The other thing to worry about is that while many may agree with wikileaks current mission I'm surprised at how little the concern is for a private organization acquiring so much personal information.

For example I personally know about a private corporation that has been using a fleet of vehicles with a google-van type setup to photograph the license plate of every vehicle is sees (going through parking lots etc) and uses OCR to decode it and put it into a massive database containing time, location and license plate number.

It then sells this information to the government on an as needed basis and has been using to save and catch at least one child that was abducted.

How is this organization any different from wikileaks? They both have collected a very powerful set of information but have a different customer they provide it too.

Wikileaks provides its information to the public but it filters the information and does so to affect public opinion in a way it sees fit. If we make wikileaks the kingmaker of source material then they will become the 21st century Hurst newspaper. Rich and powerful people will pay them off to not release negative information about them.

In conclusion give wikileaks props for it's innovation and its objective source material, but don't think wikileaks is 'the answer' to media, it is not 'on your side' and like any other media outlet if it gets too powerful it's a bad thing for everyone.

It currently fulfills it's role well as a scrappy bit player that pisses of powerful groups that need to get their feathers ruffled from time to time.

All this love fest for wikileaks is missplaced IMO. Wikileaks is not an unbiased open check on the government. Wikileaks is a media outlet that filters information to advance their bias and agenda like many other media outlets.

Evidence of this is as follows:

-They hold onto information and wait to release it when it will have a 'maximum impact' (meaning maximum reputation damage to the US)

-They (Julian) has a distinct anti-US bias to his emphasis and a group of supporters broke off to form a rival organization for specifically this reason.

-Julian has sued other news sources that were going to release wikileak's information before before they did as infringing on wikileak's proprietary information.

However the main innovation and difference is that wikileaks substantiates their claims with primary evidence. This is a huge improvement for media in general but it is still subject to context bias.

Meaning they might release 1 email about how the US should nuke Iran and not release the 99 other email about how the intern shouldn't make jokes about that via email.

I agree with UnknownSoldier on this one. The evidence I've seen for Dark Matter is unconvincing. I'm sure it's useful to assume in certain calculations but I find no reason to elevate it to some kind of 'truism' about the Universe. Had they simply named it 'Unexplained Discrepancy' we probably would not be having this discussion.

Maybe science should just stop coming up with interesting names for things because I've seen this same problem come up with String Theory and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Relatively benign observations or approaches to solve a physics (calculation) problem somehow get repeated and hyped to a somehow become a deep Matrix-like truism about reality.

One more item. I remember why I stopped coming by here it's because of comments like these:

"Your post shows a large amount of ignorance on this matter, and ignorance on the scientific process."

"The story of humanity is full of whole chapters...................."

Not so much that they were made... rather that they were moded up.

I miss being around smart people and slashdot is full of smart people. However every time I come by I'm reminded that smart people are often pretty unpleasant to be around.

So I consider myself fairly knowledgeable person when it comes to the nerd/tech culture. I grew up with marvel comics X-men Wolverine etc, love Star Wars, enjoy star Trek every now and then, and played AD&D as a tween. I've always been a video game fan and put in a few good years playing WOW along with all the classics. I'm at least familiar with other tech topics to be able to easily follow all but the most technical of articles. So I am baffled by the reverance for and the level to which this movie has been elevated to by the tech/nerd culture. Not only had I not heard of this series prior to the movie but no one I know has ever heard of it either. I looked it up on wikipedia and it appeared to be a relatively short lived series. Is this a Great Britian thing? My only conclusion is that this love affair must have been very regional or that there is an entire swath of the tech/nerd culture that I am totally unaware of. Can anyone give me the back story on this?

Sorry for picking but I believe you mean "for our other readers" not "for are other readers" in the title. Those phonetic word swaps are a pet peeve of mine. Anyway carry on.

FYI there is about a 4 year lag between a President's fiscal policy and the effects on the economy. So your graphic is the equivalent to blaming Obama for the Iraq war. Inheriting a boom or bust doesn't make you a better or worse president. In the area of fiscal responsibility I would put Bush senior first and Clinton second, not sure about Carter but Regan and Bush Jr were atrocious.

What's more worrying is that only 21% knew all three questions. One might expect that around 50% of people would be 'well educated' and know all of them and the other 50% wouldn't be and wouldn't know any of them but that's not the case.

If you assume everyone has roughly the same amount of education and had a random chance of knowing any one of these three facts then 14.7% (.53*.59*.47) would have 'randomly' known the answer to all three without really being any more educated than the next guy. So since the actual number is only 6% higher (and theoretically it could be as high as 47%) it means that knowing the answer to one question doesn't necessarily mean you have a much better chance of getting the next question right.

So basically very few people have a well rounded education that has prepared them to answer those questions. Without going into the math too much around 10% of the population could be expected to get all similarly difficult questions right while the rest of the population would have no better chance than the next guy.

Yea 'Peak Oil' is suck a lie. If prices got high enough we'd just mine the US oil shale reserves which are 1.5 Trillion Barrels (5 times Saudia Arabia's reserves). It's just too expensive of a proceedure right now. http://www.dailyreckoning.com/rpt/OilShale.html