The one thing the D-Wave computer is good at is solving the "D-Wave problem", or things that can be expressed in terms of that problem. However, even at this, its speciality, it is 12000 times slower than a normal single-core computer. The reason why some were reporting that the D-wave computer was faster than classical computers at this problem was simply that they used a very inefficient program to do this. http://www.archduke.org/stuff/d-wave-comment-on-comparison-with-classical-computers/
So basically: There might be some interesting things going on with the D-wave computer, but none of these are practically useful. As far as I understand it, if somebody replaced the insides of a D-wave computer with off-the shelf computer parts, then you wouldn't be able to tell the difference, except it would be much too fast unless artificially slowed down. That makes it hard to see why anybody would pay millions for a computer like that. It also doesn't help that D-wave is completely opaque about the science and engineering behind the computer.
The one thing the D-Wave computer is good at is solving the "D-Wave problem", or things that can be expressed in terms of that problem. However, even at this, its speciality, it is 12000 times slower than a normal single-core computer. The reason why some were reporting that the D-wave computer was faster than classical computers at this problem was simply that they used a very inefficient program to do this. http://www.archduke.org/stuff/d-wave-comment-on-comparison-with-classical-computers/
So basically: There might be some interesting things going on with the D-wave computer, but none of these are practically useful. As far as I understand it, if somebody replaced the insides of a D-wave computer with off-the shelf computer parts, then you wouldn't be able to tell the difference, except it would be much too fast unless artificially slowed down. That makes it hard to see why anybody would pay millions for a computer like that. It also doesn't help that D-wave is completely opaque about the science and engineering behind the computer.
Actually, Mtgox isn't that dominant any more, though it is still the biggest exchange. If counting by the number of individual exchange operations, it has been at about 35% recently. If you count by the fraction of bitcoins exchanged instead, you get a much higher number, about 70%. So clearly, the average transaction size on MtGox is higher than other places, probably because of more speculation happening there.
Which of these numbers are relevant for what would happen if MtGox were to disappear? I'm not sure, but I think the number of individual transactions, ignoring their size, might be the best one, as that could be closer to the number of individual users. If so, I think the disappearance of MtGox would be serious, but not a killing blow. I made some graphs of this based on some (incomplete) data I found: http://folk.uio.no/sigurdkn/bitcoin/exch_count_rel.png http://folk.uio.no/sigurdkn/bitcoin/exch_coins_rel.png
PS: Let's try not to invest so much emotion into these issues, shall we? Disinterested neutrality FTW.
Of course it helps somebody. I'm sure those foregin delegates will be using encryption (hopefully one-time pads, so that there is no password to compromise) the next time, and hold their meetings somewhere else. And your argument can be turned around too - if this was all blindingly obvious, then releasing a redacted document like this will not hurt either, will it? (I don't agree that it was obvious, though).
Perhaps you are right. But do you really think small western countries like Norway or Iceland spy on the US? I can't rule it out, of course, but it seems both risky and a waste of resources when you've only got a handful of people working with that kind of thing (simply due to the size of the population, which is 300k in the case of Iceland).
Wasn't it about the United Kingdom this time? And who cares if this was treasonous or not? What matters is whether it was good or bad, and you haven't made any argument for why it was bad that he exposed this. I live in the UK at the moment, and I certainly found it interesting that the government is low enough to steal login credentials from its allies.
I guess you will say that everybody is doing this, so exposing it serves no purpose other than embarassing the government. Well, nobody should be doing this, and this is providing an incentive for them to stop. It is also informing the people about it, so they can make informed decisions when voting, and helps countries decide where not to participate in meetings, as well as reminding them that they need better encryption etc. I think this is well worth some embarassment for the perpetrator.
I must say I prefer it when leaks go through Wikileaks. In that case, I can see the whole leaked document for myself, rather than getting two paltry screenshots from the Guardian.
Wow, that was a remarkably defeatist post. Basically, your message is: It is not only possible to persuade people, but also impossible to learn something and change your mind. Only as time goes can these things change through some undefined vague process. Did I get that right?
Do you have any evidence to back up this model of learning and opinion forming? Well, actually, I guess presenting such evidence would go against the hypothesis you are presenting here - after all, you're claiming that evidence and rational arguments can't change people's minds - only time can, apparently. But then, isn't your post itself pointless according to your hypothesis?
Perhaps my sarcasm-meter is broken today. Should I have heard a "whoosh" here?
Git has an amazingly rich toolkit of commands, but one thing it is missing which svn had is a standard server ala. svnserve (but hopefully better than svnserve). I.e. something as simple to use as typing "git serve [options] repo", "git adduser repo username pubkey/password", etc., much like svn had with the svnserve command. As people have pointed out, several freestanding options exist, such as gitolite (though its piggybacking on openssh is a bit problematic - something clean and freestanding would be better for a simple command like this, I think, as simply typing git serve should not silently change your.ssh/config file, and the user shouldn't be required to do so himself), and I think simply choosing one of these and standardizing it as the git serve command would make it much simpler for new users to host by themselves.
I made something like this for myself (using libssh) which, while not quite polished for general consumption, shows that it certainly can be done, and does not need to be that much work either. In a way, the presence of services like GitHub has perhaps delayed the development of good, simple and standardized ways of hosting git repositories yourself.
Where did you get an outrageous number like 80 from? How about something sensible like 0-5 years, depending on the subject? Retroactive, of course. I think that's still a pretty long duration (5 years! That's practically an eternity!), but it would be a nice first step.
It is a bit scary that copyright keeps being extended without any empirical evidence to show that society would benefit from longer copyright. As far as I know, very little research has been done on the optimal duration of copyright. One paper I've found, which appears to be one of the most ambitious ones on this topic, still makes several unrealistic assumptions such as "Works are only produced for monetary gain", "No income is possible from works not covered by copyright", "Enforcing copyright has no cost" and "It does not get harder to produce new works when the public domain gets smaller", which all bias it towards longer copyright. Despite this, it finds an optimal duration of *15 years*, with your suggested 80 years being very strongly disfavored.
What exactly did you base your 80 years suggestion on?
PS. Hopefully this won't show up two times - this is my second time trying to submit it, but I had a connection problem the first time.
Where did you get an outrageous number like 80 from? How about something sensible like 0-5 years, depending on the subject? Retroactive, of course. I think that's still a pretty long duration (5 years! That's practically an eternity!), but it would be a nice first step.
It is a bit scary that copyright keeps being extended without any empirical evidence to show that society would benefit from longer copyright. As far as I know, very little research has been done on the optimal duration of copyright. One paper I've found, which appears to be one of the most ambitious ones on this topic, still makes several unrealistic assumptions such as "Works are only produced for monetary gain", "No income is possible from works not covered by copyright", "Enforcing copyright has no cost" and "It does not get harder to produce new works when the public domain gets smaller", which all bias it towards longer copyright. Despite this, it finds an optimal duration of *15 years*, with your suggested 80 years being very strongly disfavored.
What exactly did you base your 80 years suggestion on?
Another good place to host the datacenter would have been iceland. Its winters are not as cold, but the summers are significantly colder. The average high in July is 14 C, compared with 20 in Lulea). It also has abundant, cheap geothermal energy, which makes it popular for aluminium production. To service one of the aluminium plants there, a 630 MW power station was built. Until then, the total power consumption of Iceland had been about 300 MW! According to this table, the price of electricity in Iceland is about 1/3rd of that in Sweden (though perhaps it is even lower in Lulea?).
Both Sweden and Iceland are actually atypically warm for their Latitude due to the Gulf Stream. So if temperature were the only concern, somewhere in Alaska or coastal Russia would be better. I guess accessibility also matters a lot here.
Are you sure about that? I bet that if I plot the population vs. carbon emission of the countries of the world, I will find a very clear trend. Among the developed countries, the carbon emission per capita varies little relative the huge variation in population number, and this implies that total emissions will be roughly proportional to population. For example, Denmark has much lower emissions than the USA.
Reducing population is the most straightforward way to reduce the current overconsumption of resources, but it is still difficult and economically painful. And I think you're probably right that it won't avert global warming, though it might make it a bit less pronounced. Global warming isn't our only problem, though, and all our resource problems are basically proportional with our population size.
I used Windows until XP, and gradually spent more time on my linux machines and less on the windows machines. I think the main reason for this is the CLI. Linux comes with a good shell by default, and more importantly, linux programs have good support for being used from the command line. This lets me easily automate tasks that would require either tedious manual point-and-click operations in windows, or writing a dedicated program (which would probably end up being a cli program anyway).
My experience is that using the CLI occasionally is inconvenient - one has to open up a terminal, find the path to the file one is interested in, cd there, and then get on with what one planned to do. But this does not happen if one stays in the terminal all the time, as one will already be the correct place.
Examples of things that are trivial to automate in the terminal are: Make a 10% size thumbnail of every image in a directory and construct a html page with the thumbnails as images, each linking to the corresponding image. That's a few echos, a for loop and convert, and is written in about a minute, and can be put in a script file for later reuse. Or how about converting an emulator input file into a gameplay movie by piping the audio/video output from the emulator to ffmpeg? Or doing a regex replace of filenames in a directory? Or swapping the order of two columns in 50 text files? Etc. All of this is much simpler to when you have the combination of a good text shell *and* programs meant to be used that way.
(But I guess I am a bit too late to this discussion - this will probably be post 1000 or something).
Is filling in your tax forms so complicated that you need special software to do it in the USA? In Norway (and probably many other countries), you simply get a sheet of paper summarizing your relevant income, debt etc. as reported by banks, employers etc. Usually this information is correct, and in this case you don't have to take any action. Otherwise, you can add, correct or remove items using a government web-app (or paper forms if you prefer). I've had to do this a few times, and it usually takes a few minutes.
No, copyright is a monopoly on creating copies. Sometimes the same laws that define copyright also handle the issue of the right to being named the author, but that does not make them the same thing.
The most reduced forms of religion, where gods exist but do almost nothing, may be compatible with our scientific knowledge of the world because we can't rule them out, so in that sense science and religion are compatible.
But there is an important way in which I think they are incompatible, and that is as approaches to getting knowledge about the world. The scientific approach is to form hypotheses that you become more or less confident in depending on how well they match with observations. This naturally results in a body of hypotheses that becomes better and better at predicting future observations as more data is collected.
The religious approach also uses hypotheses, such as "there are gods", "I will live on after death", "the space reptiles love me and have a purpose for me", but the confidence given to these is completely disproportionate to any evidence. In the religious approach, belief beyond evidence is seen as a virtue, and doubt is a failing.
So clearly, for any given hypothesis about the world, these two approaches proscribe incompatible rules for the confidence you should have in that hypothesis. If you want to be both scientific and religious at the same time, you have to compartmentalize your mind, and choose some ideas you will think scientifically about, and some you will think religiously about.
For example, for a hypothesis like "there is an afterlife", the scientific approach would be to to have extremely low confidence for this idea because of the lack of evidence in favor of it, and because it does not follow from other hypotheses that are supported by observations. The religious approach would be to assign a strong confidence for or against this idea (the choice is "for" for all religions I know of, for obvious reasons), with no regards to evidence. The point here is that for any idea about the world, science and religion both give a recipie for how confident you should be in it, and these recipies are incompatible.
No astronomers doubt the existance of black holes. Both black holes with masses comparable to stars, and supermassive black holes with millions to billions of solar masses are supported by a huge body of evidence. However, there is almost no evidence for black holes with masses in between these ranges, so-called intermediate mass black holes. But logically, they should exist - the way we think the supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies form is by a combination of accretion of matter and mergers of smaller black holes. Both of these mechanisms require supermassive black holes to grow from smaller progenitors.
What this article is about is an experiment to test the hypothesis that there is a high concentration of stellar- and intermediate-sized black holes near the center of the galaxy, waiting to merge with the central supermassive hole. So it is a test a model of the galactic structure, not the existance of black holes as such, though it could provide the first solid evidence of intermediate-mass black holes.
The lack of a magnetic field might indeed be the explanation, but right now the case for it is not very strong. At least with the current solar activity, the observed atmospheric mass loss rates from Earth, Venus and Mars are comparable, even though only Earth has a significant magnetic field. There is a good article about these issues here
Why would fusion plants need "hydrogen storage out of the wazoo"? The amount of hydrogen involved is pretty small, isn't it? A 1 GW (i.e. moderately large) fusion power plant would need less than 10 grams of hydrogen per hour according to my back of the envelope calculation (assuming 40% efficiency (and a 1% rest mass fusion yield) - I don't know how efficient a real plant would be). So I don't see why they would need to store such large amounts of hydrogen.
Also, all the lines appear to be simple geodesics rather than the actual path taken by the flights, which would have been much more interesting to see (though perhaps a bit harder to come by). It would be neat to have a world map of passenger-time per area by means of transportation.
Why is everybody so eager to point out what the law says, but so reluctant to discuss how it should be? Every case like this is a clear example that something is wrong with the law. It is likely that his actions had a net positive effect on society, and even if you only look at the tiny negative effects on the publisher and disregard the positive effects for the students, the punishment is far out of line compared to what he did.
Publicly refusing to comply with the law while accepting any punishment is called civil disobedience, and is a brave thing to do, not stupid. In his case, though, it seems like he was surprised about the reaction he got, so it might not qualify.
Of course they bite. But the bite isn't what hurts - bites of ants that small range from unnoticable to mildly uncomfortable depending on what sort of skin they bite. What hurts is the sting. So claiming that the bite gave you those symtoms is inaccuate and misleading.
You're right that the species concept is not a hard-drawn line, and that is especially so for plants (and even more so for microorganisms), where genetically quite distant plants can interbreed if I recall correctly (but even here they almost always have to be in the same family). I think this is much less a case for anmals, though. Anyway your links all talk about crossbreeding between the red and black fire ant, which is very different from what you claimed (crossbreeding between fire ants and native ants (both red and black fire ants are relatively recent immigrants) and between fire ants and crazy ants). The red and black fire are very closely related - so close that they were previously considered the same species.
Hmm, I don't understand these numbers. 20 Wh/kg works out to 72 kJ/kg, which is much less than the 1.08 MJ/kg Wikipedia quotes for supercapacitors. On the other hand the article on supercapacitors claims 15 Wh/kg to 30 Wh/kg as the typical range of commercially available values, so perhaps the other number unrepresentative. Anyway, these numbers would place the 20 Wh/kg result in the article squarely inside the range of commercially available supercapacitors when it comes to energy density. This is also about 10 times lower energy density than rechargable lithium batteries. So not exactly something you want in your mobile phone.
Do different ant kinds really interbreed like that? I'm skeptical. They are supposed to be different species, aren't they? And fire ants seem to be relatively unrelated with crazy ants. Also, fire ants don't have a particularly painful bite - it is their sting that is poisonous.
Slashdot Mirror
The one thing the D-Wave computer is good at is solving the "D-Wave problem", or things that can be expressed in terms of that problem. However, even at this, its speciality, it is 12000 times slower than a normal single-core computer. The reason why some were reporting that the D-wave computer was faster than classical computers at this problem was simply that they used a very inefficient program to do this.
http://www.archduke.org/stuff/d-wave-comment-on-comparison-with-classical-computers/
So basically: There might be some interesting things going on with the D-wave computer, but none of these are practically useful. As far as I understand it, if somebody replaced the insides of a D-wave computer with off-the shelf computer parts, then you wouldn't be able to tell the difference, except it would be much too fast unless artificially slowed down. That makes it hard to see why anybody would pay millions for a computer like that. It also doesn't help that D-wave is completely opaque about the science and engineering behind the computer.
The one thing the D-Wave computer is good at is solving the "D-Wave problem", or things that can be expressed in terms of that problem. However, even at this, its speciality, it is 12000 times slower than a normal single-core computer. The reason why some were reporting that the D-wave computer was faster than classical computers at this problem was simply that they used a very inefficient program to do this.
http://www.archduke.org/stuff/d-wave-comment-on-comparison-with-classical-computers/
So basically: There might be some interesting things going on with the D-wave computer, but none of these are practically useful. As far as I understand it, if somebody replaced the insides of a D-wave computer with off-the shelf computer parts, then you wouldn't be able to tell the difference, except it would be much too fast unless artificially slowed down. That makes it hard to see why anybody would pay millions for a computer like that. It also doesn't help that D-wave is completely opaque about the science and engineering behind the computer.
Actually, Mtgox isn't that dominant any more, though it is still the biggest exchange. If counting by the number of individual exchange operations, it has been at about 35% recently. If you count by the fraction of bitcoins exchanged instead, you get a much higher number, about 70%. So clearly, the average transaction size on MtGox is higher than other places, probably because of more speculation happening there.
Which of these numbers are relevant for what would happen if MtGox were to disappear? I'm not sure, but I think the number of individual transactions, ignoring their size, might be the best one, as that could be closer to the number of individual users. If so, I think the disappearance of MtGox would be serious, but not a killing blow. I made some graphs of this based on some (incomplete) data I found:
http://folk.uio.no/sigurdkn/bitcoin/exch_count_rel.png
http://folk.uio.no/sigurdkn/bitcoin/exch_coins_rel.png
PS: Let's try not to invest so much emotion into these issues, shall we? Disinterested neutrality FTW.
Of course it helps somebody. I'm sure those foregin delegates will be using encryption (hopefully one-time pads, so that there is no password to compromise) the next time, and hold their meetings somewhere else. And your argument can be turned around too - if this was all blindingly obvious, then releasing a redacted document like this will not hurt either, will it? (I don't agree that it was obvious, though).
Perhaps you are right. But do you really think small western countries like Norway or Iceland spy on the US? I can't rule it out, of course, but it seems both risky and a waste of resources when you've only got a handful of people working with that kind of thing (simply due to the size of the population, which is 300k in the case of Iceland).
Wasn't it about the United Kingdom this time? And who cares if this was treasonous or not? What matters is whether it was good or bad, and you haven't made any argument for why it was bad that he exposed this. I live in the UK at the moment, and I certainly found it interesting that the government is low enough to steal login credentials from its allies.
I guess you will say that everybody is doing this, so exposing it serves no purpose other than embarassing the government. Well, nobody should be doing this, and this is providing an incentive for them to stop. It is also informing the people about it, so they can make informed decisions when voting, and helps countries decide where not to participate in meetings, as well as reminding them that they need better encryption etc. I think this is well worth some embarassment for the perpetrator.
I must say I prefer it when leaks go through Wikileaks. In that case, I can see the whole leaked document for myself, rather than getting two paltry screenshots from the Guardian.
Wow, that was a remarkably defeatist post. Basically, your message is: It is not only possible to persuade people, but also impossible to learn something and change your mind. Only as time goes can these things change through some undefined vague process. Did I get that right?
Do you have any evidence to back up this model of learning and opinion forming? Well, actually, I guess presenting such evidence would go against the hypothesis you are presenting here - after all, you're claiming that evidence and rational arguments can't change people's minds - only time can, apparently. But then, isn't your post itself pointless according to your hypothesis?
Perhaps my sarcasm-meter is broken today. Should I have heard a "whoosh" here?
Git has an amazingly rich toolkit of commands, but one thing it is missing which svn had is a standard server ala. svnserve (but hopefully better than svnserve). I.e. something as simple to use as typing "git serve [options] repo", "git adduser repo username pubkey/password", etc., much like svn had with the svnserve command. As people have pointed out, several freestanding options exist, such as gitolite (though its piggybacking on openssh is a bit problematic - something clean and freestanding would be better for a simple command like this, I think, as simply typing git serve should not silently change your .ssh/config file, and the user shouldn't be required to do so himself), and I think simply choosing one of these and standardizing it as the git serve command would make it much simpler for new users to host by themselves.
I made something like this for myself (using libssh) which, while not quite polished for general consumption, shows that it certainly can be done, and does not need to be that much work either. In a way, the presence of services like GitHub has perhaps delayed the development of good, simple and standardized ways of hosting git repositories yourself.
Where did you get an outrageous number like 80 from? How about something sensible like 0-5 years, depending on the subject? Retroactive, of course. I think that's still a pretty long duration (5 years! That's practically an eternity!), but it would be a nice first step.
It is a bit scary that copyright keeps being extended without any empirical evidence to show that society would benefit from longer copyright. As far as I know, very little research has been done on the optimal duration of copyright. One paper I've found, which appears to be one of the most ambitious ones on this topic, still makes several unrealistic assumptions such as "Works are only produced for monetary gain", "No income is possible from works not covered by copyright", "Enforcing copyright has no cost" and "It does not get harder to produce new works when the public domain gets smaller", which all bias it towards longer copyright. Despite this, it finds an optimal duration of *15 years*, with your suggested 80 years being very strongly disfavored.
What exactly did you base your 80 years suggestion on?
PS. Hopefully this won't show up two times - this is my second time trying to submit it, but I had a connection problem the first time.
Where did you get an outrageous number like 80 from? How about something sensible like 0-5 years, depending on the subject? Retroactive, of course. I think that's still a pretty long duration (5 years! That's practically an eternity!), but it would be a nice first step.
It is a bit scary that copyright keeps being extended without any empirical evidence to show that society would benefit from longer copyright. As far as I know, very little research has been done on the optimal duration of copyright. One paper I've found, which appears to be one of the most ambitious ones on this topic, still makes several unrealistic assumptions such as "Works are only produced for monetary gain", "No income is possible from works not covered by copyright", "Enforcing copyright has no cost" and "It does not get harder to produce new works when the public domain gets smaller", which all bias it towards longer copyright. Despite this, it finds an optimal duration of *15 years*, with your suggested 80 years being very strongly disfavored.
What exactly did you base your 80 years suggestion on?
Another good place to host the datacenter would have been iceland. Its winters are not as cold, but the summers are significantly colder. The average high in July is 14 C, compared with 20 in Lulea). It also has abundant, cheap geothermal energy, which makes it popular for aluminium production. To service one of the aluminium plants there, a 630 MW power station was built. Until then, the total power consumption of Iceland had been about 300 MW! According to this table, the price of electricity in Iceland is about 1/3rd of that in Sweden (though perhaps it is even lower in Lulea?).
Both Sweden and Iceland are actually atypically warm for their Latitude due to the Gulf Stream. So if temperature were the only concern, somewhere in Alaska or coastal Russia would be better. I guess accessibility also matters a lot here.
Are you sure about that? I bet that if I plot the population vs. carbon emission of the countries of the world, I will find a very clear trend. Among the developed countries, the carbon emission per capita varies little relative the huge variation in population number, and this implies that total emissions will be roughly proportional to population. For example, Denmark has much lower emissions than the USA.
Reducing population is the most straightforward way to reduce the current overconsumption of resources, but it is still difficult and economically painful. And I think you're probably right that it won't avert global warming, though it might make it a bit less pronounced. Global warming isn't our only problem, though, and all our resource problems are basically proportional with our population size.
I used Windows until XP, and gradually spent more time on my linux machines and less on the windows machines. I think the main reason for this is the CLI. Linux comes with a good shell by default, and more importantly, linux programs have good support for being used from the command line. This lets me easily automate tasks that would require either tedious manual point-and-click operations in windows, or writing a dedicated program (which would probably end up being a cli program anyway).
My experience is that using the CLI occasionally is inconvenient - one has to open up a terminal, find the path to the file one is interested in, cd there, and then get on with what one planned to do. But this does not happen if one stays in the terminal all the time, as one will already be the correct place.
Examples of things that are trivial to automate in the terminal are: Make a 10% size thumbnail of every image in a directory and construct a html page with the thumbnails as images, each linking to the corresponding image. That's a few echos, a for loop and convert, and is written in about a minute, and can be put in a script file for later reuse. Or how about converting an emulator input file into a gameplay movie by piping the audio/video output from the emulator to ffmpeg? Or doing a regex replace of filenames in a directory? Or swapping the order of two columns in 50 text files? Etc. All of this is much simpler to when you have the combination of a good text shell *and* programs meant to be used that way.
(But I guess I am a bit too late to this discussion - this will probably be post 1000 or something).
Is filling in your tax forms so complicated that you need special software to do it in the USA? In Norway (and probably many other countries), you simply get a sheet of paper summarizing your relevant income, debt etc. as reported by banks, employers etc. Usually this information is correct, and in this case you don't have to take any action. Otherwise, you can add, correct or remove items using a government web-app (or paper forms if you prefer). I've had to do this a few times, and it usually takes a few minutes.
No, copyright is a monopoly on creating copies. Sometimes the same laws that define copyright also handle the issue of the right to being named the author, but that does not make them the same thing.
The most reduced forms of religion, where gods exist but do almost nothing, may be compatible with our scientific knowledge of the world because we can't rule them out, so in that sense science and religion are compatible.
But there is an important way in which I think they are incompatible, and that is as approaches to getting knowledge about the world. The scientific approach is to form hypotheses that you become more or less confident in depending on how well they match with observations. This naturally results in a body of hypotheses that becomes better and better at predicting future observations as more data is collected.
The religious approach also uses hypotheses, such as "there are gods", "I will live on after death", "the space reptiles love me and have a purpose for me", but the confidence given to these is completely disproportionate to any evidence. In the religious approach, belief beyond evidence is seen as a virtue, and doubt is a failing.
So clearly, for any given hypothesis about the world, these two approaches proscribe incompatible rules for the confidence you should have in that hypothesis. If you want to be both scientific and religious at the same time, you have to compartmentalize your mind, and choose some ideas you will think scientifically about, and some you will think religiously about.
For example, for a hypothesis like "there is an afterlife", the scientific approach would be to to have extremely low confidence for this idea because of the lack of evidence in favor of it, and because it does not follow from other hypotheses that are supported by observations. The religious approach would be to assign a strong confidence for or against this idea (the choice is "for" for all religions I know of, for obvious reasons), with no regards to evidence. The point here is that for any idea about the world, science and religion both give a recipie for how confident you should be in it, and these recipies are incompatible.
No astronomers doubt the existance of black holes. Both black holes with masses comparable to stars, and supermassive black holes with millions to billions of solar masses are supported by a huge body of evidence. However, there is almost no evidence for black holes with masses in between these ranges, so-called intermediate mass black holes. But logically, they should exist - the way we think the supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies form is by a combination of accretion of matter and mergers of smaller black holes. Both of these mechanisms require supermassive black holes to grow from smaller progenitors.
What this article is about is an experiment to test the hypothesis that there is a high concentration of stellar- and intermediate-sized black holes near the center of the galaxy, waiting to merge with the central supermassive hole. So it is a test a model of the galactic structure, not the existance of black holes as such, though it could provide the first solid evidence of intermediate-mass black holes.
The lack of a magnetic field might indeed be the explanation, but right now the case for it is not very strong. At least with the current solar activity, the observed atmospheric mass loss rates from Earth, Venus and Mars are comparable, even though only Earth has a significant magnetic field. There is a good article about these issues here
Why would fusion plants need "hydrogen storage out of the wazoo"? The amount of hydrogen involved is pretty small, isn't it? A 1 GW (i.e. moderately large) fusion power plant would need less than 10 grams of hydrogen per hour according to my back of the envelope calculation (assuming 40% efficiency (and a 1% rest mass fusion yield) - I don't know how efficient a real plant would be). So I don't see why they would need to store such large amounts of hydrogen.
Also, all the lines appear to be simple geodesics rather than the actual path taken by the flights, which would have been much more interesting to see (though perhaps a bit harder to come by). It would be neat to have a world map of passenger-time per area by means of transportation.
Why is everybody so eager to point out what the law says, but so reluctant to discuss how it should be? Every case like this is a clear example that something is wrong with the law. It is likely that his actions had a net positive effect on society, and even if you only look at the tiny negative effects on the publisher and disregard the positive effects for the students, the punishment is far out of line compared to what he did.
Publicly refusing to comply with the law while accepting any punishment is called civil disobedience, and is a brave thing to do, not stupid. In his case, though, it seems like he was surprised about the reaction he got, so it might not qualify.
Of course they bite. But the bite isn't what hurts - bites of ants that small range from unnoticable to mildly uncomfortable depending on what sort of skin they bite. What hurts is the sting. So claiming that the bite gave you those symtoms is inaccuate and misleading.
You're right that the species concept is not a hard-drawn line, and that is especially so for plants (and even more so for microorganisms), where genetically quite distant plants can interbreed if I recall correctly (but even here they almost always have to be in the same family). I think this is much less a case for anmals, though. Anyway your links all talk about crossbreeding between the red and black fire ant, which is very different from what you claimed (crossbreeding between fire ants and native ants (both red and black fire ants are relatively recent immigrants) and between fire ants and crazy ants). The red and black fire are very closely related - so close that they were previously considered the same species.
Hmm, I don't understand these numbers. 20 Wh/kg works out to 72 kJ/kg, which is much less than the 1.08 MJ/kg Wikipedia quotes for supercapacitors. On the other hand the article on supercapacitors claims 15 Wh/kg to 30 Wh/kg as the typical range of commercially available values, so perhaps the other number unrepresentative. Anyway, these numbers would place the 20 Wh/kg result in the article squarely inside the range of commercially available supercapacitors when it comes to energy density. This is also about 10 times lower energy density than rechargable lithium batteries. So not exactly something you want in your mobile phone.
Do different ant kinds really interbreed like that? I'm skeptical. They are supposed to be different species, aren't they? And fire ants seem to be relatively unrelated with crazy ants. Also, fire ants don't have a particularly painful bite - it is their sting that is poisonous.