I think there's an argument that a truly open government would allow us to see what's going on in the public offices of the elected officials (I think that would also further decrease our ability to compromise, but that's a digression...).

However, this was in a campaign office. That's not a public function, it's necessarily a private group which is (supposed to be) separate from the staff and work of the public office. Recording campaign discussions is just dirty politics, not looking out for the public good.

The problems of poor education and inefficient military bureaucracy are not solvable by a clever program or a nifty piece of hardware. Entrepreneurship is not a welcome trait in many facets of our society. These are deep cultural differences.

Solving these types of problems takes a lot more than 2-3 years of work, no matter how inspired it may be. The young people getting into civil service today have 10 years before they're going to be able to make changes. It's going to take patience, stubbornness and a superhuman resistance to cynicism for these young staffers and bureaucrats to solve these problems.

Yeah, not every school can afford an LHC, that is simply the unfortunate reality we all have to live with.

Just about all of them have (or had) cloud chambers though, which you can use to do some early 20th century era particle physics. That would be enough to get students pretty far into particle physics if we actually wanted to teach it.

How many people here took physics?

The US produces approximately 7000 professional physicists a year, yet almost every student in the country takes physics classes.

These "everyone" physics classes are insufficient training to do any sort professional physics. What they do accomplish is help expose people to physics so that 1) they can see that physicists think a bit differently and 2) they can think about physics as a career. The classes are designed to do this instead of actually teaching useful modern physics (this is why you're repeating 400 year old experiments in a college class).

So yeah, physicists have to deal with crackpots and managers who haven't actually learned any physics from the last 150 years, but in the end, it's a net positive experience for all of us. Doing the same thing with programming would be a good idea.

It is not ok to bend the rules just because maybe the politicians didn't mean to tie the hands of the civil service quite so much. It may make some logical sense, but it is still an improper use of the government and we shouldn't be ok with that.

All those nice arguments aside, you really need to read some of the articles on this event. This wasn't just profiling, it was the IRS asking for documentation and details that went beyond what they're allowed to ask for in an audit of one of these types of applications. If they had simply strictly audited every single application mentioning "Tea Party" it would have been a non-issue.

There are two things lacking in this order:
1) teeth
2) funding

Asking the civil service to "report" on something quarterly is only going to lead to a meaningless blip in the inboxes of countless government employees. Data calls like this come in endlessly. Not funding it ensures that to actually write the reports and implement the policy we'll be scraping the bottom of the barrel looking for people who couldn't get on a real (aka funded) project.

This conversation is a lot of grumpy old men complaining about things changing too much.

I hated Win 8 until I saw one of my friend's kids using it on a tablet. If you haven't seen a "touch native" use it yet, track one down. This kid was great, he was doing things with shocking efficiency. His dad was telling me he wouldn't use the (substantially more powerful) desktop anymore because "it's too slow".

We are not the market segment Win 8 was built for, and we're not going to drive the market maybe ever again. This is the kind of thing we're going to need to get used to. It was only a matter of time before technology changed so substantially that even technophiles got future shock.

In the end, it doesn't matter that Win 8 is a market failure. Our first computers were DOS or Windows 3 boxes. Our kid's first computers are cell phones and tablets. They're going to want an operating system similar to the one they grew up using the most.

If you have good video enhancement software, don't go strait to a VC. The government (read: military) has plenty of programs which will pay you to develop your idea into a tool which will be used with established systems.

If, for some reason, you don't want the military to get its hands on your work, don't try commercialize it. You may as well get the "free" investment out of it. to

Unless you can convert dark energy into a useful form of energy, then isn't it only making us use up our useful energy faster?

I used to work at General Atomics's original campus in La Jolla, which was created in the 60s.

The campus was mainly a series of concentric circles. The main circular building had a curvature which was "calculated" to maximize random interactions with scientists and engineers outside your normal working group while also giving an illusion of working in a small group. There were pools, gyms, baseball fields and support buildings around the outside and along the radial lines. The center of the circle was a large cafeteria.

This was all great as long as nuclear power was going to save the world and money was rolling in. When the company hit hard times the ball fields were turned into office rentals and many non essential services were stopped.

When the company once again was making money with military hardware, the new buildings were simpler and located in a less expensive area of San Diego.

There are many externalities where I can come up with plausible sounding assumptions that give it whatever value I want.

I'm not sure you can get as far out ahead in resource planning as you might hope. Making decisions on this basis often requires making decisions that can't be made objectively and if you fail to anticipate a shift in which resource constraints are binding, the objective decisions you did make may not provide a useful advantage.

That said, I tend to think that most functions can either be performed by the private or public sectors, but depending on the structure of the issues, one or the other may have an edge in efficiency. There are trade offs between improved efficiency through microspecialization (favors decentralization) and improved efficiency through fluidity of capacity (favors centralization). Efficiency isn't the only element, though. Individual determination, community determination, and national determination issues can also come into play.

Intrusive regulation "may" discourage infectious disease research? Of course it would. It has done just that for (non-medical) nuclear research.

We sent a UCLA professor to jail when a student in his lab died in an accident related to poor training. Maybe that's the right idea.

If a deadly accident or malicious release occurs from your lab, you go to jail. Just reiterate that to everyone: you're ultimately responsible for what comes out of your lab. It's a lot less harsh than the permanent label you earn as a terrorist and an enemy of civilization for a nuclear mistake.

Even for the nonclueless users it would be kind of obnoxious. I'm not a settings minimalist, but I happen to think that if its hard to tell what flipping a setting has actually done, maybe it shouldn't be there.

Imagine... All of that just to render a napkin.

and particle accelerators are the best way to address each of those issues?!

I didn't say physics wasn't interesting, I said particle physics is not relevant to the most interesting problems (see your list for some great examples).