless (I'm assuming their data with error lies within the data with error of other measurements. If it didn't, that might end being much bigger news).

And if I take a tonne of gold and bury it in the ground, did I make a mine? Sure, I guess, but most people would call you crazy if you actually did that. It may be "farmland", but it's not good farmland (by and large, some areas of California are different, and some crops work very well in drier weather), especially when you're wasting massive amounts of water even on a good year.