Unfortunately, the US Deficit is $1.56 trillion dollars on revenues of $2.314 trillion and with expenditures of $3.36 trillion. Huge budget changes need to happen to correct the imbalance. Compared to this, NASA is small potatoes, and will probably get severely cut as it is "low hanging fruit."

No other federal government in the world could run the deficits that the U.S. is currently running. It is amazing we get away with it.

Space X has some ideas on how to land a rocket on Mars, and is already testing some design principles, like the SuperDrago rockets for landing its Dragon capsules.

If I were the Europeans, I would be contacting them. The cheapest and best original thinking in the space race is currently at Space/X.

IBM will be sued the moment the PTO grants a similar patent application to another company, so they file first.

As long as it passes the "will the PTO grant this?" threshold, IBM files it. They have to file it, because five years later someone else will attempt to patent the same feature. The PTO will issue the patent in due course, and sometime later a patent troll company will buy the patent and source code (like SCO). Presto IBM will be sued for billions of dollars for violating patents and copyright, for something that happened many years ago. To prevent this from happening, IBM files patents, such that the technology shows up in the PTO database of patents.

The interesting thing is that this technology was probably present in email systems running from the 1970s. Nevertheless, IBM still felt the need to patent it.

What? What is this "Magnetics" and how does that protect against gamma rays?

Most of a robot is built with some fairly old-school stuff, like steel and copper, and this is unaffected by gamma rays (in the short term). The robot moves through the use of magnetics ie: Electric Motors. It turns out that most electric motors, along with the steel and rubber used in most robots is short-term invulnerable to low intensity (and even fairly high intensity) radiation. The issue is that certain types of radiation generate electric (and magnetic) fields which play havoc with some of the fancy sensors used in the newer brushless DC motor designs. The solution is to redesign the magnetics of the robot such that they use old-school technologies which operate happily in extreme environments.

Radiation sources like gamma rays will eventually effect some of the key non-electronic systems of robots. In particular, they can break down insulation. Also, they can render the entire robot radioactive, and not safe to be around people. Prolonged exposure to high-energy sources may also damage bearing surfaces, preventing robot motion. However, long before any of this happens, the electronics will act up.

The GP poster was trying to suggest: is (a) take a regular robot, (b) install radiation protected electronics, (c) use a bunch of old-school servo-motor technologies (like DC motors and resolvers), and (d) you will have a short-term survivable rad-hardened robot.

Monsanto makes money regardless of whether the seed works. Monsanto's contracts specify that once you purchase Genetically Modified seed from them, you must keep purchasing seed from them.

If the Genetically modified seed quits working, the farmers have to pay Monsanto for seed anyway.

The study concludes with:

It is fully consistent with socioeconomic status of the home environment being a primary determinant for success of children in school.

The dominant factor in the study appears to be the ability of the school system and parents to teach math (aka the "culture").

I don't think the metrics ever come close to evaluating the true mathematical potential of the children. Otherwise, they would be confronted with the unpleasant result that my Calculus prof and I noted: 20 years ago, the university math tests were harder. Simply put, the math education system (at least in Ontario, Canada) is being watered down. This can easily be seen with proposals where Integration is to be eliminated from the High School math curriculum.

If the education system is not teaching students to the peaks of their abilities, then all the effects will be cultural or systemic.

AMD tried this once before with their AMD QuadFX 4x4 concept. It didn't go anywhere.

The problem is that most games are insufficiently multi-threaded to take advantage of a dual processor architecture. A hard core group of gamers exists that would purchase dual processor and quad processor Opteron and Xeon motherboards if it resulted in increased game performance. Unfortunately, best game performance is often obtained from single processor desktop chips.

Bottom line: Games often struggle at keeping more than 2 to 3 cores busy. As a result, better performance for the dollar is obtained by purchasing better video cards.

If this is a serious production application, consider optimizing your software. Firstly, spawning endless threads is rarely an efficient use of resources. After the thread count exceeds the number of available threads the CPU can process, the overhead of managing threads becomes pure overhead. The degree to which this overhead can be reduced is application dependent, but it is often worth chasing.

Additionally, applying 10,000 and 200 rules at a rate of one thread per rule per packet is probably not a sensible strategy. Consider merging the rules and using one or more state machines to process the packet data once. That way only one set of reads occur per incoming packet, and the rest of the code is executed in tight state machines that cache efficiently.

Finally, did you mean 65535*2*10k + 4*252*200?

If ^ is interpreted as a power symbol, 65535^2^10k+4^252^200 results in a fantastically large number that all the supercomputers in the world could not process in real-time.

This is the reason why gcc (or any other compiler) should never be installed on any production Linux machine.

Having a compiler installed permits the add-hoc creation of code, with all the resultant security risks. Self-modifying code, including compiled self-modifying code, is an elegant solution in certain environments, however it is a huge security and reliability risk in any production application.

The problem with the Windows NT 4.0 security model was that security was present almost everywhere, except if an application could be tricked into loading a DLL which then permitted uncontrolled code execution. Microsoft developed Internet Explorer and Active/X, and Microsoft Windows platform security has been weak every since. If you want a secure system, it is necessary to block all methods of running unapproved and unverified code.

Funny. I would have said that QNX crashes often in 1988.

Are their any QNX success stories?

The issue with obscure operating systems is in the device driver support. If the project will take two to three years to develop, and be in the market for another five to ten years, then several different hardware platforms will be required. If you are not running an operating system that supports a wide range of hardware with pre-built drivers, then multiple different device drivers may be needed over the life of the project. It really helps to be running a standard operating system.

The result is that the projects that use Linux with Real-Time extensions tend to get finished much faster and have better ongoing support than projects which use an obscure RTOS with limited hardware support.