It depends on what type of rc maybe. At least in the car world NiMH rule the world. 3000 milli-amp sanyo 3000 HV are pretty much the top of line. Even where you can get NiMH and NiCD overlap (2400 milli-amp) to NiMH are the ones used. They have more "punch" and thier voltage discharge curve is better. When racing rc cars the NiCD tend the drop quickly at the beginning, then drop at a fairly even rate for the rest of the battery. Whereas NiMH drop off early but level off (same speed as the top end of the NiCD). They only dump right at the end of thier charge.
And I would have to say I use some fairly hefty draw. the standard tamiya plugs (basically the tube type connectors - not sure their technical name) will melt and fuse the metal together. I either have to directly solder everything or use "zero resitence" plugs (the resistence is less than the equivilent length of wire - so they use some marketing crap) such as deans ultra plugs. For the 10'th scale rc cars some of the modified engines will drain a 3000 milliamp NiMH in around 5 minutes. If your taking more draw that a 9 turn single hand wound 540 engine in a small rc then you must be making it yourself.
For lightweight motors look at something like a speed 280 bb - runs aprox 4000rpm/volt. I can run them in my HPI micro rs4 and get ~30000 rpm at the shaft (same as my larger stock engine for the 10'th scale touring car). I run it from a 6 sub aa 1100 pack and get ~15 mins runtime.
I dunno, maybe in other types of rc this is not the case but for the extremely high draw engines only the NiMH are used - NiCD does not have the performance in a 10'th or 12'th scale vehicle.
FYI I got my matched set of sanyo's out - the tag says 369 sec @ 1.143 volt - 30 amp - 3.2 mOhm internal. In rc car land matched batteries are batteries that someone (in this case team orion - or whoever they paid to do it) fully charges the batteries. They are next placed on a discharge tray and are given a draw of 30 amps. Things such as discharge time and internal resitence are checked and then the batteries are "matched" to all have fairly equal settings. They are sold in grades - the longest running/lowest resitence seel the highest with the sucky ones going into unmatched packs (eg radio shack specials). I do not have an older set of matched NiCD's to look at - but the NiMH perform much better here.
While true, a circle is about the most effecient form one could use given what a manhole is for. When first made - easy to produce (not necessarilly easy than others). What it does have is two things - 1: very efficient use of materials. Basically a circle does not have any wasted material to either cut out or produce and fits a person and thier tools quite well. And secondly, much less smarts needed for design. Sure there are other shapes that roll easy (though from experience pulling manhole covers rolling easy makes them harder to open, though once open they are good), doesn't take a lot of work to design, and many times you only want to look into the sewer so just rotating the manhole in place is the thing to do (a circle being easy to do this). Basically a circle is the best intersection of these qualities, though not the only one that has them.
Non circle openings in the ground tend to be more specific purpose (basically we have this shaped equipment to get down there and a circle would need to be too large - say moving something square for example). From the engineers I worked with before getting a CS degree that was thier opnion on things (I was working on a surveying crew laying out the easements and cut lines for a fibre-optics exchange box that was underground - discussion about what shape to make the hole - we needed to calculate and set points for the crew to dig. They of course expressed reason to not be a circle and I am extrapolating backwards).
not only is that the wrong question, but even the entierly wrong focus. Who, except the music industry, cares if they make money? It's entertainment - that means that, from a whole economy point of view, all that matters is that the money is spent and jobs are created. The assumption that even what you said is that it is important that the music industry makes money. It drives me nuts the important industries and ideas that get crippled, or at least punished, because an irrelevant industry may loose money. Why in the world should computer manufacturers, in server machines, be required to put DRM stuff in thier hardware. Hmm, lets see - we run a large part of national defense (insert watever country you want here - nearly all are computerized to a large extent), touch nearly every industry in the world. In other word we are vital now to the operation of the global economy. And yet, many nations tax us, want ultra-strict regulations, increase dramatically cost, and in some cases even render hardware unusable because a form of entertainment may not make as much money as before - oh yea that's adjusting priorities correctly.
I have somewhat more trouble imagining why aliens would give a shit about making crop circles (if it's communication they want, surely they can be more direct about it!) unless it's really a biohazard marking to warn their fellows.;)
that reminds me of a quote that is probably the most damning evidence against extra-terrestrial origin of crop circles. Basically you have to beleive that an alien race out there has the ability/technology to fly faster than light and remain invisible to radar/human eyes when they so choose (no radar confirmation of something odd in the sky nor do people see the UFO making the circles, there are enough of them that someone would - and radar would always catch it). Now lets further assume that this race wishes to make contact with us. In order for crop circles to be what some people wish them to be this highly advanced race has chosen to show thier existence to us by making circles in grain fields without being seen. Hmm, apparently these aliens like the stealthy approach of making contact. I could see the conversation now "hey, lets go reveal ourselfs to those things on that planet down there, look theres a big group of them - lets go". whereto the commander replies "no, lets turn on stealth mode and fuck with them for 60 revolutions of thier planet around thier sun - lets make some circles in thier fields - start simple and then get more complicated (though only do a mathematical one every 20 revolutions)". Much more likely joe bob and bubba went "hey you know it would rock to go make some circles in a field" and slowly they learned how to make more complicated ones. Then as the "phenomonon" took off more educated people doing it. I know which one is more likely:)
grid computing in this sense will never work. You may (and do) get something like it with seti@home and some of the genome stuff - that's cool tech and maybe you will own the comp that finds evidence of life. grid computing within an intranet will probably be a reality. Donating bandwidth and compute cycles so someone can play grand theft auto 5 faster won't. To use one of the examples I have heard that I like - "your not using your toothbrush right now, mind if I have a go with it?". Simply put I will never pay a fee (bandwidth, computing resource) so some game company/oil company can make tons of money, and many other people will not.
Depressingly, the next movie I'm looking forward to is LOTR II
ok, to be picky, it's not LOTR II. Lord of the Rings is 6 books (acts if it were a play). Since this was so large Tolkein published them in three bound volumes. The three volumes are named "Fellowship of the Ring", "The Two Towers", and "Return of the King". In no way is it volume one, two, and three, it's one long story (in fact the bound volume I have is all one big book, no special divisions based on previous published volumes). So be happy, your not looking forward to a sequel, you getting to view the part of the movie after the first intermission:)
Actually the govt funds A LOT of opensource software. Go look at the clustering side of things (ever hear of mpich or PVM? notice they are from argonne and oak ridge national labs). Govt research can work well, it's the beauracracy(sp?) that sucks.
Do I think that a US Dept of Software Developement would produce less buggy and esier to use software? Probably not - a department such as that does not compete for funding. The national labs, while funded by DOE/DOD, compete for the dollars.
In the end the amount of money thrown at a problem is a worthless metric, nor where the money comes from - competition is what does it. open/close free/costs doesn't have a thing to do with it. You have something of value (typically money or fame) and the best software gets it. Stuff such as the Linux kernel tends towards fame (it's cool to have your name in the source), the above mentioned PVM/mpich is money (funding and a job). The FBI/ and Department of Education have no competition, in fact in the education it is discouraged.
And lastly, the resluts of govt funded software can be free as in beer. Europeans aren't paying any tax dollars for PVM. I can say the same about any free Open Source project - if you narrow your groups in the right way it will always cost something.
I too have gone through peer-review more than severaltimes. My experience with it is not nearly as bad. In fact it was over all good. Very few of the people reviewing the papers were that negative. Mostly the comments were "add more in this section". If this book only has a few detractors then I would be inclined to agree. But as of right now it has many (at least relativly). If that continues (it may take some time to completly digest what was said) then I would either call him wrong or a crank. The point someone else was trying to make was that how many times have all per-reviews been "this guy is wrong" and all the ameteurs going "rock on!" have the ameteurs been correct. I would bet not very often.
As for a grad student with Watson and Crick, well, it's typicall that grad students do the actuall work, Phd's do the "vision" thing. They also didn't think it was wrong for very long. They didn't dismiss him/her without listening, otherwise they would not have the credit for finding DNA.
When writing an acedemic paper/book and not having it reviewed for correctness is not thumbing your nose at them (ignoring all the irritating font/format changes is) - it is either sheer stupidity or sheer arrogance - in the case of this book I would bet arrogance.
Did you actually pay attnetion to what they wrote. Notice the ifs, mights, maybes, etc... I know I always want sweeping govt regulation on stuff that has been around along time because one person might maybe have been injured by a roller coaster if it exceded a certain G force. Not too mention the doctor could not really think of anything else the guy told him about that could have caused it. Good thing we cought it now, it might have one day have possibly been the cause of injuries of 2-4 people per million if we use rollar coasters the may have enough G force to maybe hurt someone. Good use of our tax dollars, I wish the govt was always this usefull.
Hot jobs tend to be only hot in the short term. It's like deciding, right now, what clothes you are going to wear the rest of your life based on what is currently hot. Look at the web deseigners that only learned web deseign. They had a good run but unless they picked up more mainstream computing skills along the way they are probably looking for a job. Now they are lokking at someone in thier late twnties/ early thirties with a skill that has a glut of qualified individuals - all because it was the "hot job" of the moment. Now take a database person. It's not a hot job and probably never will be a hot job (i'm not talking data mining but deseigning/implementing/maintaining SQL databases). On the other hand demand is pretty high and will continue to be pretty high.
It is important to remember when making these lists they look at NOW, not the long term viability of the job.
First, be found guilty of having a monopoly and abusing it. Then, during your testimony at the penalty phase use two arguments. 1: if you do that you will break our monopoly (earlier testimony). 2: declare that becuase you have such huge market saturation you had no reason to fix a major bug you have known about. So then say that disclosing the bug would be risking national defense. Hmm, if I were the prosecution I would dancing with glee. Microsoft does not seem to understand that they have been found GUILTY of abusing thier monopoly and keep giving the court more and more ways they have abused it.
you take the x-box hardware in an x-box housing and you have an x-box. You take the x-box hardware in a tivo housing and you have the "msdvr". I mean lets face it, most consumers are stupid. Go look up sales of prunes. You can not seel a box that in large letters say "prunes" and small letters under it "dried plums", put "dried plums" in large letters and "prunes" in small ones and you can't keep them in stock. Not only that but you can charge more for "dried plums" and the lemmings will happily pay it. Many consumers would be willing to pay 300-400 dollars for a DVR, but not a console. MS would only need to spend developement costs once, saving money.
I've always hated the "they aren't holding a gun to your head" argument as stupid. One can be forced to do things in many many ways. One is by using thier market dominance to run any potential competitor out of bussiness, not by competing, but by simply using thier market dominance. Microsoft was found guilty of this and is now in the penalty phase. For example.
Back in the win 3.1 and win 95 days there was this small company called stacker. They produced software that compressed a disk and decompressed it on the fly making it appear as if you had a larger drive. They produced a good product. Enter MS - they produced and integrated thier own disk compression technique - great. Did it work better? no. Even though it was bundled, stacker continued to have market dominance within that single field. Enter microsoft abusing thier monopoly. Pay any programmer working for stacker 1 million to never work there again. Change windows constantly in such a way as to not allow stacker to run. Many other things also (including stealing thier code). In the end stacker went broke and MS had the only disk compression software out there. I was very much forced to use thier products (since there was no alternative).
A monopoly such as microsoft has two main ways it can go. One is not illegal - use thier vast resources to produce a kick ass product. Wal-mart has a near monopoly, and barring some examples where they didn't do this, they continue to provide cheap goods, even cheaper because of thier monopoly (there is a term for this type of monopoly but its been 7 years since my econ class:) ). Microsoft has the ability to do great good, in fact they are in a unique position to do so. But instead they try and stiffle competition, not by producing a better product but by using thier market dominance to force the changes they want.
In short - Microsoft seems to have basically met your needs. In many cases they do not meet mine but it is either use thier products or not do it at all. The argument is analogous to telling someone unless they give you 500 dollars (when you know they have 1000) or you will drown them, them not giving you 500, and then you drown them, and your defense is "but they could have given me 500 dollars". Yea, you have a choice - but it's not like you can always take the alternative.
no, no. Even better. I am an 102 year old afghani cleric who does manual labor in webservices. Sure, they get demographic info from me, but I specifically make it as worthless as possible, a random generator may produce a profile that make sense - I would much rather completely ruin my data (and do for any of these stupid profiling crap they push on us).
It's not yahoo specifically there, it's the attitude in general. As many people pointed out the e-mail was filtered as spam many times (I know it was for me). There is a HUGE difference between 95% not unsubscribing and 95% not thinking it was a big deal.
See, this is why I thought that the quote about the price of freedom is so important. Take speech for example. What harm will it do for the Govt to disallow me to be a member of a religious cult. They are damaging to your mental health and damaging to society. the heavans gate people would have been much better off had they not been allowed to form a group. Way more than 95% of the poblic wouldn't care. But of course that infriges WAY to much on freedom of religion/speech. It's not yahoo specifically but the allowance of the invasion of privacy in general - you can say "oh, that invasion is fine, it's not really hurting me".
as far as what is "eternal vigilance"? well, they were pretty clear in the federalist papers. Read them sometime. Basically if you allow small erosions in your freedoms you will eventually lose them - you must be activly aware of transgressions against your freedoms and fight to maintain them.
Now then, why is your argument invalid? well, you have narrowed your argument down to the point that you need it too to help your conclusion. You say "yahoo's invasion of privacy will not cause an orwellian world". Fine, I agree with that statement. Neither is the DOT tracking where you drive so they can catch criminals running from the police easier going to do it. Neither tracking every book you buy so they know what to sell better going to do it. But that one case is not the point. Now, what I am arguing is that "The privacy violations inherrent in what yahoo is doing could lead to an orwellian use of the information". Notice the scale of my argument. It's not a slippery slope. I do not say it is starting small and getting worse. I am saying this type of violations can be used, directly, in an orwellian fashion (don't beleive me? well, I suppose you trust the govt much more than I do). I don't beleive this alone will bring about an orwellian state but it definatlly has the potential to be used in a manner consistent with it. When you allow one to do this, you must allow all to do it. That's not a slippery slope either. It's simply the fact that it's either illegal or it is not. Basically this collection of information sets a very scary precedent (not just with yahoo but other companies doing it also)
your argument pjrc, totally misses the entier point of what everyone here is saying. You tried to read my post as saying yahoo will cause the destruction of the USA, and what I said was that the invasion of privacy like this, in general, will.
I hope this message has been 100% clear, apparently your command of rhetoric is not great enough to follow what I was trying to say. Hopefully I have repeated it enough and given enough examples so that this time you can follow what I am saying.
hmm, the point isn't what they actually do with the content but what they MIGHT do. Typically this is counter to the vast majority of what we call civil rights. But to use an example, why am I not allowed to own a 65 megaton nuclear device. Because the damage I could do with it is MUCH greater than the good I could do with it. I could, for example, hold it in my basement for as long as I live. Totally harmless right? But the option I have of detonating it is so great that it outweighs my right to own one. This of course is a judgement call.
This is why the quote (I can't remeber which one) from a founding father "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance" is so appropriate. It's not a cut and dry situation. Yea, nuclear devices are pretty much clear, but how about firearms? how about personal freedoms such as privacy? how about copyright infringements? hard questions. I think the precedent set by allowing such intrusions into privacy fall into the "bad" category because the potential abuses are horrid. I spent nearly three years defending myself to a school because I know the chemical formula to RDX - not illegal but since someone mixed aluminum and HCL to make a "bomb" I was blamed. I know first hand the idea that "I know, lets send this guy soldier_of_fortune as he reads anarchist journals" translates nicely into "he reads anarchist jornals, he must want to over throw the govt." very easily (when In fact I read such stuff as I find much of thier banter to be quite amusing because it tends to lack any level of logic).
in short we have to both look at the potential good and potential bad. sometimes what a company/govt wants to enforce is for, in the end, a good cause, or at least not a really bad one. But the potential for abuse is so great that one must oppose it. Does this fit into that category? Many beleive so, many do not - Sometimes a democracy votes itself away.
well, I work with some people who do climate modeling. They usually produce a large simulation, run it, check the results, and if it doesn't do what they expect they re-run it with different data. So thier preconceived notions have a LARGE impact on thier model. The data produced relies on two things - one thier input data. Weather depends very greatly on the input data, a very small difference in data can make totally different changes. Next it depends on how well thier model actually predicts. That is where thier preconceived notions are coming from. Basically thier model is the hypothesis, they use the model to try and understand global warming. Once thier model shows something close to what they expect they are done. One of the large differences between what they talk about and what the general public talks about is whether or not this proves anything, they understand computer models and know it didn't prove anything, it is a very detailed hypothisis. They need experimental data to make it a good theory. Unfortunatly experimental data will take years to gather.
To use a computer science example. One of the weather modeling people were angry that we would not NFS mount one of our larger clusters. We would not simply because of speed - nfs on a multi-gig file with 128 nodes was slow, it was much faster to transfer the file to each individual node and run the app. The mathmatician in question wrote a small simulation of NFS, he followed what NFS supposedly did and showed that the cacheing in NFS alleviated this problem. The math was all correct, the model was correct but when we ran the real world numbers his model didn't even come close. For whatever reason, as we knew it would from experiance, the disk reads were not being cached.
Then comes the problem of gathering the data. In the past nearly all data was obtained from land stations and from ocean going ships. When satalites began being able to very accuratly measure temperatures they found that much of thier data was WAY off. The theory that ocean surface tempuratures closly matches rising and falling air temps was faulty. Models had been used to show this and further models were based on this assumption.
And finally, even if temperatures are rising it is very difficult to prove we are responsible. There are many models out there that show we are, and there are many models that show we are not. There is also a question is it bad? In past history high levels of carbon dioxide have resulted in very moist air and a huge abundance of vegetation (were talking millions of years ago here). There is no proof, nor much evidence that it is very bad, just different. (on the other hand many of the gasses we release with CO2 are very harmfull)
For an interesting look into the past at what models would predict look to burke's "after the warming". In a class I had in school that dealt with global warming it was required watching. The teacher went on an on about how errily accurate it was. Yea, if you discount that by the year we are now in most of america should be a desert and most of the atlantic ocean should have no current. The teacher (and many of the.edu's you find this video reviewd by) advocate much of the stuff on the video because "it's scary stuff" - well yea if it was founded in reality. It's a very good look at using a model as "proof" as I am sure the models cited in the study used the most accurate models available at the time.
The point of all this is that an artificial model is being used to "prove" global warming by some people. The accuracy of thier numbers is based entierly on how accurate that model is. For example read this. you should notice the section outlined on model errors. So global warming is far from a known fact as many seem to think it is. Nor is it considered as much of a forgone conclusion as many seem to think it is.
The theory is not only that it defrays the cost of researching drugs but is an incentive to make them. They are patented because patents run out. The difference is a long term versus a short term, or an individual versus a society benefit. Yea it sucks if you're one of the poor people not able to afford medicine. In this case the government has a responsibility to society as a whole. If a few people are really hurt (maybe even die) for most people to get better then it will typically happen. It just so happens that in this case it is the poor getting screwed.
The main assumtion that is fatally flawed in your argument is assuming that cost is irrelevent to desire to do research. That is simply not true. It is a "feel good" solution. Sometimes a few have to suffer for society to do better. What we have to do is decide when the cost of the few is so great that the benefits to society are not worth it. In the case of medicine (in the United States, I know absolutly nothing about other countries) If you can not afford the medicine there are govt programs to help, and making you eat a lot of vegall and ramen noodles is better than the drug company never makeing the drug in the first place.
This argument is very similar to the one I hear sometimes about curing impotence but not cancer. The cure for impotence has put more money in drug companies research funds than any amount of donations to date. The assumtion is that there is and always will be X amount of resources to throw at the problems and there is not. And lastly cost of production being low is irrelevant. Lets say you spend 1 billion do develop a drug (not unheard of) and it costs a few dollars to produce (also not unheard of). Should you therefore sell it for a few dollars - no of course not you would be broke quite quickly. Prices drop over time (and are intially very expensive) not only because of cost of manufacturing decreasing but also because the cost of development is amortized across each sale. Plus you need to recoup costs quickly, especially if all your R&D efforts are extremely expensive.
well, yea, the only thing that came up is "sounded good at the time". I would have for sure if it had been on the same disk. I have many times installed a new disk and do stuff to it (such as install an os) and one would think it would not touch another disk. Windows on an x86 didn't do that (done it several times), linux/beos didn't either. Most of the work consisted of fighting different setups to actually work together so unless I had done some type of ghosting on it I would have lost the work anyway, as far as code (user files) go it was about a weeks worth of work, typically back up once a week. That was not really a big deal but it took at least a month to reconfigure everything.
been there, done that. We had an alpha machine running linux for some vizualation stuff where I work (trying to get a cluster to drive an immersadesk, this was several years ago). It initally had one hard drive with linux on it. We added a second drive for windows and proceded to install NT, it hapilly informed us we had an invalid filesystem and it was reformating it to ntfs, it never asked, it just did it (because, of course on the alpha's back then basically every one wither ran true64 or NT, it reconized it was neither so it "helped" us). We lost nearly three months of work because of this. I've also had windows 98 "fail" twice during install and trash my drive's partition table and file systems, strange that it only did it when linux was installed (what I would call a qui-ki-dink - pronounce kinda like a coincidence, basically something that could just have been a coincidence but not likely)
I play dungeon seige on my laptop, a 1.13 ghz piii and a 32 meg gforce2 go. The in-game FPS counter usually stays between 8-20 depending on the amount of mobs on the screen at a time. Even on a LCD panel at 10 FPS it does not look chopy. This is with all the textures/shadows/etc turned to the best quality. I tried reducing the shadows and some of the quality, while I got much higer framerates (15-30) the over all quality sucked - just as smooth looking as before and les detail. One time I have had some choppiness but while running from a large group of mobs I ran into another and must have had 30-40 mobs (plus eight of my own chars all casting/shooting/meleeing) moments before I died.
I, personaly could care less about frame rates as long as the game looks nice . I've seen quake run at 40 FPS vs ~70 and could not initially pick out which one was which. After showing me which one was running faster I *think* I could see some difference with high speed turns but it just as easily could have been psycho-somatic. Then I have seen some games run at high frame rates and suck. Though, of course, like most other people, I *like* that number to be as high as possible, I just dont get mad when its not and the game still looks nice:)
Yes, at least indirectly internet file swapping could be one of the causes, though I don't think for the reasons they mean.
Take me for example. Before MP3's were starting to get big I consistently bought 2-4 cd's a year. I had for years. Now comes MP3's and I could both listen to an album for a few days/weeks before I bought and could listen to unknowns for me. I found out I like some bands with names that had really turned me off before. I started buying 10-15 CD's a year. During this time the sales of cd's was consistently rising so I would be willing to bet I was not the only one.
Next the RIAA/MPAA began an insane journey to not only stop me from getting MP3's (which is thier right to do) but they did it in a way that was going to destroy much of the things that I should/am allowed to do (DMCA and it's ilk). Well, I pretty much said screw them and quit buying.
While of course I am only one person most of my friends have done this and they have "spread the word". I would be willing to bet this is not that uncommon. I still occasionaly buy a cd (back to the 1-2 a year deal) because a few cd's I want something more than an MP3 for quality. Also since much of this has now moved outside of the geek sector (it now no longer takes knowlege of technology to see the effects, my parents fuss about not being able to fast-forward through the FBI warnings) they should start seeing effects like this more often.
Unfortunatly I think this will cause them to get even wilder and give them more evidence to use for congressional battles. It will take an act of congress or the judicial branch (much like the VCR crap they tried way back when) to force them to embrace a new profit strategy. No matter what congress passes it will always be ineffective and some day they'll realize that.
Re:Not Really A Concern
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Space Wars
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I have heard that argument many times and it still makes little sense. When testing a guidance system (i.e. can we even manuver the missle to contact the other missle) then how we detect it is irrelevant. Much the same as any software product you write does not meet every goal before you test it neither will this. Just the same as a software project you write "drivers" for the parts not implemented. The parts to counter act those measures have not been implemented, thus testing a guidance system any other way is stupid.
As a test for the guidance system it was a very large success, they successfully made one missle strike another. Of course as a test of overcoming counter measures it was a complete failure, but well, the linux kernel makes a pretty shitty word processor - read what they are working on/testing before you make a knee-jerk reaction to a success or failure. Now then when they test detection systems then that's another story.
there are several issues that would preclude this type of computation being run in a SETI@home context. First broadband is very slow compared to what the interconnects on these clusters run. The small 64 node cluster we run has gig-ether on a non-blocking 64 port foundary switch - still slower than what is on the proprietary IBM sp machines. Even with that fast of an interconnect these types of computations tend to be i/o bound.
Also data size would be a contributing factor. In many of the gasseous simulations we run it is not uncommon to have multi-gigabyte data sets (in fact we have even had more than one request for multi-terabyte storage - we didn't have that much on the entier cluster). Not only is this hard to transfer/maintain in a timely manner on a broadband connection the home users machine would have trouble with it. Most hard drives out there could withstand it even when full of mp3's but you also have to take into account what data needs in memory at one time. Most new computation clusters have at least a gig of high speed ram in them and it is still not really enough.
And lastly as far a secrets go, you will not need the entier data set to glean information from the data. Just the algorithms used to process the data may be classified (if they simulate our nuclear weapons well enough you will probably learn something classified about thier construction).
oh, yea, unless the algorithm in question is ridicuosly parrallel there is a lot more going on than small computations that a larger computer puts together going on. Computations such as SETI@home are a very narrow type of distributed computation and does not occur very frequently.
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It depends on what type of rc maybe. At least in the car world NiMH rule the world. 3000 milli-amp sanyo 3000 HV are pretty much the top of line. Even where you can get NiMH and NiCD overlap (2400 milli-amp) to NiMH are the ones used. They have more "punch" and thier voltage discharge curve is better. When racing rc cars the NiCD tend the drop quickly at the beginning, then drop at a fairly even rate for the rest of the battery. Whereas NiMH drop off early but level off (same speed as the top end of the NiCD). They only dump right at the end of thier charge.
And I would have to say I use some fairly hefty draw. the standard tamiya plugs (basically the tube type connectors - not sure their technical name) will melt and fuse the metal together. I either have to directly solder everything or use "zero resitence" plugs (the resistence is less than the equivilent length of wire - so they use some marketing crap) such as deans ultra plugs. For the 10'th scale rc cars some of the modified engines will drain a 3000 milliamp NiMH in around 5 minutes. If your taking more draw that a 9 turn single hand wound 540 engine in a small rc then you must be making it yourself.
For lightweight motors look at something like a speed 280 bb - runs aprox 4000rpm/volt. I can run them in my HPI micro rs4 and get ~30000 rpm at the shaft (same as my larger stock engine for the 10'th scale touring car). I run it from a 6 sub aa 1100 pack and get ~15 mins runtime.
I dunno, maybe in other types of rc this is not the case but for the extremely high draw engines only the NiMH are used - NiCD does not have the performance in a 10'th or 12'th scale vehicle.
FYI I got my matched set of sanyo's out - the tag says 369 sec @ 1.143 volt - 30 amp - 3.2 mOhm internal. In rc car land matched batteries are batteries that someone (in this case team orion - or whoever they paid to do it) fully charges the batteries. They are next placed on a discharge tray and are given a draw of 30 amps. Things such as discharge time and internal resitence are checked and then the batteries are "matched" to all have fairly equal settings. They are sold in grades - the longest running/lowest resitence seel the highest with the sucky ones going into unmatched packs (eg radio shack specials). I do not have an older set of matched NiCD's to look at - but the NiMH perform much better here.
While true, a circle is about the most effecient form one could use given what a manhole is for. When first made - easy to produce (not necessarilly easy than others). What it does have is two things - 1: very efficient use of materials. Basically a circle does not have any wasted material to either cut out or produce and fits a person and thier tools quite well. And secondly, much less smarts needed for design. Sure there are other shapes that roll easy (though from experience pulling manhole covers rolling easy makes them harder to open, though once open they are good), doesn't take a lot of work to design, and many times you only want to look into the sewer so just rotating the manhole in place is the thing to do (a circle being easy to do this). Basically a circle is the best intersection of these qualities, though not the only one that has them.
Non circle openings in the ground tend to be more specific purpose (basically we have this shaped equipment to get down there and a circle would need to be too large - say moving something square for example). From the engineers I worked with before getting a CS degree that was thier opnion on things (I was working on a surveying crew laying out the easements and cut lines for a fibre-optics exchange box that was underground - discussion about what shape to make the hole - we needed to calculate and set points for the crew to dig. They of course expressed reason to not be a circle and I am extrapolating backwards).
not only is that the wrong question, but even the entierly wrong focus. Who, except the music industry, cares if they make money? It's entertainment - that means that, from a whole economy point of view, all that matters is that the money is spent and jobs are created. The assumption that even what you said is that it is important that the music industry makes money. It drives me nuts the important industries and ideas that get crippled, or at least punished, because an irrelevant industry may loose money. Why in the world should computer manufacturers, in server machines, be required to put DRM stuff in thier hardware. Hmm, lets see - we run a large part of national defense (insert watever country you want here - nearly all are computerized to a large extent), touch nearly every industry in the world. In other word we are vital now to the operation of the global economy. And yet, many nations tax us, want ultra-strict regulations, increase dramatically cost, and in some cases even render hardware unusable because a form of entertainment may not make as much money as before - oh yea that's adjusting priorities correctly.
I have somewhat more trouble imagining why aliens would give a shit about making crop circles (if it's communication they want, surely they can be more direct about it!) unless it's really a biohazard marking to warn their fellows. ;)
:)
that reminds me of a quote that is probably the most damning evidence against extra-terrestrial origin of crop circles. Basically you have to beleive that an alien race out there has the ability/technology to fly faster than light and remain invisible to radar/human eyes when they so choose (no radar confirmation of something odd in the sky nor do people see the UFO making the circles, there are enough of them that someone would - and radar would always catch it). Now lets further assume that this race wishes to make contact with us. In order for crop circles to be what some people wish them to be this highly advanced race has chosen to show thier existence to us by making circles in grain fields without being seen. Hmm, apparently these aliens like the stealthy approach of making contact. I could see the conversation now "hey, lets go reveal ourselfs to those things on that planet down there, look theres a big group of them - lets go". whereto the commander replies "no, lets turn on stealth mode and fuck with them for 60 revolutions of thier planet around thier sun - lets make some circles in thier fields - start simple and then get more complicated (though only do a mathematical one every 20 revolutions)". Much more likely joe bob and bubba went "hey you know it would rock to go make some circles in a field" and slowly they learned how to make more complicated ones. Then as the "phenomonon" took off more educated people doing it. I know which one is more likely
grid computing in this sense will never work. You may (and do) get something like it with seti@home and some of the genome stuff - that's cool tech and maybe you will own the comp that finds evidence of life. grid computing within an intranet will probably be a reality. Donating bandwidth and compute cycles so someone can play grand theft auto 5 faster won't. To use one of the examples I have heard that I like - "your not using your toothbrush right now, mind if I have a go with it?". Simply put I will never pay a fee (bandwidth, computing resource) so some game company/oil company can make tons of money, and many other people will not.
I prefer to be called a moassronhole.
Depressingly, the next movie I'm looking forward to is LOTR II
:)
ok, to be picky, it's not LOTR II. Lord of the Rings is 6 books (acts if it were a play). Since this was so large Tolkein published them in three bound volumes. The three volumes are named "Fellowship of the Ring", "The Two Towers", and "Return of the King". In no way is it volume one, two, and three, it's one long story (in fact the bound volume I have is all one big book, no special divisions based on previous published volumes). So be happy, your not looking forward to a sequel, you getting to view the part of the movie after the first intermission
Actually the govt funds A LOT of opensource software. Go look at the clustering side of things (ever hear of mpich or PVM? notice they are from argonne and oak ridge national labs). Govt research can work well, it's the beauracracy(sp?) that sucks.
Do I think that a US Dept of Software Developement would produce less buggy and esier to use software? Probably not - a department such as that does not compete for funding. The national labs, while funded by DOE/DOD, compete for the dollars.
In the end the amount of money thrown at a problem is a worthless metric, nor where the money comes from - competition is what does it. open/close free/costs doesn't have a thing to do with it. You have something of value (typically money or fame) and the best software gets it. Stuff such as the Linux kernel tends towards fame (it's cool to have your name in the source), the above mentioned PVM/mpich is money (funding and a job). The FBI/ and Department of Education have no competition, in fact in the education it is discouraged.
And lastly, the resluts of govt funded software can be free as in beer. Europeans aren't paying any tax dollars for PVM. I can say the same about any free Open Source project - if you narrow your groups in the right way it will always cost something.
I too have gone through peer-review more than severaltimes. My experience with it is not nearly as bad. In fact it was over all good. Very few of the people reviewing the papers were that negative. Mostly the comments were "add more in this section". If this book only has a few detractors then I would be inclined to agree. But as of right now it has many (at least relativly). If that continues (it may take some time to completly digest what was said) then I would either call him wrong or a crank. The point someone else was trying to make was that how many times have all per-reviews been "this guy is wrong" and all the ameteurs going "rock on!" have the ameteurs been correct. I would bet not very often.
As for a grad student with Watson and Crick, well, it's typicall that grad students do the actuall work, Phd's do the "vision" thing. They also didn't think it was wrong for very long. They didn't dismiss him/her without listening, otherwise they would not have the credit for finding DNA.
When writing an acedemic paper/book and not having it reviewed for correctness is not thumbing your nose at them (ignoring all the irritating font/format changes is) - it is either sheer stupidity or sheer arrogance - in the case of this book I would bet arrogance.
Did you actually pay attnetion to what they wrote. Notice the ifs, mights, maybes, etc... I know I always want sweeping govt regulation on stuff that has been around along time because one person might maybe have been injured by a roller coaster if it exceded a certain G force. Not too mention the doctor could not really think of anything else the guy told him about that could have caused it. Good thing we cought it now, it might have one day have possibly been the cause of injuries of 2-4 people per million if we use rollar coasters the may have enough G force to maybe hurt someone. Good use of our tax dollars, I wish the govt was always this usefull.
Hot jobs tend to be only hot in the short term. It's like deciding, right now, what clothes you are going to wear the rest of your life based on what is currently hot. Look at the web deseigners that only learned web deseign. They had a good run but unless they picked up more mainstream computing skills along the way they are probably looking for a job. Now they are lokking at someone in thier late twnties/ early thirties with a skill that has a glut of qualified individuals - all because it was the "hot job" of the moment. Now take a database person. It's not a hot job and probably never will be a hot job (i'm not talking data mining but deseigning/implementing/maintaining SQL databases). On the other hand demand is pretty high and will continue to be pretty high.
It is important to remember when making these lists they look at NOW, not the long term viability of the job.
First, be found guilty of having a monopoly and abusing it. Then, during your testimony at the penalty phase use two arguments. 1: if you do that you will break our monopoly (earlier testimony). 2: declare that becuase you have such huge market saturation you had no reason to fix a major bug you have known about. So then say that disclosing the bug would be risking national defense. Hmm, if I were the prosecution I would dancing with glee. Microsoft does not seem to understand that they have been found GUILTY of abusing thier monopoly and keep giving the court more and more ways they have abused it.
you take the x-box hardware in an x-box housing and you have an x-box. You take the x-box hardware in a tivo housing and you have the "msdvr". I mean lets face it, most consumers are stupid. Go look up sales of prunes. You can not seel a box that in large letters say "prunes" and small letters under it "dried plums", put "dried plums" in large letters and "prunes" in small ones and you can't keep them in stock. Not only that but you can charge more for "dried plums" and the lemmings will happily pay it. Many consumers would be willing to pay 300-400 dollars for a DVR, but not a console. MS would only need to spend developement costs once, saving money.
I've always hated the "they aren't holding a gun to your head" argument as stupid. One can be forced to do things in many many ways. One is by using thier market dominance to run any potential competitor out of bussiness, not by competing, but by simply using thier market dominance. Microsoft was found guilty of this and is now in the penalty phase. For example.
:) ). Microsoft has the ability to do great good, in fact they are in a unique position to do so. But instead they try and stiffle competition, not by producing a better product but by using thier market dominance to force the changes they want.
Back in the win 3.1 and win 95 days there was this small company called stacker. They produced software that compressed a disk and decompressed it on the fly making it appear as if you had a larger drive. They produced a good product. Enter MS - they produced and integrated thier own disk compression technique - great. Did it work better? no. Even though it was bundled, stacker continued to have market dominance within that single field. Enter microsoft abusing thier monopoly. Pay any programmer working for stacker 1 million to never work there again. Change windows constantly in such a way as to not allow stacker to run. Many other things also (including stealing thier code). In the end stacker went broke and MS had the only disk compression software out there. I was very much forced to use thier products (since there was no alternative).
A monopoly such as microsoft has two main ways it can go. One is not illegal - use thier vast resources to produce a kick ass product. Wal-mart has a near monopoly, and barring some examples where they didn't do this, they continue to provide cheap goods, even cheaper because of thier monopoly (there is a term for this type of monopoly but its been 7 years since my econ class
In short - Microsoft seems to have basically met your needs. In many cases they do not meet mine but it is either use thier products or not do it at all. The argument is analogous to telling someone unless they give you 500 dollars (when you know they have 1000) or you will drown them, them not giving you 500, and then you drown them, and your defense is "but they could have given me 500 dollars". Yea, you have a choice - but it's not like you can always take the alternative.
no, no. Even better. I am an 102 year old afghani cleric who does manual labor in webservices. Sure, they get demographic info from me, but I specifically make it as worthless as possible, a random generator may produce a profile that make sense - I would much rather completely ruin my data (and do for any of these stupid profiling crap they push on us).
well, at the risk of repeating myself also...
It's not yahoo specifically there, it's the attitude in general. As many people pointed out the e-mail was filtered as spam many times (I know it was for me). There is a HUGE difference between 95% not unsubscribing and 95% not thinking it was a big deal.
See, this is why I thought that the quote about the price of freedom is so important. Take speech for example. What harm will it do for the Govt to disallow me to be a member of a religious cult. They are damaging to your mental health and damaging to society. the heavans gate people would have been much better off had they not been allowed to form a group. Way more than 95% of the poblic wouldn't care. But of course that infriges WAY to much on freedom of religion/speech. It's not yahoo specifically but the allowance of the invasion of privacy in general - you can say "oh, that invasion is fine, it's not really hurting me".
as far as what is "eternal vigilance"? well, they were pretty clear in the federalist papers. Read them sometime. Basically if you allow small erosions in your freedoms you will eventually lose them - you must be activly aware of transgressions against your freedoms and fight to maintain them.
Now then, why is your argument invalid? well, you have narrowed your argument down to the point that you need it too to help your conclusion. You say "yahoo's invasion of privacy will not cause an orwellian world". Fine, I agree with that statement. Neither is the DOT tracking where you drive so they can catch criminals running from the police easier going to do it. Neither tracking every book you buy so they know what to sell better going to do it. But that one case is not the point. Now, what I am arguing is that "The privacy violations inherrent in what yahoo is doing could lead to an orwellian use of the information". Notice the scale of my argument. It's not a slippery slope. I do not say it is starting small and getting worse. I am saying this type of violations can be used, directly, in an orwellian fashion (don't beleive me? well, I suppose you trust the govt much more than I do). I don't beleive this alone will bring about an orwellian state but it definatlly has the potential to be used in a manner consistent with it. When you allow one to do this, you must allow all to do it. That's not a slippery slope either. It's simply the fact that it's either illegal or it is not. Basically this collection of information sets a very scary precedent (not just with yahoo but other companies doing it also)
your argument pjrc, totally misses the entier point of what everyone here is saying. You tried to read my post as saying yahoo will cause the destruction of the USA, and what I said was that the invasion of privacy like this, in general, will.
I hope this message has been 100% clear, apparently your command of rhetoric is not great enough to follow what I was trying to say. Hopefully I have repeated it enough and given enough examples so that this time you can follow what I am saying.
hmm, the point isn't what they actually do with the content but what they MIGHT do. Typically this is counter to the vast majority of what we call civil rights. But to use an example, why am I not allowed to own a 65 megaton nuclear device. Because the damage I could do with it is MUCH greater than the good I could do with it. I could, for example, hold it in my basement for as long as I live. Totally harmless right? But the option I have of detonating it is so great that it outweighs my right to own one. This of course is a judgement call.
This is why the quote (I can't remeber which one) from a founding father "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance" is so appropriate. It's not a cut and dry situation. Yea, nuclear devices are pretty much clear, but how about firearms? how about personal freedoms such as privacy? how about copyright infringements? hard questions. I think the precedent set by allowing such intrusions into privacy fall into the "bad" category because the potential abuses are horrid. I spent nearly three years defending myself to a school because I know the chemical formula to RDX - not illegal but since someone mixed aluminum and HCL to make a "bomb" I was blamed. I know first hand the idea that "I know, lets send this guy soldier_of_fortune as he reads anarchist journals" translates nicely into "he reads anarchist jornals, he must want to over throw the govt." very easily (when In fact I read such stuff as I find much of thier banter to be quite amusing because it tends to lack any level of logic).
in short we have to both look at the potential good and potential bad. sometimes what a company/govt wants to enforce is for, in the end, a good cause, or at least not a really bad one. But the potential for abuse is so great that one must oppose it. Does this fit into that category? Many beleive so, many do not - Sometimes a democracy votes itself away.
well, I work with some people who do climate modeling. They usually produce a large simulation, run it, check the results, and if it doesn't do what they expect they re-run it with different data. So thier preconceived notions have a LARGE impact on thier model. The data produced relies on two things - one thier input data. Weather depends very greatly on the input data, a very small difference in data can make totally different changes. Next it depends on how well thier model actually predicts. That is where thier preconceived notions are coming from. Basically thier model is the hypothesis, they use the model to try and understand global warming. Once thier model shows something close to what they expect they are done. One of the large differences between what they talk about and what the general public talks about is whether or not this proves anything, they understand computer models and know it didn't prove anything, it is a very detailed hypothisis. They need experimental data to make it a good theory. Unfortunatly experimental data will take years to gather.
.edu's you find this video reviewd by) advocate much of the stuff on the video because "it's scary stuff" - well yea if it was founded in reality. It's a very good look at using a model as "proof" as I am sure the models cited in the study used the most accurate models available at the time.
To use a computer science example. One of the weather modeling people were angry that we would not NFS mount one of our larger clusters. We would not simply because of speed - nfs on a multi-gig file with 128 nodes was slow, it was much faster to transfer the file to each individual node and run the app. The mathmatician in question wrote a small simulation of NFS, he followed what NFS supposedly did and showed that the cacheing in NFS alleviated this problem. The math was all correct, the model was correct but when we ran the real world numbers his model didn't even come close. For whatever reason, as we knew it would from experiance, the disk reads were not being cached.
Then comes the problem of gathering the data. In the past nearly all data was obtained from land stations and from ocean going ships. When satalites began being able to very accuratly measure temperatures they found that much of thier data was WAY off. The theory that ocean surface tempuratures closly matches rising and falling air temps was faulty. Models had been used to show this and further models were based on this assumption.
And finally, even if temperatures are rising it is very difficult to prove we are responsible. There are many models out there that show we are, and there are many models that show we are not. There is also a question is it bad? In past history high levels of carbon dioxide have resulted in very moist air and a huge abundance of vegetation (were talking millions of years ago here). There is no proof, nor much evidence that it is very bad, just different. (on the other hand many of the gasses we release with CO2 are very harmfull)
For an interesting look into the past at what models would predict look to burke's "after the warming". In a class I had in school that dealt with global warming it was required watching. The teacher went on an on about how errily accurate it was. Yea, if you discount that by the year we are now in most of america should be a desert and most of the atlantic ocean should have no current. The teacher (and many of the
The point of all this is that an artificial model is being used to "prove" global warming by some people. The accuracy of thier numbers is based entierly on how accurate that model is. For example read this. you should notice the section outlined on model errors. So global warming is far from a known fact as many seem to think it is. Nor is it considered as much of a forgone conclusion as many seem to think it is.
The theory is not only that it defrays the cost of researching drugs but is an incentive to make them. They are patented because patents run out. The difference is a long term versus a short term, or an individual versus a society benefit. Yea it sucks if you're one of the poor people not able to afford medicine. In this case the government has a responsibility to society as a whole. If a few people are really hurt (maybe even die) for most people to get better then it will typically happen. It just so happens that in this case it is the poor getting screwed.
The main assumtion that is fatally flawed in your argument is assuming that cost is irrelevent to desire to do research. That is simply not true. It is a "feel good" solution. Sometimes a few have to suffer for society to do better. What we have to do is decide when the cost of the few is so great that the benefits to society are not worth it. In the case of medicine (in the United States, I know absolutly nothing about other countries) If you can not afford the medicine there are govt programs to help, and making you eat a lot of vegall and ramen noodles is better than the drug company never makeing the drug in the first place.
This argument is very similar to the one I hear sometimes about curing impotence but not cancer. The cure for impotence has put more money in drug companies research funds than any amount of donations to date. The assumtion is that there is and always will be X amount of resources to throw at the problems and there is not.
And lastly cost of production being low is irrelevant. Lets say you spend 1 billion do develop a drug (not unheard of) and it costs a few dollars to produce (also not unheard of). Should you therefore sell it for a few dollars - no of course not you would be broke quite quickly. Prices drop over time (and are intially very expensive) not only because of cost of manufacturing decreasing but also because the cost of development is amortized across each sale. Plus you need to recoup costs quickly, especially if all your R&D efforts are extremely expensive.
well, yea, the only thing that came up is "sounded good at the time". I would have for sure if it had been on the same disk. I have many times installed a new disk and do stuff to it (such as install an os) and one would think it would not touch another disk. Windows on an x86 didn't do that (done it several times), linux/beos didn't either. Most of the work consisted of fighting different setups to actually work together so unless I had done some type of ghosting on it I would have lost the work anyway, as far as code (user files) go it was about a weeks worth of work, typically back up once a week. That was not really a big deal but it took at least a month to reconfigure everything.
been there, done that. We had an alpha machine running linux for some vizualation stuff where I work (trying to get a cluster to drive an immersadesk, this was several years ago). It initally had one hard drive with linux on it. We added a second drive for windows and proceded to install NT, it hapilly informed us we had an invalid filesystem and it was reformating it to ntfs, it never asked, it just did it (because, of course on the alpha's back then basically every one wither ran true64 or NT, it reconized it was neither so it "helped" us). We lost nearly three months of work because of this. I've also had windows 98 "fail" twice during install and trash my drive's partition table and file systems, strange that it only did it when linux was installed (what I would call a qui-ki-dink - pronounce kinda like a coincidence, basically something that could just have been a coincidence but not likely)
I play dungeon seige on my laptop, a 1.13 ghz piii and a 32 meg gforce2 go. The in-game FPS counter usually stays between 8-20 depending on the amount of mobs on the screen at a time. Even on a LCD panel at 10 FPS it does not look chopy. This is with all the textures/shadows/etc turned to the best quality. I tried reducing the shadows and some of the quality, while I got much higer framerates (15-30) the over all quality sucked - just as smooth looking as before and les detail. One time I have had some choppiness but while running from a large group of mobs I ran into another and must have had 30-40 mobs (plus eight of my own chars all casting/shooting/meleeing) moments before I died.
:)
I, personaly could care less about frame rates as long as the game looks nice . I've seen quake run at 40 FPS vs ~70 and could not initially pick out which one was which. After showing me which one was running faster I *think* I could see some difference with high speed turns but it just as easily could have been psycho-somatic. Then I have seen some games run at high frame rates and suck. Though, of course, like most other people, I *like* that number to be as high as possible, I just dont get mad when its not and the game still looks nice
Yes, at least indirectly internet file swapping could be one of the causes, though I don't think for the reasons they mean.
Take me for example. Before MP3's were starting to get big I consistently bought 2-4 cd's a year. I had for years. Now comes MP3's and I could both listen to an album for a few days/weeks before I bought and could listen to unknowns for me. I found out I like some bands with names that had really turned me off before. I started buying 10-15 CD's a year. During this time the sales of cd's was consistently rising so I would be willing to bet I was not the only one.
Next the RIAA/MPAA began an insane journey to not only stop me from getting MP3's (which is thier right to do) but they did it in a way that was going to destroy much of the things that I should/am allowed to do (DMCA and it's ilk). Well, I pretty much said screw them and quit buying.
While of course I am only one person most of my friends have done this and they have "spread the word". I would be willing to bet this is not that uncommon. I still occasionaly buy a cd (back to the 1-2 a year deal) because a few cd's I want something more than an MP3 for quality. Also since much of this has now moved outside of the geek sector (it now no longer takes knowlege of technology to see the effects, my parents fuss about not being able to fast-forward through the FBI warnings) they should start seeing effects like this more often.
Unfortunatly I think this will cause them to get even wilder and give them more evidence to use for congressional battles. It will take an act of congress or the judicial branch (much like the VCR crap they tried way back when) to force them to embrace a new profit strategy. No matter what congress passes it will always be ineffective and some day they'll realize that.
I have heard that argument many times and it still makes little sense. When testing a guidance system (i.e. can we even manuver the missle to contact the other missle) then how we detect it is irrelevant. Much the same as any software product you write does not meet every goal before you test it neither will this. Just the same as a software project you write "drivers" for the parts not implemented. The parts to counter act those measures have not been implemented, thus testing a guidance system any other way is stupid.
As a test for the guidance system it was a very large success, they successfully made one missle strike another. Of course as a test of overcoming counter measures it was a complete failure, but well, the linux kernel makes a pretty shitty word processor - read what they are working on/testing before you make a knee-jerk reaction to a success or failure. Now then when they test detection systems then that's another story.
there are several issues that would preclude this type of computation being run in a SETI@home context. First broadband is very slow compared to what the interconnects on these clusters run. The small 64 node cluster we run has gig-ether on a non-blocking 64 port foundary switch - still slower than what is on the proprietary IBM sp machines. Even with that fast of an interconnect these types of computations tend to be i/o bound.
Also data size would be a contributing factor. In many of the gasseous simulations we run it is not uncommon to have multi-gigabyte data sets (in fact we have even had more than one request for multi-terabyte storage - we didn't have that much on the entier cluster). Not only is this hard to transfer/maintain in a timely manner on a broadband connection the home users machine would have trouble with it. Most hard drives out there could withstand it even when full of mp3's but you also have to take into account what data needs in memory at one time. Most new computation clusters have at least a gig of high speed ram in them and it is still not really enough.
And lastly as far a secrets go, you will not need the entier data set to glean information from the data. Just the algorithms used to process the data may be classified (if they simulate our nuclear weapons well enough you will probably learn something classified about thier construction).
oh, yea, unless the algorithm in question is ridicuosly parrallel there is a lot more going on than small computations that a larger computer puts together going on. Computations such as SETI@home are a very narrow type of distributed computation and does not occur very frequently.