ooops... wrong thread...

And yet, somehow I suspect that the metallurgist working for the stainless steel pipe and fitting company might object to being called a "plumbing guy".

To be fair pate de foi gras is disgusting, so even if it were cheap I doubt you'd see it being served at nascar events. Now single malt scotch... that one maybe. Highland park and coke anyone?

Wow... uhmm, you seem to know the ins and outs of a complete strangers marriage and whose fault it is based on a 3 line /. comment. My guess is you are either: psychic, a psychological genius, or projecting. Or you are said poster's wife, in which case I take it all back.

you think that's bad I remember seeing the ads for this cd-i title on tv: voyeur

If this were any other scientific theory this wouldn't be happening. Politicians are in on this, politically deciding which evidence is valid and which is not, on both sides of the issue. The "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" isn't even strictly necessary most of the time. If this were string theory I wouldn't care. The problem is that this is being used to advocate drastic changes in public policy. Policies Al Gore supports would end factory farming and dramatically drive up energy prices. The only possible outcome of this is an immediate and severe increase in the price of food, and famine in much of the undeveloped world. It would lead to millions perhaps billions of deaths over the next several decades. If you're asking me to standby and let our politicians kill millions through famine, because the alternative is even more devastating destruction, you better have some evidence that: A) Your doomsday scenario is fairly certain B) the policy changes you suggest will definitely prevent it. While the evidence for A is getting slightly more convincing, all the evidence seems to be against B. When DDT was banned millions died of malaria, I don't want my generation being responsible for another such well meaning, naive, indirect mass murder.

APA papers that reference wikipedia? I might have to go throw up if your talking about the American Psychological Association, unless someone is doing a study on wikipedia contributers, nothing, absolutely nothing, from wikipedia should be referenced in a published paper, ever. Anything authoritative enough to get into a scientific journal needs to be peer reviewed, and sure as hell not anonymous.

What strikes me most about this is that the dolphin shape has been decided, while other details, like: what will the button actually do? where do we buy/acquire the tech? is this a good idea? are still undecided. It's like in the hitchhikers guide book where they are back in time on earth with the golgafrinchams and they are wanting to invent a wheel, and the most important decision to them is what color (colour in the book I suppose) to make it.

Yes that is where it comes from, that's why they call it the god particle.

Pretty much everyone has that problem. If you need some entry level physics or EE or some more advanced materials science stuff maybe I'll contribute one day. Free education is possible, just like you say. At the same time I'd be sad to see the brick and mortar schools go. You can't replace being physically in the same buildings with the same labs for a lot of stuff.

Great, so now it will be a slashdot summary, or an article about an interesting lawsuit, etc. Apparently german killers haven't heard of the streisand effect.

What a strange car analogy

That is no different than the tax system now. The IRS doesn't do accounting for people, but in any system where fudging some numbers in a few books will result in longer patents making a lot more money you would need auditing and oversight, not to mention processing all of the filings about R&D costs, making sure they are somewhat reasonable, endless regulations as to what constitutes an R&D cost (travel? consultants? internet bandwidth that the company might have had anyway but was also being used for the project?). All of those regulations would need enforcing. It would just be a huge can of worms.

The primary issue I see with this is the huge record keeping and auditing overhead. The USPTO would end up making the IRS look efficient.

Turning off the internet will likely become necessary because of the basilisks.