...and the enlightened explanation for galactic rotation curves will be, what?

There's strong evidence for the presence of unseen stuff in galaxies. It shows itself in its gravitational effects on the way stars orbit around galaxy centres. Either our understanding of gravity is wrong (an option on which money has also been "wasted"), or there is some invisible "dark" matter out there. Figuring out what that matter is will mark a huge advance in cosmology and likely determine the future direction of particle physics too.

If you feel that understanding our universe and our origins is wasted effort, then we will never see eye to eye.

Why does bash have to worry about security? It's just a shell, a thin interface supposed to execute whatever commands it receives. Surely the bug lies with Apache et al. for not properly censoring the data they receive from outside and send to bash for execution.

I understand that the exploit works by appending malicious commands after a function definition contained in an environment variable. The environment variables aren't meant to contain anything more than the function, so executing the extra code is a bug. In that sense the bug belongs to bash. But the shells were never designed to be secure against this kind of attack, and as we're now discovering there are all kinds of related vulnerabilities. Server software such as Apache is made to be secure: it has to worry about sending arbitrary commands to bash, so why not worry about setting arbitrary environment variables too?

He is indeed talking about 1 MeV per photon. He's discussing the theoretical limits of photon power density in a hypothetical gamma-ray laser with an adjustable wavelength. An ordinary laser pointer stores more than 1 MeV of energy in its lasing cavity, although a physicist would not typically use eV to describe the combined energy of a light beam.

That's what I thought. I have a backup server in the basement, built out of two Raspberry Pis attached to four USB disk enclosures. Goodsync takes about 15 minutes to scan my 4TB of data, depending on how many new files there are. It would be faster over a wired network. Scaling that up to 20TB across five 4TB drives doesn't sound expensive or difficult.

Right. Certain people claimed that they "felt" that the weather was too cold on the day of the Challenger explosion. Others "felt" that the risk was one in a million. Who's right? If you scrub the launch whenever one of the thousands of NASA technicians feels nervous you'll never do anything. Only by quantifying the risk can you work out what to do, and it took Feynamn to demonstrate that.

Cleaning, Lubrication & Adjustment? Canadian Lacrosse Association? Carry Look-Ahead Adder? Certified Legal Assistant? Cigarette Lighter Adapter? College of Liberal Arts? Communist League of America? Cuban Liberator Army?

Somebody help me out here

Maybe they are clumsy questions -- I don't know the context. The question about boats may be following on from a comment about hobbies, or a desperate attempt to get a reticent candidate to open up. The question about luck may be triggered by something the candidate said which made the interviewer think they might be a chancer or risk-taker. Clumsy or not, the questions are neither rude nor inappropriate.

If somebody sneers at me every time my English dips below Shakespearean standard, I know we're not going to be working together.

I have your CV, your references, and usually the results of a written test. So why would I spend a lot of time asking about your technical expertise?

The things I need to know are,

• Are you willing and able to learn new stuff?
• In a complex and dynamic environment, can you get things done?
• How do you behave when your information is incomplete?
• Do you care about making things work, or just about avoiding blame?
• Do you have a bad attitude when taken out of your comfort zone?

These question are relevant in almost any job, and the writer of this daft article has answered all of them.

It's only a metaphor, but holds surprisingly well. Worryingly well. So well that we, if we claim to be modern enlightened people, should have some kind of response.

But what? Switching operating systems - like switching religions - involves a lot of work if you do it properly. Unlike religion it is possible to "worship" two or more OSes, but many people find that an inefficient way to work. So how can we avoid unwarranted faith in our way of doing things, fighting between neighbouring factions, and all the other destructive forces that religions suffer from?

The Linux kernel does a good job of holding all the myriad Linuxes together: all need the kernel to evolve and improve, but none can afford to implement those changes alone. Android and iOS have opened peoples eyes to other ways of interacting with computers and rendered the Windows-Mac conflict less important.

Technology evolves, preventing us from stagnating and developing unchangeable "holy" rules. It's a natural human tendency to break into tribal factions, but it seems that technological progress puts a damper on this, forcing us to widen our horizons and helping us to work together. Suddenly progress seems more important than ever.

If you are a good scientist, then you will easily prove the specific claim "some black rocks attract one another". You will repeat the experiment, thereby showing that particular rocks consistently attract one another in controlled conditions. You will lend those rocks to other experimenters to test, proving beyond all doubt that certain rocks behave as you say. Then you will get on the cover of Prehistoric Nature magazine, and be given funding to find out why certain black rocks are special. Other researchers will scour the earth searching for more special black rocks, and reference your paper every time they succeed or fail. Eventually you will become a respected become professor in the department of black rocks.

Parapsychology fails because it cannot meet the requirements of the scientific method. Until it can offer a prediction which (a) differs from existing knowledge, and (b) can be tested in a reproducible experiment it is, by definition, not science. Science being the only method we have for establishing whether a claim is trustworthy, ologies which can't meet the requirements of science must be labelled untrustworthy.

Here's why string theory is different from crackpot hokum such as parapsychology:

• - Nobody is claiming ST has passed any complete scientific test. Parapsychology proponents put forward their claims as reality.
• - ST is compatible with known facts. Parapsychology is not.
• - ST is interesting because it might help current research to find the way forward. Parapsychology is disconnected from all scientific knowledge.

One should keep an open mind, but not gaping. Life is short, and we have to be critical. If we spent all our time re-testing already discredited theories we would have wasted our lives.

Parapsychology theories have been given every chance. They've been tested under proper laboratory conditions according to the scientific method. They've been tested again and again, over and over, given far more chances than any ordinary scientist might expect to be given. The tests were scientific, and the theories failed those tests.

Hanging on to disproven theories is what makes parapsychology a non-science. The -ology suffix is just a desperate attempt to associate with proven laws of nature. Science is right to give crazy ideas a chance, but also right to shun them when they are emphatically shown to be wrong.

And when the pseudo-scientists persist in dressing up their mumbo-jumbo, quackery, and bullshit as respectable ideas as, you can forgive the real scientists for getting a little bit cross.

For "unconventional science" read "mumbo jumbo". Parapsychology does not qualify as science, unconventional or otherwise. It only qualifies as quackery and bullshit.

An impressive balancing act, but the really interesting thing is to see how Atlas stumbles on objects which shift under its weight. It vividy shows the need for flexible feet on a biped. That's going to be an interesting engineering puzzle to solve.

True enough, but I don't think we're ready to design the next big accelerator anyway. The science is at an impasse, and these machines are too big and costly to build speculatively. What we need to do is keep developing various novel technologies, including laser and dual-beam wakefield acceleration as well as muon sources, and hope fervently that new discoveries at the LHC will soon show us the way we should go next. If the LHC does not discover anything beyond the Higgs, then I think particle physics may be in for some dark ages.