You don't have any clue what NASA does do you? Research is their primary mission, specifically including public/private research partnerships. This is how NASA's research activities benefit the US. NASA research eventually gets turned over to the private sector and we all benefit from it - the term for this is technology transfer. This is exactly the sort of "subsidy" you want because no private company could justify the risk for such an exotic and unproven technology.
Also you do realize NASA doesn't build rockets or aircraft themselves right? They hire contractors to build and operate them including lockheed. NASA isn't an intergalactic bus and freight service and shouldn't be. Furthermore this is an X plane. The X stands for experimental. This is a public/private research project which if it works it will result in jobs and grow our economy. Call it a subsidy if you want but technology research like this is among the best uses for tax dollars there are. The internet that you are using right at this moment is a great example of a US government (DARPA) research project that resulted in a gigantic ROI to the American people.
i guess they DO have to much money?!!!!
Every dollar we spend on NASA results in somewhere between a 7X-14X return on that investment to our economy. Are you seriously arguing we should reduce our investment on something that has that much benefit? Especially when NASA's budget accounts for 0.5% of the federal budget?
Google allows users to export all of their data. Hasn't seemed to destroy Google.
A) Google definitely does NOT permit exporting all their data or even accessing all of it. Some yes but definitely not all. B) Different business model and the information Google cares about is different than the information Facebook cares about. C) Google's crown jewels are the quality of their searches and they aren't about to tell anyone key details of how they do that. D) Meta-data about group tendencies are as valuable as personal information and they don't (and won't) give you access to that.
Perhaps the "Science Guy" should learn a little bit about Mars before talking about it.
He's the CEO of The Planetary Society which is concerned with among other things this very topic. I'm certain he's better informed about the topic than you are.
I'm not actually that much of a Mars advocate, and think the simplicity of using water there is overplayed (people talk about it like it's some sort of pure snow that you just pick up and melt, but it's (mostly) a rock-hard toxic brine mixed with sand and clay) - but come on, if you're going to talk about something, learn the basics.
Who is arguing it is simple? The argument is that it is necessary and possible if you want a manned Mars mission. Shipping water from Earth is simply unrealistic in any sort of large scale. There are a host of very serious technical problems in gathering and utilizing any resource on Mars and water is no exception.
No, the reason people don't live in Antarctica -- is because there are no jobs, nor the possibility of a job (even self employed) there.Look at the *North* Pole. There are resources. And there are loads of people living there. For research, for hunting, for fishing, and for mining/resources.
You think there are no resources in Antarctica of economic value? It's a freaking continent. The only reason they haven't been tapped yet is because it's a freaking miserably place and the cost of getting the resources is too EXPENSIVE to be worth the bother currently. So we have a gentleman's agreement between nation states for now but if the ice melts (as seems likely) or there is a shortage of a key resource (like oil) expect that agreement to fall apart rather quickly when the mining companies move in. The only real question is how cooperative the countries will be. If the US or Russia or China decides to mine Antarctica, nobody is really going to be able to stop them.
Well put. I find him annoying as fuck, because he plays such a bad cliche.
Well we cannot all be as cool as you. I'm sure you are much better and more impressive public speaker than he is. [/sarcasm] What were you expecting, a real life Buckaroo Banzai?
But, hey, if that's what sells to the cheap seats, go for it.
He has a following and is quite popular and he's a good teacher. What more do you really want? He's had a lot of success in getting people interested and informed about science who otherwise would not have been. Stop being so picky.
If you actually want to learn science as an adult, there are a ton of free lectures online from good schools, some directed specifically at older learners.
Great. There are a shit ton of people that aren't going to do that but they still need to understand some amount of science to be useful in a modern society. People vote and make policies about science and it's not good when they don't understand the science underlying the policies. Nye helps reach people that your online lectures will never touch. Yes a lot of what he talks about is superficial (and he knows that) but there is a need for that. He knows his stuff and does a good job.
Bill Nye says the idea of Mars colonization and terraforming -- making a planet more Earth-like by modifying its atmosphere -- is science fiction.
Of course it is... for now anyway. It's so absurdly beyond our current technology that it beggars the mind. If we cannot manage controlling the climate on Earth (Terra) we sure as hell aren't going to be able to do it on Mars.
Is it utterly impossible? Maybe. Maybe not. Certainly not worth worrying about by anyone currently living. We maybe could feasibly colonize Mars within my lifetime in a very basic way. But terraforming it will take thousands of years and it will be hundreds at best before we achieve a sufficient technological sophistication to even ponder the idea seriously. I could see us inhabiting Mars but I think it's highly unrealistic to seriously try to turn the entire planet into some sort of garden. The energy requirements and economics alone should point out the folly of the idea.
Slate argues that Facebook "is a normal sleazy company now," saying the company "obscured its problems and fought dirty against its critics" -- but that now its failings are being publicly aired
"Now"? They have ALWAYS been a sleazy company from day one. There have literally been movies made about the lack of moral compass their founder has. Of course they fought dirty. Anyone who believes or believed otherwise is either naive or a moron.
Even Steve Wozniak has joined the critics, saying this week that Facebook should "stop putting money before morals," adding later that "I haven't seen them do one real thing."
Easy to say for the guy who made a fortune 30+ years ago and has been more or less coasting ever since then on his celebrity. Don't get me wrong, I like and respect the hell out of Woz but what has he done besides some charity work in the last 30 years that I should care about? It has no more credibility than me pointing out that Facebook lacks a moral compass - he just has a bigger megaphone. When Woz uses his fortune to actually build something bigger than his public image I'll take his opinion on the matter more seriously. Not to mention he hasn't exactly taken Apple to the woodshed for many of their ethics problems so I think we might have a glass house in play here.
Woz also suggested that Facebook should allow users to export their data so they could upload it onto competing social networks.
You know, Woz is seemingly a very decent but this is just almost weapons grade stupid. How about Woz tell Apple to drop all their patents and open source their software? Because that's the functional equivalent of what he is suggesting. He's telling Facebook to hand over the crown jewels of their empire which is data about their customers. Woz cannot possibly be dumb enough to believe that is a useful suggestion for anything other than for puffing up his own image.
Any individual Kibble balance will also deteriorate and be out of range of the others. There will also be differences in construction since no system is perfect. You might as well use the current method.
I have a hard time telling if you are a troll or just ignorant. What they did was they redefined Planck's constant to be a fixed number. So instead of measuring Planck's constant from an arbitrarily chosen value for the kilogram they measure the kilogram from an (sort of) arbitrarily chosen Planck's constant.
Basically what they did was they defined Planck's constant to be a fixed value pretty close the the calculated number previously used. So instead of calculating Planck's constant from an arbitrarily defined kilogram they define the kilogram (and a few other constants) from an arbitrarily defined Planck's constant. This takes the error bars away from Planck's constant and the other fundamental measurements fall out naturally as a result to precisely defined and fixed numbers.
Now today Amazon is bigger then Walmart and they are struggling to fight for competition with Amazon.
Depends on how you define "bigger". Amazon is bigger by market cap but only about a third of the size by revenue. ($177B vs $500B) Saying Walmart is struggling against Amazon is only true for online sales. Walmart is playing catch up with online sales (with mixed results) but the demographics the two companies cater to aren't precisely the same ones so it's unclear how much that will matter in the long run. Amazon will have a hard time displacing Walmart in rural communities and with many of your typical Walmart shoppers. Retail is a big industry so there is certainly room for both of them.
Just as these big box stores dominated the last decade, are now their former self.
I think declaration of the collective death of the big box stores is premature. Some have gone bust but others are doing just fine. The pressure from Amazon through online sales is forcing a lot of them to change in ways that are positive for you and me.
There are plenty of other forces ready to unseat Amazons spot.
Amazon may be successful in everything from cloud computing to groceries to electronic devices to selling just about everything under Bezos, but one has to wonder if the next leader can keep it all going without cracks forming.
I think Amazon is likely to start seeing problems when Bezos is out of the picture similar to Apple without Jobs or possibly someday Berkshire Hathaway without Warren Buffet. Amazon is kicking ass but Bezos has the authority to do a lot of things most public company CEOs can't do because he owns a lot of the company and has the track record to tell investors to get bent if they don't like his quarterly results. The next guy isn't likely to have that option to anywhere near the same degree. Tim Cook seems to be doing a credible job as CEO from a financial standpoint but he doesn't have the authority (or skill set) to try some of the stuff Jobs managed - especially regarding product design. I suspect Elon Musk's companies stand a good chance of running into headwinds without their Dear Leader.
It's late, but I initially interpreted this to be precision and thought how much more precise do I need it? Isn't it precise to within a few feet already?
It varies but more precision is useful. A lot of tools you probably use routinely like the navigation system in your car could be made simpler and better if they didn't have to guess your location much of the time. The GPS in my car doesn't actually know for sure if I'm on a road much of the time but it guesses based on various clues (direction and speed of travel among them). But it's wrong sometimes. My house is about 1000 meters from the road my driveway connects to but it's close to another road on the back side of my house. So when I do route finding it guesses incorrectly that I'm going to take this other road and adds about 2 kilometers to my route until I get away from my driveway. I've often been traveling down a service road next to a highway and the GPS thinks (guesses really) that I'm on the highway even though I'm not and it screws up the route because of that fact. In some cases I'm only 5-10 meters away from the highway but that's enough to be a problem sometimes.
Of course being precisely wrong is generally worse than being approximately correct.
But accuracy is different.
Accuracy is different. Standard joke about the difference. A statistician is shooting arrows at a target. He clusters 6 arrows in a 1 inch circle a foot to the left of the target. He then shoots another 6 arrows in a 1 inch circle to the right of the target and then yells "Bullseye!". Each cluster is precise - precision means repeatable results. Both clusters together are accurate. Accuracy is the average of the results in relation to the target you are trying to hit. You can have great accuracy without great precision or great precision without great accuracy. The trick is having both.
If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years.
That's not quite true unless you are using a rather narrow definition of corporate lifespan. They might only be at the top of their game for 20-30 years but once they get to a certain size they rarely actually die completely in the sense of bankruptcy. They just tend to get absorbed into other companies or shift to a less prominent place in the market. Go look at any company in the Fortune 500. Most of them have been around a LOT longer than 30 years. Apple and Microsoft are already older than 30 years and are unlikely to go away any time soon. Yahoo is/was close to 25 years old as a standalone company but it isn't actually gone, it just got absorbed into another company and that's fairly normal. Amazon has reached sufficient scale that they'd have to do something remarkably stupid to go bankrupt or there would have to be some sort of techtonic shift in the marketplace. Also please recall that Amazon was founded in 1994 so it's already 25 years old and most of that time could properly be described as a large company.
You have to remember that large companies are the ones that survived. The companies that go away before 30 years are the ones that didn't so there is something of a surviviorship bias in play here. It's entirely plausible that Amazon won't be a standalone company 20 years from now but it's pretty unlikely the company will disappear completely.
Blaming C/C++ for that is like blaming water for drowning, and saying we'd be safer if we replaced all water with Gatorade, since nobody's ever drown in Gatorade.
I'm not blaming C/C++. Those languages are what they are and there is a lot of good that comes with the problems. I'm blaming programmers for using those languages for use cases that don't really require them or using them when they don't fully understand what they are doing. If C/C++ are truly the best/only way to properly solve a problem then it makes perfect sense to use them. But like with many things their biggest asset is also their biggest liability. Having total flexibility and minimal/no safety net means that the problems we are discussing here become inevitable if used inappropriately. You are quite right that the attack surface is huge so it makes sense to mitigate that problem by using tools with a smaller attack surface whenever feasible.
Sure you can have problems in other languages too. Nobody should claim otherwise. But as a general principle I would argue that as a principle one should use the "safest" language for the use case possible. If that happens to be C/C++ then so be it but it seems obvious that programmers are using C/C++ in many cases because that's the language they know best and we have an "have a hammer so every problem becomes a nail" situation. I think in many cases we have a lot of programmers who are ill equipped to handle the amount of flexibility and power C/C++ grant. Think of it like handing the keys to a Corvette to a new driver - they just haven't learned how to properly handle that sort of power yet and some never really will.
How did we get into the state of Fascism so advanced, a private enterprise needs government's permission to offer services to other private enterprises?
If you think this is fascism, you have NO idea what that word means.
Anyway the answer to your idiotic question is in the Constitution, specifically the bits about interstate commerce. When those services involved common spaces of finite quantity (like radio frequencies) you need an independent regulator to make sure the Tragedy of the Commons does not occur. We codified this into the Constitution precisely for circumstances like this.
Being a private enterprise doesn't mean you get to do anything you want without limitation regardless of the impact on your fellow citizens.
It's Interesting that the approval by a bureaucratic agency in a single nation is all that's required to make significant use of the finite orbit of all the World.
You have a better idea? One that actually could be accomplished?
America doesn't own space. What right do they have to give permission anyway? Space belongs to all of us.
We regulate access to common spaces so idiots like you don't ruin it for everyone else. Please go study the concept of tragedy of the commons. You want to launch a rocket from US territory? Then the US government is going to have a few questions on the behalf of the citizens of the US. You can launch from somewhere else if you have the means but don't be surprised when other governments have similar questions.
I mean "USians" of course, not America, because America is a continent, not a country.
Please recall what the "A" in USA stands for. You see any other countries with that word in the name of their country? Were you confused at all about what someone is saying when they say "American"? No you were not so take your trolling elsewhere.
You do realize that you could pretty much replace "C/C++" with any language that has that level of access, usability, and flexibility, right?
You do realize rather few use cases actually need that level of access and flexibility? A LOT of code is written in C/C++ that definitely does not need to be and probably should not be. Limitations are not always a bad thing and its rather rare that a programmer is going to run into a problem that only C/C++ can solve.
The problem isn't that C/C++ don't have good uses. The problem is that they are used WAY too often for problems that don't truly require what they offer. When a decision is made to use C/C++ there are certain categories of bugs like the ones here that are absolutely, positively, going to happen some percent of the time. The solution is to use a different and safer programming tool whenever possible. Just because you can do it with C doesn't mean you automatically should.
I expect that there are any number of developers who would be happy to address those issues if their managers would only put enough time into the schedule to do so
This would account for a percentage of the problem but your argument is something of a cop out because it ignores all the other parts of the problem. You can give programmers all the time and resources in the world and if they used C/C++ these bugs still occur. People are imperfect and they make mistakes. Many programmers are inexperienced and don't know any better. These problems have been known about for decades and yet they still occur even with projects where there are no time deadlines like many open source projects.
C/C++ are important for some things. Experienced developers know exactly when and how they should be used
A) Experienced developers do not always use them in appropriate circumstances B) Not all programming is done by experienced programmers C) One doesn't get to be an experienced programmer with C/C++ without working with the tools and making a lot of mistakes. D) Experienced programmers still generate bugs and security holes E) Tools that require the programmer to catch 100% of a known problem with known solutions are bad tools F) This problem with C and C++ has been known about and routinely ignored for decades. G) It is screamingly clear that training will not resolve this problem as a general proposition
We have a bunch of sloppy code, written in a hurry, often by programmers who didn't know what they were doing, built over decades with tools which allow sloppy coding practices to occur. Sure there are occasionally reasons to work without the safety net but these are the exceptions that should prove the rule.
Fusion reactors are still generating neutrons.. activation is still a problem. There must be at least some radioactive crap that can leak out and make the evening news.
There is some but it's far less of a problem than with fission reactors. The half lives of the waste products are short and there isn't much high level waste to begin with. In the event of problems the reactor shuts down almost immediately and there is no residual heat to cause the sorts of problems we see with fission reactor failures. Additionally fusion reactors do not contribute to weapons proliferation either. Basically fusion power is pretty much the holy grail of power generation if we can figure out how to do it. It's got huge upside, minimal dangers, essentially zero emissions or problems with carbon footprint, the fuel is not renewable but is so plentiful it doesn't matter, etc.
I'm sure some idiot news organizations will go all chicken little the first time a fusion reactor has a problem but the reality is that it's close to the safest power source we know of if we can make it work.
Most science ministers lack a science degree and there have certainly been some decidedly uneducated education ministers.
We have both of those currently here in the US.
Defence ministers have rarely served in the armed forces and we once had a Chancellor of the Exchequer who could not balance his credit card.
Speaking as a certified accountant I can definitively say that the skill sets for personal finance and for corporate or government finance bear very little resemblance to each other so I'm not really sure what your point about the Chancellor of the Exchequer is. Just because someone is irresponsible in their personal finances doesn't mean they are incompetent or irresponsible with their professional responsibilities.
And "balance his credit card"? I don't know anybody who actually reconciles (the proper term for it) their personal credit card statements in any great detail. Most people quickly glance over their statement for obvious incorrect charges and then call it a day. Companies reconcile their credit cards but individuals seldom do. I don't really see this as evidence of anything.
Isn't 12,000 --3,000,000 years a pretty big window?? Or is that par for the course?
The main reason for the wide window is just that they only recently discovered it and most of the geologic record needed to pin it down more accurately is buried under hundreds to thousands of feet of ice. It's going to take them a little time to gather the evidence and narrow the error bars.
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why is NASA subsidizing a commercial project..
You don't have any clue what NASA does do you? Research is their primary mission, specifically including public/private research partnerships. This is how NASA's research activities benefit the US. NASA research eventually gets turned over to the private sector and we all benefit from it - the term for this is technology transfer. This is exactly the sort of "subsidy" you want because no private company could justify the risk for such an exotic and unproven technology.
Also you do realize NASA doesn't build rockets or aircraft themselves right? They hire contractors to build and operate them including lockheed. NASA isn't an intergalactic bus and freight service and shouldn't be. Furthermore this is an X plane. The X stands for experimental. This is a public/private research project which if it works it will result in jobs and grow our economy. Call it a subsidy if you want but technology research like this is among the best uses for tax dollars there are. The internet that you are using right at this moment is a great example of a US government (DARPA) research project that resulted in a gigantic ROI to the American people.
i guess they DO have to much money?!!!!
Every dollar we spend on NASA results in somewhere between a 7X-14X return on that investment to our economy. Are you seriously arguing we should reduce our investment on something that has that much benefit? Especially when NASA's budget accounts for 0.5% of the federal budget?
Google allows users to export all of their data. Hasn't seemed to destroy Google.
A) Google definitely does NOT permit exporting all their data or even accessing all of it. Some yes but definitely not all.
B) Different business model and the information Google cares about is different than the information Facebook cares about.
C) Google's crown jewels are the quality of their searches and they aren't about to tell anyone key details of how they do that.
D) Meta-data about group tendencies are as valuable as personal information and they don't (and won't) give you access to that.
Perhaps the "Science Guy" should learn a little bit about Mars before talking about it.
He's the CEO of The Planetary Society which is concerned with among other things this very topic. I'm certain he's better informed about the topic than you are.
I'm not actually that much of a Mars advocate, and think the simplicity of using water there is overplayed (people talk about it like it's some sort of pure snow that you just pick up and melt, but it's (mostly) a rock-hard toxic brine mixed with sand and clay) - but come on, if you're going to talk about something, learn the basics.
Who is arguing it is simple? The argument is that it is necessary and possible if you want a manned Mars mission. Shipping water from Earth is simply unrealistic in any sort of large scale. There are a host of very serious technical problems in gathering and utilizing any resource on Mars and water is no exception.
No, the reason people don't live in Antarctica -- is because there are no jobs, nor the possibility of a job (even self employed) there.Look at the *North* Pole. There are resources. And there are loads of people living there. For research, for hunting, for fishing, and for mining/resources.
You think there are no resources in Antarctica of economic value? It's a freaking continent. The only reason they haven't been tapped yet is because it's a freaking miserably place and the cost of getting the resources is too EXPENSIVE to be worth the bother currently. So we have a gentleman's agreement between nation states for now but if the ice melts (as seems likely) or there is a shortage of a key resource (like oil) expect that agreement to fall apart rather quickly when the mining companies move in. The only real question is how cooperative the countries will be. If the US or Russia or China decides to mine Antarctica, nobody is really going to be able to stop them.
Well put. I find him annoying as fuck, because he plays such a bad cliche.
Well we cannot all be as cool as you. I'm sure you are much better and more impressive public speaker than he is. [/sarcasm] What were you expecting, a real life Buckaroo Banzai?
But, hey, if that's what sells to the cheap seats, go for it.
He has a following and is quite popular and he's a good teacher. What more do you really want? He's had a lot of success in getting people interested and informed about science who otherwise would not have been. Stop being so picky.
If you actually want to learn science as an adult, there are a ton of free lectures online from good schools, some directed specifically at older learners.
Great. There are a shit ton of people that aren't going to do that but they still need to understand some amount of science to be useful in a modern society. People vote and make policies about science and it's not good when they don't understand the science underlying the policies. Nye helps reach people that your online lectures will never touch. Yes a lot of what he talks about is superficial (and he knows that) but there is a need for that. He knows his stuff and does a good job.
Bill Nye says the idea of Mars colonization and terraforming -- making a planet more Earth-like by modifying its atmosphere -- is science fiction.
Of course it is... for now anyway. It's so absurdly beyond our current technology that it beggars the mind. If we cannot manage controlling the climate on Earth (Terra) we sure as hell aren't going to be able to do it on Mars.
Is it utterly impossible? Maybe. Maybe not. Certainly not worth worrying about by anyone currently living. We maybe could feasibly colonize Mars within my lifetime in a very basic way. But terraforming it will take thousands of years and it will be hundreds at best before we achieve a sufficient technological sophistication to even ponder the idea seriously. I could see us inhabiting Mars but I think it's highly unrealistic to seriously try to turn the entire planet into some sort of garden. The energy requirements and economics alone should point out the folly of the idea.
Slate argues that Facebook "is a normal sleazy company now," saying the company "obscured its problems and fought dirty against its critics" -- but that now its failings are being publicly aired
"Now"? They have ALWAYS been a sleazy company from day one. There have literally been movies made about the lack of moral compass their founder has. Of course they fought dirty. Anyone who believes or believed otherwise is either naive or a moron.
Even Steve Wozniak has joined the critics, saying this week that Facebook should "stop putting money before morals," adding later that "I haven't seen them do one real thing."
Easy to say for the guy who made a fortune 30+ years ago and has been more or less coasting ever since then on his celebrity. Don't get me wrong, I like and respect the hell out of Woz but what has he done besides some charity work in the last 30 years that I should care about? It has no more credibility than me pointing out that Facebook lacks a moral compass - he just has a bigger megaphone. When Woz uses his fortune to actually build something bigger than his public image I'll take his opinion on the matter more seriously. Not to mention he hasn't exactly taken Apple to the woodshed for many of their ethics problems so I think we might have a glass house in play here.
Woz also suggested that Facebook should allow users to export their data so they could upload it onto competing social networks.
You know, Woz is seemingly a very decent but this is just almost weapons grade stupid. How about Woz tell Apple to drop all their patents and open source their software? Because that's the functional equivalent of what he is suggesting. He's telling Facebook to hand over the crown jewels of their empire which is data about their customers. Woz cannot possibly be dumb enough to believe that is a useful suggestion for anything other than for puffing up his own image.
I know exactly what they did.
Evidently not.
But apparently you don't, based on your "explanation".
Again, I can't tell if you are trolling or just ignorant. Either way what you said is demonstrably wrong.
Any individual Kibble balance will also deteriorate and be out of range of the others. There will also be differences in construction since no system is perfect. You might as well use the current method.
I have a hard time telling if you are a troll or just ignorant. What they did was they redefined Planck's constant to be a fixed number. So instead of measuring Planck's constant from an arbitrarily chosen value for the kilogram they measure the kilogram from an (sort of) arbitrarily chosen Planck's constant.
This is good, and very important. But exciting?
To people who deal with precise measurements yes it is very exciting. Maybe not to you but certainly to some of us.
Basically what they did was they defined Planck's constant to be a fixed value pretty close the the calculated number previously used. So instead of calculating Planck's constant from an arbitrarily defined kilogram they define the kilogram (and a few other constants) from an arbitrarily defined Planck's constant. This takes the error bars away from Planck's constant and the other fundamental measurements fall out naturally as a result to precisely defined and fixed numbers.
Now today Amazon is bigger then Walmart and they are struggling to fight for competition with Amazon.
Depends on how you define "bigger". Amazon is bigger by market cap but only about a third of the size by revenue. ($177B vs $500B) Saying Walmart is struggling against Amazon is only true for online sales. Walmart is playing catch up with online sales (with mixed results) but the demographics the two companies cater to aren't precisely the same ones so it's unclear how much that will matter in the long run. Amazon will have a hard time displacing Walmart in rural communities and with many of your typical Walmart shoppers. Retail is a big industry so there is certainly room for both of them.
Just as these big box stores dominated the last decade, are now their former self.
I think declaration of the collective death of the big box stores is premature. Some have gone bust but others are doing just fine. The pressure from Amazon through online sales is forcing a lot of them to change in ways that are positive for you and me.
There are plenty of other forces ready to unseat Amazons spot.
Really? What are they? Nobody else seems to know.
Amazon may be successful in everything from cloud computing to groceries to electronic devices to selling just about everything under Bezos, but one has to wonder if the next leader can keep it all going without cracks forming.
I think Amazon is likely to start seeing problems when Bezos is out of the picture similar to Apple without Jobs or possibly someday Berkshire Hathaway without Warren Buffet. Amazon is kicking ass but Bezos has the authority to do a lot of things most public company CEOs can't do because he owns a lot of the company and has the track record to tell investors to get bent if they don't like his quarterly results. The next guy isn't likely to have that option to anywhere near the same degree. Tim Cook seems to be doing a credible job as CEO from a financial standpoint but he doesn't have the authority (or skill set) to try some of the stuff Jobs managed - especially regarding product design. I suspect Elon Musk's companies stand a good chance of running into headwinds without their Dear Leader.
It's late, but I initially interpreted this to be precision and thought how much more precise do I need it? Isn't it precise to within a few feet already?
It varies but more precision is useful. A lot of tools you probably use routinely like the navigation system in your car could be made simpler and better if they didn't have to guess your location much of the time. The GPS in my car doesn't actually know for sure if I'm on a road much of the time but it guesses based on various clues (direction and speed of travel among them). But it's wrong sometimes. My house is about 1000 meters from the road my driveway connects to but it's close to another road on the back side of my house. So when I do route finding it guesses incorrectly that I'm going to take this other road and adds about 2 kilometers to my route until I get away from my driveway. I've often been traveling down a service road next to a highway and the GPS thinks (guesses really) that I'm on the highway even though I'm not and it screws up the route because of that fact. In some cases I'm only 5-10 meters away from the highway but that's enough to be a problem sometimes.
Of course being precisely wrong is generally worse than being approximately correct.
But accuracy is different.
Accuracy is different. Standard joke about the difference. A statistician is shooting arrows at a target. He clusters 6 arrows in a 1 inch circle a foot to the left of the target. He then shoots another 6 arrows in a 1 inch circle to the right of the target and then yells "Bullseye!". Each cluster is precise - precision means repeatable results. Both clusters together are accurate. Accuracy is the average of the results in relation to the target you are trying to hit. You can have great accuracy without great precision or great precision without great accuracy. The trick is having both.
If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be 30-plus years, not a hundred-plus years.
That's not quite true unless you are using a rather narrow definition of corporate lifespan. They might only be at the top of their game for 20-30 years but once they get to a certain size they rarely actually die completely in the sense of bankruptcy. They just tend to get absorbed into other companies or shift to a less prominent place in the market. Go look at any company in the Fortune 500. Most of them have been around a LOT longer than 30 years. Apple and Microsoft are already older than 30 years and are unlikely to go away any time soon. Yahoo is/was close to 25 years old as a standalone company but it isn't actually gone, it just got absorbed into another company and that's fairly normal. Amazon has reached sufficient scale that they'd have to do something remarkably stupid to go bankrupt or there would have to be some sort of techtonic shift in the marketplace. Also please recall that Amazon was founded in 1994 so it's already 25 years old and most of that time could properly be described as a large company.
You have to remember that large companies are the ones that survived. The companies that go away before 30 years are the ones that didn't so there is something of a surviviorship bias in play here. It's entirely plausible that Amazon won't be a standalone company 20 years from now but it's pretty unlikely the company will disappear completely.
Blaming C/C++ for that is like blaming water for drowning, and saying we'd be safer if we replaced all water with Gatorade, since nobody's ever drown in Gatorade.
I'm not blaming C/C++. Those languages are what they are and there is a lot of good that comes with the problems. I'm blaming programmers for using those languages for use cases that don't really require them or using them when they don't fully understand what they are doing. If C/C++ are truly the best/only way to properly solve a problem then it makes perfect sense to use them. But like with many things their biggest asset is also their biggest liability. Having total flexibility and minimal/no safety net means that the problems we are discussing here become inevitable if used inappropriately. You are quite right that the attack surface is huge so it makes sense to mitigate that problem by using tools with a smaller attack surface whenever feasible.
Sure you can have problems in other languages too. Nobody should claim otherwise. But as a general principle I would argue that as a principle one should use the "safest" language for the use case possible. If that happens to be C/C++ then so be it but it seems obvious that programmers are using C/C++ in many cases because that's the language they know best and we have an "have a hammer so every problem becomes a nail" situation. I think in many cases we have a lot of programmers who are ill equipped to handle the amount of flexibility and power C/C++ grant. Think of it like handing the keys to a Corvette to a new driver - they just haven't learned how to properly handle that sort of power yet and some never really will.
How did we get into the state of Fascism so advanced, a private enterprise needs government's permission to offer services to other private enterprises?
If you think this is fascism, you have NO idea what that word means.
Anyway the answer to your idiotic question is in the Constitution, specifically the bits about interstate commerce. When those services involved common spaces of finite quantity (like radio frequencies) you need an independent regulator to make sure the Tragedy of the Commons does not occur. We codified this into the Constitution precisely for circumstances like this.
Being a private enterprise doesn't mean you get to do anything you want without limitation regardless of the impact on your fellow citizens.
It's Interesting that the approval by a bureaucratic agency in a single nation is all that's required to make significant use of the finite orbit of all the World.
You have a better idea? One that actually could be accomplished?
America doesn't own space. What right do they have to give permission anyway? Space belongs to all of us.
We regulate access to common spaces so idiots like you don't ruin it for everyone else. Please go study the concept of tragedy of the commons. You want to launch a rocket from US territory? Then the US government is going to have a few questions on the behalf of the citizens of the US. You can launch from somewhere else if you have the means but don't be surprised when other governments have similar questions.
I mean "USians" of course, not America, because America is a continent, not a country.
Please recall what the "A" in USA stands for. You see any other countries with that word in the name of their country? Were you confused at all about what someone is saying when they say "American"? No you were not so take your trolling elsewhere.
You do realize that you could pretty much replace "C/C++" with any language that has that level of access, usability, and flexibility, right?
You do realize rather few use cases actually need that level of access and flexibility? A LOT of code is written in C/C++ that definitely does not need to be and probably should not be. Limitations are not always a bad thing and its rather rare that a programmer is going to run into a problem that only C/C++ can solve.
The problem isn't that C/C++ don't have good uses. The problem is that they are used WAY too often for problems that don't truly require what they offer. When a decision is made to use C/C++ there are certain categories of bugs like the ones here that are absolutely, positively, going to happen some percent of the time. The solution is to use a different and safer programming tool whenever possible. Just because you can do it with C doesn't mean you automatically should.
I expect that there are any number of developers who would be happy to address those issues if their managers would only put enough time into the schedule to do so
This would account for a percentage of the problem but your argument is something of a cop out because it ignores all the other parts of the problem. You can give programmers all the time and resources in the world and if they used C/C++ these bugs still occur. People are imperfect and they make mistakes. Many programmers are inexperienced and don't know any better. These problems have been known about for decades and yet they still occur even with projects where there are no time deadlines like many open source projects.
C/C++ are important for some things. Experienced developers know exactly when and how they should be used
A) Experienced developers do not always use them in appropriate circumstances
B) Not all programming is done by experienced programmers
C) One doesn't get to be an experienced programmer with C/C++ without working with the tools and making a lot of mistakes.
D) Experienced programmers still generate bugs and security holes
E) Tools that require the programmer to catch 100% of a known problem with known solutions are bad tools
F) This problem with C and C++ has been known about and routinely ignored for decades.
G) It is screamingly clear that training will not resolve this problem as a general proposition
We have a bunch of sloppy code, written in a hurry, often by programmers who didn't know what they were doing, built over decades with tools which allow sloppy coding practices to occur. Sure there are occasionally reasons to work without the safety net but these are the exceptions that should prove the rule.
Fusion reactors are still generating neutrons.. activation is still a problem. There must be at least some radioactive crap that can leak out and make the evening news.
There is some but it's far less of a problem than with fission reactors. The half lives of the waste products are short and there isn't much high level waste to begin with. In the event of problems the reactor shuts down almost immediately and there is no residual heat to cause the sorts of problems we see with fission reactor failures. Additionally fusion reactors do not contribute to weapons proliferation either. Basically fusion power is pretty much the holy grail of power generation if we can figure out how to do it. It's got huge upside, minimal dangers, essentially zero emissions or problems with carbon footprint, the fuel is not renewable but is so plentiful it doesn't matter, etc.
I'm sure some idiot news organizations will go all chicken little the first time a fusion reactor has a problem but the reality is that it's close to the safest power source we know of if we can make it work.
Most science ministers lack a science degree and there have certainly been some decidedly uneducated education ministers.
We have both of those currently here in the US.
Defence ministers have rarely served in the armed forces and we once had a Chancellor of the Exchequer who could not balance his credit card.
Speaking as a certified accountant I can definitively say that the skill sets for personal finance and for corporate or government finance bear very little resemblance to each other so I'm not really sure what your point about the Chancellor of the Exchequer is. Just because someone is irresponsible in their personal finances doesn't mean they are incompetent or irresponsible with their professional responsibilities.
And "balance his credit card"? I don't know anybody who actually reconciles (the proper term for it) their personal credit card statements in any great detail. Most people quickly glance over their statement for obvious incorrect charges and then call it a day. Companies reconcile their credit cards but individuals seldom do. I don't really see this as evidence of anything.
Isn't 12,000 --3,000,000 years a pretty big window?? Or is that par for the course?
The main reason for the wide window is just that they only recently discovered it and most of the geologic record needed to pin it down more accurately is buried under hundreds to thousands of feet of ice. It's going to take them a little time to gather the evidence and narrow the error bars.