That's cynicism dressed as realism. The plagiarism in question seems mild and perfectly explainable by honest mistakes. Which was absolutely NOT the case for von Guttenberg, the case she called embarrassing.
Not a fan of her policies, but it's ridiculous to hold politicians to absurdly high standards and react with cynicism when they fail them. That's not the way towards better politics and politicians.
The whole point of kickstarter is for people to chip in for projects they believe in. Not a formal investment, not a purchase.
The kickstarter money you give is a GIFT. What does it take for you to give your money to some random dudes on the interwebs who promise stuff in return? Well that's up to you, but for me if the team doesn't have some sort of track record that demonstrates they are capable, realistic and enthusiastic, I will not pledge.
True, but I can still hate the fact that the largest economy in the world will not simply invest in bettering the human condition if it can not be done alongside improving it's ability to kill people.
It IS a lamentable state of affairs, and drawing attention to this, and staying out of research that is military funded is a principled stance, even if you use the previous civil accomplishments of military research (as we all do anyways).
until the shit hits the fan...
Not surprising really. What does an astrophysicist do? Point hyper sensitive instruments at random portions of the sky and generate humongous data sets that need heavy processing to extract structure and meaning. A really large part of Astrophysics these days is data analysis, almost all of it done with automated codes.
Which is for example why Renaissance Technology has a lot of Astrophysicists on board as well.
Absolutely. They do really fundamental stuff actually. Including things like topological quantum computing. Not going to yield a product this decade or next, but at the cutting edge of the interface between physics and mathematics.
(http://stationq.ucsb.edu/research.html)
Do we have any info that you wont be able to disable web history after the change? Or delete it afterwards? That would seriously change my googling habits actually.
Their product is search. Mozilla is one way of getting to their product. Chrome is another. They benefit from there being a sufficient number of sufficiently fast and well engineered ways to get to their product. That's all.
Peculiar, it renders correctly for me, and I assume for most others (as its a high profile page that, if it broke across the board would be fixed quickly). Does it work with a clean install/profile?
It's 4 clicks or so to get the non chrome UI in the newer firefox releases and now that people have had time to adjust to the rapid release schedule add on compatibility is not really an issue anymore. I'm on the Beta chanel and haven't had an add on break in a long time.
I don't get it. Do you really miss the menu in Firefox? I like the new interface, with a little bit of tweaking (less then I did before!) it has everything I need right there and nothing else.
You know how many clicks it takes to activate the menu in Firefox BTW? Three: Firefox -> Options -> Menu
Firefox might not be perfect, but to say its lost its way is ridiculous. They have sped up the browser drammatically recently, they are working on threading it, which should help stability, etc... The new release schedule brings problems, for sure. But it also makes enormous amounts of sense from a logical point of view.
It's idiotic really. On the one hand supposedly Firefox UI is terribly because they are imitating Chrome to much, and in the next thread people say they are switc hing over to Chrome because its much faster (obviously not minding the Chrome UI at all). And the fact that it's slower is partly due to it's extendability (which is why I'm sticking with it), in other words due to the fact that it gives you enormous customizability.
Now Gnome 3 fucked up, but it's not beyond repair, and it's technically sound. Mint proves that (http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1851) "From a technological point of view, Gnome 3 is a fantastic desktop, and it’s getting better with every new release. It will take time for Linux Mint to develop a Gnome 3 desktop that is on-par with what we had with Gnome 2, but eventually we’ll be able to do much more with it than was possible with the traditional desktop."
Innovation means that you sometimes have to make high profile mistakes. KDE 4 was such a mistake but everybody seems to be very happy with the latest releases. Gnome 3 was such a mistake, but that doesn't mean that experimentation with UI paradigms isn't necessary. And now people like Mint and others are building on their technological foundation. The way we use computers has shifted dramatically since the paradigms Gnome 2 is based on were established.
tl;dr: Quit your whinning, sometimes big projects make mistakes, innovation is needed, the vast majority of the whinning is resenting change.
More over, any large cooperation is subject to the same type of politics. Relative to the size of the government these failed projects are not that huge.
Where's the evidence for anything you say? It's just ideology. It's the opposite of a pragmatic "what works" approach for the sake of an ideological vendetta that irrationaly glorifies one particular way of organising things.
Were there fewer fools, knaves would starve. - Anonymous
