Fiber optics can easily contain photon energy of 3 megawats/cm^2 and have a low enough loss to allow for quantum communication, which relies on individual photons being delivered successfully. Yes, photons really are orders of magnitude more reliable in terms of transmission. The hard part about photons is actually the same thing: they're hard to make interact with each other, which is why designing optical quantum gates is hard.

Just because the humans are ignorant of it doesn't mean the dolphins are.

The vast majority of science throughout history has been government funded. Newton, for example, was a member of the University of Cambridge, which has always been funded by the Crown. Individuals contributing to science were largely aristocrats.

Theoretical science simply isn't profitable. Devices using the new knowledge may be, but that's what separates engineering from science. Our research into the Higgs Boson will take a long time, if ever, to have any practical ramifications. However, it is still important, because it lays the groundwork for technology that needs a better understanding of how things works than what we know now. Things like manipulation of spacetime for FTL drives would allow for efficient space trade, but we need to bridge general relativity and quantum physics to even know what, if any, of the proposed possibilities would even work.

TL;DR: There's an almost completely opposing economical spectrum between hard science and technology.

If it's a communications device, it's already had a ton of testing. If you look at a devices packaging and often the back of the product itself, you will see symbols from the FCC and other national telecommunications agencies. Devices are not allowed to emit radiation that may cause interference with non-public frequencies, especially not frequencies as critical as those used for airplanes.

No FCC approved consumer device is allowed to transmit or cause problems on the restricted frequencies used by airplanes to begin with. Devices that do transmit at non-public frequencies require licenses to use. Source: A friend with a PhD in aerospace engineering who has worked for Boeing and Airbus.

Linux has a much sharper definition of privileges than Windows. If UAC was only needed to do important things, and less programs needed root-type privileges to even run, the security would improve a lot. Unfortunately, requiring elevated privileges just for a program to run is not a good idea, and setting a program to always run with elevated privileges is risky similar to how the setuid bit is risky. Microsoft needs to enforce that elevated privileges be required only when absolutely necessary.

Another way of doing things would be to implement a model similar to FreeBSD Jails. This would allow for users to install software safely, as the software would only be able to alter its own files and see its own information. PCBSD's (a derivitive of FreeBSD) graphical package manager does something similar to this, but there isn't a 1:1 jail:program setup. I find this to be quite an elegant solution for home use, where you often want application installation, not just usage, to be multi-user. It wouldn't stop botnet type programs, but it could be implemented to block access to private data files.

IE doesn't even ask about "accelerators" any more. I got a copy of Win7 SP1 and was annoyed on my way to install Firefox, that the only choice I had was Bing and wasn't presented with any other options. Talk about leveraging market share to gain unfair advantage.

The whole idea of PCs started as a way to get away from walled gardens. It seems Microsoft, et al. have forgotten that the very reason for their existence is that people want more freedom than what you get from a rented terminal client. Cloud computing would be a different story if people needed more computing power than what they could reasonably afford to own in full; however, the exact opposite is the case.

One of the problems is that it's called Windows RT. To this point "Windows compatible" has never had such a serious compatibility regression. Sure, some programs broke between windows versions in the past, but ALL applications not working hasn't been the case.

There's also the issue that Microsoft is pushing their monopolist practices really hard: a forced walled garden with WinRT, and a purposefully non-user-friendly standard of EUFI SecureBoot (there were ways proposed to make it just as secure, but muti-os friendly, and microsoft chose the monopolistic method). It seems PCs are becoming a niche. I can only hope it will remain possible to run whatever software you want at all.

I agree. 32 bit a PGAS memory model is silly. Giving each core its own 32 bit address space and using MPI for communication would be much more useful. Then, it could at least be a good learning tool for HPC programming techniques. Right now, it looks pretty useless.

Even GPGPU is limited for what it can do for HPC. There's a lot more to HPC than raw mathematical power. Memory is often the bottleneck, not the FPUs. The reason we even deal with multiple processors is that the performance increase of single cores has nearly stalled, forcing the use of multiple processors. Communication between multiple cores/processors is a very complicated thing, as well, and getting good performance is a lot more complicated than hooking up a bunch of processors in a grid. For example, the supercomputer I work with has 90,112 2.3GHz cores and 90TB ram; 16 cores per chip in 704 blades, interconnected with a 3d torus network topology. It's the memory/cache size and speed and network topology that makes it a supercomputer. You could get the 800TFLOP/s in a much smaller package using GPUs, but the performance would be drastically less. Even with the 64 cores parallella could have, distributing the workload on a 64 core grid isn't easy. GPGPUs use work groups of smaller numbers of cores to make this sharing a bit more easy to manage. They should have at least made the interconnects a 2d torus rather than a grid, thereby reducing the maximum path length in half. In order to do stuff like quantum mechanics, a 5d torus is optimal. Memory access is the key. This is a bit like comparing apples to oranges, but that's exactly my point: the thing is not a supercomputer.

The main problem is that the variety that is sold in the US is bread for size, not taste. The little ones you get in the tropics are way tastier. Cash crop bananas are about the most altered fruit there is.

Bitcoins != Bitcoin wallets. The breakage wasn't with bitcoin, but people deciding to store PRIVATE KEYS online. There's a big difference between a protocol being broken and people being stupid with private keys.

This is exactly the problem I have with his response. We went to war with Iraq over the possibility that Saddam had WMDs. Now, the entire world is confirmed to be affected by global warming, and the Republicans want to wait to know exactly how fucked we really are before doing anything about it.

It really depends on if they choose do more with that personhood than the average bar of Soylent Green.

Yeah, nastiest bug I've encountered was from early kdevelop4. I canceled the "make project" dialog, and the project directory hadn't been entered, and was ~ (and not marked invalid due to no project name). Canceling it did an rm -rf ~/*.