Or perhaps less than you think.

At my local university, they tied all the computer services to one login system. So, getting a library card only allows you to borrow books. All computer resources can only be accessed by logging in with the student account and if you are not a student, you can't access it.

Most universities don't bother with physical copies of journals anymore.

I hope this is not one of those five year technologies.

Slashdot is full of stories about this new technology and that new technology that will be ready in five years. These then just vanish after the story first appears.

After the story is published and we comment, it is forgotten and nobody is held accountable for publishing bullshit.

Maybe someone should do a review of stories published 5 years ago of new technologies that have never materialized. I remember five years ago there used to be so many stories of new storage technologies about storing in DNA, some crystal lattices. nano-structures and so on.

That sideways scrolling thing makes me queasy.

There has got to be a zillion better ways to do it than that.

When Netflix has the data mining contest, I thought they were such a cool company. Now they look like a stagnant company.

If you want to find fault in something, you'll always find something. If you want to find positives in something, you'll also always find something. All your post says is that you really wanted to believe that there are problems with the Chinese scientific institutions for whatever your own reasons*.

Just let it go. Enjoy the achievement and whatever comes off it. We're all a little better off, however little from the success.

Unless you have done extensive statistical analysis of the Chinese scientific institutions and community and claim to be one of the leading researchers in such a field, then my apologies and I acknowledge that I am getting the best opinion there can be on this topic.

The status quo doesn't have to come about because it is the best solution to a problem. There are many times when status quo can appear because it was first to the market, or because it was pushed by the giant gorilla of the market etc. Just look at web standards and internet and there are so many status quo ideas that are established not because they are the best but for a variety of different reasons.

Gene mutations are random whereas creative ideas are directed. Perhaps gene mutations would be comparable to random thoughts in people's heads. Creative ideas are more refined than that.

I agree that its hard to determine which creative idea is going to be successful and maybe even successful for completely different reasons. I admit than when Twitter first came out, I thought it was a dumb idea. But, there lies the problem. Out society of innovation is based on creative ideas and there are no ways of determining which ideas are great and which are not. As the article suggests, the only way to make your idea take effect is through extreme perseverance and mountains of rejection. I remember reading that JK Rowling had her Harry Potter manuscript rejected over a dozen times.

If there is an inherent psychological bias against new ideas, then maybe the psychologists should create a procedure in which we can develop new ideas without having the creative idea having to face rejections.

This is something that I've found very strange.

Why do people come up with strange beliefs? Fat cells screaming to eat! Maybe a good analogy but is it really true?

If someone challenges them, then they hit Google and find some article and reaffirm their beliefs.

My weight touched that obese BMI of 30 but managed to get my BMI down to the low 20s by losing over 50lbs. In my case, I find that my weight problem was due to some very strange beliefs I had been keeping and so questioning these beliefs and experimenting out of them was what worked. Everyone has different reasons for the weight problem but for me that was the problem.

When I wanted to lose weight, I would cut out fat and meat and go vegetarian. I would eat lots of rice, cereal and bread instead.I would buy lots of fruits and eat glasses after glasses of apple and banana smoothies all day. Add to that, I would try to exercise and make it a point to use the elliptical machine for 30 minutes every day. I would lose weight but it would come back if there was a deadline or some stressful event.

My point is that maybe we should be experimental and not dogmatic when it comes to weight loss. Try different things and keep experimenting until you find something that puts in normal weight that you are able to maintain. Question beliefs because there might be that one belief that you use everyday to make food choices that over months and years is causing your weight problems.

Only in select genres. A lot of music produced right now is just computer created and so quality is easily matched.

Try matching drums, guitar sounds, acoustic instruments or vocals with consumer grade equipment. The quality of the instruments, room, microphones and the skills of the engineer play a huge part in the quality.

There will always be a grey area in the decision between if it is safe to stop or not.

Whatever the condition to determine if it is safe or not, there will always be situations when it will be close the decision boundary.

Out of the millions stop light encounters, there will be thousands where the decision on either side could be taken depending on the variability of measurements. Two cars taking two different decisions because of minute variations in their sensor measurements could result in a crash.

If you take the light timings out, you increase the margin to probably unacceptable high levels.

Freeway travel everywhere is pretty much the same.

On local streets, there are quirks.

However, this problem can also be solved by doing a Google street view style of predetermined intentions of how the roads were designed instead of computing them on the fly.

The traffic signals are also not standardized. The yellow in a 45mph road going downhill is shorter than the yellow at a 20mph road. Also, this behavior changes with time of day in some lights. So, when the light turns yellow, the car has to make a decision to keep going or brake for a stop.

So, here also the entire traffic light timings need to be recorded and stored to make right decisions.

Construction again changes things. But, they are easiest because they can be easily standardized.

Snow in Michigan changes things but I guess if you can automate the snow plows also, then it will make things easier for self-driving cars since the snow is plowed in some pre-defined method.

When a majority of the cars are self-driving, then the problem will be simpler. It is the phase when a few cars are self-driving and most are human drivers, then it becomes tricky.

But hopefully in the next decade, all the cars will be self-driving.

Perhaps all cars will be rentals in the future. You can have a car pick you up and drop you off and then go somewhere else. This will make car sizes smaller because people will not have to buy cars with the worst case use in mind. I see huge trucks with just a single driver on the freeway all the time. People will rent cars depending on passengers and how much stuff they have to move.

Why do people even try to predict the future of military strategies and technology? When we went to the gulf war, we had a vastly different set of technology and strategy than when we left. Afghanistan is so much about drones now but we didn't even use drones when the war in Afghanistan started.

The exact opposite of what you predict could happen. Robots in the hands of civilians could render military actions ineffective because civilians will always be able to deploy more and gain understanding of movements of small groups of men. So, civilians would have more knowledge and information and avoid military offenses. China could manufacture controllers and parts for super cheap and so people could put together batteries, cameras, controllers, communications for civilian robots very easily.

My point is anything could happen. Unless you are from the future, this kind of talk is bogus. If you read 10 year old slashdot articles, you will see almost painful amount of bad predictions.

The only alternative for appliances are now Home Depot, Lowes or Best Buy. I doubt they are much better. There is no way any company is going to come running out to fix your appliance for a free warranty claim.

Sears has as good a price or better as Amazon on many products. Nothing beats placing the order and picking it up 20 minutes later at a local Sears or Kmart.

Amazon has gone heavily into data center business as well. It makes as much sense for Sears to do the same. Sears can attract the small local businesses who want IT services like mail, storage and custom apps without paying for an in-house IT and a local venue to go to if there is something wrong or if they want custom services.

Working for China right now

Please, give an example or two.

Spectacular failures are Somalia, Hailti and many African countries. Slow failures: Shah era Iran, India and the third world.

If China doesn't do communism anymore, then we don't do capitalism anymore.

We now call it socialism and remark at how awesome Sweden, Norway, Canada are. Even we don't want to be capitalists. Capitalists will let someone die because they don't have good enough health insurance and capitalism creates 1%ers and 99%ers.

It is not the philosophy but the implementation.

There are many places as well where capitalism has failed miserably and resulted in anarchy as well.

Plus, as anyone would say, what we call capitalism has an enormous government sector and our government spending is about 40% of the GDP.

There great failures in government have been when there have been enormous failures of communication and policies were not adjusted to reflect reality but pushed on by fantasy.

The recent success of China would say communism can work though their approach is to use a combination of free market and state ownership not for a political fantasy philosophy but economic metrics. Of course, Chinese economic metrics are always suspect and if they become super inaccurate they could also be in the way of fantasy.

Even if the Chinese implement more free market policies and we let our government grow bigger and reach the same portion of government size, we will call ourselves capitalists and China communists.

Diabetic patients are told to eat low carb diets. Even people who have been fat all their life start following a strict low carb diet, they become thin.

There was a discussion regarding some experiments on this. One doctor had diabetic patients that were getting too thin, "wasting away" as they said and wanted to put some meat on the bones. The doctors prescribed drinking olive oil shots. The patients didn't gain any weight. So, he doubled the amount of olive oil to be drunk like medicine. Still no weight gain. He doubled it again. Nothing again. At the end, patients were consuming over 2000 calories in olive oil shots and not gaining any weight (this in addition to their strict low carb diet for diabetes).

The whole "insulin" as the fat hormone I think was popularized by the book "Good calories, bad calories" by Taubes. There is no scientific consensus about insulin though. Taubes does cite a lot of work on his book and one of the most dramatic is the topical fat bulbs at the site of insulin injections.

Low-carb seems to be the best of all the weight loss diets when examined experimentally. There are a plethora of theories regarding why low-carb seems to be the best. Since low-carb diets were popularized by the diabetes doctor Atkins, there has been a strong suspicion that it is through insulin.

One area from the top of my head: bicycling. Multi-thousand lumen LED headlamps with LiIon battery packs, countless LED and laser lights for bikes, bike computers and gadgets, clothing for riding bikes including reflector straps and wearable LED lights and so on.