They said that when...

And they were right. All of those things did de-humanize war (as if it were humanized to begin with). Of course winning is often more important than the human element, but we should think carefully about the trade-offs, so we can decide if it's worth it in any particular circumstance.

I saw this set up at SC09 (they happened to have a booth next to ours). The enclosure is set up to make it easy to work on without making too much of a mess; the servers are mounted vertically, and they can be pulled up and set on their side over the top of the tub, so they're just dripping back into the tank. The technicians will probably have to wear gloves to keep from getting oil on their hands, but otherwise it didn't seem like the mess would be a big deal.

The 1.8 million fares represent a tiny fraction of a total 360 million trips over the 26-month period in question.

Taxi drivers are people. People make mistakes. One mistake per two hundred trips does not seem unreasonable, especially considering that the frequency of incidents per driver probably follows a power-law distribution and the median number of mistakes per driver is likely much lower. Another way of looking at it is that 25% of drivers didn't make a single mistake in more than two years of driving.

Which isn't to say that these were all honest mistakes. However, I don't see this as the massive systematic fraud the article seems to be suggestion. A 0.5% chance of being overcharged just doesn't seem like something to get excited about (even if I lived in New York, which I don't).

I like to think of the current state of the Internet as the Wild West phase.

it didn't seem right for a *million* inbound links to have a *million* times the effect compared to a single inbound link

Pagerank isn't just a citation count; it's defined recursively, such that a link from a page with a high pagerank is worth more than a link from a page with low pagerank. Similarly, a link from a page with many outlinks is worth less than a link from a page with the same rank but few outlinks.

It does turn out to be more of a popularity contest than a quality metric, though. I think you're absolutely right about that.

I totally agree, the call graphs are very helpful. (Note: graphviz needs to be installed for this to work.)

I'm aware of the difference, but even so, C programmers typically call them functions, not procedures, and I've been a C programmer for a lot longer than a functional programmer, so that's what I (and many imperative programmers) are accustomed to calling them. It isn't as if I don't think it's important to use words correctly, but I don't think it's productive to argue about who is using what word in the wrong way if my meaning is clear. If it isn't, then that's my mistake, then.

Very true. However, I have found that programs I write in functional languages tend to have significantly fewer bugs. I don't know how much of this to attribute to the functional style of programming without side-effects, or the very strict Hindly-Milner type system I'm accustomed to working with in ML-derived languages like Ocaml and Haskell.

I did not mean to imply that functional programs don't need to be tested, and I fear my post came across that way. Rather, the testing effort is usually much shorter, as there are fewer iterations of "find bug, fix bug, re-test".

What if you need a complex program that's very reliable? I know it can be done in C and Python, but usually not without rigorous testing.

To say a language is "functional" does not mean the same thing as the common usage of the word, which is to say "useful" or "utilitarian", though in my experience with Ocaml, Haskell, and Erlang, they are that as well if you take the time to learn to use them well. Fortran and F# have just about nothing in common.

The name "functional" is a little confusing, since imperative languages are heavily based on functions as well, though they are not typically used in the same way. For instance, in a functional language it is usually much easier to write functions that compute useful things without causing side effects, such as modification of shared state. They also usually support such features as tail call optimization (which causes certain forms of recursion to require constant rather than linear stack space), closures, the ability to declare functions within other functions, and the ability to call a function with less than its expected number of arguments, yielding a function of the remaining arguments.

Another common trait of functional languages is the absence of looping constructs, in favor of recursion and library functions like map and fold.

Another thing I'm curious about (I expect it's probably addressed in the paper) is that they're comparing military personnel with PTSD against civilians without PTSD. Did they include any military personnel without PTSD, or civilians with PTSD? I would not be surprised if simply being in the military (I.e. the different discipline, training, lifestyle, experiences, etc... ) would alter the brain in a measurable way, and they would have to be careful that that isn't what they're seeing.

I just watched that a couple of days ago.

Interesting details:

Hydrogen is used because it's low molecular weight allows it to accelerate much more quickly than other gases. It's just pressurized hydrogen; they don't combust it because then it would turn into a high-molecular weight gas which would have too much of its own inertia. According to Hunter, compressed hydrogen guns have the record for the highest velocity projectiles, far surpassing gunpowder or magnetic devices (i.e. rail guns).

The projectile has a heat shield, some of which burns off as it leaves the atmosphere. Outside the atmosphere, the shield is jettisoned, and a single stage rocket kicks in. The cannon shoots the projectile at more than orbital velocity, but there's enough atmospheric drag that the rocket is needed. It will have active guidance, and presumably dock with an orbital fuel or cargo depot of some kind. (The primary use would be to get rocket fuel into orbit for cheaper than it costs to lift it with multistage rockets.)

Adapting electronics to high-g is not as hard as it sounds. Most consumer electronics can withstand a pretty strong shock, and the parts that don't are easy to modify.

Most of the hydrogen is re-captured and re-used.

I never took a statistics class as an undergrad. In retrospect, I think it would have been very useful, probably more so than the calculus I took (which I think is also a very good thing to know, but stats tend to be used more often).