What about saving energy? A typical desktop consumes over 100 watts of power. Keep all your lights on too?
It's converting the energy into (mainly) heat. If he's living somewhere where keeping things warm overnight is a must, using a fraction of that power to keep the machine running is not a problem at all. (Plus it's entirely possible for the system to be doing useful work even if nobody is sitting at it. Lots of computing is done that way.)
Every deep-space ship in any self-respecting sci-fi movie seems to have a rotating part. Not because it looks cool. But because centripetal force is a very accurate and perfectly sufficient for all practical purposes simulation of earth gravity. 50m radius from axis of rotation, 2.25s per rotation, and you have a neat 1g. And due to 1st Newton's Law and no air friction, it needs only to be started once and requires no power to keep turning.
What we don't know — because we have no data at all — is how little gravity (or equivalent acceleration) is required to maintain a safe level of bone mass. The earth-bound bed-rest experiments don't really cut it because the body remains under gravity the whole time, even if from an unusual direction. Could we survive long-term on lunar levels of gravity? Or if not that, martian levels? If so, it makes building such centrifuges much simpler (less force, less material, less mass, less to launch, less cost).
Now that's really quite arrogantly disassociated from reality! Quite apart from the fact that the rules are byzantine (due to the number of layers of government with tax-raising powers) it takes a lot of time and effort to encode those rules, especially as there's going to be a lot of edge cases (e.g., special temporary tax breaks by a particular city). Even I, a foreigner who lives abroad, know that this is not at all simple. (By the time it gets to "a computer and a database", the hard part is done; it's just running a program.)
Sears, Macy, Target, Walmart, ect do not have an issue. Order from them and low and behold they charge the correct sales tax ( Use Tax).
And I can guarantee that it costs them a lot to be able to do that. Of course, if they're operating a physical store in a large fraction of the US then they have to deal with the complexity anyway, but it's certainly not free!
Amazon does not want to collect the tax because it cuts in to their price advantage.
That may be true, but you show an astonishing ignorance of the way either computers or local tax codes work.
The ISPs have another alternative: refuse to offer connectivity except via NAT unless you're using IPv6. If you're content with being a second-class user, you can continue to use your crappy Linksys. Your call.
Depends on the deployment configuration. It's often quite easy to mitigate DoS attacks that only hit a single layer of the overall architecture (e.g., by replicating servers and adding a watchdog that restarts things if they go unresponsive for too long). The tricky ones are those that involve many levels, especially if they just look like lots of normal traffic.
So I have to wonder, how do bookies calculate their odds?
According to an ex-bookie's clerk I know, mostly by watching other bookies very carefully and by trying to keep their overall liability to the punters to a minimum. Remember, the bookies are in this to make money, so they're actually looking to manage risk to themselves while maximizing the amount of trade they're doing; if they get it wrong, either the punters all go elsewhere (odds too low) or the punters all come running (odds too high).
ACS Law tried this for bigger money in proper court. Bad Move(TM). The judge provided them with a very unpleasant surprise by disallowing the withdrawal. If they lose they pay, possibly pay legal expenses for the other party and a precedent is created which blows the model out of the water. Their only retreat route here was to fold the company which is exactly what they did.
First off, it's the UK so there's a presumption in favour of the losing party "making good" the losses from the court case itself of the winner; costs are normally awarded. (Formally, it's in the power of the judge to decide in equity, so if the other side has outrageous or disproportionate costs, the level of costs awarded might be well short of their actual level, making the victory a distinctly pyrrhic one. This is an area where the UK and the US have diverged.)
Secondly, folding the company might not save it. Judges don't like people who screw around with them or blatantly misuse the law, and court fines and fees are one of the more protected classes when it comes to bankruptcy. (Not as much as the taxman IIRC, but even so.) Moreover, if it's not a limited liability company (the case with many law firms for tax reasons) it's the owner(s) that's in trouble as they're personally liable. Oh dear!:-)
That's because there's no standard scripting section for those container formats, as far as I'm aware. Without some way to package in code that can be executed in a way that the target will understand at all, the exploit isn't going anywhere.
If you work for Microsoft and are reading this, please, for the love of all that's holy, do not define such a thing, even as a vendor extension. Even if it lets you do something you think is neat. Such a change could only ever cause grief and pain, which would be redoubled when a battalion of computer security catch up with you in person after having had to suffer through years of dealing with the resulting vulnerabilities. (Hey, I'm just trying to head this off at the pass right now. Some ideas really are that awful.)
I don't see a downside to standardization to be honest.
Apart from the huge fight over it and all the patent and licensing worries? Let's face it, trying to standardized the whole technical stack is just making it incredibly hard to finalize any standard at all. Far better to drop the largely orthogonal bits like media formats and focus on how to handle larger classes of content (e.g., do video/* as a generic thing rather than nailing down exactly what sort of a baseline there needs to be there).
Standards should be focussed and composable, as that makes it possible to implement them. The whole HTML5 process has not ever given the impression of having been properly limited in scope. It's just one shark-jumping moment after another.
I think as competition grows in the cloud computing market we'll see a lot more modeling being done on the cloud. There's a lot to be said about having your own supercomputer for sure, but if I can get it done at a fraction of the cost by renting off-peak hours on Amazon's cloud... I'm convinced the future is there, it'll just take us another decade to migrate off our entirely customized and proprietary environments we see today.
Depends on the problem. Some things work well with highly distributed architectures like a cloud (e.g., exploring a "space" of parameters where there's not vast amounts to do at each "point") but others are far better off with traditional supercomputing (computational fluid dynamics is the classic example, of which weather modeling is just a particular type). Of course, some of the most interesting problems are mixes, such as pipelines of processing where some stages are embarrassingly distributable and others require grunty concentrated power. If you're getting into the design of this class of "meta-application", then you're going to have to just be aware that the details really matter (and the costs associated with the various tradeoffs also vary over time, just to make it more "fun").
Not really, especially as each of those ISPs has lots of complexity in their service portfolio so doing the split would be exceptionally tricky (and make the whole graph impossible to read, instead of just plain difficult). What I find more interesting is that the average level of service of the worst performing Canadian ISP would put it in the middle of the top performing group of US ISPs. Maybe it's because the US has a much lower population density than Canada? Or maybe it's because US ISPs prefer giving their customers the shaft to actually providing a decent and value-for-money service...
Except that google paying a premium to get higher speed special treatment is effectively the same thing as google paying to slow down everyone else. Anyone who wants to compete is forced to pay the same premium.
Not at all. There's a crucial difference; a provider paying to give the ISP's customers elevated service is doing an overall positive thing because their competitors can compete. Paying to slow down the competition though, that's a beggar-thy-neighbor move and is wrong. It's particularly wrong as it can have unintended side effects, such as slowing down unrelated services. A key feature of regulations when they have to exist at all should be that they focus on stopping negative behaviors without (greatly) impacting positive ones.
Any kind of media production that appeals more to the brainy folks will bring fewer advertising dollars than shows for morons who will buy anything they see on TV. Hence the downward spiral for commercial TV. American Idol, Glenn Beck, Big Brother... that's what the advertisers like. Fodder for consumers.
Not necessarily. It is possible to advertise to people with a full set of functioning neurons, but it requires effort, applied intelligence and creativity. For some reason, most advertisers in the US seem to instead focus on the lowest common denominator instead, which is cost effective for the mass market, but nowhere near as good for the higher quality end. The proportion of intelligent ads is higher in the UK for some reason (even if that's still only relative; we have plenty of terrible ads too). I don't think a reflection of anything other than trends of thought in ad agencies though.
Of course, being able to get an acceptable ad to the smarter end of the market has a number of advantages. For one thing, on average more intelligent people have more disposable income.
But good luck fighting against it. You'd have to have a really good case for it to be worth considering at all.
I haven't specifically read Google's AOI.. but consider for a moment if the "don't be evil" principle was written in some way into the AOI. What if one day Larry Page decided that targeted advertising is evil (it arguably is), and therefore decided to immediately shut down AdSense?
Well? It's purely hypothetical. He's unlikely to do so unless there's a scheme waiting to take over that makes even more money. However, if he did then maybe a case could be made. Until that time... well, who cares? (Well, as an investor maybe you should care, but you would typically price that risk premium into the price you're willing to pay to invest in the company, and that's true for any investment; the details vary, but the principle doesn't.)
This is true because the fiduciary is required to act in the best interests of their counter party. Ultimately it doesn't matter what the AOI says.. if the fiduciary clearly acts in a way that could damage the counter party (shareholder) that is a violation of the fiduciary duty, and thus the counter party (shareholder) may be entitled to compensatory damages or other actions undertaken by the court.
But determining the best interests of the counter party is difficult, so proving a case where the CEO does an action that is exactly in line with both the letter and spirit of the corporate charter, and which was both freely open to examination and widely discussed before the investment position was taken, proving such a case is very hard. (It's easier to show in the situation where a company has put itself up for sale and the Board accepts an offer from a golfing buddy of the CEO that is a long way below the highest price. Nobody's accusing anyone at Google of this sort of scumbaggery.)
Consumption based taxes would even things out individually, but would flip the scale on its head by class. Someone making $100 million a year isn't likely to spend more than $20-30 million, a frugal multi-millionaire may only spend $10 million. A 20% consumption tax would mean he is only paying 2% of his income in taxes.
Contrast that with someone living pay check to pay check, making $15,000 a year. They have to spend all of their money every year, so a 20% consumption tax would mean he pays 20% of his income.
You end up with the people who need every dime they can get their hands on to survive paying the highest percentage of their income in taxes. That can only be considered fair by the cruelest definitions of fair.
We have a consumption tax (VAT) in the UK, but it avoids being grossly unfair in the way you describe by virtue of having certain categories of goods excluded. In particular, most food purchased for consumption off the premises (e.g., in a supermarket or for take-away, but not in a restaurant; this does mean that the price of some goods - fast food is a good example - will vary quite a lot by whether you eat in or not) has no VAT on it. The details are quite bewilderingly complex though; beware!
In practice, your webserver will probably also need permissions for outgoing connections. So if it's hacked then your computer can be a part of DDoS'ing botnet.
That's actually pretty easy to manage: you firewall outgoing connections using a firewall that isn't on the same machine — actually, using a device whose management port isn't on the same network is most advisable — so that the webserver can only make outgoing connections to whitelisted sites. Typically, none of those need to be exposed to the outside world. If there's a need to support things like outgoing SMTP from the httpd, you use tricks like a firewall rule that rewrites all those connections so they go to a special local mail router, so making it really easy to track who's sending what and spot problems that way.
Of course, this does mean that some crappy web2.0 webapps won't work. But that's really the fault of the developers of those webapps being security-ignorant numpties.
Ah, but Iceland chose not to bail out their own banks because a very large part, if not a majority, of the investors in those banks were British. Made perfect sense not to sink their economy to recover British savings.
Alas, it seems that it was the British Treasury that bailed out the Irish banks (which makes sense given the level of financial integration between the two countries, something which most citizens in both countries are unaware of).
X11 the protocol was very good 20 years ago, but by now shows its age. A new X12 could use some cleanups such as removing colors, palettes and visuals (truecolor is the only relevant one nowadays), adding explicit gamma support, removing every drawing primitive except unaliased points, horizontal/vertical lines and image handling, adding alpha support, adding efficient image transfer mechanisms by mapping video-card accessible buffers in the application (XShmPutImage and glTexSubImage2D are sad jokes, performance-wise), adding blending/compositing support, etc.
I'd agree on some of those things (I hate visuals and palettes) but I think you're being a little too strict in what you propose to remove. Stuff like a multi-segment line that can go at arbitrary angles is useful and shouldn't have to be reimplemented in client-side code. It would be better if we could have some sort of model like you see in (Display) PostScript; that's what OSX uses, and its rather nice to code for.
And that's just graphics, don't get me started about multi-screne handler, internationalization, window management or inter-process communications.
Window management isn't too bad, but multi-screen handing is nasty, and internationalized input handling is truly awful. (IPC... I'm not too excited about. It's bad on all platforms really.)
Often those systems are at least firewalled in a DMZ, but I have yet to see them on a completely separate network (although some clients are making noises in that direction).
So nobody's yet done them a quote for running separate cables to all the doctors offices in the area. Still, it'd do a lot to support the local economy, especially building contractors that are handy with a backhoe...
Discovering the higgs will fill in the biggest hole in the standard model, it's what gives everything in the universe mass.
Strictly, it's the rest masses of the fundamental particles that are determined by the Higgs field. However, the majority of mass of "ordinary" matter - i.e., protons and neutrons - is actually due to the (enormous) binding energy in the color field that is holding the quarks together. When I first found that out, I found it pretty amazing; it goes to show just how important relativity is.
And, aside from all that-- it's a fantastic research facility that funds some of the greatest scientists on Earth, and it's on American soil. If the US keeps cutting science and research programs, then guess what, no US kid will want to move into science and the US will fade into the distance as Europe continues to dominate high-energy physics, and eventually, every other field.
I believe that Fermilab are going to be focusing on other research fields, and they are also one of the main sites in the US that handles data coming from CERN. They're still a cutting-edge lab.
Mars is flat?? I don't know where you get that idea from. Mars has mountains and valleys that dwarf anything we have on earth. Olympus Mons is over 21km tall, almost 3 times the height of anything on earth.
Maybe he's basing it on some of the pictures that have been sent back (though obviously not the ones of inside a crater) which have mostly been from fairly flat locations as they're easier to land safely in and get good scientific results back from.
Slashdot Mirror
There's usually somewhere in the rest of the world changes their DST policies on a yearly basis
That place usually seems to be somewhere in Argentina. For some reason, messing with exact timezone rules seems to be a national pastime there.
[Glen Beck] is about one step away from saving his urine in jars
He's the Sniper? I didn't know he was Australian...
What about saving energy? A typical desktop consumes over 100 watts of power. Keep all your lights on too?
It's converting the energy into (mainly) heat. If he's living somewhere where keeping things warm overnight is a must, using a fraction of that power to keep the machine running is not a problem at all. (Plus it's entirely possible for the system to be doing useful work even if nobody is sitting at it. Lots of computing is done that way.)
Every deep-space ship in any self-respecting sci-fi movie seems to have a rotating part. Not because it looks cool. But because centripetal force is a very accurate and perfectly sufficient for all practical purposes simulation of earth gravity. 50m radius from axis of rotation, 2.25s per rotation, and you have a neat 1g. And due to 1st Newton's Law and no air friction, it needs only to be started once and requires no power to keep turning.
What we don't know — because we have no data at all — is how little gravity (or equivalent acceleration) is required to maintain a safe level of bone mass. The earth-bound bed-rest experiments don't really cut it because the body remains under gravity the whole time, even if from an unusual direction. Could we survive long-term on lunar levels of gravity? Or if not that, martian levels? If so, it makes building such centrifuges much simpler (less force, less material, less mass, less to launch, less cost).
It is called a computer and a database.
Now that's really quite arrogantly disassociated from reality! Quite apart from the fact that the rules are byzantine (due to the number of layers of government with tax-raising powers) it takes a lot of time and effort to encode those rules, especially as there's going to be a lot of edge cases (e.g., special temporary tax breaks by a particular city). Even I, a foreigner who lives abroad, know that this is not at all simple. (By the time it gets to "a computer and a database", the hard part is done; it's just running a program.)
Sears, Macy, Target, Walmart, ect do not have an issue. Order from them and low and behold they charge the correct sales tax ( Use Tax).
And I can guarantee that it costs them a lot to be able to do that. Of course, if they're operating a physical store in a large fraction of the US then they have to deal with the complexity anyway, but it's certainly not free!
Amazon does not want to collect the tax because it cuts in to their price advantage.
That may be true, but you show an astonishing ignorance of the way either computers or local tax codes work.
You will when your ISP mandates IPv6.
The ISPs have another alternative: refuse to offer connectivity except via NAT unless you're using IPv6. If you're content with being a second-class user, you can continue to use your crappy Linksys. Your call.
DOS is classified as a security issue.
Depends on the deployment configuration. It's often quite easy to mitigate DoS attacks that only hit a single layer of the overall architecture (e.g., by replicating servers and adding a watchdog that restarts things if they go unresponsive for too long). The tricky ones are those that involve many levels, especially if they just look like lots of normal traffic.
So I have to wonder, how do bookies calculate their odds?
According to an ex-bookie's clerk I know, mostly by watching other bookies very carefully and by trying to keep their overall liability to the punters to a minimum. Remember, the bookies are in this to make money, so they're actually looking to manage risk to themselves while maximizing the amount of trade they're doing; if they get it wrong, either the punters all go elsewhere (odds too low) or the punters all come running (odds too high).
ACS Law tried this for bigger money in proper court. Bad Move(TM). The judge provided them with a very unpleasant surprise by disallowing the withdrawal. If they lose they pay, possibly pay legal expenses for the other party and a precedent is created which blows the model out of the water. Their only retreat route here was to fold the company which is exactly what they did.
First off, it's the UK so there's a presumption in favour of the losing party "making good" the losses from the court case itself of the winner; costs are normally awarded. (Formally, it's in the power of the judge to decide in equity, so if the other side has outrageous or disproportionate costs, the level of costs awarded might be well short of their actual level, making the victory a distinctly pyrrhic one. This is an area where the UK and the US have diverged.)
Secondly, folding the company might not save it. Judges don't like people who screw around with them or blatantly misuse the law, and court fines and fees are one of the more protected classes when it comes to bankruptcy. (Not as much as the taxman IIRC, but even so.) Moreover, if it's not a limited liability company (the case with many law firms for tax reasons) it's the owner(s) that's in trouble as they're personally liable. Oh dear! :-)
PNG and MP3 don't have exploits, programs do.
That's because there's no standard scripting section for those container formats, as far as I'm aware. Without some way to package in code that can be executed in a way that the target will understand at all, the exploit isn't going anywhere.
If you work for Microsoft and are reading this, please, for the love of all that's holy, do not define such a thing, even as a vendor extension. Even if it lets you do something you think is neat. Such a change could only ever cause grief and pain, which would be redoubled when a battalion of computer security catch up with you in person after having had to suffer through years of dealing with the resulting vulnerabilities. (Hey, I'm just trying to head this off at the pass right now. Some ideas really are that awful.)
I don't see a downside to standardization to be honest.
Apart from the huge fight over it and all the patent and licensing worries? Let's face it, trying to standardized the whole technical stack is just making it incredibly hard to finalize any standard at all. Far better to drop the largely orthogonal bits like media formats and focus on how to handle larger classes of content (e.g., do video/* as a generic thing rather than nailing down exactly what sort of a baseline there needs to be there).
Standards should be focussed and composable, as that makes it possible to implement them. The whole HTML5 process has not ever given the impression of having been properly limited in scope. It's just one shark-jumping moment after another.
Cause banks have a long history of honesty and stability!
By comparison with organizations handling payments that aren't banks? Yes. Alas.
I think as competition grows in the cloud computing market we'll see a lot more modeling being done on the cloud. There's a lot to be said about having your own supercomputer for sure, but if I can get it done at a fraction of the cost by renting off-peak hours on Amazon's cloud... I'm convinced the future is there, it'll just take us another decade to migrate off our entirely customized and proprietary environments we see today.
Depends on the problem. Some things work well with highly distributed architectures like a cloud (e.g., exploring a "space" of parameters where there's not vast amounts to do at each "point") but others are far better off with traditional supercomputing (computational fluid dynamics is the classic example, of which weather modeling is just a particular type). Of course, some of the most interesting problems are mixes, such as pipelines of processing where some stages are embarrassingly distributable and others require grunty concentrated power. If you're getting into the design of this class of "meta-application", then you're going to have to just be aware that the details really matter (and the costs associated with the various tradeoffs also vary over time, just to make it more "fun").
The different connections need to be split.
Not really, especially as each of those ISPs has lots of complexity in their service portfolio so doing the split would be exceptionally tricky (and make the whole graph impossible to read, instead of just plain difficult). What I find more interesting is that the average level of service of the worst performing Canadian ISP would put it in the middle of the top performing group of US ISPs. Maybe it's because the US has a much lower population density than Canada? Or maybe it's because US ISPs prefer giving their customers the shaft to actually providing a decent and value-for-money service...
Except that google paying a premium to get higher speed special treatment is effectively the same thing as google paying to slow down everyone else. Anyone who wants to compete is forced to pay the same premium.
Not at all. There's a crucial difference; a provider paying to give the ISP's customers elevated service is doing an overall positive thing because their competitors can compete. Paying to slow down the competition though, that's a beggar-thy-neighbor move and is wrong. It's particularly wrong as it can have unintended side effects, such as slowing down unrelated services. A key feature of regulations when they have to exist at all should be that they focus on stopping negative behaviors without (greatly) impacting positive ones.
Using a browser's find-in-page feature (Ctrl+F) still breaks the layout.
That seems to depend on the browser. Safari seems OK with it, for example.
Any kind of media production that appeals more to the brainy folks will bring fewer advertising dollars than shows for morons who will buy anything they see on TV. Hence the downward spiral for commercial TV. American Idol, Glenn Beck, Big Brother... that's what the advertisers like. Fodder for consumers.
Not necessarily. It is possible to advertise to people with a full set of functioning neurons, but it requires effort, applied intelligence and creativity. For some reason, most advertisers in the US seem to instead focus on the lowest common denominator instead, which is cost effective for the mass market, but nowhere near as good for the higher quality end. The proportion of intelligent ads is higher in the UK for some reason (even if that's still only relative; we have plenty of terrible ads too). I don't think a reflection of anything other than trends of thought in ad agencies though.
Of course, being able to get an acceptable ad to the smarter end of the market has a number of advantages. For one thing, on average more intelligent people have more disposable income.
It's a defense, but it's not an ironclad defense.
But good luck fighting against it. You'd have to have a really good case for it to be worth considering at all.
I haven't specifically read Google's AOI.. but consider for a moment if the "don't be evil" principle was written in some way into the AOI. What if one day Larry Page decided that targeted advertising is evil (it arguably is), and therefore decided to immediately shut down AdSense?
Well? It's purely hypothetical. He's unlikely to do so unless there's a scheme waiting to take over that makes even more money. However, if he did then maybe a case could be made. Until that time... well, who cares? (Well, as an investor maybe you should care, but you would typically price that risk premium into the price you're willing to pay to invest in the company, and that's true for any investment; the details vary, but the principle doesn't.)
This is true because the fiduciary is required to act in the best interests of their counter party. Ultimately it doesn't matter what the AOI says.. if the fiduciary clearly acts in a way that could damage the counter party (shareholder) that is a violation of the fiduciary duty, and thus the counter party (shareholder) may be entitled to compensatory damages or other actions undertaken by the court.
But determining the best interests of the counter party is difficult, so proving a case where the CEO does an action that is exactly in line with both the letter and spirit of the corporate charter, and which was both freely open to examination and widely discussed before the investment position was taken, proving such a case is very hard. (It's easier to show in the situation where a company has put itself up for sale and the Board accepts an offer from a golfing buddy of the CEO that is a long way below the highest price. Nobody's accusing anyone at Google of this sort of scumbaggery.)
Consumption based taxes would even things out individually, but would flip the scale on its head by class. Someone making $100 million a year isn't likely to spend more than $20-30 million, a frugal multi-millionaire may only spend $10 million. A 20% consumption tax would mean he is only paying 2% of his income in taxes.
Contrast that with someone living pay check to pay check, making $15,000 a year. They have to spend all of their money every year, so a 20% consumption tax would mean he pays 20% of his income.
You end up with the people who need every dime they can get their hands on to survive paying the highest percentage of their income in taxes. That can only be considered fair by the cruelest definitions of fair.
We have a consumption tax (VAT) in the UK, but it avoids being grossly unfair in the way you describe by virtue of having certain categories of goods excluded. In particular, most food purchased for consumption off the premises (e.g., in a supermarket or for take-away, but not in a restaurant; this does mean that the price of some goods - fast food is a good example - will vary quite a lot by whether you eat in or not) has no VAT on it. The details are quite bewilderingly complex though; beware!
In practice, your webserver will probably also need permissions for outgoing connections. So if it's hacked then your computer can be a part of DDoS'ing botnet.
That's actually pretty easy to manage: you firewall outgoing connections using a firewall that isn't on the same machine — actually, using a device whose management port isn't on the same network is most advisable — so that the webserver can only make outgoing connections to whitelisted sites. Typically, none of those need to be exposed to the outside world. If there's a need to support things like outgoing SMTP from the httpd, you use tricks like a firewall rule that rewrites all those connections so they go to a special local mail router, so making it really easy to track who's sending what and spot problems that way.
Of course, this does mean that some crappy web2.0 webapps won't work. But that's really the fault of the developers of those webapps being security-ignorant numpties.
Ah, but Iceland chose not to bail out their own banks because a very large part, if not a majority, of the investors in those banks were British. Made perfect sense not to sink their economy to recover British savings.
Alas, it seems that it was the British Treasury that bailed out the Irish banks (which makes sense given the level of financial integration between the two countries, something which most citizens in both countries are unaware of).
X11 the protocol was very good 20 years ago, but by now shows its age. A new X12 could use some cleanups such as removing colors, palettes and visuals (truecolor is the only relevant one nowadays), adding explicit gamma support, removing every drawing primitive except unaliased points, horizontal/vertical lines and image handling, adding alpha support, adding efficient image transfer mechanisms by mapping video-card accessible buffers in the application (XShmPutImage and glTexSubImage2D are sad jokes, performance-wise), adding blending/compositing support, etc.
I'd agree on some of those things (I hate visuals and palettes) but I think you're being a little too strict in what you propose to remove. Stuff like a multi-segment line that can go at arbitrary angles is useful and shouldn't have to be reimplemented in client-side code. It would be better if we could have some sort of model like you see in (Display) PostScript; that's what OSX uses, and its rather nice to code for.
And that's just graphics, don't get me started about multi-screne handler, internationalization, window management or inter-process communications.
Window management isn't too bad, but multi-screen handing is nasty, and internationalized input handling is truly awful. (IPC... I'm not too excited about. It's bad on all platforms really.)
Often those systems are at least firewalled in a DMZ, but I have yet to see them on a completely separate network (although some clients are making noises in that direction).
So nobody's yet done them a quote for running separate cables to all the doctors offices in the area. Still, it'd do a lot to support the local economy, especially building contractors that are handy with a backhoe...
Discovering the higgs will fill in the biggest hole in the standard model, it's what gives everything in the universe mass.
Strictly, it's the rest masses of the fundamental particles that are determined by the Higgs field. However, the majority of mass of "ordinary" matter - i.e., protons and neutrons - is actually due to the (enormous) binding energy in the color field that is holding the quarks together. When I first found that out, I found it pretty amazing; it goes to show just how important relativity is.
And, aside from all that-- it's a fantastic research facility that funds some of the greatest scientists on Earth, and it's on American soil. If the US keeps cutting science and research programs, then guess what, no US kid will want to move into science and the US will fade into the distance as Europe continues to dominate high-energy physics, and eventually, every other field.
I believe that Fermilab are going to be focusing on other research fields, and they are also one of the main sites in the US that handles data coming from CERN. They're still a cutting-edge lab.
Mars is flat?? I don't know where you get that idea from. Mars has mountains and valleys that dwarf anything we have on earth. Olympus Mons is over 21km tall, almost 3 times the height of anything on earth.
Maybe he's basing it on some of the pictures that have been sent back (though obviously not the ones of inside a crater) which have mostly been from fairly flat locations as they're easier to land safely in and get good scientific results back from.