...and again I would say that while the challenge is different there is no reason to assume that medicine has it any more challenging that other fields. In medicine the data is relatively easy to collect but very hard to analyze because of all the interwoven factors. In particle physics the data is exceedingly hard to collect because of the conditions required to produce it but probably easier to analyze.

Building detectors and accelerators requires just as much scientific input as analysis: it is not just a question of effort. New approaches and technologies have to be developed to meet ever increasing performance requirements.

That's true - olympic medals are only required to contain a minimum of 6 grams of gold, and at least 92% silver. Even still, it's a an incredible price

$9.4 billion for a 28 mile road. And we're not talking through an urban area, just simple new constuction. 4 lines. 28 miles. 45000 meters long with an actual driving width of... oh, let's say 3,5 meters per lane? Not sure what's typical. So about 157500 square meters. $60k per square meter. I mean, seriously, just think about that. You could stack $1000 Louie Vitton handbags 5 layers deep across the whole road for that money. $9.4 billion for 28 miles? You could pay Russians $3 an hour to carry passengers on their shoulder at 3 miles per hour and carry 50 thousand passengers per day every day and it wouldn't cost as much as the road for nearly 20 years.

Really? That's your example of something comparable to Roscosmos embezzling 10% of its annual budget? Operation Lightning Strike which turned out to be a big entrapment op that spent years trying to convince non-key players to commit crimes that they never would have otherwise, and a link that's anything but an endictment of NASA?

This is, after all, the same country whose 28 mile road to the Olympics cost more than if they'd covered the whole road with gold medals two layers thick. ;)

Concerning this privatization, the only question that remains is, which friend of Putin is going to get to "buy" the space agency at a " fair market value" ;)

Since when does the amount of money he makes factor into this? If his negligence resulted in the death or injury of people on the train, he should be punished. I don't care if he's a pauper or the richest man in the world, if you take responsibility for a train carrying hundreds of people and you don't respect that responsibility, you deserve every iota of punishment that can be mustered against you.

So you're saying that our educational system should focus on not leaving any children behind? What a startlingly original idea - I can see no flaw in that plan!

Most links on slashdot are underlined to me.

Poke around with a mouse sometime over many of the two lines of text above each post... many things are clickable, and are not underlined until you hover over them.

In IOS the indicator that something could be interacted with was meant to be similar to an underline, in that buttons took on the tint color for the app - so when you saw that color you would know you could press.

I personally prefer outlines either, but it's not Ive's fault if some designers did not follow those guidelines in UI designs with textual buttons.

If you want fair competition, you have to do it under the same rules as everyone else.

Uber is under the same rules - might makes right.

Both taxis and Uber have drivers working for a large organization with lots of money trying to compete. It's just that governments fight competition through fear and intimidation; companies like Uber fight competition through better service.

If you like fear and oppressive rule, by all means cheer the taxis on.

I think that mixing the smart kids in with everyone else is just misguided in the first place - that it's a passing symptom of the "participation trophy" culture (which has IMO passed it's peak and already started the other way). Do you think the old-school system would work well if it were all smart kids?

IMO it would - it would in fact let you socialize properly with people smart enough to get your jokes (or at least, that was always my problem). And the nice part is: it scales down well - for smaller schools who otherwise couldn't make a gifted&talented program work, combing a few grades just might. I know I was greatly held back because I didn't have other smart kids to mentor me - my parents gave 0 fucks about my education, and before the internet, in a small town with a crappy library, well, self-education sucked.

Musk isn't a politician, and this isn't a new idea. The current, regimented-by-grade system was explicitly invented to train kids to be good little manufacturing workers (back when those were the bast jobs most people could get, it was a good enough plan). But before that, before we twisted the educational system into a manufacturing-job-training system, you didn't divide kids up by age like we do today.

The old way had the teacher directly teach the older kids an the age rage, who would then be responsible for teaching the younger kids themselves. This is a great system: you learn better through mentoring, you develop better critical thinking skills when the person teaching you is sometimes wrong, and you likely develop leadership skills along the way.

There may be a better system for the modern era, but the old-school (heh) system seems vastly better than what we have.

I disagree. The ATLAS detector took 3,000 physicists well over a decade to design, build and test and that's before we even consider the similar effort which went into the LHC accelerator and the other large, multipurpose experiment, CMS. The challenges in other fields are different to those biomedical science but that does not in any way mean that it is easier.

Every bit of important, interesting research, regardless of field, has difficult challenges to overcome because if it did not someone would already have done it. You cannot just throw up your hands, say it is hard and then lower your standards until it becomes easy because at that point it is questionable whether the research you are doing has any value at all and, in some cases, even brings into question whether it actually counts as scientific research.

You design systems to be robust in terms of the components behaving badly. Any fool can design a system that works if the components all work the way you'd like them to.

It was not intended to be a slur against any field. It was intended to correct the slur that the author made on science in general and refocus it back to the specific field which the article itself referred to and which is the only one about which the author seems to be in any position to judge.

Research being hard is not an excuse. The difficulty and assumptions should be made clear and the analysis should take this into account. I'd agree that have a 3 sigma evidence and 5 sigma discovery threshold probably will not work in other fields where it is hard to quantify the statistics accurately. I'd also say that medical research has far more of a problem with the media sensationalizing their results.

We had some similar problems in particle physics with claims being made and then retracted which is what lead to the 3 sigma/5 sigma rule. So medical researchers need to come up with standards for the medical field that are appropriate along with guidelines on how to present results so that it is hard for the media to sensationalize them. This might be a hard challenge to meet but this is research. If you are doing it because you think it should be easy you are in the wrong field.