Agreed. But that doesn't mean it doesn't make sense to embark on big projects. Rather than a "Hey, we're going to walk somewhere new" sort of thing, I'd like to see work on one of any number of space-related megaprojects - for example, a launch loop and/or fallout-free nuclear rockets**. Something that could actually lower the cost of access to space to the point that it doesn't take a vast effort to go walk on another celestial body.

** - There's so many competing designs it's hard to know where to start. My personal concept I've mulled over is a variant of the nuclear lightbulb concept, but instead of the fused-silica bulb containig a gas or plasma core reactor which requires some unknown containment method, the concept calls for a dusty fission core (akin to a dusty fission fragment rocket), which can be electrostatically contained. The energy would be released in the infrared, not visible or ultraviolet (as in a conventional lightbulb concept), but that's fine - fused silica is also transparent to infrared, and moreover doesn't lose much IR transmission as like happens in higher frequency bands; the lower radiation rate of infrared would be compensated for by the huge surface area of the dust radiating it. The simultaneous huge amounts of electric output (from fission fragment deceleration in a grid) could be used in part to run a microwave beam, creating a plasma sheath in ducted atmospheric air surrounding the bulb (airbreathing mode) or injected gas surrounding it (rocket mode) to aid in IR absorption and keep as much of the heat away from the (reflective) walls as possible. A VASIMR-ish mode is possible if you use low gas injection rates and a magnetic nozzle. In space, gas injection could be terminated altogether and the core could be opened up to run in dusty fission fragment mode and get Isp figures in the lower hundreds of thousands. To make up for the problems with using the standard dusty fission fragment rocket proposal's (heavy) moderator in such a high power environment, my thoughts were to have it operate as a subcritical reactor with a spallation neutron source as the driver - after all, there's no shortage of electricity to run an accelerator if you're decelerating a good chunk of the fragments; you don't even have to deal with Carnot losses.

You tell 'em, Ayn! You'll be rich enough to afford your own space program any day now - or at least you would be, if it wasn't for all those Liberal Looters derailing you to get themselves a free ride!

"Plot idea: 97% of the world's scientists contrive an environmental crisis, but are exposed by a plucky band of billionaires & oil companies." -- Scott Westerfeld

Not if you're the Russian intelligence services, the prime suspect behind the hack. Anyone want to bet that this was part of the same initiative that brought us the more recent scandals of Russian state funding for European anti-fracking groups and American lobbying against LNG export approval?

Whatever it takes to keep your main market open, dependent, and buying your main exports in vast quantities, I suppose.

So now that it turns out that this was done in conjunction with the Maldives government, what's your deal?

Is it that you prefer to leave hackers and carders out there robbing people and businesses?

I'm not the biggest fan of America (actually look forward to renouncing my citizenship as soon as I'm able), but seriously, I think you prematurely Godwinned.

That seems to be precisely what his public defender is saying today (see elsewhere in this thread). And that it was done in cooperation with the Maldives government. So it looks like if there's a scandal here it would be the Maldives government breaking their own laws (although I personally have no clue if that would be illegal in the Maldives, or even what legal grounds would have been used)

According to his public defender:

A Federal Public Defender on Guam, John Gorman, has been appointed to represent him.

Gorman told PNC News today that he was informed by federal officials that the U.S. Secret Service arranged with the Maldives Government to "detain" Seleznev as he was about to board a plane back to Moscow this past Saturday, July 5th. He said Seleznev was then flown on a charter flight here to Guam where, the Federal authorities said, the actual "arrest" was made.

1. He was arrested in Guam. He was detained in the Maldives, but not arrested there.
2. You can't call it a "kidnapping" if it was done in conjunction with the Maldives government (the local authorities).

Did the Maldives government break their laws by doing this action with the Secret Service? Beats me, I'm not a Maldives legal professor. But if there's anyone who would have the authority to order someone in the Maldives detained, I would think it would be the Maldives government.

An update today:

A Federal Public Defender on Guam, John Gorman, has been appointed to represent him.

Gorman told PNC News today that he was informed by federal officials that the U.S. Secret Service arranged with the Maldives Government to "detain" Seleznev as he was about to board a plane back to Moscow this past Saturday, July 5th. He said Seleznev was then flown on a charter flight here to Guam where, the Federal authorities said, the actual "arrest" was made.

Clearer, although still ambiguous. We now know that this was done with permission in the Maldives. But who did the detaining? The Maldives Government? Secret Service officers? Both? Clearly there would be Secret Service officers on the plane to Guam.

If I had to bet, I'd bet that it was either Maldives officers, who then walked him to the charter flight and handed him off to the Secret Service; or both Maldives and Secret Service officers confronting him together.

I'm a little rough on my Maldives law, so I have no clue how legal / illegal this sort of activity would be in the Maldives. ;)

Let's not make a big deal out of this. 640kg of reactor-grade plutonium is only enough for a bit over 100 fission bombs / fusion bomb first stages, merely enough to make the recipient roughly tied for being the world's sixth most armed nuclear power.

Nothing to see here.

I disagree. Java and Python - or any other programming language - are tools and only in widespread use because they fulfill their purpose well. It is a mistake to think that a programming should aim to make programming easy - designing and writing programs are fundamentally difficult tasks, and the only way you can make coding feel easy is by hiding away the complexities behind an API; but the cost is always to narrow the scope of the language.

Java and Python have both found a very good balance between generality and ease of use; my fear is that if you don't learn the hard, but more universal programming techniques from the beginning, then you'll never learn them and you'll always be a user of tools that you don't fully comprehend. It is a lot easier to move in to Java, Python or any other "easy" language, if you start from C++, than it is to go from Python to C++, for example.

One would hope that Java or Python is not the only programming language that is learned; it should IMO be mandatory to also learn at least C and possibly assembler of some sort.

Indeed. As it turns out, the greatest threat to mankind is not necessarily from power-crazed world-leaders sitting on huge arsenals, but from people who didn't care enough, didn't think far enough ahead and didn't understand what they were dealing with.

Due to being in a different place and quite a few years older than most here it appears I misunderstood "SAT scores" to be equivalent to an accurate measure of high school achievement averaged over at least two years. Other places do not do a single test.
So I'd better update my statement to make things more clear.

Raising your score in a single type of test is easy - just do a lot of that sort of test as practice. Raising your actual intelligence is a lot harder.

Real IQ tests aren't like most of the stupid things you find on the internet

The sort of things used by lazy fad driven HR idiots are until you tell them to either do their job or get out of the way.

I'm no pychologist, but I'm been told by some that at least in the field of education IQ tests are pointless and can vary widely with the same child over several years. It was described to me in the 1980s as being nothing but a measure of how good people are at doing that sort of test and translating poorly to other situations. It's still an artifact of that time that only remains due to management fads.

His fund has an impressive trading record. He had the big advantage of starting early, in 1982, when almost nobody was doing automated trading or using advanced statistical methods. Their best years were 1982-1999. Now everybody grinds on vast amounts of data, and it's much tougher to find an edge. Performance for the last few years has been very poor, below the S&P 500. That's before fees.

The fees on his funds are insane. 5% of capital each year, and 45% of profits. Most hedge funds charge 2% and 20%, and even that's starting to slip due to competitive pressure.

Simons retired in 2009. You have to know when to quit.

If he had this "decency" you speak of, he would have only alerted his own people and not the foreign governments

He notified a couple of newspapers. If you want to hassle people about letting foreign governments know then your problem is with them and not with Snowden.

I run into too many technical people who hate learning new things even though they are in a field where learning new things is mandatory

That sounds like people who followed the money - the same problem that turned a "woman's profession" of sitting inside and typing into what's close to a boy's only club and an industry with a high turnover and short attention span. I got away from that problem by working with scientists instead of a bunch of "programmers" that were scared of 64bit, multithreading, and anything that wasn't fucking Visual Basic.