It's not the first model that doesn't have a big bang. It's not even the first that uses de Broglie-Bohm theory. For example, there are the bouncing cosmologies (where the universe shrinks down to almost zero but not quite --essentially stopped by quantum effects-- and then starts to re-expand) proposed by Pinto-Neto, Peter, et al. ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2790 for a review and references therein, e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/02...).

Now while this paper is old news in that it was posted on arxiv almost a year ago, well done to the slashdot editors for waiting for it to be peer-reviewed (independently of how messed up you think the peer-review process is) and not taking every new model that gets posted on arxiv as some new profound discovery that must be true (slashdot would never do that, honest).

"I want Americans to win the race for the kinds of discoveries that unleash new jobs – converting sunlight into liquid fuel; creating revolutionary prosthetics,..."

1. I would love to convert sunlight into liquid fuel too.
2. Developing new technology is great. But it seems odd that the main purpose of developing it should be the jobs it creates and not the fact itself that we have liquid sunlight and cyborgs, which can improve our lives independently of any new jobs.
3. Hey, it's not even primarily about the jobs, but it's a nationalist race for America to win (and everyone else to lose?). And no, the technology is not for the rest of mankind, just for Americans.

--- I wish I could buy items falling under that description.

And in any case, throughout the whole discovery they were all really careful to repeatedly emphasise that they found a particle with Higgs-like properties, rather than outright stating that they found the Higgs.

So it's not really news that it could be something else with similar properties. Okay, someone came up with a model. Great. But why do those headlines make it sound like "in you face, CERN, you got it all wrong"?

Or via really short gestation periods and reproduction at a young age.

In principle I might agree with having the possibility of harsher punishment for online actions such as threats of murder, rape or other forms of violence. However, this is not what most people would call "trolling". Trolling has a less serious but rather simply obnoxious connotation. I wouldn't call someone who threatens murder a "troll".

Of course, if the wording is general enough ("venom" used figuratively here isn't exactly precise) you can justify the legislation by the former (i.e. genuine threats) and later use it to persecute the latter (or rather, against anything the tories don't like to see online). It really seems like a variant of the "but-think-of-the-children" justification for oppression of unwanted opinions or facts.

... Robot Wars (as in the British television series back in the late 90s), except with people inside? I thought that was a pretty good show, but then, I was a teenager at the time, so of course I would think that.

Or even be allowed to live together in the same country, if you're not lucky enough to fall in love with someone of the same nationality.

... because, you know, it might get confused with Windows 3.11 ?

Well, with Windows 8.1 however, there is a start button. You now just have to right-click it to actually get any functionality out of it and not get sent to an obnoxious picture-book page. If they don't count right-clicks, then I would not at all be surprised if the start-button usage has indeed gone to zero.

Anyone who seems to think that applying for grants is a good way to make money, or even to guarantee to get rich quick, clearly has never actually gone through a grant application. "Quick" certainly does not apply, "rich" even less so and "guarantee" is more like a 5% chance that the grant review committee just came back from a good lunch and are in a good mood when they skim your application. And if you by chance do end up being lucky, then your institution decides to take its cut in order to pay for another football stadium.

The number of extremely viable suggestions to solve the OP's problem made here is significant, but in my experience another limiting factor will be the teachers' IT competence. The lack of basic understanding among some school instructors for anything IT related can be rather shocking. So I do hope they train their teaching staff well enough, so that they are indeed able to reset a student's account if the password is lost/stolen. Sounds simple, but you'd be surprised.

But seriously, why do primary school children (or 'elementary') need computers in class? I'm not saying that everything was better in the olden days (hey, I'm far too young to say anything like that), but some things of the modern day and age seem rather unnecessary. I get that not having to carry books is a good thing, but primary school books are usually pretty small and light anyway and there aren't that many of them, so it's not that much of an issue. And students forget them at home? Sure, then they'll get told off (and get penalty assignments, or whatever) and have to learn basic organisation skills.

They call it, "replicator".

I lived in Canada for a year and kept my netflix subscription at the time. The content there was definitely different, and somewhere near the top of lists of suggestions has always been the category of Canadian shows (of all genres bunched together). So they are promoting Canadian content in Canada, as far as their model of allowing the viewer to freely pick what they want to watch allows. In fact, that's no different from having a certain amount of Canadian shows on a cable channel, where the viewer can just turn off the TV at the right times to avoid all the Canadian content, except it's much more convenient.

I wish there were a would-be-funny-if-only-it-weren't-true mod option.