As a physicist, this sort of thing has me really worried, as it's becoming increasingly clear that physics research in the US is now in the process of "winding down." None of the new big projects on the table are even being considered for the US, as we lack the willingness and capacity to help them.
Fermilab has a few years left, but even its experimental projects face an uncertain future. Their big accelerator, the Tevatron has a year or two left (thanks to the LHC's persistent issues), while their smaller accelerators will continue to provide beams to a small number of neutrino experiments until around 2015. After that, the lab's fate is uncertain.
The story is the same at many of the other big labs around the country. Meanwhile, we continue to funnel funding into CERN and other international collaborations that provide few opportunities for American scientists and students.
Ars Technica has a great overview of what GCD is, and why it's important.
I haven't done much multithreaded programming in C, although this looks like an absolute godsend to those who do. Maybe someday we can actually have a modern desktop as responsive as BeOS was...
The article also contains a bit of information about Apple's compiler strategy and refinements to the C language itself. Most of these have been open-sourced under a permissive license, which is pretty damn cool.
Now it is true that many magnets use low temperature superconductors instead, but the reason for this is mainly that the high temperature ones are ceramics that can be expensive and difficult to manufacture.
Almost correct. As far as I'm aware, nobody has successfully used a high-temperature superconductor in particle accelerator applications, regardless of cost or difficulty. SRF linacs require a superconductor that is smooth and malleable, which ceramics are characteristically not.
The performance of the low-temperature niobium-based accelerators currently in operation is constrained by the surface topography of the niobium accelerating cavity itself. Superconductors have no resistance, though they can exhibit inductance, which is particularly noticeable when a surface defect "absorbs" some of the accelerator's RF energy, and ultimately converts it into heat.
CERN shouldn't be feeling foolish. Remember that the LHC is essentially 10-year-old technology, given that these big projects take ages to design, plan, and construct. Portions of the project such as the computing grid were deliberately not designed/implemented until the main accelerator had mostly been built, as major advances were (correctly) predicted in these fields. This isn't CERN's fault, but rather a simple reflection of the nature of cutting-edge research.
It will likely be another 10 years before (if) we figure out a way to build a particle accelerator out of an "icebox-temperature" ceramic superconductor, and likely another 10 years before we see a workably-large accelerator constructed around the material. This is OK, because in the interim we'll be seeing projects built around discoveries from 9,8,7,6.... years ago.
Of course, if we stop funding basic research, this trend won't continue.
(I wrote a thesis on this subject. If you have any questions, feel free to ask away)
Although a few big cities have gotten big projects (such as boston, where the Big Dig was, in fact sorely needed), the condition of the roads and infrastructure in these areas tends to be absolutely horrible.
New York, in particular suffered from extreme neglect after the end of Robert Moses' tenure until part way through Giuliani's tenure. (Even still, New Yorkers foot most of their own taxes, receiving an insultingly low return on their state and federal taxes. The current mayor, Mike Bloomberg has actually threatened to secede from the state because of the tax situation)
Much of New York's massive metro/subway system was constructed between 1900 and 1930 by a private company. The remainder was constructed at the city's expense to keep the place actually inhabitable. The Lexington Avenue Subway line (4/5/6 on Manhattan) carries more traffic every day than the entire population of Boston. The city's roads simply couldn't handle that type of traffic. Arkansas doesn't have the population density necessary to make such a system effective.
Very few urban museums are funded using significant amounts of federal funds (the Smithsonian being the prime exception). I'm only directly familiar with New York's museums, although virtually all of them are self-funded.
Stadiums are an irritating by-product of our obsession with (watching) sports. I agree that they shouldn't be funded by tax money.
Don't forget that AC signals produce a magnetic field!
This is a huge problem for some newer particle accelerator designs, which produce their accelerating gradient using a standing RF wave inside a hollow low-temperature (niobium) superconductor. Depending upon the superconductor's surface topography (along with a few other factors), various hot-spots might be produced that raise the temperature high enough that the accelerator begins to behave like a normal conductor (which, as we in the business say, is "really bad")
Obama, Biden, and other executive officers have spent 75% of their time in states that put them into office. i.e. The blue states.
To be fair, all of the states near DC voted Democratic, so this statistic isn't particularly surprising.
Similarly, pretty much all of the states with major urban centers (except perhaps for Texas) voted Democrat in the last election.
Yawn. This statistic is absolutely meaningless. (Also remember that the rural, traditionally 'red' states have always received an exceptional return on their tax dollars. States like Delaware, New Jersey, and New York get absolutely shafted, and often have to fund major projects on their own)
Wake me when we can tell the middle east we won't be needing their product anymore.
Imports from the middle-east only represent a small proportion of the total oil imported to the US.
Most of our imports come from Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela. 40% of our oil consumption comes from domestic sources.
Part of the problem is that our consumption is so high that we're dependent upon all of these sources. If we reduce our consumption by a third (possibly achievable with current technology), we might even be able to cut off imports from Venezuela and the Middle East entirely (or at least, we'd have one hell of a bargaining chip on the table)
No doubt the House mainframe's replacement is the $900 Dual Xeon unit previously used as a front-end processor for the mainframe's 32-port serial mux!
Actually, I'll bet it's some sort of Sun/IBM blade cluster running redundant VMs. Gives you many of the advantages of a traditional mainframe, but offers much more flexibility in terms of hardware. One of the coolest things about server virtualization is that your applications and operating systems become completely hardware-agnostic.
It also eliminates the need for any huge "transition" when the system eventually becomes obsolete. Individual applications and blades can be retired/upgraded as is necessary. No need to keep the $700k/year mainframe around until the very last applications have been moved off of it.
As long as the software itself isn't proprietary, I have absolutely no problem with the government using a Microsoft solution.
Use the right tool for the job. In the hands of a competent admin, Microsoft's server offerings aren't half-bad. Microsoft's licensing fees are only going to be a drop in the bucket for a datacenter that evidently has no problem forking over $700k per annum on maintenance. (In fact, for a system of this size, Microsoft might even bid lower than Red Hat or Novell on a project of this size...)
I'm no Microsoft fanboy, and love open source. However, if Microsoft can offer a solution that's technically equivalent at a lower cost, the government is in fact obliged to the taxpayer to choose that solution.
Hm. I can't actually tell whether or not the Open Source solution actually would have been applicable in this situation. All the article states is that an open-source medical record system exists, and is used by a handful of doctors in Canada.
What is blindingly clear, on the other hand, is that the $1bn contract was horribly, horribly mismanaged.
Also don't forget that somebody had to pay for the open-source system to be developed. I somewhat doubt that anybody spends their spare time hacking away on electronic health record databases.
Barring any re-use or re-adaptation of code that might have been done by the open-source devs, the license under which the software is released would appear to be inconsequential. One of two things might have happened:
1) Ontario specified a bloody complicated piece of software to be written, which was far more sophisticated than the existing open-source solution. In other words, the cost (though high) may have been justified.
2) The open source solution was indeed adequate for Ontario's needs, and the contractor was corrupt/incompetent.
Russia, for instance, has multiple factories capable of literally assembling entire launch vehicle systems rapidly down miles of assembly line. Parts come in by train and are moved down miles of assembly line in huge factories and, basically, a complete rocket is spit out the other side of the factory.
Calling BS on this one. [citation-needed]
Granted, there are some significant philosophical differences between NASA and Russia's approach to engineering. Currently, this is pronounced by NASA's use of the overly-complex shuttle, in contrast with the rather primitive Soyuz (which also has the benefit of being decades old, and thus extremely well-understood).
However, this is not necessarily a valid comparison; the USSR constructed its own Space Shuttle, which was similar in complexity (and actually more advanced than the American craft in a few key aspects). The primary reason listed for the failure of the N1 moon rockets was the extreme complexity of the design.
If anything, the current simplistic design of Russian spacecraft stems from an extreme lack of resources, and a tendency to be just as risk-averse as the US. In the Soviet days, I imagine that failures were dealt with rather harshly (extended Siberian vacation for all personnel involved?).
(Also...Lockheed does screw tracking and extensive failure-analysis, because this is, in fact, Rocket Science)
With the nutcase Ahmadinejad going full speed ahead with a nuclear arms program - and Obama talking about "multilateralism" rather than kicking his ass back to the Stone Age?
Ahmadinejad is many things. Stupid is not one of them. He knows exactly how to provoke and contort his enemies to look like fools.
Thus far, Obama hasn't taken the bait. If anything, his decision to tolerate a peaceful Iranian nuclear program was a brilliant political move. Ahmadinejad now has no legitimate excuse to deny inspectors access to his facilities.
So, by your definition, we'll have made progress if every person on the road is driving a V-12 powered bus?
Hate to break it to you, but the rather ordinary V4 in my car generates more power output than pretty much any consumer-grade car manufactured prior to 1980, and comes close to matching the V-12s used by Ferrari in the 70s. I'd call that quite significant progress. Even more impressively, Volkswagen's 4cyl diesel can even come close to those numbers, produce more torque, and still attain 40-50mpg, while releasing fewer emissions than a petrol-based engine from 15 years ago.
Plenty of mid-size cars will seat 5 comfortably, while SUVs push this number up to 7 (and have also made some rather impressive strides in terms of efficiency recently). If you want to haul loads of people around, we have passenger vans, which can hold 10-15 people while still attaining 10-15mpg. I'd also hardly turn my nose up at innovations such as ABS, airbags, and power steering.
Oh, and don't forget about safety. This might have been an evolutionary development, although it's hardly something to ignore. Thanks to modern designs, we can walk away from accidents that would have almost certainly been fatal in older vehicles.
Planes, on the other hand haven't seen terribly much innovation since the adaptation of the jet engine, apart from increasing the size of the aircraft to gargantuan proportions. The concorde was pretty cool, apart from the part where its operators got too lazy to maintain the fleet (despite the fact that the service was profitable).
Although we obviously can't stretch cars to larger proportions, bus networks have been successfully implemented in many cities since the 1930s -- London's double-decker buses can carry up to 64 people, which they claim removes approximately 40 cars from the road per bus. London would literally grind to a halt if so many cars were on the road. (Unfortunately, London might be one of the only places on the planet whose bus network was more effective and efficient than the trolley networks it replaced)
Numerous other proposed advances in passenger aircraft have been shelved for being too expensive or too ambitious. Even the "technologically advanced" 787 is a watered-down result of a series of compromises.
Many of the tests which moved to computer-adaptive methods have gone back to just serving a range of items, but one, the GRE, is still adaptive, even though ETS (the company that makes it and the SAT and the TOEFL) knows it doesn't work reliably (people taking the test over and over can get very different scores).
Slightly offtopic, but since you seem to be in the know... what's your opinion of the Math/Quantitative section of the GRE? I recently graduated with a degree in Physics & Math, and subsequently took the GRE. The math section of the test was completely unlike any other math-based test I've ever encountered...I honestly couldn't discern what the people who wrote the test were actually attempting to evaluate.
It was also the first math-based test I've taken since middle school in which I was denied access to a basic calculator (particularly annoying, given that they threw in a few long division questions to waste my time).
The essay portion seemed even more absurd, as it only measures the taker's ability to bullshit an essay on an arbitrary topic.
Odds are, he's gone this route, because the current structure of the Federal government is such that it's much easier to fund and develop a project through a private corporation receiving federal funding than it is to have the agency to the actual work.
(This is nothing particularly new either. Although it's my understanding that NASA used to do more in-house engineering work than it currently does, rocket engines have been privately sourced since the days of Apollo, and possibly even earlier.)
He worked with NASA for 25 years before retirement, and was by all appearances, a model employee of the agency, not to mention the immense personal sacrifices he gave as an astronaut (years of training for an incredibly risky job that only lasts for a few days). I'm astonished by the negative tone being used in these comment threads, given that the guy is clearly displaying great scientific ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit.
Although I'd like to see NASA cultivate its own talent, as far as I'm aware, he's working well within the bounds of the system. Seriously....you're trying to fault a guy who's advanced the state of science and risked his own life numerous times by doing so for trying to make money by doing so. Are you going to now start complaining about how our greedy, money-grubbing soldiers want to eat while deployed?
Although I'd love to be able to mount my iPod into the filesystem, and manage it that way, I can appreciate the historical reasons that Apple chose the method that they did, even if they're not particularly applicable anymore. (That said, it really is time for them to improve upon this)
I've never had a huge issue with iTunes, apart from a few gripes about memory consumption. I don't know of any applications that provide a similar level of functionality without having severe issues of their own (even if you ignore proprietary features such as iPod sync and.m4p support). Amarok comes closest, although I have to wonder if the developers are aiming to be a poster child for poor UI design (not talking about aesthetics -- Amarok's UI makes horrible use of on-screen real estate. Less than half of the window is dedicated to the application's primary function)
Windows Media Player can't figure out what it wants to be, Winamp's a bit sparse, and seems to have been mostly abandoned by its developers. Songbird still lacks essential features, and is also quite bloated.
Don't knock iTunes without considering that nobody else seems to have to produced a worthy competitor.
However, in this study, all participants received some sort of education along with the vaccine, simply as a matter of ethics and due diligence. This considerably lowered the exposure of both the control and experimental groups (there's a pretty massive body of work on this matter -- HIV incidence in developing nations could be enormously reduced with proper education alone).
This doesn't affect the results of the experiment, given that there was a control group that received educational advice, but not the vaccine. Both groups were advised to limit their exposure. The presence of the control group also effectively cancels any selection bias that might have been present in the trial.
Extrapolating a trial performed on a limited set of participants to the general population is a dangerous game. The scientists running this trial were wise not to have done it.
Unless something's changed in the past two years, this probably didn't have a huge effect, given that the next two games following Vancouver are going to be held in London and Moscow respectively. Neither the UK nor Russia have a reputation of being particularly welcoming to travelers.
Although not as bad as the US, border security in the UK is by far the most invasive in the EU, opting to screen people arriving from within other parts of the EU. Back when I used to hold a multiple-entry visa to the UK, it was treated as a point of suspicion every time I crossed the border (despite the fact that I had to provide the consulate with every shred of information about my private life in order to get the visa). This policy is completely and entirely illogical -- odds are that the border agencies knew more about me than they do about their own citizens.
On the other hand, Russia takes the cake for bizarre and restrictive immigration procedures. The US state department's page describes these in detail, as there are far too many peculiarities and specifics to list here.
If this was an issue, I seriously doubt that the UK or Russia would have been selected by the IOC. As it stands, Chicago didn't lose by that many votes, and the IOC's voting rules and distribution of membership are hardly fair. An IRV system is definitely needed to prevent the sort of gamesmanship that likely caused Chicago to lose, and somehow made Tokyo lose votes in the second round.
That all said, Rio will be a fantastic host for the games. This will be the first time ever that the Olympics have been held on the South American continent, which is a pretty cool milestone all in itself. I'm fairly confident that the US will be first in line for 2018.
Manpages are a godsend for the new and experienced user alike, although I have a few major gripes with how they're written. The manpage for ls is particularly bad, and suffers from some serious bloat. Here's the one from BSD/OSX (I'm pretty sure the GNU equivalent is mostly identical):
LS(1) BSD General Commands Manual LS(1)
NAME
ls -- list directory contents
SYNOPSIS
ls [-ABCFGHLOPRSTUW@abcdefghiklmnopqrstuwx1] [file...]
DESCRIPTION
For each operand that names a file of a type other than directory, ls
displays its name as well as any requested, associated information. For
each operand that names a file of type directory......
And this goes on for about 2,200 more lines of cryptically-written text. Yikes. That's a lot of options. Most users (myself included) have only used 3 or 4 for day-to-day use. If you're piping into sed/awk, some of the others can be useful, although scrolling through the whole damn manpage to find 'ls -l' or somesuch is maddening. The 80-20 principle definitely needs to somehow be applied here.
I frequently fault documentation for being too sparse, although in this case, we have the exact opposite extreme.
Apple's 21" Studio Displays were $%*#&ing heavy.... about 85lbs if I remember correctly, and no easy way to pick it up, given that all of the edges were stylishly rounded off (remember, this was the same era that produced the godawful hockey-puck mouse)
The eMac also suffered from being astonishingly heavy (although a more reasonable 50lbs, which was still damn heavy for a machine of its size), and was even more "slippery," quickly becoming the bane of educational IT professionals (myself included) who had to move them from place to place on a yearly basis. This was in sharp contrast to the iMacs, which were light, and had a handle built into the top. (This also allowed us to hurl them into the dumpster with great ease/fun, when the district finally allowed us to retire them after ~9 years of service)
I still have my G4 tower from 1999 connected to the 21" Studio display. Damn good machines, and still reasonably fast with current software -- it's painfully ironic that the 10-year-old G4 can hold as much RAM as my 2-year-old Mac Mini. Although the Mini (obviously) wins hands-down for ease of transportation, the G4 was pretty light, and had some nice handles. The acrylic case was solid as a rock -- probably moreso than most metal PC cases.
Non-UK slashdot readers should take a moment to note that the state of the UK press is really, really bad, with the possible exception of the BBC (and unfortunately, this only clouds and adds to the societal problems that Britain is facing).
Take everything you read with a huge grain of salt. Harebrained schemes thought of by a single government employee have made front-page news more times than I care to recall. Governments are convoluted bureaucracies precisely so that all ideas are passed before enough sets of eyes as to weed out the batshit insane ones (like the one being discussed).
Of course, US journalism isn't exactly a shining beacon, particularly with the regrettable loss of the WSJ, which was likely the only remaining right-leaning publication with any claim of objectivity.
Slashdot Mirror
As a physicist, this sort of thing has me really worried, as it's becoming increasingly clear that physics research in the US is now in the process of "winding down." None of the new big projects on the table are even being considered for the US, as we lack the willingness and capacity to help them.
Fermilab has a few years left, but even its experimental projects face an uncertain future. Their big accelerator, the Tevatron has a year or two left (thanks to the LHC's persistent issues), while their smaller accelerators will continue to provide beams to a small number of neutrino experiments until around 2015. After that, the lab's fate is uncertain.
The story is the same at many of the other big labs around the country. Meanwhile, we continue to funnel funding into CERN and other international collaborations that provide few opportunities for American scientists and students.
Thanks, Mozilla team, for hitting the kill switch and hopefully this will get Microsoft to release a patch sooner."
Imagine the shitstorm that would have erupted on /. if Microsoft or Apple hit the kill-switch on a vulnerable version of Firefox.
That all said...I thought we were against kill-switches, and certainly wasn't aware that there were any built into Firefox...
You joke, but there's mounting evidence that the placebo effect is indeed getting stronger.
(Of course, conducting a double-blind test to confirm this would create numerous paradoxes)
Ars Technica has a great overview of what GCD is, and why it's important.
I haven't done much multithreaded programming in C, although this looks like an absolute godsend to those who do. Maybe someday we can actually have a modern desktop as responsive as BeOS was...
The article also contains a bit of information about Apple's compiler strategy and refinements to the C language itself. Most of these have been open-sourced under a permissive license, which is pretty damn cool.
Now it is true that many magnets use low temperature superconductors instead, but the reason for this is mainly that the high temperature ones are ceramics that can be expensive and difficult to manufacture.
Almost correct. As far as I'm aware, nobody has successfully used a high-temperature superconductor in particle accelerator applications, regardless of cost or difficulty. SRF linacs require a superconductor that is smooth and malleable, which ceramics are characteristically not.
The performance of the low-temperature niobium-based accelerators currently in operation is constrained by the surface topography of the niobium accelerating cavity itself. Superconductors have no resistance, though they can exhibit inductance, which is particularly noticeable when a surface defect "absorbs" some of the accelerator's RF energy, and ultimately converts it into heat.
CERN shouldn't be feeling foolish. Remember that the LHC is essentially 10-year-old technology, given that these big projects take ages to design, plan, and construct. Portions of the project such as the computing grid were deliberately not designed/implemented until the main accelerator had mostly been built, as major advances were (correctly) predicted in these fields. This isn't CERN's fault, but rather a simple reflection of the nature of cutting-edge research.
It will likely be another 10 years before (if) we figure out a way to build a particle accelerator out of an "icebox-temperature" ceramic superconductor, and likely another 10 years before we see a workably-large accelerator constructed around the material. This is OK, because in the interim we'll be seeing projects built around discoveries from 9,8,7,6.... years ago.
Of course, if we stop funding basic research, this trend won't continue.
(I wrote a thesis on this subject. If you have any questions, feel free to ask away)
Although a few big cities have gotten big projects (such as boston, where the Big Dig was, in fact sorely needed), the condition of the roads and infrastructure in these areas tends to be absolutely horrible.
New York, in particular suffered from extreme neglect after the end of Robert Moses' tenure until part way through Giuliani's tenure. (Even still, New Yorkers foot most of their own taxes, receiving an insultingly low return on their state and federal taxes. The current mayor, Mike Bloomberg has actually threatened to secede from the state because of the tax situation)
Much of New York's massive metro/subway system was constructed between 1900 and 1930 by a private company. The remainder was constructed at the city's expense to keep the place actually inhabitable. The Lexington Avenue Subway line (4/5/6 on Manhattan) carries more traffic every day than the entire population of Boston. The city's roads simply couldn't handle that type of traffic. Arkansas doesn't have the population density necessary to make such a system effective.
Very few urban museums are funded using significant amounts of federal funds (the Smithsonian being the prime exception). I'm only directly familiar with New York's museums, although virtually all of them are self-funded.
Stadiums are an irritating by-product of our obsession with (watching) sports. I agree that they shouldn't be funded by tax money.
Don't forget that AC signals produce a magnetic field!
This is a huge problem for some newer particle accelerator designs, which produce their accelerating gradient using a standing RF wave inside a hollow low-temperature (niobium) superconductor. Depending upon the superconductor's surface topography (along with a few other factors), various hot-spots might be produced that raise the temperature high enough that the accelerator begins to behave like a normal conductor (which, as we in the business say, is "really bad")
with labor provided by illegal immigrants
RACIST
Did you check their papers yourself? If you care so much about this to post about it on slashdot, why didn't you report it?
Stop equating 'foreign' with 'illegal.' It might be the case sometimes, but certainly isn't always.
Obama, Biden, and other executive officers have spent 75% of their time in states that put them into office. i.e. The blue states.
To be fair, all of the states near DC voted Democratic, so this statistic isn't particularly surprising.
Similarly, pretty much all of the states with major urban centers (except perhaps for Texas) voted Democrat in the last election.
Yawn. This statistic is absolutely meaningless. (Also remember that the rural, traditionally 'red' states have always received an exceptional return on their tax dollars. States like Delaware, New Jersey, and New York get absolutely shafted, and often have to fund major projects on their own)
Wake me when we can tell the middle east we won't be needing their product anymore.
Imports from the middle-east only represent a small proportion of the total oil imported to the US.
Most of our imports come from Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela. 40% of our oil consumption comes from domestic sources.
Part of the problem is that our consumption is so high that we're dependent upon all of these sources. If we reduce our consumption by a third (possibly achievable with current technology), we might even be able to cut off imports from Venezuela and the Middle East entirely (or at least, we'd have one hell of a bargaining chip on the table)
No doubt the House mainframe's replacement is the $900 Dual Xeon unit previously used as a front-end processor for the mainframe's 32-port serial mux!
Actually, I'll bet it's some sort of Sun/IBM blade cluster running redundant VMs. Gives you many of the advantages of a traditional mainframe, but offers much more flexibility in terms of hardware. One of the coolest things about server virtualization is that your applications and operating systems become completely hardware-agnostic.
It also eliminates the need for any huge "transition" when the system eventually becomes obsolete. Individual applications and blades can be retired/upgraded as is necessary. No need to keep the $700k/year mainframe around until the very last applications have been moved off of it.
As long as the software itself isn't proprietary, I have absolutely no problem with the government using a Microsoft solution.
Use the right tool for the job. In the hands of a competent admin, Microsoft's server offerings aren't half-bad. Microsoft's licensing fees are only going to be a drop in the bucket for a datacenter that evidently has no problem forking over $700k per annum on maintenance. (In fact, for a system of this size, Microsoft might even bid lower than Red Hat or Novell on a project of this size...)
I'm no Microsoft fanboy, and love open source. However, if Microsoft can offer a solution that's technically equivalent at a lower cost, the government is in fact obliged to the taxpayer to choose that solution.
Hm. I can't actually tell whether or not the Open Source solution actually would have been applicable in this situation. All the article states is that an open-source medical record system exists, and is used by a handful of doctors in Canada.
What is blindingly clear, on the other hand, is that the $1bn contract was horribly, horribly mismanaged.
Also don't forget that somebody had to pay for the open-source system to be developed. I somewhat doubt that anybody spends their spare time hacking away on electronic health record databases.
Barring any re-use or re-adaptation of code that might have been done by the open-source devs, the license under which the software is released would appear to be inconsequential. One of two things might have happened:
1) Ontario specified a bloody complicated piece of software to be written, which was far more sophisticated than the existing open-source solution. In other words, the cost (though high) may have been justified.
2) The open source solution was indeed adequate for Ontario's needs, and the contractor was corrupt/incompetent.
Russia, for instance, has multiple factories capable of literally assembling entire launch vehicle systems rapidly down miles of assembly line. Parts come in by train and are moved down miles of assembly line in huge factories and, basically, a complete rocket is spit out the other side of the factory.
Calling BS on this one. [citation-needed]
Granted, there are some significant philosophical differences between NASA and Russia's approach to engineering. Currently, this is pronounced by NASA's use of the overly-complex shuttle, in contrast with the rather primitive Soyuz (which also has the benefit of being decades old, and thus extremely well-understood).
However, this is not necessarily a valid comparison; the USSR constructed its own Space Shuttle, which was similar in complexity (and actually more advanced than the American craft in a few key aspects). The primary reason listed for the failure of the N1 moon rockets was the extreme complexity of the design.
If anything, the current simplistic design of Russian spacecraft stems from an extreme lack of resources, and a tendency to be just as risk-averse as the US. In the Soviet days, I imagine that failures were dealt with rather harshly (extended Siberian vacation for all personnel involved?).
(Also...Lockheed does screw tracking and extensive failure-analysis, because this is, in fact, Rocket Science)
With the nutcase Ahmadinejad going full speed ahead with a nuclear arms program - and Obama talking about "multilateralism" rather than kicking his ass back to the Stone Age?
Ahmadinejad is many things. Stupid is not one of them. He knows exactly how to provoke and contort his enemies to look like fools.
Thus far, Obama hasn't taken the bait. If anything, his decision to tolerate a peaceful Iranian nuclear program was a brilliant political move. Ahmadinejad now has no legitimate excuse to deny inspectors access to his facilities.
So, by your definition, we'll have made progress if every person on the road is driving a V-12 powered bus?
Hate to break it to you, but the rather ordinary V4 in my car generates more power output than pretty much any consumer-grade car manufactured prior to 1980, and comes close to matching the V-12s used by Ferrari in the 70s. I'd call that quite significant progress. Even more impressively, Volkswagen's 4cyl diesel can even come close to those numbers, produce more torque, and still attain 40-50mpg, while releasing fewer emissions than a petrol-based engine from 15 years ago.
Plenty of mid-size cars will seat 5 comfortably, while SUVs push this number up to 7 (and have also made some rather impressive strides in terms of efficiency recently). If you want to haul loads of people around, we have passenger vans, which can hold 10-15 people while still attaining 10-15mpg. I'd also hardly turn my nose up at innovations such as ABS, airbags, and power steering.
Oh, and don't forget about safety. This might have been an evolutionary development, although it's hardly something to ignore. Thanks to modern designs, we can walk away from accidents that would have almost certainly been fatal in older vehicles.
Planes, on the other hand haven't seen terribly much innovation since the adaptation of the jet engine, apart from increasing the size of the aircraft to gargantuan proportions. The concorde was pretty cool, apart from the part where its operators got too lazy to maintain the fleet (despite the fact that the service was profitable).
Although we obviously can't stretch cars to larger proportions, bus networks have been successfully implemented in many cities since the 1930s -- London's double-decker buses can carry up to 64 people, which they claim removes approximately 40 cars from the road per bus. London would literally grind to a halt if so many cars were on the road. (Unfortunately, London might be one of the only places on the planet whose bus network was more effective and efficient than the trolley networks it replaced)
Numerous other proposed advances in passenger aircraft have been shelved for being too expensive or too ambitious. Even the "technologically advanced" 787 is a watered-down result of a series of compromises.
Many of the tests which moved to computer-adaptive methods have gone back to just serving a range of items, but one, the GRE, is still adaptive, even though ETS (the company that makes it and the SAT and the TOEFL) knows it doesn't work reliably (people taking the test over and over can get very different scores).
Slightly offtopic, but since you seem to be in the know... what's your opinion of the Math/Quantitative section of the GRE? I recently graduated with a degree in Physics & Math, and subsequently took the GRE. The math section of the test was completely unlike any other math-based test I've ever encountered...I honestly couldn't discern what the people who wrote the test were actually attempting to evaluate.
It was also the first math-based test I've taken since middle school in which I was denied access to a basic calculator (particularly annoying, given that they threw in a few long division questions to waste my time).
The essay portion seemed even more absurd, as it only measures the taker's ability to bullshit an essay on an arbitrary topic.
Odds are, he's gone this route, because the current structure of the Federal government is such that it's much easier to fund and develop a project through a private corporation receiving federal funding than it is to have the agency to the actual work.
(This is nothing particularly new either. Although it's my understanding that NASA used to do more in-house engineering work than it currently does, rocket engines have been privately sourced since the days of Apollo, and possibly even earlier.)
He worked with NASA for 25 years before retirement, and was by all appearances, a model employee of the agency, not to mention the immense personal sacrifices he gave as an astronaut (years of training for an incredibly risky job that only lasts for a few days). I'm astonished by the negative tone being used in these comment threads, given that the guy is clearly displaying great scientific ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit.
Although I'd like to see NASA cultivate its own talent, as far as I'm aware, he's working well within the bounds of the system. Seriously....you're trying to fault a guy who's advanced the state of science and risked his own life numerous times by doing so for trying to make money by doing so. Are you going to now start complaining about how our greedy, money-grubbing soldiers want to eat while deployed?
Although I'd love to be able to mount my iPod into the filesystem, and manage it that way, I can appreciate the historical reasons that Apple chose the method that they did, even if they're not particularly applicable anymore. (That said, it really is time for them to improve upon this)
I've never had a huge issue with iTunes, apart from a few gripes about memory consumption. I don't know of any applications that provide a similar level of functionality without having severe issues of their own (even if you ignore proprietary features such as iPod sync and .m4p support). Amarok comes closest, although I have to wonder if the developers are aiming to be a poster child for poor UI design (not talking about aesthetics -- Amarok's UI makes horrible use of on-screen real estate. Less than half of the window is dedicated to the application's primary function)
Windows Media Player can't figure out what it wants to be, Winamp's a bit sparse, and seems to have been mostly abandoned by its developers. Songbird still lacks essential features, and is also quite bloated.
Don't knock iTunes without considering that nobody else seems to have to produced a worthy competitor.
However, in this study, all participants received some sort of education along with the vaccine, simply as a matter of ethics and due diligence. This considerably lowered the exposure of both the control and experimental groups (there's a pretty massive body of work on this matter -- HIV incidence in developing nations could be enormously reduced with proper education alone).
This doesn't affect the results of the experiment, given that there was a control group that received educational advice, but not the vaccine. Both groups were advised to limit their exposure. The presence of the control group also effectively cancels any selection bias that might have been present in the trial.
Extrapolating a trial performed on a limited set of participants to the general population is a dangerous game. The scientists running this trial were wise not to have done it.
Which is exactly why we use control groups.
Unless something's changed in the past two years, this probably didn't have a huge effect, given that the next two games following Vancouver are going to be held in London and Moscow respectively. Neither the UK nor Russia have a reputation of being particularly welcoming to travelers.
Although not as bad as the US, border security in the UK is by far the most invasive in the EU, opting to screen people arriving from within other parts of the EU. Back when I used to hold a multiple-entry visa to the UK, it was treated as a point of suspicion every time I crossed the border (despite the fact that I had to provide the consulate with every shred of information about my private life in order to get the visa). This policy is completely and entirely illogical -- odds are that the border agencies knew more about me than they do about their own citizens.
On the other hand, Russia takes the cake for bizarre and restrictive immigration procedures. The US state department's page describes these in detail, as there are far too many peculiarities and specifics to list here.
If this was an issue, I seriously doubt that the UK or Russia would have been selected by the IOC. As it stands, Chicago didn't lose by that many votes, and the IOC's voting rules and distribution of membership are hardly fair. An IRV system is definitely needed to prevent the sort of gamesmanship that likely caused Chicago to lose, and somehow made Tokyo lose votes in the second round.
That all said, Rio will be a fantastic host for the games. This will be the first time ever that the Olympics have been held on the South American continent, which is a pretty cool milestone all in itself. I'm fairly confident that the US will be first in line for 2018.
Manpages are a godsend for the new and experienced user alike, although I have a few major gripes with how they're written. The manpage for ls is particularly bad, and suffers from some serious bloat. Here's the one from BSD/OSX (I'm pretty sure the GNU equivalent is mostly identical):
And this goes on for about 2,200 more lines of cryptically-written text. Yikes. That's a lot of options. Most users (myself included) have only used 3 or 4 for day-to-day use. If you're piping into sed/awk, some of the others can be useful, although scrolling through the whole damn manpage to find 'ls -l' or somesuch is maddening. The 80-20 principle definitely needs to somehow be applied here.
I frequently fault documentation for being too sparse, although in this case, we have the exact opposite extreme.
Apple's 21" Studio Displays were $%*#&ing heavy.... about 85lbs if I remember correctly, and no easy way to pick it up, given that all of the edges were stylishly rounded off (remember, this was the same era that produced the godawful hockey-puck mouse)
The eMac also suffered from being astonishingly heavy (although a more reasonable 50lbs, which was still damn heavy for a machine of its size), and was even more "slippery," quickly becoming the bane of educational IT professionals (myself included) who had to move them from place to place on a yearly basis. This was in sharp contrast to the iMacs, which were light, and had a handle built into the top. (This also allowed us to hurl them into the dumpster with great ease/fun, when the district finally allowed us to retire them after ~9 years of service)
I still have my G4 tower from 1999 connected to the 21" Studio display. Damn good machines, and still reasonably fast with current software -- it's painfully ironic that the 10-year-old G4 can hold as much RAM as my 2-year-old Mac Mini. Although the Mini (obviously) wins hands-down for ease of transportation, the G4 was pretty light, and had some nice handles. The acrylic case was solid as a rock -- probably moreso than most metal PC cases.
2) You appear to read too much of the Daily Mail.
Non-UK slashdot readers should take a moment to note that the state of the UK press is really, really bad, with the possible exception of the BBC (and unfortunately, this only clouds and adds to the societal problems that Britain is facing).
Take everything you read with a huge grain of salt. Harebrained schemes thought of by a single government employee have made front-page news more times than I care to recall. Governments are convoluted bureaucracies precisely so that all ideas are passed before enough sets of eyes as to weed out the batshit insane ones (like the one being discussed).
Of course, US journalism isn't exactly a shining beacon, particularly with the regrettable loss of the WSJ, which was likely the only remaining right-leaning publication with any claim of objectivity.