How the hell did this get modded up +4? It's total rubbish.
Rather than moderate, I'll attempt to explain why it's wrong: Investment risk consists of many things, of which you missed out: Credit risk and operational risk (there's also market risk, which you kind of covered).
The risk of a glitch in a computing system is indeed "factored in" the "equation" - it's part of operational risk, which all sophisticated investors are aware of and most make some effort to measure (this also covers things like user error, legal risk, etc.). The financial system is a system, and anyone using the system should be aware of the things that can go wrong. Contrary to your assertion, all sophisticated investors are aware that system glitches can happen - if you don't appreciate this, then you shouldn't be playing the game. Also, NASDAQ is very unlikely to be liable - if you ever read the conditions on market participation, you'll note that "buyer beware" is the first rule of business...
What are you smoking? "England" (I think you mean "Britain" or "the UK"): 1) Has a violent crime / murder rate much lower than that of the States, and 2) Has NEVER permitted ownership of unlicensed personal firearms. In a civilised society, there's no _need_ for civilians to own firearms (notice the emphasis on NEED). As to your "Taking away guns is just treating the symptoms" comment: where does one stop ascribing causes to an effect (gun crime)? To me, the most obvious cause of gun crime is guns, not "lack of education", "poverty" or "deprivation". But that's too obvious a link for some people.
What is it with you people? I've been running windows since 3.1 and linux since 1.6, and as soon as someone posts a comment saying that windows XP (or whatever) can be made stable, some zealot accuses the poster of working for microsoft! Newsflash - in the real world, countless large orgs use NT/2k/XP on the desktop, and have managed to evolve stable configurations that do not crash. I've not had XP crash once since I got it with my laptop, and the only time I reboot is for a system update. I've only ever had driver related crashes on 2k. My subjective user experience of Linux (in the 2.2 days, at a large US DOE lab) was that it was only marginally more stable than NT4; at home, playing with kernal updates it is of course *less* stable.
Dan
Re:UK seems a little better.
on
Add-Ons Add Up
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· Score: 1
Why is this moderated +2?!? Yes, HSBC is Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp., but it's an British (London) bank through and through -it's about as anglo saxon as they come, with huge profit margins, listings in London (which is where their head office is!) and New York - and they're so filthy rich, they recently bought up a huge load of domestic US debt. The renaming exercise they went through a few years ago (from Midland bank) was done to make them appear to be a global player. Guess what? It worked! Just so I'm not too off-topic - don't believe the hype that the UK is much better than the US (just because we have so-called watchdogs) - spend six months checking *all* your bills (utility, mobile, bank statements etc.) and I guarantee you'll find at least one error in their favour. That said, I've never been shafted by any entity as much as I was by my treatment at the hands of Wells Fargo bank in California. You want an account? Have a fee. You want to access your money? Fee. Check balance? Fee. Transfer money from the UK? Fees both ends. Not only that, when I signed up, the branch manager tried to convince me she'd "waive the cost" of me depositing my opening cheque - guess, what, there should *not* have been any cost, she was misrepresenting her bank's policies to appear to be better value than others! Dan
Not only that, but the numbers/graphs in the article do not offer any more than tentative support for the conclusions drawn by the author! IE: I can see very little difference (less than 5%) in speed between the 64 and 128MB versions of the cards and occasionally the 64MB card was significantly faster. In fact, a better conclusion to come to from the evidence presented is that the speed improvement is marginal at best. Instead, we're presented with speculation as fact (that next years games will differentiate the cards). Don't believe this hype - the GPU / bus architecture is FAR more important than the local memory cache - unless you *need* that extra memory today, wait until the next generation of cards, or sped the money on a different feature.
Sounds very similar to the kind of scams that a well known power company (or rather, ex company) was pulling - selling electricy futures and virtual power plants, etc. I'd be careful with that kind of idea if I were you!
But the notes are all one colour, and one size, and lack holograms! I can't believe the resistance to any kind of change I'm seeing on a GEEK site! When I stayed in the US for a few years it became obvious to me that the mainstream of society was so conservative that they'd rather retain the use of paper money to buy a soda then accept a far more ergonomic coin for their unit of currency (yes, yes, I know about the ill-fated dollar coins). Having to take out a bunch of notes from my wallet and check them before getting a cab also wasn't the greatest thing when I was blind drunk in downtown Palo Alto - back at home in England, there's no need to fumble around with my wallet thumbing the notes to check whether I've spent £100 or £50 on a night out.
Not only are they not completely sealed, but they can be operated successfully under normal conditions with the platters fully exposed! I tried this with an old 1GB WD drive the other day (cost: around $500 when I first got it 6 years ago) - no problem booting up from it, and extremely cool to watch the head zip big and forth whilst calibrating at power up time. Newer HDs are probably even more robust...
Water is the single most important thing we could find on a planet. Our biology is carbon and water based, we need water for all biological processes. Ecologically, large quantities of water act as a temperature regulator for the planet - water is only found in liquid form over a very narrow range of temperatures, but in that form it is an especially good solvent, lubricant and transport mechanism. Chemically, water consists of hydrogen (pre-cursor to most chemical fuels, and one day, in the form of deuterium also to controlled fusion) and oxygen (also a fuel, and necessary for life!). Remember, moving even a kilogram of mass out of the earth's gravitational field is very costly (in fuel and resource terms), so finding such an important resource "in place" is very exciting news, and could significantly accelerate mankind's expansion through the solar system and beyond. Dan
Arab modern inventions - how about modern math? Whilst Europe was stagnating in the Middle Ages, the Arab world housed the intellectual elite (the number zero was quite a handy discovery, as was Algebra - an Arabaic word).
It really is amazing how the more things change, the more they stay the same - even back then, American revisionism was alive and well: the inventor of Television wasn't an American, it was a Brit (a Scotsman actually): John Logie Baird. OK, that was the only on-topic bit, now for my rant: I know this looks like flamebait, but this level of shoddy journalism (not checking facts) is rife, and seeing it in the NYT infuriates me. I've lived in both countries (US, UK) and it is amazing how culturally insular the US is - many otherwise very intelligent citizens grow up thinking that inventions and discoveries that were originally from or made abroad (Chinese, Arabic, or European mostly), were made by Americans. Give me a break! This attitude is so in-grained that Hollywood has regularly rewritten whole wars (normally to make America look far more noble than it is - if you want to see how noble a country really is, look at how they treat their poor and needy) in the name of "entertainment" - when really it is just to pandar to primative notions of patriotism in order to sell more.
That said, the NYT (WP, LAT) are still far superior to the majority of UK trash that gets labelled as newspapers. I just wish they (and slashdot) would get their facts right.
Hello? That wouldn't work at all, did you even think before you posted that? If you depolarise only one strip (which happens at a speed much less than "the speed of electricity", of order milliseconds so that the whole concept is flawed) then you're still left with all the other blackened strips in front of the laser, so the light goes no where. What were you thinking of?
This type of optical problem has in reality already been solved in the telecoms industry to very high levels of sophistication.
"Diaspora" in film? Not in a million years - too deep a storyline, ultra-tech so way beyond our current level that there are few recognisably human characters, n-dimensional realities, and self re-engineering. It's one of my favorite books, but I can't even imagine it in film. As I discovered as a kid in drama class - some stories are meant to stay on paper...
No, one can have a cross (outer) product in any number of dimensions, just as one can have an inner ("dot") product in any number of dimensions. Tensor calculus is the generalisation of ordinary geometric calculus that describes this.
Mine is a Dell also. The batteries I use are the highest capacity that Dell make, rated for 14.8V@3.8Ah = 56Wh (ie: they can supply 56 watts for one hour, 28W for 2, etc.). I normally get about 2 hours per battery watching a DVD (about 30-40% CPU), so the power consumption then is around 30 watts. Thus, a 150Watt hour battery would power my laptop, which isn't particularly energy efficent (GForce2Go, 1GHz, 512MB, DVD, monster IBM HD, and huge 1600x1024 LCD!) - for about 5 hours continuous DVD watching - which is not to be sniffed at!
You've missed the point, I think. You are a member of a population (I'll assume you live in the good old US, forgive me if this is not the case) - as a representative of that population, you do indeed earn an income comparable to a very large country - the US! Your *average* income, as an average representative of the US population, is far more than that of most (nearly all) countries. On a per capita basis, including all goods, serivces, and invisibles - it is *precisely* the US per capita income! The NS article makes the point that the internal EQ economy - _on a per capita basis_ - is more "valuable" than that of say, India. The valuation is of course fairly subjective, as the realised market isn't liquid/efficient enough for there to be a real exchange rate to hard dollars.
Since supply and demand create and motivate all market economies, it's possible to have a market for virtually anything (pun intended). Think this through: there's not really much difference in terms of actual consumer product between trading virtual luxury items and trading stock options. Other than the market size, both products are notional and useless without a willing counterparty.
Years ago I worked with the Watcom compiler on x86, which was considered to be a pretty agressive optimizing compiler. Such FP hacks were all in use back then, and one would quite commonly obtain "wrong" numerical results in optimized builds. Unfortunately, I've seen at least one major difference between optimized and debug (non-optimized) builds in every compiler technology I've used, from HP and Sun's offerings to MS VC6++ - all of them stemming from too agressive optimizations or unspecified assumptions. The big advantage of GCC is then the ability to compare across multiple platforms - if you're in a hetrogenous computing environment (as most research institutions and big companies are) - you can just retarget the same source for a different platform. If the optimized builds are then giving the same numbers (still different from debug), something's up in the optimizer and the assumptions it's making...
Please think about these before you write - precision is a very subtle concept when one is considering numerical techniques!
Replacing division by multiplication is fine (a/x = aq exactly if q=1/x) - compilers have been doing this for as long as I've been coding (at least a decade in other words). Multiplication is usually faster than division on an FPU (certainly true for x86), so it is almost always better to have this optimization. There is *no* loss in precision with this optimization.
Truncation of a float to an integer - exactly how else should truncation be performed if not rounding to nearest integer? Have you ever done any numerical analysis?
There's nothing in your post that should shock you or anyone else; if you do numerical computation on an x86 platform you should know, or at least be aware of, the idiosyncracies of the floating point unit (80 bit internal storage, stack based registers, etc).
Dan
Re:Could faster processors lead to better programs
on
CPU Wars
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· Score: 1
Unfortunately your wishes have already come true, and I (and many in industry) would draw the exact opposite conclusions you have done. Faster CPUs encourage laziness (which you seem to be advocating by claiming that C[++] is bad because it prohibits laziness - which in itself is not strictly true either). Laziness is bad; look at all the bloated, useless Visual Basic code out there. Business critical enterprise level software should almost never be written in a scripting langauge (even a good one, like Perl). Faster CPUs together with easily abused and easily learnt (at least to a basic level) scripting langauges produce undisciplined programmers . These, especially MS VB script hackers (in the correct, though non-complimentary sense of the term), are the scourge of the industry - churning out buggy, insecure, and monstrously inefficent code. That's not to say that all VB/Lisp/Perl is bad (I've seen good VB coders take bad production code and speed up business processes by orders of magnitude), just that every lanuage has its place and scripting languages are of little use for hard computing and business tasks.
Well that depends upon how much I need to qualify: In the Standard model, the Higgs mechanism is postulated to be responsible for mass generation - the (non-virtual) Higgs boson as a particle has little to do with it (and indeed may not even exist in the region predicted by the SM). Nevertheless, the mass field is generated by the Higgs mechanism - the colour (color) field is generated by strong interactions and the two are quite seperate in the Standard Model Langrangian. The behaviour of quarks inside the proton leads to some interesting physics, but I don't see how it has anything to do with mass generation.
Apart from being the last of the Standard Model particles to be discovered, it is also (via the so-called) Higgs Mechanism responsible for the generation of mass.
What?
Well, just as the photon is the "carrier" of the electromagnetic field, the carrier (incidently, all such carrier particles are bosons - that is, have integer "spin") of the mass field is the Higgs Boson, and will be seen as evidence for either the Standard Model of Particle Physics, or (depending upon its properties, or indeed, existence!) for other competing models. As one might well imagine, the mass generation process is very interesting to Physicists, and Higgs discovery would certainly be worthy of a Nobel prize.
As to the closure of LEP - LEP has done some startling physics and has been an extremely successful endevour however you look at it (for a start, without CERN we would not have the World Wide Web!) The collaborative model of smaller states coming together to afford large scientific projects was the predessesor to the ISS, and even a couple of the US High Energy Physics experiments (such as the experiment I'm involved with, BaBar are going the same route.
Finally, don't forget that Physics is still a human endevour, and us Physicists need a pat on the back sometimes too!
Slashdot Mirror
How the hell did this get modded up +4? It's total rubbish.
Rather than moderate, I'll attempt to explain why it's wrong: Investment risk consists of many things, of which you missed out: Credit risk and operational risk (there's also market risk, which you kind of covered).
The risk of a glitch in a computing system is indeed "factored in" the "equation" - it's part of operational risk, which all sophisticated investors are aware of and most make some effort to measure (this also covers things like user error, legal risk, etc.). The financial system is a system, and anyone using the system should be aware of the things that can go wrong. Contrary to your assertion, all sophisticated investors are aware that system glitches can happen - if you don't appreciate this, then you shouldn't be playing the game. Also, NASDAQ is very unlikely to be liable - if you ever read the conditions on market participation, you'll note that "buyer beware" is the first rule of business...
Dan
What are you smoking? "England" (I think you mean "Britain" or "the UK"):
1) Has a violent crime / murder rate much lower than that of the States, and
2) Has NEVER permitted ownership of unlicensed personal firearms.
In a civilised society, there's no _need_ for civilians to own firearms (notice the emphasis on NEED). As to your "Taking away guns is just treating the symptoms" comment: where does one stop ascribing causes to an effect (gun crime)? To me, the most obvious cause of gun crime is guns, not "lack of education", "poverty" or "deprivation". But that's too obvious a link for some people.
Dan
What is it with you people? I've been running windows since 3.1 and linux since 1.6, and as soon as someone posts a comment saying that windows XP (or whatever) can be made stable, some zealot accuses the poster of working for microsoft! Newsflash - in the real world, countless large orgs use NT/2k/XP on the desktop, and have managed to evolve stable configurations that do not crash. I've not had XP crash once since I got it with my laptop, and the only time I reboot is for a system update. I've only ever had driver related crashes on 2k. My subjective user experience of Linux (in the 2.2 days, at a large US DOE lab) was that it was only marginally more stable than NT4; at home, playing with kernal updates it is of course *less* stable.
Dan
Why is this moderated +2?!? Yes, HSBC is Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp., but it's an British (London) bank through and through -it's about as anglo saxon as they come, with huge profit margins, listings in London (which is where their head office is!) and New York - and they're so filthy rich, they recently bought up a huge load of domestic US debt.
The renaming exercise they went through a few years ago (from Midland bank) was done to make them appear to be a global player. Guess what? It worked!
Just so I'm not too off-topic - don't believe the hype that the UK is much better than the US (just because we have so-called watchdogs) - spend six months checking *all* your bills (utility, mobile, bank statements etc.) and I guarantee you'll find at least one error in their favour. That said, I've never been shafted by any entity as much as I was by my treatment at the hands of Wells Fargo bank in California. You want an account? Have a fee. You want to access your money? Fee. Check balance? Fee. Transfer money from the UK? Fees both ends. Not only that, when I signed up, the branch manager tried to convince me she'd "waive the cost" of me depositing my opening cheque - guess, what, there should *not* have been any cost, she was misrepresenting her bank's policies to appear to be better value than others!
Dan
Not only that, but the numbers/graphs in the article do not offer any more than tentative support for the conclusions drawn by the author! IE: I can see very little difference (less than 5%) in speed between the 64 and 128MB versions of the cards and occasionally the 64MB card was significantly faster. In fact, a better conclusion to come to from the evidence presented is that the speed improvement is marginal at best. Instead, we're presented with speculation as fact (that next years games will differentiate the cards). Don't believe this hype - the GPU / bus architecture is FAR more important than the local memory cache - unless you *need* that extra memory today, wait until the next generation of cards, or sped the money on a different feature.
Dan
Sounds very similar to the kind of scams that a well known power company (or rather, ex company) was pulling - selling electricy futures and virtual power plants, etc. I'd be careful with that kind of idea if I were you!
- Dan
That's 40 billion **accumulated** - so that many viewings, not that many individuals pairs of eyeballs.
Dan
But the notes are all one colour, and one size, and lack holograms! I can't believe the resistance to any kind of change I'm seeing on a GEEK site! When I stayed in the US for a few years it became obvious to me that the mainstream of society was so conservative that they'd rather retain the use of paper money to buy a soda then accept a far more ergonomic coin for their unit of currency (yes, yes, I know about the ill-fated dollar coins). Having to take out a bunch of notes from my wallet and check them before getting a cab also wasn't the greatest thing when I was blind drunk in downtown Palo Alto - back at home in England, there's no need to fumble around with my wallet thumbing the notes to check whether I've spent £100 or £50 on a night out.
...
Come on America, time for some change
Dan
Not only are they not completely sealed, but they can be operated successfully under normal conditions with the platters fully exposed! I tried this with an old 1GB WD drive the other day (cost: around $500 when I first got it 6 years ago) - no problem booting up from it, and extremely cool to watch the head zip big and forth whilst calibrating at power up time. Newer HDs are probably even more robust...
Dan
Water is the single most important thing we could find on a planet. Our biology is carbon and water based, we need water for all biological processes. Ecologically, large quantities of water act as a temperature regulator for the planet - water is only found in liquid form over a very narrow range of temperatures, but in that form it is an especially good solvent, lubricant and transport mechanism. Chemically, water consists of hydrogen (pre-cursor to most chemical fuels, and one day, in the form of deuterium also to controlled fusion) and oxygen (also a fuel, and necessary for life!).
Remember, moving even a kilogram of mass out of the earth's gravitational field is very costly (in fuel and resource terms), so finding such an important resource "in place" is very exciting news, and could significantly accelerate mankind's expansion through the solar system and beyond.
Dan
Arab modern inventions - how about modern math? Whilst Europe was stagnating in the Middle Ages, the Arab world housed the intellectual elite (the number zero was quite a handy discovery, as was Algebra - an Arabaic word).
Dan
Replying to my own post, but here's something that explains J.L.Baird's significant contributions and gives dates:
John Logie Baird
Dan
It really is amazing how the more things change, the more they stay the same - even back then, American revisionism was alive and well: the inventor of Television wasn't an American, it was a Brit (a Scotsman actually): John Logie Baird.
OK, that was the only on-topic bit, now for my rant:
I know this looks like flamebait, but this level of shoddy journalism (not checking facts) is rife, and seeing it in the NYT infuriates me. I've lived in both countries (US, UK) and it is amazing how culturally insular the US is - many otherwise very intelligent citizens grow up thinking that inventions and discoveries that were originally from or made abroad (Chinese, Arabic, or European mostly), were made by Americans. Give me a break! This attitude is so in-grained that Hollywood has regularly rewritten whole wars (normally to make America look far more noble than it is - if you want to see how noble a country really is, look at how they treat their poor and needy) in the name of "entertainment" - when really it is just to pandar to primative notions of patriotism in order to sell more.
That said, the NYT (WP, LAT) are still far superior to the majority of UK trash that gets labelled as newspapers. I just wish they (and slashdot) would get their facts right.
Dan
Hello? That wouldn't work at all, did you even think before you posted that? If you depolarise only one strip (which happens at a speed much less than "the speed of electricity", of order milliseconds so that the whole concept is flawed) then you're still left with all the other blackened strips in front of the laser, so the light goes no where. What were you thinking of?
This type of optical problem has in reality already been solved in the telecoms industry to very high levels of sophistication.
Dan
"Diaspora" in film? Not in a million years - too deep a storyline, ultra-tech so way beyond our current level that there are few recognisably human characters, n-dimensional realities, and self re-engineering. It's one of my favorite books, but I can't even imagine it in film. As I discovered as a kid in drama class - some stories are meant to stay on paper ...
Dan
No, one can have a cross (outer) product in any number of dimensions, just as one can have an inner ("dot") product in any number of dimensions. Tensor calculus is the generalisation of ordinary geometric calculus that describes this.
Dan
Mine is a Dell also. The batteries I use are the highest capacity that Dell make, rated for 14.8V@3.8Ah = 56Wh (ie: they can supply 56 watts for one hour, 28W for 2, etc.). I normally get about 2 hours per battery watching a DVD (about 30-40% CPU), so the power consumption then is around 30 watts. Thus, a 150Watt hour battery would power my laptop, which isn't particularly energy efficent (GForce2Go, 1GHz, 512MB, DVD, monster IBM HD, and huge 1600x1024 LCD!) - for about 5 hours continuous DVD watching - which is not to be sniffed at!
Dan
You've missed the point, I think. You are a member of a population (I'll assume you live in the good old US, forgive me if this is not the case) - as a representative of that population, you do indeed earn an income comparable to a very large country - the US! Your *average* income, as an average representative of the US population, is far more than that of most (nearly all) countries. On a per capita basis, including all goods, serivces, and invisibles - it is *precisely* the US per capita income! The NS article makes the point that the internal EQ economy - _on a per capita basis_ - is more "valuable" than that of say, India. The valuation is of course fairly subjective, as the realised market isn't liquid/efficient enough for there to be a real exchange rate to hard dollars.
Since supply and demand create and motivate all market economies, it's possible to have a market for virtually anything (pun intended). Think this through: there's not really much difference in terms of actual consumer product between trading virtual luxury items and trading stock options. Other than the market size, both products are notional and useless without a willing counterparty.
Dan
Years ago I worked with the Watcom compiler on x86, which was considered to be a pretty agressive optimizing compiler. Such FP hacks were all in use back then, and one would quite commonly obtain "wrong" numerical results in optimized builds. Unfortunately, I've seen at least one major difference between optimized and debug (non-optimized) builds in every compiler technology I've used, from HP and Sun's offerings to MS VC6++ - all of them stemming from too agressive optimizations or unspecified assumptions. The big advantage of GCC is then the ability to compare across multiple platforms - if you're in a hetrogenous computing environment (as most research institutions and big companies are) - you can just retarget the same source for a different platform. If the optimized builds are then giving the same numbers (still different from debug), something's up in the optimizer and the assumptions it's making...
Dan
Please think about these before you write - precision is a very subtle concept when one is considering numerical techniques!
Replacing division by multiplication is fine (a/x = aq exactly if q=1/x) - compilers have been doing this for as long as I've been coding (at least a decade in other words). Multiplication is usually faster than division on an FPU (certainly true for x86), so it is almost always better to have this optimization. There is *no* loss in precision with this optimization.
Truncation of a float to an integer - exactly how else should truncation be performed if not rounding to nearest integer? Have you ever done any numerical analysis?
There's nothing in your post that should shock you or anyone else; if you do numerical computation on an x86 platform you should know, or at least be aware of, the idiosyncracies of the floating point unit (80 bit internal storage, stack based registers, etc).
Dan
Unfortunately your wishes have already come true, and I (and many in industry) would draw the exact opposite conclusions you have done. Faster CPUs encourage laziness (which you seem to be advocating by claiming that C[++] is bad because it prohibits laziness - which in itself is not strictly true either). Laziness is bad; look at all the bloated, useless Visual Basic code out there. Business critical enterprise level software should almost never be written in a scripting langauge (even a good one, like Perl). Faster CPUs together with easily abused and easily learnt (at least to a basic level) scripting langauges produce undisciplined programmers . These, especially MS VB script hackers (in the correct, though non-complimentary sense of the term), are the scourge of the industry - churning out buggy, insecure, and monstrously inefficent code. That's not to say that all VB/Lisp/Perl is bad (I've seen good VB coders take bad production code and speed up business processes by orders of magnitude), just that every lanuage has its place and scripting languages are of little use for hard computing and business tasks.
Well that depends upon how much I need to qualify: In the Standard model, the Higgs mechanism is postulated to be responsible for mass generation - the (non-virtual) Higgs boson as a particle has little to do with it (and indeed may not even exist in the region predicted by the SM). Nevertheless, the mass field is generated by the Higgs mechanism - the colour (color) field is generated by strong interactions and the two are quite seperate in the Standard Model Langrangian. The behaviour of quarks inside the proton leads to some interesting physics, but I don't see how it has anything to do with mass generation.
Why is the Higgs so important?
Apart from being the last of the Standard Model particles to be discovered, it is also (via the so-called) Higgs Mechanism responsible for the generation of mass.
What?Well, just as the photon is the "carrier" of the electromagnetic field, the carrier (incidently, all such carrier particles are bosons - that is, have integer "spin") of the mass field is the Higgs Boson, and will be seen as evidence for either the Standard Model of Particle Physics, or (depending upon its properties, or indeed, existence!) for other competing models. As one might well imagine, the mass generation process is very interesting to Physicists, and Higgs discovery would certainly be worthy of a Nobel prize.
As to the closure of LEP - LEP has done some startling physics and has been an extremely successful endevour however you look at it (for a start, without CERN we would not have the World Wide Web!) The collaborative model of smaller states coming together to afford large scientific projects was the predessesor to the ISS, and even a couple of the US High Energy Physics experiments (such as the experiment I'm involved with, BaBar are going the same route.
Finally, don't forget that Physics is still a human endevour, and us Physicists need a pat on the back sometimes too!
- Dan
PS: Ed, get back to work!