Speaking as a team lead for tier 2 support group, that's part of the premium service desk for managed IT outsourcing (ASA 30 seconds, 70% FTR kind of thing), this made me laugh my butt off.
Yes, we get crap-tons of calls from users about mobile devices. Tom is out of touch with "real" users, he's suffering (benefiting?) from massive selection bias here. His sample base is nowhere near representative of your average corporate IT user.
Thanks for writing that for me, because that's pretty much what I was here to say. Since you got that out of the way though, that brings my attention to another point. Those pieces of information that he imagines customers finding via search tools? Who does he thinks writes those things? Programmers write code. Technical writers write manuals for code. Who writes the solutions to the problems that both these groups overlook? Why, problem solving end-user support staff do that. If you break that staff down between on-site support (aka your "desktop" team) and off-site support (aka the Service Desk/Helpdesk) it's mainly the off-site people who write those articles. What this deranged C-level imagines is that "Tier 0" support invents itself spontaneously.
We libertarians and conservatives understand this, progressives see a problem to be fixed.
Bzzt. You use the word "progressive" far too broadly. Socialists (whether secular or religious in nature) are serious about re-engineering the economic rules of order with the goal of bending the natural curve of wealth distribution. We could argue the relative merits of trying to do that, but that's not really why I'm here.
There are a lot of people, like myself, who self-identify as being on the "left" but aren't socialists. The problem with laissez-faire capitalism is what happens with that minority percentage at the top. Once there, they regularly engage in two behaviors that I believe needs to be controlled:
1. Many engage in their own re-engineering effort, designed to lock themselves (and their progeny) into position at the top and deny the social and economic mobility that a free market economy is supposd to enable.
2. Some enjoy pissing on the heads of those further down the curve for their own entertainment.
Libertarians suffer the same delusions that all flavors of anarchists experience, the notion that any central authority is inherently worse than letting human nature run it's course. It's just wrong. There will always be a certain % of humanity that are unredeemable assholes. It is in the best interests of everybody else that we negotiate a consensus framework of socioeconomic limitations to keep those bastards in check.
Seems like music fans, music critics, and the industry itself are obsessed with categorizing artists and drawing attention to the similarities between them, real or imagined. A music service like Pandora is completely founded on this premise, and it's success suggests that for better or for worse, this is the way people relate to music. Does it bug you that your music is often lumped in with artists as stylistically diverse as Weird Al, the Barenaked Ladies, and Ween, or do you find that good company?
Artists don't always see eye-to-eye with their audience. I've heard anecdotes and stories from other artists where they expressed surprise that a piece that meant a tremendous amount to them was ignored by their audience, while a throwaway piece became immensely popular. Can you point to songs of albums that produced a reaction from your fans that was the opposite of what you expected?
1. Do populations that eat significantly more rice have significantly different LDL levels?
2. If not, are those populations less sensitive to the effects?
And just to mention here, why call it "white" rice in the summary? Same genes, whole grain or not. TDA doesn't suggest that white rice puts more microRNA into the bloodstream. It doesn't make a distinction anywhere.
In fact it is better and faster news than many people feared. It suggests a by-the-numbers path to return the Soyuz to service. In turn, this dramatically lowers the risk that we will need to evacuate the ISS and suffer any negative consequences associated with that.
(We now return you to this thread's excessively random spew.)
As has been pointed out in previous bitch-fests about this, it's a way to encourage a more diverse range of submissions by communicating to users that they are welcome to submit stories even if they're not part of the Slashdot Cabal. Of course, many hardcore nerds LOVE to be part of clique-ish cabals. So I assume you're one of those knee-jerk noob haters as well as an AC.
I would guess that the recent high frequency of "first time submitter" mentions is because this plan is ACTUALLY WORKING. Get over yourself.
Friend: "Look at this! It's Guiness! Real. Live. Irish. Guiness! And I got it.... at the [insert early 90's supermarket chain here]."
Me: "Oh I've heard of that stuff. Is it really all that special?"
Friend: "What? Philistine! Look at this stuff. It's blacker than your soul. You could eat this for lunch. Many Irish do. It takes your girly American lager out back and beats it with a 2x4. Look, even the can has this automagical thingy inside it to reproduce the legendary foamy head of a real draft Guiness. This is as close as you're going to get to Ireland without a passport. Here, try some." (Friend pours small amount in a glass, jealously hoarding the rest of his six-pack)
Me: (taking a slow sip) "Hmm... yeah. That is different. Not as bitter. But... hmm... it kinda reminds me of soy sauce."
We can only simulate what we fully understand; beyond that, we're just guessing. This will do something between 'jack' and 'squat' for testing things like the effect of novel pharmaceuticals. There are too many unknowns when it comes to cellular biology.
There's only one use case in scientific history that I know of where simulations have COMPLETELY supplanted experimentation, and that would be nuclear weapons testing, per the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. That treaty, and the necessary maintenance of our existing nuclear stockpile have done a lot to drive the supercomputing "arms race" in the last couple of decades.
The vRat is most certainly not going to replace the meat version, but it will provide an adjunctive tool. In the real world, biomedical research works at successively larger scales, beginning with in vivo (test tube) studies, then animal studies, then human trials, and finally meta-analyses of multiple human trials. Even within those general tiers, there are many specific differences in individual studies that help to drive a larger comprehensive picture. Advanced simulations of dynamic biological systems are not currently part of that regime like they are in say... mechanical engineering, but they will be eventually, and this is a step in that direction. Simulations will probably offer novel approaches to ask biomedical questions that are currently considered unanswerable, while also providing a lower-cost entry point to questions that might be very expensive to currently ask.
Look, here's Toyota's robot running. It's brief, but both feet do leave the floor for brief intervals. And instead of a support beam holding it to a fixed track, it uses this stuff called "feet" and a "sense of balance" to stay upright.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv35ItWLBBk
(and if it does, it will just spark a flash of evolutionary progression in impacted species, much like antibiotics have done for microbes.)
This seems like a good time to point out that one way of "sparking" evolutionary progression is killing off 95% of a population. Given the likelihood of homo sapiens counting among the "impacted species," I'd have to ask you if you like your odds?
It may sound like a great idea on the surface, but a leopard doesn't change its spots just because you give it a paycheck.
You're suggesting here that most (if not all) Black Hat attendees who might join the NSA are destined to betray the organization at some point? Either by embarassing the agency through extra-curricular activities or outright acts of treason? The short answer to that assertion is that you are underestimating both the people already in the NSA, and also underestimating the IT security community in general.
Black Hat != Bomb Throwing Anarchist, and NSA != Bush(II)-era political appointees.
So either the NSA are really fucking stupid or this is some sort of honeypot trap to target some specific (or maybe even non-specific) hackers and bust them on an espionage charge when they inevitably leak some fake secrets you give them after they become "employees."
Must. Resist. Grammar... flame. *whew* Okay so to summarize, your contention is that the only good reason for the NSA to recruit at Black Hat is as a "trap" of some sort for Black Hat attendees. Why if that weren't such a transparent, easily avoided ploy, you might have something there. Black Hat attendees who truly see themselves as enemies of the NSA aren't going to apply for jobs... unless they are foreign agents trying to infiltrate the organization. THOSE hypothetical people are going to apply for jobs at the NSA and other agencies no matter what happens at the Black Hat conference.
OTOH, there is a tremendous amount of technical talent at Black Hat focused on both the offensive and defensive ends of IT security. If you want to hire the best and the brightest, you go to where the best and the brightest hang out. If they don't want to talk to you, fine, but at least you tried. In some sense it would be irresponsible for the NSA to attend and not even bother trying to recruit because they just assume nobody would be interested. Especially because there are surely Black Hat attendees who would be thrilled to work for the NSA. Don't get me wrong. If your idea of being an el33+ h@x0r is demonstrating the size of your e-peen through acts of vandalism, you probably don't want to work for the NSA. Whatever nefarious things they might encourage, you don't get to brag about it after on Twitter. Likewise if you've already been radicalized politically, then you probably don't want their job offers either. Beyond those two subsets you've got whole categories of people who would have a different outlook on an NSA job. There are the wannabees who think cloak and dagger stuff is cool but wouldn't dream of comitting criminal acts. There are aging vets of prior hacker eras who have wives, and kids, and have worked all that "you're not the boss of me" stuff out of their system already. There are members of the "loyal opposition" who have specific objections to US govt. actions but not the US govt. itself.
If it's the latter, I'm impressed. Never seen anyone go that far with a honeypot operation. But maybe Anon and LulSec are making them desperate. Hell, maybe they're hoping they can just *luck* into busting some Anon/LulSec leaders by throwing a wide net.
So I guess it really comes down here to a question of who's more stupid--the NSA for thinking they can tame hackers or the hackers for possibly falling for a honeypot. I don't know which is the more scary possibility.
Anonymous and LulzSec aren't even on the NSA's radar. NSA != LE. The NSA is interested in the next Stuxnet, whether that is authoring it or defending against it. They're interested in the cell tower intercepting UAV that was Slashdotted earlier today. They're interested in encryption algorithms, data mining algorithms, and language translation algorithms. Anon+Lulz primary weapons (SQL injections, voluntary DDOS) are as interesting to the NSA as gasoline bombs and homemade silencers.
Another interesting statistic is that they cited polls claiming that 80% of software engineers say patents hurt their business and creativity. I know we've been repeating this to each other for years, but it's nice to see it backed up every now and then.
Well that statistic might be correlated to the 80% of software engineers leave/. comments.
1. Insular geek clique gets into a pissing match over software design. Software is taken back to alpha by the developers, and they give notice. The EFF propagates the developers own wishes to a wider audience.
2. Slashdot??? RTFA??? Wha???
3. EFF bashing profit!
It's not unusual for new bands to basically rip off the sounds of prior generations and foist them off on their peers as "original" but I didn't realize that astrophysicists did this as well!
Almost 20 years ago I had the chance to abuse listeners of my late night college radio show by playing tracks from "Music from the Galaxies," a CD of "songs" derived from the signal data of radio astronomy. The auteur behind this project was Italian astrophysicist Dr. Fiorella Terenzi, who aside from having dual PhD's in both musicology and astrophysics, was also smoking hot. She later collaborated work with nerd-pop hero Thomas Dolby for the soundtrack to one of those Amigas-on-LSD Mind's Eye video compilations.
As someone who really enjoys experimental and electronic music, I found Dr. Terenzi's album only somewhat listenable. As someone who enjoyes experimental and electronic music, and who also feels that science could stand to be sexed up a bit for the masses, I tried really hard to get into it and still couldn't manage to inflict it on my handful of listeners for more than a couple of weekends. Unless the Sun is dramatically funkier than Andromeda, or unless they've got a busty bombshell on their research team, I think they'll have a long time to wait before they can sign a record deal.
Generally speaking, there are parallels between Information Technology and governance, but it's not a 1:1 relationship of coding to legislating. Much legislating is better compared to the development of protocols and industry standards than it is to actual software. Congress has no control over the Federal Register, which is bassically the rulebook that the executive branch plays by. Indeed, in many cases laws just say "thou shalt achieve these goals" and the REAL software development happens in the federal bureaucracy where the implementation of those goals are actually designed and carried out.
But those metaphorical nitpicks aside, I think it's a worthy thing to hold the two systems up to each other and compare methodologies. I think each side would stand to learn a lot from each other. For example under the US Constitution the role of the Judiciary is to interpret the law, and even evaluate as to whether a given law is constitutional. This bears great superficial similarity to the process of Quality Assurance in software development... except that formal QA by the Judiciary only happens AFTER that code is rolled into production. Prior to publishing, laws are not required to go through pilot phases, there are no "test environments." There's just a period of "code peer review" as the bills get worked, reworked, and finally signed into law.
I wonder what it would be like if any new federal law had to be piloted in the authoring congressman's home state for a year before it rolled out to the rest of the country?
Myers-Briggs temperments broadly classify personalities into four categories based on how people perceive their surroundings and what motivates their behavior. It would be very interesting to see if the four classes of player they are observing also neatly fall into the sorting system of the Myers-Briggs model. If that proved to be true, then there would be a whole body of work game developers could use as the foundation for customizing player experiences.
With this research being a collaboration between the Australians and the Japanese, is there any wonder that it sounds like they borrowed a plot from Ghost in the Shell?
While there is a perfectly valid argument in suggesting that the private sector should be more involved in space exploration and development, your particular example of public-sector stupidity holds no water.
The "standard/metric" foulup you refer to is specifically a reference to the Mars Climate Orbiter that was lost in 1999 due to Lockheed Martin sending data to NASA in standard units where the NASA team receiving the data was expecting metric units.
I was working for LM at the time this occured. Even though we were an entirely different division of LM that had nothing to do with space exploration, we all felt collectively embarassed over this error. In the final postmortem of the event, I don't know how much blame falls on NASA's side of the fence, and how much falls to Lockheed Martin, but it is clear that the private sector is at least partially responsible for this mishap, if not more.
Furthermore, the Mars Climate Orbiter mission was part of a long series of missions that NASA designed under their revised "fast and cheap" philosophy they embraced in the 90s. The whole reason for that strategic shift in project design was to get more science done with less money, as well as distributing the financial risks of failure more widely. If you look at the Mars exploration projects of the last decade as a whole, then this strategy has been wildly successful with MCO only representing a single failure in an otherwise exemplary record. This is especially true with the Spirit and Opporunity projects, which have dramatically outlasted their original operating goals and have produced a fantastic ROI in space exploration terms.
So yes, lets have more X prizes, and private investments, and so forth. But simply regurgitating the idea that public sector projects are inherently inefficient and wasteful is a canard, and nothing more.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as a team lead for tier 2 support group, that's part of the premium service desk for managed IT outsourcing (ASA 30 seconds, 70% FTR kind of thing), this made me laugh my butt off.
Yes, we get crap-tons of calls from users about mobile devices. Tom is out of touch with "real" users, he's suffering (benefiting?) from massive selection bias here. His sample base is nowhere near representative of your average corporate IT user.
Thanks for writing that for me, because that's pretty much what I was here to say. Since you got that out of the way though, that brings my attention to another point. Those pieces of information that he imagines customers finding via search tools? Who does he thinks writes those things? Programmers write code. Technical writers write manuals for code. Who writes the solutions to the problems that both these groups overlook? Why, problem solving end-user support staff do that. If you break that staff down between on-site support (aka your "desktop" team) and off-site support (aka the Service Desk/Helpdesk) it's mainly the off-site people who write those articles. What this deranged C-level imagines is that "Tier 0" support invents itself spontaneously.
We libertarians and conservatives understand this, progressives see a problem to be fixed.
Bzzt. You use the word "progressive" far too broadly. Socialists (whether secular or religious in nature) are serious about re-engineering the economic rules of order with the goal of bending the natural curve of wealth distribution. We could argue the relative merits of trying to do that, but that's not really why I'm here.
There are a lot of people, like myself, who self-identify as being on the "left" but aren't socialists. The problem with laissez-faire capitalism is what happens with that minority percentage at the top. Once there, they regularly engage in two behaviors that I believe needs to be controlled:
1. Many engage in their own re-engineering effort, designed to lock themselves (and their progeny) into position at the top and deny the social and economic mobility that a free market economy is supposd to enable.
2. Some enjoy pissing on the heads of those further down the curve for their own entertainment.
Libertarians suffer the same delusions that all flavors of anarchists experience, the notion that any central authority is inherently worse than letting human nature run it's course. It's just wrong. There will always be a certain % of humanity that are unredeemable assholes. It is in the best interests of everybody else that we negotiate a consensus framework of socioeconomic limitations to keep those bastards in check.
Seems like music fans, music critics, and the industry itself are obsessed with categorizing artists and drawing attention to the similarities between them, real or imagined. A music service like Pandora is completely founded on this premise, and it's success suggests that for better or for worse, this is the way people relate to music. Does it bug you that your music is often lumped in with artists as stylistically diverse as Weird Al, the Barenaked Ladies, and Ween, or do you find that good company?
Artists don't always see eye-to-eye with their audience. I've heard anecdotes and stories from other artists where they expressed surprise that a piece that meant a tremendous amount to them was ignored by their audience, while a throwaway piece became immensely popular. Can you point to songs of albums that produced a reaction from your fans that was the opposite of what you expected?
Er, TFA..
2. If not, are those populations less sensitive to the effects?
And just to mention here, why call it "white" rice in the summary? Same genes, whole grain or not. TDA doesn't suggest that white rice puts more microRNA into the bloodstream. It doesn't make a distinction anywhere.
In fact it is better and faster news than many people feared. It suggests a by-the-numbers path to return the Soyuz to service. In turn, this dramatically lowers the risk that we will need to evacuate the ISS and suffer any negative consequences associated with that.
(We now return you to this thread's excessively random spew.)
As has been pointed out in previous bitch-fests about this, it's a way to encourage a more diverse range of submissions by communicating to users that they are welcome to submit stories even if they're not part of the Slashdot Cabal. Of course, many hardcore nerds LOVE to be part of clique-ish cabals. So I assume you're one of those knee-jerk noob haters as well as an AC. I would guess that the recent high frequency of "first time submitter" mentions is because this plan is ACTUALLY WORKING. Get over yourself.
This is Slashdot. Apple good, Google bad M-W-F. Google Good, Apple Bad on T-TH. They get weekends off.
FTFY.
(paraphrasing here, this was almost 20 years ago)
Friend: "Look at this! It's Guiness! Real. Live. Irish. Guiness! And I got it.... at the [insert early 90's supermarket chain here]."
Me: "Oh I've heard of that stuff. Is it really all that special?"
Friend: "What? Philistine! Look at this stuff. It's blacker than your soul. You could eat this for lunch. Many Irish do. It takes your girly American lager out back and beats it with a 2x4. Look, even the can has this automagical thingy inside it to reproduce the legendary foamy head of a real draft Guiness. This is as close as you're going to get to Ireland without a passport. Here, try some." (Friend pours small amount in a glass, jealously hoarding the rest of his six-pack)
Me: (taking a slow sip) "Hmm... yeah. That is different. Not as bitter. But... hmm... it kinda reminds me of soy sauce."
Friend: "WHAT?!?!?! You're crazy."
Me: "No. Seriously. Check it out."
Friend: (takes his own slow sip). "..."
(Former) Friend: "DAMN YOU!"
http://www.gocomics.com//nonsequitur/2011/07/08
We can only simulate what we fully understand; beyond that, we're just guessing. This will do something between 'jack' and 'squat' for testing things like the effect of novel pharmaceuticals. There are too many unknowns when it comes to cellular biology.
There's only one use case in scientific history that I know of where simulations have COMPLETELY supplanted experimentation, and that would be nuclear weapons testing, per the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. That treaty, and the necessary maintenance of our existing nuclear stockpile have done a lot to drive the supercomputing "arms race" in the last couple of decades. The vRat is most certainly not going to replace the meat version, but it will provide an adjunctive tool. In the real world, biomedical research works at successively larger scales, beginning with in vivo (test tube) studies, then animal studies, then human trials, and finally meta-analyses of multiple human trials. Even within those general tiers, there are many specific differences in individual studies that help to drive a larger comprehensive picture. Advanced simulations of dynamic biological systems are not currently part of that regime like they are in say... mechanical engineering, but they will be eventually, and this is a step in that direction. Simulations will probably offer novel approaches to ask biomedical questions that are currently considered unanswerable, while also providing a lower-cost entry point to questions that might be very expensive to currently ask.
Look, here's Toyota's robot running. It's brief, but both feet do leave the floor for brief intervals. And instead of a support beam holding it to a fixed track, it uses this stuff called "feet" and a "sense of balance" to stay upright. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv35ItWLBBk
(and if it does, it will just spark a flash of evolutionary progression in impacted species, much like antibiotics have done for microbes.)
This seems like a good time to point out that one way of "sparking" evolutionary progression is killing off 95% of a population. Given the likelihood of homo sapiens counting among the "impacted species," I'd have to ask you if you like your odds?
Everybody wants to dunk on the other team's basket, but nobody wants to play defense.
It may sound like a great idea on the surface, but a leopard doesn't change its spots just because you give it a paycheck.
You're suggesting here that most (if not all) Black Hat attendees who might join the NSA are destined to betray the organization at some point? Either by embarassing the agency through extra-curricular activities or outright acts of treason? The short answer to that assertion is that you are underestimating both the people already in the NSA, and also underestimating the IT security community in general. Black Hat != Bomb Throwing Anarchist, and NSA != Bush(II)-era political appointees.
So either the NSA are really fucking stupid or this is some sort of honeypot trap to target some specific (or maybe even non-specific) hackers and bust them on an espionage charge when they inevitably leak some fake secrets you give them after they become "employees."
Must. Resist. Grammar... flame. *whew* Okay so to summarize, your contention is that the only good reason for the NSA to recruit at Black Hat is as a "trap" of some sort for Black Hat attendees. Why if that weren't such a transparent, easily avoided ploy, you might have something there. Black Hat attendees who truly see themselves as enemies of the NSA aren't going to apply for jobs... unless they are foreign agents trying to infiltrate the organization. THOSE hypothetical people are going to apply for jobs at the NSA and other agencies no matter what happens at the Black Hat conference. OTOH, there is a tremendous amount of technical talent at Black Hat focused on both the offensive and defensive ends of IT security. If you want to hire the best and the brightest, you go to where the best and the brightest hang out. If they don't want to talk to you, fine, but at least you tried. In some sense it would be irresponsible for the NSA to attend and not even bother trying to recruit because they just assume nobody would be interested. Especially because there are surely Black Hat attendees who would be thrilled to work for the NSA. Don't get me wrong. If your idea of being an el33+ h@x0r is demonstrating the size of your e-peen through acts of vandalism, you probably don't want to work for the NSA. Whatever nefarious things they might encourage, you don't get to brag about it after on Twitter. Likewise if you've already been radicalized politically, then you probably don't want their job offers either. Beyond those two subsets you've got whole categories of people who would have a different outlook on an NSA job. There are the wannabees who think cloak and dagger stuff is cool but wouldn't dream of comitting criminal acts. There are aging vets of prior hacker eras who have wives, and kids, and have worked all that "you're not the boss of me" stuff out of their system already. There are members of the "loyal opposition" who have specific objections to US govt. actions but not the US govt. itself.
If it's the latter, I'm impressed. Never seen anyone go that far with a honeypot operation. But maybe Anon and LulSec are making them desperate. Hell, maybe they're hoping they can just *luck* into busting some Anon/LulSec leaders by throwing a wide net.
So I guess it really comes down here to a question of who's more stupid--the NSA for thinking they can tame hackers or the hackers for possibly falling for a honeypot. I don't know which is the more scary possibility.
Anonymous and LulzSec aren't even on the NSA's radar. NSA != LE. The NSA is interested in the next Stuxnet, whether that is authoring it or defending against it. They're interested in the cell tower intercepting UAV that was Slashdotted earlier today. They're interested in encryption algorithms, data mining algorithms, and language translation algorithms. Anon+Lulz primary weapons (SQL injections, voluntary DDOS) are as interesting to the NSA as gasoline bombs and homemade silencers.
Another interesting statistic is that they cited polls claiming that 80% of software engineers say patents hurt their business and creativity. I know we've been repeating this to each other for years, but it's nice to see it backed up every now and then.
Well that statistic might be correlated to the 80% of software engineers leave /. comments.
1. Insular geek clique gets into a pissing match over software design. Software is taken back to alpha by the developers, and they give notice. The EFF propagates the developers own wishes to a wider audience. 2. Slashdot??? RTFA??? Wha??? 3. EFF bashing profit!
It's not unusual for new bands to basically rip off the sounds of prior generations and foist them off on their peers as "original" but I didn't realize that astrophysicists did this as well! Almost 20 years ago I had the chance to abuse listeners of my late night college radio show by playing tracks from "Music from the Galaxies," a CD of "songs" derived from the signal data of radio astronomy. The auteur behind this project was Italian astrophysicist Dr. Fiorella Terenzi, who aside from having dual PhD's in both musicology and astrophysics, was also smoking hot. She later collaborated work with nerd-pop hero Thomas Dolby for the soundtrack to one of those Amigas-on-LSD Mind's Eye video compilations.
As someone who really enjoys experimental and electronic music, I found Dr. Terenzi's album only somewhat listenable. As someone who enjoyes experimental and electronic music, and who also feels that science could stand to be sexed up a bit for the masses, I tried really hard to get into it and still couldn't manage to inflict it on my handful of listeners for more than a couple of weekends. Unless the Sun is dramatically funkier than Andromeda, or unless they've got a busty bombshell on their research team, I think they'll have a long time to wait before they can sign a record deal.
But those metaphorical nitpicks aside, I think it's a worthy thing to hold the two systems up to each other and compare methodologies. I think each side would stand to learn a lot from each other. For example under the US Constitution the role of the Judiciary is to interpret the law, and even evaluate as to whether a given law is constitutional. This bears great superficial similarity to the process of Quality Assurance in software development... except that formal QA by the Judiciary only happens AFTER that code is rolled into production. Prior to publishing, laws are not required to go through pilot phases, there are no "test environments." There's just a period of "code peer review" as the bills get worked, reworked, and finally signed into law.
I wonder what it would be like if any new federal law had to be piloted in the authoring congressman's home state for a year before it rolled out to the rest of the country?
A system for delivering a wide variety of data discreetly over SMTP based email systems?
You mean, UUENCODE?
Myers-Briggs temperments broadly classify personalities into four categories based on how people perceive their surroundings and what motivates their behavior. It would be very interesting to see if the four classes of player they are observing also neatly fall into the sorting system of the Myers-Briggs model. If that proved to be true, then there would be a whole body of work game developers could use as the foundation for customizing player experiences.
With this research being a collaboration between the Australians and the Japanese, is there any wonder that it sounds like they borrowed a plot from Ghost in the Shell?
The "standard/metric" foulup you refer to is specifically a reference to the Mars Climate Orbiter that was lost in 1999 due to Lockheed Martin sending data to NASA in standard units where the NASA team receiving the data was expecting metric units.
I was working for LM at the time this occured. Even though we were an entirely different division of LM that had nothing to do with space exploration, we all felt collectively embarassed over this error. In the final postmortem of the event, I don't know how much blame falls on NASA's side of the fence, and how much falls to Lockheed Martin, but it is clear that the private sector is at least partially responsible for this mishap, if not more.
Furthermore, the Mars Climate Orbiter mission was part of a long series of missions that NASA designed under their revised "fast and cheap" philosophy they embraced in the 90s. The whole reason for that strategic shift in project design was to get more science done with less money, as well as distributing the financial risks of failure more widely. If you look at the Mars exploration projects of the last decade as a whole, then this strategy has been wildly successful with MCO only representing a single failure in an otherwise exemplary record. This is especially true with the Spirit and Opporunity projects, which have dramatically outlasted their original operating goals and have produced a fantastic ROI in space exploration terms.
So yes, lets have more X prizes, and private investments, and so forth. But simply regurgitating the idea that public sector projects are inherently inefficient and wasteful is a canard, and nothing more.