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The only "unrest" is going to come from the voting-livestock that is bribed into voting democratic in the inner cities.

Their solution will be more welfare to build more voting-live stock that votes for democrats.

So you're saying you prefer the free range voting-livestock the Republican party cultivates in rural areas? 340 of 386 of persistent-poverty counties in the US are rural counties. 16.5% of people living in rural areas are poor, compared to 14.9% of people living in metropolitan areas nationwide. The deep South leads the charge, and accounts for the essentially all of the difference, with 19.6% of rural people falling below the poverty line, compared to 16.2% in cities.

None of that corn fed voting-livestock for you, no sir. You prefer grass fed voting-livestock. It's skinnier, because it's starving, because nobody can live on the diet of grass and bullshit provided by the Republican party.

I've only done a bit of diving myself, and it was close enough to the surface that I didn't need anything more exotic than a tank. I've luckily (I guess) never used a rebreather. I'll take your word on the excitement of using it. :) Passout games are dangerous in the comfort of your own living room surrounded by pillows. I'm thinking underwater is less than ideal.

In theory, the necessary gases are present in the water. Taking it out of the water, and presenting just what you need in a useable form would be the cool trick.

If the Triton thing ever works out, it'll revolutionize all kinds of technology. It made for some cool pictures though.

The Like-a-fish has a mention of doing something with the DoD, but they couldn't discuss it further. I've seen claims like that in the past from really cool "could maybe work" places, that really turn out to be "We got our 15 minutes of fame! Whoo!"

Foreign countries paying Americans to build arms for them brings in capital that didn't exist here.

No it doesn't. It brings in goods. The only way for foreign countries to get American dollars is to send us goods (or get us to give them the money for free). All exporting does is give us more money to buy foreign goods. Since the American dollar is the de facto world currency (and the world economy is growing), we run a trade deficit. Increasing our exports does not reduce that trade deficit; instead, it increases our imports.

Ironically, the thing that brings foreign capital to the US is Americans buying foreign goods. Because there is an advantage to holding one's money in the world currency, foreign investors take their import profits and invest them in the US. This tends to cause bubbles (dot com, housing, etc.) when times are good, as foreign investors have a lot of US dollars to invest then. Later, when times are bad, the US imports less and foreign investors have less money to invest, causing a bust.

This is why the US should consider a national wealth tax. Currently, about $13 trillion of $50 trillion in US wealth is held by foreigners. A modest 1% (10 mill) tax would raise about $130 billion from foreigners and could be offset by income tax reductions (or a conversion from an income tax to a consumption tax) for domestic investors. Thus, something revenue neutral for domestic tax payers could still add an additional $130 billion in tax revenue. A wealth tax also makes more sense as a revenue source for defense spending than an income tax does.

A wealth tax would discourage foreign investment, increasing the US's internal investment. Further, it would reduce the loopback effect of booms by increasing the tax as the value increases (rather than waiting until the profit is taken via a sale). Note that foreign investors do not pay taxes on their US capital gains to the US (and may or may not pay it in their own country) but would still have to pay the wealth tax.

Suburburban development in the U.S. doesn't begin with the automobile, it begins with the ferry, the horse-drawn streetcar and the railroad.

Brooklyn has a middle income commuter population in 1850. The streetcar [1880-1930] defined - or created - the suburban landscape the automobile requires:

Automobiles were invented around the ame time as trolleys, but had much less immediate impact on urban development in the early years of the 20th century. They were expensive, hard to store, and poorly accommodated in urban places. Yet the streetcars began to loosen up the American metropolis so effectively that cars began to find navigating suburbs easier with each passing year. The first commercial districts to begin building parking lots were the trolley-based taxpayer strips. By the 1920s, the west side of Los Angeles began to develop fully auto-based shopping. The Six Suburban Eras of the United States {2006] {PDF]

Yes it makes for nice, clean, tidy towns, with beautiful roads, ample living space, etc. But take away the automobiles and people are screwed.

You have it backwards.

The "picturesque suburb" begins with Frederick Law Olmsted in 1857.

The move to the suburbs becomes the defining ambition of the American middle class while Henry Ford is still peddling a tricycle.

"Giving up" on doing a study showing a particular result means hiding results that don't agree with your hypothesis. You can't give up on something unless you've tried.

Here's one from 2003.

A report from 1998.

Some more from the 1990's.

And a Stanford professor on industry FUD in the 50s to 70s. (unfortunately light on details, it's a press release).

It's hard to find the papers from that long ago. I will amend my post though: the tobacco industry is STILL doing their best to pervert science to show results favourable to themselves.

I wonder if they read a similar paper from a year ago?

RYAN M. KELLOGG and Hendrik Wolff, "Does Extending Daylight Saving Time Save Energy? Evidence from an Australian Experiment" (February 14, 2007). Center for the Study of Energy Markets. Paper CSEMWP-163.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/ucei/csem/CSEMWP-163

Maybe there should be some kind of central place we could all use to search for papers that have some bearing our subject matter?

There are several petaflop machines in their initial phases of roll-out right now, but peak performance isn't the only number worth paying attention to. The SX-9 is an amazing architecture, with orders of magnitude more bandwidth than the roadrunner system, both in interconnect, and in memory bandwidth. It's also a very expensive machine. The SX, however, has an advantage of being an update and refinement to a very established architecture. codes written for the SX-3 are going to perform well on the sx-9.

Roadrunner is a cool machine, but hard to program. You have most of your compute capability on the cell coprocessors, which are connected by a non-coherent infinaband pipe, to the host opteron processor. On the cell, you have a powerpc doing the program setup, and the 8 spu engines chunking through the data in parallel. If you can parallelize your program enough, you can get those working really quickly, but you have to do all the memory management in software, and control flow has to happen on the ppc. It's not impossible to get good performance from such a machine, but don't expect to just drop your existing software onto it and get decent performance. Blue gene is a less radical approach, and it took 3-4 years for a dozen codes to be rewritten to take advantage of it. Los Alamos runs a small number of applications, but needs a lot of performance. Thus they can spend the time to optimise their small list of apps for such a heirarchical design.

Also, you have your number off a little. The updated cell will provide 100Gflops of double precision performance, according to IBM. Still very fast. http://www.cs.utk.edu/~dongarra/cell2006/cell-slides/04-Ken-Koch.pdf
http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4262&context=lbnl

First, the exact quote is this: A poll taken by the UCS of 549 randomly selected members of the American Physical Society found that SDI was criticized as "a step in the wrong direction" by 54 percent of the respondents who did not oppose other military R&D; 29 percent were in favor. . In other words, we're talking about generally pro-military R&D people opposing SDI (also, in a left-leaning liberal mathematics numbers above 50% are considered a majority).
Second, this is a poll taken in 1986. The whole SDI disaster started in 1983, Ashton Carter from MIT provided scientific criticism against SDI when testifying for Congress back in 1984. The "science says this can't possibly work" part came first, political advocacy and polling came afterwards.

You fail to mention that only 29% said SDI was positive (source). If 71% of respondents don't think your massively expensive program (which, by the way, had the potential to employ many of the people asked in the poll) has positive value, I'd say that could be described as "profound and pervasive skepticism". I do, however, agree that the poll is biased. You could have said it in your own words rather than cut and pasting it from some website somewhere.

A proposal to encode the Greek Lunate Sigma in UCS. (It's since been incorporated into Unicode 4.0.) Or this blog post.

Only two?
How disappointing for you.

I suggest you look up "knowitallatosis" while you're at it

      Here, some links from reputable sources for the terminally lazy. I don't know it all, but I know a lot more than you about this particular subject, at any rate. Sure, you can believe that doctors are "making this stuff up". Or you can believe the snake oil salesman when he promises to cure everything with silver. Eventually you'll come to us anyway. I have a special rate for people like you.

http://www.emedicine.com/derm/topic595.htm

http://dermatology.cdlib.org/111/case_reports/argy ria/wadhera.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= retrieve&db=pubmed&list_uids=11107524&dopt=abstrac t

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Search&db=pubmed&term=argyria&tool=QuerySuggestion

The End of End-to-End: Preserving the Architecture of the Internet in the Broadband Era

Mark A. Lemley, Stanford (...)

Boalt Working Papers in Public Law

University of California, Berkeley

IANAL, but there's something called a state action doctrine which allows governments to make regulations which would otherwise be considered to violate antitrust law. See, for example, http://repositories.cdlib.org/blewp/art140/

The number of outsourced jobs is not high enough to make a dent.

You're right, what's 10% of the current US labor force whose jobs are at risk of being outsourced relative to the 500,000 jobs a year being outsourced. Besides, isn't our economy creating 30,000 jobs a month? Subtract from that the 150,000 people entering the work force each month and ... ummm ... no no wait WalMart, McDs, Disney are always hiring! Anyhow, I don't care if you're for or against outsourcing, but you're underinformed if you think that outsourcing "is not high enouth to make a dent" while we're not even creating enough jobs to meet the growth in our local labor pool.

But if I told you I had something that would not just cure but outright prevent cancer and specifically the most lethal cancer, the type that causes 30% of all cancer deaths, wouldn't you be interested?

It's not sexy, it's not high-tech, it's not at the cell level, but I have a vaccine for the most lethal cancer. It's called tobacco prevention. It's proven effective and cost effective.

Tobacco product causes 30% of all cancer deaths in America.

The most effective way of fighting those deaths is not at the cellular level, when the cancer has already started. The most effective way is prevention, reducing tobacco consumption as rapidly and effectively as possible.

This is not sexy, doesn't involve high tech -- and there's nothing high tech cancer cures have ever delivered that even comes close.

Put yourself in an oncologist's shoes and think about it.

Better yet, think about all the people you know, and chances are you knew someone who died from tobacco product. You should. This product kills 1 out of 5 Americans.

You want to fight cancer? Stop it before it starts. Learn about tobacco .

Learn about the scope and scale of the problem, the big picture

Learn about what tobacco product does to the customer, to those nearest the customer, to all of us:

Learn how tobacco product is engineered, marketed, and spread across the globe:

And, if you decide you do want to do something about this, learn what and who you will be fighting, and how to fight effectively.

It's not sexy, it's not high tech, but it's nothing less than a vaccine for cancer, and it works.

LifeBits? That's nothing!
Buckminster Fuller archived everything from 1920-1983. His mass storage was a warehouse :-)

His Dymaxion Chronofile was one of his many human guinea pig experiments. For those of the /. generation who've never heard of the guy, he's one of the 20th century's great thinkers--probably most famous for the Geodesic dome. Read Operating Manual for SpaceShip Earth once in a while for a wake up call on priorities. :-)

It seems that vpr does indeed kill cells (indiscriminatly... a vesicle bound delivery mechanism is needed to deliver vpr on contact) in a manner quite different from that of p53. vpr induces caspases [1] which in turn causes the "cleavage of critical cellular substrates, including poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase and lamins, so precipitating the dramatic morphological changes of apoptosis[,]" [2] resulting in cell death. (Of course, the article was absolutely correct, p53 is a totally separate mechanism[1])

Notably, the key with using such a drug against cancer, as with all cancer drugs, is a finely targeted delivery system. I suspect that if vpr sees clinical usage, it will either be in a vesical bound delivery system (antibody mediated vesical fusion) or a one time viral borne delivery system (such as HIV minus the ability to manufacture protein coats with the appropriate antibody mounted on the protein.)

1: Shostak LD; Ludlow J; Fisk J; Pursell S; Rimel BJ; Nguyen D; Rosenblatt JD; Planelles V. Roles of p53 and caspases in the induction of cell cycle arrest and apoptosis by HIV-1 vpr. Experimental Cell Research, 1999 Aug 25, 251(1):156-65.

2: Cohen GM. Caspases: the executioners of apoptosis. Biochemical Journal, 1997 Aug 15, 326 ( Pt 1):1-16.

Don Armstrong -".naidnE elttiL etah I"