It's fairly simple to use something like a Joule Thief circuit in conjuction with peltier tiles and an LED to make a low power flashlight, but it is fairly impractical. Even mass produced these would still cost more than a standard LED flashlight, and the standard flashlight will have higher light output and more life.
It's a cool high school science experiment, but not really ground-breaking.
The same thing applies in a sense to welfare programs in general. The amount of aid you get is dependent upon certain factors. However, these factors don't necessarily get updated that often or are applied in a general sense instead of being location specific. So if you find a job and you dutifully report it, you get a significant reduction in benefits.
This is what I called "Hellfare" when I was a kid. The system seems designed to deliberately keep people from climbing out of the hole.
But I disagree that there is very little income mobility. I found there is quite a bit of income mobility. I was making just under min-wage... hmm 10 years ago. Now I'm making more in a week than I did in a month before. The biggest issue I saw in "Movin' on up" was crabs in a bucket. A lot of my old 'poor' friends weren't happy to see me get a better job, better skills, and more income (especially that). I am not seen as a role-model, or even anybody to be looked upon favorably. I am looked at as a sell out. I haven't talked to them in years. Last time I had my old friends over, some of my stuff went missing. I'm sure it was rationalized in their mind, but really... I don't need that.
But you just proved his point. In a group of peers, you managed to claw your way out while the rest of them did not. Now you could probably come up with a set of reasons why that might have been the case and perhaps you'd even be right, but look at the demographics of the country. Do you really think the millions of poor in this country are lazy spiteful bastards?
Look at the demographics. The middle class is shrinking. The lower class is growing. Wages are stagnating or dropping. These are not signs of upward mobility. And to top it off, we have live 24/7 coverage demonizing all those lower class, minimum wage shmucks as being little more than parasites.
Being poor is a stigma in this country, and it's gotten worse over time. I agree with you that there is a lot of mobility. It's just all downward.
No kidding. Has anyone ever SEEN the League Of Legends community? The comment made by this kid is G rated compared to the human filth regularly spewed out by the sociopaths on there. If this standard were applied to the League of Legends community, maybe 10% of it's player base would remain. Everyone else would be in jail for making terrorists threats.
On the plus side, it would make the game a lot more pleasant to play.
It's a step in the right direction, but his assessment is correct. It doesn't do enough to measurably impact future climate to any appreciable degree.
Or to use a football analogy, it's 3rd down and 20 and we're standing in your own end zone. We're losing 28 to nothing, and it's almost the 4th quarter. Had we applied a strategy at the beginning of the game, we would at least be tied. However, since we let our star players spend most of the game flirting with cheerleaders and had the coaches pounding shots of vodka on the sidelines, we're not in a very good position. We can't actually win the game at this point, but we can at least come back enough to not have an embarrassing loss.
B&N should have tried to refocus on customer experience if they intended to keep their stores open. There really isn't a reason to go to a brick and mortar store anymore when you can browse and read practically any book you want from a couch, and at usually cheaper prices. To compete with that they need something to make the customers WANT to come to the store.
Her account is detailed, and there are images that show the respective injuries. What, you think she attacked him and he simply defended himself by punching her in the face? His account is what I would expect coming from an asshole who does things like this and expects to get away with it. Items missing from her room just happened to "magically appear" in his room after he denied taking them? Yeah.
The Polish police do have a report, but they aren't doing anything about it. And given that they are both foreigners from different countries, it is unlikely they ever will do anything about it. Pretty typical actually if you have ever dealt with foreign authorities, even in first world countries.
Her story is far more credible than his. His story sounds more like a sociopath. The circumstantial evidence appears to be in her favor.
At the very least, hopefully other female tech experts attending conferences with this guy will be on their guard.
Your right. We should all get bar codes tattooed on our foreheads so we can be scanned, as well as GPS tracking devices and webcams so we can be sure there aren't any terrorists around.
The only damage being done here is to long held beliefs that we are supposed to be BETTER than those totalitarian/authoritarian/surveillance states that we always here about.
Protection my ass. You will never be able to protect against one asshole with mental issues and a little chemical know how. And using that as some excuse to systematically strip the rights and freedoms away from citizens is idiotic nonsense. More to the point, if the government really was looking out for American lives then it would take their trillion dollar "protection" programs and divert it towards curing cancer and heart disease, which kills well over a million people a year in this country.
We weren't doing this crap when a militaristic superpower called the USSR was our Big Bad Enemy(tm), and they had a LOT more resources. There is NO EXCUSE for doing it now.
Here's the difference between a 13 year old kid and a 30 year old man looking at an E3 booth babe:
13 year old kid: OH MA GAWD! She is soooo HAWT! Oooo she's talking to me and she's smiling and nice. She's totally hitting on me. If I had a car I take her to a hotel and bang her!
30 year old man: Stop pretending to flirt with me. You're not fooling anyone kid. You have as much interest in me as you would a bug, and pretending otherwise is really a turn off. The only reason your flaunting your lady lumps is to pay the bills, and we both know it. Thanks for the eye candy, though.
I appreciate a nice looking woman as much as the next guy, but having them dressed scantily trying to lure you in or sell something is really just unattractive.
2. Snowden honestly misinterpreted a far more innocuous -- but still quite possibly overstepping of constitutional bounds -- intel-gathering operation as a panopticon
3. Snowden is lying for e-fame
The sad conclusion that I'm forced to make is that I don't have enough data to rule out any one of these possibilities, although my personal belief is that number two is closest by a hair to being correct. Snowden sounds exactly like the type of kid who might fabricate or embellish the truth in order to get the Reddit userbase to hoist him up on their shoulders and triumphantly dump Gatorade on his head. But that doesn't mean he *did* fabricate or embellish.
It doesn't appear that you have given this much thought then. Snowden distributed the information (it's PPT, you can go and look at it yourself). The government immediately spins into damage control, but came right out and admitted that they were doing this. They even went so far as giving it legal justification, which immediately made me think of McArthy and the Red Scare nonsense.
Now the government says that Snowden is lying. But they just spent the past week or so explaining why the program exists and is legal. Huh? Then what is Snowden lying about? And if he is lying, then why are they going after him as a traitor? And if they are so hot bothered about lying, then why haven't they nailed the NSA chief to a wall when he LIED DIRECTLY TO CONGRESS ABOUT THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE?
Is it possible for anyone to have a conversation on the Internet without being a gigantic dick?
In the before time, in the long long ago the internet was a forest of gigantic dicks. But now the community has matured and diversified into an incredible melting pot of dicks, douchebags, and the perenial favorite: assholes. There's even crossover's and new species now, like vaginal squids and cockgobblers, something not even dreamed of back when the internet was new.
As a community, we have explored many facets of dickishness and assholery. And surprisingly, every time we think we have discovered all there is to know, some radical new asshat or douchebagel stumbles upon yet another new cranny of crevicedom.
So where once you only had a single choice, there is now a veritable cornucopia of internet cornholes. Enjoy the marvels of human depravity!
Perhaps creators of botnets were actually trying to help us. By turning all our machines into spam pumping zombies, all the NSA would see is an endless sea of useless noise. Collecting metadata then would be more worthless than not collecting information at all.
Of course, rookie error #1 is getting involved in a land war in Asia and rookie error #2 is going in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.
All kidding aside, I'm not sure I like this idea. It's not really a good idea to announce your presence in an area where the natives could be restless and you could be considered "tasty".
"Power don't come from a badge or a gun. Power comes from lying. Lying big and gettin' the whole damn world to play along with you. Once you've got everybody agreeing with what they know in their hearts ain't true, you've got 'em by the balls." -Senator Roark, Sin City
I wouldn't feel comfortable letting my FRIENDS have access to this kind of information, let alone complete strangers who actually have the power to lock me up indefinitely without trial for some nebulous classification like "terrorism". And the best part is, they don't even have to tell you why.
Do we need new memes now? In corporatist Amerika, government watches YOU! Or is it fascist? I remember as a kid it was all about how much better we were than the Soviet Union because of our freedoms. Yet here we are doing the same exact things we ridiculed them for.
We didn't do this crap when when we had that 800 lbs gorilla glaring at us with a fist full of nukes, but for some reason now it seems like our elected officials are climbing over each other to be the first to wipe their ass with the Constitution because a few fanatical wingnuts might try to kill a couple people with pressure cookers? For fuck's sake, we kill more of our fellow citizens BY OURSELVES each year than the combined total of terrorists attacks. You want a real terrorist? Heart disease. That crazy bastard kills a million people each year. Where's the trillion dollar bio-industrial complex to take on that freakin' terrorist?
I think perhaps the populace has kind of lost sight of what this country is supposed to be.
Both sides can make their claims. But unless someone can do a proper experiment with a control planet, and make that experiment repeatable while you're at it, its all speculation. Not proper science.
You can't be that dense. By your reasoning, just about every aspect of science is "speculation".
Almost all non-trivial physics models are simulations. This includes everything from CFD's to weather and climate models. These simulations are built upon physical equations the describe the phenomena. These models are run against KNOWN CONDITIONS to see if the are accurately modelling the phenomena.
In the case of climate models, the models are initialized with pre-industrial conditions (with various small tweaks to the initial conditions to create what is known as an ensemble). Then the models are run forward to present day to see how well they modeled the KNOWN conditions that happened over that time period. And, not surprisingly, the climate models do a pretty good job. Keep in mind, these models are not STATISTICAL models. These are PHYSICAL models, i.e. modelling the actual physical dynamics of the earth's climate.
And even then, the models are just tools. The research used to the develop the models are based upon real world observations (historical as well as current). And this research has been ongoing since Fourier first proposed greenhouse gas theory back in 1824.
Speculation is someone saying "The moon is made of cheese!". Science is someone showing objectively that it isn't. Idiocy is looking at the science and disregarding it as nonsense since it goes against your belief that the moon is made of cheese.
Also, I don't even have a problem with saying that CO2 is the primary driver of increased temperatures - but I do have a problem with
a) anything that goes beyond CO2 (that is 1.3K for a doubling) that is pure speculation, consists of poorly researched feedback mechanisms, with the poor state of research in cloud formation being among the worst offenders and most important negative feedbacks that are currently being ignored due to the poor state of knowledge...
Bullshit. You're ignoring the decades of research on these topics. You're ignoring the physics, and the simulations built on those physics. Now you may simply be ignorant of this, or you're being willfully deceitful, but either way these are certainly not "poorly understood phenomena".
b) I do have a problem with the constant one-sided discussion of the effects of increased temperatures. They are always held in the tone of horoscopes and greek oracles to avoid any clear statements that could be easily contradicted. "Extreme weather events" being the worst offender. That's says nothing and is obviously taylored to feed a constant media frenzy. This is combined with a complete lack of reporting on past "extreme weather events". Thus even decidetly average events like hurricanes Katrina or Sandy (in their historical and geographical context!) become "unprecedented monster storms", which is just laughable for anyone who bothered to look into the history of hurricanes on the US south and east coast.
That's because you have no idea what you are talking about. And it is people like you which make scientists not even want to bother to try and explain anything. If you don't even understand the most basic research concepts and results, why bother trying to explain something more advanced. You don't want to listen. You don't want to know. And that's perfectly fine. But you have no credibility even with someone who has a passing knowledge of the actual research,
However the final straw that drove me to Linux over Windows 7 was a very, very nasty Java virus...
This statement makes you're whole anecdote suspect. You can't write a computer virus in Java. Java is bytecode, and that bytecode can only be run by a JVM. There's no way you can put bytecode in a windows executable to have it run without embedding the whole JVM in there with it.
What you're probably referring to is an exploit, which takes advantage of potential security holes. But that's different than a "Java Virus". And no, Linux is not invulnerable to such exploits (several have occurred recently). If you think Linux somehow makes you magically safer, then you're fooling yourself. Linux systems get compromised as well via various exploits, poor administration, etc. .
Moral of the story: If you aren't vigilant against computer threats, then sooner or later you will become a victim. It doesn't matter what OS you run.
Oh. Oh really? Well, that's really a shame, given that you should have conducted a reasonable discussion on the merits of these programs BEFORE implementing them!
It is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. A dark truth, but a truth nonetheless.
Of course supercomputers use Linux. Windows is not designed to be run in a supercomputer environment, nor is that the primary intended audience. And of course scientists use linux systems (or mac) to work with these systems for compatibility among other reasons.
There is great beauty and power in command-line processing, when done well.
When done well, being key. Scientists are not software developers or system engineers. I have come across very few scientists who have the ability to write decent code, let alone come up with clean workflows. But that is neither here nor there. An OS isn't going to make a difference in that regard.
Well, there's only one answer then. He needs to have him killed. It's probably cheaper than hiring a lawyer anyway.
An assassin is merciful. He/she will only deprive you of your life. A lawyer shows no such mercy and will kill you slowly over a number of years while destroying everything around you that you hold dear.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to agree.
It's fairly simple to use something like a Joule Thief circuit in conjuction with peltier tiles and an LED to make a low power flashlight, but it is fairly impractical. Even mass produced these would still cost more than a standard LED flashlight, and the standard flashlight will have higher light output and more life.
It's a cool high school science experiment, but not really ground-breaking.
The same thing applies in a sense to welfare programs in general. The amount of aid you get is dependent upon certain factors. However, these factors don't necessarily get updated that often or are applied in a general sense instead of being location specific. So if you find a job and you dutifully report it, you get a significant reduction in benefits.
This is what I called "Hellfare" when I was a kid. The system seems designed to deliberately keep people from climbing out of the hole.
But I disagree that there is very little income mobility. I found there is quite a bit of income mobility. I was making just under min-wage... hmm 10 years ago. Now I'm making more in a week than I did in a month before. The biggest issue I saw in "Movin' on up" was crabs in a bucket. A lot of my old 'poor' friends weren't happy to see me get a better job, better skills, and more income (especially that). I am not seen as a role-model, or even anybody to be looked upon favorably. I am looked at as a sell out. I haven't talked to them in years. Last time I had my old friends over, some of my stuff went missing. I'm sure it was rationalized in their mind, but really... I don't need that.
But you just proved his point. In a group of peers, you managed to claw your way out while the rest of them did not. Now you could probably come up with a set of reasons why that might have been the case and perhaps you'd even be right, but look at the demographics of the country. Do you really think the millions of poor in this country are lazy spiteful bastards?
Look at the demographics. The middle class is shrinking. The lower class is growing. Wages are stagnating or dropping. These are not signs of upward mobility. And to top it off, we have live 24/7 coverage demonizing all those lower class, minimum wage shmucks as being little more than parasites.
Being poor is a stigma in this country, and it's gotten worse over time. I agree with you that there is a lot of mobility. It's just all downward.
No kidding. Has anyone ever SEEN the League Of Legends community? The comment made by this kid is G rated compared to the human filth regularly spewed out by the sociopaths on there. If this standard were applied to the League of Legends community, maybe 10% of it's player base would remain. Everyone else would be in jail for making terrorists threats.
On the plus side, it would make the game a lot more pleasant to play.
It's a step in the right direction, but his assessment is correct. It doesn't do enough to measurably impact future climate to any appreciable degree.
Or to use a football analogy, it's 3rd down and 20 and we're standing in your own end zone. We're losing 28 to nothing, and it's almost the 4th quarter. Had we applied a strategy at the beginning of the game, we would at least be tied. However, since we let our star players spend most of the game flirting with cheerleaders and had the coaches pounding shots of vodka on the sidelines, we're not in a very good position. We can't actually win the game at this point, but we can at least come back enough to not have an embarrassing loss.
B&N should have tried to refocus on customer experience if they intended to keep their stores open. There really isn't a reason to go to a brick and mortar store anymore when you can browse and read practically any book you want from a couch, and at usually cheaper prices. To compete with that they need something to make the customers WANT to come to the store.
Her account is detailed, and there are images that show the respective injuries. What, you think she attacked him and he simply defended himself by punching her in the face? His account is what I would expect coming from an asshole who does things like this and expects to get away with it. Items missing from her room just happened to "magically appear" in his room after he denied taking them? Yeah.
The Polish police do have a report, but they aren't doing anything about it. And given that they are both foreigners from different countries, it is unlikely they ever will do anything about it. Pretty typical actually if you have ever dealt with foreign authorities, even in first world countries.
Her story is far more credible than his. His story sounds more like a sociopath. The circumstantial evidence appears to be in her favor.
At the very least, hopefully other female tech experts attending conferences with this guy will be on their guard.
Your right. We should all get bar codes tattooed on our foreheads so we can be scanned, as well as GPS tracking devices and webcams so we can be sure there aren't any terrorists around.
The only damage being done here is to long held beliefs that we are supposed to be BETTER than those totalitarian/authoritarian/surveillance states that we always here about.
Protection my ass. You will never be able to protect against one asshole with mental issues and a little chemical know how. And using that as some excuse to systematically strip the rights and freedoms away from citizens is idiotic nonsense. More to the point, if the government really was looking out for American lives then it would take their trillion dollar "protection" programs and divert it towards curing cancer and heart disease, which kills well over a million people a year in this country.
We weren't doing this crap when a militaristic superpower called the USSR was our Big Bad Enemy(tm), and they had a LOT more resources. There is NO EXCUSE for doing it now.
Here's the difference between a 13 year old kid and a 30 year old man looking at an E3 booth babe:
13 year old kid: OH MA GAWD! She is soooo HAWT! Oooo she's talking to me and she's smiling and nice. She's totally hitting on me. If I had a car I take her to a hotel and bang her!
30 year old man: Stop pretending to flirt with me. You're not fooling anyone kid. You have as much interest in me as you would a bug, and pretending otherwise is really a turn off. The only reason your flaunting your lady lumps is to pay the bills, and we both know it. Thanks for the eye candy, though.
I appreciate a nice looking woman as much as the next guy, but having them dressed scantily trying to lure you in or sell something is really just unattractive.
There are three distinct possibilities:
1. Snowden is correct
2. Snowden honestly misinterpreted a far more innocuous -- but still quite possibly overstepping of constitutional bounds -- intel-gathering operation as a panopticon
3. Snowden is lying for e-fame
The sad conclusion that I'm forced to make is that I don't have enough data to rule out any one of these possibilities, although my personal belief is that number two is closest by a hair to being correct. Snowden sounds exactly like the type of kid who might fabricate or embellish the truth in order to get the Reddit userbase to hoist him up on their shoulders and triumphantly dump Gatorade on his head. But that doesn't mean he *did* fabricate or embellish.
It doesn't appear that you have given this much thought then. Snowden distributed the information (it's PPT, you can go and look at it yourself). The government immediately spins into damage control, but came right out and admitted that they were doing this. They even went so far as giving it legal justification, which immediately made me think of McArthy and the Red Scare nonsense.
Now the government says that Snowden is lying. But they just spent the past week or so explaining why the program exists and is legal. Huh? Then what is Snowden lying about? And if he is lying, then why are they going after him as a traitor? And if they are so hot bothered about lying, then why haven't they nailed the NSA chief to a wall when he LIED DIRECTLY TO CONGRESS ABOUT THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE?
Is it possible for anyone to have a conversation on the Internet without being a gigantic dick?
In the before time, in the long long ago the internet was a forest of gigantic dicks. But now the community has matured and diversified into an incredible melting pot of dicks, douchebags, and the perenial favorite: assholes. There's even crossover's and new species now, like vaginal squids and cockgobblers, something not even dreamed of back when the internet was new.
As a community, we have explored many facets of dickishness and assholery. And surprisingly, every time we think we have discovered all there is to know, some radical new asshat or douchebagel stumbles upon yet another new cranny of crevicedom.
So where once you only had a single choice, there is now a veritable cornucopia of internet cornholes. Enjoy the marvels of human depravity!
Perhaps creators of botnets were actually trying to help us. By turning all our machines into spam pumping zombies, all the NSA would see is an endless sea of useless noise. Collecting metadata then would be more worthless than not collecting information at all.
Too complicated. Just ride a bear.
Of course, rookie error #1 is getting involved in a land war in Asia and rookie error #2 is going in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.
All kidding aside, I'm not sure I like this idea. It's not really a good idea to announce your presence in an area where the natives could be restless and you could be considered "tasty".
It's crap like this that makes me wonder if things would have just been better if we paid the damn 3 penny tax on tea.
"Power don't come from a badge or a gun. Power comes from lying. Lying big and gettin' the whole damn world to play along with you. Once you've got everybody agreeing with what they know in their hearts ain't true, you've got 'em by the balls." -Senator Roark, Sin City
I wouldn't feel comfortable letting my FRIENDS have access to this kind of information, let alone complete strangers who actually have the power to lock me up indefinitely without trial for some nebulous classification like "terrorism". And the best part is, they don't even have to tell you why.
Do we need new memes now? In corporatist Amerika, government watches YOU! Or is it fascist? I remember as a kid it was all about how much better we were than the Soviet Union because of our freedoms. Yet here we are doing the same exact things we ridiculed them for.
We didn't do this crap when when we had that 800 lbs gorilla glaring at us with a fist full of nukes, but for some reason now it seems like our elected officials are climbing over each other to be the first to wipe their ass with the Constitution because a few fanatical wingnuts might try to kill a couple people with pressure cookers? For fuck's sake, we kill more of our fellow citizens BY OURSELVES each year than the combined total of terrorists attacks. You want a real terrorist? Heart disease. That crazy bastard kills a million people each year. Where's the trillion dollar bio-industrial complex to take on that freakin' terrorist?
I think perhaps the populace has kind of lost sight of what this country is supposed to be.
Hurray for Peter Pumpkinhead
Both sides can make their claims. But unless someone can do a proper experiment with a control planet, and make that experiment repeatable while you're at it, its all speculation. Not proper science.
You can't be that dense. By your reasoning, just about every aspect of science is "speculation".
Almost all non-trivial physics models are simulations. This includes everything from CFD's to weather and climate models. These simulations are built upon physical equations the describe the phenomena. These models are run against KNOWN CONDITIONS to see if the are accurately modelling the phenomena.
In the case of climate models, the models are initialized with pre-industrial conditions (with various small tweaks to the initial conditions to create what is known as an ensemble). Then the models are run forward to present day to see how well they modeled the KNOWN conditions that happened over that time period. And, not surprisingly, the climate models do a pretty good job. Keep in mind, these models are not STATISTICAL models. These are PHYSICAL models, i.e. modelling the actual physical dynamics of the earth's climate.
And even then, the models are just tools. The research used to the develop the models are based upon real world observations (historical as well as current). And this research has been ongoing since Fourier first proposed greenhouse gas theory back in 1824.
Speculation is someone saying "The moon is made of cheese!". Science is someone showing objectively that it isn't. Idiocy is looking at the science and disregarding it as nonsense since it goes against your belief that the moon is made of cheese.
Also, I don't even have a problem with saying that CO2 is the primary driver of increased temperatures - but I do have a problem with
a) anything that goes beyond CO2 (that is 1.3K for a doubling) that is pure speculation, consists of poorly researched feedback mechanisms, with the poor state of research in cloud formation being among the worst offenders and most important negative feedbacks that are currently being ignored due to the poor state of knowledge...
Bullshit. You're ignoring the decades of research on these topics. You're ignoring the physics, and the simulations built on those physics. Now you may simply be ignorant of this, or you're being willfully deceitful, but either way these are certainly not "poorly understood phenomena".
b) I do have a problem with the constant one-sided discussion of the effects of increased temperatures. They are always held in the tone of horoscopes and greek oracles to avoid any clear statements that could be easily contradicted. "Extreme weather events" being the worst offender. That's says nothing and is obviously taylored to feed a constant media frenzy. This is combined with a complete lack of reporting on past "extreme weather events". Thus even decidetly average events like hurricanes Katrina or Sandy (in their historical and geographical context!) become "unprecedented monster storms", which is just laughable for anyone who bothered to look into the history of hurricanes on the US south and east coast.
That's because you have no idea what you are talking about. And it is people like you which make scientists not even want to bother to try and explain anything. If you don't even understand the most basic research concepts and results, why bother trying to explain something more advanced. You don't want to listen. You don't want to know. And that's perfectly fine. But you have no credibility even with someone who has a passing knowledge of the actual research,
However the final straw that drove me to Linux over Windows 7 was a very, very nasty Java virus...
This statement makes you're whole anecdote suspect. You can't write a computer virus in Java. Java is bytecode, and that bytecode can only be run by a JVM. There's no way you can put bytecode in a windows executable to have it run without embedding the whole JVM in there with it.
What you're probably referring to is an exploit, which takes advantage of potential security holes. But that's different than a "Java Virus". And no, Linux is not invulnerable to such exploits (several have occurred recently). If you think Linux somehow makes you magically safer, then you're fooling yourself. Linux systems get compromised as well via various exploits, poor administration, etc. .
Moral of the story: If you aren't vigilant against computer threats, then sooner or later you will become a victim. It doesn't matter what OS you run.
Oh. Oh really? Well, that's really a shame, given that you should have conducted a reasonable discussion on the merits of these programs BEFORE implementing them!
It is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. A dark truth, but a truth nonetheless.
Of course supercomputers use Linux. Windows is not designed to be run in a supercomputer environment, nor is that the primary intended audience. And of course scientists use linux systems (or mac) to work with these systems for compatibility among other reasons.
There is great beauty and power in command-line processing, when done well.
When done well, being key. Scientists are not software developers or system engineers. I have come across very few scientists who have the ability to write decent code, let alone come up with clean workflows. But that is neither here nor there. An OS isn't going to make a difference in that regard.
I'm assuming he has some sort of signed contract/paperwork to show the he did the work for the original company. That should be more than enough.
Well, there's only one answer then. He needs to have him killed. It's probably cheaper than hiring a lawyer anyway.
An assassin is merciful. He/she will only deprive you of your life. A lawyer shows no such mercy and will kill you slowly over a number of years while destroying everything around you that you hold dear.