It's not particularly that scientists should make all the decisions, but rather, than we need an informed population and a very informed government in order to deal with modern problems.

In congress:

three physicists, one chemist, six engineers including a biomedical engineer, and
one microbiologist;

[...]

17 Representatives and four Senators had a doctoral (PhD) degree, and 197 members of the House and 60 Senators had a law degree. Five members
of the House and one Senator had a medical degree.

And quite a few are career politicians who moved up from state legislatures/etc.

In short, we're a nation run by lawyers and politicians, and have a tiny representation by engineers and scientists - people who have a demonstrated interest and capacity in how things actually work.

This is problematic because there simply isn't enough knowledge in congress to go around. Quite a few Americans, likewise, are voting from a position of complete ignorance and, instead of selecting a candidate who is very knowledgeable on the assumption that that candidate will make better decisions, quite a few Americans vehemently "vote their ignorance"; that is, they're looking specifically for a candidate who reflects their own biases and uninformed viewpoints.

As Isaac Asimov said:

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”

Politics now seems to be almost entirely about money and religion, which is a shame, since while those things are important, they probably have very little impact on how we live our lives in the long run.

As soon as you actually USE the machine, though, bandwidth and IO charges will drive that up to $25+ quite easily, however. I sometimes experiment with Amazon boxes, but I just spin them up using a popular aws perl toolkit, use them, spin them down. It's really easy to create them and interact with them via script, but I wouldn't want to use them regularly.

I'm a fan of Virtacore. They're offering VMs on VMware vCloud Director, which means a full gui console, and pricing is basically cheap. (Cheaper than Amazon when you factor in even modest bandwidth and IO charges.)

It's too bad PHP doesn't scale.

Crystal Singer was definitely my favorite of her works. The 2nd one in particular I think was incredible.

And most likely they will be washed away.

Would that it were so. That prediction has been made since Napster was taking off, however, and the RIAA is still here, still sending letters.

Let's have a Slashdot roundtable. Get together Richard Posner, Paul Krugman, Greg Mankiw, Tyler Cowen, Lawrence Lessig, and some smart econ/political geeks, and let's talk turkey about economic policy, politics, and how technology interacts with these forces. (I'd really love to get a luminary on education in there, but I'm not sure who the good choices would be.)

yum update = get security fixes

One of the nice things about Red Hat (and thus CentOS) is that they do binary-compatible patch updates, meaning in almost all cases, updates will not break interoperability at all. Say there's a bug in PHP-5.3.6 and it was on a RHEL distribution (no idea if it was). The PHP developers release PHP-5.3.7 (and then 5.3.8 because 5.3.7 was broken) to fix it. RHEL doesn't update you to 5.3.8, Red Hat backports the security fixes to 5.3.6 and released a patched 5.3.6.

His point is that the cost of a RHEL license is only a tiny component of the TCO of a server. After that, if anything goes wrong, then the question is: is the price you pay for RHEL support less than the time it would take you to handle it yourself? Also, as someone else pointed out, RHN adds configuration management and faster patches. Time to set up some other system to management system configs; time to repair or replace hacked boxes because a centos patch was too slow... In the grand scheme of things, those may not be worth it. For example, in a fully-loaded 12-core system being used for virtualization hosting with a 4:1 cpu overcommit, RHEL only costs $.0019 per vm-hour.

Also, long term support is a big deal in enterprises. A lot of times large enterprise projects are built over the course of years. Having Red Hat means that when some change to a piece of hardware firmware causes some inexplicable OS crash 5 years after deploying. It may be very specific to your environment and your hardware and software. You can call up Red Hat, and if it hasn't been fixed, they will go in and fix the source code in order to fix it for you. There are cases where the systems and their function is worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars; having Red Hat able to "stand behind" Linux is worth paying for, for some people.

HP Public Cloud? Vaporware right now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hear_hear

They do: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html

Get a domain for $10 a year and sign up. You can alias the whole domain and just blacklist/whitelist at will.

And if you happen to have a first-initial-last-name type email address at a popular provider, then you get potentially dozens of other peoples' single-opt-in spam. Over 50% of the email I get is addressed to someone other than me. Painful.

How is VMware like mainframes? They were a hardware platform that became cumbersome to maintain for legacy software when the world moved on.

VMware is a software platform that is designed to make other software platform-independent.

I have an iPad, and I use mine almost every day. In the past week I've been streaming Merlin episodes off Netflix, reading Sherlock Holmes off iBooks/Kindle, I use it to check my calendar/email before going to bed. I plug a noise-canceling headset in and watch movies on it on the plane (I've had to travel a dozen times this year, so >25 flights), which is nice in coach because laptops are too bulky really (especially if the guy in front leans back). Plus it's a really convenient way to check/offline read documents, which I can drop in dropbox, sync over to the ipad without a wire, and then read (on the plane, in the hotel bed, etc). (Also, Angry Birds HD, go.)

Honestly, I called it a gimmick when it first came out. A week or two after launch, I happened to swing by an Apple store, we played with one, we decided to get it. Now we have 3 in the family (one each), and all 3 of us use it regularly.

Granted, to me, about 50% of the utility is the video - Netflix + iTunes shows/movies (I don't pirate, but I also don't pay for cable, so I supplement netflix with an occasional itunes purchase).