According to three separate tests I have an IQ of 160, and I've spent most of my career working in academia. And believe me, intelligence is overrated. "Average" people are often a great deal smarter than they're given credit for.
And us "smart" guys can be dumber than a bag of hammers more often than we'd like to admit. The smarter you are, the more likely you are to be a victim of Dunning-Krueger syndrome. In academia, "I have a Ph.D." often translates into "I know everything about everything", usually with comic or tragic outcomes.
What I have seen, both in my personal and professional lives, that would make far more impact for society is finding the genes for discipline, for rationality, for work ethic, for compassion to others. Solve those, and you'll improve our society far more than trying to create a planet of Einstein's.
My friend lives in Atlanta. She has a TigerDirect, two Microcenters, and two Fry's.
I live in Nashville. We have Radio Shack, and Best Buy.
I don't understand why companies would rather beat each other senseless in fiercely competitive markets and completely ignore markets where they would *be* the market.
The whole "people go to Best Buy to shop and then buy online" thing is totally overblown. Yeah, I understand a real storefront costs a bit, so I don't mind paying a little extra, especially to have it *now*.
Best Buy's problem is that it isn't a 10-15% increase. It's often 200-400% increase. Golly shucks, I just can't understand why people go to Best Buy, look at price tags, and then buy somewhere else.
I can't find someone who'll sell me a Corvette for $10. That must mean there's a Corvette shortage...
The MBA's, pols, and lobbyists that run our society can't seem to understand that supply and demand applies to other people as well. If the reward for several years of grad school were equal to the risk and cost, you'd see more people in STEM. That's why they went into finance, because that's where the money was.
When the scientists and engineers make more money than the MBA's running the company, I'll imaging you won't have any problem finding them. (And I have both a MBA from a top 25 school and 12 years in high-performance computer. Guess who makes more around here...)
When you say something is unimportant, and yet treat it as unimportant, people are smart enough to see through that.
The world uses 83 million barrels per day. If they threw up 20 of those 1M tanks, it would only represent a few hours of world oil usage. And most of that capacity isn't used to "speculate", but for temporary storage for loading/unloading/processing. As your supply chain gets farther afield (deep sea, Venezuela, etc), you need to have more "cache" in the system to avoid disruptions.
I did not say speculation was impossible, simply that a) it was *much* harder than the average person understands and b) most "speculation" was simply the country that owns the oil leaving it in the ground on the belief that it would be worth more tomorrow. Goldman Sachs are a bunch of elementary-school pikers next to Saudi Aramco.
You're wasting your time. I've argued with roman_mir before. Either he's a professional troll out for lulz, or a walking, talking case of Dunning-Kruger. He is absolutely, utterly impervious to any facts which don't conform to how he thinks the world *should* work. And suggestions that perhaps he might want to read a book or two don't end well.
the output is growing, again, thanks to new technologies, like fracking and shale oil.
Supply is growing, but demand is growing faster. You do understand that supply-and-demand is about the imbalance between the two? As that imbalance grows, the price of oil will continue to climb.
the global demand is down because USA demand is massively down,
America is no longer the primary driver of either the world economy as a oil, or the oil market. Again, you really need to open a newspaper and see how the world has changed the past 10 years.
They set interest rates very low during Clinton and the other Bush before him
You do understand that supply-and-demand applies to cash as well as oil? The US didn't "set" the Fed rate low. The world economy is awash with capital looking for a safe harbor, and relatively little demand for that capital. When the supply is high, and the demand is low, the price (in this case interest rate) falls. Conspiracy nuts have a hard time understanding that the Fed doesn't "set" the rate. It looks where the market has shot the arrow, and moves the target there.
why would you want me to subject myself to worthless Keynesian shamanism?
Because that worthless Keynesian shamanism has proven remarkably adept at making predictions on inflation and growth on an economy against the zero-bound? Just because you personally don't like Keynes, doesn't make it any less right, any more than hating the fact that 2+2=4 will make it suddenly equal 5.
I haven't been wrong yet.
In the two threads I've followed you, you haven't been right yet. It's hard to tell whether you're actually a hard-headed idiot, or a remarkably advanced troll. If the latter, I solute you. Otherwise, may I suggest you spend some time reading about the Dunning-Kruger effect on Wikipedia? Because you seriously do not have a single clue.
I hope you all recognise that the prices of gas are being moved up by inflation, not by any increase in demand
How on earth is this modded insightful?!? This is head-in-the-sand Ron Paul wharrgarbl. You do understand that global oil supply has nearly peaked, while global demand is growing rapidly.
Rising oil prices aren't caused by some liberal conspiracy to debase the currency. Even if you adjust for inflation, oil is reaching all-time highs. Just like Adam Smith and supply-and-demand would predict.
I remember you from a previous thread, and I suggest you go to a community college and actually take a class on economics and pass it with a A/B before you start chiming in with your opinion on how the world should work.
Your idea of how the world works, and how it actually *does* work, don't intersect at any two contiguous points.
I've already seen some of my Facebook friends grousing about how speculators are gouging them. They have a hard time understanding how much the world has changed in a decade. Most of it is due to static oil supply meeting rapidly rising oil demand, coupled with extremely inelastic demand for gas. Within a few years we have another billion or so people competing with us for the same barrel of oil.
It's actually hard to speculate in oil, simply because there's no place to store enough to make a huge difference. Most "speculators" are sovereign countries, who are wagering that oil left in the ground today would be more expensive tomorrow.
Iran produces about 5% of the world's oil. If Israel and Iran go at it, the price of oil would go through the ceiling. The price of oil is set by the cost of extracting the last barrel of oil, and tapping those deep-sea oil wells and Canadian oil sands for that last barrel of oil is extremely expensive. If it costs $100 to produce that last barrel of Canadian oil, why would Saudi Arabia sell their oil for $20 instead of $100 too? They'd be leaving money on the table. That's why the last barrel sets the price.
And if a country expects a barrel of oil to shoot up $50 in the event of war, it makes sense to either charge more for pumping it today, or leave it in the ground until the price goes up naturally.
To put this in Slashdot terms, supposed you had a complete set of Babylon 5 collector plates that were worth $100 today, and you expected them to be worth $1000 next year from now, would you sell them now or wait? The smart thing to do is either wait until next year, or require the buyer to pay you a premium today above the $100 asking price. Expectations affect the price. And if you wait until next year, you have reduced the global supply of collector plates on sale, so the price goes up a bit to compensate. Supply and demand also affect the price.
If you're really worried about speculators, buy a Prius, Leaf, or Volt. Last time I checked, no one's been able to form a cartel on sunshine and wind. And if you drive a big SUV, stop whining about how speculators, government, Democrats, or "The Man" is screwing you, and take a long, hard look at how you are screwing yourself.
Gingrich said this in Florida, a few weeks before the Floriday primary. Newt needs a win here to cement his momentum, because if Romney wins it's a serious blow to his candidacy. Because of that, I expect him to spend the next couple of weeks telling voters any outlandish fantasy it takes to get elected, up to and including telling people in Miami he'll invade Cuba and kill Castro.
They're not imaging the event horizon, they're trying to image the accretion disk around the central black hole, and hoping they can see the event horizon's "shadow" against it. I doubt that we're going to be directly imaging the event horizon for the central black hole anytime soon.
The Milky Way's central black hole is 4.l million solar masses. The Schwartzchild radius of a static black hole of that mass is roughly 12.3 million km, or 17.7 x the radius of our sun. That's roughly 1/3 the size of Mercury's orbit. You could put it in the center of our solar system, and not devour a single planet (though they would start orbiting a *lot* faster).
Hold out your fist at arm's length. If you put the Milky Way's central black hole where our sun was, it would be roughly that big.
Now, imagine trying to see something that size, which is perfectly dark, from 27,000 light years away and you'll understand how difficult it would be to directly image it.
I was talking about games that use Steam DRM, vs just the Steam store. The only two non-Steam games I have are Fallout 3 and Arkham Asylum. Past that, if you don't use Steam DRM, I don't buy it. Respect your customer, or you won't have customers.
These guys are walking billboards highlighting the value of Steam vs the crap DRM-ware of Ubi, Origin, MS Games, etc.
I was stuck at the office very, very late one night. Nothing to do. So I logged into Steam, downloaded a game I owned ("Bloody Good Time", excellent FWIW), and played a while until I could get of there.
The MBA's at Ubu/EA/MS would explode at the very concept. And it is why I will be spending my money at Steam.
(And Gabe, if you read this, I can haz HL2e3/HL3 now plz?)
Agreed. I was surprised the first time I visited the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin. *THAT* is how movies are supposed to be seen. I can see why Harry loves 'em so much.
I have a MBA from a top tier school, but I also have a decade of experience as senior sysadmin for a large academic computer cluster and a large chunk of a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, so hopefully I'll have some street cred when I say this.
I promise you, if Wall Street paid $500k a year to geology majors, you'd see that discipline packed with money-grubbing psychopaths too. You're confusing the body of knowledge, with the people who learn it.
Yes, I know MBA's who are parasitic, narcissistic sociopaths. I also know MBA's who are good decent people with honest ambition and a desire to make their mark and be their own master.
Believe it or not, there are nerds in business and politics, just as much as in computers and physics. I happen to enjoy economics, finance, entrepreneurship, and public policy. A MBA allowed me to scratch those itches.
Saying "MBA's are all PHB's" is like saying IT people are all BOFH's. You're painting with a mighty broad brush.
My parents live a mile off the main road at the bottom of a valley. No DSL, cable, 3g/4g, satellite, but with the help of a big honking antenna and a couple of amplifiers, they can pick up solid TV signals.
I'm salivating at the prospect of getting two of these radios and trying to set up a point-to-point bridge between their house and mine. The 145-225 MHz band out to be a lot more amenable to line-of-sight obstacles than 2.4 GHz.
They don't have any cell reception, barring standing in the right spot in the yard. They live at the bottom of a large valley that blocks cell signals.
One thing I have thought about is buying two antennas and building a passive reflector to beam some signal into their valley, but I'm waiting for Verizon (or anyone, for that matter) to roll out 4G before I spend money on it.
I've used Lynx since the early 90's, but it's not a realistic solution for my parents. Since they have both Chrome and Firefox installed, I disabled loading photos in Firefox to give them something Lynx-like, but it renders a number of sites unreadable, primarily ones that validator.w3.org barf at.
and the 3G users, and the satellite users, and everyone else that has a low-bandwidth and/or high cost per byte connection.
My parents can't get DSL or cable. They're stuck with 22k dial-up, and use AdBlock Plus, NoFlash, and Propel accelerator with compression set to the point where you can barely recognize photos, and it still takes 2 minutes for a reasonably normal page (CNN, MSNBC) to load, much less anything with a ton of Javascript or Flash.
Can't websites automatically detect connection speed the first time a client visits, and store a cookie so that us slow people get a nice, simple website?
Oh, and Propel, please move to JPEG2000 and XZ compression. Some people need every byte they can get.
This is primarily caused by newbie admins who are just smart enough to be dangerous. They need root access, but consider sudo to be annoying, so they give root a password. And because they don't know any better, they suck at picking passwords. Put the two together, and you've got a hacked box in short order.
I'm sure the Chinese government has their crack team of hackers, just like we do. Having said that...
I run a honeypot at work. 70% of the attacks do come from Chinese machines, but I suspect that's because the Chinese buy those $2 pre-hacked warez'd Windows CD's at the market and don't install security updates.
Of the actual living, breathing hackers that log into my honeypot, 1/3 of them come from Romanian IP's, and another 1/3 come from other eastern European countries, but the text files/strings in their utilities are Romanian. Wired has a good article which partly corroborates this.
I see two modes of attack. 98% are single machines launching 100's of attacks. 70% of those are in China. The other 2% are distributed attacks. These are more likely to be major power intelligence agencies, and don't have anywhere near the geographic concentration as the single-machine attacks (Chinese IP's are 15% of distributed attacks, same as Brazil).
We have several racks full, purchased because "they're cheaper than Tesla's".
Except the Tesla's have, as pointed out, ECC memory and better thermal management, and the GTX's have several useful features (like the GPU load level in nvidia-smi) disabled.
The former cause the compute nodes to crash regularly. What you save on cards, you'll lose in salary for someone to nursemaid them. The latter makes it harder to integrate into a scheduler environment (we're using Torque).
Yes, this is primarily marketing discrimination, and there probably isn't $10 worth of real difference between the two. I hope the marketing droid who thought that scheme up burns. It's a total aggravation, but paying for Teslas is worthwhile.
Slashdot Mirror
According to three separate tests I have an IQ of 160, and I've spent most of my career working in academia. And believe me, intelligence is overrated. "Average" people are often a great deal smarter than they're given credit for.
And us "smart" guys can be dumber than a bag of hammers more often than we'd like to admit. The smarter you are, the more likely you are to be a victim of Dunning-Krueger syndrome. In academia, "I have a Ph.D." often translates into "I know everything about everything", usually with comic or tragic outcomes.
What I have seen, both in my personal and professional lives, that would make far more impact for society is finding the genes for discipline, for rationality, for work ethic, for compassion to others. Solve those, and you'll improve our society far more than trying to create a planet of Einstein's.
My friend lives in Atlanta. She has a TigerDirect, two Microcenters, and two Fry's.
I live in Nashville. We have Radio Shack, and Best Buy.
I don't understand why companies would rather beat each other senseless in fiercely competitive markets and completely ignore markets where they would *be* the market.
The whole "people go to Best Buy to shop and then buy online" thing is totally overblown. Yeah, I understand a real storefront costs a bit, so I don't mind paying a little extra, especially to have it *now*.
Best Buy's problem is that it isn't a 10-15% increase. It's often 200-400% increase. Golly shucks, I just can't understand why people go to Best Buy, look at price tags, and then buy somewhere else.
I meant to say...
When you say something is *important*, and yet treat it as unimportant, people are smart enough to see through that.
I can't find someone who'll sell me a Corvette for $10. That must mean there's a Corvette shortage...
The MBA's, pols, and lobbyists that run our society can't seem to understand that supply and demand applies to other people as well. If the reward for several years of grad school were equal to the risk and cost, you'd see more people in STEM. That's why they went into finance, because that's where the money was.
When the scientists and engineers make more money than the MBA's running the company, I'll imaging you won't have any problem finding them. (And I have both a MBA from a top 25 school and 12 years in high-performance computer. Guess who makes more around here...)
When you say something is unimportant, and yet treat it as unimportant, people are smart enough to see through that.
The world uses 83 million barrels per day. If they threw up 20 of those 1M tanks, it would only represent a few hours of world oil usage. And most of that capacity isn't used to "speculate", but for temporary storage for loading/unloading/processing. As your supply chain gets farther afield (deep sea, Venezuela, etc), you need to have more "cache" in the system to avoid disruptions.
I did not say speculation was impossible, simply that a) it was *much* harder than the average person understands and b) most "speculation" was simply the country that owns the oil leaving it in the ground on the belief that it would be worth more tomorrow. Goldman Sachs are a bunch of elementary-school pikers next to Saudi Aramco.
You're wasting your time. I've argued with roman_mir before. Either he's a professional troll out for lulz, or a walking, talking case of Dunning-Kruger. He is absolutely, utterly impervious to any facts which don't conform to how he thinks the world *should* work. And suggestions that perhaps he might want to read a book or two don't end well.
the output is growing, again, thanks to new technologies, like fracking and shale oil.
Supply is growing, but demand is growing faster. You do understand that supply-and-demand is about the imbalance between the two? As that imbalance grows, the price of oil will continue to climb.
the global demand is down because USA demand is massively down,
America is no longer the primary driver of either the world economy as a oil, or the oil market. Again, you really need to open a newspaper and see how the world has changed the past 10 years.
They set interest rates very low during Clinton and the other Bush before him
You do understand that supply-and-demand applies to cash as well as oil? The US didn't "set" the Fed rate low. The world economy is awash with capital looking for a safe harbor, and relatively little demand for that capital. When the supply is high, and the demand is low, the price (in this case interest rate) falls. Conspiracy nuts have a hard time understanding that the Fed doesn't "set" the rate. It looks where the market has shot the arrow, and moves the target there.
why would you want me to subject myself to worthless Keynesian shamanism?
Because that worthless Keynesian shamanism has proven remarkably adept at making predictions on inflation and growth on an economy against the zero-bound? Just because you personally don't like Keynes, doesn't make it any less right, any more than hating the fact that 2+2=4 will make it suddenly equal 5.
I haven't been wrong yet.
In the two threads I've followed you, you haven't been right yet. It's hard to tell whether you're actually a hard-headed idiot, or a remarkably advanced troll. If the latter, I solute you. Otherwise, may I suggest you spend some time reading about the Dunning-Kruger effect on Wikipedia? Because you seriously do not have a single clue.
I hope you all recognise that the prices of gas are being moved up by inflation, not by any increase in demand
How on earth is this modded insightful?!? This is head-in-the-sand Ron Paul wharrgarbl. You do understand that global oil supply has nearly peaked, while global demand is growing rapidly.
Rising oil prices aren't caused by some liberal conspiracy to debase the currency. Even if you adjust for inflation, oil is reaching all-time highs. Just like Adam Smith and supply-and-demand would predict.
I remember you from a previous thread, and I suggest you go to a community college and actually take a class on economics and pass it with a A/B before you start chiming in with your opinion on how the world should work.
Your idea of how the world works, and how it actually *does* work, don't intersect at any two contiguous points.
I've already seen some of my Facebook friends grousing about how speculators are gouging them. They have a hard time understanding how much the world has changed in a decade. Most of it is due to static oil supply meeting rapidly rising oil demand, coupled with extremely inelastic demand for gas. Within a few years we have another billion or so people competing with us for the same barrel of oil.
It's actually hard to speculate in oil, simply because there's no place to store enough to make a huge difference. Most "speculators" are sovereign countries, who are wagering that oil left in the ground today would be more expensive tomorrow.
Iran produces about 5% of the world's oil. If Israel and Iran go at it, the price of oil would go through the ceiling. The price of oil is set by the cost of extracting the last barrel of oil, and tapping those deep-sea oil wells and Canadian oil sands for that last barrel of oil is extremely expensive. If it costs $100 to produce that last barrel of Canadian oil, why would Saudi Arabia sell their oil for $20 instead of $100 too? They'd be leaving money on the table. That's why the last barrel sets the price.
And if a country expects a barrel of oil to shoot up $50 in the event of war, it makes sense to either charge more for pumping it today, or leave it in the ground until the price goes up naturally.
To put this in Slashdot terms, supposed you had a complete set of Babylon 5 collector plates that were worth $100 today, and you expected them to be worth $1000 next year from now, would you sell them now or wait? The smart thing to do is either wait until next year, or require the buyer to pay you a premium today above the $100 asking price. Expectations affect the price. And if you wait until next year, you have reduced the global supply of collector plates on sale, so the price goes up a bit to compensate. Supply and demand also affect the price.
If you're really worried about speculators, buy a Prius, Leaf, or Volt. Last time I checked, no one's been able to form a cartel on sunshine and wind. And if you drive a big SUV, stop whining about how speculators, government, Democrats, or "The Man" is screwing you, and take a long, hard look at how you are screwing yourself.
Gingrich said this in Florida, a few weeks before the Floriday primary. Newt needs a win here to cement his momentum, because if Romney wins it's a serious blow to his candidacy. Because of that, I expect him to spend the next couple of weeks telling voters any outlandish fantasy it takes to get elected, up to and including telling people in Miami he'll invade Cuba and kill Castro.
They're not imaging the event horizon, they're trying to image the accretion disk around the central black hole, and hoping they can see the event horizon's "shadow" against it. I doubt that we're going to be directly imaging the event horizon for the central black hole anytime soon.
The Milky Way's central black hole is 4.l million solar masses. The Schwartzchild radius of a static black hole of that mass is roughly 12.3 million km, or 17.7 x the radius of our sun. That's roughly 1/3 the size of Mercury's orbit. You could put it in the center of our solar system, and not devour a single planet (though they would start orbiting a *lot* faster).
Hold out your fist at arm's length. If you put the Milky Way's central black hole where our sun was, it would be roughly that big.
Now, imagine trying to see something that size, which is perfectly dark, from 27,000 light years away and you'll understand how difficult it would be to directly image it.
I was talking about games that use Steam DRM, vs just the Steam store. The only two non-Steam games I have are Fallout 3 and Arkham Asylum. Past that, if you don't use Steam DRM, I don't buy it. Respect your customer, or you won't have customers.
These guys are walking billboards highlighting the value of Steam vs the crap DRM-ware of Ubi, Origin, MS Games, etc.
I was stuck at the office very, very late one night. Nothing to do. So I logged into Steam, downloaded a game I owned ("Bloody Good Time", excellent FWIW), and played a while until I could get of there.
The MBA's at Ubu/EA/MS would explode at the very concept. And it is why I will be spending my money at Steam.
(And Gabe, if you read this, I can haz HL2e3/HL3 now plz?)
Of course, if we had that fiber network we've paid for several times over in telephone fees, that would also deter thieves from stealing copper too...
Agreed. I was surprised the first time I visited the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin. *THAT* is how movies are supposed to be seen. I can see why Harry loves 'em so much.
I have a MBA from a top tier school, but I also have a decade of experience as senior sysadmin for a large academic computer cluster and a large chunk of a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, so hopefully I'll have some street cred when I say this.
I promise you, if Wall Street paid $500k a year to geology majors, you'd see that discipline packed with money-grubbing psychopaths too. You're confusing the body of knowledge, with the people who learn it.
Yes, I know MBA's who are parasitic, narcissistic sociopaths. I also know MBA's who are good decent people with honest ambition and a desire to make their mark and be their own master.
Believe it or not, there are nerds in business and politics, just as much as in computers and physics. I happen to enjoy economics, finance, entrepreneurship, and public policy. A MBA allowed me to scratch those itches.
Saying "MBA's are all PHB's" is like saying IT people are all BOFH's. You're painting with a mighty broad brush.
My parents live a mile off the main road at the bottom of a valley. No DSL, cable, 3g/4g, satellite, but with the help of a big honking antenna and a couple of amplifiers, they can pick up solid TV signals.
I'm salivating at the prospect of getting two of these radios and trying to set up a point-to-point bridge between their house and mine. The 145-225 MHz band out to be a lot more amenable to line-of-sight obstacles than 2.4 GHz.
They don't have any cell reception, barring standing in the right spot in the yard. They live at the bottom of a large valley that blocks cell signals.
One thing I have thought about is buying two antennas and building a passive reflector to beam some signal into their valley, but I'm waiting for Verizon (or anyone, for that matter) to roll out 4G before I spend money on it.
I've used Lynx since the early 90's, but it's not a realistic solution for my parents. Since they have both Chrome and Firefox installed, I disabled loading photos in Firefox to give them something Lynx-like, but it renders a number of sites unreadable, primarily ones that validator.w3.org barf at.
They live in Ashland City, TN. I have a 10 Gb pipe at work, and can barely use SSH at their house. The contrast is amazing.
and the 3G users, and the satellite users, and everyone else that has a low-bandwidth and/or high cost per byte connection.
My parents can't get DSL or cable. They're stuck with 22k dial-up, and use AdBlock Plus, NoFlash, and Propel accelerator with compression set to the point where you can barely recognize photos, and it still takes 2 minutes for a reasonably normal page (CNN, MSNBC) to load, much less anything with a ton of Javascript or Flash.
Can't websites automatically detect connection speed the first time a client visits, and store a cookie so that us slow people get a nice, simple website?
Oh, and Propel, please move to JPEG2000 and XZ compression. Some people need every byte they can get.
This is primarily caused by newbie admins who are just smart enough to be dangerous. They need root access, but consider sudo to be annoying, so they give root a password. And because they don't know any better, they suck at picking passwords. Put the two together, and you've got a hacked box in short order.
Here's a little write-up about some of the hacking I've seen.
http://binkley.accre.vanderbilt.edu/documents/hack-stats.txt
I'm sure the Chinese government has their crack team of hackers, just like we do. Having said that...
I run a honeypot at work. 70% of the attacks do come from Chinese machines, but I suspect that's because the Chinese buy those $2 pre-hacked warez'd Windows CD's at the market and don't install security updates.
Of the actual living, breathing hackers that log into my honeypot, 1/3 of them come from Romanian IP's, and another 1/3 come from other eastern European countries, but the text files/strings in their utilities are Romanian. Wired has a good article which partly corroborates this.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_hackerville_romania/all/1
I see two modes of attack. 98% are single machines launching 100's of attacks. 70% of those are in China. The other 2% are distributed attacks. These are more likely to be major power intelligence agencies, and don't have anywhere near the geographic concentration as the single-machine attacks (Chinese IP's are 15% of distributed attacks, same as Brazil).
We have several racks full, purchased because "they're cheaper than Tesla's".
Except the Tesla's have, as pointed out, ECC memory and better thermal management, and the GTX's have several useful features (like the GPU load level in nvidia-smi) disabled.
The former cause the compute nodes to crash regularly. What you save on cards, you'll lose in salary for someone to nursemaid them. The latter makes it harder to integrate into a scheduler environment (we're using Torque).
Yes, this is primarily marketing discrimination, and there probably isn't $10 worth of real difference between the two. I hope the marketing droid who thought that scheme up burns. It's a total aggravation, but paying for Teslas is worthwhile.