People can complain about the European patent system but they do a lot of things better than the USA:
- Actually doing due diligence on first-discovery vs. the nonsensical "first to file"
How does that statement make any sense in light of this situation? The court is throwing out the patent because it can be proven that Apple has "first-discovery" before they "filed". In other words, they're fully acknowledging that the invention is novel and Apple is first, but---oops!---they filled out the paperwork in the wrong order. That doesn't sound like a "better" patent system to me, just stereotypical German.
Agreed---he's being dishonest in some regard.
My anecdotal experience with my Honda Insight (an $18k car, BTW) is that I get average 44 mpg on my regular commute, which is stop and go at an average speed of 20 mph. My particular commute, which can include at 5-10 minutes of idling per direction, absolutely kills non-hybrid cars gas mileage. When I do a trip the the airport, with mostly freeway speeds, I can get 55 mpg for an average of the whole trip.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that GPL 'is not about telling people what they cannot do' -- it sure as hell is.
While it does prohibit one from doing something I disagree that it's what "GPL is about", I see it as means to an end, and the end is what GPL is about.
I couldn't agree with you more when you write that "the end is what GPL is about"---and that's the crux of my analogy with communism. GPL works when everything is GPLed (or with a more permissive license). This means that the "end" is an elitist club of software with homogenous licensing. Everyone is open and playing by the same rules, nobody "gets ahead". This is perfectly wonderful ideal and it is, without a shadow of a doubt, an ideal that can only be created by "telling people what they cannot do."
It sounds to me like we agree. Whether it's what "GPL is about" or a "means to an end" is largely irrelevant from a practical perspective.
To be absolutely clear, I'm fine with people wanting to GPL their code, but they shouldn't delude themselves into thinking that they're not being restrictive or imposing rules. For anything that I open source, I think GPL is too restrictive. ge7 said it better than me when he wrote,
If you truly believe in open source, you should let anyone to decide what they do with the code. Some will contribute back, and those will be good contributions. Then some won't, nothing is lost. The same is why I think BSD license is much better GPL - if you truly believe in freedom, you let everyone to decide themselves. After all, open source was created to free people from proprietary code and people telling them what they can't do.
Oh BS -- GPL is a pie-in-the-sky communist-like ideal in which you get kicked out of the commune if you actually try to assert some independence. That fine for sitting around and singing Kumbaya, but real open source is definitely closer to a BSD license as stated by the OP.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that GPL 'is not about telling people what they cannot do' -- it sure as hell is.
That joke would be way funnier if there were actually a difference between a grizzly bear and a brown bear (they're the same thing). I think you mean black bear...
Uh, I think that was President George W. Bush that reported that in his 2003 State of the Union. But you're absolutely correct, if GWB were reporting this I wouldn't trust it either.
That doesn't answer the question. Obviously that's how you would have to design it. The question is what code would you have to write to accomplish what GCD with blocks allowed.
I mean, programmers execute something on a separate thread and then make notifications on the main the thread all the time. The beauty in GCD with blocks is what little code you have to write to accomplish that task. Having your code stay contextual (like in the wikipedia example) is far better than splitting it across multiple functions. Additionally, that concurrent task was automatically handed to a system-wide load balanced thread pool.
So, to answer the question just show the equivalent code in Java that maintains the same benefits that GCD does.
I think that the usage patterns with GCD are a little bit more broad than you're giving it credit for. Your audio processing example, for example, works just fine with other more primitive parallelization libraries. You could have easily done that with NSOperation before GCD was around. The question is can you do the equivalent to the -analyzeDocument example in this wikipedia article,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch
with your Java API? It's an honest question, BTW.
I agree completely -- you leave a loaded gun and a three year alone in a room together, what do you think is going to happen? Of course the three year old is going to play with and examine the new object! At that age they are just naive and curious explorers with little fear. The Wii controller has little to do with this.
When you disable Flash completely, we serve up static backup ads. Flashblock, however, breaks this so it's effectively the same as running a dedicated ad blocker. It's more a technical problem with Flashblock, though.
That's a really annoying answer, but completely correct.
The math classes aren't just about learning the topics, but learning how to approach a problem. I think your goal should be to have strong enough fundamentals in mathematics that when you encounter a math problem in a topic you haven't seen before, you are comfortable pulling out a book and figuring out how to solve it. It sounds like you're not very comfortable with mathematics, so a good solution is to take enough classes that you do become comfortable.
Fair enough that's where we disagree. I think if you don't have the time or ability to investigate and decide for yourself you shouldn't be acting in that sphere for fear of doing more harm that good.
That's completely unavoidable. For example, politicians must decide
whether power lines or cell phones cause cancer and how to regulate it,
whether vaccinations cause autism and if we should ban vaccinations
whether the H1N1 vaccination should be immediately distributed,
whether humans contribute to global warming and if we should regulate our contributions.
These policy makers can't be expected to be experts in all of these fields. I don't actually expect Senator Lisa Murkowski to understand enough immunology to look at the lab notebooks of the scientists and know whether or not the H1N1 vaccination they created will kill you outright. What I do expect her to know, is who's opinion she should trust. When the scientists at the CDC tell her its perfectly safe and will actually prevent infection, she's just gonna have to believe that and make policy choices based on that information.
As for paragraph 2 if you have read a 100 scientists opinions refuting Joe Blogger and you agree with their analysis isn't this educating yourself?
No, it's not. How can I even know if I agree with their analysis? For example, if these scientists are telling me that adding GFP to tomatoes that I eat won't cause cancer, I'm not going to take the time (years!) to learn about details of molecular biology in order to evaluate the biochemical pathways they used to back their claims. I'm just going to trust that they know what they're saying. Even if Joe Blogger tells me they will cause cancer because genetic engineer is bad, I'm also going to just have to trust that when the scientists tell me his claim is bogus, that they actually listened to what he had to say.
The thing that scares me is the don't believe him or even take the time to look at his stuff because he's not part of the club mentality.
Yes! If the scientists won't even listen to the claims, then they're not doing their job. We definitely agree here. That's the scientists responsibility to listen to them. But, I sure as hell don't want Senator Lisa Murkowski giving this other guy equal credence if the scientists have already refuted the claims. The politician and the layperson should not simply assume that there are two sides to this story and consider both claims. Neither is actually equipped to evaluate the claims; they simply aren't experts and haven't invested the time.
In my reading of the original article, the author decided to go the route of giving both the scientists and the blogger equal credibility. He took the time to investigate the claims a little deeper (as deep as his understanding would go) and then found that in the end scientists were likely right. His conclusion was simply that he wasted his time and should have stuck with believing the expert. He's not arguing the other guy is automatically wrong just because he's not an expert, but he is arguing he, a layperson, should have stuck with believing the experts; the system worked.
The broader conclusion, from my perspective, is that this is generally going to be the case. Even if I invest 10 years of my life educating myself such that I completely understand the intricacies of some scientific field of study, I'm pretty sure I'll likely agree with the general consensus in that field as it currently stands. This is why I don't actually need to educate myself about everything; I can evaluate claims simply by considering the source. In the case of a general consensus amongst scientists, I trust that the scientific process was followed when evaluating those claims.
Anytime someone tells me that I should let someone else decide the validity of any opinion for me I find it very frightening.
Yeah, see, this is where we disagree -- I don't find that frightening at all. As a practical matter I can't take the time to investigate all the claims people make, so sometimes I need a way to relatively quickly place my bets. In the case of science, there's a reasonable system in place whereby erroneous hypotheses eventually get weeded out and a consensus of what is true is formed. So I do immediately assume that claims resulting from scientists in their field are more likely correct than someone not in the field.
If there are 100 scientists who have spent their lives studying a particular subject telling me that Joe Blogger's claim about their particular field isn't true, who do you think I'm going to believe? I really do think you have to sometimes trust other people's opinions -- let them 'decide' for you.
They see, somebody laying out refuting the points of the AGW crowd, which then responds with basically "U STUPID", that isn't going to gain any more fans.
Here's the problem: the Economist article actually responded to the various claims by checking out sources, while Mr Eschenbach's reply ignores the informative responses to his questions from scientists and he doesn't actually show the statistics were bad (he just claims it's obvious they must be). YET, Mr Eschenbach continue to spout out his claims.
So what now? Should the scientists continue to repeat the same thing over and over again back to Mr Eschenbach until he finally decides to spend a few weeks/months/years of his time actually trying to understand the issue? If they do keep responding, then it suggests there's real debate going on here. There isn't. The debate ended when Mr Eschenbach couldn't respond with actual science.
Should you're words carry more weight because you have been trained in an area you are speaking on?...yep. Should you be completely dismissed because you don't have a PhD?...no and to suggest it is irresponsible and idiotic.
I largely agree with the spirit of what you're saying here, but you're conflating two issues. The author of the Economist article claims to not have the expertise to judge all of the scientific claims made in various quoted articles; so from his perspective, the smart thing to do is to believe the peer-reviewed consensus. That's all he's saying. However, this is NOT to say that global climate scientists within the field should do the same (and I think this is your point). They *do* need to listen to people outside their field and keep and open mind. It's their job.
To also suggest that someone not so decorated by academia can never show statistical manipulation is stupid as well.
You're absolutely correct, but the problem is that Mr Eschenbach *hasn't* shown such manipulation. Actually, the real problem is that Mr Eschenbach *thinks* that he has, but doesn't actually know what he doesn't know. In fact, in Mr Eschenbach's response to the Economist article, he states the following:
The question is, should temperatures more than a thousand km away from Darwin be used to arbitrarily adjust Darwin’s temperature by a huge amount? You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out.
This quote demonstrates exactly why someone like Mr Eschenbach should be ignored by most people. First, the "arbitrarily adjust" comment reveals that he didn't even understand the explanations given for how things were adjusted (they weren't arbitrary, and that was wells stated). But second, he simply dismisses out-of-hand the possibility that two datasets separated by 1000 km can't be correlated!!! Uh, whoops.
This pretty much proves that Mr Eschenbach is wasting our time. He hasn't taken his own time to understand the arguments the scientists are making (or even basic statistics) and simply continues to repeat his claims.
So the fact that he isn't "decorated by academia" certainly doesn't mean we should dismiss his claims outright, but it probably does mean we should be a little bit more skeptical of his claims that are so far outside of his knowledge base.
Are you kidding? A person can absolutely not distinguish between 'microgravity' and 'zero-gravity' on the space station. There are tidal effects, yes, they can be measured, yes, they do matter for precision experiments, yes, but a person can absolutely not tell the difference when on the space station. Microgravity is truly so-called because it's on the order of 10^{-6} g -- you think you perceive that?!?!
The fact that people are anal about using the term microgravity is great in that it raises awareness for what's truly going on, but on the other hand, calling someone out on the difference between weightlessness and microgravity in the context of astronaut perception is either horribly anal or in fact lacks a true understanding of the underlying concepts. Based on the comments in this thread, it was clear the latter was true.
This can be interpreted just fine using General Relativity. If you ignore the small effects tidal forces and atmospheric drag of this case, there is no way to distinguish between zero gravity and being in free fall.... that's Einstein's strong equivalence principal.
According to us as observers in the rotating reference frame (earth) the ISS experiences both centrifugal AND the coriolis force. You're right that to us it appears that the centrifugal force cancels gravity. But it's simply not true that the Coriolis force is zero. That's why the ISS appears to turn to the right in the northern hemisphere, cross the equator, then turn to the left in the southern hemisphere.
To answer your questions -- apparently Armadillo will be the only team competing this year. According to last year's wrap up they spent "...six months and about a quarter million dollars in direct pursuit of this...". Of course, more money has been spent since then, but even if they quadrupled the amount they spent, they'd still come out way ahead.
Anyway, very cool. I'd also point out (just to everyone else) that based on the readme on the download page, it's licensed under the GPL. Maybe some enterprising person will make a version for systems other than Linux? I could see something like that being a slick feature in an iPhoto-like management app.
GPSPhotoLinker has been doing this on the Mac for two years now. Although it isn't yet integrate with iPhoto, one can use the application as part of their workflow before importing into iPhoto.
DF
A "theory", as used in science, is a collection of facts strung together
with a set of guiding principals that explains how those facts are related.
This is a *completely* different definition of the word 'theory' than is
typically used by the general public. I'm appalled by the number of people
who think they have an understanding of the Theory of Evolution, yet clearly
don't even know what the word theory means in this context or even bother to
look it up.
In fact, just looking in my email programs dictionary shows the different
definitions.
Definition 3 (common usage): an idea of or belief about something arrived at
through speculation or conjecture
Definition 5 (scientists usage): a set of facts, propositions, or
principles analyzed in their relation to one another and used, especially in
science, to explain phenomena
For example, it is "fact" that gravity exists and causes apples to fall from
trees to the ground. Newton's "Theory of Gravity" did a pretty reasonable
job of explaining this, but was after all, "just a theory". Along came
Einstein and replaced Newton's theory with "General Relativity", another
"theory".
The "fact" that gravity exists and causes apples to fall from trees is
"true".
Newton's theory of gravity can be regarded as being "true" in the sense that
it does a reasonable job of explaining what gravity is and seems to be right
most of the time.
Einstein's theory of gravity is even more "true" because not only does it
explain everything Newton's theory did, but explains even more.
When scientists call something a theory, is the highest honor it can be
given. People don't seem to doubt "Electromagnetic theory" or the "Theory of
Gravity" -- the fact that they doubt the theory of evolution is curious
indeed.
Want GPS metadata in your photos? You could just use the program I wrote to do this. Check out GPS PhotoLinker. Take pictures with your camera and have your GPS on. When you get back to your computer, download the trackfile from the GPS, and the photolinker will use the time/date stamp to embedded the lat, long and elevation into the EXIF metadata.
Of course, this metadata will be so much cooler when something like spotlight is there to take advantage of it...
Slashdot Mirror
People can complain about the European patent system but they do a lot of things better than the USA: - Actually doing due diligence on first-discovery vs. the nonsensical "first to file"
How does that statement make any sense in light of this situation? The court is throwing out the patent because it can be proven that Apple has "first-discovery" before they "filed". In other words, they're fully acknowledging that the invention is novel and Apple is first, but---oops!---they filled out the paperwork in the wrong order. That doesn't sound like a "better" patent system to me, just stereotypical German.
Agreed---he's being dishonest in some regard. My anecdotal experience with my Honda Insight (an $18k car, BTW) is that I get average 44 mpg on my regular commute, which is stop and go at an average speed of 20 mph. My particular commute, which can include at 5-10 minutes of idling per direction, absolutely kills non-hybrid cars gas mileage. When I do a trip the the airport, with mostly freeway speeds, I can get 55 mpg for an average of the whole trip.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that GPL 'is not about telling people what they cannot do' -- it sure as hell is.
While it does prohibit one from doing something I disagree that it's what "GPL is about", I see it as means to an end, and the end is what GPL is about.
I couldn't agree with you more when you write that "the end is what GPL is about"---and that's the crux of my analogy with communism. GPL works when everything is GPLed (or with a more permissive license). This means that the "end" is an elitist club of software with homogenous licensing. Everyone is open and playing by the same rules, nobody "gets ahead". This is perfectly wonderful ideal and it is, without a shadow of a doubt, an ideal that can only be created by "telling people what they cannot do."
It sounds to me like we agree. Whether it's what "GPL is about" or a "means to an end" is largely irrelevant from a practical perspective.
To be absolutely clear, I'm fine with people wanting to GPL their code, but they shouldn't delude themselves into thinking that they're not being restrictive or imposing rules. For anything that I open source, I think GPL is too restrictive. ge7 said it better than me when he wrote,
If you truly believe in open source, you should let anyone to decide what they do with the code. Some will contribute back, and those will be good contributions. Then some won't, nothing is lost. The same is why I think BSD license is much better GPL - if you truly believe in freedom, you let everyone to decide themselves. After all, open source was created to free people from proprietary code and people telling them what they can't do.
Straw man! You responded to what you wish I had said, not what I did say.
Oh BS -- GPL is a pie-in-the-sky communist-like ideal in which you get kicked out of the commune if you actually try to assert some independence. That fine for sitting around and singing Kumbaya, but real open source is definitely closer to a BSD license as stated by the OP. Don't fool yourself into thinking that GPL 'is not about telling people what they cannot do' -- it sure as hell is.
That joke would be way funnier if there were actually a difference between a grizzly bear and a brown bear (they're the same thing). I think you mean black bear...
Uh, I think that was President George W. Bush that reported that in his 2003 State of the Union. But you're absolutely correct, if GWB were reporting this I wouldn't trust it either.
That doesn't answer the question. Obviously that's how you would have to design it. The question is what code would you have to write to accomplish what GCD with blocks allowed.
I mean, programmers execute something on a separate thread and then make notifications on the main the thread all the time. The beauty in GCD with blocks is what little code you have to write to accomplish that task. Having your code stay contextual (like in the wikipedia example) is far better than splitting it across multiple functions. Additionally, that concurrent task was automatically handed to a system-wide load balanced thread pool.
So, to answer the question just show the equivalent code in Java that maintains the same benefits that GCD does.
I think that the usage patterns with GCD are a little bit more broad than you're giving it credit for. Your audio processing example, for example, works just fine with other more primitive parallelization libraries. You could have easily done that with NSOperation before GCD was around. The question is can you do the equivalent to the -analyzeDocument example in this wikipedia article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch with your Java API? It's an honest question, BTW.
Oh *snap*! Of course, I'll just steal the content since its not legally available on my Linux version... man, you really got me there!
On top of that, Apple will be including DRM on some eBooks and other iPad content.
Oh, that's fantastic! You mean the Linux versions will offer the same books without DRM?
Didn't think so.
I agree completely -- you leave a loaded gun and a three year alone in a room together, what do you think is going to happen? Of course the three year old is going to play with and examine the new object! At that age they are just naive and curious explorers with little fear. The Wii controller has little to do with this.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't internet ads generate their revenue through the amount of clicks they incur? I know Google's ads do this.
RTFA. From the THIRD and FOURTH sentences in the article,
There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won't hurt a site financially. This is wrong.
When you disable Flash completely, we serve up static backup ads. Flashblock, however, breaks this so it's effectively the same as running a dedicated ad blocker. It's more a technical problem with Flashblock, though.
That's a really annoying answer, but completely correct.
The math classes aren't just about learning the topics, but learning how to approach a problem. I think your goal should be to have strong enough fundamentals in mathematics that when you encounter a math problem in a topic you haven't seen before, you are comfortable pulling out a book and figuring out how to solve it. It sounds like you're not very comfortable with mathematics, so a good solution is to take enough classes that you do become comfortable.
Fair enough that's where we disagree. I think if you don't have the time or ability to investigate and decide for yourself you shouldn't be acting in that sphere for fear of doing more harm that good.
That's completely unavoidable. For example, politicians must decide
These policy makers can't be expected to be experts in all of these fields. I don't actually expect Senator Lisa Murkowski to understand enough immunology to look at the lab notebooks of the scientists and know whether or not the H1N1 vaccination they created will kill you outright. What I do expect her to know, is who's opinion she should trust. When the scientists at the CDC tell her its perfectly safe and will actually prevent infection, she's just gonna have to believe that and make policy choices based on that information.
As for paragraph 2 if you have read a 100 scientists opinions refuting Joe Blogger and you agree with their analysis isn't this educating yourself?
No, it's not. How can I even know if I agree with their analysis? For example, if these scientists are telling me that adding GFP to tomatoes that I eat won't cause cancer, I'm not going to take the time (years!) to learn about details of molecular biology in order to evaluate the biochemical pathways they used to back their claims. I'm just going to trust that they know what they're saying. Even if Joe Blogger tells me they will cause cancer because genetic engineer is bad, I'm also going to just have to trust that when the scientists tell me his claim is bogus, that they actually listened to what he had to say.
The thing that scares me is the don't believe him or even take the time to look at his stuff because he's not part of the club mentality.
Yes! If the scientists won't even listen to the claims, then they're not doing their job. We definitely agree here. That's the scientists responsibility to listen to them. But, I sure as hell don't want Senator Lisa Murkowski giving this other guy equal credence if the scientists have already refuted the claims. The politician and the layperson should not simply assume that there are two sides to this story and consider both claims. Neither is actually equipped to evaluate the claims; they simply aren't experts and haven't invested the time.
In my reading of the original article, the author decided to go the route of giving both the scientists and the blogger equal credibility. He took the time to investigate the claims a little deeper (as deep as his understanding would go) and then found that in the end scientists were likely right. His conclusion was simply that he wasted his time and should have stuck with believing the expert. He's not arguing the other guy is automatically wrong just because he's not an expert, but he is arguing he, a layperson, should have stuck with believing the experts; the system worked.
The broader conclusion, from my perspective, is that this is generally going to be the case. Even if I invest 10 years of my life educating myself such that I completely understand the intricacies of some scientific field of study, I'm pretty sure I'll likely agree with the general consensus in that field as it currently stands. This is why I don't actually need to educate myself about everything; I can evaluate claims simply by considering the source. In the case of a general consensus amongst scientists, I trust that the scientific process was followed when evaluating those claims.
Anytime someone tells me that I should let someone else decide the validity of any opinion for me I find it very frightening.
Yeah, see, this is where we disagree -- I don't find that frightening at all. As a practical matter I can't take the time to investigate all the claims people make, so sometimes I need a way to relatively quickly place my bets. In the case of science, there's a reasonable system in place whereby erroneous hypotheses eventually get weeded out and a consensus of what is true is formed. So I do immediately assume that claims resulting from scientists in their field are more likely correct than someone not in the field.
If there are 100 scientists who have spent their lives studying a particular subject telling me that Joe Blogger's claim about their particular field isn't true, who do you think I'm going to believe? I really do think you have to sometimes trust other people's opinions -- let them 'decide' for you.
They see, somebody laying out refuting the points of the AGW crowd, which then responds with basically "U STUPID", that isn't going to gain any more fans.
Here's the problem: the Economist article actually responded to the various claims by checking out sources, while Mr Eschenbach's reply ignores the informative responses to his questions from scientists and he doesn't actually show the statistics were bad (he just claims it's obvious they must be). YET, Mr Eschenbach continue to spout out his claims.
So what now? Should the scientists continue to repeat the same thing over and over again back to Mr Eschenbach until he finally decides to spend a few weeks/months/years of his time actually trying to understand the issue? If they do keep responding, then it suggests there's real debate going on here. There isn't. The debate ended when Mr Eschenbach couldn't respond with actual science.
Should you're words carry more weight because you have been trained in an area you are speaking on?...yep. Should you be completely dismissed because you don't have a PhD?...no and to suggest it is irresponsible and idiotic.
I largely agree with the spirit of what you're saying here, but you're conflating two issues. The author of the Economist article claims to not have the expertise to judge all of the scientific claims made in various quoted articles; so from his perspective, the smart thing to do is to believe the peer-reviewed consensus. That's all he's saying. However, this is NOT to say that global climate scientists within the field should do the same (and I think this is your point). They *do* need to listen to people outside their field and keep and open mind. It's their job.
To also suggest that someone not so decorated by academia can never show statistical manipulation is stupid as well.
You're absolutely correct, but the problem is that Mr Eschenbach *hasn't* shown such manipulation. Actually, the real problem is that Mr Eschenbach *thinks* that he has, but doesn't actually know what he doesn't know. In fact, in Mr Eschenbach's response to the Economist article, he states the following:
The question is, should temperatures more than a thousand km away from Darwin be used to arbitrarily adjust Darwin’s temperature by a huge amount? You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out.
This quote demonstrates exactly why someone like Mr Eschenbach should be ignored by most people. First, the "arbitrarily adjust" comment reveals that he didn't even understand the explanations given for how things were adjusted (they weren't arbitrary, and that was wells stated). But second, he simply dismisses out-of-hand the possibility that two datasets separated by 1000 km can't be correlated!!! Uh, whoops.
This pretty much proves that Mr Eschenbach is wasting our time. He hasn't taken his own time to understand the arguments the scientists are making (or even basic statistics) and simply continues to repeat his claims.
So the fact that he isn't "decorated by academia" certainly doesn't mean we should dismiss his claims outright, but it probably does mean we should be a little bit more skeptical of his claims that are so far outside of his knowledge base.
Are you kidding? A person can absolutely not distinguish between 'microgravity' and 'zero-gravity' on the space station. There are tidal effects, yes, they can be measured, yes, they do matter for precision experiments, yes, but a person can absolutely not tell the difference when on the space station. Microgravity is truly so-called because it's on the order of 10^{-6} g -- you think you perceive that?!?!
The fact that people are anal about using the term microgravity is great in that it raises awareness for what's truly going on, but on the other hand, calling someone out on the difference between weightlessness and microgravity in the context of astronaut perception is either horribly anal or in fact lacks a true understanding of the underlying concepts. Based on the comments in this thread, it was clear the latter was true.
To answer your questions -- apparently Armadillo will be the only team competing this year. According to last year's wrap up they spent "...six months and about a quarter million dollars in direct pursuit of this...". Of course, more money has been spent since then, but even if they quadrupled the amount they spent, they'd still come out way ahead.
A "theory", as used in science, is a collection of facts strung together with a set of guiding principals that explains how those facts are related. This is a *completely* different definition of the word 'theory' than is typically used by the general public. I'm appalled by the number of people who think they have an understanding of the Theory of Evolution, yet clearly don't even know what the word theory means in this context or even bother to look it up.
In fact, just looking in my email programs dictionary shows the different definitions.
For example, it is "fact" that gravity exists and causes apples to fall from trees to the ground. Newton's "Theory of Gravity" did a pretty reasonable job of explaining this, but was after all, "just a theory". Along came Einstein and replaced Newton's theory with "General Relativity", another "theory".
The "fact" that gravity exists and causes apples to fall from trees is "true".
Newton's theory of gravity can be regarded as being "true" in the sense that it does a reasonable job of explaining what gravity is and seems to be right most of the time.
Einstein's theory of gravity is even more "true" because not only does it explain everything Newton's theory did, but explains even more.
When scientists call something a theory, is the highest honor it can be given. People don't seem to doubt "Electromagnetic theory" or the "Theory of Gravity" -- the fact that they doubt the theory of evolution is curious indeed.
Of course, this metadata will be so much cooler when something like spotlight is there to take advantage of it...