I agree. People don't often stop and think that the goals of the organization funding research make a big difference in what gets funded. Profit driven organizations looking for reliable or at least probable returns on investment during fairly short-term horizons are naturally going to focus on applied research. Fundamental research often has unpredictable returns or returns where the organization doing the research can't adequately capture a large enough share of the value they create (or it undermines their existing business) to justify the research without appealing to ideas like "the greater good" which isn't what keeps for-profit endeavors in business.

The scope wasn't at all the same between the CA HSR and the Hyperloop. The CA HSR was city center to city center while the Hyperloop was basically just the rural part of the CA HSR route. The rural part of CA HSR would cost about $10B compared to $6B for Hyperloop but with a significantly higher capacity although that capacity really only makes sense city center to city center. It isn't like Elon Musk invented public transportation so a lot of Hyperloop seems poorly thought out for anyone familiar with public transportation systems that actually work well.

The first rule of private transport is that it is also heavily subsidized by the taxpayers.

In most cities expanding the road network would cost more and provide fewer economic benefits than improving or building rail services (assuming you have a rail corridor) This is because we have been making collosal investments for decades in the road network so there generally isn't much low-hanging fruit. When Saint Louis was building light rail they basically said, in their situation, that a train line replaces four new traffic lanes and didn't have the disadvantage of dumping way more cars into already overcrowded roads in town where they don't have any more options for expanding roads.

Most countries spend far more on roads than they do rail and it has very little to do with any kind of cost-benefit analysis. It is simply that there are a lot of people with a vested interest in keeping things the same as they are now because anything else would cause change and uncertainty.

I still see plenty of O^3 algorithms when there is a fairly obvious O^2 or even linear one. These are cases where they aren't even thinking about complexity they just wrote down the first algorithm that seemed to work. The single biggest issue I have with younger programmers is the lack of deliberate design; they are just focused on getting something that seems to work without recognizing or even thinking much about the consequences of their decisions.

There were quite a few studies about the feasibility of doing something like this in Switzerland although the top speed they were looking at was about 500 kph and they wanted to connect the major Swiss cities so it would be about 15 minutes from one city to the next. It would require such a huge investment that really only the government could do it and even though it appears to make longterm financial sense there isn't enough political support to start the ball rolling.

The Nokia N9 has a 3.9" screen and is same size as the iPhone so I can't imagine Apple coming out with anything much smaller.

In Clinton's last year there was a "real" budget surplus, meaning above and beyond the surplus FICA contributions. As you noted the other years there was only a budget surplus in the sense that US debt held by the public decreased.

In 2010, 865 billion was paid into social security and 701 billion was paid out. So ignoring social security and interest on the debt we have 4 major categories of spending, DoD, Medicare & Medicaid, Mandatory and Discretionary. About 150 billion of the discretionary spending is military so we end up with something like Defense: 839 billion, Medicare & Medicaid: 793 billion, Mandatory: 416 billion and Discretionary (non-defense): 510 billion. I don't think "pale in comparison" means what you think it means.

My initial reaction was "crap, no keyboard" but even with a nice keyboard on my N900 I have to be really bored to do anything more than a very short SMS or an instant message. I'll read an email but generally won't write one unless it is nothing more than "OK", "go ahead" or "thanks".

Nintendo always makes money on their hardware so they could just do another console in two years. Their competition reportedly loses money on their hardware for the first couple years so they probably wouldn't want to do another console after just two years.

It is taught that way if you have a good teacher. All my math teachers were excellent so we got lots of practical examples. But just like any skill, there is a lot of what one of my math teachers called "crank and grind" that you have to go through to internalize the skill enough that you can then focus on applying it.

mod parent up, original poster doesn't have a clue

which is from Night Shift (1982)

Many self-taught programmers lack even a basic understanding of algorithmic complexity. This is the single biggest issue I run into in industry and should be one that isn't too hard to fix. Again and again I find people have written some algorithm that just doesn't scale to larger amounts of data because it is n^3 or n^4 instead of linear. After that I would say it is a good grasp of some of the ideas in functional programming particularly recursion. There are a lot of other things I run into but I never noticed that self-taught programmers were more prone to them than others.