Sure, the Feds also put a good bit of money into medicine and basic research and even social sciences, but the largest driver of US scientific research and development over the last five or more decades has been the military, either directly or indirectly (e.g. research into computers not only drives military use of computers, aircraft builders (for the military) and NASA (for the missile programs) funded a lot of computer and mathematical research.) We've gotten some useful spinoffs from it (like the internet and GPS and Tang freezedried orange juice), but it's taken a lot of scientists away from doing medical research, energy efficiency, or other things that should have been higher social priorities. Some of that airplane development has been dual-use, since a 747 to haul passengers is a lot like a military cargo plane or an older slower bomber, but a lot of it has diverted people and money that could have been making the world a better place into the military.

Bush 2 didn't "keep tax cuts in place" - he significantly cut taxes on the richest 20%, and the Congressional Republicans have made keeping those cuts in place one of their highest priorities even under Obama and the 2008 supermajority. That means that when the debts Bush ran up come due, the middle class will have a much larger share of the spending than they would have had.

(As a Baby Boomer myself, I'll preface this with the obligatory "Fuck you, get off my lawn, my generation spent our lives paying taxes for our parents' generation's Social Security and more taxes paying for their wars". Now that that's over with, I've got a more serious point to make.)

There's a significant demographic change between the Boomers' Parents' Generation, who generally had 4 kids, and the Boomers and later generations who've mostly had 2 or fewer, which means that the population's getting a lot older on average, and as the boomers retire (which they're starting to), there'll be a lot more retired non-working people than workers, even after the levels of immigration that are politically likely in the US, Japan, and Europe. That doesn't just affect Social Security and Medicare:

• - Pensions, for those of us who had that kind of job, are paid for by some combination of profits invested by the companies we worked for. There's less profit being made by fewer workers.
• - Stocks and bonds owned by retired people (or their pension funds) - fewer workers per investor, so they'll be making less profit on investment capital.
• - Interest on savings - fewer workers paying mortgages or loans per dollar of savings, so interest rates will be lower.
• - other effects like that.

Some of that will be balanced by Boomers not being able to afford to retire, or retiring later. But have no fear, the Democrats say that the Social Security Trust Fund will have plenty of money until 2036, when the middle of the Boomers turn 80, too old to go back to work at Walmart, as long as the government is fiscally responsible from now until then.

Another big problem with medical care is that the Boomer generation had a lot of doctors, who are starting to retire, and at least in the US, medical schools haven't had the capacity to crank out enough graduates to replace them. (Should have been one of Obama's first priorities, since it's a really-long-lead-time change to build up medical school capacities.) And the improving economies in India and China mean that while they are starting to train more doctors, they're also starting to be able to afford to hire them in-country for people who haven't had real medical care before, instead of having them all come here to make money.

So yeah, dude, we're all doomed.

And China and Japan for centuries, and the modern West is practically an anarchy in many ways compared to what it was like the Middle Ages. (Etc... etc...)

The grandparent is a nutjob.

Yeah, there can be problems delivering medicines to people by drone, such as theft of the product near the delivery point, but you can reduce some of that by having video cameras in the drone.

Of course, this being San Francisco, the obvious "medicine" that'll be delivered is weed.

You've got to set an IP address somehow. Typing a MAC address into your DHCP server isn't a cool way to do it, and you need an address that you know from the outside, not just an address the device can use to talk to servers it already knows about.

The equipment I've been using recently added a front-panel LCD/pushbutton mechanism that lets you set the IP address; previous versions of the hardware required you to either log in with an RS232 console that got a shell prompt or else use a VGA monitor and keyboard (and stupidly, the default on some versions of it required you to use the VGA/keyboard to tell the device to use the serial console.)

And while almost all the rest of the administration gets done using a web GUI, the system (which ran a custom Linux) didn't have an X server, so you typically needed to bring a VGA monitor and keyboard AND a laptop; the current versions let you do a bit more from CLI, so that's slightly less annoying.

But if you want to reimage the box (which you have to do for major version upgrades), ALMOST all of the steps can be done via the serial console. Except for the one step in the middle, where the box remembers its IP address settings but forgets that you were using a serial console instead of VGA, so you still need to have a technician onsite with a VGA, instead of being able to use a modem.

The article said that after Bangalore the alarms got handled in Minneapolis. Can't complain about rightshoring with that.

Lots of books are out of print that were printed since the publishing industry went to digital production systems. That fiction book that's more than a year old and wasn't selling well? It's not coming out on dead trees again, but they've got it in Word. Older books may be in older formats, but even if they're proprietary formats, extracting the text (for books without pictures) isn't that hard.

It's a problem with publishing rights and contracts and publishers' predictions about profitability.

And even with books that require scanning, Dover Books did surprisingly good business for years selling fuzzy images of out-of-copyright books; these days it wouldn't be too hard to OCR and reimage most of them, but alternatively bits are cheap enough these days that they could be available in image formats instead of OCR.

Seriously? How much "diversity" and "innovation" do you need in terms of a charger?

It's not about the charger, it's about what the charger plugs into. Now, under this new regulation, all devices must accept the same input charge - regardless of whether or not a different charging system would be beneficial to the design. It's kind like specifying that all motor vehicles (from scooters up to eighteen wheelers) must use the same air filter. It'll be too big for some devices, too small for others, and lock designs ten years down the road to a standard written today.

Or, to put it another way, yes - charger designs evolve just the same as the equipment they're attached to. (Though chargers get far less attention because they aren't very sexy.)

It will also provide a wider window for cheap Chinese knock offs - and if you recall the debacle over counterfeit Apple chargers last year, you'll see why this can be a bad thing.

Because the water is in a closed loop system, very little of it is lost

But, being a closed loop system, any contaminants (such as nitrites, which is toxic to plants) produced are retained and tend to build up in the system. And ask anyone who keeps fish tanks how much work it is to keep a fish tank clean and balanced, even if you have a well established bacteria and plant system.
 

Done rightly, this system can shake up food supply as surely as 3D printers are going to shake up industry.

That's the claim, but there's been a lot of claims (running back to the 60's) out of the alternative farming community of things like this that would "surely shake up the food supply". They've pretty much all turned out to be unsustainable, or expensive, or fail to scale beyond the homestead/DIY level, or some combination of the three. The jury is still out on aquaponics.

Bluetooth is dead - Netcraft\\\\\\\
I've seen his tomb - he's buried in Roskilde Cathedral. It's about 30km west of Copenhagen, but you can get there with the Copenhagen city transit pass, and don't need to burn a trip on your railpass. Good museum of Viking ships there, which they'd found sunk in the harbor.

She's a stupid douche because the fewer people who take the vaccine the more likely people are to catch this disease, increasing the number of people who die from it, making it far more deadly than bee stings. You're not very good with this whole "science" thing, are you?

all these software engineers that work for nsa/gov , do they have any fucking morals? do they really believe they are securing the world from the evil guys? are they kept at gunpoint? are they just plain stupid?

Imagine a fraternity house filled with hundreds of "bro-grammers" looking to impress their peers and outsiders, alongside more socially inept nerds with a superiority complex and a grudge against society for its refusal to pay homage to their obviously superior intellects. The herd is managed by a cadre of MBA/careerist sociopaths with a lust for profit, exploitation and power. The entire operation has been given essentially unlimited budgets, unprecedented resources, and unrestricted access to private industry and the backbone of the net, and finally has been mandated to gather all it can, on whoever it can, by whatever means necessary by an ascendancy whose interests are explicitly opposed to the general public good.

Things have worked out about as well as you'd imagine. The fraternity house has engaged in naked, shameless and destructive criminal behaviour; in effect the NSA has become the largest hacker/cyber-crime organization on the globe. The Rule of Law now has no meaning on the network, or for computers, and society itself has been pushed into a literal sci-fi dystopia of surveillance and state security excess.

And were it not for one single fraternity member who found the courage to turn back and listen to his conscience, we would be spiraling into an even darker scenario at this very moment. Whether we eventually meet this fate is still uncertain.

The NSA is an out of control cyber-criminal gang. It is a matter of time before insiders at the NSA make contact with the criminals who run the banking industry, and at that point western society will probably be ripped apart in an orgy of computer-aided looting, sabotage, fraud, and political suppression. This is what happens when you let the hyenas run the zoo.

Yes he did. I really should have taken that remedial reading class in kindergartner.

Of course it is. You just keep right on thinking that. It's doing such a good job that you don't have scams like Mt Gox or other exchanges just vanishing in the night. Naw, nobody is out almost a half a billion dollars because of a poorly run exchange or just outright theft. Damn, skippy its doing a fine job.

Hey, how would you like to buy a bridge? It's in New York state right outside of Brooklyn. Only 400,000 bitcoins.