what's at stake with the LHC is Knowing how the universe is put together.

the Higgs boson is the capstone of the Standard Model and was proposed in 1964. If we don't find that with LHC, Standard Model fails.

The cost of all HEP ever done is negligible compared to the cost of wars to line the pockets of the elite and bailouts to prop up their failed business model.

there are other experiments on structure of universe going on beside the LHC, dark matter detection and CMB mapping too.

no, IBM just has some divisions that do the (very profitable) mediocre stuff. They're a business. They are still leaders in R&D in physics (solid state, quantum computing and cryptography, optics, etc.), computer hardware (disk, memory, networking, storage, systems architecture, fabrication), ... what a silly narrow point of view you must have, maybe you have an IBM managerial consultant in your cube farm?

well, that black monolith plot device is as silly as the holodeck.

It would not be worthless for someone who really wasn't going to be a mega-corporate bitch and was willing to be leader and work with congress to get the country going in a proper direction of real wealth production, breaking the positive feedback loop of healthcare costs, stopping wars of choice. Danger is the banking cartel or the other mega-corporations might assassinate such a person as that's probably happened a couple times already.

eh? who makes the machines that hold and move money? who makes the machines that do the CADD / CAE / CAM for the military industrial complex? Those ain't wintel boxes, m'boy....

My first lines of code were in ForTran (yup, another shit sandwich) in the 70s, but of course that not on any machine I owned. Yes, played with BASIC a little but didn't care for it, though I did type in some BASIC electronics hobbyist programs from magazines (open source before Bruce and Eric, heh)

Your fan-boy's cute article non-withstanding, any competent linguist will tell you that the phonology, grammar, vocabulary, and semantics of Esperanto are based on the western Indo-European languages, and nothing else. Funny that bit in article about the having the "spirit of Hebrew", as I can assure you Esperanto has none of the phonology, grammar, vocabulary nor semantics of any semite language.

Persian is a western language, being Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European. Hence it was an easy addition to your exclusively western language repertoiure.

That wikipedia that just proves a few esperanto speakers wasted an enormous amount of time to make a language wikipedia of little practical use.

I'd rather my students not think of white space as significant. that's so gay

funny, I programmed in Pascal on my microcomputer in the early 80s. BASIC was the shit sandwich choice.

Yes, our BSD Unix came with the source and multiple compilers, just for the asking.

The TRS-80, hah, that was late 70s. The PDPs first came out in 60s.

I tellz ya, deez cute but iggernit young punks.....git yer tricycle off mah lawn!

oh, it exists all right. But unusable for serious work, no one is going to hire me to develop in Perl 6.

Not whining, I've done plenty of Perl 5 development over the last 20 years. Sorry to see Larry try to turn Perl 6 into mutant Swiss Army Knife with fold-out condom and umbrella and eggbeater and cuckcoo clock.

the guts of a thousand whales fed through a wood chipper....

Doesn't change the fact those people are using western constructs; again *Your Esperanto is a Latinate Language* It's totally western.

How many eastern languages do you speak? zero, I'll bet. Your only frame of reference is western languages.

Funny how I hear these tired worn arguments from people who can speak Esperanto. You have an obscure fringe hobby, there are more people who have used pig-latin in their childhood than who will ever speak Esperanto.

on the other hand, we can all enjoy internet pr0n regardless of language being spoken or grunted or shouted

wrong, China is a Sino-Tibetan language. That language group has more first-language speakers than Indo-European, Sino-Tebetan languages includes by the way northeast India (shame on you for assuming all Indians speak an Indo-European langauge)

http://stedt.berkeley.edu/html/STfamily.html

Arabic is member of the Semitic language family.

that's just silly. Esperanto is a Latinate language, and thus suitable solely for western thought and concepts. We already have a logical, consistent Latinate language that isn't an artificial construct and in fact has over a million speakers, as opposed to Esperanto's few thousand (inflated lies to the contrary): Latin! Might as well waste one's time learning Klingon.