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Comment SIGNIFICANT delays? (Score 4, Insightful) 129

Gee, the telescope size limit. Guy proposes that they shouldn't be bigger - everyone on the west coast ignores him, build bigger. It may have held back a small group of astronomers, but...
X ray Observatory. It delayed things 5 WHOLE YEARS! GASP. Yes, I realize that the /. crowd is heavily biased to young males, but guys, it is to the point the average college student doesn't graduate in 5 years. I've got bottles of booze that I haven't had a drink out of older than that, and projects sitting on my workbench longer than that. One of my dad's HOBBY projects took 3 hours a night, every night for 8 years.. The only one I'd call at ALL significant is the 30 years

Comment Re:what you need them for? (Score 1) 306

Not just kids. Some people have managed to go for decades as cowboys, hacking crap together that barely works but doing it fast enough and visibly enough and in the critical path often enough that they always look like heroes. The worst is when they start believing their own bullshit and stop acknowledging that any other way exists. See also: Asshole Driven Development.

Comment Re:Living in 1925 kinda sucked (Score 1) 516

"We need things to cost less"

Take a look at the prices of consumer goods from 50 years ago. Stuff was *expensive*. Example: A friend of mine showed me an ad from a discount store in 1960 advertising basic two-slice toasters for $8.88. That's a little over $70 in today's dollars. The day he showed me that, you could buy a basic two-slice toaster from Target for $7.99. That's a little under $8.00 in today's dollars.

The only things that really need to cost less are health care, housing and education, the costs of which have risen faster than the CPI for decades.

Comment It's not just gifted/not gifted (Score 1) 529

People talk about "gifted" kids as if they're simply a normal kid turned up to eleven. Our school system has a pretty good program for those kids (and they're also good at filtering out the normal kids who have whip-cracking tiger parents). Where they completely vapor-lock is when they're presented with a kid who's gifted in some areas, but normal or even below normal in others. My daughter is in the gifted class but also has an IEP. You'd think her teachers were trying to accommodate a silicon-based methane-breathing life form. It's not that they're not willing to try, it's that there's no pigeonhole already there, so they don't know what to do, and they have to make it up as they go along, all the while dealing with the entrenched bureaucracy.

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