I'm not quite sure whether it is cute or sad that the FTC is merrily holding a little contest to attempt to detect robocallers based on the (relatively sparse) information available to the system at the far end of the phone line when it's a matter of public knowledge that somewhere between 'a strikingly large percentage' and 'All' calls connected are logged and potentially retained for quite some time.

Surely the network level is where robocallers stand out most dramatically, unless the caller has spoofing good enough to disguise the origin and frequency of their calls from the telco carrying them (which would also likely allow theft of service and thus be the sort of thing that would actually get fixed, unlike the pitiful state of caller ID), and we know that those logs exist.

Is it just considered polite to pretend that the telephone system can't be so scrutinized, or are robocallers customers who are just too reliable to hunt down and exterminate?

Your post inspires dueling sentiments of being flattered and being deeply depressed...

I'm pretty sure that 'obviously a better choice than some guy who impersonates a fungus on the internet' should be one of those minimum qualifications for politics so obvious that it needn't even be stated. Apparently this is not always the case.

As with so many political labels, there are at least two distinct schools of thought that use the term 'small-government conservative'; plus a large swath of opportunists who adopt the label if they suspect that it will poll well with their target audience.

You've got the 'small-government' segment primarily worried about the feds doing things without constitutional basis. Then you have the ones who are 'small-government' in that they want as little as possible (and think that 'as little as possible' is very, very, little).

The former flavor would likely prefer to avoid really embarrassing exercises of 'state's rights', like protecting car dealers; because fuck those guys; but would theoretically be obliged to be hostile to any federal intrusion on the matter. The latter flavor doesn't care nearly as much about the origin of the laws, so they'll oscillate between using and attacking federal power as the situation dictates. If a bunch of state legislation is bothering them and looks like it will be difficult to cut through, bring on federal supremacy to supersede all state regulations with federal equivalents that are as toothless as possible. If the feds look like they might regulate something that at least some states have hitherto ignored, it's all aboard for state's rights and reigning in federal abuses of the interstate commerce clause and similar.

Once you get into the realm of the pure opportunists, of course, absolutely anything goes, without the slightest requirements for honesty, internal consistency, or even coherence.

Unless I managed to draw entirely the wrong impression from every budget spat I've been old enough to be conscious for, I'm pretty sure that 'defense' is not the area that tends to feel the loss of a given dollar until a fair few alternatives have been tried...

Ah! That's the Windows Genuine Advantage right there: by making both Metro and moderately-lobotomized-classic-Windows mandatory, we've eliminated the need to make those abysmal choices!

You don't have to think my argument has any merit; but 'fungible' has been a real, actual, English word since the late 18th century or so. It's not really news, or even especially esoteric.

The 'insecure-device-to-internet-attachment-protocol' field is crowded with nominally standard and/or standards-based flavors, generally not the sort that play well together, each with its own acronym soup, optimistic vender coalition, and lofty promises. Does this one have anything going for it aside from the installed base of Nest thermostats?

Oh, classical mythology is great fun (though there are some under-appreciated competitors in the running: some of the fertile crescent stuff is...strange indeed... and anyone who doesn't enjoy the Norse or Aztec stuff has no appreciation of the sanguinary things of life). As for the contemporary stuff, The Official Version of most monotheisms is pretty dry (once you assert a single supreme god your theologians usually discover that you've overdetermined yourself out of any sort of real character drama); but the assorted heresies and folk-variant offshoots have some real promise. Gnostics, Manichean types, cults of the saints, theologically-dubious fan fiction like Dante and Milton, all good fun.

I'd leave it to the experts to say exactly when the electrical costs and maintenance make it more cost effective to buy something newer; but by the looks of this system, it has the additional advantage of being large enough, and new enough, that (aside from being able to attack nontrivial problems, though not the biggest ones) it should provide the user experience in working with, and around, the strengths and weaknesses of a comparatively large, moderately tightly coupled, system.

That sort of experience should be applicable to much larger and more powerful systems; but isn't necessarily something you could easily get with a cheaper system. If your problem fits in a socket or two, it's delightful how many cores you can buy for not much money, and if your problem is loosely coupled, it sure is handy that GbE is pretty much impossible to not buy with any remotely recent system; but stepping up to infiniband remains quite costly.

You could probably cook up a virtual infiniband cluster system with a bunch of VMs and some creative tuning of the latency and throughput of the virtual network interconnects; but that would be pretty agonizing for anything that isn't an absolute toy problem. With a chunk of this system, you should at very least be able to develop experience in dealing with these sorts of systems, even if you might have to beg, borrow, or scrounge time on somebody else's faster system to attack very large problems.

Dollars are fungible; but how you react to that fungibility can have real, and long term, consequences that you can't necessarily cheaply or quickly buy your way back out of.

In the case of South Africa, say, you've got high crime rates and substantial pockets of poverty; but you also have areas of fairly well developed civil society, economic development, higher education, and similar. Unless you are god's own gift to social engineering, do you really want to bet that you can divert resources from the less-dysfunctional areas of the country efficiently enough that you can fix the defective ones before the functional ones brain-drain away to somewhere with higher salaries and lower murder rates?

One must, of course, do something about the festering issues (even if you have no humanitarian interest, crime and low quality of life are very, very, expensive in terms of guard labor, instability, etc.) and one must also be very careful not to treat a given sector of the country as 'well developed' just because it's rich and looks good in a suit (any Russian oligarch, middle eastern petro-sheik, or American white-collar criminal could say that much, and those tend to be cancers on their respective societies); but unless you have the good fortune of having social problems that can be solved with mere money (rather than money along with sustained good governance, anti-corruption efforts, and assorted other tricky bits), you probably don't want to slash support for the parts of your society that aren't totally screwed merely to hire more of the police that aren't keeping crime in check now to wander around.

Meh, if the UK would just stop holding out on the Schengen agreement they could easily repatriate any inadvertent launch debris with almost no border control hassles!

If it is political theatre, 'spaceplanes' are doubly convenient: not only are they the new-and-cutting-edge-hotness, they also have ground requirements much closer to 'airport with atypically long runway' rather than the sort of expensive and specialized apparatus that very large vertically launched systems often do (the KSC's Crawler-Transporter vehicles are undeniably endearing; but not something I'd want to cost-justify...)

If the PR renders are anything to go by, you can pretty much take an existing airfield, knock down any ugly buildings that the media might see, and replace them with cool, ultramodern equivalents, and you've got a spaceport.

Does the UK have the same 'economic interest wrapped in the flag' rituals surrounding potential military base closings that the US does? (I'd assume so; but I don't know.) If so, the base's post-cold-war use patterns certainly look like those of a base in search of a mission... On the plus side, if any of the rumblings about radium and mustard gas having been improperly landfilled in the area are true, they'll barely notice an extra dash of hydrazine in the local water supply.

"Mythology" is the polite term for a religion's corpse.

The distinction between religions that are dead and ones that aren't is certainly relevant; but I do get the impression that some prefer to imagine that 'myths' have always been somehow fundamentally different than 'religions', rather than being different now because some of the 'religions' didn't survive.

Given how relatively time-consuming research is(and how negative results, however valid, tend to have difficulty moving papers), it would be...surprising... to hear that one percent of the scientists are co-authoring 41 percent of the papers on sheer productivity.