So all that "slippery slope" shit from 10 years ago doesn't seem so stupid now, does it?

The biggest lesson learned is that when Congress passes a law, to kill a program like Total Information Awareness, all NSA will do is change code-names and reassign the workers to a different team.

When NSA says "we have not done X in program Y", it means they have done X in program Z. When it says it has not conducted illegal activity under Authority Z, it has done it anyway, under some other contrived interpretation of a different authority.

To quote Robin Koerner on every new NSA disclosure: "Of course they did."

Now then, who thinks we still live in a functional Republic?

Also, it challanges a lot of sacred cows that people hold dear to them. You see kind of a religeous attachment to certain ideas, that is tough to give up, even when presented with a system that provides a different model of working

Very well put. In any group of humans you have the conservatives and the liberals (in the true political sense, not the f*ed up media representations). The conservatives protect us from going off half-cocked and the liberals prevent us from stagnating.

The thing is, people have been trying to replace SYSV init for twenty years. Upstart, Makefile-based systems, etc. - it's not a very new idea. The big distro maintainers feel systemd has finally become more viable than SYSV init.

I bemoan some of the loss in flexibility (I still run an rc.local almost everywhere, even under systemd) but since nobody ever succeeded in making SYSV init fast, it's probably a case of the pendulum swinging just a little bit too far the other way.

Somebody will graft node.js or go or [that redhat thing that's almost a good scripting language] to systemd and then we'll be back towards the middle but better off.

Last time I was at the Princeton lab, the thing that impressed me even more than the fusion reactor (it just goes "phht") was the flywheel room. Imagine an indoor soccer field that's just rows and rows of massive 12' flywheels, all spinning up with grid power until they're suddenly all magnetically braked, to get enough juice to force two hydrogen atoms together.

Steampunk authors can't dream up anything as cool as physicists and mechanical engineers working on big problems.

I can't help but think of the "New York is open for business" commercials flooded on the TV news channels

States that are truly that don't have to run ads, so proclaiming.

I'm glad Princeton is getting back in the game, but everything I hear says there won't be enough funding to actually get the staffing they need.

Sad to say, but the People support blowing up unwitting brown people in the Middle East, not real energy solutions.

For the cost of one Iraq Occupation, we'd have clean energy already. But War is the health of the State, not real solutions to human problems. Now if the humans would just realize that it's the State that enhances their suffering (whose electric rates are going down here?) then we'd start making some real progress.

Make helium, not war.

You seem to be perfectly willing to sell out the long term future for the medium term, which is the weirdest case of short-sightedness I've ever seen.

And at this point, I think you are deliberately misstating my argument. Fusion is a dream at this point that the most knowledgeable in the sciences say is at least 60-80 years away from economic viability. Don't believe me? Look at the ITER roadmap, publically available. And the reality is that the visionaries are usually overoptimistic. You and I will be dead before it becomes viable and our children as well. And that is assuming this becomes viable as there is always a risk when talking about advanced tech like this. Even if you are convinced the science will work out, political upheaval could mean that we can't see the project through to the end. Just imagine a more indebted US and Europe having to cut science and a China that no longer has a market to sell to and collapses on its own centrally managed bureaucracy. Insert your own worst case scenario and you see why century long, multi billion dollar research projects are risky.

So, fund it? Sure. But not at the expense of something that is a sure thing and will have a huge benefit now. You state that solar is somehow selling out the long-term... unless you mean over a billion years from now when the Sun goes nova, I'm not sure how this is remotely accurate.

Uh-oh, someone has been drinking the renewables koolaid again.

Thank you for your well-reasoned, informative response. Based on your information, I am changing my entire worldview. Thanks again, Anonymous Coward!

It may be cynicism, but it is well placed cynicism. I'm all for funding fusion research, but the reality is that we are decades away from seeing anything remotely economically viable.

And the other reality is that we do have solar which is already economically viable but still behind fossil fuels (if you forget about externalites). If I were king of the world, I'd fund solar heavily because it can do good NOW. Serious good. World saving good.

And, yes, it is a false dichotomy to say we can only fund one. But the other reality is that we have only so much money for the sciences and one dollar spent on one project is one not spent on the other. If I were King of the world I'd also cut military spending and fund sciences much more heavily.

But, alas, I am not King of the world.

Bigotry.

How many Muslims do you know? How many are there in the world? What miniscule fraction write screeds and take up arms?

Catholicism has the bloody destruction and enslavement of the Americas on it's conquistador hands. Islam - past and present - has nothing to shade that, by way of comparison.

It is interesting to note that Ghengiz Khan was a worshiper of nature-spirit, but almost half his armies were Buddhist - His first wife was oriental Orthodox, as were a substantial minority contingent of the Mongol horde and leadership. Papal emissaries were entertained by the Khan and later his grandson Guyuk was in correspondence with the pontiff.

The "muslims" that you see and read about with violent conversion and conquest? They are created, inflated and supplied by the various trans-national agencies and alliances in Global para-politics.

Snide.

But do background on Foley and Berg. Seriously.

It ain't about foreign wars.

It's about locking up unrest at home. Those evil, ISIS guys we gave weapons? They could be your neighbors! They are able to operate anywhere, anytime! They have Mexican drug-cartels (boogey-man II) in their pocket!

Anyway I don't know why they had an alert - surely it would take many hours for the lava to burn through the ice, so ther would be plenty of time to divert planes before it went boom and blocked the flight path with ash.

It's probably better to set flight plans before take-off and not change them at the last possible moment except in the event of a unpredictable emergency. You don't want to be one radio failure away from an engine full of ash.

He may have assumed the normal distribution.

It's OK - the poor guy has obviously never been exposed to elementary statistics or he would have recognized what a sigma refers to. I do think it's fair to assume a certain base level of education on Slashdot - it is a nerd site after all. But what a great example of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action!

But why do they like different career paths?

I'm going to posit that women are smarter about accepting abusive work conditions than men are. 90-hour weeks where you sleep at your desk and get free Mountain Dew and a game of pinball in a few times during a death march is an abusive situation.

What I really don't get is why some women want so badly to put other women in these situations when they're already winning. I guess what we need is more women entrepreneurs, to run companies sanely. Or men to grow a pair and tell their masters to kiss off so that tech work environments can become places where women would feel welcome.

Yeah, smoke on that one - when you work unpaid overtime you're being hostile towards women.