If either of those grant applications would get funded in your country, then the entire grant system needs to be scrapped and rebuilt - they are both putting the conclusions before the research. Science is very different to lawyering - with lawyering your conclusions come first (i.e. your client is innocent) and you gather as much evidence for your conclusions as possible. Scientists on the other hand have the luxury of adapting their conclusions to fit the data. Sometimes this means a null result, but often this is worth publishing too and will get you more grants.

A variation on your first suggestion that doesn't imply bad science would be "to investigate the effect of solar flares on Earth's temperature and climate". In fact there has been a lot of publicly funded science on this topic, and I think a significant connection was pretty much ruled out back in the 90's (though I haven't checked).

Unlike your family, which is DEEE-LICIOUS.

Yes, this is really quite pathetic. On several occasions now I have wanted some information on a particular topic (e.g. a shitty old game I picked up, my mobile phone, or even a description of lemon party). I go to the wikipedia page, I can tell that several people went to the effort of writing an entry on that topic but the page was deleted by someone who decided that no-one would ever want to see that information. This is arrogance in the extreme - destroying some people's work because they incorrectly assumed that no-one would ever want to see it. Was the article getting in the way before it was deleted?!

Surely Wikipedia could have a link to view pages that were 'deleted' for non-notability - what would be so bad about that?

Actually it doesn't, which is the really cool thing about these cloaks. The cloaks are made of a metamaterial for which the refractive index is less than 1, so light travels faster than c in that medium. That's what makes them tricky (but not impossible) to build! The reduced refractive index with respect to the surrounds exactly makes up for the extra distance travelled. It's neat stuff.

How would it show movement? AFAIK the cloak should be able to move around and this movement shouldn't be visible to you.

Or do you mean they won't be able to make a flexible cloaking ninja suit that keeps cloaking the ninja as they walk, despite the suit bending? The solution to that, of course, is to roll around inside a giant hamster ball/zorb cloaking device! Watch out... i'll sneak up on you and ROLL YOU TO DEATH.

Yep, and even if you got a broadband cloak that worked at all those frequencies, you could still pick it up by a number of ways not mentioned in TFA. You could pick it up with sonar (I guess in principle it could also be an acoustic cloak to beat that too), but you could also change the refractive index of the room. The cloak is designed so that no matter what's in the cloaked region, it appears to have a refractive index of 1 (or whatever the cloak's surrounds are supposed to be). If you change the refractive index of the surrounds slightly (change temperature, spray an aerosol, fill the room with water (!)) then the cloak should be relatively easy to spot.

The other downside of these cloaks, of course, is that you can't see out of them since no light interacts with your eyes.

Yes! It got fixed in Jaunty a month or two ago - and it looked like they were sitting on the bugfix for about a month. Pretty unprofessional stuff, since many people's computers were rendered unusable, but now it's fixed and Karmic sings on my EEE. It does tell me that my battery's broken and that the SMART status of my SSD indicates that it's on its way out, but let's not shoot the messenger.

Which is exactly what the Commonwealth Bank of Australia does.

Whenever you try to do anything 'serious', e.g. transfer money to someone new, change your details etc, you have to enter a code they'll send you by SMS. This SMS will briefly say what you're trying to do, e.g. a part of the account number you're sending money to. It's fast and doesn't get in your way unless you're doing something potentially dangerous

The libs and greens are voting against the filter, so yes the dentist-filter plan is dead in the water. But I wouldn't be surprised if the libs supported this copyright bill, which would be more than enough to get it through.

I never thought I'd say this, but I think I preferred Richard Alston, who had the international reputation of "Worlds Biggest Luddite", as IT minister. At least he was too incompetent to do much damage.