Even if you could recharge a car in 5 minute, service stations would require massive upgrades in electrical capacity to do it. It's not something that could be done with standard 220V lines. For long distance trips on Interstates in the western US, you would have to run heavy duty electrical cables for dozens if not hundreds of miles.

"That was also the moment, according to Gordin, when the American scientific establishment started to take over dominance in the world." That one sentence at the end explains it all. English became dominant because the Americans and the British dominated science after WWI. German was the lead language before 1900 because that's when they dominated science. It didn't help that Hitler caused many of Germany's remaining best scientists to emigrate to America and Britain in the '30s.

There has always been a glut of postdocs. In the early '80s when I was thinking about getting a doctorate, the dismal job market in academia was a major reason I didn't. A friend of mine got a doctorate in botany and wound up at a backwater university in a city he never wanted to live in. The truth is that if you're a superstar, you'll find a job. Anybody who's just very good or excellent (and you really should be to consider getting a doctorate in the first place) is left scrambling.

Actually, that's exactly how copyright should work. If you never view a video, read a book, listen to a song, etc., what value is stolen from the copyright owner? Unfortunately, we didn't have the technology track when people actually do these things so possession became a poor proxy for actually experiencing copyrighted material. With such technology now possible, maybe that will change one day, but I'm not holding my breath.

As an older programmer, I can't say my enthusiasm for programming has decreased. Instead, other interests and obligations build up and take their priorities. You can't hope to have a family and raise your kids properly if you work the same number of hours you did in your 20s. While it's great to get a large project completed at work, watching your kids play sports or teaching them about life is at least as rewarding. Another thing is that after you've been around for a while in engineering, you've pretty much seen it all as far as dealing with bosses, schedules, faceless corporations, etc. It does jade you. And I have to say that while I can still pick up new ideas, it takes longer and requires more concentration than it used to.

ECC use is standard with all flash storage. Flash is so unreliable that it can't be used without it, and it has nothing to do with the hard radiation environment on Mars. As for wear leveling, it's been standard since at least 1990 with the first attempts at flash storage. Why the rovers don't do it, I don't know. Maybe because it requires too many cycles of an already limited processor, plus dedicated storage space to keep "use counts" of all the flash blocks.

No, the drives themselves don't do this because it pulls the head away from where the host wants/expects it to be. This would result in a lot of unexpected thrashing. If scrubbing is to be done, it is best done by the OS as a background task.

Back in 2010, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said President Obama gave him three priorities: "When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator -- he [President Obama] charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering" None of these is actually about doing space exploration.

I'm not an expert on systemd or why the change was deemed necessary. All I know is that last year when Arch Linux made the change, the update crashed my installation and I had to reinstall from scratch. As a non-expert casual user, the switch came out of the blue, was never justified, and when I went into the forums the attitude from the "experts" was shut up and learn to live with it.

The paper posits that early societies were relatively egalitarian. That's ridiculous. In any group of human beings, a hierarchical structure is always created. What creates the hierarchy changes (brawn and hunting skills back then, brains today), but one always forms on the basis of something. Have the authors never even been in first grade?

All this drug does it improve the conversion of short-term memory to long-term memory. This is a problem in patients suffering from Alzheimer's but no way can it regain memory stored in neurons already lost to Alzheimer's. I hope this treatment works, but it's not even clear it will stop the progression of the disease to it's ultimate conclusion.

After she got her Oscar, Helen Hunt was making $1 million per episode in "Mad About You". Paul Reiser had a clause in his contract that his salary would match Hunt's, so he got $1 million as well. The main stars of "Friends" and "Seinfeld" were supposed to be making in the $1 million per episode range at the end of their series, plus generous fees for syndication. The five or six main voice actors in "The Simpsons" are supposed be making close to $1 million per episode.

The Spirit of St. Louis had no front windshield because of the placement of tanks. Lindbergh would yaw the plane to look out a side window when he wanted to look ahead. The plane was also equipped with a periscope for take-offs and landings, though it's not clear Lindbergh used it while in flight.

The article ultimately points to an IEA website for the data on subsidies. If you look there (http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/resources/energysubsidies/ ), much of the subsidies are in the form of fuel price subsidies in developing countries (see http://www.iea.org/subsidy/ind... ). According to a 2009 IEA document (http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/media/weowebsite/energysubsidies/second_joint_report.pdf ), this accounts for $312 billion a year. The rest is attributed to "tax expenditures, under-priced access to scarce resources under government control (e.g. land) and the transfer of risks to governments (e.g., via concessional loans or guarantees. These subsidies are more difficult to identify and estimate compared with direct consumer subsidies." If you take away fuel subsidies in India, for example, many people could not even cook their food, much less get around. In many countries eliminating fuel subsidies would result in mass hardship and even civil disruption. Blithely assuming such subsidies can be eliminated is not a practical solution.

I don't know why everybody assumes there is only one life/work balance that's optimal throughout your life. When you first get out of school, want to make a mark, and don't have a family, it's often very rewarding to put more hours into work. But later on in life when you get a family and other interests, work just isn't as important for most people. It's not that one is better than the other, it's that priorities change as you age.