The problem with white phosphorus is that it doesn't kill people, it maims them. The overall gist of the rules of war is that it's OK to kill people but not to leave them suffering. It's tantamount to torture or terrorism, using fear and pain rather than force to achieve your goals. Ostensibly killing soldiers is part of a just war (making them stop doing whatever it is that justifies your war), while simply scaring people isn't, even though it leaves them alive.
It took me a long time to write that in as neutral a fashion as I could. I'm sure that a great many people would find it a silly distinction. But it really is a key underlying principle for why we have rules of war at all. I personally find the concept kind of odd.
I don't think it's unreasonable. Government spending is in a sense an arbitrary number. About half of the budget is money that comes in one door and out the other; they're wealth transfer programs rather than actual "spending". Such programs could, if we wished, be many times GDP. It's a bit like basing a bank's value based on the size of its deposits, even though every dollar on deposit is also a dollar that they owe. I'm not taking a stand on the programs one way or another, simply pointing out that the size of the budget isn't an easy number to interpret for comparison purposes.
The GDP, on the other hand, more or less corresponds to something real: how much the nation produces. There are numerous ways in which the calculation is flawed, and that number too is most effective only when compared to historical data. But in this case, it's a not-completely-insane way to say, "This is how much the nation makes, and this is what fraction we spend on protecting that earning capacity via intelligence services."
It would also be meaningful to compare to real government spending (as opposed to the government's supervision of transfer payments). But that number is roughly proportional to GDP, since it effectively takes a fraction of GDP in taxes. So it's another way of saying the same thing.
You can certainly dispute whether that amount is still too much, or whether the amount is being spent well in pursuit of that protecting-the-rest-of-our-earnings goal. But I don't think it's meaningless to compare the two numbers.
I am having a bit of trouble trying to figure out what this is intended to achieve. T(brief and uninformative)FA mentioned its ability to answer technical questions that you should be able to glean from the web site if the answers have any meaning to you. And it doesn't do most of the things that a salesman is supposed to be able to do, about financing and the dealership's policies and such like.
It sounds less like a salesman-replacement and a lot more like ELIZA dressed up with car questions so that somebody can get a bit of free advertising on somebody's blog.
People don't generally taste feces, but they do know what it smells like, and a huge fraction of the sense of flavor is smell. So whenever I read something like that, I read it as "it doesn't taste like what I expect feces to taste like, given the stench".
The actual sense of taste plays a role, something you can't guess from the smell, but it's relatively coarse and imprecise. Coffee, in fact, tastes very different from the way one expects from the aroma alone, because the flavor is very bitter (due to various alkaloids, including caffeine). The acrid, burned flavors of dark roasts contribute. But if you mix it with milk, whose proteins bind a lot of those bitter flavors, you end up with something that actually does taste a lot like it smells.
(I know you didn't ask, but my $.02 were burning a hole in my mental pocket.)
Accounting for just over half the Senate, and only 19 of the 49 Republicans. Leaving me to conclude that well over half of the Republicans voted for one or the other, but not both. And only a quarter can claim to be fully against all bailouts.
So the OP may not be correct in claiming that "very few Republicans" dissented, it's also not correct to imply that they're universally against bailouts. Rather, it seems more like "bailouts when we like them; not when we don't (but somehow justified by being universally against them)".
I think it works like this: if the broadcast networks were to offer their content for free via streaming, they would be competing with their own clients: the local affiliates. They receive the stuff and broadcast it locally over the airwaves, with local ads (inserted in addition to the national ads that come with the content). They also broadcast it over the local cable providers.
I don't know what, if any, revenue-sharing deals the networks make with the affiliates for competing with them via Hulu.
We don't have a rigorous definition of consciousness, yet, and may not for a long time.
But legal and medical decisions have to be made in the absence of certainty, because they can't wait. They're caught in a bind: they'd really like to have some unambiguous measure, so that they're not trapped in a judgment call that would be argued indefinitely without getting any closer to certainty. Since they don't have a rigorous definition, they're forced to make do with extremely rough approximations that can only be calibrated against some set of initial judgment calls.
The pursuit of a rigorous understanding of consciousness is ongoing. The tools that it has developed in the meantime will have to suffice for legal and medical decision-making. We're all going to be unhappy about that, but life never promised us timely answers.
The "proper authority" wording really catches at me. Authority doesn't mean that you know everything; it just means that you were in the right place at the right time with sufficient credentials to have power.
What he could have said there is, "In my low-level position I didn't have the perspective to see what damage this might cause, and should not have overriden the authority of those in a position to take a broader perspective." It's written so that people could come away thinking that's what he did say, but it clearly doesn't. Instead, he's saying exactly what you said: "I had no power to change things. I'd hoped the leaks would give me some, but they didn't. The power structure remains in place."
What I don't understand is, just who is this addressed to? Surely he doesn't expect the sentencing judge to be fooled by this non-apology into granting leniency. Could it just be a thinly coded message, telling the people who support him that there's still a lot of work to do, dressed up as an "apology" so that it would get press coverage?
Wish I had mod points, but since I don't, I'm just gonna agree emphatically.
I am a Shakespearean actor and director, and the issues are exactly what you say they are. Throwing students a copy of the book and telling them to read it is about the worst way to teach Shakespeare. The transformation from the page to the stage takes years to learn.
As an actor, I can get you to understand the text even if you don't know all the words and don't have a glossary. I know what they mean, which drives my performance, but if you're stumbling over unfamiliar text and grammar there's no hope of you following the story. It takes me weeks of studying the lines to understand the full meaning.
I would much rather have them watch a good staged production (NOT just a bunch of other students reading it out loud) and then discuss it with the actors and director. Then go back and read some of the best parts in detail, to figure out how they work and what makes it so effective. Memorize some speeches and learn how the sense of the text matches the rhythm of the meter and the tactic of each line, not just a bunch of syllables to be spat out.
I really hated the way I was taught Shakespeare, and this technology sounds as if it won't make that one whit better. Bringing some actors into schools, however, might do some good.
The latter was, I think, a reasonable mistake. Summers and Rubin figured that people, especially financial experts, would know better than to invest in an obvious bubble whose leveraged value exceeded the underlying value many times over. It's a company-ending mistake that causes you to lose all of your money.
Except, of course, that the company-ending mistake also takes the rest of the economy with it when it becomes that large. As JP Getty supposedly said, "When you owe the bank $100, it's your problem. When you owe the bank $100m, it's the bank's problem". The same applies to the economy, and the federal government stepped in to protect companies (and the economy as a whole) from the consequences of egregiously, flamingly stupid errors.
Which leaves us trapped between economic libertarians on one side, who chafe at any government regulation, and economic pragmatists on the other, who really hate cutting off their noses to spite their faces by letting too-big-to-fail companies fail and take the rest of the economy down with them. Oh, maybe it reemerges a few years later a little smarter, but meantime a few tens of millions have lost their homes and livelihoods for years.
Rubin and Summers, meanwhile, need to learn that Homo Economicus isn't, and that greed and shortsightedness really do need to be taken into account. Long-term self-interest may in the end benefit both of us, but your short-term self-interest screws me as well as you when foresight fails.
Maybe this sounds weird, but this is actually a key question for me about 3D printing. Material matters at least as much as shape.
I cook a fair bit, and I know what I like in a spatula. I have several different kinds of spatula on hand for different purposes. They need the right amount of flexibility for the job. Some are very thin and stiff (but not brittle); others are thick and flexible. Some need to tolerate high heat; some need to be soft enough to avoid scratching Teflon.
That's just for spatulas, a pretty trivial tool. I'd imagine that more complex jobs require more complex combinations of materials. Shape is important, but I haven't seen any indication that they're getting anywhere close to being able to get a machine that does the things that rubber, metal, wood, and a vast array of different plastics yield.
They also like to link to sites like jquery and google and other sites who are hosting basic Javascript features that they depend on. I'd just as soon they download it and serve it from their domain, but that way they get automatic, dynamic upgrades and bug fixes.
Frenemy. Or rather, lots of web sites are my frenemies, scooping up Javascript from dozens of web sites with no clear indication that they're aware of the interactions or trustworthiness of those sites. Slate.com is my particular nemesis here; I once counted two dozen separate sites that would have had to be enabled before the site could run as its designers intended, some of them down 4 and 5 layers of indirection.
NoScript, who treats everybody as an enemy until told otherwise, requires an awful lot of hand-holding before permitting that. NoScript I trust (more or less) to be on my side, but lots of web site designers consider them the enemy, and that makes our mutual encounters... tense.
Thanks a lot for this. Slashdot is full of very smart people who say, "I'm very smart, and I don't understand why it takes you so much time, effort, and money to do the thing that you do. Here, let me teach you your job." It's nice to have the occasional interjection from somebody who actually understands what's going on to explain at least a few of the complications glossed over in the process.
Unfortunately, one senator is NOT completely meaningless. Inhofe isn't just a Senator. He's the ranking minority member of the Committee on Environment and Public Works. That means he has enormous say in any legislation on the environment. If the Senate changes hands, he becomes the chairman of that committee, and has the power to singlehandedly stop any legislation to do anything about climate change. He would also have significant power to introduce legislation to dismantle any regulatory framework, and the ability to hassle executive branch agencies with subpoenas (and has shown a willingness to use it).
The committee structure of the US Congress puts enormous power in the hands of a few individuals. And the ones with the biggest axes to grind try to end up in prominent positions: the House Committee on Science and Technology is packed with people who aren't just climate change denialists, but creationists to boot.
The paper on special relativity is fairly readable. The general relativity paper is practically illegible to the layman, requiring tensor mathematics that are usually not taught until the later stages of a physics degree.
He did, however, try to make it more generally accessible, at least to the determined student. This paper is pretty amazing:
That's true, but you need to take the tally with a grain of salt. Everybody knows what the outcome will be before the vote is taken, so they each get to plan their votes according to what they think will get them re-elected. You could switch your vote when it's actually taken, but lying to the party whip is a good way to get yourself shut out of important meetings.
There were probably some who would have switched votes each direction if the tally were taken entirely in secret. I can't really say whether it would have gotten closer or further from passing, though I suspect the whips could take a stab at it.
It's kind of weird. People are desperate for news, lots and lots of it, but they seem to care little for quality. They'd rather have wrong news now than right news tomorrow. They'd rather have Big Picture news that presents issues in cosmic ideological terms while ignoring the dull stuff that's generally far more relevant. And they seem to be willing to tune into the same Newsflash over and over, even if there isn't actually anything new in it, like hamsters at a feeder bar hoping that this press is going to give them some kibble.
It's entertainment, not news. The actual news is important, and it is in there, but they can't afford to produce it without larding it with junk. If somehow there were a way for actual journalists to sequester the actual news behind a paywall, there might be a market for it, but instead what happens is that it gets reported and then endlessly repeated, with additions of junk to fill out the time.
The closest thing I can recommend to actual news is to go to the wire reports, or even better to just get a quality weekly magazine which at least isn't desperate to pad its content with new RIGHT NOW. Both approaches have deep flaws, but it's sure as hell better than 99% of daily newspapers and 100% of televised reporting.
TFA isn't really about the dead-tree edition. He's talking about news-gathering and -publishing in general.
And there's still demand for that, but people have grown to think of that as "free". It continues to exist, paid for by online advertising, paywalls, and the remaining print subscribers. He's talking about the limitations and futures of those things, and what that's going to mean for news-gathering.
I got the impression "iPhone" was used deliberately. He's making a comparison to another product where others already existed in the space, but where some company managed to package it in a way that somehow caught the imagination of non-technical users and became wildly popular.
It's as if that New York Times hit-job on the Tesla had read:
"No instant refueling. Less range than a Ford Focus. Lame."
The FTC doesn't issue patents. That's the Patent Office. They're not even in the same department. The USPTO is in Commerce; the FTC is an independent agency.
The whole point of an independent agency is to provide checks and balances, so that the departments don't feel compelled to cover up for each other and can try to compensate for each other's mistakes. Unfortunately, that can also mean that the left hand doesn't know, or like, what the right hand is doing.
"The government" isn't a big monolithic entity. Even the President has limited ability to interfere with many of the agencies. That has advantages and disadvantages.
This one has the advantage of being an Internet Startup, which can be breathlessly blogged about until some big corporation with too much cash on hand buys out its original investors for many times the actual revenue stream. Can the Hellenic Geodetic Reference System claim that?
It took me a couple of extra readings, too. The tricky unstated part: while other atomic clocks are better than cesium clocks, they are not the standard.
TFA doesn't explain why trapped-ion clocks (the "better clocks" mentioned in TFS) aren't used to define the standard. Presumably, that's just the glacial pace of international standards setting, and perhaps a trapped-ion clock standard is working its way through the system but has not yet become the new standard. That's just my guess, though.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with white phosphorus is that it doesn't kill people, it maims them. The overall gist of the rules of war is that it's OK to kill people but not to leave them suffering. It's tantamount to torture or terrorism, using fear and pain rather than force to achieve your goals. Ostensibly killing soldiers is part of a just war (making them stop doing whatever it is that justifies your war), while simply scaring people isn't, even though it leaves them alive.
It took me a long time to write that in as neutral a fashion as I could. I'm sure that a great many people would find it a silly distinction. But it really is a key underlying principle for why we have rules of war at all. I personally find the concept kind of odd.
I don't think it's unreasonable. Government spending is in a sense an arbitrary number. About half of the budget is money that comes in one door and out the other; they're wealth transfer programs rather than actual "spending". Such programs could, if we wished, be many times GDP. It's a bit like basing a bank's value based on the size of its deposits, even though every dollar on deposit is also a dollar that they owe. I'm not taking a stand on the programs one way or another, simply pointing out that the size of the budget isn't an easy number to interpret for comparison purposes.
The GDP, on the other hand, more or less corresponds to something real: how much the nation produces. There are numerous ways in which the calculation is flawed, and that number too is most effective only when compared to historical data. But in this case, it's a not-completely-insane way to say, "This is how much the nation makes, and this is what fraction we spend on protecting that earning capacity via intelligence services."
It would also be meaningful to compare to real government spending (as opposed to the government's supervision of transfer payments). But that number is roughly proportional to GDP, since it effectively takes a fraction of GDP in taxes. So it's another way of saying the same thing.
You can certainly dispute whether that amount is still too much, or whether the amount is being spent well in pursuit of that protecting-the-rest-of-our-earnings goal. But I don't think it's meaningless to compare the two numbers.
I am having a bit of trouble trying to figure out what this is intended to achieve. T(brief and uninformative)FA mentioned its ability to answer technical questions that you should be able to glean from the web site if the answers have any meaning to you. And it doesn't do most of the things that a salesman is supposed to be able to do, about financing and the dealership's policies and such like.
It sounds less like a salesman-replacement and a lot more like ELIZA dressed up with car questions so that somebody can get a bit of free advertising on somebody's blog.
People don't generally taste feces, but they do know what it smells like, and a huge fraction of the sense of flavor is smell. So whenever I read something like that, I read it as "it doesn't taste like what I expect feces to taste like, given the stench".
The actual sense of taste plays a role, something you can't guess from the smell, but it's relatively coarse and imprecise. Coffee, in fact, tastes very different from the way one expects from the aroma alone, because the flavor is very bitter (due to various alkaloids, including caffeine). The acrid, burned flavors of dark roasts contribute. But if you mix it with milk, whose proteins bind a lot of those bitter flavors, you end up with something that actually does taste a lot like it smells.
(I know you didn't ask, but my $.02 were burning a hole in my mental pocket.)
Accounting for just over half the Senate, and only 19 of the 49 Republicans. Leaving me to conclude that well over half of the Republicans voted for one or the other, but not both. And only a quarter can claim to be fully against all bailouts.
So the OP may not be correct in claiming that "very few Republicans" dissented, it's also not correct to imply that they're universally against bailouts. Rather, it seems more like "bailouts when we like them; not when we don't (but somehow justified by being universally against them)".
I think it works like this: if the broadcast networks were to offer their content for free via streaming, they would be competing with their own clients: the local affiliates. They receive the stuff and broadcast it locally over the airwaves, with local ads (inserted in addition to the national ads that come with the content). They also broadcast it over the local cable providers.
I don't know what, if any, revenue-sharing deals the networks make with the affiliates for competing with them via Hulu.
We don't have a rigorous definition of consciousness, yet, and may not for a long time.
But legal and medical decisions have to be made in the absence of certainty, because they can't wait. They're caught in a bind: they'd really like to have some unambiguous measure, so that they're not trapped in a judgment call that would be argued indefinitely without getting any closer to certainty. Since they don't have a rigorous definition, they're forced to make do with extremely rough approximations that can only be calibrated against some set of initial judgment calls.
The pursuit of a rigorous understanding of consciousness is ongoing. The tools that it has developed in the meantime will have to suffice for legal and medical decision-making. We're all going to be unhappy about that, but life never promised us timely answers.
The "proper authority" wording really catches at me. Authority doesn't mean that you know everything; it just means that you were in the right place at the right time with sufficient credentials to have power.
What he could have said there is, "In my low-level position I didn't have the perspective to see what damage this might cause, and should not have overriden the authority of those in a position to take a broader perspective." It's written so that people could come away thinking that's what he did say, but it clearly doesn't. Instead, he's saying exactly what you said: "I had no power to change things. I'd hoped the leaks would give me some, but they didn't. The power structure remains in place."
What I don't understand is, just who is this addressed to? Surely he doesn't expect the sentencing judge to be fooled by this non-apology into granting leniency. Could it just be a thinly coded message, telling the people who support him that there's still a lot of work to do, dressed up as an "apology" so that it would get press coverage?
It's still true. I regularly see web containers holding IBM 3270 emulators.
Wish I had mod points, but since I don't, I'm just gonna agree emphatically.
I am a Shakespearean actor and director, and the issues are exactly what you say they are. Throwing students a copy of the book and telling them to read it is about the worst way to teach Shakespeare. The transformation from the page to the stage takes years to learn.
As an actor, I can get you to understand the text even if you don't know all the words and don't have a glossary. I know what they mean, which drives my performance, but if you're stumbling over unfamiliar text and grammar there's no hope of you following the story. It takes me weeks of studying the lines to understand the full meaning.
I would much rather have them watch a good staged production (NOT just a bunch of other students reading it out loud) and then discuss it with the actors and director. Then go back and read some of the best parts in detail, to figure out how they work and what makes it so effective. Memorize some speeches and learn how the sense of the text matches the rhythm of the meter and the tactic of each line, not just a bunch of syllables to be spat out.
I really hated the way I was taught Shakespeare, and this technology sounds as if it won't make that one whit better. Bringing some actors into schools, however, might do some good.
The latter was, I think, a reasonable mistake. Summers and Rubin figured that people, especially financial experts, would know better than to invest in an obvious bubble whose leveraged value exceeded the underlying value many times over. It's a company-ending mistake that causes you to lose all of your money.
Except, of course, that the company-ending mistake also takes the rest of the economy with it when it becomes that large. As JP Getty supposedly said, "When you owe the bank $100, it's your problem. When you owe the bank $100m, it's the bank's problem". The same applies to the economy, and the federal government stepped in to protect companies (and the economy as a whole) from the consequences of egregiously, flamingly stupid errors.
Which leaves us trapped between economic libertarians on one side, who chafe at any government regulation, and economic pragmatists on the other, who really hate cutting off their noses to spite their faces by letting too-big-to-fail companies fail and take the rest of the economy down with them. Oh, maybe it reemerges a few years later a little smarter, but meantime a few tens of millions have lost their homes and livelihoods for years.
Rubin and Summers, meanwhile, need to learn that Homo Economicus isn't, and that greed and shortsightedness really do need to be taken into account. Long-term self-interest may in the end benefit both of us, but your short-term self-interest screws me as well as you when foresight fails.
Maybe this sounds weird, but this is actually a key question for me about 3D printing. Material matters at least as much as shape.
I cook a fair bit, and I know what I like in a spatula. I have several different kinds of spatula on hand for different purposes. They need the right amount of flexibility for the job. Some are very thin and stiff (but not brittle); others are thick and flexible. Some need to tolerate high heat; some need to be soft enough to avoid scratching Teflon.
That's just for spatulas, a pretty trivial tool. I'd imagine that more complex jobs require more complex combinations of materials. Shape is important, but I haven't seen any indication that they're getting anywhere close to being able to get a machine that does the things that rubber, metal, wood, and a vast array of different plastics yield.
They also like to link to sites like jquery and google and other sites who are hosting basic Javascript features that they depend on. I'd just as soon they download it and serve it from their domain, but that way they get automatic, dynamic upgrades and bug fixes.
Frenemy. Or rather, lots of web sites are my frenemies, scooping up Javascript from dozens of web sites with no clear indication that they're aware of the interactions or trustworthiness of those sites. Slate.com is my particular nemesis here; I once counted two dozen separate sites that would have had to be enabled before the site could run as its designers intended, some of them down 4 and 5 layers of indirection.
NoScript, who treats everybody as an enemy until told otherwise, requires an awful lot of hand-holding before permitting that. NoScript I trust (more or less) to be on my side, but lots of web site designers consider them the enemy, and that makes our mutual encounters... tense.
Thanks a lot for this. Slashdot is full of very smart people who say, "I'm very smart, and I don't understand why it takes you so much time, effort, and money to do the thing that you do. Here, let me teach you your job." It's nice to have the occasional interjection from somebody who actually understands what's going on to explain at least a few of the complications glossed over in the process.
Unfortunately, one senator is NOT completely meaningless. Inhofe isn't just a Senator. He's the ranking minority member of the Committee on Environment and Public Works. That means he has enormous say in any legislation on the environment. If the Senate changes hands, he becomes the chairman of that committee, and has the power to singlehandedly stop any legislation to do anything about climate change. He would also have significant power to introduce legislation to dismantle any regulatory framework, and the ability to hassle executive branch agencies with subpoenas (and has shown a willingness to use it).
The committee structure of the US Congress puts enormous power in the hands of a few individuals. And the ones with the biggest axes to grind try to end up in prominent positions: the House Committee on Science and Technology is packed with people who aren't just climate change denialists, but creationists to boot.
The paper on special relativity is fairly readable. The general relativity paper is practically illegible to the layman, requiring tensor mathematics that are usually not taught until the later stages of a physics degree.
He did, however, try to make it more generally accessible, at least to the determined student. This paper is pretty amazing:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Foundation_of_the_Generalised_Theory_of_Relativity
We don't eat carnivorous land animals. Some carnivorous fish, on the other hand, are so tasty that we're in the process of wiping them out.
That's true, but you need to take the tally with a grain of salt. Everybody knows what the outcome will be before the vote is taken, so they each get to plan their votes according to what they think will get them re-elected. You could switch your vote when it's actually taken, but lying to the party whip is a good way to get yourself shut out of important meetings.
There were probably some who would have switched votes each direction if the tally were taken entirely in secret. I can't really say whether it would have gotten closer or further from passing, though I suspect the whips could take a stab at it.
It's kind of weird. People are desperate for news, lots and lots of it, but they seem to care little for quality. They'd rather have wrong news now than right news tomorrow. They'd rather have Big Picture news that presents issues in cosmic ideological terms while ignoring the dull stuff that's generally far more relevant. And they seem to be willing to tune into the same Newsflash over and over, even if there isn't actually anything new in it, like hamsters at a feeder bar hoping that this press is going to give them some kibble.
It's entertainment, not news. The actual news is important, and it is in there, but they can't afford to produce it without larding it with junk. If somehow there were a way for actual journalists to sequester the actual news behind a paywall, there might be a market for it, but instead what happens is that it gets reported and then endlessly repeated, with additions of junk to fill out the time.
The closest thing I can recommend to actual news is to go to the wire reports, or even better to just get a quality weekly magazine which at least isn't desperate to pad its content with new RIGHT NOW. Both approaches have deep flaws, but it's sure as hell better than 99% of daily newspapers and 100% of televised reporting.
TFA isn't really about the dead-tree edition. He's talking about news-gathering and -publishing in general.
And there's still demand for that, but people have grown to think of that as "free". It continues to exist, paid for by online advertising, paywalls, and the remaining print subscribers. He's talking about the limitations and futures of those things, and what that's going to mean for news-gathering.
I got the impression "iPhone" was used deliberately. He's making a comparison to another product where others already existed in the space, but where some company managed to package it in a way that somehow caught the imagination of non-technical users and became wildly popular.
It's as if that New York Times hit-job on the Tesla had read:
"No instant refueling. Less range than a Ford Focus. Lame."
The FTC doesn't issue patents. That's the Patent Office. They're not even in the same department. The USPTO is in Commerce; the FTC is an independent agency.
The whole point of an independent agency is to provide checks and balances, so that the departments don't feel compelled to cover up for each other and can try to compensate for each other's mistakes. Unfortunately, that can also mean that the left hand doesn't know, or like, what the right hand is doing.
"The government" isn't a big monolithic entity. Even the President has limited ability to interfere with many of the agencies. That has advantages and disadvantages.
This one has the advantage of being an Internet Startup, which can be breathlessly blogged about until some big corporation with too much cash on hand buys out its original investors for many times the actual revenue stream. Can the Hellenic Geodetic Reference System claim that?
It took me a couple of extra readings, too. The tricky unstated part: while other atomic clocks are better than cesium clocks, they are not the standard.
TFA doesn't explain why trapped-ion clocks (the "better clocks" mentioned in TFS) aren't used to define the standard. Presumably, that's just the glacial pace of international standards setting, and perhaps a trapped-ion clock standard is working its way through the system but has not yet become the new standard. That's just my guess, though.