*That* should teach her a lesson and send a strong signal.
It's still not as bad as Carly Fiorina driving HP's stock price down 50% and firing 7000 people, and getting let go with a $20M severance package, and still being considered a serious candidate for California senator. That's the biggest difference between the rest of us and the 0.01%: when we fuck up, we get fired with cause and are economic roadkill, and seriously risk being impoverished. When they fuck up, they lose access to the corporate jet and may have to postpone buying the third home in Pebble Beach. I honestly wouldn't have any problem with income inequality if we could occasionally see failed CEOs like Dick Fuld reduced to standing in line at soup kitchens like all of the other "takers".
I wonder how many of them have embellished their accomplishments, too? Seems pretty common in academia these days.
It's actually exceptionally rare. Anil Potti, the Duke cancer researcher who falsely claimed to have been a Rhodes scholar, was an unusually notorious case simply because it was so unusual. (Also because he may have been committing outright fraud in his research.) It's very rare to come across someone in the academic community falsely claiming a degree, simply because it's such a stupid idea: most of us aren't paid enough for it to be worth the risk. More often, the people getting caught are the ones who aren't happy with a merely middle-class lifestyle and want a managerial position that will propel them into at least the upper-middle class. Or they want a more elite teaching post than they might otherwise merit.
I do suspect there are a significant number of people in primary education who have done this. My favorite story was about a public school superintendent: in the course of writing an article about the school district, a local newspaper reporter interviewed one of the superintendent's underlings. At one point during the interview, the reporter referred to the superintendent as "Mr. Smith", and was quickly corrected by the minion: "it's Dr. Smith". If the reporter was like most people, (s)he probably thought, "what a pompous asshat." (Even most people with PhDs think that insistence on titles is the sign of a self-important douche; when I'm asked for a title I just give "Mr.".) In any case, the reporter was motivated to dig a little deeper into the background of the superintendent, which pretty quickly turned up evidence that a) he hadn't actually received a PhD, and b) he'd already lost a previous job because he lied.
people in the job market today face some unpalatable options: You can either forego the degree and slam into the glass ceiling in a mid-level position as HR passes over you repeatedly, or get it and wind up a bit farther ahead in your career but be financially worse off than your subordinates who aren't paying back hundreds to thousands of dollars a month to some corporation who will just keep jacking the rates up year after year so you're paying off mostly just the interest and doing very little to hit the principal of your student loan
As someone pointed out below, PhD programs don't usually require student loans. (Most actually pay you - not a ton, but if you're in your 20s and don't have children or family members to support, it is enough to lead a reasonably comfortable lifestyle and still have a little bit left at the end of the month, even in high-cost areas. Subsidized housing is often available too.) And every time I've read about someone lying on their resume about academic credentials, it's a false claim to have earned a PhD. People who reach the level where that matters usually don't have any problem getting jobs anyway, and they're rarely in debt.
Linus Pauling died at age 93... At a time when living past 90 wasn't as common as it is today.
Only because there were so many other things that could kill you before you reached the end of your "natural" lifespan. The maximum age of the human body appears to have been constant throughout recorded history. The massive increase in actual life expectancy (to somewhere in the 70s) in the developed world coincided with Pauling's life, so he benefited from all of the many advances in medicine, public health and sanitation, and an overall decrease in violent crime.
Don't assume that because he was a competent and careful scientist in one area (the one where he he earned the Nobel Prize), that he couldn't or didn't have a bee in his bonnet in another (in which he had no formal training or qualifications).
In fact, there is no shortage of other examples of this: just about anyone acquainted with the history of science can pull up multiple other examples of otherwise brilliant scientists who went completely batshit insane when they tried to step outside their area of expertise. Or sometimes even within a closely related field: Peter Duesberg was indisputably an expert on viruses, and might have eventually won the Nobel prize himself, but his activities related to HIV have been incredibly stupid, and his theories on cancer are just about as insane.
Genius that strikes out and proves how stupid the person is. e.g. Shockley, Pauling, Chomsky......Duesberg, Mullis, Montagnier, Hoyle... I could probably spend all day doing this.
Another example of how great marketing helps get your research funded. The reason this is being widely reported is because they chose a cool name.
Everyone in the academic sciences loves popular media exposure, but it usually doesn't matter for funding the individual research projects. The fact is, these viruses are an intrinsically important enough discovery that the research article would have been worthy of Science magazine regardless of the name they chose, and that's what they're going to be bragging about on their next grant application, not an NPR story. The media coverage is just a bonus ego boost for the professors involved.
The people who really care about popular media coverage are typically the parent institutions (universities, etc.) and megaprojects like the LHC, which are more likely to have to appeal directly to politicians for money, and also need to compete for the best researchers and students. I'm sure the head of Aix-Marseille Université is just as thrilled as the scientists who wrote the paper right now.
I understand people who are sitting around smoking pot and speculating like that, but scientists are supposed to apply sober reason to their conjectures.
Why can't scientists do both? The actual paper is quite reasonable and sober, and methodologically sound as far as I can tell; the Mars bit was just a bit of hand-waving for the benefit of popular media. A little of this goes a long way (the notorious "arsenic bacteria" are a really excessive example), but we all get excited sometimes.
Most virus species carry only RNA, but not all of them. The type knowns as retroviruses carry DNA, and actually gene manipulate their host, making them really tough to get rid of. Examples are HIV and Hepatitis.
I think your terminology is confused. Retroviruses carry RNA, which is then converted into DNA in the cell using the viral reverse transcriptase (typically integrating into the host genome), then back to RNA for protein translation. DNA viruses produce RNA using their own RNA polymerases, but their complete package is just DNA and protein.
The near future for US people will probably involve medical researchers migrating to friendlier jurisdictions and medical-tourism cruise ship vacations to route around the FDA damage.
And it will also involve charlatans promising miracle cures to anyone desperate enough or dumb enough to fork over thousands of dollars for an unregulated and unverified medical procedure. I'm not a fan of what the FDA is doing in this specific instance - although I suspect you're overstating the case - but entities like that exist for a good reason.
I think at a certain point you're gonna get a test result back and either you do the right thing, or you elect to have a human pet that is a drain on society (but nice for you).
Classy. So, by the same logic, we should also euthanize stroke victims, Alzheimer's patients, and so on, lest they be a drain on society?
If the effort to maintain a Down's syndrome child keeps an otherwise middle-class family in squalid poverty for the rest of their lives, please tell me how that's better than having it aborted. Everyone loses, and the portion of the child support that comes from tax money is stolen money, immoral from the start. There are more to costs than dollars, there's the destruction of established human lives.
If the effort to maintain an aging parent with dementia keeps an otherwise middle-class family in squalid poverty for the rest of their lives, please tell me how that's better than having it euthanized. Everyone loses, and the portion of the elder care support that comes from tax money is stolen money, immoral from the start. There are more to costs than dollars, there's the destruction of established human lives.
I'm extremely reluctant to defend the CIA in most circumstances, but I think the poster (or possibly the source article) may have misunderstood the point of this study. If there was a potential superweapon that could be used against your country, wouldn't you want to know everything possible about it so you could a) possibly detect it in advance, and b) defend against it? Who knows what the CIA's real motivations are - it's not like they have any kind of democratic accountability - but assuming that this whole concept is something of genuine concern and not just some sci-fi fantasy, they'd be idiots not to research what could potentially be a threat to national security.
I actually moved in the opposite direction from a pure research position in the hard sciences to a programming position in support of research. At the time, I received similar advice from a senior researcher. It was a little more strident though, something like: "What are you nuts? You won't ever be able to propose research again and no one will ever take you seriously."
This is sometimes true, but it depends on what exactly you do and who you work with. I moved from doing molecular biology research (as a PhD student) to writing software in support of same. I have far more exposure now than I was ever likely to get by doing my own research, and I have lots of other researchers (both junior and senior) constantly asking me for help. As a result I've been able to rack up enough publications and visibility that I don't think I'd have a problem moving back to pure research. However, as long as I'm doing methods development, it would be very difficult to get a tenure-track faculty position; I'd basically have to demote myself back to postdoc and do more basic research for a while. Fortunately I have no such delusions.
The bigger problem for the submitter, as others have implied, is the lack of a PhD; this is always going to limit his (?) career advancement.
Except that every attempt at communism has always miserably failed to build this classless, moneyless and stateless utopia because it's not intended for actual humans with feelings, ambitions, goals and freedom. It requires everyone to be "with the program" or they get shot or starved to death.
This can be formulated more generally as: true communism, on a national scale, is impossible without coercion. This means that it's effectively impossible without violence and some kind of dictatorship - even Marx admitted that initially some amount of authoritarian control would be required before society could evolve towards a more "pure" and democratic form of communism.
The big problem lies in the fact that violent revolutionary movements tend to attract people who are at least as interested in the violence as the underlying ideology. Which is why nearly every attempt at communist revolution has eventually degraded into mass murder and/or corrupt oligarchy. ("Nearly", because a few abortive attempts were nipped in the bud by right-wing counter-revolutions - the best example being Chile, also one of the only cases where communists won power in free and fair elections. Whether Allende's rule would have been enlightened or followed the same course as the rest, we can only guess.)
The lone example that I'm aware of "true" communism by peaceful means is the anarchist movement in early 20th century Spain. But the key difference there is that non-coercion and free will were considered at least as important (probably more so) as the collectivism they practiced; despite being polar opposites of the Nationalists, they were reluctant to even join the Republican (i.e. liberal democratic) government in the Spanish Civil War, because all government was considered inherently coercive. It's a shame that the movement essentially died out in the war, because it was a fascinating experiment. My guess is that it would have succumbed to outside pressures eventually, but I find the idea of a purely voluntary collectivism philosophically appealing.
If however, we were 1000 times smarter and had spent the last 1000 years finding fish-like creatures across the galaxy, and could predict the existence of such creatures from light-years away, it probably wouldn't be all that interesting to go study another one.
I'm not sure about that; human scientists never get tired of biodiversity, of finding some strange and novel biochemical mechanism in newly discovered microbes from hellish (terrestrial) environments. And anthropologists still study remote stone-age tribes in places like the Amazon rain forest or Papua New Guinea, partly just out of intrinsic curiosity, but also because of what we can learn about human society in general from observing different paths of development. If we assume (not unreasonably) that intelligent, socialized life is relatively rare in the galaxy, then if a race becomes advanced enough to make interstellar travel economically viable, surely many generations of alien PhD students would be eager to study humans and write theses on alien mating rituals.
The bottom line is that if an alien race is capable of getting here, all the other technology they've developed in the meantime would make the trip unnecessary, and more than likely, simply meaningless.
I generally agree with most of your rant, but I think you've failed to take one factor into account: pure desperation. We have no incentive to rush into interstellar travel because Earth is such a remarkably habitable environment, and we'd need to engage in truly heroic levels of pollution to fuck that up. At our current level of technology, attempting to leave the planet would require converting the entire global economy to a spacecraft development program, with all of the disruption and coercion that implies. But what if an alien race with roughly terrestrial biology, of approximately the same technology level (or maybe a few centuries more advanced) and population, discovers that its sun is going to burn out or blow up, or some other planetary catastrophe destroys conventional agriculture and makes the surface nearly uninhabitable? And what if there are no nearby planets which could be terraformed? In that case, they'd suddenly have plenty of motivation to seek out another habitable planet, while lacking any of the other technology that might make this irrelevant. Perhaps it is still easier to support several billion humanoids in orbiting colonies than to transport them in hibernation to another planet, but I'm not convinced.
The good news is that if they're motivated by desperation, their level of technology probably isn't so far advanced that we couldn't kick their asses if and when they try to invade. So I'm sleeping soundly (for now).
Not in Europe or other civilised places. In civilised countries, public health is studied by public research institutions at public universities.
We do this in America too - perhaps you've heard of the National Institutes of Health? But ultimately the actual drugs are made by private companies in most places, Europe included, because drug development is such a shitty business that most governments would (wisely) prefer to let someone else deal with it.
The cures for pandemics have never been a product of corporate research
Except that, to the extent that HIV is now largely survivable for those with access to the drugs, AIDS was cured by corporate R&D (aided, of course, by a lot of government-subsidized academic basic research). You can split hairs over whether protease inhibitor cocktails count as a "cure", but if you actually RTFA, maybe you'd understand why the pharma companies concentrated on making simpler treatments. Bone marrow transplants for every AIDS patient in the world is not a trivial matter.
Isn't it interesting that "statist" national healthcare systems, pharmaceutical patent busting, publicly-funded medical research etc, has was, WAY better outcomes than the joke privatized hell that passes for a healthcare system in America?
We have publicly-funded medical research in America too. In fact, it dwarfs most other countries, both in terms of money and productivity. The problem is that this research doesn't automatically lead to cures - developing new therapies is still extraordinarily expensive and slow. There have been many solutions proposed for this, but it's hard to point to an example where massive government spending magically solves the problem. It's also worth pointing out that the treatment covered in this article was done in the US, at a Harvard-associated hospital, and I would be surprised if NIH funding was not involved.
Aside from the research, I think you're also misunderstanding the nature of other first-world healthcare systems. The NHS in Britain is towards one extreme, where not only the insurance but most of the hospitals are state-run, but on the other end, there are plenty of countries with essentially private healthcare (providers and insurers) not so dissimilar from America's. What they have in common is effective universal coverage and far more government regulation of insurance than in the US. But it is not simply a matter of the government nationalizing the entire system, despite what ideologues on both the left and the right would claim.
What you get in America, is expensive gold-plated crap for the Worried Well, and dick pills and statins for rich old men too irresponsible to look after themselves. Meanwhile, half the developing world is dying of preventable disease, because Big Pharma and their warped priorities don't see any profit in it.
So what's your solution? The American government isn't going to step in and cure all those diseases in the developing world, because the taxpayers don't want their government pouring billions into TB and malaria research instead of the diseases that they personally have. On the other hand, Bill Gates is now using his (ill-earned) billions to fight these diseases.
A patient of chemo for cancer will take many thousands of dollars each year to combat their disease, so this is where cancer treatment seems to have stalled out in the US.
Or maybe it's because treating cancer is insanely fucking difficult, because it isn't actually one disease but hundreds or thousands of different cellular regulation disorders which simply happen to have broadly similar effects, because really weeding out every last tumor cell would require therapies so drastic that they'd be likely to kill the patient, and because many cancers tend to evolve drug resistance over time. The costs of cancer go way beyond prescriptions for a few name-brand drugs (which aren't even available for everything); they include older therapies, hospitalization, and surgery. Insurance companies would save multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient if there was a magic drug that cured cancer, and would happily pay a large amount for such a drug, so it's not like there's no profit to be had.
What exactly is the problem in your application area?
The main problem is that there's no single bottleneck where parallelization really helps. We do a lot of FFTs, but those only account for maybe 25% of total runtime - and they're mixed in with a lot of other calculations (and yes, branch points), mostly called by the LBFGS minimizer. The memory transfer overhead makes it especially difficult. We could probably figure out a way to make it work, at enormous cost (for us) in terms of manpower, but there are many other algorithmic improvements that we could make which would be at least as effective and would still run on CPUs. It's not at all like molecular dynamics where you have a bunch of approximately O(N^2) loops that take up most of the time.
you can bet the cloud quickly being abandoned by almost everybody
Except that CERN probably isn't too worried about the NSA spying on their exciting particle detector analysis. Maybe if there was something extremely proprietary in there, they might care, but I suspect even most (American) companies won't give it a moment's thought. I hate to resort to the cliche "If you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't be afraid", but as far as scientific research is concerned this is largely true. I work for a government agency and all of our computers issue disclaimers that we basically have no privacy; I also assume that any US citizen can file an FOIA request, etc. So I act accordingly, and don't use our computers for anything I would particularly mind being publicly broadcast - and I don't particularly bother to hide what I'm working on from my competitors either. Not once has this caused me any worry. CERN has been around for ages and the people there are deeply committed to academic research, so I suspect they're not very worried either.
Of course it sucks to have to adopt this attitude towards everyday life - but that's a very different concern.
Slashdot Mirror
*That* should teach her a lesson and send a strong signal.
It's still not as bad as Carly Fiorina driving HP's stock price down 50% and firing 7000 people, and getting let go with a $20M severance package, and still being considered a serious candidate for California senator. That's the biggest difference between the rest of us and the 0.01%: when we fuck up, we get fired with cause and are economic roadkill, and seriously risk being impoverished. When they fuck up, they lose access to the corporate jet and may have to postpone buying the third home in Pebble Beach. I honestly wouldn't have any problem with income inequality if we could occasionally see failed CEOs like Dick Fuld reduced to standing in line at soup kitchens like all of the other "takers".
I wonder how many of them have embellished their accomplishments, too? Seems pretty common in academia these days.
It's actually exceptionally rare. Anil Potti, the Duke cancer researcher who falsely claimed to have been a Rhodes scholar, was an unusually notorious case simply because it was so unusual. (Also because he may have been committing outright fraud in his research.) It's very rare to come across someone in the academic community falsely claiming a degree, simply because it's such a stupid idea: most of us aren't paid enough for it to be worth the risk. More often, the people getting caught are the ones who aren't happy with a merely middle-class lifestyle and want a managerial position that will propel them into at least the upper-middle class. Or they want a more elite teaching post than they might otherwise merit.
I do suspect there are a significant number of people in primary education who have done this. My favorite story was about a public school superintendent: in the course of writing an article about the school district, a local newspaper reporter interviewed one of the superintendent's underlings. At one point during the interview, the reporter referred to the superintendent as "Mr. Smith", and was quickly corrected by the minion: "it's Dr. Smith". If the reporter was like most people, (s)he probably thought, "what a pompous asshat." (Even most people with PhDs think that insistence on titles is the sign of a self-important douche; when I'm asked for a title I just give "Mr.".) In any case, the reporter was motivated to dig a little deeper into the background of the superintendent, which pretty quickly turned up evidence that a) he hadn't actually received a PhD, and b) he'd already lost a previous job because he lied.
people in the job market today face some unpalatable options: You can either forego the degree and slam into the glass ceiling in a mid-level position as HR passes over you repeatedly, or get it and wind up a bit farther ahead in your career but be financially worse off than your subordinates who aren't paying back hundreds to thousands of dollars a month to some corporation who will just keep jacking the rates up year after year so you're paying off mostly just the interest and doing very little to hit the principal of your student loan
As someone pointed out below, PhD programs don't usually require student loans. (Most actually pay you - not a ton, but if you're in your 20s and don't have children or family members to support, it is enough to lead a reasonably comfortable lifestyle and still have a little bit left at the end of the month, even in high-cost areas. Subsidized housing is often available too.) And every time I've read about someone lying on their resume about academic credentials, it's a false claim to have earned a PhD. People who reach the level where that matters usually don't have any problem getting jobs anyway, and they're rarely in debt.
Linus Pauling died at age 93... At a time when living past 90 wasn't as common as it is today.
Only because there were so many other things that could kill you before you reached the end of your "natural" lifespan. The maximum age of the human body appears to have been constant throughout recorded history. The massive increase in actual life expectancy (to somewhere in the 70s) in the developed world coincided with Pauling's life, so he benefited from all of the many advances in medicine, public health and sanitation, and an overall decrease in violent crime.
Don't assume that because he was a competent and careful scientist in one area (the one where he he earned the Nobel Prize), that he couldn't or didn't have a bee in his bonnet in another (in which he had no formal training or qualifications).
In fact, there is no shortage of other examples of this: just about anyone acquainted with the history of science can pull up multiple other examples of otherwise brilliant scientists who went completely batshit insane when they tried to step outside their area of expertise. Or sometimes even within a closely related field: Peter Duesberg was indisputably an expert on viruses, and might have eventually won the Nobel prize himself, but his activities related to HIV have been incredibly stupid, and his theories on cancer are just about as insane.
Only one of Pauling's Nobels was the peace prize - the other was for chemistry.
Genius that strikes out and proves how stupid the person is. e.g. Shockley, Pauling, Chomsky... ...Duesberg, Mullis, Montagnier, Hoyle... I could probably spend all day doing this.
Another example of how great marketing helps get your research funded. The reason this is being widely reported is because they chose a cool name.
Everyone in the academic sciences loves popular media exposure, but it usually doesn't matter for funding the individual research projects. The fact is, these viruses are an intrinsically important enough discovery that the research article would have been worthy of Science magazine regardless of the name they chose, and that's what they're going to be bragging about on their next grant application, not an NPR story. The media coverage is just a bonus ego boost for the professors involved.
The people who really care about popular media coverage are typically the parent institutions (universities, etc.) and megaprojects like the LHC, which are more likely to have to appeal directly to politicians for money, and also need to compete for the best researchers and students. I'm sure the head of Aix-Marseille Université is just as thrilled as the scientists who wrote the paper right now.
I understand people who are sitting around smoking pot and speculating like that, but scientists are supposed to apply sober reason to their conjectures.
Why can't scientists do both? The actual paper is quite reasonable and sober, and methodologically sound as far as I can tell; the Mars bit was just a bit of hand-waving for the benefit of popular media. A little of this goes a long way (the notorious "arsenic bacteria" are a really excessive example), but we all get excited sometimes.
Most virus species carry only RNA, but not all of them. The type knowns as retroviruses carry DNA, and actually gene manipulate their host, making them really tough to get rid of. Examples are HIV and Hepatitis.
I think your terminology is confused. Retroviruses carry RNA, which is then converted into DNA in the cell using the viral reverse transcriptase (typically integrating into the host genome), then back to RNA for protein translation. DNA viruses produce RNA using their own RNA polymerases, but their complete package is just DNA and protein.
The near future for US people will probably involve medical researchers migrating to friendlier jurisdictions and medical-tourism cruise ship vacations to route around the FDA damage.
And it will also involve charlatans promising miracle cures to anyone desperate enough or dumb enough to fork over thousands of dollars for an unregulated and unverified medical procedure. I'm not a fan of what the FDA is doing in this specific instance - although I suspect you're overstating the case - but entities like that exist for a good reason.
I think at a certain point you're gonna get a test result back and either you do the right thing, or you elect to have a human pet that is a drain on society (but nice for you).
Classy. So, by the same logic, we should also euthanize stroke victims, Alzheimer's patients, and so on, lest they be a drain on society?
If the effort to maintain a Down's syndrome child keeps an otherwise middle-class family in squalid poverty for the rest of their lives, please tell me how that's better than having it aborted. Everyone loses, and the portion of the child support that comes from tax money is stolen money, immoral from the start. There are more to costs than dollars, there's the destruction of established human lives.
If the effort to maintain an aging parent with dementia keeps an otherwise middle-class family in squalid poverty for the rest of their lives, please tell me how that's better than having it euthanized. Everyone loses, and the portion of the elder care support that comes from tax money is stolen money, immoral from the start. There are more to costs than dollars, there's the destruction of established human lives.
I'm extremely reluctant to defend the CIA in most circumstances, but I think the poster (or possibly the source article) may have misunderstood the point of this study. If there was a potential superweapon that could be used against your country, wouldn't you want to know everything possible about it so you could a) possibly detect it in advance, and b) defend against it? Who knows what the CIA's real motivations are - it's not like they have any kind of democratic accountability - but assuming that this whole concept is something of genuine concern and not just some sci-fi fantasy, they'd be idiots not to research what could potentially be a threat to national security.
I actually moved in the opposite direction from a pure research position in the hard sciences to a programming position in support of research. At the time, I received similar advice from a senior researcher. It was a little more strident though, something like: "What are you nuts? You won't ever be able to propose research again and no one will ever take you seriously."
This is sometimes true, but it depends on what exactly you do and who you work with. I moved from doing molecular biology research (as a PhD student) to writing software in support of same. I have far more exposure now than I was ever likely to get by doing my own research, and I have lots of other researchers (both junior and senior) constantly asking me for help. As a result I've been able to rack up enough publications and visibility that I don't think I'd have a problem moving back to pure research. However, as long as I'm doing methods development, it would be very difficult to get a tenure-track faculty position; I'd basically have to demote myself back to postdoc and do more basic research for a while. Fortunately I have no such delusions.
The bigger problem for the submitter, as others have implied, is the lack of a PhD; this is always going to limit his (?) career advancement.
Except that every attempt at communism has always miserably failed to build this classless, moneyless and stateless utopia because it's not intended for actual humans with feelings, ambitions, goals and freedom. It requires everyone to be "with the program" or they get shot or starved to death.
This can be formulated more generally as: true communism, on a national scale, is impossible without coercion. This means that it's effectively impossible without violence and some kind of dictatorship - even Marx admitted that initially some amount of authoritarian control would be required before society could evolve towards a more "pure" and democratic form of communism.
The big problem lies in the fact that violent revolutionary movements tend to attract people who are at least as interested in the violence as the underlying ideology. Which is why nearly every attempt at communist revolution has eventually degraded into mass murder and/or corrupt oligarchy. ("Nearly", because a few abortive attempts were nipped in the bud by right-wing counter-revolutions - the best example being Chile, also one of the only cases where communists won power in free and fair elections. Whether Allende's rule would have been enlightened or followed the same course as the rest, we can only guess.)
The lone example that I'm aware of "true" communism by peaceful means is the anarchist movement in early 20th century Spain. But the key difference there is that non-coercion and free will were considered at least as important (probably more so) as the collectivism they practiced; despite being polar opposites of the Nationalists, they were reluctant to even join the Republican (i.e. liberal democratic) government in the Spanish Civil War, because all government was considered inherently coercive. It's a shame that the movement essentially died out in the war, because it was a fascinating experiment. My guess is that it would have succumbed to outside pressures eventually, but I find the idea of a purely voluntary collectivism philosophically appealing.
Bullshit.. citation?
Dude, the quote is right there at the top of the Wired article. And it's not the only time he's said that.
If however, we were 1000 times smarter and had spent the last 1000 years finding fish-like creatures across the galaxy, and could predict the existence of such creatures from light-years away, it probably wouldn't be all that interesting to go study another one.
I'm not sure about that; human scientists never get tired of biodiversity, of finding some strange and novel biochemical mechanism in newly discovered microbes from hellish (terrestrial) environments. And anthropologists still study remote stone-age tribes in places like the Amazon rain forest or Papua New Guinea, partly just out of intrinsic curiosity, but also because of what we can learn about human society in general from observing different paths of development. If we assume (not unreasonably) that intelligent, socialized life is relatively rare in the galaxy, then if a race becomes advanced enough to make interstellar travel economically viable, surely many generations of alien PhD students would be eager to study humans and write theses on alien mating rituals.
The bottom line is that if an alien race is capable of getting here, all the other technology they've developed in the meantime would make the trip unnecessary, and more than likely, simply meaningless.
I generally agree with most of your rant, but I think you've failed to take one factor into account: pure desperation. We have no incentive to rush into interstellar travel because Earth is such a remarkably habitable environment, and we'd need to engage in truly heroic levels of pollution to fuck that up. At our current level of technology, attempting to leave the planet would require converting the entire global economy to a spacecraft development program, with all of the disruption and coercion that implies. But what if an alien race with roughly terrestrial biology, of approximately the same technology level (or maybe a few centuries more advanced) and population, discovers that its sun is going to burn out or blow up, or some other planetary catastrophe destroys conventional agriculture and makes the surface nearly uninhabitable? And what if there are no nearby planets which could be terraformed? In that case, they'd suddenly have plenty of motivation to seek out another habitable planet, while lacking any of the other technology that might make this irrelevant. Perhaps it is still easier to support several billion humanoids in orbiting colonies than to transport them in hibernation to another planet, but I'm not convinced.
The good news is that if they're motivated by desperation, their level of technology probably isn't so far advanced that we couldn't kick their asses if and when they try to invade. So I'm sleeping soundly (for now).
Not in Europe or other civilised places. In civilised countries, public health is studied by public research institutions at public universities.
We do this in America too - perhaps you've heard of the National Institutes of Health? But ultimately the actual drugs are made by private companies in most places, Europe included, because drug development is such a shitty business that most governments would (wisely) prefer to let someone else deal with it.
The cures for pandemics have never been a product of corporate research
Except that, to the extent that HIV is now largely survivable for those with access to the drugs, AIDS was cured by corporate R&D (aided, of course, by a lot of government-subsidized academic basic research). You can split hairs over whether protease inhibitor cocktails count as a "cure", but if you actually RTFA, maybe you'd understand why the pharma companies concentrated on making simpler treatments. Bone marrow transplants for every AIDS patient in the world is not a trivial matter.
Isn't it interesting that "statist" national healthcare systems, pharmaceutical patent busting, publicly-funded medical research etc, has was, WAY better outcomes than the joke privatized hell that passes for a healthcare system in America?
We have publicly-funded medical research in America too. In fact, it dwarfs most other countries, both in terms of money and productivity. The problem is that this research doesn't automatically lead to cures - developing new therapies is still extraordinarily expensive and slow. There have been many solutions proposed for this, but it's hard to point to an example where massive government spending magically solves the problem. It's also worth pointing out that the treatment covered in this article was done in the US, at a Harvard-associated hospital, and I would be surprised if NIH funding was not involved.
Aside from the research, I think you're also misunderstanding the nature of other first-world healthcare systems. The NHS in Britain is towards one extreme, where not only the insurance but most of the hospitals are state-run, but on the other end, there are plenty of countries with essentially private healthcare (providers and insurers) not so dissimilar from America's. What they have in common is effective universal coverage and far more government regulation of insurance than in the US. But it is not simply a matter of the government nationalizing the entire system, despite what ideologues on both the left and the right would claim.
What you get in America, is expensive gold-plated crap for the Worried Well, and dick pills and statins for rich old men too irresponsible to look after themselves. Meanwhile, half the developing world is dying of preventable disease, because Big Pharma and their warped priorities don't see any profit in it.
So what's your solution? The American government isn't going to step in and cure all those diseases in the developing world, because the taxpayers don't want their government pouring billions into TB and malaria research instead of the diseases that they personally have. On the other hand, Bill Gates is now using his (ill-earned) billions to fight these diseases.
No, these are transplants from bone marrow donors - no embryos or cloning involved.
A patient of chemo for cancer will take many thousands of dollars each year to combat their disease, so this is where cancer treatment seems to have stalled out in the US.
Or maybe it's because treating cancer is insanely fucking difficult, because it isn't actually one disease but hundreds or thousands of different cellular regulation disorders which simply happen to have broadly similar effects, because really weeding out every last tumor cell would require therapies so drastic that they'd be likely to kill the patient, and because many cancers tend to evolve drug resistance over time. The costs of cancer go way beyond prescriptions for a few name-brand drugs (which aren't even available for everything); they include older therapies, hospitalization, and surgery. Insurance companies would save multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient if there was a magic drug that cured cancer, and would happily pay a large amount for such a drug, so it's not like there's no profit to be had.
What exactly is the problem in your application area?
The main problem is that there's no single bottleneck where parallelization really helps. We do a lot of FFTs, but those only account for maybe 25% of total runtime - and they're mixed in with a lot of other calculations (and yes, branch points), mostly called by the LBFGS minimizer. The memory transfer overhead makes it especially difficult. We could probably figure out a way to make it work, at enormous cost (for us) in terms of manpower, but there are many other algorithmic improvements that we could make which would be at least as effective and would still run on CPUs. It's not at all like molecular dynamics where you have a bunch of approximately O(N^2) loops that take up most of the time.
you can bet the cloud quickly being abandoned by almost everybody
Except that CERN probably isn't too worried about the NSA spying on their exciting particle detector analysis. Maybe if there was something extremely proprietary in there, they might care, but I suspect even most (American) companies won't give it a moment's thought. I hate to resort to the cliche "If you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't be afraid", but as far as scientific research is concerned this is largely true. I work for a government agency and all of our computers issue disclaimers that we basically have no privacy; I also assume that any US citizen can file an FOIA request, etc. So I act accordingly, and don't use our computers for anything I would particularly mind being publicly broadcast - and I don't particularly bother to hide what I'm working on from my competitors either. Not once has this caused me any worry. CERN has been around for ages and the people there are deeply committed to academic research, so I suspect they're not very worried either.
Of course it sucks to have to adopt this attitude towards everyday life - but that's a very different concern.