It's interesting that the two big complaints seem to be:
a) Projects give no guaranteed return, and there's ironclad way to prevent people from taking the money and doing nothing.
b) The developers who are doing well on Kickstarter are very well known "traditional" developers making games of the type they've made before.

Seems to me that the second point addresses the first. Someone like Tim Schaefer or Brian Fargo has a reputation to uphold and would absolutely destroy that if they promised a game then did nothing. These guys absolutely have their careers on the line when they go with this approach, in a way they've never been exposed to with traditional publishing, where failure means the publisher either cancels the project or decides to inject more cash than was initially anticipated. People know this, know these guys are at risk, and know they have the experience and good track record to have good odds of delivering on their promises, and that's a big part of why they can get 7 figure funding where the unknowns can't (and probably shouldn't!).

On the other hand, it not as though there aren't successfully funded indie games in novel genres from true first-time developers. A good example which was recently funded is FTL, which is a sort of graphical space-rougelike focused on crew management which raised over $200,000, which is about 20x what was asked. Part of what got them there was having a playable demo of the game to show that they could deliver. Just like anything else, you've got to start small and work up, but Kickstarter can provide a few thousand dollars in seed funding to even the littlest guys where they had nothing before, and that can certainly make a difference. That developers with no reputation, experience, other day jobs, and only an idea to show for it are not receiving millions is a good thing--that would be a recipe for disaster.

Thread is dead, but this is just dead wrong. All certified helicopters can autorotate safely at the hands of an average pilot. The autorotation descent velocity is much much much slower than the terminal velocity of the airframe--that's a flat out ridiculous claim you are making. In fact, simple physics you can look up in any introductory helicopter aerodynamics text tells you that in a vertical autorotation the helicopter will descend at about twice the hover induced velocity (proportional to disk loading)--and in practice will descend at half that speed during forward flight. To run some numbers on a big heavy and poorly autorotating helicopter, the CH-53 will descend vertically at 85 ft/s without power, or about 43 ft/s in forward flight. That's 2500 fpm, which is sporty but survivable. The actual speed of the helicopter as it hits the ground will be much lower still, as the pilot bleeds stored kinetic energy from the rotor system to arrest the rate of descent just before landing. Now let's estimate the aircraft terminal velocity--flat plate drag area of the helicopter airframe is about 45 sq. ft. for the CH-53A. Solving for drag equal to the weight of the helicopter, that gives me a terminal velocity of *865 ft/s* TWENTY TIMES the autorotatative rate of descent. And this is one of the worst autorotating helicopter of all time, thanks to it's huge size--all commercial helicopters do better. Don't make stuff up if you have no idea--while it's generally true that gyroplanes have lower autorotation descent rates, it's not that big a difference and in practice commercial helicopters are held to much higher safety standards than the current field of kit-built "experimental" gyroplanes out there. You simply can't get a helicopter which can't autorotate certified.

Exactly. The problem isn't education; the US has the best university system in the world, bar none. For all of the talk about it, even our elementary and secondary schools systems are good, and we have a huge spread in quality (directly related to economic inequality) such that while we have a number of really bad schools in poor areas, we also have many world-class schools in middle and upper class areas.

The real problem is that our society doesn't value STEM these days. One obvious factor is that salaries aren't high enough to encourage Americans to enter technical fields--but it's not just the money. R&D funding is at an all time low, so there are fewer exciting things to motivate students to enter technical fields. We're no longer seriously taking on huge engineering projects like hypersonic aircraft, space elevators, manned missions to points outside Earth orbit, or alternative sources of power. We talk the talk, but when it comes down to it, the funding is slowly ratcheted down year after year. This is the stuff that inspires children to dream of becoming engineers, but instead these dreams from the early 80s seem to be drifting farther and farther from reality. You can't ramp R&D up overnight either--real progress takes sustained effort over many years, and you start falling back as soon as you let up on the gas.

A lack of exciting projects is correlated to a lack of cultural interest in science and technology. People don't seem to care anymore about space exploration or fusion power. We have an entire political movement which denies global warming, regardless of the evidence, and smaller groups who are so mistrustful and misunderstanding of science that they oppose things like vaccination or the fundamentals of whole fields like geology and biology. We have a culture where television programming about science can't survive, and people from all walks of life take pride in their ignorance of basic math and science. I don't know what causes this, and I'm not sure how to fix it. In 1957 Sputnik scared America straight, and kicked off two generations of sustained investment in STEM, which contributed in part to the cultural, economic, and military dominance the US has enjoyed since. The dominance is waning, but when China announces a space exploration program and then begins to deliver on it in record time, America doesn't even seem to notice. I'm not sure what it'll take to change things. It's easy to blame politicians for their poor priorities, but in this case, they really are reflecting the will of the people. Can America aspire to technological brilliance again?

I used to work as an engineer in the auto industry, at a major parts design company which worked with virtually every manufacturer, and you couldn't be more wrong. Cars are better than they've ever been, and there are plenty of data to support that fact. Almost every car built today, barring only a handful of individual lemons, will exceed 250k mi on the original engine without a rebuild with normal maintenance--a rarity for the all metal cars of yesteryear. And that maintenance is less and less year over year with 10k+ mi oil changes now standard, going on up to 30k in many models.

Modern plastics are cheaper, but they're also lighter, chemical and corrosion resistant, non-conductive, and often tougher; there are so many more options for plastics these days than there used to be, and tooling costs have dropped dramatically with the adoption of CNC, so it's no wonder these materials are more and more widely used. Wiring gauges have decreased--so what? Why carry around more weight than you need? Modern digital electronics mean less power is being transmitted to individual devices, and modern systems are operating at higher voltages, both of which mean lower current which means more safety with smaller gauge wiring.

Automakers, even the American ones, most definitely do care how long cars lasts and don't intentionally design them to fail on the second owner or after the warranty period. All manufacturers design parts with intended lives well beyond the warranty period; but you can't design for forever. Enhanced component life costs you money and saps performance. So there's a balance, but car manufacturers know they're in this game for the long haul, more than just about any other industry I've been involved with, and they know that when someone's suffers a catastrophic failure after six years, that informs not only their next purchasing decision, but that of all their friends and family. American companies see 20 year old Honda Civics driving around now and *know* that's powerful advertising for Hondas sold today. Everyone in the industry wants to be last generation's Honda. JD Power may not be the most scientific survey, but it's absolutely no surprise that the industry has converged to a high standard of quality.

Lastly, to address some other points people made about the death of the shadetree mechanic; I can't believe that the /. crowd of all people would fall for that tired line. Scantools are cheap, USB interfaces are cheaper, and the manufacturer specific protocols have been reverse engineered in many cases. For most vehicles it should be an easy exercise for a hacker to get his laptop up and running on the CAN bus and start talking to every component in the car. In most cases the car will simply tell you what's wrong ("Help, my mass air flow sensor is bad!") and you just have to replace it, without needing a whole parts shop to try and replace until things start running right. Fuel injection, in particular, is so much easier to deal with than carburation. In the long term, I think cars will start to adopt Health and Usage Monitoring Systems (HUMS), like many aircraft now have, so that they'll be able to tell you "I think that CV joint is going bad, maybe you should grease and reboot it" before it starts making noise and needs to be replaced.

Great example! One of only two cities in the US that requires any sort of permitting for the possession of a long gun. We'll just ignore the fact that there is no licensing required anywhere else in the entire country!

The 600' minimum ceiling doesn't even apply to manned helicopters, and it certainly doesn't apply to a "drone" which is being flown unlicensed as a remote control aircraft; can you imagine if everyone had to fly R/C aircraft over 600' AGL? Come on! The R/C aircraft rules only apply to vehicles used for recreational use; I don't know how this use is classified. Unmanned aircraft never fall under FAA rules, though; under the current FAA framework, if they aren't military and they aren't recreational, they aren't allowed to fly.

It was inappropriate, although perhaps not illegal, to get into a sustained hover over a highway--these sorts of vehicles just aren't that reliable, and a simultaneous loss of control and power could have killed someone. Likewise, it was definitely wrong to shoot at the drone; it posed no threat to the hunters and the police had already been alerted to their actions. In the end, no real harm done, but both sides were acting like children.

Most modern cars do that on their own. Or rather, a program executed by the ECU does it. When was the last time you saw you saw someone using a stroboscope on a modern car?

You're wrong. I'm an engineer, albeit on the research side these days but with some industry experience, and I believe strongly that you can't be a good engineer or scientist these days without knowing how to program. Your job in these professions is to analyze, design, or discover something new; the job description requires the ability to do something things which haven't been done before, at least in a specific context or domain. Most modern analysis has moved beyond the point where it is practical to work it out by hand (not to mention whether even if practical, it's wise to attempt it), and since you will encounter new cases you are very likely to run into situations where no existing program can perform the analysis you need. You have to be able to put math on paper into a computer readable form. But that code need not be sophisticated--writing a 30 line throwaway MATLAB script is still "coding" and that level of effort is sufficient to solve many useful problems. The /. IT centric crowd often imagines that people mean to teach development to a general audience, ideas like OOP, and technologies like compilers and version control--that's unnecessary. The key skills are in learning how to combine data with constructs like loops and conditionals to allow the computer to perform a set of instructions on that data. And the need for these skills is trickling down... for instance, my father in law is a machinist, and in an area where many have lost there jobs he's been successful because he has the ability to write simple programs to automate the increasingly sophisticated computer-controlled machine tools which are becoming a requirement for precision machining. A friend of mine is a financial consultant; she's become a hero in her office because she's been able to automate a lot of their analysis by writing some VBA macros for Excel. Again, in an environment where her peers are losing their jobs, she's been promoted. Unskilled jobs are disappearing, and skilled jobs are increasingly utilizing computers for very niche tasks. Being able to at least write scripts for automation is becoming a necessity in many areas--and never is a professional software involved, or even desirable.

Also, learning how to program a computer is an important skill, even if you aren't working as a developer! Knowing how to write a script to manipulate text files, or to plot complex data in different ways, or to code and automate a complicated calculation in a spreadsheet macro are useful skills many workers could benefit from having. A lot of programs are written for use by one person to do one thing and maybe even to do it just once. They don't need to be efficient, well written, or easy to understand so long as they work, and in working they can bring huge gains in productivity.

I think knowing how to program is becoming a lot like knowing math beyond arithmetic. There are lots of jobs you can do without algebra, but mathematical knowledge opens up many doors and there's a clear line in demand and salary for normally obtainable jobs which require a mathematical background and those that don't. If you're an engineering, a machinist, an accountant, an economist, a typesetter, so on and so on, not knowing how to write at least small programs simply won't cut it for much longer. If you're an innumerate assembly line worker, opportunities for success without extra training and skills are just getting farther away.

So sure, CodeAcademy won't get you a job as a programmer; but it might help you make the leap from unskilled to skilled labor. Developers and IT professionals are not the only people who program as a part of their jobs duties--you don't need all of the skills of a developer to write useful programs. I think the IT centric /. community might not appreciate how many people outside IT use some programming knowledge as a part of their job duties.

Noise is strongly dependent on the flight condition of the helicopter and the orientation of the helicopter with respect to the observers; there's no simple answer for noise levels at some fixed distance, unfortunately. UAV are generally quieter because they're smaller and lighter and because the smaller rotor needs to operate at a higher RPM and hence higher blade passing frequency; this drives the frequencies of noise up where they are more readily absorbed by the atmosphere (albeit, they are also more annoying!)

As for your helicopter encounter, if you were in a rural area with farmland, it was quiet likely an agricultural helicopter. Helicopters are commonly used for spraying, since they're maneuverably enough to get into small fields and the rotor wash helps disperse the chemicals better than fixed wing dusters. I'm not sure they do it in Ohio, but helicopters are also sometimes used in citrus growing areas around the time when the first frosts start to set in. The helicopter operators will contract out with farmers to set up temperature monitoring stations on the ground; when it approaches freezing the stations light up a beacon. The pilots will fly out at night, when there;'s usually a temperature inversion and hover over the lit beacons, using the rotor as a large fan to draw warmer air from higher up down into the orchard until the ground temperature raises and the beacon shuts off. Surprisingly, it's quite effective although I've heard it's becoming less common in recent years due to changes in weather and rising fuel costs. Could it have been some UAV helicopter? Not impossible, but not likely--operation is highly restrict for civil applications, especially at night. The military has plenty of places to fly these things on government property where a crash won't put civilians at risk. I've been involved in some research flight tests of manned helicopter on private property, but we'd never fly at night and Ohio doesn't have the best weather for flight testing anyway.

Stop wasting electrons; don't you know how expensive they are!?!

I don't think the strength of Khan academy (or any other video-based educational programs) is as a replacement for more traditional education, but rather as a supplement. Khan gives students additional instruction about whatever their interested when they need it. For instance, a student struggling to understand the concept of limits whilst completing a pre-Calculus assignment at 8 pm is not able to get further explanation from their primary instructor at that moment. They can, however, go to the Khan academy lecture on the topic right then, and have the concept explained to them at the moment they need it and immediately put what they've learned into practice on their assigned work. Khan provides immediacy and an alternative viewpoint; it's just like looking the concept up in a textbook, but perhaps easier for many students to follow. So, I agree that it's no replacement for other teaching methods; but it is a great resource which can be made accessible to all English speaking children for a very low cost. Seems worthwhile to me as a supplement to other methods.

You're not getting the parent's point, or are intentionally trying to deflect blame.

Lebanon and most other Middle Eastern states have populations of Palestinians who fled their homes in Palestine and entered these countries as refugees. They're immigrants of these countries admitted temporarily under a special refugee status, and are not citizens. Temporary is, of course, looking more permanent as time passes with no feasible solution. Maybe the countries hosting these refugees should start thinking about a path to citizenship at least for those born in their borders, but I suspect most of these refugees wish to return to a Palestinian state if and when such a state is created. Jordan is also to blame for the original destruction of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and originally conspired with Israel to annex it. However, Jordan has long since renounced those claims and regardless of the past, is not occupying Palestine at present. In any case, this is orthogonal to the issue at hand; the choices of other Middle Eastern nations, most of which are not and do not claim to be democracies, should not held against the Palestinian people.

Let's focus on the present. Israel claims to be a free westernized democracy. How can they engage in a multi-generation occupation of territories with populations in the millions, leaving these people in statelessness by refusing to either annex the territory or release it as a sovereign state of its own? Israel is the occupier and has the power to right this wrong unilaterally, with or without the consent or participation of the Palestinian people or their representatives. Israel exacerbates the situation by allowing, if not encouraging, it's citizens to settle in these occupied territories.

I'm sorry about your mother, truly, but I'm not sure $5B for "cancer research" would really have much of an impact--that's an old line of thinking and we know better now. Twenty years ago people used to talk about finding a "cure for cancer," but you never hear that seriously anymore. A lot of money has been spent on general cancer research; what we learned from that was that cancer isn't just one thing. There are a huge variety of cancers, with different causes, mechanisms, and consequently, treatments. There is no possibility of a single universal cure; each kind must be handled separately, like any other medical malady. So really, what you're proposing is basically a general increase in medical research overall. Medical research is hot now, and continuing to grow; I think funding is adequate for the number of researchers (and the number of researchers we can feasibly train in the short-medium term). We continue to achieve incremental progress. In addition, the medical industry is growing quickly and is happy to advocate for increased medical research funding. Things look really good compared to the other physical sciences, many of which are weathering years of declines in funding despite a growing body of researchers, with few strong supports with money, and a corporate culture which is rapidly divesting from what R&D expenditures they still make.

Now, I can't say whether or not JWST is a good investment in particular; certainly, it's been poorly managed. But you wouldn't notice the difference if we redirected that funding to NIH. On the other hand, there are plenty of physical scientists and research engineers with important projects who need that money, too, and are getting squeezed pretty hard right now. Even DoD would rather spend it's largess on procuring what exists today, than preparing for the future. NASA is embroiled in a battle for funding between Congress and the President, and is getting pulled in every direction. The days of large scale DoE projects seem to be over; and our physicists are taking their research teams overseas where new facilities are being built. American government and industry shouldn't rely on today's technological advantages persisting until tomorrow.

On the technical side, this isn't nearly as challenging a problem as Mr. Brin suggests. Taxation, of any sort, can be represented with very simple math models which could be evaluated very quickly for any "representative" population. Depending on the mathematical details, this is the sort of problem which could be solved on a typical laptop in the range of seconds to hours, even for very large numbers of variables describing the design of the tax scheme and populations of people. I would be a little surprised if someone economist hadn't already done this, because it would make for a pretty easy paper. A Folding@Home type project is massive overkill.

The trick, as anyone who has done a fair bit of practical optimization knows, is in how the problem is formulated not the method used to find the "optimal" solution. First, you need to define exactly the "goodness" of the candidate tax codes, or an objective function in optimization parlance. In this case we seek the simplest tax code; how do you define that? What seems simple in mathematics might not seem simple to your average taxpayer (e.g. just solve this transcendental equation for income normalized by PPP, acres of land owned, ratio of capital gains to income,... , and out pops you tax rate!) and vice versa. Brin suggests that you could just deactivate some rules and try to augment the effects of existing rules to compensate, but that is likely to leave a very small space of solutions.

Secondly, you need to define your constraints. Brin suggests a sort of "do no harm" principle. For the same revenue, this implies under the assumption of no cheating or loss that everyone will be taxed exactly same amount. It's very possible that there are no substantially simpler tax codes that would result in everyone in a truly representative population being taxed the same amount. So, you probably don't want hard equality constraints--you'd like to have *similar* taxes which were much simpler. So, how close of a match for the overall tax is close enough? How do you even define closeness across the whole population in a sensible way? (e.g. $X, X%, (X-X_0)%?)

So, even this "optimal" approach leaves a lot of room for "fuzziness," and therefore would still be a very political process. The implementation would be very easy, if we could all agree on how to do it. I wouldn't hold my breath on a computer-assisted solution being adopted anytime soon. We've made little ground on getting optimal redistricting to be accepted--and even where redistricting software is used, it's passed through political committees who tweak the input and outputs to get the overcomplicated and suboptimal solutions they'd like to see.