If you look at the published video on YouTube of the explosion and go frame by frame, there are two events. The first is a bright flash that lasts a few frames and appears much larger than it actually is because it is both saturating the camera and illuminating the condensation clouds. You can see the illumination effect clearly in the first frame the flash appears as there are distinct shadows in the clouds. It's unclear to me whether this triggering event is electrical or chemical in nature, but I'm not an expert. Three observations can be made, however: (1) it is bright enough to cause lens flare in the camera which allows pinpointing its source despite the saturation (look for the X, carefully find its center -- you can do that very accurately -- and then back up a handful of frames; see that triangle thingy with a thin tail? That's what failed.) Then, (2) the initial flash is small and is followed almost immediately by a medium sized flash, and in turn that releases the fireball. Then, (3) the condensation clouds aren't moved by the explosion for about 12 frames until the fireball really starts to form, suggesting that the earlier flashes marked the release of lots of energy that may have been primarily radiation (light) rather than heat because they didn't expand the air enough for me to think of them as explosions. The video is 60 FPS, and the initial flash forms within one frame, so that's only 17 ms. The consdensation clouds don't start moving for 200 ms from the main explosion.
So we have one event that's exceedingly hot that triggers a second that's also exceedingly hot, that releases enough LOX to start the fireball. I'm thinking static discharge from the LOX filling.
One thing I don't understand, though, is that if you watch the fireball in slow motion, as the lower front heads toward the ground, there are seemingly waves passing through it. What are those? Additional shock fronts from tertiary explosions?
Except that a rock would be a lot more obvious, and if you wanted to socially engineer a company into self-destruction of property, just leave one of these USB-killer things disguised as a normal flash drive in the parking lot.
Now why you would want to destroy the USB port and possibly the computer it is part of rather than deliver malware if you have nefarious intent, well, that beats me. Destroying the computer causes limited damage. Malware, in contrast, can propagate.
Nevertheless, if vandalism is the goal, rocks will do, but gum, half-chewed soft candy, or a squirt of glue will still disable the port and require a visit from a field tech. One might imagine that gum is a far more pervasive nuisance to public-facing USB ports than rocks.
Any chance that EM sensitivity is really caused by magnetic particles in the sufferer's brain?
One pre-mortem way to look for evidence is to see if there's a correlation between length of time spent in zones of high air pollution and complaint severity. Heck, if magnetite is found in the brain, then it must be in the blood stream, too, and other tissues as well. There's potentially some serious science to be done here.
"He actually found a USB that was in this jar that was closed, and the jar was in a box, and the box had stuff in it. The jar itself had stuff in it."
Maybe, just maybe, he didn't smell the USB flash drive that was in a closed jar inside a box. Maybe, just maybe, he smelled the residue that the owner had left on the outside of the box when putting the flash drive away.
It's very, very challenging to completely isolate something from ordor-based detection. You need to work with clean instruments and put the item in a clean container, operating ideally in a clean environment. Then, because you probably slightly contaminated the outside of the bag, you need to do it again, with a completely new set of clean instruments, in a new, clean environment. And then you probably need to do it again. And probably again.
Otherwise, the owner might as well have just rubbed the flash drive on the outside of the box.
And yet, no terrorists. No bridges or malls or trains or buses blowing up, no water being poisoned, etc.
Perhaps not in the US, but in Nice, France, there was recently that Tunisian fellow who drove a large truck through a crowd (on the sidewalk) for two kilometers, killing nearly 100 people, and injuring slightly over 200. Pretty good soft target: a diffuse crowd gathered for Bastille Day celebrations. Quite effective terrorism.
Then in the US, there was that couple in San Bernardino who shot up a Christmas party in 2015. Another effective act of terrorism on a soft target.
And the recent shooting in the night club in Florida.
And the Boston Marathon bombing.
Oh, and the ricin mailed to a senator and the US president.
And when the POAM is being tracked, and things aren't getting fixed.... oh, wait, *I* know, we'll put together a Selected Hurdles Integration and Testing Facility Engineering System Template to make sure the problems get resolved.
The deal is that once you've spent big money, you just can't back out and save face. They need a new leader, brought in from the outside, to shred the contract and tell HPE to go away.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Nevertheless, I do want to point out that there is a simple case where a pressurized tank will hold just fine, but will leak like a sieve if the pressure is lowered: an internal flap that is being held in place against a hole by the high pressure, that is no longer being held sufficiently tightly when the pressure is lowered. The flap, in this case, might well be unintentional, like from an overlapped seam of two panels. It turns out that the flapper valve in most toilets works just in that way: it depends on the weight of the water to ensure a good seal, leaking terribly during the initial filling of the tank. The toilet valve is designed to do that, but after shaking the begeezus out of a lift stage that has been designed neither for low-pressure use nor for long-term durability, there might well be such flaps unintentionally present.
But the primary point is that we agree -- the basic idea is worth pursuing. Given the vast cost of lifting the shell to orbit, it would seem to be a resource that could be utilized, somehow, and that bears investigation.
It is pressure tested at many times the 0.5-1.0 atm pressure differential needed to sustain human life in space.
It is pressure tested on earth before being subjected to the intense rigors of launch. All bets are off as to whether it retains long-term integrity, as it has not been designed to do that. It's easy to find situations where a vessel will will not leak at high pressure differentials, but will leak at low pressure differentials. That we don't know the answer as to what will happen to the current designs is a good reason to test, but it should not be put forth as incontrovertible evidence of future success.
2. No. Cute ways to make graphics spell out a company's name is a first-year student's approach. You can do better. It looks like a QR code FFS.
3. Interesting. But what does it have to do with browsers? Is Mozilla now making robots? Or a chat app?
4. Cute. Will not be cute in about 18 months.
5. No, and see point 2 as to why. It also does not render well at 32x32.
6. Makes my eyes bleed almost as much as #1. Also will not render well at low resolutions. FFS, why do I want to recall those horrid Apple drawing programs from the pre-iMac days?
7. What? Which part of that is the logo? Is Mozilla an origami company now? It's supposed to read Mozilla? See objection to #2.
The only one that has any relevant design sensibility (note the important "relevant" part... the open elevator door logo is sheer idiocy, unless Mozilla has bought Otis Elevator and no-one's noticed) is the fourth Moz://a, but it will get tired quickly. Cute does not last.
Now, can anyone tell me what the Mozilla logo currently is? Not the Firefox logo. Not the Thunderbird logo, but the Mozilla Foundation's logo. Anyone? Anyone? So the logo does not matter one whit. (The logo, having looked at the mozilla.org web site appears to be a lower-case "mozilla" in an attractive sans-serif font; not a bad logo, kind of bland, but lacks the iconic symbology that is regrettably so popular right now.)
Fedora 24 is THE reason that I'm now running CentOS 7 on my machines. Screw the constant need to upgrade / reinstall the OS, screw the constant need to figure out how to fix things that stopped working with the newest version, screw the lack of updates in basically a year (because who is stupid enough to upgrade to a new OS immediately when it's released?), screw the idiots who think that change for the sake of change alone is a good idea.
Fundamentally, I gave up on Fedora when I installed a test instance of 24 on my laptop, and seemingly half of the things in my carefully constructed environment were now broken because someone decided to re-implement something or other, and hadn't bothered to FINISH their implementation before releasing it.
No thank you. Yes, I understand cutting edge. Yes, I understand the role that Fedora is supposed to have. But over the last N releases, it has become increasingly acceptable to release a new version with inadequate testing and worse overall performance.
I installed CentoS 7, and holycrap, it all just worked! Moreover, it's stable! And supposed to be supported well into the 2020s!
From the descriptions above, Wayland sounds like another one of these urges that young programmers get to make their mark without fully understanding the existing system first. X is amazing. It works exceedingly well. Remotely executing programs rendered on the local screen was a problem that was solved in its entirety in the 1980s, and done much better than any of the replacements I've seen for Unix-derived systems or Windows. There must be some important issue that I don't understand to make it worth re-engineering the entirety of that system, and running games isn't good enough.
Public libraries are a vastly under-utilized resource. When I was a kid, I loved spending time there, looking for exciting books to read. One of my best finds was a book on nuclear fission and fusion by Glenn Seaborg. I pored over that book, checking it out time after time after time.
One other thing that journals do, when performing their filtering process is force the authors to re-write. When my papers get rejected, I don't turn around and just resubmit elsewhere, I take the criticism to heart and address it. My best written papers are ones that were rejected (or required major revisions) two or three times. My most highly referenced paper was rejected from three journals before being accepted (and then was covered in the international press). Each rewrite was painful, but it is a much, much better paper than when it was first submitted.
The NIH has been requiring this for some time now, and the important part is that the papers are freely available after one year. So the journals get to reap the benefits that their selection process provides for a given period of time. Thus far, they've been able to handle survival under such circumstances and some (*cough* Elsevier *cough*) have even thrived.
And note that I slipped in an important observation that gets often overlooked: journals provide an important filtering mechanism that has, thus far, not been sucessfully reproduced elsewhere. While there clearly are exceptions, and I'm sure nearly every person who reads scientific articles has their favorites, generally put the more respected journals have more stringent vetting processes that lead to a higher concentration of quality publications. Given that there are too many papers published to read in nearly any given field, having someone apply a filtering process to pick out the ones more likely to be worth reading is an extremely valuable service.
Full disclaimer: I was a member of the ADU faculty. I've also taught at some pretty high-powered schools across the US. The ADU students were frelling amazing.
I was part of an early social networking site that, at its peak had 20 M users, with about 10K actively using the site at any given moment. We ran with 200 servers and had really very excellent render time (this was getting on to a decade ago, and if our page loads ever got above 1 second it was considered a near crisis; our email/messaging system, that I wrote, handled 150 M messages per day). It just can't be that hard to run an airline site compared to running a web site that peaked at Alexa 100. They need 500 servers? Five HUNDRED servers? And with the resources of a multi-billion dollar company, they're STILL ALL IN ONE LOCATION?
They need a new IT team. Or a new management to give them the support they need.
the damages per violation is $80,000 on each image, out of a possible $150,000, times the number of violations per image.
Exactly my point. They don't know yet how many violations per image. The document quoted assumes exactly one violation per image. That is unlikely to be true. It is a justifiable inaccuracy to assume one violation per image as a starting point, but until discovery is complete, the figure is not accurately known. It may be substantially higher, it may be substantially lower.
My understanding is that Getty's offering of licensing is not in and of itself illegal with regard to this case, but the selling of licenses, that is taking money from a licensee under false pretense, is the issue. We don't know how many such licenses were actually sold, yet. Given the vast number of images, my bet is that the total number of licenses sold is going to be substantially below 1 per image on average. I also bet that Getty is busy calculating the actual number.
The amount will, of course, be determined during discovery when Getty is forced to reveal the number of times they actually sold a license for each of her images. The three-times-$400M amount bandied about is assuming maximum value on each image, and one violation per image. That's a place to start, and gives a scale for the potentially massive size a judgement could take, but is unlikely to be found to be accurate in the end.
The only history the modern Olympics and the ancient Greek Olympics share is the name.
Not exactly. The modern IOC-run Olympics started in 1896. In Athens. The reason, of course, that Athens was chosen for 1896 was because of the ancient games that were held in Olympia (thus, the name, of course). There was a strong push to have the 1996 games in Athens as well (I was tangentially involved in the bid) because of the 100 years celebration, but Greece was not in sufficiently modern shape to be able to handle the necessary infrastructure upgrades -- for example, an entire new phone system would have had to been overlaid on top of the existing one (that eventually happened in the guise of the mobile phone system, but, recall, the bid for 1996 was made back in the late 1980s when the technology was different). Because of the obvious marketing potential, Athens made it all the way into the final decision round before losing out to Atlanta (indeed, Athens was the leading candidate through the first few selection rounds), and, naturally, I'm condensing things a lot. But back to the 1896 games; prior to that inaugural Olympics, there was a strong revival effort in Greece starting around the 1800s. The revivalist efforts eventually included the restoration of the Panhallenic Stadium in Athens (known in Greece as the Marble Stadium), within sight of the Acropolis, and the organizing of a series of pre-IOC Olympic games there. The IOC games started out in 1896 with many of the same athletic contests that were held in Olympia, including various foot races, (a different version of) long jump, discus, and wrestling. They are held every four years just as the ancient games. Again, by historical inspiration.
It isn't difficult to draw a pretty clear path from the ancient Olympic Games to the modern IOC-games. That the closer we get to the present, the more grotesque the Olympics become is certainly true, but the history is there.
And then there's the whole Marathon, which, as I'm sure you know, is named after a fabled run from the town of Marathon to Athens to report the defeat of the Persians. The 2004 Athens games had runners use the same (more-or-less) path.
Actually, there was a lot of talk in Athens after 2004 that the Olympic games should be moved there permanently: the venues and necessary infrastructure had been built, the games were largely successful from a logistical viewpoint, and Greece knows how to handle mobs of tourists. And, of course, history and all that.
Personally, having been at the 2004 Games, I'm kind of glad it didn't work out. But it's shameful to see how the Olympic venues are largely just sitting idle and decaying. Currently at least one of them is being used as a staging area to handle UN donations and supplies for the Syrian refugees, but it's not in good condition. Others are being used as trash dumps. Be careful what you wish for.
Slashdot Mirror
If you look at the published video on YouTube of the explosion and go frame by frame, there are two events. The first is a bright flash that lasts a few frames and appears much larger than it actually is because it is both saturating the camera and illuminating the condensation clouds. You can see the illumination effect clearly in the first frame the flash appears as there are distinct shadows in the clouds. It's unclear to me whether this triggering event is electrical or chemical in nature, but I'm not an expert. Three observations can be made, however: (1) it is bright enough to cause lens flare in the camera which allows pinpointing its source despite the saturation (look for the X, carefully find its center -- you can do that very accurately -- and then back up a handful of frames; see that triangle thingy with a thin tail? That's what failed.) Then, (2) the initial flash is small and is followed almost immediately by a medium sized flash, and in turn that releases the fireball. Then, (3) the condensation clouds aren't moved by the explosion for about 12 frames until the fireball really starts to form, suggesting that the earlier flashes marked the release of lots of energy that may have been primarily radiation (light) rather than heat because they didn't expand the air enough for me to think of them as explosions. The video is 60 FPS, and the initial flash forms within one frame, so that's only 17 ms. The consdensation clouds don't start moving for 200 ms from the main explosion.
So we have one event that's exceedingly hot that triggers a second that's also exceedingly hot, that releases enough LOX to start the fireball. I'm thinking static discharge from the LOX filling.
One thing I don't understand, though, is that if you watch the fireball in slow motion, as the lower front heads toward the ground, there are seemingly waves passing through it. What are those? Additional shock fronts from tertiary explosions?
Except that a rock would be a lot more obvious, and if you wanted to socially engineer a company into self-destruction of property, just leave one of these USB-killer things disguised as a normal flash drive in the parking lot.
Now why you would want to destroy the USB port and possibly the computer it is part of rather than deliver malware if you have nefarious intent, well, that beats me. Destroying the computer causes limited damage. Malware, in contrast, can propagate.
Nevertheless, if vandalism is the goal, rocks will do, but gum, half-chewed soft candy, or a squirt of glue will still disable the port and require a visit from a field tech. One might imagine that gum is a far more pervasive nuisance to public-facing USB ports than rocks.
Any chance that EM sensitivity is really caused by magnetic particles in the sufferer's brain?
One pre-mortem way to look for evidence is to see if there's a correlation between length of time spent in zones of high air pollution and complaint severity. Heck, if magnetite is found in the brain, then it must be in the blood stream, too, and other tissues as well. There's potentially some serious science to be done here.
"He actually found a USB that was in this jar that was closed, and the jar was in a box, and the box had stuff in it. The jar itself had stuff in it."
Maybe, just maybe, he didn't smell the USB flash drive that was in a closed jar inside a box. Maybe, just maybe, he smelled the residue that the owner had left on the outside of the box when putting the flash drive away.
It's very, very challenging to completely isolate something from ordor-based detection. You need to work with clean instruments and put the item in a clean container, operating ideally in a clean environment. Then, because you probably slightly contaminated the outside of the bag, you need to do it again, with a completely new set of clean instruments, in a new, clean environment. And then you probably need to do it again. And probably again.
Otherwise, the owner might as well have just rubbed the flash drive on the outside of the box.
And yet, no terrorists. No bridges or malls or trains or buses blowing up, no water being poisoned, etc.
Perhaps not in the US, but in Nice, France, there was recently that Tunisian fellow who drove a large truck through a crowd (on the sidewalk) for two kilometers, killing nearly 100 people, and injuring slightly over 200. Pretty good soft target: a diffuse crowd gathered for Bastille Day celebrations. Quite effective terrorism.
Then in the US, there was that couple in San Bernardino who shot up a Christmas party in 2015. Another effective act of terrorism on a soft target.
And the recent shooting in the night club in Florida.
And the Boston Marathon bombing.
Oh, and the ricin mailed to a senator and the US president.
(and there are more)
So what were you saying again?
And when the POAM is being tracked, and things aren't getting fixed .... oh, wait, *I* know, we'll put together a Selected Hurdles Integration and Testing Facility Engineering System Template to make sure the problems get resolved.
The deal is that once you've spent big money, you just can't back out and save face. They need a new leader, brought in from the outside, to shred the contract and tell HPE to go away.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Nevertheless, I do want to point out that there is a simple case where a pressurized tank will hold just fine, but will leak like a sieve if the pressure is lowered: an internal flap that is being held in place against a hole by the high pressure, that is no longer being held sufficiently tightly when the pressure is lowered. The flap, in this case, might well be unintentional, like from an overlapped seam of two panels. It turns out that the flapper valve in most toilets works just in that way: it depends on the weight of the water to ensure a good seal, leaking terribly during the initial filling of the tank. The toilet valve is designed to do that, but after shaking the begeezus out of a lift stage that has been designed neither for low-pressure use nor for long-term durability, there might well be such flaps unintentionally present.
But the primary point is that we agree -- the basic idea is worth pursuing. Given the vast cost of lifting the shell to orbit, it would seem to be a resource that could be utilized, somehow, and that bears investigation.
It is pressure tested at many times the 0.5-1.0 atm pressure differential needed to sustain human life in space.
It is pressure tested on earth before being subjected to the intense rigors of launch. All bets are off as to whether it retains long-term integrity, as it has not been designed to do that. It's easy to find situations where a vessel will will not leak at high pressure differentials, but will leak at low pressure differentials. That we don't know the answer as to what will happen to the current designs is a good reason to test, but it should not be put forth as incontrovertible evidence of future success.
1. No, simply no. It makes my eyes go funny.
2. No. Cute ways to make graphics spell out a company's name is a first-year student's approach. You can do better. It looks like a QR code FFS.
3. Interesting. But what does it have to do with browsers? Is Mozilla now making robots? Or a chat app?
4. Cute. Will not be cute in about 18 months.
5. No, and see point 2 as to why. It also does not render well at 32x32.
6. Makes my eyes bleed almost as much as #1. Also will not render well at low resolutions. FFS, why do I want to recall those horrid Apple drawing programs from the pre-iMac days?
7. What? Which part of that is the logo? Is Mozilla an origami company now? It's supposed to read Mozilla? See objection to #2.
The only one that has any relevant design sensibility (note the important "relevant" part ... the open elevator door logo is sheer idiocy, unless Mozilla has bought Otis Elevator and no-one's noticed) is the fourth Moz://a, but it will get tired quickly. Cute does not last.
Now, can anyone tell me what the Mozilla logo currently is? Not the Firefox logo. Not the Thunderbird logo, but the Mozilla Foundation's logo. Anyone? Anyone? So the logo does not matter one whit. (The logo, having looked at the mozilla.org web site appears to be a lower-case "mozilla" in an attractive sans-serif font; not a bad logo, kind of bland, but lacks the iconic symbology that is regrettably so popular right now.)
Fedora 24 is THE reason that I'm now running CentOS 7 on my machines. Screw the constant need to upgrade / reinstall the OS, screw the constant need to figure out how to fix things that stopped working with the newest version, screw the lack of updates in basically a year (because who is stupid enough to upgrade to a new OS immediately when it's released?), screw the idiots who think that change for the sake of change alone is a good idea.
Fundamentally, I gave up on Fedora when I installed a test instance of 24 on my laptop, and seemingly half of the things in my carefully constructed environment were now broken because someone decided to re-implement something or other, and hadn't bothered to FINISH their implementation before releasing it.
No thank you. Yes, I understand cutting edge. Yes, I understand the role that Fedora is supposed to have. But over the last N releases, it has become increasingly acceptable to release a new version with inadequate testing and worse overall performance.
I installed CentoS 7, and holycrap, it all just worked! Moreover, it's stable! And supposed to be supported well into the 2020s!
From the descriptions above, Wayland sounds like another one of these urges that young programmers get to make their mark without fully understanding the existing system first. X is amazing. It works exceedingly well. Remotely executing programs rendered on the local screen was a problem that was solved in its entirety in the 1980s, and done much better than any of the replacements I've seen for Unix-derived systems or Windows. There must be some important issue that I don't understand to make it worth re-engineering the entirety of that system, and running games isn't good enough.
I don't remember the title, but after a little sleuthing, I'm betting it was "Man and atom: Building a new world through nuclear technology".
... and that command line would be? Bonus points if it works under Windows, too (or has an equivalent)!
How quickly can a tool be built that scans all of memory for that string?
Public libraries are a vastly under-utilized resource. When I was a kid, I loved spending time there, looking for exciting books to read. One of my best finds was a book on nuclear fission and fusion by Glenn Seaborg. I pored over that book, checking it out time after time after time.
One other thing that journals do, when performing their filtering process is force the authors to re-write. When my papers get rejected, I don't turn around and just resubmit elsewhere, I take the criticism to heart and address it. My best written papers are ones that were rejected (or required major revisions) two or three times. My most highly referenced paper was rejected from three journals before being accepted (and then was covered in the international press). Each rewrite was painful, but it is a much, much better paper than when it was first submitted.
The NIH has been requiring this for some time now, and the important part is that the papers are freely available after one year. So the journals get to reap the benefits that their selection process provides for a given period of time. Thus far, they've been able to handle survival under such circumstances and some (*cough* Elsevier *cough*) have even thrived.
And note that I slipped in an important observation that gets often overlooked: journals provide an important filtering mechanism that has, thus far, not been sucessfully reproduced elsewhere. While there clearly are exceptions, and I'm sure nearly every person who reads scientific articles has their favorites, generally put the more respected journals have more stringent vetting processes that lead to a higher concentration of quality publications. Given that there are too many papers published to read in nearly any given field, having someone apply a filtering process to pick out the ones more likely to be worth reading is an extremely valuable service.
Finally? No. More like Johnny Come Lately.
Please see ArsDigita University. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Full disclaimer: I was a member of the ADU faculty. I've also taught at some pretty high-powered schools across the US. The ADU students were frelling amazing.
Here's the thing that amazes me.
500 servers.
The airline runs on 500 servres.
I was part of an early social networking site that, at its peak had 20 M users, with about 10K actively using the site at any given moment. We ran with 200 servers and had really very excellent render time (this was getting on to a decade ago, and if our page loads ever got above 1 second it was considered a near crisis; our email/messaging system, that I wrote, handled 150 M messages per day). It just can't be that hard to run an airline site compared to running a web site that peaked at Alexa 100. They need 500 servers? Five HUNDRED servers? And with the resources of a multi-billion dollar company, they're STILL ALL IN ONE LOCATION?
They need a new IT team. Or a new management to give them the support they need.
Isn't distance nominally estimated through red shift?
the damages per violation is $80,000 on each image, out of a possible $150,000, times the number of violations per image.
Exactly my point. They don't know yet how many violations per image. The document quoted assumes exactly one violation per image. That is unlikely to be true. It is a justifiable inaccuracy to assume one violation per image as a starting point, but until discovery is complete, the figure is not accurately known. It may be substantially higher, it may be substantially lower.
My understanding is that Getty's offering of licensing is not in and of itself illegal with regard to this case, but the selling of licenses, that is taking money from a licensee under false pretense, is the issue. We don't know how many such licenses were actually sold, yet. Given the vast number of images, my bet is that the total number of licenses sold is going to be substantially below 1 per image on average. I also bet that Getty is busy calculating the actual number.
The amount will, of course, be determined during discovery when Getty is forced to reveal the number of times they actually sold a license for each of her images. The three-times-$400M amount bandied about is assuming maximum value on each image, and one violation per image. That's a place to start, and gives a scale for the potentially massive size a judgement could take, but is unlikely to be found to be accurate in the end.
The only history the modern Olympics and the ancient Greek Olympics share is the name.
Not exactly. The modern IOC-run Olympics started in 1896. In Athens. The reason, of course, that Athens was chosen for 1896 was because of the ancient games that were held in Olympia (thus, the name, of course). There was a strong push to have the 1996 games in Athens as well (I was tangentially involved in the bid) because of the 100 years celebration, but Greece was not in sufficiently modern shape to be able to handle the necessary infrastructure upgrades -- for example, an entire new phone system would have had to been overlaid on top of the existing one (that eventually happened in the guise of the mobile phone system, but, recall, the bid for 1996 was made back in the late 1980s when the technology was different). Because of the obvious marketing potential, Athens made it all the way into the final decision round before losing out to Atlanta (indeed, Athens was the leading candidate through the first few selection rounds), and, naturally, I'm condensing things a lot. But back to the 1896 games; prior to that inaugural Olympics, there was a strong revival effort in Greece starting around the 1800s. The revivalist efforts eventually included the restoration of the Panhallenic Stadium in Athens (known in Greece as the Marble Stadium), within sight of the Acropolis, and the organizing of a series of pre-IOC Olympic games there. The IOC games started out in 1896 with many of the same athletic contests that were held in Olympia, including various foot races, (a different version of) long jump, discus, and wrestling. They are held every four years just as the ancient games. Again, by historical inspiration.
It isn't difficult to draw a pretty clear path from the ancient Olympic Games to the modern IOC-games. That the closer we get to the present, the more grotesque the Olympics become is certainly true, but the history is there.
And then there's the whole Marathon, which, as I'm sure you know, is named after a fabled run from the town of Marathon to Athens to report the defeat of the Persians. The 2004 Athens games had runners use the same (more-or-less) path.
So, yea, history and all that.
Actually, there was a lot of talk in Athens after 2004 that the Olympic games should be moved there permanently: the venues and necessary infrastructure had been built, the games were largely successful from a logistical viewpoint, and Greece knows how to handle mobs of tourists. And, of course, history and all that.
Personally, having been at the 2004 Games, I'm kind of glad it didn't work out. But it's shameful to see how the Olympic venues are largely just sitting idle and decaying. Currently at least one of them is being used as a staging area to handle UN donations and supplies for the Syrian refugees, but it's not in good condition. Others are being used as trash dumps. Be careful what you wish for.
Ah, so there's the issue. You misread, "not necessarily better," as, "is always worse."
Hope that helps with your reading comprehension.
It's simple, really. New is not necessarily better. Change for the sake of change is rarely beneficial to the end user.
But, unfortunately for the public, neither observation helps sell more widgets. Rather quite the opposite.