Yeah, except that the whole "but Israel is just as bad" is a cop out. Israel has its issues, no argument there, but Iran didn't go a good 50+ years with hostile countries around them trying to drive them into the sea.

Iran has no reason to sponsor terrorism that makes any sense other than wanting to push their own agenda. There are no security issues that it solves for them. All it has done is piss countries off that might have otherwise let things lie.

And if you still believe Israel is a problem, then how much more of a problem are they with nuclear weapons? Do we really believe that Iran with nuclear weapons is going to make that better?

It was a mistake to go into Iraq without a serious plan and commitment for dealing with the fallout, but it is what it is. Most of the people killing each other are native to the area. If they don't want to unite to deal with their own problems, there's little anyone is going to be able to do for them.

Nevertheless, an Iran with nuclear weapons is still a lot less safe for everyone else then without them. They have the one thing that the Russians never had: they really believe they're going to heaven if they die while taking us with them. I'm more afraid of them holding one nuclear weapon than I was of the USSR holding 8,000. At least the Russians didn't think they had a backup plan to overcome Mutually Assured Destruction. The Iranians aren't insane, but they will feel they can push the envelope more than the Soviets could. And with that much oil, we can't simply let them have it.

Land value can easily rise.

Also, some land was given out as land grants to encourage people to farm it and put it to use. They got their 160 acres and did what they needed to do to develop the land, and now they may benefit because land values rise in that case too.

No. No way that they should have to give their land up for a speeding ticket or even a reckless, for that matter. Not if some rich asshole can do the same out of petty cash, and some poor person can simply shrug and say they have no money. I mean, are we really so blind that we'd attack the underpinings of a middle class or small business people because we can't see beyond a number?

How is making someone take a mortgage on their means of income "fair"?

Sure, he has a million dollar asset. Probably one that became a million bucks because his family has worked on it for generations and the land value rose around them. Now you want to force him to mortgage his farm because of a speeding ticket?

I suppose he *could* sell, and end his way of life, and also make it possible to put up yet more townhouse developments. Or sell to a corporate farm or something. Sounds like a great idea.

I've seen more jackasses in Hondas than I have in BMWs. Driving a less expensive car doesn't make you a better or more responsible driver, it just makes you stand out less.

Sure you would. Me too, probably.

But what I wouldn't do is go somewhere to blow up random civilians. Even if it was effective. And I certainly wouldn't pretend that God wanted me to do it.

And let's be clear, Iran sponsors terrorism that has nothing to do with protecting itself, and has done so for years. They seem like a nice eccentric country to people who fail to realize that the whole "Revolutionary" in "Revolutionary Guard" is not just for Iran. The whole Iranian Revolution was fully intended to be a theocratic Shiite uprising across the region and beyond.

Revolutionary Iran is *expansionistic*, it has merely been checked in its ambitions. Don't be confused between them being stopped and them being an innocent regime that just wants to be left alone. Iran with nukes is more war, not less. And if there is going to be a war, I want the US to win it, because in the end, we'll at least try to do the right thing, and failing that, we'll leave.

Your machine does not scale out to 64 processors for $2k.

Yes, it is slower, and yes, it could probably be done with a better set of hardware like some video cards.

However, the point is likely that the people doing the experiment wanted to have about 64 processors, and they knew how to use the Pi as opposed to the instruction sets for GPU coding. That and the Pi should have all the networking and other pieces on it to make it a standalone node.

When you want to practice working on an computer with multiple compute nodes, it is more important to have more nodes, because that is where the complexity is. You then scale out on a better class of nodes using the same principles. Either more Pis, or replace the Pis with better ARM nodes with similar characteristics, but better performance.

If you are targeting any minority of the population while you are supposed to be pushing "safety", you're doing it wrong. In this case, the rich get lawyers and get off, and the not-rich aren't even enforced upon because they cease to be juicy targets.

Which means there's less safety and not more.

Right now, the rich probably drive with impunity, but there are a lot fewer rich than poor. If the poor drive just as badly, and there are more of them, then despite the unfairness of the situation, you're actually closer to safety. Even if a full 50% of the 1% drive like crazed maniacs, that's still fewer people than the 10% of the 99% who drive like crazed maniacs.

Pull them both over and give them points on their license. Allow insurance companies to use the points to jack up their rates, if they want. Yes, the insurance companies get more money, but at least they can't control enforcement. And if you are driving a BMW, you still get charged proportionally to someone who doesn't, if you have the same risk group and driving history, of course.

I think you should simply suspend or revoke their license if safety is an issue. You throw them in jail or then fine them as a criminal if they drive without a license. That will shape these folks up right quick.

Fines have always been a means that turns into a revenue generation tool which becomes part of someone's budget. Once it is part of a budget, the state authority finds a way to push that button more often. Legislators are notorious for raiding things like independent funds for education, transportation, and social benefits for money for their pet projects. And that also makes them a lot more inclined towards passing legislation to allow the rules to be a little tighter for the purposes of "safety".

Scandinavian countries have a completely different dynamic and culture to the United States. In some ways, that is an advantage. In others, I think many people who admire these programs in isolation might chafe at the completely different mindset which makes them viable in places like Finland. You don't have such programs work well unless everyone cooperates with them, from government to individuals.

I think it is better to say that it gets released when it is complete and tested to totally meet the acceptance criteria set for the feature.

The feature could still be a bad idea itself. The execution could still be flawed, but it fully meets the requirements of what it was expected to do. That's not perfection, that's a testable end result.

Work done against a date will find the acceptance criteria bent, or testing skimped on. If either happens, you run into a buggy or half-baked feature.

I don't know, however, if FLOSS has anything to teach the business world itself in that regard. I think the business world, instead, needs to set criteria that it can meet within its acceptable timeframe. FLOSS can go forever without releasing a feature, because it is not beholden to anyone.

The business world has legitimate reasons to be beholden to dates because it must coordinate its activities to have things land on a certain schedule. Sometimes those dates are bullshit, but many times, they are not. If you have a factory that is tooling up for a huge run of hardware, and your software is needed to make that work, that code needs to be working by the time that hardware is ready or you screw up the whole process. That costs money and also competitive advantage.

Businesses who want quality, and also to have their stuff done on time need to learn what their teams can and cannot do, and not force them to push it beyond normal limits. FLOSS doesn't provide a good model for the workflow, but it does provide a good example of the quality of a product that is not released until it fully meets its own criteria.

Not sure anyone would accept that for a contract unless they were desperate. Yes, their work is shite, but the outsourcer did have to pay someone to write it, and those people might work for peanuts, but they aren't working on spec.

The open source projects succeed in that regard because they really have no direct pressure to release anything. If the next feature comes out, it comes out. If *you* need that new feature, then you have a paid development team work on that feature and you beat *them* into completing on time.

One of the bigger benefits to FLOSS coding is that much of it is *not* done by volunteer coders, only volunteer organizations. Many of the bigger open source projects have a significant contingent of paid workers doing the work because their parent corporation's products tend to depend on things like the Linux kernel being stable and up to date.

Deep Impact @ Home?

You don't need recordings of 17th Century English to use. Analyzing poetry, for instance, is one method of working that out, as it was meant to be read in a way where sounds and word pronunciations would matter. There are likely other textual methods based on how speech was recorded.

Linguistics is a real science, and there are some pretty smart people doing it.

I think being able to undertake rescue missions to the moon is no more likely than a rescue mission to Mars, realistically. They may want to avoid anyone thinking it is possible and get them to focus on making the best of it.

Well two or maybe three things really.

Mars, as a larger body, is likely to have the gravity required, as well as other resources to make it more viable for long term habitation than the moon. Mars is still low gravity, but better than the Moon in that respect.

Secondly, and probably decisively, they're trying to push the program forward beyond a place we've already been. They have the thesis that it is possible, at least one way. They want to prove that. So, its a stretch goal.

And... not really on the list but possibly... they want a place that people will go and not have the hope of rescue to hold them back. If you go to the moon one way, there may be some in that colony who earnestly believe they could be saved. After all, they can see the Earth right there every day. On Mars. Earth is a blue dot, and they know there are there to stay, so they may as well get used to it.

I think you may well have a good point, but I think people might feel that a one way trip to a place we've already been there and back, may not feel justified. Been there and done that is less romantic.

Personally, I think it's a space suicide pact and I don't approve. That said, I also wouldn't try to stop anyone from going in any forcible way. If they make it, we could benefit. Hell, even if we were able to drop 20 frozen human corpses on the planet, it would be macabre, but still an achievement, assuming they managed to live most of the way there and sent back telemetry.

I would be more in agreement with starting with the moon. A moon colony could allow us to seriously build a microgravity infrastructure to make Mars travel much more feasible for our first attempt at it. Hopefully a there and back attempt.

Most of what is holding up large scale nuclear isn't capability to put it up, it's bureaucracy. If we need nukes, we'll be able to build them (for some value of "in time"), our desperation will suffice to get the controls relaxed sufficiently. If you have to put up 2,600 nuclear plants, you're going to get efficient at building nuclear plants.

Not saying that's a good way to go, and there certainly may be a resource war or two in the meantime. I hope no one thinks that we're going to see the end of that any time soon. As usual, some areas will suffer more than others.

None of that means we're done with space. Even if you cut the population down to a smaller number of people, they're not going to be back in the stone age permanently. I admit, that would mean we'd have to postpone that dream for decades or even centuries in the worst case, but while I may not be going to the stars, I think humans still are quite capable of doing it without oil.