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Comment Re: Taxpayer-funded should always mean Open Source (Score 1) 69

CERN has a pretty big open hardware library. Have you looked through it?

You're being pretty disingenuous though. CERN is basically a facility that provides services. Most of the scientists who "work at" CERN aren't actually employed by it. They're employed by home universities in many countries, including ones outside Europe. Many of the people who actually do the work and make the inventions are grad students who may well be paying to be there, not the other way around.

Again, "publicly funded" doesn't automatically mean the public owns everything any more than your employer, public or not, owns you. Slavery is illegal, yeah? Many (most?) universities leave IP ownership with the inventors. It's an important part of academic freedom. It's also in line with typical public funding objectives which are:

1. do the most research as cheaply as possible

Sometimes there's a #2 which is:

2. commercialize as much as possible in order to stimulate economic development.

Open sourcing is typically done because scientists think sharing freely is an important part of science, and it's typically done with their own time, money and effort, often in conflict with their best career interests.

Comment Re:Boo me too, then. (Score 1) 169

There are lots of people who have lots of different motivations. "Will" isn't usually a problem. "Ability" is. Or "capacity" is maybe a better word. The pattern repeats over and over and has been studied over and over, in exhaustive detail.

Yes, it gets in the way of all that delightful Victorian "the savages are savages because they want to be," manifest destiny, chosen people bullshit. Good.

Comment Re:So not a big deal (Score 5, Informative) 147

Is it an emergency? Yes. Is it of global concern? Also yes.

In 2014, in the middle of a big Ebola outbreak, a guy in Dallas went to the hospital with symptoms. He sat around in an ER until the hospital diagnosed him with a stuffy nose, gave him Tylenol and sent him home. Later he got sicker and came to the hospital in an ambulance. Some doctor actually asked him about his travel history, realized he'd come from Liberia, the heart of the outbreak, and ordered everyone into gowns, masks, gloves and face shields.

A couple weeks later two nurses got fevers and tested positive for Ebola. One of them had flown home to Ohio in the meantime to visit family.

The reason you can *yawn* about Ebola is because there's a very good international system to protect you against it and things like it. Close calls happen anyway. The WHO emergency isn't for you. It's for people like the ER doctor who are supposed to start looking at people with stuffy noses and mild fevers and think "better be safe."

Comment Re:Fucking Losers (Score 1) 169

Lol. Instead of "Lenny's Podcast" or whatever, try something at least halfway respectable. Maybe the "history" section of the Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Note that 1959 is when "machine learning" was coined. The actual practice goes back quite a bit further than that. The least squares fitting algorithm is from 1805.

Comment Re: Phonics (Score 1) 132

it's a bizarre "learn to recognize whole words by reading picture books and guessing what the text is from the pictures"

Whole language isn't bizzare. It's how you learn most things. How to speak, for example. Realistically you need both, which is why good language programs will have "picture books" and if you're stuck the teacher will tell you to sound it out.

Comment A beast of a rocket (Score 1) 46

124.4 meters (408.1 feet) tall, 9 meters wide, 5,500 metric tons at launch with a TWR of 1.6. Should leap off the pad and hit max Q in 45 seconds. These engines are grossly overpowered for the launch mass, which implies another stretch. And they're a work of art.

I have to go see one of these launches one day.

And they're not done. Raptor 4 is in the works. They really are going to Mars. The long dry spell of "boldly go" is coming to an end.

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