But that's just begging the question of why they didn't use liquid-fuelled boosters instead. As I said, the crazy and conflicting design requirements (for example, the 'need' to launch satellites into polar orbit, the unnecessary focus on re-usability, and the decision to have lower up-front cost at the expense of greater future operating costs) contributed to these flawed decisions.

I've been actively working in the field for the past few years and I don't think he's incredibly off the mark. Google, for instance, has some pretty advanced tech in production and lots more in development. The 'new AI' (statistical machine learning and large-scale, distributed data mining) is getting pretty advanced and scary.

Symbolic manipulation as a route to AI was a period of collective delusion in computer science. Lots of people wasted their talents going down this route. In the 80's this approach was all but dead and AI researchers finally sobered up. They started actually learning about the human brain and incorporating the lessons into their designs. It's sad that so much time was wasted on that approach, but the good news is that the new approaches people are using now are based on actual science and grounded in reality. The intelligence in search, natural language, object and facial recognition, and self-driving cars (that ShanghaiBill pointed out) is due to these new approaches.

AI spent its youth confused and rebellious. That was when you were in your graduate studies. Now it's far more matured. I encourage you to read up on new machine intelligence approaches and the literature in this area. You won't be disappointed.

The problem isn't reuse of old technology. The problem is the selection of old technology you reuse, and how you go about re-using it.

Start with the solid rocket boosters as an example. There's very good reasons why most space launch platforms don't use solid rockets. Cost, efficiency, and inherent lack of safety (you can't turn off an SRB once it's been lit) are just a few. So why did the shuttle use them? Because it was kind of forced upon them by the crazy and contradictory design decisions they had to comply with. The end result was that 70% of the takeoff thrust was actually provided by the two solid boosters, with only 30% coming from the three high-tech hydrogen rockets.

With the SLS, NASA had the opportunity to fix the warts in the shuttle program. Instead what we have now is the maximum-pork option.

If you look at the case, there's evidence she did slight but deliberate manipulation and misrepresentation of results. That's what I meant by wrong.

It's probably not the case that she wrote the paper cackling to herself madly and proclaiming "Those suckers will never find out!"

It's probably the case that through self-delusion and carelessness she managed to partially convince herself that the results were true, and this, coupled with pressure to produce results, caused her to take a few shortcuts to get it published. What she did was wrong, and her career is over. It's not something a rational mind would have done. But scientists are just human and sometimes prone to making irrational decisions. The great thing is that we have the scientific method to weed out the good from the bad.

The clean-up was less due to the severe amount of radioactivity and more due to the fact that he was careless and got it everywhere.

The total amount of radioactive material was small and the actual dose of radiation he was exposed to was probably minimal. Although the exact dose isn't known because he never completely revealed his experiments and he never underwent testing.

One thing I find interesting is that he was arrested again in 2007 on charges related to stealing smoke detectors for their Americium, 13 years after his boy scout experiments.

As far as google is concerned, you're going to be using voice commands anyway.

Yup, that's exactly it. Another thing about those computers is that they are often more 'geek-oriented' overall. I got a vostro 1320 laptop with freedos, for instance, and it has a backside panel for easy access to the fan and heatsink assembly. Cleaning the computer is literally a matter of just removing a pair of screws. Compare to some other laptops where you virtually have to disassemble down to the bare motherboard just to get the fan clean. It was also about $90 cheaper than the windows version, even though the specs were almost exactly the same. It's nice that companies still make computers like this. I wonder when it will end.

As the article says, that's irrelevant because it's a tribe affiliation. When it comes to these things, logic and intelligence are completely overwhelmed and suppressed. That's how our brains work. Ever notice how all so-called "freethought" and "rationalist" groups soon turn into hilariously ironic examples of conformity and groupthink?