Did you build your own compiler? If not, how can you trust the binaries it produces? Have you dissected your CPU? How do you know it's executing the instructions you want and not quietly running other instructions too? As others have said, you have to draw the line somewhere. Personally, I have no trouble running a binary distribution (not sure why you pick on Ubuntu and not Redhat or Suse or Debian or FreeBSD, but meh)

The HTCondor (formerly known as Condor) distributed computing project has always been free to use, but transitioned from a closed-source to open-source license a few years ago. Development of the software has been continuing unaffected, so far as I can tell. So: yes, it's definitely possible.

Indeed. It is an "experimental technique" rather than a "theoretical technique" or a "computational technique", say. It's frustrating to read an abstract of a physics paper which sounds like the authors have performed a nifty measurement, only to find that in fact they are proposing an idea, or have performed a simulation, or theoretically analysed the problem. (Don't get me wrong, they're all equally important things, but not the same as performing an experiment). Thus, it's nice to emphasise one's "experimental technique".

http://www.withouthotair.com/ Great book which performs a detailed analysis and discussion about energy usage (written by a Physics Prof who is also chief scientific advisor to the UK Government's Dept of Energy), freely available for download as a PDF (Off-topic: he's also the author of a brilliant textbook on Information Theory, also available as a free PDF)

Ireland != Northern Ireland. The latter is part of the UK, the former is not. That's kind of why there's been ~50 years of violent and, more recently, significantly less violent conflict in that part of the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles

http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.0096 Many physics papers are also uploaded to the arxiv where they are freely accessible.

The title seems to be trying to suggest (to me at least, and based on the other comments here also to plenty of other readers) that birds can perceive fractal dimensions (FDs). However, if you read the journal article, it's all about a study of how the fractal dimension of the plumage correlates to different measures of the bird's health. They then also investigate some causative effects, by changing the bird's food intake and measuring the effect this has on FD. Nowhere in the article do they make any claim that birds can necessarily perceive or calculate a fractal dimension: the paper ends by saying "We therefore suggest that considering FD should shed new light onto the evolution and maintenance of complex animal patterns. " So they suggest (entirely reasonably IMHO) that it would be interesting to study that latter aspect, which is quite an important difference from what the Slashdot title is trying to imply.

A basic precept of science is that you can't prove a negative.

FFS, RTFA! "The Prime Minister is expected to announce formal plans to look into...Cameron will announce a consultation". No plans to do anything at all have been announced, which is what the summary says

Firstly it's a superconductor, not a semiconductor (as would have been obvious had the editor even bothered to glance at TFA). They're totally different things. Also, this is not news at all: it's a cool video, but again as TFA states it's just an example of the well-known Meissner effect.