Pretty sure the article was auto-generated by a buzzwordifier:

Doesn't mainstream PC tech use the least abusive field-related babble when compared to medicine and legalese?

This is insulting to hackers.

My god! Why did I never think of that?

define 'normal' ? Memory access was GPU-like retarded. It reminded me of the cell....

While this is also true, the current system is completely unsustainable unless the funding basically increases exponentially, which is never going to happen. The problem is that for each faculty (each lab), you typically have ~4 postdocs and ~4 PhD students at a time... so after 5 years, you've gone from needing 1 faculty position to 5. If they each get jobs, after another 5 years you're up to 25 positions... unless funding (and, equally as importantly, university positions/space) is going to increase exponentially, it eventually falls apart.

It's exactly the same training problem as other fields (law, medicine) in that you're constantly training more people than there are current positions... except that in those fields if you really can't find a position, you can go open your own practice. In biomedicine, that's nearly impossible - any serious research lab is going to require a significant amount of funding and resources that you basically can't get outside the university/grant system, and it's very difficult to do a biomedical startup without having a prototype already existing (since it's biology, and the failure rate is high simply because we don't understand enough about most systems yet to know what will work and what won't without actually testing it).

Why don't they call a 'radiation detector' by its name? It's a Geiger Counter. Way to make a name for something fall out of common usage...

Dude. That's not what people mean when they say big data. HP and Dell will both quite happily sell you machines with 2TB of main memory, and SGI will go to 16TB, and anything which can fit in memory on a single machine without custom hardware isn't big data. It's only big data once you get up to a few hundred terabytes.

I think the difference is when you use file formats that are flatter than databases and certain GUIs. In those cases, rather than taking the data as it needs it, it attempts to load all of it into memory and can max out the memory allowed to the process in 32 bit systems. But even then, there are ways around that through smart planning, variable use, and multiple data files for different variables so not all are in memory at once (of course databases implements all three at once internally).

Keep in mind that Universities, one of the biggest centers of innovation (often government funded), tend to have massive patent portfolios. They license them out to companies and that in turn funds more fundamental research^W^W^W bigger stadium. So if we killed the system completely we would also have to restructure how basic research is done... which would probably be a good, thing.. just pointing out that corporations are not the only ones utilizing this system.

Edison's lightbulb is a really bad example. Edison took something which was already working in a lab (wire emitting light when you send electricity through it) and made it actually useful. Before Edison it was a scientific curiousity.

That is not fundamental research, it is directed product development.

The whole article was not much more than a high level review. The graphic naturally draws attention to the parameters the writer wanted to cover but he did not back up his graphic with any sort of serious textual review of what he felt were the weaknesses or advantages of the different programming language at least not in any detail.

No, all fundamental discoveries are made by government. Commercial entities have never invented anything.

That is because profit is incompatible with social benefit.

We need to encourage more funding from government through taxation of corporation. Let's give government more control over corporations.