Facebook has already reached maximum growth, and future efforts to monetize the service will only alienate users. This IPO is simply a huge cash payoff to the private investors, the owner and friends of the owner, because Facebook is no longer a "growth" company. The risk is also high. Look at how fast AOL, then MySpace collapsed...it will not take much for Facebook to do the same.

Unless I had access to privileged pre-IPO shares that could be flipped in a few days as the suckers pile in, I'd not touch this IPO.

Siri -> Evi. Please. Lets be a little more original than that. I'm so tired of the non-Apple market simply making cheap knock-offs. I wish someone would step out in front for once.

Ethanol is just the latest in a long line of failed "policies".

In my lifetime, the US, the most powerful & advanced military in the world, has never won a war! Over 20 years I've watched the US government destroy the space program, destroy the housing market, and destroy the public education system. Even the most solar friendly administration in history managed to destroy the US solar market in less than three years. Simply amazing. Granted, European leaders are working just as hard to screw up everything they touch as well, lol.

Maybe if they still allowed the Pledge of Allegiance, people would remember that the US is a republic. I don't think there are any actual "democracies" in the world. Almost most all are representative or parliamentary. No politician would willingly surrender power to a true democracy.

Wow. Price is generally the reason for all theft. That includes scamming the movie and music industry into funding a three year study of the obvious.

Most scientific hypotheses fail. So most scientists are usually WRONG. That is not a bad thing. Proving something does not work is knowledge too. But these days scientists appear more like game show hosts. They will say anything knowing hardly anyone will dispute it, and scientific refutation does not usually get reports. Political correctness takes precedent over the scientific method.

This leads to stories worthy of Monty Python. The most recent I have seen was a scientist who died of plague. He was working with a genetically modified version of plague that should have been non-infectious. So they implemented no bio-hazard controls. Since they really had no clue what they were doing, they actually created a version of plague optimized for the genetic condition common to descendants of plague survivors. The scientist died, and a bio-hazard incident on the campus. Talk about Darwin Awards.

In shot take all pronouncements Deus ex Scientifica with a large grain of sand, and wait a few years for the actual physical proof.

The simplest answer is that life formed from indigenous materials on the planet. Personally I think that anywhere life is possible, life appears.

Why would anyone use an expensive smart phone to handle communications for illegal enterprises? Cheap, pre-paid, zero audit trail phones are the way to go. Why ditch a $600 phone every few days?

IMO, this is just as bad as those two. Given all of the core functions of government that are not working today; Given the lack of universal health care. Given the generally shoddy state of the social safety net; Given the generally shoddy state of the economy - maybe the government should spend 3% of GDP on more important things?

This is just welfare for PHD's.

3% for scientists is just as bad as 3% for the military (although military defense is a constitutional duty of the federal government while funding research is not).

I argue that 3% of GDP is a ridiculous amount to give to 480,000 scientists. How many research projects that get grants actually benefit society? How are many esoteric studies of useless phenomena?

Does the taxpayer profit from fruits of the research the taxpayer funds? Nope. Any federally funded research should result in patents in the public domain that are open to all.

Given that we don't have the basics such as universal health care, pensions, or a social safety net that comes any where close to that in the EU, I think the money is better spent somewhere other than science at this time.