In 1998, 2002, 2007 and 2008, there were zero US airline fatalities. No Boeing jetliner operated by a US airline has had a fatal crash since 9/11. None of the fly-by-wire Airbus models (A320 and later) operated by a US airline have ever had a fatal crash, not even the one that had to land in the Hudson River after a bird strike.
Thirty years ago, no one in aviation would have believed that to be possible.
I actually took a 1-credit "How to use a Macintosh" course at Stanford. Of course, this was in 1984, when that was a big deal.
(The 128K Macintosh, with one floppy and no hard drive, wasn't very impressive. It's worth remembering that it was a commercial flop.
"A machine for the intensive study of wait icons", someone wrote at the time.
Not until the Mac was built up to 512K or so and had a working hard drive was it actually useful.)
Home burglary is almost dead. What's to steal? Any TV that can be easily carried has zilch resale value. Anything with a CRT has negative value; you have to pay the recycling center to take it.
Used computers have little value. Nobody keeps much cash around any more. Cell phones are usually in someone's pocket. Who has real silverware today? Used kitchen appliances are nearly worthless. Same for used clothing. Used furniture? No market there.
In the current recession, pawnshops are currently choked with stuff they can't sell, so unloading stolen property is tough.
I just looked at the crime map for my area, which is an urban area of about 100,000 people, ranging from very poor to very rich. About ten burglaries in the last month, and only one was a residence. The rest were break-ins into vehicles. There were more attempted burglaries with arrests than successful ones.
Classic mistake - writing your own database. This was a long-standing vice in the UNIX world, BIND and Sendmail being the classic offenders.
for a long time, Windows had an edge - Jet, which is a little database engine used by applications. The open software world now has sqlite, although it's not used well in Firefox.
At one point I was trying to explain that a problem they had with duplicate entries in the password database should be fixed by making one field a unique key. "But that would break programs", was the objection. It would break the ones that were inserting bogus data, yes. The solution implemented was a JavaScript kludge that tried to fix the database when Firefox exited, which was O(N^2) at least and could hang Firefox on exiting. So the solution to that was to tell users to get rid of unneeded password entries. Some developers just have no clue about how to use databases.
SQLite isn't a bad database, provided you don't need to do many concurrent updates. (It can handle concurrent updates correctly, but the locking works by polling and retrying a file lock, which is painfully slow. So don't use it to run your web site. Get MySQL or Postgres,)
Given what Firefox does, it really should keep its messages in SQLite databases, not "folders".
There is no "IT personnel shortage" until salaries go up.
As I point out occasionally, "Information Technology" is taking the same path that "stationary engineering" did almost exactly a century century ago. In the 1880s, it was a really big deal if you were the one who could get a steam engine and generator to work together and light up a factory, business, or town. By 1910 or so, it was a routine job. Today, there are still about 25,000 stationary engineers in the United States. It's a good union job. There are electrical engineers designing new equipment, but they're nowhere near the user and have completely different training than the people who install and run the stuff.
That's where IT is going, and it's almost there. Don't worry about it. Just use your iPhone like a good little consumer, and buy your software from Microsoft.
Lockheed's P-791 airship has been flying around Palmdale for several years now.
This is a product of Lockheed's Skunk Works. It is slightly heavier than air, and those four "feet" are lift fans. This has advantages and disadvantages. It takes fuel to stay up, for one. On the other hand, takeoff and landing are easier; the craft can land on a runway and taxi as a hovercraft. No mooring mast required.
The P-791 looks far more controllable than any previous airship. Rudders and elevators are ineffective at low speed.
The P-791 has four propellers, each fully and independently steerable in two axes, plus speed, and maybe blade pitch. Plus the four lift fans. So it is controllable in all six degrees of freedom, even at zero speed. With classic airships, having twenty controls to manage by hand would be hopeless. With flight control computers, it's possible, once the airship has been characterized. That's really what flight tests of the P-791 are for - figuring out the control strategies. In the video,it's clear that the propellers are all being steered independently, which indicates computers and sensors are busily working to stabilize the beast. This is probably an easier job for the Skunk Works controls team than any of the stealth fighters they've done, all of which are unstable in all three axes.
The Zeppelin NT has a similar, but less flexible system, with three steerable fans plus a lateral tail rotor, all controlled by a fly-by-wire system. I suspect that the Skunk Works put more degrees of freedom into their prototype than are really needed, so that they could experiment with different control strategies and find the best way to control their unusual craft.
The Zeppelin NT has a compressor system, so they can reduce lift by compressing some helium into a high pressure tank and letting some of the ballonets deflate a little. This is preferable to dumping ballast or helium.
That's the trouble with relying on unprofitable services from a profit-making company. Google pulls the plug on many such projects. They've dumped the SOAP-based search interface, Google Gears, and now Wave.
All Google services other than search advertising lose money. I wouldn't be at all surprised if someday they announce that GMail is becoming a paid service.
This is getting to be such a mess that the future of stock markets may be something like an auction in each stock every 15 minutes or so.
Some very low traffic markets work that way, as infrequently as daily. The debacle in electricity markets indicates that can help. Electricity markets are now mostly "day ahead".
But for a few years, California had an "auction every 30 minutes" system. That was too fast; it could be gamed so much that there were blackouts. Moving to a daily system damped out the transients. The stock market doesn't need as much damping, because it has inventory, but it needs some.
The Google link is a z-backscatter image, not a millimeter wave image. That's a more intrusive technology than
millimeter wave. It's most useful for scanning vehicles, because, being a low-power X-ray system, it can punch
through metal. Because it detects objects based on atomic number, materials with carbon or nitrogen show up
clearly. This gets organics and explosives. But it's expensive and bulky, more useful for shipping
containers and trucks than people.
Yes. Not only do you have speed of light latency, you have marshaling latency, as the bits have to go into a register in parallel, then be clocked out serially for transmission, then converted to parallel at the other end. For memory access, that overhead matters.
Optical interconnects do have faster propagation than electrical ones. Radio in vacuum achieves the speed of light, but in cables and on PC boards, capacitance and inductance slow down propagation well below the speed of light. Coax is 60-75% of light speed. Traces on FR4 board are around 50%. Inner traces on multilayer PC boards are below 30% of light speed. Interconnects on chip are sometimes even worse. Optical interconnects don't reach the speed of light in vacuum either, but they're usually above 60% of light speed.
I can't see getting excited about millimeter wave images. Big deal. You get to see the body outline.
Compared to Z-backscatter X-ray images, they don't even show very much.
I'd rather go through a millimeter wave scanner at nightclubs than be pawed by the security goons.
Now NASA is in real trouble. For the last two decades, the best-working part of NASA has been the PR and lobbying operation. If that's tanking, they're really dead.
NASA has two fundamental jobs: 1) robotic exploration, and 2) finding some way to get significant mass into orbit. Their last three tries at 2) have been flops.
Cameron made a good 3D film, in which he used depth effects with restraint.
This was then followed by a slew of films in crap post-processed from 2D to stereoscopic 3D. Not a good thing.
Cameron has been quoted as saying that what he really wants is a higher frame rate, at least 48FPS. It's obvious why. Cameron orders up good high=-detail backgrounds, and panning shots across high-detail backgrounds produce seriously annoying edge effects at 24FPS. So you don't do medium speed pans over a high-detail background today. He'd like to get past that.
Remember, depth in 3D movies is horribly fake, because it's scaled. In the real world, there are no visible stereoscopic effects beyond 3 meters or so. This really bothers some small kids. Kids also have to face the headache-inducing effect of films scaled for adult inter-ocular distance. Seen with kid-sized eye spacing, it forces the eyes into a cross-eyed situation, which usually induces a headache.
Also, watching 3D TV while lying sideways on the couch is not going to be fun.
The basic question with an oscilloscope is how much bandwidth you need. Price goes up with bandwidth. 100 MHz is around $200. 80 GHz is around $24,000.
If you want to see what a PC motherboard or a cell phone radio is really doing, it's very expensive. If you want to see what an Arduno is doing, it's not so bad.
That's a fascinating idea. Some postings claim that construction will start this year, but it seems unlikely. They'd have to build a prototype and a test track first, and if they had that, there would be pictures.
The thing runs on road wheels, not tracks. Steering is at least semi-automated, to keep it properly positioned. It's electrically powered, with recharging as it passes through stations. The electrical contact mechanism for recharging, as drawn, is wildly optimistic about the difficulties of making contact with a moving vehicle. The illustrations show solar cells atop buses and stations, but no way can those yield enough power for this thing.
They're vague about how the articulated bus corners. The trick with articulated buses is avoiding crush points. Real articulated buses have turntables and bellows at the joints, and they narrow at the join region. That's going to be tough with a vehicle this wide. Also, it's not at all clear how transitions to hills are handled. Does it articulate in pitch, too? All that can be made to work; San Francisco, of all places, has large articulated buses. The joints were troublesome at first, but the second generation of joints seems to work adequately.
Also, on sharp turns, there had better not be cars underneath.
The emergency evacuation slide system is a bit much, as is the roof entry stair system.
There are several tougher variations on glass. Borosilicate glass (once called "Pyrex", but the name has been sold and "Pyrex" today is not necessarily borosilicate) is tough and very tolerant of temperature stresses. There are various laminates of plastics and glass. A common combination is a thin layer of glass, for scratch resistance, on top of polycarbonate. That won't shatter; it dents or punctures if hit hard enough.
Cell phones should be using sapphire coated glass. Then you can put the thing in your pocket without a cover and not worry about it being scratched. The scanner glass at supermarkets is often sapphire coated, so it can handle years of canned goods being dragged across the scanner. Versace has shipped a "luxury cell phone" with this feature.
There's also a diamond-coated glass for that application. Diamond coating is much cheaper than sapphire, but not quite as scratch-resistant.
Indeed, behind the gorilla that is E-Ink (which seem the only ones to have successfully industrialized an e-paper technology so far)...
E-Ink never lived up to its hype. "e-paper" was supposed to be cheap, flexible, etc. What they actually have is just a front layer for a display to give it some permanent state. Costs are comparable to monochrome LCDs.
Somewhere during his quest for visibility - which was meant to give the OLPC project the needed funds and customers - Negroponte got addicted to the spotlight...
No, he was like that in his Media Lab days, before OLPC.
That's the big problem with OLPC - it's more about Negroponte schmoozing with heads of state, and less about shipping product.
Another CEO with the same ego problem is Shai Agassi, of Better Place, the people with the electric car battery changing system. He's full of grand schemes, but what he actually has delivered, after raising substantial capital, is one charging station in Tokyo for a fleet of taxis.
After going through two articles and a blog, we get to the Mirasol site. Mirasol is straightforward - each pixel is a flexible membrane in an air gap. It's bistable; either the membrane is against the front plate (dark) or against the back plate (light), pushed there by an electrostatic charge. So it's either monochrome, or an 8-color technology if RGB pixels are provided. By putting in more pixels, they can dither their way up to 3 bits of color per pixel, for 512 different colors. This costs resolution, of course. Their technical paper talks about dithering over time at 50Hz to get more even shades. But if they do that, they lose their power-saving advantage. It costs power to change a pixel.
This is one of many bistable persistent display technologies. Kent Displays has had a similar technology, cholesteric LCD devices, for years, used mostly for big display signs and military applications. Until recently, Kent's displays were very expensive, but they've finally solved the cost problem. This year's DEFCON badge has a built-in Kent display.
The US once had a huge nuclear weapons establishment - Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, Hanford, Sandia, Lawerence Livermore, Rocky Flats, and a other big installations, most dating from WWII. Today, the major activity at most of those sites dealing with toxic waste. Almost everyone who ever designed a working nuclear weapon is retired or dead. The US hasn't built a major power reactor in decades. Smart young people don't go into nuclear engineering or nuclear physics. There's just no demand for new work in the field. It's surprising that there's
still a nuclear forensics capability left at all.
"Nuclear forensics", should it ever be needed, will have to be done by people who usually do something else. Probably deal with nuclear waste.
Those are classic criticisms of the American higher educational system. Yet the rest of the world is mostly worse.
Japan has the "prestigious university name" thing far worse than the US does. The University of Tokyo was the "magic key to opening the door to a powerful elite" for decades. There are now other schools approaching it in prestige, but not many. France has a very centralized educational system, with the Ecole Polytechnique at the top. Both systems are very examination-oriented. Germany has worse tenure problems than the US. Russia and China emphasized technical education after their revolutions, and they develop good engineers and scientists.
Higher education in the Islamic world is hopeless, even where there's money available. 91% of PhDs produced in Saudi Arabia are in "religious studies". The country has to import skilled labor to do almost everything that takes real-world knowledge.
Microsoft made a big attempt to make Go Computer, the first decent tablet machine, go away. Or run Windows. The Go was innovative, and the prototype version, which looked like a textbook with a rubber cover, was a nice machine. This was in 1989.
The Go Computer machine went into production, but as an AT&T product, from AT&T's short-lived venture into personal computers. AT&T wanted a fancier looking case, with curved sides, and the result was ugly and hard to hold. The simple prototype was a better machine.
The Go Computer line went down with AT&T's computer line. It was too early; think of a Palm Pilot the size of a textbook and you'll have the right picture.
Slashdot Mirror
In 1998, 2002, 2007 and 2008, there were zero US airline fatalities. No Boeing jetliner operated by a US airline has had a fatal crash since 9/11. None of the fly-by-wire Airbus models (A320 and later) operated by a US airline have ever had a fatal crash, not even the one that had to land in the Hudson River after a bird strike.
Thirty years ago, no one in aviation would have believed that to be possible.
I actually took a 1-credit "How to use a Macintosh" course at Stanford. Of course, this was in 1984, when that was a big deal.
(The 128K Macintosh, with one floppy and no hard drive, wasn't very impressive. It's worth remembering that it was a commercial flop. "A machine for the intensive study of wait icons", someone wrote at the time. Not until the Mac was built up to 512K or so and had a working hard drive was it actually useful.)
Who are you going to believe, the New York Times or some unsigned comment on Twitter?
Having read the patent application, claim 1 sounds rather obvious. That's a very broad claim on a rather banal idea.
Home burglary is almost dead. What's to steal? Any TV that can be easily carried has zilch resale value. Anything with a CRT has negative value; you have to pay the recycling center to take it. Used computers have little value. Nobody keeps much cash around any more. Cell phones are usually in someone's pocket. Who has real silverware today? Used kitchen appliances are nearly worthless. Same for used clothing. Used furniture? No market there.
In the current recession, pawnshops are currently choked with stuff they can't sell, so unloading stolen property is tough.
I just looked at the crime map for my area, which is an urban area of about 100,000 people, ranging from very poor to very rich. About ten burglaries in the last month, and only one was a residence. The rest were break-ins into vehicles. There were more attempted burglaries with arrests than successful ones.
Classic mistake - writing your own database. This was a long-standing vice in the UNIX world, BIND and Sendmail being the classic offenders. for a long time, Windows had an edge - Jet, which is a little database engine used by applications. The open software world now has sqlite, although it's not used well in Firefox.
At one point I was trying to explain that a problem they had with duplicate entries in the password database should be fixed by making one field a unique key. "But that would break programs", was the objection. It would break the ones that were inserting bogus data, yes. The solution implemented was a JavaScript kludge that tried to fix the database when Firefox exited, which was O(N^2) at least and could hang Firefox on exiting. So the solution to that was to tell users to get rid of unneeded password entries. Some developers just have no clue about how to use databases.
SQLite isn't a bad database, provided you don't need to do many concurrent updates. (It can handle concurrent updates correctly, but the locking works by polling and retrying a file lock, which is painfully slow. So don't use it to run your web site. Get MySQL or Postgres,) Given what Firefox does, it really should keep its messages in SQLite databases, not "folders".
There is no "IT personnel shortage" until salaries go up.
As I point out occasionally, "Information Technology" is taking the same path that "stationary engineering" did almost exactly a century century ago. In the 1880s, it was a really big deal if you were the one who could get a steam engine and generator to work together and light up a factory, business, or town. By 1910 or so, it was a routine job. Today, there are still about 25,000 stationary engineers in the United States. It's a good union job. There are electrical engineers designing new equipment, but they're nowhere near the user and have completely different training than the people who install and run the stuff.
That's where IT is going, and it's almost there. Don't worry about it. Just use your iPhone like a good little consumer, and buy your software from Microsoft.
Lockheed's P-791 airship has been flying around Palmdale for several years now. This is a product of Lockheed's Skunk Works. It is slightly heavier than air, and those four "feet" are lift fans. This has advantages and disadvantages. It takes fuel to stay up, for one. On the other hand, takeoff and landing are easier; the craft can land on a runway and taxi as a hovercraft. No mooring mast required.
The P-791 looks far more controllable than any previous airship. Rudders and elevators are ineffective at low speed. The P-791 has four propellers, each fully and independently steerable in two axes, plus speed, and maybe blade pitch. Plus the four lift fans. So it is controllable in all six degrees of freedom, even at zero speed. With classic airships, having twenty controls to manage by hand would be hopeless. With flight control computers, it's possible, once the airship has been characterized. That's really what flight tests of the P-791 are for - figuring out the control strategies. In the video,it's clear that the propellers are all being steered independently, which indicates computers and sensors are busily working to stabilize the beast. This is probably an easier job for the Skunk Works controls team than any of the stealth fighters they've done, all of which are unstable in all three axes.
The Zeppelin NT has a similar, but less flexible system, with three steerable fans plus a lateral tail rotor, all controlled by a fly-by-wire system. I suspect that the Skunk Works put more degrees of freedom into their prototype than are really needed, so that they could experiment with different control strategies and find the best way to control their unusual craft.
The Zeppelin NT has a compressor system, so they can reduce lift by compressing some helium into a high pressure tank and letting some of the ballonets deflate a little. This is preferable to dumping ballast or helium.
That's the trouble with relying on unprofitable services from a profit-making company. Google pulls the plug on many such projects. They've dumped the SOAP-based search interface, Google Gears, and now Wave.
All Google services other than search advertising lose money. I wouldn't be at all surprised if someday they announce that GMail is becoming a paid service.
This is getting to be such a mess that the future of stock markets may be something like an auction in each stock every 15 minutes or so.
Some very low traffic markets work that way, as infrequently as daily. The debacle in electricity markets indicates that can help. Electricity markets are now mostly "day ahead". But for a few years, California had an "auction every 30 minutes" system. That was too fast; it could be gamed so much that there were blackouts. Moving to a daily system damped out the transients. The stock market doesn't need as much damping, because it has inventory, but it needs some.
The Google link is a z-backscatter image, not a millimeter wave image. That's a more intrusive technology than millimeter wave. It's most useful for scanning vehicles, because, being a low-power X-ray system, it can punch through metal. Because it detects objects based on atomic number, materials with carbon or nitrogen show up clearly. This gets organics and explosives. But it's expensive and bulky, more useful for shipping containers and trucks than people.
Yes. Not only do you have speed of light latency, you have marshaling latency, as the bits have to go into a register in parallel, then be clocked out serially for transmission, then converted to parallel at the other end. For memory access, that overhead matters.
Optical interconnects do have faster propagation than electrical ones. Radio in vacuum achieves the speed of light, but in cables and on PC boards, capacitance and inductance slow down propagation well below the speed of light. Coax is 60-75% of light speed. Traces on FR4 board are around 50%. Inner traces on multilayer PC boards are below 30% of light speed. Interconnects on chip are sometimes even worse. Optical interconnects don't reach the speed of light in vacuum either, but they're usually above 60% of light speed.
I can't see getting excited about millimeter wave images. Big deal. You get to see the body outline. Compared to Z-backscatter X-ray images, they don't even show very much.
I'd rather go through a millimeter wave scanner at nightclubs than be pawed by the security goons.
Now NASA is in real trouble. For the last two decades, the best-working part of NASA has been the PR and lobbying operation. If that's tanking, they're really dead.
NASA has two fundamental jobs: 1) robotic exploration, and 2) finding some way to get significant mass into orbit. Their last three tries at 2) have been flops.
Cameron made a good 3D film, in which he used depth effects with restraint. This was then followed by a slew of films in crap post-processed from 2D to stereoscopic 3D. Not a good thing.
Cameron has been quoted as saying that what he really wants is a higher frame rate, at least 48FPS. It's obvious why. Cameron orders up good high=-detail backgrounds, and panning shots across high-detail backgrounds produce seriously annoying edge effects at 24FPS. So you don't do medium speed pans over a high-detail background today. He'd like to get past that.
Remember, depth in 3D movies is horribly fake, because it's scaled. In the real world, there are no visible stereoscopic effects beyond 3 meters or so. This really bothers some small kids. Kids also have to face the headache-inducing effect of films scaled for adult inter-ocular distance. Seen with kid-sized eye spacing, it forces the eyes into a cross-eyed situation, which usually induces a headache.
Also, watching 3D TV while lying sideways on the couch is not going to be fun.
The basic question with an oscilloscope is how much bandwidth you need. Price goes up with bandwidth. 100 MHz is around $200. 80 GHz is around $24,000.
If you want to see what a PC motherboard or a cell phone radio is really doing, it's very expensive. If you want to see what an Arduno is doing, it's not so bad.
That's a fascinating idea. Some postings claim that construction will start this year, but it seems unlikely. They'd have to build a prototype and a test track first, and if they had that, there would be pictures.
The thing runs on road wheels, not tracks. Steering is at least semi-automated, to keep it properly positioned. It's electrically powered, with recharging as it passes through stations. The electrical contact mechanism for recharging, as drawn, is wildly optimistic about the difficulties of making contact with a moving vehicle. The illustrations show solar cells atop buses and stations, but no way can those yield enough power for this thing.
They're vague about how the articulated bus corners. The trick with articulated buses is avoiding crush points. Real articulated buses have turntables and bellows at the joints, and they narrow at the join region. That's going to be tough with a vehicle this wide. Also, it's not at all clear how transitions to hills are handled. Does it articulate in pitch, too? All that can be made to work; San Francisco, of all places, has large articulated buses. The joints were troublesome at first, but the second generation of joints seems to work adequately.
Also, on sharp turns, there had better not be cars underneath.
The emergency evacuation slide system is a bit much, as is the roof entry stair system.
There are several tougher variations on glass. Borosilicate glass (once called "Pyrex", but the name has been sold and "Pyrex" today is not necessarily borosilicate) is tough and very tolerant of temperature stresses. There are various laminates of plastics and glass. A common combination is a thin layer of glass, for scratch resistance, on top of polycarbonate. That won't shatter; it dents or punctures if hit hard enough.
Cell phones should be using sapphire coated glass. Then you can put the thing in your pocket without a cover and not worry about it being scratched. The scanner glass at supermarkets is often sapphire coated, so it can handle years of canned goods being dragged across the scanner. Versace has shipped a "luxury cell phone" with this feature.
There's also a diamond-coated glass for that application. Diamond coating is much cheaper than sapphire, but not quite as scratch-resistant.
Indeed, behind the gorilla that is E-Ink (which seem the only ones to have successfully industrialized an e-paper technology so far)...
E-Ink never lived up to its hype. "e-paper" was supposed to be cheap, flexible, etc. What they actually have is just a front layer for a display to give it some permanent state. Costs are comparable to monochrome LCDs.
Somewhere during his quest for visibility - which was meant to give the OLPC project the needed funds and customers - Negroponte got addicted to the spotlight...
No, he was like that in his Media Lab days, before OLPC.
That's the big problem with OLPC - it's more about Negroponte schmoozing with heads of state, and less about shipping product.
Another CEO with the same ego problem is Shai Agassi, of Better Place, the people with the electric car battery changing system. He's full of grand schemes, but what he actually has delivered, after raising substantial capital, is one charging station in Tokyo for a fleet of taxis.
After going through two articles and a blog, we get to the Mirasol site. Mirasol is straightforward - each pixel is a flexible membrane in an air gap. It's bistable; either the membrane is against the front plate (dark) or against the back plate (light), pushed there by an electrostatic charge. So it's either monochrome, or an 8-color technology if RGB pixels are provided. By putting in more pixels, they can dither their way up to 3 bits of color per pixel, for 512 different colors. This costs resolution, of course. Their technical paper talks about dithering over time at 50Hz to get more even shades. But if they do that, they lose their power-saving advantage. It costs power to change a pixel.
This is one of many bistable persistent display technologies. Kent Displays has had a similar technology, cholesteric LCD devices, for years, used mostly for big display signs and military applications. Until recently, Kent's displays were very expensive, but they've finally solved the cost problem. This year's DEFCON badge has a built-in Kent display.
The US once had a huge nuclear weapons establishment - Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, Hanford, Sandia, Lawerence Livermore, Rocky Flats, and a other big installations, most dating from WWII. Today, the major activity at most of those sites dealing with toxic waste. Almost everyone who ever designed a working nuclear weapon is retired or dead. The US hasn't built a major power reactor in decades. Smart young people don't go into nuclear engineering or nuclear physics. There's just no demand for new work in the field. It's surprising that there's still a nuclear forensics capability left at all.
"Nuclear forensics", should it ever be needed, will have to be done by people who usually do something else. Probably deal with nuclear waste.
Those are classic criticisms of the American higher educational system. Yet the rest of the world is mostly worse.
Japan has the "prestigious university name" thing far worse than the US does. The University of Tokyo was the "magic key to opening the door to a powerful elite" for decades. There are now other schools approaching it in prestige, but not many. France has a very centralized educational system, with the Ecole Polytechnique at the top. Both systems are very examination-oriented. Germany has worse tenure problems than the US. Russia and China emphasized technical education after their revolutions, and they develop good engineers and scientists.
Higher education in the Islamic world is hopeless, even where there's money available. 91% of PhDs produced in Saudi Arabia are in "religious studies". The country has to import skilled labor to do almost everything that takes real-world knowledge.
Sudoku. A flip clock. A picture of a watch. I'm so not impressed.
Microsoft made a big attempt to make Go Computer, the first decent tablet machine, go away. Or run Windows. The Go was innovative, and the prototype version, which looked like a textbook with a rubber cover, was a nice machine. This was in 1989.
The Go Computer machine went into production, but as an AT&T product, from AT&T's short-lived venture into personal computers. AT&T wanted a fancier looking case, with curved sides, and the result was ugly and hard to hold. The simple prototype was a better machine.
The Go Computer line went down with AT&T's computer line. It was too early; think of a Palm Pilot the size of a textbook and you'll have the right picture.