Your scheme has merit. Its complicated though, in a lot of fields there are only a very small number of experts who are qualified to review a paper, and you would need some way to get the "right" people doing the reviews. A paper with a provocative title like Kip Thorne's "Wormholes, Time Machines and the Weak Energy Condition" is likely to attract a hoard of people who are in no way qualified to evaluate the work. We see the same effect on Slashdot where a very technical article will be referenced and there will be a few comments from knowledgeable people, a lot will be from people who don't have the background to understand the original article.

Still - I absolutely agree that we need a fix, but it is a tricky problem.

Its not just the scientists. Laboratories are judged (and to some extent funded) based on the total impact of their publications. You get there with a few easy steps:

1) public decides that funding science is good
2). lots of organizations compete for limited funding
3). Public needs to decide how to allocate funding and needs a metric for measuring the performance of these organizations
4) Public decides that peer review is a good metric
5) Important publications are sent to the journals that have other important publications, those that are rejected go to lower level journals. This establishes a hierarchy of journals.
6). The public considers publishing in higher "impact" journals as representing more value.

It is all logical, and a difficult system to fix. If I have a really good publication, I am hurting my career and my laboratory and coworkers by not publishing it in one of the premier journals. I'm even hurting science because by publishing in a lower impact journal, my (presumed brilliant and important) publication will be read by fewer scientists.

As an aside, a lot of the published material is also available to the public for free (all my stuff is also in SLAC pubs as is required by DOE), but these do not rate as high on a google search so you will have a more difficult time finding them. Google, like everyone else, gives higher ratings to the prestigious journals.

I wish I knew how to fix this. It is quite frustrating that 3rd party companies are paid for my work. To add insult to injury, I often review papers for these journals - and am not paid for the reviews. I could turn down the review requests, but peer review IS a vital part of science.

To the previous poster - the problem with non-anonymous reviews is the risk of "trading" good reviews, retaliation etc if the reviewers are known. Scientists are people, as easily tempted to misbehavior as any other group.

Don't equivelence principal experiments test this due to virtual anti-matter in normal matter? Maybe there isn't enough sensitivity?

A direct test is certainly nicer.

In general relativity, gravity is a warping of space and EVERYTHING falls at exactly the same speed. This has been tested to very high accuracy in a variety of experiments. (see eotvos experiment)

There are other theories of gravity where this doesn't necessarily need to be true and antimatter and matter might fall at different rates. The eotvos type experiments have indirectly tested this since there is some amount of virtual antimatter in normal objects (from quantum fluctuations), but a direct measurement would be a nice demonstration.

This is one of those experiments were people are pretty sure of the answer, but getting a different result would be very important to physics.

Its difficult because for a single atom gravity is very weak. Small magnetic or electric fields (or field gradients) can interact with the magnetic field, or electric dipole moment of the atom. Also the atoms are moving inside of the trap. The speed of their motion depends on temperature: (at room temperature it is > 1 kilometer/second). I assume they cool the anti-hydrogen, but the atoms may still be moving so quickly that gravitational effects are not very large.

I think that there is a difference between whether current implementations of DRM are desirable, and whether there could be an implementation that does desirable things.

As a consumer, I am happy to pay for content. I am happy to have DRM content IF:
1. I can view the content without using proprietary software - sorry, I DO NOT trust software written by any but a very small set of companies.
2. I can view the content when I am not connected to the net.
3. I can sell the content to other people in the same way that I can sell physical objects.
4. The content will NEVER disappear, the company cannot change the content, or remove the content. If they go out of business, they unlock all the content that they sold, or in other ways ensure that I don't lose the rest of these requirements.
5. I can transfer the content to other devices (one at a time is OK) with different operating systems. I have content that is 30 years old, and I plan to keep it another 30 years, no idea what device and OS I may want to be using in the future.
6. VERY IMPORTANT: I am buying content for money, I am NOT willing to provide ANY usage or personal information whatsoever. You do not get my name, my IP address, or know what I watched when. If you want my personal information you may separately offer to pay me for the information and I will give any reasonable offer serious consideration.

rying to understand alien economics seems rather silly since we can't understand our own. Imagine even a society as advanced as ancient Rome trying to understand what caused our recent global recession. Let me make a few possible assumptions:

Technologies reach a plateau: we've seen this in a number of cases so far: ships, aircraft, cars haven't changed dramatically in capabilities in the last 50 years. Even computer tech may be slowing.

Getting to these ultimate technologies requires a near planetary scale infrastructure - for each one. For example it may be difficult to build a small chip technology - you need large fab lines, development teams etc.

A static alien civilization with very long year timescales - either through long-lived aliens, or a society that values organizations over individuals.

So - they build a starship (expensive), but amortize that cost over many millenia of use. Fuel is deuterium - available at all gas giants. And they mosey around the galaxy at .05C. When they get to a planet like present day earth, they offer to trade: Say a bunch of mister-fusions they picked up on Rigel 7, for a thousand metric tons of high density memory chips. Later they will trade some of those chips for 10 meter cubes of flawless diamond from some other culture that has specialized in that technology.

Some of the trips will be a bust, the civilization may have fallen, so you load up on more D2 and off you go again.

Basically interstellar travel only seems unreasonable because humans happen to live 100 years. If we lived 100,000 it might seem quite reasonable.

You don't need FTL. Its easy to imagine a fission or fusion powered rocket that could reach 0.1C - this is not far from what we can imagine now. That leaves you with a trip of centuries to millenia. That might be completely reasonable to an advanced race that either has a naturally long lifespan, or which has solved the problem of ageing. Depending on their technology they might be able to bring enough of their information technology with them to stay interested for the trip.

The point is to decide which rules you are willing to accept. I will not enter a country that might ask for access to my private accounts, assuming that I can verify that this is really the case.

You may have been in his email list, or possibly both of you in a 3rd person's list. Has anyone absolutely verified that they received an invite from someone who didn't send one?

When an individual driver is at fault, the lawsuits are limited because the typical driver can't afford much. In the much rarer cases where a car manufacturer has been found negligent, the lawsuits can be enormous - I think one was over a billion.

With an AI it may be possible to convince a jury that Google was negligent - juries hate large companies.

I completely agree that an AI could on average do a better job than a human. My concern though is that sometimes it will make a mistake - this is pattern recognition in a very complex environment.

When a human driver makes such a mistake (which happens), there is lots of legal case work to assign blame. In the scenario presented, if the driver was at a legal speed, has a good driving record, was not impaired, distracted, etc, they are likely to be exonerated of any crime. We don't have rules for how to assign blame when an AI makes a similar mistake.

I agree, and this is a very different situation from an automated aircraft. Things generally happen quite slowly in aircraft except for the few minutes around takeoff and landing during which times the pilots can be alert. In cruise flight if something goes wrong with the automation there are usually many seconds for the pilot to become aware of the problem and to take over. In the famous AF 447 flight it was several minutes between the beginning of the problem and the last time at which the aircraft could have been saved - a skilled crew should have been able to recover.

In a car when things go wrong there is often only a second or two to respond before impact. This is too fast for a human who is not already paying attention to gain situational awareness and to react. It is completely unreasonable to expect that a driver will be paying constant attention for the entire drive while the computer is driving the car - I'm sure that most people would much rather drive themselves.

Even if the automation is better on average than a human, there is still a responsibility issue. Who is at fault when a car swerves to avoid a trash bag in the street and hits a child? The drive? The auto manufacturer? The programmer who designed the image recognition system? The cars will not be perfect - thousands of people will die, and there will be constant lawsuits.

The mention of a "cyclotron particle accelerator" control system sounds scary, but may not be. At least here at SLAC there are several levels of control systems, and the ones involved in life safety required physical access to locked areas. Even if someone somehow broke both electronic and physical security machines like this are not very dangerous, similar risk to a typical factory.

I expect that nuclear reactors are far more secure. The "command and control" system may not actually control the reactor, but just provide monitoring.

I travel a lot. US TSA is bad, but not worse than the UK. A lot of other airports are pretty bad, some are much better.

I think airport security is a big problem, but not unique to the US.