USA only, because nobody would ever think of posting some to a friend in another country / plant seeds won't ever blow across a national border without checking in with customs officials first of all?

Are the plants sterile, or are we going to find them gradually spreading in the wild?

going to hurt when you feel that ducking or rolling is the way to get out of trouble in the game! :-)

Both suspects wear baseball caps. They are baseball fans. Suspect and round up all the baseball players and fans you know. Clearly it is a conspiracy by baseball fans against the rest of us!

"Funny how broke-ass Russia can afford to spend 50B next year ..."
Priorities... you have your national budget and you decide how you want to spend it. Most people think their government should spend more on X (the thing they are passionate about) and less on Y (the thing they don't care about). I guess you have to decide how to slice up the cake.

"unspecified strong accent"

There must be a Monty Python reference here, because it sure ain't science....

Broadly speaking, how does this mining work (yes, too lazy to go and read, but you appear to be knowledgeable so I thought I'd come straight to primary expertise than secondary documentation...)?

- I set my computer to using downtime to run problem solving software that the bitcoin people provide? In a certain amount of time, made more efficient by running lots of computers simultaneously, I am granted some currency (which has real world value) for doing so?

Is this how mining basically works?

I win bitcoins by dedicating computers to some mathematical task? The bitcoin owners pay me to put my computers onto a task? They pay me a virtual currency that I can then trade for real money?

cheers!

I'd like to see some evidence that publishing a journal requires each article to be costed at 2995 dollars (a suspicious looking figure to me).

I'm an academic. I get asked to peer review articles for free. We do it as part of our workload. I have colleagues who edit journals. They do this for free. I author articles: I do this within the costs of my project, the journal gets my article for free. Authors work for free, reviewers work for free, editors work for free. It's just the production and publicity team that get paid (the publishing house). We don't even expect them to roll the presses and produce paper versions these days, we are happy with web links to PDFs.

So we need to think hard about what the costs are in putting an online journal live onto the internet.

Why do academics continue to publish in closed journals? because generally they are still the high impact ones (with a very few exceptions). So I, and many other contract researchers like me, tend to publish in closed journals because these look better on the cv. Philosophical high ground is all well and good but when you've got a child to feed and a house to pay for you have to be pragmatic and keep in a job.

I can imagine this might change over the next 20 years or so as more and more folk start open access journals and they are gradually given greater impact ratings.

Personally I think we're going to see a few universities taking the lead with open access journals and this might break into the monopoly held by a small number of publishers right now. If you're doing it not-for-profit you can do it cheaper than a commercial publishing house that has to show profit to its shareholders.

It's not dead, it's resting! (oblig. Motny Python reference...)

2300 years ago Plato was complaining that the invention of writing had affected memory and attention span.

The complaint that things aren't as good as they used to be, and the young don't have the wisdom of the old, is not a new phenomenon.

I completely agree with you: if you're measuring by results then it should indeed be reduction of road traffic accidents that is the measure.

Thanks for your considered response. I think you make a good point indeed, I think there will always be a problem when speed camera companies earnings are related to income, perhaps another metric would help make sure cameras improve public safety rather than generate income. Perhaps a before and after comparison of traffic accidents/ pedestrian fatalities in the areas covered?

I'd agree with you, I'd hope to see revenue declining as more people obeyed the speed limit going past a school where children are walking. And if it doesn't? Does this say that people refuse to slow down when travelling past a school? (would be possibly indicated by repeat offenders) or that there's a lot of passing traffic (single time offenders) and the warning notices aren't well posted (e.g. you come down a fast slope and immediately round a corner there's the school, and there's no distance between the school and the slow down notices?) Have to go and think about the implications of this!