Yes, it is very unfortunate. This first started happening yesterday (for me), and I was kind of bummed that it didn't open in Firefox like it used to. It is stuff like this that lends credence to the EU's issues with Google. I am not sure why they feel it is worth it to just put stumbling blocks to user choice like this at every possible chance.
Direct wealth taxes at the federal level are considered unconstitutional unless they are carried out in proportion to each individual state's wealth. It is a really strange aspect of constitutional law that may prove complicated for the Sander's tax plan.
Was there any thought to having line discipline as the voting system? As in voting on entries into the terminal up until the first new line character? It would increase the likelihood of having sensible inputs since interacting with a terminal is very different than a video game and there are only a small number of combinations of inputs that are meaningful to it. Also, any thought to disabling signals coming from the terminal? I could imagine a lot of SIG* spam.
For actual journalism on the internet, it is worth going to shared common sources. I almost always rely on Reuters and AP. Since they are cited so often by downstream media, which is a major part of their business model, their content is--by its very nature--somewhat static. I have also generally found their writing to be less biased, with the exception of Reuters being inherently pro-finance and globalization (again, due to their specialized business model). In terms of more immutable print media, back n the early 2000s, I was also a firm believer in that the ridiculously low word count limits and easier barrier to reader entry encouraged at the Metro (the free public transportation newspaper) left whatever was able to make it through less biased. This again is on the basis that bias would add too much complexity to stories whose sole purpose was to impart the basics of widely agreed upon fact (cf. Simple English Wikipedia).
The main benefit optical interconnects aim to provide is not about the speed with which photons propagate, which as you point out is not all that much faster than electrons in copper, but it is about bandwidth.
Propagation speed of course affects latency, which as you point out is already running up against relativistic limits, but the physics of photonics vs. electronics affects the maximum bandwidth achievable in a modulated digital signal. At a high level, one issue is that the capacitance and inductance present in copper limit the ability of discrete pulses to remain discrete voltage levels that still are distinguishable between logical high and logical low when modulated at a very high frequency due to the capacitance of the wire which effectively blurs the pulses together as they propagate. The other fundamental issue with electronic interconnects is the issue of shot noise, which for information theoretic reasons can further limit the theoretical maximum bandwidth logical high/low voltages in copper. Photonics does not have these limitations, but as you say, is still a very long way off from practical application. It is important to point out, though, that the motivation (unlike the article's slightly clickbaity title) is not speed but bandwidth.
They join the military for a variety of reasons, which may or may not have involved any feelings about any conflict at hand much less the media. The reason they go to war, however, is because of old men.
I worked for a CFD HPC company for about two years doing a mix of traditional engineering and programming, and I realized that I like programming and learning about computer architecture way more than the mechanics. So I went back to school for CS/CE and just like you fell into the trap!
Point well taken. They are not numerically unstable in the sense that the term is most often used with ill conditioned matrices or floating point weirdness, but yes, they are significantly oversimplified and will not converge with reality if you measure them by a meaningful metric.
Small world, I used to work for an industrial CFD company, and one of my tasks was estimating the computational effort required for a given simulation (which depended on the specific characteristics of our turbulence model). I was mostly doing compressible work, too, so my knowledge of hydrodynamic models used in cinema is not super detailed. I do know, however, that most cinema software uses particle based simulation for incompressible flow, which really is not a terrible approximation, but it probably would not be suitable for the kind of work you are doing!
The truth about all flow and especially turbulence is that it is not hard to make it look convincing to the human eye. Capturing the motion on various length scales and presenting it in a plausible way is not all that computationally intensive (the algorithms to make them can still of course be challenging). Making simulations that are numerically correct, however, is incredibly computational intensive (in addition to being algorithmically complex). This is why CFD is still run on massive clusters for transient simulations. There is also a whole field in itself for "sub-grid" turbulence models that allow for the spatial resolution of a simulation to remain coarser than the Kolmogorov microscales (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_microscales). (As a side note, Kolmogorov was a true polymath/genius in areas outside information theory and complexity theory.) Cutting edge basic research on turbulence will perform calculations at such scales (direct numerical simulation). Suffice it to say, most graphics work does not waste too many cycles on physical accuracy. Hard to know for sure, but since the video has words "cinema" and "rendering" in the description as opposed to "simulation", it is probably just realistic enough to pass muster in terms of human perception. Also accurately simulating the formation of foam requires a two-phase simulation of both gas and liquid as well as considering cohesive forces.
This reads like an Adam Curtis documentary (a good thing), and several of the episodes of more famous documentaries touch upon some of the themes here.
The episode of "Pandora's Box" called "The Engineer's Plot" describes the rise of cybernetic thinking in the Soviet Union--less so the early resistance to it. It describes some of the insane rituals that developed out of the entrenched management hierarchies that computing was grafted on to. It effectively shows the endgame of the Soviet cybernetic experiment.
More recently, the episode "The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts" of the documentary series "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" describes the development of cybernetics in the US and the resistance to it from environmentalists (outside the scope of the article). It gives portraits of some of the main characters this article talks about, though.
They have been trying to improve the exact specification of RPython since David Beazley sorta called the project out on the fact that, for a time early in the development of PyPy, RPython was basically whatever subset of Python survived the PyPy build process. The 2012 PyCon keynote gives and awesome explanation of the project internals and its promise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_HBRhcgeuQ
Not trying to be pedantic, I just want to know if recurse is now an accepted word. Any thoughts? Sources seem to vary, and I know as a young field CS forms new words fairly often still, but it is clear historically that the verb base of "recursion" is "recur". Has recurse become the accepted form for discussion relating to algorithms, though?
I think using a pre-existing software service as a base instead of a massive handmade distributed system may not be a bad idea for the USG. Remember the healthcare.gov rollout? Although it is certainly a government contract to a private corporation, the cause is warranted since it helps the federal government better allocate resources and make funding decisions. Your comment does raise the question, though, of whether the Digital Analytics Program managing the account requested any safeguards for user privacy or are just using the standard free or premium service. There was an article earlier around the launch of healthcare.gov that raised the same privacy issues you are now relating to Google Analytics, but I can't remember who published it.
If anyone is interested in the history of long-distance telephony in the US, the PBS documentary "Transistorized!" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0381663/) (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA97634694AC92A93) has a great explanation into Bell Labs' long-standing interest in the transistor going back to the use of vacuum tubes in signal amplification on the long stretches of telephone cable. The documentary is also really cool since it shows you the inner lives of Shockley, Brattain and Bardeen leading up to the discovery.
"There are too many competing standards for x, so we are proud to announce a new standard, which will supersede all existing x standards and unify everything." -The founders of every competing standard ever introduced for anything in the history of things.
The article makes it seem like this technology will completely replace copper, which is obviously untrue. Silicon photonics for use in interconnects in multicores, though, is very promising purely from the perspective of bandwidth. HP and Intel have expressed interest, and there is a lot of academic research at Northwestern and UCSB ECE, for instance. I do not know what energy efficiency figures you were referring to, but emitter efficiency is dependent on the band gap and other properties of the semiconductor and lasing material, so the specific technology used does matter.
I shared this from Henrik Forsten's blog. It is worth reading all his other articles, too, if you are interested in computer architecture, electronics, programming or math. He has a very wide range of interests.