Idiotic fantasy: Scientists sit around eating cheetos and drinking soda and guess which stars have planets.

Reality: Thousands of engineers and scientists dedicate our lives to refining theories based on decades (in some cases centuries) of work and building the most sensitive instruments ever created and the fastest computers ever built in order to know which stars have planets and life because science and engineering are FUCKING AWESOME.

u jelly?

If the Vega system's evolution is similar to our own, the first signs of permanent life are likely originating there right now.

The reason we have no evidence of life before 3.8 billion years ago on Earth is because the Late Heavy Bombardment, which ended around then, would've wiped out anything living on any planetary surface anywhere in the solar system. It's entirely possible that life began many times before then only be to be repeatedly annihalated.

This provides an interesting constraint on life-supporting planets. The LHB was caused when the outer planets migrated into roughly their current orbital configuration and agitated various orbiting debris belts as their orbital resonances moved, them sending missiles flying every which way. This indicates that in a many planet system like ours, the planets must arrange themselves into stable orbits (preferably early on) for billions of years in order for advanced life to arise. Not only that, they have to do so in a manner that keeps them in the outer reaches of the solar system, as they will destroy or eject any rock worlds if they migrate too far sunwards (c.f. Hot Jupiters).

To my knowledge it's an open question how likely this is to happen. The fact is we haven't found a single extrasolar system that remotely resembles ours. A lot of that is because the limits of transit observation and dopper velocimetry create a massive bias in favor of seeing large worlds in close orbits: You want large dips in brightness and large velocity shifts, and on average have to watch for at least 1-2 orbital periods to confirm. Meaning you'd have to watch our solar system nonstop for over 160 years to discover all the massive planets this way!

"Tyrants like Hitler, Stalin and FDR"

If the credence I gave to your post were plotted as a function of how much I'd read, at this point there would be a discontinuous step to zero.

preferably bypassing any such due-process

Yes, eliminating a delay in the inevitable (since "his guilt is already confirmed") is TOTALLY worth betraying one of the most important precepts of the rule of law which untold millions of people have died to uphold around the world.

You sad, myopic, fucking moron.

To then be overtaken by the next generation radio telescopes, which will store TB/h as they test technologies for the SKA, which will store TB/second.

Seriously, no one has any idea how the fuck we're going to analyze all the data quite yet. A completely untrained n00b beats the pants off of any image classifying algorithm hands down, but how do you classify billions of objects that way?

one can easily trade raw speed for core numbers

Having spent two years porting a serial code to GPU, then a whole summer plus a few months getting it to talk to MPI, I regret to inform you that you have no idea what you're talking about.

In fact, OpenMP and MPI and CUDA and all other parallel toolkits and architectures are bloody hell difficult to use, dump an enormous amount of additional work and consideration onto your shoulders, and worst of all they provide no benefits or even negative returns for whole classes of problems (this last issue will remain true no matter what magical compilers may be invented in the future).

Hubble isn't the only telescope NASA runs, or even the most powerful. FERMI, SWIFT, Spitzer, Chandra, ERO, and Kepler are just the ones I can name without Google's help, there's many more.

They just don't produce pretty pictures in the optical frequency range like Hubble does.

Tell you what, go have yourself dropped of with nothing whatsoever on a remote South Pacific island for 3 years. If you're still alive when we come back, then and only then will I be willing to entertain your feeble "Waah, I hate taxes, I don't owe anything to anyone" tantrum with more than a momentary derisive smirk.

We know quite certainly that the standard model is incomplete both from quantum theory and cosmology: If one rejects fine tuning, something has to keep the Higgs mass from diverging due to Top loops. Above a few TeV, something has to keep vector boson scattering cross sections sane. Dark matter and dark energy have to be made of something.

Unfortunately, that it is incomplete is about all the hell we've got at this point. The LHC has basically been ruling proposed SUSY models out unceasingly, and if we're unlucky and New Physics lies past 14TeV, it will likely be a damn long time until we discover it because the LHC took up the theoretical physics budgets of nearly every nation that does theoretical physics for the better part of a decade to build, and they already had the tunnel. To make significant advances with a successor hadron accelerator we'd be talking about building something at least several times larger and the obstacles are enormous... Staggering costs, the irradiation of the inner detectors, data processing, construction times stretching into multiple decades. Not to mention that the LHC consumed most of the world's supply of helium for years on end.

In the worst-case scenario, there's nothing significantly new until one reaches strong-force unification, and that lies a trillion times beyond the LHC,

If you think wind power provides base load, you may need to review what "base load power source" means.

This isn't "heating atoms by making them enter resonance." It's, ah, one of those details that GP was talking about. The part where the inner electrons of large atoms follow many and complicated multi-photon-absorbtion paths to being ionized, which extremely high-spin orbitals as well as a near continuum of high-laying Rydberg orbitals, which mean that slight changes in pulse length, shaping, and frequency will be able to have a large effect on ionization rates.

Let me give you a hint: If there's a paper being published in Nature about it, they probably did not, in fact, "just, like, change the dial, man."

The Republican leaders met the day Obama was inaugurated and declared that their only priority was to make him a 1-term president, and they did it by doing everything they could to poison the political process in America for four years straight. In the last few days, they openly said that people should vote for Romney because they will stop at nothing to block anything at all from happening under Obama.

But a Democrat somewhere once did something bad, so what the Republicans are doing is completely justified. And clearly Obama is being unreasonably partisan by refusing to give the Republicans every single thing they want.

If only there were something that happened near the time President Obama was elected that could explain a sudden simultaneous loss of revenue and increase in demand for social programs. Hmmm.

Nope, can't think of a thing. He must've just decided to ship a barge with nothing but pallets of Benjamins out to sea and scuttle it or something.

"Out of our control?"

If the situation in your nation has degenerated to the point that the electric grid is used as a weapon of coercion, some solar tiles on your roof aren't going to fix anything. Luckily, no part of the developed world is like that, or for that matter even the developing world to any real extent.

Yeah, sure you could. Which is of course why you're glibly saying you could instead of, er, actually doing it.

It's remarkable how simple many, many things appear to be if one is ignorant of how they actually operate and how much work goes into designing them. I used to be routinely guilty of this in machine shop, but I quickly learned to strip the phrase "just" from my vocabulary in light of how damn long it takes to get things right with a mill or lathe.

Most people learn to hold their tongue rather than spout off about how "simple" something they don't understand is because they don't want to look like idiots to those who do understand.