I have two young children. With delivery trucks, I have a certain amount of security. I can make rules like: "no playing in the street, only in the yard". I can feel reasonably confident that the chain of events that would result in a delivery truck or generally any vehicle ending up in my yard on my sleepy little street when my kids are playing are extremely unlikely.

(flying) Drones inspire much less confidence. They are far more susceptible to nature. There would be huge cost and time incentives to have them do direct line-of-sight flyovers to their destinations. Even if the plan initially wasn't to do this, it'd be pitting public safety vs corporate cost savings. Which one do you think would eventually win? I'd have little confidence that my yard or any outdoor space potentially could be a crash site. instead of worrying about danger on a 2D plane, there would now be a full half sphere to worry about.

I want to make it clear that I'm not totally against drones for delivery or other uses as there are real cost savings and benefits to society, but there are huge downsides that need to be taken into consideration too. I don't think we are ready just yet.

I suspect they meant half the latency

No, McDonald's has no meat or plant matter in their food, so it doesn't apply.

Honestly I felt like this was by far worse near the end of David Tennant's reign. While the story was that he was starting to (mistakenly) buy into his own greatness, he should never have been able to do half the stuff he did in the first place. Snap his fingers to close the door to the tardis? The trickster god indeed. To me it seems like Matt Smith's doctor relies too much on the sonic screwdriver and seems to be able to intiimidate his opponents way too easily, but David Tennant in my mind is more the Magical Space Jesus Doctor than Smith's. Having said that, I greatly enjoy the most recent episodes with the right expectations. :)

I never even watched the Man of Steel. The preview was enough. The new Star Trek films I enjoyed as mindless action flicks.

Cinnamon here, but same basic theory. My anger about gnome 3 has decreased significantly since switching. I look at these threads more with amusement than with rage at this point.

If you are still on gnome3 and angry, it's really worth getting out while the getting is good.

I did something similar: worked 30 hours a week, lived in cheap housing, took 6 years to graduate, but did so debt free. Having said that, I have mixed feelings about it. Yes I worked hard and sacrificed to make it work. I was lucky too though and had opportunities other people don't necessarily have:

1) I had a good quality state school I could attend.
2) My parents let me live at home until I could find a good/cheap housing solution.
3) My parents helped me out with classes my first year until I got established.
4) I had good jobs in high school and was able to build a savings.
5) I managed to get a civil service position at the University that provided me with some free credits every semester.

It seems to me that in today's world it may not be enough to be responsible and diligent. I'm not sure I could have done it had I not had the opportunities I had.

Look, I shouldn't have to worry about these things. If it's not the sidewalks, it's the gas lines (3 blocks from my home!):

http://www.startribune.com/local/minneapolis/203710911.html

Or how about the bridges collapsing into the river?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge

I expect better than this from my government. I don't mind paying taxes to make sure infrastructure is maintained, but they are doing a hell of a job convincing me they aren't the right people to be doing it.

I'll bite. You seem to think that distributed computing, however you are defining that, is a better solution. I am going to assume your primary objection then is using infiniband (or some other low latency interconnect such as Numalink or Gemini). What then, would you propose to do with the class of problems that are rely on extremely low latency transmission of data between nodes?

That's not the other explanation, it's more or less what I'm complaining about. The city should be in the business of finding the best value, not the dirt cheapest solution. *Anyone* can do that. I naively assumed that the default option of letting the city handle it would be optimal. I mean, is it really that unreasonable to expect that the city should know how to find someone to install proper sidewalks at a reasonable price better than I do?

Who's everyone? We are talking about city sidewalks...

I'm not sure what any of this really has to do with shoddy sidewalks installed by the city... Anyway, had the city done a better job (even with a bit of extra work to make sure things were done right) I would have been grudgingly happy (despite wondering why my tax dollars are going toward building new sports stadiums when the old ones are fine instead of replacing our crumbling infrastructure). The problem here is that the government provided options was as, if not more, shoddy than private solutions.

Sidewalks! It's literally not rocket science. I'm not talking about putting down advanced concrete formulations, subsurface heating, or crazy glow in the dark walking stripes. I just want them to level the dirt, throw down some aggregate, and use rebar so I'm not being forced to pay for this again in 10 years.

I live in Minneapolis. About 3-4 years ago we were told the city would be coming through assessing our sidewalk squares for cracks, shifting, etc. After the assessment, we were told that they would be replacing a number of the squares. We could pay the city $800 upfront or pay them over the next 5 years with our taxes (also incurring some additional interest overhead). Alternatively we could hire a licensed contractor from a list provided by the city at our own expense. Later on when they came through to pour the new sidewalks, I noticed at my neighbor's house that they didn't properly level the ground (or lay down a base). The concrete was only two inches deep in places and poured directly on the dirt. I suspect they didn't use rebar or any kind of structural support either. It's almost certain to crack again in the not-to-distant future.

I'm about as liberal as they come, but in this case it's pretty easy to see why people become disillusioned with government spending.

I've got Mint on my wife's laptop and ubuntu with Cinnamon on mine. On my desktop I recently installed an SSD and did a new install. Had mint 15 been out I would have strongly considered it, but ultimately I decided that for now Ubuntu 13.04 + cinnamon is a pretty good combination. Not sure if that will continue to be the case, but for the moment I think it's about as good as it gets.

Having said that, Mint 14 on my wife's laptop has been rock solid and I'm guessing she will continue to happily use it for some time to come.

I'm an HPC professional too.

I don't totally disagree with your premise, but what the heck are you doing talking about genetics and proteomics in reference to giant supercomputers? If you know anything about proteomics codes, you know that the commonly used search engines like sequest and mascot were never designed to run on systems like that. Hell, they barely run on small clusters and yet people are getting enough science done that they just don't care. That doesn't mean that it's hard to find problems that need supercomputers though.

If you want to talk about the really big systems, you are talking about things like nuclear weapons simulations, astrophysics, molecular dynamics, and quantum mechanics. There are only a handful of guys that will actually make really good use of those systems and scores of folks that would otherwise be perfectly fine running on significantly smaller ones. Having smaller jobs backfill on the big machines when the really hardcore guys are off doing something else isn't such a bad situation though. It lets you get the big science done and still keep the machines being used efficiently in the interim.

Beyond that, just because some researchers aren't scaling their codes to those levels yet doesn't mean we should give up on big systems. There will always be people pushing the envelop and others playing catch up. Our job is to help the slow guys scale their codes when possible so they can do even better and more intensive science. Yes, not all problems require the big systems, but there are many that do, many that can be made to scale even when they don't appear to at first, and others that can serve as backfill to keep the systems busy. They have their place just as smaller clusters, cloud resources, and big data resources do.

It's easy: Because it costs more to ship you.

None of this is the airline's problem. It's entirely reasonable for the airline to charge people based on how much it costs to fly them somewhere. In a lot of ways it's more honest than the current system where that 100lb woman is helping to subsidize your ticket.

I've got most of my machines running Ubuntu with the cinnamon repo and my wife's laptop running Mint. It's fantastic and I don't find myself missing gnome2 much. Takes a slight amount of readjustment and a bit of tweaking but it's not bad and I was die-hard gnome2 user. It's really worth the switch at this point.

Mark

As I sit here on my MacBook Air running Ubuntu, working on Ceph (ie getting stuff done!) while browsing slashdot. I've tried OSX many times, and I keep coming back to Linux because it's so much *more* productive, especially when working on code. The only thing I miss is netflix.

So whatever. I still have a soft spot for Apple hardware, but I'll stick with Linux thank-you-very-much.