Ayindar

Oh god yes I'm getting so annoyed with this whole "mobile gaming needs to be like facebook gaming" shit.

"Do you want to share this high score with your friends?", "Buy extra yaddawhatever for only 0.99$", "Put this on your facebook wall", "Ask a friend for help" Bitches I'm trying to relax and just play a game on my phone here delete game.

And ads, ads everywhere. Does anyone still think that spamming an ad in my face while I'm playing a game will actually make me want to buy anything? Because frankly, any ad that pops up while I'm playing is another product added to a list of shit I'm never buying.

In academic circles the problem (things like competitiveness) mainly comes from the way funds are divided. I don't know how it is done in the US but I can imagine it doesn't differ that much from here in Europe. Simply put, to get your funding at the beginning of a year, your department (be it languages, science, whatever) needs to churn out scientific papers and books. Not meeting your quota as a department means less funds, means tougher year.

First and foremost this gives rise to a complete stunting of research. Departments will rather rehash old ideas (bordering on the verge of plagiarism), or fill in flimsy written papers with pseudo-scientific (and incorrect) bullshit, as long as there's a steady stream of written material coming out of the department. Original research and the investigation of new things becomes too timeconsuming to be valuable when looked at from a financial perspective, which means that you're either going to go with the flow, or come up with something new that has to sound EXTREMELY good and quickly manageable.

Secondly, situations like the one you found yourself in arise. New research will take place but as you stated, corners get cut, and then some, and eventually some more, and you end up with a bastard child of the thing you originally started. Falsification, 'approximation' of results, anything to keep the money rolling in.

So yeah. Science is just as competitive as business because science stopped being about the science and started being about money. Just as pretty much everything else. Sorry you had to find this out the hard way, but seriously, good on ya for being an awesome human being.

The biggest problem with reviving neanderthals according to what I'm thinking is that they're human. Regardless of the fact that they're a separate species, they belong to the same genus as we do. So bringing one back would lead to the fact that he/she would be born and raised in a lab, kept under surveillance 24/7 probably, be subjected to tests and so on.

This is not something you'd allow a "regular" human child to go through, so why would you allow a lab created neanderthal child to be subjected to this?