The reason they use older laptops is not because of the density of the chips but simply because they're known commodities -- any quirks they have have already been figured out and they get the job done. Getting anything certified (for mission critical purposes) is a very time consuming process, and once it's done ... the item is no longer state of the art, that's just the nature of the beast.

The Raspberry Pis don't have to go through the same certification process, though of course if they were expected to only work "for eight seconds" I think NASA would have told the people sending them up that to pick something older. I'm guessing that NASA knows a bit about the radiation environment up there and advises people who send up experiments appropriately.

And as others have said ... humans are living in the same environment for months at a time -- it can't be *that* bad.

The ISS is well below the Van Allen radiation belts and well within the Earth's magnetic field (which deflects many of the charged particles headed towards the Earth) so the level of cosmic radiation it gets is not *that* high, and the metal of the ISS blocks most of of that.

And if a Raspberry Pi does get its registers corrupted by cosmic rays ... it's not a tragedy. Nobody dies -- it's not mission critical.

In any event, they use pretty standard (but old -- last I heard, they still ran Windows 95) laptops on the ISS and they work fine. It would be interesting to know how much more often they experience failures and errors on the ISS due to radiation compared to how much they experience here, but I don't know if anybody has measured that. (My guess is that NASA has, though I wouldn't know where to look for the data.)

Don't forget to push each of your versions of this through the FDA's medical device approval process....

Ever read mainstream news reporting about a topic you were very familiar with? Perhaps something related to technology, or a local issue you were in the middle of?

Most people have had that experience. The more you know about something, the less the story seems to be accurate.

Yeah, all the rest of the news stories are about that accurate also, people just mostly don't notice.

Think about it.... it's mostly some j-school grad who asked a couple people some questions to get quotes, then threw the "story" together. Usually they're lucky if they understood what they were told, let alone can explain it in a manner which actually enlightens their audience.

My best luck as been with subject matter experts who blog on news topics related to their subject. So I get my economics news and analysis from economics professors (not the pet ones in the NY Times), my legal news from law professors and judges who blog, my technical news from a technical site focused on that part of the industry, etc...

Even then you have to be willing to read multiple viewpoints to try and see a bigger picture than one voice is going to paint for you.

Operating systems for gaming computers? I suppose your Playstation and your Wii and your Steam Machine run windows and WINE doesn't exist? Dude, don't confuse a monopoly with having a big market share.

De Beers managed to get to 85-90% of the world market for diamonds, not quite an actual monopoly... but as the diamondmarket is international, couldn't get all the governments to protect their market position by granting an actual monopoly and requiring their customers to purchase only their products. Guess what their market % is now? 40%? Lower? I guess they didn't have a natural monopoly after all.... market forces and all that.

Monsanto? No need to even go there in terms of IP. There are hundreds of seed companies farmers can buy from. Yeah, Monsanto is one of the biggest (at around 35% of the corn and soybean market share, just below DuPont) because many of their customers like their product combinations (pest control + seeds that resist it), but if another company came along tomorrow offering a better deal, how long would their market share last? One season, two? You're reading too much anti-GM propaganda and not looking at the actual facts.

Show me a monopoly in the United States that isn't enforced by the government and you might be able to start to make a point here.

The reality is that power company monopolies exist most everywhere in the U.S. today because the government legally requires things to be that way.

Companies have no power to enforce a monopoly without the government making laws giving them a monopoly. Even if a capitalist managed to achieve a local monopoly on something, the only thing keeping their competitors away is if the barriers to entry are larger than the potential profit.

You can claim that there are some natural monopolies, but if these are actually natural monopolies, then why would it require a law to prevent anyone from competing with them?

When you have government price controls (see for example, your local public utility commission), the natural result is that the company they've setup as a monopoly has only an incentive to deliver the worst possible service they can get away with, spending the least possible on everything, and pocket the rest.

It works that way in every industry it's been tried, so there shouldn't be a big surprise it works that way in the local electricity market. The real question is why do we keep having our government set things like this up... oh, that's right, most people are ignorant of basic economics and public choice theory.

Why do people keep conflating complete government control of an industry, to the point where the government outright decides who your local power company is and exactly how much they charge you, with capitalism? You could make a good case for calling that model socialism, or communism, or even fascism, but it's the exact opposite of any sort of market-based capitalism...

Sure, when the people in government decide to take complete control of an industry, the people in the industry become reduced to working their government masters for their own benefit, but the issue there isn't a lack of government power.

Ever heard of a public utilities commission? They're the ones who approve rates, expansion, rules for how the power company functions, etc...

Would it surprise you to learn that the deaths from producing renewables is orders of magnitude higher than the deaths from all the reactor meltdowns combined?

If so, do a little research and prepare to be surprised.

Exactly. The biggest issue is that it's difficult for a PHB, even a technical one, to reliably determine ahead of time who is worth 2x what everyone else is getting for a particular technology job and who is worth 1/2.

Then once someone is hired, in most companies HR makes it impossible to either give appropriate raises to those who actually deserve it or to get rid of those who aren't worth their salary as long as they're minimally performing.

Unregulated last mile wiring looks like this [ggpht.com]. It's a "natural monopoly" because the alternative is a dangerous, unmaintainable eyesore.

Except of course, as best as I can tell, your image appears to be from India, where the companies responsible for those poles are chosen as regional monopolies heavily regulated by the government. That short of undercuts your argument....

I agree that a co-op is a decent middle ground, especially in rural areas where the residents may be more interested in the services than might be otherwise profitable for companies to create the infrastructure. The key for me to that is that the co-op actually be voluntary, not a co-op in name only, but really just another required-by-the-government organization that they decided to name a co-op.

What stops you from competing with an ISP in the last mile? You could do it right now..open your own competing cable internet/copper wire internet/fiber internet provider to the premises.... except of course that's currently illegal in most parts of the U.S.

Last mile is not a natural monopoly... if it was, the government wouldn't have to make it illegal to try, people just wouldn't be willing to waste their money trying without any possibility of success.

Are there first mover advantages in many of the last mile connectivity markets? Sure there are, but If your city only allows one cable company to lay any cable, it isn't the market nor private enterprise preventing competition. There's only so much crap customers will put up with from the first mover before they're willing to look elsewhere, but when they're not legally allowed to....

Like others I found the headline confusing. I read it as "Researchers are predicting the use of Wikipedia as a vector for the spread of disease". This may mean that:

• Disinformation and ignorance are diseases.
• Memes and computer viruses are diseases.
• Wilipedia contains information that leads to depression.
• Instructions on Wikipedia lead to substance abuse.
• This is getting entertaining, fill in your own reason here.

One of the definitions I found was:

One who makes great sacrifices or suffers much in order to further a belief, cause, or principle.

I am sure that fits. While SpaceShip II is mainly intended for a non-exploration purpose, the program has resulted in some significant advances in rocketry and White Knight II has significant non-tourism use. These pilots have been involved in other space efforts, I remember the one who was injured from the Rotary Rocket test flights. There are lots of safer ways for these folks to make as much money as a test pilot is paid. They do what they do to advance our progress in aeronautics and space.