Since the data is unique to a time & place and irreplaceable, it would completely destroy the reproducibility aspect of the scientific process.

This gets tricky in some fields, however. I work in a field where generating the data is a notoriously difficult and haphazard process, subject to many non-experimental variables, such that the use of a different pipette or stock solution can make the difference - or even just the speed of the researcher's manual labor. Temperature and humidity play a role too, and these are not as precisely calibrated as one might like. So if an experiment is performed at 8pm on a Saturday night by a grad student in Colorado, there is no guarantee that a postdoc in Singapore will be able to do the same thing based on reading the paper. (Actually, from past experience, there's no guarantee that the original experimenter will be able to reproduce it either!) But the data may be just as good, and they're difficult to fake, and they're deposited in a public database. Since everyone in the field is accustomed to the complexities of the process and we have decent archival policies, this problem is accepted as a fact of life.

I am quite certain that some of my (published) results from grad school would be difficult at best to reproduce exactly. I stand by my data - and am happy to share them - but it is always troubling to wonder if someone else in a different environment would have reached different conclusions.

On several occasions I have tried to get data from researchers. Most of them guard their data jealously

I should note that this almost certainly violates the terms of publication for most journals, and possibly the terms of their research grants as well. I actually had one professor complain to me that it was "his" data and I had no right to it - conveniently ignoring the fact that he (like me) was being funded by taxpayers (albeit in different countries). My views on this subject aren't particularly radical - I do think scientists should be allowed to keep data private until they publish (or give up) - but any academic researcher with this kind of attitude needs to find a new job.

For some projects the NIH has gone even further and said that data need to be publicly archived immediately, regardless of publication plans. This is problematic for most fields, but at least the funding agencies are being militant about this.

We let a bunch of 1 percenters, who themselves barely know how or care to read, sponsor draconian copyright laws to stop eeryone from copying all that stuff, just on the off chance that they might copy a bunch of songs or movies that are outmoded within two years. And the commercial scienrific pulishers are some of the worst.

Commercial scientific publishers do indeed tend to be bottom-feeders, but if I'm understanding the article correct, they're not the root cause here - the issue is not that articles are being lost, it's that the underlying data used to generate them are lost. The journals can't help with that, because they're in the publication business, not the data archival business. We're talking about some grad student's lab notebook that contains the raw numbers used to generate a box plot, which then gets thrown out by mistake the next time the lab moves, or when the professor retires, etc.

Many fields (genomics, structural biology) have mandatory data-deposition policies that ensure that the raw data is available to everyone, without charge (except for patents on commercial uses, but that's a separate rant). The problem here tends to be that we're usually archiving derived data, which is still a lot better than nothing at all, but limits the types of analyses that can be done.

NASA blasts a 1000Watt laser at the moon on a regular basis, in fact the Goddard center has an even bigger one going in place to give them a better return pulse for range finding. Yes they actually measure how far away the moon is quite a bit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment

Lasers lose power on a logarithmic scale, so to hit the moon with enough power of a laser beam to actually heat the ground, not destroy anything, but act as a space heater, the ground based laser here would have to be so big that the atmosphere would boil, and they would have to use most of the power that the United states generate to fire the beam. Attenuation from our atmosphere is huge, but the distance is just mindbogglingly large.

So if you did have a moon base, you have about 5000 years before technology is at a point where someone can shoot a laser at your base from earth and even be noticed on the moon.

We should also look at who produces most of the code. If we simply slap the label of developer on anyone who writes code, we may come away with the idea that because 40% of DEVELOPERS are hobbyists, that 40% of actual DEVELOPMENT/implementation is done by hobbyists. It would be like saying 80% of authors, defined as someone who spends 10 or more hours a month writing text (could be emails, could be text messages, etc.), are hobbyists.

Considering just how skewed productivity is among programmers, it wouldn't surprise me if this 40% collectively gets much less done than the pro's. That's not saying we shouldn't encourage people to make coding a hobby, but I think it's dangerous to present the idea to the world that code is a freely available resource that can easily be obtained for an extremely low cost or for free. I have to fight this quite a bit as a professional, because the expectations of some customers and employers is just incredibly out of line. Many of them will expect a project that requires 50K+ lines of code (and as a result, potentially hundreds of man hours of work)to take a couple of weeks and cost maybe $500 (to see what I mean look at sites like rentacoder).

" It is at the bottom of a shallow gravity well,"

It is at the bottom of a Gravity well that is 1/3 as deep as the Earths gravity well but also still within the earths gravity well, which is also within the Sun's gravity well.

To orbit is easy from there, out of orbit still needs a lot of energy.

you forgot the two MOST valuable resources...

11 Moon Rocks.
12 Moon Dust.

Moon rocks go for more than 5000X their weight in gold. Moon dust is close to the same value.

So DeBeers will be there selling wonderful classy Moon rock engagement rings, because being expensive means you love her....

It seems pretty strange that there's no provision for looking in front of the machine. You'd almost expect that there would be some kind of camera or way to poke a camera out an opening to see what's in front of them.

I would assume than running into weird shit digging a tunnel would be typical, although maybe it's designed with so much boring power that they only really expect to look at the overburden on the conveyor behind the boring machine.

So the worst that can happen is that the moon starts generating life on it's own?

Luckily, the guys at NASA are into that kind of thing....

Very simple. Thin film on glass = junk.

Actual silicon solar cells = good.

Mono crystalline = very good.

Citation? try www.google.com and my experience at wasting a LOT of money on the garbage sold at Harbor Freight, Sears, Home Depot, etc... if it's a "brown" color and a sheet of glass they are complete garbage.

So they ran into the location where they buried all the bowling balls from the great bowling blight of the 1700's.

The same researchers plan to do a study on the new electronic social networking phenomena. All of the test subjects will be given pagers for two hours a day.

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Compared to many of the people that manage to have the job title of "developer" in corporations, a "hobbyist" would be a step up.

A sphere has to have dimensions?

I would have thought being 0 in all dimensions made for a perfect sphere, I mean, hey, its not a cube is it?