worren

"They throw it at you..."

I've the same gripe. Maybe, I can elucidate the parent's point.

I can appreciate the mathematician's fancy for reducing numerical manipulation to an indivisible, atomic precision. Creating poetic abstractions is dear to many in applied sciences. Where it sticks in the craw, where it stops making sense, is where you have this beautiful construct and it's purpose is left a mystery. If it's a piece of art, fine. It's welcome to hang on the wall over there next to the others, but I'm not going to remember it in much detail without some context. If there isn't a concrete use, if there isn't a purpose, the idea won't make it out of short-term memory. "But it's the foundation for all of these other beautiful edifices of logic that we'll cover in the next chapter!" It's like being told, "This is red paint. This is green paint. This is burnt umber paint...", without ever being shown a Picasso, Renoir, or da Vinci. If you ground the presentation with messy, imprecise, real world numbers, the logical purity of the subject will not be lost or sullied, the esteem for it's power only more appreciated. Pull the pin, show us what it can do!

You may not be a physicist or engineer, and that their respective topics will be covered in their respective classes. But those same physicists and engineers probably aren't mathematicians. So what business did they have teaching me math... better than a math teacher ever did?

As I was later to understand, "The Republic" is slang that indicates a sympathy for Republicans, Irish Catholics, some of whom rather notoriously caused "trouble" for the Crown and it's subjects. The offences were mutual. Open hostility relatively rare now, but there is still a lot of animosity and caution reserved for suspected troublemakers of any stripe. As an American, I am certain I was treated deferentially. I had, in effect, just given the agent the finger.

I am sensitive, having insensitively used the term "The Republic" to refer to Ireland when speaking to a British customs agent, to your argument regarding sovereignty and the necessary discretion of government officials. I simply didn't know the implications. Similarly, a stated intent, not a joke, to engage in an activity that, while indiscreet and boorish in some circles, is not reviled as in our Puritanical society should not serve to permanently discredit a visitor to the US. It is a pernicious scale to employ. And it isn't just visitors to the US who need to find concern in this story. Am I to expect that all of my public statements from now on, guided by whatever level of maturity, sobriety, or proclivity, are to be recorded, permanently and used to determine which airspaces I may traverse? Should my intended audience include every customs official I may ever encounter? Puritanical, indeed. Jesus and the border patrol are watching! You trumpet our political freedoms, casting aspersions on the domestic political establishment. Talk trash about the Her Majesty and then go to England. Speak about religion or sexuality without offending anybody, and expect to travel the other way around the globe to reach your destination. A panopticon such as this equates every iota of common speech with taunting an official.

The argument that we're still a popular place to visit rings hollow. Greece is a popular place to visit, but that shouldn't server as an endorsement of their horribly broken bureaucracy.

If damage is done...you can be held criminally responsible

I was very careful to condition my statement. If something happens, then there is a probability of penalty. The current system conditions operators to gamble. The perceived risk of something bad happening is low. So, it doesn't matter what, if any, penalty may be associated with shirking responsibility. Without the risk of damage dramatically increasing or criminalizing the cause rather than the result, the behavior will not change.

do we really need a Fukushima size hacker-induced failure to wake people up.

There's no incentive to install the systems correctly or to ensure that they remain secure. It isn't illegal to operate a vulnerable system. A Fukushima-like event won't make a difference. The specter of preemptive financial penalties might give pause, but an accounting after the fact? That only matters if something goes awry.

It's rather lovely to see simulations providing robust direction. The old method of seeing what sticks to the proverbial wall is horribly tedious.

"...burning the warehouse to the ground..."

If you've a militaristic mindset, and there's a bad guy in the warehouse, this is exactly what happens. A siege mentality, and the simplicity and effectiveness of execution reinforce the approach.

"You know the score, pal? You're little people."

To a certain extent, a program like this can pay for itself. A school's influence greatly affects the attention (read: grants and contracts) that labs and faculty enjoy basking in. Conversely, competitors theories and techniques are left clawing their way out of obscurity for lucrative funding. Patents and spinoffs make it big business, and all is fair...

Past observing tadpole behavior, science takes a strongly dangerous bent.