I remember my whole family being excited, but my mom was the one who was intrigued by science.
At the time my folks perceived it as a triumph for humankind.
My mom's take on it was that it meant all the pictures of those wheel-shaped space stations... Arthur C. Clarke... Werner von Braun on the Disneyland "Tomorrowland" segments... Willy Ley... the Chesley Bonestell murals in the Hayden Planetarium... the George Pal "Conquest of Space" movie (ugh)... (that one might have been after Sputnik)......it was all real, it was all actually going to happen.
I'm not sure when the OMG-they've-seized-the-high-ground, the Russians can drop atom bombs on us stuff started to sink in. Probably some Americans saw it in cold war jingoistic terms from the beginning. Not my family, though. Although it was sort of embarrassing when all the Project Vanguard rockets kept crashing.
Another great historic turning point I remember because almost nobody else noticed it or cared about it: the first Telstar satellite television transmiion. I was at summer school at the time, didn't have my own TV, and had to search around a bit to find a lounge at the school that had one. I tried to interest my techie friends in watching it with me, but nobody cared. The program itself was the most awful thing you can imagine, "entertainment" as organized by government officials. Lots of talking heads. Some boring French dancers, I don't remember what-all.
Telstar. A great moment in history... and all that same out of it was a mediocre pop instrumental number.
A new manager has just arrived. He found the old product name confusing.
Unfortunately, they're confusing for a good reason: the product line is complex.
So, he'll impose a new set of names on it. He will think the new names are less confusing, because they make sense to him. And he says it will make things less confusing for customers, because he projects his own feeling onto his customers. And perhaps the new names really are a little less confusing.
But in reality it will make things more confusing, because of the name change.
The people who actually did understand the old names will be confused by the new ones, and the people who learn the new ones will be confused whenever they have to deal with legacy memos or documentation that uses the old ones, and everyone who is deeply involved in the products will have to carry around with a little wallet-sized conversion table around them with both sets of names on them.
Meanwhile, the average customer won't be aware of anything other than the processor brand (Intel) and the clock rate.
If a doctor find blood in your stool, you shouldn't say "what's the problem? It's a trivial amount of blood."
The loss of blood is not serious. What is serious is what the loss of blood shows: that something is wrong inside you.
Kopczynski found a bug in the activation system. This particular bug didn't affect him in a serious way this particular time. That doesn't mean it isn't a serious bug.
Microsoft should abandon Vista, port the spiffy graphics back to XP, add a few more bells and whistles, and release the incrementally enhanced XP under the name Vista.
That plan worked for Apple with Mac OS 8, didn't it?
Oh, wait--Microsoft made the mistake of releasing VIsta. Too bad.
If Engcom is going to present an online simulation of a slide rule, why show a cheap-looking stock-issue Mannheim?
Please, at the very least, show a Log-log Duplex Decitrig to illustrate the virile power of the device.
And believe me, a slide rule was a badge of manhood (why do you think we carried them in holsters dangling down from our belts?) and there was intense rivalry and claims and counterclaims between the Keuffel & Esser faction and the Pickett & Eckel fans.
But it was really no contest. I mean, Pickett had eye-ease tinted yellow, and was made of aluminum that wasn't subject to dimensional changes due to humidity, and the scale design and layout... well... nobody with taste or discrimination would get a K & E when they could get a Pickett.
"The idea of cornering a drug struck upon my mind then as a sort of irresponsible monkey trick that no one would ever be permitted to do in reality.... I thought it was part of my uncle's way of talking. But I've learnt differently since. The whole trend of modern money-making is to foresee something that will presently be needed and put it out of reach, and then to haggle yourself wealthy. You buy up land upon which people will presently want to build houses, you secure rights that will bar vitally important developments, and so on, and so on.... I will confess that when my uncle talked of cornering quinine, I had a clear impression that any one who contrived to do that would pretty certainly go to jail. Now I know that any one who could really bring it off would be much more likely to go to the House of Lords!"
The process has become somewhat moderated by antitrust laws, but the dynamic is still the same.
The phase in which a company produces good, useful stuff, and sells it to pleased customers, who are happy to pay money because of the value the product delivers... is just a temporary phase which all companies yearn to get past. It's just a ploy to expand market share in hopes of getting to the big payoff. The big payoff comes when the company is so dominant that it can stop pretending to be nice, and stick it to their competitors, their customers, and any meddling bureaucrats that have the nerve to try to regulate them.
Companies want to reach the stage where they can be arrogant, like Microsoft. It's not an aberration, it's what every good company is trying to achieve.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but someone has got to work out better technology for designing and updating operating systems. For thirty years now, we've had operating systems that only work as perfect integrated wholes, and operations called "installation" and "uninstallation" and "updates" and "patches" which are basically ad-hoc processes for which the operating system offers relatively little support.
Everything depends on everything else. After a few years of updates and software installation, whether on Windows or Mac OS X (no, I can't speak to Linux so if Linux solves all these problems I plead ignorance), almost every system is in a slightly broken state, and you just hope it isn't intolerably broken. Talk to any average mom 'n dad and they'll say "Things that used to work fine on our computer aren't working any more, I guess it's just time to buy a new computer."
Some new way of building operating systems is needed that reduces the interdependence of its components.
"It is. It has to be. It would be ideal if you could run isolated networks, but it's impractical. Let's say you run a facility with some gas turbine generators, as in this example. The generator package has to communicate with the control system."
Sure.
"The control system has to communicate with the "business" network (for record-keeping, among other reasons),"
What? Why? Why? Why?
What's so darn important that it requires instantaneous communication? Why can't it just gather summaries in, you know, overnight batch runs or something, and write them on media that can be hand-carried to the business system?
The insidious thing about counterterror efforts is the slow but steady chilling effect they are having on humor and eccentric self-expression.
Twenty-five years ago I was talking to a friend about a book I'd been reading about the Trinity atomic bomb tests. Naturally I kept saying "atomic bomb." As we happened to be in an airport at the time, and happened to be approaching security, he started to look increasingly nervous and finally said something. He was right, of course, but what's the effect?
The effect is that I am now self-conscious about what I talk about in security checkpoints... and airports in general (after all, they're monitoring book titles)... and public places in general. I obviously don't talk seriously about bombs, and by extension I certainly mustn't joke about bombs, and of course the safest thing is not to joke at all.
I'm not going to wear satirical political T-shirts at public events where Bush is speaking... in fact maybe it's just prudent not to wear satirical T-shirts at all.
I've been delighted by the emergence of cheap "blinkies," those little battery-powered LED flashers that use strong magnets and attach to clothing, earlobes, etc. Maybe it would be fun to be slightly outrageous and wear some of those just for the heck of it on New Years' Day? No, after the Boston "mooninite" scare and the MIT student who got into trouble the other day, it's probably best not to wear any blinking lights in public.
Don't do anything to tweak public officials. Since you're not sure what will tweak them, best to just shut up and behave compliantly.
Conform. Don't stand out. Wear "normal" clothing. Don't act in any way that calls attention to yourself. Don't read books in public with political or religious titles (except the Bible, of course). Play it safe. Don't joke.
I certainly hope the brass have read Arthur C. Clarke's 1951 short story, Superiority. Anthologized in Clifton Fadiman's Fantasia Mathematica, which a lot of libraries still have.
A rueful officer explains how his advanced army with a brilliant research division was "defeated by the inferior science of our enemies."
The story describes how they were continually being equipped with new and advanced weapons. They were constantly delayed while their ships were being refitted. They are constantly discovering that gadgets that seemed wonderful in tests and demonstrations have minor glitches that basically render them useless until the relatively small problems can be solved with them can be solved.
"Given time we might even have overcome these difficulties, but the enemy ships were already attacking in thousands with weapons which now seemed centuries behind those that we had invented...."
To say nothing of falling packages trailing 30-km-long super-strong ropes behind them, or lots of satellites with 30-km-long super-strong ropes getting tangled in each other.
One of the common observations about orbital collisions is that space is big, but by the time you start restricting yourself to practical orbits and orbital distances, and then deploying objects whose longest dimension is very long compared to its volume, it may not be so big after all.
"The whale line is only two thirds of an inch in thickness. At first sight, you would not think it so strong as it really is. By experiment its one and fifty yarns will each suspend a weight of one hundred and twenty pounds; so that the whole rope will bear a strain nearly equal to three tons. In length, the common sperm whale-line measures something over two hundred fathoms. Towards the stern of the boat it is spirally coiled away in the tub, not like the worm-pipe of a still though, but so as to form one round, cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded sheaves, or layers of concentric spiralizations, without any hollow but the heart, or minute vertical tube formed at the axis of the cheese. As the least tangle or kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take somebody's arm, leg, or entire body off, the utmost precaution is used in stowing the line in its tub. Some harpooneers will consume almost an entire morning in this business, carrying the line high aloft and then reeving it downwards through a block towards the tub, so as in the act of coiling to free it from all possible wrinkles and twists."
I was tempted by the "bargain sale" and went to the website, which I thought was crudely designed and difficult to navigate. I had a lot of trouble figuring out whether there was anything there I was potentially interested in.
It was full of problems like this album. The title that shows up in the list, before you go to the album, is
"Most Popular Tv Themes In The"
When you click on it, you get to see the cover art, and learn that the album title is "The Most Popular Classical TV Themes in the Universe." And what's on it? Well... the helpful track listing is:
...like the printer instruction books that warn you that third-party ink cartridges may damage your machine.
It could even be just what Apple says: they've found that there really is an innocent, unintended incompatibility between their updates and the hack. Certainly, there are perennial conflicts between Apple OS updates and software tweaks like Unsanity's "Haxies," and I don't think Apple is doing it deliberately.
I think Apple is using scare tactics, both to keep AT&T happy and to keep them out of the nightmare scenario of being forced to provide support for hacked iPhones.
I could be wrong, of course, but I'm curious to wait and see whether iPhones actually do get bricked... and whether a smoking-gun memo will emerge--"The job's not complete 'till unlocked phones are dead meat"
It sure didn't happen with the $300 worth of DRMed, encrypted content I purchased for my GemStar eBook.
That content is keyed to a hardware serial number in my own, personal eBook device.
The servers were shut down, the customer service people who could have enabled the content to work on a different eBook device are gone, but it doesn't matter anyway because there are no follow-on devices that use that encryption scheme.
No provision was made for freeing the content, there's no equivalent of "burning to CD and re-RIPping), and when my vintage 2000 eBook--which has started to act funny--finally dies, all the content I purchased dies with it.
Just what is it about the iTunes Store that's so hard to grasp? Put up a store that sells a huge selection of music at half-decent prices with halfway-tolerable DRM, and the world beats a path to your door.
Put up a store that rents a limited selection of music at lousy prices and heavy-handed DRM, and the world yawns. That business model has now been tried at least a dozen times and has failed every single time.
There are other kinds of products for which a manufacturer would refuse to sell through the only store that's successfully sold that product, and instead sets up its own store--but music is the only product for which they set up stores that emulate, not the successful store, but the unsuccessful stores.
As others have noted, the focus on short-term payoffs is not limited to DARPA but affects our whole society. The days when private corporations invested in basic research is gone.
Gone, too are the J. C. R. Lickliders and Vannevar Bushes and Jerome Wiesners who laid the foundations of our technical and scientific success. The President's Science Advisory Council vanished under Nixon. The Office of Technology Assessment was abolished under Reagan. Science and engineering are no longer at the table when national policy is being decided.
And the current hostility toward immigration and the hoops that foreign grad students and postdocs have to jump through isn't helping, either.
Call the roll of the people who gave us our nuclear weapons. Sure, there were the Harold Ureys and E. O. Lawrences and Richard Feynmans, but a lot of it depended on foreign scientists escaping the European dictatorships. Postwar, the space race was a contest between "our German scientists and their German scientists."
And now we have an administration that is not only fostering science and engineering, it seems to have an active hostility toward it. Somewhat reminiscent of the days of the Soviet Union when Lysenko came to the fore.
I think it's probably too late for the U. S. to maintain its present position of world leadership in science and technology. The conditions that nourished that leadership have been too absent for too long.
"It was our aspirational goal that the SDL will get rid of every bug. But let's get realistic for a minute: It's not a realistic goal."
If you articulate a goal that you don't believe is realistic, and all the people working for you know that you don't believe it's realistic, it can't actually serve to measure or motivate progress and is not a real goal.
If you can articulate a goal that is measurable, so that you can whether or not it's been met ("get rid of every bug,") but everybody knows it's not the real goal, and the real goal isn't measurable, then there is no goal at all.
To the extent that I understand what he's saying, he's saying that there was no goal at all. (Or he's not telling us what it was, lest it be obvious that it was not met).
Actually, I thought the ability to travel freely within one's own country without passports or border check was a very fundamental right of a free people.
At least that's what they taught me during the fifties... when Soviet citizens did not have that right but U. S. citizens still did.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember my whole family being excited, but my mom was the one who was intrigued by science.
...it was all real, it was all actually going to happen.
At the time my folks perceived it as a triumph for humankind.
My mom's take on it was that it meant all the pictures of those wheel-shaped space stations... Arthur C. Clarke... Werner von Braun on the Disneyland "Tomorrowland" segments... Willy Ley... the Chesley Bonestell murals in the Hayden Planetarium... the George Pal "Conquest of Space" movie (ugh)... (that one might have been after Sputnik)...
I'm not sure when the OMG-they've-seized-the-high-ground, the Russians can drop atom bombs on us stuff started to sink in. Probably some Americans saw it in cold war jingoistic terms from the beginning. Not my family, though. Although it was sort of embarrassing when all the Project Vanguard rockets kept crashing.
Another great historic turning point I remember because almost nobody else noticed it or cared about it: the first Telstar satellite television transmiion. I was at summer school at the time, didn't have my own TV, and had to search around a bit to find a lounge at the school that had one. I tried to interest my techie friends in watching it with me, but nobody cared. The program itself was the most awful thing you can imagine, "entertainment" as organized by government officials. Lots of talking heads. Some boring French dancers, I don't remember what-all.
Telstar. A great moment in history... and all that same out of it was a mediocre pop instrumental number.
A new manager has just arrived. He found the old product name confusing.
Unfortunately, they're confusing for a good reason: the product line is complex.
So, he'll impose a new set of names on it. He will think the new names are less confusing, because they make sense to him. And he says it will make things less confusing for customers, because he projects his own feeling onto his customers. And perhaps the new names really are a little less confusing.
But in reality it will make things more confusing, because of the name change.
The people who actually did understand the old names will be confused by the new ones, and the people who learn the new ones will be confused whenever they have to deal with legacy memos or documentation that uses the old ones, and everyone who is deeply involved in the products will have to carry around with a little wallet-sized conversion table around them with both sets of names on them.
Meanwhile, the average customer won't be aware of anything other than the processor brand (Intel) and the clock rate.
Nice turn of phrase.
"... why doesn't he activate Visio, already?"
If a doctor find blood in your stool, you shouldn't say "what's the problem? It's a trivial amount of blood."
The loss of blood is not serious. What is serious is what the loss of blood shows: that something is wrong inside you.
Kopczynski found a bug in the activation system. This particular bug didn't affect him in a serious way this particular time. That doesn't mean it isn't a serious bug.
Microsoft should abandon Vista, port the spiffy graphics back to XP, add a few more bells and whistles, and release the incrementally enhanced XP under the name Vista.
That plan worked for Apple with Mac OS 8, didn't it?
Oh, wait--Microsoft made the mistake of releasing VIsta. Too bad.
If Engcom is going to present an online simulation of a slide rule, why show a cheap-looking stock-issue Mannheim?
Please, at the very least, show a Log-log Duplex Decitrig to illustrate the virile power of the device.
And believe me, a slide rule was a badge of manhood (why do you think we carried them in holsters dangling down from our belts?) and there was intense rivalry and claims and counterclaims between the Keuffel & Esser faction and the Pickett & Eckel fans.
But it was really no contest. I mean, Pickett had eye-ease tinted yellow, and was made of aluminum that wasn't subject to dimensional changes due to humidity, and the scale design and layout... well... nobody with taste or discrimination would get a K & E when they could get a Pickett.
H. G. Wells got it right in Tono-Bungay:
"The idea of cornering a drug struck upon my mind then as a sort of irresponsible monkey trick that no one would ever be permitted to do in reality.... I thought it was part of my uncle's way of talking. But I've learnt differently since. The whole trend of modern money-making is to foresee something that will presently be needed and put it out of reach, and then to haggle yourself wealthy. You buy up land upon which people will presently want to build houses, you secure rights that will bar vitally important developments, and so on, and so on.... I will confess that when my uncle talked of cornering quinine, I had a clear impression that any one who contrived to do that would pretty certainly go to jail. Now I know that any one who could really bring it off would be much more likely to go to the House of Lords!"
The process has become somewhat moderated by antitrust laws, but the dynamic is still the same.
The phase in which a company produces good, useful stuff, and sells it to pleased customers, who are happy to pay money because of the value the product delivers... is just a temporary phase which all companies yearn to get past. It's just a ploy to expand market share in hopes of getting to the big payoff. The big payoff comes when the company is so dominant that it can stop pretending to be nice, and stick it to their competitors, their customers, and any meddling bureaucrats that have the nerve to try to regulate them.
Companies want to reach the stage where they can be arrogant, like Microsoft. It's not an aberration, it's what every good company is trying to achieve.
...see my comment posted earlier on a related topic.
A decade of this sort of nonsense and there will be a market for charm schools to teach people how to dress "normal," walk "normal," and act "normal."
I feel very sorry for the borderline-mentally-ill.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but someone has got to work out better technology for designing and updating operating systems. For thirty years now, we've had operating systems that only work as perfect integrated wholes, and operations called "installation" and "uninstallation" and "updates" and "patches" which are basically ad-hoc processes for which the operating system offers relatively little support.
Everything depends on everything else. After a few years of updates and software installation, whether on Windows or Mac OS X (no, I can't speak to Linux so if Linux solves all these problems I plead ignorance), almost every system is in a slightly broken state, and you just hope it isn't intolerably broken. Talk to any average mom 'n dad and they'll say "Things that used to work fine on our computer aren't working any more, I guess it's just time to buy a new computer."
Some new way of building operating systems is needed that reduces the interdependence of its components.
"It is. It has to be. It would be ideal if you could run isolated networks, but it's impractical. Let's say you run a facility with some gas turbine generators, as in this example. The generator package has to communicate with the control system."
Sure.
"The control system has to communicate with the "business" network (for record-keeping, among other reasons),"
What? Why? Why? Why?
What's so darn important that it requires instantaneous communication? Why can't it just gather summaries in, you know, overnight batch runs or something, and write them on media that can be hand-carried to the business system?
The insidious thing about counterterror efforts is the slow but steady chilling effect they are having on humor and eccentric self-expression.
Twenty-five years ago I was talking to a friend about a book I'd been reading about the Trinity atomic bomb tests. Naturally I kept saying "atomic bomb." As we happened to be in an airport at the time, and happened to be approaching security, he started to look increasingly nervous and finally said something. He was right, of course, but what's the effect?
The effect is that I am now self-conscious about what I talk about in security checkpoints... and airports in general (after all, they're monitoring book titles)... and public places in general. I obviously don't talk seriously about bombs, and by extension I certainly mustn't joke about bombs, and of course the safest thing is not to joke at all.
I'm not going to wear satirical political T-shirts at public events where Bush is speaking... in fact maybe it's just prudent not to wear satirical T-shirts at all.
I've been delighted by the emergence of cheap "blinkies," those little battery-powered LED flashers that use strong magnets and attach to clothing, earlobes, etc. Maybe it would be fun to be slightly outrageous and wear some of those just for the heck of it on New Years' Day? No, after the Boston "mooninite" scare and the MIT student who got into trouble the other day, it's probably best not to wear any blinking lights in public.
Don't do anything to tweak public officials. Since you're not sure what will tweak them, best to just shut up and behave compliantly.
Conform. Don't stand out. Wear "normal" clothing. Don't act in any way that calls attention to yourself. Don't read books in public with political or religious titles (except the Bible, of course). Play it safe. Don't joke.
In fact, best not to smile.
Just like Moscow in the days of the Soviet Union.
I certainly hope the brass have read Arthur C. Clarke's 1951 short story, Superiority. Anthologized in Clifton Fadiman's Fantasia Mathematica, which a lot of libraries still have.
A rueful officer explains how his advanced army with a brilliant research division was "defeated by the inferior science of our enemies."
The story describes how they were continually being equipped with new and advanced weapons. They were constantly delayed while their ships were being refitted. They are constantly discovering that gadgets that seemed wonderful in tests and demonstrations have minor glitches that basically render them useless until the relatively small problems can be solved with them can be solved.
"Given time we might even have overcome these difficulties, but the enemy ships were already attacking in thousands with weapons which now seemed centuries behind those that we had invented...."
To say nothing of falling packages trailing 30-km-long super-strong ropes behind them, or lots of satellites with 30-km-long super-strong ropes getting tangled in each other.
One of the common observations about orbital collisions is that space is big, but by the time you start restricting yourself to practical orbits and orbital distances, and then deploying objects whose longest dimension is very long compared to its volume, it may not be so big after all.
"The whale line is only two thirds of an inch in thickness. At first sight, you would not think it so strong as it really is. By experiment its one and fifty yarns will each suspend a weight of one hundred and twenty pounds; so that the whole rope will bear a strain nearly equal to three tons. In length, the common sperm whale-line measures something over two hundred fathoms. Towards the stern of the boat it is spirally coiled away in the tub, not like the worm-pipe of a still though, but so as to form one round, cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded sheaves, or layers of concentric spiralizations, without any hollow but the heart, or minute vertical tube formed at the axis of the cheese. As the least tangle or kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take somebody's arm, leg, or entire body off, the utmost precaution is used in stowing the line in its tub. Some harpooneers will consume almost an entire morning in this business, carrying the line high aloft and then reeving it downwards through a block towards the tub, so as in the act of coiling to free it from all possible wrinkles and twists."
--Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick, or the Whale"
I was tempted by the "bargain sale" and went to the website, which I thought was crudely designed and difficult to navigate. I had a lot of trouble figuring out whether there was anything there I was potentially interested in.
... "25. Track 25."
It was full of problems like this album. The title that shows up in the list, before you go to the album, is
"Most Popular Tv Themes In The"
When you click on it, you get to see the cover art, and learn that the album title is "The Most Popular Classical TV Themes in the Universe." And what's on it? Well... the helpful track listing is:
"1. Track 1," "2. Track 2,"
The conductor? The orchestra? Who knows?
To be transformed in such a way as to have the same computing functionality as a brick.
To become completely disabled. Gronked. Smoked. Kaput. Dead. Discombobulated. Gone kerplooie.
...like the printer instruction books that warn you that third-party ink cartridges may damage your machine.
It could even be just what Apple says: they've found that there really is an innocent, unintended incompatibility between their updates and the hack. Certainly, there are perennial conflicts between Apple OS updates and software tweaks like Unsanity's "Haxies," and I don't think Apple is doing it deliberately.
I think Apple is using scare tactics, both to keep AT&T happy and to keep them out of the nightmare scenario of being forced to provide support for hacked iPhones.
I could be wrong, of course, but I'm curious to wait and see whether iPhones actually do get bricked... and whether a smoking-gun memo will emerge--"The job's not complete 'till unlocked phones are dead meat"
I'll bet that even this machine would have gotten it right.
It sure didn't happen with the $300 worth of DRMed, encrypted content I purchased for my GemStar eBook.
That content is keyed to a hardware serial number in my own, personal eBook device.
The servers were shut down, the customer service people who could have enabled the content to work on a different eBook device are gone, but it doesn't matter anyway because there are no follow-on devices that use that encryption scheme.
No provision was made for freeing the content, there's no equivalent of "burning to CD and re-RIPping), and when my vintage 2000 eBook--which has started to act funny--finally dies, all the content I purchased dies with it.
Just what is it about the iTunes Store that's so hard to grasp? Put up a store that sells a huge selection of music at half-decent prices with halfway-tolerable DRM, and the world beats a path to your door.
Put up a store that rents a limited selection of music at lousy prices and heavy-handed DRM, and the world yawns. That business model has now been tried at least a dozen times and has failed every single time.
There are other kinds of products for which a manufacturer would refuse to sell through the only store that's successfully sold that product, and instead sets up its own store--but music is the only product for which they set up stores that emulate, not the successful store, but the unsuccessful stores.
As others have noted, the focus on short-term payoffs is not limited to DARPA but affects our whole society. The days when private corporations invested in basic research is gone.
Gone, too are the J. C. R. Lickliders and Vannevar Bushes and Jerome Wiesners who laid the foundations of our technical and scientific success. The President's Science Advisory Council vanished under Nixon. The Office of Technology Assessment was abolished under Reagan. Science and engineering are no longer at the table when national policy is being decided.
And the current hostility toward immigration and the hoops that foreign grad students and postdocs have to jump through isn't helping, either.
Call the roll of the people who gave us our nuclear weapons. Sure, there were the Harold Ureys and E. O. Lawrences and Richard Feynmans, but a lot of it depended on foreign scientists escaping the European dictatorships. Postwar, the space race was a contest between "our German scientists and their German scientists."
And now we have an administration that is not only fostering science and engineering, it seems to have an active hostility toward it. Somewhat reminiscent of the days of the Soviet Union when Lysenko came to the fore.
I think it's probably too late for the U. S. to maintain its present position of world leadership in science and technology. The conditions that nourished that leadership have been too absent for too long.
"It was our aspirational goal that the SDL will get rid of every bug. But let's get realistic for a minute: It's not a realistic goal."
If you articulate a goal that you don't believe is realistic, and all the people working for you know that you don't believe it's realistic, it can't actually serve to measure or motivate progress and is not a real goal.
If you can articulate a goal that is measurable, so that you can whether or not it's been met ("get rid of every bug,") but everybody knows it's not the real goal, and the real goal isn't measurable, then there is no goal at all.
To the extent that I understand what he's saying, he's saying that there was no goal at all. (Or he's not telling us what it was, lest it be obvious that it was not met).
In fact, given that it's the number that have upgraded all their desktops to Vista, it sounds quite respectable, or at least par for the course.
My company still has some desktops running Windows 98, how about you?
"Could this be an effective argument against the proliferation of cameras or will politicians simply ignore the facts and press ahead?"
Was that a rhetoric question?
Actually, I thought the ability to travel freely within one's own country without passports or border check was a very fundamental right of a free people.
At least that's what they taught me during the fifties... when Soviet citizens did not have that right but U. S. citizens still did.