as small toy makers. Mattel, Hasbro, et al. wrote the Lead-Free legislation. Not too surprisingly the requirements are onerous for local one-off type toy makers that saw a boon after the lead doped Chinese manufactured toy story broke. This is the tragedy of American democracy. You don't really have much say in law. Well connected people with money do.
My facebook profile's arguably most prominent features are my religious and political affiliation, marital status, and age. It is illegal to ask about this stuff when being considered for a job. I think it would be very easy to argue that they are in effect asking these questions when they require access to the profile.
of public school failure. I have a BS in both chemistry and mathematics, minored in physics. Have a PhD in Physical Chemistry,Theory. A successful career in research. I almost didn't graduate high school- failed most of my math, failed physics and chemistry. Ended with less than a 2.0 in my core classes, and had to petitioned to graduate. It's hard for me to say exactly why. That was 20 years ago, and my memory is a bit foggy. Luckily, my state university admitted me based on promising entrance exam scores. Mom and Dad didn't go to college, so they weren't really in a good position to line me out for it. I wasn't invited to my high school's prep sessions for the college entrance exams. I think they assumed I wouldn't be interested. I have always been into science type stuff. I read Einstein's primer on special relativity in high school. Loved pop science stuff - Brief History of Time, anything by Sagan, and so forth. Somehow none of my high school teachers were able to capitalize on it. Maybe it was because they didn't have much going on, themselves. I remember my high school physics teacher commenting that he went into education because he couldn't quite make the general physics curriculum. This was in the context of explaining just how hard quantum mechanics was, and that nobody really understood it. Well, I understand it, and use it frequently. It's fun for me to think about because it's so weird. It would have been nice if the special, advanced classes I had in grade school had a counterpart in my high school. Wonder where I would be now.
is where the massively parallel applications are at. I regularly write and run parallel code that will efficiently run over thousands of processors - my largest run to date was over 1024, 8 processor nodes, so 8192 processes parallelized. It is all Linux - no exception. I've yet to hear of a respectable production cluster running Windows. In fact, I have yet to run into anybody who isn't running Linux on their desktop, in my line of work. I regularly write and run parallel code - the analysis code for crunching the enormous data sets produced on the clusters - for my quad core desktop machine running Linux. You've no clue.
"however, $10-20k/year for page charges is only going to result in less science, IMO."
Doesn't seem like much to me. Half a $gradstudent/yr, maybe 1/3-1/4 of a $postdoc/yr. In a government lab this would be noise in the budget. I think open access is easily worth it. After all, it is my money you're spending.
I'm not feeling too charitable toward my macbook today. The last round of updates hosed a bunch of crap. All my iTunes files were "deauthorized" and wont authorize through the store (unknown error, try again), password on wake is set but not working - and it still won't gracefully wake or sleep. I've tried running all the cron scripts, disk utilities, and so forth. The forums are no help; just a bunch of folks with problems like mine.
So, I'm on my way to meet a macstore "genius" to see if they can get it working properly. I have many other obligations I need to meet today - yeah, my time is valuable as well. This is my first mac, and also the first time I've ever needed to consult a professional about computer problems. Hoping it's just coincidental.
There seems to be a pernicious trend in the molecular dynamics world to do the biggest system using the most processors irrespective of the utility. I'll reserve judgment on this particular study until I have time for a critical read, but for all the others... if you can only observe one or two interesting 'events', even if your system is a million atoms over a microsecond, you haven't shown anything. 'Good' statistical mechanics needs good statistics. So, here's my challenge; I say your one observed event (capsid collapse) is simply fortuitous. Disagree? Show me a statistically significant number of complimentary trajectories. Can't run enough trajectories with a million atoms? I sympathize, but really...
"There's no underground to do things that are genuinely difficult."
Hmmm... A. Q. Khan and Mohammed Farooq ring any bells.
Look, there are black markets in every highly regulated, albeit 'genuinely difficult' activity. Cosmetic surgery, fertility procedures, arms proliferation, illicit technology transfer and development, an so on. If it's desirable (read profitable) there is a market; if it's illegal then it's a black market.
"It's really a matter of hardware/software support, at the end of the day. For most end-users, mp3's compression:quality ratio is good enough..."
And that is *all* there is to it. As I write this I'm encoding my entire CD collection as ~200kps VBR MP3 using EAC and LAME. I just purchased a DMP1 player for my car stereo; its little ARM processor can't handle a much greater bit rate. But it doesn't need to. I've put a lot of money and time into my car stereo. It's not quite competition quality but I would consider it audiophile quality; it's certainly better than a couple of ear buds. At this compression rate in a side-by-side comparison with the CD using the same song, the MP3 was indistinguishable, without road noise. And at this bit rate I can fit ~265 CDs on the DMP1's meager 20GB hard drive.
And just where do you get these 'facts'? According to the Congressional Budget Office and Census Bureau, inflation adjusted wages have risen (1973-2003) for all income deciles; even the lowest 10%. When you look at overall income the picture only gets better. The bottom quintile of US workers in 2003 was making 28% more (in inflation adjusted purchasing parity) than they did in 1967. Perhaps they could be better off with wiser economic policy, but the poor are certainly not getting poorer.
I don't know why this meme is so pervasive; probably just the lack of any real perspective. For example, my mother and her four siblings were raised in a home smaller than the one I share with just my wife, and her parents were considered solidly middle-class. I own a home that was built in 1947. It was originally ~1000 sq ft, almost exactly the median size for homes built in ~1950. In 2003 the median new home was over 2200 sq ft. The cost hasn't risen much either; about 3% per sq ft. Folks are making more disposable income and blowing it on bigger homes.
They picked "Sombodies" as a successful drama. Drama? Not really; definitely a flat out comedy. Good stuff.
Sundance is cool, but their ticketing system is getting progressively worse. This year I paid $5 for the chance to pick movies in a ½ hour slot 3 days after the box office opened. Didn't get even one of my first choices; essentially got what was left.
Encyclopedias are analogous to news aggregate sites; it's where you start looking for the information you need. Citing Britannica is no less ridiculous than citing yahoonews.
I use Wikipedia to get the broad view of a subject. There are usually some very good bullets pointing me in the direction I need; get some good keywords, a more refined idea of the topic.
Incidentally, I just used Wikipedia to find out why my father-in-law booked a guided fishing trip in the middle of winter. Turns out there are winter and summer runs for steelhead trout.
"With any site like resellerratings how do you know that these people are actually customers?"
Simple; look for consistency. If a site has some very glowing reviews and some very shitty reviews the scamming site is stacking it. It's fairly obvious if you sit down and read through the reviews.
There is this pernicious misconception that hydrogen power will be derived mainly from hydrogen gas. The research into hydrogen power is almost exclusively centered around fuel cells that use hydrogen, or rather a bare proton as the charge carrier. There is no reason this proton should necessarily come from hydrogen gas. Take methanol for example, ironically a precursor to biodiesel; it has a large energy density and as a volatile liquid can be distributed in the same manner as gasoline, perhaps even using the same infrastructure. Direct methanol fuel cells are already commercially available without government subsidy. The wholesale replacement of combustion engines with fuel cell powered motors is really an engineering problem and not a conceptual or fundamental one.
I would like to see a more user friendly and stable super-computing environment. All the SC I use are remarkably opaque and extremely unstable, including the new Cray XT3. Likely the worst are the Army and DOD computers. Adding to the difficulty of dealing with their esoteric security procedures they insist on running an in house batch scheduler. My research is difficult enough without spending hours debugging scripts.
Perhaps from an engineers perspective this makes sense. But heat isn't some universal currency passed between materials; it's an expression of energy contained in the degrees of freedom of a given material. So no, the submerged portion of the heating element is not perfectly coupled to the water. It is producing radiation at frequencies that do not have corresponding water modes. If you look at the absorption spectrum of water you will see it is a poor absorber in the frequencies that are maximal for a perfect blackbody, not that any heating element is a perfect blackbody. A better strategy would be to work at efficiently producing those frequencies most absorbed by water, in the microwave region for example.
I don't know how well current elements fit the absorption spectrum of water or how efficiently/economically microwaves can be produced. So this new method may in fact suck. But your reasoning is too simplistic and misses critical nuance.
I work in a computational theory group and our entire problem is volume; definitely not speed. I don't quite understand where it all comes from but the data just sprawls and sprawls; I'm using a relatively modest 200Gigs and certainly need much more. Anyway, having more room would definitely increase the efficiency of my work. I wouldn't have to zip/unzip stuff as I need it, or move it between long/short term storage or off site unmounted servers. So, in this respect volume is speed.
I've been running on an XT3 now off and on; when it's stable it's a workhorse. Anyway, I'm not up on all the given bench marks, etc. But, in my experience (molecular dynamics) with my homebrewed code, an opteron cluster absolutely wastes anything put together with intel or IBM.
Well, efficiency is sort of the issue. Perhaps ethanol isn't the greatest as a gasoline additive but when used in next generation fuel cells the returns may be considerable. The convenience point is well taken. I do some fundamental research on a component of the a direct methanol fuel cell and one of my often repeated selling points for using methanol (in place of plain old H2) is that the infrastructure for the delivery of a volatile liquid fuel is already in place. However, in the end the whole ethanol debate ends at market subsidy. If ethanol is that good it would have a viable market and subsidies would be superfluous. It seems without the support of our federal 'donations' ethanol is dead.
Competition in the free market has improved all goods and services without exception; I challenge you to find one it hasn't. Education isn't so different from any other service as to be uniquely deserving of a public monopoly. Whatever, keep repeating that under funded under appreciated meme. Paying more for the worse product is asinine; it guarantees the survival of inferior schools and teachers.
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as small toy makers. Mattel, Hasbro, et al. wrote the Lead-Free legislation. Not too surprisingly the requirements are onerous for local one-off type toy makers that saw a boon after the lead doped Chinese manufactured toy story broke. This is the tragedy of American democracy. You don't really have much say in law. Well connected people with money do.
My facebook profile's arguably most prominent features are my religious and political affiliation, marital status, and age. It is illegal to ask about this stuff when being considered for a job. I think it would be very easy to argue that they are in effect asking these questions when they require access to the profile.
of public school failure. I have a BS in both chemistry and mathematics, minored in physics. Have a PhD in Physical Chemistry ,Theory. A successful career in research. I almost didn't graduate high school- failed most of my math, failed physics and chemistry. Ended with less than a 2.0 in my core classes, and had to petitioned to graduate. It's hard for me to say exactly why. That was 20 years ago, and my memory is a bit foggy. Luckily, my state university admitted me based on promising entrance exam scores. Mom and Dad didn't go to college, so they weren't really in a good position to line me out for it. I wasn't invited to my high school's prep sessions for the college entrance exams. I think they assumed I wouldn't be interested. I have always been into science type stuff. I read Einstein's primer on special relativity in high school. Loved pop science stuff - Brief History of Time, anything by Sagan, and so forth. Somehow none of my high school teachers were able to capitalize on it. Maybe it was because they didn't have much going on, themselves. I remember my high school physics teacher commenting that he went into education because he couldn't quite make the general physics curriculum. This was in the context of explaining just how hard quantum mechanics was, and that nobody really understood it. Well, I understand it, and use it frequently. It's fun for me to think about because it's so weird. It would have been nice if the special, advanced classes I had in grade school had a counterpart in my high school. Wonder where I would be now.
is where the massively parallel applications are at. I regularly write and run parallel code that will efficiently run over thousands of processors - my largest run to date was over 1024, 8 processor nodes, so 8192 processes parallelized. It is all Linux - no exception. I've yet to hear of a respectable production cluster running Windows. In fact, I have yet to run into anybody who isn't running Linux on their desktop, in my line of work. I regularly write and run parallel code - the analysis code for crunching the enormous data sets produced on the clusters - for my quad core desktop machine running Linux. You've no clue.
"however, $10-20k/year for page charges is only going to result in less science, IMO."
Doesn't seem like much to me. Half a $gradstudent/yr, maybe 1/3-1/4 of a $postdoc/yr. In a government lab this would be noise in the budget. I think open access is easily worth it. After all, it is my money you're spending.
I'm not feeling too charitable toward my macbook today. The last round of updates hosed a bunch of crap. All my iTunes files were "deauthorized" and wont authorize through the store (unknown error, try again), password on wake is set but not working - and it still won't gracefully wake or sleep. I've tried running all the cron scripts, disk utilities, and so forth. The forums are no help; just a bunch of folks with problems like mine. So, I'm on my way to meet a macstore "genius" to see if they can get it working properly. I have many other obligations I need to meet today - yeah, my time is valuable as well. This is my first mac, and also the first time I've ever needed to consult a professional about computer problems. Hoping it's just coincidental.
Doubt it's a pin based lock. It's a cam lock, which is most likely a wafer based lock. However, wafer locks are real easy to pick, so ...
There seems to be a pernicious trend in the molecular dynamics world to do the biggest system using the most processors irrespective of the utility. I'll reserve judgment on this particular study until I have time for a critical read, but for all the others ... if you can only observe one or two interesting 'events', even if your system is a million atoms over a microsecond, you haven't shown anything. 'Good' statistical mechanics needs good statistics. So, here's my challenge; I say your one observed event (capsid collapse) is simply fortuitous. Disagree? Show me a statistically significant number of complimentary trajectories. Can't run enough trajectories with a million atoms? I sympathize, but really ...
"There's no underground to do things that are genuinely difficult."
... A. Q. Khan and Mohammed Farooq ring any bells.
Hmmm
Look, there are black markets in every highly regulated, albeit 'genuinely difficult' activity. Cosmetic surgery, fertility procedures, arms proliferation, illicit technology transfer and development, an so on. If it's desirable (read profitable) there is a market; if it's illegal then it's a black market.
And what's next, I won't be able to read all that crap I wrote in vi either? Dumbass.
"It's really a matter of hardware/software support, at the end of the day. For most end-users, mp3's compression:quality ratio is good enough..." And that is *all* there is to it. As I write this I'm encoding my entire CD collection as ~200kps VBR MP3 using EAC and LAME. I just purchased a DMP1 player for my car stereo; its little ARM processor can't handle a much greater bit rate. But it doesn't need to. I've put a lot of money and time into my car stereo. It's not quite competition quality but I would consider it audiophile quality; it's certainly better than a couple of ear buds. At this compression rate in a side-by-side comparison with the CD using the same song, the MP3 was indistinguishable, without road noise. And at this bit rate I can fit ~265 CDs on the DMP1's meager 20GB hard drive.
"the facts don't lie."
And just where do you get these 'facts'? According to the Congressional Budget Office and Census Bureau, inflation adjusted wages have risen (1973-2003) for all income deciles; even the lowest 10%. When you look at overall income the picture only gets better. The bottom quintile of US workers in 2003 was making 28% more (in inflation adjusted purchasing parity) than they did in 1967. Perhaps they could be better off with wiser economic policy, but the poor are certainly not getting poorer.
I don't know why this meme is so pervasive; probably just the lack of any real perspective. For example, my mother and her four siblings were raised in a home smaller than the one I share with just my wife, and her parents were considered solidly middle-class. I own a home that was built in 1947. It was originally ~1000 sq ft, almost exactly the median size for homes built in ~1950. In 2003 the median new home was over 2200 sq ft. The cost hasn't risen much either; about 3% per sq ft. Folks are making more disposable income and blowing it on bigger homes.
They picked "Sombodies" as a successful drama. Drama? Not really; definitely a flat out comedy. Good stuff. Sundance is cool, but their ticketing system is getting progressively worse. This year I paid $5 for the chance to pick movies in a ½ hour slot 3 days after the box office opened. Didn't get even one of my first choices; essentially got what was left.
Encyclopedias are analogous to news aggregate sites; it's where you start looking for the information you need. Citing Britannica is no less ridiculous than citing yahoonews.
I use Wikipedia to get the broad view of a subject. There are usually some very good bullets pointing me in the direction I need; get some good keywords, a more refined idea of the topic.
Incidentally, I just used Wikipedia to find out why my father-in-law booked a guided fishing trip in the middle of winter. Turns out there are winter and summer runs for steelhead trout.
"With any site like resellerratings how do you know that these people are actually customers?"
Simple; look for consistency. If a site has some very glowing reviews and some very shitty reviews the scamming site is stacking it. It's fairly obvious if you sit down and read through the reviews.
There is this pernicious misconception that hydrogen power will be derived mainly from hydrogen gas. The research into hydrogen power is almost exclusively centered around fuel cells that use hydrogen, or rather a bare proton as the charge carrier. There is no reason this proton should necessarily come from hydrogen gas. Take methanol for example, ironically a precursor to biodiesel; it has a large energy density and as a volatile liquid can be distributed in the same manner as gasoline, perhaps even using the same infrastructure. Direct methanol fuel cells are already commercially available without government subsidy. The wholesale replacement of combustion engines with fuel cell powered motors is really an engineering problem and not a conceptual or fundamental one.
I would like to see a more user friendly and stable super-computing environment. All the SC I use are remarkably opaque and extremely unstable, including the new Cray XT3. Likely the worst are the Army and DOD computers. Adding to the difficulty of dealing with their esoteric security procedures they insist on running an in house batch scheduler. My research is difficult enough without spending hours debugging scripts.
Perhaps from an engineers perspective this makes sense. But heat isn't some universal currency passed between materials; it's an expression of energy contained in the degrees of freedom of a given material. So no, the submerged portion of the heating element is not perfectly coupled to the water. It is producing radiation at frequencies that do not have corresponding water modes. If you look at the absorption spectrum of water you will see it is a poor absorber in the frequencies that are maximal for a perfect blackbody, not that any heating element is a perfect blackbody. A better strategy would be to work at efficiently producing those frequencies most absorbed by water, in the microwave region for example. I don't know how well current elements fit the absorption spectrum of water or how efficiently/economically microwaves can be produced. So this new method may in fact suck. But your reasoning is too simplistic and misses critical nuance.
I work in a computational theory group and our entire problem is volume; definitely not speed. I don't quite understand where it all comes from but the data just sprawls and sprawls; I'm using a relatively modest 200Gigs and certainly need much more. Anyway, having more room would definitely increase the efficiency of my work. I wouldn't have to zip/unzip stuff as I need it, or move it between long/short term storage or off site unmounted servers. So, in this respect volume is speed.
I've been running on an XT3 now off and on; when it's stable it's a workhorse. Anyway, I'm not up on all the given bench marks, etc. But, in my experience (molecular dynamics) with my homebrewed code, an opteron cluster absolutely wastes anything put together with intel or IBM.
"There are two sources of hydrogen, electrolyzing water, and stripping it from hydrocarbons."
Or alcohols, which we can simply grow.
"I think that the catalyst problem is more solvable than the more fundamental problem of hydrogen source"
The catalysis problem is one of many challenges fuel cells present. In the end these are problems for engineers, and they will be solved.
They say he carved it from a bigger case.
Well, efficiency is sort of the issue. Perhaps ethanol isn't the greatest as a gasoline additive but when used in next generation fuel cells the returns may be considerable. The convenience point is well taken. I do some fundamental research on a component of the a direct methanol fuel cell and one of my often repeated selling points for using methanol (in place of plain old H2) is that the infrastructure for the delivery of a volatile liquid fuel is already in place. However, in the end the whole ethanol debate ends at market subsidy. If ethanol is that good it would have a viable market and subsidies would be superfluous. It seems without the support of our federal 'donations' ethanol is dead.
Competition in the free market has improved all goods and services without exception; I challenge you to find one it hasn't. Education isn't so different from any other service as to be uniquely deserving of a public monopoly. Whatever, keep repeating that under funded under appreciated meme. Paying more for the worse product is asinine; it guarantees the survival of inferior schools and teachers.
"For the purpose of this question, the following are givens:
1. disregard accountability
2. disregard accountability
Thanks in advance, folks."
Well then, this should be an altogether pointless exercise. Have at it.