Insurance companies typically force the insured company to be proactive, i.e. start thinking about cyber-security (or fire safety, or employee driver training, etc.) *before* something catastrophic happens. Like think of how your home fire insurance rates are lower if you install an automatic sprinkler system... same idea here with cyber-security. I have no doubt that the big insurance companies will be looking closely at companies' security policies before writing them a $200-million policy.

Or double the cost of construction and twenty years of operation for ITER, the tokamak that will demonstrate magnetic fusion energy for the first time. If it doesn't get cancelled because of government budget shortages, that is...

Nano-steampunk means gluing non-functional pico-watch parts to it.

Sure, a tablet or mobile phone is useless for those of us that actually do non-trivial things with the computer (video editing, Photoshop, finite element analysis, coding, even heavy MS Excel work), but for that cousin you have that only uses it for uploading photos to Facebook and emailing?

I can almost see such a person getting by fine with a modern smartphone (one of the more powerful dual-core ones), with an MHL output allowing it to be hooked up to a monitor when at home, and a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Heavy storage is done in the cloud; you pay for data through your mobile provider (or if this isn't enough, get a home cable connection and WiFi). Polaris Office is fine for the one word-processing task such a person does per week (making birthday invitations or Please Don't Steal Food From The Fridge signs).

We're only a few years away from this being a common use case, I think.

Why not, I don't know, just run the "don't stress out the human" program from the beginning? Why wait until they're already pissed off?

Hyperspectral imaging (viewing electromagnetic radiation across a much wider wavelength/frequency range than the human eye can see) is one of these things that just boggles the mind with the possibilities. For a system to be able to simultaneously "see" in far IR or even terahertz or microwaves, all the way up to X- and gamma-rays.... Well, it's like Predator. But doing cool things like monitoring the health of rainforests or quickly identifying explosives.

What about people who aren't capable of doing these high-level, un-automatable jobs? Half the population has an IQ below 100. Easy to forget that when your real-world milieu consists of other highly educated, intelligent people and your online reading leans toward sites like Slashdot.

This article/rant is very much worth reading: http://www.fredoneverything.net/Commentators.shtml

I completely disagree. People have a very deep need for meaningful work. A world in which we all work meaningless jobs selling each other coffee (assuming we haven't automated the barista!), even the necessities of life are cheap, would not be a very happy place. Sadly I think the reality of the 12-hour work week would be more "drugs and mindless entertainment" than "leisurely creation of art and science".

Are you at MIT and is your benefactor David Koch? Because in that case, we have some researchers up at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center that do simulation work that could definitely use access to a bigger cluster. As long as you can compile FORTRAN on it, the TRANSP runs and GYRO simulations that we do are already run on a (smaller) cluster. This falls under "energy research" and is way cool to boot.

I'm not joking, if you are at MIT, please get in touch with Martin Greenwald (contact info on the PSFC staff page).

It's really not that complicated to know what is the right thing to do here. Harsh terms in a contract, fine. The person you're negotiating with can take it or leave it. Opaque and intentionally misleading terms, not okay.

To repeat: nothing wrong with both parties in a transaction negotiating vigorously on their own behalf. When the one party, which has the support of teams of lawyers skilled in writing opaque legal sourcecode that no ordinary person can read, uses that to their advantage, it may be legal, but it's wrong.

Bigger news than a new fastest supercomputer on the planet would be one that had as its primary mission peaceful uses. The Roadrunner (fastest computer in the USA) is for H-bomb simulations ("stockpile stewardship") and gives some of its time to climate change and magnetically-confined plasma (for fusion power) simulations. (Possibly just for PR.) Hopefully since Japan doesn't have a nuclear weapons program this machine will be used 100% for peaceful purposes!

So you want your engineers to stop acting purely as trusted advisors, and start thinking more about how they might push your own companies products. That seems like a good way to have your clients stop trusting your engineers. If your product is the best for the job, they should already be advising the clients to use it.

I mean, it's a tough economy, you gotta do what you gotta do. But still, I'm not sure you're going to get a lot of good advice on here.

No. Sorry. I can't let this one go.

"Dear Leader" is currently gambling on losing his kidnapped Japanese girls, Playstation and VSOP. Starving, murdering, subjugating and indoctrinating millions to satisfy his own bizarre megalomaniac urges.

On one hand, the President of the United States allowed (...and was limited to allowing...) the qualified private sector engineers and managers to fix the problem that they created.

On the other hand, the President coddles the fascist rightists by keeping Guantanamo open, allowing an idiotic "no-fly" list to continue, and continues to delude himself into thinking that Karzai is the partner for conquering Afghanistan. Teabagger corporatists (do you fall into this group...hmm?) blame the President for inaction on the spill, then scream at the idea of increased regulation and oversight.

The President is flawed. BP, TransOcean, and oh...oh yes...Halliburton are at minimum not properly regulated and most likely corrupt. Kim is an insane tyrant.

You, on the gripping hand, are the beacon of logic and liberty.

I believe you meant to say "d'oh!".

Worst. Nitpicking. Ever.

Not for long.

Worst call since Leonidas pre-paid his tee-time at Thermopylae Meadows.