Go home dad - You're drunk!

For visible light I personally prefer to use a mirror. Lugging around a spare black hole is kind of a hassle.

Currently, the known massless particles are gauge bosons, the photon (carrier of electromagnetism) and the gluon (carrier of the strong force). Massless particle.

The effective (accurate) range of a slug from a shotgun is about 100 m. Given a polar bears running speed is about 30 km/h that gives you 12 s to shoot it. I'd really rather have a rifle.

No - They don't have the stopping power and the range required. The large predators they're encountering are polar bears. Shooting one with a shotgun would only make it enraged.

Not at the moment, but it's being worked on, and it's called "Smart Grid".

The most important difference between Smart Grid and lack of net neutrality is that with Smart grid it's the customer who owns the appliance that gets paid (or refunded) if power isn't available for the appliance. The idea is that you'll be able to plug in your electric car in the evening, and the car will then negotiate for power, so that it is fully charged, at latest the next morning. It's a win for the costumer and the electricity company, unlike lack of net neutrality.

QoS for networks could perhaps learn something from the ideas being worked on in Smart Grid - I wouldn't mind being paid for allowing the internet provider to provide worse services for some packages.

Circumcision.

Sure, no problem.

The probability of a hit in an urban area given a single meteor is 0.3*0.03, i.e., 30% land mass and of that 3% urban area. (Meteors don't impact uniformly over the area of the earth like that and urban areas aren't distributed evenly across the earth, so my assumptions here are wrong. Still I'm only guestimating so it's good enough for now.)

The probability of a miss is then 1 - 0.3*0.03 and 100 misses in a row (2 meteors per year, 50 years) is (1 - 0.3*0.03)^100. One or more meteors (larger than 1 kilton) hitting an urban area in 50 years is thus 1 - (1 - 0.3*0.03)^100.

Your math is off. If your numbers are correct, the risk of having at least one meteor over an urban area during those 50 years is:

P(N>1) = 1-P(N=0) = 1-(1-0.3*0.03)^100 = 60%

2010 and 2011 were La Niña years, i.e., years where the sea surface temperature is 3-5 degrees celcius below normal. What you're seeing is weather, not climate.

Now, if it continues like that for another ten-fifteen years, our models were wrong and you'll see me running in the street, celebrating.

Nope, not the least bit embarrased. Why excactly should I be again?

I set out to use the GDP per capita of Switzerland and the US (the two first on the list given by GP) to show you how you didn't use the numbers correctly. It turned out that the spendings on health care per capita of the two countries are almost the same*, and the joke was on me.

*(8676.91 $US per capita per year for Switzerland and 8272.64 $US per capita per year for the US)

Colour me surprised!

One of the important, but often belittled, tasks of science is to investigate the obvious. Some times something "obvious" turns out to be false. On the other hand, if the "obvious" turns out to be true, then we have evidence, and not just common sense to back it up.

Checking and double checking what we think we know is important, and we do it so that we may gain a better understanding of the world we live in.

You have a point, but you're a long way from cutting into actual need.

I live in a country where everybody has access to high quality ground water. Our avarage daily water consumption is per capita less than a third of that of a the US, where you don't have access to high quality water. (our tap water is cleaner than bottled water.)

I was shocked by the disregard for water the first time I visited the US. Just as an example, your toilet bowls are huge lakes of water compared to what I'm used to. Flushing all that water just made me feel guilty.

Thats a rather bleak, defeatist attitude, you know.

I'd rather go down fighting than just accept the status quo, and if the "bullies" move to my preferred battleground, so that I can actually fight them, instead of staying out of reach, I'll see that as a small step forward.