For phones, sure, we are reasonably close at hitting diminishing returns. But when it comes to Google Glass, the Oculus Rift or augmented and virtual reality in general we are nowhere near at hitting it. It will probably take 20K screens 2 inch in size before we hit diminishing returns there. Nvidia also just demoed a few nifty light field displays that would need even more resolution then a classical 2D display, so that's out even further.

Also lets not forget about our good old monitors at home, 4K monitors are finally back on the market, but still far from having any kind of mass market penetration and when it comes to big curved monitors, you'd probably need 8K or 16K before you are done.

You'll do have to take care about a whole lot of compatibility issues when you want to deploying something that should run on IE6, but still, even then, the actual deployment of an HTML app is still vastly easier then trying to deploy a regular application across as many platforms as do support HTML.

Try to imagine the web wouldn't run in your web browser, but would instead come in the form of .deb packages that you "apt-get install" or setup.exe files you'd have to double click. The experience of a web implemented via the means of classical desktop software would be so terrible it would be unbearable.

I think "learning from the old masters" really isn't the problem. It's not that we don't have lots of smart people writing software. I think the core problem is that we haven't figured out how to do upgrades and backward compatibility properly, which the old masters haven't figured out either. You can go and develop a HTML replacement that is better and faster, sure, but now try to deploy it. Not only do you have to update billions of devices, you also have to update millions of servers. Good luck with that. It's basically impossible and that's why nobody is even trying it.

In a way HTML/Javascript is actually the first real attempt at trying to solve that issue. As messed up as it might be in itself, deploying a HTML app to billion of people is actually completely doable, it's not even very hard, you just put it on your webserver and send people a link. Not only is it easy, it's also reasonably secure. Classic management of software on the desktop never managed to even get near that ease of deploying software.

If software should improve in the long run we have to figure out a way how to make it not take 10 years to add a new function to the C++ standard. So far we simply haven't. The need for backward compatibility and the slowness of deploying new software slows everything to a crawl.

Someone else here reminded me that Manning actually delivered these documents to others, who WERE supposed to try to separate that out. But somebody goofed. So I'm not sure that can honestly be blamed on Manning, who actually did make an effort to expose wrongdoing while not releasing those other things to the public.

That's kind of a huge abdication of responsibility on his part, don't you think? Ultimately Manning was the person responsible for leaking classified information - it was his decision alone, and only he had the necessary access. If he really thought that the public would benefit from some of the material he released, it was his duty to separate it out.

I still think this points to naivete rather than malice, and I certainly don't buy the argument that Manning aided his enemies, which would criminalize just about any action which simply makes the US look bad. But I still find Manning's behavior shockingly irresponsible and somewhat dangerous. If revealing US misdeeds damaged our national interests, that's our problem, not his, and we obviously need to clean up our act. However, there is an awful lot of sensitive information which the government is quite right to keep secret, not because it hides evidence of their perfidy, but because leaking it simply creates messes. Stuff like which foreign nationals are (legally) cooperating with us, which foreign officials are problematic to deal with, what the political situation in a country is like, etc. I'm not convinced that it actually did as much harm as some have suggested - if people really did get killed as a result of the leaks, I'm sure the prosecution would have made a big deal about it - but we simply can't afford to let this kind of irresponsibility go entirely unpunished. Time served, a criminal record, and a dishonorable discharge seem like enough to me, however.

(On the other hand, from what I've read about Edward Snowden, I'd have a difficult time defending his prosecution under any circumstances, although I'm not very impressed that he sought refuge with the PRC and Putin.)

Many of the documents made it very clear that our government was working covertly in ways that were not necessarily in the actual interest of The People of the United States. I applaud those revelations.

I agree, but keep in mind that many of the documents were simply things we didn't want the entire world to know, but didn't actually indicate any wrongdoing. Like the cables in which diplomatic staff characterized the flaws of some of the people we have no choice but to deal with (unless, of course, you believe that the US should not even have diplomatic relations with countries under less-than-ideal government). This is an essential function of their job, and there was no greater purpose to be served by releasing those documents, other than further embarrassing the US government. So while I'm glad Manning released the video of a gunship mowing down civilians, I still think he needs to go to jail for indiscriminately spreading as many secrets as he could get his hands on, even the harmless ones. (20 years seems a little excessive, though.)

Even in college, calling my Professors "Dr. Whatever" was exceptionally rare and I went to an Ivy League school where you'd think they'd insist on their proper titles.

Weird, I always used their titles in class, also at an Ivy, and it wasn't that long ago (less than 15 years). Of course once I started doing research, I figured out after a couple of days that it was okay for a lowly undergrad to address the professor as "Mark". Since I work with mostly PhDs, usually the only time we're addressed as "Dr. So-and-so" is when someone is being sarcastic; I actually get uncomfortable when someone uses the title seriously.

*That* should teach her a lesson and send a strong signal.

It's still not as bad as Carly Fiorina driving HP's stock price down 50% and firing 7000 people, and getting let go with a $20M severance package, and still being considered a serious candidate for California senator. That's the biggest difference between the rest of us and the 0.01%: when we fuck up, we get fired with cause and are economic roadkill, and seriously risk being impoverished. When they fuck up, they lose access to the corporate jet and may have to postpone buying the third home in Pebble Beach. I honestly wouldn't have any problem with income inequality if we could occasionally see failed CEOs like Dick Fuld reduced to standing in line at soup kitchens like all of the other "takers".

I wonder how many of them have embellished their accomplishments, too? Seems pretty common in academia these days.

It's actually exceptionally rare. Anil Potti, the Duke cancer researcher who falsely claimed to have been a Rhodes scholar, was an unusually notorious case simply because it was so unusual. (Also because he may have been committing outright fraud in his research.) It's very rare to come across someone in the academic community falsely claiming a degree, simply because it's such a stupid idea: most of us aren't paid enough for it to be worth the risk. More often, the people getting caught are the ones who aren't happy with a merely middle-class lifestyle and want a managerial position that will propel them into at least the upper-middle class. Or they want a more elite teaching post than they might otherwise merit.

I do suspect there are a significant number of people in primary education who have done this. My favorite story was about a public school superintendent: in the course of writing an article about the school district, a local newspaper reporter interviewed one of the superintendent's underlings. At one point during the interview, the reporter referred to the superintendent as "Mr. Smith", and was quickly corrected by the minion: "it's Dr. Smith". If the reporter was like most people, (s)he probably thought, "what a pompous asshat." (Even most people with PhDs think that insistence on titles is the sign of a self-important douche; when I'm asked for a title I just give "Mr.".) In any case, the reporter was motivated to dig a little deeper into the background of the superintendent, which pretty quickly turned up evidence that a) he hadn't actually received a PhD, and b) he'd already lost a previous job because he lied.

people in the job market today face some unpalatable options: You can either forego the degree and slam into the glass ceiling in a mid-level position as HR passes over you repeatedly, or get it and wind up a bit farther ahead in your career but be financially worse off than your subordinates who aren't paying back hundreds to thousands of dollars a month to some corporation who will just keep jacking the rates up year after year so you're paying off mostly just the interest and doing very little to hit the principal of your student loan

As someone pointed out below, PhD programs don't usually require student loans. (Most actually pay you - not a ton, but if you're in your 20s and don't have children or family members to support, it is enough to lead a reasonably comfortable lifestyle and still have a little bit left at the end of the month, even in high-cost areas. Subsidized housing is often available too.) And every time I've read about someone lying on their resume about academic credentials, it's a false claim to have earned a PhD. People who reach the level where that matters usually don't have any problem getting jobs anyway, and they're rarely in debt.

The idea is nice, but the actual images are completely wrong. WiFi is just electromagnetic waves and those in turn are nothing other then light at another wavelength, i.e. a different color if you will, see this infrared image. This means being able to see WiFi signals would look fundamentally no different then just seeing ordinary light. You wouldn't see waves shooting out of your router, as you can't see waves unless they actually hit your detector, so the thing would simply glow like a light source. The thing where it gets interesting is in how different materials react to the WiFi, materials that are obaque to regular light would be transparent for WiFi signals, while others that are transparent for light would be opaque to WiFi. How much or how little WiFi gets reflected would also change. Being able to see how directional the signal of different antenna could also be interesting. There might also be issues with image resolution, as the wavelength determines how good you can resolve an image (not sure if that's just a practical limit of detector size or actually a physical limit).

Anyway, some simple photoshopping won't cut it, it would probably need a raytracer to simulate the wave propagation properly.

Linus Pauling died at age 93... At a time when living past 90 wasn't as common as it is today.

Only because there were so many other things that could kill you before you reached the end of your "natural" lifespan. The maximum age of the human body appears to have been constant throughout recorded history. The massive increase in actual life expectancy (to somewhere in the 70s) in the developed world coincided with Pauling's life, so he benefited from all of the many advances in medicine, public health and sanitation, and an overall decrease in violent crime.

Don't assume that because he was a competent and careful scientist in one area (the one where he he earned the Nobel Prize), that he couldn't or didn't have a bee in his bonnet in another (in which he had no formal training or qualifications).

In fact, there is no shortage of other examples of this: just about anyone acquainted with the history of science can pull up multiple other examples of otherwise brilliant scientists who went completely batshit insane when they tried to step outside their area of expertise. Or sometimes even within a closely related field: Peter Duesberg was indisputably an expert on viruses, and might have eventually won the Nobel prize himself, but his activities related to HIV have been incredibly stupid, and his theories on cancer are just about as insane.

Only one of Pauling's Nobels was the peace prize - the other was for chemistry.

Genius that strikes out and proves how stupid the person is. e.g. Shockley, Pauling, Chomsky... ...Duesberg, Mullis, Montagnier, Hoyle... I could probably spend all day doing this.

Another example of how great marketing helps get your research funded. The reason this is being widely reported is because they chose a cool name.

Everyone in the academic sciences loves popular media exposure, but it usually doesn't matter for funding the individual research projects. The fact is, these viruses are an intrinsically important enough discovery that the research article would have been worthy of Science magazine regardless of the name they chose, and that's what they're going to be bragging about on their next grant application, not an NPR story. The media coverage is just a bonus ego boost for the professors involved.

The people who really care about popular media coverage are typically the parent institutions (universities, etc.) and megaprojects like the LHC, which are more likely to have to appeal directly to politicians for money, and also need to compete for the best researchers and students. I'm sure the head of Aix-Marseille Université is just as thrilled as the scientists who wrote the paper right now.