In the UK, university research departments are assessed base on the Research Excellence Framework (REF, formerly the Research Assessment Exercise [RAE]). Each faculty member is required to submit 4 things demonstrating impact. These are typically top-tier conference or journal papers, but can also be artefacts or examples of successful technology transfer. The exercise happens every four years, so to get the top ranking you need to write one good paper a year. The only incentive for publishing in second-tier venues is meeting other people who might lead to interesting collaborations.

Reproducing work is often a good thing to set for first-year PhD students to do. If they reproduce something successfully, then they've learned about the state of the art and are in a good position to start original research. If they can't reproduce it, then they've got a paper for one of the debunking workshops that are increasingly attached to major conferences and that's their first publication done...

Predicting that x86 would go away was more wishful thinking than anything else. At the time, Intel had just switched from pushing the i960 to pushing the i860 and would later push Itanium as x86 replacements (their first attempt at producing a CPU that it was impossible to efficiently compile code for, the iAPX432, had already died). Given that Intel was on its second attempt to kill x86 (the 432 largely predated anyone caring seriously about x86), it wasn't hard to imagine that it would go away soon...

I found Modern Operating Systems better than the Minix book. The Minix book tells you exactly how a toy OS works in detail. Kirk McKusick's Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD OS (new version due out in a month or two) tells you how a real modern OS works in detail. Modern Operating Systems gives you a high-level overview of how modern operating systems work and how they should work. If you want to learn about operating systems, I'd recommend reading the FreeBSD D&I book and Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems and skipping the Minix book (which was also a bit too heavy on code listings for my tastes).

Minix has been BSD licensed for well over a decade. I'm not sure exactly how long, but it was when I was an undergrad and that was a depressingly long time ago now. As the kids today say: Old troll is old.

While this is true, it's worth noting that a lot of the compartmentalisation and sandboxing ideas that most of the userland programs on OS X employ (either directly or via standard APIs) have roots in microkernel research. OS X is in the somewhat odd situation of having userspace processes that are a lot more like multiserver microkernels than its kernel...

This is confusing in Brussels, because there is Université libre de Bruxelles (Free University of Brussels), but there is also Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels), a different university.

They're good at the animations and the easter eggs, but they lack things like a pause button which is really irritating if the phone or doorbell rings a little way into the video.

"the same mistake the anti-eugenics movement made in 1925 with the Scopes Monkey Trial [wikipedia.org], which fought the teaching of evolution in schools"

All the history of the Butler act I ever read mention they simply feared teaching of evolution would weaken faith, and that they refused our descendance from great apes, as it would shows us as descending from lower beings like animals. At no point the proponent of Butler's act mentioned eugenism, that sound like a modern rewriting of the history. In fact the prominent web sites which promote this thesis are : answeringenesis and creation.com. Fancy that.

If you're looking at any web site that is that general, then you're in the wrong area. Job ads are like any other ads: they're useless without doing some targeting.

I thought it was a fairly faithful adaptation, but I admit I got bored some time in Season 2. The pacing in the book can be slow at times, but when transferred as-is to a visual medium it's amazingly tedious.

Seriously? You want competent people and you advertise on Craigslist and Monster.com? No wonder you think there's a skills shortage...

This is exactly how they do it now for software in medical devices. Except that that 'private firms' are the manufacturers. It's ludicrous for them to claim that a certification process that basically amounts to asking the manufacturers to promise that they've tested it really well 'won't scale'.

With medical devices efficacy and safety are very closely linked. If you're providing a product that monitors blood glucose and you do a poor job of it, your customer makes incorrect medical decisions that are potentially life threatening. The closer an app gets to providing such "actionable" information, the more likely it is that it requires FDA approval.

That said, this "can't be overseen" thing is silly. The FDA doesn't have the resources to oversee ALL smartphone health apps, they don't want to, and they shouldn't. There's no debate there. If the next generation of phones include electrocardiogram electrodes or a sophisticated spectrometer, the FDA is going to regulate the health software using those tools. That's really the news coming out of that FDA statement.

Apparently the early script drafts had a more plausible explanation: that the spare brain capacity of humans in a dream-like state was used as processing power to run the AIs. One of the editors thought this was too complicated for a movie-going audience to understand and so replaced it with a magic perpetual motion machine.