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Worth pointing out that solar produced hydrogen efficiency is also improving, world record efficiency published last week. (Unfortunately nature energy pay walls all their articles, RDM did a report on it though) http://www.rdmag.com/news/2017...

Brain-computer interfaces are superior, cheaper, safer, more reliable and offer more flexibility. Case Western literally just published a paper showing a brain-computer interface allowing a quadriplegic arm mobility using his thoughts. (Youtube video in the article too). A head transplant would have to be done within an hour without immune response issues and all of these operations he's done on animals they end up with mobility issues and die after a few days to weeks. Only attractive option for it would be sci-fi live forever scenarios but even then the brain still ages so it's impractical at best.

Except, of course, I just spelled out the reasons why it is. It's like someone saying "hey, they invented a cheap 300mpg car as a side effect of this project, that's going to be immensely valuable" and you responded "Unless, it's not, of course".

Which is a ludicrous comparison since higher magnetic fields at higher temperatures, using helium-cooled superconductors, just isn't that valuable compared to lowering effective ground transportation costs of humanity by a factor of ten. That's like getting two orders of magnitude return on investment (assuming you spent $14+ billion for it) - which you aren't going to get with ITER.

Research on magnetic materials is just a single example of a tiny fraction of that cost. How many more examples do you want? Or will you be equally dismissive to all of them? Where do YOU think that $14+ billion is going? Do you think there's just some bonfire where they burn it all? It's mostly spent on researchers, working on the technology behind the various subsystems. Much if not most of which is multi-application.

I sure will be equally dismissive of the whole lot of them. If there was a serious benefit to ITER, we would have known about it by now. It wouldn't be vague talk of technological improvements or fusion break even in ten years.

If you want something to attack for budget reasons, direct your gaze upwards (ISS). I think $150B for that is a lot harder to justify.

Well, I googled myself about ISS and boy was I on fire in January 2014.

I'm sure there's useful stuff being studied. Who knows? It might even some day approach within an order of magnitude of the original cost of the station.

When I read posts like the above, I have to remind myself that not everyone realizes the extremely high value of what could have been done with the money spent on publicly funded research like the ISS.

For example, we could have built three or so ISSs for that price (at least half of the savings gained by cutting out the Space Shuttle and a similar amount gained by dropping the "international" from the ISS). But we prudently didn't because the research is far too valuable to triple the quantity produced without actually spending a cent more.

or

[Teancum] Treatiing the existing ISS structure as sunk costs

Can't because the ISS costs almost $2 billion a year just to keep operational. Also, the same sort of bad decision making that led to the Shuttle and the ISS leads to more recent bad decisions such as development of the Space Launch System.

There's the matter of political hygiene. Let's say I have an apartment and I leave the place a serious mess, with food and stuff lying around. It won't be long before rodents, bugs, and other vermin are squirming through my apartment. But by cleaning up the apartment and especially getting rid of the easy food sources, I greatly reduce my vermin problem.

I see the ISS as it currently stands as a pile of old, rotting food feeding the next generation of cockroaches and rats. If it weren't around, then things like the Shuttle, Constellation, and now SLS would have been greatly curbed.

and

[Princeofcups] You sad sick fuck. The world is not beholden to the economic views of market capitalism. Science and knowledge expansion requires the expenditure of resources that are NOT tied up in making the elite more elite. It's your viewpoint that has destroyed what was once the greatest scientific community and left nothing but a corpse picked over by weasels and hyenas.

Consider that the above complaint is made in the face of the greatest expenditures ev

LIGO Scientists Will Make Gravitational Waves Announcement Thursday

Why does a company need government's permission to fly a 10:1 model of their future product? It is not like they are testing it in public or on animals...

(And here is the link I submitted about the same thing earlier.)

Because selfish drone owners who believe they can do whatever they want ruined it for everyone. RC Airplane flying had been largely unregulated for 50 years because people acted responsibly. But drone owners don't think they have to be responsible. They can do whatever they want, fly anywhere they want, videotape whatever they want. Now because of their selfishness, everybody pays.

Why does a company need government's permission to fly a 10:1 model of their future product? It is not like they are testing it in public or on animals...

(And here is the link I submitted about the same thing earlier.)

You sad sick fuck. The world is not beholden to the economic views of market capitalism. Science and knowledge expansion requires the expenditure of resources that are NOT tied up in making the elite more elite. It's your viewpoint that has destroyed what was once the greatest scientific community and left nothing but a corpse picked over by weasels and hyenas.

Consider that the above complaint is made in the face of the greatest expenditures ever made on scientific research in the history of the world. If the "greatest scientific community" is being destroyed, then it must be by something other than mere economics.

I think Lawrence_Bird nailed the fundamental problem. Programs like the ISS aren't scientific programs but rather corrupt transfers of wealth to various elite which happen to do a minor bit of research. Too much research is not about producing something of value either for today or the distant future.

... but it's still just a theory that we evolved from, say, single-celled organisms.

We'd have to actually go back in time to know for sure. Otherwise, it's just guesswork...

It's more than just guesswork, we can see that most life on the planet is single-celled, and we know that we are made up of cells. We know that each sexually-reproducing multicellular organism grows from a single cell. We know what our cells have in common with single-celled organisms (e.g. RNA and DNA) and what's different. We can see colonies of single-celled organisms clustering together and symbiotically working together to increase their chances of survival and reproduction. And the capstone, we know how single-celled life can evolve to become multicellular. There's really not a lot of guesswork involved; tracing back the tree of life via the genes and fossils of multicellular organisms points inevitably to a common single-celled origin.

Of the crystaline structure of M-Carbon can be seen in this article http://rdmag.com/News/2012/06/Materials-Researchers-Establish-Structure-Of-A-New-Superhard-Form-Of-Carbon/

"The researchers used a Bayesian analysis—which weighs how much of a scientific conclusion stems from actual data and how much comes from the prior assumptions of the scientist—to determine the probability of extraterrestrial life once the influence of these presumptions is minimized."
Source

From the article: "We find that, given only this very limited empirical information, the choice of Bayesian prior for the abiogenesis probability parameter has a dominant influence on the computed posterior probability." ...and that, my friends, is the problem with Bayesian statistics. Bayesian statistics is always biased. So stick to likelihood-based statistics.

In any event, there are well-defined ignorance priors, and they didn't use them.

It's statistical probability, you Philistine!

"The researchers used a Bayesian analysis—which weighs how much of a scientific conclusion stems from actual data and how much comes from the prior assumptions of the scientist—to determine the probability of extraterrestrial life once the influence of these presumptions is minimized."
Source

Which amounts to, "my filter hasn't found any papers on extra-terrestrial life we've found yet, so clearly no evidence of extra-terrestrial life exists." I don't need a Bayesian filter to figure that one out, and it's actually pretty stupid to use one. We already know that we haven't found any life outside the Earth.

That said, the existence of life on Earth is all the evidence you need for life elsewhere. The chance of life arising is bigger than zero, and the amount of planets is large enough that for anything with probability not zero, it's going to happen more than once. The only valid question is just how full of life is the universe? Is it mostly lifeless or chock-full of it?

It's statistical probability, you Philistine!

"The researchers used a Bayesian analysis—which weighs how much of a scientific conclusion stems from actual data and how much comes from the prior assumptions of the scientist—to determine the probability of extraterrestrial life once the influence of these presumptions is minimized." Source

...possibility of also finding Earth-like life on those worlds

Whoever said extraterrestrial life had to be "Earth-like?"

Thus is the fallacy of the analysis.

Expectation of extraterrestrial life built more on optimism than evidence http://www.rdmag.com/News/2012/04/General-Science-Expectation-Of-Extraterrestrial-Life-Built-More-On-Optimism-Than-Evidence/

And yet there's a Slashdot user named mbone that repeatedly claims otherwise ... either he's an extremely well researched troll or he's on to something.

It's statistical probability, you Philistine!

"The researchers used a Bayesian analysis—which weighs how much of a scientific conclusion stems from actual data and how much comes from the prior assumptions of the scientist—to determine the probability of extraterrestrial life once the influence of these presumptions is minimized."
Source

...since the one in the story appears dead.

Expectation of extraterrestrial life built more on optimism than evidence
http://www.rdmag.com/News/2012/04/General-Science-Expectation-Of-Extraterrestrial-Life-Built-More-On-Optimism-Than-Evidence/

Is the search for ET pie-in-the-sky fantasy?
http://www.futurity.org/science-technology/is-the-search-for-et-pie-in-the-sky-fantasy/

We Really Hope ET is Out There, But There’s Not Enough Scientific Evidence, Researchers Say
http://www.universetoday.com/94838/we-really-hope-et-is-out-there-but-theres-not-enough-scientific-evidence-researchers-say/

See http://www.rdmag.com/RD100-Awards-Rounding-The-Edges-On-Superconductor-Wires/ which I reached via the sapphire outfit's site. The sapphire is a substrate for epitaxial deposition of an unspecified superconductor. It is not the conductor and the story is making more sense now.

... covered with High-Tc superconductor film, epitaxially grown. So yes, it would work.

Much better info about this R&D for /. crowd : http://www.rdmag.com/RD100-Awards-Rounding-The-Edges-On-Superconductor-Wires/

Paul B.

Yes, you are a geologist who is obviously ignorant of the state of the debate in a field not your own which continues even today.

2009, energy and mechanics analysis of 14 dinosaurs indicates possibility of warm-blooded: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0007783

The Caltech isotope analysis of teeth indicating warm-bloodedness for sauropods was announced this year. http://www.rdmag.com/News/2011/06/General-Science-Analytical-Instrumentation-Biology-Dinosaur-body-temperature-measured-for-first-time/

There is much more, but since you are wilfully ignorant you can just go back to twiddling your rocks.

I agree with reading about it on the Internet. I like RSS, but I've found it homogenizes my content so that things don't jump out at me and the really interesting stories get buried with all the mediocre ones. So I keep the following list of bookmarks to check on a weekly basis:

ABC (Australia) Science, ABC (US) Science, Air & Space Magazine, ARKive, Ars Technica, BBC SciTech News, CBS Sci-Tech News, Chet Raymo, Cosmos News, Current: Science, Discover, Discovery News, Edge, Economist Science, EurekAlert!, Flyp media, Futurity, h+, Inkling Magazine, LiveScience, Massimo Pigliucci, Mother Jones Environment, MSNBC Science News, National Geographic News, National Public Radio (US), Natural History Magazine, New Scientist, New York Times Science, New Yorker Science, Newsweek Science, Orion, PhysOrg, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, R&D Magazine, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Science Daily, Scientific American, Seed Magazine, Science Cheerleader, Science News, Schrodinger's Kitten, Slashdot Science, Smithsonian, Space.com, The Technium, Time Magazine Science, USA Today Science, US News & World Report Science, Wired News, World Changing

Not quite. Hypothetically, what it only costs them $50 to manufacture, but it costs them $6 billion a year in R&D to develop?

Then, selling i5s for $200 and i7s for $300 might be a perfectly fair price, and doing that by selling $200 chips with a $100 optional software upgrade might be reasonable as well.

Do they run linux?

The laptops don't, but the new treadmill does.

I foresee a bunch of very angry and utterly confused "life starts at DNA" people.

If "life" means being able to reproduce then because RNA can self replicate the quote needs to be "life starts at DNA or RNA".

Falcon

If the were no protection on infomation sharing, a company still has a great advantage of doing the research
There is very little advantage in doing the research. If somebody else copies my exam in class, I have the great advantage of doing the research, though I'm stuck with the same grade. Will it help me on the next exam? Yes, but the kid next to me is still getting the same grades I am.
So they will complain and whine how they would never invest $500 million if the payoff was "only" $600 million
So who is going to fund their next $500 million dollar project? Who will invest in a company where the rate of return is lower? Are you going to put your retirement money to a company earning 5% or one earning 50% rate of return? Once you dry up the investment dollars you dry up industries that rely heavily on IP.
You clearly didnt try to use your computer in any way that was not approved by those vendors when they colluded to agree on their restricted view of how things should be, even though, when you purchased your PC, you purchased a "general computing" device and not a DRM-infected "enterntainment center".
Yes my computer is so locked down, I can't do any research on it, I can't do my own programming, I can't even play non-approved music. Oh wait, I can. If my computer becomes DRM infested, then I can just not buy it. I can vote with my dollars, and purchase an alternative machine. I know legislation keeps pushing in that direction, and I am against that.
Had he/she any say in this?
Children rarely have any say in the decisions of the parents. Like I said, this would affect a small population since the patent will expire round about the time the child can conceive. You are also assuming nobody else comes up with an alternate method for gene therapy.
which would be easilly obtainable from a sample of few hair or blood drops
Most likely not, unless you know what you are looking for (which you wont since people wont publish the information), it will take a long time to reverse engineer a gene treatment. It would require a large sample of treated people to determine what sequence(s) were affected.
Such agreements would be unenforcable if infomation were not "property".
No, even though the information isn't property, the act of sharing information, would damage the company and they could sue.
You oversimplified what I am proposing. Academia would be the leading source of discovery, sponsored by both taxpayers and industry who (even though they will not be able to hide this data from each other) would still hope to be quicker to bringing the actual product to market then the next guy
So now the goverment decides how we progress? They would have the power now that they hold all the pursestrings. You propose to take away the greatest source for R&D spending and don't think that will greatly impact the rate of progress?
As I said before I am for limited protections, not goverment forcing things down my throat. IP does not mean INDUCE or DMCA, those are perversions of the original concepts. An important aspect of IP is encouraging things to get into public domain. Current copyright law does not do this, patent law did, until they started to misapply to software and other more general concepts. I don't believe the "fix" is wholesale abandonment of IP.