You mean you were a kid before they discovered the planets in the solar system? O_o

Having participated in FIRST myself during my high school years, our team was lead by a local University, 2 engineers from a locally based (but still large enough to be middling on the Fortune 500 list...) company, and in my first year, we won the championship in the early 2000s, and have since then won a few more times after I left.
It's an amazingly fun experience, and besides, as a HS student, this should be more of a learning experience for you. It's great to see the whole engineering process, from problem definition to solution implementation... including some of the work-place drama that goes on >_>

Going to have to call bullshit on that. Potatoes arrived in Europe from the "New World", then planted in the US from plants brought over from Europe. Irish potato famine destroyed one breed, but not others. If they were genetically identical, no species would've been safe, but that's obviously not the case.

Other than your sarcasm not entirely helping your argument, I don't really disagree with you on most of your points, except maybe this one:

How would you go about demonstrating that the placement was necessary? And do you really believe that just because you've provided evidence of such necessity, the parent's won't threaten to sue regardless, wasting massive amounts of money? From what I can gather in Loughla's post, he/she teaches in a small community, and so their school department may not have the funds to mount a proper legal defense, especially seeing how the autistic student's parents were willing to spend the money to hire a lawyer from quite far away. The whole point of these legal threats may just be to say "i can waste a lot of your money", as to dissuade any real action, even if the reason was legitimate... because let's face it, frivolous law suites are not at all rare in this country.

... Peace, and Economics. Forget that what most people look for when they announce the prizes is to see who/what topic won the Physics and Chemistry prizes.

Quoting from the winning project's abstract:
"Optimal layering was determined using a scanning electron microscope."

Ok what? How does a high school student get access to one of those? I highly doubt most HS in this country has one of those for their students to use...

While i'm from MA, and I'm quite happy that my state is tied for first... but... 44%????? Only 44% of the kids tested passed the test, and it somehow tie for FIRST among the nation? If this was a test, then all 50 people (state) in the class (country) have failed. This is not good news :/

Well, i don't think just building a repository will be too hard. The AI doesn't have to understand it, it just has to be there stored somewhere. Maybe you can get something like reCaptcha for the analysis part?

so is that meta-first?

There was this brief clip i caught on TV years ago that made this exact point. It was something about steroids, and one of the guys that was promoting its use said "Don't worry, the stuff's all natural", to which another guy replied "So what? Heroin is all natural!"

part of me is going: wtf? Why?
and another part of me is going: that's fucking awesome.

I must have played too many video games... >_>

Did the US do similar studies? It seems like it would have been a pretty good idea to study those effects during the cold war.

Equivalent in terms of light output, not current tolerance. if you used a product outside of its design specs, and complained when it failed, no one would listen to you.

But then again, I guess the American legal system has seen sillier things...

Well... if you've got some fixtures that seems to burn through light bulbs faster than normal, then maybe it's not the light bulb's fault? And if that is any indication of an average household's (electrical) current stability, maybe the lack of a 5 year warranty is somewhat justified. Seriously, you can't fault the manufacturer of the product if you're providing bad running conditions.

Yeah this is really true. I was just thinking about when was the last time I actually watched a DVD movie on my computer... and realized... i don't remember. Netflix/youtube/torrented stuff has basically replaced DVDs for all intents and purposes. While initially this move by MS sounded a little annoying, it's actually pretty reasonable.