I looked at the article - I don't understand how this is different than a covariance matrix?

Wow - so many little boys whining that they aren't being encouraged to play with Chistmas tree lights! Whaaa Sexism! Man up - as a white male I can attest to enjoying the benefits of white privelege in america every day - cops don't pull me over and I dont worry about getting shot by them, my bank likes me and gives me loans, people alway defer to me right in front of my chinese girlfriend even when we are shopping for her! - oh and I am the boss at work - don't worry boys I don't see that changing any time soon, so some little girls get to play with christmas tree lights and you will grow up to be a senior director while she will be told to quit after getting pregnant - OMG OBAMA sexism! I guess maybe you guys are upset because you have all the advantages and you still can't get ahead!

A lot of people don't want to get it right and are just fine with these problems

Yes I love how in the 1860s in the US an armed citizenry overthrew a corrupt goverment that allowed the enslavement of its citizens - oh wait, that didn't happen, the armed citizens were there to suppress slave revolts on the south, which was the original purpose of the second amendment - not to overthrow a tyrannical goverment, it was to preserve a tryranical government which allowed slavery - i.e. to allow (white) people to carry guns to suppress local slave revolts - duh, you can't really keep slaves without guns to keep them in line. The freedom loving patriots in the south never rose up to free the black slaves - that took a fucking government army.

This is good news people as it is a mark in favor of the only optimisic answer I can think of to the Fermi paradox - i.e. life is rare and could only have formed fairly recently- the other answers are ugly and imply our imment extinction.... cheer up people!

I doubt unions are the problem Germany makes lots of cars with very expensive labor - in my experience US management sucks (literally) - management at a lot of US companies is just focused on looting the company by transferring any value created into their bonus and not reinvesting in new products and not paying to keep skilled labor - of course the profits look great for a while until there is nothing left but a dry husk of the company left - usually just marketing, sales and service teams are all that is left in the end state....

I know this will not be well recieved - but I do not understand the enthusiasm, or what is remarkable about SpaceX - the government never has built rockets, it always subcontracts them out to (usually to Boeing or Lockeed) maybe integration is done by the government but usually that is subcontracted out too - so the "innovation" in SpaceX is basically just a change in the way goverment contracts are run, removing the rider that lets the contractor get paid more if the budget goes over (note SpaceX recieved 250M+ in "seed money" from the gov't - sounds alot like the old way of doing things to me) - I guess this is what the we call innovation these days - as for the critique by NASA and the ESA, it is more credible that both agencies say it could be an issue, they both have experts and have tried re-use before - so SpaceX should listen to what they have to say - but listening to experts is out of fashon these days too - anyway call me us when someone develops a new type of rocket motor or spacecraft system concept, not a new way to write government contracts, or just the government having another contractor to shop with.

bingo! mod parent up - damping is what is needed in a lot of socially engineered systems, just as in mechanical systems sometimes damping is required for socally engineered systems to operate effectively - without damping, we get a lot of the problems we see in our society like CEO salaries, or unlimited political donations.... the problem is the people who profit from these out of whack systems fight like hell to make the system even less damped...

Rockets were always built by private corporations - like Lockeed Martin - the "innovation" in SpaceX is simply a change in the terms of the contract by which the rockets are funded - the Saturn V was built by Boeing, McDonnel Douglas and IBM as lead contractors - I love how we equate innovation with a change in contract, or how we equate money with actual value - it is like being confused over the difference between a pointer to an object with the object itself

How is this a threat? the value of the dollar goes down and US industry magically becomes more competetive via cheaper production- China has been buying dollars for years precisely to keep the value of thier currency _down_ - the problem is Russia's and China's they have a bunch of dollars which can buy American goods and services what are they going to buy? guns from the US? - plus most dollar reserves are owned by Americans - approximately 80% - how was this labeled insightful?

I am always disappointed by the comments of otherwise intelligent people on slashdot in response to these articles, as this point was first brought up by the club of rome and more recently Jared Diamond - the response I see here makes it clear we will have a collapse - everyone is in denial, nobody wants to change a thing, everyone is going to use up non-renewable resources as fast as they can to get some perceived short term advantage over some other group - I want my car, I want my house in the middle of nowhere, I want to have as many children as I can - blah blah blah Exponential growth is impossible on a finite planet, space travel will not save us nor will any breakthrough technology - at best genetic engineering can buy us a bit of time - we need birth control, we need people to live in cities and share resources and we can't have a handful of people allocating a civilization's resources for their own self interest - and I will be cursed on /. for saying this.

upstate? in the atlantic? 10x10 miles really isn't that much... pretty sure we have that much space allocated to parking lots in new york state...

What I don't get is that Whatsapp isn't even a new app, it adds no funcitonality over its competetors - the telcoms have the app (text messaging) and charge a boatload of money for it even though it costs them almost nothing to provide the service - whatsapp is just undercutting in price, the telcoms could cut their price to almost nothing esp. since they already have a revenue stream from voice and data - if the telcos did that whatsapp would be worth nothing and the telcos could try to make up the lost revenue with data plans - what am I missing? this deal seams stupid to me.

You raise a very good point that can be applied to a lot of situations - such as reasearch or inventment in infrasturcture or even whether or not to go to war (ex. Iraq) - but most people are terrible in assessing risk, we are comfortable with huge familiar risks like getting in a car accident, getting cancer or getting shot by a gun and so underinvest in efforts to mitigate them, while unfamiliar risks are highly overweighted (radiation, plane crash, terrorism) - needless to say the people in power understand this, they hype the obscure risks that can lead to profit (defense, homeland security) and fight like hell against anyone who trys to point out an "everyday" or long term risk that can be mitigated (lung cancer, seatbelts, global warming, motorcycle helmets, vaccines) but might cost them. It is funny that even the terrorism risk is really just being afraid of a label, every few days we have the eqivalent of hundreds of small scale terrorist attacks, i.e. shootings in malls, public places, street corners etc... yet we ignore them - whereas if a guy with a foregn name did the same thing the media would go apeshit about it...