I wonder if requiring including the names of the referees on all papers would change their behavior in a good way. Signing off on a paper that was later found to be bogus would detract from the reputations of the referees as well as the authors.

Consider driving from LA to LV, losing your car in a poker game, and simply riding the train back to LA. It's very simple and much cheaper than renting a car to return to LA.

I had to pass a Morse Code test to earn my First Class badge in the Boy Scouts in 1959.

I'm still happily using my 2012 MacBook Pro. The latest versions of the OS won't install, but Apple continues to supply security updates. So, unless the machine completely breaks down or Apple stops supporting Intel powered Macs, I will stick with this machine.

It seems that many posters are reinventing the work of Thomas Kuhn in 1962 in his "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." A scientific revolution creates a new paradigm (yes, that's where we get that word) that replaces an older paradigm. Einstein vs. Newton is a perfect example. Once the new paradigm is accepted by all or most of the revolutionary's peers, all future scientific work is based on the new paradigm. Future work is performed by refiners as opposed to revolutionaries. All scientists would like to be revolutionaries, but only a few of them are capable of creating new paradigms.

I think one of the issues that the PC industry faces is the quality of the PCs produced in the last 10 or 15 years. I have a 2012 MacBook Pro and I have had few minor repairs totaling a few hundred bucks. At some point the Intel processor will render the unit obsolete. I suspect that the PC has another five years of life, maybe more. I also suspect that their are many more PC owners with the same circumstances. Why replace a perfectly functioning PC with a new PC? PC manufacturers need to produce new PCs with signifigantly more functionality to get us legacy users to replace our existing machines.

WRT to your "Second" point, the Federal government routinely contracts out lots of things to the private sector. For example Medicare is operated by contractors under the oversite of the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services. The contracts are competitively bid. These contracts are similar to the one under which UNOS operates.

Vote Libertarian!

I'm surprised that the drone used such a simpleminded technique as the one described in the article. For centuries, sailors have used a technique called dead reckoning that extrapolates from a previously known position, speed, and direction to an estimated current position. Today, when navigation instruments fail, sailors still use the technique. A friend of mine crewed on a boat sailing from Norfolk, VA to St. Thomas, USVI (roughly 1500 miles) using nothing but dead reckoning. When they arrived in St. Thomas, they were about two miles off course. I'm not a drone expert, but the attack that the Iranians mounted against the drone could easily have been defeated using other countermeasures besides GPS signals.

Drop dead.

Muslims inherited the scientific work of the Assyrians, who were a highly prolific community of scientific theorists, when they conquered them. Within 100 years of the conquest, no significant new scientific work was accomplished by this community. Muslims conquered centers of scholarship (e.g., Alexandria) and maintained them through the dark ages. This was an important contribution, but it should be understood for what it was - maintenance of centers of scholarship that others created without contributing significant scholarship on top of the established paradigm. Has Christianity been hostile to science? Of course, examples (Galileo et al.) are well known. However, science advanced, perhaps despite Christian orthodoxy, once the dark ages ended. Significant scientific advancement stopped within 100 years of the Muslim conquest of the Assyrians (roughly 900 CE) and restarted in 1200 CE when the dark ages ended.

I must say that this thread is Slashdot at its best. Knowledgeable people, whose knowledge was earned from years of study, freely share their knowledge with the rest of us. I am humbled by their knowledge, but more importantly, I am stunned by the generosity of these posters.

Half the population is below the median, Hazel. It is below the average if and only if intelligence is normally distributed. So, while you condescend the lower half of the population, get your statistics right.

The Andromeda Strain, 1971, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qEsqjJAY-k, has a scene where scientists are simulating the growth of a foreign living substance, the Andromeda Strain. The substance grows exponentially and the computer "blows up" trying to keep up with the high speed growth. The computer's console device was a TTY. Although most computers in those days had TTY consoles, it is funny to see scientists entering in commands on the TTY. Of course, the TTY lives on as the standard input device in Unix. etc. operating systems. We just don't have a physical TTY in front of us any more. In those days hardly anyone was exposed to computers and movies' depictions of the giant machines usually had operators wearing lab coats and carrying clipboards.

My firm's business model includes part time workers working from home on their own computers. Since these knowledge workers already have computers and high speed internet access AND since all of our applications are web based, why do we need to replicate the employee's hardware/software/service environment? We test applications against IE, Firefox, and Chrome to insure compatibility. Even though we buy all services from the cloud, we need to stay abreast of changes in technology such as smart phone access. Consequently, we have a CIO. Our research shows that security problems are more likely to occur in in-house hosted environments than in SaaS environments. Nothing is fool-proof and vigilance is always requiremed, but our model has been working well so far. Finally, the employees love working at home. We have zero capital requirements and happy employees. What's not to like about that?