DOE's stewardship program is not for retired scientists, but current ones. The laboratory directors at the nuclear labs (Sandia/LLNL/maybe others) are required to certify the stockpile as being ready to go each year. Their supercomputers are the only way to test the aging stockpile without actually detonating a few to see which designs age better than others.
And let's remember that almost everything in the current arsenal was designed and actually tested, not just worked up via computer. It takes a whole lot more computing power to run the thermodynamic and nuclear codes for simulation than it does to validate designs.
I'm sure that's good for the current company-owned employees (haha), but what about us SAIC ex-pats? I've heard nothing about this myself. I've been gone from there (free at last, free at last...) for about 10 years now, but if these computers had stock information, there's a good chance there are thousands of us affected who haven't heard about this yet.
I work for a government client who's invested a sizeable chunk of change in Harris Stat Scanner
They evaluated a number of products, including some leading open source tools like nessus. Their bottom line is that Stat makes the job relatively easy for a largely Windows shop (that is, if you have admin rights to all the boxes, turn on remote registry editing, kill all firewalls/IDSes, etc. - leaving you wide open for the duration of the testing!) to perform a multitude of tests and to install patches on the fly. Reporting is centralized, easy to read, and fairly comprehensive. It works on a fairly heterogeneous network as well, covering Macs, *x boxes, Cisco routers, HP printers, etc. Updates are frequent and easy to apply (basically a reinstall of the product).
Most of the folks that will run this product for this client are computer professionals, but few are truly security professionals. This tool makes it almost point-and-shoot simple to understand what's going on and provides the Windows administrators an easy way to get "caught up" on patches they may have missed.
Sometimes you don't get immobilization. We had a prototype of this years ago here in Oak Ridge, TN, developed by Martin Marietta Molten Metals (M4) where they tried in situ vitrification by sticking these huge carbon electrodes into a prepared testbed in an open field. What little water was trapped inside caused a massive steam explosion that blew hot dirt for a radius of hundreds of feet.
I'm now the technical support for the financial servers for the federal bankruptcy court for M4.
First, Red Hat decide that the desktop is not where they want to focus, and fire off the Fedora project to shift the focus for support to the community a la Debian for their non-enterprise focused distro. Fedora takes off well, certainly better than many expected, before RH9 EOLs, but not without causing a lot of grief for many of their existing enterprise customers, who don't feel that RH's existing lineup will work for them. Then, four days after the end of the Red Hat line, the announcement is made that there's a new Desktop offering that somehow slots in below Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS.
News flash: Elvis has left the building. Many enterprise customers, being confused by RH's current strategy and feeling less than satisfied by the Fedora have already moved to some other Linux distro for the desktop and are looking to consolidate behind one vendor that can cover their needs top to bottom (SuSE and to a lesser extent Mandrake come to mind).
Why, Red Hat, did you not announce this product long before the RH9 EOL, positioning it as RH10, for example? Many of my clients would have been reassured that they weren't being abandoned. Many were already happily paying the $5/month for support and feel betrayed. I've done my best to keep them in the fold, but your message hasn't been consistent and forthcoming enough. They don't trust you any longer.
Exactly how is questioning the scientific elite at any time in history "detrimental"? Many of the greatest discoveries came from just such opposition and debate.
SciAm has been a political organization for many years now (is it fair to say their inception?). They're working in their own best interests on many issues, which largely "tilt left" in bent. Hence, the attack on the current administration. It has much to do with competing ideologies that threaten long-standing, but still far-from-proven, theories in the biological and environmental sciences, along with ethical issues which history tells us are often tragically considered ex post facto.
The best way to raise the hackles of any scientist is to challenge their intellectual endeavors on any level. Refute their theories, threaten their funding, refocus research (money) into other fields - any of these tactics will kindle their ire. SciAm is but one mouthpiece. UCS is but one other.
And let's not forget the most important fact of all: This is a presidential election year in the United States. That, my friends, says it all.
consistent with archaeological evidence. Nothing in the Bible has ever been disproven based on ancient findings by any reputable scientific investigation.
Supposing that Noah's ark actually exists (which I believe is the case), its sheer size and climatological conditions would suggest that there should be at least some respectable quantity of wood left above the timber line of some mountain in the Ararat range that could be identifiable as being (1) about 4300 years old; (2) quite probably above the timberline; and (3) showing signs of having been worked with tools.
Why is it, therefore, here at/. there is such open hatred for Judeo-Christian beliefs when just about anything else goes? If this were an Egyptian dig, no one here would denigrate it. If this were Mayan or Aztec, or Hindu or ancient Sumerian, it would be taken at face value. Why the hatred, then, for what has been shown time and time again to be the most accurate and most studied ancient historical text in the world?
Exactly how did you think that an electric motor functions? The electrons don't line up all nice and pretty and start pushing the armature around and around. Their dizzying speed doesn't induce a partial vacuum that drags the armature around in its wake. No siree, Bob. They're enslaved to make a magnetic field that alternates attraction and repulsion against a set of fixed magnets.
Keyspan USB to serial converters are like this as well. This sparked a lot of debate on lkml on whether the firmware, clearly not open source, could be included in the kernel driver code. The upshot of that lengthy discussion was that yes, firmware can be bundled in the kernel code since it's not actually run by the host processor that's running the kernel.
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has a good network engineering track. Dr. Tom Dunigan, who also is involved with high performance networking/computing/security at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is a big draw. SNMP was born at UT as well, where Dr. Jeff Case is known to make the occasional appearance when not running SNMP, Inc.
Caveats: The DW6000 seems to be a real pain to install. Our tech spent 4 *days* getting it aimed. According to him, it's much pickier than the DW4000, which Directway recommended he use to aim the dish.
I'm getting about a megabit down, but a frighteningly poor 17 kbits up. Latency for me isn't an issue, but the poor bandwidth out certainly is. It's not much better than Sprint or Verizon's 3G data service.
Yet another uninformed opinion. There is no "trance". I've seen kids heavily drugged on Ritalin, so I know exactly what you're talking about. As is usually the case, when you overgeneralize, you make mistakes, like you have in this assessment. Unless you knew him well, you would notice little difference in his behavior. There are subtle differences at best.
Again, most of the time he is not on Concerta. It's a 12 hour time release, if and only if he's going to school that day. No overnight effects. No weekend dosing. That means that he's only on Concerta about 35% of the time during the school year, assuming a five day school week. That amounts to about 25% of a calendar year given a 180 day school year.
You seem to want to lump all "mind-altering" drugs into a single category, mixing marijuana and cocaine in with FDA scheduled medications. That's a really weak argument. Your opinion about doing better on tests and with behavior on illegal drugs has no basis in fact and no bearing on the discussion at hand.
I understand your skepticism of my earlier remarks. Attempting to stay on topic, I shortcutted my explanation of why I believe I am/was(?) affected by ADHD.
I was high school valedictorian. I rarely, if ever, had any homework. I never felt challenged by any of my school work. So my work ethic vis a vis homework was not as tuned as I needed it to be for college. That certainly had something to do with it. In retrospect, I was a bit immature as well. However, according to a quick consultation with my son's psychistrist, who himself has ADHD, (1) ADHD is inherited, and my son's mother has little to no symptoms herself (class valedictorian a year ahead of me), and (2) I show almost all of the signs of being ADHD, however mild, in a twenty question list that the psychistrist provided. My one scholastic weakness was in my handwriting. It was terrible. The processing required to properly write characters in order is immense, far more than I originally thought. That was my first clue about my son as well. His handwriting was abyssmal, but the real problem was that he could not write sentences. He could speak them well enough, but couldn't even dictate to himself and get them onto paper! I didn't have the pen-to-paper problem, but my writing was nearly illegible.
College is an startling experience for most kids, me included. But there were times, especially the first couple of quarters, when I thought I had forgotten to pack my brain when I moved off to college. I could not concentrate at a level that I could before. Fiercely academically competitive, I found that I could not perform at a level that I was satisfied with, one that approximated my earlier results. I expected college to be more difficult, but not to the point that I just didn't grasp the material. Something was clearly wrong here. It was about 15 years later when my son's problem cropped up that I recognized ADHD as the cause of much of my problems in college.
Based on this new revelation that I have/had ADHD, I believe that to a large degree my symptoms were mitigated by the intense exposure to second hand cigarette smoke that was pervasive throughout my childhood. Nicotine has been shown in many experiments to sharpen many mental tasks, including concentration. My notes from my first quarter of college show a moderate but distinct decrease in the legibility of my handwriting over my senior high school work. I'll admit that these signs are by no means rock solid evidence, but I certainly believe them to substantiate that I was positively affected by nicotine (no, this is not a pro-tobacco stance - let me make that perfectly clear. I had to deal with my mother's cancer operations and chemotherapy enough in my childhood) enough to lessen the severity of my ADHD.
I can't claim this as a revelation in the field of cognitive science, either. I don't have a reference handy, but I have seen studies to suggest that some people return to tobacco use after kicking the habit precisely because of their diminished ability to concentrate, some after even years without tobacco. Anyone who's been around a tobacco addict or is one can attest to their behavioral differences based upon their nicotine levels.
I am defending drug therapy because it works in this case to solve a learning disability. Tutoring didn't help. Special classes didn't help. All the love and attention we could muster didn't help. Waiting for him to "grow out of it" didn't help. Concerta helps. Thankfully, despite my initial suspicion and intense distrust of medical treatment, I agreed to give it a trial run, and it has largely solved the problems my sons was having.
I never mentioned any behavioral problems, because there aren't any significant issues there. My son's problem manifests itself in scholastic endeavors, particularly in the area of written language processing. He's quite a mathematician, however, with or without the medication.
And, contrary to your uninformed opinion, I am often confronted by others (in some of the strangest contexts and locations, too) asking me how I get my kids, including my son, to behave so well. So, from a behavioral standpoint, I and others think I'm doing quite well, thank you.
As a further note, my son only takes Concerta on school days, never on weekends or when school is out of session. This is a directed treatment against a known problem that has had very positive results with my son's learning and self-esteem.
As the father of a son with ADHD, I have to disagree that ADHD is not a disorder and, therefore, should not be treated.
A little background is in order here. I am absolutely certain that I am/was ADHD myself and that I made it through school because of the nicotine in the second-hand smoke (5 pack a day combined habit of my mother and father) at home. Nicotine, except for its highly addictive tendencies, is an wonderful stimulant. I hit college away from home and the smoke and I felt as if I was completely disoriented and unable to concentrate on anything - this from the high school valedictorian who had never struggled with any learning issues except for pensmanship (a clue that I have/had ADHD, as I was to discover 20 years later).
My son was struggling to finish even simple assignments. I've watched him struggle for three hours to write five simple sentences! His grades were mediocre, far below what a child of his intelligence would be expected to score. The psychologist evaluated him as having a moderate case of ADHD and recommended Concerta (time-released Ritalin, essentially).
I was as anti-drug therapy as you could imagine but decided to give it a trial run. Within a month, he was a new kid. His ability to concentrate allowed him to perform his homework with much more dedication and concentration. He had a fair amount of catching up to do, but over the last two years he's moved from a C student to all A's except one B (English, generally the most challenging for him) on his last two report cards (sixth grade).
I would agree that there have been some very bright people who had ADHD and were never treated, your Einstein example, for instance. However, when ADHD begins to affect your ability to learn at an early age, given the requirements of the society in which we live dictate that some level of competency be achieved with basic intellectual skills, that the option of drug therapy, carefully monitored for progress and side-effects, be considered. I don't say this lightly. I can't emphasize how adamant I was that drugs were undesirable. I'd heard too many stories about Ritalin, its side-effects, and the dependency issues. But when the psychiatrist, a 30+ year veteran who himself has moderate ADHD and by his own admission no more than a 30 minute concentration span (!), presented me with a list of symptoms for adult ADHD, and I had nearly every one of them (!), I began to dig into why I did so well in K-12 school only to be so swamped in college. Well, I was on drug therapy of a sort in those early school years - nicotine. I suspect that this is why many people can't kick the habit; there's more than just an addiction issue here.
I am sorry to hear of your subsequent methamphetamine dependency. I believe that is not an inevitable consequence, however, and that drug therapy can do wonders. But it is truly a two-edged sword.
What is the submitter whining about? Palm print authentication? How is that any different than a old-fashioned timeclock, other than the fact that it virtually removes the possibility of fraudulent time charging?
Biometrics is not necessarily equivalent to privacy invasion.
Because many motherboards aren't running blistering data rates through them like the i8x5 and Nvidia Nforce2 chipset families. These northbridge chips get about as hot as the processor itself, requiring active cooling just as the CPU itself.
I've personally stabilized many a motherboard, particularly when overclocking, by paying attention to NB cooling, either by improving the interface between the heatsink and NB chip (many have inferior thermal transfer materials and/or poor fitment), or changing out the stock cooler for an heatsink/fan combo. Any overclocker worth his salt will sing the praises of these techniques.
The fan on the Northbridge that you state as unnecessary is, in fact, quite necessary with the high front side bus speeds we see in chipsets for the P4 and Athlons. These chips get quite hot and require a significant amount of airflow to cool them under any serious processor load that involves memory access. Not cooling this chip will cause system instability.
But you forget that you've got the trucks driving around the neighborhood checking to see how many TV sets you have so you'll pay the appropriate tax. Free? I think not. Anonymous? I think not. No way to tell what you're watching? Maybe not directly for the provider, but not that hard for a government bent on monitoring its citizens.
Re:Old-style environmentalism
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 1
Air does a good job of long-range transport of pollutants too. I work with researchers investigating ozone generation and transport. In our area, about a third of the ozone comes from about 500-1000 miles away, a third is locally human generated, and a third is generated by local plants such as evergreens.
Your comment about fixing problems locally being economically undesirable is correct. The current complaints we hear about are states complaining to their neighbors about the transported ozone. No one wants to fix the local issues, except those state employees who see money coming from the state.
Slashdot Mirror
Asbestos I can tell, that's a pretty complete list, save for the radium raves and deep tanning contests!
DOE's stewardship program is not for retired scientists, but current ones. The laboratory directors at the nuclear labs (Sandia/LLNL/maybe others) are required to certify the stockpile as being ready to go each year. Their supercomputers are the only way to test the aging stockpile without actually detonating a few to see which designs age better than others.
And let's remember that almost everything in the current arsenal was designed and actually tested, not just worked up via computer. It takes a whole lot more computing power to run the thermodynamic and nuclear codes for simulation than it does to validate designs.
If this were anywhere but /., the following clarification would not be necessary.
Shoes are not the article of clothing that these ladies would be filling oh so admirably...
I'm sure that's good for the current company-owned employees (haha), but what about us SAIC ex-pats? I've heard nothing about this myself. I've been gone from there (free at last, free at last...) for about 10 years now, but if these computers had stock information, there's a good chance there are thousands of us affected who haven't heard about this yet.
I work for a government client who's invested a sizeable chunk of change in Harris Stat Scanner They evaluated a number of products, including some leading open source tools like nessus. Their bottom line is that Stat makes the job relatively easy for a largely Windows shop (that is, if you have admin rights to all the boxes, turn on remote registry editing, kill all firewalls/IDSes, etc. - leaving you wide open for the duration of the testing!) to perform a multitude of tests and to install patches on the fly. Reporting is centralized, easy to read, and fairly comprehensive. It works on a fairly heterogeneous network as well, covering Macs, *x boxes, Cisco routers, HP printers, etc. Updates are frequent and easy to apply (basically a reinstall of the product). Most of the folks that will run this product for this client are computer professionals, but few are truly security professionals. This tool makes it almost point-and-shoot simple to understand what's going on and provides the Windows administrators an easy way to get "caught up" on patches they may have missed.
Sometimes you don't get immobilization. We had a prototype of this years ago here in Oak Ridge, TN, developed by Martin Marietta Molten Metals (M4) where they tried in situ vitrification by sticking these huge carbon electrodes into a prepared testbed in an open field. What little water was trapped inside caused a massive steam explosion that blew hot dirt for a radius of hundreds of feet.
I'm now the technical support for the financial servers for the federal bankruptcy court for M4.
Diesel fuel and/or gasoline. Universal herbicide.
Add well-placed lit match to speed up the process...
First, Red Hat decide that the desktop is not where they want to focus, and fire off the Fedora project to shift the focus for support to the community a la Debian for their non-enterprise focused distro. Fedora takes off well, certainly better than many expected, before RH9 EOLs, but not without causing a lot of grief for many of their existing enterprise customers, who don't feel that RH's existing lineup will work for them. Then, four days after the end of the Red Hat line, the announcement is made that there's a new Desktop offering that somehow slots in below Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS.
News flash: Elvis has left the building. Many enterprise customers, being confused by RH's current strategy and feeling less than satisfied by the Fedora have already moved to some other Linux distro for the desktop and are looking to consolidate behind one vendor that can cover their needs top to bottom (SuSE and to a lesser extent Mandrake come to mind).
Why, Red Hat, did you not announce this product long before the RH9 EOL, positioning it as RH10, for example? Many of my clients would have been reassured that they weren't being abandoned. Many were already happily paying the $5/month for support and feel betrayed. I've done my best to keep them in the fold, but your message hasn't been consistent and forthcoming enough. They don't trust you any longer.
Exactly how is questioning the scientific elite at any time in history "detrimental"? Many of the greatest discoveries came from just such opposition and debate.
SciAm has been a political organization for many years now (is it fair to say their inception?). They're working in their own best interests on many issues, which largely "tilt left" in bent. Hence, the attack on the current administration. It has much to do with competing ideologies that threaten long-standing, but still far-from-proven, theories in the biological and environmental sciences, along with ethical issues which history tells us are often tragically considered ex post facto.
The best way to raise the hackles of any scientist is to challenge their intellectual endeavors on any level. Refute their theories, threaten their funding, refocus research (money) into other fields - any of these tactics will kindle their ire. SciAm is but one mouthpiece. UCS is but one other.
And let's not forget the most important fact of all: This is a presidential election year in the United States. That, my friends, says it all.
consistent with archaeological evidence. Nothing in the Bible has ever been disproven based on ancient findings by any reputable scientific investigation.
/. there is such open hatred for Judeo-Christian beliefs when just about anything else goes? If this were an Egyptian dig, no one here would denigrate it. If this were Mayan or Aztec, or Hindu or ancient Sumerian, it would be taken at face value. Why the hatred, then, for what has been shown time and time again to be the most accurate and most studied ancient historical text in the world?
Supposing that Noah's ark actually exists (which I believe is the case), its sheer size and climatological conditions would suggest that there should be at least some respectable quantity of wood left above the timber line of some mountain in the Ararat range that could be identifiable as being (1) about 4300 years old; (2) quite probably above the timberline; and (3) showing signs of having been worked with tools.
Why is it, therefore, here at
You! Back to physics class!
Exactly how did you think that an electric motor functions? The electrons don't line up all nice and pretty and start pushing the armature around and around. Their dizzying speed doesn't induce a partial vacuum that drags the armature around in its wake. No siree, Bob. They're enslaved to make a magnetic field that alternates attraction and repulsion against a set of fixed magnets.
Magnets! They're everywhere! Argh!
What else? SPAMCAN
Keyspan USB to serial converters are like this as well. This sparked a lot of debate on lkml on whether the firmware, clearly not open source, could be included in the kernel driver code. The upshot of that lengthy discussion was that yes, firmware can be bundled in the kernel code since it's not actually run by the host processor that's running the kernel.
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has a good network engineering track. Dr. Tom Dunigan, who also is involved with high performance networking/computing/security at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is a big draw. SNMP was born at UT as well, where Dr. Jeff Case is known to make the occasional appearance when not running SNMP, Inc.
Cross-border,multinational law enforcement? Under UN control/mandate?
I'll take the script kiddies, thank you very much.
then I'd say give it a shot.
Caveats: The DW6000 seems to be a real pain to install. Our tech spent 4 *days* getting it aimed. According to him, it's much pickier than the DW4000, which Directway recommended he use to aim the dish.
I'm getting about a megabit down, but a frighteningly poor 17 kbits up. Latency for me isn't an issue, but the poor bandwidth out certainly is. It's not much better than Sprint or Verizon's 3G data service.
Yet another uninformed opinion. There is no "trance". I've seen kids heavily drugged on Ritalin, so I know exactly what you're talking about. As is usually the case, when you overgeneralize, you make mistakes, like you have in this assessment. Unless you knew him well, you would notice little difference in his behavior. There are subtle differences at best.
Again, most of the time he is not on Concerta. It's a 12 hour time release, if and only if he's going to school that day. No overnight effects. No weekend dosing. That means that he's only on Concerta about 35% of the time during the school year, assuming a five day school week. That amounts to about 25% of a calendar year given a 180 day school year.
You seem to want to lump all "mind-altering" drugs into a single category, mixing marijuana and cocaine in with FDA scheduled medications. That's a really weak argument. Your opinion about doing better on tests and with behavior on illegal drugs has no basis in fact and no bearing on the discussion at hand.
I understand your skepticism of my earlier remarks. Attempting to stay on topic, I shortcutted my explanation of why I believe I am/was(?) affected by ADHD.
I was high school valedictorian. I rarely, if ever, had any homework. I never felt challenged by any of my school work. So my work ethic vis a vis homework was not as tuned as I needed it to be for college. That certainly had something to do with it. In retrospect, I was a bit immature as well. However, according to a quick consultation with my son's psychistrist, who himself has ADHD, (1) ADHD is inherited, and my son's mother has little to no symptoms herself (class valedictorian a year ahead of me), and (2) I show almost all of the signs of being ADHD, however mild, in a twenty question list that the psychistrist provided. My one scholastic weakness was in my handwriting. It was terrible. The processing required to properly write characters in order is immense, far more than I originally thought. That was my first clue about my son as well. His handwriting was abyssmal, but the real problem was that he could not write sentences. He could speak them well enough, but couldn't even dictate to himself and get them onto paper! I didn't have the pen-to-paper problem, but my writing was nearly illegible.
College is an startling experience for most kids, me included. But there were times, especially the first couple of quarters, when I thought I had forgotten to pack my brain when I moved off to college. I could not concentrate at a level that I could before. Fiercely academically competitive, I found that I could not perform at a level that I was satisfied with, one that approximated my earlier results. I expected college to be more difficult, but not to the point that I just didn't grasp the material. Something was clearly wrong here. It was about 15 years later when my son's problem cropped up that I recognized ADHD as the cause of much of my problems in college.
Based on this new revelation that I have/had ADHD, I believe that to a large degree my symptoms were mitigated by the intense exposure to second hand cigarette smoke that was pervasive throughout my childhood. Nicotine has been shown in many experiments to sharpen many mental tasks, including concentration. My notes from my first quarter of college show a moderate but distinct decrease in the legibility of my handwriting over my senior high school work. I'll admit that these signs are by no means rock solid evidence, but I certainly believe them to substantiate that I was positively affected by nicotine (no, this is not a pro-tobacco stance - let me make that perfectly clear. I had to deal with my mother's cancer operations and chemotherapy enough in my childhood) enough to lessen the severity of my ADHD.
I can't claim this as a revelation in the field of cognitive science, either. I don't have a reference handy, but I have seen studies to suggest that some people return to tobacco use after kicking the habit precisely because of their diminished ability to concentrate, some after even years without tobacco. Anyone who's been around a tobacco addict or is one can attest to their behavioral differences based upon their nicotine levels.
I am defending drug therapy because it works in this case to solve a learning disability. Tutoring didn't help. Special classes didn't help. All the love and attention we could muster didn't help. Waiting for him to "grow out of it" didn't help. Concerta helps. Thankfully, despite my initial suspicion and intense distrust of medical treatment, I agreed to give it a trial run, and it has largely solved the problems my sons was having.
I never mentioned any behavioral problems, because there aren't any significant issues there. My son's problem manifests itself in scholastic endeavors, particularly in the area of written language processing. He's quite a mathematician, however, with or without the medication.
And, contrary to your uninformed opinion, I am often confronted by others (in some of the strangest contexts and locations, too) asking me how I get my kids, including my son, to behave so well. So, from a behavioral standpoint, I and others think I'm doing quite well, thank you.
As a further note, my son only takes Concerta on school days, never on weekends or when school is out of session. This is a directed treatment against a known problem that has had very positive results with my son's learning and self-esteem.
As the father of a son with ADHD, I have to disagree that ADHD is not a disorder and, therefore, should not be treated.
A little background is in order here. I am absolutely certain that I am/was ADHD myself and that I made it through school because of the nicotine in the second-hand smoke (5 pack a day combined habit of my mother and father) at home. Nicotine, except for its highly addictive tendencies, is an wonderful stimulant. I hit college away from home and the smoke and I felt as if I was completely disoriented and unable to concentrate on anything - this from the high school valedictorian who had never struggled with any learning issues except for pensmanship (a clue that I have/had ADHD, as I was to discover 20 years later).
My son was struggling to finish even simple assignments. I've watched him struggle for three hours to write five simple sentences! His grades were mediocre, far below what a child of his intelligence would be expected to score. The psychologist evaluated him as having a moderate case of ADHD and recommended Concerta (time-released Ritalin, essentially).
I was as anti-drug therapy as you could imagine but decided to give it a trial run. Within a month, he was a new kid. His ability to concentrate allowed him to perform his homework with much more dedication and concentration. He had a fair amount of catching up to do, but over the last two years he's moved from a C student to all A's except one B (English, generally the most challenging for him) on his last two report cards (sixth grade).
I would agree that there have been some very bright people who had ADHD and were never treated, your Einstein example, for instance. However, when ADHD begins to affect your ability to learn at an early age, given the requirements of the society in which we live dictate that some level of competency be achieved with basic intellectual skills, that the option of drug therapy, carefully monitored for progress and side-effects, be considered. I don't say this lightly. I can't emphasize how adamant I was that drugs were undesirable. I'd heard too many stories about Ritalin, its side-effects, and the dependency issues. But when the psychiatrist, a 30+ year veteran who himself has moderate ADHD and by his own admission no more than a 30 minute concentration span (!), presented me with a list of symptoms for adult ADHD, and I had nearly every one of them (!), I began to dig into why I did so well in K-12 school only to be so swamped in college. Well, I was on drug therapy of a sort in those early school years - nicotine. I suspect that this is why many people can't kick the habit; there's more than just an addiction issue here.
I am sorry to hear of your subsequent methamphetamine dependency. I believe that is not an inevitable consequence, however, and that drug therapy can do wonders. But it is truly a two-edged sword.
What is the submitter whining about? Palm print authentication? How is that any different than a old-fashioned timeclock, other than the fact that it virtually removes the possibility of fraudulent time charging?
Biometrics is not necessarily equivalent to privacy invasion.
Because many motherboards aren't running blistering data rates through them like the i8x5 and Nvidia Nforce2 chipset families. These northbridge chips get about as hot as the processor itself, requiring active cooling just as the CPU itself.
I've personally stabilized many a motherboard, particularly when overclocking, by paying attention to NB cooling, either by improving the interface between the heatsink and NB chip (many have inferior thermal transfer materials and/or poor fitment), or changing out the stock cooler for an heatsink/fan combo. Any overclocker worth his salt will sing the praises of these techniques.
The fan on the Northbridge that you state as unnecessary is, in fact, quite necessary with the high front side bus speeds we see in chipsets for the P4 and Athlons. These chips get quite hot and require a significant amount of airflow to cool them under any serious processor load that involves memory access. Not cooling this chip will cause system instability.
But you forget that you've got the trucks driving around the neighborhood checking to see how many TV sets you have so you'll pay the appropriate tax. Free? I think not. Anonymous? I think not. No way to tell what you're watching? Maybe not directly for the provider, but not that hard for a government bent on monitoring its citizens.
Air does a good job of long-range transport of pollutants too. I work with researchers investigating ozone generation and transport. In our area, about a third of the ozone comes from about 500-1000 miles away, a third is locally human generated, and a third is generated by local plants such as evergreens.
Your comment about fixing problems locally being economically undesirable is correct. The current complaints we hear about are states complaining to their neighbors about the transported ozone. No one wants to fix the local issues, except those state employees who see money coming from the state.