It's a matter of funding.

Looking at the chart at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... and in particular the inflation-adjusted line there tells you pretty much what the story was: at the peak of the Apollo program NASA's budget was about $40 billion/year in today's dollars (the red line in that graph is in 1996 dollars). NASA's budget today is less than $18 billion/year.

Or to put it in relative-to-the-economy terms, in 1966 NASA was 4% of Federal budget expenditures. 4% of the 2013 US expenditures (actual, not requested) would be $138 billion, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2...

I bet if you funded NASA at that level (even just the inflation-adjusted one; I understand that the overall budget structure is quite different now from what it was in 1966, so the $138 billion number is pretty much meaningless), I bet it could produce results a lot quicker than it can at current funding levels...

Consider trying QNX, the message-passing real time OS, for this. This is a message passing problem, and Linux doesn't do message passing well. QNX has a scheduler optimized for message passing. You should be able to handle the UDP front end and fan-out without any problems. You can give the front-end process a higher priority than the other processes, which should let you get all the UDP packets into the fan-out program without losing any. That's what real-time OSs are for.

Trying to do anything high-performance with CPython's threads is hopeless. Watch this presentation on performance issues with Python's Global Interpreter Lock, Python has an internal scheduler, and it behaves very badly under load.

So each Python process should be single-thread. Have as many as you need, set up to get work via MsgReceive and reply by MsgReply. Don't set them up as "resource managers".

Python under QNX is being used by the robotics community, where real-time matters for some things, but not others.

QNX - great technology, marketing operation from hell.

" If you want to understand what removing legalization would result in, I recommend that you read "Diary of a Drug Fiend" by Aliestar Crowley."

You could also experiment with drugs yourself. Why read someone's opinion when you could just go and form your own.

Personally the injection route always made me a bit uneasy. It's probably the cleanest way to use these substances however, except for the poking a vein repeatedly part. All you need to do is form some sort of embolism by injecting regularly and you risk dying not even from the drug itself.

That level of control probably belongs at the cluster management level. We need to do less in the OS, not more. For big data centers, images are loaded into virtual machines, network switches are configured to create a software defined network, connections are made between storage servers and compute nodes, and then the job runs. None of this is managed at the single-machine OS level.

With some VM system like Xen managing the hardware on each machine, the client OS can be minimal. It doesn't need drivers, users, accounts, file systems, etc. If you're running in an Amazon AWS instance, at least 90% of Linux is just dead weight. Job management runs on some other machine that's managing the server farm.

There is a serious bipartisian proposal in Congress to reduce the tax deduction for advertising. Call your Congressional representative and tell them you support the elimination of tax deductions for advertising.

Because the US savings rate is so low (most people are spending almost all they earn), advertising does not increase demand. It just moves it around a bit. All advertising does is increase prices. There are many products, from movies to medications, where the advertising cost exceeds the cost of production. Let's put the brakes on advertising.

I think it's more likely that more people are becoming obese because of exactly one factor: age. They are living artificially prolonged lifetimes due to access to adequate food and to medicine. It's easier to get fat when you are 50 than when you are 30 because of the natural changes in your metabolism.

It's not just about Wikipedia. Mr. Barry's press agent claims he is also suing the National Post (Canada) for publishing a critical article, "The world according to Yank: Montrealer with checkered past gets Nobel nod, or does he?"

:-)

You make it sound like starving people are getting fat too.

If they are becoming obese, the particular individual has a surplus of caloric intake, if only for this year or month. This is not to say that they have proper nutrition. So I am not at all clear that the fact that there is obesity in the third world is confounding evidence.

For most of the existence of mankind and indeed all of mankind's progenitors, having too much food was a rare problem and being hungry all of the time was a fact of life. We are not necessarily well-evolved to handle it. So, no surprise that we eat to repletion and are still hungry. You don't really have any reason to look at it as an illness caused by anything other than too much food.

You do realize those rights at that point in time applied only to white male land owners, right?

I should point out native americans are still largely unemployed, stuck in reservations on land white American's didn't want. One of their few rays of hope being the ubiquitous Indian Casino where they are exacting their revenge. Still they are second class citizens.

Blacks were still being massively discriminated against until the Civil Rights act which was around 180 years later. They are still second class citizens.

The poor, they are still second class citizens.

Women are the one group doing pretty well for themselves though they are still underrepresnted in government.

Look around the room at a State of the Union address. The room is still overwhelming full of affluent white men.

As for the founding fathers brilliant ideas on governence, it exploded in a bloody civil war in 80 years.

You need look no further than where the U.S. congress, courts and presidency are today. They are a smoldering ruin. They have never been the great institutions Americans are brainwashed in to thinking they are. Are they better than totalitarian dictatorships, sure. Are they models the rest of the world can aspire too, no, not really.

American governement is the best government money can buy.

Try reading Zinn's A People's History of the United States. It will disillusion you of the comic book U.S. History taught in U.S. school where the founding fathers are all saints and geniuses.

They were mostly self serving and profiteering. Its fitting Andrew Jackson is on the $20 dollar bill because he was infamous for profiteering off the battles he won, mostly by seizing the lands he took and splitting it up between himself and his friends.

Martin,

The last time I had a professional video produced, I paid $5000 for a one-minute commercial, and those were rock-bottom prices from hungry people who wanted it for their own portfolio. I doubt I could get that today. $8000 for the entire conference is really volunteer work on Gary's part.

Someone's got to pay for it. One alternative would be to get a corporate sponsor and give them a keynote, which is what so many conferences do, but that would be abandoning our editorial independence. Having Gary fund his own operation through Kickstarter without burdening the conference is what we're doing. We're really lucky we could get that.

The founding fathers weren't exactly the pillars of individual freedom you seem to think they were. They were an American centric elite and plutocracy trying to displace a Britsh centric elite and plutocracy, mostly so they could have a bigger cut of America's growing wealth.

You can tell because most of those constitutional protections and the Bill of Rights didn't apply to people who weren't affluent(i.e. who didn't own land), women, native American's, blacks/slaves and indentured whites. They applied mostly to white men who had wealth (at least enough to own land).

They actively prevented people who were not white, male and affluent from voting or holding office. They were mostly slave owners themselves, and they were for the most part very affluent and owners of very large real estate holdings. They were all 1%'ers.

The Declaration of Independence and Constitution were carefully designed to inspire support from enough people in the colonies for their Revolution to succeed, and to create the illusion of freedom, but they had no intention of relinquishing their power and control over the levers of government when it their Revolution did succeed. That plutocracy has never relinquished that control in the more than 200 years since.

The NSA along with the DHS, FBI, ATF and IRS are means for maintaining that control.

The Internet let a genie out of a bottle and created dangerous potentential for the rest of us to organize and try to win some of that power and control back.

When faced with the twin crises, and excuses, that were 9/11 and the 2008 crash it was nearly inevitable that The Powers That Be in the U.S. and U.K. would exploit every tool at their disposal, mainly computers and networks, to try to put a lid back on their control of their increasingly restless and networked homelands and to try to maintain their domination of the world as a whole in the face of increasing challenges.

The 2008 crash in particular resulted in widespread global disillusionment with the fact economies and governments are rigged to benefit the ruling elite and screw everyone else. When ruling elites start feeling that heat they trot out their police states, always have, always will.