Well, it's two things, really.

1) Yeah, they want to get a tech nucleus thing going (which does actually work in some places, if done right) and are going about it in a really awkward fashion

2) They realize that the absurdly high taxes in New York are driving businesses away, and so they're giving a temporary tax break to out of town corporations to move in. The trouble is, the turkeys can see the farmer with the shotgun at the end of the line, and aren't buying it. Who would want to grow a business when you know you'll be taxed heavily after becoming successful? You might as well live here in the People's Republic of California where the weather is nicer.

>This one also isn't being used for nuclear security work. It's all open science runs for the Office of Science.

So you're saying the title is wrong, too?

>The point is, it's a chip company, not a supercomputer company, that got the contract. All of your examples are of computer companies (IBM, Cray, Digital, etc.) getting the contract. In this case it's a chip company (Intel) that doesn't usually build the actual computers.

Re-read my list. Intel built one of the ASCI Machines. IBM is also a chip manufacturer (they did, in fact, create the chips for some of their supercomputers). Cray and Digital were also chip makers, though IIRC Cray was out of the business at this point in time.

>>For the first time in over twenty years of supercomputing history, a chipmaker [Intel] has been awarded the contract to build a leading-edge national computing resource.

That's bullshit. Multiple supercomputers were built for nuclear security that were constructed after 1995.

I worked at the San Diego Super Computer Center during this time period, and could get access to them to run computations occasionally. Kinda neat.

ASCI Red (1.3 teraflops) was built by Intel in 1997 at Sandia, upgraded to 2.4tf in 1999:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

ASCI Blue Pacific (3.9 teraflops) was built by IBM in 1998 at LLNL:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

ASCI Blue Mountain (3.1 teraflops) was built by SGI in 1998 at Los Alamos:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

ASCI Q (7.7 teraflops) replaced it in 2003:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

ASCI White (12 teraflops) was an IBM box built in 2001 at LLNL:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

ASCI Purple / ASC Purple (100 teraflops) replaced it in 2005:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

Red Storm (36 teraflops in 2005, 101 teraflops in 2006, 204 teraflops in 2008) was built by Cray at Sandia in 2005:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Blue Gene (which are a whole line of supercomputers since the 90s continuing to the present day) have been built in different places, including Argonne and have hit 17 pflops and hold half the top10 list of supercomputers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

I did some of my Master's thesis on the SDSC Blue Gene supercomputer. Good times.

But yeah, anyway, the article is factually wrong.

Jack Horner put on an TEDx talk a while back discussing research that asks an interesting question: where are the babies?

Jack's research indicates many of these similar species may in fact be the same, but merely at different levels of development -- an adolescent thought to be a difference species from one fully developed.

The crux of it is that in the early days of our rediscovering dinosaurs, these guys would find a visual few differences in the dinos and name it as a new species, turning a blind eye to many similarities that might suggest otherwise.

I follow Scalzi's Whatever. This is his most recent post on the topic: http://whatever.scalzi.com/201...

He's leading the drive to vote NO AWARD against the conservatives who dominated the slate this year/ Even though he doesn't come out and say it explicitly, it's blindingly obvious what he's talking about. He did something similar last year when this stupid "controversy" emerged.

I don't recall him ever saying "VOTE FOR X", but the implied message is very clear.

In fact, it's unbreakable if you do it right. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad)

I'm disappointed that the person who submitted the story said "Just XOR".

It depends on the games, but honestly I miss arcades. It was more than just playing games. It was a social experience. Very little in life do you get to be in a room full of people who're intensely passionate about the exact same thing as you.

You're thankful for not waiting in line, but some of my fondest memories are not of playing a game, but waiting in line for them. Cheering on an amazing Street Fighter match up with the 5+ other people who're in the queue watching with you, and the chaotic buzz of the arcade around you. You can't get that rush at home.

Universal's belief is most certainly correct to some extent, but is that a bad thing? True fans, I think, would find other ways of supporting the artists they love, and I'd guess the ones who do nothing but stream wouldn't have spent more money on it in the first place.

>... don't plant water-intensive crops in a drought zone? Naaa, that would require actual understanding of the situation. As it is, the only thing that will help is all those water-wasters going bankrupt. Reality is merciless.

I know several almond farmers here in the Central Valley.

Contrary to what you and TFA think, they've been engaging in very significant water cutbacks on their crops for years now, testing to see how little water they can get by with needing. I think they're currently at about 10% of the water that they were using a decade ago. How? They have water sensors in the soil, making sure they don't overwater below the root line, that wirelessly report back their findings to the farmer, who can then turn on a very small amount of water as needed to trees that are bone dry. They've also found the trees are a lot more drought tolerant than anyone thought, and can get by with less water than is recommended.

Overall, their water efficiency is about 90% currently, with the remaining 10% waste being hard to get rid of, as its used for things like backwashing dirt out of filters and the like.

Farmers here aren't these naive "water wasters" as you so ignorantly put it, and have a much better "understanding of the situation" than you do.

>Yep, the date on the one I cited being 4 years more recent has nothing at all to do with it.

Still no acknowledgment that the companies have, in fact, disclosed what is in their fluids.

>In my experience it's not just a head tracking issue. Just the feeling of seeing your avatar walking around in the virtual world, while your real body is stationary, was enough to cause nausea in a lot of people.

Well. You shouldn't be seeing your own avatar. Other than that, there's nothing inherently sim sickness-causing about moving around a world. You could be a tank or an airplane or a person as far as your inner ear is concerned. What *does* cause a massive amount of nausea is when you are in a FPS and you're constantly snapping your neck around to see if someone is behind you, above you, besides you, etc. But that's not necessarily sim sickness - you'll get nausea in real life if you made the same head movements. You'll also wear our your neck muscles, which is another big issue... once VR headsets weigh past a certain amount, they cause neck problems.

>Actually most of what you describe is solved. the head tracking latency is a solved problem, or at least well understood what is required to remove it as a cause for sickness

Well. A problem can be (and is) well understood without necessarily having a good solution for it.

I recall talking to Michael Abrash about how we quasi-solved it back in the day when he asked about it a couple years ago. And he was working on VR for Valve. So maybe, yeah, they solved it. But at the time he thought it was pretty much impossible to do right.

>In your experience would you say that people can adapt to sickness caused by VR over time? Does it vary?

For some people, yes. They get used to it.

For me, I actually got more nauseous over time. But we also moved between software products and switched the prediction software, which was also part of it.

The interesting thing is that the people who are most in tune with their bodies get the most sick. My boss had a friend who was a pole vaulter who put it on and got instantly sick. Whereas people who aren't really physical have an easier time with it on average.