It is their property. They have a right to sell sandwiches. The NASA budget these days means they probably pay the security guard's salary out of the proceeds of those sandwiches. So, he has a vested interest in making sure you don't smuggle in your own food.

Actually, the thing I hate is when they make me leave my 'tinker' swiss army knife behind. The thing is so dull it'll only strip wires, but I guess you never know. Watch out! Fat bald guy with a tiny pocket knife! It was on my keychain until I got sick of having to walk back to the car. Now, of course, I never have a knife when I need one.

A few years ago, there were a couple of black guys who evaded capture for weeks after killing people with sniper rifles at target stores on the east coast. DWB is a well-known cop attractant.

If Iran really wanted to mess with the US, they could dispatch 100 teams of well spoken/well dressed people to hang out around walmarts and freeway overpasses. These hitmen wouldn't even need to bring their own weapons. They could get better ones here at gun shows and by mail order. It would stop commerce completely, tank our 'financial markets', and cause mass chaos.

Add a few dozen really big fertilizer bombs, and 20 bizjets flown into high value targets like the white house, congress, and the various stock exchanges, and our government would be effectively brought to its knees.

Given that, flying my parrot drone around the neighborhood seems unlikely to be a bother.

I used to have a doctor who, rather than actually examining me, would quiz me about software engineering. That was all he was interested in. He eventually left Kaiser to start a small programming business. So, I guess it goes the other way as well. He wasn't very good at being a doctor. This was the late 80s, so he is probably a billionaire venture capitalist by now.

I don't want to be a dick here, since we are clearly on the same side of most of this. However, you can't really call a decrease in government employment an increase because the private sector lost more jobs. That is faulty logic. In addition, during the sort of recession we've been through, you WANT to spend more government dollars to promote demand. The fact that government spending has gone down for the last 4 years (as a percent of GDP) is due to misguided nonsense like saying that government employment and private employment are a zero sum game. Not even close to being true.

I am really just pointing out that government is already pretty efficient. You claim to work in an agency that is really efficient, but you say that it isn't as efficient as any business. You probably haven't worked in business much. I've worked in various large, successful computer companies over the years (cisco and apple spring to mind. Cisco in particular is 'known' for being cheap), and they are all incredibly inefficient, starting projects and then canning them, buying lots of crap they don't need when they are having a good year, running parallel development efforts, and laying off whole teams they will just need to rebuild in a year. Other things include buying shit nobody needs because "if you don't use up your budget, they will cut it next year". At cisco, there are about 20 labs, each of which have thousands of routers for 'testing and development'. In my racks, at least 80% of the machines were powered on and unused most of the time. This was true of most of the other racks. The power waste must have been 10s of millions of dollars per year, with equivalent air conditioning costs. Nobody cared.

I get what you are saying about government, and not wanting it to be efficient, but that is wrong. Government is obviously not a business (which is why business guys like Bush and Cheney don't really understand it;) it has different goals. However, given a mandate and resources, it should effectively fulfill that mandate using the least amount of resources possible. Serving the most people with the given resources is a matter of pride for many in government (state government, and I suspect federal government.)

The post office won't ever make a profit, but, as you say, that isn't its purpose.

Did you read the article? They swapped out synchronous for asynchronous NAND, which seems to have a large effect on throughput. The graph they show is startling. However, I agree that it isn't fraud. There was no implied contract to ship synchronous NAND. They also are shipping product that conforms to the original claims (just not the claims of reviewers).

Still, crappy PR.

Since there is no shortage of paid shills for the rich, whenever there is any waste, it is pointed out gleefully (and usually unfairly) by these mouthpieces. So, there have been innumerable stories (mostly unfair) of welfare queens and $1000 hammers since I was a kid in the 60s. These stories have lead people to the mostly incorrect assumption that government is wasteful.

The US government is NOT wasteful. Our tax rates are lower than most other industrialized countries. Government is trimmed to the bone. You probably don't know this, but there has been a huge reduction in government employees since the 2008 financial meltdown. Local government has been hit even harder, since reduction in federal subsidies have caused massive layoffs. There is CONSTANT cost pressure on government. This ratchets costs downwards. You may also not know that we enjoy the lowest income tax rates in the industrialized world. We do have a very fine military, but the reality is that that military is where the real government waste lives. Do we really need more military spending than the next 10 players combined?

Our government works pretty well, all things considered. We enjoy safety from invasion, robbery, and fire, reasonable roads, fairly good schools, and OK health care (assuming we are 'middle class' enough to live in a good neighborhood.) I think you are seeing a government that doesn't really exist outside conservative ideology.

Isn't this just buying elections? Just let the rich pay the poor for their votes. Worked well enough in Chicago...

Nature is pretty good at regulating species that get out of hand. However, I for one am not going to be happy when natural negative feedback, in the form of mass starvation and disease kick in. I would prefer if we used our main gift, our minds, to prevent the worst of that by anticipating and solving the problems well before they become extinction level.

When he turned on roaming, the phone probably started updating his facebook page, downloading every picture Aunt Sally posted of her collection of potatoes that resemble the baby Jesus. That was probably why his google map didn't get updated; it was waiting patiently behind the 750MB of downloads that were queued up.

with 4G, 50MB isn't much. I just tested my phone, and I average 2.65Mbps. In 1 minute, that is 159Mb, which would have cost $2442 at ATT prices!

Are you saying that banks should be separated from investment banks? Snort!

Like arrays that start at 1. Grrrr. Julia got it wrong too. I mean, who wants to say i-1 everywhere? Even Wirth got this wrong. So did maxima.

Python got it right, and got lots of other things right too. They just missed the fact that 1/2 > 0. Small price to pay.

You will be rewarded when the singularity comes to pass...

Spot on. This is actually a problem with pilots. They use their automation for nearly every approach, until the automation is off line and they land short and kill people.

A boeing 747 uses 140MW of power during flight.

The wings of a 747 are about 525 m^2. The sun provides about 1367W/m^2. A solar panel will turn about 20% of that into electricity. So, the result is 143kW.

So, the best solar panels in the best angle from the sun provides about 1/1000 of the energy needed to fly the plane. The 143kW might power the air conditioner and lights, although that is not certain.

Your assertion is true for theoretical reinterpretations of existing theory. Things like the germ theory, Einstein's changes to mechanics or atomic theory, the quantization hypothesis, continental drift, even the Copernican view were not accepted by contemporary scientists, being too large a jump from their accepted understanding.

On the other hand, what is the theory on climate change? Carbon dioxide causes temperature rise by a greenhouse effect. You can run that experiment in a terrarium. Nobody really disputes it. The Permian extinction was caused by massive increases in C02, due to Siberian volcanic action. We know what large amounts of CO2 do in the atmosphere, and have known for a hundred years.

So, given rising levels of CO2, the only real scientific question is how long it will take before the oceans rise, or storms start getting more severe. Scientists argue about that sort of thing all the time. Estimates change on a monthly basis, models are improved, new data is collected, etc. Science is doing its thing, which is to improve its predictions of the future.

There may well be an Einstein out there, who can take the data, and reinterpret it such that it is no longer necessary to limit greenhouse gas emissions. If he or she exists, it will take a long time before her theoretical reinterpretation of the data is accepted. However, assuming there is no way to reinterpret the data is the safer way to go,

Also, the deniers on /. aren't Einsteins, despite their claims to the contrary.