"I like this, I don't like that." So what? That's just your taste. Yes, that's a starting point, but everyone overestimates how much they understand *other* users.. What you have to do is observe users working with the software for real. And you can't just do it for five minutes and declare yourself an expert; you've got to watch users over the course of years before certain things become clear.
I was for many years a software designer targeting PalmOS and later PocketPC. In the early days we designed what were essentially scaled down desktop applications -- using common sense of course. But unlike many people in the modern App Store environment I had close contact with users. I traveled to user sites to install the software and train the users. I rode in their trucks and watched them using the software in the field. And over the years I began to gain insight into the PDA form factor and how people use it. We all started out with the notion that UI design for handhelds was about dealing with the limitations of a small screen. It took me years to realize that mobile US design was actually about exploiting the potentials of a touch screen you held in your hand. When the iPhone came out I immediately knew that Apple got it: the handheld form factor is about the experience of direct manipulation. By using a capacitive touch screen Apple removed the last perceived intermediary between the user and the things on scree: the stylus.
Now I'm no longer a professional developer, but I do watch how people use their mobile devices with interest. The author is obviously right when he says a tablet is a different animal than a smartphone, but I think he hasn't grasped what the difference is. It's not just about screen real estate; it's about the totality of how the user interactrs with the device. You can't put a tablet in your pocket, and I think that's a much huger difference than it sounds; it stands for a whole lot of other things that are different betwen a palmtop device and one that is simply hand-holdable. For example he likes the idea of widgets that float over the active application as a way of making use of wasted screen real estate. This is technology focused design thinking (how can we use this resource), not user focused. And my admittedly casual observations suggest that this idea is bad for a lot of the way users use tablets.
One interesting development has been the near-disappearnce of handheld computers in the 4-5 inch screen range that *aren't* smartphones. But wi-fi only tablets remain popular. Why should that be? Again I haven't been observing as a developer, but I think it's because people have different application focuses when they use different devices. When you see someone using a smartphone as a computer they're texting, tweeting,instagramming etc. When they're on their tablets they're surfing the web, watching videos, reading ebooks, and playing games. The idea of widgets floating over active content is ideal for someone who uses their tablet like a smartphone. It's not so great for people using tablets in the ways they seem to. Of course some peoiple *do* use their tablets like smartphones. They're the people who drag out their iPad to take a candid photo. Such people exist, we've all seen them, but it doesn't make them typical. I'd guess most tablet owners these days also have a smartphone.
I'm no longer developing, so take this with a grain of salt, but it seems to me that the focus of smartphone use is connecting, the focus of tablet use is consuming, and the focus of desktop use probably should be creating. Blowing up a phone app to a 10.1 inch screen will clearly make it look ridiculous, but it may not matter. What matters is the usability of apps that are built for the things tablet users are focused on.
Add column C: children are geniuses... at certain things. One of those things is acquiring language, something that adults struggle with but which is literally child's play to them. That doesn't mean children -- even precocious ones -- can reason like adults.
The linguistic genius of very young children might well help one pass a test a standardized test with a simple scalar score which depends in part on whether you can talk the lingo the way the vendor wants you to talk. I'm assuming the tests are devised by marketing people rather than people in actually evaluating human capabilities, like people education or research psychology PhDs.
I was in the last cadre of high school student to learn the slide rule. I did trig and math problems on a Picket N800, although later I preferred a circular Scientific Instrumentys 300B.
The idea of building a machine to perform mechanical analog computation is not so outside the box for anyone who's ever done analog computation by hand. A repetitive series of calculations boil down to a repetitve sequence of movements, and in particular if you used a circular slide rule the idea of some kind of gear train to do the calculation woudl have been obvious.
Which is not to say the devices weren't ingenious. But except for the abacus and the adding machine, analog contraptions were the only way to do computation other than by handwriting.
I dunno. Has anyone ever (publicly) cracked a disk encrypted with bitlocker and TPM? I'm sure it can be done, but it'd be surprising if it were done without ripping the computer apart and using exotic equipment to peer into the state of the TPM.
Why? Because solar panels will do the job, where the job needs to be done. Simple as that. All the interesting stuff is going to happen when the comet is near perihelion, which for 67P is 1.2 AU. There's plenty of solar power there.
At 67P's aphelion of 5.7 AU an RTG would be needed -- if there were any observations worth spending money on. But powering this spacecraft with an RTG would be sending an expensive and heavy piece of equipment out into the middle of nowhere for no good reason. It'd be different if 67P were going to pass by Jupiter, like it did in 1959, but just because it's going out past the orbit of Jupiter doesn't mean it's going anywehre near Jupiter or anything else of interest in our lifetime.
If you're old enough, you might remember a time when that joke was funny.
I was 14 years old when the GOES-1 satellite was launched. At the time the most powerful computer in the world was probably the CDC 7600, which ran at 34 MHz, had 64 Kilobytes of RAM, and delivered 10 MFLOPS. Today the highest end desktop delivers over 100 GigaFLOPS, and supercompuyters deliver into the PetaFLOPS -- that's eight orders of magnitude faster.
So until I was a teenager forecasts were essentially done by hand without computers or sattelites, and these early forecasts had an interesting property: the next day's forecast was not significantly more accurate than assuming tommorow's weather would be like today's. In my experience, today's three day forecasts are more accurate than next day forecasts were back then. In the early 70s we'd maybe get two days of warning that a storm like Sandy might hit our region, and we wouldn't know for sure until hours before it made landfall. With Sandy the track was predicted within fifty miles accuracy five days ahead.
We can still complain about next day's forecast because we're now expecting hourly predictions. We're holding weather forecasts to the standard that we can almost set our watch by them -- or at least our sundial. The problem with that is that at any given moment it might be raining in one spot and not raining in another spot a mile away. But I have a feeling that that kind of pinpoint geographic precision is coming someday.
It's important to remember these advances didn't happen because the problem was easy; they're an immense human accomplishment. When GOES-11 failed three years ago I remember having an argument with a young guy who claimed that the government shouldn't be in the weather satellite business, and (I am not making this up) if it wants satellite weather maps it should get them off the Internet like everyone else.
I've used Oracle (as well as practically every other major RDBMS platform) on and off since v4. Oracle has been around a long time and over that time it has acreted features and along with them complexity. For example it's got excellent features for storing and querying geographic objects. One of my favorite neat-o features is "virtual private databases" -- fine grained row-level security. You can set it up so some logins can't even see certain rows of a database -- e.g. if you log in as a regional manager you can see and manipulate only your region's records.
But of course if you've learned to program apps in the last fifteen years or so, you're probably thinking, "How are you supposed to use that feature when the connections are pooled?" And there's the rub. The way people typically use a database is different than the way they did 25 years ago. Now often what people are lookign for is a data store for a handful of object types in their website, and Oracle is overkill, and if you're thinking about serving thousands of users a minute it'll cost you a fortune for features you probably aren't going to use.
So for many if not most apps today really doesn't matter much which RDBMS you choose -- or whether you choose an RDMS at all, so long as it provides the performance and reliabilty you need. The nastieness of MSSQL's Transact SQL and the idiosyncracies of PL/SQL are hidden away by peristance providers so you hever have to deal with them. There are stills some apps where you have dozens or even hundreds of tables that are continually being combined in queried in idiosyncratici ways, and this is what a traditional RDBMS is designed to solve. If you've got dozens or even hundreds of tables and millions of records with a modest number of users, it's hard to beat Oracle.
Within the traditional RDBMSs, Oracle provides rich feature sets that are irrelevent to many developers today. Some of its SQL was non-standard (don't know if this is still true), and some of its JDBC driver features were non-standard (BLOBS -- again don't know if this is still true), but this doesn't matter to users who are working with some kind of persistence provider like Hibernate that papers over the differences.
As for performance, it's very good for an RDBMS out of the box -- which is to say mediocre. That's the deal with RDBMS: guaranteed mediocre perofrmance for no programmer effort. As load climbs, Oracle in my experience works very well if you have someone who is a capable Oracle DBA. If not Oracle performance has a way of collapsing catastrophically due to resource starvation (e.g. exceeding the memory allocated to the System Global Area etc). Managing an Oracle database that will get hammered is not for amateurs. Oracle databases have all kinds of parameters to tweak, many of which can cause disaster. Beware.
On top of that Oracle's licensing practices are (or at least were) ridiculously complicated and predatory. They don't care if you screw up and it costs you a ton of money, once they have their hooks into you. I've been to Oracle offices many times, and the corporate culture always gave me the creeps. Of course, if I had to pick a competitor for creepiest corporate culture, I'd have to name Amazon. That may be a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire.
You have to disaggregate statiustics before you use them to evaluate a policy.
For example, I think we can agree that forcible rape is a violent crime. Violent crime rates are down, does that mean we should be less concerened about forcible rape? No, because we need consider the specific rape statistics, which might possibly have risen even if the overall rate for violent crime has dropped.
In this case, you need to show that the rate of school shootings has dropped. You can 't lump them in with all violent crimes and then use statistics about the larger group to reasonable about the smaller; that's the fallacy of overgeneralization.
Which is not to say your conclusion is wrong, only that your argument is specious.
School shootings are "black swan" events. It's a near statistical certainty that you won't have one in your community. This does not necessarily mean, however, that communities shouldn't prepare for them. How far to go is a complex question that depends among other things on what *else* is on the community's plate.
The punishment for cheating on CS201 should be having to get through CS330 (Design and Analysis of Algorithms) without cheating. If you can't get through a 200 level data structures without cheating you're going to be roadkill when you face your first dynamic programming problem.
Any particular reason religion is in that list of protected attributes? The others are innate characteristics while religion, regardless of how deeply held or deathly serious the consequences of deviating,is an opinion.
I think you answered your own question as to why religion ought to be protected. It should be part of a more general right to hold unpopular opinions without unreasonable discrimination.
Well, this is the dark side of competition. Without regulation, you find yourself competing with bottom feeders.
It's one thing to be competing with bottom feeders who simply externalize costs -- e.g. shipping waste to countries with weak environmental regulations. It's another thing to be competing with bottom feeders who undermine trust in your industry. You can't just copy them and say, "everyone does it, that's life." Winning that race to the bottom is actually bad for your bottom line.
Then make qualifying to serve in a silo and spending at least a year in the silo a requirement for anyone who wants to make a certain level, say full colonel. That would guarantee that *every* general officer would have first hand experience with that part of the service. It'd be an unpopular policy because it's a shit job, but maybe it wouldn't be such a shit job if everyone had to do it.
Since you typically need post-graduate education to be a colonel, and boredom is the biggest problem in the job, maybe you could combine the two -- study and mind the missile at the same time.
If you read the article you'll see that the senators from states with missile silos don't want any of them closed. That's why the airforce will be manning all 454 ICBM silos, even though 54 of them will be empty.
It's basically welfare for Montana, South Dakota and Wyoming. It would make more sense to cut 2.4 million checks for $819 and send them to every man, woman and child in those three states every year for perpetuity, rather than spendin that same 2 billion dollars on a half-assed job of maintaining these dangerous "assets".
I learned to program in Lisp -- specifically scheme, because that's what they taught at MIT. I spent many years working in K&R C. I belong to the generation that learned to do actually useful programming from The Unix Programming Environment and Software Tools in C -- God help me, I actually spent a year programming in Ratfor targeting Fortran IV as a back end.. I've used most of the major languages that have come down the pike since -- C++, Java, Python, PHP, blah blah blah.
Javascript feels an awful lot like Scheme to me. Ugly but workable syntax. Powerful stuff under the covers. Yes, you can use Javascript to write trivial little event handlers, and it's no better or worse than any other scripting language for that. But it supports higher order functions, for Pete's sake. Can you think of any other language that has popularized an advanced programming concept like that?
I was an MIT student when Reagan was elected. A lot of us had work study jobs in research labs. The change in research wasn't so much a cut in funding a change in focus. "Deaths per dollar" became a familiar metric.
There was a guy who came to work in the same lab as me as an engineer. He'd been the PI of a project that developed an advanced electron microscope that was fifteen years ahead of its time. His project was discontinued because under the Reagan philosophy of science research the government shouldn't do applied research except into weapons -- thus the "deaths per dollar" metric. We used the microscope -- his life's work basically -- as a spare vacuum tank. In the mid 90s under Clinton funding was restored, and electron energy loss spectroscopy made rapid advances again.
Slashdot Mirror
"I like this, I don't like that." So what? That's just your taste. Yes, that's a starting point, but everyone overestimates how much they understand *other* users.. What you have to do is observe users working with the software for real. And you can't just do it for five minutes and declare yourself an expert; you've got to watch users over the course of years before certain things become clear.
I was for many years a software designer targeting PalmOS and later PocketPC. In the early days we designed what were essentially scaled down desktop applications -- using common sense of course. But unlike many people in the modern App Store environment I had close contact with users. I traveled to user sites to install the software and train the users. I rode in their trucks and watched them using the software in the field. And over the years I began to gain insight into the PDA form factor and how people use it. We all started out with the notion that UI design for handhelds was about dealing with the limitations of a small screen. It took me years to realize that mobile US design was actually about exploiting the potentials of a touch screen you held in your hand. When the iPhone came out I immediately knew that Apple got it: the handheld form factor is about the experience of direct manipulation. By using a capacitive touch screen Apple removed the last perceived intermediary between the user and the things on scree: the stylus.
Now I'm no longer a professional developer, but I do watch how people use their mobile devices with interest. The author is obviously right when he says a tablet is a different animal than a smartphone, but I think he hasn't grasped what the difference is. It's not just about screen real estate; it's about the totality of how the user interactrs with the device. You can't put a tablet in your pocket, and I think that's a much huger difference than it sounds; it stands for a whole lot of other things that are different betwen a palmtop device and one that is simply hand-holdable. For example he likes the idea of widgets that float over the active application as a way of making use of wasted screen real estate. This is technology focused design thinking (how can we use this resource), not user focused. And my admittedly casual observations suggest that this idea is bad for a lot of the way users use tablets.
One interesting development has been the near-disappearnce of handheld computers in the 4-5 inch screen range that *aren't* smartphones. But wi-fi only tablets remain popular. Why should that be? Again I haven't been observing as a developer, but I think it's because people have different application focuses when they use different devices. When you see someone using a smartphone as a computer they're texting, tweeting,instagramming etc. When they're on their tablets they're surfing the web, watching videos, reading ebooks, and playing games. The idea of widgets floating over active content is ideal for someone who uses their tablet like a smartphone. It's not so great for people using tablets in the ways they seem to. Of course some peoiple *do* use their tablets like smartphones. They're the people who drag out their iPad to take a candid photo. Such people exist, we've all seen them, but it doesn't make them typical. I'd guess most tablet owners these days also have a smartphone.
I'm no longer developing, so take this with a grain of salt, but it seems to me that the focus of smartphone use is connecting, the focus of tablet use is consuming, and the focus of desktop use probably should be creating. Blowing up a phone app to a 10.1 inch screen will clearly make it look ridiculous, but it may not matter. What matters is the usability of apps that are built for the things tablet users are focused on.
Add column C: children are geniuses... at certain things. One of those things is acquiring language, something that adults struggle with but which is literally child's play to them. That doesn't mean children -- even precocious ones -- can reason like adults.
The linguistic genius of very young children might well help one pass a test a standardized test with a simple scalar score which depends in part on whether you can talk the lingo the way the vendor wants you to talk. I'm assuming the tests are devised by marketing people rather than people in actually evaluating human capabilities, like people education or research psychology PhDs.
I was in the last cadre of high school student to learn the slide rule. I did trig and math problems on a Picket N800, although later I preferred a circular Scientific Instrumentys 300B.
The idea of building a machine to perform mechanical analog computation is not so outside the box for anyone who's ever done analog computation by hand. A repetitive series of calculations boil down to a repetitve sequence of movements, and in particular if you used a circular slide rule the idea of some kind of gear train to do the calculation woudl have been obvious.
Which is not to say the devices weren't ingenious. But except for the abacus and the adding machine, analog contraptions were the only way to do computation other than by handwriting.
None of which matters if you can get the Li-ion batteries last for as many months as you need them to last and they're priced cheap enough.
I dunno. Has anyone ever (publicly) cracked a disk encrypted with bitlocker and TPM? I'm sure it can be done, but it'd be surprising if it were done without ripping the computer apart and using exotic equipment to peer into the state of the TPM.
Nanaimo bars are great, except for the feeling you get after eating one that you're going to be sick.
No, it had 64K words. 60 bit words. That's 640K bytes (6 bit bytes of course).
6 bit bytes! Why?
Science doesn't need lower case.
Because they had to chisel them out of rock.
Why? Because solar panels will do the job, where the job needs to be done. Simple as that. All the interesting stuff is going to happen when the comet is near perihelion, which for 67P is 1.2 AU. There's plenty of solar power there.
At 67P's aphelion of 5.7 AU an RTG would be needed -- if there were any observations worth spending money on. But powering this spacecraft with an RTG would be sending an expensive and heavy piece of equipment out into the middle of nowhere for no good reason. It'd be different if 67P were going to pass by Jupiter, like it did in 1959, but just because it's going out past the orbit of Jupiter doesn't mean it's going anywehre near Jupiter or anything else of interest in our lifetime.
Not for all colleges, but there are plenty of colleges that are less likely to admit students who've taken part in 4H.
Can you name any?
And where can I obtain this "tat" people speak of?
Who has a Kit-Kat or Lollipop for dessert, seriously?
Agreed. Personally, I'm waiting for Android Napoleon to come out.
I mean, who would even notice.
If you're old enough, you might remember a time when that joke was funny.
I was 14 years old when the GOES-1 satellite was launched. At the time the most powerful computer in the world was probably the CDC 7600, which ran at 34 MHz, had 64 Kilobytes of RAM, and delivered 10 MFLOPS. Today the highest end desktop delivers over 100 GigaFLOPS, and supercompuyters deliver into the PetaFLOPS -- that's eight orders of magnitude faster.
So until I was a teenager forecasts were essentially done by hand without computers or sattelites, and these early forecasts had an interesting property: the next day's forecast was not significantly more accurate than assuming tommorow's weather would be like today's. In my experience, today's three day forecasts are more accurate than next day forecasts were back then. In the early 70s we'd maybe get two days of warning that a storm like Sandy might hit our region, and we wouldn't know for sure until hours before it made landfall. With Sandy the track was predicted within fifty miles accuracy five days ahead.
We can still complain about next day's forecast because we're now expecting hourly predictions. We're holding weather forecasts to the standard that we can almost set our watch by them -- or at least our sundial. The problem with that is that at any given moment it might be raining in one spot and not raining in another spot a mile away. But I have a feeling that that kind of pinpoint geographic precision is coming someday.
It's important to remember these advances didn't happen because the problem was easy; they're an immense human accomplishment. When GOES-11 failed three years ago I remember having an argument with a young guy who claimed that the government shouldn't be in the weather satellite business, and (I am not making this up) if it wants satellite weather maps it should get them off the Internet like everyone else.
I've used Oracle (as well as practically every other major RDBMS platform) on and off since v4. Oracle has been around a long time and over that time it has acreted features and along with them complexity. For example it's got excellent features for storing and querying geographic objects. One of my favorite neat-o features is "virtual private databases" -- fine grained row-level security. You can set it up so some logins can't even see certain rows of a database -- e.g. if you log in as a regional manager you can see and manipulate only your region's records.
But of course if you've learned to program apps in the last fifteen years or so, you're probably thinking, "How are you supposed to use that feature when the connections are pooled?" And there's the rub. The way people typically use a database is different than the way they did 25 years ago. Now often what people are lookign for is a data store for a handful of object types in their website, and Oracle is overkill, and if you're thinking about serving thousands of users a minute it'll cost you a fortune for features you probably aren't going to use.
So for many if not most apps today really doesn't matter much which RDBMS you choose -- or whether you choose an RDMS at all, so long as it provides the performance and reliabilty you need. The nastieness of MSSQL's Transact SQL and the idiosyncracies of PL/SQL are hidden away by peristance providers so you hever have to deal with them. There are stills some apps where you have dozens or even hundreds of tables that are continually being combined in queried in idiosyncratici ways, and this is what a traditional RDBMS is designed to solve. If you've got dozens or even hundreds of tables and millions of records with a modest number of users, it's hard to beat Oracle.
Within the traditional RDBMSs, Oracle provides rich feature sets that are irrelevent to many developers today. Some of its SQL was non-standard (don't know if this is still true), and some of its JDBC driver features were non-standard (BLOBS -- again don't know if this is still true), but this doesn't matter to users who are working with some kind of persistence provider like Hibernate that papers over the differences.
As for performance, it's very good for an RDBMS out of the box -- which is to say mediocre. That's the deal with RDBMS: guaranteed mediocre perofrmance for no programmer effort. As load climbs, Oracle in my experience works very well if you have someone who is a capable Oracle DBA. If not Oracle performance has a way of collapsing catastrophically due to resource starvation (e.g. exceeding the memory allocated to the System Global Area etc). Managing an Oracle database that will get hammered is not for amateurs. Oracle databases have all kinds of parameters to tweak, many of which can cause disaster. Beware.
On top of that Oracle's licensing practices are (or at least were) ridiculously complicated and predatory. They don't care if you screw up and it costs you a ton of money, once they have their hooks into you. I've been to Oracle offices many times, and the corporate culture always gave me the creeps. Of course, if I had to pick a competitor for creepiest corporate culture, I'd have to name Amazon. That may be a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire.
You have to disaggregate statiustics before you use them to evaluate a policy.
For example, I think we can agree that forcible rape is a violent crime. Violent crime rates are down, does that mean we should be less concerened about forcible rape? No, because we need consider the specific rape statistics, which might possibly have risen even if the overall rate for violent crime has dropped.
In this case, you need to show that the rate of school shootings has dropped. You can 't lump them in with all violent crimes and then use statistics about the larger group to reasonable about the smaller; that's the fallacy of overgeneralization.
Which is not to say your conclusion is wrong, only that your argument is specious.
School shootings are "black swan" events. It's a near statistical certainty that you won't have one in your community. This does not necessarily mean, however, that communities shouldn't prepare for them. How far to go is a complex question that depends among other things on what *else* is on the community's plate.
On the plus side, think what this will do for the journal's impact factor!
Sounds like a character from the newspaper comic strip, "Barney Google and Snuffy Smith".
The punishment for cheating on CS201 should be having to get through CS330 (Design and Analysis of Algorithms) without cheating. If you can't get through a 200 level data structures without cheating you're going to be roadkill when you face your first dynamic programming problem.
Bad form, calling "whoosh" on a response your own attempt at a joke. Only a third party can call "whoosh".
Any particular reason religion is in that list of protected attributes? The others are innate characteristics while religion, regardless of how deeply held or deathly serious the consequences of deviating,is an opinion.
I think you answered your own question as to why religion ought to be protected. It should be part of a more general right to hold unpopular opinions without unreasonable discrimination.
Well, this is the dark side of competition. Without regulation, you find yourself competing with bottom feeders.
It's one thing to be competing with bottom feeders who simply externalize costs -- e.g. shipping waste to countries with weak environmental regulations. It's another thing to be competing with bottom feeders who undermine trust in your industry. You can't just copy them and say, "everyone does it, that's life." Winning that race to the bottom is actually bad for your bottom line.
Then make qualifying to serve in a silo and spending at least a year in the silo a requirement for anyone who wants to make a certain level, say full colonel. That would guarantee that *every* general officer would have first hand experience with that part of the service. It'd be an unpopular policy because it's a shit job, but maybe it wouldn't be such a shit job if everyone had to do it.
Since you typically need post-graduate education to be a colonel, and boredom is the biggest problem in the job, maybe you could combine the two -- study and mind the missile at the same time.
If you read the article you'll see that the senators from states with missile silos don't want any of them closed. That's why the airforce will be manning all 454 ICBM silos, even though 54 of them will be empty.
It's basically welfare for Montana, South Dakota and Wyoming. It would make more sense to cut 2.4 million checks for $819 and send them to every man, woman and child in those three states every year for perpetuity, rather than spendin that same 2 billion dollars on a half-assed job of maintaining these dangerous "assets".
I learned to program in Lisp -- specifically scheme, because that's what they taught at MIT. I spent many years working in K&R C. I belong to the generation that learned to do actually useful programming from The Unix Programming Environment and Software Tools in C -- God help me, I actually spent a year programming in Ratfor targeting Fortran IV as a back end.. I've used most of the major languages that have come down the pike since -- C++, Java, Python, PHP, blah blah blah.
Javascript feels an awful lot like Scheme to me. Ugly but workable syntax. Powerful stuff under the covers. Yes, you can use Javascript to write trivial little event handlers, and it's no better or worse than any other scripting language for that. But it supports higher order functions, for Pete's sake. Can you think of any other language that has popularized an advanced programming concept like that?
I was an MIT student when Reagan was elected. A lot of us had work study jobs in research labs. The change in research wasn't so much a cut in funding a change in focus. "Deaths per dollar" became a familiar metric.
There was a guy who came to work in the same lab as me as an engineer. He'd been the PI of a project that developed an advanced electron microscope that was fifteen years ahead of its time. His project was discontinued because under the Reagan philosophy of science research the government shouldn't do applied research except into weapons -- thus the "deaths per dollar" metric. We used the microscope -- his life's work basically -- as a spare vacuum tank. In the mid 90s under Clinton funding was restored, and electron energy loss spectroscopy made rapid advances again.
Sometimes there's more than two sides to an issue.