Ordinarily I don't reply to ACs, but this one's too good to pass up:

I find it laughable to listen to someone trivialize CERN, and the EU's investment in it, as an economic waste on the world wide web. Where do you think this wonderful tool came from, the sky? Don't you think that invention of the web alone added more to the economies of the investing EU nations than all the money they invested in CERN?

No, it's not: I mentioned exactly how much the SSC would cost each citizen, had it been completed -- $40. The argument is that that $40 would have been a good investment for the country, for the reasons outlined, had it been made in 1993.

I never said anything about a "death knell for science." My point was that smart governments realize that public works projects, especially those that benefit scientific research and understanding, can have a positive value for their nations far in excess of their capital cost, because they make their nation(s) more globally competitive.

What makes you think that the LHC was constructed by companies selected by competitive bid? See, for example, these instructions from CERN:

Question: Can I send my Price Enquiry to any Bidder?
Answer: The Technical Officer has to take into account the technical competency of the firm as well as the
origin of the supply or service (which should be originated from CERN Member States and preferably from
poorly balanced Member States).
[...]
Question: Why it is so important to know the origin of the supply/service?
Answer: Member states contribute to CERN’s budget, therefore one of the main procurement goals is to
achieve balanced industrial return for Member states. [emphasis added.]

This is the point -- the nations that compose CERN recognize the value of the organization to their industrial base. If they didn't, they would just keep the money they invest in CERN. Instead, they make the investment because they realize that they, as nations, get a stronger, more capable -- and, therefore, more valuable -- industrial base as a result of CERN. It's a good investment.

I have never understood this attraction to the "free market" in dealings between nations. One of the reasons China is gaining market share wrt the US in many fields -- from photovoltaics to high-speed rail transport -- is that it subsidizes their development. Supporting technologies critical to the nation's future is not a crime -- most nations do and, arguably, all should. The US did the same with many technologies, from the telegraph to the railroad, in the 19th Century, and the spending of public funds to develop technology for the public good reached new highs in the federal funding of scientific research during and after WWII. The nation benefited greatly from this investment of public funds -- why not now? Is it really better to stand by, and watch our economy become more and more dependent on the industries of other nations?

My father was a tremendous model airplane, and photography, enthusiast. In 1962 he strapped his Leica to the bottom of one of his radio-controlled models and took black-and-white photos of the airfield where he flew his models, and the adjacent industrial plant. The shutter was tripped by the Leica's built-in timer; he got pictures of approximately what he wanted by running a second timer on the ground and ensuring the plane was in right place at the right time. The timer was used because the radio-control equipment of the day (at least, the equipment he could afford) had only one channel, used for rudder control. He used black-and-white film so that he could do his own developing; besides the fact that he just liked doing it, doing his own developing allowed him to compensate for things like underexposures. (To compensate for vibration blur, present despite all of his anti-vibration efforts, he was always underexposing these shots.)

By 1971, the R/C art had improved to the point that multichannel radio equipment (4 to 6 channels) was commonplace, and the photographic art had improved to the point that small, lightweight motion-picture cameras were also affordable. To take advantage, he took a handheld Super 8 mm movie camera and mounted it on a wire frame on the fuselage over the wing, pointed ahead and slightly down, so that the arc of the propeller was just visible in the resulting images (to give scale). He quickly learned to fly very slowly and gently; images taken during even the most mundane of maneuvers would be enough to induce nausea when viewed on the screen later.

Because of the consumer-grade equipment used, these photos and films will never win any prizes for photographic art; still, it is always a pleasure to see something state-of-the-art in its time, turn into something available at Wal-Mart a few years later.

Oh, yes, you did.

You subsidized it with higher levels of unemployment in the many technical fields needed to design, construct, and use the SSC.

You subsidized it with lower salaries in those fields, for those able to find work in them.

You subsidized it with the loss of the many small companies that otherwise would have been started by entrepreneurs in response to the challenges faced by the SSC project. Most would have failed, of course, but in a project of that size it's likely that a handful of these small companies would have survived to make significant advances in the state of the art.

You subsidized it with a US industrial base that was less competitive than its foreign competition, which honed its capabilities solving the difficult technical problems presented by the LHC, while the US base did not.

You subsidized it with a loss in stature of the US physics community on the world stage. Having the top-tier experimental apparatus outside the US is not the way to attract "the best and the brightest" to the US and is, in fact, the way to force the best young researchers in the US to go overseas.

You subsidized it with a loss in stature of hard science in the minds of US school children. Like the space program before it, the SSC could have been the motivation for a generation of school children to study science and technology. Lacking this symbol, clever students who might have made significant contributions in many technical fields have instead drifted off to other things.

The per-capita cost to build the SSC, in round numbers, was $40 in 1993. Wouldn't it have been cheaper to pay $40 then, than the above subsidies now?

Was it this feature that lead to the standard of airport traffic patters being left-turn only? Did that convention start as a military requirement in WWI, and then move into civil aviation after the war, even though rotary engines were obsolete by then? Wikipedia states that this convention developed "because most small airplanes are piloted from the left seat (or the senior pilot or pilot-in-command sits in the left seat), and so the pilot has better visibility out the left window"; while that's no doubt true, one wonders whether this is an incorrect historical rationalization after-the-fact, or a conscious decision made independently, at a later meeting of some international regulatory body. When was the left-hand traffic pattern standardized?

I'm reminded of the rotary engine, used in some WWI aircraft. The crankshaft was stationary -- attached to the plane's firewall -- and the entire engine block, including the cylinders, rotated around it. (The propeller was attached to the engine block.) In this way, no flywheel was necessary (the block was its own flywheel), saving weight, and the engine was cooled naturally, by the air flow over the moving cylinders. I don't know how the engines were balanced.

In a similar manner, the Sandia Cooler moves the heatsink through the air, rather than the air through the heatsink. It's solving a different problem, but I've always been fond of contrarian thinking like this.

The most useful, entertaining, and educational source, IMHO, for all things optical and atmospheric is the Atmospheric Optics site of Les Cowley. Originally built to support HaloSim halo simulation software (developed in collaboration with Michael Schroeder), the site now includes photos and physical explanations of everything from green flashes and other refractive phenomena to glories, ice halos (including the types that may form on other planets), and rainbows.

It's the kind of site that nearly everyone finds interesting and, if they're not careful, learns something from.

translates to

which translates to

The thing that surprised me most about TFA was that the author was able to find some feature that wasn't in MS Word. It always seems to have every feature known to man, except the feature I want, when I use it.

Look for Fookes Software to be purchased any day now. . . .

"Intel Corp., Samsung Electronics and TSMC today announced they have reached agreement on the need for industry-wide collaboration to target a transition to larger, 450mm-sized wafers starting in 2012." -- 6 May 2008.

. . .is that it's cut from a single silicon crystal (called a boule), two meters long, weighing several hundred kilos, with a defect density so low that it is commercially useable to make chips 25 mm on a side, 0.5 mm thick, with 20 nm feature size.

. . . that's if you believe life begins at conception. The OP is clearly one of those that believes life begins at implantation.

I hate screwing up a good punch line.

. . . that's if you believe life begins at conception. The OP is clearly one of those that life begins at implantation.

(Sorry, it was too good to pass up.)

This kind of argument always baffles me.

The purpose of the design patent is to keep competitors from not innovating, and just making duplicates of your product. Once you have a design patent, your competitors have to innovate -- to do something different; to think of something better -- to compete in the market. With the design patent, if they duplicate the appearance of your product, you have grounds to sue.

It's this protection of innovation that drives industries forward, and creates progress.