Came here to say this. Leaving satisfied.

Dealing with suppliers or manufacturers of anything in China presents the possibility of low costs but adds risk. The reward/risk calculus is seriously out of whack these days: for example, a tremendous amount of world HDD capacity is located in Thailand, where floods can stop everyone's production. China's industral advancement is going to be short-lived unless they start treating contracts as binding instead of a general idea.

A responsible supply chain manager would second-source everything they bought in China except for plastic toys, shower curtains and flip-flops - and I'm not so sure about the toys because high lead or selenium (or both) levels have been found in Chinese toys.

Eucalyptus trees were implicated in the spread of the Oakland Hills firestorm. They are flammable weeds. There isn't anything except the rapid growth rate and the smell to recommend them for anything at all in the USA, though in Australia it is my understanding that various pests constrain their growth and they're useful wood (for furniture) there.

If every single eucalyptus tree in California died it would bother me not a bit except for the brief time during which they were falling down.

Yup. Samuel Delany tries a little of this here and there and it not only looks strange, it's also difficult to read. Hyperlinking is throwing off some ideas like multiple finishes to a novel. If it's going to flower as a new art form, it has to start with an idea that is really new and not just an obvious mechanism. It's probably even odds that someone has actually come up with genuinely new fiction that is enhanced a lot by its hyperlinking, and it's sitting on a drive someplace with the creator wondering what it is for.

These days, you only have to whore yourself out once to be fixed for life. Reaching the desired conclusion for money has corrupted so many fields that there is a serious credibility problem with anyone getting funded by entities that have oxen and fear their being gored. It has gotten so bad with the unholy alliance between politics and drug companies that many people have begun giving up paying attention to it altogether.

The way these studies are conducted might be unimpeachable and the conclusions with these particular tests (wherein the changes are said to be "insignificant" (on what basis?)) might be statistically supportable. However, this is one conclusion and not a Fact. Similar studies show that coffee|Brussels sprouts|dietary fiber|control of sodium intake is good | bad for you (related summary here), and reaching opposite conclusions shows either that experiments are not being repeated, or that the effects are not clear.

and find out what you think might be wrong, instead of what is wrong.

Engage the users. It's your problem, not theirs.

Harlan Ellison is going to release "The Last Dangerous Visions" right about that time. What a coincidence.

Look at page 4 of this: http://www.lytro.com/science_inside. You can read the founder's Ph.D. dissertation and I guarantee you'll get your geek on if you can follow it. It's a really excellent piece of work, and at the same time it is written in such a pleasant style that it keeps you curious and interested.

It's war infrastructure pure and simple. It's analogous to the Duomo in Siena. Those big, wide boulevards? Meant for crushing civil insurrection with cavalry. China has roads strong enough to accept tanks already, to Nepal and Laos, but rail moves things so much faster.

In the second link there is a line: This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the jury will see that the unclassified lan- guage has been changed and left to wonder why they cannot see information the government’s expert deems unclassified. The jurors will be completely and hopelessly confused.1. So, if the jurors are completely and hopelessly confused, is the real problem that they won't know it? In the face of hopelessly confusing evidence, it seems as though the responsibility of the jury is to acquit. IANAL, but if I were the defense would it not be entirely reasonable to say just that in the wind-up of arguments?

Exactly. English words are consistent for English-speaking people. Icons have no such standard, and having to memorize the functions represented by icons when they are application-specific (take a look at Solidworks 2011 if you want to see some examples) is an unnecessary hurdle.

TFA lists as concerns the wrong ones. 1) STEM "education", which is really training. You don't train people to innovate, you train people to push buttons or flip burgers. Education begins with independent, critical thinking and that is less and less fostered by the educational system. 2) Why would a smart student do STEM when the money is in pie-dividing, not pie creation? Besides, B-school is about parties and sex, not cracking books all night and all weekend. 3) The progress toward a knowledge-based economy -should- be slowest for the early adopters, then people can copy it and learn from those mistakes. 4) The benchmark of "green energy" is wrong, it is now viable only because governments mandate it. From TFA: "Clean energy is an industry the government has cited as important to future growth." And the government will piss in your pocket and tell you it's raining. Government initiatives are playgrounds for rent-seekers, perpetual-motion nuts, and con men.

America's tech decline is fostered by a government in thrall to companies that ship profits to Jersey, Bermuda and Monaco; jobs to China and Vietnam; and toxic waste to Africa. Simplification of the tax code, taxing companies and individuals on parity (after all, companies are people) and letting the bastards walk if they don't like it, and a serious crackdown on malfeasance under color of authority are what the government should be doing.

Clarkson is an ass and Tesla is a tax farm. Scroom, both.

However, the dignified party in this particular action is Tesla. Clarkson, being an ass and a blowhard, cannot possibly be dignified.

This is how you rile up your trade enemies. Make no mistake, China is getting aggressive. Too fast, guys, because there are good big rare earth mines in the USA. These will re-open and China will lose leverage. What is more, now the game is out in the open. I have been waiting for such a moment, and I assure you it will be much more painful for the Chinese in a few years than it will be for US corporations in a few months.

"Leadership" might not translate fast enough to cash in the US to look as though it's worth having. The US metric up to the last year or so, which I hope is beginning to fade, is "can we make our money back on this in a short time?" and the closure of labs like Bell and Xerox PARC reflect this bottom-line thinking. Germans and Japanese alike see nothing "better" in the challenges of design than in those of manufacturing so they have good engineers doing both, and they think longer-term. It's less difficult to sell the leadership argument to their management. The French don't even appear in the contest and that's because all their bright people - who are legion - are theoreticians, they see something not quite nice, or grubby, or something in manufacturing and manufacturing engineers are seen as lower life-forms. If the French could get over that they might place.

The Chinese won't lead, ever, with stolen IP and that's how they do business. They have advanced recipes but when they break, there is no theoretical backing for it. They'll manufacture things a couple lamellae behind the cutting edge until they get over that. Once the ROW catch on you will see the Chinese doing truly wacky things because they will be stealing poisoned IP.