From the article: "The newly formed million-processor-core ‘Spiking Neural Network Architecture’ or ‘SpiNNaker’ machine is capable of completing more than 200 million million actions per second, with each of its chips having 100 million moving parts."
Yes, I've switched to the HTML version permanently, and I hope others do the same. Maybe if Google sees enough people switching to HTML, they'll get an idea of how popular their new version is.
There is something to be said for having at least one 30 meter class telescope in the Northern hemisphere. There are parts of the sky which are never visible from Chile.
Your point about there being no universally recognized Native Hawaiian representative organization is a very good one. There's no group or finite set of groups, that the TMT could reach an agreement with (by providing scholarships, environmental offsets, rent, etc.) and then be free from the protests. Three people getting angry in a Hilo coffee shop can stop construction of the TMT.
I don't think this ruling changes much. The TMT project had permission to start construction 3 years ago. They could not even hold the ground-breaking ceremony, because protesters blocked the access road. Every time the TMT construction crews tried to drive up the mountain, protesters would stand in the road, and block the vehicles. A couple of hours later police would show up. They would stand around for 3ish more hours, and then arrest perhaps 5% of the people blocking the road. By the time that was done, it was too late for the construction crews to get to the summit and do any work, so everyone drove back down. The few people who were arrested were immediately released once they arrived in Hilo, so they'd be ready to do it all again the next day if the crews tried to return to the mountain. No significant fines were ever levied on the arrested protesters.
The only way the TMT construction will be able to proceed is if local law enforcement is willing to arrest dozens of protesters (including "aunties" - photogenic elderly Hawaiian women) every week day, and not release them immediately. There is absolutely no reason to believe that will happen.
Even if the local law enforcement officials are willing to perform mass arrests, there are lots of other pressure points that the protesters could attack. I would not be surprised to see the protesters shut down the University of Hawaii, which hosts the Institute for Astronomy that runs Maunakea Observatory, because that university has a very active Hawaiian Studies program.
I worked for an observatory on Maunakea when the the first set of TMT construction protests took place. The protesters were allowed to build an unpermitted shelter building, to make blocking the road more convenient for them. If they spend half a day piling rocks in the road, they can declare that it is a sacred shrine, and the road maintenance crews cannot simply remove it. Meanwhile, our observatory had to go through a formal review process with an outside board if we wanted to move a small weather station from one side of our building's roof to another side.
Actually, when I was a Fed worker, I was told that browsing porn sites was one of the very few things that could lead to immediate termination, without the usual Civil Service procedures (which take years to play out).
There are things which are provably impossible. No amount of future cleverness will change that. It is, for example, impossible to find three nonzero positive integers A, B and C for which the cube of A plus the cube of B equals the cube of C.
The article does not address what I think is the Achille's Heel of crypto currencies: Controlling the money supply is one of the most powerful rights that a government has. Why do you think the governments in the EU have not unified their fiscal policies? Why do you think EU countries cheat on their budget deficits? Governments want to be able to make money plentiful during economic downturns, and tighten it up when the economy starts overheating. They set nonzero target inflation rates to encourage people to consume and invest. The idea that governments will allow some technology to remove that power from them is silly. If a crypto currency ever becomes a significant medium of exchange, it will be outlawed (following predictable reports about Drug Kingpins, Terrorists and Child Pornography).
I agree with everything you said. But just as important as the technical leap was the business model improvement. Before the iPhone, at least in the US, carriers dictated what functions could and could not be present in the phones. The video offerings were nothing but short snippets of content offered at steep prices from the carriers. Phone manufacturers considered the carriers to be their real customers, and the carriers wanted to make sure that every phone feature was a money stream for them. Apple was the first manufacturer with enough clout to get a carrier (Cingular) to offer a smartphone that was not crippled by the carrier. Once the iPhone became popular, it was no longer possible for carriers to hobble the smartphones they sold, in order to nickle-and-dime their customers.
Yes. If you report a spectacular result, and it is not proven wrong within ~5 years, its effect on your career is almost the same as if the result had been correct. The unfortunate thing for these folks is that their claim was shot down quickly.
I think your estimate of 99% is a wee bit high. At least in the field I'm familiar with, astronomy, the idea of using Excel for any serious computation or design would be met with laughter.
Science publication is moving (very, very, very slowly) towards a model where instead of a final, polished traditional paper, the raw data along with the software tools and interpretation is published. In principle this should allow readers to completely understand and reproduce the processing of the raw data, rather than reading a few paragraphs summarizing the processing done by the authors. Using a closed source tool for processing the data limits how deeply a reader can delve into the processing that the authors did, because the functions in the proprietary package are black boxes. Jupyter has no black boxes.
Also, the persons most comfortable with a radically different publishing model like PR are apt to be young researchers, but they are the ones most in need of establishing a reputation by publishing in established, prestigious journals.
As far as I can tell, the only advantage Siri has over Google Assistant is its integration with Wolfram Alpha. If you ask Siri "What is the angular diameter of Mars?" it will tell you the current angular diameter of Mars. Google Assistant can't do that. Apart from the Wolfram Alpha connection, Siri is inferior in every way, IMHO.