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No one is arguing that all the complexities and nuances of government can be described in a 100 word slashdot comment. However, I still fail to see how a government can be classified as "democratic" if (as seen above) "average citizens’ preferences continue to have essentially zero estimated impact upon policy change." So, if by "the people have the power to change things" you mean "the wealthy people have the power to change things," then we agree, but this form of government has a different name.

Every definition I've seen disagrees with you.

Your flat tax is actually defined as "proportional," not "progressive."

Not when "average citizens’ preferences continue to have essentially zero estimated impact upon policy change."

I absolutely agree - that's why I opined that harvesting power form other, higher power external sources might be more effective.

I've done a fair bit of weak signal work on the 30m band. I once transmitted with 100mW of power using the WSPR mode from Richmond Va and a station in New Zealand received and correctly decoded it. That's a lot of km/W ! Here's a map of current activity.

Really? -Census reported that only one in four STEM degree holders is in a STEM job
-Microsoft announced plans to downsize its workforce by 18,000 jobs.
- analyses on the issues have not been able to find any credible evidence to support the IT industry’s assertions of labor shortages. http://press.princeton.edu/tit...

So good luck with you bullshit.

Yes. It's easy to convince yourself that you did something, when in reality what you did was worse than doing nothing. You actually made yourself think that you tried to make a change, and as a result if nothing happens, you have a "well, at least I tried" excuse.

Which is why this is the reality:
http://www.princeton.edu/~mgil...

If you don't know what that is - that's the study of democratic impact of things like "desires of the masses" on actual legislative process. The study that concluded that US is de facto oligarchy, because when masses want something and capital wants something else, capital almost always gets what it wants.

And if you want to know why that is, all you need is to look in the mirror. "Just write your [legislative representative] (so he/she can ask for a bit more money in donations when he/she makes the opposite decision as to have a bit more to finance his/her re-election campaign)" is the solution that is worse than doing nothing.

At least doing nothing makes you feel guilty about it, and may eventually push you to act in ways that may actually bring about a change. What you are advocating is status quo. As a result, you're part of the problem.

And while "sawing people's heads off on youtube" is also a terrible solution, yours isn't that much better.

Saddam never gassed his own citizens, you probably mean Kurdish insurgents.

Assad never gassed his own citizens, you probably mean rebels.

Both strongmen considered their victims to be their citizens and subjects. In the state of rebellion, but citizens nonetheless. Bullshit propaganda much?

How are they NOT "citizens"?

How are they citizens?

Those people have lived within the territorial boundaries their whole lives.

So? The "boundaries" have Israel on one of the sides — why aren't you claiming them to be citizens of Jordan and Egypt? At least, those two neighbors actually once occupied the entire West Bank and Gaza respectively — for twenty years...

The Israeli government is being run by far-right reactionaries

Israeli government has changed many times since the country's establishment — swinging from Left to Right and anything in between. Never once have PLO or Hamas changed their official goal of destroying Israel.

but that won't make it any less true.

Nothing your wrote is true — except for the obvious fact, that downmodding will not make it any less so.

Did that make them valid military targets?

It would have, if that — destroying the soldier's transportation — were the goal. But it is not. The goal of blowing up a bus is to make the population — civilians — afraid. That, by definition, is terrorism.

To put it differently, if the IDF started providing a separate transport for these soldiers going home for the weekend — prohibiting them from using the regular buses, Hamas would still try to blow up the regular transit. On contrast, if Hamas were to stop using schools and hospitals to store weapon caches or, indeed, fire from, Israel would not be shooting at those installations.

Got any more false analogies for me?

... this is an Orion.

Get back to us when you can take a crew of 200 to Mars and back. In a month.

I've been laughing at this (pdf) for days now. The lower right pic on the second page gets me every time.

Ahh, the tolerance of progressive fascists for conflicting ideas is so refreshing! Praise Gaia!

https://www.princeton.edu/~pro...

IMHO, it goes back to the old discovery of Muons and then Pions and when some physicists were convinced these two particles (one and then the other) were carrier bosons of the Strong Force. (Look up Yukawa particle) Muons turned out to be just another flavor of lepton and Pions were something entirely two (quark- anti-quark pairs) which were totally unexpected but fit the math perfectly as a Strong Force mediator particle at the time. (if I recall). This and other debacles of the past led physicists to be more cautious when detecting a particle to make sure it has all the right properties (aka spin and decays) before being sure they found what they think. Now this doesn't meant we aren't in a for surprises later, but at least they covered their bases here and checked as many decays and properties as they can. IE: http://puhep1.princeton.edu/~m... This are just two of those epic epic stories of running down the wrong path, but finding out some really great things.

No, we really do have working quantum computers in the lab right now. They are fully capable of running Shor's algorithm. It's just that they can factor at most a number like 15.

I was going to mod you up, but I can see others have taken care of that for me.

I say more or less what you have just written to people all the time and I would encourage others to do the same. Just look at all the nonsense which is posted on FB for example. I try to explain to these people that it makes no difference at all who is elected. They are all the same person. It is only a question of which industry group is pulling the strings.
The USA and NOT a democracy. It has be proven scientifically. Look to the recent paper published by Princeton. http://www.princeton.edu/~mgil...

Look to history people. It is a very rare thing indeed for an entrenched ruling class to be tossed out without blood in the street. The worst part is, the ones fighting you back are your brothers and neighbors who the ruling class have tricked into dieing to keep them in power, even though it is clearly not in their long term interest.

I have no idea what the real solution is, but I hope someone smarter than me can come up with something.

How about the syntax for specifying model?.

lmfit = lm( change ~ setting + effort )

Maybe the reason those kids aren't paying attention is because they are learning stuff elsewhere and feel you're just wasting their time.
Or maybe it is, as the union suggests, because they realize how lame school is by comparison.

Or maybe kids are paying better attention now then they have in the past, and the union is falling for the golden age fallacy.

From http://www.princeton.edu/futureofchildren/publications/docs/10_02_05.pdf
The limited evidence available also indicates that home computer use is linked to slightly better academic performance.

I'll take that limited evidence over the "no evidence" supplied by the teachers union.

Actually, John Conway and Simon Kochen at IAS have a really interesting argument about free will. Lecture videos here.

"Yum! was created on May 30, 1997, as Tricon Global Restaurants, Inc. an independent company, as a result of a spin-out of the former fast food division of PepsiCo, which owned and franchised the KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell brands worldwide. Because of the company's previous relationship with Pepsi, Yum! Brands has a lifetime contract with PepsiCo"

Also, here's the citation Wikipedia is missing: https://www.princeton.edu/~ach...

All part of the circus to convince the gullible American people that Congress represents *them*, and not just the oligarchy.

A circus that we the people have no say in whatsoever. Akin to serfdom of old, only with some modern conveniences.

"Researchers from Princeton University and Northwestern University have concluded, after extensive analysis of 1,779 policy issues, that the U.S. is in fact an oligarchy and not a democracy. What this means is that, although 'Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance,' 'majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts.' Their study (PDF), to be published in Perspectives on Politics, found that 'When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.'"

I take this as a good example of why we should not strive for universal languages to use everywhere.

I take it as a good example of how programmers don't know what "excluded middle" means.

Clarification, unless you can get the elites on your side (they're on their own side :/) it doesn't really have much of a chance. Here's a link to the paper, form your own opinion. Warning PDF.

The study found that even when 80% of the population favored a particular public policy change, it was only instituted 43% of the time.

But you're an oligarchy

Not the last time I checked.

Check again.

It may seem to fit that partisan narrative, but you don't really know Detroit politics. The Big Three run Detroit, in any meaningful sense. The economy of the city is completely dependent on them, and as auto company jobs have declined since the 1950s, so has Detroit. GM just went bankrupt and Chrysler nearly did; it's hard to blame that on local Detroit politics.

Race problems have been huge. Much of the city's talent was effectively barred from eduction, productive employment, or decent housing for a long time. The riots in 1967 did not come from a vacuum, but from decades of oppression by the white population. You probably haven't read about the riots that would happen when a black person dared to move into a white neighborhood. George Wallace (former Alabama governor and ardent segregationist) won the 1968 Democratic primary in the city!

If you really want to understand Detroit and urban politics, and the role of race, read this history (which won the Bancroft Prize, among others):

The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Thomas Sugrue

Warning: you're just going to make people double down on their previously-held belief:

http://synapse.princeton.edu/~...

http://www.princeton.edu/~mgil...

"Democracy is far from a perfect system, but it beats the hell out of whatever's in second place."

http://www.princeton.edu/~mgil...

is because of this that you want to over sample by at least 2 times the highest frequency of the signal you want to reproduce No, it is because of this: http://www.princeton.edu/~acha...

I'm guessing that what you *might* hear are unwanted side effects of digital transcoding and not signals which where part of the original material.
We either crosstalked or you simply got me wrong. I was not talking at all about recordings. I only stated the fact that a human can notice the absense or presense of over tones regardless if he would be able to hear that over tone if it was a single frequency (not modulated on top of the base tone).

https://www.princeton.edu/~pea...
"The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program, which flourished for nearly three decades under the aegis of Princeton University's School of Engineering and Applied Science, has completed its experimental agenda of studying the interaction of human consciousness with sensitive physical devices, systems, and processes, and developing complementary theoretical models to enable better understanding of the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality."

Disclaimer: I worked in a joint program with them when I was managing the PU robotics lab in the 1980s. The program was funded in part by the McDonnell Foundation (of McDonnell-Douglas) in part because supposedly strange unexplainable things happened in fighter cockpits especially to pilots under stress in emergency situations. Rather that give the money just to the PEAR lab, it was decided to give the money to a group of labs that would work together somehow exploring aspects of human consciousness (or something like that, not saying how effective all that was). Dean Radin is the researcher who connected the groups back then and has been active in parapsychology work since: http://www.deanradin.com/

Another person active in this field of consciousness studies is Charles Tart (unrelated to PU, but interesting in the field).
http://www.paradigm-sys.com/
http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/...

Related items at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (founded in 1973 by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell) which include mention of Dean Radin and Charles Tart:
http://www.noetic.org/search/?...

Mainstream science has been apparently useful, even if it is more the tinkerers and engineers who actually invent and bring to production useful things. But ultimately, if we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit we don't very much understand the nature of consciousness or the deeper nature of reality, which together, as much as we think we know about them, still form a "great mystery" (a term some Native Americans used for God and such). And, no, mapping a few or even many neural pathways or having a chemical analysis of brain neuro-transmitters does not equate to understanding the mystery of consciousness. As Charles Tart points out, there is a step where many otherwise good scientists move from apparently solid ground in their specialties to claiming fallacious things like "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" and so create essentially a new religion of "Scientistic Materialism".
http://blog.paradigm-sys.com/a...
"His [Tart's] and other scientists' work convinced him that there is a real and vitally important sense in which we are spiritual beings, but the too dominant, scientistic, materialist philosophy of our times, masquerading as genuine science, dogmatically denies any possible reality to the spiritual. This hurts people, it pressures them to reject vital aspects of their being."

Anyway, mass compulsory schooling in "classrooms" (intended by 1920s eugenicists to segregate people by social class so they interbreed and stratify, see Gatto) is also in general another way of hurting people:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real. ... Our official assumptions about the nature of modern childhood are dead wrong. Children allowed to take responsibility an

Exactly, Science is never about adding truth, but removing falsehood.
(By definition what is left must be closer to the truth)

Apparently these authors never heard of PEAR which proved human consciousness could influence random numbers.
Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research
https://www.princeton.edu/~pea...

WTF are you talking about? Who are these mysterious "miltant" feminists? Can you name even one?

Now why would I even bother to name one, when I can point to the entire ideology. Perhaps it's time for you to grow up a little bit, and realize just what it's like living in a land of reality, where fluffy bunnies don't exist.

Same info, only from Princeton:

http://www.princeton.edu/main/...

Happy?

So you are saying the smelt neither have a natural predator, or are the predator for any other items in its habitat? You seem to be making the assumption that preserving one animal has no other positive impacts, as though removing one species could not collapse a habitat. http://press.princeton.edu/cha...

Last month, at ShmooCon a talk was given about spatial analysis of malware samples. The technique is borrowed directly from bioinformatics. This is a great example of techniques from Biology being used effectively in the IT security realm.

I hope that the researcher involved in naming organisms based on hash algorithms chooses context triggered piecewise hashes (CTPH) AKA fuzzy hashing or a similarity hash algorithm rather than an algorithm like SHA512. Google's simhash or at least the ideas of this type of algorithm would lend itself much better to the naming of organisms.

FYI: a FOSS implementation of fussy hashing is called ssdeep. The project site is here. This is an implementation that is widely used in open source malware analysis tools like Cuckoo Sandbox.

Princeton has "needs-blind" admission. They'll help you graduate loan free: https://www.princeton.edu/admi...

You have the filthy rich sitting next to the dirt poor in lectures. But the one thing they both have in common, desides the grim and grit, is that they are both smart and work hard.

A Princeton-led research group has discovered an isolated community of bacteria nearly two miles underground that derives all of its energy from the decay of radioactive rocks rather than from sunlight. According to members of the team, the finding suggests life might exist in similarly extreme conditions even on other worlds.

Any legislator who accepts such money deserves 20 years in federal prison...and not a "gentleman's club", either.

You do know where deterrence porn goes, don't you? Missing hands. Honour killing of single mothers ... by their own families. And the political transparency index just zooms right up.

This from one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever known, where once upon a the Western Europeans weren't worthy to lick their curly shoes (on the web are more associated with Pakistan, but that could have something to do with Arab culture raising "shoe fetish" almost to the top of the state's checklist of people to watch closely).

Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane

The Europeans were no slouch in the deterrence department, either. Here's a hot, glowing pinnacle of deterrence that settled accounts a long year after the horse had already left the barn.

Münster Rebellion

And yet, it's not the last crime ever recorded. What does it take, a nuclear bomb?

I'm presently reading Tyler Cowen's Average is Over. This is about how the machines are presently driving a wedge through the middle class. It's a sobering—rather than alarmist—perspective on what comes next (sorry, no Armageddon porn for the tin hats).

One current is that the machines are poised to begin gnawing away at the tedious underbelly of routine law. The downsides are easier to enumerate, not having been there. The upside—which is hard to envision in precise terms—is that old bastion of the workings of law as privileged knowledge will finally experience a scary, erosive Borg-like incursion.

This I think will have more long term effect that throwing a bunch of lawyers into a stone box, where they become subject to psychopathic depredations of their person while justice-loving members of greater society snuggle into their beds to dream happy dreams.

That said, if there's so much as a pebble of deterrence we've left unturned, the executives of Network Solutions should be high on the list. Their behaviour leaves you wanting to believe in deterrence soooo badly.

so-called: (adj) alleged, so-called, supposed (doubtful or suspect) "these so-called experts are no help".

Read it until you understand it.

There's something that calls itself 'Princeton Alumni Weekly' that lists Raj Shah as a F-16 fighter pilot.

This seems to match his mini resume in AngelList:

CEO of Morta Security. Strong business (McKinsey, private equity) and government (@USAF F-16 pilot, DoD, NSA) background. @Wharton MBA, @Princeton undergrad.

Profiteering, actually, is defined as:make an unreasonable profit, as on the sale of difficult to obtain goods

So, selling copies of the statues — at the normal price for such trinkets — would not be profiteering by definition. This is why I put the word in quotes... No doubt, people, who think "profit" is a dirty word, failed to notice...

A while back Ron Rivest (the R in RSA) announced the Three Ballot cryptography for voting systems which was touted a system that would let voters check if their ballot was counted without jeopardizing the anonymity of the secret ballot. The really cool thing about it was that the crypto was a one-way system without any key at all. So it seemed to be uncrackable since there was no trusted key-keeper.

  Shortly before the publication was accepted, Andrew Appel at Princeton University and Charles Strauss at Los Alamos National Laboratory published articles showing it was invertable and not anonymous in practical election situations.

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/DefeatingThreeBallot.pdf

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/voting/Strauss-ThreeBallotCritique2v1.5.pdf

  Imagine if that had been adopted... Sort of makes you wonder about everything RSA has touched including SSL.

A while back Ron Rivest (the R in RSA) announced the Three Ballot cryptography for voting systems which was touted a system that would let voters check if their ballot was counted without jeopardizing the anonymity of the secret ballot. The really cool thing about it was that the crypto was a one-way system without any key at all. So it seemed to be uncrackable since there was no trusted key-keeper.

  Shortly before the publication was accepted, Andrew Appel at Princeton University and Charles Strauss at Los Alamos National Laboratory published articles showing it was invertable and not anonymous in practical election situations.

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/DefeatingThreeBallot.pdf

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/voting/Strauss-ThreeBallotCritique2v1.5.pdf

  Imagine if that had been adopted... Sort of makes you wonder about everything RSA has touched including SSL.

Except that when collected in bulk, the metadata reveals your data. A few examples:

"Consider the following hypothetical example: A young woman calls her gynecologist; then immediately calls her mother; then a man who, during the past few months, she had repeatedly spoken to on the telephone after 11pm; followed by a call to a family planning center that also offers abortions. A likely storyline emerges that would not be as evident by examining the record of a single telephone call."

"The phone records indicating that someone called a sexual assault hotline or a tax fraud reporting hotline will of course not reveal the exact words that were spoken during those calls, but phone records indicating a 30-minute call to one of these numbers will still reveal information that virtually everyone would consider extremely private."

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/in-aclu-lawsuit-scientist-demolishes-nsa-its-just-metadata-excuse/

https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/2013.08.26_aclu_pi_brief_and_declarations.pdf

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~felten/testimony-2013-10-02.pdf

How about a land, air, or ship launched drone that flies to a pre-set location then submerges and homes-in on a submarine?

I built guidance systems for ASROCs...

http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/ASROC.html

So I tend to think of things going the other way. It actually wouldn't be that hard to build such a drone with the hardware & tech available these days compared to the 1970s.

I wonder how the Navy would feel about swarms of civilian flying-submersible drones shadowing & recording their submarine fleet?

Strat

30 secs of google found a NY Times article* by Floyd Norris from 2011, using data from the Commerce Department, shows that it avg GDP growth was 3.5% under Reagan, The Gipper and 3.2% under Carter,

Here's something more recent that shows something different:

If you calculate the average GDP growth by term, you get the figures you cite. If you calculate the average GDP growth by presidency you get Carter ahead. See the paper below, figure 1b:

http://www.princeton.edu/~mwatson/papers/Presidents_Blinder_Watson_Nov2013.pdf

Collecting private and/or secret information on people without their knowledge and against their will. Seems to describe what they're doing and is simultaneously a suitable definition of "spying".

Here are the several definitions — and none of them is worded the way you do.

The spying is unethical all by itself.

Not at all. If we were to take this view, we'd call all detectives unethical, for example. And all intelligence workers — including, for example, Alan Turing.

Sure, the above examples cover work against (suspected) criminals or outright national enemies — but it is still spying by any definition — including yours.

Can this sort of thing be done to ordinary consumers? Sure — that's what "market-research" has been doing for decades. That information was not as fine-grained as to make the collected data personally identifiable, but that was due to limitations of technology — not laws or ethics.

Today's computers and software just make it simpler and far more complete. I agree, that it is scary — and raises questions. But I maintain, that it is neither necessarily nor automatically unethical — except, maybe, for that part, were they allow you to "opt-out", but continue reporting anyway. Well, maybe, it should be an "opt-in" only to begin with, I agree.

As for what's being tapped, it's the communications between yourself, and other devices such as storage devices, that's being tapped.

Oh, no, it is not... The communication is between your storage device and the LG's TV itself — there is no "third party" — and one of the two parties is reporting to its maker. Anyway, I don't think, you have a case there — but I'd be curious to watch (and listen to) the arguments unfold in court.

A quick google search tells me Michelle Obama graduated from Princeton in 1981

Michelle Obama '85 . . . graduated from Princeton in 1985 . . . that is what the '85 behind her name means:
http://dailyprincetonian.com/tag/michelle-obama-85/
https://www.princeton.edu/pr/pwb/volume98/issue10/obama/
http://globalcomment.com/michelle-obama-princeton-do-the-hard-work-yourself/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/27/michelle-obama-skips-mile_n_553125.html

Your link, please . . . ?

"Just the facts, Ma'am . . . just the facts . . . " -- Sgt. Joe Friday

Oh, and as to them not knowing each other . . . they were both very active members of the Third World Center at Princeton, a group for minorities . . . and when they say minority at Princeton . . . they mean it with the full sense of the word. The university let them use an old boathouse for their meetings.

This is spot on. I'd guess that the tendency to redefine Western European countries like France, Germany, Sweden and even the UK (with its NHS and high welfare spending) as 'socialist' comes from the rhetoric of a particular American political party opposed to the introduction of universal healthcare. Or from people opposed to that particular party who want to draw a definite line between the US system and what's done in every other western developed country (including ones outside Europe like Australia, Canada, NZ).

Of course there's no definite, scientific definition for 'socialism' but academcis and political parties in these countries usually define their system as a 'mixed economy' or a 'Social market economy (German: Soziale Marktwirtschaft)'. Which basically means a capitalist based-economy where the majority of GDP remains in private ownership but the government takes a significant amount (33-45%, sometimes more) to fund a welfare state and other programs, and the government has significant power to intervene in markets to ensure fair competition, prevent environmental damage etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy
http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Mixed_economy.html

I'm going to preface my comment here by saying that I generally cook my own foods, and eat a lot of things fresh. I consume very little added sugars of any sort. But this ridiculous debate about sugar vs. HFCS is just idiotic. Both of them are bad for you.

there is no chemical difference between HFCS and Sucrose.

Wrong again. HFCS is high-fructose corn syrup. The ratio of fructose to glucose is higher in HFCS than in sucrose. That's why it is called "high fructose".

It would instill more confidence in your post if you actually showed that you knew anything about the substance you're discussing. The ratio of fructose to glucose in HFCS has nothing to do with comparisons to sucrose. The adjective "high-fructose" added to "corn syrup" is self-explanatory. Corn syrup (the kind of stuff you use when making candies that need a certain texture) is naturally almost all glucose. "Corn syrup" thus contains almost no fructose. Therefore, any "corn syrup" which contains more than a tiny percentage of fructose is automatically a kind of "high-fructose" corn syrup. Normally, HFCS is produced by taking normal (little to no-fructose) corn syrup and processing it in some manner to raise fructose, generally to around 50%

Sucrose is 50/50 glucose and fructose. The kind of HFCS normally used in most foods is either HFCS 55 (about 55% fructose, 42% glucose, 3% other) or HFCS 42 (about 42% fructose, 53% glucose, 5% other). The former is generally used in sodas; the latter in most other processed foods with HFCS (like baked goods, etc.). Please note that HFCS 42 actually contains LESS fructose than sucrose.

While we're on the topic of chemical breakdowns, I also think it's important to bring up honey, which is roughly the same as HFCS 55 in terms of having almost all fructose and glucose, with a bit more fructose. (Honey has a slightly higher proportion of other sugars than HFCS, particularly maltose, but still less than 10%.) Natural foods wackos generally hold up honey as an ideal "natural" alternative sweetener, but it's mostly the same as HFCS, particularly regarding the simple sugars the parent is so worried about.

Whenever HFCS comes up, why aren't people proposing a honey ban as well?

Anyhow...

The problem with HFCS is that it first bypasses the metabolic pathway that sucrose must go through, thereby creating a rush as the simple sugars are directly absorbed by the blood.

As pointed out by other responders to your post, this metabolic pathway doesn't appear to be that significant... it may not be on the order of milliseconds in the stomach, but downing a Coke with sucrose vs. downing a Coke with HFCS will both be causing a surge of simple sugars into your bloodstream in short order.

Most of the studies that purport to "prove" that HFCS is terrible are actually studies that compare pure fructose to other things. (Most people apparently, like the parent poster, are ignorant of the fact that "high-fructose" doesn't even necessarily mean that most of HFCS is fructose.) Yes, apparently eating a lot of pure fructose is bad for you. But the metabolic response is largely dependent on context, and HFCS in that respect is much closer to table sugar than to pure fructose.

Only in the past few years have there been some studies that actually compare HFCS to sucrose directly. Out of the handful that I've seen, all but one have shown no significant statistical difference between HFCS and sucrose consumption, and that includes human studies (for example, this recent one).

There is one intriguing rat study t

If you are going to use "Let there be light" in the context of science fiction, "The Last Question" by Asimov is a much better reference

http://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf