You can only survive multibillion bloat of you are military or a white elephant in orbit!

It was pretty amazing that Congress was talking about balancing the budget back then while now they have all but given up.

Why the SSC Was Terminated : http://www.aip.org/fyi/1993/fyi93.142.txt

The Decline and Fall of the SSC : http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw84.html

In the latter we read:

"It is common wisdom in Washington, D.C., that it is dangerous for a large project to span more than one Administration. Bush was defeated by Clinton in 1992, and the SSC project came to violate this rule and suffer the consequences. In 1993 the incoming Clinton Administration made a budget-tightening decision to stretch out the SSC project, moving its date of completion from 1999 to 2003, increasing the overall cost of the project while reducing its yearly cost. The SSC cost rose to over $10 billion, a 16% cost increase. The budget-conscious freshman Congressmen swept in with with Clinton in November of 1992 felt no responsibility for the decisions of their predecessors, and the SSC project became a tempting target of opportunity.

Clinton's new Science Advisor John Gibbons did not give active support to the SSC project, as had his predecessor, Alan Bromley, and Clinton's new Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary, now famous for her million dollar travel excursions, proclaimed during her confirmation hearings that she was "not passionate" about the SSC. In September, 1993 when her passions were finally aroused, she took the counter-productive steps of re-shuffling major SSC contractors and increasing the already bloated oversight team to 140 bureaucrats in the Dallas DOE Office. Before the two critical votes in June and October, neither Clinton nor Gore was willing to make personal appeals to House Members on behalf of the SSC, as Bush had in 1992.

The final blow to the SSC came late in 1993 when the DOE's Baseline Validation Report was released. The validation group surveyed the sorry history of SSC cost escalations and concluded that extreme conservatism was needed. Their report advocated much larger safety and contingency margins and moved the completion date back to 2004, increasing the project cost to $11.5 billion or another 15% increase.

With this, rank-and-file members of Congress had had enough. They were fed up with the ever-rising SSC price tag, the evidence of poor management and DOE indecisiveness, and the heavy-handed attempts by Congressional Leadership to save the project. On October 27, 1993, by a vote of 283 to 143 the House rejected the Conference Committee report that would have continued SSC funding. The project was officially dead."

"imposed on people who used to be civil servants"

Any questions?

I will be at the pub.

No boom today.

Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow

Good riddance

...and don't come back, ACTA.

Was the "Copyright is Theft" subline really needed? It doesn't make any sense however you look at it.

Copyright = Privilege (which may vary greatly in extent and moral justification) granted by state to a "right holder" (often a well-connected) to control the distribution and replication of an often intangible good. Apparently "creates new markets" and "puts the food on the plates of the creative types".

Theft = Somone takes your TV. The ECB issues money, driving inflation. You are being hit by the taxman.

Not the same thing at all.

Yeah right

They are actually playing Half-Life 2. You can see the underground sewer of City 17 on that greenish screen,

Are the stats good enough?

I know what you’re thinking: “Did we find five sigma, or only four?” Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I’ve kinda lost track myself. But being this is the LHC, the most powerful collider in the world, and would blow your mind clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well do you, punk?

(Originally by Neil Bates)

Pretty historical stuff

"The real story is not that a generator can bring down a chunk of a cloud, but that the recovery process when there is a failure is still hairy even after some of the best minds on the planet have tried to think of all the angles."

It's also the first time in human history such cloudy juggling at a large scale is being attempted. Just keep on trucking!

As for the 2012-leapsecond-linux-bug, I wonder how many Linux server are still running full blast in the various datacenters right now. I hear our hosting company noticed a fat uptick in Watt consumed when the bug hit.

These statements are actually sinister

One can actually imagine Beria sitting in the smoky, shady background, nodding, while the sweating spokesperson delivers the laudatio-of-the-party-interspersed-with-appropriate-selfcritique-and-the-demand-to-be-controlled-by-people-more-worthy to the assembled members.

Only a reference to the teachings of Marxism-Leninism and the glories of The President is missing.

As said in the comment section of the earlier iteration of this article...

Details on Tevatron data mining and compositing:

http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/25_sigma_higgs_signal_tevatron-91654

Ivory-tower uponfrowned rumormongering details on the upcoming 4th of July PRESENTATIONFEST at:

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/

Tossers!

People have unreasonably high expectations. Let the dole queue lengthen, let state interfere somewhat more in the economy, let the depression continue or even worsen.

Social networking, mobile and gaming??

Be happy to take up a job in the basement of MinPlenty as datatypist to the Big Blair Computer.

The Old Collider

Bosons appear, possibly -

Significance increased!

Anyway, and as usual, details can be admired here:

http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/25_sigma_higgs_signal_tevatron-91654

And for people who want rumormongering about the 4th of July:

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4794

Yeah...

Sod this. Red Hat 6 servers going haywire *simultaneously* from 02:00 CEST (Red Hat 5 holding though), with load average at around 150 or so. JBoss was gummed up, restart was not helping, everything dying a crawling slow death, everything waiting for some futex. The only thing I could think of was that mcelogd is triggered from cron at that time. Bad lead.

That was not a good night.

Who injects leap seconds on weekends, at night, during the Euro football??!?

Objectivism married to Machiavellism?

Office Attilas and Witch Doctors shall get no traction!

The General Service Vehicle "Lots of Boxes On This Slide" is entering subspace!

I should really get interested in these things but that slide looks a wee bit crowded. On the other hand, the words indicate that the boxes indicate "wishful attributes" which may or may not be encountered in real life. How do they manage to stitch up stuff from various developer cultures together and still make sense afterwards? Shouldn't one just keep things simple? I have spent a good part of my life trying to heal wobbling boxes-withing-boxes, configuring obscure elements and scripting around "one-click deployments". Oh my god.

Has it come to this?

Our only hope is death camps.

Ha! HA!

"As always, partners will continue to determine final price and currency to end customers.”

I think "end" is being used as a verb here rather as an adjective.

Additionally, this article should end with the obligatory "Which is nice" quip.

Keeping interest rates low not long-term enough for ya, skippy?

This $EXPLETIVE$ guy assumes that governments take long-term views?

Hey, we are currently in a DEPRESSION OF SOME MAGNITUDE.

Guess where it came from? Not investment funds or pension schemes with "short term view"

I can only conclude that the PwC airhead considers a "long-term view" a permapipe from the taxpayer and inflation-funded government moneyhose into his bank account.

This is EXACTLY why government should have practically no economic relevance whatsoever. Outfits like these beat their drum, some politicians decide to "invest" in a hare-brained scheme, it ends in tears but the drum-beating outfit and its boardroom members are richer.

Crowbars. Apply to braincase.

Wooly and confused.

Who speaks of "rights"? Did anyone mislabel the drives?

"The only right that Sun is seeking to enforce..."

It's called a "privilege". Generally one has to work for that. Not here. We just relabel it a "right". Instant gratification.

"...thus does not engage the principle of the free movement of goods"

Recently the NSA has said that it couldn't tell anyone how many citizens it was listening in on because doing so would violate their right to privacy. This statement is in the same ballpark.

Austerity? The only solution is to get drunk and set fire to things!

Clearly a bunch of 99%ers who are eagerly awaiting their social-security financed tablets to be delivered to their front porch.

Wasn't there something along those lines in a John Brunner novel? "Muckers"?

Carding macht frei

"the UGNazi black-shirt hacking crew"

Either black hats ain't enough anymore or that should be "brown shirt".