I have yet to encounter a group of atheist/agnostics who did not accept religious people at their events. Likewise, the only situations where I've seen LBGT groups refuse to let anyone in is because they posed a danger.
For yet another example of how an organization intended to address the issues of a subset of society can do so without discriminating against everyone else -- as a white kid in high school, there was no opportunity to do the science fair because my school was too poor. Instead, I did it through NOBCChE, and didn't even realize what it stood for until years later.
I would also be very, very happy to be able to help the Boy Scouts. I was in the BSA for many years, but since I self-identify as gay, and am not willing to lie in order to be eligible to *volunteer* my time and experience.
Boy Scouts gave me some of the best experiences of my adult life, but also taught me that I can't decide how to behave based on what other people do -- just because some people are willing to shove their morals down the tubes doesn't mean that I should.
As a taoist Eagle Scout with Vigil Honor, who also happens to now self-identify as LBGT... I strongly feel that "don't ask, don't tell" is not honesty. If you were LBGT, could you really, in good moral faith, support the Boy Scouts? I can't. I'd like to, I've thought about it a lot, and every time I come to the same conclusion -- if I support them, they have one person less reason to go back to their open-minded roots.
Agreed. The scouts I joined were tolerant and the focus was on leadership and exploration, not exclusion and morals. I earned eagle, I was given Vigil, and I now self-identify as LGBT. Working with the Scouts rubs far to hard against my moral grain to ever consider volunteering or donating to them.
They've made it clear that they think I'm too immoral to help their program anymore, despite giving me every award they have as a youth. I will always be thankful of the years of great experience I had with the organization, but it is no longer the organization it was when I was a youth.
The boy scouts dramatically changed a fairly short time ago. If I recall correctly, leadership training before around 1990 specifically said not to discuss sexual morality, as this was a matter for the parents to handle.
I'm not an athiest, but I am also not christian or jewish (turns out I'm mostly taoist). No one ever noticed, nor cared that I didn't attend religious services at summer camp or on camping trips. I didn't like the idea of dishonoring their ceremony by pretending to believe at all what they were saying.
Agreed. I also did the Eagle Scout and Vigil Honor thing, and although I turned them down because of my own moral objections to participating in an anti-LGBT activity, I was encouraged to help out with the local scouting organizations despite my sexuality. As in, "they have bigger things to worry about" kind of acceptance.
Then you don't purchase ITER and fund 4150 independent projects instead.
IANAPP, but my experience with science in general is that you're better off funding many, many projects to the proof-of-concept phase than funding one proof-of-concept project that we're absolutely sure will eventually cost ~$100B to make actually generating power. That way, we learn a huge amount about plasma physics and can make educated decisions about which projects to fund to completion.
The problem is, right now we know that tokomaks sort of work, but aren't really feasible for power generation. We have *no idea* if all those other systems could be feasible with more work.
Thanks for the details. The nuclear engineering professor that discussed the topic in class mentioned these things, but I couldn't find a good reference to double check the numbers, and only remembered the ~100 year number. You should consider adding what you wrote above to wikipedia under breeder reactors, it's a fairly important piece of information that seems to be missing from the article.
Here's why. We have coal reserves to easily meet the total electricity needs of the entire United States. *If* we were able to sequester all the carbon from those plants, and especially if we were able to do it with a retrofit instead of only on new plants, we would have secure, local, carbon-free electricity for as long as it takes for us to make fusion work.
Alternative electricity generation systems are generally either already very highly utilized (hydro), unsuitable for scaling up to large installations (solar, wind), or are questionably ever going to be net energy positive and sustainable (biomass) (disclaimer, I work on biofuels for a living. I think they will work eventually, but it may well take less time to get sequestration to work than it will to get biofuels to work). $125M is not going to substantially change the energy landscape, and this is exactly the sort of project I would want that sort of basic research money to go into.
If we run off of U235 plants, we'll run out of cheap uranium poste haste. The only way we know of to extend our nuclear fuel supply is to reprocess the U238 transmuted to plutonium (or thorium to U233) into additional fuel. However, this is readily achievable.
Conveniently, this sort of breeder reactor also has the ready potential to result in much more *complete* burning of nuclear fuel, resulting in much further reacted, and generally much shorter half-life products. The half life of breeder reactor waste can be as low as 100 years, and as the 95% of the enriched uranium that is U238 becomes viable fuel instead of being discarded as plutonium, the amount of waste per unit power drops by many orders of magnitude
Right now, India is the only country I am aware of that does extensive breeding (they're not in the Non-proliferation treaty, and don't have natively mined uranium, so they transmute thorium into fissile material) although France does some as well. The US doesn't do it because of proliferation concerns (which makes no sense to me, but whatever). However, since switching to a full nuclear power system requires going to breeder reactors anyway, it will also result in massively less waste (probably way less than coal power, and better contained), and shorter-lived waste.
Sure they did, for the case of oil at least. As fuel becomes "lower grade", it becomes harder to extract. Just imagine the two limiting cases -- now, it's at around 13:1 (in the 50's it was 100:1 or more). If all the oil was literally gone, it would be 0:1.
The mean value theorem pretty clearly means that at some point we'll be lower than 5:1
They aren't suggesting that the energy gain is going to necessarily drop less than 5:1. They are suggesting that if we rely purely on petrochemical oil, it will drop less than 5:1, and that the economy in and of itself may be unable to make that transition due to economics being based on dollars instead of on energy.
They definitely seem to be suggesting that it is necessary to switch, and soon, to alternative fuels like ethanol from sugar cane (8:1), cellulosic ethanol (10-20:1) or algae based biodiesel (???:1). Solar, wind, etc are great except that our battery tech isn't sufficient to use it in transportation -- the energy balance in using electricity as a transportable fuel probably (my feeling, having studied this in a bit of detail, but not actually calculated) not very favorable.
In any event, the article is very interesting, and right or wrong has a lot of good points of how the economy works. Personally, I think the 5:1 cutoff is the most questionable aspect of it, but they claim to have done simulations about it. I think we could probably find a way to deal with less, but it does make the point that 1:1 may not be the actual point at which we're screwed.
I would direct interested people to the following article at the oil drum. It discusses why Brazil's ethanol program is energetically feasible while the US program is impossible. Basically, they demonstrate that as soon as the energy gain is less than around 5:1, the economy spends all it's money on maintaining current energy needs instead of expanding. A ratio of less than 5:1 results in gradual degradation and stagnation of the economy.
It's an *extremely* interesting read. It also explains why, regardless of how much oil might exist, as soon as it costs 1/5th as much energy to explore and drill for it, it is energetically no longer worth doing. It makes "peak oil" a lot scarier, as oil is currently only at around 13:1 at best.
I put linux on ancient computers for my cousins, who cover the gamut of elementary school ages. By far, their favorite toys are tuxpaint and frozen-bubble. They think globulation2 is great as well, but it's a bit too hard for them.
I remember loving simcity when I was in elementary school. I believe there is an open source clone of the original somewhere, but it's probably not pretty enough for today's kids.
It may be different at other technical schools, but at mine there was a very heavy emphasis on technical writing. Technical writing is a lot different from essay writing, and (IMO) is a hell of a lot more useful and fun to write. It'll prepare you for writing proposals (either for grants, or to do projects at a company), and writing up results and giving presentations of a technical nature intended for a slightly-technical audience.
1 on 1 teacher time is not as valuable as 1 on 1 student time, given difficult problems to solve. Being told existing solutions is not nearly as useful as banging your head against a wall coming up with "new" solutions (known already or not), and is definitely not as useful as the moment of enlightenment when you discover that the "library" is perhaps the most useful thing at the university. 1 on 1 teacher time can give you really cool ideas, but I would suggest it's at least as valuable to learn how to work with other people who "don't know the answer" in conjunction with literature which also doesn't know the answer to solve a hard problem -- that's real life, no? Who solves known problems in real life?
Thanks for this post, I graduated not too long ago, and find that I can't help but agree very strongly. I enjoyed every minute of my technical education (even though I switched majors junior year and still graduated in four years... this is not as trivial as it sounds at a hard school). The more impossible a class was, the more I got out of it, regardless of what my grade said, and having gone through that with so many like-minded individuals, I have many extremely close friends with whom I've dealt with times I felt powerless, frustrated, and unqualified to solve a problem (either in class, or outside of class).
From the more practical point of view, I find it extremely easy to find people to work on projects with or start companies now. A quick email or a phone call and I've got a partnership going to solve a real, interesting problem.
Yes, it is different once you have a job. If you get overworked and don't like the hours/problems you get assigned in school, you're boned -- you've made a huge investment already, and moving to a new school is ridiculous to avoid working to death to finish a project for a single class... it's all justified by the work you've already done, the (hopefully small) amount of work you have left to do, and the ability to find a better job when you're done.
If you don't like the work conditions or the projects at your job, it's not even comparably difficult to move to a new one. People switch careers on average once every two years in the US (between the age of 18 and 38).
I mean, I feel like the answer is intuitively obvious. If you were told to press one of two buttons within two seconds, you would bypass the "decision making" phase and just push whichever one you felt like. I'd bet a lot of money that people would have no difficulty pushing one that fast.
Although, your idea does raise the interesting idea of whether or not the button choice would be more or less random. Small, subconscious preferences would probably be exhibited on a much larger level.
First, I want to compliment the GP of this thread. He hit the nail on the head -- seven second lag between a decision and realizing you've made a decision is very different from not having free will. I can very easily imagine people subconsciously (or even consciously) knowing what their decision will be well before they "decide". I find personally that most of my "decision making" is trying to understand why I feel a particular choice is correct, not deciding which choice is correct.
Secondarily, to comment on the parent. I teach karate, and in fighting matches I have observed this in quite a bit of detail. If you try to decide what to do, you are invariably ~100ms too slow in reacting (varies from person to person and experience level).
One of the most critical elements of training is to move intellectual responses into the automatic response regime, which gradually reduces the reaction time while simultaneously freeing conscious brain-power for higher level guidance. For example, at a low level, your body is handling blocking and striking without your conscious intervention while at a high level, you're observing the rhythm of the fight and observing your opponent's posture and techniques.
Then, you set up a "trigger" in your reactions so that as soon as a particular opening appears again, you immediately capitalize. Usually you do this by repeating a motion many, many times, but it eventually happens. That capitalization definitely happens in under 100ms (I can punch about 6 times in one second, and in order to break the rhythm you need to get at least a factor of four faster than that).
To see this (maybe), imagine that your opponent does a quick punch. If you notice that he's a bit slow to recover, a good option is to sidestep and punch before his punch is over -- but a punch is over in 200ms, tops. You have to start your punch in at most 50ms after she starts hers (switching genders for the sake of the female karateka in my club). Of course, I might be convinced that this is more a matter of picking up on a rhythm and predicting a punch... but if you do this then you're screwed by a fake, and it wouldn't explain quick responses to the very first attack of a sequence, so I'm fairly sure it's a real reaction time.
p.s. Can you tell I teach at an engineering school? It's always entertaining when the class is completely at a loss to understand a move until I draw a force diagram.
Besides, if they're running linux, all of their games are going to be installed via aptitude (or equivalent) anyway. I don't have a CD drive in my laptop, and I play plenty of games... the only tricky part was getting the initial OS installed, for which I had to borrow a friend's CD drive from his Dell (I'm so glad that drive bays are standardized between Dells...) Presumably, the kids aren't going to have to *install* the OS, so they'll probably never even need a CD drive to do anything.
Agreed. I've been looking into moving to another country after I finish my PhD work in order to find someplace that's more welcoming and less overbearing. The problem is that when I look closely at Europe, every country there is as bad or worse than the US when it comes to every personal freedom I care about. Germany? Italy? France? England? Are you kidding me? And that doesn't even start to look at gay rights (which are important to me personally) -- in Massachusetts I have the right to get married. In Poland, people get beat up for going to Gay Rights Parades. The Netherlands look promising, but are getting worse rapidly.
The only country I've looked at seriously and found to actually value personal freedom more than the US right now is Canada. Japan has some pretty ridiculous laws, Australia is becoming England II, India is extremely homophobic... (with apologies to the less-developed countries, my first requirement for a country is having a strong technology infrastructure in place for work reasons).
The US continues to be my best choice. It's so bureaucratic and represents such a heterogeneous population that it takes a lot of time for the government to screw things up. Thankfully, things also have the tendency to snap back when they get pushed too far in any one direction (see the pretty much alternating opinions of each generation on most topics). Each generation, the average opinion shifts more socially liberal.
The only thing that matters is the accuracy. If your 4.5gHz clock is accurate to 1ppm, it will be off by 4500 counts every second, which happens to be equal to a drift of 1 millionth of a second every second. If your 1Hz clock is accurate to 1ppm, surprise, it will also drift by 1 millionth of a second every second.
Not to say you would use a 1Hz clock for a second counter, but this is more because it's convenient to not have to wait around in software for a clock edge to start calculations, and because the accuracy goes up when you get to real resonators (which don't exist so much at 1Hz).
I haven't talked to Rosco, I will give them an email.
By the way, I've *substantially* reworked the theory section to better address the confusions which arose in the various slashdot discussions; I added a very large amount of more basic information instead of trying to compress it so much. You should take a look and tell me if you like it. Feel free to email me as well at neltnerb@mit.edu, I feel sort of silly posting comments on a week old slashdot article.
Slashdot Mirror
I have yet to encounter a group of atheist/agnostics who did not accept religious people at their events. Likewise, the only situations where I've seen LBGT groups refuse to let anyone in is because they posed a danger.
For yet another example of how an organization intended to address the issues of a subset of society can do so without discriminating against everyone else -- as a white kid in high school, there was no opportunity to do the science fair because my school was too poor. Instead, I did it through NOBCChE, and didn't even realize what it stood for until years later.
I would also be very, very happy to be able to help the Boy Scouts. I was in the BSA for many years, but since I self-identify as gay, and am not willing to lie in order to be eligible to *volunteer* my time and experience.
Boy Scouts gave me some of the best experiences of my adult life, but also taught me that I can't decide how to behave based on what other people do -- just because some people are willing to shove their morals down the tubes doesn't mean that I should.
As a taoist Eagle Scout with Vigil Honor, who also happens to now self-identify as LBGT... I strongly feel that "don't ask, don't tell" is not honesty. If you were LBGT, could you really, in good moral faith, support the Boy Scouts? I can't. I'd like to, I've thought about it a lot, and every time I come to the same conclusion -- if I support them, they have one person less reason to go back to their open-minded roots.
Agreed. The scouts I joined were tolerant and the focus was on leadership and exploration, not exclusion and morals. I earned eagle, I was given Vigil, and I now self-identify as LGBT. Working with the Scouts rubs far to hard against my moral grain to ever consider volunteering or donating to them.
They've made it clear that they think I'm too immoral to help their program anymore, despite giving me every award they have as a youth. I will always be thankful of the years of great experience I had with the organization, but it is no longer the organization it was when I was a youth.
Mod parent up.
The boy scouts dramatically changed a fairly short time ago. If I recall correctly, leadership training before around 1990 specifically said not to discuss sexual morality, as this was a matter for the parents to handle.
I'm not an athiest, but I am also not christian or jewish (turns out I'm mostly taoist). No one ever noticed, nor cared that I didn't attend religious services at summer camp or on camping trips. I didn't like the idea of dishonoring their ceremony by pretending to believe at all what they were saying.
That was in Indiana.
Agreed. I also did the Eagle Scout and Vigil Honor thing, and although I turned them down because of my own moral objections to participating in an anti-LGBT activity, I was encouraged to help out with the local scouting organizations despite my sexuality. As in, "they have bigger things to worry about" kind of acceptance.
Then you don't purchase ITER and fund 4150 independent projects instead.
IANAPP, but my experience with science in general is that you're better off funding many, many projects to the proof-of-concept phase than funding one proof-of-concept project that we're absolutely sure will eventually cost ~$100B to make actually generating power. That way, we learn a huge amount about plasma physics and can make educated decisions about which projects to fund to completion.
The problem is, right now we know that tokomaks sort of work, but aren't really feasible for power generation. We have *no idea* if all those other systems could be feasible with more work.
Thanks for the details. The nuclear engineering professor that discussed the topic in class mentioned these things, but I couldn't find a good reference to double check the numbers, and only remembered the ~100 year number. You should consider adding what you wrote above to wikipedia under breeder reactors, it's a fairly important piece of information that seems to be missing from the article.
Here's why. We have coal reserves to easily meet the total electricity needs of the entire United States. *If* we were able to sequester all the carbon from those plants, and especially if we were able to do it with a retrofit instead of only on new plants, we would have secure, local, carbon-free electricity for as long as it takes for us to make fusion work.
Alternative electricity generation systems are generally either already very highly utilized (hydro), unsuitable for scaling up to large installations (solar, wind), or are questionably ever going to be net energy positive and sustainable (biomass) (disclaimer, I work on biofuels for a living. I think they will work eventually, but it may well take less time to get sequestration to work than it will to get biofuels to work). $125M is not going to substantially change the energy landscape, and this is exactly the sort of project I would want that sort of basic research money to go into.
If we run off of U235 plants, we'll run out of cheap uranium poste haste. The only way we know of to extend our nuclear fuel supply is to reprocess the U238 transmuted to plutonium (or thorium to U233) into additional fuel. However, this is readily achievable.
Conveniently, this sort of breeder reactor also has the ready potential to result in much more *complete* burning of nuclear fuel, resulting in much further reacted, and generally much shorter half-life products. The half life of breeder reactor waste can be as low as 100 years, and as the 95% of the enriched uranium that is U238 becomes viable fuel instead of being discarded as plutonium, the amount of waste per unit power drops by many orders of magnitude
Right now, India is the only country I am aware of that does extensive breeding (they're not in the Non-proliferation treaty, and don't have natively mined uranium, so they transmute thorium into fissile material) although France does some as well. The US doesn't do it because of proliferation concerns (which makes no sense to me, but whatever). However, since switching to a full nuclear power system requires going to breeder reactors anyway, it will also result in massively less waste (probably way less than coal power, and better contained), and shorter-lived waste.
Sure they did, for the case of oil at least. As fuel becomes "lower grade", it becomes harder to extract. Just imagine the two limiting cases -- now, it's at around 13:1 (in the 50's it was 100:1 or more). If all the oil was literally gone, it would be 0:1.
The mean value theorem pretty clearly means that at some point we'll be lower than 5:1
They aren't suggesting that the energy gain is going to necessarily drop less than 5:1. They are suggesting that if we rely purely on petrochemical oil, it will drop less than 5:1, and that the economy in and of itself may be unable to make that transition due to economics being based on dollars instead of on energy.
They definitely seem to be suggesting that it is necessary to switch, and soon, to alternative fuels like ethanol from sugar cane (8:1), cellulosic ethanol (10-20:1) or algae based biodiesel (???:1). Solar, wind, etc are great except that our battery tech isn't sufficient to use it in transportation -- the energy balance in using electricity as a transportable fuel probably (my feeling, having studied this in a bit of detail, but not actually calculated) not very favorable.
In any event, the article is very interesting, and right or wrong has a lot of good points of how the economy works. Personally, I think the 5:1 cutoff is the most questionable aspect of it, but they claim to have done simulations about it. I think we could probably find a way to deal with less, but it does make the point that 1:1 may not be the actual point at which we're screwed.
I would direct interested people to the following article at the oil drum. It discusses why Brazil's ethanol program is energetically feasible while the US program is impossible. Basically, they demonstrate that as soon as the energy gain is less than around 5:1, the economy spends all it's money on maintaining current energy needs instead of expanding. A ratio of less than 5:1 results in gradual degradation and stagnation of the economy.
The Oil Drum
It's an *extremely* interesting read. It also explains why, regardless of how much oil might exist, as soon as it costs 1/5th as much energy to explore and drill for it, it is energetically no longer worth doing. It makes "peak oil" a lot scarier, as oil is currently only at around 13:1 at best.
I put linux on ancient computers for my cousins, who cover the gamut of elementary school ages. By far, their favorite toys are tuxpaint and frozen-bubble. They think globulation2 is great as well, but it's a bit too hard for them.
I remember loving simcity when I was in elementary school. I believe there is an open source clone of the original somewhere, but it's probably not pretty enough for today's kids.
It may be different at other technical schools, but at mine there was a very heavy emphasis on technical writing. Technical writing is a lot different from essay writing, and (IMO) is a hell of a lot more useful and fun to write. It'll prepare you for writing proposals (either for grants, or to do projects at a company), and writing up results and giving presentations of a technical nature intended for a slightly-technical audience.
1 on 1 teacher time is not as valuable as 1 on 1 student time, given difficult problems to solve. Being told existing solutions is not nearly as useful as banging your head against a wall coming up with "new" solutions (known already or not), and is definitely not as useful as the moment of enlightenment when you discover that the "library" is perhaps the most useful thing at the university. 1 on 1 teacher time can give you really cool ideas, but I would suggest it's at least as valuable to learn how to work with other people who "don't know the answer" in conjunction with literature which also doesn't know the answer to solve a hard problem -- that's real life, no? Who solves known problems in real life?
Thanks for this post, I graduated not too long ago, and find that I can't help but agree very strongly. I enjoyed every minute of my technical education (even though I switched majors junior year and still graduated in four years... this is not as trivial as it sounds at a hard school). The more impossible a class was, the more I got out of it, regardless of what my grade said, and having gone through that with so many like-minded individuals, I have many extremely close friends with whom I've dealt with times I felt powerless, frustrated, and unqualified to solve a problem (either in class, or outside of class).
From the more practical point of view, I find it extremely easy to find people to work on projects with or start companies now. A quick email or a phone call and I've got a partnership going to solve a real, interesting problem.
Yes, it is different once you have a job. If you get overworked and don't like the hours/problems you get assigned in school, you're boned -- you've made a huge investment already, and moving to a new school is ridiculous to avoid working to death to finish a project for a single class... it's all justified by the work you've already done, the (hopefully small) amount of work you have left to do, and the ability to find a better job when you're done.
If you don't like the work conditions or the projects at your job, it's not even comparably difficult to move to a new one. People switch careers on average once every two years in the US (between the age of 18 and 38).
I mean, I feel like the answer is intuitively obvious. If you were told to press one of two buttons within two seconds, you would bypass the "decision making" phase and just push whichever one you felt like. I'd bet a lot of money that people would have no difficulty pushing one that fast.
Although, your idea does raise the interesting idea of whether or not the button choice would be more or less random. Small, subconscious preferences would probably be exhibited on a much larger level.
First, I want to compliment the GP of this thread. He hit the nail on the head -- seven second lag between a decision and realizing you've made a decision is very different from not having free will. I can very easily imagine people subconsciously (or even consciously) knowing what their decision will be well before they "decide". I find personally that most of my "decision making" is trying to understand why I feel a particular choice is correct, not deciding which choice is correct.
Secondarily, to comment on the parent. I teach karate, and in fighting matches I have observed this in quite a bit of detail. If you try to decide what to do, you are invariably ~100ms too slow in reacting (varies from person to person and experience level).
One of the most critical elements of training is to move intellectual responses into the automatic response regime, which gradually reduces the reaction time while simultaneously freeing conscious brain-power for higher level guidance. For example, at a low level, your body is handling blocking and striking without your conscious intervention while at a high level, you're observing the rhythm of the fight and observing your opponent's posture and techniques.
Then, you set up a "trigger" in your reactions so that as soon as a particular opening appears again, you immediately capitalize. Usually you do this by repeating a motion many, many times, but it eventually happens. That capitalization definitely happens in under 100ms (I can punch about 6 times in one second, and in order to break the rhythm you need to get at least a factor of four faster than that).
To see this (maybe), imagine that your opponent does a quick punch. If you notice that he's a bit slow to recover, a good option is to sidestep and punch before his punch is over -- but a punch is over in 200ms, tops. You have to start your punch in at most 50ms after she starts hers (switching genders for the sake of the female karateka in my club). Of course, I might be convinced that this is more a matter of picking up on a rhythm and predicting a punch... but if you do this then you're screwed by a fake, and it wouldn't explain quick responses to the very first attack of a sequence, so I'm fairly sure it's a real reaction time.
p.s. Can you tell I teach at an engineering school? It's always entertaining when the class is completely at a loss to understand a move until I draw a force diagram.
Yeah, schools don't understand technology.
Besides, if they're running linux, all of their games are going to be installed via aptitude (or equivalent) anyway. I don't have a CD drive in my laptop, and I play plenty of games... the only tricky part was getting the initial OS installed, for which I had to borrow a friend's CD drive from his Dell (I'm so glad that drive bays are standardized between Dells...) Presumably, the kids aren't going to have to *install* the OS, so they'll probably never even need a CD drive to do anything.
Agreed. I've been looking into moving to another country after I finish my PhD work in order to find someplace that's more welcoming and less overbearing. The problem is that when I look closely at Europe, every country there is as bad or worse than the US when it comes to every personal freedom I care about. Germany? Italy? France? England? Are you kidding me? And that doesn't even start to look at gay rights (which are important to me personally) -- in Massachusetts I have the right to get married. In Poland, people get beat up for going to Gay Rights Parades. The Netherlands look promising, but are getting worse rapidly.
The only country I've looked at seriously and found to actually value personal freedom more than the US right now is Canada. Japan has some pretty ridiculous laws, Australia is becoming England II, India is extremely homophobic... (with apologies to the less-developed countries, my first requirement for a country is having a strong technology infrastructure in place for work reasons).
The US continues to be my best choice. It's so bureaucratic and represents such a heterogeneous population that it takes a lot of time for the government to screw things up. Thankfully, things also have the tendency to snap back when they get pushed too far in any one direction (see the pretty much alternating opinions of each generation on most topics). Each generation, the average opinion shifts more socially liberal.
The only thing that matters is the accuracy. If your 4.5gHz clock is accurate to 1ppm, it will be off by 4500 counts every second, which happens to be equal to a drift of 1 millionth of a second every second. If your 1Hz clock is accurate to 1ppm, surprise, it will also drift by 1 millionth of a second every second.
Not to say you would use a 1Hz clock for a second counter, but this is more because it's convenient to not have to wait around in software for a clock edge to start calculations, and because the accuracy goes up when you get to real resonators (which don't exist so much at 1Hz).
I haven't talked to Rosco, I will give them an email.
By the way, I've *substantially* reworked the theory section to better address the confusions which arose in the various slashdot discussions; I added a very large amount of more basic information instead of trying to compress it so much. You should take a look and tell me if you like it. Feel free to email me as well at neltnerb@mit.edu, I feel sort of silly posting comments on a week old slashdot article.
R. W. G. Hunt (2004). The Reproduction of Colour, 6th ed., Chichester UK: Wiley-IS&T Series in Imaging Science and Technology. ISBN 0-470-02425-9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB#Physical_principles_for_the_choice_of_red.2C_green.2C_and_blue