SAP upgrades can easily take that long, but SAP can easily run organizations an order of magnitude bigger, and two orders of magnitude more complicated than Tesla.

From the comments I'm readin in this story, my take home messege here is that SAP probably shouldn't run organizations at all. What the hell does their software do for all this expense and hassle anyway?

Basically her response is that of the bankrobber who is angry and blaiming his friends for turning him in rather than himself for being caught with the cash.

The response of the entire administration has been the response of a spoiled, petulant teenager.

In fact, this has been the response of the administration -- and the previous one -- to just about any development or obstancle they don't like.

The US is no longer a nation of laws. It is a nation of men (and some women) who are impulsive, incompetent, largely juvenile, disrespectful of their offices, and contemptuous of both the public and the law. The Administration is being run by people with the mentality and motives of a cast of Saturday morning cartoon, or late Thursday night TV villains. Unfortunately these people have one common talent -- they are all connected to each other like threads in a rotten carpet.

Not a nation of laws. A nation of men. And a particularly base and uninspiring kind of man at that. Central and South American countries have been run by such men for centuries. Run into the ground. The US, for all its power and potential, is now being run into the ground as well.

The end result is probably something like Singapore. Ostensibly free, but scratch the surface and you quickly hit authoritarianism and an oligarchy of connected families and companies. The problem is, most of the US governing class would see little wrong with such an outcome.

Once you understand quantum, it all makes sense.

Well, ....until you come to measure it.

The big problem is the contractor didn't even get the blueprint right so the entire project from start to finish needs to be tossed and redesigned go back to specs and then get the specs cleaned up as from reading between the lines, part of the problem is the spec is also screwed up. This is a case of GIGO, Garbage in, Garbage out.

Except cost (and profitability, if you're a Republican and think it should be less subsidized than the roads).

A 29-hour coast-to-coast bullet train isn't competing with roads. It's competing with 5-hour coast-to-coast air travel. The unpleasantness and other limitations and subsidies of air travel notwithstanding, a bullet train which takes ~6x as long will also need to have a price-per-trip that's at least somewhat competitive with coast-to-coast air travel for most people to bother considering it.

Notably, the extant US passenger rail system is not very competitive with air travel on most routes outside of the Boston-Washington corridor.

. I mean, you can prove that it works, but some people "see" how to separate a function and some don't.

You don't ever "see" how to seperate the function into udv to get uv-vdu. Even in the case of the most "obvious" examples like xe^x, you still need to decide which part should be u or dv.

After a few dozen (hundred?) times of doing this, you get a feel for which should be chosen. More recently, this knowledge has been codified in a LIATE mnemonic/algorithm for choosing the two parts, which works for most elementary integrals students are likely to encounter.

Nobody can "just integrate". Nobody. Not even Euler was able to integrate everything. With experience -- extensive expeirience -- you may garner enough tricks and techniques to be able to integrate something like x^m(a+bx^n)^p -- but you would need to be very well read to know that you could only do so if one of p, (m+1)/n, or (m+1)/n +p is an integer -- (see Chebyshev's Integral). I didn't "see" or know this fact -- I learned it from reading works of others who came before me. No gene can replicate that.

Ah, but you can no longer even contemplate refusing a business card once it has been proferred. Think of all you have lost.

"Liberal" means lose, freely, without limitation, etc....

Yeah, given the way politics has gone over the last 30 years, that sounds about right.

(I Am Aware That This Was a Typo)

Money laudering in US politics hit the big time during the Watergate scandal. Details are never quite clear, but basically CREEP -- the Committee to Re-electe the President -- funnelled a then extraordinary $60 million or so through mexico to help fund Nixon's relelection campaign. Some of this money was used to finance dirity election tricks, rat-fucking, a famous letter which caused a governors campaign to implode I believe, and of course the watergate bugging itself and related operations.

Nixon won the 1972 election campaign.

That's right. The journal that Cortney Grove gave as an example, Topics in Language Disorders http://journals.lww.com/topicsinlanguagedisorders/pages/default.aspx , does provide free access to papers funded by NIH, Wellcome Trust and Howard Hughes http://journals.lww.com/topicsinlanguagedisorders/_layouts/oaks.journals/nih.aspx

Nope. Doesn't appear to.

Here's an example paper which I picked at random from the journal : Differentiating Speech Delay From Disorder: Does it Matter?. There's a paywall on the journal site with a $30 fee.

And here's the result of a search on PubMed for the same paper. I'm danmed if I can find it there.

Perhaps this is due to my search coming from outside the US, but I doubt it. I don't think the papers are being made available, or at least, they are being made less accessable than the paywalled versions.

To make universal knowledge a reality, it is first necessary to have all books and journals available in torrents and file sharing sites everywhere.

I knew a researcher from a place around Eastern Europe way. He claimed he had access to a university alumni forum where almost any paper could be requested, and an aluimni working at an institution with access would post the request within hours.

They are light years ahead of us over there.

Well the President shouldn't know about these things. That's what his Secretaries of State are for.

The President is the Head of State. I put those capitals in for a reason. It is an almost religious position. A large part of the authority and legitimacy of the state is invested in the current head of state and their behaviour has to be of an appropriately high standard. This is difficult under an executive presidency like the US, but the principle still applies.

Of foremost concern here is the simple principle that there are certain things the president should not see or hear. Sometimes countries need to spy on others, or assassinate people, or steal, or whatever. But there is absolutely no reason why the President needs to be told about these things. The only time the President should hear about things like this is in the newspapers, shortly before he makes a pledge to hold the guilty responsible.

The President is not going to be able to uphold the law if all of the lawbreakers make him an accessory before or after the fact as a matter of routine.

This is to say nothing of the loss of legitimacy that comes with being involved this close to the coal-face of the uglier side of state operations. As bin Laden was being killed, the President should never have been allowed into a room where live images of people being shot and killed were displayed on screen. Without exaggeration: His aide-de-camp deserves to be court-martialed for allowing that. The damage to the image of the US President as a head of state will take decades to undo. Heads of State do not watch gunbattles on live feeds.

There is Politics, or PR-Politics as it is practised today. There is Government, and the business of running it. Then there is Diplomacy and grand and murkier business of deal with other countries.

And finally there is Statecraft, the art of running a country wisely. No PR-man, economist, scientist or other technocratic advisor can speak with any authority on this most essential of topics. It is nebulous, yet essential to all actions of the state. Systems ; political, economic, national, international, are made or unmade by the actions of senior officials and heads of state. It is essential that these actors have the gravity and respect necessary to inspire confidence in their actions. It is simply not possible to do this effectively if you have been repeatedly seen emerging from the latest political abattoir, covered from head to twitter feeds in fallout gore and scandal. Heads of State have to be above such things.

Not with major browsers like Firefox screaming blue murder at encrypted connections that haven't been officially by certification authorities. We can't have an encrypted web if browsers themselves are hostile towards it.

It cost the shareholders $472 million. The men and women mismanaging Knight Capital drew their paychecks and benefits as before and didn't lose a dime in remuneration.

The only lesson learned here was that no lesson was learned.