There is questionable benefit to having that tactile experience a)extend beyond a few nodes - certainly nowhere near 64 b)have it on hardware which resembles embedded systems, not real compute nodes. In short, it's teaching 15 year old HPC technology in an era where you can fit 64 cores into 1U for a couple grand.
There is a whole lot of point missing going on here.
You're the one missing the point here. I can fit in 1U what used to take an entire rack.
When you can fit that kind of power into 1U, and given the massive leaps in computing power per core, traditional nodes-connected-by-networks clusters are applicable for far fewer people these days. What they should be teaching is proper multithreaded programming techniques.
get out of the collection high compute performance
Were you not paying attention when I said that 64 700mhz ARM nodes connected via USB (which requires enormous CPU overhead, on a processor with virtually no cache and slow busses, which means lots of out-of-cache memory access and context switching) with shitty, slow storage - does not make "high compute performance"? That cluster probably struggles to match one single 6-core Xeon.
It's not (yet) a requirement for getting a Slashdot account to demonstrate that you have an IQ slightly south of that of a stick of used chewing gum, but some of you clearly haven't yet got that message.
I just did the math. The Pi community supposedly recommends a minimum of 1A@5V if you intend on using any peripherals, including ethernet. 700mAh is the minimum draw with *nothing* connected.
5W x 64 = 320W. That's quite close to the max capacity of the power supply for the dual-socket machine I mentioned. The E5-2620 processors have a max TDP of 95W each.
Now, that doesn't count the auxiliaries - but there's still a 120W difference between typical power usage for the Pi, and MAXIMUM power usage for the Xeons, and I haven't even counted the power loss from the AC-DC power supply against the Pi (the rackmount machine's supply is ~95% efficient.)
64 SoC 700mhz cores connected via universal serial bus ethernet controllers, using flash memory that can at best pull about 10-30MB/sec read, and maybe 10MB/sec write if you're lucky.
If this is an example of applying high-performance computing and data handling techniques to tackle complex engineering and scientific challenges", this is a massive fail.
$4,000 buys you at retail (not with any sort of educational discount) a 1U machine (ie, a formfactor of about one quarter or less) with 12 Xeon 2Ghz cores connected by a bus that is orders of magnitude faster. 20-40MB of L3 cache between the processors. 16GB of ram (32GB if you're willing to spend another $600 or so), and TWO terabytes (wow, two!) of storage that will run at well over 100MB/sec sequential read. And guess what? It'll run on "one mains socket" too. In fact, because you don't have 64 separate DC linear regulators, it might even be *more* efficient.
Spend $7k and you can get 64 xeon cores on four chips...still in 1U...
I love the diagram on her site where they break down the layers:
"Temperature and moisture control".
Remember the Far Side cartoon where two scientists are staring at a chalkboard and "magic happens" is written in the middle? Yeeeeaaaaaaaah.
Newman needs to spend less time showing herself off wearing mockups and playing celebrity space cadet - and more time actually working on the practical problems. A significant amount of sweat is generated by the body even under light exertion. Moderate exertion is even worse. For example, when cycling in comfortable summer temperatures, it's easy to go through a litre of water or more every hour.
There's also the problem of insulation from temperatures ranging from as high as 31 degrees below freezing, to -161 degrees F. That's roughly the temperature where carbon dioxide precipitates into a solid, folks.
Right now men, almost across the board in every country live 5 years less than women do. I'd like to see some work into determining why, and doing something about it.
By almost every measure, men have higher incidents of disease, including cancer. Men represent 93% of workplace deaths in the US. Men represent 3/4 of suicides in the US. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the suicide rate seems to follow economic indicators - and suicide rates skyrocket after typical retirement ages (they don't for women.)
It's one of the reasons I found all the hooplah about free benefits for women in Obama's healthcare overhaul to be very puzzling...until I realized it was a vote-buying gesture to kiss and make up with women voters in an election year, after he pissed them off with his abortion stance.
If we sandwich a few of these with the metasurfaces tuned right, could we build a telescope that is a slab instead of a tube?
Only in limited cases, because it's only applicable from near-infrared to terahertz frequencies. UV and visible band are pretty much all out from the sounds of it.
Also: the lens is very thin. Nothing else is - just the lens. Ie, the objective or sensor still has to be some distance behind it, and I'm sure there are limitations with respect to angles. So you still need a tube - especially if the lens is very large in diameter.
This is fascinating, because it sounds like it is operating as a phased array; they *delay* the light depending on where it strikes on the lens. Wild! Phased arrays work by delaying the signal, thus steering the electromagnetic wave, but that's when you're generating or receiving...not modifying and retransmitting!
However, they're doing it in this case by physical manipulation of the gold/silicon structures at construction time. It's not tuneable afterward.
That's fine for telecom / fiber applications, where you only have a fixed number of specific wavelengths. However, astronomers might not mind being restricted to imaging just that one wavelength or that high in the light spectrum.
Sadly, this limitation also makes it useless for semiconductor lithography, which is UV to x-ray range.
Most organizations worldwide are moving off the dollar and away from US-based businesses for financial support and advice because they've become a militant government that commits acts of economic terrorism.
[citation, not oddball global conspiracy nutter generalism, required]
Currency use has to do with the currency's valuation and ease of use. Nobody gives a shit about politics when it comes to money except for other governments.
Ironically, I would trust a stranger with a gun over anyone sanctioned by government (especially cops). Rationale? The stranger is merely an unknown, but government has proven over and over again that they are willing to use deadly force as a means to achieve their agenda (both inside and outside the border) -- regardless of whether that agenda is moral and just.
Really? A few weeks ago, a guy in a neighboring city threatened his upstairs neighbors with a shotgun because he thought they'd stolen his turtle. I shit you not. He ran a bunch of shells through the chamber and waved the gun at them. They scooped a shell on the floor as proof, slammed the door, hid, and called 911.
Police confiscated three live green 12-guage shotgun shells, a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun, a Ruger 40-caliber handgun, a Ruger 45-caliber handgun, a large capacity Ruger magazine, two machete type knives, a box of.22-caliber bullets, a box of 46 5.56 rounds, a box of 18.45 rounds, three boxes of.22-caliber rounds, a box of.38 rounds and numerous loose rounds of ammunition.
At the moment, our city has been racking up several shootings a day; a week or two ago we had two QUADRUPLE shootings in the space of a few hours. When the police are forced to draw weapons it's practically front-page news, and a police shooting is covered heavily. It's pretty rare that the shootings are fatal, too, in part because its called in to EMS, who may even already know to be in the area - and because the police can supply first-responder treatment.
Right now "strangers" have a body-count about 20-40x the police; our local PD are at "1" and that was a few days ago for a guy who was told, at gunpoint, to drop his gun. He turned and brought the weapon towards them, and they shot and killed him.
Every time I hear some asshole talking about how he should have the right to carry a gun and the world would be a safer place if he and everyone else could, they're from suburbia or a rural area. We already have that. And all it is getting us is a lot of robberies, muggings, store/bank holdups, drive-by shootings, and so on.
I can certainly tell you though that I would not sign up for a data plan with T-Mobile, at least not where I currently live. That would be a tremendous waste of money.
At home you have wifi, don't you?
Not only does that mean you don't really need data coverage, but you can make and receive phonecalls seamlessly via wifi calling. Myself and several other coworkers switched to tmobile specifically because wifi calling works perfectly (provided there's enough wifi signal strength) and as a result, we can make calls from our building's basement - we have wifi everywhere on campus, and as a result we have the best "cell service."
You can even set whether to prefer wifi or cellular. It just switches over automatically. If you have your phone set to keep wifi on all the time, you can receive calls without issue.
If you have signal strength issues at home, you can also purchase an amplifier/antenna pair. An antenna goes on your roof (or stuck to the inside of a window, or attached to the exterior wall), a cable goes into a central part of the house where you locate the amplifier+indoor antenna.
I used to live next door to a public library that had free wifi.
Guess where the safest spot in the neighborhood was on the graveyard shift?
That's right - the library's parking lot. Without fail, almost every night, there would be a cruiser parked there with the two cops surfing the net.
I guarantee you that this 'emergency switch' would just get used by cops to get free internet access where they're hidin...er, "patrolling".
In an ideal world, governments behaving sensibly wouldn't make headlines.
Universal healthcare is useless if you live in a country with absolutely no rule of law (they have a murder rate three times the US) and in the midst of a bloody civil war the government won't admit to that kills about 10,000 people a year.
Any time anyone says the words "civil war" they freak out, yet the cartels are blowing up police stations and military installations like it's going out of style. Judges, police, prosecutors live in constant fear of the kidnappings, bombings, beheadings the cartels are using to brutally suppress the justice system.
Sigh, I've been reading a lot of stories now about Stanford tooting their horn about this...and they just can't seem to stop blabbing about how they're "as good as a human driver". Bullshit.
First off, quoting times around the track is silly unless it was in the same car. Which it wasn't. However, if you want to see what "fast" is, look at the SCCA records for various classes. Spoiler: lap times of 1:39 to 2:12. Read that again: the absolute slowest competitive race time is 2:12, and that was done by someone in a Mazda Miata in a stock racing class (ie, limited modifications.) The Stanford car has more than 100HP over the Miata, all wheel drive, big brakes, and a dual-clutch gearbox that shifts virtually instantly.
120MPH sounds impressive, until you realize that we're talking about a nearly 270HP car and a very open track. 120MPH isn't that hard to hit on many racetracks, even for a novice, and it's not a demonstration of skill; what's a demonstration of skill is how fast you exit each turn. Just by looking, I can tell you the fastest part of the track is between turn 8 and 9, most likely, for high-powered cars; slower, lighter cars may be faster between 9 and 10.
Second: "professional driver" could mean anything from someone who drives a taxi, to someone who races dirt-track, to someone who races Formula 1. Anyone can call themselves a "professional driver."
Third: the way that thing drives itself is absolutely atrocious and reminiscent of the worst kind of first-day HPDE students. The ones who think they know how to drive, don't, and are aggressive. Hammers it down the straights, not smooth with the controls at all, misses the apex (the inside center of the turn) by half a dozen feet, overloads the tires (hear them screaming? That's not a "I'm giving you the most grip" noise, that's a "I'm past my limit and am sliding all over the place" noise)...ugh.
From the way the car dives and rolls, as well as how the 'driver' is thrown around and the steering wheel is jerked - there is absolutely no finesse, and that is critical for driving fast.
Lastly: "For example, the math involved in getting a spinning wheel to grip the pavement is very similar to recovering from a slide on a patch of ice. "If we can figure out how to get Shelley out of trouble on a race track, we can get out of trouble on ice," Gerdes said."
Haha, no. Pavement, ice, dirt, and snow all have very different characteristics and "getting out of trouble" on them is different. Effin' Californians... Spend a winter in Vermont, then tell me about how to drive on ice.
If you're reading non-fiction, especially non-fiction with charts, graphs, and the like, get a tablet. They support more advanced features with ePub.
All the major e-ink readers support epub.
If you need to read charts and graphs and large tables, your best bet is an iPad because of the high resolution, color display. The Kindle DX is one of the few large-scale eInk devices and it suffers from issues with PDFs and hasn't been refreshed software-wise in quite some time. The other large eReaders are basically DoA or vaporware...the Illiad large eReader goes through its battery in a matter of hours (defacto lifetime in eReaders is a week or two, sometimes more.)
Other than that, I agree that books without charts/graphs/large tables are best read on a small eInk device. I love my Nook Simple Touch (do not get the lighted version unless you NEED to read in the dark. The screen doesn't take scrapes and bumps and bruises as well; they show up as lighted-up areas. The non-light-up version's screen is very strong and has stood up to a year+ of being in a compartment in my bag. You can also root the Simple Touch and run all sorts of Android apps on it...including the Kindle app, and several free eReader applications like Moon+.
Research on tokamacks started in the 50's. They've been at it for 62 years, and they still can't solve a number of problems, including the fact that the high energy electrons generated tear the machine apart. Nevermind the fact that large parts of the machine become (effectively) permanently radioactive.
Technologically, we have enough engineers and scientists in the world to make it a world-scale Apollo type endeavour and get Fusion to market by 2020-2030
Bullshit. They've been at it for 30-40 years and still haven't broken Q 1, where Q is the ratio between power inputted and power generated. You need a ratio of 5:1 just to sustain the plasma. 10:1 is needed for power production. The best verifiable results have been Q=.75.
You can't claim a problem is solvable just by throwing enough money at it.
The major problem with Valerie's article is that she creates a strawman argument ("all you men say that if women don't feel comfortable, they shouldn't go") which she then leaps off of to claim that women are not made welcome and thus are being denied employment opportunities available at said conference. In prior discussions here on Slashdot, I have not seen a single commenter say anything similar to that. It is at best an extremist viewpoint. Most of the voices in this and prior discussions have been one of collective disapproval and support for women feeling comfortable at conferences.
The other problem is that Valerie and her cohorts think female-on-male violence is funny:
"The cards are a hilarious way to raise awareness of the problem of brutal sexual harassment at DEFCON and similar conferences."
This is a perfect example of how culturally it has become completely acceptable for women to beat men in public or media; people stare, freak out, and intervene when a guy gets aggressive with a woman....but she can use his hair to thrash his head around, punch him repeatedly, etc - and nobody says a word or gives it a second glance. In movies, a woman getting hit is the ultimate bad-guy act...but a man getting hit? That's comedy! Funny! Let's not forget that the man is always portrayed in media as being a lecherous slimebag, and thus "deserves" this treatment.
It's insulting, as a male, to see a husband portrayed as a complete ditz; if they'd done it with a woman, there would have been hell to pay, or people wouldn't have thought it was funny. Look at the idiot man, everyone!
As a techie, I found the way the Genius acts to show someone who is practically codependent. They're not people - they're apparently robots who spend their entire lives wherever they are, serving as customer service agents?
As someone currently trying to find a place to live - craigslist is a shithole. Everything except the by-owner apartment section is just horrible, with realtors keyword spamming and posting the same ads multiple times a day; nobody flags them.
Age/gender/orientation/class discrimination is rampant and uncontrolled (in my particular neighborhood, you have to be late-20's, GLBT or female, and a grad student, or nobody wants to live with you or have you as a tenant.)
It's also firmly stuck around 1996 technology. The searching sucks. The new photo gallery sucks (makes printing or PDF-saving an ad difficult.) They still don't do any kind of validation on the address fields, which makes apartment/room hunting a nightmare because people can't seem to handle "enter nearest cross-streets" 50% of the time.
Up until recently they were profiteering off the sex industry (which uses human trafficking) and fought bitterly when the state attorneys went after them for it.
About the only two things CL has going for it: pages are served reasonably fast, and the site doesn't go down very often. Really, guys: there's a REASON WHY sites like Padmapper and others exist...
(We always suspect, but can never prove that one of our competitors is behind this click fest to drive my ads off the
search results by over-running our limits, because they always seem to happen when they launch a new product).
Seriously? I don't suppose it occurred to you that when your competitor launches a new product, it creates both interest online for the two of you, and relevant, current content pages that your ads will appear on?
People are searching/blogging/etc about the competitor's products, your ad campaigns are appearing on those pages, and relevant users are interested and clicking on said ads.
Over the last 4 decades we've employed a variety of engineering improvements like air bags, anti lock brakes, better tires and suspensions, backup cameras, crush zones and so forth. This reduced the accident and death rates through around 1990-1995. Since 1990, those rates have remained almost exactly the same, year on year.
Meanwhile, pedestrian and cyclist deaths have gone up because US road safety consists of "make crashes as survivable as we can for the people in the cars, because we've felt they are inevitable." As a result, the death rates for peds and cyclists is 5-10x that of countries where there are vulnerable user laws.
Basically: if you hit a pedestrian or cyclist - you have to prove it was their fault, and if you can't, YOU are assumed at fault. Not the other way around, where we assume it was the fault of the pedestrian or cyclist. Such an injury or death is also a criminal matter.
Slashdot Mirror
There is questionable benefit to having that tactile experience a)extend beyond a few nodes - certainly nowhere near 64 b)have it on hardware which resembles embedded systems, not real compute nodes. In short, it's teaching 15 year old HPC technology in an era where you can fit 64 cores into 1U for a couple grand.
There is a whole lot of point missing going on here.
You're the one missing the point here. I can fit in 1U what used to take an entire rack.
When you can fit that kind of power into 1U, and given the massive leaps in computing power per core, traditional nodes-connected-by-networks clusters are applicable for far fewer people these days. What they should be teaching is proper multithreaded programming techniques.
get out of the collection high compute performance
Were you not paying attention when I said that 64 700mhz ARM nodes connected via USB (which requires enormous CPU overhead, on a processor with virtually no cache and slow busses, which means lots of out-of-cache memory access and context switching) with shitty, slow storage - does not make "high compute performance"? That cluster probably struggles to match one single 6-core Xeon.
It's not (yet) a requirement for getting a Slashdot account to demonstrate that you have an IQ slightly south of that of a stick of used chewing gum, but some of you clearly haven't yet got that message.
http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem
I just did the math. The Pi community supposedly recommends a minimum of 1A@5V if you intend on using any peripherals, including ethernet. 700mAh is the minimum draw with *nothing* connected. 5W x 64 = 320W. That's quite close to the max capacity of the power supply for the dual-socket machine I mentioned. The E5-2620 processors have a max TDP of 95W each. Now, that doesn't count the auxiliaries - but there's still a 120W difference between typical power usage for the Pi, and MAXIMUM power usage for the Xeons, and I haven't even counted the power loss from the AC-DC power supply against the Pi (the rackmount machine's supply is ~95% efficient.)
64 SoC 700mhz cores connected via universal serial bus ethernet controllers, using flash memory that can at best pull about 10-30MB/sec read, and maybe 10MB/sec write if you're lucky.
If this is an example of applying high-performance computing and data handling techniques to tackle complex engineering and scientific challenges", this is a massive fail.
$4,000 buys you at retail (not with any sort of educational discount) a 1U machine (ie, a formfactor of about one quarter or less) with 12 Xeon 2Ghz cores connected by a bus that is orders of magnitude faster. 20-40MB of L3 cache between the processors. 16GB of ram (32GB if you're willing to spend another $600 or so), and TWO terabytes (wow, two!) of storage that will run at well over 100MB/sec sequential read. And guess what? It'll run on "one mains socket" too. In fact, because you don't have 64 separate DC linear regulators, it might even be *more* efficient.
Spend $7k and you can get 64 xeon cores on four chips...still in 1U...
"Temperature and moisture control".
Remember the Far Side cartoon where two scientists are staring at a chalkboard and "magic happens" is written in the middle? Yeeeeaaaaaaaah.
Newman needs to spend less time showing herself off wearing mockups and playing celebrity space cadet - and more time actually working on the practical problems. A significant amount of sweat is generated by the body even under light exertion. Moderate exertion is even worse. For example, when cycling in comfortable summer temperatures, it's easy to go through a litre of water or more every hour.
There's also the problem of insulation from temperatures ranging from as high as 31 degrees below freezing, to -161 degrees F. That's roughly the temperature where carbon dioxide precipitates into a solid, folks.
Right now men, almost across the board in every country live 5 years less than women do. I'd like to see some work into determining why, and doing something about it.
By almost every measure, men have higher incidents of disease, including cancer. Men represent 93% of workplace deaths in the US. Men represent 3/4 of suicides in the US. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the suicide rate seems to follow economic indicators - and suicide rates skyrocket after typical retirement ages (they don't for women.)
It's one of the reasons I found all the hooplah about free benefits for women in Obama's healthcare overhaul to be very puzzling...until I realized it was a vote-buying gesture to kiss and make up with women voters in an election year, after he pissed them off with his abortion stance.
If we sandwich a few of these with the metasurfaces tuned right, could we build a telescope that is a slab instead of a tube?
Only in limited cases, because it's only applicable from near-infrared to terahertz frequencies. UV and visible band are pretty much all out from the sounds of it.
Also: the lens is very thin. Nothing else is - just the lens. Ie, the objective or sensor still has to be some distance behind it, and I'm sure there are limitations with respect to angles. So you still need a tube - especially if the lens is very large in diameter.
This is fascinating, because it sounds like it is operating as a phased array; they *delay* the light depending on where it strikes on the lens. Wild! Phased arrays work by delaying the signal, thus steering the electromagnetic wave, but that's when you're generating or receiving...not modifying and retransmitting!
However, they're doing it in this case by physical manipulation of the gold/silicon structures at construction time. It's not tuneable afterward.
That's fine for telecom / fiber applications, where you only have a fixed number of specific wavelengths. However, astronomers might not mind being restricted to imaging just that one wavelength or that high in the light spectrum.
Sadly, this limitation also makes it useless for semiconductor lithography, which is UV to x-ray range.
It looks like the mold for the exterior body panels was 3-D printed, not the actual body panels themselves?
Let's see, where have we heard all of this before, on Slashdot, pointed out by average commenters? Oh yeah:
When TPM was introduced in 2006.
When Apple started doing code signing in 2008 on OS X.
Oh, and I forgot driver and application signing in Windows. When did that start?
Most organizations worldwide are moving off the dollar and away from US-based businesses for financial support and advice because they've become a militant government that commits acts of economic terrorism.
[citation, not oddball global conspiracy nutter generalism, required]
Currency use has to do with the currency's valuation and ease of use. Nobody gives a shit about politics when it comes to money except for other governments.
Ironically, I would trust a stranger with a gun over anyone sanctioned by government (especially cops). Rationale? The stranger is merely an unknown, but government has proven over and over again that they are willing to use deadly force as a means to achieve their agenda (both inside and outside the border) -- regardless of whether that agenda is moral and just.
Really? A few weeks ago, a guy in a neighboring city threatened his upstairs neighbors with a shotgun because he thought they'd stolen his turtle. I shit you not. He ran a bunch of shells through the chamber and waved the gun at them. They scooped a shell on the floor as proof, slammed the door, hid, and called 911.
Police confiscated three live green 12-guage shotgun shells, a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun, a Ruger 40-caliber handgun, a Ruger 45-caliber handgun, a large capacity Ruger magazine, two machete type knives, a box of .22-caliber bullets, a box of 46 5.56 rounds, a box of 18 .45 rounds, three boxes of .22-caliber rounds, a box of .38 rounds and numerous loose rounds of ammunition.
At the moment, our city has been racking up several shootings a day; a week or two ago we had two QUADRUPLE shootings in the space of a few hours. When the police are forced to draw weapons it's practically front-page news, and a police shooting is covered heavily. It's pretty rare that the shootings are fatal, too, in part because its called in to EMS, who may even already know to be in the area - and because the police can supply first-responder treatment.
Right now "strangers" have a body-count about 20-40x the police; our local PD are at "1" and that was a few days ago for a guy who was told, at gunpoint, to drop his gun. He turned and brought the weapon towards them, and they shot and killed him.
Every time I hear some asshole talking about how he should have the right to carry a gun and the world would be a safer place if he and everyone else could, they're from suburbia or a rural area. We already have that. And all it is getting us is a lot of robberies, muggings, store/bank holdups, drive-by shootings, and so on.
I can certainly tell you though that I would not sign up for a data plan with T-Mobile, at least not where I currently live. That would be a tremendous waste of money.
At home you have wifi, don't you?
Not only does that mean you don't really need data coverage, but you can make and receive phonecalls seamlessly via wifi calling. Myself and several other coworkers switched to tmobile specifically because wifi calling works perfectly (provided there's enough wifi signal strength) and as a result, we can make calls from our building's basement - we have wifi everywhere on campus, and as a result we have the best "cell service."
You can even set whether to prefer wifi or cellular. It just switches over automatically. If you have your phone set to keep wifi on all the time, you can receive calls without issue.
If you have signal strength issues at home, you can also purchase an amplifier/antenna pair. An antenna goes on your roof (or stuck to the inside of a window, or attached to the exterior wall), a cable goes into a central part of the house where you locate the amplifier+indoor antenna.
I used to live next door to a public library that had free wifi. Guess where the safest spot in the neighborhood was on the graveyard shift? That's right - the library's parking lot. Without fail, almost every night, there would be a cruiser parked there with the two cops surfing the net. I guarantee you that this 'emergency switch' would just get used by cops to get free internet access where they're hidin...er, "patrolling".
In an ideal world, governments behaving sensibly wouldn't make headlines.
Universal healthcare is useless if you live in a country with absolutely no rule of law (they have a murder rate three times the US) and in the midst of a bloody civil war the government won't admit to that kills about 10,000 people a year.
Any time anyone says the words "civil war" they freak out, yet the cartels are blowing up police stations and military installations like it's going out of style. Judges, police, prosecutors live in constant fear of the kidnappings, bombings, beheadings the cartels are using to brutally suppress the justice system.
I have quite a bit of HPDE experience.
First off, quoting times around the track is silly unless it was in the same car. Which it wasn't. However, if you want to see what "fast" is, look at the SCCA records for various classes. Spoiler: lap times of 1:39 to 2:12. Read that again: the absolute slowest competitive race time is 2:12, and that was done by someone in a Mazda Miata in a stock racing class (ie, limited modifications.) The Stanford car has more than 100HP over the Miata, all wheel drive, big brakes, and a dual-clutch gearbox that shifts virtually instantly.
120MPH sounds impressive, until you realize that we're talking about a nearly 270HP car and a very open track. 120MPH isn't that hard to hit on many racetracks, even for a novice, and it's not a demonstration of skill; what's a demonstration of skill is how fast you exit each turn. Just by looking, I can tell you the fastest part of the track is between turn 8 and 9, most likely, for high-powered cars; slower, lighter cars may be faster between 9 and 10.
Second: "professional driver" could mean anything from someone who drives a taxi, to someone who races dirt-track, to someone who races Formula 1. Anyone can call themselves a "professional driver."
Third: the way that thing drives itself is absolutely atrocious and reminiscent of the worst kind of first-day HPDE students. The ones who think they know how to drive, don't, and are aggressive. Hammers it down the straights, not smooth with the controls at all, misses the apex (the inside center of the turn) by half a dozen feet, overloads the tires (hear them screaming? That's not a "I'm giving you the most grip" noise, that's a "I'm past my limit and am sliding all over the place" noise)...ugh.
From the way the car dives and rolls, as well as how the 'driver' is thrown around and the steering wheel is jerked - there is absolutely no finesse, and that is critical for driving fast.
Lastly: "For example, the math involved in getting a spinning wheel to grip the pavement is very similar to recovering from a slide on a patch of ice. "If we can figure out how to get Shelley out of trouble on a race track, we can get out of trouble on ice," Gerdes said."
Haha, no. Pavement, ice, dirt, and snow all have very different characteristics and "getting out of trouble" on them is different. Effin' Californians... Spend a winter in Vermont, then tell me about how to drive on ice.
If you're reading non-fiction, especially non-fiction with charts, graphs, and the like, get a tablet. They support more advanced features with ePub.
All the major e-ink readers support epub.
If you need to read charts and graphs and large tables, your best bet is an iPad because of the high resolution, color display. The Kindle DX is one of the few large-scale eInk devices and it suffers from issues with PDFs and hasn't been refreshed software-wise in quite some time. The other large eReaders are basically DoA or vaporware...the Illiad large eReader goes through its battery in a matter of hours (defacto lifetime in eReaders is a week or two, sometimes more.)
Other than that, I agree that books without charts/graphs/large tables are best read on a small eInk device. I love my Nook Simple Touch (do not get the lighted version unless you NEED to read in the dark. The screen doesn't take scrapes and bumps and bruises as well; they show up as lighted-up areas. The non-light-up version's screen is very strong and has stood up to a year+ of being in a compartment in my bag. You can also root the Simple Touch and run all sorts of Android apps on it...including the Kindle app, and several free eReader applications like Moon+.
Research on tokamacks started in the 50's. They've been at it for 62 years, and they still can't solve a number of problems, including the fact that the high energy electrons generated tear the machine apart. Nevermind the fact that large parts of the machine become (effectively) permanently radioactive.
Technologically, we have enough engineers and scientists in the world to make it a world-scale Apollo type endeavour and get Fusion to market by 2020-2030
Bullshit. They've been at it for 30-40 years and still haven't broken Q 1, where Q is the ratio between power inputted and power generated. You need a ratio of 5:1 just to sustain the plasma. 10:1 is needed for power production. The best verifiable results have been Q=.75.
You can't claim a problem is solvable just by throwing enough money at it.
The major problem with Valerie's article is that she creates a strawman argument ("all you men say that if women don't feel comfortable, they shouldn't go") which she then leaps off of to claim that women are not made welcome and thus are being denied employment opportunities available at said conference. In prior discussions here on Slashdot, I have not seen a single commenter say anything similar to that. It is at best an extremist viewpoint. Most of the voices in this and prior discussions have been one of collective disapproval and support for women feeling comfortable at conferences.
The other problem is that Valerie and her cohorts think female-on-male violence is funny:
"The cards are a hilarious way to raise awareness of the problem of brutal sexual harassment at DEFCON and similar conferences."
http://singlevoice.net/redyellow-card-project/
Text from the red card: "You should be happy you got this card and not a punch in the face."
This is a perfect example of how culturally it has become completely acceptable for women to beat men in public or media; people stare, freak out, and intervene when a guy gets aggressive with a woman....but she can use his hair to thrash his head around, punch him repeatedly, etc - and nobody says a word or gives it a second glance. In movies, a woman getting hit is the ultimate bad-guy act...but a man getting hit? That's comedy! Funny! Let's not forget that the man is always portrayed in media as being a lecherous slimebag, and thus "deserves" this treatment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlFAd4YdQks
It's insulting, as a male, to see a husband portrayed as a complete ditz; if they'd done it with a woman, there would have been hell to pay, or people wouldn't have thought it was funny. Look at the idiot man, everyone!
As a techie, I found the way the Genius acts to show someone who is practically codependent. They're not people - they're apparently robots who spend their entire lives wherever they are, serving as customer service agents?
As someone currently trying to find a place to live - craigslist is a shithole. Everything except the by-owner apartment section is just horrible, with realtors keyword spamming and posting the same ads multiple times a day; nobody flags them. Age/gender/orientation/class discrimination is rampant and uncontrolled (in my particular neighborhood, you have to be late-20's, GLBT or female, and a grad student, or nobody wants to live with you or have you as a tenant.) It's also firmly stuck around 1996 technology. The searching sucks. The new photo gallery sucks (makes printing or PDF-saving an ad difficult.) They still don't do any kind of validation on the address fields, which makes apartment/room hunting a nightmare because people can't seem to handle "enter nearest cross-streets" 50% of the time. Up until recently they were profiteering off the sex industry (which uses human trafficking) and fought bitterly when the state attorneys went after them for it. About the only two things CL has going for it: pages are served reasonably fast, and the site doesn't go down very often. Really, guys: there's a REASON WHY sites like Padmapper and others exist...
(We always suspect, but can never prove that one of our competitors is behind this click fest to drive my ads off the search results by over-running our limits, because they always seem to happen when they launch a new product).
Seriously? I don't suppose it occurred to you that when your competitor launches a new product, it creates both interest online for the two of you, and relevant, current content pages that your ads will appear on? People are searching/blogging/etc about the competitor's products, your ad campaigns are appearing on those pages, and relevant users are interested and clicking on said ads.
The corn yield this year is due to the "largest drought in 50 years". http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-07-27/news/sns-rt-us-usa-grains-tourbre86q1hf-20120727_1_crop-tour-soy-crops-corn Our records on droughts in the continental US only go back about 110. The climate models predict continental centers drying out - a cycle of drought does not disprove or counter this.
Over the last 4 decades we've employed a variety of engineering improvements like air bags, anti lock brakes, better tires and suspensions, backup cameras, crush zones and so forth. This reduced the accident and death rates through around 1990-1995. Since 1990, those rates have remained almost exactly the same, year on year.
Meanwhile, pedestrian and cyclist deaths have gone up because US road safety consists of "make crashes as survivable as we can for the people in the cars, because we've felt they are inevitable." As a result, the death rates for peds and cyclists is 5-10x that of countries where there are vulnerable user laws. Basically: if you hit a pedestrian or cyclist - you have to prove it was their fault, and if you can't, YOU are assumed at fault. Not the other way around, where we assume it was the fault of the pedestrian or cyclist. Such an injury or death is also a criminal matter.
...which came out in 2001.