It's a good thing this sort of quackery is limited to India and Russia. I'd be pretty embarrassed if we had some of our people claiming that the world was only a few thousand years old, that climate change doesn't exist, and that we didn't evolve over time but were all designed by a supernatural entity.

So is Slashdot, if you're Bennett Haselton.

Actually that was merely a proposal by CCA, zero states signed up. There are occupancy clauses in contracts with some private prison operators, but it's on a case-by-case basis, and given the number of hideously expensive empty prisons in the US you can see why they'd want some sort of guarantee that they'll get a return on their investment.

(The problem isn't so much CCA or similar operators, it's the concept of running prisons as private for-profit operations).

It's like processor performance ratings: AMD, er, Airbus PR800 -> 270, PR900 -> 314, and PR1000 -> 350. No doubt Boeing will roll out its own bCOMP index to rate its aircraft: Take the number of passengers, multiply by the number of engines, divide by the average delivery delay, multiply by the number of consonants in "Rolls-Royce Trent 1000", and you have the bCOMP index, which oddly enough works out slightly higher than the Airbus Performance Rating in all categories. I hear that Airbus are planning to overclock their engines in order to get higher numbers than Boeing for their next release...

I recognise Silvanus Thompson as the calculus author. He died a quarter of a century before this Stewart newbie was born. And since his calculus text was written in 1910, the cost to students is $0.

If you look at the graph they include in their article, complete with its pointless scare quotes around "hypergolic" every time it's used, the reason for mothballing almost all of the test stands is that hypergolic propellants aren't used too much any more in modern designs (less energy than cryogenics, and incredibly unpleasant and dangerous to work with), so there's less need to experiment with them in test stands. Another way of writing the article therefore could have been "Switch to safer fuels reduces need for expensive test stands", a win-win situation all round. In fact I'm sure Fox ("We Report, You Believe"), are working on that version right now...

Who's this Johnny-come-lately Chiusano guy? What happened to Bennett Haselton?

As someone who's worked the helldesk at an ISP, I can definitely confirm that some of us remember passwords. Unfortunately way too many of us don't.

It's not a meh, it's a myth. The physics package can only be triggered after a fairly complex set of conditions have been fulfilled, starting with launch authorisation, a period of high acceleration, a period of zero-G (long enough for the warhead to have moved outside the continental US), re-entry heat, and so on. And unlike any number of Hollywood movies, this isn't something you can bypass by uploading a hotfix, it's fixed-function stuff that can't be changed.

Another thing about these gee-whiz national-lab designs is that they've been coming up with them since the 1980s (and probably earlier than that, I wasn't around then). None of them ever get used. They eventually find their way into civilian applications (things like MEMs, PUFs) years or even decades after the national labs come up with them, but they're never used for arms control due to a mix of massive inertia, difficulty in turning a proof-of-concept into a fieldable item, and the fact that deploying them typically requires renegotiating international treaties.

(This is a very abbreviated description of something that'd take a book to cover).

That was my reaction as well. If Chromefox and a bunch of money-wasting vanity wank ("Firefox OS") is all we're getting for $300M, Google should be asking for their money back.

Oh, so in Roman terms it's actually largitiones (referring to the act of providing money for political ends) rather than ambitus (a more general term for the crime of political corruption, including bribery) - see my other post above.

I'd Googled it, but it just seems to be a way of funnelling money to politicians or for political objectives. S**t, that's been going on since (at least) ancient Rome, they called it ambitus.

As someone who lives outside the US, and after seeing several articles talking about PACs, I have to ask: WTF is a PAC, and WhyTF should I care?

So you've got the choice between crappy graphics hardware with OSS drivers and high-end graphics hardware with binary-blob drivers. Damn.

What I find kinda surreal is that they were quite happy to set up a monument to a sociopath, but then felt the need to take it down when a completely different person admitted he wasn't into women so much. In post-Soviet Russia, happy ocelot pancake.