Actually, Congress did give NOAA more money for a new supercomputer. The computer hasn't materialized because NOAA is locked into a single-source contract with IBM. As TFA mentions, IBM just sold its supercomputer division to a Chinese company (Lenovo). It seems some people are antsy about the implications for a Chinese company providing the computer behind a critical national security capability (weather prediction).

Who needs competition anyway? Why go to the moon, why be the best at anything?

Indeed. It would be much easier to fling our nuclear shit at the Soviets like good screeching monkies, rather than impress the world with our feats of engineering.

Just out of curiosity, do you actually know what aggression means?

Sounds more like lazy people wanting to get carried by those they look down upon.

And this sounds like someone's having delusions of grandieur.

Barbie getting recogonized for her actions

Whatever this is, both Google and various dictionaries refuse to discuss it, so I have to ask... what the heck do they put into kid's books these days ?!?

"I make half a mil a year to align the corporate IT strategy with the CEO's vision... But the company would rather use me to fill a 50k chair".

Few leaders want underlings who are good at determining what their "visions" will actually look like once implemented.

So why hasn't some company just built a fusion reactor and made untold billions of dollars?

Should fusion ever work, it's still nuclear. It still involves radiation, and produces radioactive waste - the reactor vessel will get activated over time. Greenpeace has already announced they'll oppose fusion power too.

So basically, even if someone had the technology, actually building the plants would be impossible, the enviromentalists have seen to that.

In a free market capitalist economy markets discover prices that allow markets to clear, that means the prices adjust accordingly to the supply and demand for all things, including all types of labour and capital and land and other assets and resources.

This is the problem, actually. Historically and currently the supply of labour is greater than demand, thus the prices adjust to very low levels. This is bad for the people who get paid barely enough to eat (and not necessarily even that), and it's bad for the companies, since it means most people can't afford their products. So those companies downsize, which lowers demand even more (since there's now more unemployed people), which gives the companies need to downsize more, and so forth. The end result is a complete collapse of production systems out of lack of demand while people starve.

Basically, you're taking a pre-industrial economic model that assumes skill is all the capital you need, and apply it to post-industrial world where you can do nothing without lots and lots of money. Adam Smith assumed everyone who wants to can always find a productive job, shoveling horseshit if nothing else, but that hasn't been true for a while now. Capitalism is a system of optimally allocating labour; it can't handle a world where labour is no longer the limiting factor for production.

It is unacceptable to declare some form of moral authority based on theft and initiation of violent force.

All forms of ownership are based on willingness to initiate force against anyone who ignores your claims of ownership. All such claims originate from someone simply claiming something as theirs. That they've often passed through many hands over many generations doesn't change this fact. And that means that declaring some claims as valid and others as theft is simply a matter of convention; all claims of ownership are ultimately stealing from public domain. So stop treating them as some kind of revealed holy order and see them as they are: a convenience similar to, say, city limits, which absolutely can be adjusted without there being anything immoral about this (altough such adjustments need to happen in an even, fair and legal manner, obviously).

Anything that reduces individual freedoms is less moral than anything that increases individual freedoms. Anything that reduces private property rights and self determination through these rights is less moral than than anything that increases private property rights and self determination.

The problem is, excessive focus on private property rights leads to wealth concentration which decreases self determination - and thus effective individual freedom - for most participants. Or possibly for all, since even the wealthy have their potential choices limited to those which acquire them more, or at the very least maintain what they alrady have.

This process led to the excesses that gave birth to both socialism and fascism during the Industrial Revolution. Any capitalistic system that fails to adress it is going to give birth to similar movements. And those which manage to suppress them yet fail to learn their lesson will collapse due to insufficient share of wealth going to the lower classes that they could continue participating in the economy even if they wanted to, which is currently happening.

AFAIC the profit motive is the most moral way to run a society because it is the most moral way to run an economy without stealing and without using collective violence against an individual.

Claims of ownership are backed by threats of violence, either private or collective. Property does not exist in a society that has truly forsworn violence.

some of them might actually be certified experts.

But on the Internet, they're just screen names. So they need to use their expertise, rather than these hypothetical certificates, to back their arguments. Which might not be such a bad idea IRL, either.

Spaceborn or would-be-spaceborn RTGs have crashed many times with no outcry or PR trouble for the responsible space agencies, I don't see any reason why this would be any different.

Because hysterics is nowadays an accepted way of doing politics. And because of that, there's a lot of people who jump at any chance, no matter how ridiculous, to make nuclear power seem scary, consequences be damned.

And let's face it, inability to send space probes to outer solar system is a pretty small consequence compared to climate change and economy permanently crippled by high energy prices, both of which are the inevitable consequences of succesfully opposing nuclear energy.

Sure, but when you have outages and stability issues which impact your business, is it really a good trade off?

Sure. You get to blame your cloud provider for their problems, and with luck for even some of your own. You get bonuses for the savings and a scapegoat for the costs. What's there to trade off?

Don't need to upgrade regularly anymore, huh? Go look at the system requirements on AC: Unity and tell me you can play that on even medium settings with a system that hasn't been upgraded in years.

Go loot at pretty much any other game and you can. That you can find always find a game that requires a high-end PC to run, doesn't mean that you have to upgrade. Especially not when the game in question has around 7 or so practically identical predecessors which run on mid-level machines just fine.

If anything, modern PCs with their multicore 64-bit CPUs are years ahead of game development, which still targets 32-bit machines by default.

The Libertarian philosophy is the most self-consistent of all available. It requires the fewest "common-sense" exceptions to be practical.

Right. So you're okay with me opening an open-air nuclear waste dumb next door to your house? Or do you reserve the right to keep redefining "force" to cover everything I do which might negatively affect you yet not cover anything you do that might negatively affect me?

"By the same logic, computers should not be allowed in any life-critical situation."

That isn't true. Some of those situations have clearly defined parameters. For instance air traffic control is collision avoidance. You can build a truth table and mathematically prove every possible outcome within certain bounds. We can do and do do this for many critical programs.

"Civilian" and "Combatant", "Us" and "Them" these are fuzzy classifications at best. Human's fed all the data could not consistently classify people into one category or another, in fact, they can only achieve a better consensus with data limited by a perspective. If humans can't come up with a consistent definition how can they assess whether or not a machine is more or less accurately adhering to it?

The fact that we can all conceive of the vague notion of a "bad guy." Doesn't mean such a thing exists. The fact that no individual can come up with a set of discrete and measurable criteria that will successfully classify "bad guy" in a logically consistent way even for themselves, let alone get a consensus among others, says that being able to agree on a vague notion of a thing doesn't mean that vague notion actually exists. There is no such thing as a "bad guy." No matter how much we can all agree we should stop the bad guys.

You are personally going to migrate your employer's systems because you personally do not like something, something every single major distro is moving too, and the top kernel developers are already using?

Isn't that kinda his job? Institutional decisions aren't engraved in CEOs granite desktop in fiery letters by an invisible finger; they're always made by some agent acting on behalf of the institution. Which is actually a pretty fascinating process, the way personal convictions and institutional culture interact to give raise to them, and probably behind more than a few religious and secular cults. Which, I'm more and more convinced, is very relevant to the topic of both pro- and anti-systemd camps.

Both are pretty likely. Let's start by defining civilian. Is the farmer who supports the militants cause and brings them goat cheese and steel a civilian? What about the farmer who is afraid of them and does the exact same thing? What if the farmer knows the danger level and carries a gun for personal defense?

You can't compute us and them in an analogue world where the real value is never actually 0 or 1 but always a shifting value in between and usually multiple shifting values in between. YOU can't, and neither can your robot.